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Explorer
Patchwall 5, CY 593
70—Bogeys!
The Liberators take positions around the central chamber of Piscean’s tower, finding hiding places amongst the ice-stalagmites and snow drifts, and settle in for an anxious vigil. They converse tersely through the telepathic bond Prisantha keeps active, and discuss possible responses to whatever action Piscean might take. As the wait drags on, their tension increases.
Several minutes pass, then the Liberators notice a shimmering gate appear in the center of the chamber. On its other side, the heroes can see the forests of Furyondy illuminated by the cool grey light of a summer storm, and notice that a light rain has begun. But of their enemies, there is no sign.
As they anxiously study the gate, Lucius speaks up through the bond. “Heads up, we’ve got bogeys,” he thinks loudly.
“What’s a bogey? ” Prisantha asks.
Jespo replies, “A larger boggart, I believe.”
“No, I’ve got invisibles, here,” Lucius snaps. “Three, no—more. Maybe . . . I count seven.”
“Where are they?” Heydricus demands.
“They’re coming through the gate!” Lucius thinks.
Dabus counts silently to ten, then calls upon his god for an invisibility purge, leaving his hiding place to ensure that the effect radiates out from his holy symbol to encompass the gate. He bravely stands before his assembled enemies and fixes them with a defiant gaze.
As Tritherion’s will brushes aside their enemies’ invisibility like so many cobwebs, the Liberators see that Piscean has not arrived alone. At the forefront of his group is a huge floating sphere, covered in decaying grey scales that rim a lone central eye, kept closed, and a mouth half-full of rotted teeth. The grisly beholder has several writhing and desiccated eyestalks radiating out from its crown, and they whip around in all directions, scanning for foes.
Directly behind the beholder, a pair of human fighters stalk forward, their rune-encrusted plate armor engraved with the ancient mark of the Great Kingdom. Each of them whirls a wickedly barbed spiked chain. Moving between the fighters is another knight bearing the holy symbols of Wee Jas, but this woman shows no flesh beneath her plate mail, and the hands that grip her massive adamantine maul are wrapped in burial-bandages; strips of the dusty cloth protrude through the gaps in her armor and she gives off a spice-and-decay stench.
Behind this vanguard, a filthy winged creature flutters through the gate, her human upper torso festooned with magical trinkets, her lower half that of a huge bird of prey. A slim woman walks behind her wearing a cloak covered in a scale of small mirrors. Around her neck are two other mirrors, worn as amulets. Perched on her shoulder is the small ice-imp familiar to the Liberators from their last encounter with Piscean—the imp wears a tiny-sized suit of glowing chainmail and wears a ring as a bracelet. The thing is armed with an almost comically small mace, and a double-bandoleer of spell-component pouches.
Last but not least, Piscean himself, Ivid the Third, slithers through the gate, grinning from ear to ear.
Prisantha remains in hiding, but makes the mass suggestion that her foes, “stand completely still.” Unusually, her opponents seem for the most part to disregard her spell, although the mirrored-sorceress and Piscean both succumb.
But even as he stops moving forward, Piscean smiles at Dabus and says wistfully, “one last exchange then, before you go. Out with the old . . .”
Piscean raises his hands, as if to quiet a large crowd, and opens his mouth to enter a time stop.
“Well, sh-t.” Heydricus says, as all hell breaks loose.
Piscean shimmers for a moment, and his clothing and skin take on the texture of rough granite, even as his form becomes slightly distorted, as if viewed through a heat-mirage. At the same time, both Jespo Crim and Gwendolyn disappear entirely. Regda shouts in dismay, again too late to save her Jespie, and shoots at Piscean with her greatbow. This attack provokes another series of abjurations, and the mage is shielded, and begins to radiate a repulsion effect that stops Dabus’ determined advance.
The woman wearing the mirrored-scale cloak turns toward Dabus and snatches one of her mirrors from her robe, shattering it on the ground. As the mirror shatters, the shards streak toward Dabus in a thin beam of razor sharp glass fragments that strike him squarely in the chest, imbedding themselves in his armor and drawing blood.
The ice-imp on her shoulder flutters its crystalline wings and takes to the air, waving its tiny arms frantically and invoking a prismatic spray that catches Dabus with a stream of fire—cauterizing his many cuts but setting his clothing on fire and searing his skin. Dabus staggers away from the conflagration and tries to steady himself against the intense pain.
