IWoS 5: Clash Against the Blue
General Summary
With Heather Rowling still reeling from the initial strike of the stormcaller, and Blood on the Dawnflower gasping for breath as a result of the electricity coursing through his system, the party joins battle against the stormcaller, who they now realize is unlike the first one that they encountered. This stormcaller, with his scales of a brilliant azure, his feathers rippling in the night breeze, is a much more dangerous breed. Hadrea is the first person to react following the cascade of lightning, but disorientated by the battle that is ongoing around her and the ringing of the alarm bells, she briefly forgets the capabilities of the Tussari Centhiri and sends a bolt of venomous energy streaking toward the stormcaller, which impacts it without doing much harm. Following Hadrea's unsuccessful attack, the stormcaller moves, calling upon its innate magics to disappear from sight whilst simultaneously summoning three disparate images of itself that move periodically around the battlefield, mystically distracting the party and keeping their focus off of the stormcaller itself. Izha Mostana is able to discern where the stormcaller is, but is unable to hit it with her gun, the images magically catching her attention before she is able to correct for them. Not sure what to do, and not knowing where the stormcaller is, Plays for the Stars inspires the rest of the group with a rousing song and fortifies their minds against fear and charms. Dawn, however, follows up on Izha's earlier attacks and manages to destroy the two remaining illusions, providing an opening for Heather to attempt to knock the invisible stormcaller down. Heather spends most of her time trying to bring the stormcaller to the ground, and so only manages to get one strike with her maul in despite her best efforts. However, this allows Hadrea to hit the creature with her javelin. Recovering from the withering assault, the stormcaller repositions itself and declares to the party that although fire and lightning are the elements of the desert, because its family fled to a distant place as a result of the genocide, it has learned different arts. It then summons a cold biting wind that chills most of the party to the bone, sparing only Stars from the spell. Heather, meanwhile, is able to survive the brunt of the damage by employing the same spell that she had used to counter the first bolt of lightning. The stormcaller then attempts to bind Heather with fetters of magic, turning itself visible in that moment and ultimately failing to restrain her. As a result, Izha is able to pepper the creature with bullets. Stars attempts to blind the creature, but it is able to resist the effects of the spell. Dawn rushes in and slashes twice at the stormcaller, and Heather does the same, swinging with her maul, though the stormcaller retaliates with lightning against her. Hadrea then blasts the stormcaller with a beam of radiance, but the moment that the attack hits, the party can only watch as the stormcaller disappears in a puff of purplish energy. Before any of them can react, the sand beneath their feet grows hot, particles melting together to form crude glass. Moments later, the beach nearest to the manor erupts in enormous sheets of flame, consuming everyone except for Izha. When the fire subsides, it is clear that many of the party's members are severely hurt, their condition made visible by the small tongues of flame continuing to burn on the beach. The group scans the facade of the house for the stormcaller but fails to find it. Dawn scales the side of the home and examines the roof to see if it is there, but only finds a pair of hooded figures who quickly flee upon noticing his presence. Left with no other option, the party enters the manor, searching the rooms while the stormcaller taunts Izha from the brass pipes and brass horns that allow commands to be delivered throughout the home from a single room, telling her that she could have been a noble, with servants, if only she had followed her destiny, telling her that she is throwing her life away for a cause that is not worth fighting for. As they explore the house, the group discovers that there are three entrances and exits from the house, while there is a single staircase to the second storey. Izha goes to investigate the staircase but notices tendrils of fog slowly creeping down the steps. She immediately warns the rest of the group to stay away, and not a moment too soon as the fog surges down the steps. Izha is consumed in the cloud, but is unaffected. She strides up the stairs and calls out for the stormcaller, calling him a coward when she fails to find him. Meanwhile, the group cautiously watches the drifting cloud until, Plays for the Stars, reasoning that Izha must have made it through unharmed, attempts to do so himself and walks into the cloud. He immediately falls unconscious as the poisonous vapors fill his lungs. Dawn drags Stars out of the cloud while Heather picks up the limp body and pulls Dawn out of the cloud's trajectory. While Izha is searching the rooms upstairs for any sign of the stormcaller, Hadrea exits the house through the door that opens onto the deck overlooking the sea and in the meantime, Dawn and Heather tend to Plays for the Stars. Plays for the Stars recovers just as Izha discovers the study where the stormcaller has been hiding out in. The stormcaller taunts her, telling her that she could have been so much more if she hadn't betrayed her people, commenting on how her poor stormrider hadn't even been awakened yet, telling her that stormriders were originally her people's weapons of war. Izha lashes out at the stormcaller. Hadrea, noticing the flashes of the gun, flies up to the window and tries to set the stormcaller on fire with the magic that she has access to, but the stormcaller reveals that he has had another card up his sleeve. The stormcaller's own stormrider, larger by far than the party's, and with feathers tipped with frost, enters the battle. The bird harries Hadrea, managing to knock her out of the sky, while the stormcaller lashes out at Izha with a withering bolt of energy and summons illusions to distract her from her aim. Downstairs, Plays for the Stars takes on the form of a stormrider and uses the powerful winds that he has at his command in this form to blow the cloud of fog away, creating a corridor for Heather to walk through. While this is going on, Dawn exits the manor and climbs up to the second storey, jumping in through a window. Hadrea summons a fire elemental to contend with the stormrider while upstairs, in an attempt to pin down the real stormcaller, Izha tries to grapple it. She succeeds, but is ultimately rebuffed. Dawn joins the scuffle in the study, but the stormcaller is prepared, unleashing another tide of biting cold against both him and Izha. It is only just able to survive a joint assault from Dawn and Izha, but before it has the chance to recover, it has to contend with Hadrea joining the battle soon after, shooting him with another beam of radiance. As Heather is making her way up the stairs, Stars realizes the folly of trying to get out of the manor in the form of a bulky bird and transforms back to his old self, running up the side of the house like Dawn to get to the second floor. He arrives just in time to hear a thump against the wall next to him as the stormcaller has a last hurrah, surviving a blow from Dawn and retaliating with lightning, knocking him unconscious and throwing him halfway across the room. The stormcaller then declares that while the group might have won the battle, the war is far from over. He conjures a beam of fiery energy in his hands, but instead of letting it loose, he lets it build and build, and build until the magic grows unstable enough and explodes outward in a rattling conflagration that consumes both Hadrea and Izha. Heather is able to wither the blast, but not Izha. When the dust clears, there is nothing that remains of the stormcaller, and it appears that all of the documents in the room have been incinerated, leaving nothing but burning scraps of paper floating in the air as testament to what had once been held in the study.
