I don’t even know what’s happening anymore. My ears are buzzing as the guys talk about what to do with the body. I can’t look at any of them. There’s shouting for a moment about the body rising, but a few bursts of magic and it is down again. Dalish animates it, to keep the shadow from doing it again. I can’t look at any of them. What are we doing?

A couple of them start talking to the air, and Klyce materializes out of the mists. The others explain what has been happening, and we move on. The haze is thickening as we go down. Too much for a normal mana mine. It feels weird, like static in the air. The shadowman follows us, ranting. Easier to focus on his madness instead of my own.

He caught them scheming against the king, but he wasn’t fast enough. They enfeebled him and send him down to the mines. Him, Arnis Lysander. It took him months to regain his mind, but the mana degrades and warps. It erased his ability to cast spells. He lost track of time between escape attempts. They took bits of him every time, until his mind was gone. Then She came. She restored his mind and his magic. She promised to restore his body. If only he would break the Bones. He will gladly repay her, gladly kill a thousand people. One small family means nothing to him. He wants to finish this.

We arrive in a chamber, much like the one that led us to the gods the first time we were ever here. This one, however, has four of the mutant prisoners and one horribly distended, bloated, purple body. They posture at each other, and bring up Rictus one last time. He laughs about Rictus’ clone factory, and says that should we find Rictus’ own clone, only then would we have a chance of ever defeating him. He says that those clones won’t work for us, we’re blocked down here, from that magic. Too much mana, too much static down here.

The fight begins and Klyce, in scorpian body, starts attacking Nat. Klyce gets controlled too easily, I levitate him up to the ceiling until he calms down, edging my way into the room. When I let him down again, he starts attacking me, until Gerhardt dispells the mind control. Lysander put up a barrier to block our spells, so they group focuses on the mutants, while I work my way around the room. I got too close though, and everything turn to blackness.

There is darkness. And a green hill. And something Very Important. Nothing. Red smoke. “Revenge is my purview, witch!” Blackness.

I wake up in bed with Marybeth beside me and Nat curled up near our feet. Everything hurts! Remy knocks on the door, but we make him wait a moment. What happened, is he dead? I don’t know if he’s dead. What? It’s too much and we let Remy come in to change my bandages.

They tell me that I died. But then a glowing green figure with six arms rose in my place with a blinding flash. They say this figure called down lightning right through the earth, ripping the mine wide open. They say that when Lysander tried to get away, the figured ripped open a five hundred foot crevice through the mine to get at him and destroy him. They say it called such a horrible storm down. But then it was suddenly gone, and they found me, badly burned where it had been.

We gather up with all the others, and I tell them about the red smoke and what it said. Afraid for a moment that it was Lysander, but the others remind me he was black shadow, and Nat assures me he is gone. The others think maybe it was the Wandering Vengeance. Klyce admits that he sees red auras around people who hurt him when he fights, and tells us about how his father died. Maybe he opened the door in his anger to this god.

We take stock. Nat’s dad is still unconscious. The town seems safe, the prisoners are no longer running amok. There are, however, strange things still happening in the castle. We have to find Vlad Tepish and the other invader and stop them. First, though, we get all the townspeople safely back out of the castle and to their homes.