Heydricus is the next Liberator to take action, and he charges squarely at the central eye of the beholder, feeling his armor sag on his frame as the beholder’s huge eye rasps open, and renders his gear mundane. Nonetheless, Heydricus draws a puff of dust from a long and deep cut just above the creature’s toothy maw, and cries out exultantly. If they can be cut, even the dead can be killed.
For his trouble, he is set upon by the mummified warrior and her two spiked-chain wielding associates. They lay into Heydricus with bludgeon and whirling edge, and force him to back away from the beholder in a vain attempt to keep from being surrounded.
Lucius, meanwhile, remains hidden, and has noticed an otherwise unseen figure moving stealthily along the outside of the melee, looking for an opening. Another woman, she is heavily cloaked, and her features are entirely hidden by an oversized hood. Lucius smiles to himself, and coolly points his crossbow at her, waiting for his opening.
“What is good for the gander is good for the goose,” Prisantha says to herself, and for the first time enters into her own time stop. She is startled to find that her surroundings seem to have frozen as she hurries through several spells.
“Spell turning, check,” she says. “And let’s see how you like it,” she mutters to no-one as she drops a Mordenkainen’s disjunction on Piscean’s group. She follows up with a hold monster on the imp, and suggests that the beholder, “just close your eyes and float to the ceiling where you’ll be safe.”
As Prisantha returns to normal-time, she frowns and furrows her brow in consternation. The beholder passes a dried and gurgling sound through its mouth that might be a laugh, and the thing casually disregards her good advice. The gall of some abominations! At least she is gratified to note that the imp is frozen, and she is especially pleased at her enemies’ discomfort as spell effects and magic items flare and go inert; her disjunction, at least was a success.
Sonhamiin has watched the opening exchange, and confident of victory, he prepares himself for his entry into the battle. As he reaches out mentally to fix the image of Tritherion within his mind, the celestial becomes aware of another immortal presence in the room. Speaking words of power, he attunes his sight to the hidden realms of immortal existence, and focuses on a slowly spreading cancer to the back of the room. Moving toward the vile emanation, Sonhamiin detects a familiar tinge to the aura. An abyssal tinge to be sure, and one that he has just recently (as celestials mark time) encountered.
“You.” Sonhamiin says, without any preamble.
The rumbling reply is debased and profound, laden with menace, and to the angel’s ears, reminiscent of a deep and abiding anguish. “Surely you didn’t expect my lord Iuz to allow you pretty cowards to go slumming in the mortal realms without inviting me, did you?” As these words are spoken, a dull and muddy orangish light flickers into existence, growing like a wildfire until it takes the form of a tall humanoid figure—twice the celestial’s size, composed entirely of an abyssal flame. “Slumming is my specialty, you slave,” the demon slurs. “We have unfinished business, and this time that fool Zinvellon does not hold the key to my binding!”
Sonhamiin stares for a moment at his demonic foe, his immortal senses taking in the fact that like himself, the balor is present—fully within the demi-plane. This ancient beast has given the most lethal of challenges—an angel and a demon, face to face in one realm with their very existence in the balance. But courage is as much a part of Sonhamiin as the urge for depravity is part of the balor, and with a shout, the angel flies towards his foe, determination radiating from his beautiful and perfect form.
As Prisantha curses her enemies’ strength of mind, Lucius has tracked the hidden woman, and as she maneuvers to the rear of the Liberators, he emerges from his own hiding place and buries a crossbow bolt into her chest, just inches from her heart. She cries out, he curses his poor shot, and the filthy harpy begins to sing the rogue a mother’s song. Before he can reload his crossbow, Lucius drops his weapon and regards the creature with an unalloyed fascination. Regda also succumbs to the song, and the two adventurers begin to shuffle, entranced, toward the waiting claws of the vile bard.
The hidden woman, her ruse exposed, abandons all subtlety, and throws back her cloak, revealing a nest of writhing vipers that crown her scaled and serpentine head.
Gwendolyn frantically tries to make sense of her surroundings. She is in a strange realm, transported there entirely without her consent—a confusing place of angles and passageways that seem to obey no laws. She suppresses a moment of panic, then recalls Prisantha’s description of the maze spell. Thinking quickly, she reaches the same conclusion as Jespo Crim, and at the same instant—she uses plane shift to return to the fighting.
Unfortunately for Gwendolyn, there is an un-hooded medusa standing directly before her. Before she can even congratulate herself on her successful escape, she is turned to stone—a dainty and fetching statue of a formerly very dangerous wizardess.
