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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 2813645" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 567The canyon that culminated in the white shield wall of the Bastion was crawling with demons, a dark mass that surged forward in an all-out attack upon the citadel. Arrows, hurled stones, and other missiles flew down into the massed demons, accompanied by the occasional flash of a spell.  But the defenders were few, far too few, to halt the onslaught.  Only a few dozen angels, archons, half-celestials, and inevitables held the wall, slaying demons that were instantly replaced with fresh attackers from the horde. From within the demonic host came the thrum of a trebuchet, a sinister device crafted of black metal, dragged here from some unknown source by the fiends.  The engine was far enough back to avoid counterattacks from the defenders atop the battlements, and every few minutes the evil machine leapt into action once more, hurling a boulder—or occasionally, a demon or two—at the Bastion.  The trebuchet was wildly inaccurate, and thus far had inflicted little damage, but several cracks in the shield wall suggested that time and persistence would lead to additional destruction. Small groups of chasmes made passes above the wall, casting unholy blights and other destructive magics into the ranks of the defenders.  Occasionally one would flutter to the ground, pierced by holy missiles, but for the most part the demons were content to flit quickly back out of range, recovering position for another hit-and-run attack.  Those few defenders with bows and ammunition, led by the half-celestial avariel, Abrigen and Callendes, targeted the fly-demons when they could, but at the moment other concerns pressed for their attention. At the base of the wall, a number of hulking forms heaved through the milling mob of fiends.  They were goristo demons, seven of them, dominating their smaller cousins with their sheer size and fearsome mien.  The huge bull-headed demons reached the wall and immediately started to climb, stabbing black metal hooks carried in their meaty fists into the white stone, using them to pull themselves mechanically upward.  Each goristo carried several babau as passengers, the emaciated demons clinging to the larger demons’ backs, screeching challenges at the defenders above.  A hound archon leaning out over the battlements spotted this new threat and shouted a warning to its fellows.  Soon large rocks came plummeting over the edge of the battlements, tumbling down the nearly sheer face of the wall.  One goristo took a boulder the size of a man’s torso directly to the center of its face, and it lost its grip, falling back thirty feet to smack solidly into the ground, squashing a half-dozen dretches too slow to get out of the way.  Several of the other goristos took hits but shrugged them off, continuing their slow but inexorable climb up the wall.  Explosions of dark energies erupted along the length of the battlements, unholy blights and chaos hammers summoned by a dozen hezrous near the forefront of the demonic horde, and soon the barrage of rocks ceased, as the defenders fell back slowed and sickened by the fell power unleashed by the fiends. From a dense cluster in the center of the horde rose a score of vrocks, their wings beating furiously as they each lifted a pair of small, black-skinned demons, jovocs, in their hind claws.  The vrocks rose high up into the air, a hundred feet or more above the summit of the Bastion’s shield wall, before cutting into steep dives down at the defenders atop the battlements.  They let out terrible shrieks as they encountered the edge of the antipathy field generated by the Warder, and veered off, dropping their burdens with almost casual abandon.  The hapless jovocs fell, some of them bouncing painfully off of the massive overhang that shielded the interior of the Bastion before landing hard atop the wall.  A few missed even that broad target, and plummeted all the way to the floor of the canyon, another hundred feet below.  Those that did manage to land atop the wall and survive the impact were immediately overcome by the antipathy effect, and fell back in disarray, toppling over the edge of the wall, or huddling miserably against the thick merlons of the outer battlement.  Most of them were slain at once by the defenders, led by the compact and heavily armored form of a certain genasi warrior, but the jovocs’ auras of retribution ensured that at least some of the damage wrought upon them was returned to their attackers.  Lok saw three hound archons and an aasimar fighter go down, crippled by wounds that echoed those being torn in the jovocs.  He himself altered the stroke he’d intended for another of the creatures, and instead smacked it hard with the flat of his axe, knocking it over the battlements to fall away into the vast open beyond.  He looked up to see a huge stone arcing almost directly toward him, and he hurled himself aside as the trebuchet stone struck the ground two feet from where he’d been standing, bouncing as it caromed into the cavern beyond the wall, stopping in a crash of stone shards and pulverized dust.  Another dark shape followed it, and for a moment he thought that the demons had added a second trebuchet to their arsenal.  But no, the figure resolved into the bulbous shape of a lesser demon, a filthy dretch, which flailed its thin arms and legs as it arced up over the wall, landing painfully in a heap only a few feet from him.  