In the course of an epic journey to equally epic conflicts with some of the most elite fighting forces imaginable, it is of course necessary to have conflict zones.
Such areas are replete with dramatic scenery, and fell foes that must be overcome on the road to uberness, little smelting trials to make you worthy of the fight at the end, won in the blood and deaths of your comrades and followers.
They were a goddamn pain and we did everything we could to make them as undramatic as freaking possible.
Naturally the Void Brothers had scouted out our pathway, so we knew which way to go. That didn't mean the way was easy, because this was basically a 9000 x 3000-mile little world, a quarter of a million years old or older, filled with nasty shit vomited up from the Felldeep, or twisted by the influence of both the Hags and Leng.
That didn't mean we avoided fights. On the contrary, we made sure to include at least one fight a day. Naming Karma didn't manufacture itself out of nowhere, and why waste any day you might get stronger? Every single individual was fully cognizant of how the wonderful baseline magic of Naming Karma and Renewals, of once a day Feats, Masteries, and Levels worked, the restrictions thereof, and how to make use of them. A day without Karma was one day lost on the road of apotheosis, and while that didn't matter as much to the longer-lived races, it left the humans champing at the bit to fight more.
Which was fine. After all, I liked to fight, too. It's just the whole army complained when Briggs, AA, and I did anything other than wipe out the really dangerous things. I was only allowed one Cleaving run to open up the enemy formation, and then my job was to sit aside and Warlord everyone while Tremble kept everyone healed, and Briggs and AA went on idle 'Oh my are they trying to spring a surprise? Splat!' duty, disposing of certain undesirables who would mess up the fun of those behind us.
Even the dragons, those elemental-breathing, flying, hexa-limbed engines of destruction, got in on the whining, once they saw how the three of us would steamroll anything that looked like a proper fight. With two riders each, the dragons were extremely confident of taking on just about anything, and watching us mulch down some terrifying opponents that looked like they might provide the dragons with a good tussle and an ego boost was something they were quick to get snarky about.
Naturally, when there was stuff up in the sky that only they and the knights in the air could do anything about, we didn't hear a peep about sharing. That was okay. They could only look on, depressed, when their enemies zipped into the Stillflight Fields of our continuous Interdiction and went plummeting to the ground. 20d6 ground-saying-hello damage and a few Spears to non-mushed parts later, and the various mutant avians, reptiles, insects, worms, polyps, drakes, dinos, humanoids, plants, swarms, elementals, jinns, undead, flowers, towers, shadows, Radiant Ones, canines, felines, bovines, ursines, rats, bats, and other twats that defied easy description went aaAAaaAA in disbelief at Reality insisting that no, a multi-ton brute with no wings and a poor mass-to-area ratio really could not fly, and King Gravity agreed from up there on his Throne of Interdiction.
The Nulls in our company scrupulously kept their smiles off their faces at such things. But still, everyone enjoyed watching the pageantry of swooping griffons and dragons speeding through the air with improbable agility, setting up one another's charges with ease and experience, Wrath flashing here and there, burning arrows flying out, and multi-ton engines of destruction smashing into other equally impossibly big fliers and doing a claw-claw-claw-claw-bite-wing-wing-tail flurry of ripping destruction and quickly disassociating key body parts.
Despite their egos, the dragons were also team players, and it was repeatedly pounded into them that they couldn't abuse the healing capacity of the group, in case we had to, oh, fight five times in one day, and didn't have time to heal up in between the scalefolk on the ground, the spellcasting Rimmer Cones, the swooping flock of monstrous bats, the charging raptor riders, and the avalanche elementals thundering down the side of the pass we were going through.
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"Sooooo... is everyone else smelling what I'm smelling?"
Everyone else pretty much flared their nostrils at the same time.
"Trap." "Trap." "Trap." "Trap." "Sacrifice." "Ambush." "Trap." "Enfilade." "They think we're stupid."...
I sniffed again. "Yep, smells like it. Shall we smirk?"
Smiles teased at the edges of lips as everyone looked over the situation ahead of us.
The canyon was over a mile across, going down into some howling gulf that might or might not have a bottom in this dimension. Certainly the winds coming up out of it smelled/felt/sounded/looked/tasted like something not exactly of the mortal plane, and the non-Forsaken indicated that there felt like something down there was looking up at them, and it was a mite bit eternally hungry-like.
There was a single long arch crossing that gulf, old rock shaped by unhuman hands, big enough for a wagon to cross, but bereft of anything sensible, like, oh, handrails... Gusts of roof-raising wind blew this way and that, and playing in the unholy winds were a whole lot of wind walkers, a-wailing and a-whooping in a-nticipation.
The dragons and griffons, having the best eyesight, pointed out a dozen aether-wendigos leading the worship services to something Man Didn't Want To Know in the howling winds. We waved to them...
The fort and small city behind us were mostly empty of life. The Leng natives and ghouls that had made up the city and the fort respectively had long since ceased to burn vivus, and a disconcertingly blue area of sky had opened above the city, with wan sunlight now filtering through the temporal-dimensional soup down upon us, no need for sunscreen.
Leng ghouls were powerful undead. We'd harvested enough heads for Undead Baneskulls for all the dwarves, gnomes, and Casters by now, with the Tokens going to the elves. When we ran into more of them, they'd swap who got what. Our rest period had been about burning a whole lot of goldweight from the belongings of the natives, and converting it into things that could kill them better.
...Fine, we plundered them thoroughly, just like respectable murderhobos should. Unfortunately, we couldn't trust most of the food, so it was clerical manna-with-spices and some Really Good Apples/Berries/Oranges once again.
