Post by Dead Greyhawk on Jan 21, 2007 22:18:46 GMT -5
The Company hikes back out onto the ledge and peers down its length. In the odd greenish light, the blood from the slain giant shows as a dark black stain, unmistakable against the ice. Past the boulder and the bloodstain, the ledge widens and then ends in another cave entrance. The cave is equally as wide as this one that held the giants. Otto is uncomfortable with their position. If the cave ahead leads into the giant stronghold, good, but if it does not, giants could trap them by coming up the ramp and pinning them on this part of the ledge. He sends Oaklock back to the ramp to watch for motion while he walks up to the cave mouth to try to find signs of transit.
The cave mouth shows the signs of many a giant footprint. Otto waves the others forward to him, and the Company hikes down into the icy tunnel. After thirty or so feet, the passageway splits to the left and right. Staying with their new approach to tunnels, they follow the right wall. The passage again goes only thirty feet forward before it splits again. The fork to the left ends after a mere fifty feet, so the Company again stays with their right hand plan. They walk carefully down the right fork, which slopes slightly downward. After turning a corner in the passage, they are confronted by a huge rune etched into the floor.
The rune fills the twenty foot wide corridor and is at least fifteen feet long. It seems to be written in a runic language similar to that found on Nosnra’s map, but the Company had needed an enchantment to read these runes before. Dell walks up to the rune, being careful not to touch it. “Warning...Death...Stop. Pretty clear what it means, eh?” says Dell. The others look at Dell quizzically. “What?” he says. “After running into all of these giants no one else started studying primitive ur-giantish as an entry into the common vernacular? Oh yes, I forget most of you aren’t as smart as I am.” He beams a smile at Winthrop and Oaklock.
The Company backs up to the first fork and continues along the left-hand passage. The passage ends in an ice cavern containing two giant guards. Both are on their feet, apparently having heard the Company through the din of the storm, but been uncertain as to what the noise signified. One of the giants turns to face the Company while the other turns to flee out a passage in the right wall of the cavern. Its effort to flee is for naught as the archers and Jasper focus their attentions on it. The giant falls to the ground, punctured and slashed from behind, and its partner soon joins it, gutted by Otto and Al.
The ice cavern is clearly a guard post, with several uncomfortable stools and a single bedroll occupying most of the room. The giants have large sacks tied to them, but they contain only odds and ends. The Company is quite frustrated by the total lack of coin found so far.
The only exit from the cavern is through the tunnel on the left, so the Company forms up and heads out that way. The tunnel quickly leads back outside, into the eerie green light as the sun has either set or is blotted by the thunderclouds ahead. The wind has picked up significantly and the snow now whips by in a blinding haze. The passage terminates in a wide ledge that branches off to the right. The Company carefully works their way along the wall of the crevasse, not wishing to get too close to the edge with the great wind whipping around them. Soon they find another cave entrance, and the Company takes it without even checking to see if any giant tracks mar the floor, simply to get out of the cold.
The cave entrance leads into a long tunnel that the Company hikes down. The tunnel eventually bends to the right, but before turning that corner, the thieves and Jasper all listen carefully, trying to hear the sounds of giantkind over the howling storm. No clear sounds are heard, but Dell and Jasper are fairly certain that some sort of repetitive, non-natural noise echoes down from around the corner.
The Company carefully comes around the corner to see another long corridor before them, but this one is different than the previous one. About fifty feet away, another corridor branches out to the left, and, at the junction of the two corridors, the corridor widens to almost thirty feet across. Additionally, about one hundred feet away, the corridor ends in an ice cave. Standing in the opening of the ice cave is a giant, his spear held loosely in one hand, idly tapping it against the side of passageway. As the Company rounds the corner, he shouts something in a guttural tongue and ducks out of the doorway, clearly having seen them.