It was not alone; others were coming now as well, mostly dretches, with a few babaus, rutterkin, and jovocs among them. Lok could not see what was giving these demons the power of flight, but if he’d had the liberty to look down upon the demon ranks, he would have seen the glabrezu Aborathaz, summoning areas of reverse gravity into densely packed masses of lesser demons.  The glabrezu’s power was not enough to lift the demons all the way over the wall, but Aborathaz had a dozen bar-lgura accompanying it, and as their cousins reached the apex of their vertical ascent, twitching as they floated seventy feet above the ground, they gleefully used telekinesis to roughly push them the rest of the way over the obstacle.  All Lok knew was that demons were landing all around him, as he decapitated a second dretch, and then tore into a rutterkin before it could pull itself to its feet.  Again most were immediately falling back before the power of the Warder, but here and there a few managed to resist that repulsion long enough to attack, or fire off a spell-like ability against the nearest celestials.  More chaos hammers went off, giving cover to those along the edge of the wall, maybe giving them a chance to regroup.  A pair of warden archons, bright golden collars and bracers gleaming on their shaggy ursine forms, joined the genasi, tearing into a babau that was able to resist the power of the statue long enough to hold its ground for a moment, its body quivering in rage.  As if that wasn’t enough, Lok glanced up to see at least two groups of vrocks holding position outside of the radius of the antipathy effect, joined in frenetic dances of ruin.  A scream drew his attention around, as one of the warden archons, already wounded with an arrow jutting from its shoulder, staggered, clutching its legs where blood poured out from deep gashes into his thick fur.  Lok felt the same pang, a hot pain that felt like daggers being drawn across his thighs.  There were no demons within reach at the moment, but Lok saw a trio of jovocs huddled between two of the merlons at the edge of the wall.  He was surprised and dismayed to see the demons clawing at each other, opening gashes in their own legs that quickly healed, their aura of retribution inflicting the damage they suffered upon the nearby defenders.  The demons regenerated quickly, allowing them to continue inflicting wounds upon themselves, and their enemies. The genasi fighter started toward the demons, but was driven back as a pair of chaos hammers exploded right in front of him, dazzling him for a moment.  As he tried to clear his vision, he heard a familiar noise, distinct over the insane cacophony of the demon host, a roar he would not soon forget. Nax was returning to the fray. Chapter 568Demons tumbled off the battlements, falling to their deaths by the dozens, only to be replaced by others lifted by their flying kin, or hurled into the sky by the field of reverse gravity that shifted across the gathered mass.  The majority of those failed to even reach the summit of the wall, slipping out of the narrow magical field to plummet back down to a painful impact, or failing to clear the wall and slamming hard into the battlements when launched up by telekinesis.  Those that did make it over were almost always overwhelmed by the power of the Warder, or torn to pieces by those defenders of the garrison that still stood.  The celestials had lost the edge of the wall, which had been turned into a deathtrap by the ongoing barrage of unholy blights and chaos hammers, and now fell back into a half-circle centered on the softly glowing statue, taking comfort in the reassuring rays of light that emanated from it. Black arrows with pulsing red-iron heads arced over the battlements, fired from the powerful longbows of Graz’zt’s half-fiend warriors, soldiers of his elite Blood Legion. The vast majority of those shots hit stone, and as many plunged into the bodies of the demons landing atop the wall as into the defenders.  But while those that struck fiends inflicted little damage, those few that hit celestials ripped terrible wounds in the bodies of the assorted defenders.  The hard-pressed garrison was falling back, now, overcome by the sheer violence of the fiendish assault, even though the fortress itself was still secure, bolstered by the potent aura emmanting from the statue in the back of the cavern beneath the overhang.  Another boulder rose up over the wall and slammed into the cavern, hitting a lantern archon that simply evaporated from the force of the impact, and then bounced into the far wall to the left of the statue, near where a pair of massive stone doors bound in brass stood open, the entrance to the interior portion of the fortress.  Out of the press of demons rose the massive form of the half-dragon hordeling Nax, its symbiant Yavuv clinging to the bony ridge that ran down its broad back.  The hordeling had regenerated the injuries it had suffered earlier, but still bore scars that testified to the violence of its initial meeting with the companions from Faerûn.  Now it spread its broad wings and flew, driving back dretches and other smaller demons with the backblast from its flight.  As it ascended into the air, it drew up a framework of metal bars fixed into a half-moon shape, to which over a dozen lesser demons, mostly babaus, clung.  