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Theodorus mutters under his breath as he scrawls another jagged passage in the pages of a leatherbound tome. The night air is gloriously clear atop the astronomy tower, and if the chill is slowly worming its way into his robes it is nothing another nip of firewine cannot handle.
High above, where even the mage's heightened senses cannot reach, a flock circles.
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Maegara casts a wary glance over her shoulder, marking the descent of her subordinate sisters. They are a long way from home, and much care and forethought has gone into their arrival.
She notes the sloppy disposition of her right-side wingmate. Only the sharpest fighters are recuited to Lady Lorelei's unit, but it takes years of experience to master the finer points of special operations. If the damnfool girl survives the mission she will be taught a painful lesson about the primacy of proper preparation.
Approaching their target, Maegara's enomotia peels off from the rest of the flock. At the head of the formation she begins to describe a tight circle to bleed altitude without excessive acceleration. From behind her and to the right comes a clinking noise that is deafening after hours of soundless flight. The glare she sends backwards would make a beholder balk.
Chastened, the offending harpy adjusts her harness. They are all traveling light, so as to enable the incredibly long journey over lands inhospitable to conventional forces.
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It is all for naught in the end. Far below, Theodorus runs through another hasty calculation in the margins of his journal. Cursing softly, he returns to the eyepiece of a finely-crafted telescope. The magnificent view affords him unprecedented opportunity for astronomical research, but the new observations are handily disproving months of painstaking work.
A faint clink reaches his keen ears, and he nearly dismisses it as an artifact of a long night in the absence of company. One does not long survive as an Enrothi stargazer without an abundance of caution, however.
He disengages from the eyepiece, a look of irritation wrinkling his cold-reddened face. A spell is uttered curtly, and a faint glow suffuses the astronomer's eyes. He scans the heavens, and with shaking hands confirms his secret fear.
"Nighon."
In a panic he grabs a gnarled length of wood from its resting place on a nearby parapet. The focus in the tip of the staff flares to life as arcane energy is channelled through it.
He punches a rune scrawled on the kiln-baked hide of an Earth elemental. The medium crumbles to dust, but the burning lines of the sigil remain as clear as the day they were inscribed, hovering motionless in the night air.
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Erinyes dips a shoulder and begins to yaw as she makes her approach run. Her sharp eyes pick out Maegara's dim silhouette up ahead as it wheels ever closer to the peak of the observation tower. One of the lead harpy's talons unfurls to signal the start of their attack. She signals in kind to the sisters following in her wake, and draws her soot-dulled blade in anticipation.
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Erinyes bleeds speed as she angles herself towards the platform at the tower's summit. A few seconds too late, she notices the glow of the alarm sigil and realizes the element of surprise has been lost. Before she is able to cry out to her sisters, a blinding flare of light reduces her torso to a cloud of ash and feathers.
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Theodorus scans the horizon for the next threat, and a blur of motion in his peripheral vision forces him to duck under a whirling ball of talons and hate. He throws up a hand, palm wreathed in glowing energy, to deflect a thin steel blade. Light flashes, blood sprays, and a finger tumbles to the marble underfoot. The head of his staff arcs into the bird-woman's neck and discharges a thunderous clap of energy, flattening her and snapping her spine.
He lifts the staff to track another dark silhouette across the horizon, before the bright green discharge highlights the doomed harpy. As her embers rain to the ground below Theodorus glances left and right. He closes his eyes and mumbles an incantation, drawing walls of invisible force around the edges of the tower. A foolish juve swoops down to attack and is crushed by her own weight and speed. The force-walls have the interesting side-effect of muffling the sound of the wind, and of the infiltrators' terse calls to one another.
Despite the sudden quiet, he doesn't hear a whisper of the silver feathers rustling behind him as he hurriedly stuffs his journals and loose parchment into an ornate satchel. It is the tingling of his mage-sense that finally warns him of his approaching doom.
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Maegara stalks the distracted mage triumphantly, suppressing her snort of disdain as a young sister slams into the his shields. Lady Lorelei will not be pleased with their losses, but the crucible of combat exists to burn off the impurities and temper the survivors into the firmest steel.
The man stuffs written materials into a messenger bag. This must be the intelligence we were sent to collect. The tip of her long, narrow tongue curls idly around one of her fangs as she contemplates the killing blow.
Suddenly she lunges forward, and her wicked blade is buried to the hilt in the man's thick robes. Immediately the warm glow at the tip of his staff is extinguished, but his eyes still blaze defiantly as he turns to face his assassin.
"Any last words, Bracadan scum?" the loathsome bird-woman jeers.
In reply Theodorus barks one final spell.
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Omnisophix rouses itself from a long slumber. An ember glow fills its darkened eye sockets and stone lips creak wide to reveal wicked obsidian fangs. Though it cannot see in the traditional sense, it is aware of its 3 brethren waking concurrently.
Its master is dead, and master had been very clear about what was to be done IF he was no longer alive. It steps down from its pedestal with a lightness and grace that belies its sturdy construction. It has a bag to secure.
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