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Salvistar halted at the void, tossed his head, and leaped into it

Karigan wanted to screah the pitch black, but like her knowledge that she was to speak for Westrion, and that the spirits would invade the lands above if not called back to their graves, she knew the stallion would not let her fall Indeed, she had the i their course and her seat was secure

Eventually Salvistar landed lightly on a ledge deep within the void The glow of their star steel arht on skulls and bones tucked into hundreds of depressions in the walls of the crevice Engraved on the walls were Delver drawings and offerings of crude pottery,furs, and weapons and tools of chert littered the ledge

“Come,” she said The voice was hers, and it was not She spoke Westrion’s words

One by one spirits massed around her, transparent presences, shadows Thousands of them She felt their hostility Their voices shrieked in disobedience, spoke of their thirst to feed on the living She knew this even though their utterances were unintelligible She knew also that though n, many of the evil of their kind had been tossed to the very bottom of the void, a fored seal between the worlds, and de to escape their hell This was an even greater threat than that of the spirits

“Sleep,” she commanded the spirits

They screeched and swirled in rebellion, and one who had been their chieftain in life appeared before her, standing on air Wild hair floated about his head and he was clad in animal skins

“Go away, avatar,” he said “You are not our god We shall do as ish”

Karigan thrust her lance through the chieftain and he evaporated from existence The other spirits stilled

The great voice of Westrion welled up inside her and eed as a forceful compulsion: “Sleep”

The spirits scra insects and did not reee

Salvistar launched hie and spiraled down and down into sepulchral darkness, down to a place that had never known light Karigan was not sure if it was even a physical place they traveled to or if they had transcended into some other existence

Finally the stallion alighted and the glow of their armor revealed a dry, rocky landscape The rocks were unweathered and of sharp and forbidding shapes Eround was a round shield of star steel Like Karigan’s arled across its surface, but some did not move, were dead, and a portion of the seal was tarnished and had begun to buckle She sensed the throng of de the seal for release

This was the greater threat If the demons escaped, life on Earth would turn into a hell, a place of eternal strife and darkness, where the living must battle for their very existence or be enslaved and tormented unto eternity Humans would beco world would be transformed into a realm of death