Chapter 8: The Whispering Gate
The staff pulsed like a second heartbeat in Lira's hand.
The chamber was no longer quiet.
Whispers slid along the walls, voices in dozens of languages — old, broken, familiar and not. The runes on the floor glowed brighter now, casting her in bone-white light. Her grip tightened.
"Okay," she muttered, "bad guys up top, creepy spirit down here, and now the walls are talking. Just a normal day in Krynn."
The guardian spirit drifted beside her. Its form wavered more than before — less solid, more anxious.
> "They come," it whispered. "She sends them. They smell the gate…"
The earth behind them split with a violent shudder. A cold wind, unnatural and foul, howled through the chamber.
From the breach crawled things.
They were not skeletal soldiers. These were worse.
Long-limbed, shadow-bound, stitched with runes and chains. Their faces were wrong — blank, eyeless masks of bone with carved mouths frozen in screams. And behind them, at the edge of the rift, floated her.
The sorceress in the bone mask.
Her robes rippled like smoke. Her mask was cracked now, revealing a sliver of blue-painted lips curled in a smile.
> "You found it for me," she cooed. "How thoughtful."
Lira swallowed hard. "Let me guess. You want the staff. You'll kill me if I don't hand it over. Monologue, spell, doom, destruction, the usual?"
The sorceress tilted her head. "Kill you? No. You're far more useful alive."
One of the masked horrors lunged.
Lira rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding the claw. She spun, slashing with her dagger — the blade sparked uselessly off its armored ribs.
The staff burned in her hand.
Not pain. Not heat.
Choice.
She looked down at it.
For a moment, she saw herself — younger, running through the market, laughing, free. Then she saw herself standing alone, staff in hand, as shadows fell all around her.
"…Don't you dare Destiny me," she hissed.
Another horror charged. She raised the staff.
There was no spell.
No command.
Only release.
A wave of force erupted from her — blue fire, laced with silver and bone-white radiance. The horrors screamed, flung backward like dolls. The bone-masked sorceress recoiled, cloak curling inward, mask cracking further.
The staff burned brighter.
The chamber shook.
Stone broke away to reveal a sealed archway behind the pedestal — a great door of black metal etched with dragons, locked by six spinning sigils. The guardian spirit cried out in a language Lira couldn't understand.
The gate pulsed once. Then… again.
"Uh-oh," she said, backing away.
> "You opened it," the sorceress hissed, her voice no longer calm. "You don't even know what you've done."
Lira gritted her teeth.
"Nope. But I'm starting to guess it involves something big, dead, and very cranky."
She raised the staff again.
> "So maybe… let's shut it together."