Jespo emerges from his maze at the same moment, and while there are no medusa in front of him, he is treated to the sight of his fiancée stumbling against all good sense across a spell-strewn battlefield. As he prepares to aid her, he watches Regda walk into the killing-field of the beholder’s eyestalks. She is struck by a flashing ray, and her flesh withers as Jespo watches, knocking her to one knee, then pitching her face-first into the snow and ice of the Hyperborean Obverse.
Heydricus is faring no better—he has hurt the beholder, but the three plate-armored warriors have driven him back. The mummy stands before him—shielding the beholder from Heydricus’ sword, and both of the spiked-chian wielding fighters have managed to find Heydricus’ flanks. All three foes are armed with adamantine weapons—inferior to his own holy armament, in all conditions save one; within an anti-magic zone, the advantage is theirs. Heydricus is a master swordsman, his skills honed by a long career of “adventuring over his head,” but even so, he cannot keep up. He whittles at them as best he can, his confidence in his companions (and their inevitable assistance) perhaps misplaced.
Dabus, however, has more loyalty than sense, and noting his Liberator’s situation, he ignores the two wizards attacking him, and chooses instead to arc a mass heal through the battlefield. Judging rightly that the rotting beholder is itself undead, Dabus includes the beast and his spell nearly shreds the thing with positive energy. But nearly is not enough, and even as Prisantha turns her attention to her petrified cohort, the beholder turns the enchantress of Verbobonc to stone. A matching pair of pretty statues, frozen for the ages with nearly identical expressions of arcane concentration upon their faces.
Dabus’ heroism has saved his leader, but left him at the mercy of his enemies; the mirror-festooned woman presents one of her amulets, as if it were a holy symbol, and Dabus some trifling undead. As Tritherion’s cleric gazes into its reflective surface, he sees an image of himself—a cruelly distorted image of his own worst fears; a Dabus that has fallen from the path of righteousness, and become himself an oppressor. The sight overwhelms Dabus, and the cleric is unable to avoid the thin beam arcing from Piscean’s fingertips. As the ray strikes him, Dabus disappears—replaced by a thin cloud of cleric-shaped dust that slowly settles to the ground. Piscean chuckles to himself, relishing the moment, and ticks off an entry on his mental to-do list.
Heydricus, surrounded on all sides by foes, does not notice this event.
At the opposite end of the huge chamber, Sonhamiin has fixed his mind upon the glory of Tritherion, and with a mental nudge, imposes that image upon the balor. The creature howls in rage, as the holy thought cools and dampens its flaming skin. The demon responds by charging toward Sonhamiin, screeching its fury and lashing its whip about the angel’s wings, then slicing into him with a fiery greatsword.
Heydricus, invigorated by Dabus’ last act, is able to weather another round of attacks from his enemies, and he presses his cause against the plate-armored mummy before him. He drives her back with sledgehammer blows, and after beating down her guard is able to split her helm with a single powerful stroke. The mummy beneath the steel proves to be a dry and fragile thing—Heydricus’ overhand cut smashes her skull and nearly pulverizes the rest of her. He coughs against the spray of spice and dust filling his nostrils and follows through with a shot at the beholder’s central eye.
Deciding that it has had quite enough of that, the beholder snaps its eye closed, and strikes Heydricus in succession with rays of disintegration, inflict wounds and vampiric touch. The combination is more than the Liberator can bear; sighing softly, he falls to the ground, lifeless.
The balor chuckles to himself, for he can see a desperate thought cross the mind of his foe. “If you do this, it will be your death, slave, for we are too evenly matched for you to waste effort upon this rabble.”
Sonhamiin glares back at the demon, but makes no reply.
Prisantha’s mind still functions, she is surprised to note, even within the stony prison of her body. She reflects for a moment that this condition might have a very un-sociable effect on one’s mood should one be left as a statue for any length of time. Perhaps she was too quick to judge Liszt’s character, after all. That musing is quickly followed by curiosity about the lack of chatter on her telepathic bond. Or rather, the amount of chatter all coming from one source—Jespo Crim. Dabus is slain, Heydricus is slain, Regda likewise and Gwendolyn turned to stone. Lucius’ mind is enraptured by the harpy who is even now singing him into a deep, restful slumber. The lone Liberator standing is the least likely combatant—the new Dean of Conjurations at the Willip Wizard’s Communtiy College.
