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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 3722725" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 238THE WIGHT ANSWERThe wights surged through the opening as the heavy door was flung wide open.  The object they had used to batter down the door—a stone tomb-lid, by the look of it—fell to the ground, the undead creatures leaping over the now-unnecessary tool.  An iron spike, knocked free from the door as it was battered open, skittered past Dar’s foot.  The fighter held his ground, fifteen paces in front of the door, silhouetted against the glow of the lava pit at his back.  A streak of light flashed past the fighter.  The small orb shot over the heads of the first few ranks of surging undead, vanishing into the dark opening of the staircase beyond the gaping doorway.  The result was immediate; the brilliant blossoming of a fireball exploded out of the opening, the flames savaging the wights.  But it was not enough to stop the rush.  More of them, their flesh blackened with char, continued to essay from the dark tunnel.  There were already over a dozen in the room. The leading edge of the wight rush focused on Dar, as the sole obvious threat.  The first died messily, cut down by a single powerful two-handed stroke from Valor.  The undead flopped to the ground, its chest cavity ripped wide open by the powerful blow.  Another four leapt over the carcass, assailing the fighter with slams of their filthy fists.  Against the fighter’s magical armor, they may as well have been hammering against a fortress’s shield wall.  As the wights swarmed around him Dar went to work with his blade, tearing limbs from undead bodies, cleaving open torsos, in one case even taking a wight’s head from its shoulders, sending the decapitated knob bouncing across the room.  The wight’s body was slow to realize the fact of its demise, its claw still scratching against Dar’s armor as it slumped slowly to the ground.  Dar had withstood the first rush, but more wights were still coming, and the charge split around him, forming two prongs that swept forward into the chamber.  For a moment, Dar was swallowed up in that onrushing surge.  But then his allies came to his aid.  Mehlaraine and Shay met the two wings of the wight rush, both women charging with blinding speed back into the fray.  Ten paces from the leading wight on the left, the elven woman sprang into the air and came down in the midst of a small knot of undead.  Her slender sword, Avelis, flashed in her hand, biting deep into the body of one of the wights.  For a moment, the creatures were caught off guard by the audacity of her attack, but then they were attacking her from every direction, pounding at her with their claws.  Mehlaraine was fast, and avoided most of the strikes, but even she could not escape the attacks unleashed upon her from all sides.  For a moment, she was obscured within a snarling, furious ring of undeath, and her leaping attack looked like suicide. But then the wights fell back, caught up in a blur of motion.  Mehlaraine spun in a nimble dance that somehow filled the constrained space in the midst of the wights.  Avelis flashed out as she turned, and every wight within her reach felt the bite of that blade.  The wights, most of them already seriously injured by Alderis’s fireball, could not withstand that assault, and when Mehlaraine finished her spin, five of them collapsed to the ground, gashed and ruined.  The duelist stepped out of the circle, back toward the lava pit, and saluted with her sword as she fell into a ready position.  The next rank of wights surged forward to meet her.On the opposite flank, Shay had joined battle with equal speed and grace.  She lined up her charge with precision, driving her new longspear right through the body of the first wight, its head catching the shoulder of a second behind it.  Both wights fell in a thrashing heap as she dropped the spear and whipped out her sword.  More wights were on her in a flash, but Shay was almost as fast as Mehlaraine, and none of the first cluster to reach her laid a hand on her.  She gave ground to avoid being surrounded, drawing them after her, taking one down with a feint that turned into a low cut that took the wight’s left leg off at the knee.  The two women held the line, with Dar anchoring its center between them.  But there was a fresh surge of wights already coming forward to replace the fallen, and it was clear that even a trio such as they could not hold them off for long.  But their companions were already moving to help them.  Talen had sprung up at Mehlaraine’s first warning, Beatus Incendia bare in his hand, ready to fight.  But when he saw no foe immediately at hand he had started to put on his armor, assisted by Allera.  That cost him a few seconds when the wights busted down the door; he cursed as he hastily tossed his greaves back down to the floor, and hastily fumbled with the last fastener on his breastplate.  Some armor was better than none at all, but a breastplate hanging loosely off his body would be worse than nothing in the chaos of a violent melee. Like Talen, Alderis had risen with a weapon at hand, and it had been his fireball that had weakened the first charge of wights.  Letellia, less accustomed to the rigors of taking sleep in a hostile environment, was a bit more sluggish, pulling her cloak around her as she looked around wide-eyed for the danger.  She did not associate the pounding noise with the south door until it was already open, and wights were surging out toward Dar.  She drew out a wand of her own as she started across the room toward the battle.  Selanthas, having strung his bow, started after her, but Talen forestalled him.  “Watch out for an ambush!” the knight warned.  “This may be only part of the attack!” The elf nodded, and even as he drew his first arrow, he scanned the perimeter of the room.  He almost missed the dark figures that had emerged from the far wall of the cavern to the east, beyond the huge stone statue of Orcus, but the hint of movement draw his eye back, and as they entered the radius of the glow from the lava pit, he could clearly identify them.Spectres, four of them, the last surrounded by both a protective shield and a bevy of shifting mirror images.  They were heading straight for Nelan; the cleric, still focused on his ritual, seemed oblvious to their presence. “Incorporeal undead!” he yelled in warning, lifting his bow, letting its familiar magic empower his arrow with electrical energy as he aimed and let fly.</blockquote>

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