Before they can bring Heth down, however, a new threat emerges. Slithering to the top of the stairs comes a dark, huge ghastly snakelike demon with a hideous-looking human head and a bone ring around its tail. . .
With quick thinking, however, Uso begins chanting and waving his fingers in the air, calling upon the arcane powers of transformation. The subject of his magical spell is none other than Cirend, whose shape is altered by the incantation. Slowly, before the very eyes of his companions, the human warrior is changed into a large, powerful bear. He springs up and lunges for Heth, raking with his claws and biting with his powerful maw. Heth staggers back, not expecting this change in events.
Around the same time, Si�lara recalls Sebastian�s warning that an invisible, hairy beast-man was also in the room. She whispers a prayer to power of nature and a shimmering dust of pure light faintly appears as an outline around the invisible foe. With his position exposed, the hairy beast is no match with the combined might of the Company who bring him low expediently.
Heth slowly circles around, now clearly looking worried and bleding quite profusely from the terrible claws and fangs of the transformed Cirend. With animal-like intensity, Cirend attacks Heth again and again. Meanwhile, the ugly snake-demon attacks the other members of the Company but with little success.
After several more seconds of this combat, both Heth and the snake-like beast seem to be working their way toward the balcony. Before he can step out onto the ledge overlooking a 200� drop over the side, Heth is mauled to death by the bloodthirsty Cirend. The snake-demon speaks through its human head, making sarcastic remarks about Heth, calling him a despicable human lackey whose only use was getting himself killed. The Company seemed surprised by this, as it appeared to them that Heth and the snake-beast were working together. Clearly outmatched, the snake-being slithers over the top of the railing on the balcony and disappears from view. The Company rush outside to see where it has gone, but they find no sign of it. It is as though the snake-demon simply vanished.
Using his powers of observation, Sebastian observes a strange disturbance in the air just below the balcony. He concentrates on it and after a while is able to point it out to the other members of the Company. It seems strange, but Uso remembers having studied before in magical tomes about the rumored existence of portals, magical gateways to other worlds. While he and most learned scholars believe such stories to be mere fairy tales, he cannot deny that he himself along with the other members of the Company were magically whisked to Verundhi through some kind of strange magick, courtesy of the Raunie of the Baltrany Rye of the Dasidia peoples. Perhaps the existence of such magical portals is not so far-fetched after all?
Such philosophical questions will have to wait for later, however. The Company needs rest and recuperation, and there is still the matter of Orongorg�s body-switching to deal with. Fortune has smiled upon the Company this day, however, as they find that they hairy, beastly humanoid that was assisting Heth is not actually dead, but only unconscious. They revive the ugly creature for a session of intense questioning. He reveals that the two machines are "The Unmaker" and "The Probe of Dreams". Orongorg's consciousness can easily be restored to
