Chapter Text
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Theodorus muttered under his breath as he scrawled another jagged passage in the pages of a leatherbound tome. The night air was gloriously clear atop the astronomy tower, and if the chill was slowly worming its way into his robes it was nothing another nip of firewine could not handle.
High above, where even the mage's heightened senses could not reach, a flock circled.
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Maegara cast a wary glance over her shoulder, marking the descent of her subordinate sisters. They were a long way from home, and much care and forethought had gone into their arrival.
She noted the sloppy disposition of her right-side wingmate. Only the sharpest fighters are recuited to Lady Lorelei's unit, but it takes years of experience to master the finer points of special operations. If the damnfool girl survived the mission she would be taught a painful lesson about the primacy of proper preparation.
Approaching their target, Maegara's enomotia peeled off from the rest of the flock. At the head of the formation she began to describe a tight circle to bleed altitude without accelerating excessively. From behind her and to the right came a clinking noise that was deafening after hours of soundless flight. The glare she sent backwards would have made a beholder balk.
Chastened, the offending harpy adjusted her harness. They were all traveling light, so as to enable the incredibly long journey over lands inhospitable to conventional forces.
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Their caution was all for naught in the end. Far below, Theodorus ran through another hasty calculation in the margins of his journal. Cursing softly, he returned to the eyepiece of a finely-crafted telescope. The magnificent view afforded him unprecedented opportunity for astronomical research, but the new observations were handily disproving months of painstaking work.
A faint clink reached his keen ears, and he nearly dismissed it as an artifact of a long night in the absence of company. One does not long survive as an Enrothi stargazer without an abundance of caution, however.
He disengaged from the eyepiece, a look of irritation wrinkling his cold-reddened face. A spell was uttered curtly, and a faint glow suffused the astronomer's eyes. He scanned the heavens, and with shaking hands confirmed his secret fear.
"Nighon," he uttered, a faint tremble marring his usually-steady voice.
In a panic he grabbed a gnarled length of wood from its resting place on a nearby parapet. The focus in the tip of the staff flared to life as arcane energy was channelled through it.
He punched a rune scrawled on the kiln-baked hide of an Earth elemental. The medium crumbled to dust, but the burning lines of the sigil remained as clear as the day they were inscribed, hovering motionless in the night air.
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Erinyes dipped a shoulder and began to yaw as she made her approach run. Her sharp eyes picked out Maegara's dim silhouette up ahead as it wheeled ever closer to the peak of the observation tower. One of the lead harpy's talons unfurled to signal the start of their attack. Erinyes signaled in kind to the sisters following in her wake, and drew her soot-dulled blade in anticipation.
She bled speed as she angled herself towards the platform at the tower's summit. A few seconds too late, she noticed the glow of the alarm sigil and realized the element of surprise was lost. Before she was able to cry out to her sisters, a blinding flare of light reduced her torso to a cloud of ash and feathers.
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Theodorus scanned the horizon for the next threat, and a blur of motion in his peripheral vision forced him to duck under a whirling ball of talons and hate. He three up a hand, palm wreathed in glowing energy, to deflect a thin steel blade. Light flashed, blood sprayed, and a severed finger tumbled to the marble underfoot. The head of his staff arced into the bird-woman's neck and discharged a thunderous clap of energy, flattening her and snapping her spine.
He lifted the staff to track another dark silhouette across the horizon, before its bright green discharge highlighted the doomed harpy. As her embers rained to the ground below Theodorus glanced left and right. He closed his eyes and mumbled an incantation, drawing walls of invisible force around the edges of the tower. A foolish juve swooped down to attack and was crushed by her own weight and speed. The force-walls have the interesting side-effect of muffling the sound of the wind, and of the infiltrators' terse calls to one another.
Despite the sudden quiet, he failed to hear even a whisper of the silver feathers rustling behind him as he hurriedly stuffed his journals and loose parchment into an ornate satchel. It was the tingling of his mage-sense that finally warned him of his approaching doom.
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Maegara stalked the distracted mage triumphantly, suppressing her snort of disdain as a young sister slammed into his shields. Lady Lorelei will not be pleased with their losses, but the crucible of combat exists to burn off the impurities and temper the survivors into the firmest steel.
The man jammed a loose collection of written materials into a messenger bag. This must be the intelligence we were sent to collect, she thought exultantly.
The tip of her long, narrow tongue curled idly around one of her fangs as she contemplated the killing blow.
Suddenly she lunged forward, and buried her wicked blade to the hilt in the man's thick robes. Immediately the warm glow at the tip of his staff was extinguished, but his eyes still blazed defiantly as he turned to face his assassin.
"Any last words, Bracadan scum?" the loathsome bird-woman jeered.
Theodorus barked one final spell in reply.
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Omnisophix rouses itself from a long slumber. An ember glow fills its darkened eye sockets and stone lips creak wide to reveal wicked obsidian fangs. Though it cannot see in the traditional sense, it still felt its brethren waking concurrently.
Its master is dead, and master had been very clear about what was to be done IF he was no longer alive. It steps down from its pedestal with a lightness and grace that belies its sturdy construction. It has a bag to secure.
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