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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 2581189" data-attributes="member: 143">Commentary after the post...* * * * * Chapter 454It should have ended right there. The word was pure power, and spoken by one of the demon lord’s might, it would have resulted in confusion or death for all who heard it.  Dannel, Mole, and Dana would have avoided its potency, their own philosophies of life resonating with the echoes in that rending utterance.  But Arun, Beorna, Morgan, Lok, Cal… and the inevitables, too… they would have been fully affected, either struck down or their minds clouded with madness.   Divided, weakened, turned against each other, the advantage would have surely swayed decisively to the side of the Prince. Several of them had various forms of spell resistance, granted by spell or item, but it would not have mattered against Adimarchus’s power. Cal saw all of that in a single instant, the moment Adimarchus opened his mouth to utter the word.  He also knew that his own intervention had almost no chance of stopping that outcome; he’d seen the demon lord’s power firsthand, and despite his own brilliance, or perhaps because of it, he knew what he faced.  But their plan had placed the ultimate hope in his hands, and he did what he’d been ready to do, since the confrontation had begun.  He had held back his actions thus far, ready to intervene should the Prince call upon his dread power.Even as he spoke his own word, triggering the final release of the greater dispel on the scroll he carried, he knew he would not succeed.  It wasn’t a question of confidence; he could feel the power of Adimarchus’s magic building, how own spell a dagger thrust against a stone wall.  How could there be any other outcome?But there was one factor that the gnome did not include in that instant’s calculation.  The scroll that he used was not his own; he had not had time to transfer the spell into his own books, to make it his.  Thus the spell was one borrowed, found upon the scroll taken from one of the Cagewright strongholds; he’d even forgotten which one.   What he did not know, was that the scroll had been originally scribed by Thifirane Rhiavati. Thifirane Rhiavati, the mad transmuter with dreams of power and glory, pawn of Adimarchus.  Though the spell was arcane, not divine, so much of what she had become, at the end, was tainted by the madness of Adimarchus that the words scribed upon the scroll were as much his words as hers.The power of the greater dispel struck the energies of the word of chaos, impacting with a perfect harmony, for they ultimately had come from the same source.  The deadly sound quivered in the air, once, and died. Morgan leapt into the air, pursuing his adversary, the rival to Occipitus whose madness now bound the two of them together through the very essence of the plane.  His sword clove into Adimarchus once from below, this time knocking the Prince noticeably aside, opening a shallow gash in one violent leg, the golden runes inscribed into the flesh glowing around the injured member.  They could see, now, that the angel-form of the demon prince retained the wounds of the earlier battle they’d witnessed on Skullrot.  True to Morgan’s earlier words, they could see the scars wrought by the black powers of Vhalantru’s eye-beams, and the ugly tear where Morgan had smote it earlier with Aludrial’s Shard.  Arun followed the knight, calling upon Dana’s earlier-cast fly spell to come up behind the demon lord.  But again his swing had no effect, turned by one of the razor-sharp golden wings, clanging off it as though it were a shield of layered plate steel. Another arrow knifed into the Prince from below, caroming off of one of his wings without apparent effect. Despite his injuries, both old and new, the Prince was still a powerful enemy in this form, even without the Ashen Blade and his life-draining tentacles.  Adimarchus smote Morgan across the face with his clawed gauntlet, piercing the knight’s golden helmet, opening bloody gashes across his face.  The knight screamed as golden light suffused the wounds, seeping into his body, threatening to crush him much as Vhalantru had been crushed, back in the cavernous hollow spire of Skullrot.  But Morgan resisted the implosion, and fought back with another series of attacks that for the most part failed to penetrate the demon prince’s incredible defenses.  In fact he came off the worse for the exchange, as the golden wings tore at him, opening up long gashes in his legs.  Already the warrior of Helm had bled out enough to kill three men, and kept fighting only through the earlier intervention of Dana’s magical healing. Morgan continued to take an incredible amount of abuse.  But again he was not alone, and his allies finally began to make their attacks be felt. Hovering behind the Prince, Arun kept trying to find an opening, and finally managed a swing that darted under the golden wings, tearing into the Prince’s back.  His holy sword opened a depressingly small rent that trailed brilliantly bright droplets of white liquid.  Another arrow slid into the melee, a gift from Dannel that zinged off of the metallic skullcap of the demon lord.  The elf’s cold iron missiles were spent, but he was using Benzan’s bow, and the holy arrows that he now fired could injure Adimarchus, even if the arrows themselves had little chance of penetrating his demonic—or angelic—hide. Chains lashed at the Prince as the zelekhut joined the attack, flying around the borders of the melee, careful not to interfere with Morgan or Arun.  