The stone walls painted a putrid red as we dispatched with the undead servants.
Bistek, whose own blood trailed the stairwell, managed to fend off death alongside Dirkbrüe behind the undead line.
Flo'rel and Balthazar crashed against them and tore through the rotting flesh with their spears.
There was no gasp or wails of anguish to be heard but our own.
Their bodies crumbled to the stone beneath them as every living soul in the vault fought to catch their breath.
This was not the night's most perilous trial.
With hurried steps we found the monk and a Huutakan priest manically flipping through a tome stashed in a stone casket at the end of the Vault.
This must be it, The Book of Rituals. But as it were, we had no time to revel in our accomplishment as fiery pursuers burned down the hillside toward us.
From the distance, a trail of fire scorched the sky approaching us. Five flying fire methods shortly arrived to torment us once more.
The narrow corridors left us in poor condition to defend against their fire breath.
What more, each fire bird slain resulted in a splash explosion, further injuring the front line.
Djura's raptors were quickly dispatched and we lost a number of Rakastan and Huutakan envoys to flames.
They were each expunged eventually, one fiery explosion at a time. Flo'rel was seared deeply in the melee as he bravely held the front and caught most of the blasts, now smelling of steak.
I rushed to the front as the rest of the team moped up the birds and I saw them.... A river was all that stood between the fire elementals, their hellish spawn and us.
And so we fled.
Battered, beaten and burned we thought to make camp late into the night. But our rest was not to be. The towering infernos had found us.
We ran to a pitiful stream which would mark our battle line.
The three fire elementals shuffled slowly toward us with no great haste as if aware of their own inevitability.
We did not want this fight.
This is likely the doom of more than a few of us. But we could not outrun them, and escape now would risk turning our only refuge here, Byxata, into another charred ruin.
We cannot risk that. And so, the line was drawn.
The bard, peeled himself from the camp floor and dragged his mangled body to the line.
He turned to us and muttered breathlessly in an amused voice,
"We have merely nodded at death, now we must shake its filthy hand."
-Cyd
Comments