Aelar account:
Aelar followed his companions towards the entrance of the final hall. Time was pressing upon them to find that human wizard as soon as possible.
The devil that he was threatening to free in our dimension was undoubtedly quite powerful and although Aelar's brother and sisters in arms where fearsome, he was not sure if the group would be a match for this kind of hellish conjuration...
Especially in the state of exhaustion that the mutiple battles with the minions of Gimbolge (and eventually himself) had brought upon them, the group was now quite close to the end of its tether.
A few steps later, when he started to distinguish a big mechanical contraption at the center of the room, his heart sank. Aelar really hated these metal montruosities: Full of spikes and tortured shapes, rusty and noisy... the polar opposite of the wind in the elegant branches of a giant tree when you have a nap on its canopy. Only dwarves could only create these aberrations... no surprises here...
His gaze followed the long chains coming from a hoist in the ceiling and were attached to a crank on the wall on one side, and split into four to link the corners of a stone slab on the ground, on the other side of the hoist.
Around the slab, some ceremonial candles were lit up and radiated with an ominous glow.
"Candles!... Awww this is so romantic!" Aelar joked, just for himself as it was not really a good time for public displays of sarcasm.
It didn't take an arch-mage to guess that the slab could be raised and would irrevocably open up a pit towards the very creature they were trying to prevent entering their realm.
Aelar tightened the grip on the rope of his bow and let the hunter's spirit take over as his first job will be without doubt to disable whoever would attempt to operate that crank.
Sure enough, a few feet away from the crank, in the opposite corner of the room, a human in a long robe was looking at them. And like them, he was gearing up for the final confrontation.
Messoria, Andraste and Roarzac(?) were about to burst into the room when a quatuor of gobelins jumped from the ceiling beams above us, and tried to surprise our elite fighters to not much avail.
Nevertheless that annoying diversion bought the wizard enough time to summon a huge bear out of nowhere.
The game suddenly was changing: Instead of targeting the wizard or raining arrows on these vicious little goblins, Aelar now had to stop that bear from coming to contact with the group or they would never prevent the wizard from pestering them and eventually activating the mechanism.
Aelar took a deep breath, armed his bow and brought the nock of his arrow toward his jawline in a swift motion. A few fractions of a second more, in order to focus for a disruptive shot and the arrow flew over the heads of his companions in a perfect straight line. When it reached the bear, the arrowhead lodged itself in the ankle of the animal, emerged behind the heel and wedged itself right between two floor tiles. The bear was stuck in place, the wound was too painful to allow the creature to extract the arrow or dislodge it from the floor, just yet. But that situation wouldn't last long... "That should buy us just enough time to clean up the room and transform that wizard into a pin cushion", Aelar muttered for himself as the battle was raging between the melee fighters and the pesky goblins. Forced into battle, the wizard was coming over and the fun was about to start....
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