So it is, wolff! Here you go!
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Book VI, Part 34
The defenders along the wall shouted out an alarm as a knot of heavily armed and armored attackers poured into the chamber, a mixture of men and gnomes that shouted out battle cries as they brandished their weapons and moved forward. The group, numbering over twenty, charged directly toward the fortifications. Arrows from the defenders, secure in their well-crafted embrasures along the wall’s summit, or behind narrow arrow slits further down, rained missiles upon the attackers. In most cases the shots glanced off of steel shields or armor plating, but a few dug deep, and the attackers fell, the deadly missiles jutting from their bodies.
The attackers reached the trench and leapt in without hesitation. Several were impaled on the wicked spikes that had been planted in the slanting stone incline at the base of the pit, but the rest of them forged their way upward, driving with a fanatical courage in the face of incredible odds.
There were a few anomalies, but these were hard to mark in the chaos of the battle. One of the fallen in the middle of the chamber abruptly vanished, while a few of the gnomes and humans clambering up the ramp of spikes passed through some of the steel pinions, even as others were cut by them as they climbed.
Such inconsistencies could be forgiven, perhaps, as it was overall a very complex illusion.
By the time that some of the defenders had recognized that something wasn’t right, the illusory attack had served its purpose. None of the defenders had spotted the large form moving along the ceiling, cloaked as it was by the power of Benzan’s ring of shadows. It crossed the ceiling twenty feet above the battle and descended above the arch, where one of the defenders—the drow elf—looked up and saw it, the shroud of darkness it wore cut by the light of the half-dozen torches burning brightly there.
“Behind, on the wall!” the dark elf cried, lifting his crossbow to shoot the intruder.
The shot was true, but the missile bounced off the armored carapace of the attacker.
Lok leapt down from where he’d been spider climbing down the wall toward the apex of the arch, landing on the stone floor ten feet below with an force that shook the ground around him. With a chittering growl he swept forward, knocking aside one man who tried to attack him as he made his way to the iron gate in the wall from behind. His huge claws tore into the stone moorings of the gate, and with a single powerful lurch he tore the heavy barrier free, hefting it above his head for a moment before he hurled it into the faces of a pair of onrushing attackers.
Lok, polymorphed into an umber hulk through the power of one of Alera’s scrolls, rampaged through the defenders.
Even caught off guard, the defenders rallied quickly, turning from the illusory frontal assault to direct their attacks at the true threat behind them. Thus distracted, none of them noticed as the plank bridge was lifted out over the trench to the far side, rising into the air seemingly of its own volition.
They did notice, however, as a massive lion, easily twenty feet in length, suddenly appeared on the far side of the room, taking substance as it materialized out of the surrounding darkness. The huge beast, its eyes blazing with a glorious intelligence, charged across the chamber in a blur, and with a pair of mighty jumps cleared first the trench and then the wall, landing on the far side among several surprised defenders.
Cal discarded the second scroll as the magical writing of a shades spell faded from its surface, and he hurried across the room toward the now-waiting bridge. A magical shield protected him, just in case any of the archers were still targeting attackers on this side of the wall.
He needn’t have worried—the defenders were all quite occupied at the moment.
Lok cut down a hobgoblin as it tried to run him through with a spear, his massive claws slamming with the force of a battering ram into the hapless creature’s chest. He turned as the clatter of plate armor in poor repair announced the arrival of the dwarf fighter, his waraxe already carving a path through the air toward Lok’s insectoid head. The genasi-turned-umber hulk dodged back, but could not fully avoid a powerful blow that tore through his armored skin and opened a gash in his shoulder.
On the opposite flank, the defenders attacked the dire lion that Cal had summoned. One human in a Watch uniform crumpled as a single massive paw flattened him against the hard stone floor. A second defender, a wiry kobold, thrust a shortsword into the huge creature’s leg, only to draw an immediate and deadly response as the lion snapped his huge jaws on the diminutive reptile’s head. The kobold’s body was tossed limply aside, and its head joined it a few moments later as the lion spit it out in disgust.
The drow, a short distance away, fired another poisoned bolt at the lion. The missile struck the lion in the shoulder, but the dark elf stared at the creature with narrowed eyes as another pair of humans tried to keep it at bay with their swords.
“It’s another illusion, a shadow-creature,” the drow shouted to his allies. “If you disbelieve, its blows will not be as deadly.”
Lok, meanwhile, grunted as another blow from the dwarf’s axe drove him backward into the deep alcove under the arch. Thus far his armored shell had protected him from serious damage, but the dwarf fought relentlessly, shrugging off in turn Lok’s own powerful attacks. Another pair of defenders, a hobgoblin and a dusky-skinned human armed with swords, had joined in attacking him, but their strikes were weak in contrast to the powerful blows of the dwarf.
But the dwarf staggered a moment later, even as he raised his axe for another attack on the umber hulk. Benzan appeared behind the dwarf, his borrowed sword showing red along the last foot of its length as the dwarf tore free and spun around to face this new adversary. Despite being hurt and flanked by two potent adversaries the dwarf did not hesitate, tearing into the tiefling with a series of powerful strokes of his axe. Benzan tried to spin out of the way of the sudden assault, but took a heavy blow to his torso that crunched his ribs even through the protective sheath of his mithral armor.
“Ouch! You hit hard for a little guy, but I think my friend’s got something to say to you...”
The dwarf didn’t respond to Benzan’s taunt, but he could not ignore the force of Lok’s assault upon his back. Lok drove his claws down into the dwarf’s armored shoulders, staggering him, and tore at him with his massive and powerful mandibles. Even as the sound of metal being crumpled filled the space the dwarf was attacking, slamming his axe with a half-hearted blow into the side of Lok’s head, tearing yet another shallow gash.
