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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 3630193" data-attributes="member: 143">Today's post begins the answer to that question, but you'll have to come back next week for the final answer. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />* * * * * Chapter 204SHADOW SURPRISEVaro cried out, his voice echoing uncannily off the oddly angled walls.  “Gather around me, at once!” His companions needed no encouragement, as they were each all too familiar with the deadly effects of a shadow’s touch.  There were too many to fight, too many for Varo to turn, so they relied on the cleric’s experience and instincts, falling back on a point in the center of the room.  The leading edge of the shadow charge pressed in among them, penetrating armor and flesh alike with ease.  Talen was staggered as a pair of shadows siphoned strength from him, and he shouted, “Varo, now!” But the cleric waited another second, a seeming eternity as the shadows eagerly assaulted the defenders.  Dar bisected a shadow with his sword, but the weapon passed harmlessly through it, and it in turn cut through his arm, sucking away a measure of his strength.  All of them suffered attacks, and still more shadows were descending, a curtain of black that blocked out their light sources, closing them in within a shrinking bubble of light. “Varo!” Talen yelled. The cleric lifted a hand high into the air, thrusting through the body of a shadow to raise a wand crafted of rune-marked bone.  The cleric drew upon the power of the device, stolen from the corpse of Theron, and summoned a flame strike that descended directly upon himself and his companions.  Shay was the only one to react in time, hurling herself out of their circle and away from the descending column of fire.  The rest of them suffered cruel and familiar burns as the spell wrought its deadly effect, but it also burned away all of the shadows. Or nearly all; two of them had followed Shay on her leap, and as she came to her feet they continued to harry her.  One dug its claws through her back, and the scout fell, her strength all but gone.  The pair surged in to finish the job, but Dar, Talen, and Allera were there at once to aid her.  Once again Valor failed to bite, but Talen tore one in two with Beatus Incendia, while Allera used a precious healing spell to disrupt the other.  Varo knelt over Kalend, who’d fallen unconscious, his body covered with burns from the flame strike.  The cleric stabilized him with a trickle of magical healing, then said, “Allera, Kalend requires your aid.”Dar turned angrily on Varo.  “What in the hells was that, priest?”Varo took out a healing potion and drained its contents.  “It was either that, or accept casualties.  I could not have possibly affected so many shadows at once with a rebuke, and if I had focused the wand’s power on one portion of the room, the other shadows would have killed us before I had a chance to fire another.”Talen returned carrying Shay; the scout was too weak to move.  Once Allera had returned Kalend to consciousness, she took Tribitz’s rod and treated all of them for their lost strength.  All save Varo; the cleric used a lesser restoration spell to accomplish the same effect.  “I am glad that my instincts warned me not to trust you,” Shay said to Varo, once Allera had treated her. “Your instincts quite nearly cost you your life,” Varo said.  “Had another shadow followed you out of the blast radius of the strike, you would now be undead, like them.”Dar drained a healing draught and hurled the empty bottle across the room.  “Let’s get on with it,” he said.  It took them only a few minutes to find the secret door.  Varo closed his eyes and cast out for the source of the pulsing tendrils of energy that they could all feel now, thrumming through the room like the heartbeat of some great machine.  He directed them to the proper wall, where Shay uncovered the hidden trigger that allowed a wide segment of the wall to swing open.  The space beyond was surprisingly unremarkable.  The dusty, barren chamber was maybe twenty feet square, its only feature of note a crude stone altar set into the center  of the wall to their right.  Stone etchings were cut into the wall above the altar, but like the doors outside they were worn down to indecipherability. “Something’s not right here,” Dar muttered under his breath.  They moved into the room, but clustered close to the secret panel, wary of another trap. “The sounds,” Shay said.  “This place... it sounds bigger than it looks...”“An illusion,” Varo said.  “A veil lies over this place, masking its true extent.”“Can you dispel it?” Talen asked, but before the cleric could respond, a cold chill passed through them, a scant second before a wave of incorporeal undead passed through the far wall.  