Did it have any last words?
Sagiro's Story Hour: The FINAL Adventures of Abernathy's Company (FINISHED 7/3/14)
Did it have any last words?
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Nothing particularly memorable. It knew this was coming.
Joshua Randall
Legend
Love Cayyat! Although I'm jealous, because when I made a timeless demiplane for my PCs to use, they were too paranoid to use it. Such a waste.
Well, I'll be shamefully pluggy and recommend my own! hahaha. Steel Dragon's Tales of Orea. It is just kinda getting off the ground...not nearly the epic length and levels of Sagiro's campaign (not yet, at least
I'll also recommend Iron Sky's Rise of Felskein. I found it to be thoroughly engaging (especially the early to mid-levels). Wonderfully creative foes/storyline. Was an enjoyable read for me.
There's also the "Rose in the Wind" SH which I have also found very engaging and enjoyable. This one, and its predecessor are both also archived by StevenAC in pdf form for easy reading.
Enjoy.
--SD
Neurotic
I plan on living forever. Or die trying.
don't forget several stories from [MENTION=143]Lazybones[/MENTION] - most going from humble beginings to epic fights
Start here
My favorites: Travels through the Wild West and Doomed bastards
Start here
My favorites: Travels through the Wild West and Doomed bastards
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
There's a sticky story hour index up at the top of this forum which is awesome for finding other good storyhour authors, and you can always start another thread asking folks what they like. I definitely encourage you to find and read other stories! Nevertheless, please don't hijack this thread for that purpose.
Thanks.
Thanks.
gah! Last space?
Bump!
Hope all's well.
--SD
Bump!
Hope all's well.
--SD
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 326
Undead Collision
The Company confers. How to best find the Skysteel Hole in a maze of canyons a hundred miles on a side? Morningstar tries a quick excursion into Ava Dormo, but finds the region warded, filled with impenetrable blackness. After reviewing several other options, most of which would be far too time-consuming, they decide that Kibi will use limited wish to spoof commune with nature. But the spell will only have a radius of 20 miles, and as the wizards think the edge of the mist is closer than that, they decide to keep moving center-ward for a bit. (Otherwise, some of their 40-mile diameter circle will be wasted.)
Hide from undead is recast, and onward they fly. There are no dead-ends in this exaggerated labyrinth, but many loops that bring them back to places previously explored. Progress is slow, but Kibi is certain that, on the whole, they are headed in the right direction. More of the canyons are dotted with the broken giantish statues, their presence now making a gruesome sense in light of the petrifying wind. Morningstar clings to Aravis’s draconic back while the others ride on Ernie’s flying carpet, and all of them at a high altitude so as to be less vulnerable to threats on the ground.
“Why do we always fly so high?” groans Kibi, and he wonders if closing his eyes would make things better or worse. It helps that they have to land periodically, so that he can use his dwarfish senses to figure out how far they’ve come. Once he’s convinced that they’ve moved more than twenty miles from the edge of the ravines, he sits upon the rocky floor and casts his spell.
Kibi has never before effected commune with nature, and is nearly overwhelmed by the sensory overload. His eyes roll upward into his head and only his natural affinity for stone (along with his mighty intellect) keeps him conscious and focused on what he senses. He has chosen to divine the layout of the ravines, the locations of powerful magical creatures, and the presence of any living people.
The ravines stretch out from him in all directions, interconnected in a weaving labyrinthine map. There are many hundreds of “powerful magical creatures” appearing on his mental diagram as glowing gray spots, and these vary greatly in potency. Kibi guesses that the run-of-the-mill skeletons aren’t showing up at all, but that creatures like the blasting skulls and bone dragon are pinging the radar.
The density of the glowing dots increases toward the center of the maze, and culminates at a location so bright that there must be over a thousand powerful undead creatures clustered there. This locus of activity – most likely the spot where armies of undead are clashing – is in a final long ravine, one which terminates at the only pure dead-end revealed by the commune with nature. That ravine is almost half a mile long, and the concentration of undead is about a thousand yards from the dead-end.
