As the chamber spun round and round, she spied Xet as it ducked back down the corridor through which they'd first entered. Bastard familiar. Her quick breath had been too shallow-already her lungs burned. Worse, the gyration forced more and more blood to her extremities. She'd be pulled apart before she drowned. She relaxed her hand, and Sadrul flew from her grip and was expelled. Straining against the spinning water, Kiril retracted her arm and got a hand on Angul's hilt. The Blade Cerulean slipped free of the bondage of his sheath. Lucidity seared her consciousness. Doubts, worries, and pains of mind and body faded as new certainty was born in her right hand and quickly spread to engulf her. The Blade Cerulean flamed triumphantly in her welcoming grip, its star blue fire burning and boiling the tissue of the watery creature that held her. The star elf was spat from the vortex with the velocity of a ballista bolt. She windmilled through the air, but a pillar came up too fast. Agony jolted across her shoulder and back. Robbed of velocity, she fell a full story to the floor. Her left ankle twisted, and she heard something snap.

Through it all, she retained a grip on her sword. For her perseverance, she was rewarded. Kiril stood, her breath coming in ragged gasps. Angul took from her the pain in her back and arm. Her ankle supported her weight as if whole. Kiril raised the blade, and his blue-white light doubled, then redoubled again, shedding light like the day in all directions. Together, she and Angul said, "All abominations will be vanquished." The vortex towered over her, and at its apex it held a madly spinning blot of earth-Prince Monolith. The column suddenly doubled over, like a striking snake, and attempted to smash her down, using Monolith's body as the hammer. Kiril rolled to her left and was clipped on her right hip by one of the earth elemental's thrashing arms. She kept her feet, and the vortex reared back, pulling itself out of reach and the muddy body of Monolith back into the air. The swordswoman took a step to close the distance, and her hip buckled. She fell on her face. The corrupted water elemental's blow had been mightier than she'd supposed. If not for my shelter, Angul spoke into her conscious mind, that blow would have smashed every bone of your fleshy frame. Kiril understood the Blade Cerulean was apologizing for failing to fully protect and heal her from the last savage blow. It was the first time the elf could recall her blade not meeting a challenge. For some reason, the thought was a welcome one. "Blood!" she screamed, forcing herself to her feet despite the wrenching flare in her right side. The blade darkened as it registered her curse, but forwent retaliation for her impious word. The water elemental was aiming another blow, using Monolith as the weapon.

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.