57

With trepidation, you and the scorpion nod at each other. You will let the crooked Cardinal's plan unfold and let him bring the perfect beat into the Vocal House set. He may be onto something, and the chaos it is sure to cause may be your only way back out of the underworld. The ground shakes, the sky shakes, the very energy of life shakes. The resonation spreads through all the circles of the underworld, and all planes start shattering and collapsing. The ground buckles beneath your feet and you fall and fall, through time, through space, until the fragments of hell you stood on crash into reality, and smash back into the ground more or less right where your tent is. Sure, now hell itself has broken loose and the dead walk the Earth again, but those are all problems for the afternoon. For now, you climb into your tent for a good morning's sleep.

an ending