The dragons had informed me that the moonbeast in charge of everything tasted like mushroom and chicken pie after I fixed it up for them, and they were looking forwards to more. Not having the I-can-eat-rocks-and-dewdrops-mwahahahaha physiology of a dragon, the rest of us demurred on the dish. More for them!
The constant susurrus of the winds, interspersed with expertly timed wails, howls, groans, and shrieks, would have had quite the deleterious effect on any normal troop. Alas, the combination of fear-immune Heavenbound, Aura of Courage Paladins, and Tremble not having to make fatigue checks for playing morale-boosting Courageous music meant the maddening, terrifying chorus of unholy paeans to forbidden powers was running into the wall of something like an extra +18 bonus to save against fear and horror, and everyone was pretty much ignoring it in favor of some rather transcendental elevator music.
Oh, and Minstrels/Bards can sub their Skill Checks for Perform skills against sonic effects to everyone who can hear their music, which means there's no automatic failure on a 1. Guess who had a base Song check of +34 before other modifiers, and just Took 10, making a no-roll average effort? Additionally, the Cantors and Bards among the dwarves and elves could assist if they so liked, for an additional +2 each, up to +6.
Let's see. Take 10, add 34, add 6, and then tack on 18 for fearlessness, Courage, Courageous, Warlord Bonus, Save buffs...
Hmm. With a 68, all the hordes of Hell could be sitting in front of us, and we'd be humming along to the elevator music, and were trying not to sway along to the melody.
Tremble, oh OHHHHHH oh tremble, we come...
"Confirm no flying through that mess?" I inquired.
"You'd need Windbound to cut through that," Errant promptly replied. "We'd be blown all over the place. The Walkers will rip apart any kind of aeromancy put into effect."
The dragons conferred with /Marktells and subtle movements of wings and muscles. "We could reach the other side, but we could not be certain of our course," big Corgun spoke for all of them, both proudly and admitting they didn't have the strength to overcome it all.
"Which is totally the idea. Likely there's a Blessing or Ritual that's formed to propitiate the wind walkers, probably having to do with sacrificing some slaves to them, in order to cross," Briggs noted. "We'll have to rope it across, the gusts are mostly from below, but there's some nasty crosswinds coming across, I'm betting?" The dragons and griffons confirmed it immediately, looking annoyed that they'd have to claw it across. No hooves, couldn't hoof it, hee...
"Oh noze, we shall have to sacrifice some of our own to cross the dire bridge to nowhere," I said, clasping my cheeks, and more than a few chuckles spread out behind me. "Might we, how horribly, be ambushed as we cross, roped together in single file, so vulnerable as we cross this ageless bridge to the other side, where yet more fell foes await us? I canzt not think of what to do, woe, oh woe is uz."
More of them chuckled.
"Okay, get the wings of the fliers bound tight so they don't get caught by the wind, and get the roping done. Let's make this as hilariously anti-climactic as possible, I trust everyone agrees?"
There was effusive and amused agreement.
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March march march, humming softly as the Odes of Heaven calmly fended off the subsonic, quasisonic, psionic, and sensionic waves of fear, horror, terror, despair, apathy, insanity, madness, craziness, mad enlightenment, disenchantment, bleakness, weakness, and overall eminently critic-worthy bad vibes coming from below.
A few criticisms promptly got made into anti-Aberrant specialized stanzas, as the music-makers took the opportunity to collaborate on something new and interesting. Hey, a +2-4 modifier in the future against Old One sonic effects could be useful to someone, why not?...
The smallest folk and elves were hanging grimly onto the Rockborn, who had low centers of gravity and Heavyfoot, and were in about as much danger of being blown off this bridge as walking boulders. The humans largely all had Heavyfoot to one degree or another, more than enough to secure themselves.
The dragons, once their wings were bound, were in no danger, their claws and mass letting them advance with sure-footed, powerful grace. The griffons had all gone lion claws, but their riders all had shared Heavyfoot up, or Wards flicked up to deflect the winds that could come from any direction.
March march march. Wail-howl-moan, look at them all gathering up. Why, there must be thousands of them. What were they saying in Aklo? Dire threats? Devoured souls offered up to which of the Old Ones? How horrible. Really must do something about their invitations to dinner and religious services, how did they expect to recruit new worshippers with such stuff?
March march march, we be a-moving and a-grooving, nobody paying attention to the winds that were definitely trying to shake us, effectively deaf to everything but the Elevator To Heaven music playing in our heads. It really seemed to be pissing off these things, which were anticipating a hearty meal of fear, dread, horror, terror, and other flavorful sesquipedalian synonyms (seriously, the phobias get VERY long) while making offerings to their foul and benighted master...
Hey, why weren't air-based worshippers offering screaming souls to something Up There, instead of Down There?
Everyone looked up at the same time, pursed their lips, and puzzled over that before glancing in ridicule at the thousands of wind walkers and their wendigo masters gathering around us.
Ah, right, non-Euclidean geometry, it is a thing with this set, the Valor dragoness Kumusa pointed out with just the right touch of levity.
Okay, we were all on the bridge, halfway, couldn't get away, and we were not-so-subtly pissing them off. They all did the moany-shrill howl-tornado rumble thing and exploded at us. Less than a hundred yards to reach us, moving pretty fast there, somehow all the winds blowing at us from every direction at the same time without crossing.
March-march-march. -Oh, fine, put your foot down.-
March.
The Stillflight from the spread-out Null Interdictions went off when they were about ten yards away. The equally spaced Casters released their Ward Walls to cover the entire length of the column from those diving from above, angled nicely to deflect certain falling entities off to the sides.
It was impressive seeing that solid wall of elemental spirits and doomed hunger-makers suddenly take a dive all together. The astonishment on their rather indistinct and wispy faces had to be seen to be believed, exaggerated as it was.