The Company closes at a quick pace as jagged chunks of ice are thrown down the corridor at them from the waiting giants. The ice blocks are huge and devastating when they hit. The giants stand in the entryway of the cavern, bottling the Company up in the corridor and inflicting great wounds on the persons standing in front. With their long weapons and missile fire, the giants in the rear are able to strike at those in the front rank of the Company while a single giant holds the doorway.
The Company, with its combined firepower, wreaks havoc on the giant holding the doorway, but the ice giants have a strongly defendable position. The giant in the doorway, if it survives the Company’s attacks, rotates out of the doorway, allowing a compatriot to hold the doorway. Additionally, the giants set up a horrible racket, screaming and bellowing in rage and fear as they fight.
Winthrop, looking up the corridor to the left, sees a large table moved across the corridor mouth. He frowns. The giants at the front of the Company are punishing the warriors badly. A flank attack now would be very bad. Concentrating, he summons gouts of fire onto the table, blowing it back from the mouth of the corridor. Smiling at his success, his joy disintegrates as a barrage of boulders, not chunks of ice, but even larger, heavier rocks, flies past the now-destroyed table, through the corridor, and at the Company. Hugh, Oaklock, and Winthrop are sorely injured, while Pfiffwin is struck unconscious.
An odd mixture of giantkind joins the battle as the ice giant warriors are finally, slowly being overcome. Five shorter hill giants charge forward into battle on the flank of the Company, while a cluster of stone giants, their grey skin, black eyes, and impassive faces a stark contrast to the ranting and screaming ice giants, bombard the Company with huge rocks. Adrienne collapses under the rock barrage, barely able to breathe, while the hill giants strike at the other priests. The giants are clearly not used to this snowy environment, as they are all heavily clad in furs against the chill.
Dell snarls, whether at the giantkind or at Winthrop is unclear, and lets loose an enchantment, slowing the rock throwing stone giants. With the punishing rock bombardment delayed and the ice giants almost slain, Otto, Raven, and Diego turn their attention to the hill giants in among the Company. The hill giants appear to be fell fighters and swing their weapons in great arcs among the lightly clad of the Company. The compressed space works to the Company’s advantage, as the taller giants are more easily shot at by the archers, but also against them, as there is no way to avoid the giants with their long reach.
Oaklock sends a bolt of lightning through the stone giants as they heft another round of boulders. This staggers many of them, but only one drops to the ground. They repay the attention by bombarding him with rocks. Oaklock, now possessing better armor, is more able to withstand such a barrage, and grins through the blood streaking his face. Dell, uncharacteristically, adds a ball of fire to the fray, cooking the stone giants where they stand.
“I hear more coming!” shouts Al, who struggles to slay the last of the ice giants. The ice giant, the last of the four that blocked the doorway, seems intent on holding out until his reinforcements arrive. He stolidly stands in the doorway, parrying Al’s blows and conservatively responding, so as to not be pulled out of the protection of the doorway. Dell begins to struggle through the crowd over to the two of them.
As the hill giants begin to fall, three large, ebon-skinned, flame-haired giants charge down into the corridor. Unharmed and moving at speed, they seem to have held back in whatever space is behind the table. The ebon giants smash the Company with their great swords, carving wedges from the Company and the ice beyond them. Gitmo falls before them and Diego is sorely pressed. Unable to get clear of the ebon giants, who seem to intuit that the archers pose them a special threat, Diego is pressed by all three of them. Tossing his horsebow to the ground, he pulls out his bastardsword and begins hacking at the giants, trading grievous blows. The three giants win that contest, and Diego collapses to the ground, blood frothing from his lips.
