"An odd thought just struck me." Ben scratched slowly at his beard, gaze drifting along the walls of the Effulgent Hallow. The party had spent an hour exploring deep and deeper into the underground ruin, and he could swear the inlaid patterns on the walls were shifting imperceptibly.

"This is certainly the place for odd thoughts." Justin held his staff aloft, and the lantern on the end reflected from thousands of gemstone facets and cast myriad conflicting shadows. The ruins absorbed any magic cast within them - even a trifling Illumine charm was quickly drained, reducing Justin to holding a lamp and carrying a bag of medicine. "What was yours?"

"This place was made by the Spark-lings, right? The dead crystal people?" The place felt wrong. The ruins of a capital city abandoned for centuries ought to look like it, ought to be crumbling and dusty and falling apart in places. The Hollow was clean. Sterile, even.

"If the records were true, yes ..."

"They were," murmured Ailura. A sorceress herself, she was not taking the magic suppression well, and had been wringing her tail the whole way down. "Beings brought to life when lightning struck a vein of rock with a certain magical resonance. Their bodies formed as more of these stones gathered together." She shuddered at the memory of cold hearted beings combining to form segmented horrors, rebuilding themselves endlessly no matter how many wounds they took. But that era was long dead. No Spark-lings had been seen in ages.

"So if they were made of crystal ... then all the crystals on the walls here." He reached out and tapped one, frowning. It rattled, and kept rattling. "Wouldn't this be like decorating your house with body parts? Papering the walls with your own flesh?"

"I hadn't thought of it that way." Justin shivered softly, drawing his arms around him. The rattling grew louder as more and more crystals trembled in their settings, breaking free one by one and joining to form a hideous mechanism. "... and I rather wish you hadn't, either."

** Playing with felt tip pens, since I've been negligent in keeping my computer desk clean. Please be kind.