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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 2532181" data-attributes="member: 143">I have plans this evening, so here's an early Wednesday update:* * * * * Chapter 446“Mole, what is it?” Cal asked, returning to the opening where his niece stood transfixed, watching the scene below.  She could only point, unable to turn away from what happened next. Vhalantru may have been reconstituted through Adimarchus’s power, but that certainly didn’t appear to have sweetened the beholder’s attitude toward the Prince.  The beholder spun and fired a series of blasts into the freed demon lord, beams that lanced into his body as he slowly pulled himself to his feet.  One cut a bright swath across his torso that hissed black vapors, but all of them had expected Adimarchus to have considerable resistance to magical assault, and Vhalantru’s initial barrage seemed to have little overall effect. The Demon Prince of Madness reached his full height and spread his arms wide, the tentacles sprouting from his back forming a wide “X” behind him.  He opened his mouth and unleashed a scream that shook the citadel of Skullrot to its foundation. “Okay, we’re in trouble,” Cal said.The beholder continued its assault, blasting the demon prince with more eye-beams, trying to find a combination that worked.  It hit him again with the disintegrate ray, and again the prince suffered another flesh wound that hissed black smoke and drained black ichor.  Adimarchus seemed to belatedly recognize the presence of the adversary trying to destroy him.  He lifted his hand, and unleashed a power upon the beholder.  The companions could see its effect even at this range, as Vhalantru’s body shook in agony, ravaged by a powerful horrid wilting. Vhalantru quickly responded by shifting its body and opening its central eye, bathing Adimarchus in antimagic.  The Prince snarled as he recognized the smoking orb, a larger cousin to his own right eye, trailing a wisp of black smoke, its radiance brightening with the demon lord’s fury. The beholder did not let up, running its disintegrate ray along the base of the railing that fronted one of the nearby galleries.  Even as the moorings holding the metal construct were sundered, it hit the barrier with its telekinesis ray, ripping the structure from its remaining supports and hurling the entire thing at Adimarchus. The demon prince made no move to dodge or avoid the huge object, merely bringing his arms up across his face.  The metal barrier struck him solidly.  The impact would have utterly crushed an ordinary man, as the banister had to weigh at least several hundred pounds.  Adimarchus was driven back. One step. The form of the Prince of Madness shifted, and he took on the other form familiar to the companions, the golden-winged angel with the clawed gauntlet.  The prince leapt into the air, his wings carrying him easily aloft, out of the radius of Vhalantru’s antimagic field.  The beholder, now drawing back, resumed the full fury of his barrage, hitting Adimarchus with another series of eye-beams.  Apparently recognizing that most of its beams with mental effects had little chance of affecting this enemy, the beholder had settled upon combination strikes with its disintegrate and finger of death rays; even when the full potency of those was resisted, they still inflicted considerable damage.  Those beams drew black lines across the perfect features of Adimarchus’s angelic form, but did little to stop the demon prince as he flew directly at the beholder.  Vhalantru blasted him with its telekinesis beam in an effort to drive the charging demon back, but to no avail.  As Adimarchus flew past the beholder his golden wings lanced out, cutting deep gashes in the giant orb of its body.  The golden claw shot out a moment later, puncturing the beholder’s body, drawing out a terrible sigh of agony as the gauntlet drew back covered with black blood and gore.  Now seriously discomfited, Vhalantru abruptly dropped twenty feet, its eyestalks twitching in unison as they all fixed onto the angelic figure directly above.  Adimarchus was swallowed up in a blaze of colored light as beams from all ten of the beholder’s eyestalks blasted into him.  Rents opened up in his violet skin, and fat droplets of golden fluid trailed from his body to drip down onto the beholder’s bloated form.  The beholder’s attacks were clearly starting to take their toll, but Adimarchus did not appear to be seriously hindered as he abruptly closed his wings around his body, and plummeted straight down.  Vhalantru tried to get out of the way, but moved too slowly as the golden gauntlet was extended, straight down, and the demon prince slammed into the beholder’s body, his weight driving that member deep into its body.  Vhalantru screamed as the prince unleashed some potent energy through the attack, an energy that drove into the core of its corrupted being.  As Adimarchus clung to it, his arm sunk into its body up to his elbow, a bright glow seemed to shimmer around the beholder.  Then, so quickly that an eyeblink might have caused one of the watchers to miss it, the orb collapsed in upon itself like an overfull waterskin rent open by a dagger.  Adimarchus withdrew his arm as the wreckage of the beholder was reduced to a mass smaller than he was, and as he spread his wings to catch the air once more what was left of Vhalantru plummeted to the ground below to land in a sad heap on top of the mangled form of one of the Dark Myrakul’s flesh golems. Up above, the companions had watched the entire exchange.  With Vhalantru’s destruction, it was as if a switch had been thrown, suddenly restoring their ability to act. “Um… we’d better get out of here, don’t you think?” Mole said. “He has been weakened,” Arun said.  “This may be our only chance to overcome him.”“Did you just see the same battle that I did?” Dana asked.  “We have to go, now!”Cal nodded.  “I agree.”  He turned to the opening that Beorna and Lok had wrought in the wall of the chamber; fully ten feet across, it revealed the blighted landscape of Carceri in all its terrible glory.  There was no wind, no indication other than the vast panorama that they were more than two hundred feet above the ground.  Mole was the last to leave the opening to the shaft.  “Here he comes!” she said to the others, who needed no further incitement to gather at the breach. Lok had taken the flying carpet out of his bag of holding, and was preparing to unroll it.  “There’s no time for that!” Cal said.  “Everyone, take hold of someone else; Dana, in the center; you’ll need your hands free.  On the three count, we leap, as one.”“You’d better know what you’re about, gnome,” Beorna said, as they took their positions.  Lacking time to repack the carpet, Lok merely slung it over one shoulder. “One, two, three!” On that last word they leapt, the warriors all but carrying the gnomes, Dana locked in the center of the ball of interlaced limbs as they plummeted down, down, down. More than one of them screamed, although Mole’s cry sounded suspiciously like a whoop of exhilaration. Cal let them fall about a hundred feet before he invoked his feather fall.  Their rate of decline abruptly eased, and they could hear Dana’s invocation to her goddess as she drew open the veil between worlds.  Even as he sensed the magic building around them, Cal chanced to glance upward, back at the spire.  He saw Adimarchus, still in his angelic form, emerge from the opening in the prison, his wings spreading as he burst out into the open air.  Cal imagined that he could feel the multiverse tremble as the demon prince hovered there, drinking in the liberty that had so long been denied. He wasn’t sure, but as the bright glow of Dana’s spell enveloped them, taking them home, he thought he heard one wondrous and terrible word echo out across Carceri. “FREEDOM!”</blockquote>

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