The bottom of the well was in view when the phantom led Bareris off the steps and into one of the vaults. A moment later, a gray, plump, segmented creature half as long as the bard was tall crawled from behind a bier. It raised its hairless, eyeless, but nonetheless manlike head and swiveled it in his direction.

Bareris's body clenched into rigidity, and pain burned through his limbs. He struggled to fill his lungs then chanted a charm of vitality.

The agony and near-paralysis faded. Intending to dispatch the sluglike creature before it could afflict him a second time, he lifted his sword and took an initial stride, but the spirit stepped to block the way, and a shadow blade extended from its murky hand.

Meanwhile, the crawling thing turned, retreated deeper into the crypt, and called out in a language Bareris had never heard before.

He hesitated. Despite the unpleasantness he'd suffered a moment before, it now seemed as if the worm-creature wanted to talk, not fight, and he certainly didn't want to battle it and the wraith at the same time if it wasn't necessary.

He sang to grant himself the gift of tongues then called, "I couldn't understand you before, but I will now."

"I said to keep your distance," the eyeless being replied. "I don't want to turn you to stone-not unless you mean me harm-but I can't stop the force emanating from my body any more than you can stop the flow of blood through your veins."

"I didn't come to hurt you," Bareris said. "I asked your… companion here to take me somewhere safe because other undead creatures are hunting me. I should warn you, they might track me into the well. They've sniffed out some of my other hiding places."

"I doubt they'll find this one," the creature said. "Those who built it had a fear of necromancers tampering with their remains, so they took precautions to prevent such indignities. They laid their dead to rest in a secret place far from their habitations and also arranged for me to dwell here, to petrify the corpses and make them impossible to reanimate. Most importantly from your perspective, they laid down wards to keep a wizard's undead servants from locating the tombs."

Bareris felt the tension flow out of him, leaving a profound weariness in its place. "That's good to hear."

"Sit. Mirror and I can offer no other comforts fit for a mortal man, but you can at least rest."

The bard flopped down with his back against a wall. "Mirror is an apt name for your friend, I suppose. Mine is Bareris Anskuld."

"I'm Quickstrike. A gravecrawler, as you can see."

Bareris shook his head. "I have to take your word for it. I've never met or even heard of a creature like you before."

"Truly? I wonder if the rest of my kind have vanished from the world." Quickstrike sounded more intrigued than dismayed by the possibility. "Men also called us ancestor worms."

"Interesting," Bareris said, and it was, a little. Despite the despair that had consumed him of late, he couldn't help feeling somewhat curious about his new companions. Curiosity was a fundamental aspect of the character of any bard. "Are gravecrawlers undead?"

"Of a sort, but not the sort that was ever human or preys on humans, not as long as they behave themselves."

"I assure you, I intend to. And Mirror is a ghost?"

"Of a particularly brave and accomplished warrior, I believe. As you will have guessed, Mirror is simply the nickname I gave him, based on his habit of filching an appearance. He doesn't remember his true name or face any longer, or much of anything really."

"Why not?"

Quickstrike's body rippled from head to tail in a manner that suggested a man stretching. "He fell victim to the power that destroyed his entire people. It's a sad story, but one I can relate if you want to hear."

Bareris had the feeling that, after centuries with only the mute, nearly mindless Mirror for company, Quickstrike enjoyed having someone to talk to, while for his part, he had nothing better to do than listen.

"Please do. I've spent much of my life collecting tales and songs."

"Well, then. In its time, not so very long after the fall of Netheril, a splendid kingdom ruled these mountains. It owed much of its greatness to a single man, Fastrin the Delver, a wizard as clever and powerful as any who ever lived.

"For much of his life, Fastrin worked wonders to benefit his people and gave sage counsel to their lords. Eventually, however, he withdrew from the world, and those few who saw him thereafter said he was troubled but couldn't or wouldn't explain why, which kept anyone from realizing just how dire the situation was. Fastrin wasn't just morose, he was going mad.

"One sunny summer morning," Quickstrike continued, "he emerged from his seclusion and started methodically slaughtering people, laying waste to one community after another, but he wasn't content with simply ending the lives of his victims. His magic mangled their minds and souls. In many cases, it may have obliterated their spirits entirely. Even when it didn't, it stripped them of memory and reason."

"Like Mirror," Bareris said.

"Yes. He was one of many who tried to stand against Fastrin. Sadly, their valor accomplished nothing. I suppose a few people must have escaped by taking flight, but at the end of the wizard's rampage, the kingdom he'd done so much to build no longer existed. He then turned that same lethal, psyche-rending power on himself."

"What was it all about? Even lunatics have reasons, though they may not make sense to the rest of us. Did anyone try to parley with him?"

"Yes," said the ancestor worm. "Fastrin said he'd been robbed, and since he was unable to identify the thief, everyone must die. It was the only way to be safe."

Bareris shook his head. "I don't understand."

"No one did, and Fastrin refused to elaborate."

"May I ask how you learned all this?"

"When I was buried in this place? Well, even Fastrin couldn't kill an entire realm in a day, or a tenday, and as the massacre continued, folk sought my counsel. Ancestor worms were accounted wise, you see. When I ate the flesh of the dead, before I grew beyond the need of such provender, I absorbed their wisdom. Alas, nothing I'd ever learned offered any remedy to the disaster.

"Later, when people stopped coming here, I ventured forth to discover if anyone remained alive. I didn't find any humans, but by good fortune, I encountered a hunting party of orcs, who then attacked me."

Bareris smiled crookedly. " 'Good fortune,' you say."

"Very much so, because they didn't all turn to stone. One simply bled out after I pierced it with my fangs, and when I ate some of it, it turned out that it had witnessed Fastrin's suicide from a safe distance. Either the wizard didn't notice, or since the or hadn't been a subject of the kingdom, it didn't figure in his delusions and he saw no reason to attack it. Either way, at least I now knew what had happened, grim though it was, so I returned home.

"Now tell me your tale."

Bareris winced. For a moment, Quickstrike's story had distracted him from his sorrows, and he had no desire to return to them. "It's not worth telling."

"When it involves you fleeing the undead? Don't be ridiculous."

Bareris reflected that the gravecrawler was, in fact, his host, so he owed the creature some accounting of himself. "As you wish. I don't know how much you know about the kingdoms of men as they exist today. I hail from a realm called Thay…"

He tried to relate the tale as tersely as possible, without any of the embellishments he would have employed if he'd been enjoying himself or striving to tease applause and coins from an audience. Still, it took a while. Long enough to dry his throat.