I came out of my glide and threw my tether around the leg of Eradicia and my own arm, my momentum causing me to swing in the wind as the great spirefiend bore me upward. A moment later Cuby collided with the tether just above me, gripping it with both hands. She started climbing first—both of us wanted to grab hold of the actual boss, as the tether was far more vulnerable.

Do you think that she knows we’re—

My question was interrupted as the boss let out another furious howl and a wave of dark energy emanated from its jaw. It was the strangest thing to see Cuby ahead of me, pulling her weight up all of the sudden so that she was perpendicular to the glowing cable before doing a little roll and shifting her grip—how this constituted dodging a wave of stunning power, I couldn’t say.

I had dealt with the attack another way: the other end of the tether was on my own arm, looped tightly around it, and so I hung limply in the air as Eradicia’s wingbeats buffeted me to and fro, Cuby climbing the tether hand-over-hand, making use of her inhuman Strength score. Finally she perched on the boss’s talons, hugging its legs, and then I followed, casting an Intuitive Fragmented Supercharged Purging Radiance in the time it took me to do so.

I grabbed Cuby’s hand and was hauled up onto Eradicia’s leg, then invested both Cuby and I with another Hardlight Tether.

It was then that we broke through the cloud, leaving behind the snow and fog to enter a clear, moonlit night, the stars bright above us and the mountain’s peak ahead. It was blanketed in snow, cracked and craggy like the upper slopes below it, but with one exception: at the summit was an ancient, ruined temple. It was half-standing, half-collapsed, a set of stone columns supporting a roof that crumbled and slanted toward the ground. The space around it was paved with stones, a square plateau at the top of Mount Mirrak whose corners were set with larger stone pillars—two of which were broken, and two of which bore statues of gnomes.

There were also four more wyverns circling in the skies around us: two patriarchs, and two ordinary spirefiends.

At some point, we’re going to deplete this mountain’s stock of spirefiends, I said, a pit forming in my stomach as I saw them. More monsters would complicate things. If Axxonni was anything to go by, a half-health boss was still a threat—the only reason I’d suggested we try fighting her now was because I felt she was slow enough that we could get away if we needed to.

Sure thing, said Cuby. There’s only four left, far as I can tell.

I had started casting a Supercharged Purging Radiance after I invested Cuby with a tether, and this I invested in her also. As I turned to start attacking the boss for real, I communicated with Cuby quickly, transmitting thoughts through the mind link.

Haroshi brought her down when he reflected her gigantic laser attack.

You know what a laser is? I thought your people were—

It doesn’t matter right now, the point is that while my crowd controls don’t work, enough damage might serve as an interrupt—damage tests are a perfectly sensible thing to build into a boss, otherwise a party of tanks and healers can chip them to death. I want us to save these strong purges for if something bad happens—say, if that beam is coming and we don’t have a defense, or if we get stuck in her jaws, or crushed under her body weight.

Makes sense, said Cuby.

And then my casting finished I loosed my Purging Radiance at Eradicia, dealing 455 damage and causing her to lose a single percentage point of health.

Fifty more ought to do it, I thought as the boss shrieked and kicked its legs. I reached around the leg and grabbed both of Cuby’s hands, and we stayed held on by hugging Eradicia’s leg like there was a tree between us. But we knew from the other spirefiends that the legs, if they weren’t grabbing you, were a major blind spot, and so he hung on as I cast an Intuitive Purging Radiance and tossed it at the boss for 478 damage—only this time, Eradicia’s health percentage didn’t move.

It’ll go faster once I start helping, said Cuby. But by my guess the boss had well over 50 000 Hit Points. Half health or not, we’d be here a while. And if it turned out that I couldn’t out-heal her damage, we’d have to bail.

I loosed a third spell, and for a moment I wondered if our leg-hugging strategy had essentially trivialized the fight—but then Eradicia roared and dark red flames spewed forth from her mouth and covered her body. Cuby and I agreed to take the damage, which dealt 200 to our Mana Shields and gave us a debuff:

Vilefire Immolation

You are burning for 68 damage a second. Healing you receive is reduced by half.

And this might have been bearable, except that the flames didn’t subside—the debuff, which had a 5 second duration, refreshed each second as Eradicia’s body burned.

Do we bail? Cuby asked.

Bail.

And each of us threw ourselves from her talon and started gliding toward the temple. My Mana Shield struggling against the flames, which burned me faster than it regenerated—but Cuby, who had her Saint’s Purity, was taking so little damage that her shield recharged through it.

You have the range to hit it from the ground? she asked.

I think so.

We kept our eyes on Eradicia and her other spirefiends as we descended. The boss was coming round to the platform in a slow circle, mouth still glowing with red energy, but her spirefiends had all started making a beeline for us as soon as we’d bailed. Cuby spoke:

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We gotta kill those, she said. If we’re gonna outlast her, we need healing. Their fire will give us too few chances for it.

She was right. We’d entirely neglected the anti-healing effect of the spirefiend’s poisonous fire until now, but only because I almost never healed: if we were going to down a boss with tens of thousands of Hit Points remaining, I needed heal windows.

We split in midair—Cuby flying for one of the smaller spirefiends, and me flying for one of the patriarchs. As Eradicia flew to the other side of the mountain, our targets spat fire at us, but my Mana Shield absorbed it in both cases—Cuby didn’t even take damage from the residual DoT—and dropped onto the backs of our enemies.

My first attack was to try and tether the patriarch’s wings together, winding the cord around the talons at the front of each, but the force that it could generate simply by flapping its wings was enough to break the cable almost instantly, and all I got for my efforts was a slight dip in altitude.

