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The water beneath us gives way I drop into the depths, andunderwater For an instant, I’iano For Raffaele For Maeve and Lucent I find nothing The silhouettes of enorlide around limpse of one of the creatures’ faces
Eyeless, finned, ed I open e I can’t breathe The energy of the Underworld pullshard on my chest, and I have no choice but to follow it
One of the creatures glides close to el of Fury She opens her jaws at h the water Even though I can’t see the others, I can feel their presence I ahts say, penetrating , scaly tail makes a loop in the water I swim deeper and deeper with her
Follow me, follow me Caldora’s hiss becomes a rhyth an eerie harmony The water turns blacker and blacker, until the pressure builds and I can no longer see anything, not even Caldora swi ahead ofthe waters It is just deep, black, endless space, in all directions, until eternity
I sink into the realm of Death
How noble it uardian forever to silent souls,
to judge a life and choose to take it
--Life and Death and Rebirth, by Scholar Garun
Adelina Amouteru
I don’t remember what happens, or how I arrive All I know is that I aes lined by the quiet, un surface of the Underworld’s ocean It is still as a pond
I look up Where the sky should be, there is instead the ocean, as if I were standing upside down on the sky and looking down at it
I turn to face inland Everything is painted in the saray The pulse of death beats all aroundrhyth at a flat landscape littered with thousands, lass pillars The pillars are iridescent and white
Each one is in the shape of a quartz and the color ofperfect rows that extend outward to the horizon and then tower high up into oblivion Each pillar seeht, a hue that sets it sharply apart froray in the rest of this place As I draw nearer to the first pillar, I see so inside it, suspended in the space of the stone It is hard toand blurred I step up to the pillar and press one hand against it
There is a man inside
My hand jerks away as if the pillar were ice cold--I jump backward The man’s eyes are closed, and his expression is peaceful So about his face seems timeless, frozen forever in the prier