Nothing could have prepared anyone in that square for what was happening. Drow were assaulting elves viciously. Magic was flinging itself against stone and mortar with abandon. Skandra could see that ... whatever Aeotha had made ... expanding with every shift of the breeze and every plunging draft created by another stab or parry of magic. The smarter of the Drow were dancing beyond its edges. Somewhere they must have entertained a vain hope of striking something - anything - that was going to make this disaster worthwhile. Skandra's head snapped around at the first sensation of skin crawling. He should not have been able to feel something like that. Should not have been able to see what he was seeing.
At the far end of the courtyard, where the madness was brutal but not yet hideous and out of hand, stood Elemmire. She was beautiful in that slender brown robe with its hood drawn. That hair, normally one of her most endearing features, instead seemed menacing spilling from the sides of the hood as it did. She was preparing something. He had no idea what it was, but she was preparing it, and it turned his guts to ice.
"Run!" one of the Drow shouted. "Run!"
As if the earth itself was a coiled whip, the ground before Elemmire began to snap. A grinding of stone and dirt rose up from nothing as the stone separated from its foundation. The stone was churning all across the square, but in sequence, as though a wave were passing beneath the stone and turning all of it into something fluid and terrible. Skandra could not imagine what she knew, or what she'd done, to make such a thing possible. It didn't matter. The wave was not discriminating between Drow and elf.
"What the fuck," he had time to whisper.
That whisper was as meaningless as the thoughts behind it. Skandra stood between Fiaethe and Elemmire. It did not matter. That same rolling wave of stone rollicked into the once-sturdy foundation beneath him. The Immortal was flung wild into the air. Magic all across the courtyard was cutting short as its wielders were thrown off-balance, into the air, into the sides of buildings. Skandra was certain he was ten feet above the ground as the shattered stone settled into a bed of wreckage beneath him. An instant of weightlessness, and then he was falling. Struck the stone hard. A rolling of his head was almost all that he could manage. Fiaethe's stone hand had shattered. The fog was gone.
Aeotha and Fiaethe were both as he was, flailing on the ground, out of breath.
Stunned and injured. Skandra was certain he'd broken at least one of his ribs in the fall. They must have been thrown, as well. Great clouds of dust and filth were swirling across the courtyard in the wake of the ruined earth. Barely anyone was stirring. Not Drow. Not Elves. Skandra was the first to push himself to his feet, and that was only with a great deal of pain.
Lights were still filling the sky above their heads. The earth still shook with each impact of spellcraft against the fortifications these elves had cleverly erected. Skandra's eyes were filled not by fury and magic. Only by her. He could not see her face. And something told him that this was wrong, all wrong. His thumb came to rest on a switch, carefully placed on the new device. One hard tug of said thumb, and the shapes on either side of the weapon turned. As they turned, blades emerged from nowhere, hidden within the twin boxes. Each one was the length of a sword blade, two fingers wide and straight as an arrow, with a single edge.
He'd almost doubted that it would work.
"I could not make myself strike for the heart," was what she called. "But if you do not stand aside, I will move you."
"You already put 'em down," Skandra called back. "No need for all of this."
"You do not mistake me," she returned, louder now. "Your time is running out."
That wrongness had a shape. Elemmire was trying to kill Fiaethe.