Velendo acts by drawing on his most powerful prayers. He raises his eyes towards heaven -- or at least towards the ceiling above -- and creates a sovereign wall out of pure faith. It stretches out from the fortress in a vast semi-circle, separating the remaining ghouls and trapping the powerful, injured monster inside. There's a loud *clunk* as the fleeing ghoul runs face first into the invisible wall.

Nolin snickers.

Galthia doesn't, though, and charges after the ghoul. The creature turns and hisses ferally, fluids slowly oozing out of its broken and rotted nose. Moving at full speed, Galthia stops just short of the monster and uses his momentum to flick his magical staff out in a whirling crescent. The ghoul is remarkably agile, but not that agile, and the weapon catches it across the neck. There's a burst of light, a celestial roaring sound, and the disrupted undead turns to dust at Galthia's feet.

The rest of the Defenders have organized the dwarven troops, filling them with hope as they use mass heal and remove disease to bring the injured back to life. The dwarven leader introduces himself as Prince Stern Balestone, the only son of King Horox IX of Mrid, sent to Mridsgate to organize the defenses. "I don't know if my father still lives," he says tiredly as he wipes smoky grit from his bearded face. "We've been fighting for more than two days, and I know Mrid has fallen. The ghouls don't stop, they don't sleep, and divination tells me that they've been bringing up more troops once they realized we wouldn't let them prance in." He looks at the Defenders, and then at his recently healed dwarves, and then at the rows of the dead. "Almost seventy dead, but about a hundred left alive. We'd have lost a lot more than we did if you hadn't arrived. Good job." He says the last gruffly, but Nolin can sense the emotion in the simple words.

"Your majesty, you'll need to burn the bodies of the dead," advises Nolin, "so your own men don't rise on you."

The prince looks up angrily. "Dwarves are not burned! It would dishonor . . . ."

Nolin draws on his store of ancient and obscure legends. "But wasn't the dwarven hero Corothin Stonemaw cremated in the holy forge of Moradin, adding his ashes to the iron in order to make the first steel weapons? There is a long history of dwarves accepting cremation when the lives of their brethren are at stake." To this the tired Prince has no argument.

"Your Majesty," interjects Velendo, "do you have people listening for diggers? Now that they can't get past the wall, they may try to dig under it."

The dwarf shakes his head. "We did, but they were removed from their posts to fight in the defense. Good point. Hogan!" He roars at a younger dwarf walking by. "Get four stout soldiers with good ears, and get 'em down in the basements with their ears to the stone. We need to listen for sappers." Hogan nods and hurries off. Within a minute, he's got volunteers and is headed into the fortress.

Agar hasn't wasted this time, and the first of his prying eyes has just returned to him. "Odd," he reflects, sucking on his pipe and blowing smoke rings absentmindedly. "They're reorganizing their troops into battle lines, but they're quite spread out . . . in a formation about four times wider than I'd expect. They have some sort of fascinating skeletal siege engine out there that just emerged from a tunnel. Lots of those spying eyes made from green flame, too. I'd guess that there are about 250 or 300 ghouls dead here on the battlefield, and maybe another 200 or 300 out in the cavern." Another eye swoops back in and merges into Agar's head. "Yep," he says while swatting an invisible fly, "wide formations. But no sign of leaders yet."

"Wide formations?" muses TomTom. "They might . . . ." Then TomTom disappears in a prismatic shimmering. Agar's face splits into a smile at the unusual planar effect, even though it means that TomTom has slipped back into another plane. Nolin rolls his eyes in frustration and excuses himself to fly out onto the battlefield. He quickly lays down a line of quiescent fire seeds in a semicircle around the wall, intending to detonate them later. He then returns.

"Your Majesty?" Hogan the dwarf is standing next to the Prince and looking worried. "Something strange. By the time I got all four listeners settled, I went back and checked on Delemer, who was in the east room. He's gone! No sign of a struggle. And there's an odd chalk mark on the floor."

"What's it say?" Next to the Prince, Malachite gazes around uneasily, his hand on his sword.

Hogan frowns. "It's the number '1'. That's all."

The dwarven prince's craggy forehead creases with worry. "Well, go check the others! And take someone with you. Go!" Hogan runs off with an escort, and returns a moment later. "Two more dwarves missing, Sir! And more chalk marks: '1+1=2' and '2+1=3'."

"Great," snorts Nolin, "we have an undead math teacher in the fortress." Agar snickers. "I have no idea what it means, but it can't be good. We should go and investigate."

Agar absorbs another prying eye, and then turns to face the group once he's absorbed its images. "The rest of the ghouls are advancing," he says. "Slowly, but they're coming . . . all of them."

"Go!" orders the dwarven Prince. "With your magical walls and the fresh reinforcements of your troops, we should be able to hold them here for long enough." Hogan leading, the Defenders turn and run for the heavy doors into the dwarven outpost. Malachite has Karthos in hand, and the sword detects undead as they go. Mara tries to detect evil, but can't do so when moving quickly.

The group moves quickly along the low and narrow corridors past several intersections, emerging into a large, torch-lit great hall. Neither Malachite, Mara or Karthos detect anything, but Agar's persistent arcane sight shows him something disturbing on the far side of the long room. He sees what looks like an elongated shadow stretching along the wall, in a place where no shadow should be.