The extra weight slowed the hordeling considerably, but sheer hatred fueled it, and soon it was rising toward the battlements of the Bastion.  One babau lost its grip and fell back into the press, but it was just another casualty that was more than replaced by the ongoing rush of new demons that continued to pour into the canyon from the far end. Lok started toward the knot of jovocs again, ignoring the pain that stabbed through his body.  He was tired, but he drew upon that deep reservoir of fortitude that had stayed him through so many battles in the past.  While several of his companions had spent time with the defenders on the wall, cutting into the ranks of the demons with arrows and spells, he alone had spent the full time—six hours? Eight? Ten?—since their arrival joined with the defense.  Unlike the others, he had no spells to recover, and while Cal had urged him to take his rest while the ongoing demon assault had been more moderate in its intensity, he found that he could not simply withdraw while the celestial warriors were fighting and dying on their behalf. A trumpet archon had restored him at one point, but he’d since used up the fresh energy granted him by the spell.  He could not see the celestial among the defenders now, although he had not seen it fall.  There had been no shortage of losses on their side; he’d seen a kolyarut inevitable firing off enervation rays from the battlements get hit by six chaos hammers in quick succession, leaving only a smoking heap of gears and rubble.  The bodies of other celestials were strewn about the top of the wall.  Those were the fortunate ones; a number of the defenders had fallen from the wall, and a few of those had survived long enough to be torn to pieces by the demons pressed up against its base.  Everywhere he looked he saw death and destruction; here a zelekhut creaking mechanically on its side, half its body crushed by a glancing blow from a trebuchet stone, there a hound archon that lay where it had fallen, a violated unholy arrow jutting from its left eye socket.  They were few and getting fewer, Lok thought, ducking under the swing of a rutterkin, bringing his axe around into its back as he passed.  The demon crumpled, its spine severed, but Lok was already focused on the jovocs.  The demons shrieked as they saw him coming, but there was no place for them to run as the genasi barreled hard into them, driving them off the edge of the wall and into the open space beyond.  Lok felt a pain jab through his upper body as the reflected force of the impact rebounded on him, but it was just a minor tally against the serious wounds he already bore.  The genasi caught himself well before he would have followed the demons into that void, but was still given a panoramic view of the battlefield that made his breath catch in his throat.  Even with the losses they had taken, the canyon was crammed with demons, thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands.  To his left and right, demons continued to mount the wall, as the vrocks continued to shuttle more up to the top, and others rode up on a violent plume of reverse gravity and telekinesis.  The wall shuddered beneath him, and he stole forward enough to see the nearest of the goristo climbers just fifteen feet below him, looking up with unconcealed malice shining in its eyes.  The babaus riding upon it chortled in glee, their claws tightening in anticipation of rending his flesh.  And then he saw Nax, rising up with its burden of demonic passengers, already almost at eye-level with him, and for a split-second he was overwhelmed by the enormous intensity of it all, the chaos of a siege more dramatic than any he could have imagined upon—or under—the surface of his own world. “Um, you might wanna, y’know, get out of here,” a voice came, from directly above.  He glanced up, but saw only the merlons to either side, and the sky, empty for the moment, directly above.  Then a form shimmered, and Mole appeared for a second atop one of the merlons, winking at him before she became invisible again.  “Sheesh, you’re going to draw their fire, clumsy!” her voice came.  “Like I said, I’d back it up!” Almost as if on cue, an unholy blight exploded around him.  He fell back, picking up speed, just avoiding a second blight, and then a third, which erupted in close succession where he’d been perched.  More demons dogged his steps.  He ignored for now the bulk of them, the ones that were falling back in disarray toward the edge of the wall, overwhelmed by the antipathy effect.  A dretch bounced hard on the stone behind him and caromed off his hip, screaming in Abyssal as it tried to arrest its momentum.  A lantern archon blasted it with a pair of white beams, ending its torment.  He passed the same rutterkin he’d taken down a moment ago; the fiend was dying from his stroke, but it still tried to grab his ankle as he ran past it.  “Behind you!” He still couldn’t see Mole, but he acted reflexively, weaving to the side as a babau came flying down from the sky, claws extended toward him.  The demon landed awkwardly, the snap as its left leg broke under it clearly audible, but still it lunged at the genasi, gibbering madly as the antipathy washed over it.  Lok readied his axe, but there was no need, as an arrow buried itself to the feathers in the demon’s throat, and it collapsed in a quivering heap.