Like with all the best riddles, the answer was perfectly obvious after he heard it. Letho reckoned this was the case with the previous two as well, and that the solution would have come like a slap to the face if only someone provided it. But out of the three of them, none seemed to have penchant for solving these brain teasers, their answers failing to appease the riddler with in the stone. And so the hill kept shaking, the monolith kept standing there like the world’s largest tombstone, and the darkness kept closing in around them. It rose around the hill’s summit until they seemed to be standing at the bottom of a well whose walls were ever moving, like corporeal black smoke. The horrors within that veil stretched their smoky limbs out in ghastly gestures of greeting, eager to embrace whoever got within reach.
Extending his will towards the malleable metal of the Vorpal Blade, Letho morphed the weapon into a massive scythe. And even as Hsa’s conjured familiar started drilling the shadows within the mist with his rotating horn and Steppenwolf started smacking them away with his mitts, Letho began slicing them away. The curved blade of his scythe went through the limbs unchallenged, the slicing motions leaving smoky trails as they severed the extremities from the surrounding mist. Yet for every arm he separated from the mist, two more appeared, and for every tentacle he stomped into a puff of black smoke, two more came reaching for his legs. It felt like trying to fight water, trying to make the flood stop with naught but your hands and feet and feel it pour through no matter what you did. Hsa’s creature was the sole source of light, shining as a falling star on a moonless night, but even its light started to fade as the black smoke started to envelop it.
Orud, Ylime! To me! Letho extended his inner voice to his two old friends. A pair of portals materialized next to the bulky ranger instantaneously, and through it leapt a huge pair of silver-furred wolves. They landed on the rocky plateau with a growl, their red eyes scanning the surrounding as their heads went back and forth. Protect the Chibimon.
Creatures of natural origin might’ve been perplexed by such a request without further elaboration, but the two wolves were as much a part of Letho’s mind as he was a part of theirs. They bounded away instantly, snapping their large fangs at the black hands that reached for Myslight. They worked in perfect unison, Orud and Ylime, leaping over the smaller wolf-like creature and fending off whatever came close enough to extinguish its light.
“Fall back slowly!” Letho commanded, ducked beneath a massive tentacle that wanted to run him through, then rolled away when it tried to crush him. The scythe came crashing down on the thick tendril, turning it to dirty vapor. “We make a half-circle around the lad! Buy him some time to answer.”
“What’s the riddle?” Steppenwolf asked, swatting the smoky hands away with his massive arms. Letho could see that half the man’s jacket was missing, be he was otherwise no worse for wear.
“It makes you weak at worst of times,” the Chibimon trainer said hurriedly. “Keeps you safe, keeps you in line. Makes your hands sweat, makes your heart grow cold. It visits the weak, but seldom the bold.”
“And?” the pink-haired man again.
“And what? I don’t know the answer. Grief maybe, or sickness...” Hsa spat back. He turned away from the monolith, cringing at the sight. His wolf-like familiar was a faint twinkle amidst the darkness, like an oil lamp behind a dirty pane of glass. Steppenwolf was just a couple of paces away from him, wrestling with three hands that kept pulling at his shirt, his knee, his shoulder. Of the two Letho’s wolves, only one still stood next to Myslight, blood trickling between the huge fangs. Letho himself was at his side now, swiping the scythe this way and that, chasing the blackness away with the flat of the curved blade.
“Just... not sure,” the youngster said in little over a whisper.
“It is fine, lad,” Letho said, his voice calm in between swipes and groans and shallow audible breaths. “Just pick one. And have no fear.”