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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 2431977" data-attributes="member: 2">His hand still tingled from the ride down the lightning.  Imperator Caustus stood on the sodden earth, feeling the distaste he always felt whenever his feet touched dirt. Coruscating electricity ran up and down his massive frame, and his laugh sounded like the shuddering of the heavens. Sword in hand, he opened his arms wide to the glorious devastation that was the shattered keep. . .He blinked. The keep his people built years ago was covered in mud, but standing. The Imperator’s face contorted in anger, and he barely noticed the spells and arrows that flashed impotently into his armored chest.“Why is it standing, Olaf?” the Imperator growled over his shoulder to the cringing giant on his back. His tone made it clear that whatever the reason, Olaf the Lame was sure to be at fault.“I do not know, my lord!” burbled Olaf. He was safe within his metal vessel strapped to the Imperator’s back, but he had no illusions that the Imperator would allow anything but subservience. “Surely it was spared by the Storm Gorger so that your majesty could crush the humans underfoot yourself, and thus bring endless blessings and fortune onto his majesty’s house and sons thereby!”  Olaf wiped a trail of sweat and rainwater from his brow.It doesn’t make any sense, but believe me, he silently prayed, because I speak with the voice of the Storm Gorger himself. . .“Then let’s be about it!  Olaf, I demand wind.”“Yes, Imperator.”  Olaf was a runt barely fifteen feet tall, and the 40’ tall Imperator barely noticed his weight. Olaf squinted through the narrow slot in his vessel and called out to the Storm Gorger.  The Storm Gorger answered, and shrieking hurricane winds began to blow. Many of the humans were picked up by the wind and flung back into the mud-covered wall of their shelter. “You have trespassed onto giant lands,” began the Imperator in a voice that could still be heard over the shrieking wind, “and you have attacked the messenger who came to demand tribute.  You dared to dominate one of my people! You will. . .”If the Imperator finished the sentence, it was on another plane of existence. One of the humans, a tiny creature surrounded by floating rocks, had pointed a finger at the Imperator and in mid-sentence the giant had vanished into nothingness.  Unfortunately, this left Olaf’s metal vessel hanging unsupported twenty feet in the air. Olaf braced himself as he fell painfully onto the filthy ground. He grunted as his nose snacked painfully against the side of the vessel.“Not good,” mumbled Olaf. “Come back, Imperator!” Olaf heard the sound of spells and weapons shattering on the shell of his enchanted vessel. Fire and cold snaked in through the casting slot, and he felt something try to seize control of his mind. It was lucky that this had been foreseen and defenses were in place. Nevertheless, this hadn’t gone the way Olaf had expected.  The giant leaned and rolled, and his casting slot aligned with the tiny humans.  “They can’t move against the wind,” he thought, “and am I not the most powerful priest in the Storm Gorger’s service? The soldiers will be here in moments, and Zghelb has his own surprise prepared.  Let him see them stand against my prayers!  Olaf began to cast.--For Imperator Caustas, the world had disappeared and been replaced with a shifting array of force planes in a sphere of endless night. He had no body. He had no eyes, but somewhere on the other side of the maze the Imperator could see a pulsing portal that represented escape back into his own world. They want me to run like a goblin through a maze, he realized. I am supposed to pant and turn and lose myself in the labyrinth. Clearly, they have never met one of the old blood before.  With that, Caustas stood up to his full height (if in that strange place one could be said to be standing, when one did not possess a body), and reached a long arm he didn’t possess above and across the maze of shifting force planes. It was a stretch, even for Imperator Caustas. One non-finger tapped the pulsing door of energy, and the Imperator was flung back into the real world.--“He’s back!” shouted Olaf with delight, voice echoing loudly around his head. The Imperator had returned within mere seconds, doubtlessly due to his innate state of grace and unsurpassed cleverness. Unfortunately, Olaf saw that the Imperator was looking the wrong way and had not yet regained his balance, and the treacherous humans seized an unfair advantage before Olaf could shout a warning. Before Olaf’s eyes, one of the humans somehow managed to strip nearly a dozen abjurations from the Imperator’s frame.One of the little people, a tiny little thing no bigger than a mouthful, conjured a massive tentacle fully as tall as the Imperator himself. The slimy dark tendril wrapped itself around the Imperator before the most majestic one could react, and the Lord’s sword arm was pinned to his most royal chest.“Vultures!” snarled the Imperator, and struggled to free his arm. He hadn’t yet succeeded before an armored knight - and a woman! noticed the shocked Olaf, she should be somewhere breeding! -  spurred her horse through the gale towards the partially grappled Imperator. Unnatural fires played along her lance, a frail sliver of wood. The woman ran the lance into the Imperator’s knee. Olaf grinned in expectation of the lance shattering into matchwood. Instead, there was a burst of light and the Imperator’s knee shattered in gobbets of flying flesh, bone and gristle. The Imperator gave the first scream of pain that Olaf had ever heard.“Not good, not good,” gurgled Olaf as he desperately tried to roll the protective cylindrical vessel towards the Imperator. Spells went off all around him. A spell Olaf recognized as meteor swarm hit the Imperator point blank on the chest, and what seemed like half a dozen warriors fought their way forward through the wind to attack the Imperator’s ankles. Still grappled by the tentacle, the Imperator could do nothing.  Where were the griffon riders?  A dull thump sounded nearby, and a brilliant flash lit the air. Olaf looked up to see a second dead cloud giant strike the ground, and blinded giants and griffons staggering across the sky.  Ah, he thought. That’s where they are.  I never thought I’d say this, but I hope Zghelb hurries.“I am here, my lord!” shouted Olaf.  Still trapped in his protective cylinder, Olaf finally rolled close enough for one arm to reach out and touch his ruler’s bloody foot. He cast heal, and felt the Imperator throw off the tentacle that encircled him. “Now!” screamed his Lord and Master, raising the massive sword that coursed with lightning.  “Now!”  The humans answered with a withering barrage of blows and spells. Olaf’s restricted view of the fight was narrowed even further when a green ray entered the narrow casting slot, quickly followed by a sphere of force that blocked him from any contact with the Imperator.  Olaf the Lame didn’t even have enough time to sing the traditional lament. It was only seconds before his lord and master fell, his leg literally chopped in two, his body weakened and burned by profane spells. The Imperator never even had a chance to swing his legendary sword Skyblood at his foes.  As casually as if someone snapped their fingers, the king of the giants swayed, toppled. . . and died.-- o --“Empty,” yelled Velendo. He had to scream to get his voice to carry over the howling wind.  Olaf the Lame was nowhere to be found, and the metal cylinder that had held him was empty.  “He must have dispelled the dimensional anchor and teleported out somehow. The big guy wasn’t so lucky.”  Velendo hooked a thumb at the massive corpse of the dead giant. The bodies of smaller giants lay where they had fallen out of the sky.  Suddenly, another massive boulder fell from the heavens.  This one missed the temple by several hundred feet, but the impact was still enough to knock people off of their feet.Malachite wiped rain-slick hair from his eyes and looked angrily up at the thunderhead above them.  “We have unfinished business.”</blockquote>

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