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It was a good thing he’d managed to remember in time. Would’ve been quite the gnarly surprise to run into Kallmakk without realizing.

Which reminded him of something further.

He’d forgotten on purpose. In order to deceive Germal. Morgunov was ninety percent certain that the mind flayer was capable of reading his thoughts, so he’d decided to put certain memories into a temporary mental storage state.

Eheheh.

Were you still reading these thoughts, Germal? It was too late to run away, now. Kallmakk was close.

The network of caves expanded out ahead of him into one enormous cavern. Distant holes in the ceiling allowed visible bars of sunlight to cut through the otherwise thick darkness.

The light couldn’t disperse very much in here, which was the feldeath’s doing, Morgunov knew.

One other thing that he had learned about them during his years of study was that feldeaths very frequently acquired an elemental affinity--but not in correspondence with the modern understanding of elements. Rather, it was the five classical elements that the feldeaths gravitated to. Earth, water, wind, fire, and--in Kallmakk’s case--darkness.

Why this was, Morgunov still did not know. Truly baffling, he found it. But then, that was often the way with feldeaths, wasn’t it? They were paradoxical beings that should not have been able to exist in the first place.

Regardless, it made fighting Kallmakk that much more of a challenge. Because this darkness wasn’t just physical. It muddied soul senses and even aura sight, too, concealing the feldeath’s presence beneath a kind of regional blanket.

Which meant that light was now a precious resource. Vital for survival here. These bars of it from the sun were nowhere near enough.

So he set about creating more. With integration, it was a simple enough matter. He stopped running abruptly and slapped the flat ground with one hand, sending dozens of glowing lines through the rock all around him, lighting up the entire cavern within seconds.

And there the surly bugger was, bundled up in a high corner above the workshop’s entrance.

Kallmakk the Nightspinner.

The sight of it there made even his pursuers stop and pause.

Eheh. Getting cold feet? Bit late for that.

Kallmakk unfurled itself slowly, not unlike a massive serpent, but its actual form, to Morgunov’s eyes, soon became that of a hulking, ethereal machine with a distorted clock face at its center. Blood oozed from its numbers and twitching hands, and black smoke seeped from cracks all over its body.