[Desmodus]

The chains stretched from wall to wall, filling the width of the tunnel. Short of cutting them down, the only way around these hindrances was down in the central groove where the mine-car track lay. With only about two feet between the poison-barbed bottom of the chains and the track, Avanthar and his followers would have to crawl carefully under each of three chain-drops to proceed, unless the Archmage contrived some way to lift them to provide him with more headroom. If he decided to take the crawling route, he and his party would emerge with their arms, legs, and chests covered in rock-dust, but otherwise unharmed. Perhaps that was because Jalat was watching over them -or rather, perhaps it was because He was not...

Not long after negotiating the third chain-drop, Avanthar arrived at the entranceway his specters had been unable to pass. Was this a new enchantment, or one that had somehow survived the Aetherfracture? The answer turned out to be a bit of both.

Across the floor at the end of the tunnel, just before it widened out into the cavern beyond, Avanthar could see a symbol carved in the rock: it consisted of a hexagonal outline, inside which lay six sword-shaped rays radiating point-out from the center of the figure. In the figure were glyphs of some sort that Avanthar could not readily identify, although they struck him as familiar somehow. The symbol had clearly been graven into the stone floor some time ago, for its edges showed hints of wear from patterns of (living) creatures treading across it. The outline of the figure, however, had been recently retraced with some sort of vivid red pigment.

As the Archmage entered Clara to extend his perception into the Astral planes, he could see that the retraced figure held a strong, and relatively intact arcanic weave, in marked contrast to the scattered fragments of mana that clung haphazardly to other objects he had passed in the tunnel, including the long steel track. He could also see the outline of fissures that crazed their way across the rock floor in which the ward lay embedded; these had been closed up magically, presumably by some elementalist, but Avanthar could still make out their outlines from the faint trace of the magic that had worked their mending.

The ward did not interfere with Avanthar's movement nor with that of any of the living members of his party. It also did not hinder his necromancy per se; as far as the Lord of Dar Havark could make out, its effects were limited to undead creatures themselves.

Beyond the glyph, the tunnel yawned into a chamber with a high ceiling hung with ghastly white stalactites. The floor of the chamber was uneven, sloping generally downward away from Avanthar's party. About halfway into the chamber, perhaps some forty to fifty feet, that floor seemed suddenly to plunge into the depths of a bowl-shaped pit, its bottom studded with stalagmites that mirrored the stalactites dangling above them. Indeed, "mirrored" was exactly what they did, for the abyss that seemed to yawn in the middle of the cave was none other than a reflection of the roof that soared above, flawless in the preternaturally smooth water that covered much of the cavern floor. How deep that water actually was was nearly impossible to tell at the moment, for its surface revealed only that which hovered above it, and nothing of what lay beneath.