>>5177988You draw back your hand, fingernails and bones coiling together and widening even as your fingertips detach from the rest of your hand, held only by a gradually-thinning strip of skin. It is… Well, suffice it to say that when Irinnile warned you that the process would not be painless, she was not deceiving you. You grit your teeth and blink tears from your eyes, but you endure without crying out—you were trained to endure pain worse than this. Still… Well, you might not want to do this again.
>16Perhaps it is the distraction of the pain, or the deformed remains of your hand with which you line up the throw, but the ‘dagger’ sails wide, hitting neither gryphon nor rider…
>2But the older Paladin is at least startled enough to rein his gryphon back, and the effort of dodging the dagger causes him to drop his crystal beacon. He seems to visible hold back a blasphemous curse as it clatters upon the ground… But the beacon does not shatter, and it yet glows.
>12The younger Paladin, meanwhile, is hacking away at the oozing, smoking afterbirth that is Brezzog’s reforming body. Wherever that presumably-blessed sword touches ectoplasm, the unshaped essence of the hellhound recoils or gives way and withers. The Paladin is making real progress…
>19Until, abruptly, he is not. So vainglorious was the younger human in his hacking and slashing into the heart of his foe that he failed to notice the bones and teeth forming in his periphery. Abruptly, the wave of mucous-like material solidifies into chitin-like calcified cartilage, and it comes crashing down in a great collapse. The paladin cries out in disgust and anger as much as in pain…
But when the temperature rises and you begin to smell burning hair and flesh, the pain takes precedence.
“Joffrey!” the older Paladin shouts.
He is too late—Sir Joffrey is gone, his body so much grist to manifest a hellhound. The beast Brezzog shies away from the dead man’s dropped weapon, even as it gnaws upon the burning wreckage of his body and the molten metal of his armour.
“Get the other one!” you command urgently…
But the damned hound fails to heed you, absorbed in its repast.
‘Strong,’ Irinnile notes, referring to the whole of Brezzog’s breed, ‘but dumb as a bag of dicks.’
