>>5875065>>5875088Beneath the holy caroling, the sharp-yet-sweet whistling of the woodwind, (and, yes, that’s even your father’s lute, now) you hear a dull hum. It isn’t a musical sound, but the tuneless, terrible thrum of dozens, hundreds of wings beating at once—wings like insects’, more than n those of birds. The Unseelie do not come quietly, not this time, but in a great swarm. In fact, as the shadows rise from the forest and blot out the sun, you think you see their dreadfully-familiar shapes writhe and break apart, as if they have rejected singular, elf-like shapes in favour of each and every one of their number assuming their own sort of… swarm-shape, becoming a cloud of fluttering, thrumming moths or cicadas of some sort. Even in this amorphous cloud, though, you can make out the paired, reflective orbs of those empty, hungry eyes, fixated upon the stone and its light.
“MOONLIGHT!” comes their war-cry, their demand, and their mission-statement, as if from a million tiny throats.
The cloud descends, and you raise your own voice in response—in terror, in defiance. Your friends and family do likewise.
>20: Critical successThe wave of darkness comes crashing down like a tsunami from the sky, but the barrier holds—a sacred <Sanctuary> supported by all your voices and by yours and Clanirae’s aura. The priestess beside you flashes brightly upon impact, and flinches at the recoil; you feel it also, like the battering of hundreds of squirming hailstones. You shudder, but hold firm. Neither of you lower your voices or break from your holy chorus. Thus it is that even as the insectoid mass batters against the immaterial wall of the shrine’s radiance, they can draw no nearer—rather, they ricochet from it, or mass against it, bashing and battering angrily against it in their furious, but fruitless, siege.
Despite this success though, you feel a pang of fear from within. The cloud… Each of these little insects cannot be one of the unseelie, surely, but to form such a swarm there must still be dozens, maybe even a hundred of these antagonistic entities, these dark and unclean fairy-folk. Can you really keep this up all night? Your throat is already horse, and you have precious little energy to reinvigorate the barrier should your <Sanctuary> spell falter for even a moment.
