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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4407429" data-attributes="member: 143">Well, the story is finished. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Going to double-post tomorrow, because I have a nice cliffhanger to toss out for Friday. The big finale with the Ravager will play out over the next week and a half, when I hope to wrap everything up. * * * * * Chapter 83THE BRAWLERFlames erupted around the head of the Ravager.  The half-dragon outsiders flashed by, keeping a good distance, throwing fireballs.  The one that had been nearly killed by the Ravager’s bite trailed behind, not fully recovered from its ordeal, but that did not stop it from flinging magic.  The Ravager ignored both of them.  It could not treat Corath Dar with such cavalier disregard, however.  The warrior made his presence known with a diving attack that came at the Ravager from behind.  Justice flashed in his hand as he slashed at the creature’s skull, but at the last instant it shifted slightly, and instead of carving its left eye as he’d intended, he merely drew a shallow gash in the bony ridge under the socket.  The Ravager snapped at him, but while it failed to catch him with its viciously sharp teeth, one jutting side of its jaw clipped him hard in the side.  Flung upward off his trajectory, the fighter hovered in the air, just a moment too long.  Even as he started to recover, angling down and away, the Ravager slammed a fist into him with the force of a ram.  Dar was knocked flying so hard that when he hit the side of the gatehouse tower, still clinging precariously to the remnant of the castle wall, he went through it, an armored projectile that vanished from view in a tiny plume of pulverized stone. Lyllalya drifted down on spread rainbow wings, white flashes erupting from her bow as she dropped a steady barrage onto the Ravager.  It ignored the attacks much as it had the ineffective fireballs from the draconic war mages, but as it turned back from its devastating punch against Dar, one missile caught it on the edge of one armored nostril, driving a stab of pain into the dim mind of the creature.   Reaching down, the Ravager tore into the remnant of the wall with its huge claws.  Its brawler form was less conducive to excavation than its crawler incarnation, but that had not stopped it from burrowing out of the rubble of the keep, nor of demolishing the gatehouse.  Its strength proved quite adequate to tearing free a hunk of stone the size of a draft horse, which it hurled at Lyllalya with a massive snap of its muscled arms.  The lillend was fast and agile, but the stone came at her almost as fast as a bolt fired from an arbalest.  Lyllalya dove out of its path, but was clipped hard on one wing.  She screamed as the missile broke the wing, and was barely able to control the path of her descent as she fluttered down behind the bluff, toward the sluggish-moving river below.  A bright blaze of blue energy stabbed through the pre-dawn gloom, knifing into the Ravager’s chest like a dagger.  That got the creature’s attention, and it focused its baleful stare upon the square at the edge of the town below, at the elven mage who stood supported by a black staff that radiated power.  Sultheros’s chain lightning had hurt it, but its body was already beginning to repair the damage that the spell had wrought.  Sinking into a half-crouch, the Ravager sprung into the air.  The arc of its leap was impossibly high for a creature of its sheer size, but again its sheer strength made such mundane considerations meaningless.  For a moment it was just a dark shadow in the air, and then it landed, smashing down through a chandler’s shop with enough force to shatter the sturdy structure of wood and stone into splinters and rubble.  Several other buildings nearby collapsed from the concussive impact of its landing, and windows shattered all around the square.  A crack appeared in the ground, running out into the square for twenty paces, and flagstones an arm’s span across toppled into it.  Those few defenders left on the far side of the square were thrown roughly to the ground. The Ravager tore through the remains of the chandlery and stepped out into the square, doom burning in its black eyes.</blockquote>

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