They managed to find Myrin near the command tent. Aurigeant, the finnian fisher, and Garyung, the sword-and-board bhogad, were near at hand, and all three were breathing heavily. Kaldalis could easily see that they were badly battered, but whatever they’d tangled with was gone, meaning they’d likely beaten it into leaving.

“What happened?” Balrim said, already pulling out potions and chucking the first to Myrin. “Are you all alright?”

“Yeah,” Myrin said, slumping down, despite the potion restoring a big chunk of health. “They just keep coming. And they don’t stick around long enough to do anything with. At least, not until Garyung showed up.”

“They seem to be vulnerable to strong threat generation,” Garyung said.

“That’s what we found as well,” Kaldalis said as Balrim bobbed in place impatiently. It was obvious he was waiting for his potion cooldown to come back so he could finish topping Myrin up and get on to helping the other two. He just looked slightly ridiculous. “What’s our plan, then? Just soften them up one by one until they leave?”

“No. I was on the front line with the expedition leader,” Aurigeant said, “and she sent me back this way. In her tent is a warbanner. We need it..”

“Of course she would want something like that.” Kaldalis rolled his eyes. “Is her plan to go down in a blaze of glory? Stand her ground?”

“It is no mere decoration,” Aurigeant said with a thin chuckle. “The banner will help. It was put together by Baimer’s top alchemists from materials gathered by the last explorers who returned to this region.”

“Why?” Myrin asked, just before getting hit with another potion. “What’s the banner for?”

“The Infernal Horde,” Kaldalis said with a grimace. “What I fought before was just some scarier-than-normal wildlife. This is the real deal.”

Aurigeant didn’t say anything, but nodded.

“There’s like… An entire cavern full of them about a ten minute sprint north,” Kaldalis explained, pointing in that direction. “But they’re roaming the area all over the place. One saw me on my way inland, like, probably a mile or two from here, and chased me down forever. It wouldn’t drop aggro for anything. After it killed me, it went and got some friends and ran them straight here.”

“Hah, yeah, sorry pal.” Garyung clasped him on the shoulder. “You can’t despawn enemies by leashing them. Not without items.” He paused. “The starter quest rewarded a few talismans that you can use.”

“Of course,” Kaldalis grumbled. He didn’t regret skipping the tutorial, but it was a near thing.

Balrim tossed the bhogad a potion. “If we have this warbanner thing, then why are we so afraid of the Infernal Horde at all?”

“The problem is that we only have one,” Aurigeant said. “And we do not have materials to replace it. We thought we’d have a few more days before they attacked.”

Kaldalis ducked his head, and then shook away the guilt. It wasn’t his fault, and it would have happened to anything. “So, it sounds like we need to make this one count. Save the camp, keep our foothold. This whole expedition was for nothing if we can’t save the people here.”

“I’m game,” Myrin said. “Where’s the warbanner, then?”

“The expedition leader’s tent.” Aurigeant pointed a little bit back the way Kaldalis and Balrim had come. “Not far from here.”

Without waiting for Balrim to finish healing everyone, the quintet made their way in that direction. Balrim pulled out potions on cooldown to heal up Aurigeant and Garyung without complaint. It looked exhausting, and Kaldalis found himself feeling privileged that all he had to do was stand in front of shit and get hit.

Travelling through the chaos of the camp was relatively easy now that they were all together.

They weren’t completely safe, however. There were still monsters in the area, but the creatures were darting around the tents, looking for isolated adventurers to prey on. They all seemed to balk at even approaching the larger group. Neither Kaldalis nor Garyung could tag one with a hit to use their enmity generation to lock the monster in place for the party to soften them up and send them running for real.

“This one,” Aurigeant said, drawing the group up short. He ducked into the tent, and the rest followed.

Kaldalis had expected the expedition leader’s personal tent to be a giant ostentatious mess. Something to reflect her hunger for glory. But this tent was only slightly larger than the one Kaldalis himself had slept in. And when he saw the inside, he found that he couldn’t even begrudge her that little extra space, since the tent didn’t just hold a modest cot salvaged from the ship, but also a small office area.

Despite the small size and abundance of furniture, she had organized the space rather neatly. Everything looked strangely tidy which wasn’t a surprise. From what Kaldalis knew of Onirioago, presentation was everything to her. But it meant that the tall warbanner - decorated with the Adventurers League sigil and topped with what appeared to be a censer of incense - was easy to spot propped up against the back wall of her tent.

“This is it,” Aurigeant said, grabbing it and handling it very carefully on the way out of the tent.

“So do we need to light it?” Myrin reached into her pocket and produced a flint. Kaldalis had never seen it before, and wasn’t sure how she obtained it. Maybe it was something from her time in Baimer.

“Not here.” Aurigeant led them back out of the tent and pointed back towards the command tent. “It has a limited radius. We have to be in the middle of the camp so we can help everyone.”

“You four seem to have this under control,” Garyung said. He reached over and patted Balrim on the shoulder. “And I thank you for the healing. But there are others in danger. I’ll spread the word that this help is coming, and try and get everyone else rallied and ready to fight.”

Aurigeant gave a nod at that.

“We’re with you,” Kaldalis said, giving the finnian as reassuring a smile as he could muster as Garyung headed out into the camp. There was a moment’s pause and Aurigeant’s health bar appeared on Kaldalis’s vision as Balrim extended a party invite to him.

“Soonest begun, soonest done,” Aurigeant said, leading the way back towards the center of the camp.

The command tent wasn’t precisely the center of camp, and the terse finnian didn’t provide commentary as he led the way beyond it towards a kind of vague town square area on the other side.

Between the time when Kaldalis had left that morning and now, the area had been modified.

Before, it had been sort of just an open space, but now there were workshops half-assembled. Or perhaps they had been more put-together for a short time, and had been dismantled by the attack. There were quite a few of them, and it gave Kaldalis hope that he might be able to get into crafting, if they survived this.

“Here,” Aurigeant said at the center of the open space, in the middle of the scattered crafting stations. “This will cover the whole camp.”

Without hesitation, the finnian drove the bottom of the warbanner into the ground. There was a moment of resistance before the metal tip of the shaft broke through the tamped-down earth and into the more yielding ground beneath that layer.

“Do we need to light it… Physically?” Myrin asked, the flint in her hands again. “Or should it just activate?”

Aurigeant said nothing, but his expression spoke volumes. He grimaced up at the censer atop the warbanner, now nearly nine feet off the ground.

“Don’t worry.” Kaldalis sighed and looked to Myrin. “We got it.” He knelt down next to the suyon and patted his shoulder. “Hop on. Just watch the horns.”

Myrin hesitated with an uncomfortable look on her face - as if she had just tried kombucha for the first time - and the pause was just long enough that Kaldalis almost apologized. But she clambered onto his shoulders, delicately holding onto one horn for support.

“I said watch the horns,” he grumbled, and she adjusted her weight so that she wasn’t leaning on it. Her grip there still felt weird to him, but he supposed he didn’t want her falling off.

He straightened up. Combined, Myrin was able to easily reach the censer. There was a conical lid at the top to pull off to reveal the incense, and Myrin fumbled for a moment to pull out and light a match while holding the lid in one hand. With the boost he offered, she was able to reach in with the match, light the incense, and lock the lid back in place.

As Kaldalis lowered her back to the ground, the incense began to do its work. A thick grey smoke began to rise from the holes in the metal lid. Kaldalis hoped that whatever it did would be enough to turn the tide.