For some strange reason, I was absolutely sure it was coincidence, the winds didn’t blow them out of the Stillflight area as they fell. Amazingly enough, the winds were all suddenly blowing in and down. These elemental creatures of air, who should have been able to tread the winds like the lawn I didn’t have, dropped like stones. Well, soapstone or pumice, maybe, but that just meant the winds had more effect. The semi-corporeal wendigos, materializing to get some food for perpetually empty bellies, found they couldn’t go back ethereal, nor ignore He Who Is King gravity anymore.

They smashed into our meteor shelter of Ward Walls, bounced off to the sides with rather shocked shouts of pain, and scrabbled instinctively at the stone with claws of solid air and congealed ice, hanging on in shock and disbelief as the winds dragged them down...

March march march, crossbows held at arms swinging down. Poinkpoinkpoink!

Damn, that +15 (or higher) or so penalty to climbing checks to an unskilled climber from taking damage was truly nasty. Aieeeee... off they went on their pilgrimages.

Zipzipzip, Shards flew out; a few Fire and Lightning Reserves detonated; some breath weapons disdainfully played over the stone and cleaned off the sacrificial offerings to their no doubt delighted master and Patron. Waaat, they didn’t know how famously uncaring the Mythos masters were?

Well, far be it from me to withhold a fine instructional moment from such eager and willing students, so zealous and eager in their fanatical devotion. I’m sure they appreciated the enlightenment, judging by the amount of fear, dread, terror, and so forth ad nauseam wafting up from below, which their master would no doubt dearly enjoy, given the amount of effort they’d put into trying to generate some for It.

I strongly admonished everyone not to peep over the side for the umpteenth time, as they didn’t really want to see what was down there greeting the eager devotees.

March march march. Hey, the winds died down! Wow, their Master really did approve of this offering of theirs. No doubt It wished It had more such zealous servants serving It so faithfully...

A thin line of blue crept across the sky, and if the shadows down below seemed to pull back a bit, we could only regret that we didn’t vivic some of the eager worshippers. Their master might have taken it as trying to steal food from Its mouth, after all. Gotta be polite about this sort of thing, y’know. A little respect for immortal Entities from Beyond keeps a Null healthy and sane, after all...

Humming and Not Looking Down, any vertigo and agoraphobia finding the Muzak Elevator To Heaven just too hard to climb and taking a polite rest off to the side, we marched on across this mile-long arch of warped stone towards the far side.

--------

Now, the Brotherhood had zipped across this thing by Veilwalking, pausing only just long enough to see what was on the other side, and then they were on the way again.

Naturally, it couldn’t be more undead to let us use all these nice new Baneskulls and Tokens in proper field tests. Leng natives are kind of rude that way.

No, this was an opposing faction of Aberrants, namely the cerebrovores.

These little brains-on-legs are pesky little fuckers. They can eat the brain of a sentient, then occupy their bodies and animate them, using surface memories to sub for their victims and infiltrate their societies. Naturally, they are completely amoral about such things, considering it their right and privilege to do so, while the rest of us are just walking livestock existing to provide them additional experiences to savor and a new set of meat clothing.

They’re also approximately as hard as granite somehow, as well as extremely resistant to most forms of energy, including magic, and so a true pain in the ass for most people to butcher and grind into spell components properly.

The favorite ride of cerebrovores are xenosyms. These creatures bear a disturbing resemblance to Aliens from Da Movies, which only served to reinforce my opinion that Giger was one of those mad artists tapping into the dark dreams of Mythos entities and painting out stuff nobody really wanted to exist.

Cerebrovores didn’t have to eat the brains of xenosyms. Nope, symbiotic relationship, they could scuttle in right under their skull-crest, and there was a nice little shielded hollow with cortex access they could plug right into. Lo, now you have some existential psionic brain-eating genius horrors plugged right into phrenic acid-spewing chest-bursting horrors... with extending jaws and claws and nasty tails who could scuttle along walls with blindsight.

Needless to say, these creatures were not something you wanted to fight with a standard line of infantry. Aberrant phrenic shit is just a total pain in the ass to deal with, worse than most magical creatures that at least take a decent amount of time to mature.

I did say most...

Of course, the folks I had fighting with me were anything but a standard line of infantry, and as they say, knowing is half the battle.

Mind control was the last thing I was worried about. Any successful mental attack like that was blindingly obvious in /Marktell, meaning only some of the berserkers were vulnerable, and trying to mind control them in rage was completely impossible, as they had been very careful to learn how to resist such. The rest would just get shouted back to awareness by their buddies, getting somewhere between zero to two hundred or so extra saves against mind control, at most costing them a moment of hesitation, or not even that if I noticed and just bid them attack something other than the creature that had just tried to control them.

Certainly I wouldn’t notice such a blindingly obvious intrusion against my Marked, nope, nope...

Topping off their Will saves was my Warlord bonus, enhanced by my Resolve/Courage bonus for a happy +10 extra, and with Soul-boosted Mindwarding saves adding +3-4 more, well, the success rate of such things wasn’t going to be too high.

The Forsaken, of course, basically ignored them. Nulls work perfectly fine on piss-I-on-ics.

Acid resistance took care of that horribly acidic xenosym blood, and, well, both silvershine and blueshine slakes rendered the Gear so subjected completely immune to acid. I certainly wouldn’t have been so foresighted as to insist on everyone have their Gear treated that way, right? I mean, with all the rotting, corrupting, decaying, molding, rusting, and other effects prevalent in Mythos and Chaos-infested areas. Nope, nope, not me, my 32 Int and 34 Wisdom is Totally Fer Show. I r stoopid, hur hur hur, I iz.