And he is panicking.
70—Bogeys!
The Liberators take positions around the central chamber of Piscean’s tower, finding hiding places amongst the ice-stalagmites and snow drifts, and settle in for an anxious vigil. They converse tersely through the telepathic bond Prisantha keeps active, and discuss possible responses to whatever action Piscean might take. As the wait drags on, their tension increases.
Several minutes pass, then the Liberators notice a shimmering gate appear in the center of the chamber. On its other side, the heroes can see the forests of Furyondy illuminated by the cool grey light of a summer storm, and notice that a light rain has begun. But of their enemies, there is no sign.
As they anxiously study the gate, Lucius speaks up through the bond. “Heads up, we’ve got bogeys,” he thinks loudly.
“What’s a bogey? ” Prisantha asks.
Jespo replies, “A larger boggart, I believe.”
“No, I’ve got invisibles, here,” Lucius snaps. “Three, no—more. Maybe . . . I count seven.”
“Where are they?” Heydricus demands.
“They’re coming through the gate!” Lucius thinks.
Dabus counts silently to ten, then calls upon his god for an invisibility purge, leaving his hiding place to ensure that the effect radiates out from his holy symbol to encompass the gate. He bravely stands before his assembled enemies and fixes them with a defiant gaze.
As Tritherion’s will brushes aside their enemies’ invisibility like so many cobwebs, the Liberators see that Piscean has not arrived alone. At the forefront of his group is a huge floating sphere, covered in decaying grey scales that rim a lone central eye, kept closed, and a mouth half-full of rotted teeth. The grisly beholder has several writhing and desiccated eyestalks radiating out from its crown, and they whip around in all directions, scanning for foes.
Directly behind the beholder, a pair of human fighters stalk forward, their rune-encrusted plate armor engraved with the ancient mark of the Great Kingdom. Each of them whirls a wickedly barbed spiked chain. Moving between the fighters is another knight bearing the holy symbols of Wee Jas, but this woman shows no flesh beneath her plate mail, and the hands that grip her massive adamantine maul are wrapped in burial-bandages; strips of the dusty cloth protrude through the gaps in her armor and she gives off a spice-and-decay stench.
Behind this vanguard, a filthy winged creature flutters through the gate, her human upper torso festooned with magical trinkets, her lower half that of a huge bird of prey. A slim woman walks behind her wearing a cloak covered in a scale of small mirrors. Around her neck are two other mirrors, worn as amulets. Perched on her shoulder is the small ice-imp familiar to the Liberators from their last encounter with Piscean—the imp wears a tiny-sized suit of glowing chainmail and wears a ring as a bracelet. The thing is armed with an almost comically small mace, and a double-bandoleer of spell-component pouches.
Last but not least, Piscean himself, Ivid the Third, slithers through the gate, grinning from ear to ear.
Prisantha remains in hiding, but makes the mass suggestion that her foes, “stand completely still.” Unusually, her opponents seem for the most part to disregard her spell, although the mirrored-sorceress and Piscean both succumb.
But even as he stops moving forward, Piscean smiles at Dabus and says wistfully, “one last exchange then, before you go. Out with the old . . .”
Piscean raises his hands, as if to quiet a large crowd, and opens his mouth to enter a time stop.
“Well, sh-t.” Heydricus says, as all hell breaks loose.
Piscean shimmers for a moment, and his clothing and skin take on the texture of rough granite, even as his form becomes slightly distorted, as if viewed through a heat-mirage. At the same time, both Jespo Crim and Gwendolyn disappear entirely. Regda shouts in dismay, again too late to save her Jespie, and shoots at Piscean with her greatbow. This attack provokes another series of abjurations, and the mage is shielded, and begins to radiate a repulsion effect that stops Dabus’ determined advance.
The woman wearing the mirrored-scale cloak turns toward Dabus and snatches one of her mirrors from her robe, shattering it on the ground. As the mirror shatters, the shards streak toward Dabus in a thin beam of razor sharp glass fragments that strike him squarely in the chest, imbedding themselves in his armor and drawing blood.
The ice-imp on her shoulder flutters its crystalline wings and takes to the air, waving its tiny arms frantically and invoking a prismatic spray that catches Dabus with a stream of fire—cauterizing his many cuts but setting his clothing on fire and searing his skin. Dabus staggers away from the conflagration and tries to steady himself against the intense pain.
