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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4306517" data-attributes="member: 143">We're coming up on a cliffhanger of a different sort, tomorrow. * * * * * Chapter 61AFTER“Come on angel, wake up.  We need you here, Allera... I need you...”She heard the words as a faint presence against the edge of the muzzled gray that surrounded her.  The next ones were louder, but no less insistent.  “Damn it, Maricela, get in here!” “I...” Allera tried to speak, found the simple word escape her.  She tried to get up, but her body felt alien, like an unfamiliar shell.  It did not obey her commands.“Hold on, angel,” he said.  Summoning her will, she forced through the gray with sheer doggedness.  As it retreated, she blinked—could blink, unable to keep her eyes open against the bright glow. She was still in the spherical chamber, lying on the floor, her head cradled in Dar’s lap.  The bright light was Dar’s torch; the sphere was gone, and with it the bright yellow glow.  But to her damaged eyes the torch seemed like the light of the sun, and everything had a hazy look to it, even Dar’s face slightly indistinct, as though she was looking upon a painting where the artist had blurred out the lines. “I am all right,” she said, although she felt anything but.  Dar put a hand on her shoulder, as if expecting her to try to get up.  Instead, she felt at her magic, letting out a sigh of relief as the power of a cure serious wounds spell seeped into her.  The magic felt soothing, although her injuries were not just of the body, she knew.  But her muscles tingled as control over them returned, and her vision sharpened incrementally, although she still had to avoid looking directly at the torch.  Dar noticed her ailment, and shifted the torch behind him with his free hand.  “Thank you,” she said.  “I think I can get up, now.”“Just wait for Maricela,” he replied.  She opened her mouth to protest—there was nothing that the priestess could do for her that she herself could not—but froze as she got a look at the pedestal in the middle of the room over Dar’s shoulder.  He followed her stare, and held her as she started to struggle, trying to get away. “It’s all right,” he said.  “It’s just a skull, it’s not undead.”She stopped trying to resist him, and took a deep breath.  The skull sat atop the pedestal, and would have been inside the sphere, when it still existed.  She could now see that it lacked the gemstones set into it that the demilich had possessed, but she disagreed with Dar in one respect: there was something there, a presence, within the skull.  Something ancient, and powerful.  She could hear someone approaching through the tunnel.  With the yellow beam gone, passage through it had to be a lot easier than when she had done it, but its circular shape, a low shaft bored straight through the stone, made navigating it still slightly tricky.  With Dar helping her, she pulled herself up to a sitting position, deciding it was easier to let Maricela help her if it eased her husband’s worry. But it was not the priestess of Soleus who appeared in the doorway, but rather Amurru.  The lich, still clad in its ancient armor, regarded them with a look that was somehow just as penetrating, just as cold, as the stare she’d gotten from the demilich just a short while before.  The creature said nothing, turning and walking to the pedestal.  It took up the skull, tucking it into the crook of its arm.  It headed back toward the exit, where it paused to look back at them again. “Come.  There is not much time.”</blockquote>

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