-------

Corgun traipsed up behind me, Briggs, and AA, while some esoteric energies were trying to get past Null, Source, and Void, and basically just fading into nothingness ahead of us. There were a few catapults unleashing their loads, and the Casters behind us were taking turns Featherweighting the big rocks and watching them blow away on the winds into the void beneath us. After a few minutes, there was a crack of some inverse-note thunder from below, the ground trembled, and even the cerebrovores in charge didn’t keep sending more offerings of just rocks down to whatever was below us.

The big dragon wasn’t exactly comfortable in three overlapping Forsaken auras, but tolerated it out of pure superiority... and knowing we weren’t going to attack him. -There is a Queen atop the wall,- he /pointed out helpfully, with that tone he used when wanting to wheedle a good fight away from us.

I’d already seen it, my Mask up now that we were past the canyon and there was no chance of me looking down low and Seeing Something I’d have to lobotomize myself instantly to forget. -Yeah, I’ma throw Briggs at it,- I /replied, ignoring the way the dragon’s surprisingly mobile lips fell. -I need you to be a mobile siege ladder, not a combatant here, until we get multiple Disk Stairs raised. The last thing I need is for a dragon to be caught in tight quarters and assaulted from all sides. Xenosyms are armor-rending sons of lungs, and they’ll chew up your scales quick. Once we have a foothold, I’ll need the dragons to get around to the front and make sure nothing gets in or out. You can cover one another in formation there, and you’ll be out of the winds if they try to swarm you.-

-Hmmm.- The dragon ran a few scenarios, I helpfully /supplied him some numbers, his eyes flickered, and he decided that being attacked by a dozen xenosyms ripping away his scales was probably not a good tactical decision... and it may or may not have got him thinking about actually investing in some barding, which the proud dragons had been rather skeptical of acquiring when magic was so sufficient.

Big difference between +4 from Force Armor and potentially +11 from mithral Plate Barding, and if it was well-made, it would look totally badass on him... and it wasn’t like they hadn’t built up a heap load of goldweight credits for battlespoils.

We weren’t dumb enough to actually give the dragons coins for their hoards, of course, as they’d never spend the damn things, and they would be completely impossible to haul along while we were traveling. It was just a mental tally, but they salivated over the shining numbers in Markspace as if they were real.

-I know this isn’t your specialty, AA; any problems?- I /inquired, bringing my left hand back, and Tremble slowly slid forth from her scabbard, immediately beginning to chime with the notes to our Song, which Endure patiently picked up with ringing emphasis.

Quaver slid out eagerly, happy to be fighting with her older Sister.

Soul Essence flowed over the Belt at my waist, flared as it turned my hips into extra shoulders and two vaguely spider-like arms coalesced out of a third of the symbols encircling my waist, electrum against the white of my Marks. They crossed, clasped, and Fall and Stand lit up in eager anticipation as I drew them.

Corgun pursed his scaled lips warily. He’d seen me fight with a Sword, and rarely a Sword and Shield. He’d never actually seen me pop the Arakne Arms. Sir Harbrom and Vialeste, the Elven Magebow riding crossbow, were also very interested.

A kite-shaped silver decoration on my waist-length hair dropped down, and sealed itself just below the Mark on my spine, right on the tailbone. Soul Essence flared on the other third of those Belt-Tats, and Compressed mithral extended out in serpentine segments, arcing out and up and over my head.

Sparky flared into existence, and promptly zipped into the widened last segment of what looked like a serpentine Tail that had lit up with the same assortment of multi-hued flames as my two Swords. Three spikes of solid light gathered around the Tail, and Sparky formed a watching eye up there, ready to attack with his own now-considerably buffed energies.

We had an Interdiction up, so Tremble couldn’t float free, which meant hack and slash time it was.

-I’ll just clean up in the wake of the two of you,- the Void Brother /chuckled, without a bit of shame.

-Errant,- I /called back softly. He traveled over the intervening troops and dragons by bouncing from Ward Wall to Ward Wall, landing weightlessly on Corgun’s head, since space was limited. The dragon just rolled an eye at him.

-Go!- and Errant took off. I followed on his heels, AA paced me, and Briggs paced heavily behind, each step planted like a descending stone... or a boulder rolling downhill.

Errant wasn’t as fast as I could be, but he was definitely not slow. He stayed just within my Null, so the cavalcade of piss-I-on-them energies coming down faded into nothingness right in front of him, and if they were mind-churningly bright and nauseating to look at, well, that’s what Devasight is good for.

It was two hundred yards to the walls. They got off one volley of arrow fire, which rattled against the stones behind us as we kept picking up speed towards those hundred-foot walls of basalt that were bending and twisting as we looked at them.

Errant held out his hands low to the sides, palms up.

AA and I took two steps, and left the ground. Our ki was nicely harmonized, juked into Errant’s, and without stopping, he heaved at the same time he jumped, the Philosopher’s Might on his forearms burning to life.

An effective Might in the neighborhood of 60, sufficient to lift a main battle tank, hurled us skywards.

He hopped into a handstand at sixty mph, Angel Walk took his momentum away an inch from the ground, he hit, crouched his legs.

Briggs came down perfectly on his soles with both feet, and they kicked off one another with massive force, enough to send Errant’s hands crunching into the ground, and Briggs took off like a rocket.

=========

Author’s Notes: Giger is of course the name of the artist who inspired the design of the xenomorphs in Aliens, and a master of some really disturbing imagery.

Customizing to a foe, Aliens ain’t nearly so dangerous to Tens.