Vampire's Kiss V

The gate spell dissipated, and, expecting to see Ashtear here, she knelt to the floor before the gate dissolved. But she didn't expect to see this.

Ashtear was there all right, surrounded by a nimbus of necrotic energy, black lightning arcing and crackling between his outstretched fingers, and the center of a dark portal that was in the center of the summoning circle. The portal, a dark swirling ovoid, seemed to pulse as even darker veins ran it's surface. The portal seemed almost to groan in protest of Ashtear's work, but he pushed on, the lightning growing in intensity with each step.

From what she knew of magick, she knew that gate to lead elsewhere, though where, she didn't know. She also knew, from the sigils on the floor and the runes that flashed in and out of existence in the air around Ashtear, that he was trying to shut this gate. And she also knew, to her great concern, that if he was exerting himself this much, and the gate was still open, then whatever was pushing from the other side was dreadful indeed.

Suddenly, the goons outside didn't seem so important anymore.

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Ashtear gritted his teeth. He was trying to destabilize the gate, to make it collapse, yet, something was restabilizing it from the other side. No, something was restructuring the gate at some point between the source and destination, to make it point somewhere else. And considering the planes his gate had to pierce through to get to the plane of shadow, this didn't look good.

At all.

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Amidst the crackling of Ashtear's spell and the groaning of the colossal gate, something prickled at Kayrim's sensitivity. Something hidden, yet barely within her perception. Here, yet not quite...

There! Circling the protective sigils carved on the ground, besides the gate, something scratched at the sigils. It looked impish, with elongated nails and pointed features, like a demon of sorts. He was scratching at the ground bordering the protective circle, seeking to undermine the integrity of the stone, since, by their very nature, the sigils themselves repelled the intrusion. He was indirectly trying to bring the circle down.

"Ash, something's trying to slip out of the circle!"

"Then do something about it!", he growled back, unable to spare the effort to even look at her, or check what she was talking about. Even talking to her seemed to have taken his deep concentration off a bit, the lightning imperceptibly waning for a second or two, while he recovered precise control again.

"They're inside the circle, Ash! I can't reach them any more than they can reach us! If I break it to get to them, I do their work for them!"

Ashtear yelled "Then deal with it!", frustration apparent in his voice. Kayrim had never heard him so out of control, and she sincerely wondered what would happen if he totally lost it.

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And that's when he totally lost it. Deciding that a change of tactics was necessary, Ashtear dropped both his attack on the gate, and the protective circle. A small flick of a wrist, and the barrier's energy runs inverted on the runes around it, causing it to collapse explosively.

Kayrin braces herself, the explosion ripping the stone on the ground in all directions. Ashtear, seeing she's ok, continues with the next step. "Instead of just staying there, wasting all that energy and not really succeeding..." he muses to himself, "I might as well take the offensive, shouldn't I?" He smiles softly, and vanishes.

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"What the hell is he thinking?" She backflips to the wall behind her, hoping that the explosion and a quickly-woven shadowcloak will cover her until her opponents show themselves.

Things aren't looking so good.