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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4045652" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 355THE HANDMAIDS OF ORCUSAllera had gone after Dar, but she could not reach him through the blade barrier, and a more immediate need confronted her as Letellia staggered forward out of the wall of spinning blades.  Her stoneskin spell had protected her from being torn to pieces, but blood seeped from numerous rents in her arms, legs, and face, staining her clothes with bright spots of red.  The sorceress, half-dazed, turned away from Allera.  “Alderis... he’s still in there!” Allera could see the elf’s lean form, half-obscured by the blades.  He was upright, but appeared stunned or confused, and he didn’t respond to their calls to escape the stationary barrier.  Allera realized that he would be shredded in seconds, and she had two choices: try to heal him faster than the blades killed him, or go in and drag him free herself.  The latter option, of course, would expose her to the devastating effects of the spell.  She did not hesitate, and rushed forward.  But before she could reach Alderis, something happened. Within the storm of blades, Alderis stood shock-still.  He could no longer distinguish the pulsing in his chest from the beating of his own heart.  Razor-sharp lines of force blurred all around him.  He could feel them slicing into his robe, but he felt only an odd tingling as they touched his flesh.  Is this what dying feels like? he thought. He heard someone yell his name, and he looked up.  Allera was there, clearly coming toward him, but before he could yell for her to stay back, something happened.Varo hit the mariliths again.  His summoning spells were of no use here, so he channeled the power of one into a mass inflict serious wounds spell.  His potent magic pierced their unholy auras like a hot knife through butter, but he cursed silently as the negative energy of the spell faltered against the innate resistance of one of them.  The other one shrieked as the spell’s power ripped into her, but even a hundred feet away Varo could tell that the creature was far from crippled.  One of them tried to hit him with a spell, but his will was an armor that protected him far more securely than any suit of steel plate.  The other demon, the one that he had hurt, lifted its swords and started forward.  Varo glanced back but saw that his companions were in no position to help.  He started to turn back to face the oncoming demon, but then something happened, and he stood there, surprised. Allera and Letellia staggered back as the pitch and speed of the blade barrier suddenly changed.  The wall of deadly knives started to collapse upon Alderis, the magical blades mere blurs as they sliced in a violent, collapsing orbit around the elf.  Alderis stood there, his face frozen into a scream, his arms stretched out and behind him, as thousands of tiny swords of arcane force tore into him.  The blades cut his robe as they converged upon his chest, but there was no blood, nothing at all as they vanished into him.  It took a fraction of a second, and then it was done; the barrier was gone, and the elf sagged, dropping his arms to his side.  As the blade barrier collapsed, Dar pulled himself to his feet, leaving splatters of blood splayed upon the cold floor from the dozens of gashes that the magical blades had torn in his body in his hasty passage through it.  A low growl built within him as he strode forward, picking up speed as he approached the oncoming marilith.  The demon turned from Varo and shifted to face him, dragging several of her swords along the floor, scraping up rows of sparks and filling the room with a din like the scream of a doomed soul.  The second demon was approaching behind it, a grim echo to the first, overkill in the face of their sheer power and deadliness. Allera and Letellia cast spells, imbuing themselves and their companions with power.  Allera’s mass cure closed the wounds that Dar and Letellia had suffered from the blade barrier, while the sorceress’s haste spell infused them all with supernatural speed. Dar put that added boost to good use.  As he approached the first demon, it gathered its long body underneath it, rising up to its full height.  One of the black swords lashed out, and Dar caught it on Beatus Incendia, deflecting it to the side, the edge glancing off the side of his helm as it passed above him.  The blow failed to penetrate the hard steel of his helm, but his head felt at though it had been struck by a ram; the creature was phenomenally strong.The marilith’s other arms converged upon him, but Dar was already surging forward, the holy sword blazing a trail through the air.  He slammed it into the marilith’s torso, the blessed steel biting deep into the leathery substance of its body.  Black blood sprayed across his body, his clothes hissing as the caustic substance burned the fabric.  The blow was telling, but he paid for it. The last time he’d faced a marilith’s full attack, he’d been left bleeding out his lifeblood upon another cold floor, looking at the severed wreckage of one of his arms lying a few feet away.  Since then he had fought and learned, but even the skill of one of the foremost masters of arms ever to have lived in Camar could not withstand the fury of the demon’s assault. Steel whistled through the air as the demon carved him with its blades.  The weapons, forged with dark power and infused with the potency of demon magic, found every gap in his armor, and only his desperate evasions kept serious wounds from becoming mortal.  The demon was putting a considerable part of its strength behind each attack, eschewing defense to hit harder, to make certain that this foe would go down.  And yet, somehow, Dar did not go down.  Blood poured down his arms and legs, and pulsed out from under his breastplate where a steel edge had pierced through and opened a deep gash between two ribs.  The marilith’s hissing filled his helmet, and swords seemed to fill the air around him.  He almost didn’t see the demon’s long tail coming around as it twisted its body, coiling around him to come at him from behind, snapping down like a thick whip to trap him.  