“We’re on one of the turret balconies of the Walking Castle in the Harrowing fighting off a bunch of Scro looking for the Witchlight Marauder Key. Any of that ring a bell?” Ef Utan grunts as the Scro below push at the trap door and he reinforces it with his weight.

“Right… right…” she mutters as reflexively pats her waist looking for her gear that is no longer there.

“Oh, I imagine you’ll be wanting this stuff back,” I say with a start as I pull out the beaded mask, Black Nib & paper, and the scroll with the bard song.

She smiles and strokes the mask fondly before putting it in her sack, mutters something about how her song about Zagyg was much better, and then looks up with a start. “Wait… you have the Black Nib? There may just be a chance to fix things after all! The question is… do you trust me?”

“My magics revealed that you have a good heart, even if your appearance might not suggest it so,” Lenata says with a smile and a nod.

“Hey, if Lenata trusts you…” Vedis mutters and the rest of us shrug and nod in agreement.

The Hellbred sighs in relief and smiles a toothy grin. “Great! My name is Violetta, and we really need to get to the basement where the Dream Stone is if we’re going to have any hopes of making things right.”

“The Dream Stone? It’s in the basement of this castle?” Vedis exclaims in surprise. “But I thought it was huge?”

“Moot is what it is if we can’t find a way through these Scro,” Ef Utan mutters as he struggles to keep the trap door closed.

Hmmn… teleportation…transportation… I know I’ve got to have something… wait! What about that tapestry?

“Will this do?” I say as I sling my pack onto the ground and unroll the Tapestry of Psychoportation that we removed from that hallway in the Wax Works.

“I can’t believe you have one of these!” Violetta exclaims in excitement. “Hmmph… this one is better than mine,” she mutters as she skims over the symbols with her fingers. “Ok… this just might work!” She scoots over to Ef Utan. “I’m going to start singing, and I want you to count to 5. When you’re done, we’re all going to join hands as quickly as possible and hope to the gods that this works!”

Everyone nods and kneels within reach of each other as Violetta places her lips near the crack of the trapdoor and starts to sing a moaning dirge I have to struggle not to listen to.

“1…2…3…4…5!” Ef Utan shouts as we quickly grasp hands around Violetta as she manipulates the symbols on the tapestry and we disappear in a flash of light… to appear again in a large circular room with doors at the four directions that I haven’t seen since the vision we beheld around the thrones in the pyramid before we came to the Harrowing.

Except this time… there seems to be a 20ft tall pyramid of crystal floating in the middle of it.

“Now I know my pack is bigger on the inside… but I don’t think I can carry that,” I joke as I move to investigate the doors.

“There’s something odd about it…” Vedis mutters as she stares at the crystal pyramid in fascination. “It’s like it’s here… but not here.” She reaches her hand out like she’s in a trance and suddenly the pyramid flickers to reveal an odd shaped key in the middle of it.

Wait…was that what I think it was?

The pyramid flickers again, but this time stabalizes for a few seconds to reveal the key inside… just long enough for Vedis to lunge forward and remove it before it reverts back to the crystal pyramid. "Well there’s that, at least… now what about the Dream Stone itself?

“This thing was supposed to be huge, right?” Ef Utan asks.

“The Imaskari wizard did say it was quite vast,” Lenata nods.

“Hmmn…” he mutters as he walks around the stone and looks at it from different angles. “It’s definitely not as big as it was described now… so perhaps…” he steps back to the edge of the room, covers one eye and reaches out to grab what has suddenly become a much smaller crystal pyramid that he puts in his pouch, “it’s all a matter of perspective?”

I have to fight the urge to applaud the bodyguard from Sigil for his ingenuity as I refocus my attention on the doors in this room. “Just so everyone’s aware… don’t touch the doors. It seems that each of these babies has some wicked fireball traps rigged to them. It would be all well and good if they were pointing out… but these things are pointed in… probably to destroy the artifacts before anyone like us got our grubby paws on them.” I chuckle. “Not that it did them much good.”

“Okay… now that we have the key and the Dream Stone, we need to focus our energies on trying to get out of here,” Violetta announces as Lenata gently helps her to sit on the floor with the tapestry. “Vedis, Word, I am going to need the help of both of you if this is going to work.”

“I see…” says Word as he floats over to Violetta and sits cross-legged beside her. “You plan on pooling our energies in order to power the tapestry enough to return us to the Shadowsphere? I had tried this on my own previously…”

“As had I… but alone we were no match for the powers of the dimensional anchor. With this tapestry, however… and the added energy… we just might be able to make it work this time.” Violetta grins hopefully as Vedis sits to her other side and they all hold hands. Their eyes close as a humming in the air starts to pick up… the vibrations getting stronger and stronger to the point that it makes me feel like my fur is going to stand on end. Hands begin to glow and spread as the energies of the three psions combine… and with a great flash of light and crescendo of noise we are suddenly falling through the air… towards the pointed top of a pyramid surrounded by Mulhorandi slaves and 10th Pit slavers.

Honey… I’m home!