Baneck inspected the formed saber in the vise.  He could not help but notice how much his work had improved over the last few months.

He heard the wagon of Dromen Hashing go by, fully loaded, by the creaks of the axles.

Then Dromen shouted, and Baneck looked up, stepping out into the street, to see the tell-tale shadow sweep over the ground.

“Felldrake!” came the cry, followed by shouts and commotion, as the winged red touched down at the north end of the street.

Maguleth slid down off the dragon’s back, striding toward the forge where Baneck Lichner worked, already feeling the effects of Khostead’s warding-totems.  If Hkoshiktay was to abandon him, then the power in Lichner offered his only hope, to regain what he lost so many centuries ago.  If the Beast God chose to inflict a more direct punishment, then offering the Blood of Wintermore might help appease his anger.  Either way, he needed the human.

He saw armed Coastals approaching, as well as Felldrake’s shadow to the side, as the beast moved behind him.  The wyrm’s head was drawing back, while the shoulders were hunched, before the imminent bite-attack.

Cutting through the suspense, Maguleth cast a spell at the Coastals, sending magical darts of purple light streaming toward them, burning their flesh.

But it was Felldrake who cried the loudest, with a roar that shook the earth, as he collapsed in pain.

Ignoring him, Maguleth walked onward, pushing resistance aside and proceeding toward his prize.

“You!” Felldrake roared out from behind.  “You tricked me!”

Maguleth was too disgusted to reply.  Of course he had.  The ignorant wyrm’s own flesh had been the sacrifice, when he cast the spells on the membrane-sheets, creating a way around the Coastals’ protective totems.

Each new enchantment burned his flesh under his scales, as Maguleth continued on.

Behind him, the red’s cries quickly became a nuisance.

Baneck ran forward with everyone else, Tungstil drawn.  But the sight of the dragon, as he rolled into a couple of buildings, bellowing in pain, was minor, compared to the ominous, hooded figure that kept advancing, and attacking his countrymen.

Dromen shouted beside him, “How can he use magic with our wards protecting us?!”

Glancing at Morgy’s store across the street, Baneck wondered if the absent dragon’s building might have magical protection they could use to make their stand.

Then he spotted Gavina, under the eaves of the storefront, and hoped she got back inside, as he advanced with other sons and daughters of Vongilor to meet their enemy.

He stared wide-eyed, as some mysterious force blasted through the air, and several men in front of him were cast aside like blowing leaves.

Baneck raised Tungstil and ran forward.

And then he himself felt the impact, his feet leaving the ground, helpless to stop his flight.  The wall of a small building broke his momentum, and he slid to the ground, making a quick scramble back to his feet.

Then the fiend was in front of him.  But it was only a skeleton!  Was it a ghost, or something else?

“Have a care, Baneck Lichner.  I don’t want to damage you.”

Baneck hesitated.  If he could reach the creature, Tungstil could cut it.

The bone-ghost made another gesture, and suddenly the young smith was falling.  A hole had opened beneath his feet.

He saw, briefly, Gavina running out of Morgy’s front door, waving a torch.

“No!” he shouted at her, as he slid down a cloud-like chute, inside a swirling space that churned with the colors of water and grass.  A cloud-like mist covered the ground so he could not see his own feet, making him wonder if there was any ground at all in the strange place.

But the magical doorway, several yards down the cloudy corridor, whose dusk-like background framed a massive, lizard-headed creature with giant clawed pinchers where it should have had hands, was plenty real.

The stench of sulfur and scorched earth wafted at him from the doorway, from some other place of existence, and the creature’s black-orbed eyes focused on him.

He jumped to his feet, Tungstil at the ready.  The monster snorted in contempt.

Maguleth turned to jump into the hole, when a torch of all things came flipping at him, end over end, and hit him square on top of his head.

He turned to regard the dark-haired girl, and gave a start, as he noticed the heat, and the burning of his hood, as the torch fell into the portal.

The creature was motioning its body-long arms, and the tunnel shivered in response, the ground actually moving Baneck toward it.

Then a stick bounced against his boot.  He recognized the burnslick torch’s fire in the low haze, as he glanced down, and felt the heat despite his protective amulet.

He snatched it up, and with the same skill as throwing his smithy’s hammer to kill a fly on the wall, flung it at the monster, hitting it squarely in its ugly face.

The lizard-beast clamped its scaled claws over its eyes, and drew back with a fearsome roar.

The torch fell, its magical flame burning on the threshold of the doorway, and Baneck saw a ripple-effect – a physical disruption – as if the heat damaged the fabric of the magic portal.  The tremor passed into the walls of the tunnel around him, as he turned back the way he had come.

He grabbed at the walls.  The space around him started to lose its definition as he futilely climbed; the surfaces of the walls and ground roiled, like bright blue clouds, rushing and poofing in erratic air currents.

Spots in the walls collapsed in on themselves, and formed what appeared to be other smaller doorways, like whirlpools of thin air, with different backgrounds and sights in their depths.

The surface became less substantial under his feet.  With every step, his body sank.

Suddenly, something grabbed his arm.

The roar came from the portal, and Maguleth disregarded his burning robes, looked into the magic hole, and saw the jetsam the inter-dimensional space had become.

Tungstil passed through the watery arms of the nebulous creature.  Not drawing any blood, the thing still let go and backed away.  Baneck looked back up at his escape route.

The eyeless sockets of the skeleton-ghoul, with its bony maw shouting something  incomprehensible, was the last thing he saw, as the portal above closed like an iris.

Maguleth started the incantation to re-stabilize the dimensional space, when his left arm gave a shudder.  The spot where the noble sword had cut him flared with pain, belying his weakened state.

He looked back, and the saw the cowardly Felldrake retreating, flying out of range of the sacrifice-spell,  leaving Maguleth especially vulnerable to the land’s protective magic.  Screaming his curses at all the living world, he cast a small escape-door in the dimensional fabric before the totems robbed all his power, and fled.

The turbulence inside the queer space became worse.  Baneck watched as the water creature, whose contoured face – sort of like a woman’s – drew back, through the opening she had come.  He looked back at the lizard-monster, with its clawed arms grasping at the edges of its own doorway.  The roof and floor of the magic space around the door contracted.  Then the monster’s door squeezed itself shut, and disappeared altogether, as the far end of the tunnel folded on itself, and ceased to exist.

The other smaller openings poofed out of sight, one after another, as the crumpling of the tunnel worked its way closer.

One final smaller opening was still open beside him.  Whatever was on the other side might kill him.  The magic space’s collapse was about to crush him.  He jumped, and  dove into the unknown.

END