There were over a dozen of them, mostly shadows, but with several wraiths among their number, their glowing eyes shining with hunger for the life energy of the companions. Varo raised his wand, and called down a flame strike.  The column of fire filled the room, close enough to singe the edges of their ragged garments as the backblast washed over them.  Some of the undead were able to avoid the flames, but they could not escape the divine potency infused within the spell.  Perhaps the fact that the wand had been crafted by a follower of Orcus made it more deadly to creatures of undeath, or perhaps it was something in Varo himself as he drew upon its magic.  Whatever the source, the spell was devastating, and when the flames cleared, only a pair of wraiths remained, their insubstantial forms riven and wavering.  Both creatures pressed their attacks, but Dar and Talen were waiting for them, and cut them apart before they could strike.  Varo raised his wand again, and while the others could hear the rush of flames from somewhere beyond the wall, they could not see it. Dar faced the wall, Valor at the ready, but he held his ground, wary of charging forward into another ambush.  Allera, standing in his shadow, looked past him and grew pale, her hands trembling.  “Varo!” Talen yelled. “Marshal your will, commander,” the cleric said.  “See what is there, not what your eyes tell you to see.”The two fighters, standing side by side, stared at the wall.  The illusory barrier shimmered and dissolved, revealing a much larger space beyond.  They realized that the room they were standing in was but a foyer, opening onto a broad hall easily sixty feet wide and many times that in length.  Two rows of bronze pillars graven with obscene designs supported an arched ceiling high above, its details lost in deep shadow.  Further down the hall, the chamber opened into an even larger space, its full extent vast but difficult to quantify in the face of the bright haze of light that illuminated it.  The light came from a bright globe dozens of paces across, a sphere of wavering and flickering chaos that was all too familiar to most of them; they had seen it once before in the second temple of Orcus high above.  The source of the light was a vague point in the center of the globe, but none of them had to see it clearly to know what it was. The Sphere of Souls. But while the companions marked their goal, their attention was drawn to the entities that stood silhouetted against the bright chaos of the Sphere.  Two were clerics, a man and woman, familiar if dangerous foes.  They were clad in the heavy armor and black robes of the high clergy of the demon lord.  The light of the Sphere played on their bald skulls, casting eerie reflections off the Abyssal runes etched deep into their flesh.  Black energies surrounded them, protective wards that shielded them against the power of good and light. The clerics flanked a monstrosity, a creature whose demonic nature was instantly evident.  The being had a face and torso that were vaguely humanoid and feminine, but those features were attached to a serpentine body that extended for some twenty feet from the top of its head to the end of its tail.  Six arms extended from its torso, each holding a slightly curving and viciously sharp sword with blades of black steel.  Like the clerics a malevolent nimbus of darkness clung to it like a second skin, the chaotic surges of the unholy aura adding to the incredible impression of power and dread it made upon those beholding it. “Oh, fricken crap,” Dar said under his breath. The clerics’ robes were scorched from Varo’s flame strike, although the marilith, standing between them, was utterly unharmed.  The fell priests had not been idle during the attack, however.  As the companions stared in horror at what confronted them, each completed a spell.  The male cleric swelled and grew as he drew upon the power of righteous might, while the female hurled an unholy blight into their midst, weakening them with angry pulses of corrupt energy.  The marilith extended a long, slender arm, holding a heavy sword out without apparent effort.  The companions tensed, but the attack they expected came not directly at them, but at the confined space of the exit behind them.  The demon’s power funneled into that gap, and the vicious blur of a blade barrier materialized there.  Kalend, hovering in the rear of their group, was standing almost at the edges of the deadly barrier, and as the blades started to clip into his back the thief leapt forward, narrowly avoiding being cut into ribbons.  With eyes wide, he stared back at the violent storm of death that now blocked their retreat. Their only avenue of escape was now cut off.</blockquote>

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