Anya snatched up her sword and darted after the priest. The shrieks of the bandits were ghastly as the shadow beasts fell upon them, rending and tearing. Kaseem Bai hurled a dreadful curse at them as they fled and Anya pivoted smoothly to strike sparks as she batted away the warlords thrown dagger. It had been foolish of him to shout but she supposed it wasn't the worst mistake he had made this day. With a burst of speed she looped after the priest, deflecting a spear thrust from one of the wide eyed bandits and taking his throat with her riposte. The pair of them darted through the door of the ancient structure and Abelard raised his staff again. Stone shrieked as the ancient portal began to seal itself, not quickly but with the inexorable inevitability of a tide coming in, or a glacier sliding towards the ocean. The entry stones boomed together, abruptly cutting off the screams of dying bandits as completely as if they had existed only in the imagination of the listeners.

"I'd give you my thanks priest," Anya said, pausing to spit towards the now sealed portal, "but I don't know if our situation is better or worse."

"We are alive," Abelard replied austerly and turned towards the passageway ahead of them. The walls were of sandstone, smoothed but not built, as though it had once been a cave that had been laboriously polished to remove the worst of its irregularity. A thick mist filled it that reminded Anya of the unexplored jungles that stretched for uncounted miles in the lands beyond the forbidding southern borders of Stygia. There was something else on the air too, a faint taste of sulphur that put Anya in mind of the volcanic hotsprings of Trondhel or Aikanaborg. The mist was so thick they could see no more than a few feet infront of them as they edged their way down the passage until they found an opening. Anya had seen many things in her life that others might deem strange, but the sight before them was more incredible than any she had yet witnessed. The passage opened onto a lush fog shrouded jungle, the air so humid that water condensed in droplets on the tip of her blade. Vast trees reached up towards the sky and large leafed plants squatted at their bases. Strange animals called and hooted in the jungle and lizard like creatures skittered and leaped from the wrist thick vines which hung like spider webs. Vast columns of  greenish soapstone reached upwards into the low hanging mist which was none the less illuminated by a sickly green yellow light beyond. There was no way that this place existed within the structure they had scene in the desert, either in scale or in the alien aspect of the jungle which was unlike anything Anya had scene.

"By Wotan's eye," she marveled, staring in awe at the landscape before her.