Nix hounds are comparatively weak creatures, but they're desperate. They've lived on the slopes of Nirn's most terrible volcano for thousands of years, survived blight and ash and flows of lava, and still they persevere. Something seems to have driven them into a frenzy - a good few dozen have poured out of the Morrowind side of the pass, and they fall like a snapping tide on the party.
The conjurers among the party seem to be having something of a field day, clearing a narrow circle of crushed bug around themselves. Atronachs are mindless beasts, creatures pieced together from pure elemental energy, and lack imagination of their own. This makes them rather blunt weapons, if powerful ones. Sheogorath's mad genius seems to be strong in Alistair's tactics, though, and he vaults atop his flesh-beast's shoulders, turning it into a sort of unorthodox cavalry that lifts him above the fray. It lumbers into a knot of famished hounds that seem intent on tearing into the group's provisions - seeing a perfectly serviceable food source in the body of the atronach, they fall upon it, even taking a few bites out of the Alistair's legs, but, one by one, it pulls them up into the air, and either rips them apart or flattens them with a single mighty blow of its fist.
Swain's flame atronach is similarly effective, if not very efficient. It flings bolt after bolt of killing fire at the hounds, but they're adapted to deal with the stygian heat of the Vvardenfell Ashlands, and they shrug off the blows. Rather than changing its tactics, adopting a new approach or angle of attack, the elemental simply piles more fire on the blaze that it's created around itself. The flames of its body turn from red to orange, orange to yellow, yellow to white, and only get hotter from there. Flickering auroras of bluish plasma limn its fists as it batters the hounds, but what blows it can land only seem to char their silicate shells - it's not enough to cause significant damage to the tender meat beneath. But they can't hold up forever - slowly but surely, the atronach's turning them into soot and carbon, and there's a sickening crack as one of his Aetheric swords shatters the hound's ruined shell, biting deep into its flesh. It yelps, snapping at him ineffectually. This fighting's taking its toll on him, though - fighting in such close quarters with his own atronach would have singed his eyebrows off if he had them, and his skin's going to be sore in the morning.
The more conventional fighters put up an excellent showing too. Anchored by Valus and Dagvar's ring of flashing steel, the others gradually find themselves converging on it, fending off a carpet of snapping jaws beneath them and the flapping wings of cliff racers above. The merchant and his guard sustain a few wounds, but do manage to save the guardswoman with the aid of a mysterious two-headed, four-armed beast of blood, sinew, and flapping robes, which charges across their field of vision before crashing off into the trees and the darkness. Screams come from every side, hunting-screams, fear-screams, pain-screams, and a slick of inhuman blood stains the snow of Dunmeth Pass.
One scream, though, is very definitely a sapient scream - a war-cry, inflected with a courage and fearful bravado that's missing in the other cries. Dagvar wheels, looking for this mysterious attacker, inadvertently turning his back on another hound, which crouches, and prepares to spring. Its locust-like legs coil beneath it, readying a leap that will tear out his throat - but, without warning, it is flattened by what looks like a flailing flesh meteor, it's back broken by M'ar and the cliff-racer he's literally just wrestled out of the sky. The hound's back breaks instantly from the impact, the racer shudders and is still, breaking the fall of the young Argonian boy. He bounces, ragdolling up in the air, and for a moment it's as if he's about to land on his feet - but he slumps slowly to the floor, murmuring something about flying as he does so. Chahin and Lugag stand over him, idly dispatching the blighted fauna and discussing the finer points of law and food. As Lugag bites into another leg, though, his teeth grate against something caught in the meet, that's decidedly inedible. He draws it out of his mouth, and, after cleaning off a little of the blood, saliva, and meat, will be surprised - and a little disturbed - to see that it's a piece of braided copper wire, seemingly enmeshed into the meat.
All across the camp, there's chaos, but it's a chaos that seems to be resolving in the party's favour. Almost everyone is a little roughed up, scratched, bitten - but more than half the hounds lie dying on the bloodstained snow. Their savage, desperate, hungry fury - so dangerous when there so many earlier in the fight - has made them skittish, fearful, and uncoordinated. As more and more fall to the men and mer's blades, they begin to fall back, snapping at anyone so foolish as to pursue them. They don't flee - every so often, one of the alpha hounds rallies a handful of its followers to launch a raid on the food supplies - but they do seem to be broken.
~~~
The hound with Albel doesn't seem to have the same violent frenzied hunger as the others - it seems like, separated from the collective hive-mind of the pack, it's been reduced to a diffident, pleading aspect. As he eyes the beast, it eyes him back with quizzical segemented orange eyes, and rests its chitinous 'muzzle' on the ground. When he throws it some of his meat, it goes into violent motion, leaping up and snapping the scrap out of the air, before worrying at it on the ground, fileting off slices with its sharp mandibles. Something - some small predator's instinct - alerts it to movemement in the corner of its eye, however, and, with its animal intelligence, spots the sharp object that's suddenly appeared in the man's hand. Nix know that two-legged creatures often have sharp claws that can strike even over a distance, and so this particular specimen begins cowering in fear and submission. Its two long prehensile antennae flick out, touching Albel's boot, but then withdraw, clearly trying to put up a non-threatening aspect. As the man leaves, it slinks along after him, drawn by the smell of food in his pack but fearing to get too close and get stung by the man's claws.
~~~
Serenes disappears into the darkness of the Northern night, but that doesn't trouble her - she hasn't needed light to 'see' for a very long time. She creeps past the pack of Nix-hounds slowly slinking towards the camp, but they don't notice her in the gloom. Besides, her disability has made her occupy space in a different way, walking occluded along unseen spaces past beasts that would wish her ill, discerning paths invisible to those who rely on light to guide them. A multitude of hissing, croaking, shrieking, and piping creatures suffuse the Resdayni wetlands with a panoply of sound that would baffle lesser ears, but Serenes' heightened sense of hearing, together with her Bosmeri communion with the natural world, guides her through unmolested.
It's not all plain-sailing, though. Serenes is, theoretically, walking on a paved Imperial High Road, one of the main arteries of imperial commerce - at least that's what her map indicates. In fact, it seems to be uneven, broken rock at best, and a seemingly bottomless quagmire at worst, which even the feather-light Bosmer sinks into up to her knees. Her sense of balance and hearing are second to none, but they're of little use here, and it's slow going.
After a few hours of walking, though, she does come across something that makes her draw up cold. She's on a drier patch of ground, a mossy heath, and finally can feel something other than bog and rock beneath her feat. Years of tracking prey both human and animal have given her excellent skills at recognising traces of the passage of her prey, and she can immediately tell that there are tracks here, sapients' tracks, from the way that the soil is disturbed and from the faint outlines of clawed feet marching in an organised formation. She reaches down, caressing the earth's memories of their passage, seeing if she can coax any information out of them.
Argonians. Thirty or so of them. Came this way roughly three weeks ago. She wouldn't know her father's footprint by touch - can't really tell Rajee-za's tracks from any other Argonian after such a delay - but she can't rule out that he came this way.
