Bruce Cordell - Darkvision

Instead of allowing her to jump away, Angul pulled himself up like a spike to meet the mallet. For the blade, friendships and alliances mattered not. For Angul, overcoming the unrighteous and the abominable came first and last, damn every consequence. Angul was intent on sacrificing Monolith, if he still lived, to deprive the watery scourge of its weapon. "I'm the wielder!" hissed Kiril. As the blow descended, she crumbled and rolled back and to her left, slapping the damp stone with her left hand to absorb the fall instead of her hip and back. She maintained her grip on Angul with her right hand, despite its flare of displeasure. She was ruining its strategy! Kiril sprang to her feet as she exited the roll, anticipating the vortex's reaction. She charged the vortex's base even as its muddy crown coiled up and back. Angul's blue-white fire burned hot as she lunged forward and plunged the blade directly into the vortex. Cerulean battled sapphire, fire contested water. The ensuing steam explosion threw Kiril back across the wet floor. Angul's fire sputtered, but the water elemental's vortex was unraveled. The column of water collapsed, deluging the floor of the chamber. Prince Monolith crashed to the floor, and stone shrapnel from his fall scored Kiril's face. What remained seemed more a mound of mud than anything else. Kiril's will reunited with Angul's as she spied the tiny amulet that still pulsed with venomous luminescence. She dived at the glimmering shard. As a phantom, wine-colored tentacle reached from an interstitial space focused by the amulet, the Blade Cerulean smashed the malign talisman into a thousand burning, guttering splinters.

The pale-skinned wizard said Eined was dead. Even after the funeral, he couldn't grasp it.

Ususi said his sister perished nobly. Nobly or shamefully, the horrifying, dawning realization that his sister was gone occluded everything else. A gasping emptiness inhabited Warian's chest. It was an echoing hollow nothing could fill, but his thoughts swirled around it like water circling an abyss.

He clenched his crystal fist, ready to vent his sudden fury.

Violet light leaped dangerously in his prosthesis. What would he smash? He saw nothing but the path below his feet. No railway or embankment separated him from the gulfs of darkness that Ususi and Iahn's ancestors had constructed.

With a strangled sob, Warian dropped to his knees and struck the path with his flashing prosthetic. His fist punched a small crater, and cracks in the stone raced ahead and behind him. The path shuddered, and he heard his uncle cry out behind him.

A hand touched his shoulder. He turned his head, saw Zel. "Why?"

Warian asked. "Why'd she have to die?"

His uncle squeezed his shoulder and said, "More than your sister is dead this day, Nephew."

Warian realized Zel's own sister had also died, Sevaera. And perhaps Zel's own father was, if not dead, compromised to such an extreme degree that he might as well have perished.

"I'm sorry, Uncle. I just…"

"You'll have your chance to exact vengeance when we get into that tower, if the Imaskari are right. Unless you exhaust yourself out here battering the stone, or send us all screaming into the dark."

Warian nodded and allowed the lavender radiance flickering in his arm to lapse. Zel helped him to his feet as he weathered the momentary wave of faintness following his arm's surge. The weakness was not nearly as bad as before, since he'd started to practice accessing the arm's strength in controlled bursts. It was a triumph he would have enjoyed sharing with Eined.

Up the path, Iahn paused where he walked with Ususi. The wizard looked ahead to the wavering walls of the tower, now only a few hundred paces ahead. The vengeance taker turned and fixed Warian with his ice-cold eyes. He said, "The paths are not indestructible."

Warian nodded, blood rushing to his cheeks. Damn. He briefly felt much younger than his twenty-two years.

Iahn turned and conferred with the wizard, who was pointing ahead.

Feeling the pressure of Zel's hands on his shoulders encouraging him to proceed, Warian walked ahead.

"… some sort of broad interface with the Celestial Nadir and the world," Ususi was saying. The wizard had her keystone out and was studying the wavering facade of the tower through it.

"Yes," she continued. "It's a magical mechanism the Imaskari put in place in case the Purple Palace ever returned to the world. This path maintains a connection with some chamber inside the palace. If we walk the path to its end, through the interface, we should be injected back into our world, safely inside the tower."

"And not far from the weapons cache?" asked the vengeance taker.

"Only a floor or two below, from what I remember of the floor plans."

Iahn nodded and increased his pace. He threw over his back, "Time is precious."

Ususi turned to Warian and Zel. "Once we get into the palace, we could go up against Pandorym, plus whatever else Pandorym has released from the weapons cache to defend it. Be ready for anything." She looked dubiously at Zel, then turned and moved quickly to catch up with Iahn.

"Do you think that look implied something?" wondered Zel.

"She wants you to be careful, Uncle."

"And you?

"I've got my arm. You've got… a pickaxe."

Zel chuckled and slung the haft of the pickaxe over his shoulder.

Stepping through the wavering interface was like walking beneath a waterfall-icy, and just as shocking.

Warian stiffened, but the cold faded. He wasn't actually wet. And the gulfs of the Celestial Nadir were gone. Instead, the glimmer of Ususi's head-orbiting light revealed the confines of a cylindrical stone corridor. Inscribed glyphs spiraled endlessly around the passageway. He jumped when the glyphs pulsed, sending a whirl of white light corkscrewing down the passage a hundred paces or more. Zel suddenly blinked into the space next to Warian.

The wizard said, "We stand at the endpoint of a more sophisticated version of the stone circles, which are the usual means to access the Celestial Nadir. This is probably one of the twenty gates."

"Twenty… are you saying there are twenty gates into the Celestial Nadir?" asked Warian.

"Yes. Prior to this journey, it was my goal to find and catalogue all of them. I suspected the Purple Palace contained at least one gate, but figured it would be years before I learned whether I was right or wrong. Funny. Until recently, this gate wasn't even accessible from our world."

"You're sure we're back in the world?" asked Zel. He cast a suspicious gaze down the narrow, circular corridor.

"If not the world, then at least the Purple Palace," said the wizard. "Soon, we'll encounter Pandorym."

"And defeat it," added Iahn. The vengeance taker muttered a few words in a language unknown to Warian and trudged ahead.

Ususi nodded, apparently agreeing with Iahn's statement, and followed.

Warian and Zel brought up the rear.

The long, spiraling corridor opened into a wider space. Iahn and Ususi entered, and Warian moved just inside the new chamber. The wizard's light flickered around, revealing a wide, empty room with a single exit opposite the corridor. It was shuttered by a rusted slab of iron.

"If I recall correctly…" Ususi began, then a shudder rumbled below Warian's feet. He tried to retreat the way he'd come, but he bumped against his uncle.

"Get back!" Warian cried.

The floor dropped away. He fell, as did Zel and Ususi. The vengeance taker performed a desperate and impressive leap toward the far door, where an iron handle glinted invitingly, but he came up several feet short and plunged like the rest of them. He tumbled through a series of braking maneuvers against the wall.

Warian smashed hard onto stone. Thuds, cries, and gasps peppered the darkness around him, and he knew he wasn't alone. Ususi's light flicked back on.