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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 2061699" data-attributes="member: 143">Look at it this way... if this was Sepulchrave's story, you'd have to wait six months to find out what happens!Also: have you read Travels through the Wild West?  That story hour is complete (8 books long, and with 460,000 words of text, it would keep you busy for a while!). LB* * * * * Chapter 335There was no time for thought, only for instinct.  Dannel raised his right hand, the one bearing the magical ring he’d recently acquired, and with a thought called upon its power.  The ring, its bronze face shaped into the head of a ram, hummed as a plane of translucent force formed around the elf’s fist, then blasted into the descending form of the morkoth. The creature was caught off-guard, and any mundane foe would have been diverted by the potency of the ring’s attack.  But Dannel, reacting out of a self-preserving reflex, had not factored in the half-fiend’s considerable spell resistance.  The force-blast dissipated as it struck the morkoth, which snapped its head forward as it landed, opening its huge jaws to seize the unfortunate elf.  Dannel didn’t even have time to cry out as the creature smote him, and he was unconscious even before it sent him hurtling back behind the wagon to fall in a gangly heap in the muddy ditch behind it. The morkoth lifted its head and bellowed in triumph, a hollow, gasping sound made more terrible by the red smears of Dannel’s blood that surrounded its gaping mouth.  But despite its success thus far, the creature was clearly in some discomfort.  Its body had been designed for dwelling under the water, not for breathing the air above, and blood continued to seep from the various puncture wounds Dannel had inflicted upon it already with his arrows.  Turning to see its summoned vrocks doing poorly against the dwarves, it started beating its wings to lift it once more into the air. But before it could alight, something struck it across the back with a sucking plop.  There was no pain, but within a few seconds it became harder for the morkoth to flap its wings.  It could not see, of course, the sticky strands of alchemical goop that spread out from the tanglefoot bag that had just hit it between the shoulder blades, fouling its wings more with each beat.  Nor did it see the rope that had been wrapped around the bag, and which now was tangled in the mixture, trailing out behind it to a terminus that Mole was quickly wrapping around one of the axles of the ruined wagon nearby. The morkoth, its wings pounding furiously, leapt into the air, and was finally able to start gaining altitude despite the hindrance caused by the adhesive strands cluttering its back.  But it quickly reached the limit of the rope, which jerked it roughly back down.  Hissing in fury as it landed, it turned and grabbed hold of the rope.  Looking back, it spotted Mole, who darted behind the wagon as the morkoth lifted its wand and fired a lightning bolt that slammed into the damaged conveyance, sending wood splinters flying.  And more importantly, from its perspective, severing the rope that bound it to the ground. In the meantime, as the morkoth struggled with Mole’s entangling line, Arun and Hodge had finally whittled away the last of the shifting images protecting the critically injured vrock.  The hapless demon, compelled by the summoning that had drawn it here, could not retreat, and so it perished in a bloody mess, dissolving into noxious black smoke as the bond holding it on the Prime Material Plane ebbed with the ending of its life.  The two dwarves turned to aid Beorna.  The templar’s foe had tried everything it could in an effort to stop her; telekinesis had failed against her indomitable resistances, and even blasting her with a cloud of invasive spores had done little to ease the ferocity of her attack, although the burrowing growths fostered by the spores had to be causing her intense pain.  Only its mirror images was keeping it in the fray at all, and as Beorna drove it back, the demon flapping its wings madly as it hovered a few paces above the ground, it paused to refresh the blurring shroud of images surrounding it.  Like its kin, however, the demon did not, could not, withdraw, and with a shriek it met the templar’s charge, slashing at her body with all four of its taloned limbs. “Damn it, slay the master fiend!” Beorna shouted at the other two dwarves.  When Arun hesitated, only for an instant, she added, “I can handle this one!  MOVE!”  The two men complied, charging toward the morkoth, some fifty paces distant, even as it blasted the wagon with its lightning bolt, freeing itself.  Beorna, fighting through the pain of the spores burrowing into her flesh, cursed as her sword again passed through empty air, popping another image, suffering in turn a painful impact as a talon bruised her shoulder.  She wasn’t badly hurt, not yet, but each small wound inflicted by the demon was adding to her tally of injuries.  And the others had been hurt, hurt bad by the horrid wilting, and she knew that they would need her help against the powerful fiend that had unleashed such destructive magical powers. To the hells with it, she thought, and she lowered her head, closing her eyes as she listened for the flapping of wings that announced another sweeping assault from the demon.  When the sound filled the interior of her helmet, and its shriek echoed within that adamantine cavern, she thrust her blade forward with all her might. The morkoth lifted once again into the air, laboring against the clinging strands of tanglefoot mixture splayed across its back.  The fragment of rope, still anchored solidly to that adhesive, trailed behind it.  The remnants of the rope formed a twenty foot tail behind the ascending creature, and as its end lifted up off the ground Arun, charging hard, lunged forward and seized it in a mailed fist.  For a moment the dwarf was jerked roughly into the air, dangling several feet above the ground before his weight dragged him—and the morkoth—back with him.  The fiend let out a fierce roar of protest as the paladin tossed his shield aside, taking ahold of the rope in both hands, yanking the morkoth down while Hodge lifted his burning axe, ready to deliver a telling blow. But before he could strike, the morkoth opened its jaws wide, and spoke a single word.  A word of utter anathema that shook the reality of the world in a forty-foot radius around it.  Hodge clutched his head and crumpled.  Likewise, Arun fell, paralyzed by the fell power of the blasphemy.  Behind the blasted wagon, Dannel, brought to the brink of consciousness by a healing potion from Mole, slumped back into the muck of the ditch, while Mole, her body quivering, fell across his ravaged frame.  With a single stroke, the fiendish monstrosity had incapacitated almost all of its foes. The morkoth, exulting in its evil power, landed and stood over the helpless form of the paladin, ready to deliver a final, killing blow.</blockquote>

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