They moved.  Running and limping and pushing and helping, they moved.

Glances out the tiny windows showed them that the abyssal horror was smashing the front of the church and had several Dromm caught in its tentacles.  One by one they were lifted up and dropped into its mouth, which seemed to be a huge opening at the center of its mass of tentacles, like an upside-down squid.

On the other side of the square, the roof they’d been on had mostly collapsed and smoke was billowing up from everywhere.  Flames were visible coming out of windows and doors.

Isiah and Marisol came to the top of the stairs, which ended with a narrow platform all around the insides of the tower and huge, vaulted openings to let the sound ring free across the land.  The structure that had held the bells was now gone.  Above them the tower formed a pyramid shaped roof.

Right next to them, tied up with a simple rope, floated Marisol’s skyship.  

Isiah paused for a moment, glancing around.  Other than the smoke from multiple fires in his eyes, the fact that he was standing on top of a structurally unsound tower, and a hundred-foot-tall eldritch monstrosity taking another step closer, there didn’t seem to be any immediate problems.  Marisol pushed past him and leapt into the sloop.

The skyship was about twenty feet long with a single mast, the small sail hanging loose.  A rudderfan about as tall as Isiah still looked functional.  The back half of the sloop was an open deck with a short, two-foot rail around it and the forward half was a covered cabin that couldn’t be much more than a sleeping berth.

The others were coming up onto the platform.  Isiah unmoored the rope and tossed it into a loose coil on the back corner of the deck.  Marisol was checking the linkage between the steering control and the rudderfan when she paused.  “You’ve got to be kidding...”

Isiah stepped aboard as the others piled in.  He looked down over the monk’s shoulder.  Shutan was climbing up the outside of the tower, about at the halfway point.  “Wow,” said the thief.  “This guy really hates you.”

Below, the eldritch ogre looked up and saw them.  He started whistling, high pitched and unsettling.

Miah stood behind her brother.  “Enough of this.”  A swirling line on her quarterstaff glowed as she chanted her spell words and pointed three fingers down at him.  There was a blinding flash of light and heavy crack of thunder.  A lightning bolt shot out and hit Shutan in his snarling face.  The ogre’s muscles seized up and he fell back down into an overgrown courtyard.

Miah turned to look at Marisol, who had grabbed the steering yoke.  “Now we circle back and look for Tem.”

Kaspar, bleeding and bruised, was kneeling next to her.  “We might not be going anywhere.”  He pointed at a flock of flying shapes coming up out of and old collapsed building a couple blocks away.  Quasits.

Cley shouted, “Everybody down!”

The abyssal horror stepped closer to them, smashing the entire side of the church open, and lashed out with a tentacle.  It was heavy and thick and it passed over the mast, hitting the top of the tower and breaking it apart.  Stonework shattered and rained down onto the deck.

Everyone dropped to their knees on the crowded deck and grabbed a rail.  Marisol pushed the yoke forward and pulled on a large lever.  The sloop surged forward and the rudderfan swung to the side.  The entire roof of the tower broke free and slid off into the air behind them.  

A corner of the heavy stonework clipped the stern and tipped the sloop backwards.  They all held on to stop from rolling off the deck.  Marisol fought to level the ship when a tentacle whipped out and bashed into the port side.

The skyship spun around like a top, pushed closer to the swarm of quasits.  Now tilted and spinning, everyone could see Shutan standing up in the courtyard and raising his arms.  He whistled again and the quasits turned like a flock of starlings and dove at the sloop.

The monstrosity raised a leg to step nearer and its huge clawed foot came slamming down on Shutan, squashing him like a bug.

The quasit flock broke apart and started flying in random and directionless patterns.

Marisol regained control of the sloop and it leveled out.  She pulled at the controls and it turned upward, started rising.

A thin black tendril reached up and circled around the back of the sloop.  Kaspar chopped down with his sword and severed it.  Dark ichor sprayed across the deck.

Marisol kept the sloop going up.  

Two more tendrils shot up and wrapped around the skyship.  One was forward of the mast.  The whole ship rocked to one side and everyone tumbled together.  The sloop started dropping, pulled lower.

Beneath them, the eldritch horror’s back opened up into a vicious mouth ringed with sharp teeth.  

Kaspar cut through another tentacle.  Isiah grabbed the mast and jumped up onto the forward deck.  He braced himself and stabbed his dagger into the other tendril several times before it let go.

Marisol forced the sloop higher.

A wave of tendrils snaked up and around them.  With a jerk, the skyship was stopped and rocked from side to side.  Everyone had weapons out and was hacking at anything they could find.

Cley and Miah were rolled next to each other at the stern.  The paladin looked down at her terrified eyes.  He winked at her while tossing the mooring rope overboard.  “I’ll be right back.”

