Prologue: Troubles at Red Larch.

"Damn it Falka, will you stop getting hit!"
Keavan rushes past Midnight racing to get to the other bandit before he can retreat.

A look of pained disbelief flutters across Falka's noble, if rough features. Just as she pulls the glaive from her foe, she tumbles backwards, a javelin in her gut.

Vardo sighs as he sees the headstrong dwarf take a powerful hit. He takes note of Keavan's advance, sees his opening, and moves.

Yohna rounds the corner just in time to see the knight collapse. She sees Keavan going to launch himself after the bandits and judges it to be apt cover for her to assist. Raising her hand, she yells at the top of her lungs. "Back from the crossing! I call you!" In doing so, a flood of healing washes over the dwarf, restoring her wounds and reinvigorating her.

Thoroughly displeased at the injuries sustained up to this point, she turns to help Keavan with his target. This time, her hand glows with a dull, greyish light. "Your fleeting time runs short, wretch - Hark, the summons of the beyond!" Extending two fingers, the very air surrounding the bandit is filled with a cacophony of grim bells.

With the need for his help passed, Breezy will casually stroll into the cave, surveying the aftermath. He moves to a position where he can guard the rear of the party while also keeping an eye south, should any bandits try to hit the group from that direction. He hefts his crossbow once again, readying his action should the need arise.

There is a stillness to Falka's features as she lies bleeding into the stone. Her chiselled jaw and the sharp lines of her shoulders almost blend in with the smooth rock underfoot.

The blankness that welcomes her back is overwhelming, the silence deafening. Trapped in her body, as heavy as a millstone. And yet she can neither see nor hear nor feel anything. The same voice still resides here, but louder this time. Not her own, but almost as familiar. No longer is it incoherent, like a blur of sound when it was still a fresh and open wound. Rather, it drones a low dirge like a solemn hammer beating, shouting words that held no meaning to her. She felt no surprise, for it had never left her since that night. It only took falling down again for her to feel it again. Dimly, as if distantly, she heard footsteps shuffling around her, the sounds of blades on flesh, and of bodies clattering to stone ground. All of a sudden, it is too much. To hear them die again. To hear the ashen ones strip their bodies again. The dull chant rises and rises.

Falka gasps for air and clutches her head stomach. She writhes and flails, panting from the pain. In an utterly alien motion, she twitches and lurches upright, extricating the javelin from her body even as the wound closes around it. Her eyes do not turn towards the cleric, her saviour, but instead burn forward like bullseye lanterns, searing with an inhuman heat. Moving as if animated not by life, but by some outside force not content in her body, she heaves herself onward, deeper into the cave. All trace of her unassailable honour and knightly conduct is shattered as she continues to gasp for air, moving forward as if her companions did not exist. In a voice not her own, she screeches, "I will have their heads... their heads... their heads."

A bandit emerges from the southern corridor treading near the party with careful step. Yohna ever vigilant and having her cantrip readied, she raises her hands, finger pointed at the bandit and speaks the last words of her incantation. There is a momentary dead silence, as if the very air surrounding the bandit was sucked into a vortex - a dreadful, solemn knell rings from all around her.

But the bandit steels herself, with uncanny determination in her eyes. The bells soon fade and the bandit shakes off the effect of the necromancy, focused solely on her mission. She takes few more careful steps and let loose the crossbow bolt straight toward the witch who tried to get into her head.

However, still shaken from the Yohna's spell, the bandit's aim is off and the bolt flies wide passed Yohna's ear and harmlessly hits the cavern wall.

Unused to all of this coordinated action, Breezy found himself frozen for what seemed like an eternity. His mind flashed back to that instant, that ripping maelstrom that grabbed him into his current dilemma and deposited him in this foreign place where death awaited around every corner. He saw their faces and he almost cried, but snapped from the reverie at Yohna's incantation.

Gritting his teeth, the Genasi moves down and into the cavern. The sight of the bandit trying to take another of his friends was not lost on him as he lets flow the arcane energy. Eyes flashing light specks of lightning blue, he twists the energy around the bandit into a glowing mass of white-hot plasma.

With a swift, downward stroke of his arms, he spat the last of the incantation "Lord of ice and air, strike true my enemy!", sending the mass down on top of the girl.