“At them!” came a familiar cry, followed by a dwarvish invocation to battle. Reinforcements had arrived. Arun, Beorna, and Umbar rushed forward to bolster the line of defenders, their armor hastily strapped to their bodies, but their weapons held at the ready to unleash carnage upon the attacking demons.  Dannel fired another arrow from his fiendbane longbow, striking a vrock a moment before it was ready to drop another pair of squirming jovocs.  The impact causing it to drop one of the black demons short, to smack into the wall and tumble down to its destruction below.  It was a slaughter, with the demons slain almost as quickly as they could reach the top of the wall.  With the majority of them unable to advance against the aura projected by the Warder, the demons could not engage the defenders effectively.  However, neither could the garrison advance back to the battlements of the wall, due to the magical attacks from the demons below.  “Where is Saureya?” Cal asked a nearby archon.  The canine-headed creature shook its head, not knowing the answer, only that its hated enemies were nearby, needed to be destroyed.  With a growl, it rushed at a rutterkin that had actually managed to regain its feet, having landed off to the far left end of the wall.  A hezrou materialized upon one of the merlons atop the wall, having flown up in gaseous form.  It alone of its fellows had resisted the antipathy effect to get even this close of its own volition, and it quickly spoke a word of blasphemy.  Not all of the defenders were within range of the dread utterance, but a pair of lantern archons were vaporized, and one of the warden archons and an aasimar cleric fell to the ground, paralyzed.  The two avariels, who had retreated to the back of the cavern, almost to the feet of the statue, immediately opened fire upon the demon, but it withstood their initial barrage, letting out a triumphant croak at the damage it had wrought.  The two paralyzed celestials were dragged back by their fellows, of whom only a little over a dozen remained.  Arun rallied Umbar, Beorna, and Lok, and led a charge toward the hezrou’s perch.  Unfortunately, their rush coincided with the completion of a vrock dance of ruin high above, and a twisting storm of unholy energy slammed down into them, inflicting heavy damage.  The blast failed to extend back into the cavern, where most of the rest of the defenders were gathered, but the hound archon that had rushed the left flank had been caught in the open, and was scorched into a blackened heap. The hezrou cackled and hit the beleaguered dwarves with a chaos hammer, but all of them were able to resist the worst effects of the blast.  Its glee evaporated as Dannel shifted his aim upon it and unleashed a rapid-fire barrage of arrows that slammed hard into its body.  It took the first hit with a grunt, then the second, and a third, and finally a fourth that caused it to stagger back, slipping on the edge of the parapet.  It hung there for a moment, off-balance, before a fifth arrow punched square into its chest, and it toppled over backward off the wall. The respite was only temporary, as a meaty arm appeared over the edge of the wall to the right, followed by a trio of babaus that leapt up, hissing as they reached the edge of the antipathy effect and came to a halt.  A second goristo drew itself up to the left, but it too could not advance against the power of the Warder. The dwarves marked both foes, but before they could respond to the new threat, Beorna lifted her sword and shouted a warning.  The combined forces of the garrison saw the huge figure of the hordeling Nax rise up over the wall, its wings beating furiously as it fought for more altitude.  Another babau fell from the frame it clutched in its hind legs, but that still left nearly twelve others dangling from the crude conveyance.  A few arrows flew out at the creature, but there were mere pinpricks as it lurched forward, swinging the lower half of its body forward, launching the construct and its passengers up over the battlements.  One babau was run through by an iron rod as the contraption came apart from the impact, and the others screamed as the golden light from the Warder spread across them.  One called upon an aura of darkness that shrouded them, but that did not protect them from the potent antipathy generated by the statue. Nax, meanwhile, seemed content to hover in mid-air, perhaps kept at bay by the antipathy effect.  Dannel shot it in the meat of its left bicep with a shot that had to hurt, but the creature merely roared, fixing all of the defenders with a contemptuous stare. “What’s he doing?” Abrigen asked.  Both of the half-celestial avariel had depleted their supply of arrows, but Dannel paused to toss the nearer of the two his reserve quiver, before returning to his own barrage.  Cal, shrouded within greater invisibility just a few paces from the elves, was thinking the same thing.  A dark suspicion clouded his mind.  The power granted to him by the god Azuth came to him without conscious thought, and although none of the mortals could see it, his eyes began to glow with a soft blue radiance as his sight extended deep into the realm governed by the Weave. It did not take him long to see what he’d been looking for.  But even as he tried to shout a warning, he knew it was too late.  Within the web of glamer that hovered directly behind and slightly above the stationary hordeling, a powerful evocation was taking form.  