Vecna's forces are attacking along a wide front.
Against the forces of William and John Brown, on the North Front.
Against the forces of Dagger and his allies on the Central Front.
Against the forces of Turrosh Mak on the Southern Front.
There is no effective way to tell how much of Vecna's force is where at the moment ... there are over a hundred million combatants, spread out over thousands of square miles of land.
The Shade, previously uninvolved, throw their entire force into the assault, backing Vecna, since they were attacked first.
The Doomgrinder pulls itself out of the very bedrock of the Oerth, and begins stomping with the feet of titans towards the Shadow Throne.
And the battle rages.
It rages.
People and beings, monsters and undead, are fed into the War Machine like branches of felled trees into a thousand chippers, with about the same gruesome results.
Hour after hour the two forces fight, titans blasting at each other at 20 paces.
The magical firefight is visible from Luna, Oerth's moon.
The dead litter the battlefield, then they pile up in gruesome heaps, then there are hills of the slain.
As the powerful spells and high tech weapons slug away at each other, everything that stands above ground - trees, rocks, buildings - are all pulverized.
The battle rages, hour after hour.
The first day of the battle passes. Over a wide region, it looks like the eruption of Mount St Helens, with the ground churned up, great slabs of shattered bedrock sticking up out of the mud, lakes turned into sludgepools, rivers erased from the map.
The Torilians descend in their full strength.
Spelljammers roar into the battle.
Dragons scream down out of the skies.
The heavens themselves are filled with explosions, gouts of fire, rains of acid, clouds of sulphur and clorine gas, even as the Lortmil Technomancy sprays gasoline and phosphorus down upon the Legions of Vecna.
In the midst of it all stands Vecna.
No spell touches him, no blade can pierce his armor.
He roars in exultation and glee, as his staff, hissing and turned jet black, fires gout after gout of flame and acid.
Where the acid hits the ground, the ground evaporates, leaving giant craters. Even the tiniest drops of that acid burn holes in solid stone.
Where the fire slashes across the countryside, trees instantly burn to ash, rocks explode and the shards melt into white hot lava, and men turn into heaps of ash, blown away in the superheated winds.
Fires burn out of control across all of southeastern Furyondy, through Gnarley Forest, through the Welkwood.
All of the Flanaess as far east as the Sea Barons see the sun cut off, the sky turn black, from the great fires in the west.
Ash falls make breathing difficult, and bury towns, in Nyrond, Urnst, and the western Dark Union.
Wild Magic storms rage across the Flanaess, with great multicolored clouds filling the sky, lightning striking down at the earth, hurricane force winds sweep across the terrain.
Kalden, Prince of Swords, meets Vecna in one on one battle.
Kalden is the greatest swordsman in all of Oerth.
He sweeps forth his sword, and a bright light strikes down upon him amidst the darkness, and his sword flames like the sun.
However, Vecna is almost as fast with his staff, and the two duel, sword against staff.
Long and epic is that duel, as the two fight.
Again and again, Kalden wounds Vecna, his sword the sword of a demipower, piercing Vecna's Prismatic Armor, cutting the undead flesh, causing Vecna to howl in pain.
Time and again, Vecna's staff swipes at Kalden, and Kalden cries out, his skin blackened and burned where the staff touched him.
However, Vecna's endurance seems unlimited, and ever the hellish light burns in his eyes, and with the progression of the battle he grows in stature, and does not weaken.
He knocks Kalden's sword wide, and with one great thrust, runs him through with his staff, burning a hole 4 inches wide right through Kalden's body, through his heart.
As Kalden falls to his knees, dying, impaled on the staff, Vecna snarls gleefully at him:
BOY, IT TAKES MORE THAN A SWORD TO MAKE A WARRIOR!
YOU SHALL JOIN YOUR FRIENDS IN THAT GREAT ASTRAL GRAVEYARD IN THE SKY!
He rips his staff upward. It tears through Kalden's upper body, through his neck, and divides his head in half.
The pieces of Kalden go flying in every direction.
Vecna shatters Kalden's sword with a blast from his staff.
Then he grinds Kalden's remains into the ground with his feet, and burns them until the ground underneath them bubbles and froths like water in a cauldron.
The Dragons breathe their huge gouts of fire, acid, pure energy, blowing titantic holes in the ground, burning vast strips across the landscape, massacring thousands of Vecna's people with each hit.
Clerics and mages fly up and give battle to the dragons.
Armed with jars filled with gray ooze, they slime the dragons, and before the dragons can save themselves, they topple out of the air in ruin, and gigantic gray oozes rise out of the wreckage, attacking both sides, devouring tree, grass, undead, and living alike.
Other mages throw flensing, and watch in glee as the dragons are flensed.
First their scales are peeled off, and go flying as deadly missiles down upon the battlefield.
Then their skin is peeled off, and then muscle and flesh starts raining down, along with cloudbursts of blood, as the death screams of dragons shatters stone and leaves the living staggering, hands held to their ears, blood running through their fingers.
Iuz reaps a grim harvest through the Legions of Vecna, and none can stand against the might of the Old One.
Champions and powerful undead go down before him, and weaker undead cower or run, terrified.
Finally, a force of liches assemble, and give battle to the Old One.
