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star that crossed the sky above, and before it had disappeared, another followed in its wake, and then another.
    “Wow!” Marco murmured unconsciously, struck by the impossibility of seeing three such events in the same part of the sky virtually simultaneously.
    There was another flurry of the celestial phenomenon.  “Glaze, did you see that?” Marco asked aloud.
    And then the room flared with an intense flash of bright light, so bright that Marco shut his eyes, and heard the other two shout in surprise.  Porenn’s prayers stopped.  And all three occupants of the temple passed out.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 4 – The Caverns Below
     
    “Glaze?  Marco?” Porenn called out in the darkened temple, the first sounds Marco heard when he awoke.
    “Porenn?” he replied as he began to sit up.
    “Marco?  Porenn?” Glaze replied as well, also coming to his senses.
    “I’m up!” Marco suddenly cried in excitement.  “Porenn!  I’m healed!  I’m up,” he shouted as he slipped off the altar and looked around in the darkened temple.  He saw Porenn standing on the other side of the altar, and Glaze off to his right, shadows that were visible in the starlight that came through the opening in the dome.
    The three of them met in a hug in which they all wrapped arms around each other and she squeezed tightly, as Marco felt tears running on his cheek, tears of joy at his extraordinary recovery.
    “Look at me!” he said after moments of their three-way embrace.   “I’m whole again!”
    “We can go home,” Glaze said softly, happily as they broke their clinch.   “Porenn, you should come with us to see Marco’s castle!” he impulsively declared.
    She shook her head ruefully.  “I’m sure it’s a wonderful place, but I’m not supposed to leave the island, as you may not know,” she told him.
    “But I can certainly leave the temple and go back down to the village with you,” she told him with a smile.
    Marco felt a note of something peculiar tickle the back of his mind.  He looked around the temple, thinking of the times he had been in the temple before, and how he had left when he had last been healed there.   He remembered the Lady Iasco’s words of farewell, her prophecy that she would not see him upon his departure.  “Can you tell me how we’ll leave the temple?” he asked Porenn.
    “We’ll go down the trail on the mountainside, just as we did when I walked you down, holding that sword between us,” she grinned.  “Except I don’t imagine we have to hold the sword this time, do we?”
    “Can you tell me how we’ll get out of the temple itself?” he asked.
    She looked at him, puzzled, and pointed in the direction of one side of the temple.  “Through the door,” she glanced over.
    “Glaze, go see if there’s a door to open,” Marco said as he leaned back against the altar.  He felt a reckless surety that he knew what was going to happen, his spirits buoyed by his return to health.
    “Of course there’s a door,” the young man retorted, as he stepped lightly across the floor.  “The way we came in, remember?” he said, his words trailing off in confusion as he stood close to the shadowed white marble wall, his hand running across the stone in search of evidence of the doorway he knew had existed.
    “Where is it?” he asked softly, as he slowly stepped both left and then right, searching for some seam or crack or evidence of what he could not find.
    There was a grinding sound on the far side of the temple, and all heads turned.
    “The last time I was here and healed,” Marco said softly, brushing past Porenn as he circled around the altar to approach the back wall of the temple, “I did not go out a doorway.
    “I had to climb down through a cave to leave by the same way I initially came here, when I met Porenn the first time,” he explained as he reached the spot where a dark line outlined a panel that was ready to be opened.  He pressed against the marble