1.4.11 - A new challenger approaches

Hel's brood poured into the city, and for once elf and Pact lowered their blades at each other to raise them at something worse.

The rift kept giving. Pale elongated limbs and scything claws, jaws that unhinged too wide, some slick with ichor and some plated in clattering carapace. Worst were the ones that wore a trace of the familiar: twisted mockeries of elf-kind, faces stretched and broken, ears drawn into cruel spines, eyes gone to hollow voids. For a heartbeat the whole battlefield simply stared, elf and Pact alike, every blade lowered in the raw animal understanding that something older and fouler than their quarrel had arrived.

Then it came in droves, and the line between enemy and ally dissolved. Pact veterans and elven host found themselves back to back against Hel's children, and you were in the thick of it, cutting the nightmare down as it clawed for Hammerfall. The common horror did what no parley could. It put the war down, at least for tonight.

Remember For Next Time

• Hel invaded Hammerfall: monsters poured from the rift, including grotesque, corrupted echoes of elves.
• An accidental truce: facing the brood, the Pact and the elves fought side by side. The thing that paused the war was a worse enemy.
• The wound remains: the gate to Hel under the city is the real story now.

Where We Are

Holding the line beside former enemies against Hel's brood, the elven war drowned out by something far worse coming up from below.