Kibi can detect two distinct types of undead there. One matches that of many small “scouting parties” similar to the ones the party has already encountered. The other is unfamiliar, and presumably those are the Droshian undead, set here to guard the Skysteel Hole. The dwarf frowns; he can’t be sure which side is winning.
Only a hundred feet short of the terminus there is a gap in Kibi’s perception of the ravines – mostly likely a building of some kind. The gartine arch, perhaps? But there are four undead beings in that gap, of significant power, that are of the Droshian type.
There is one final creature, more powerful than any other, and this one is high up, near to the ceiling of mist that caps the ravines. This being, which Kibi assumes must be the necromancer Ten Old Bones, is, if anything, slightly more powerful than himself.
As for living creatures, there are none, save for those in the Company.
Kibi’s perspective returns to his own person, and he sums up his discoveries. “They’re already fighting at the Arch!” As the Company immediately sets out again, the dwarf shares the remaining details. He estimates that the hot spot is 12 miles distant in a straight line, but closer to 20 given the winding route they must take. Only one path through the maze will lead them true; all other paths and branches lead to reverses and loops.
Half an hour later, as they round a bend in one of the canyons, they see a cluster of some 30 black-clad figures below them. These aren’t the blue-runed skeletons of the Black Circle, but the Droshian defenders set here to repel intruders. Despite the active hide from undead spell, these creatures fire a volley of arrows at Aravis’s draconic body. The party is flying high and fast enough that most of the arrows miss their mark, and they opt to continue on at full speed rather than try to explain to these creatures that they’re on the same side.
“You know what?” says Dranko as they speed away. “If these guys are shooting arrows at skeletons, it’s probably not working out very well.” Ordinarily, the party knows, any skeletons in this place would be controlled by Drosh, Kivian God of the Dead. But the old rules have lost their application in light of Drosh’s abdication.
Soon enough the party encounters a second group of Droshian undead, but these are headed in the same direction as themselves, and don’t manage to hit with a single arrow before the Company is out of range. They fly onward through the ravines, whose only feature is the scattered petrified remains of giants. Kibi leads them, the one true course still etched into his mind.
Finally, up ahead, they see the back end of the battlefront. Black-clad humanoids wielding oversized falchions are battling by the hundreds with skeletons covered with glowing blue runes. Farther ahead the battling undead forces grow denser and the fighting more intense, before the ravine makes one final ninety-degree bend. They are high enough that neither side has taken notice of them, or at least with enough alarm to alter their battle plans. They take the opportunity to cast some buffing spells (including indomitability on Morningstar) before turning the final corner and facing the last long ravine.
They take the turn, and see that the final thousand yards is a clogged mass of raging war. Forces in numbers impossible to estimate are engaged in countless melees, surging forward and backward like ocean tides. The ground is stone, but most of that is covered with splintered bones or the fallen cloaked remains of the Droshian defenders. Inasmuch as a single front can be identified, the Black Circle army is pushing it inward toward the dead end, while the Droshians are trying to force it back.
In the center of the ravine, a hundred yards from the dead-end, a tall but narrow tower of quartz and adamant soars upward a hundred feet. It seems to grow organically from the stone floor, and at its apex is a wide stone platform. At the edge of this platform, nearest to the end of the canyon, is a black stone obelisk set about with white glowing runes. Four oversized Droshian guards stand atop the tower, hacking apart an endless progression of skeletons coming up through a trapdoor in the roof.
The Company makes for the tower at top speed. As they draw near to the heart of the fighting, they can see strange creatures below them mixed in with the rank-and-file skeletons:
There is what looks like an enormous bone buckyball, 20’ in diameter at least, with sharpened giantish elbows protruding from its surface. It looks like an gigantic skeletal flail head rolling to and fro across the canyon, crushing Droshian defenders (along with many of its allies) and impaling them on its spikes.
