THE BLADES.
Amos could only nod as Rictor joined them and uttered his thanks. Sweat was beading on his brow as he focused on the opponents. Attention could not be given to the wounds the Blades were sustaining, much as every instinct screamed for him to heal them, to make them strong where he himself could not be. For the Gardists and the Korporal were men not unlike the Luscini patriarch. They were cut from the same cloth, vibrant and indomitable. Amos was another fabric entirely. Much like the material of his clothes, he was fraying at the seams, threadbare, greys and blacks and whites. In his washed out uselessness, he had failed his father.
But he would not fail the Blades. Holyra burst from the Book in waves, sweeping through the undead's fresh vanguard. It was not the beautiful precision of Lex's fusillade of Holy, but it would do. The undead faltered, buckling under the tide of holy magicks. Those that were not felled were quickly put to a head by the flash of Filip's blade.
Under the party's offensive, the creatures began to crumple with awful, sibilant noises. Small towers of corpses seemed to be erected around the Blades as wave upon wave was dispatched. But the zombies only climbed over their fallen comrades, the heaping piles of putridity, as if driven onward by an emotion far more compelling than the anger of the living. Their stench was almost palpable in the air. Again, Amos thought of the man he had failed, of offals spilling out into cobblestone as the sun sank into the skyline.
In a burst of creativity (no, arithmeticks were not for him; his was a poet's soul), Amos began to use Raise in place of Holyra. The results were considerable—Raise seemed to inflict more damage than the more costly holy magick. Breathing heavily, the priest flipped the pages of the Scripture, seeking the appropriate chapter, the precise verse, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
The new approach sparked in Amos a newfound fortitude. Each wave that fell was another dozen souls relieved of this unholy bondage. This was not only the extermination of the Dark but also the exhumation of souls. And suddenly the awful moans and groans of the zombies were not terrible but mellifluous, a chorus of rapturous children at last reunited with their Father. The spells left the pages of the Scripture with mounting speed and potency, the dead predecessor of Hume escaping Amos's lips with greater vigor and volume.
There was light at the end of even these caves. But as the hordes thinned, so too did the combatants tire. More knights began to slip past Balder's and Filip's blades, managing to land blows on the Kaplan. The last knight managed a blow on the Kaplan's head before it was caught in a burst of white magick. Blood spilled down the left side of his face, but Amos prayed on and on and on.