The ebon giants are not immune to the Company’s efforts, and they begin to fall. They deal horrible wounds though, and Jasper succumbs as well. Dell, seeing the battle teetering, fires magical bolts into the chest of the ice giant, slaying it, and sends Al to go help the others with the ebon giants. Dell then hikes into the guard room beyond. Indeed, another passage leads out of the guard room, and the sound of giant footfalls echoes up from the passageway. Dell considers, and considers, and considers. Then he bows his head, furrows his brow, and pulls forth a scroll tied with red and yellow ribbons. Reading from the scroll, he erects a giant wall of greenish-blue fire down the passageway before him. The magical fire springs up from the ice, burning intensely hot. Screams of agony reach him from down the corridor as the ice giants stagger about, burning. The giants are robust though, and some try to stagger forward through the flames. Dell concentrates on the flames, willing them to burn hotter and longer. As the giants come into clear sight, huge screaming candles, a loud cracking sound reverberates through the ice around Dell. In one fluid, graceful motion, Dell turns and dives over the giant bodies, back towards the Company. A series of loud cracking noises follow him and blocks of ice bigger than a house shift within the glacier, collapsing the cavern behind him as he slides along the floor into the ice passageway.
The Company is just finishing off the last of the fiery giants when the ceiling gives way. Cedrus, who has avoided all combat, grabs Dell and drags him out of the way of the ice calving from the ceiling. In the surprise caused by the cave-in, Al, who is quite injured, hamstrings the last giant and then buries his axe in the giant’s forehead. With continuing cracking and popping sounds occurring all around them, and a sickly brownish-purple light emanating through the ice from where the natural green and magical red light interact, the Company gathers their fallen and limps up towards the giants’ room, hoping to avoid being crushed by the shifts in the glacier.
The ice cave that contained the mixture of giantkind is too small to have held them all for a long period of time. Only three huge piles of fur are present, and they are of a size to fit the ebon giants best. The cave feels slightly warmer than the other parts of the glacier, and water runs off along the edges of the room and out another passageway on the opposite side of the cavern. A large coal brazier, lit and shedding warmth, sits in the middle of the huge piles of fur. Whoever stayed here needed the heat to stay alive. Several wooden stools, a wooden bench, and a wooden table round out the accommodations.
The Company’s health is checked, and, miraculously, no one is dead, though many are bruised into unconsciousness. Once the light from Dell’s flames has died out, the cracking sounds ceased, and the fear of sudden burial faded, the fallen are brought back to consciousness, if not good health. They search, checking for valuable objects, among the dead giants still reachable in the corridor. Spread between the three ebon giants are several thousand giant-sized coins bearing an odd mint, that of an armored chest and an upraised sword. The hill giants each wore well-maintained and kept furs to keep warm. Their corpses are stripped, and the fur cloaks are dragged into the warmer air and wrapped around the most wounded.
Gitmo walks down the opposing passageway, following the flowing water. The passageway exits onto a ledge in the crevasse, but the ledge doesn’t appear to connect to anything else. The wind whips around like a cyclone in front of him, but the snow is surprisingly absent. It is almost as if the wind forms a wall at the end of the rift, spinning the snow out of the airstream, against the walls. Visible perhaps sixty feet away below is a large stone dome, covered in ice and snow, looming up out of the crevasse floor. The dome seems to emanate steam or smoke from an entrance at its base. Adjacent to it, perhaps eighty feet away, is a large hole surrounded by smooth snow. Across the rift, at almost the same height and location as this ledge, is another free-standing ledge with a cave entrance. Nothing and no one stand on the ledge. Seeing no threat here, he returns to the others.
Raven has set up a guard back at the corner of the long corridor, with those that have clear ears and sharp hearing assigned there. He hopes to get a short reprieve to allow the priests to rest and then pray for more healing.
About two hours pass with the Company huddled around the coal brazier trying to stay warm in their sweat and blood-soaked clothes before Jasper returns to them. He has heard the sound of footsteps in the passageway beyond the corner. The Company forms up and heads out to see what Jasper heard. Otto crawls around the corner and stares at the ground, spotting a large, barefoot, ogrish footprint in the snow. Frowning, he wriggles back. “We’ve got company,” he mutters.
