Role

Chapter 9

.........................A dim awareness of some
impending doom began to creep into the corners of his normally
adamantite-girded consciousness as he moved past the sigil at the door near
the mosaic, an eye, and past the horn and then the flame, and came upon an
unholy font between countless lacquered urns, all containing ashes of various
ages and contents.

A dabbler in magical devices of great power and having witnessed some of the
rites of the Black Sect, he considered the possibility of the use of cremains
in dark magics in dark magics he himself could undertake in secret, or of the
value to others who already are initiated to such. Into the vial-belt he used
collecting poison specimens for the Sect, he placed a bit from each vial and
placed them in order from left to right, top to bottom, until he could take
no more. Just a pinch from each.

Suddenly, horror dawned upon the duergar like one who awakens in a steel cage
after having remembered with some certainty they were dead. The chattering he
heard earlier went silent the moment he turned around from the Mosaic.

At this point, having gained some of his strength back from the attack and
regaining more tangibly his sense of awareness, and now he was indeed a LOT
more sweaty and ashen than when he had arrived through the twilight vortex.
Clenching shaking hands, and sweat dripping from his down turned brow, he
lifted his gaze from the imperceptibly pilfered urns, and moving only his
beady eyes, gazed to the west. Memories of the Sacraa, read about during his
years of study in the libraries of Thera came to him as he strained not to
run in horror from the Lich Coprophagous, and Hyetian the great winged devil.


It was this moment, when he decided if he had been made and whether to run,
all while realizing he saw no exit from the chamber he was in on his way
through, that he lost consciousness. His last thought was of speaking the
words "Shadow Sword of Scanlon, I call upon your power!", and in response,
something intoned even more sweetly than before, "CI BRAKUMI LA MALUMA"

Awaking after the taxing ordeal of travel invoking the dead archmage
Scanlon's power, he imagined it all a dream as he gained his bearings in the
middle of a light-drenched field of growing grain. Hiding himself from view
by way of laying down to recover, he rested his hands on his belt without
thought, and fell asleep for a few moments, when his eyes shot open and his
pupils dilated even more than they should for a duergar looking directly into
the daytime sky. His hands rested on pouch and bandoleer after pouch and
bandoleer of ash the color of ground slate.

Too late to bring it back, hopefully this won't come back to bite him...
too hard.