There is something like an enormous bone spider, reminiscent of a construct the party fought years ago, consisting of two huge concentric bone rings resting on eight long jointed bone legs. The rings rotate independently, and it fires bolts of hot red energy from an agglomerated “head.”
There are two particularly large and well-equipped giantish skeletons, towering almost as high as the spiky ball, wearing custom steel mail and laying waste with enormous thick-chained flails.
And finally there is a dragon. This one is larger than the specimen recently controlled by Kibi, and a good deal larger than Aravis in his draconic shape. Unlike every other Black Circle combatant here, the dragon has gray, rotting flesh clinging to its bones. It circles lazily around the top of the tower, deigning now and again to breath a black mist upon all the undead upon it.
All of this is set against the backdrop of the Skysteel Hole. In the stone wall that marks the dead-end of the ravine, a gigantic ring of metal is pressed into the rock. It sinks below ground level at its base, so that it more resembles an inverted horseshoe. It doesn’t seem to lead anywhere; its entire empty center is simply the rock wall. None of the undead seem concerned with it; the tower is clearly the focus of everyone’s attention.
That the Company should have arrived at this moment, given the many days the Black Circle forces have been searching, is a staggering coincidence, an unnatural stroke of luck. It seems that the wild fluctuations in probability brought about by Corilayna’s absence have thrown a potentially world-saving gift to the Company. Now they just have to claim it.
/*/
The Company wonders where in this mess Ten Old Bones is hiding; according to Kibi’s vision the most powerful being here was high up near the mist layer, but there’s no immediate sign of him. More urgently, they see that the stream of skeletons pouring out through the tower roof is threatening to overbear one of the four Droshian guards and push it over the railing. They move to assist, swooping in to the tower top and wondering how powerful the dragon is. Dranko’s whip and a rainbow blast from Grey Wolf clear about nine of the skeletons, which provides enough of a respite that the Droshian guard pushes away from edge and regains solid footing.
Ernie casts blade barrier across the entire ravine at ground level, cutting off the encroaching skeletons from the tower. Aravis casts Bigby’s clenched fist and sends it to aid the tower-top guardians. It bull-rushes a particularly large skeleton right off the roof, which falls pleasingly into the blade barrier below.
Ah, but the dragon. It flies over and hovers, observing these unwelcome newcomers to the fray. To its surprise, they seem to be alive. It breathes upon them, a massive cone of horrid wilting that draws the vital fluids from their bodies. Grey Wolf, Ernie and Flicker are struck more fully, and are left so weakened that another such blast would surely finish them off. Having done that much, the dragon flies up and away, stopping again some 40’ above them, and fires off magic missiles at Dranko.
The half orc is indignant. “You hit me with magic missiles! You son of a bitch!”
The dragon thinks directly into Dranko’s head. “That’s what you’re worried about? You should not have come here, mortal. You will die.”
“Yeah, well,” thinks Dranko in reply, “we kind of killed everyone else in the Black Circle. Ten Old Bones was the only person left.”
The Dragon chuckles.
Although they are still either on dragonback or the carpet, the individual members of the party can also fly on their own. Morningstar casts mass heal, entirely undoing the effects of the dragon breath, before disembarking from Aravis and flying out of cluster formation.
Kibi quickens a wall of force in mid-air, directly above the blade barrier, hoping that it will impede the dragon’s flight. Then he casts his own Bigby’s fist to join Aravis’s.
One of the massive flail-wielding skeletons stops laying waste for a moment, and with a gesture dispels the blade barrier. The other one does likewise, dispelling one of the fists. The huge bone spider spins its top ring about so that the head is facing a preponderance of the party. It fires off a ball of green energy that, by sheer luck, is halted by the wall of force. Green light plays all along the wall, illuminating it for all the combatants to see.
