[center][h2][b]Ilshar Ard’sabekh[/b][/h2][/center]

The room was becoming crowded, and not merely in bodies, fully material or otherwise. The Chasm was more than just a figurative name. At times it acted just like the oceanic depths, shadowed and sluggish at a glance, but teeming with cryptic animation to a knowing eye. So it was now. Having become conscious of the stillness brought about by the shroud when he observed the scavenger-worms, Ilshar now readily felt the distortion approaching from beyond the opening door. It was hardly an analogy to say that it was a current, or a ripple; a push of displaced force that pressed against his senses after being set into motion by an approaching mass. Tensely probing the dense ambient ether, he almost did not think about why the door had opened apparently on its own at just that moment. A mechanical death-spasm of Sargasso, most likely.

[b]“These are Chasm-crawlers,”[/b] he assented, absently, to his fellow etherealists’ cautioning, [b]“We are not equipped to clear out the likes of them. If anyone's got anything of use, save it for when battle is inevitable. Not now.”[/b]

Ilshar was only half-listening to the exchange, most of his attention focused on the entity approaching from outside the room. He could make out little of the being itself, but a rippling wake in the ether revealed more than a mere physical trail. Shaped partly by intention, it carried towards a particular point in the room - one that writhed with activity of its own, perhaps drawn out by the very approaching presence. 

Conceptual rot. Collapsing, exsanguinated fragments of information and memory. It was less evident than the mouldering of the celaderakan's physical remains, but a sort of decay nevertheless, a phenomenon that ant tarrhaidim would have recognised for what it was. [i]Many are the ways unto the Nexus![/i]

[b]“Whatever is out there is a carrion-feeder, like the worm-pack,”[/b] Ilshar hissed to the rest of the team, [b]“It might not care for us. But if both are after the same, we can use that.”[/b]

Casting his will our through his neural web, Ilshar dredged his own augment-organs for anything that could have drawn the unidentified Chasm scavenger, scoriae and byproducts of ether-manipulation that did not sublimate to qillatu. The efficiency of his own enhancements worked against him: unlike the dead celaderakan, who was metaphorically bursting open with the accumulated cognitodebris of a lifetime, there was little that his own systems had not dispersed already - some figments of intentionality, sloughed off and left orphaned from his conscious mind, formulae calcified through ritual, minor etheric missteps aborted in time and left to fester. Not much, but maybe it would do.

With an imperceptible contraction, he gathered the immaterial refuse together and quietly pushed it through the ambient ether, tagging them onto the same body Salvator had set as bait for the worms with a subtle injection. If the entity beyond the door felt it, it could be attracted to converge with the pack, and then most likely both would be distracted by each other from the dangerously exposed Rho-Hux and the Envenomed as a whole. No part of this plan was perfectly certain, but few things ever were in the Chasm.