Heydricus is the next Liberator to take action, and he charges squarely at the central eye of the beholder, feeling his armor sag on his frame as the beholder’s huge eye rasps open, and renders his gear mundane. Nonetheless, Heydricus draws a puff of dust from a long and deep cut just above the creature’s toothy maw, and cries out exultantly. If they can be cut, even the dead can be killed.
For his trouble, he is set upon by the mummified warrior and her two spiked-chain wielding associates. They lay into Heydricus with bludgeon and whirling edge, and force him to back away from the beholder in a vain attempt to keep from being surrounded.
Lucius, meanwhile, remains hidden, and has noticed an otherwise unseen figure moving stealthily along the outside of the melee, looking for an opening. Another woman, she is heavily cloaked, and her features are entirely hidden by an oversized hood. Lucius smiles to himself, and coolly points his crossbow at her, waiting for his opening.
“What is good for the gander is good for the goose,” Prisantha says to herself, and for the first time enters into her own time stop. She is startled to find that her surroundings seem to have frozen as she hurries through several spells.
“Spell turning, check,” she says. “And let’s see how you like it,” she mutters to no-one as she drops a Mordenkainen’s disjunction on Piscean’s group. She follows up with a hold monster on the imp, and suggests that the beholder, “just close your eyes and float to the ceiling where you’ll be safe.”
As Prisantha returns to normal-time, she frowns and furrows her brow in consternation. The beholder passes a dried and gurgling sound through its mouth that might be a laugh, and the thing casually disregards her good advice. The gall of some abominations! At least she is gratified to note that the imp is frozen, and she is especially pleased at her enemies’ discomfort as spell effects and magic items flare and go inert; her disjunction, at least was a success.
Sonhamiin has watched the opening exchange, and confident of victory, he prepares himself for his entry into the battle. As he reaches out mentally to fix the image of Tritherion within his mind, the celestial becomes aware of another immortal presence in the room. Speaking words of power, he attunes his sight to the hidden realms of immortal existence, and focuses on a slowly spreading cancer to the back of the room. Moving toward the vile emanation, Sonhamiin detects a familiar tinge to the aura. An abyssal tinge to be sure, and one that he has just recently (as celestials mark time) encountered.
“You.” Sonhamiin says, without any preamble.
The rumbling reply is debased and profound, laden with menace, and to the angel’s ears, reminiscent of a deep and abiding anguish. “Surely you didn’t expect my lord Iuz to allow you pretty cowards to go slumming in the mortal realms without inviting me, did you?” As these words are spoken, a dull and muddy orangish light flickers into existence, growing like a wildfire until it takes the form of a tall humanoid figure—twice the celestial’s size, composed entirely of an abyssal flame. “Slumming is my specialty, you slave,” the demon slurs. “We have unfinished business, and this time that fool Zinvellon does not hold the key to my binding!”
Sonhamiin stares for a moment at his demonic foe, his immortal senses taking in the fact that like himself, the balor is present—fully within the demi-plane. This ancient beast has given the most lethal of challenges—an angel and a demon, face to face in one realm with their very existence in the balance. But courage is as much a part of Sonhamiin as the urge for depravity is part of the balor, and with a shout, the angel flies towards his foe, determination radiating from his beautiful and perfect form.
As Prisantha curses her enemies’ strength of mind, Lucius has tracked the hidden woman, and as she maneuvers to the rear of the Liberators, he emerges from his own hiding place and buries a crossbow bolt into her chest, just inches from her heart. She cries out, he curses his poor shot, and the filthy harpy begins to sing the rogue a mother’s song. Before he can reload his crossbow, Lucius drops his weapon and regards the creature with an unalloyed fascination. Regda also succumbs to the song, and the two adventurers begin to shuffle, entranced, toward the waiting claws of the vile bard.
The hidden woman, her ruse exposed, abandons all subtlety, and throws back her cloak, revealing a nest of writhing vipers that crown her scaled and serpentine head.
Gwendolyn frantically tries to make sense of her surroundings. She is in a strange realm, transported there entirely without her consent—a confusing place of angles and passageways that seem to obey no laws. She suppresses a moment of panic, then recalls Prisantha’s description of the maze spell. Thinking quickly, she reaches the same conclusion as Jespo Crim, and at the same instant—she uses plane shift to return to the fighting.
Unfortunately for Gwendolyn, there is an un-hooded medusa standing directly before her. Before she can even congratulate herself on her successful escape, she is turned to stone—a dainty and fetching statue of a formerly very dangerous wizardess.
