Fires in the West: THE BALEFROG RISES [EMPIRE!]

[TheDarkDM]

As the demon glowered down on the assembled defenders of Sulvan's Fury, the sky behind it swirled with oily black smoke, rising from the burning countryside to choke out the sunlight. The beast screamed a challenge at the proud city of the Sulvai, and jumped. The ridge disintegrated beneath its weight, and it sailed through the air towards the city's main gate. The force of its landing sent cracks through the dwarven masonry, as it hung like a malformed gargoyle over the assembled army. It hung there for minutes, swaying on the unsteady gate, surveying the meager force arrayed against. Then it began to laugh. The sound was an avalanche of breaking glass, jagged and fractured and wholly unnatural. It's eyes were filled with a sadistic glee that betrayed its foul intelligence, revealing to the assembled soldiers what only Freki Valison had known for sure - this was no simple beast. And then the laughter ceased, and the demon's throat bulged with a monstrous breath.

Freki's eyes bulged outwards in terror at what was to come, but he could only manage a strangled cry of warning before the ashen tide exploded from the demon's mouth. Its pyroclastic cloud flowed through the streets of the capital like water, incinerating the mithril armored soldiers like cordwood. The doors of the Sulvai longhouses disintegrated beneath the burning gas, and the longhouses themselves were soon flooded with the deadly black fume. From the buildings of the regional government, it seemed as though an impenetrable shadow had fallen over a quarter of the city, and panic began to sweep through the city's remaining inhabitants when the smell of charred meet wafted over them. By then the creature's breath was spent, yet its mouth remained wide as thousands of tortured dwarven souls were sucked into its hellish crucible of a stomach. The screams of the populace reached it as it finished digesting its meal, and the demon answered with a scream of its own, a thousand times more savage and powerful than the mightiest living dwarf in the city. It leapt into the street to hunt its cowering prey, and the gate finally collapsed. There would be no escape for the Sulvai.