As his strange new companions plunged ahead into the forest, Keffa fidgeted, torn between his fears of being alone and the prospect of losing the familiar mountains behind them. In the end, his desire for accompaniment won out, and he lagged behind them, his moccasin-clad feet making little noise in the underbrush.

"Do you have anything to eat, Enn? I feel like it's been years since I last ate. I'd go shoot something, but I've seen nary a rabbit, much less a deer."

And even with the beholder's heightened senses, there wasn't much to find within the ocean of green. It was eerily quiet for a forest, where sounds were muffled by trees growing close and thick. There was not a scamper of animal movement anywhere to be seen: no tracks, no birdcalls, no scat. Night was falling fast, but in the thick of these dark groves, there wasn't a noticeable difference between the rising and setting of the sun.

But the sun had set, and as the shadows lengthened, Keffa did his best to stay close to the leading figures, paranoid with the legends he had heard from his elders.

Keffa sighed wearily as his stomach grumbled and gurgled in complaint. Blasted gryphon, Keffa thought. I wouldn't be in this predicament if it weren't for that overprotective bitch of a flying lion.

The Lenter straightened, tightening his resolve. No matter, he consoled himself. I could've been less fortunate if these two hadn't run across me. Count your blessings and buck up, you damn fool. He peered ahead at the beholder, wondering what exactly it... they were thinking. And how they were floating. And what they ate.

Keffa shook his head. While he was tilting it back and forth, lazily stretching, a glint of reflected moonlight caught his eye. A white-gray slab of stone, perhaps ten feet wide, lay off to the corner in a thicket. It was circular and perfectly flat - and the peculiarity of this was not lost on the Lenter.

He caught Naut's arm, shaking him softly.

"What do you suppose that is?" He said tremulously, pointing with a shaky finger.

Keffa had stood just about rock-still while Naut investigated. But as the drow had moved closer, the Lenter had sprung forward, catching his shoulder.

"Don't touch it!" Keffa hissed softly. "I think I know what it is."

He had just finished speaking when the slab began to shake and quiver. Just about everyone knows what a rock looks like. They are still, they are fixed. But what the little group was about to witness belied everything they knew about stone, about physics.

The stone rippled. Little waves moved across it, and it skittered within itself, like a horde of spiders unearthed. Quivering, the stone began to float into the air, revealing it to not be a slab, but the top of an enormous pillar. The entirety of the pillar rose into the sky, some fifty feet tall. The sides of it were caked in dirt, cracked through, and covered in moss. But as the ripples and waves moved across it, the dirt fell off of it. Deep, baritone hummings echoed from within the solid stone. The cracks mended themselves like a liquid, the stone's surfaces perfectly smooth.

And then, as quickly as it had begun, the pillar dropped back into the yawning chasm it had opened in the earth, and all was silent and dark once more.