Still... to think they weren't in heaven or hell, but in some other place, where things might live. Skandra stared up into the sky again, his feet carrying him forward - those gray masses were still there, circling above this most unnatural of bowls, far out of his reach. Were they alive? Was it just some natural feature whose purpose he could not guess? Frustrated by his own lack of comprehension the Immortal nevertheless pulled his notebook from his pocket. There was a pencil pinched between the pages, and this he put to use, sketching as best he could while he followed after Aeotha.
"You think the goddess talks to you," Skandra's words were slow, since his attention stood divided. "I don't know what seems so impossible about another world."
Uaine... she'd been killed by the experience of traveling here. Skandra was lucky not to have died a thousand times over during his visit to the Empyrean. Nobody could have prepared him for what he was going to see and feel on his way through to the other side. It seemed as impossible as just about anything he'd ever done, really, but the difference was people believed him when he said he'd punched a woman. Talk about visiting another world, though, and suddenly that was the impossibility to end all impossibilities.
"Gateways don't open on their own," Skandra charged right over her with words. "That kind of energy can't sustain itself indefinitely. It needs ... a spark, something to use up, and ... ah, it's like your magic. It has to be brought into existence by something and then kept there. You stop keeping it in existence and it goes away. At least, that's how it should work."
So what ... how did he explain the black sphere with that logic? Shantar might have an idea, if he was still alive, but Skandra was beginning to doubt it. They couldn't have been this far apart, after all.