So I resorted to the method that I knew worked and started spamming Purging Radiance, but I only hit the spirefiend with two of these before it started to dive in an effort to throw me—I pitched forward on its back, wrapped both my hands around its neck, and cast an Intuitive Unnatural Terror. My cast finished and it pulled up out of its dive, beating its wings frantically so as to gain altitude as I cast Purging Radiance again.

Alatar!

I looked up just as another bolt of fire struck me from one of the other spirefiends—but this wasn’t why Cuby had called my name.

The sky had darkened, the stars no longer visible: Eradicia was on the other side of the peak, charging up her terrible beam ability.

Dive, I told her. I want to try something.

Cuby leapt from her 30% Hit Point spirefiend to glide to a ledge on our side of the mountain, covered from the beam, as I reached down and hugged the burning-hot neck of the patriarch below me, waiting….

The beam cut the air and I used my Moment of Solace, becoming invincible a split-second before a overwhelming wave of force and heat struck both me and the patriarch, which I’d guessed had 4000 Hit Points left. I watched them vanish a half-second at a time, counting—six half-ticks until the patriarch disintegrated beneath my hands. The beam continued, tracking me as I fell through the air, my sight entirely blocked by a wall of burning light until I fell beneath the cover of the mountain—and a split-second after my 5.6 second Moment of Solace ended, the beam stopped.

Six seconds, I told Cuby. And more than 8000 damage. If the mountain doesn’t tank it, I need a Supercharged Moment of Solace—which has a 40-second cooldown.

Gotcha, she said, sending me an image of herself as she leapt back up over the edge of the mountain to land on the paved stone plateau.

I still had some distance to glide until I could do the same—the beam had knocked the patriarch and I backward through the air—and so I got a full view of Eradicia as she swooped in for a landing.

I’ll tank, said Cuby. If it goes wrong, I can fly still. Kill the wyverns.

I wasn’t thrilled about this idea, but I also knew she was right: if I could be left to kill these spirefiends, I could take them out fast. Not only had Cuby been able to take every other spirefiend with ease, but her abilities made her more able to handle the stun and the flames.

I struck the side of the mountain, but instead of leaping up onto the plateau, I waited a moment for one of the spirefiends to draw in close and hit me with its breath attack—at which point I used Mighty Leap to jump onto its back. I didn’t wait for it to dive to cast a basic fear spell and start laying into it with Purging Radiance as it ascended, looking around for my other targets only to see with dismay that they had both gone after Cuby.

Eradicia had landed with such force that snow shook from the peaks, then breathed a massive swathe of fire at the center of the plateau, striking Cuby even as the matriarch reared up and beat both her wings to send a shockwave of air across the whole of the platform, creating a cloud of fire and throwing Cuby backward so that she rolled to a halt, Mana Shield broken and her body in flames, at the edge of the plateau.

Cuby stood and Eradicia’s mouth was once again wreathed in hellfire. The boss shrieked and spat her flames, and Cuby leapt into the first pool of fire as the side of the plateau she’d been standing on was also engulfed.

Standing in the fire, Cuby took minor damage as she ran full-tilt at the boss and struck out with her weapon. Eradicia recoiled, almost in offense more than anything, then snapped at Cuby with her jaws—but Cuby sprang into the air, doing a backflip and landing on the matriarch’s snout.

Then the other spirefiends arrived, and two bolts of flame sped toward Cuby, who chose to take them both and was so engulfed in flames that her body could barely be seen and her health was fast plummeting below 50%. Eradicia, unable to attack the player on her snout, threw her head back, levering Cuby straight into the air.

Then she unleashed her stunning howl, and Cuby seemed to twist midair to evade it, her second acrobatics. Eradicia simply opened her mouth, waiting to catch the sword saint as she fell—and Cuby loosed the Hardlight Tether I’d invested her with, tying it to one of the passing spirefiends and yanking it as hard as she could to change her trajectory, avoiding the jaws of death and swinging away under the spirefiend patriarch she’d lashed herself to.

I had finished killing my spirefiend when she’d leapt onto its snout, and I landed on one corner of the plateau that wasn’t engulfed in poisonous hellfire just as she flew away with the spirefiend—her health at 40% from the flames.

Burn your target, I said, starting to cast a Healing Light. I need room to give you a heal.

Cuby obliged by throwing her Supercharged Purging Radiance at the wyvern above her for a thousand damage, and my cast finished just in time for her to heal herself for 300. At her request, I invested her with another tether before casting another heal to bring her to full, but I never finished this spell—the matriarch let out another stunning roar and I had to use my Moment of Mastery to evade it, afraid of what might happen if I didn’t.

Sure enough, the next thing that Eradicia did was rear up and beat her wings to create a shockwave of air that would have thrown me from my place at the edge of the mountaintop. I used a Mighty Leap—not to clear the mountaintop, but to throw myself into the air in front of one the four pillars dotting the corners, the shockwave slamming me back into the stone column with incredible force before I fell to the ground in a heap, still in the game.

Eradicia snarled and beat her wings again, this time to give more force to a massive jump—the ground shook as she pushed off, clouds of stone debris following her talons as she leapt toward me and landed with a quaking smash right in front of me just as I managed to get to my feet.

And I had no Moment of Mastery or Moment of Solace to prevent what happened next—the matriarch snatched me up in her jaws.

Hot breath rushed by me on all sides as teeth bore against my Mana Shield. The very thing that we’d been trying to avoid had happened—and I had no escape.