BECMI Chapter 274 – Dragonflights, Too
The air was stark and cold and clear, extremely windy and rarefied up at over thirty thousand feet. Not many things aside from air Elementals and some Fey, maybe a wendigo, dared the atmosphere up here, even dragons finding it too high most of the time for any comfort.
The cold meant nothing to me, I shared my Bloodline immunity with Duum, and Primus took care of winds and air pressure with Elemental Command. It also instantly cloaked us in Invisibility so we wouldn’t be spotted from a distance, although I doubted any of the dragons had the spell running as yet.
Dumm slowly banked in a circle, his long hairy ears up, giving both of us a full view out to the horizon, now covered with rumbling, sparking storm clouds in the early fall. Messing with the weather at this time of year could be bad news, causing a cascade of foul weather…
-I need a Divination run on whether this weather magic is going to cause a Wolf Winter,- I /sent into Markspace. -If so, we need to harvest early to salvage what we can, and start spending magic to reduce the incoming effect on Eismoor.-
I received confirmations back from a couple of the Ur-clerics, who got to work on that. I had the feeling this was a multi-pronged attack, and my thoughts headed northwards.
Even a casual investigation into the history of the area indicated that the frost giants in Joklhjem would swarm over the frozen seas and coming raiding south during a Wolf Winter.
Gulguz was also their god Tyrm. We were not friends with Gulguz, although the fact this was on the First Shore meant this variant of Him likely didn’t even know of the animosity.
I did, however, have a very clear record of the kind of shit He’d been pulling off for the last four thousand years here.
I noted Duum’s very flexible ears suddenly swivel in one direction and lock on.
-They are using the low notes, Mistress,- he /said eagerly, leveling off and shooting off in that direction with all speed. -They ride with the thunder like murmurs of the wind. Unless you know what to listen for, they would just cause some unease, like something is looking at you from the sky, but you don’t know why.-
He fed me the pattern of sounds, below my range of hearing. I did know draconic, of course, and the voices of dragons could carry for miles.
Basically, it was a whole bunches of variants of “Here”, “I’m here”, “Present”, “Following” and other positional indicators.
Duum had no problem triangulating any of them, as they were basically providing the echolocation for him. It wasn’t too precise, but about five miles thataway, and sweeping over the Last Range even now, the echoes off the mountains below also obvious in the rolls of thunder and bouncing voices.
I fed all that information back into the Markspace, especially as the different ‘voices’ added up quite quickly.
Yeah, about four hundred dragons sweeping up from the southwest flank to surprise us.
Briggs swore, Sama laughed, and the Dragonbane Fleet’s second Squadron promptly veered off to intercept.
They were moving about sixty mph. The dragons would be on top of some of our southern settlements within the hour.
Dread hummed in my hand. Tiny vestiges of Immortal power, as if an Immortal was Casting without using Immortal Power to freely emulate spells, just to do so as a mortal, were present in the storm cloud.
If the Pearl Dragon wasn’t with them, she was at least helping them along.
Well, we were moving considerably faster than sixty mph, especially once I whipped up a tailwind to drive us along and add its speed to ours. Duum was shooting across the sky at over three hundred mph at the moment, Elemental Command making sure nothing crystallized in our wake and formed an arrow following us.
The spread of dragons became ever clearer as we spread closer, the majority of them within a couple hundred yards of other dragons, navigating by terrain echoes and keeping their positions constant from one another.
They should have been triggering all kinds of lightning reactions from the stormclouds, but seemed to be universally clad in Lightning Resistance to render them effectively inert and not targets for natural conduction, while what were probably scattered Blue dragons were actually attracting the lightning and enjoying the thunderstrokes that arced back and forth between different parts of the cloud, illuminating the fog-like depths of the heavy clouds with blasts of shadowed illumination refracted through suspended water droplets with managed regularity.
Cirru would have enjoyed the show and feeling of power, but we did not use her in any dragons on dragons action, as a show of respect and honor to her. We would not use her to fight against her kind, especially a dragon king, so she was back at Innspot, watching all this unfold with a clear level of schadenfreude about what was going to happen here.
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If they attacked Innspot directly, where her hoard was located, that was a different story, but I had spent a lot of magic making sure Innspot was VERY hard to find.
-How are you planning on playing this, Edge?- Sama /asked me coolly, knowing I was not the kind to just sit by and watch stuff happen.
-I have an hour. Do you know how many Call Lightnings I could Cast and evoke in an hour?- I /replied back humorlessly. With Zealous Holy buffering and Spell Potency to make it very hard for them to Save against the effects, too… and changing the damage type to Primal Holy to get around lightning immunity, if not Lightning Resistance!
I had already Cast a Mistsight, and the clouds faded away into a transparent misty overlay that did not impede my vision in the slightest. Naturally the spell was shared with Duum, who was my Familiar.
