NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spyscribe" data-source="post: 2556776" data-attributes="member: 5808">Part the One-Hundred Fifty-FifthIn which: shades of the past return.Instead of waiting for dusk, the party breaks camp late the next afternoon, hoping to arrive at the tower just before the sunset.When it is still some ways off, they find the first body.It’s an Ebisite military officer, lying on the leeward side of a sand dune as though cut down in his tracks, the right side of his body horribly burned.  The remains of his face are twisted into an expression of terrible agony.As the party pauses at this gruesome sight, a hot wind comes over the crest of the dune, carrying with it a horrible, but not unfamiliar stench.Since the attack on the Mages’ Academy, none of the members of the party could ever mistake the smell of burned human flesh.The party crests the dune and sees, for the first time, the result of the lights they witnessed the night before.An enormous tower sits in the middle of a great depression in the endless expanse of sand.  It rises, rosy in the twilight, almost as though it has grown out of the field of battle that surrounds it.The Ebisties sent a battalion out into the desert.  Little now remains.Bodies, pieces of wooden battering rams, and twisted metal rods that once formed some  sort of cages litter the ground around the blank walls of the tower.  What isn’t charred has melted into slag.Many of the corpses lie burnt and twisted in scorch marks that were hot enough to melt the sand beneath them into glass.“But…” Eva begins, looking over at Lira for confirmation, “I thought that wizards couldn’t create fire with magic.”Lira nods, staring at the remains of what appears to have been a very one-sided encounter.  “They can’t.”   She shrugs and hazards, “Maybe she created fire through mundane means, and employed some kind of siege engine to attack the Ebisties?”  She doesn’t sound terribly confident of her theory.“Siege engines are usually employed by those besieging, not those besieged,” Anvil points out.Lira looks at him as if to say: I didn’t say it made a lot of sense, I just said it was possible.“Umm…” Thatch begins, “how could she do that without any doors or windows?”A look confirms that Thatch is correct.The tower is easily one-hundred fifty feet tall, and—at least from this angle—has no visible doors or windows.“Well, there must be some way in and out,”  Reyu points out, ever logical.  “Perhaps we just cannot see it from this vantage.”Keeping a respectful distance, the party slowly circles the tower.They have arrived from the east, and so use the shadow of the tower as their starting point for a deliberate clockwise circuit.About a third of the way around, Reyu notes an anomaly.“Look there, it appears there once was a window… but it has been… filled.” She’s right.  Once the party knows what to look for, they spot several more bricked-up windows, each at a different height on the tower.  It’s as though the tower has been built, story by story, always with a single window on the top floor, the window on the previous level filled in as the tower grew.It’s… odd.The party has almost completed their circuit when two things happen, nearly simultaneously.The first is Kiara shouting, “Look!  There’s an open window—”The second is Annika screaming in terror as two perfectly black, mist-covered creatures come leaping out of the shadow of the tower, claws out and snarling.  The reason for her abject terror is quickly understood.  The last time she was face to face with one of these beasts, she was trapped in a burning dormitory at the Mages’ Academy, and the creature had just killed her familiar.Anvil and Reyu are at the front of the group and immediately take their positions as the first line of defense.  Reyu feels the burning of the creature’s claws slicing across her gut and for an instant—between the pain, the shadow beast, and the smell of smoke hanging in the air—it’s as though she’s returned to the site of the Mages’ Academy fire.For Reyu, the sensation lasts only for an instant.  She is quickly back to the present and preparing to fight the creature on its own terms.  Behind her, Annika screams and falls to the ground, curled into a fetal ball.The rest of the party quickly falls into action.  Lira immediately steps out of the shadow of the tower and—hoping against hope that it will do her more good than her offensive spells did last time—casts shield on herself before drawing her crossbow.  Thatch draws his sword without hesitation and charges forward on Bob towards the creature attacking Reyu.  As he closes in, one of Eva’s arrows buries itself in the shadow beast’s shoulder.  Thatch slashes down with his sword while the creature is still seething at the sudden pain.  Bob kicks out at it as he passes, and the shadow beast boils away into the air.Thatch nods in satisfaction.  One down, one to—Out of the corner of his eye, he spots movement in the tower’s shadow.  He turns to watch just in time to see two more shadow beasts coalesce out of the darkness.  They sniff the air for just a moment, then lower their heads and lope across the sand towards the party.Good, Thatch thinks to himself, more to cleave.But before Thatch can turn Bob to take another pass, the creatures have run past him… and one has launched itself in the air to land right on top of the cowering Annika.Reyu—despite still being menaced herself and bleeding freely—tries to club the shadowy figure with her quarterstaff before it can get its claws into the young wizard.  The creature knocks her arm out of the way and leaves a burning trail of pain from elbow to shoulder.Lira fares better with her crossbow, planting a bolt deep into the shadow beast’s flank.  It turns to look at her and snarls.Lira snarls back.The pain and the reality of the shadow creature being on top of her right then, along with Kiara’s frenzied screaming in her mind, helps to bring Annika back to her senses.  She reaches for the first thing that feels like it could be a weapon that she can lay hands on, her everburning torch.She shoves it at the underbelly of the shadow beast that has her pressed to the ground, but to her shock, it passes through the creature as though it wasn’t even there.  She gasps and then screams as the claws rake across her again.And then, just as suddenly as the weight of the creature was upon her, it is gone.  One of Eva’s arrows and a bolt from Lira’s crossbow have hit at nearly the same instant, and with a final snarl of protest to the darkening night, the shadow beast is gone.Annika picks herself up and fumbles for her own crossbow, hoping to still be able to help if needed.A few feet away, Reyu grits her teeth as she once again fends off the creature’s claws with her own arm.  Anvil brings his sword around—ignoring the other remaining shadow beast which is trying to get through his armor.  Anvil’s blade strikes true and the creature lets out a snarling howl.Eva reloads and quickly shoots again, following up on Anvil’s strike.  Meanwhile, behind Anvil, Thatch and Bob have teamed-up on the shadow beast attacking the cleric.  Thatch unleashes a full attack from horseback, and then allows Bob the honor of trampling the thing into the sand until it melts beneath his hooves.Free of all distractions, Anvil calls upon his feat of strength.  He feels the power of Kettenek surging up from the ground beneath his feet, and he channels all of that force into the abomination between him and Reyu.The critical hit nearly slices it in half, and it dissolves, snarling.A quiet falls over the pitched battlefield and the shadows are empty once more.The sun slides below the horizon, casting the desert into purple twilight.  At that precise moment, at the top of the tower—in its only open window—a light flares.</blockquote>

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