Cley pushed himself up and jumped over a tendril to land next to Marisol.  With a slash of a dagger he opened the velvet sack and grabbed the Sunfire Gem.  

“What are you doing!” shouted the monk.  She reached for him but the sloop canted backward and she had to return her hand to the controls.

Cley Alexandros, SkyKnight, Guardian of the Loreholm Chapterhouse, tucked the Gem close to his chest with one hand and leapt off the back of the sloop.  He twisted in midair and grabbed the mooring rope with his other hand.

Miah screamed his name and reached out helplessly.  She watched as he slid down the rope towards the waiting mouth of the beast.

He reached his arm out, aether lock held in his hand.  Suddenly there was sunlight everywhere, more dazzling than a summer day, with Cley at its center.  The paladin kept falling until he tightened his gauntleted fist around the rope to slow himself.  Ten feet above the monstrosity he dropped the gem into its razor filled mouth.

The creature’s mouth everted and reached up with teeth like claws.  It closed around the paladin like a bear trap.

The explosion that followed was bigger than anything they’d seen before.  Bright burst of searing sunlight that blinded Miah as she stared into it.  Shockwave of noise that deafened all of them.  Black ichor and flesh splattering against the underside of the sloop, knocking it into a rapid spin.

Marisol was cursing and crying and fighting with the yoke.  The rudderfan was gone.  Isiah dropped his dagger and wrapped his arms around the mast, feet flying free behind him.  Everyone was clinging to the rail and trying not to fly off the deck.

Miah was watching the scene below as it flickered by.  With each spin she saw the remains of the beast splashing across the remains of the church.  The belltower collapsed and crashed into the next building.  Smoke and fire engulfed the rest of the church.  Nothing but destruction and devastation everywhere.

Marisol got her sloop back under control.  She leveled out and pushed forward.  They started going up again.  Everyone was quiet.

Miah lay slumped against the stern rail, her face blank.  Her brother came up and knelt next to her.  She lay her head back on his forearm.

Then she saw Tem racing across a rooftop and waving his arms back and forth.  She bolted upright.  “Marisol, turn right!”

The monk looked back, puzzled.  Then she also saw the boy on the roof.  With a twist of her wrists she moved the yoke and the sloop began a slow turn, hampered by the lack of a rudder.

“How in Light’s Name did he get all the way over there?” asked Isiah.

He was answered by a series of booming sounds from beyond the edge of the mist.  They all looked over to see two more monstrosities stomping across the town.

“I don’t have much fine control over this thing,” shouted Marisol.

They were closing in on Tem’s rooftop.  But the new abyssal horrors were moving much faster than the other, and with a purpose that signaled a lust for revenge.

Miah looked down at the mooring rope still secured next to her.  She reached for it but Isiah grabbed her by the wrist.  “Miah, we’re out of tricks.  If those things grab us, it’s all over.”

Fury blazed in her eyes.  “He said he’d save all of us.  Tem is one of us.”

Isiah didn’t let her go but glanced at Marisol and nodded towards the roof.  The monk kept the sloop steady and it moved forward, the skyshards attuned to her thoughts and responding.  They coasted over the edge of the roof, about thirty feet above it.  Tem was running at them and waving.

Miah saw the nearest monstrosity reach out with tentacles.  There were only a few seconds left.  She shouted down at Tem.  “Grab the rope!  Grab the rope!”

The boy jumped and clutched on to the mooring rope.  He climbed quickly and got his legs wrapped around it.  The hollow booming from the monstrosities was matching the crash and stomp of their many legs as they came closer. 

Isiah waved upwards.  “Now, now, now!”

Marisol pushed forward hard and the sloop turned its bow up at a sharp angle and started rising.  

Kaspar and Caelian were bracing themselves and hauling up the mooring line.  Miah waited at the corner of the deck, reaching down and encouraging Tem to climb faster.  Isiah watched black tentacles whipping out towards them with nothing but his last dagger in his hand.

Tem was about fifteen feet below them when he looked up at Miah and smiled.  His smile grew wider and wider and then unnaturally wide.  His face peeled back to reveal a black skull with tendrils crawling out of his eye sockets.  A single tentacle burst out of his back, ripping through his tattered shirt, and reached for Miah’s neck.  She screamed.

Isiah’s dagger came down on the mooring rope and cut through it.

Eldritch Tem tumbled into the air and was lost in the misty haze as they kept moving up.  Miah kept screaming but her voice had gone hoarse and she let out no more than a breathy wheeze.

They burst up through the cloud deck to a warm setting sun in the west and a fresh breeze from the north.  Miah knelt in her brother’s arms.

Her sobs were soundless.