Session Log 2024-02-26

The woman in the gold mask turned from the scale-swarm below. Ignis, still climbing the Stormjumper's rigging to face her, watched as she made an inhuman leap from its prow to the next ship in the fleet. Though the deck was defended by more soldiers, they fell before her before without landing a blow. The scale-swarm, meanwhile, hovered up the other side of the Stormjumper. Heiras, tracking its escape, called out with sudden alarm that someone needed to "take out that zombie on my ship's deck".

The forces of the Keep struggled to hold off the desperate Torch deserters boarding their ships in advance of the burning zombie hordes. Some ships began to lift off, haltingly and without coordination. Lord Arva, scowling from across the battlefield, threatened them not to "try to take away what was rightfully his." His magic stirred searing winds into a vast tornado, which began to drag the barely-aloft airships towards each other.

Beyond the storm, the zombies stagger-rushed unimpeded out towards the warehouses and plaza. Though their burning front lines were beginning to collapse, the soldiers defending the warehouses had largely retreated to the fleet. Angitt and her lizardman teammate, with a head start on the zombie forces, raced into the closest warehouse of the eastern block. Behind them, the undead Captain Caergon stumbled under Torrix's assault, its clumsy movements and oversized weapon poorly matched to face the stout dwarf's brawling in close quarters.

Ignis boarded the deck of the Stormjumper and, heeding Heiras's plea, scanned his surroundings. He saw a humanoid shadow rising as a zombie from some woundless death. Beyond, he spotted the glittering onyx scales swarming across the opposite threshold of the deck. He drew upon his fire magic to ignite his hands and forearms, then rushed the zombie. The former Gale Knight tumbled, burning, to the plaza below, but the scale-swarm hesitated to follow.

Though Robin lacked a pilot's sense of how a ship moves, she reasoned that Arva's winds would destroy the ships of the Windwatcher's Keep fleet if they tried to lift off now. Since without those ships, she would be stuck here, she decided to signal the panicking pilots to stay put. However, she couldn't remember any emergency naval codes for the Torch Empire or the Windwatcher's Keep, so she settled for scaring them into grounding.

She opted for a large threat, to grab attention through the lashing winds, and so reused the illusion of Haxryn looming overhead. The dragon's return, coupled with the earlier aerial zombie-dragon blockade, were sufficient to deter the would-be pilots, and scare them back down the rigging. Though she had ensured the ships safety, Robin was concerned by the gold-masked woman's proximity and lethality, and so drew her crossbow and slipped into a crowd of Torch soldiers reforming ranks .

Klaitos raced across of the plaza, dodging mobs of burning zombies. He hurtled directly towards Lord Arva, who had just made himself the biggest obstacle to their evacuation plans. The Torch noble had not been punched in many years, and so Klaitos's mighty fist struck him almost unguarded. His thin, centuries-aged body sailed backwards to a violent crash, where he lay for a moment dazed.

However, Lord Arva, clinging to centuries of hatred, would not allow himself to fall so easily. His eyes, unfocused with his concussion, leered in Klaitos's approximate direction. He rose from the ground and began to hover overhead, using his wind magic to lift his battered body aloft.

With the weird scales hovering out of reach, Ekkels turned his attention to the nearby ship atop which the gold-masked woman had leapt and begun killing. He spotted a Keep soldier, retreated to the guardrail, and used his chaos magic to swap their two positions. He landed quietly, and saw the masked woman walking between three fresh, unmarred corpses. Her casual stride seemed intended to cruelly prolong the moments before she killed the remaining soldier, crouching within the steerage compartment.

Ekkels scuttled up behind her and lunged forward, grabbing for her arm to try to seize hold of whatever magic she seemed to possess. She pulled away, leaving him clutching her gown-sleeve, but not before his fingertips grazed her wrist. He felt a brief contact with some vast force, channeled through her. Some of its powerful magic infused her body, and seemed to be controlling it as if it were a puppet, yet her inhuman grace betrayed none of the ungainliness of a puppetmaster's strings. Her sorcery radiated in his arcane sense, evoking exactly the dancing figure of his earlier dream.

