From: Balefire Subject: Awakened Fury A harsh, almost bestial snarling drew all the party's eyes to the red-mailed warmage whence it emanated. It seemed no throat but that of a caged great cat could ever hope to produce such a sound of sheer frustrated fury, but it clearly came from the fallen mage. Cromm looked at the red-armored figure, concern warring with hope in his countenance, and hope gradually took over as he saw Balefire's great limbs quiver, then twitch, then move smoothly and purposefully as the Dark Elf's crimson eyes opened. Teeth bared in a rictus of hate and fury, the warmage rose to his feet with a harsh grating of metal on stone. The inarticulate snarling rose to a growling roar of rage as his gaze took in his surroundings and fell on the cyclopean doors. Raising both fists over his head, he roared out his anger in a shouted challenge that rang and echoed in the cavern and struck nerve-twisting harmonics from the huge bronze bowls. "Hide! Hide, enemy mine, while you can! Cower, foul skulker in darkness! Run, to whatever pit spawned you! You have gone too far, using souls of dead traitors to drag me into sleep against my will!" The warmage's left fist dropped to his side but his right stayed aloft, brandished now like a weapon in itself, and the tone of his voice changed, so that the listeners felt his words as glacial gusts from some frozen wasteland. "Breathe deeply, whoever you are, for these breaths are your last. I am coming for you, and these gates will not bar me, nor long stave off your doom. I have awakened, and with me has awakened my wrath. Know that your final hour is near, and the balefire burns for you." He lowered his fist, and stood a moment unmoving before the massive gate, the silence seeming to ring as loud as had his shouted challenge. He turned then, his expression once more impassive, even his familiar half-scowling frown gone. Taking his rune-carved staff in one gauntleted fist, he held it over the still-slumbering forms of his companions and spoke a single word. "Wake!" He turned, not stopping to see the result, to the gathered Werre. "My thanks, warriors, for doing for me what I could not. You have the word of Balefire that your efforts will not be in vain, and my gratitude for the rest of my days. I owe you a debt I cannot easily repay, but I shall do what I can to justify your faith in me, at least. Do you now stand back somewhat, for I will presently work high magics here, and while they cannot touch you, some of their side-effects may." He turned his gaze to his now-awakened friend and his voice softened. "Elfiran, old friend, I would have a boon of you." "Aye, gladly, Balefire, ef it be within me power...ye have but to ask..." "I know, comrade, so I ask that you stand beside me here, while I work with the Art, and do you raise and maintain such shields as may be needed to protect these other brave warriors. I will be using ancient magics, and not only from this plane, and the substance of this cavern may well alter in dangerous ways. I must needs rely on you to keep these others safe from aught that might prevent them from joining the final fray awaiting us beyond these doors. Guard well, good Elfiran, for our foe is not the only one who can use Words of Power." "Do nay fash yerself, Balefire, ah'll do me best." Balefire gave his friend a grateful smile, which vanished to be replaced with a look of stern determination as he turned to the gate. The dusky warmage raised his staff slowly, then held it at eye level parallel to the ground, slowly moving his hands out toward both ends, until each was about half-way from the center to one end. Muttering softly and gazing intently at the runes carved in the oakwood, he shifted his feet until they were set well apart and he was directly in front of the gate's center. He raised the staff over his head, and as he did so the carved runes suddenly shone out in blazing blue. A keening wail began, and the mage's cloak lifted and flowed in a phantom breeze none of the others felt. Small sizzling sounds drew attention to his Daedric-booted feet, where lightnings sparked, snapping louder and brighter as they grew larger and faster, twisting into and out of a rising blue-black nimbus which now enwrapped Balefire's feet, now his legs, and whirled suddenly up and around his upper body to rush up his arms and into and through the staff. In a matter of heartbeats, the Warmage was enveloped in a seething aura of energy, and the keening and wailing had grown into a drone like an endless note of a mad god's instrument. Amidst the eye-searing light and now-constant flashing of lightnings, his hair on end and his cloak now twisting and cavorting violently in the magewind only he could feel, Balefire intoned one word: "Will." The aura and lightnings flared and vanished, and the mage seemed at first unchanged, until Elfiran stole a look at his face and saw there a look of sheer determination, and was appalled to see that his friend's eyes now truly glowed like lava freshly spewed from some volcano's maw. He redoubled his efforts to provide a shield against he knew not what. Balefire lowered his staff and held it in his right hand, vertical now, held at the middle, hand at shoulder height. Leveling the staff and pointing first at one ash-filled bowl and then the other, he spoke again, his deep voice rumbling like thunder. "These ashes represent an offense to the gods and to the