The Company advances up to the mouth of the cave and peers about. Loud voices in ogrish yell from the left hand side and then boulders and chunks of ice fall among the Company. Giants must be throwing at them from across the glacial rift! Searching about for the ogres, the Company sees a group of them in the adjacent cave mouth, blocking access from the ledge and spotting for the giants, calling loudly across the rift when the rocks and ice fly astray. The Company runs up to engage them.
The Company is in a bad spot, exposed on a slippery ice ledge with rocks and hunks of ice flying in amidst them. The ogres, like the ice giant below, are content to just try to hold the Company exposed to the elements and the bombardment, and quickly rotate those ogres facing the Company. Worse, two hill giants, both clad in armor bearing the sign found on some of the giant-sized coinage, the uprooted tree, attack the rear of the Company, having hidden further along on the ledge.
Oaklock grabs Winthrop and shouts at him, “On three, we send fire across the rift!” Winthrop nods, and the two of them count loudly and then bull forward amid the flying boulders. Standing fully exposed on the icy ledge, they summon balls of fire and send them blindly across the rift, towards where the boulders must be coming. Suddenly, the bombardment stops. No more boulders are thrown.
Otto, Diego, and Jasper hurry back along the ledge to deal with the two hill giants pounding on the priests. Diego slips and slides as he staggers across the ledge, and one of the hill giants crushes him with a great mace, knocking him prone into the icy wall. The other hill giant drops his greatsword and reaches with outstretched hands to grab hold of Otto. Chortling and screaming something at Otto in giantish, the hill giant lobs Otto up into the air and out into the rift. Otto squirms in the hill giant’s grip trying to grab hold of the hill giant or the ledge or something, but fails. With a cry, he sails into the storm, plummeting from sight.
Jasper stands alone before the two hill giants. With a spin and a thrust, he strikes out with his halberd, grievously wounding one of them, but the hill giants are not so easily dissuaded. They smite Jasper with mace and newly picked-up greatsword, crushing him to death. Raven yells in anger and slides across the ice, shooting as he gains his footing. The hill giants, gloating over the deaths of two or three of the Company, are taken unawares by Raven and die, impaled.
The last of the ogres falls to Al’s axe, and the Company has held the ledge. They are in dire straights though. Everyone is wounded, some even unconscious. Otto has been has tossed to his demise, though his ring should keep him alive if his corpse can be found. Jasper has been slain. The Company drag their fallen back to the fiery giants’ room and begin to plan anew.
The cave mouth shows the signs of many a giant footprint. Otto waves the others forward to him, and the Company hikes down into the icy tunnel. After thirty or so feet, the passageway splits to the left and right. Staying with their new approach to tunnels, they follow the right wall. The passage again goes only thirty feet forward before it splits again. The fork to the left ends after a mere fifty feet, so the Company again stays with their right hand plan. They walk carefully down the right fork, which slopes slightly downward. After turning a corner in the passage, they are confronted by a huge rune etched into the floor.
The rune fills the twenty foot wide corridor and is at least fifteen feet long. It seems to be written in a runic language similar to that found on Nosnra’s map, but the Company had needed an enchantment to read these runes before. Dell walks up to the rune, being careful not to touch it. “Warning...Death...Stop. Pretty clear what it means, eh?” says Dell. The others look at Dell quizzically. “What?” he says. “After running into all of these giants no one else started studying primitive ur-giantish as an entry into the common vernacular? Oh yes, I forget most of you aren’t as smart as I am.” He beams a smile at Winthrop and Oaklock.
The Company backs up to the first fork and continues along the left-hand passage. The passage ends in an ice cavern containing two giant guards. Both are on their feet, apparently having heard the Company through the din of the storm, but been uncertain as to what the noise signified. One of the giants turns to face the Company while the other turns to flee out a passage in the right wall of the cavern. Its effort to flee is for naught as the archers and Jasper focus their attentions on it. The giant falls to the ground, punctured and slashed from behind, and its partner soon joins it, gutted by Otto and Al.