Dranko and Flicker go after the dragon, launching themselves from the carpet to assume flanking positions. Though the dragon nips Dranko with its jagged teeth on his way by, the two heroes carve large chunks of flesh out of the dragon’s putrid corpus. It snarls with surprise.
Bother. What a nuisance you all are. The voice sounds telepathically in the heads of all the Company. Ten Old Bones! I’ll give you five seconds to leave. After that, the chances of your deaths will go from ‘highly likely’ to ‘assured.’
Morningstar doesn’t buy it. “Zeg sends his regards,” she says grimly.
Unlikely. Zeg is dead. You’re going to make me do this myself, aren’t you. So tiresome.
“Nah,” Dranko responds. “You should just let your monsters take care of it.”
I was hoping they would be sufficient; I do HATE exerting myself.
Aravis guffaws. “So, not only are you a coward, but you’re lazy, too!”
Grey Wolf ignores this exchange and fires a disintegrate at the dragon, but its body is preternaturally tough, and it resists most of the damage. Ernie has a better idea: he maneuvers the flying carpet until it rises above the wall of force and casts bolt of glory. A beam of radiance lances from Ernie’s fingertips, looking for all the world like Tava’s Righteous Fury in flight, and it blows a foot-diameter hole right through the bulk of the dragon. Bits of rotten organs and rancid flesh spray out the far side. The dragon dips a bit in mid-flight, but retains its equilibrium and growls in pain.
Aravis reverts to his human form and casts lightning ring surrounding himself with a small electrical storm.
The dragon responds to the brutal assault upon itself with some kind of quickened healing, though it’s not much compared with the damage it’s taken, and then twists around mid-air like a cobra. Dranko finds himself looking into its dry, dead eyes, and before he can make any kind of witticism, the dragon savages him with claws and teeth. His own blood splashes everywhere. The dragon then flies downward slightly, putting the wall of force between itself and the majority of the party’s casters.
Morningstar sighs, and absorbs a passing swat of the dragon’s tail as she moves to heal her husband. He plants a quick kiss as she arrives.
Kibi has been intently surveying the scene. All of these antics with the dragon are well and good, but the real issue here seems to be that an endless crowd of skeletons is entering the tower at ground level, and emerging at the rooftop to harry the Droshians defending the obelisk. It’s only a matter of time before their press will become overwhelming. More of the Black Circle army is surging into the ravine all the time, and it’s clear that they are slowly but surely grinding down the Droshian’s defense. He glances at the rock face with the Skysteel Ring pressed into it, but decides that’s too risky. Instead he targets one of the ravine walls.
With an earthquake.
He’s not certain what effect this will have; the stone here is strange, at once both natural and constructed, and with properties of ancient enchantment that he cannot guess at. Will it resist his spell?
No. No it won’t. With a sound like an avalanche, a colossal volume of rock breaks free of the wall and collapses to the ground like a tidal wave. The sheer quantity of dislodged stone buries everything in its path as it sweeps from left to right. A huge cloud of dust rises up like a mushroom cloud, but in the canyon itself, everything in the vicinity of the tower is buried in ten feet of gray-green rock. Skeletal limbs and heads poke out here and there, but in matter of seconds the entire melee has ceased. The huge spiky bone-ball stops rolling, rocking futilely in place. The bone artillery-spider cannot free its legs, though the rotating rings still function. The two flail-wielding giants are buried up to their chests, effectively paralyzed.
Most importantly to Kibi, the ground-level doorway to the tower has been entirely blocked off. There may still be a hundred or more skeletons inside of it, but he has effectively turned off the tap.
The spider does manage to swing its head around, and it blasts Dranko and Morningstar with a burst of green energy. But Dranko and Flicker maintain their focus. Flicker waits until the thing becomes distracted by Dranko, and nearly severs its tail with a series of knife-slashes. When it becomes distracted by that, Dranko starts shearing off chunks of its head with his whip.
