Clariel stood before the outlined door in the rock face and stretched out one hand towards the stone and the other towards Aziminil. The Free Magic creature crept closer, her head still bowed. Clariel could feel the power within her servant, raw sorcery just waiting to be tapped, wanting to be used. She summoned it into herself, trying to hold back, to draw only just enough, but the thrill of it was so intense she found it hard to resist. With this power she could do anything, anything she could think of, and it was enormously difficult to bring her focus back, to refuse more power and direct what she had against the stone.

Intense white light burst from her outstretched hand, a spear of superheated air that she used to follow Baazalanan’s tracery, cutting through stone as easily as a hot wire through gold. Molten stone ran across the floor towards her, but Clariel made a brushing motion with her hand and the spear of white became a broom that swept the creeping lava aside. White smoke billowed out across the ledge, enough to choke any mortal, but again Clariel used the raw sorcery she held to wrap herself in a breeze that took the smoke away.

The stone door fell in with a crash, revealing a tunnel beyond. Clariel reluctantly lowered her hand, and let the power flow back into Aziminil. It ebbed slowly, not least because she had to make a determined effort to let it go. So much of her was screaming to take it all in, to make Aziminil a true servant, to subsume her into Clariel’s flesh.

The tunnel did not go far into the hillside. Clariel had to wait until the stone around the melted doorway cooled, but that did not take long. As she went into the darkness, Aziminil followed, her blood-red skin beginning to shine, till it grew bright and lit their way with a red light akin to a storm lantern or a pitch-soaked torch, shadows flickering across the wall.

There was a chamber at the end of the tunnel, a circular cave cut in the granite by sorcery. In the middle of this chamber there was a sarcophagus of bronze carved with symbols that twisted and squirmed, Free Magic parodies of Charter marks. Clariel stopped with a start as she felt the nature of these symbols, for they were the visible remnants of a Free Magic entity that had been stripped and broken apart, its power taken and infused into the metal. Yet something of its identity still lingered, a faint sense of something shadowed and brooding that liked the dark places of the earth … an ambusher and lurker. Even its name felt close, as if it were whispered in the bronze and could be heard if she pressed her ear up close.