The ice cavern is clearly a guard post, with several uncomfortable stools and a single bedroll occupying most of the room. The giants have large sacks tied to them, but they contain only odds and ends. The Company is quite frustrated by the total lack of coin found so far.
The only exit from the cavern is through the tunnel on the left, so the Company forms up and heads out that way. The tunnel quickly leads back outside, into the eerie green light as the sun has either set or is blotted by the thunderclouds ahead. The wind has picked up significantly and the snow now whips by in a blinding haze. The passage terminates in a wide ledge that branches off to the right. The Company carefully works their way along the wall of the crevasse, not wishing to get too close to the edge with the great wind whipping around them. Soon they find another cave entrance, and the Company takes it without even checking to see if any giant tracks mar the floor, simply to get out of the cold.
The cave entrance leads into a long tunnel that the Company hikes down. The tunnel eventually bends to the right, but before turning that corner, the thieves and Jasper all listen carefully, trying to hear the sounds of giantkind over the howling storm. No clear sounds are heard, but Dell and Jasper are fairly certain that some sort of repetitive, non-natural noise echoes down from around the corner.
The Company carefully comes around the corner to see another long corridor before them, but this one is different than the previous one. About fifty feet away, another corridor branches out to the left, and, at the junction of the two corridors, the corridor widens to almost thirty feet across. Additionally, about one hundred feet away, the corridor ends in an ice cave. Standing in the opening of the ice cave is a giant, his spear held loosely in one hand, idly tapping it against the side of passageway. As the Company rounds the corner, he shouts something in a guttural tongue and ducks out of the doorway, clearly having seen them.
The Company closes at a quick pace as jagged chunks of ice are thrown down the corridor at them from the waiting giants. The ice blocks are huge and devastating when they hit. The giants stand in the entryway of the cavern, bottling the Company up in the corridor and inflicting great wounds on the persons standing in front. With their long weapons and missile fire, the giants in the rear are able to strike at those in the front rank of the Company while a single giant holds the doorway.
The Company, with its combined firepower, wreaks havoc on the giant holding the doorway, but the ice giants have a strongly defendable position. The giant in the doorway, if it survives the Company’s attacks, rotates out of the doorway, allowing a compatriot to hold the doorway. Additionally, the giants set up a horrible racket, screaming and bellowing in rage and fear as they fight.
Winthrop, looking up the corridor to the left, sees a large table moved across the corridor mouth. He frowns. The giants at the front of the Company are punishing the warriors badly. A flank attack now would be very bad. Concentrating, he summons gouts of fire onto the table, blowing it back from the mouth of the corridor. Smiling at his success, his joy disintegrates as a barrage of boulders, not chunks of ice, but even larger, heavier rocks, flies past the now-destroyed table, through the corridor, and at the Company. Hugh, Oaklock, and Winthrop are sorely injured, while Pfiffwin is struck unconscious.
An odd mixture of giantkind joins the battle as the ice giant warriors are finally, slowly being overcome. Five shorter hill giants charge forward into battle on the flank of the Company, while a cluster of stone giants, their grey skin, black eyes, and impassive faces a stark contrast to the ranting and screaming ice giants, bombard the Company with huge rocks. Adrienne collapses under the rock barrage, barely able to breathe, while the hill giants strike at the other priests. The giants are clearly not used to this snowy environment, as they are all heavily clad in furs against the chill.
Dell snarls, whether at the giantkind or at Winthrop is unclear, and lets loose an enchantment, slowing the rock throwing stone giants. With the punishing rock bombardment delayed and the ice giants almost slain, Otto, Raven, and Diego turn their attention to the hill giants in among the Company. The hill giants appear to be fell fighters and swing their weapons in great arcs among the lightly clad of the Company. The compressed space works to the Company’s advantage, as the taller giants are more easily shot at by the archers, but also against them, as there is no way to avoid the giants with their long reach.
