Torrens was rather enjoying himself when D'Artagnan's grenade landed. It was a crude contraption, explosives still being a rare substance, so it did little to harm Torrens behind his buffer of molten rock, yet it did fling a good amount of the lava aside. [i]What is that rabbit trying?[/i] Perhaps he was trying to free him, although the lava proved much too thick for the bomb to clear enough of it away for him to escape.

As he was distracted by this, the shaman made his move and executed his trap. Immediately Torrens could feel the heat being violently leached away from the molten rock around him, which began to solidify quickly. But worse, the shaman also attempted to draw heat from Torrens, as the fire priest had done. While the fire demon's own internal heat sink was extremely difficult to tap directly, the shaman did not need to, for he was sapping the thermal energy from all around him, and Torrens' own heat rushed out involuntarily to fill the cold. Unlike his encounter with the fire priest, the shaman was safely out of his reach. Torrens attempted to conjure a fire bolt but that too was absorbed by the shaman's terrible heat sink. Desperately, Torrens held on to what little thermal energy he could, keeping it deep within himself for as long as he could, until finally the shaman stopped.

Torrens was in a pitiful state. One moment he had been lively, incandescent and cherry-red. Now he had cooled to a dull red-brown and he was bent over, severely weakened. His legs and waist encased in a tower of obsidian, his arms barely holding his torso up and his head hung in defeat and exhaustion. He could feel the cold grip of stasis closing in, although since he was only a bit above room temperature it would be a while before he cooled to that state. He had been bested, quite severely, but he was not out, for the last spark he held was the most powerful of them all. With it he could rise once again in a literal blaze of glory, but he could not afford to waste the last chance it represented.

Torrens sighed deeply, and raised his head just enough so his eyes could meet the shaman's. "I underestimated you, and you have beaten me." He paused, as though to catch his breath. "You going to come over here and finish me off properly?"

Then Torrens waited for the shaman to approach. Once the shaman came within arms reach, he would act. If the shaman did not approach, he would have to improvise.