“Damn you, die already!” Benzan cursed, as he stabbed at the dwarf again from behind.
The drow and his two human allies had managed to hold off the dire lion, whose attacks were much less effective now that they had recognized the creature for what it was. Even so, the shadowstuff that made up its substance could still do harm, as one of the warriors found when the lion’s claws tore through his flimsy, mismatched armor and dug inch-deep gashes across his torso. He staggered backwards, managing one return thrust that tore into the lion’s shoulder before he collapsed in a bloody heap on the floor.
The drow retreated from the melee, firing one last bolt at the summoned creature as he retreated. “Hold them off!” he ordered. “I will alert the Master!”
But even as he turned to run to the heavy stone doors he was caught in thick webs that sprang up in the confined space before the portals. One of the hobgoblins attacking Lok from behind was caught as well, unable to fight free from the sticky strands.
In the narrow space where the ruined gate had stood, Cal smiled grimly to himself and drew out one of his wands.
Somehow, inexplicably, the dwarf managed to fight on, despite having suffered damage that should have slain two or three warriors. One arm hung limply at his side, broken by one of Lok’s powerful blows, but he continued to hack at the umber hulk with the axe in his other. Benzan’s sneak attacks had penetrated deep into his body through gaps in his armor, opening a pair of serious wounds from which blood flowed freely down his body. But the dwarf ignored those as well. He chopped at Lok once more, but the attack was much less powerful than those that had come before, and the gleaming axehead glanced off of his armored body.
Finally, Lok just picked the dwarf up in his massive claws, and with a single snap of his mandibles tore the fighter’s head off.
“Yeah, shrug that one off,” Benzan said to the head as it rolled to a stop nearby on the bloodstained floor.
The web blocked their retreat, but the last few defenders made no move to escape in any case, fighting to the last. With their leader slain, it didn’t take long, as the lion and the umber hulk made quick work of those few still standing, including the hobgoblin still half-trapped in the edges of Cal’s web. Even as the chaos of battle receded, Cal’s summoned shadow-lion dissolved into wisps of darkness that quickly vanished into nothingness.
In the meantime, the dark elf had pushed to within a few paces of the door, but the webs had enfolded his arms and legs, impeding his continued progress.
“Yield,” Cal said from the edge of his webs. “You are beaten.”
The dark elf made a final push toward the doors, but didn’t get very far against the clinging strands. “Never,” he said. “Though we have failed, the Master will deal with you. No doubt the noise of this battle has already reached him, and he will be prepared to deal with your incursion.”
“No doubt,” Cal said. “Benzan.”
The tiefling hefted his bow, and fired an ice arrow into the struggling drow. The dark elf didn’t cry out, or beg for mercy, but just fixed a dark gaze on them as they slew him with arrows and bolts of acid from Cal’s wand.
And then it was just them, and the doors.
“There’s still the mage, and probably a few others,” Cal reminded them, while he used his wand of healing to treat the grievous wounds that Lok had suffered in the battle. “Not to mention this ‘Master’ of which they’ve spoken...”
“And that hobgoblin who took my sword,” Benzan said, looking up from where he was checking the bodies of the slain. “I’ve got a particular beef with him.” Satisfied that none of the dead had his lost weapon, he joined the others as they faced the stone doors at the end of the deep alcove beyond the arch. The portals were easily twice Benzan’s height, large enough to accommodate a giant.
“Well, do we wait for the webs to disappear first?” Benzan asked.
“They’ll last for more than an hour, but they’ll burn. Torches.”
At Cal’s direction Lok reached up and grabbed a pair of the brightly burning brands that were mounted on large poles to either side of the arch. The umber hulk tore the poles free and thrust the eager flames into the webbing, where they quickly caught and started burning.
Meanwhile, Cal used his wand on Benzan, easing the injury to his ribs that he’d suffered at the hands of the warrior dwarf.
Within a few minutes, a path had been blazed through the center of the webbing directly to the stone portals.
“Ready?” Cal asked his companions, as they gathered before the doors. Benzan and Lok both nodded, but Cal held them there a moment longer.
“I am going to cast a series of spells that will enhance all of our defenses. Once I am finished, we need to act quickly and decisively before the power of the enchantments fade. I don’t know what we’re going to face on the other side of these doors, but from what I sensed from the mind of that guard we captured, there is something or someone powerful and terrible in this place, something that has taken all these disparate creatures that we have battled, and turned them into a cohesive, even fanatical, fighting force.”
Benzan checked his bowstring, and the arrows left in his quiver. He seemed on edge, filled like all of them with nervous anticipation. “All right, let’s do this,” he said.
Cal began his spellcasting. First he made Benzan invisible again, this time with a more potent dweomer that would allow him to attack without becoming visible. Then he cast an illusion upon himself, creating a number of mirror images that concealed his true location. And finally, he cast another spell on Lok, and the umber hulk seemed to shift a few paces to the right, his true location masked by the power of magical displacement.
“Ready,” Cal said. He reached down and took up his lute, playing the first bars of a stirring battle tune that they had all heard numerous times before.
Lok reached forward toward the heavy doors.
working out the details of the battles in the next few chapters. I had described the spells on Alera's scrolls (he has 3 major ones left) in an earlier section, back when I didn't have a clear idea of what would happen (other than the final bad guy, of course). All will be put to use shortly. Even though the party got battered earlier, we're going to see what Cal can do when he has time to prepare, and use his magical arsenal to full advantage. 
