Scitheron was halfway to the pit when he heard the screams. They were not the screams of his people-who were, anyway, not screamers by nature, preferring to do even their dying in silence-but the screams of attacking warriors. He almost dropped the child in his fright, but he kept her close to his underbelly as he slithered quietly back toward the plaza. He called on his god’s power to drape him in a clinging shadow to hide him from enemies, and peered from the jungle’s growth.

Horrors had descended on the plaza. Humanoids, most shorter than Scitheron, wearing black leather armor. Their flesh, where it showed, was as pale as the underside of poisonous mushrooms. They cackled as they swung their war picks, the harvesters among them wielding magical black iron shackles that wound around the limbs or tangled the coils of the yuan-ti who attempted to flee.

Derro, Scitheron thought.

The baby mewled, softly, and Scitheron covered her mouth with his hands. The invaders couldn’t have heard the child’s sound over the violence happening in the plaza, but if she cried out again, Scitheron would snap her tiny neck to preserve himself, child of destiny or no. The derro were one of the most feared races of the Underdark, which meant the sinkhole that had opened in the floor of the main temple a few days before was more than merely an accident of nature-it was a breach point, allowing insane horrors from the depths to attack in their midst.

The abomination guards had fought back, and they lay dead on the stones of the courtyard. The settlement’s lone cobra striker spat venom in the face of one of the slavers, the enemy’s flesh melting away, but the attacker only cackled wildly and lashed out with its club. Derro were insane, tainted by their association with aberrant creatures and their devotion to the outer horrors of the so-called Far Realm, where madness was sanity and reality ran like melting wax.