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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 1801284" data-attributes="member: 143">Thanks!* * * * * Chapter 239Zenna loaded her last crossbow bolt and fired at the onrushing horde.  She scored a hit, the orc falling back to vanish into the ranks around it, but then there was no time to think, only to fight against the surging tide. They’d taken up positions so that Zenna was on the side of the tor that was nearly vertical, an almost sheer thirty-foot wall.  That cliff channeled the assault toward the opposite side of the bluff, but there were numerous workable assents, including a comparatively gentle slope up the front that was wide enough for twenty orcs to come up it at once.  It became more narrow at the top, where the ring of boulders formed a defensive wall around the summit.  It was there that Arun and Hodge stood waiting.  Missiles glanced off of their armor, but thus far neither dwarf had taken a serious injury from the attacks from below.  Both knew that this would change, once their foes closed to melee range. Arun brained one orc with one of his light hammers, knocking the warrior into several of its peers struggling up the slope behind it.  The positioning of the outcropping was such that the orcs were charging into the setting sun, nearly blinding them, but that barely seemed to faze them.  They knew that enemies were at the top of the hill, waiting, and they would find them by touch and smell, if their eyes failed them. Dannel, on the other hand, had a clear shot down the hill.  Every arrow he fired seemed to find an orc chest, or throat, or face.  He’d already discarded his first quiver, and was well into the inventory of missiles in the second.  At close range now he was truly devastating, and for a moment the orc rush faltered in the face of those shafts of death.  But he was only one elf, and they were many orcs. “Here come the ogres!” Arun warned, even as he dodged an orc spear and drove his holy sword into its chest.  The orc wailed and fell back, even as Arun turned and impaled another that had managed to slip up the flank of the hill, trying to get behind the dwarven defenders. Then the crashing wave struck, and both dwarves were surrounded by a storm of blades, the boulders at their backs the only thing keeping them aloft against the raging tide. Zenna stood from her position of shelter and moved to the far side of the hill.  A dozen orcs were visible, climbing the steep slope.  One spotted her and let out a cry, and the others soon echoed it, eagerly rushing forward to claim apparently easy prey. She disabused them of the notion with a color spray that blasted into them.  Several orcs were knocked unconscious, and tumbled down the hill, their bodies crashing into the rocks until they came to a stop near its base. But the others came on.  One reached the summit and rushed at her, confused by the shifting mirror images that surrounded her.  Finally it cut at one, but its choice was unlucky and an empty image vanished at its stroke.  Three others clambered up behind it, eager to overwhelm her by sheer numbers, but before they could strike she unleashed a spray of burning hands from her wand that engulfed all four.  Two staggered back, their flesh crisp and smoldering, but the other two pressed their assault, driving her back.  Behind them, other orcs continued their ascent. On the other flank, the slope was equally tricky, but another dozen and more orcs were pressing from that direction.  One cried out an alarm as a lithe form appeared atop the boulders, looking down at them.  Dannel’s bow sang, and orcs fell, clutching at the arrows jutting from their bodies as they slid down the hill.  Several archers at the base of the hill took shots at the elf, but just as quickly as he appeared he’d vanished again, dropping back behind the boulders.  Meanwhile, the wave of orcs rebounded from an implacable force; the two dwarves.  They were outnumbered twenty, thirty, forty to one; there was no way they could have stood before the onrushing tide, but somehow they did.  Hodge stabbed an orc through the chest with his spear, and drew it out to catch a second in the gut.  The spear was wrenched from his hand as the orc fell, but then five more had closed to strike, assaulting him from all sides with greataxes and equally huge blades.  He brought his shield up, and took the hits.  On his other side orcish blades clanged against his magical armor, driving him back against the stone.  Arun had laid a ward of protection upon his friend, against the evil that filled these creatures like a cancer, and that protected him, and none of the initial attacks penetrated his defenses.  But even so, for a moment it looked as though he would go down from the sheer weight of the charge. Then his fist closed around the hilt of his axe, and the weapon swept out in a broad arc.  Two orcs fell, the first with its face laid open to the skull, the second clutching at the bloody stump where its arm had been. Seven feet away, Arun stood his ground.  He’d infused himself with the power of Moradin, and against his strength, the orcs found themselves unable to stand.  His sword pained their eyes even more than the sun, and every time it cut, they bled.  Two burly orcs leapt at him, hoping to grapple him and drag him down, but he tore himself free easily, driving his shield into the face of one orc with enough force to shatter bone, and crushing the other’s skull with the hilt of his sword.  But even as he repelled the grapple, another pair of orcs that had managed the flank clambered up atop the boulder at his back.  One raised its maul to strike the still-unaware dwarf in the back of his skull, but before it could deliver the punishing blow a shadow shifted within the ring of stones.  The orc’s companion shouted a warning, but it was too late as a large form exploded upward from a shadowy crevice between two boulders that seemed barely large enough to contain its bulk.  The orc tried to shift its attack to strike down this new adversary, but Clinger was too fast, seizing the orc in his powerful jaws, crushing its body.  The second orc stumbled backward and tried to get away, but the celestial lizard dropped his first victim and sprang after it, taking it down before it got ten steps distant. A wall of bodies had risen around the two dwarves, and for a heartbeat the assault faltered, the orcs stunned even in their fury at the ferocity of the defense.  But then, behind them, came a reassuring cadence, a thump of heavy bootprints against the stone.  The ogres had arrived.</blockquote>

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