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The demonic wizard held loosely to the maddening stick. Screams of tortured souls blasted forth as if from Hell itself. He directed the screams with a wave of his hand, and naught escaped their wrath. They ploughed their hellacious way across the land, overturning the dead from their places of rest and mounding the quivering bodies in a mass, awaiting the damnation of conflagration. With a flick of his wrist, he ceased their pain and stopped the screams, only to direct their wrath in yet another direction. More of the dead appeared, and they too were interred.
The demonic wizard held loosely to the maddening stick. Screams of tortured souls blasted forth as if from Hell itself. He directed the screams with a wave of his hand, and naught escaped their wrath. They ploughed their hellacious way across the land, overturning the dead from their places of rest and mounding the quivering bodies in a mass, awaiting the damnation of conflagration. With a flick of his wrist, he ceased their pain and stopped the screams, only to direct their wrath in yet another direction. More of the dead appeared, and they too were interred.
It was dimly lit chamber and an eerie yet somber tone emanated from the walls themselves. The alchemist peered from behind slits of eyes at the disheartened adventurers as they approached; his tongue flickering behind clenched, yellowed teeth, his tri-corner hat just a bit askew.
The aberrant display behind him popped and burst with a strange cacophony unlike that which they had heard since they had met the cauldron witch all those years ago.
They knew he was a surly fellow, unkempt and angry with wild hair... he had gone mad from the years he had toiled with so little gained and so much given; and he... he knew what they wanted, what they had come for. They always came for the same thing. Without words he knew, he could see it on their pallid faces, bereft of the joys of youth.
The adventurers dared not speak to him, but instead tossed their coin from a distance into the empty receptical causing a jangling rattle. He went to work then without a word, pulling on massive levers and steaming devices that hissed with the anger of the fiends in the depths of the abyss, but in the end, against what experience might teach us, it was his enchanted potion that would return to them, against the wishes of the reaper, the gift of life.