The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [159]
Beams of light were stabbing forth and wrestling in the roiling air as Elryn and a snarling Daluth sought to strike down the elf mage, and Umbregard used his own wands to disrupt and strike aside their attacks.
Daluth shouted in pain as an errant beam laid bare the bone of his shoulder, flesh, sinews, and clothing all boiling away in an instant. He staggered back a pace or two, at about the same time as Umbregard went over backward in a grunt and a shower of sparks, leaving the elf standing alone against the Sharrans.
The Overmistress of the Acolytes found her coldest, cruel smile and put it on. It widened slowly as Starsunder's shielding spell darkened, flickered, and began to shrink under the bolts and bursts streaming from the wands of the Dreadspells.
"I don't know who you are, elf," Klalaera remarked, almost pleasantly, "or why you chose to get in our way… but it's quite likely to be a fatal decision. I can slay you right now with a spell, but I'd rather have some answers. What is this place? What magic lies here that makes it worth you losing your life over?"
"The only thing that amazes me more about humans than their habit of splitting up fair Faerun into separate 'places,' one seemingly having no connection to the next," Starsunder replied, as casually as if he'd been idly conversing with an old friend over a glass of moon-wine, "is their need to gloat, threaten, and bluster in battle. If you can slay me, do so, and spare my ears. Otherwise…"
He sprang into the air as he spoke, leaving Sharran wand-blasts to ravage elfless stumps and ferns, and collapsed his shield into a net of deadly force that clawed at the Overmistress.
She writhed in the air, sobbing and snarling, until her desperate mental goading dragged the wild-eyed Femter over to stand beneath her. Then she collapsed her own defenses…and Starsunder's attack, still gnawing at them…down into the helpless Dreadspell, in a deadly flood that left him a tottering, blinded mass of blood and exposed bone.
The joints of Femter Deldrannus failed, and he sought his last, eternal embrace with the earth, ignored by all. He hadn't even been given time to scream.
A gasping Overmistress tumbled away through the air as her flight spell began to collapse.
Elryn roared in wordless victory as his wand-bursts found Starsunder at last, spinning the elf around in a swarm of biting bolts. Umbregard was struggling to rise, his face sick with pain as he watched his friend beset.
Daluth leveled his own wand at the human mage at point-blank range, across the smoking bodies of fallen fellow Dreadspells, and smiled a slow and soft smile at the horrified human.
Then he spun around and smashed Dread Sister Klalaera out of the air with all the might the wand in his hand could muster.
It crumbled away, leaving him holding nothing, as the lash all of the House of Holy Night hated and feared so much blazed from end to end and spun high into the trees, hurled by a spasming body in black leather that was crumpling into smoking ruin.
Crumpling…then snarling into a standing stance once more, surrounded by crackling black flames, the face that had been Klalaera's working and rippling beneath dead, staring eyes as her lips thundered, "Daluth, you shall die for that!"
The voice was thick and roaring, but the two surviving Dreadspells recognized it, Elryn's head snapping around from the task of rending the convulsing, darkening body of the elf mage.
"You are cast out of the favor of Shar…die friendless, false priest!" Darklady Avroana thundered, through the lips that were not hers.
The bolt of black flame that the body of the Over-mistress vomited forth then swept away the errant wizard-priest, an old and mighty tree beyond him, and a stump that dwarfed them both, shaking the forest all around and hurling Elryn to the ground.
The last Dreadspell was still struggling to his feet as Klalaera's