Into the Mists

As soon as the centaurs feel the stone road under their hooves, they come to a halt. You slide down off Brighid’s back and Riama jumps down after you. You turn to your group and say, “Alright, Cai and Llwyd, I want you two up front. Brighid, you take the left flank, and Ysbail, you take the right. Ceirios, Maeryn, you two take the center, and I’ll be rear-guard. I’m not expecting anything to come at us from behind, but there are ruined buildings and tight alleys all along the road which could hide ambushers. A note on that -- the manikins do not seem to have very good vision, but track via scent and hearing, so try to walk softly. Brighid, Ceirios, cast whatever long-term spells you have now while we’re on the outskirts. I’ll leave it up to your judgement to determine which spells to cast, you know your options much better than I do.”

You yourself cast Burning Barrage, then Minor Shift to enhance your hearing, and finally Summon Obsidian Salamander. The last spell causes a rift to appear in the air, much like when you cast Summon Soul’s Familiar, but this one opens up into a volcanic hellscape. You can see glowing red pools of molten rock bubbling occasionally, sending yellow ripples a short distance over the surface. The portal must open up to an underground location, because you can barely see anything other than the magma. After just a second, a glossy black lizard about the size of a border collie wiggles its way through the portal. The mists around it immediately begin to burn away and steam rises from its skin. It tastes the air with its tongue and looks up at you. You tell it, “Stay beside me and attack anything which attacks us. Do not cause damage to me, any of the centaurs you see here, or the cat.” It doesn’t make any response except to take up position to your left.

After casting all of those, your Concentration drops to a mere 139, so you decide to try something out. The description of Crown of the Exalted is a little unclear about how it interacts with multi-school magic; you’re unsure whether Summon Obsidian Salamander would take both the Beast and Fire slots in your crown. However, given that the rest of your Class seems to be encouraging you to use multi-school spells heavily, and you have the spare Concentration at the moment, you attempt to push the Concentration cost of your summoned monster into the Crown. You instantly feel the tension in your mind ease and your Concentration climbs back up to 214; both Summon Obsidian Salamander and Kindle the Hearth-Flame are being maintained by the Crown. You can’t see them, but there are now two points of light glowing above your crown-shaped aura.

Brighid and Ceirios also cast a few buffs. Brighid casts a spell which causes the party’s weapons to glow a dull red briefly, and another which has no visible effect. Ceirios’s contribution causes the skin of the party to take on the appearance of rough stone for a few heartbeats before fading back to normal, and she also summons her golem; unlike your obsidian salamander, the golem doesn’t appear through a portal but rather forms itself out of the stones of the city. Once it finishes assembling itself, it looks rather like a very primitive child’s doll made out of rectangular bricks of grey-white stone, although it nearly matches Ysbail for height. The Adventurer also casts a couple of spells, though neither has a visible effect that you notice.

Once all the preparations are completed, the party falls into a roughly diamond-shaped formation as you ordered and you make your way into the city proper. The light mists thicken almost immediately into the dense fog you remember so well from your first visit, and visibility drops precipitously until you can only see a few meters ahead with any detail. Although they try to be quiet, there is only so much the centaurs can reduce the sounds of hooves hitting solid stone or metal plates and rings scraping against each other. It is thanks only to your heightened hearing that you catch the quiet rasp of paper over stone coming from an alley to your left and you shout a warning to Brighid even as five manikins -- a bear, two boars, a wolf, and what you can only assume is a Nairn Tusker -- charge out onto the main avenue.

Sticking to the, don’t fire a gun at a zombie near a horde unless you have no other choice, doctrine of trying to stay unnoticed near an unknown number of enemies, you opt not to fire off your Burning Barrage. Instead you immediately begin casting Flaming Jet with each hand. Brighid wheels to face the undead and cleanly decapitates the wolf as it leaps for her, her glaive bursting into flame a split second before slicing through its dessicated body. It immediately unravels, vines and clumps of meat falling in a pile.The bear slams into her but before it can do any real damage an arrow from Maeryn blasts a hole clear through its body. It doesn’t fall to pieces like the wolf, but it does stagger backwards.

Your obsidian salamander arches its neck back and then snaps forward, lobbing a burning ball of goop at one of the boars and striking it along its back. The actual hit doesn’t appear to cause much damage but the goop splashes all over the undead creature’s back and sides and the vines animating it instantly begin to smolder and burn. Llwyd charges in, spear lowered in a classic couched position, and skewers the bear, knocking it down with the impact. Cai intercepts the other boar, blocking a swing of its tusks with her huge shield and then chopping into its vines and dried flesh with her battle axe. Your Flame Jet casts finish and you direct both streams of fire at the Tusker Manikin, immolating it almost on contact; your magic has grown vastly stronger in just a week’s time. You quickly direct your fire towards the other remaining manikins, then burn the wolf’s remains for good measure.

You realize you didn’t see Ysbail or Ceirios participate in the ambush and turn around to face the other side of the avenue, but before you can cast Flame Jet again, Ysbail finishes off the last enemy on her side, some sort of large hulking primitive-looking humanoid covered in vines, by slicing it in half as Ceirios’s golem holds it in place. Scattered around her are the remains of three more beast manikins, two carved into pieces by her huge sword and one with a pulped head, presumably killed by the golem.

Aidan Lostlorn’s party has earned 3,450 experience for killing 9 Manikins.

You fire off a few seconds of Pulse of Life to heal the minor wounds earned by your party, then press onwards, deeper into the mists. This first fight went very well, but you know this is just the beginning.