At the second whip-snap, the dragon starts to chuckle again. Its body almost seems to be vibrating. Dranko doesn’t hesitate; he strikes twice more, and the second time he caves its head in entirely.
Goodbye thinks the dragon into Dranko’s head. And with a last bitter laugh, it explodes.
Dranko sees it coming with a split-second of lead time, and somehow finds the one safe vector within the blast radius. Morningstar and Flicker are not so lucky. Morningstar suffers pain that she knows should be indicative of death, and indeed if not for the indomitability, she’d have been eviscerated. As it is, sharp thorns of bone have gouged the entire right side of her body.
Flicker, unprotected by magic and unable to dodge the eruption, is blown into a hundred pieces, his guts splattered obscenely into the wall of force, where they slide down to splash upon the rocks.
…to be continued…
Undead Collision
The Company confers. How to best find the Skysteel Hole in a maze of canyons a hundred miles on a side? Morningstar tries a quick excursion into Ava Dormo, but finds the region warded, filled with impenetrable blackness. After reviewing several other options, most of which would be far too time-consuming, they decide that Kibi will use limited wish to spoof commune with nature. But the spell will only have a radius of 20 miles, and as the wizards think the edge of the mist is closer than that, they decide to keep moving center-ward for a bit. (Otherwise, some of their 40-mile diameter circle will be wasted.)
Hide from undead is recast, and onward they fly. There are no dead-ends in this exaggerated labyrinth, but many loops that bring them back to places previously explored. Progress is slow, but Kibi is certain that, on the whole, they are headed in the right direction. More of the canyons are dotted with the broken giantish statues, their presence now making a gruesome sense in light of the petrifying wind. Morningstar clings to Aravis’s draconic back while the others ride on Ernie’s flying carpet, and all of them at a high altitude so as to be less vulnerable to threats on the ground.
“Why do we always fly so high?” groans Kibi, and he wonders if closing his eyes would make things better or worse. It helps that they have to land periodically, so that he can use his dwarfish senses to figure out how far they’ve come. Once he’s convinced that they’ve moved more than twenty miles from the edge of the ravines, he sits upon the rocky floor and casts his spell.
Kibi has never before effected commune with nature, and is nearly overwhelmed by the sensory overload. His eyes roll upward into his head and only his natural affinity for stone (along with his mighty intellect) keeps him conscious and focused on what he senses. He has chosen to divine the layout of the ravines, the locations of powerful magical creatures, and the presence of any living people.
The ravines stretch out from him in all directions, interconnected in a weaving labyrinthine map. There are many hundreds of “powerful magical creatures” appearing on his mental diagram as glowing gray spots, and these vary greatly in potency. Kibi guesses that the run-of-the-mill skeletons aren’t showing up at all, but that creatures like the blasting skulls and bone dragon are pinging the radar.
The density of the glowing dots increases toward the center of the maze, and culminates at a location so bright that there must be over a thousand powerful undead creatures clustered there. This locus of activity – most likely the spot where armies of undead are clashing – is in a final long ravine, one which terminates at the only pure dead-end revealed by the commune with nature. That ravine is almost half a mile long, and the concentration of undead is about a thousand yards from the dead-end.
Kibi can detect two distinct types of undead there. One matches that of many small “scouting parties” similar to the ones the party has already encountered. The other is unfamiliar, and presumably those are the Droshian undead, set here to guard the Skysteel Hole. The dwarf frowns; he can’t be sure which side is winning.
Only a hundred feet short of the terminus there is a gap in Kibi’s perception of the ravines – mostly likely a building of some kind. The gartine arch, perhaps? But there are four undead beings in that gap, of significant power, that are of the Droshian type.
There is one final creature, more powerful than any other, and this one is high up, near to the ceiling of mist that caps the ravines. This being, which Kibi assumes must be the necromancer Ten Old Bones, is, if anything, slightly more powerful than himself.