Oaklock sends a bolt of lightning through the stone giants as they heft another round of boulders. This staggers many of them, but only one drops to the ground. They repay the attention by bombarding him with rocks. Oaklock, now possessing better armor, is more able to withstand such a barrage, and grins through the blood streaking his face. Dell, uncharacteristically, adds a ball of fire to the fray, cooking the stone giants where they stand.
“I hear more coming!” shouts Al, who struggles to slay the last of the ice giants. The ice giant, the last of the four that blocked the doorway, seems intent on holding out until his reinforcements arrive. He stolidly stands in the doorway, parrying Al’s blows and conservatively responding, so as to not be pulled out of the protection of the doorway. Dell begins to struggle through the crowd over to the two of them.
As the hill giants begin to fall, three large, ebon-skinned, flame-haired giants charge down into the corridor. Unharmed and moving at speed, they seem to have held back in whatever space is behind the table. The ebon giants smash the Company with their great swords, carving wedges from the Company and the ice beyond them. Gitmo falls before them and Diego is sorely pressed. Unable to get clear of the ebon giants, who seem to intuit that the archers pose them a special threat, Diego is pressed by all three of them. Tossing his horsebow to the ground, he pulls out his bastardsword and begins hacking at the giants, trading grievous blows. The three giants win that contest, and Diego collapses to the ground, blood frothing from his lips.
The ebon giants are not immune to the Company’s efforts, and they begin to fall. They deal horrible wounds though, and Jasper succumbs as well. Dell, seeing the battle teetering, fires magical bolts into the chest of the ice giant, slaying it, and sends Al to go help the others with the ebon giants. Dell then hikes into the guard room beyond. Indeed, another passage leads out of the guard room, and the sound of giant footfalls echoes up from the passageway. Dell considers, and considers, and considers. Then he bows his head, furrows his brow, and pulls forth a scroll tied with red and yellow ribbons. Reading from the scroll, he erects a giant wall of greenish-blue fire down the passageway before him. The magical fire springs up from the ice, burning intensely hot. Screams of agony reach him from down the corridor as the ice giants stagger about, burning. The giants are robust though, and some try to stagger forward through the flames. Dell concentrates on the flames, willing them to burn hotter and longer. As the giants come into clear sight, huge screaming candles, a loud cracking sound reverberates through the ice around Dell. In one fluid, graceful motion, Dell turns and dives over the giant bodies, back towards the Company. A series of loud cracking noises follow him and blocks of ice bigger than a house shift within the glacier, collapsing the cavern behind him as he slides along the floor into the ice passageway.
The Company is just finishing off the last of the fiery giants when the ceiling gives way. Cedrus, who has avoided all combat, grabs Dell and drags him out of the way of the ice calving from the ceiling. In the surprise caused by the cave-in, Al, who is quite injured, hamstrings the last giant and then buries his axe in the giant’s forehead. With continuing cracking and popping sounds occurring all around them, and a sickly brownish-purple light emanating through the ice from where the natural green and magical red light interact, the Company gathers their fallen and limps up towards the giants’ room, hoping to avoid being crushed by the shifts in the glacier.
The ice cave that contained the mixture of giantkind is too small to have held them all for a long period of time. Only three huge piles of fur are present, and they are of a size to fit the ebon giants best. The cave feels slightly warmer than the other parts of the glacier, and water runs off along the edges of the room and out another passageway on the opposite side of the cavern. A large coal brazier, lit and shedding warmth, sits in the middle of the huge piles of fur. Whoever stayed here needed the heat to stay alive. Several wooden stools, a wooden bench, and a wooden table round out the accommodations.
The Company’s health is checked, and, miraculously, no one is dead, though many are bruised into unconsciousness. Once the light from Dell’s flames has died out, the cracking sounds ceased, and the fear of sudden burial faded, the fallen are brought back to consciousness, if not good health. They search, checking for valuable objects, among the dead giants still reachable in the corridor. Spread between the three ebon giants are several thousand giant-sized coins bearing an odd mint, that of an armored chest and an upraised sword. The hill giants each wore well-maintained and kept furs to keep warm. Their corpses are stripped, and the fur cloaks are dragged into the warmer air and wrapped around the most wounded.