The spell materialized as a stream of intense, concentrated sonic energy that disrupted the air around it as it streaked over Nax’s shoulder, blasted across the cavern, and impacted the solid form of the Warder. Chapter 569Sound filled Cal’s ears, the unleashed vibrations stabbing through his joints as he staggered back.  In addition to the full force of the blast, which had impacted the chest of the statue, secondary detonations were erupting throughout the cavern.  A hound archon simply exploded as the sonic pulse hit him, while Abrigen was flung backward, knocked unconscious as a blast erupted at his feet.  Cal himself was fortunate, as the nearby door to the open tunnel beside him partially shieled him from being hit by the full force of the evocation.  Even so, he felt a painful ringing in his skull, and could feel a thin trickle of blood draining down from his nostrils. Sonics, he thought, grimly.  Clever.  A regular chain lightning would have had no effect on the celestial defenders, he knew, and a skilled caster could easily direct the blast to avoid any allies in the area of effect. Of more concern was the effect upon the Warder.  Cal could see a wide crack across its chest where the sonic blast had hit it, but the golden glow emanating from it seemed to be steady, for now. Well.  No time for half measures, then. Cal immediately grabbed his rod, but almost at once reconsidered.  While a disintegrate could take out the enemy caster, his arcane sight could not pierce the spellcaster’s greater invisibility, only give him a general idea of where he was.  Given also that he was partially shielded by the huge hordeling, the chances of a successful hit were balanced slightly against him. Dannel took careful aim and fired off a seeker arrow, the empowered shaft slicing just over the hordeling’s left ear before it suddenly stopped hard in a point in space.  That shot decided him; he knew that one arrow would not do the job, and that it was likely that none of the defenders had the ability to see invisible objects, at least not with augmentative magic. His greater dispel had the desired effect, ripping away the hidden spellcaster’s magic.  Their enemy was revealed as a youthful human, perhaps in his early twenties, with fair skin and fiery red hair pulled tight around his scalp, down into a braid that drifted behind him as he flew.  He was clad in a skirt of silvery metal scales that flowed upward over his body as he became visible, reforming until it shrouded his torso and neck.  Cal’s spell had clearly not been either accurate enough or powerful enough to completely sunder the youth’s magical wards; the gnome could identify a field of death armor and a shield spell about him, in addition to whatever spell or item gave him the power of flight.  An arrow jutted from his hip, although it did not look to have penetrated far through the protective armor. The youth sneered, and fired off a second chained sonic. The spell was just as destructive this time, and Cal was expecting it this time, dodging back again behind the cover of the door a split instant before the full force of the secondary blasts hit him.  For the celestials, however, the second sequence of blasts was absolutely devastating.  Abrigen had barely gotten back up before a burst exploded just over his left eye, knocking him back to the ground with a rough finality.  Callendes fell, dead or unconscious, and Dannel avoided a similar fate only by leaping back into the relative shelter of the passageway behind him.  The other celestial defenders lacked that avenue of escape, however.  Only a handful of the original garrison were left standing; one of the warden archons stood over the blasted body of its fellow, and a chiseled hound archon bearing a flaming greatsword tried to help a crippled equinal guardinal that lay thrashing on the stone floor of the cavern, bright blood pouring  in torrents from its ears and nostrils.  The lesser archons, lanterns and hounds for the most part, were all down or obliterated, and those few aasimars, guardinals, and inevitables that had joined them had likewise fallen.  The dwarves, along with Lok, found themselves in a no-man’s-land between the deadly sonic explosions and the line of demons repulsed by the power of the Warder.  The four of them had not been caught in the eruption of secondary blasts from Malad’s spells, but they were far from intact.  In addition to the devastating blast of a vrock dance of ruin, they’d been hit with a number of chaos hammers, unholy blights, and the damage feedback from jovoc auras of retribution.  Demons continued to land around them, hurled over the battlements by spell, mechanism, or host carrier, and while few landed in any shape to offer effective challenge to the four companions, they just kept on coming.  “We have to take him out!” Arun urged, pointing up at the comparatively little figure darting around behind the hovering hordeling.  Umbar tried to follow the paladin’s command, summoning a flame strike that came cascading down to engulf both the sorcerer and the hordeling.  But while Nax’s shriek indicated that the blast had at least inflicted some damage upon it, the flames cleared to reveal both foes holding their position, relatively intact.  Malad spared a contemptuous glance for the dwarf cleric, but it was clear where his focus lay, as he lifted his gaze again at the far side of the cavern, and the statue which continued to defy him.  