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


The scene that was playing out before the squad’s eyes would not have been out of place in the Enthuuran mangroves of Ilshar’s youth. In the evenings, especially during the planetary summer, it was not difficult to see bloated lampreys and spindly carciniforms fighting over some half-rotted carcass from upstream that had remained stuck among the roots. Some theologians of the Spiral thought that all material life had, like the tarrhaidim, been seeded from the Chasm, and in moments like this it was not difficult to believe them. Then again, what was alive and what was dead was sometimes difficult to tell in the ether - the wraithlike spherical entity could have been either for all he could say - which was all the better reason to start moving.

Shrugging away the fortunately harmless shrapnel that had pelted him when the Chasm-dwellers clashed, Ilshar grunted something inarticulate but affirmative and stepped to the side, putting King’s barrier between the struggling beasts and most of himself. The hard-light metamorph unnerved him more than the creatures, uncanny mechanical amoeboid that it was, but so long as they were on the same side its vicinity was preferable to being exposed to the ether scavengers. He hunched low to fit through the door, nodding to Echo’s endoform as he stepped past.

The light on the other side was fainter now that the spheroid entity had gone through. Ilshar held his machine gun at the ready now, warily pointed at the floor but ready to snap up at a moment’s notice.

[b]“If those were any sign, the dwellers here will pick up ether-waves much faster than gunfire,”[/b] he motioned to the door they had just left behind, [b]“If we do meet anything, I suggest we shoot instead of cloaking.”[/b]