To Fall Beyond the Night

Count Brass returns from the Air Dimension and cuts the white thread. Now only two threads, Water and Fire, hold the Demonweb up. They're opposite each other, as you would expect, but the Demonweb begins swinging wildly back and forth.

Lolth, who was about to summon six more bodies, rushes over to stabilize the Air thread. But Count Brass, Pouncequick, the Rebukers, and Bjern rush over to clobber her. Lolth is rescued by a Phase Spider, which transports her and Count Brass to another corner of her dimensional realm.

Next, Lolth summons her princes, Rhan-Tegoth and Abhoth, who burst up out of the ground and web a bunch of people in place. ROSA calls lightning on Rhan-Tegoth, which causes green lightning to burst out of the underside of Hell and smash a hole in his rocky armor. POUNCEQUICK jumps on that hole, stabs it, and rides Rhan-Tegoth up and into the Fire Dimension, pursued by Rosa and her flying horse.

The Fire Dimension turns out to be the interior of Mount Aetna, which Rosa has seen before while Lolth was sabotaging her woodswalk paths. Pouncequick dodges a huge thrown ball of molten metal hurled by the Balrog which lives in Aetna; it hits Rhan-Tegoth squarely, knocking him down into the base of the volcano. Rosa catches Pouncequick and calls lightning into the volcano, turning what was already going to be a Sicily-wrecking eruption into a hard lance of molten iron, straight up into the stratosphere. By the time the hot ash falls back down, it'll be way out in the ocean.

Pouncequick cuts the fire thread, but Lolth grabs the other end. So Pouncequick runs, telling everyone to run to the water thread, and drops the other end of the fire thread. The thread goes slack, and Lolth heaves on it, but she can't support the Demonweb herself, so she pulls in its edges, causing most of her monsters to fall off the suddenly retreating edge. Everyone runs for the water thread.

Meanwhile, BROTHER AQUILA travels up the Water thread and finds it leads to Londinium, capital of Fabulus Calamus the water wizard. He almost drowns in the polluted Thames but manages to avoid the fungus monster and rebuke the patchwork monster, and also some flying knights of the Order of the Bat. He sees the exit thread at the very top of Calamus' Panopticon, the crystal tower which sees all things, and concludes this is not an achievable one-man mission.

Nor need it be so! For just about everyone emerges from the water thread into Londinium. JUNIUS, the last to escape, sees the Demonweb tilt and submerge, falling on the support of the water thread until it snaps, and Lolth and her demons fall, farther and farther from God, glaring at Junius with her six red eyes until she is so far away she cannot see him. So far is she, in fact, that Sylvia cannot even see her with the Jewel in the Skull, and that's pretty darn far.

Next week, the Roman forces are in Londinium, capital of Calamus, the last villain left that they know of. They could just leave, recruit more forces, heal up, plan, and come back, but I somehow doubt that's going to happen ...