Death of an Aspect

This blinking ring is so trippy...

We fought the aspect of Bascerone and won. I took surprisingly little damage throughout the whole thing, and while the ring didn’t seem as effective as it has before, the range of attacks the aspect made cast a whole new light on this avoidance thing.

“Best laid plans” and all that; when we got to the moon we spent a minute or so making sure we weren’t under immediate threat and for Obegard to cast some ritual that dispatched a bunch of little detector eyes or something in a big circle around us.

Then two dragons attacked. Obegard yelled something about them being chaos dragons. I assume that was meant to mean something—I think Obegard both realises and doesn’t realise that we don’t know as much about dragons. I think he thinks that if he tells us what kind they are we’ll know exactly what to do. I don’t know why he’d think that given the consistent evidence to the contrary, but that’s Upworlders for you.

No sooner had we dealt with those than Evil Malakar made an appearance. Except it can’t really have been Evil Malakar because not-so-Evil Malakar was still with us. Hmmm. Ah. Aspect of Bascerone.

He invited Malakar to join him, which Malakar declined. I’m not sure why, because it kind of looks like Bascerone owns him already. Maybe he’s afraid that since we beat him once we can do it again. Last time he had two mooncalves, this time he’d have an aspect of a god. Personally I’d favour his odds more with the god, but Malakar’s not really your big risk taker.

When Malakar spurned him the Aspect turned into a crazy mass of tentacles. It was disgusting. But it made me wonder if this is why Upworlders are so unstable. I mean, what if all their gods are really like this—they put on some nice facade when it pleases them, but in reality they have some alien form that reeks of the insane.

The number of things that I was sure would paste me in that fight was large and I can’t recall them all because I was busy dodging them in case I happening to be on the wrong plane at the wrong time, while still trying to stick my knife in somewhere it could do some good. Because of my “now I’m here, now I’m not”-edness I was taking damage at a much slower rate than the others, so when Malakar was casting spells to heal everyone he was pretty much just topping me up. Mind you, I was glad we did that thing with the incense beforehand because at one stage I got hit bad and that went off to provide a nice comfy cushion of protection against later damage.

I think I held my own in the fight, but it was Dearthen that delivered the death blow. And it was the last insane attack of an insane Aspect, because as it died it exploded spewing some vile acid all over the place. Again I avoided most it but some of the others weren’t so lucky. Poor Livia, she was covered in the stuff and completely dead before anyone could do anything about it.

Some of the others are talking about casting some druidic spell that will call her soul back, but possibly into a different body. Fine for those Upworlders but if I die I don’t want some sub-standard Upworlder body. Give me dwarfdom or give me death! Preferably dwarfdom.