Hargamesh

==Loot==
==Lore==
Enter battle:
The kobold gazes down in amazement, like a conjurer's mark marveling at some trickery he cannot comprehend. Then the crimson droplets appear, forming a diagonal line across his scaly torso. And the top part of his chest begins to slide away.
The sundered halves of the kobold fall in different directions, and land amongst the dismembered bodies of his brethren.
You look at your sword, at a big, chunky blade that should never have been able to create so fine a cut. There isn't even a drop of blood on it. Your gaze roams over your panoply. It too is unblemished, neither scratched nor stained by the furious battle that saw the kobolds' destruction.
The arms and armor of an adventurer's dream...
You turn around, and gaze down the passage -- the direction you were running when the kobolds pursued you. It no longer stretches off into infinity, disappearing into distant darkness. Now there's a wooden door at the other end. And you know that your way out of this realm lies beyond it.
For a moment you pause, and ponder the fate of the other... The person you encountered in the void. But those memories are already fading, receding into the innermost depths of your brain -- perhaps never to be retrieved. You try to grasp hold of one, focusing on the image of the woman in white. Yet that too begins to dance away from the vision of your inner eye, and at last you relinquish it. Within seconds they're gone -- and all that's left is a subtle warmth, the knowledge that there's someone out there beyond the veil of time and space whose thoughts once touched your own.
You sigh, breathing deep of the lingering comfort it brings. Then you stride down the corridor.
A kick from your gleaming boot sends the wooden door crashing open, revealing a circular chamber. Moonlight floods in from an oculus in its vaulted ceiling, shining down upon vast mounds of glittering treasure. Great heaps of gold sprawl like the dunes of a precious desert, their yellow surfaces studded with the colorful greens, reds, blues, and whites of gemstones.
You laugh.
Truly an adventurer's dream -- a dungeon filled with plunder, almost begging to be looted. And you know that you could seize it, could use it to buy a kingdom and dwell in luxury here in this arcane dimension shaped by your unconscious intellect. But such baubles mean nothing to you.
Instead you picture Solus, and focus on his image. You see him standing on the grass before the tower, the expression of curiosity frozen on his face. And you will your mind to open up the way back to him.
You close your eyes, and redouble your mental efforts. Each scale on the blue wyrm's body appears before you in perfect detail. His orange eyes shine in their sightless stare. You feel your consciousness straining against the boundaries of this realm.
A scuttling, clacking noise fills the chamber.
When your eyes flick open, they rest upon a grinning grey face.
A fearsome creature stands before you, an abomination with an upper body like that of a man mounted atop the frame of a gigantic scorpion. He clutches a spear, its wide, vicious blade turning as he spins its scarlet shaft in his human hands. Four huge pincers emerge from the reaches behind his neck, and snap at the air around him with the noise of breaking bones. A curved tail bobs over his head, the wicked barb at its end swaying as though in time to the clicking, clacking of those monstrous limbs.
So this is an adventurer's nightmare...
Victory:
You duck beneath the flailing pincer, and swing your blade in a rising arc. It shears through one of the creature's legs at the knee, parting chitinous plating and muscle as if they were water. The severed limb falls onto the stone floor, reunited with its sundered brother and the ruined claws you've already hacked from him.
You dart backwards as the scorpion-man howls, and topples -- his remaining legs unable to bear the bulk of his body.
He snaps at you with another pincer, but a careless blow from your sword sends it flying across the room. It lands atop a pile of gold, a grisly treasure added to the hoard.
The broken creature thrashes on the ground, glaring with malevolent eyes, his teeth grinding against each other in agony and anger.
You step forward, and put him out of his misery. The killing stroke is clean, made effortless and exact by the otherworldly quality of your weapon. His head parts from his neck as though it were made by nature to detach, and bounces away.
The world starts shifting even before the decapitated skull has come to a stop, the walls and treasure piles wobbling like water. Everything begins to blur, stone and gold running together as though they're made of paint and have been exposed to a rainstorm.
The swirling walls part, subsumed into hallucinogenic torrents of color. And as the tides of surreality wash over you, sweeping you away, you realize that you aren't yet done with the eldritch realms.
It isn't Stromhamre that you're rushing towards, on this psychedelic wave. Not to the place in the shadow of the tower, where you passed through the barrier into the sphere of the spell's influence. The world you know is barred to you, held away by sorcery which is as yet unbroken.
More of you must be freed. Yes, that's it... As the tide throws you about like a piece of flotsam, you feel the touch of their thoughts. The others are still trapped within their own realms, the dimensions shaped by their subconsciouses as the field and dungeon were by yours. Only when more of you wake will the spell be ended.
And from here you can reach them, help them...
Gaping portals appear around you, opening and closing like blinking eyes. Within each of them is an inscrutable tableau of dancing imagery, passing too quickly for your mind to understand what your eyes are seeing. But you sense, feel, know that they lead to your companions.
A surge lifts you from the seething mass of color, atop the crest of a wave that launches you to impossible heights. The portals still whirl around you, either flung by the same agency or else dragged along by the force of your mind. You leap for the nearest of them, and plunge into its depths.