As for living creatures, there are none, save for those in the Company.
Kibi’s perspective returns to his own person, and he sums up his discoveries. “They’re already fighting at the Arch!” As the Company immediately sets out again, the dwarf shares the remaining details. He estimates that the hot spot is 12 miles distant in a straight line, but closer to 20 given the winding route they must take. Only one path through the maze will lead them true; all other paths and branches lead to reverses and loops.
Half an hour later, as they round a bend in one of the canyons, they see a cluster of some 30 black-clad figures below them. These aren’t the blue-runed skeletons of the Black Circle, but the Droshian defenders set here to repel intruders. Despite the active hide from undead spell, these creatures fire a volley of arrows at Aravis’s draconic body. The party is flying high and fast enough that most of the arrows miss their mark, and they opt to continue on at full speed rather than try to explain to these creatures that they’re on the same side.
“You know what?” says Dranko as they speed away. “If these guys are shooting arrows at skeletons, it’s probably not working out very well.” Ordinarily, the party knows, any skeletons in this place would be controlled by Drosh, Kivian God of the Dead. But the old rules have lost their application in light of Drosh’s abdication.
Soon enough the party encounters a second group of Droshian undead, but these are headed in the same direction as themselves, and don’t manage to hit with a single arrow before the Company is out of range. They fly onward through the ravines, whose only feature is the scattered petrified remains of giants. Kibi leads them, the one true course still etched into his mind.
Finally, up ahead, they see the back end of the battlefront. Black-clad humanoids wielding oversized falchions are battling by the hundreds with skeletons covered with glowing blue runes. Farther ahead the battling undead forces grow denser and the fighting more intense, before the ravine makes one final ninety-degree bend. They are high enough that neither side has taken notice of them, or at least with enough alarm to alter their battle plans. They take the opportunity to cast some buffing spells (including indomitability on Morningstar) before turning the final corner and facing the last long ravine.
They take the turn, and see that the final thousand yards is a clogged mass of raging war. Forces in numbers impossible to estimate are engaged in countless melees, surging forward and backward like ocean tides. The ground is stone, but most of that is covered with splintered bones or the fallen cloaked remains of the Droshian defenders. Inasmuch as a single front can be identified, the Black Circle army is pushing it inward toward the dead end, while the Droshians are trying to force it back.
In the center of the ravine, a hundred yards from the dead-end, a tall but narrow tower of quartz and adamant soars upward a hundred feet. It seems to grow organically from the stone floor, and at its apex is a wide stone platform. At the edge of this platform, nearest to the end of the canyon, is a black stone obelisk set about with white glowing runes. Four oversized Droshian guards stand atop the tower, hacking apart an endless progression of skeletons coming up through a trapdoor in the roof.
The Company makes for the tower at top speed. As they draw near to the heart of the fighting, they can see strange creatures below them mixed in with the rank-and-file skeletons:
There is what looks like an enormous bone buckyball, 20’ in diameter at least, with sharpened giantish elbows protruding from its surface. It looks like an gigantic skeletal flail head rolling to and fro across the canyon, crushing Droshian defenders (along with many of its allies) and impaling them on its spikes.
There is something like an enormous bone spider, reminiscent of a construct the party fought years ago, consisting of two huge concentric bone rings resting on eight long jointed bone legs. The rings rotate independently, and it fires bolts of hot red energy from an agglomerated “head.”
There are two particularly large and well-equipped giantish skeletons, towering almost as high as the spiky ball, wearing custom steel mail and laying waste with enormous thick-chained flails.
And finally there is a dragon. This one is larger than the specimen recently controlled by Kibi, and a good deal larger than Aravis in his draconic shape. Unlike every other Black Circle combatant here, the dragon has gray, rotting flesh clinging to its bones. It circles lazily around the top of the tower, deigning now and again to breath a black mist upon all the undead upon it.
