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[Jon Potter]

"This power here is somewhat intoxicating... huh?" Noxin slurred, idly slapping Huzair on the shoulder. The wizard stumbled to the side, colliding lightly with Saelus. Both mages looked angrily at the barbarian, but Noxin wasn't paying them any attention. Instead, he gripped Windblade tightly in his fist, muscles rippling as he marvelled at the raw energy coursing in the air around him.

"I think I can feel this fueling me..." he grinned breathily, his eyes wide as he raised the air sword above his head.

"I do not think an amatuer should mess with this," Huzair cautioned even as he scrambled back away from the half-giant.

If Noxin heard him, he did not heed the warning and presently raw tendrils of energy began to coalesce out of the air above his head, arcing like lightning into Windblade and from there into Noxin. For a moment his grin widened and then, abruptly, he was thrown backward by an overload of unchecked energy. He lay there for a moment, smoking, then he sat up, holding his head.

"Ow," he said, abashed.

"Now is not the time for foolishness," Morier scolded through gritted teeth. It was clear that it was taking a tremendous amount of will power for him to speak with the Pull distracting him so. He pointed at the island above their heads. "We are so close to our goal."

"How are we going to get up there exactly?" Noxin snorted as he got gingerly to his feet.

"Oh, it looks like it is up to me again to solve the problems of the party," Huzair quipped, opening the flap on his Haversack and producing a tiny pouch from within. "Magic dust time." Saelus peered at the pouch as Huzair carefully pulled the drawstring, revealing its glittering contents.

"Fairy Dust!" the wizard observed. "Dust of Levitation, if I'm not mistaken." Huzair nodded.

"Levitation dust?!? I ain't that fond of floating around there, wizard," Noxin observed as he looked over the two men's heads to see the pouch. "More of a boots on the ground type. Do we have any other options?" The half-giant looked around at the others and they each shook their heads in turn.

"Flyboy would have come in handy here," Huzair mused as he offered the Dust around.

"Your flyboy? Who?" Saelus asked and Huzair shook his head, making a 'never mind' gesture. "At any rate, a flying boy would probably have been useful only if he did not mind playing the boatman and ferrying one of us across each time. Ineffective and cumbersome..." Huzair shrugged.

"Well, he would not have minded and it would have worked better than standing here getting all wet," he said, overing Shamalin a pinch of the Dust.

"Well, you know him better so I defer to your judgment on that," Saelus said and sprinkled his pinch of Fairy Dust over his head.

"Sounds like a wonderful feller," Noxin observed. "What did you lot do to run him off?"

"We did very little, actually. He did it to himself," Huzair explained as Morier took a pinch of Dust. "He felt his own agenda was more important than ours." He came around to Noxin and offered the pouch. There was very little of the Dust left and Noxin's thick fingers couldn't fit inside. He ended up licking his pinky finger and sticking it into the pouch, coming out with a finger encrusted with tiny glittering crystals that he rubbed unceremoniously in his unruly hair.

Huzair grimaced, peered into the pouch and upended its meager contents on his own head.

"That's the end of the Dust," he told the others as he replaced the empty pouch into his Haversack. "By the way, do we have an escape route planned?"

His question was met with blank stares.

"Right. I thought as much," he said and sighed. "I can save Fly for the way down if we need a rapid escape."

"Let's just worry about getting there, first," Shamalin suggested, looking nervously at the island above. She remembered well how near to death she had come trying to retrieve the Key of Earth under similar circumstances. They had lost Lela there, and she wondered prophetically who amongst them would come to the end of their days in this place.

"I'll go up first if you all want," Noxin offered, pointing with Windblade. The longsword looked almost like a dagger in his big hand. "I don't mind being the first into the fray."

"Hold on," Huzair said, taking his familiar from his pocket. "I will send up Sparky first for some quick surveillance. Be safe, little buddy." He tossed the hummingbird into the air and it flitted off into the sky.

"What do we do in the meantime?" Noxin asked. "Poke around down here?"

"No!" Morier and Shamalin said at the same time and the barbarian scowled.

"Now we prepare," Huzair said, walking over to Morier. He looked at Saelus and said, "Buffing is a good time to test the magic. I'll start with Morier." The eldritch warrior raised an eyebrow at the wizard.

"Of course, I can take care of myself if I have to Huzair," he said with some effort, "but why worry about it when I have the rest of you around to do it for me?" Huzair snorted once.

"Damn straight! We have been carrying your sorry ass for how many months now?" he told the albino. Then in a quieter voice, he added, "Save the spells for that sword of yours, Morier."