But some sixth sense, some instinct, warned him at the last instant, and he spun and brought Beatus Incendia around in a blur.  Once again holy steel carved demon flesh, and the marilith screamed again as the last four feet of its tail went flying across the chamber, leaving a bloody trail as it bounced across the ground to a stop.  Driven to a mad fury by this human that had stung it so, the demon surged forward to finish him with another devastating full attack.  But Dar met it with a fury of his own.  Its first stroke went wild astray, its sword falling to the ground, its severed fist still clenched around the hilt.  He brought the sword up to block another pair of strokes, then down into another, caroming off the clash of steel on steel to drag his sword once more across the mottled scales of its body.  This wound was not as serious as the first, but Beatus Incendia flared with holy power, and the marilith felt that energy pierce into the core of its being.  Now it was the demon that gave ground, as it tried to fall back before the fury of this madman’s assault.  But it was too late; Dar followed it back, and before it could summon its magic for either flight or defense, Dar smashed through its guard, and slammed Beatus Incendia down through its body, cutting from left to right, severing it from just above its left shoulder down under the pit of its lowest arm on the right.  The demon deflated like a wineskin hit by an arrow, the two halves of its body shearing away in a vile, bloody mess.  Dar staggered back from it, splashing in the blood that poured from the marilith’s remains.  He was already looking for the second one, but his companions had rallied, and as he watched, the demon, standing near Varo about ten paces distant, teleported away.  Allera was at his side a moment later, touching him with a healing spell at the ready to seal the bloody wounds that covered his body.  “Are you all right?”Dar sighed and stretched his arms as the potent heal spell completed its work.  “I am now, angel.  Thanks.”Varo glanced down at the dead marilith.  “You fared better against this one than the last such creature we faced,” he said. “What happened with the other one?”“It attempted another spell without effect, and then closed to join the other in melee.  I was able to delay it with the threat of a harm spell; I had already penetrated its spell resistance once, so it could not dismiss me as a threat.  It was quick to withdraw; I suppose that it had been placed here as another factor to wear down our strength, and to get us to deplete our resources.”“You’re hurt.” Varo glanced down at a fresh trail of blood that seeped from the gaps in the armor at his left hip.  “It is not serious.  I elected not to get close enough to open myself to a full attack.”  Allera started toward him, but he shook his head, drawing out a slender wand from a pocket in his cloak.  “Yeah, well, sometimes there’s no substitute for an old fashioned brawl.”  Alderis and Letellia came forward, the elf leaning heavily upon the slender sorceress.  “What in the hells is wrong with him?” Dar asked.  Alderis lifted his head, that small gesture alone seeming to drain a huge amount of energy from his reserves.  His face looked shrunken, deep hollows in his cheeks and under his eyes, and for a moment even Dar was taken aback.  Then their eyes were drawn down to his chest.  His robe of the archmagi had been all but shredded across his breast, and hung from his body in tatters.  They could all see the angular shape protruding from his body, bulging out from his skin like a crude breastplate. Allera came to his aid at once, but once again her healing magic gave no succor to the elf, who hung between the two women like an old coat on a rack.  “What is happening to him?” Dar said to Varo. “The thing that is buried in his body is reacting in some way to the demon magic, to this place.  It is growing.  I suspect that it disrupted or absorbed that marilith’s magic, earlier.”“Yeah, well, it didn’t feel all that disrupted when that bitch tossed me through those razors.”  Dar walked forward to join the others.  “Is he all right?”Allera’s look told him all he needed to know.  “Nothing I do seems to help him.  He needs to rest.”“We cannot stop here,” Varo said.  The cleric walked out to the center of the room, and recovered his everburning torch from where it lay sputtering upon the floor.  They watched him as he returned, the glow forming a bright halo around him in the near-darkness.  “We are close, very close.  He knows we are here.”“Why aren’t we being swarmed by demons, then?” Dar asked. Varo’s eyes, deep within the recesses of his helmet, blazed with an inner fire.  “We are through with the preliminaries.”  He shifted his stare to each of them in turn, ending with Alderis, who was shaking like a tree in a storm.  “Now it is time for each of us to confront our destiny.”The cleric’s companions shared a long look.  Varo did not wait for comment, but headed toward a dark alcove in the corner under the ledge above.  As he walked in that direction, his torch drove back the shadows, ultimately revealing a broad tunnel that descended into utter darkness.  Each of them, staring at that opening, felt a cold, terrible feeling stir in the depths of their souls.  Varo stopped a short distance from the tunnel mouth, and waited for them.  “I cannot believe we are doing this,” Allera breathed.  She leaned into Dar, who looked at the tunnel with a dark look on his face.  Beatus Incendia flared brightly in his hand, as if the sword were eager to proceed.It was a sentiment echoed by none of those present. Letellia touched a hand to a small amulet at her throat, and whispered soft words that none of them could distinguish. Alderis just stood there, staring.  An incoherent noise bubbled in the back of his throat, and he kept rubbing his chest, his nails scratching on the hard crystal. Finally, one by one, they moved to join the priest.  They stared into the darkness together for a long moment, and then Dar led them forward, until the tunnel swallowed them up within its depths.</blockquote>

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