Art. Let them be as they should have been, long ere now." The ashes vanished in twin soundless explosions of sun-bright yellow light. Shifting the staff to his left hand and resting its lower end on the ground, he made an intricate gesture with the fingers of his right hand, and spoke a phrase in a language none there recognized. A hum like a billion bees filled the cavern, and again the nimbus returned to his staff. Harshly, in a tone neither completely demanding nor angry, but having something of both, he rapped out, "I claim this once-profaned metal as my own, by the power of the Word and the Will." The humming rose beyond the limits of hearing, then faded, and the great bronze bowls began to dissolve, like sand castles in a hurricane, a whirling tornado of metal filings taking shape between them, growing in mass and speed as the bowls flashed away their substance into the whirling, glittering vortex of metal. When the bowls had vanished, a bronze whirlwind twice his height hissed and moaned before the grim Archmage. Once again he spoke, in a tone of irrefutable command, "Faster!", and the whirlwind spun madly, glowing now with friction and moaning like a thousand lost souls, then once again the command, "Faster!", and the speed and heat increased. Dust and detritus began to rise from the floor before the gate, to be whirled off into the shadows. Balefire half turned to Elfiran and spoke softly, "Be ready, my friend, to feed power to your shields. I have just begun what cannot be stopped until all is finished." Without waiting for an answer, he turned back to the spinning, superheated vortex of bronze filings and gestured with his staff, a complex twirling motion. It rose, its nether end now at the height of the obsidian pedestals' tops. Once again the Warmage spoke a phrase, this time in a language filled with vowels and short syllables strung together strangely, but strangely, inhumanly devoid of intonation. He leveled his staff once again, pointing at each pedestal as with a saber for a charge of cavalry, and spoke in the common tongue of Tamriel, "As with metal, so with rock. By the power of the Word and the Will, I, Balefire, command it." With the last word, the squat obsidian pillars flashed bright red, melting in a searing burst of heat into molten lava and swirling away in two fiery streams to join with and blend into the brazen vortex. The forge-like glare illuminated the mage's scarred features, showing a satisfied but still implacable expression. He stared at the seething, twisting thing of whirling stone and metal, and spoke to it as if to a person, harsh, deep voice brooking no refusal and no excuse, "Metal and Stone from Earth, Air from the Wind of your whirling, and Fire from its forced embrace." He reached with his staff-holding hand to the other, and pulled his gauntlet off, his eyes never leaving the roaring, fiercely glowing funnel of tortured elements. He brought his bared wrist up to his mouth and bit into it deliberately, tearing at the vein his teeth found there and sucking at the welling, spurting blood. Red stream trickling from his lips and running down his fingers, he took two paces forward, ignoring the heat as he approached to arms'-length distance of the whirlwind. His hair starting to smoulder and his beard to smoke, he spat a mouthful of blood straight at the tornado, where it hissed into steam. "Water, from my lifeblood, makes the four, and my Will will not be gainsaid!" Stepping back, he looked at his wrist and muttered "Heal", then raised his staff again to point at the door-framing silver sigils. "By Earth and Fire, Air and Water, by the power of my Will and of the Word, may these wards be removed." Like a live thing, the vortex moved to the lowest left corner of the gate, and struck the silver rune there, in a silent flashing explosion of multi-colored sparks, obliterating it and then racing up and up, gathering speed as it went, racing around the gate frame, showering sparks and banishing shadows in actinic glare until it reached the other end, and all the runes were gone, scoured utterly away. Diminished in size somewhat, the whirlwind yet seethed and glowed with heat, and Balefire's eyes glowed to match it (indeed, Elfiran noted that the vortex and his Dark Elf friend's eyes were *exactly* the same color, and repressed a shudder). The Warmage turned to the Werre warriors and smiled grimly, his gaze softening slightly when it rested on Joran. He looked at Cromm, though, when he spoke. "Too long have these Werre been entrapped here in these doors. Know that they are about to be freed." Turning back, he strode up to the doors. Replacing his gauntlet and grasping his staff firmly in his left hand, he gestured to the vortex as to a pet. It rose and approached, following his rising right fist and coming at last to rest upon it as he held it fully extended over his head. "Ho!" he bellowed, "Your doom is upon you! Balefire and his friends are come a-calling, and we bring you a well-deserved death!" With the last word, the Dark Elf Warmage smote the great stone doors with his vortex-wrapped fist, and they exploded inward in a colossal gout of smoke and flame, wrenched out of their frame and crumbling into a huge roiling cloud of lightning and flame-streaked powder even as they flew into the hall beyond. Balefire's booming laughter sounded triumphantly over the echoes of destruction as he strode through the portal.