The swarm of onyx scales suddenly flew across the deck of the Stormjumper. Ignis found himself surrounded by dozens of the shimmering black panes. Scale after scale flung itself at him, but their awkward, jolting flight made for an easily-countered projectile - Ignis punched them away with his still-burning fists.

The burning mobs of undead reached the central plaza as the ships were settling, but their uncoordinated assault and fiery disintegration left them unable to breach the reformed Torch lines and Robin's crossbow. Heiras was injured in the chaos, and decided that she'd rather fight on her ship than get trampled on the ground, so she raced for the rigging of the Stormjumper.

Lord Arva, hovering overhead, cast his arm forward, lashing out at Klaitos with a wave of rippling heat. Klaitos, unwilling to yield to the noble's arrogance, used his own storm magic to turn the wave aside. He tried to mock Arva's ineffective use of his rightful weather magic, but his taunts could not be heard over the windy battlefield.

Ekkels, clinging to the gold-masked woman's sleeve, felt himself being deliberately lifted to her face. He realized, suddenly, that the woman's eyes might hold some deadly power - the fallen soldiers on the deck were strewn as if they had fallen before her gaze, and he could make out something black and glittering behind her mask's eyeholes.

He scrambled across her expensive robes like a squirrel, desperately avoiding her grasp and gaze, but was seized and pulled off of her by the three just-risen zombies on the deck. She glanced back at him, out of the corner of her eye, and remarked that she would have to study such a curious toy when she had the time, then turned her attention back to the soldier in the steerage compartment.

Torrix battered the undead Captain Caegron to the ground, and ripped his burning head from his neck. He roared in triumph, holding the grisly trophy and the Captain's oversized sword over his head, and rushed back into the melee as the rest of the corpse burned to ashes behind him. Angitt and her lizardman ally began hurling makeshift bombs from the warehouse stockpile, holding the undead at bay on the eastern front, but the relatively unguarded warehouses to the west were overrun.

Ignis focused the fire he was wielding into bright, knife-like jets of flame. He carved into the scales, damaging the inscriptions on a few, and the swarm as a whole recoiled as it had from the chaos magic earlier. They began floating into the air, but Ignis mocked their cowardice, and they halted just a few feet overhead.

As the swirling arid winds were sealing off any escape by airship, Robin surveyed the battlefield to ensure she would be able to get out alive. She knew that the zombie hordes would lose direction if they were not lead by a necromancer or some greater, more conscious undead. She figured Lord Arva or the gold-masked woman were the best candidates.

With Arva so heavily injured by Klaitos, she decided to channel Torrix's rampage in the Torch Lord's direction. At her goading, he hurled Caegron's sword at the hovering man. His awkward projectile came nowhere near its target, but was enough distraction for her to snipe Lord Arva with her crossbow, gouging his side.

Ekkels, held firmly by the three undead Keep soldiers, was still driven to protect the other, living man in the steerage. He channeled his inner chaos magic into them, fully disrupting their necromantic animation, and they collapsed to the deck once more with tendrils of Umbra pouring from their mouths and eyes. Wasting no time, he sprinted at the gold-masked woman and grabbed for her ankle, elongating his malleable arms to keep her from evading his reach.

He seized her leg through the gown and immediately tapped into her magic more deeply than before. He felt the Umbra all around him as a tangible weight, and knew it was a force to which he could connect somehow. He ignored it for the moment to fight for control over the spell animating the woman's body. His success disrupted her previously implacable poise and caused her to collapse like a puppet with cut strings.

Klaitos was unwilling to leave Arva a chance to regain any momentum. He called Torrix to him, bodily lifted the gore-strewn dwarf, and hurled him directly at Lord Arva. His giant strength helped land the shot, and Torrix's eager fist slammed solidly into the ancient noble. Klaitos's reckless throw overshot the necessary distance, however, and Arva and Torrix both flew through the smoke and darkness to some distant impact in the road beyond the plaza.