Morier smiled. He could see the uncertainty in the wizard's eyes and hear it in his voice. He placed a hand on the dark-skinned man's shoulder.

"We'll make it, Huzair," he reassured. "I believe the fates have selected me to do this... and I will. I was meant to survive this, and I will cast my buffing spells at the first sign of trouble..." Huzair threw up his hands in mock disgust.

"If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times. Buff BEFORE we get into trouble," the wizard scoffed. "Oh, you will never learn."

Just then Sparky returned from his reconnaissance mission and twittered to Huzair the details of the area above.

"He says there is some kind of ruin up there. Fallen columns and such like in the Termlane Forest where I first hooked up with you guys," the wizard related. "There are two big trees that look dead, a spring that is the source of this 'rain' and... a pedestal with a huge red gemstone on top."

"The Heart!" Shamalin exclaimed involuntarily. She'd been reading about it for so long in Ledare's notes that it was shocking to suddenly find herself so close to it.

"I'll go up first, Morier," Noxin said immediately, holding out his arms. "Huzair, you grab one side; Shamalin... you on the other." Huzair shook his head.

"We should all Levitate up in a different spot or spread out by say 20-30 feet so a single spell cannot afffect us all simultaneously," the mage suggested. "Personally, I do not want to die."

"We expectin' a spellcaster up there?" Noxin asked, his brow furrowed. Huzair shrugged.

"I do not know what to expect," the wizard admitted. "None of us does." Noxin considered that and then looked at Windblade.

"Sword, I am Noxin," he said directly into the weapon's nearly-invisible crosspiece. "I will wield you with a strength you have not yet seen."

"Do as you will," Windblade sighed. "I am eager to fulfill my destiny. I feel its tug on me and would have my part in this fulfilled."

"Tell me, ancient sword, can you tell anything of this place?" the barbarian asked.

"It is outside of nature," the weapon said. "it is sustained by the power of My Lady's Heart. There is an essence of Her here. It is gathering itself."

"Can you assist us here in some way?" Noxin pressed, hopeful.

"I will do what I can," Windblade said. "We all will do our parts, but powerful though we may be, we are but the smallest part of Her power." Noxin turned to the others.

"Well, that don't sound too good, does it?" he grinned and Huzair raised Flameblade and spoke to it.

"Tell us anything else before we go up there to perhaps die," the mage said simply.

"She is gathering awareness," the sword crackled. "Your advantage disappears as you stand here talking." They all looked at one another.

"Let's move," Morier ordered. "We should try to keep a logical spacing between us so that we can't all be wiped out by a single spell."

"Gee what a great idea, Morier," Huzair quipped, rolling his eyes. "You sure are brilliant!"

Morier opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment an unearthly scream split the air, like talons shrieking across a steel breastplate.

"SHE COMES!" Stoneblade thundered a moment before a face of luminous smoke twenty feet tall coalesced out of the air. It was a woman, they could all see, impossibly beautiful and impossibly horrible because of the madness in her eyes and the rictus of pain into which her mouth was twisted. She opened her jaw and screamed again and they felt the full weight of her anguish and lost godhood slam into them like a battering ram.

Confronted with the essence of a divinity, their ranks broke immediately. Huzair and Morier dropped their weapons and bolted into the tall grass. A moment later, Shamalin did the same, tossing her shield aside for good measure and clanking after her more fleet-footed companions. All three screamed in complete panic as they went, their minds all but unhinged.

They left three elemental swords abandoned on the ground as they went.

Noxin and Saelus did not immediately flee from the face of Dridana, but they both felt the powerful urge to run just the same. The urge only increased as they watched a great, moving heap of earth and rock the size of a small tower rise up from the ground on crude legs. Two clublike arms studded with jagged stone hung from its shoulders, and its head was nothing but a blunt, featureless mass of earth, but the crude features staring down at them were twisted with malevolence.

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OOC- So, anyone familiar with Malhavoc Press' event book Requiem for a God might recognize some of these effects. The entirety of the demiplane is within an Energy Well, for instance, which is straight out of that book. Noxin attempted (and failed) to channel some of that energy into himself when they first arrived.
Confronting Dridana's demiurge, required consultation of another book entirely. Atlas Games' Seven Strongholds has rules for when mortals come face to face with the divine called Primal Dread. The dice were unfavorable at this point, and only the two newbies of the party managed to hold their ground when stared down by the fallen goddess; the others all epically failed their Primal Dread checks and ran, panicked.