Yep, that was a whole lot of dragons down there.
A bit over two hundred smaller, younger dragons; over a hundred adult larger dragons, and about fifty of the elders of the clan. There were less than twoscore gem dragons, mostly Ambers below elder size, the older ones likely chased off by the Reds at Charred-Eye’s direction, not wanting the competition in his territory, especially with his own bloodline. Other than that, Greens were the least common, followed by Blacks, then Blues. Whites were the most common, outnumbering any two of the other colors combined, at all age levels, but were also the smallest and technically the least dangerous, if the most feral and savage and happy to participate.
Charred-Eye was visible in the middle of the group, his size dominating every other dragon, including the other Red wyrms. His occasional bellow indicating his position was strong and deep, and the entire group was moving at his direction as they swooped through the clouds.
Without much effort, Duum slipped in a thousand feet above them. The dragons were spread out over a couple square miles, roughly two layers of them, with the Blues evenly spaced to attract the occasional crackling bolt of lightning that arced through the clouds and hit no other dragons here.
Well, time to change that.
Call Lightning was one of the very best damage spells over time. It required you to be out of doors, clouds to be in the sky, took several rounds to Cast, and lasted for ten minutes per Caster Level. Once every ten minutes, you could call down one bolt of Lightning for a d6/Caster Level in damage, maximum 20d6, with a range of 360 horizontal yards from the Caster.
But that got a wee bit wonky when you were inside a cloud, or between a cloud and the ground. Effectively, I could designate where the bolt started, where it stopped, AND I could target anything in between those two points.
If I was good, and if they lined up with just a bit of play between them, that meant I could potentially hit four targets by choice, more if I could get three in a rough line. I could literally pull from the cloud a mile away if I liked, and the lightning would discharge through everything in its path on the way to my designated targets, before petering out into the cloud itself.
The Shape Spell Meta meant I didn’t need a perfectly straight line, either, and if I wanted to spend the Valences for Paired strokes at different dragons, well, I totally could.
Now, any dragon of Adult size or larger had excellent saving throws/resistance to magic, saving on a 2+ out of d20. However, 5d6 of Holiness, +5 Spell Potency, and +2 for a Baneskull was a swift -12 to that save, instantly popping it to a 14+, a Raise of two Valences from a III to a V increased that by +2 more, and pre-Casting an Empradweomer charged up each spell and made certain all damage dice were at maximum, i.e. 120 points per Called bolt, plus Kicker bonuses, and, oh, about +5 per die, for actually 220+ Kickers.
From 95% save chance to 25% chance was a huge swing, and it was death to fail the save. Also, the damage was Holy Primal, and so the Blues were not immune to it.
Six spells, Paired, gave me 72 Thunderbolts an hour, with from two to four targets each time.
I got to work.
My first targets were the Blues who were effectively acting as Lightning Rods for the entire attack force.
I reached down into the static charge of the thundercloud, which was plenty happy to respond to some very pronounced Halcyon magic. Duum was on high alert for Immortal shenanigans, as was Dread, as I Called out my first set of Thunderbolts.
Start them there, next to that Blue wyrm a half-mile away. Arc them out to four targets within my targetable sphere below me—two reds, a white, and a green—making it look like the Bolt was forking. Then converge them on another Blue elder a quarter-mile in that direction, and let it dissipate back into the cloud.
I also had to change the sound, or the clarion bell of the Holy magic would have really let them know something was up. As it was, the addition of Holy power to it meant the dazzle from it was truly impressive, but the only ones who actually saw that Thunderbolt itself twisted like a black vine inside a seething bright shell of voltage, sparks spraying off a rose stalk twining through the air for nearly a mile of length, black roots on the one side and exploding into a rather crimson-hued flower on the other side as the Paired bolts dissipated… not that any of the dragons could see the form of it through the refracting clouds around them.
The red sure did make them sit up and pay attention, as did the dying screams of four dragons suddenly plummeting out of the sky.
I noted their locations in the Marktell for retrieval and extraction, and Hanvol expeditiously sent a couple Butcher Teams out immediately. Waste not, want not.
The dragons didn’t know what had just happened, but the death screams and flash of red were enough to indicate they were under attack somehow, somewhen. They started clustering up instinctively, following one another’s voices to do so, and some even indicated they’d be slipping below the clouds to find their enemies.
They didn’t have actual sonar, and none of them had Mistsight. Duum smoothly shifted position, keeping a wary eye out in case of some attacker who could tell what was going on, and a minute later, the second Pair of Thunderbolts went out, this time targeting older Reds, who did NOT appreciate the attention.
At least they didn’t if the screams of dying agony they gave voice to when the spells coursed through them were any indication.