Vaegon searched around him in the wildly flaring light. There, some distance away, was a man in a white robe who might be a wizard. Vaegon charged along the top of the wall, heedless of all the arrows streaking by. A man at a crenel screamed, and fell back into his path, cursing. An arrow protruded from his head like a horn. Vaegon stopped, and helped the man tear it out of the skin. It hadn’t fractured the skull, but had pierced the flesh along his scalp, down to the bone. Vaegon took a moment to knit the skin together with his magic, but it was a poor and hasty job.
He saw ahead of him, between him and the robed man that he hoped was Targon, a group of pike-men, trying desperately to push off one of the ladder towers. Another man was throwing buckets full of oil down onto the attackers, who were scaling it. As he shot by them, the whole lot of them went up in a torrent of flame.
“Targon!” Vaegon yelled, as he came upon the white-robed man.
There was no response. The man was in the middle of a casting, and left Vaegon pleading with the air. The desperate elf was about to shake him, when a crackling bolt of yellow lightning shot forth from the man’s hands, down into a swarm of undead soldiers, who were trying to set yet another scaling ladder against the wall. The base of the wooden structure exploded, as Targon’s lightning superheated the sap in the fresh green timbers of the construction. The ladder began a slow tilting arc back into the troops below. When the spell had expired, Targon turned to the elf with clenched teeth, and a wild, almost insane, look in his eyes.
“If you can heal, then heal!” The black haired wizard shouted excitedly. “If not, then grab up a weapon! It’s all we can do here until Hyden Hawk returns!”
Vaegon started to ask, “From where?” but a great light began to fill the darkness out beyond the soldiers below. Out in the distance, a globe of reddish purple energy was forming over the head of a bald white-skinned figure wearing an ornately decorated black robe. The ball of swirling energy was the size of a wagon-wheel now, but it was growing steadily.
“Pael,” Targon hissed, then immediately began casting another spell.
Vaegon looked on, with his feet rooted to the plank walk, as the dragon passed at the edge of the evil wizard’s brightening lavender light. He shuddered with fear when he saw the beast’s huge horned head cut through the edge of the illumination. Several long seconds passed before its tail finally disappeared back into the darkness, but all he had really seen was the edge of a wing, a smattering of sparkling scale, and a huge undefined mass of slithery motion. By then, the sphere of energy building over Pael’s egg-like head was the size of a farmhouse. With a throwing gesture, and a psychotic, almost primal yell, he launched the globe into a comet-like arc, high up over the wall. It lit up the whole section of city as it started its way down. It’s churning, wavering glow, sent the shadows of buildings and towers sweeping around the city like dark swords. It was as if Pael had thrown up a miniature purple sun.
The piercing shriek of the Choska erupted far too close to Vaegon, and he dove to the side, just in time to avoid its snatching claws. He managed to pull Targon down by his robes as he went, and the demon beast’s razor sharp talons snatched nothing but air. The city quaked then, and a subsonic gut jarring boom effectively eclipsed the night.
The explosion caused by the impact of Pael’s comet was white-hot, and blinding. Orange-yellow blasts of flame and debris followed, as the traps and pitfalls set by the Highwander Mages, were triggered prematurely. The sounds of these explosions were merely pops and crackles in the near deaf hum caused by the concussion of Pael’s blast. Everything was unnaturally silent now, especially for Vaegon, who could see the mouths of the men around him moving, but couldn’t hear anything at all.
Targon and Vaegon both blinked away the spots from their vision, and then realized at the same time, that they had no chance now to get themselves back to the secondary wall. Not from where they were stranded. To make matters worse, a nearby section of the wall crumbled away, in a rumbling, flickering explosion of silvery white energy. Before the debris even settled, thousands of undead soldiers poured into the gap, and swarmed the city.
From somewhere in the sky, the dragon roared out again. When the sound of it subsided, a commanding shout cut through the chaos from behind them.
Targon grabbed Vaegon by the sleeve, and started back towards the ramp Vaegon had come up earlier. Below them, just inside the wall, and near the breach, a warrior in gleaming red plate armor had opened up the lane with his flashing sword. The soldiers of the Blacksword were rallying to his side. If they could get down the ramp, they might have a chance to make it back to the secondary wall. A slim chance, but a chance nonetheless. They had to hurry though. Already, a knot of rotting undead soldiers were heaving up and over the wall from a siege ladder just beyond the point they had to reach to gain the ramp.