Coils of Fate Page43

If you're following this series in order, click here next . For more information on the entire series, read the "'Demon's Due' Defined" journal entry here. [link]

***********************************************

Pressing against the bars, The Scholar surveys the space beyond her cage. She shrinks immediately back from the three walking corpses, standing and swaying like trees in a Winter storm, their faces stretched and twisted in old, painful death. Though their eyes are gone, Elina can feel their gaze upon her, and uncontrollable shivers race down her spine and clench her hands in a white-knuckled grip on the bars. The single gremlin now hops across the flagstones, drawing her necklace and Key of Opening along behind it, weaving in and around the corpses' legs as if they were tree trunks.

Beyond the three horrors and the cavorting, chittering form of her diminutive captor, Elina eyes the single Runemote circling about the room. The floating bit of sorcery-given-life illuminates a bizarre chamber littered with a host of corpses--Wormloat Gremlins and jackrats, all. Square columns support the room's ceiling in the center, and scattered rock and piles of dirt hide the far wall to her right.

It is a scene drawn from the worst nightmarish images in her books of arcane lore, and the Scholar feels a sense of absolute dread and darkness reaching up from the cold of the flagstones. She is suddenly certain that she is not the first person to be locked in this cage, and that only terror awaits her if she cannot find a way out, and quickly. And with that thought comes sudden alarm and wonder, as she mutters under her breath, "What happened to Luther?"

***********************************************

And, just so people can keep things straight on the timeline ( [link] ), we've now transitioned to about 3:20 pm.

Elina's stock model has already been correctly identified as Emily of ~Feathered-pics and ~whitefeather , who has provided me with awesome material to work with. Make sure to compliment her, if you approve of the results.

As far as publication of this storyline goes, things are moving, and if you want to know how, you should watch the journal updates posted by ~collared-by-faile . She also has a Facebook account set up where she'll be posting status updates for what we're working on. It's mostly just to catalog for ourselves what we're doing, but if you'd like to follow along, send a friend request to her [link] . If, while you're there you want to play FrontierVille with her, just send a neighbor request. She's nerdy like that.

Enjoy!