Story I: The Rift

As the group travels across the land bridge, you are startled by the sound of flapping wings that approach swiftly from the left. A swarm of bats flies overhead, toward the other end of the massive chasm. Neph stops momentarily, pondering the bats as something unusual. "Iliana'masafil," she says thoughtfully, before the sound of rushing wind drowns out her dialogue and a black shadow sweeps across the bridge. Most are able to react swiftly enough in order to move aside, or to roll away from the blow, except for a few...

Devanis is buffeted by a heavy weight across his shoulder, sending him sprawling toward the edge of the bridge (Take 7 damage, Devanis). With only the tip of his boot remaining on the ledge, and his center of gravity too far beyond to recover, he will need assistance, or his own quick reflexes in order to avoid plummeting into the pit below.

As this occurs, the shape that passed the bridge takes perceptible form; a large, bat-like beast with long, spear-like spines extending from the tips of its wings swoops past your group, now carrying Neph tightly in one of its claw-like feet.

It seems as though a dozen things happen at once...

As the massive bat swoops by, catching Neph in its claws, Ameera leaps toward it--and off of the ledge--only to vanish into a wisp of ethereal mist. Pyrrah, who was standing just beside Neph, reaches out to her as the bat flies past. With an uncanny, nigh-unbelievable ability, she snatches Neph by the waist, twisting her small form in such a way that the small pixie slips free of the bat's hold and lies upon the ground once more. Baric draws his blade and begins slashing wildly at the swarm of bats, catching a few of them, but none that are large enough to carry his weight. The massive bat is too quick for his attack, and he fails to latch on.

As Devanis is knocked to the side, Erran's split-second decision is to save his companion. At the same moment, Seraph shouts from the Elf's hip, "Devanis!" Devanis is falling too far back to be able to grab onto the ledge, but Erran is just able to catch hold of his fingertips. Though the old man slips from the knight's grasp, the force pulled him just close enough so that the ranger could catch onto the lip of the land bridge. With a feat that is, similar to Pyrrah's snatching Neph free of the bat's grasp, nearly unbelievable, the ranger heaves himself up to his feet with a flourish that defies his age.

At the end of this instant, Ameera reappears, above and in front of the bat creature. Though she attempts to right herself in the air, the surprise of the sudden movement has caught her off guard. She falls upon the bat's back, in between its wingspan. Though she attempts to find some purchase, to grab onto its wildly flapping wings, or to dig her heels in to keep from slipping off, she finds none. Ameera, by this point twenty feet from the edge of the landbridge, finds herself a split second from falling off of the beast's back and plummeting to the bones below.

A dozen more screeches echo from the direction the swarm had come from, and the shadows of a massive cloud of bats begins to blanket your view of that side.

Ameera currently is on the bat's back, sliding down between its wings and about to fall off of it. It has traveled far enough away from the bridge that, falling from it now, she would not travel anywhere near enough to the bridge to grab onto it. The bat does has some odd tail-like appendage that travels for several feet behind it, but Ameera thus far has struggled to find any kind of purchase. below is nothing but air, for dozens if not hundreds of feet until landing in the cavernous bone-pit of the long-dead gargantuan skeleton.