#128 - The Battle Against Trazzen

The Journal of Wynn Dennavar 

Zarantyr 25th, 999 YK

As the rest of us readied to return underground, Cypher conversed privately with Elidac. The Brelish warforged couldn’t in good conscience remain with Sharn at risk. Instead, he would take the wizard’s offer of a winged beast—a griffin—to intercept the lightning rail and do anything he could to stall its progress or disrupt the Mire of True Hunger alone. It was beyond risky but provided an unexpected benefit: Cypher’s presence at our destination would significantly improve Elidac’s accuracy with the teleportation spell for the rest of us. We wished him good luck.

I had few preparations to make and waited for the others, Fang ready in one hand, in the other hand a potion Garrek had given me with instructions to drink it as soon as we passed though the arcane gate. Bale cloaked himself in the guise of a gnoll, then hid that illusion beneath his habitual darkness. Magnus and I would enter under its cover, followed by Izzeth. Clarion assisted Aleae mounting behind him on his massive warhorse (the creature wasn’t skittish despite the increasingly crowded floating platform). Once astride, she turned herself invisible with a spell scroll.

The instant the gateway opened we charged through. A shiver passed through me. That hadn’t happened the last time. Our destination sounded wrong—not silent but too quiet for the battle we were expecting. I cursed Bale’s darkness, couldn’t deviate from the plan without knowing what we faced, and couldn’t stop moving or be crushed by the warhorse behind me. I drank Garrek’s potion and sought the edge of the sphere of darkness. Three illusionary replicas of myself appeared, weaving around me and beguiling any who would attack me. So is this what it feels like to be a wizard? In a pitched battle, this would only buy me seconds. But sometimes that mattered.

We hadn’t emerged beside Irakas and the golem as planned. The gateway opened on the far side of the battleground, opposite the Cauldron’s chamber by the stairs. I spotted the tall bronze golem immediately, towering dented and unmoving above a crowd of undead that ringed it at a ten-pace distance. Its glave was caked with blood. I couldn’t see Irakas, but heard an eerie singing. "Dirgesinger," the hobgoblin had named herself. It was the only explanation I had for the inability of the undead to overwhelm their position.

I started to move in, only then noticing an unfamiliar presence between us and the stalled battle. It was a tall figure with the head of a tiger and robed like a caster. Backwards hands. A name dredged itself up from the depths of my memory. Rakshasa. Little knowledge came with that name except that they were some sort of fiend or lesser demon…and that “lesser” was still powerful enough to single-handedly rout our attempt at reinforcement.

Yet the rakshasa ignored both us and the battle behind him. He began to walk away. Bale would later relate his theory that the rakshasa had "repositioned" our arcane gate.

Magnus charged past the tiger-headed fiend and crushed a ghoul not a dozen steps away from the rakshasa. Still the demon ignored him. More cautiously, I gave the creature a wide berth and kept it in the corner of my eye as much as possible.

Izzeth now, apparently!

Finally, I spotted Irakas kneeling beside the golem. In front of him was Trazzen himself, still in his elaborate plate armor, wielding that purple-hued scimitar. And he merely stared at Irakas. Trazzen’s lieutenants around him, surrounding her, some of them fidgeting and eager for her song to falter. Given the hobgoblin's obvious injuries, it wasn’t going to be long, and the golem appeared inert. She held a sword in one hand and the Sceptre of Glyphstone in the other, and I had the impression she was using the latter like a wizard might use a staff to channel his power.

Clarion and Aleae charged outward away from the rakshasa and undead, skirting mounds of gnoll corpses and made for the Cauldron with the red pearl. The few ghouls who noticed them scrabbled ineffectually at the horse.

Between Izzeth’s ice storm and the continual chaos of the darkness, we cleaved a path through the undead. The sphere spewed flaming arrows and eldritch blasts without warning, in between revealing Magnus’s mace or the arm of an earth elemental right before it connected with hapless undead. I have to accept the unexpected abilities of my new companions—such as Izzeth becoming an earth elemental!—without much pause. Unwilling or unable to fight the elemental, the ghouls and shrouded shade surrounded me instead.

Trazzen completed the flank, blocking my path to Irakas, who had ceased singing and struggled against the vampire spawn. With his resting place destroyed, the vampire wouldn’t heal from the injuries we inflicted this time, though he appeared fresh and uninjured. I barely dodged his openhanded blow. The illusionary mirror images from Garrek’s potion were long since gone and the shade’s necrotic touch was already wearing me down. I ignored the lesser undead and struck Trazzen, then used the Fang’s magic to teleport out of the trap.

My escape didn’t go unnoticed. Trazzen pursued me with frightening speed, but rather than attacking, ran past me. He spoke my name again, and again I was unable to resist the magic behind it. I was, once more, his ally.

“Stop the golem,” he said, looking at me over his should only for a moment. He turned and vanished back towards the Cauldron to intercept Clarion and Aleae.

My thoughts warred. I still wanted to defend Irakas, though she directed the golem. I wouldn’t hurt her. Couldn’t. I reached out to take the scepter.

A fierce spitting hiss came from behind me, and suddenly I was paralyzed. Arafin, that traitor! Didn’t she understand that she was going to get us all killed trying to hinder me?

One of the vampire spawn struck Irakas down. The golem was stopped, but at the cost of my ally. I struggled to throw off the spell as Irakas continued to bleed out at my feet.

Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a blur of matted fur, then a lone gnoll leapt into the middle of the melee. There were no living gnolls here—the golem had broken their siege against its advance—except Bale, disguised. He stopped Irakas’s bleeding with a touch and snatched up the scepter.

I threw my mind against Arafin’s paralyzing spell before Bale could figure out how to reactivate the golem. I failed to break free, but one of the vampire spawn grabbed him before he could retreat. Under the illusion it looked like it grabbed the gnoll by the scruff and yanked him back over Irakas’ body. I was about to watch my allies slaughter each other, and was unable to do anything to stop it.

And little did I know, around the corner, Clarion and Aleae had been stopped short by a demon.