The Slope Below Tresendar

Opening

From the rooftop, Zuktind could see all of it at once, and that was the trouble.

He had flown up to look — just to look — and the town gave up its shape below him in a single glance: Phandalin ringed by formations he had not known to fear until now, and to the south, spread across the open fields below Tresendar Manor, a body of cavalry drawn up in the grass. At least three houses were burning. The smoke stood up in thick straight columns because there was no wind to bend it, and it was the only thing in the whole valley that seemed to be moving slowly.

He had time for exactly one clean breath before the woman at the head of the cavalry lifted her face and found him.

She raised a horn to her lips and blew, and the sound went out across the fields and kept going — to formations three hundred feet away, four hundred, nearly six hundred at the far edges of the map — and every one of them turned toward the town. The whole field now knew that the dragonkin had come.

Below him, the party had a choice. They could slip down into Phandalin and learn what was happening there — what the burning was, who was inside, what the enemy wanted. Or they could go straight for the throat.

They went for the throat.

The Slope

Zuktind and Yeltsu spoke the words of Haste over themselves almost together, and the world stretched and quickened around them, and they threw themselves down the long slope toward the leader's group.

It was the wrong ground for it and they knew that even as they ran. Yeltsu was a hundred feet from the nearest rider; Zuktind, a hundred and twenty. Behind them the distances opened like a wound. Telno was three hundred feet back. Rathenfall and Lissandra were more than four hundred — and between them and the fight there was a four-man infantry squad closing on the road, angling to cut the road off entirely. Unless the two of them jumped the ridge — a forty-foot slope of loose earth — they would be walled off from the whole battle by men on foot.

The DM's caution hung in the air behind them, unspoken and already ignored. They ran anyway.

First Blood

Yeltsu reached the edge of his range, planted himself, and brought the sky down.

The Ice Storm fell in a churning grey column over the front of the cavalry, hail the size of fists, and when it cleared the two lead horses were simply dead — the leader's mount among them. Both riders went to the dirt with their animals. The half-orc woman rolled clear with twenty points of hail behind her; her companion took twice that and did not get up, left severely injured and prone in the frozen grass. Ice glazed the ground where the storm had struck, and the field itself turned treacherous, difficult footing for anyone who tried to cross it.

Yeltsu had not planned the second half of the blow. He had aimed the storm at riders and only afterward understood what he had truly done — killed the horses. From that moment it became doctrine. Ice, always ice, never fire, so as not to set the fields and the town alight; and always the horses first. He would spend the rest of the day dropping hailstorms on animals, and by the end only a single rider on the whole field would still have a mount beneath him.

Zuktind went to shoot and found the ground had turned the fight sideways. His enemies were prone now — and against the wide cone of a Conjure Barrage, men flat on their backs had the advantage, not the disadvantage he'd assumed. He raised his musket anyway, loaded a true bullet in place of the conjured one, and spoke the spell that split the single shot into many. The barrage swept both riders. The leader shrugged most of it aside; her companion did not. Rusty, with nothing yet in reach, put his head down and ran.

Behind them the far party did what it could with the distance it had been given. Rathenfall reached the lip of the ridge and went down it clean, a controlled slide down forty feet of slope on nothing but nerve and footing. Lissandra reached the same edge, drew invisibility over herself like a held breath, and slid down after him — and where a woman should have appeared at the bottom there was only a plume of dust. The guards nearest the base saw the dust rise and settle and could make no sense of it. She was there. She can't have just vanished. But she had, and she was already gone.

Turning Point — The Dragonkin They Came For

The half-orc came up off the ground furious, and she was looking straight at Zuktind.

A rider crossed the difficult ground at a trample and rode him down before he could clear the line; he took the hooves for eleven and went flat on his back, prone in front of the enemy and a very long way from anyone who could help him. He reached for the small certain thing he always reached for — the flash of insight that turned a near-miss into a save — and it was not there. He had uses in reserve; he knew he did. It did not answer. Whatever source fed that particular spark seemed, without warning or reason, to have run dry.

"That's stupid," Rathenfall said from far up the field, and meant it.

The DM only said that Zuktind would find out later.

And then the woman standing over him got a good look at his face, and everything about the fight changed shape. She did not draw to kill. She turned to her men and gave a different order entirely.

"Restrain him. He's the dragonkin we are looking for."

They came at him not to end him but to hold him. One rider uncoiled a rope and began casting it at him like a cowboy roping a calf, waiting for him to stand so he could drag him down. Two more crowded in with lances — and lances reach ten feet, far enough to strike a man on his back. Zuktind spoke Shield through gritted teeth, felt the AC snap up around him, and still one lance found the gap and drove home for seventeen. He was pinned in the open, being hunted alive, while somewhere behind him his friends were still trying to arrive.

The Perch

He got up and got out.

Half his hasted movement went just to standing; the rest he spent breaking contact, disengaging, and flying to the crown of a nearby tree — twenty feet up, above the reach of every lance on the field. He found the thickest of the high branches and settled onto it, and from there the fight became something he could survive: a shooting gallery with him at the top of it. He sighted down his musket at the leader and fired in four-shot volleys, taking the sharpshooter's penalty for the heavier hit, letting Yeltsu's bardic inspiration ride under the shots that needed it, spending Arcane Jolt to make the ones that landed bite deeper. When javelins came up at him he answered each with Shield until his leveled slots ran dry. The lasso came for him once more and tangled itself uselessly in the branches below his feet.

Below and around him, the pattern of the day set in.

Yeltsu kept killing horses. He was trampled a second time — two riders crossing over him at once, twenty points, flat on his back — and he stood up and did it again, another Ice Storm through the middle of them, more horses folding under the hail, a crossbow bolt for the leader in between. Time for horse skewers, he told himself, and dropped the sky on them one more time. The DM confirmed it afterward, plainly: the tactic had cut the enemy's mobility clean in half.

The far party paid, and paid, and never quite arrived. Rathenfall closed as fast as a man on foot could and still could not reach; his longest spell reached sixty feet and there was nothing inside sixty feet to touch. He wanted the cloak of the bat and could not have it — it was broad daylight, the smoke notwithstanding. Arrows found him instead, fourteen points and then fifteen, punching into his back as he ran. Telno, moving as the dice moved her, took six from the same volleys. When she finally raised her hands, a column of divine fire came roaring down out of the heavens — and the heavens, that day, gave almost nothing; the fire guttered against its targets for four points and no more. Rusty caught up to the downed riders at last, flung a force-wreathed claw for ten, and took a longsword across his plating for eighteen, armor cracking, the rest going through to the hurt beneath.

It was, all of it, a fight the party was winning in the small and losing in the large — every horse dead, most riders unhorsed and bleeding, the leader wounded and cornered behind her own tree line — and more than fifty enemies still standing somewhere out on that enormous map, unspent, waiting.

Closing

The half-orc looked at what her charge had become.

Her horses were dead — all of them but one. Her men were hurt, unhorsed, scattered. Two of them were stranded deep among the party's blades with no way back. And the dragonkin she had come to take was sitting in a tree, out of reach, killing her people at his leisure.

She reached for her horn again and set it to her lips and blew.

And those with the wit to hear it heard that this call was not the first call. It was a different note entirely — a signal for something else, sent to someone else, meaning something none of them yet knew.

The sound was still going out across the fields when the session ended.