*LITTLEJOHN'S PIC HERE*

"Shadow!" the halfling snaps. "Back wall, right side, behind the table." No one else can see it, but they take Agar at his word, and a flame strike from Tao slams down on the area, turning the old table into a blazing inferno.

"I can detect something!" says Karthos in his metallic voice, and the group rushes forward to attack. It's soon apparent that there are two shadows, not one, and agar unleashes lightning bolts as Mara slides along the top of a table to strike one with her holy mace Lightbinder. The shadows, vaguely dwarven shaped, don't last long . . . but where's the long and skinny shadow that Agar first saw?

"I can still sense undead," reports Karthos. "It's behind us. No, now it's gone." The sword is clearly frustrated, and the group looks behind him.

Nolin suddenly looks horrified. "The math! If the shadow is killing dwarves and turning them into more shadows, then . . . then they're multiplying! The shadows are going to go after all the dwarves. Soon it will be 3+3=6, then 6+6=12. It'll grow exponentially." The ease in which they could lose every single dwarf seeps in. They turn and run back the way they came. Through a previously cast Rary's Telepathic Bond, Nolin mentally warns the dwarven Prince. "You're going to have company! Keep your eyes open for shadows, or they'll overrun the fortress!"

"Suckered!" pants Velendo as he runs. "We're being lured into the fortress while the dwarves are defenseless against shadows!"

Ahead of him, Agar catches a glimpse of the same long shape, partially merged with a wall in front of them. "There it is!" he cries. One or two others think they can see it now, too, oddly distorted and indistinct.

"It's old," says Malachite as he sprints forward. "Very old." He feels concentrated fear leaching out of it, but his will is indomitable, and the aura that he and Mara give off protect the rest of the group from the terror of its existence.

Tao is there first and swings her weapon at it, but the blade goes right through the dark and blurry form. She swears, and gets the distinct impression that it smiles. Then the familiar smell of psionic energy fills her nose, and every shadow in the passageway shifts and hardens as they turn into ice-cold shadowy blades.

The world is suddenly a whirling, twisting gyre of ice-cold sharpened shadows. Only Galthia leaps entirely clear of them, twisting his body and spinning through the air to avoid them completely. When they vanish a few seconds later, though, half of the Defenders are flat on their back, too weak even to lift their heads. The rest of the heroes are gasping from the weight of their armor, weakened muscles shaking from the coldness of undeath.

The shadow, uninjured, slides forward along the wall.

Velendo is collapsed on the ground, too weak to raise a finger. So is Nolin, and Agar beside him. Galthia, Mara, Tao and Malachite are still standing. Malachite emits a positive energy burst which sears the shadow, but the emerald light which floods the room doesn't have any effect on the strength-drained heroes. Mara swings at it with her mace, and just scrapes sparks off of the stone wall as the insubstantial creature avoids her attack. Even Galthia's staff of disruption doesn't destroy it, although he manages to connect at least once.

Agar is helpless, but Proty isn't. The halfling gasps, "Proty! Get us to the clerics out on the wall!" The squirming mass of tentacles that is his familiar slurps out its assent, and Agar congratulates himself for imbuing his familiar with a teleport spell. There is a flash of writhing light, and he's gone.

Velendo knows what he wants to do, but lacks the strength to do it. As both paladins, the monk, and the divine agent swing at the incorporeal shadow -- and the shadow tauntingly claws at them, further draining vital strength -- the old cleric enters a state of total denial. "I'm half a mile below ground, flat on my back because some stinking psionic shadow has decided to destroy us. This can't happen! In fact, I refuse to believe that it's happening. Nothing can drain strength like that, and it didn't happen to me!" Ages-old faerie magic hardens his stubbornness, and his disbelief becomes utter and complete certainty as Velendo uses his priceless gift from the Queen of Faerie. The strength drain fades away as if it had never been there -- of course it's never been there, thinks Velendo, it couldn't have happened - and Velendo grins a cold, hard smile as he sits up easily. Raising his stone shield, he casts mass heal.

Silent light thunders through the room like a cascade of falling bricks.

It pours into all the Defenders and erases their wounds and lost strength as if they had never been hurt. Even more importantly, it batters the shadow in an irresistible assault of positive energy. The creature erects its mental defenses but it is caught unprepared, and the relentless prayer batters down its natural resistance. Calphas' light rips huge chunks out of its essence, leaving it nothing more than a fragile wisp of shadow matter silhouetted against the pale stone wall.

It turns to flee into the solid wall, retreating to safety until it can rebuild its strength. Only Mara Thornhill is close enough and fast enough to strike it before it does.

She draws on her inner power, and holy certainty strengthens her hand as her mace swings. She strikes once; her blow passes through the shadow to shatter chips from the wall. She strikes again; her mace passes through the creature without effect. She strikes a third time; the creature completely ignores the blow as if Mara's mace didn't even exist. Desperate and furious, a prayer to Aeos on her lips, Mara draws upon the haste magic affecting her and swings a final blow as hard as she can.

The blow connects.

Sunlight pours from Lightbinder, burning away the wispy shadowstuff like a match dropped in the middle of a dry parchment. The shadow has just enough time to scream silently, and then it boils away into nothingness. Gone.

Out on the ramparts of the fortress, Agar and Proty reappear in another flash of light. "Ummm," calls the halfling weakly from the floor of the cavern. "Cleric? A little help, please? . . . .Hello?"

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