"What?!" she bellows, as the two disappear, her eyes widening, as Draiss, like a bad penny, reappears. "Impossible! You're<em>dead!</em>No contingencies, no backups.<em>I killed you!</em>"<br/><br/>Ama, clearly exhausted from the fighting, the shock of losing him, and the power of the spell she channeled, only clutches him tightly, tears flowing down her face. "Mine," she says, softly, into his shoulder.<br/><br/>Verdelet's scream of rage quickly takes on a very different tempo. "I suppose this means that I will have to do this properly," I'elen says, as Verdelet's body erupts in crystals and spikes, just enough left of her original form to be recognizable.<br/><br/>Draiss' prediction about the portal is<em>quite</em>correct. Without its power source, the portal has utterly destabilized, and is now a twisting, writhing<em>hole</em>in reality. A sense of wrongness radiates from it, and just looking at it is enough to make one's eyes hurt, and it's especially dangerous for the terrific bursts of random energy, lancing out from it, scoring deep gouges in the tower's structure.