The Master glanced towards Balothiss and laughed a bit at how he called it a 'boring battle'. [b][i]"Yes, that is more of less what I am doing,"[/i][/b] he laughed in response to Balothiss' question as he swatted aside some feeble magical attack that Sarin had launched.

As he drew near, the paladin hastily erected some sort of barrier. A bubble of glowing light enveloped her, its brilliance enough to blind eyes and destroy any foul magic that might try to work its way within. But what would happen when the brightest of holy lights was met with the all-consuming darkness? The Keeper raised his staff and a perfidious evil was summoned. A pure shadow from the blackest depths of the earth's bowels rose up from below, effortlessly seeping through the earth and stone underfoot and welling up. Black tendrils, bubbles, and mist erupted from the ground and wrapped around Sarin's barrier of light, gnawing at it, squeezing it, strangling it away...

The two opposing forces struggled for only a short time before the shadows seemingly won, all resistance giving way and the unnatural darkness gradually evaporating away in the sun or draining back into the earth. Expecting to see a shriveled corpse, the Keeper walked to where Sarin had stood and found nothing. It would seem that she had somehow escaped the jaws of darkness, probably with some form of teleportation. Infuriated that an enemy had slain so many of his imps with impunity and then escaped from his grasp, the Master decided that he would unleash his anger upon that little dwarven colony...he knew from his scrying that the assault on the upper levels would soon be staged.

It was perfect timing. Over the next few hours the Keeper used his magic to open a portal into the tunnels Clotho had dug and bring all of his remaining champions there, even those scattered out in the countryside like Emily and Torrens. When Clotho, Xallihion, and Twich returned to the staging point of the insectoid warriors they would find more help ready than they had bargained for.

But there would be equally more trouble than expected...while the one that Clotho had sent above to claim cave-ins had been believed, the dwarven geologists and mystics above had attempted to use their magic to determine the cause of the cave-ins and realized to their horror that all manner of new tunnels had appeared. [i]Something[/i] was down there, they knew, and it seemed to have intentionally created cave-ins to kill all of the last expeditions down. Seeing as whatever was down there seemed intent on killing them, the dwarves were quick to begin readying themselves for an attack from below.