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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4344126" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 63FORTIFICATION"No.  It ends here.”The wind blew cold and hard, tugging on cloaks as though it were angry.  Corath Dar stood along the crest of a hill, exposed to the full fury of that breeze, but he paid it little heed as the words replayed in his mind.  There were a dozen people close enough to speak to without raising his voice, even with the wind, but standing there, his eyes scanning the surrounding countryside, he may as well have been alone. There was the entrance to Rappan Athuk, a blemish upon the landscape the drew the eye.  But Dar only glanced at that black opening, surrounded now by a lattice of wooden boards that supported a half-dozens ropes that descended into the darkness.  His attention was focused more on the adjacent hills, and the buzz of activity that echoed that going on around him.  To his left, he could see a group of men and dwarves assembling another scorpion on the next hill over.  They had discarded their cloaks, almost useless against the wind, and they worked quickly and with purpose despite the chill in the air.  Completing his circuit of the hills surrounding Rappan Athuk, Dar noted eight of the siege engines, emplaced in positions hastily excavated from good places at the summits where the scorpions could target wide swathes of the surrounding area.  There was another crew made up almost entirely of dwarves working in another spot further down, building an onager of some sort.  Despite his long martial career he’d encountered many siege engines, but he’d never seen one that looked like that, with a short, almost squat throwing arm attached to a massive axle covered over in heavy cords.  The whole sat in a frame the size of a small cottage.  Dalvev Gorr, the leader of the dwarf contingent, had not gone into detail on its workings, but if it was as effective as he’d claimed, then it would be an important part of their defense. His gaze turned to the elves, who were working on something behind a set of folding screens that somehow resisted the force of the wind.  He could just make out the outlines of a metal frame, but he couldn’t see any more details from his current vantage.The arrival of the elves had been as fortuitous as that of the dwarves, but the presence of neither was an accident.  Jaduran had not been idle since enabling the wind walking of their party to Rappan Athuk.  From what Maricela had told him, sendings had crossed the breadth of the continent in the last week, and more aid was on the way, with reinforcements trickling in every few hours by various magical means.  The elvish ambassador had appeared just that morning, teleporting in with five other elves.  He’d greeted Mehlaraine Alderis warmly enough, but there had only been time for a few minutes of idle chatter before the pressing hand of time forced them to practicalities.  He felt it pushing him, now, from the moment he work in the morning, until the last minutes late at night when exhaustion claimed him.  Three days.  Three days had passed since they’d left the Vault, and Dar knew that any minute could mark the end of the time they’d thus far been able to eke out. Selanthas, standing at the edge of the ring of screens, caught his eye and nodded.  The elf looked barely older than he’d been when they’d last met, twelve years ago.  A few subtle lines around the corners of his eyes, perhaps.  Grimacing at the protests of his back, sore from the intense labor he’d been engaged in these last days, Dar thought it was unfair.  Still, he was glad to have them, and not just for the skills of Mehlaraine and Selanthas; they’d brought an archmage with them, an elf that looked as though he might have been sixty—and thus was likely somewhere between four and five times that in years.  Sultheros had already proven his worth, using his magic to augment their preparations, and from what he’d told Dar his spellpower would be vital in the upcoming confrontation.  His apprentice, a slender woman elf named Callyse, had gone off to help Jalla Calestin, who had been helping them secure lumber from the copses several miles to the east using levitate spells in conjunction with flying magic.  It was disconcerting, watching women he could have picked up with one hand, streaking low over the hills carrying a log weighing hundreds of pounds.  But without them, there would have been no siege engines, and their fortifications would have been much more ad hoc.    “Another cohort of reinforcements will be here before noon, general,” Kiron said behind him.  With a single lingering look out over the work going on over the varied hilltops, Dar turned toward the man who had become his second-in-command. Kiron carried himself with the same easy confidence he’d possessed before, but there was something new as well, a quiet air of experience that Dar had seen before, surrounding veterans who’d survived a difficult engagement.  The knight had been almost as busy has he’d been, the last few days, working with the dwarves, humans, and elves that had struggled to prepare this place for what was coming. “See that they’re situated and given assignments,” Dar said, unnecessarily.  Kiron knew the plan almost as well as he did, perhaps better, given his training at the War College that had grown out of Talen’s school at the headquarters of the Order of the Dragon Knights.  There were holes in the plan; it was impossible that there wouldn’t be, given the haste with which they had to put it together, and the nature of the thing that they faced.  It was possible that Allera and Amurru were right, that they wouldn’t be able to stop it.  But even if they fell, they would do their best to give Jaduran and Camar time to prepare.  To prepare.  For what?  Armageddon?  Dar couldn’t fully stifle a wry laugh at the thought.  He’d refused to sacrifice himself and Allera for a chance to restore the prison that held the Ravager, but if they’d failed, the two of them were only going to be among the first that lost their lives.  