4. Good news first

Totally shaken, they stared at the charred, still slightly smoking remains of the small town and its direct environments, formerly blossomed in a beautiful lush green.

"Oh my god, what's happened here?" Diana was asking the question every one of them had in mind, while looking around and slowly getting over the shock.

"Where have they all gone?" Bobby pondered aloud.

"Uhh, certainly not off to Disneyland, that's for sure." Presto retorted.

"Hello? Anybody here?" Hank shouted.

However, no one answered.
They looked at each other and split up with a sense of foreboding.

"Well, that's just great! No one's here anymore. Probably they all 'moved away'..." Eric grumbled scowlingly, walking towards one of the once intact houses, which was only a ruin now.

He kicked a beam aside - and suddenly jumped back. "Whoa!"

"What's the matter, Eric?" Sheila wanted to know and stepped up to him.

"Ohhh..." she only let out when she also had a look at what has scared the Cavalier off that much.

"Hey, what's over there to see? Anything special?" Bobby asked curiously, coming closer to them.

"Oh, no, no, no. Don't look there by all means, Bobby!" the girl warned him insistently, blocking his view with outstretched arms.

"Why not?" the Barbarian demanded, trying to sneak past his sister.

"No, Bobby! I told you not to look! So don't, just... don't! Stay there were you are and don't come closer!" Sheila commanded her brother.

"Gee! Why ain't I allowed to see it, too?" he complained.
"Well, all right! I'm already gone... I'm gonna scout around back there now!" he sulkily gave in after a while, turned around demonstratively and stomped off in another direction.

"I don't like that... I don't like that one bit!" the Thief whispered after she had turned around again, now looking with Eric at the ground in disgust.

There was a human hand underneath the rubble and ash!

You could clearly see that it was cut off prior to the fire because the flesh and the bone had a jagged slash across it, partly sticking out even. There was a large dark stain around the stump. The rest of the body was missing, though, but doubtlessly it was still located underneath the ruins.
Possibly the blazing wooden beam dropped down onto the disembodied hand and had burned its flesh on this specific spot where it landed nearly beyond recognition. As a result of that, one finger had already fallen off, now lying in between the hand, more cremains than still skin and bones.

"Cover it up again! Please..." she implored Eric, turning away disgusted.

"With the greatest of pleasure." he nodded and moved the beam once again above the hand as fast as possible with his foot.

All of a sudden they heard a shriek.

"Good gracious, Bobby!" Sheila called out and burst off, suppressing vehemently the emerging déjà vu of the events in the 'Forest of the Damned'.

The others were coming together again at that to check as well what has happened.
But when they got to Bobby, who was standing there paralyzed from shock, they didn't need to ask any questions.

"Oh no..." she gasped and hugged her slightly trembling brother, turning him around so that he didn't have to stare at it any longer.

"He... he just lay there..." he stammered.

"Shh, it's ok." his sister comforted him.

She couldn't help looking over his shoulder and was sorry about it right away. Somehow, this was worse than the chopped off hand!

In front of them in the dirt and ash a man was lying writhed besides the ruin that was probably once his home.
His eyes were staring glazed and blank into the sky without ever seeing it. They still had the gruesome horror, they surely had to witness in contemplation of death, on them.
His sprawled out arms were bent in an unnatural angle as if his bones had been broken, premortal.

A sword protruded from his chest, his ripped clothes were full of dried out blood. A scroll was pinned onto the sword.

"Who had done such a thing?" Presto wondered, shocked by this horrible sight.

Hank didn't answer him but stripped off the scroll instead and read it.
His face darkened the longer he read on while the others were watching him eagerly.

"What's wrong?" the Acrobat inquired.

"I might have known it..." he grumbled, passing the note on to Diana, who eventually read it out aloud.

Greetings, my young foes!

When you are reading these lines, you presumably will just have come upon the Keeper of the Portal you have been questing for. My congratulations!

Unfortunately, he will never be able to help you along now...

I have already paid him a visit a long time afore you and slayed him, while you went on the way to the 'Sea of Madness' to 'cure' your small Barbarian - as you surely have presumed, of course still unaware at this point of time - but in actual fact you have lead him to his very death straightaway with that instead.

And if you are going to wonder what happened with the portal, be advised that it was destroyed for good by the fire ignited at my command.

Ah, I dare to say you have come this way completely in vain, what a dissipation of time!

Although this concerns me not in the least, however, I would love to see your disappointed faces right now!

Well, if you had not rescued the insolent little brat to heal him in the first place but rather simply had abandoned him inside my castle to his predicted fate and had come here without delay instead, you certainly would have met the keeper being still alive - who sure enough would have sent you back again into your own world.

