There was a sound like a sandbag being sucked through a vacuum as her consciousness left her body and entered the ethereal, a plane of existence parallel to all worlds in the Sable Unlimited multiverse. It was a dark, intangible place where one could peer through a veil of mystical mist and shadows to view the physical world. Illuminated by a thing called ‘dark light, the ethereal was a dark place, unknowable to all but the highest level players.Epic level mages, warlocks, and witches frequently used it to spy on those in the physical realm. However, to do that they had to have access to spell that could shape the very fabric of reality and Calista knew of only a handful of players who could do so.Now, with her max level [dungeon sense] Calista could enter the ethereal once every eight hours whenever she was below ground. So when she opened her eyes, the hallway had changed from a place of near total darkness to a tunnel of shadowy light. She took a moment to look down on her body where it sat against the wall, her face upturned and staring at the ceiling, before she stepped through the stone wall.
She passed through the stone in two steps and entered the cavern they had just left. She walked silently through the mist and shadows until she reached the double doorway where Neera and Vevic had gone. She could still see the trails of their ethereal shadows, one huge and dragon-like and the other a woman in flowing robes. Like a ghost, her eyes traveled through the doorway, down a short hallway, and into a room dimly lit with candles and runes that glowed yellow and green along the walls. Placed on an altar in the middle of the room was a gold and silver mask. Invisible as she peered through the ethereal, Calista watched as Narene stepped up to the altar and placed something inside the mask. There was a soft clicking sound. Narene then said something to the dragon. Calista tried to listen, but the language was foreign to her. Draconic. They’re speaking draconic. She had always wanted to learn the language, but it was also one of the hardest to gain access to in the game. Still watching, she saw Narene then take the mask off the altar and put it on. Then a wall shifted and opened into a massive hallway and the two of them walked away into the dark.
She was about to follow, but then something stopped her. A shadow, black as smoke was lurking near the corner. Is that a shade? No, it was something else. Who is that? She held still. She had not left the corner near the doorway and so she suspected that whoever was standing in the corner had entered the room after her and was thus unlikely to have seen her. The mist and shadows of the ethereal swirled gently along the floor and walls as she waited. Finally, the hooded figure turned and stepped through the wall where Neera and Vevic had gone. Calista waited, counting to ten before she followed through the stone.
In the ethereal, walking through a wall in the ethereal was dark and frightening work and this stone was no mere dungeon wall, but the endless rock of the underground. The dark light would not reach her here.However, even through the rock she could still follow the ethereal trails of three people ahead of her. They were thin, wispy strands that ran through the stone like shadowy veins. Down she went, descending through the rock and stone until finally the grey glow of the dark light appeared before her and announced she was near the end. Her fingers emerged first as she saw them turn from black to gray outlines. So she drew them back and then leaned out to peer into the next room.
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She pressed her face out to look and found not a room or a chamber, but a massive cavern large enough to house several fortresses. In one corner, a huge plateau of rock sat above all else and she could see the shadows of buildings and pillars there. Other, smaller slabs of rock stood high above the cavern floor, standing like silent sentinels in the dark. Below, on the cavern floor was something burning, bubbling. Lava. It’s a lava chamber.
Neera and her dragon had just landed on the other side of the cavern, on the largest plateau of rock where they were walking toward a building. Where’s the shade? Where did he go? Then she saw him, he was floating along the ceiling where he looked down on the medusa and her serpent. He’s spying on them same as I. For a moment, she considered getting closer, but as she watched him, she realized she knew who that was. It was Severin. He had been spying on them through the ethereal all this time.
She knew a boss fight when she saw one. This was the final room. This was where they would fight their way free or die trying. If they could find their way here …
But how to do that? Narene accessed this place with that mask. How do we … wait. The keys. I have three of them and I need five. There has to be another key in that room.
She had never been in the ethereal before. So she didn’t really know what she could and couldn’t do here. Perhaps there was a way to at least look. The least she could do was look.
The rock was just as deep and dark as when she had descended, but this time there were no ethereal strands to follow, so she went on instinct. The sensation was something like swimming, but with her feet. It was like she could step on water and the water would turn to rock beneath her boots. Up and up she ascended until finally she emerged back in that room.
Candles, chairs, and tables passed through her like smoke as she walked through the room, searching. She stopped at the altar where the mask had lain. It was empty. She stopped to look at tables and a desk, but they were empty too. She searched shelves along the wall and even looked along the floor between the candles and glowing runes. Nothing. Then, just as she was about to give up and leave through the double door to return to Lefty, she spotted something along the wall.
It was a hole carved into the rock. No, not carved. Placed. She tilted her head to look at it. The hole look something like the portable hole she kept in her pack. The portable hole she had used to escape the inescapable room where she and Lefty had descended into the other cavern with the glowing moss, where they had faced the troll juggernaut. It was a hole in the ethereal.
She stared at it for a moment, wondering if it was a trap. But how could it be trapped? She didn’t know enough about ethereal magic to judge if a trap was there or not so she just looked at it for a while. She couldn’t see inside. It was nothing but a black portal about the size of a fist. She knew she could be attacked in the ethereal. She knew a magic user could cast spells in the ethereal. But could Severin have set a trap here? She wasn’t sure, but there was only one way to find out.
Taking one last look at her hand, she said a silent goodbye to it. Then, clenching her fingers once, she reached in. First, there was nothing. Then her finger tips touched something sharp and bony. Carefully, she grasped it with two fingers and pulled it out.
It was bright white, standing out like a beacon in the shadowy ethereal world around her. It had a long handle with spines like a fish and a ring at the top. No, wait. That’s not a ring … It was a key. A key made out of bone.