Enter Soder

Malachite eyes the Ivory King, trapped in his cube of force. "How big is the cube, Agar?"

"Only ten by ten! He fills it completely." And indeed, the grotesque flab of undead presses against an invisible barrier along the edges. Nolin's paralyzed body is being balanced on the Ivory King's chest like some sort of living bib.

"Then I'm not going to be able to dimension door in with my cloak." He frowns, and with no other enemy in sight begins to pray as he slides the sword Karthos into the holy light of Aeos' afterimage. The sword almost hums in satisfaction, and begins praying itself.

"Proty, go!" The amorpheous blob of tentacles rises from Agar's arm and darts over to Tao's head. She makes a half-hearted grab at it in case it's food, but Proty settles onto her face in a smothering embrace and lets off a dispel magic that Agar had previously imbued in him. The result could hardly have been better, starting at her head and rippling like invisible heat waves down to her feet, and in the process it completely strips away any obsessive hunger that the divine agent may be feeling.

Tao lifts her head, eyes hard. She stares at the Ivory King who is in the process of eating one of her oldest friends. "Naaah umh maa. . ." She spits out the dry food filling her mouth, scattering it into the rubble. "Now I'm mad." Standing, she draws both swords.

Meanwhile, Agar casts exploit weakness. For everyone near him, the minor weaknesses in the Ivory King's defenses now become glaring gaps, and the group struggles over the rubble to launch a series of attacks against the cube of force.

"Damn it!" mumbles Velendo, trying to remember. He had been taught about cubes of force once, in a lecture about magical walls and how to cast them. That was long ago, though, and he hadn't been paying attention. He pushes past the overwhelming pain in his joints and dredges up what little he can recall. "It's a force wall, but I think we can drop it with enough damage. Hit it as hard as you can!" The group moves into position around Nolin and the Ivory King, carefully picking their way through the unstable rubble as they array themselves strategically.

"One thing's nice, at least," says Priggle as he peers out into the darkness, grasping his pick with one calloused and shaking hand. "Most of the ghouls had been heading for the body. I think the only way anyone knows we're over here is from the flame strike. With luck, it might take them a little while to reach – "

There's a flash overhead as something teleports in. The creature is huge, and horribly familiar: the animated corpse of the earth dragon that the group fought in Mrid, the one that ate Mara's mace. Much of its stony flesh has begun to rot, and it carries three ghouls on its back. The most terrifying thing about the dragon isn't its nature or its passengers, though. The most terrifying thing about it is that its eyes are glowing a lambent yellow.

"Hello, everyone!" hisses a jubilant Soder. "Welcome to my home!" It winks one huge yellow eye at the Ivory King, mutters something, and time. . . freezes.

Time restarts, and half the group are yanked upwards off their feet into the air. As they dangle there, two pulsing spheres of dark blue light explode into killing cold and jagged ice. Some of the group manages to twist out of the way of at least one of the explosions; Cruciel shields Velendo with her own body, and Mara's sacred aura helps protect Luminor from the worst of the damage. Even Agar is partially shielded by a fallen pillar of skulls. The only person caught totally out in the open is Malachite. He's flung into the air and is almost parallel with both icy spheres when they simultaneously explode into jagged fragments of frost. Both icy explosions tear through him simultaneously, and the hunter of the dead is partially frozen solid by the time his body crashes down onto the broken floor tiles below.

When he hits, part of his frozen skin shatters from the impact, then begins to melt in the warm sunlight emanating from Aeos' afterimage. There's no question that the paladin is dead. Mara's face turns dead white, and Velendo darts forward to the corpse in dismay.

"Ahhh. Hunter of the Dead? Go hunt yourself. Now that's good old-fashioned craftsmanship." Comfortably ensconsed in the dragon's undead flesh, Soder feels the warm glow of a job well done. "Who's next?"

Eyes wide, Agar lets out a horrified scream. He points his finger at Soder and casts maze. The spell unerringly bounces back, strikes Agar, and flings him bodily into an interdimensional maze of force.

The Ivory King twitches, and six other spindly arms slither out of his noisome bulk. All eight arms hold Nolin upright as he prepares for another bite. "Did you see?" whispers the ghoul into Nolin's ear. "Isn't it beautiful?