Resurrection

Jeggred stared at Pharaun and said to Danifae, "I could remove the ring of flying from the wizard's corpse and-"

Danifae held up her hand for silence, and the draegloth trailed off.

Pharaun answered Jeggred's stare with what he knew to be an annoying smirk. He held up his hand and waggled his fingers to show the draegloth the ring.

Quenthel turned her back on the junior priestess and her nephew and prepared a summoning.

She moved away a bit and used her jet disk holy symbol to trace a circle on the blasted rocks-not a binding circle but a summoning circle. Power trailed behind her movements, leaving a distortion in the air. Throughout, she softly chanted a prayer, which Pharaun recognized as the initial words to a spell that would reach into the Abyss.

Quenthel was calling a demon to transport her.

Danifae watched Quenthel's back for a time, listening to her spell. Perhaps Danifae understood Quenthel's play and was attempting to determine an appropriate response. Presently,

she began her own spell.

Holding her holy symbol to her breast, Danifae used her heel to trace a second summoning circle into the dirt, away from Quenthel's. She too chanted the while.

Pharaun and Jeggred stood a few paces apart between the dueling priestesses, doing nothing.

Pharaun moved a few steps farther from the draegloth. The wind was carrying his stink to

Pharaun, and the damp only magnified its foulness.

The voices of the priestesses mingled with the call of the wind and the patter of the rain.

Quenthel's voice rose as she began the actual summoning. Danifae's voice, still in the midst of a preparatory chant, rose in answer.

The wind gusted hard and for a moment sang above them both, favoring neither.

Pharaun spared a glance at Jeggred, expecting to see the drooling oaf trying to threaten him with his glare, but the draegloth had eyes only for Danifae. He looked rapt. Pharaun could only shake his head at the simpleton.

Power gathered. Quenthel had started her casting first, and she would finish it first.

Orange sparks flared within Quenthel's summoning circle, little mirrors of the vortices that still littered the sky.

Danifae completed her preparations and started the final stages of her summoning.

Quenthel, sweating, chest heaving, stood at the edge of her circle, pronounced the final phrase of her spell, and shouted a name: "Zerevimeel!"

Pharaun didn't recognize the name, but it hung suspended in the air like fog, a foul echo reverberating in Pharaun's ears. A final shower of sparks sizzled in the center of Quenthel's summoning circle and left in its wake a glowing line of orange. The line expanded, and grew into a tall oval. A very tall oval.

A portal.

Through the portal, Pharaun caught a glimpse of night on another world, another plane.

A lush jungle of twisted trees, grasses, and bushes waited beyond the gate, growing from a soil the color of blood. Yellowed bones of all types and sizes jutted from the earth, as though the whole plane was a graveyard. Turgid rivers covered in a brown foam squirmed their circuitous way through the befouled landscape. Thin, twisted forms moved furtively in the shadows, mortal souls trying desperately to hide from something. Pharaun could see the terror in their eyes, and it made him vaguely uneasy.

A blast of humid air escaped the portal. It smelled like a charnel house, as though tens of thousands of corpses lay rotting in the jungle heat. It bore groans with it, the soft susurration of agonized souls.

"Zerevimeel, come forth!" Quenthel shouted.

The view in the portal changed as its perspective whipped across the landscape, passing ruined cities of crimson stone, lakes of watery sludge, huge, twisted things prowling the jungle in pursuit of the souls.

A form took shape in the portal, a towering muscular form that dwarfed even Jeggred and blotted out Pharaun's view of the demon's home plane.

Nalfeshnee, Pharaun recognized from the silhouette. Quenthel had summoned a fairly powerful demon. Not as powerful as she could have but powerful nevertheless.

Pharaun readied to mind a spell that would shroud the demon in lightning should Quenthel not be able to convince it with her offer. He knew that demons, even powerful ones, were vulnerable to lightning.

The huge demon stepped through the portal and solidified fully in Quenthel's circle, naked and slicked in something sticky and red. The creature smelled sickly-sweet, like half-cooked meat.

Behind them, Danifae continued her own summoning, her voice rising. She would complete her own spell soon, but for the moment, Pharaun ignored her and focused on Quenthel's demon.

Huge tusks erupted from the nalfeshnee's muzzle. Burning red eyes dominated its bestial face.

With each breath the demon's huge chest, covered in dark, coarse fur, rose and fell like a bellows.

Two ridiculously small feathered wings sprouted from its back. Clawed hands at the end of muscular arms clenched and unclenched reflexively. The demon inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring,

and wrinkled its snout.