It ended as swiftly as it had begun, leaving him standing silently in the damp green depths of what looked to be a trackless, seemingly endless forest. Rod Everlar didn't have to look all around to know he'd never seen it before.

"The eternal lost one," he murmured aloud, "who knows not where he is."

Most of his armor had melted away, leaving the various belts and baldrics bristling with pouches and scabbards of hopefully magical stuff sagging loosely around him, but he still had his gauntlets.

With a sigh, Rod tugged off the one covering his left hand, and peered at the small, unblemished orb in his unscarred, unseared palm.

"Take me back," he hissed at it.

Nothing happened.

"Take me to Taeauna," he growled, glaring at it, bending his will upon it as he'd just been doing.

His head started to pound, and the orb quietly cracked apart and collapsed into sand-like grit in his hand.

The second time the great chamber shook, the blue-skinned man sighed and rose from among the dead women who were caressing him.

"They're going to a lot of trouble over this," he murmured, as he plucked his greatcloak off the spire of sculpted rock where he was wont to leave it, shrugged it on over his blue scales, and took up a long, thin black staff from where it leaned against the wall. "I suppose I should be flattered."

The tall man strolled down the great room unhurriedly, his every movement smooth and elegant, spell-glows awakening around the staff in his hand and chasing each other up and down its length.

He was barefoot on the old, smooth stones, and made almost no sound at all as he walked. More noise arose from the dead wenches-rotted away to bared bone in many places-who clung to him and caressed him as he passed. He patted them and smiled upon them, but slowed not at all, as he headed for a rail-less ribbon of stone steps that climbed one curving end wall of the chamber, heading up to the battlements.