Jespo emerges from his maze at the same moment, and while there are no medusa in front of him, he is treated to the sight of his fiancée stumbling against all good sense across a spell-strewn battlefield. As he prepares to aid her, he watches Regda walk into the killing-field of the beholder’s eyestalks. She is struck by a flashing ray, and her flesh withers as Jespo watches, knocking her to one knee, then pitching her face-first into the snow and ice of the Hyperborean Obverse.
Heydricus is faring no better—he has hurt the beholder, but the three plate-armored warriors have driven him back. The mummy stands before him—shielding the beholder from Heydricus’ sword, and both of the spiked-chian wielding fighters have managed to find Heydricus’ flanks. All three foes are armed with adamantine weapons—inferior to his own holy armament, in all conditions save one; within an anti-magic zone, the advantage is theirs. Heydricus is a master swordsman, his skills honed by a long career of “adventuring over his head,” but even so, he cannot keep up. He whittles at them as best he can, his confidence in his companions (and their inevitable assistance) perhaps misplaced.
Dabus, however, has more loyalty than sense, and noting his Liberator’s situation, he ignores the two wizards attacking him, and chooses instead to arc a mass heal through the battlefield. Judging rightly that the rotting beholder is itself undead, Dabus includes the beast and his spell nearly shreds the thing with positive energy. But nearly is not enough, and even as Prisantha turns her attention to her petrified cohort, the beholder turns the enchantress of Verbobonc to stone. A matching pair of pretty statues, frozen for the ages with nearly identical expressions of arcane concentration upon their faces.
Dabus’ heroism has saved his leader, but left him at the mercy of his enemies; the mirror-festooned woman presents one of her amulets, as if it were a holy symbol, and Dabus some trifling undead. As Tritherion’s cleric gazes into its reflective surface, he sees an image of himself—a cruelly distorted image of his own worst fears; a Dabus that has fallen from the path of righteousness, and become himself an oppressor. The sight overwhelms Dabus, and the cleric is unable to avoid the thin beam arcing from Piscean’s fingertips. As the ray strikes him, Dabus disappears—replaced by a thin cloud of cleric-shaped dust that slowly settles to the ground. Piscean chuckles to himself, relishing the moment, and ticks off an entry on his mental to-do list.
Heydricus, surrounded on all sides by foes, does not notice this event.
At the opposite end of the huge chamber, Sonhamiin has fixed his mind upon the glory of Tritherion, and with a mental nudge, imposes that image upon the balor. The creature howls in rage, as the holy thought cools and dampens its flaming skin. The demon responds by charging toward Sonhamiin, screeching its fury and lashing its whip about the angel’s wings, then slicing into him with a fiery greatsword.
Heydricus, invigorated by Dabus’ last act, is able to weather another round of attacks from his enemies, and he presses his cause against the plate-armored mummy before him. He drives her back with sledgehammer blows, and after beating down her guard is able to split her helm with a single powerful stroke. The mummy beneath the steel proves to be a dry and fragile thing—Heydricus’ overhand cut smashes her skull and nearly pulverizes the rest of her. He coughs against the spray of spice and dust filling his nostrils and follows through with a shot at the beholder’s central eye.
Deciding that it has had quite enough of that, the beholder snaps its eye closed, and strikes Heydricus in succession with rays of disintegration, inflict wounds and vampiric touch. The combination is more than the Liberator can bear; sighing softly, he falls to the ground, lifeless.
The balor chuckles to himself, for he can see a desperate thought cross the mind of his foe. “If you do this, it will be your death, slave, for we are too evenly matched for you to waste effort upon this rabble.”
Sonhamiin glares back at the demon, but makes no reply.
Prisantha’s mind still functions, she is surprised to note, even within the stony prison of her body. She reflects for a moment that this condition might have a very un-sociable effect on one’s mood should one be left as a statue for any length of time. Perhaps she was too quick to judge Liszt’s character, after all. That musing is quickly followed by curiosity about the lack of chatter on her telepathic bond. Or rather, the amount of chatter all coming from one source—Jespo Crim. Dabus is slain, Heydricus is slain, Regda likewise and Gwendolyn turned to stone. Lucius’ mind is enraptured by the harpy who is even now singing him into a deep, restful slumber. The lone Liberator standing is the least likely combatant—the new Dean of Conjurations at the Willip Wizard’s Communtiy College.
And he is panicking.