Gitmo walks down the opposing passageway, following the flowing water. The passageway exits onto a ledge in the crevasse, but the ledge doesn’t appear to connect to anything else. The wind whips around like a cyclone in front of him, but the snow is surprisingly absent. It is almost as if the wind forms a wall at the end of the rift, spinning the snow out of the airstream, against the walls. Visible perhaps sixty feet away below is a large stone dome, covered in ice and snow, looming up out of the crevasse floor. The dome seems to emanate steam or smoke from an entrance at its base. Adjacent to it, perhaps eighty feet away, is a large hole surrounded by smooth snow. Across the rift, at almost the same height and location as this ledge, is another free-standing ledge with a cave entrance. Nothing and no one stand on the ledge. Seeing no threat here, he returns to the others.
Raven has set up a guard back at the corner of the long corridor, with those that have clear ears and sharp hearing assigned there. He hopes to get a short reprieve to allow the priests to rest and then pray for more healing.
About two hours pass with the Company huddled around the coal brazier trying to stay warm in their sweat and blood-soaked clothes before Jasper returns to them. He has heard the sound of footsteps in the passageway beyond the corner. The Company forms up and heads out to see what Jasper heard. Otto crawls around the corner and stares at the ground, spotting a large, barefoot, ogrish footprint in the snow. Frowning, he wriggles back. “We’ve got company,” he mutters.
The Company advances up to the mouth of the cave and peers about. Loud voices in ogrish yell from the left hand side and then boulders and chunks of ice fall among the Company. Giants must be throwing at them from across the glacial rift! Searching about for the ogres, the Company sees a group of them in the adjacent cave mouth, blocking access from the ledge and spotting for the giants, calling loudly across the rift when the rocks and ice fly astray. The Company runs up to engage them.
The Company is in a bad spot, exposed on a slippery ice ledge with rocks and hunks of ice flying in amidst them. The ogres, like the ice giant below, are content to just try to hold the Company exposed to the elements and the bombardment, and quickly rotate those ogres facing the Company. Worse, two hill giants, both clad in armor bearing the sign found on some of the giant-sized coinage, the uprooted tree, attack the rear of the Company, having hidden further along on the ledge.
Oaklock grabs Winthrop and shouts at him, “On three, we send fire across the rift!” Winthrop nods, and the two of them count loudly and then bull forward amid the flying boulders. Standing fully exposed on the icy ledge, they summon balls of fire and send them blindly across the rift, towards where the boulders must be coming. Suddenly, the bombardment stops. No more boulders are thrown.
Otto, Diego, and Jasper hurry back along the ledge to deal with the two hill giants pounding on the priests. Diego slips and slides as he staggers across the ledge, and one of the hill giants crushes him with a great mace, knocking him prone into the icy wall. The other hill giant drops his greatsword and reaches with outstretched hands to grab hold of Otto. Chortling and screaming something at Otto in giantish, the hill giant lobs Otto up into the air and out into the rift. Otto squirms in the hill giant’s grip trying to grab hold of the hill giant or the ledge or something, but fails. With a cry, he sails into the storm, plummeting from sight.
Jasper stands alone before the two hill giants. With a spin and a thrust, he strikes out with his halberd, grievously wounding one of them, but the hill giants are not so easily dissuaded. They smite Jasper with mace and newly picked-up greatsword, crushing him to death. Raven yells in anger and slides across the ice, shooting as he gains his footing. The hill giants, gloating over the deaths of two or three of the Company, are taken unawares by Raven and die, impaled.
The last of the ogres falls to Al’s axe, and the Company has held the ledge. They are in dire straights though. Everyone is wounded, some even unconscious. Otto has been has tossed to his demise, though his ring should keep him alive if his corpse can be found. Jasper has been slain. The Company drag their fallen back to the fiery giants’ room and begin to plan anew.
