Even with the spell demanding so much of his attention, he could not help but dwell on the injustice of it all.
He had known from the first that the intruder was formidable. How could it be otherwise, having somehow overrun their defences and breached the sanctum all on its lonesome? It was clear that no individual consort or dirach was its match and that, even in the best case, many lives would be lost in repelling the attack. But that was acceptable, for there was not a single soul inside the sanctum that would not gladly die in defence of the Lady Meargh. So they each set about fulfilling their duty in their own way: warriors to the fore, choristers in support of the Lady and him casting a sharply angled barrier to protect his fellow dirachs from the storm ravaging the chamber. They quickly went on to discover it was an imperfect defence, sufficient to ward off razor winds and choking dust but not to nullify the discharges of lightning intermittently striking the choir. That, too, was acceptable. The storm was whittling them down one by one despite his best efforts, but if he could just slow the rate of attrition, buy enough time then the others could assist the Lady in wearing the intruder down.
(A ground tremor sent one of them stumbling outside of the protective envelope and into the stormwind, blowing with force enough that every stray speck of ash was as an obsidian knife. Within moments, skin and meat were cut away and he was dead as dry bones.)
Their strategy had seemed clear. Their Lady would spend her servants' lives wisely, using them to hinder and delay while she probed for a weakness. Sooner or later she would identify a vulnerabilty of some sort, be it a chink in the invader's armour, an exotic magical attack that bypassed its defences, fatigue or simple weight of numbers, and then it would be dead in short order. No thing of this world was invincible, after all... or so he had believed.
(One of the warriors attempted to body check the stone construct, grown monstrously large with materials pillaged from the sanctum. The blow connected - but instead of meeting strength with strength, the construct transmuted part of itself to mud, letting the warrior sink in until he was buried from the waist up in its body. His legs kicked feebly for a little while before falling limp.)
They had been fighting for some time, and the chamber bore the scars to prove it. The floor had once been covered in intricate mosaics exalting the gods, but the intruder made stone flow like water and had by now reduced their iconography to a blasphemous jumble. The walls were scoured by ash-winds and pockmarked by lightning strikes. The roof had literally been blown off some time previously, unable to contain the pressure of the storm that even now was building in power, seemingly without limit. What would all that stone rubble have done as it fell down across the city? Nothing good, he imagined. The sanctum had represented the pinnacle of their artifice and artistry, the sum of all they aspired to, and the attacker had torn it all down in a matter of minutes without even taking a wound.
(One blow from the blazing hammer heated the fimm's daemonforged armour to the point of liquefaction and a second sent his body flying towards the choir. One of the choristers attempted to arrest the impromptu projectile with a telekinetic spell... and he succeeded, after a fashion. The fimm's corpse stopped in midair, but what had once been his armour was now just a coating of liquid metal that separated quite easily and continued under its own momentum. The chorister had a breastplate's worth of molten iron spattered across his face and died screaming.)
If they had been bested by a wizard of superior skill, someone with a deeper understanding of Dhar, then - he would have hated it, would have fought back with all he had, but he would at least have understood. But the dread thing in front of them made a mockery of all he knew. Champion fimm attacked it in complete synchronicity, striking unerringly at its joints and face: it weathered the blows without even deigning to deflect them. Master dirachs cast sorceries at it that should have sufficed to flatten a mountain: it unravelled their spells with its mere presence, through that awful unnatural emanation that, even inside his barrier, took the Winds apart and made the air taste like dust underground. The Lady Meargh cast her own spells with such superb skill they overcame the deadening effect, striking the creature with frost and poison and energies for which he had no name: it accepted them with perfect disdain. All the Lady's efforts struck harmlessly against its armour, finding no purchase, and the Winds thus spent were seized, twisted into incomprehensible knots and used to fuel the intensifying storm. And through it all the monster advanced, faltering not a single step as their best and brightest threw themselves at it. It was implacable. Inexorable.
(An eye shone balefully, and for a moment the meargh appeared cracked, as if she were painted on a broken pane of glass. Then the effect ended and she returned to normal, unhurt - but the amulet around her neck crumbled to dust and released the gibbering daemon imprisoned within.)
The Lady had fought - was fighting - magnificiently, demonstrating superlative mastery of arts both magical and martial, but it was not enough. Their reinforcements had slowed to the point they could no longer fill the ranks of the dead. (And besides, with all of them coming here, who was left to guard the walls? He dared not think the thought to completion.) She was weakening, and the monster was not.
(The remaining warriors abandoned all pretense of martial finesse and bodily threw themselves at the attacker, seeking to immobilise with their combined weight. For a bare instant it seemed like they might have succeeded, might have bought the meargh time for a more complex spell or at least to make her escape - until the storm exploded from within the pile, pelting the walls with metal scrap and bone fragments.)
Was this what would become of them, in the end? All of them, their achievements and learning, trampled underfoot by an uncaring horror, leaving not even a memory? He supposed he would never know, for his barrier was no longer necessary. The choir had dwindled to the point someone of lesser skill was enough to shield them, and his life was better spent standing between the Lady and it, buying a little more time and hoping beyond hope for some impossible miracle that would let her win.
And so it was that he found himself in front of the monster, the abominable, misshapen creature that heralded the end of all things. He wanted - he did not know what he wanted. To leave a scar on it, or an injury. A dent in its armour. Something to prove he had once existed, after the monster had destroyed everything else. He wanted to scream in its face: do your worst, Unmaker! But the storm drowned out his voice, filled his throat with ash. Even his defiance was taken away from him. He lashed out furiously, desperately, with all the power he could muster-
(A single contemptuous axe swing to the weakling sorceror's gut-)
He had not the strength to stand. He felt true despair as he fell to his knees - and then, once the hammerhead made contact with his skull, he felt nothing at all.