It was too late to turn back now, but there was only one thing that could stop the stabbing knives of doubt that kept pushing at his gut. “Something the matter, general?” Kiron asked. Dar waved a hand.  “No, I’m fine.  Where’s Allera?”“She was talking with the prisoner, last I saw her,” the knight replied.  Dar’s expression darkened, and his hand fell to the hilt of Justice.  “Do you think he’s really as old as he claims to be?” Kiron asked. “I don’t care either way,” Dar said.  “He didn’t have anything useful to tell us about the Ravager, and that makes him just another hindrance.”  More than that, perhaps.  They’d sent their other prisoner, the enemy wizard, along with a pair of guards back to the secondary camp they’d set up about a mile back from the area, off to the northeast.  The idea for the camp had originally been a necessity, to give their teams a chance to rest and recover in a protected spot far enough away from the constant activity surrounding the entrance.  Dar had initially intended to send Aerim back with him, but the man had suddenly fallen ill almost immediately after leaving the close environs of the entrance.  The guards had been alert for a scheme, but Allera had confirmed that the man was too weak to move, and that his breathing had nearly faltered entirely.  He’d recovered when they’d brought him back, and now was kept carefully bound in the tent set up for quick workbreaks between a clump of boulders in the lee of two of the hills facing Rappan Athuk.  Of course, in the long run they were going to have a problem if they couldn’t move the self-declared “Duke” from the immediate environs, but that was an issue for after.  If there was an after.“Any word from the guardian?” Kiron asked.      “If it had contacted me, I wouldn’t have kept it a secret,” Dar snapped.  “I’m sorry.  If Allera was here, she would have put me in my place for that.”“It’s a lot of pressure,” Kiron said, and Dar realized that the young man felt it, although he seemed to be doing a better job of hiding it than he was.  Dar’s gaze dropped to the unusual weapon riding on the man’s hip.  “You figure out how to use that thing?”“Yes.  I mean, it’s strange, and the weight’s a bit off, but it’s basically just like my sword.  Almost too much like it, in fact.  And it’s strange, the way that it... changes.  And how it goes through a boulder like it’s not even there, but it sliced a chicken in half like the world’s sharpest razor, bones and all.”“The elf called it a ‘brilliant energy’ weapon.  The guardian says we’ll need it to stop the bastard.”  He didn’t add that Amurru had tried to get him to carry it.  He’d refused, and it wasn’t just the new bond he’d felt growing between himself and Justice.  The lich’s weapon had felt somehow wrong, as though it were resisting him.  The knight didn’t seem to have any problem with it, and Dar was content to leave it be. But the thought of the lich opened other doors in his memory.  Amurru had promised to notify them via a sending once the Ravager or its spawn penetrated the failing prison.  The defenses of its vault were no longer regenerating, ever since the power sources bolstering the pyramid had collapsed; the complex would not slow the spawn for long, let alone the larger creature.  The lich had briefed them on the properties of the creature, but they’d already divined most of them in their encounters with the spawn.  The thing regenerated quickly, and drew strength from the injuries it inflicted upon others.  They would have to strike fast and decisively.  It had some innate resistance to magic, but lacked the potent spell resistance of most fiends.  It was, however, utterly immune to magic that would drain it, or which could kill it outright.  Not that a death spell would have any affect upon a creature of its raw stamina, in any case.  The Ravager itself was at its simplest just a larger and stronger version of the spawn.  But for all its legendary prowess, it was mortal.  It could be killed.  But it wasn’t going to be easy.And there had been one more thing that Amurru had told them, in response to something Allera had said about diamonds and resurrection magic.  Apparently the greater beast had the ability to sunder a soul from its anchor, to devour a living creature so thoroughly that even the most powerful magic could not bring it back across the veil.  It seemed almost overkill, but it reinforced the finality of this confrontation, if they needed another reason. Dar hadn’t realized where his feet had been carrying him until he looked down into the bowl nestled between several hills, at the fluttering tarp that marked the top of the temporary camp.  The place was little more than a niche in the rocks, a sheltered place where the defenders could grab some hot tea, or maybe, if they were lucky, an hour’s nap in between shifts.  A few people were coming up out of the tent now, a man clad in the breastplate of the Watch accompanying a pair of young clerics of Soleus, one man, one woman.  They had over a hundred people here now, and more were on the way.  But Dar knew that numbers alone would not decide this fight.    “Are you going down?” Kiron asked him.  Dar almost started; he’d nearly forgotten the knight’s presence.  But of course, he hadn’t dismissed the young man, who would have stayed there until the end of time, maybe.  No, that wasn’t quite fair; the knight was not an automaton, and he’d demonstrated tactical initiative on several occasions just in the limited time they’d been together.  But he had a strong sense of duty that Dar couldn’t quite identify with.  His fist tightened around the hilt of his sword.  Or maybe he could.He turned away from the narrow, steep track that led down to the tent.  “No,” he said.  “I—”But he abruptly trailed off, his eyes growing unfocused as he stared at nothing.  Kiron saw it, and tensed.  “Is it—”But Dar’s response was already coming.  “INCOMING!” he yelled, loud enough so that his voice sounded over the wind, filling the valley between the hills, rebounding from the jagged ridges on the far side.</blockquote>

Verification