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.Raidon clenched his fists and demanded, “What happened here?”The creature cocked its head and blinked.It was obviously taken aback by its prey’s lack of fear.It responded, “We have selected you to be our meal.”“No, no.Tell me, what happened to Starmantle? How much time has passed since the blue fire came? I woke encased in—”The creature tittered, “You are soft in the brain? Scream and run, as food should.Trouble me not with memories of the Spellplague!”“Spellplague? What is that?”The creature growled, turned, and swept its arm past the grappling, biting forms of its “brothers” to Starmantle’s skyline.“The Spellplague was the blue fire that came when the Weave failed.Pockets of it still live here.It is a fire that eats all things.Like a ghoul!” It wheezed in something like laughter.“A blue fire that eats?” prompted Raidon.He remembered his compatriots and stones alike burning away in the fiery blast that preceded his long darkness.“Some things the blue fire consumed, leaving nothing behind.Other things, it ate, then spat back, different than before.plaguechanged.”Raidon took in the warped landscape and the warped creature.He asked, “Is that what happened to you?” Raidon gestured at the creature’s abdominal maw.It tittered again.“Maybe.maybe not,” it replied.It huffed with amusement as if recalling a funny story, but this one it refrained from sharing.Then the ghoul pointed at Raidon’s bare chest.“But you! You are spellscarred, yes? You hold back some trick to surprise me?”“What are you talking about?”The image of the firestorm branding him with the Cerulean Sign swam before Raidon’s inner eye.The coolness on his chest increased.It wasn’t painful—it was more like the feeling when the sun moves behind a cloud.or like the coolness of his amulet when it detected enemies it was forged to destroy.The creature tittered, then said, “Spellscarred or not, you are made of meat.It wouldn’t do to let a sack of blood and meat wander off un-tasted.”The creature lunged.The monk reflexively extended one leg in a buffer-kick intended to keep his opponent at bay long enough for Raidon to follow up with a real attack.He had only a moment to understand his mistake when his foot plunged directly into the gaping, abdominal mouth.The mouth began to chew.Pain, the worst he’d ever experienced, exploded up his leg.He nearly cried out.Raidon jerked savagely, trying to retract his foot.The abdominal maw’s tentacle-tongue whipped up around his calf, holding him fast.The white teeth within the cavity mashed and clacked and red fluid bubbled and spilled forth.Was that all his blood?The ghoul’s head snapped forward, its real mouth hardly any less horrid than the one trapping the monk’s foot.It struck at Raidon’s throat.The monk’s rising uppercut smashed teeth and jolted the creature’s head away.Raidon wouldn’t be overcome so easily.The creature savagely jerked on his leg with its clutching tentacle, pulling his leg farther into its abdominal cavity.His foot, calf, knee, and lower thigh.how could it be? His whole lower leg was inside the thing, and the questing tentacle began to wrap around his thigh.More reddish fluid spilled forth in thin, steaming rivulets.How could his foot and calf fit inside the gaunt monster? Had it bitten off his lower leg? Queasiness clawed at Raidon’s focus.Agony poured up his nerves, making his arms quiver and his head ring.Would it hurt so abominably if his leg were already unattached? He desperately hoped the ghoul was bigger on the inside than its shape suggested.The chill on Raidon’s chest intensified.Without quite knowing why, he laid his left palm across the symbol blazoned there.A snap and contact was made.Cerulean energy poured into him.It was the energy his amulet once lent him in the presence of aberrations.A sky blue gleam shone from his body.It seemed the Cerulean Sign etched on his chest was more than a mere tattoo.It was alive with the old power of his amulet.His touch awakened it.The symbol emanated the cleansing light he had once been able to invoke from his destroyed amulet.The Sign embodied the purity of the natural world.It was anathema to aberrations
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