Necromantic spells fly back and forth like arrows, until the sky turns black with expending energy, and gray lightning crackles all around.
The ground animates, thousands of undead Earth Elementals rising from it, berserk and under nobody's control.
They attack Iuz.
They attack the liches.
Both are forced to flee before that onslaught.
The enraged undead elementals then storm into the armies on either side, hammering with their fists, pulverizing man and horse alike, snatching up whole trees and using them in great roundhouse sweeps.
The elves attempt to defend the Welkwood from the Legions of Vecna.
The treants cause all the trees of the forest to awaken and come to their aid.
A million trees, tremendously strong with the strength of ancient wood, descend on the undead forces of the foe.
However, the Legions of Vecna unleash firestorms, and Meteor Swarms, and they turn all the underlying soil to mud.
They envelop the trees with greyish radiances, and the trees wither and die, then reanimate as undead treants, and these command the trees to turn on their own.
Branches and whole trunks of trees crash down by the thousands as the tree armies battle, while underneath, elf and undead battle hand to hand, and thousands of spells light up the carnage.
The Shade come into the battle.
Using the Power of Shade, they whelm the light of the foe, drown thousands of their foes in the pall of Shadow, the screams and defiant cries of elves and men and dwarves not availing them.
Then the Doomgrinder stomps into view, and the forces of Shade turn hastily to meet THIS monster.
Even the Shade did not expect this, nor did Vecna.
Against the titantic construct that is the Doomgrinder, the Shade hurl everything they have, while the Doomgrinder raises it's great feet, and brings them down.
Thousands of the Shade have no time to even scream as they are instantly crushed into pulp, and the earth itself is pushed down into a new depression.
The tanks fire, artillery roars, machine gun nests spray the enemy with bullets.
Gasoline and sulpher, and phosphorus, make for a primitive napalm, and tens of thousands of Vecna's troops, undead and living alike, melt into goo on the battlefield.
Lightning bolts and fireballs slam into the machine gun nests, blowing them asunder.
Cones of Cold and Icestorms slam the tanks - unavailing.
Then Acid Storms rain down upon the defenders, and the tanks and those within them perish in agony as they dissolve and melt into the sodden ground.
Spelljammers fire round after round of ballistae and catapult shots at the Flying Ships of the Sky-Sea League, along with the more high tech machine gun fire and impromptu artillery fire.
The Flying Ships fire back.
Dozens of ships on both sides are torn asunder, sails dropping, decks awash with blood and the bodies of corpses.
The great Flying Citadels, however, prove more than a match for Acererak's spelljammers, and against the great Dwarven Mountains, their firepower proves futile.
One by one, Acererak's spelljammers topple out of the air, falling in flaming wreckage onto the battlefield below.
Powerful clerics and mages, liches and vampires, teleport into the Flying Citadels and Dwarven Spelljamming Mountains, and summon forces.
However, the defenders were expecting this, and strike with holy symbols, holy water, and large numbers of point blank spells and enchanted arrows.
Time and again, the mages, clerics, and undead attempting to gain the Flying Citadels and Mountains are beaten back, or sent screaming over the sides to topple thousands of feet into the ground below.
Time and again, the defenders hold off the invasion, and hundreds of the high level attackers perish.
However, finally, they establish a beachhead on one of the Dwarven Mountains.
With that beachhead established, they summon more, and then yet more, of their undead kindred.
The dwarves fight toe to toe with the Legions of Vecna, hammers and spiked armor, battlerager and dwarven Defender, versus the infuriated vampires, ghosts, wraiths, and spectres. Against the dark mages and clerics.
The Legions of Vecna prove too strong. The dwarves are driven back, and back, hundreds of them killed, their bodies withering and shrivelling from Negative Material Energy.
The undead gain the control room.
The dwarves, seeing the battle is lost, sabotage the controls.
The dwarven mountain goes out of control, and slams into the side of the Lortmil Mountains, shattering, a monstrous avalanche of broken rock crashing like a waterfall down the side of the mountain range, taking thousands of dwarves and thousands of undead with them, burying the forests below in huge piles of debris.
The Knights of the Kevellond League lower their lances and charge, cutting deep swaths in the ranks of their foes.
Only to be hit by massed fireballs, their armor melting, their bodies melting, shrieking as they die.
Kevellond Mages target the Mages of Vecna with their own fireball barrage, and hundreds of them die as plumes of fire soar into the heavens, filling the sky, turning the whole battlefield a garish red.
But the surviving enemy mages fire back with necromantic magic.
Kevellond mages scream in agony as greyish radiance covers them, sucks the very life out of them, their bodies turning into withered husks, then rising as undead monsters and turning on their own side.
Clerics raise their holy symbols, which flame with blue light, to repel and destroy the undead of Vecna.
The clerics of Vecna raise unholy symbols, glowing purple and mauve, to counter this attack.
On the evil side, undead shriek and run, or are blasted into oblivion, turning into motes of silver light.
On the good side, paladins reel, blood running from their eyes and mouths, crashing to the ground, fleeing the battle.
Ever the battle intensifies, grows more and more terrible.
The very ground starts to shake, as the magic deluges it, blood covers it and fills it, and the battle tears great ragged wounds in it.
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