Iago followed Rappiccini through the tunnels of the cave, dimly lit from the same hooded lanterns that illuminated the laboratory. Strung along wires directly above his head, Rappiccini didn’t touch the ground as he pulled himself along like a monkey with his many arms, never needing to pause or swing as he always had another to continue the momentum.

What struck Iago the most, however, were the paintings all over the walls.

They were landscapes – beautiful depictions of waterfalls, plains, forests, and more. He saw towering red oak trees covered in immaculately detailed birds, a salmon leaping from the water of a rapid creek immortalized forever, and more. Iago had little experience with art, but he suspected what he was looking at would be considered incredible by anyone’s standards.

“Did you paint these?”

Rappiccini’s head twisted around 180 degrees, definitely not causing Iago to sweat profusely, but his expression was anything but hostile.

“Of course! There is nothing more pure in this world than creation. I seek to immortalize the land I call home, creating portals into the Forest, even should it fall one day. Besides, I’ve had…free time, between my experiments.” His head twisted back around to the front, and Iago was surprised to find that the Old One sounded almost meek.

“Do you like them?”

Iago felt no reason to lie. “They’re incredible.”

After Rappiccini mentioned it, Iago began to notice places in the Forest he had been. There, a bed of flowers Dannious rested in more than a few times, the odd boulder in the center of a clearing now sundered in two from Yuhata’s hot temper, where his Master first gave him his first scar on the treacherous slopes of a mountain during a rainstorm. He’d fallen to the ground after getting nearly eviscerated, and broke multiple ribs. It took him two months and regular treatment from Verte to get him back in fighting condition, and the entire time Baikyo called him fragile.

The thought of Verte wiped the nostalgic smile from his face, leaving only dull sadness. He steeled himself and pushed forward: That was why he was here, to prevent that from happening ever again. The best he could.

He was drawn from his thoughts by the final painting in the hallway. It covered twice the space the other paintings did, almost twice his wingspan – and Iago was not a short man. He was most familiar with this location than any of the others depicted

The sky was red and angry, swirling with smoke and fire. The clearing he’d come to call home was scorched dry and blackened, and there was nothing living in sight. Bodies littered the ground – animal and human alike – but the center figure caught his attention most.

The Ancestor Tree was split open down the middle like a gutted fish, and within was a crimson portal containing a swirling vortex. The red of the portal’s edges looked to be being sucked into the empty blackness of the portal’s center, and black tendrils dripped from the wound to the ground like tears. He thought he saw a figure in the center, and stepped forward to get a better look-

A hand appeared in his vision, and Iago flinched back. Rappiccini stared at him with alien sadness and spoke quietly.

“That is not for you to see, son of Solomon. Some things should be left in the past.” He gave a chuckle and smile no doubt meant to be reassuring, but only worsened Iago’s condition. “I’d prefer to take it down myself if I’m being honest with you. Forgetting would be a blessing.”

“Then why don’t you?”

Rappiccini shrugged with his many arms. “As I said before, I learn, I know, and I remember. That is my blessing and my curse, but truthfully it is my duty. I will not turn my back on my duty, no matter how much I may wish to. No matter how many of my siblings walk that path.”

Iago had nothing to say, but privately wondered.

Who was Solomon?

* * *

The tunnel soon ended, opening up into an unnatural cavern about half as large as the one containing the laboratory, which is to say still quite large. The stone in this chamber shifted from the greenish limestone of the previous hall to a darker grey, roughly hewn stone. Instead of hooded lanterns like the rest of the cave system, large blue crystals jutted from the rock at odd angles, bathing the cave beyond in oceanic hues. Rappiccini stopped at the entrance to the chamber, marked by rods of glass outlining the doorway filled with some sort of yellow liquid, and twisted his head to face Iago once more.

“This is as far as I will follow you,” he began, “The abnormality can sense me as its progenitor. It wishes nothing more than to end my life, and consume me thereafter. There is a scar in the center of this chamber that I have used as my disposal pit. I would urge you to avoid falling in, but perhaps it would be entertaining. If I am correct, the anomaly will exit the pit almost immediately and attack you.”

“What kind of creature was it, before the mutation?”

“A stoat.”

Iago said nothing for a moment, and Rappiccini rushed to fill the gap.

“Don’t let that outdated fact color your perception, however. It is still extremely dangerous, and…resembles little of its previous form. The mutation in this one was powerful and has resulted in something unlike I have ever created before.” A manic glimmer shone in his eyes for a moment. “It was incredible. It showed such promise, I almost considered it my child.”

“And then it tried to tear your arms off?”

“That is not inaccurate, yes.”

He drew his sword – the Artifact, as Rappiccini referred to it – and tossed the scabbard to the side. He didn’t want anything potentially inhibiting his movements. Rappiccini was an odd duck, but anything that could threaten an Old One was to be taken seriously. He couldn’t afford any distractions. He drew on his Master’s power, strengthening him, making him faster and granting him the reflexes of a tiger, and entered the chamber.