But under these circumstances, you were definitely too late!

I will never conceive human beings and their feelings! You willingly relinquish your innermost wants and desires only to help another one of your kind...

Foolish sentimentalism, one day this will be the death of you all!

Well, I must confess, you verily have caught me off-guard in my castle.

Indeed, I was absolutely convinced that you would not recover so swiftly from the shock and the capture of your beloved little one and that it would take you significantly longer time until you were finally capable of tracing my castle.

By my reckoning, you ought to have arrived only after the boy himself - not only his condition, mind you - was already far beyond all hope.

Nonetheless, you were supposed to attend his last agonizing breaths, as helpless eyewitnesses of his slow-paced unstoppable death, suffering under my sway.

And yet you have ruined my plans once again but I have wreaked revenge on you for that by removing another opportunity for you to escape from the Realms.

A fair price, wouldn't you agree?

Howsoever, be sure of my merciless wrath and your devastation by my might when we meet each other again next time.

I will anticipate this day with the veriest pleasure.

Up to that time...

Venger

"Venger... who else!" Eric huffed.

"How awful! Those poor people! They hadn't done him any wrong, Venger chased after us, after all. Why oh why did he have to kill those poor villagers instead, then? I'm so sorry they had to die for that." the Thief lamented.

"Venger's a monster! He's really doing everything just to give us hell. Those folks here were only a means to an end for him. He didn't care anything at all about them 'cause he's a heartless, bloody fiend." Hank remarked angrily.

"No, it's my fault." Bobby piped up quietly and broke away from Sheila's hug, walking over to the dead keeper of the portal and kneeling down at his side.

"That's not true, Bobby!" the girl tried to convince her brother.

"Yes, it is! Venger's right, you've come into his castle for me. You've rescued me, taking the risk of being captured as well. You've gone with me to this sea to heal me 'cause I was too careless and ate some poisonous berries I didn't know. You didn't grab the chance to get home since I needed your help. Only on my behalf, we're still stuck here in this world and these people had to die for my sake. Venger had killed them 'cause of me..." the young Barbarian trailed off, covertly wiping over his eyes.

"No, Bobby. Listen to me, this isn't your fault!" Sheila came to her brother and put her arms around him again.

"Then why do I feel so guilty?" he demanded, inadvertently a tear was running down his cheek.

"But you couldn't have guessed anything of that! After all you didn't know that the fruits were poisonous... We all didn't expect Venger to turn up and neither you nor we could predict his cruel plan. So please, don't blame yourself for this."

"Sheila's right, Bobby. Venger's the only one who has to reproach himself. He alone is to blame for the unnecessary deaths of those villagers here, and none of us. We didn't even start this bitter fight. Maybe one day we could have made peace but Venger's absolutely unwilling to do so. He'll never leave us alone, not before he's gonna possess all of our weapons. His vicious intention is to make us blame ourselves for all of this and argue with each other about it, only to weaken us with that. Do you understand what I mean, Bobby? He's only written it in this way so that you're gonna blame yourself and believe that all of this here is truly your fault. He simply wants to hurt you with that and make you sad." the leader explained to Bobby.

"Really?" the boy inquired, looking up at the Ranger.

"Yeah, of course!" Hank reassured him, placing a hand on his shoulder while smiling at him confidently. "And now, don't give that another thought, ok?"

"Ok!" the Barbarian nodded emphatically, wiping away the tears.

"What are we gonna do now? The portal's destroyed and the keeper..." the Magician didn't finish his sentence, shaking his head instead.

"Well, what we always do after a setback: don't give up and keep on searching! One of these days we're gonna be successful for once and surely find a portal taking us home." Hank proclaimed, looking at his friends one by one.

"Yeah! And we can only make it when we all stick together and help each other. With that, absolutely nothing's supposed to tear us apart, even if there are arguments sometimes - um well ok, plenty of times, actually... Standing up for one another entirely, that's the meaning of true friendship!" the Acrobat confirmed.

"Thanks, Diana. Perfectly put into words! Well, let's go back into the other village to think about our next steps. There's nothing we can do here any more." the Ranger said, stooped over the keeper of the portal and closed his eyes.

Although it would have been more respectful to remove the sword as well, however, he couldn't bring himself to even touch it, let alone bury the keeper's body.

With a nod of his head the leader indicated the group to follow him.
So one by one they turned away from the keeper and his burned down village and followed Hank towards their previous inhabitation.

They were rather silent on their way back, being in a subdued mood. But this was quite reasonable after such a bitter disappointment.