He makes a fist with one of his hands and swings it in a wide arc, letting his body turn with it, as if throwing a roundhouse punch. An arc of sunfire flashes from it, burgeoning in all directions. It is not his real attack. Based on what he’s seen so far, the figure should have no real trouble diverting, blocking, or counteracting its advance, but, as with the wolves, the method it chooses will tell him something, and the arc should be wide enough and hot enough to cleanse the circle of the technics that had eaten away his barrier.

His other hand joins the first at the apex of its Herculean swing. They lock together, forming a single fist, and, in the haze of heat and vapor created by the wash of sunfire, he slams it downwards, as if planting a flag in the soil. The earth begins to tremble, ever so slightly, beneath his feet, as the thing his Voice is calling forms.

The figure barely moves a muscle. Two fingers, forked slightly and touched to its forehead, then drawn down the chevrons marking its nose, are all the response it makes. The air shimmers in front of it and a shield of ice crystalizes into existence. Steam hisses as the sunfire billows into it, melting and then boiling it away bit by bit, layer by layer. The last of it vaporizes just as the fire fades away; the figure has designed it perfectly, creating it in the exact shape and thickness to defray the heat, with nothing left to interfere as he prepares his next maneuver.

It waves a hand, and a dark mist begins to swirl in front of it. The mist coils inward, tightening and gaining speed as it vortexes upon itself, until there is a flash of light, and a hulking mass takes its place. It stands, bent over, hair dangling from its scalp in dirty, rotten clumps, its teeth, gapped and stumpy, hanging limply in its jaw in a hungry, look-what-we’ve-got-here type smile. Decomposing flesh clung to its frame, which only showed through to bone in a handful of places. The tattered remnants of a merchant’s tunic waved gently in the vortex’s wind.

It advances towards Ylo slowly, making gestures with a skeletal hand as it did. At each gesture a cloud of…something floats towards him, a subtle warping of the world, in a space no larger than a fist. The first few fall short, landing in the soil before him, where they sink into the shells and pebbles, aging them to weathered dust.

Ylo dodges the next few manually, watching their trajectories and stepping aside whenever he is in their path. They are slow; it is not difficult. But it is a nuisance, and diverts his attention away from more constructive tasks. The undead thing will need to dealt with.

Another tremor in the earth. He checks the Voice that holds the thing he has summoned and decides that it is stable enough. He reaches for a Voice of empathy, with which he can smite the ghoul, and…

He hears that deep subsuming warble, and the world slues again. It is stronger than before; he has to clap his hands to his ears in a vain attempt to block it out. He can feel his Voices slip, trying to scatter once again, and again the anchor of perspective shifts, throwing off his eyes and ears. He gropes, doubled nearly over, for Dovesong as he did before, finding it easier this second time despite the increase in distortion, and sets its melodious Voice singing towards the figure. The warble fades, the light senesces, perspective quells, and his Voices are his own again.

And the undead thing is almost on him. As the last of the warped perspective trues he can see the weathered dust, in patches scattered in front of him, beside him, even behind him, outside the circle, and he breathes a sigh of relief. It is only by sheer luck that they had missed him as he’d gone through his gyrations. The thing begins another gesture, hand outstretched, close enough now that Ylo wonders if it might be reaching for him, and he sees the subtle warping start to form above its palm. In something of a panic he attunes his sunfire Voice again – it is the one he can manage fastest, having used it the most recently – and lashes out at the thing with a ferocity he would normally reserve for much more powerful targets. A single bar of white-hot light blazes at it from above, catching it full in the body, scorching it a Tartaran black. The smell of burning, putrid flesh fills Ylo’s nostrils, and its ragged, half-chord screams makes him want to guard his ears. The whole of the thing’s torso is enveloped, and before long it’s burned away. Its dismembered limbs and head topple with a sickening squelch, and then these, too, begin to hiss and mist away.

That was close, Ylo thinks, remembering the fencing adage that the first one to cede position usually loses. It almost knocked me off my…

Oooph!

He hears it first, the violent clip-clop, clip-clop of an equine creature charging, but he was too focused on the ghoul, or else the figure has been able to mask it longer than it should have been, and he hears it late, too late to put up any but the most primitive of defenses. The blow catches him clean in the side, overpowering his cushion of air and sending him flying across the circle. The fall knocks the wind out of him and he lies, groaning, struggling to gain his feet, then, sensing time slipping away like water from an upset mug, he gives up, and merely rolls onto his back. He can almost hear the soft, satisfied little chuckle he’s sure the Speaker is emitting as he stares up at a rampant Cayou, a half-man, half-horse creature of the prairie, with polewood staves in place of hands. Its chiseled chest sparkles with dewdrops from the mist that formed it. Its raised hooves are close enough for him to pick out hairs upon its leg.

He has maybe half a heartbeat before it comes crashing down, crushing whatever part of him it chooses with its considerable weight. Briefly he considers defending, trying again with the cushion of air, or a more protective Voice, but he rejects the idea. The figure has had time to plan, and might be ready with a counter. Instead, he jerks his head sideways, towards the figure, and calls his thing from in the earth.