It whipped a chain around the Prince’s arm, snaring on the deadly gauntlet, trying to grip and hold the limb.  A look of momentary annoyance crossed the demon lord’s face as he twisted his body, drawing the larger outsider in despite the frantic flapping of its wings.  The zelekhut tried to disengage, but before it could extract itself from its own grapple Adimarchus drove his gauntlet into its chest.  The golden light flared from the impact, and the creature released a tinny screech as it crumpled into an oblong shape a small fraction of its original size.  Adimarchus shook free the chain holding him and let the outsider drop, falling atop a stone statue and crumpling it in a spray of stone shards.  The exchange had only taken a few seconds, but it was enough time for the companions to continue their attacks.  Morgan managed to injure the Prince once more, cutting through the heavy gauntlet to score the flesh beneath, but Arun’s attacks were again ineffective.  Dannel’s supply of cold iron arrows had been already exhausted, but his shafts, empowered by Benzan’s evil outsider bane longbow, still possessed a potency against one such as the Prince, and one of his arrows managed to lodge in his thigh, digging a scant few inches into the muscle there. A number of flickering lights appeared around the melee, slightly hazy, as if viewed through a pall of thin smoke.  Cal’s shadow conjured archons immediately did what they had been called to do, blasting Adimarchus with rays of holy light.  They did not appear to have much effect, but the Prince responded by unleashing an unholy blight that surrounded him with a brief but deadly nimbus of evil power.  The shadow-creatures were immediately blasted out of existence, but both Morgan and Arun were able to hold their position and continue to press their attacks.  Each accomplished a minor injury upon the demon lord, and were bolstered a moment later as Dana healed their injuries with a mass cure spell. Adimarchus was starting to show the effects of his wounds now, the angelic figure’s body riven by numerous cuts and gashes.  The two holy warriors prepared for another full assault, but suddenly the Prince drew his wings close around his body, dropping out from between them to the ground below.  As he landed, he shifted form once again, returning to his demonic manifestation.  The two forms were clearly distinct identities, for the wounds the angel had suffered were gone, replaced by those hurts he had taken during his initial manifestation.  Unlike the angelic form, however, the demon identity obviously had the power of healing, his wounds from the earlier stage of the battle already beginning to fade. The Prince came immediately under attack from the rest of the companions that had remained on the ground.  Lok, armed with Viirdran Daragor’s rapier, infused with divine magic, scored his first hit of the battle, coming in under the demon lord’s guard to sink about six inches of the blade into Adimarchus’s side.  Backed by Lok’s very considerable strength, the blow had to have hurt it, but Adimarchus merely snarled at him.  Somehow the gesture made the Prince seem… smaller, more like the common foes that they’d fought and defeated before.The others joined in the attack, Beorna rushing at the demon lord’s flank, while Mole appeared out of nowhere and rushed past in a near-blur, leaping into the air, kicking off a statue, and past Adimarchus’s face in a blur, her knife cutting a tiny but obvious scratch in his forehead.  The marut came forward as well, again using its reach in an attempt to pound the demon lord’s body into ruin, again without much success. Arun and Morgan descended from above, ready to strike with their blessed blades.  Morgan misjudged slightly and his stroke was turned by one of the long tentacles; a second lashed out and seized his ankle.  The tentacle sought to sap his life energy, but Morgan was protected by a death ward, which protected him from that form of attack.  The knight’s efforts gave Arun a chance to slip in opposite Lok, bringing his sword down in another heavy slam that dug deeply into the Prince’s back between the roots of the thick tentacles.  This time his blade bit deeply, and Adimarchus turned, death in his eyes. “No!  Fight me, you bastard!” Beorna yelled, swinging her sword at the demon lord’s head.  Her sword had crushed stone walls and foul monsters of all sorts, but the blow merely rebounded off of his oblong skull, almost knocking the weapon free from her grasp. Adimarchus fixed Arun with his dark gaze.  The paladin roared and lifted his sword to strike, but the Prince merely said, “Be gone.”And Arun disappeared. * * * * * *Yeah, the blasphemy/WoC tactic is utterly deadly when cast by high-level boss baddies (e.g. see the morkoth battle back in Book VIII). And when I was planning this battle, it was before I'd found the errata that caps the spell at CL20 (considering Addy is CL30, that would have meant instant death for everyone within 40' who wasn't chaotic, no save). And SR against Adimarchus? Yeah, right. It was a stumper, but then I tried to think it through as someone who had 24 Int would, and this is what I came up with. Of course, by the rules a DC41 check would have been impossible, but hey, gotta give the good guys a chance.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Tomorrow: the epic conclusion (or another epic cliffhanger?)</blockquote>

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