All of this is set against the backdrop of the Skysteel Hole. In the stone wall that marks the dead-end of the ravine, a gigantic ring of metal is pressed into the rock. It sinks below ground level at its base, so that it more resembles an inverted horseshoe. It doesn’t seem to lead anywhere; its entire empty center is simply the rock wall. None of the undead seem concerned with it; the tower is clearly the focus of everyone’s attention.
That the Company should have arrived at this moment, given the many days the Black Circle forces have been searching, is a staggering coincidence, an unnatural stroke of luck. It seems that the wild fluctuations in probability brought about by Corilayna’s absence have thrown a potentially world-saving gift to the Company. Now they just have to claim it.
/*/
The Company wonders where in this mess Ten Old Bones is hiding; according to Kibi’s vision the most powerful being here was high up near the mist layer, but there’s no immediate sign of him. More urgently, they see that the stream of skeletons pouring out through the tower roof is threatening to overbear one of the four Droshian guards and push it over the railing. They move to assist, swooping in to the tower top and wondering how powerful the dragon is. Dranko’s whip and a rainbow blast from Grey Wolf clear about nine of the skeletons, which provides enough of a respite that the Droshian guard pushes away from edge and regains solid footing.
Ernie casts blade barrier across the entire ravine at ground level, cutting off the encroaching skeletons from the tower. Aravis casts Bigby’s clenched fist and sends it to aid the tower-top guardians. It bull-rushes a particularly large skeleton right off the roof, which falls pleasingly into the blade barrier below.
Ah, but the dragon. It flies over and hovers, observing these unwelcome newcomers to the fray. To its surprise, they seem to be alive. It breathes upon them, a massive cone of horrid wilting that draws the vital fluids from their bodies. Grey Wolf, Ernie and Flicker are struck more fully, and are left so weakened that another such blast would surely finish them off. Having done that much, the dragon flies up and away, stopping again some 40’ above them, and fires off magic missiles at Dranko.
The half orc is indignant. “You hit me with magic missiles! You son of a bitch!”
The dragon thinks directly into Dranko’s head. “That’s what you’re worried about? You should not have come here, mortal. You will die.”
“Yeah, well,” thinks Dranko in reply, “we kind of killed everyone else in the Black Circle. Ten Old Bones was the only person left.”
The Dragon chuckles.
Although they are still either on dragonback or the carpet, the individual members of the party can also fly on their own. Morningstar casts mass heal, entirely undoing the effects of the dragon breath, before disembarking from Aravis and flying out of cluster formation.
Kibi quickens a wall of force in mid-air, directly above the blade barrier, hoping that it will impede the dragon’s flight. Then he casts his own Bigby’s fist to join Aravis’s.
One of the massive flail-wielding skeletons stops laying waste for a moment, and with a gesture dispels the blade barrier. The other one does likewise, dispelling one of the fists. The huge bone spider spins its top ring about so that the head is facing a preponderance of the party. It fires off a ball of green energy that, by sheer luck, is halted by the wall of force. Green light plays all along the wall, illuminating it for all the combatants to see.
Dranko and Flicker go after the dragon, launching themselves from the carpet to assume flanking positions. Though the dragon nips Dranko with its jagged teeth on his way by, the two heroes carve large chunks of flesh out of the dragon’s putrid corpus. It snarls with surprise.
Bother. What a nuisance you all are. The voice sounds telepathically in the heads of all the Company. Ten Old Bones! I’ll give you five seconds to leave. After that, the chances of your deaths will go from ‘highly likely’ to ‘assured.’
Morningstar doesn’t buy it. “Zeg sends his regards,” she says grimly.
Unlikely. Zeg is dead. You’re going to make me do this myself, aren’t you. So tiresome.
“Nah,” Dranko responds. “You should just let your monsters take care of it.”
I was hoping they would be sufficient; I do HATE exerting myself.