Nax seemd more upset, and actually started to turn toward Umbar and the others, but the sorcerer stopped him with a harsh command in Abyssal. Cal knew that another blast would be coming, and another, and again until the Warder was destroyed.  For all the power in that rough-hewn representation of a warrior, it was still just stone, and could only take so much abuse.  And it was the only thing holding back the demonic horde, at this point.  Even now, Cal could see that the power of the Warder was beginning to falter.  A goristo surged forward against the golden aura, the ground shaking beneath it as it stomped toward the battered quartet at the forefront of the rapidly collapsing defensive line.  Arun did not wait, charging forward to meet it, his blessed warhammer held high above his head.  The fiend swung a huge claw around to greet him, but Arun just raised his shield and took the strike hard, barely slowing as he came in under its reach and brought the hammer up in a powerful arc that drove solidly into the center of its pelvis.  The demon let out a colossal roar and fell upon the paladin with an incredible series of attacks, laying into him with claw and horn and bite, hitting with such intensity that a blow from its claw that glanced off his shield struck the ground hard enough to open foot-wide cracks in the solid stone.  The goristo was among the strongest among the demonkind, yet somehow Arun Goldenshield held before that onslaught, even as his plate armor buckled beneath the titanic force of those impacts.  The demon roared in anger and lifted both hands to smite the defiant knight of Good that defied it.  But Arun did not give it a chance to unleash its attack.  The paladin’s hammer swung from the left, and then back again from the right, the two blows coming so quickly that the head of the weapon was a soft golden blur.  The goristo staggered beneath the force of those hits, and as its head sagged, the hammer came up in a precise arc that culminated in the center of its skull.  A loud thunderclap momentarily silenced the gathered foes, and then the demon tottered backward, landing hard and splaying out upon the ground, stone dead. “Who’s next?” the paladin spat, flecks of blood spraying out from his broken lips.  Cal knew that another chained sonic would utterly overwhelm them.  But even though the sorcerer was now visible, he certainly didn’t have an easy shot, especially with the hordeling still providing good cover in front of him.  But they were running out of good options. Cal lifted his wand, and fired off an empowered disintegrate.  For an instant, it looked like a dead-on shot.  But then, at the last instant, the hordeling shifted slightly in its flight, as if prodded slightly by the wind, and its head slid into the path of the beam.  The green ray blasted away a swath of flesh, starting from the creature’s left ear, and then passing along its head until it met the creature’s eye.  The eye, the surrounding socket, and a part of the skull beneath simply vaporized, transforming the hordeling’s already fearsome visage into a true monstrosity.  Nax screamed, a primal sound of pure agony that was torn from its gut.  Blood seeped from severed vessels that had been whole an instant previous, and an ugly gray mass was visible through the gap, almost a foot across, in its skull. And yet somehow, the creature lived. But any commitment that the hordeling had possessed to its mission evaporated.  Its wings pulsing off-beat, the demon collapsed backward from its position above the wall, diving back into the open air of the canyon.  For a moment it looked as though its flight would end in a doomed crash into the demonic horde, but a black shape rippled up its back and covered the terrible wound, and the creature seemed to regain enough control to manage an erratic but controlled flight from this place of ruin and destruction. Malad, separated from his fiendish shield, hovered there in mid-air, and Cal knew that another evocation was coming.  But a faint hiss from the adjacent corridor announced that Dannel was not out of the fray; in fact, the elf had been waiting for this moment to resume his assault.  His arrows flew with pinpoint precision at his target, punching through the tiefling sorcerer’s shield and the sentient armor he wore, piercing deep into his torso.  He managed only two hits before the sorcerer recovered enough to slide back, with the third shot glancing off of the magical ward to fall uselessly into the canyon below.But Malad, while possessed of a certain durability hard-won in the trenches of the Blood War, was not a front-rank fighter.  The sorcerer spun and dropped, avoiding a fourth arrow that knifed narrowly over his head.  In the instant before he fell below the level of the battlements, however, he smiled maliciously, and hurled his hand forward, launching a sonically-substituted fireball directly into the core of the cavern.  The missile—a tiny flare of intensely concentrated energy—streaked inches above the heads of the dwarves, over the corpses of the dead celestials, and straight into the legs of the statue, where it exploded in a rush of pure sound. Cal was blasted back by that impact, and he felt a fresh surge of pain envelop him.  But even through that rush of power, he heard another noise that sent a true stab of dread through him. Stone, cracking, giving way to a loud clatter of falling rock.</blockquote>

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