Warlock! Something is Rotten in Grim Biskerstaf...

There's a sound from behind Banio as he leaves the depression and takes to the wall, dagger in hand -- and a bit of a strange smell fills the air as he turns to look back at where he left Lambert waving the wand...

...and sees Trusova, her spear raised, looking alarmed and confused as she is not where she just was.

At the top of the steps, wide-eyed and little nauseous, Wolke stands where the road warden did, and now he hears the onrushing footsteps...

"What the fuck just happened?" Trusova speaks out loud, uncertain if she was struck by an enemy spell, or if the Vessen's toxic waters are finally seeping into her brain. When she sees Lambert standing where she was, her confusion evolves into anger - this must be Lambert's doing, and probably had to do with the items he was rifling through. Fortunately, anger is helpful when you need to bite through dizziness and nausea. Her training takes over, and she takes stumbling steps to get back into position.

Gods, this team needs discipline! she despairs. In the field, you did things a certain way, because when people didn't, people died. She was new to this cloak and dagger stuff, and accepted the other two's experience exceeded hers, but surely the same principles apply.

Phelbt stares, slack-jawed, until he twigs to what's just happened. Then the sharp and savage little wheels in his mind begin to turn. The midget's eyes glisten.

"Wolke!" he calls. "Wolke! Stand over the hole. And get ready to do that again..."

Battling a wave of nausea and a shakiness in his legs, Lambert looks at Banio perplexed.

"Again?!" he says, battling down the second coming of dinner.

"Why?" he says, crossing the floor to the hole.

The trio banters for a moment as they switch positions again, this time without invoking arcane, otherworldly forces that none of them understand. By the time Trusova is back in position, and Wolke is wondering about Banio's idea, whatever is coming up the stairs arrives!

Or at least it sounds like it does.

The spear-wielding woman's brow knits, as the rapid footfalls are close now -- so close she should be able to see who or what is making the sound. But there's nothing there, on the steps that are right in front of her. And then the air is growing more chill still, and an apparition takes shape in front of her, just a few feet away! It is another robe-wearing elf, and it's difficult to tell if in life the ghostly, translucent figure was male or female or something in-between. What is clear is that the rushing figure is casting glances back over its shoulder, and does not seem to see Trusova looming at the top of the stairs...

While Trusova is in her split-second moment deciding what to do, Lambert, wand in hand, feels the clay beneath his feet in the depression tremble and shift. Then, large chunks near the center suddenly break off and tumble into the darkness, widening the hole at the center.

"Shit. Shit! Bad idea." Lambert says, as he widens his legs to keep his footing. But his center of gravity shifts until he starts to wobble side to side.

"Don’t just stand there!" he warns Trusova.

"Good way to get harpoon’d, that!"

With his attention fixed upon the spectral intruder-- which makes him unaware the plight into which he has directed Lambert Wolke-- Banio throws out a cherubic palm with fingers splayed.

"No one move!" he hisses. "This has happened before, like with the others. Let's see what we can learn."

Trusova barely hears the contradictory advice coming from Lambert and Banio. The ghost coming up the stair sends chills up her spine. Not eager to start a skirmish with a creature from beyond the grave, she shakes free of her fear and makes a wide berth for the spectre to pass into the room, stepping to be on the same side with Banio, pushing him back. She doesn't lower her spear, though - if the spectre decides it wants a fight, she'll give it one - even if it is her last.

"Don’t move?" Lambert pants. "You bloody well told me to move, you pillock!" he follows up, with some strain, feeling the earth very precarious beneath his feet. He tries to inch his way in on either side, which only serves to split him up the middle all the more.

Trusova backs off and in short order the ghostly intruder crests the top step and runs into the circular room -- utterly ignoring the strong-backed woman holding the spear and the little toadie with the splayed hand. Around the room's center the eerie echo runs... to the dais that Trusova investigated earlier. There the figure makes to lift something, and when they turn from the platform, held in their hands is a some kind of chest or strongbox -- though it is every bit as incorporeal as the elf carrying it.

Lambert Wolke is still standing near the center of the depression, trying to keep an eye on phantasmal goings-ons in the room, but also thinking how to extricate himself from the cracking, crumbling basin he's in. But then, before the man can assemble a plan in his head and act on it, the elf is jumping down towards him, racing towards the dark orifice at the center!

The elfin figure casts a glance towards the door, hesitates a beat, then rushes the rest of the way to the center of the room, where the widening hole yawns. And into that hole they cast the phantasmal box, a split second before something invisible passes right through them -- a projectile, perhaps, leaving what looks like a vapor trail as a spray of colorless, spectral blood fills the air on the other side of the figure. Blood that hangs there in the air as the elf falls -- right towards Wolke!

Trusova inches her way around the room toward the dias and tries to get as good a look as possible at the strongbox. This seemed less like ghosts to her and more like a shadow puppet show, the events of the past being cast against the present from their original source across the ages.

When the spectre is shot down by bolts out of time, she gasps, mostly because Wolke is in the line of fire and they haven't conclusively proven the ghosts can't harm them. But Wolke doesn't seem to be moving as the apparition tumbles toward him.

She wants to yell out to Wolke, tell him to get out of the way, but in the split second this all happens, she cannot find her voice.

Trusova does her best to get a good look at the sturdy-looking but beautifully decorated strongbox as the translucent, ghostly object is hurled into what might be oblivion -- and then she's gasping as the elven apparition plunges through Wolke before the man can move. It evaporates, boiling off into the shadows as...

Lambert has never felt such a sensation. The cold of death... the ache of ages. This elf died violently, in pain and anguish... and suddenly Wolke knows he will too, because of its anguished touch.

Lambert gasps as the spectral figure hits him. It’s like being hit by a train. The cold fills his body immediately. He feels like the tips of his fingers will burst from the pressure. His ears sting and his heart pounds in his head. His kidneys stab into him from below. He feels like he needs to piss desperately.

He’d welcome the warmth of it, truth be told.

He shivers and shakes, and can’t force his body to stop shaking long enough to say or think anything.

If his dwarfish heart were capable of normal human pity, Banio would feel it for Lambert's plight. Instead, his dismay curdles into self-conscious anger; that anger seeks a target, and finds one in the elfin apparition.

"The pointy-eared fucker threw it down the hole," Banio fumes. Down to whatever fate awaited the heads of the sacrifices-- or perhaps, given the events that followed, they were assisted suicides? "You think there might be another way in at the bottom of the stairs?"

Saying this, Banio is reminded of the sound he heard before: that faintest of clicking from the darkness beneath them, so faint that it may not have been a sound at all. Should he tell the others? It could've been nothing, after all. Perhaps it's best not to alarm them prematurely.