It was a woman, but one whose flesh was half burned away. An expression of pure agony made her face a demonic mask. She was completely encased in the extruded, greenish sap.

If the woman in the amber-like stuff was still alive, but held in a strange stasis, it would be cruel beyond words to release her to suffer the pain of her burnt flesh.

Raidon turned away, his expression tight. He resumed his eastward run.

He didn't investigate any other half-glimpsed shapes preserved in green.

The monk reached the edge of Starmantle, or at least the hints of its foundations. The city itself was no more.

Starmantle was gone, replaced with a madman's fancy. The emerald outcrops, akin to the one he'd emerged from, were thicker than ever as he approached the ruins. Perhaps the blasted city was their locus and origin? No longer brittle like the one that had trapped him, these were gemstone hard. Worse, this close to the city, each hummed a single, flutelike note. In sum, thousands of spires produced atonal melodies that clawed at Raidon's ears.

Between the spires gaped fissures that harbored a flickering blue glow, the same blue he recalled from the original firestorm. Raidon backpedaled a dozen yards.

Obsidian masses slowly drifted on the open ground between spires and ravines. In shape they were like irregular chunks of black stone. A palpable animosity emanated from them. Whether merely animate or actually alive, Raidon couldn't tell with the distance. Not that he particularly wanted to know. His eyes ached as they scanned the insane vista.

He blinked and turned away. He would find no answers here.

But Starmantle's skyline tugged at his thoughts, unearthing a memory of his daughter, Ailyn.

"Oh," he gasped. The shock of his awakening had robbed him of why he'd set forth from Starmantle… how long ago? A mortal fear for Ailyn's safety squeezed all the breath out of his chest.

"I must go to Nathlekh," he whispered.

A screech snatched his attention back to the demolished city. A humanoid figure bounded up from the nearest blue-burning fissure. Three more gibbering figures appeared over the ravine's lip as the first saw Raidon. It gabbled something that almost sounded like, "I told you I smelled supper," and charged.

It was naked. Its flesh was drawn tightly over its bones. A carnivore's sharp teeth clacked in its mouth, and eyes like hot coals fixed on Raidon, communicating a ravenous appetite so pure it was nearly mystical.

A ghoul?

A seam on the charging creature's stomach opened, revealing a gaping, toothed cavity. A tentacle-like tongue emerged from the abdominal mouth, flicking like a purple flame.

It was not a ghoul, or at least not completely. It was something aberrant.

As Raidon fell into the left guarding stance, unexpected coolness tickled his chest. A quick glance down revealed the symbol upon his chest flickering with empyreal flame.

Surprise ambushed him, nearly distracting him from heeding his attacker.

The creature was upon him. Melting from guarding stance to offensive stance, Raidon caught a clawing strike with his left hand, pulled the arm diagonally forward and down, and delivered a hammer blow to the back of the creature's elbow with his right fist. The ghoul-like monster screamed with both mouths. Its right arm now flexed loosely from the elbow, the joint shattered.

The monster's two compatriots rapidly approached. Their abdominal maws drooled and gibbered like the first's. Raidon retained his hold on his foe's broken arm. He twisted his body around, tripping the creature with a foot, and hurled its body into the oncoming attackers.

One of the two newcomers was slow to dodge Raidon's contrived missile. It stumbled and went down in a tangle of limbs. They began to writhe and thrash, clawing and biting each other.

The final creature paused. Its eyes gleamed as it studied the monk. Blood, not its own, darkened its cheeks and chin. Its lower, abdominal mouth chomped and writhed, and grinding noises issued from it. Raidon glimpsed something white and red inside being chewed.

"Hunger does not rule me as it does my brothers," the creature crooned in an awful, piping tenor. "I just ate."

It could speak! Could it explain what had occurred? His normal rule of avoiding all interaction with abominations was suborned by his need to learn.

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.