"You cannot escape me," Yrsillar boomed, but remained on the dais.
Gale steered Jak for the door. "Let's move."
Behind them, Yrsillar began to mouth the words to a spell.
"Dark! I didn't know they could cast spells, Gale. I swear I didn't."
Theyran.
Jak glanced behind them to see that a distortion had formed in the air before Yrsillar. In a voice as loud as thunder, the demon lord spat the final magical syllables of the spell and pointed a clawed hand at Gale and Jak. At once the distortion spread out and took on the shape of a wave, a tide of pure nothingness. Pulsing with power, it undulated toward them like a great worm. Picking up speed, it swallowed pews, floors, and ceilings, and left only blanknessin its wake. Yrsillar and the dais sat amidst an ocean of absolute emptiness.
Jak found the emptiness hypnotic, the oblivion tempting.
"You're going nowhere!" the demon lord boomed again.
"Run!" Gale ordered, looking over his shoulder and pulling Jak along. "Run!"
Jak ran. Trailing wisps of soul in their wake, they ran down the rest of the aisle as quick as they could, crashed through the doors, and sped down the hallway for the gate that led back home.
Right behind them and gaining, the wave burst through the door, wall, and floor. It consumed everything in its path. They reached the gate. Gale lifted Jak to throw him through.
^o," Jak said. "We go together or not at all."
The wave sped toward them. Gale didn't argue. He nodded, picked Jak up, and slung him over his back. "Hang on."
The wave closed in, swallowing everything. Looking into its emptiness, Jak felt dizzy. He closed his eyes and clutched Gale around the neck.
"Go!" he screamed. "Go!"
Gale backed up a few steps, spun on his heel, and sprinted forward. The wall of nothingness seemed about to engulf the colors of the gate; to swallow them in emptiness.:c
"Gale!" Jak was face to face with the void. Bile raced up his throat. They wouldn't make it!
Gale took a final stride and leaped into the air.
Jak's final shout resounded in his mind but Gale could make no reply. He felt his body stretched as thin as parchment and a tingling that quickly grew painful, as though tiny needles had been driven into his pores. There was light and color.
"Oomph!"
"Dllarlk!"
They toppled from the gate and collapsed to the floor in a heap. They quickly disentangled themselves from one another and tried to recover their bearings.
Above them, a pulsing void of emptiness swirled in the air-the other side of the gate that they had just traveled through. With each pulse, it pulled the hairs upright on Gale's arms and head, like a tide trying to pull him back to sea. The pull of the void.
He took a deep breath, inhaled the acrid and coppery air of the real guildhouse. He sat up and looked around.
Corpse after bloody corpse Uttered the hall, over twenty of them, all gutted and decapitated. They were the ghouls he and Jak had slaughtered in their vaporous forms back in the Abyss.
Jak stared at the slaughter. "Dark," he said in wonder.
Looking upon the carnage, Cale felt no horror, just a distant, grim satisfaction. The ghouls were twisted evil creatures-irredeemable horrors-and he and Jak had done what they had to.
He surveyed the rest of the guildhouse, the real guildhouse-wood plank floors, piles of broken furnishings, heaps of filth. The whole was lit by the familiar flickering of torches. They had made it back alive.
He was surprised to find his strength returning, the energy of home apparently replacing that sapped by the Abyss. With the return of feeling came a heightening of pain-his ribs ached sharply and the gash in his torso throbbed with every beat of his heart.
The pain of being alive, he supposed. The pain of the human condition. He welcomed the sensation. Better that than the oblivion of the void.
Revivified, if not quite whole, he looked at Jak with raised eyebrows.
"Jak?"
The little man nodded. "I feel it too. It's replacing the life we lost to the Abyss." After a thoughtful pause, he added, "But it can't replace the life-force consumed by Yrsillar."
Yrsillar. He'd be coming as soon as he realized that his spell had not killed them. Cale climbed to his feet, one hand holding his blade, one hand holding the felt mask.
"Let's do this," he said, and helped Jak to his feet. "Hell be coming."
Jak nodded, pulled out his holy symbol. "First some heating. We're both wounded."
Without waitingfora reply, he chanted the words to a spell and laid a magically charged hand on Gale's arm. Gale's bruised ribs instantly stopped aching and the gash in his torso closed. Jak cast another on himself, sealed the slash in his back and the scratches about his face and head.
"That's it, Cale, that's all I can do," Jak said as he pocketed his holy symbol.
Gale nodded, held up his blade. "Well make do with only these, then."
, Jak chuckled softly, indicated Gale's shredded cloak and torn leather armor. "Not exactly in the best shape for this though, are we?"
"We'll be all right," Cale reassured him. "We've got an extra ally now," He showed Jak the felt mask he held in his hand.
The Mttle man took in Cale's meaning, nodded knowingly. "You've accepted then?"
"I've accepted. Let's go."
Together, they turned and walked for the doors that opened onto the shrine of Mask, his god. Jak fell in beside him.
Before they had taken five paces, the sound of an opening gate from within the shrine gave them pause. The voice of fee Righteous Man, the voice of Yrsillar, came through the doors.
"Erevis Cale! You will face me!" want nothing more," Gale muttered, and made for the doors.
As they walked, Jak grabbed Gale's forearm. "Remember, he's weaker here, but hell still have magic. We need to be careful."
"We will." He looked down on Jak and held up the felt mask. "I have to face him in the shrine. We fought him on his turf. Now well fight him on mine."
Jak eyed the mask, nodded in understanding, and the two friends strode for the shrine.
As he walked- Gale thought of Thazienne, of Tha-malon and Stormweather, of the warped Night Knives, the uncountable dead inadvertently caught in this demonic nightmare. He gripped his blade and the mask tightly. A reckoning was finally at hand. He jerked open the shrine doors.
Burned pews and charred ghoul corpses lay scattered about the room, the aftereffect of the magical globe Gale had exploded in the shrine two days earlier. The rest of the room remained intact, and Yrsillar, now in the form of the Righteous Man, stood in the center aisle halfway between the shrine doors and the altar to Mask. A gate swirled behind him, the doorway through which he had transported himself back.
Having seen the awful majesty of the demon lord in his true form, Gale could hardly conceive how the guildmaster's body contained such a being.
As though in answer to his thought, a distortion began to take shape around the Righteous Man's slight frame. Flickering tongues of nothingness danced around the Righteous Man's body that obscured his human form and suggested the awful magnificence of Yrsillar's true shape. To Gale, the Righteous Man's body seemed ready to burst at the seams, to vomit forth the truth of Yrsillar's being from the lie of the guildmaster's form.
"Gome, then," the demon hissed.
Without hesitation, Jak jerked free two throwing daggers. Silvery blurs in the torchlight, they sliced through t?e air for Yrsillar's throat.
Casually, Yrsillar sidestepped the first blade, then shot forth a thin arm to snatch the second dagger out of midair. Quick as a striking snake, he hurled the blade back at them.