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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Medriev" data-source="post: 4525165" data-attributes="member: 21864">Chapter 16 - Getting Back (Part 4)“Why has no one come for me?” Enlishia asked her companion once again although she already knew the answer.“You served no one,” explained the horned creature next to her. “And so no one comes for you.”Enlishia’s shoulders slumped and she surveyed again the grey, lifeless plain which surrounded her. Here and there, other like her wandered, some alone, some in groups and some with companions such as she walked with. She looked over at the creature again with the same disbelief that she had experienced when she had first met Ilagh. He smiled at her patiently, showing elongated canine teeth and the remainder as sharp as needles. He was used to her scrutiny. They had walked together in the same direction for what seemed like an age. Every so often, Enlishia would ask the same question, usually when a glowing being came down and gathered together a band of the others who walked the plain. They would vanished through a shining doorway and always, she would be left.Ilagh was crimson skinned with sharp barbs at his shoulders and along his arms. He wore black plate armour and carried a vicious barbed spear with a blade two feet long lazily over one shoulder. His eyes were bright red also and from behind his ears, horns curled back, ending in vicious points that steered down towards his shoulder blades. Ilagh’s beard was the strangest of all for it seemed to be made of writhing snakes that constantly hungered for prey. He was a strange companion, Enlishia thought. Not one she would normally seek out but here, wherever here was, strange companions were all there was.“You will reach the city soon,” said Ilagh then, as he often did. “A tenday, perhaps a little more. The time for decision is not far away.”“And when I reach the city?” Enlishia queried once more.“You will join the Wall of the Faithless,” Ilagh answered as he had repeatedly. “It is Myrkul’s condemnation of all who serve no god.”Enlishia pondered this terrible fate and found Ilagh’s offer more and more tempting. She would at least exist, she reasoned, as something more than a body in a wall of such bodies. She looked over at Ilagh and he smiled, that tooth-filled smile that she had become so familiar with. Suddenly, she felt a pull and heard someone calling her name. She was being turned around without her willing it and there, before her, she saw a golden, glowing portal. She heard the call again. Enlishia, come back to us.She was facing away from the city now, towards the portal and slowly she was being drawn in. Dimly, she realised that Ilagh was becoming increasingly agitated.“You can’t,” he was saying. “You are Faithless. You belong to me!”With one last pull, Enlishia entered the portal and the grey plain was gone. Ilagh was gone, the distant city was gone and somehow, she knew that she was safe.Enlishia’s eyes opened and she looked up at the stone ceiling of some kind of temple. She lay on hard stone, she decided and she smelled strong incense in the air. There was more than that, though. Her body was covered in sweet smelling unguents and poultices. Faces crowded around her and she saw a dark haired woman, an elf and a black-scaled lizard man. Dulvarna, Lavren and Erlmoor. The names came to her as though from a distant memory. She had come back from the dead, she realised and as memories of the grey Fugue Plain receded, hope returned.</blockquote>

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