Aravis guffaws. “So, not only are you a coward, but you’re lazy, too!”
Grey Wolf ignores this exchange and fires a disintegrate at the dragon, but its body is preternaturally tough, and it resists most of the damage. Ernie has a better idea: he maneuvers the flying carpet until it rises above the wall of force and casts bolt of glory. A beam of radiance lances from Ernie’s fingertips, looking for all the world like Tava’s Righteous Fury in flight, and it blows a foot-diameter hole right through the bulk of the dragon. Bits of rotten organs and rancid flesh spray out the far side. The dragon dips a bit in mid-flight, but retains its equilibrium and growls in pain.
Aravis reverts to his human form and casts lightning ring surrounding himself with a small electrical storm.
The dragon responds to the brutal assault upon itself with some kind of quickened healing, though it’s not much compared with the damage it’s taken, and then twists around mid-air like a cobra. Dranko finds himself looking into its dry, dead eyes, and before he can make any kind of witticism, the dragon savages him with claws and teeth. His own blood splashes everywhere. The dragon then flies downward slightly, putting the wall of force between itself and the majority of the party’s casters.
Morningstar sighs, and absorbs a passing swat of the dragon’s tail as she moves to heal her husband. He plants a quick kiss as she arrives.
Kibi has been intently surveying the scene. All of these antics with the dragon are well and good, but the real issue here seems to be that an endless crowd of skeletons is entering the tower at ground level, and emerging at the rooftop to harry the Droshians defending the obelisk. It’s only a matter of time before their press will become overwhelming. More of the Black Circle army is surging into the ravine all the time, and it’s clear that they are slowly but surely grinding down the Droshian’s defense. He glances at the rock face with the Skysteel Ring pressed into it, but decides that’s too risky. Instead he targets one of the ravine walls.
With an earthquake.
He’s not certain what effect this will have; the stone here is strange, at once both natural and constructed, and with properties of ancient enchantment that he cannot guess at. Will it resist his spell?
No. No it won’t. With a sound like an avalanche, a colossal volume of rock breaks free of the wall and collapses to the ground like a tidal wave. The sheer quantity of dislodged stone buries everything in its path as it sweeps from left to right. A huge cloud of dust rises up like a mushroom cloud, but in the canyon itself, everything in the vicinity of the tower is buried in ten feet of gray-green rock. Skeletal limbs and heads poke out here and there, but in matter of seconds the entire melee has ceased. The huge spiky bone-ball stops rolling, rocking futilely in place. The bone artillery-spider cannot free its legs, though the rotating rings still function. The two flail-wielding giants are buried up to their chests, effectively paralyzed.
Most importantly to Kibi, the ground-level doorway to the tower has been entirely blocked off. There may still be a hundred or more skeletons inside of it, but he has effectively turned off the tap.
The spider does manage to swing its head around, and it blasts Dranko and Morningstar with a burst of green energy. But Dranko and Flicker maintain their focus. Flicker waits until the thing becomes distracted by Dranko, and nearly severs its tail with a series of knife-slashes. When it becomes distracted by that, Dranko starts shearing off chunks of its head with his whip.
At the second whip-snap, the dragon starts to chuckle again. Its body almost seems to be vibrating. Dranko doesn’t hesitate; he strikes twice more, and the second time he caves its head in entirely.
Goodbye thinks the dragon into Dranko’s head. And with a last bitter laugh, it explodes.
Dranko sees it coming with a split-second of lead time, and somehow finds the one safe vector within the blast radius. Morningstar and Flicker are not so lucky. Morningstar suffers pain that she knows should be indicative of death, and indeed if not for the indomitability, she’d have been eviscerated. As it is, sharp thorns of bone have gouged the entire right side of her body.
Flicker, unprotected by magic and unable to dodge the eruption, is blown into a hundred pieces, his guts splattered obscenely into the wall of force, where they slide down to splash upon the rocks.
…to be continued…