He staggered back almost immediately. The smell of the room was oppressive, almost a physical force that threatened to bowl him over if he didn’t. It was the accumulation of centuries of decay, some fresh, most ancient, and he had to focus on his breathing to avoid immediately gagging. It was the vilest thing he’d ever had the displeasure of smelling.

His eyes watering, he pushed his way forward towards the source of the stench in the center of the room, the rough scar that Rappiccini previously referred to. It was lined purely with jagged shards of the blue crystal illuminating the chamber and was the size of a large pond. Combined, it made the refuse pit resemble a trench in the ocean.

He reached the edge – a sheer drop – and looked down.

It was riddled with corpses.

The edges of the pit were stacked higher than the center, and there were tens of thousands stacked in the pit. Every type of animal he had maybe ever seen in the Forest were lifeless and morphed in the pit. A blue scaled alligator, an elk with fur made of spikes of steel, and more. Some were in further stages of decomposition than others, with blackened and yellowed bones poking through between the tangled corpses.

He backed up as soon as he could and hoped to any greater force in the universe that he wouldn’t have to venture any deeper, that Rappiccini’s assumption was correct on the aggression of the stoat.

His fears were soon found to be unfounded, as something landed with stone shattering force behind him.

Iago whipped around in time to see the paw coming at him, but not to dodge it. He braced himself best he could and took the blow, but it still threw him fifteen feet across the chamber. He skipped like a stone against the floor a few times, barely holding onto his sword, and landed dangerously close to the pit.

Iago looked up at his aggressor, and for the first time in his life hoped that he only had a concussion, and that there weren’t actually two of the monsters that stood before him.

The bear sized stoat was hunched in a ‘U’ shape, with long spikes jutting from its spine. Saliva dripped from its maw causing the stone to sizzle where it landed, and its sharp knife-length teeth were stained red. It had paws twice the size of Iago’s head, and its limbs were tensed with raw strength like a taut spring.

Iago forced himself to his feet and held his sword at the ready, waiting to react at its next move. He could hear Baikyo growling at him about how a tiger should be on the offensive, but his head was still spinning, and he didn’t want to be hit with any more surprise attacks.

That was his last thought before the ground beneath him turned into killer bees.

He dropped three feet through a cloud of swarming insects – thankfully as shocked as he was – and landed with a sickening crunch atop a pile of them. He immediately stepped to the side and turned the world purple, reappearing out of the newly created pit and away from the swarm before he could be stung. Well, stung too much anyway.

“What the fuck was that?” he barely managed to speak the thought aloud when the creature leapt at him with its jaws wide, unhinged like a snake, and spewed saliva.

Thankfully, he expected something like that to happen. He reappeared beneath it and stabbed his sword up, unfortunately only piercing a short way through before hitting solid bone and being stopped dead. He rolled out of the way of another acidic burst and leapt back to his feet in time to see the stoat dig its claws into the stone floor.

He didn’t know what was about to happen, but didn’t particularly wish to find out. He stepped to the side once more, reappearing far from it and the spot he was in, and watched with morbid fascination as the ground he just stood on turned into what looked like pure gold.

He stepped back beside the monstrous stoat, trading probing blows without either side gaining the advantage. He lunged too far forward on a strike and the stoat growled with gluttonous glee, lunging with its unhinged jaw at his extended arm. He couldn’t pull the blade back in time to block, so he did what most of his opponents never seemed to expect.

He let go of his sword, and punched it.

His strike carried the ancient strength of his Master, and he felt something crack beneath the surface of its bloody, matted fur. It reeled back in shock allowing him to scoop the blade back into his hands, and from then on, the stoat was on the backfoot. It lashed out with the instincts of a beast, warped by the mutations coursing through its body courtesy of Rappiccini, and took far more blows than Iago thought possible. He cleaved off chunk after chunk of flesh, left countless bleeding wounds, and it would not quit. Iago was not left unscathed, however. He felt the saliva burning his skin where it splashed as the creature bucked and twisted, swinging its head every which way. The air behind him turned into a massive steel coffin covered in spikes, and he barely avoided being impaled upon it. Instead, his side was cut deep from a glancing blow, and he had to stop himself from clenching the wound instinctively.

Finally, after more than a few wounds, it dropped lifelessly to the ground after Iago cut half of its head off, but even then, he had to run it all the way through before he was certain of its fate. He panted and wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, and Rappiccini appeared almost instantly beside him.

“The deed is done, I see.”

He glanced at the Old One, wary. Iago became intensely aware of his damaged state. He wasn’t sure if he could have defeated the Old One at his best, and his current state was anything but. “It is. Will you uphold your end of the bargain?”

Rappiccini looked at him with faint offense. “Wielder, I would never go back on my word. You will find supplies outside of my cave every other morning. Send someone to collect them; I have better things to do than play delivery boy.” The many limbed man looked back to the stoat with a surprising amount of remorse, lifted the body with six of its arms, and hurled it overhead into the pit. It landed with a wet crunch, and his head turned unnaturally back to Iago.

“Another failure. Ah, well. Such is the way of science.”