The others will all try to dive at once. They are, in fact, focusing on Blai, and the shield slows them a little before they crash through it but not very much. 

Blai can take some hits and keep fighting; the claws honestly distract him less than trying to fight from horseback. He can only mace one gryphon at a time even when there's three of them but he can keep his attention on that. Swing. Swing. Swing.

Seldan can be easier to fight from than an ordinary horse but there’s really no substituting for them having any experience fighting together.

One of the gryphons trying to come at Blai’s back is stupid enough to dodge under a Vanyel-fireball and come within Seldan’s kicking reach, though. That gryphon goes flying and is too disoriented to dodge the followup.

Blai will take a few hits from the other two, but not on unarmored parts of him, and then Vanyel knocks first one and then the out of the sky. 

It turns out that Blai getting hit by gryphons is REALLY UPSETTING and makes Seldan furious! Seldan is too focused on the rest of the fight to bother with selectively shielding that emotion to where Blai can’t see it - does Blai seem to be basically all right, though, that’s the important part - 

Yeah, he has thirty-four hit points to lose, why is Seldan freaking out about a few claw gouges.

Seldan is not freaking out, thank you very much. Seldan is just ticked off with the gryphons because they're being rude. 

They keep going. The rubble is pretty hot underfoot at this point, but Seldan is the one dealing with that and he's fine. 

Nayoki stops a couple of meters short; she doesn't want to accidentally shift any debris and crush Leareth when he's made it this long and is still, if just barely, alive. She sends them all a mental sense of where to look and then, reluctantly, disengages her Thoughtsensing. She can't get debris moved nearly as quickly as Vanyel can. 

What she can do, however, is set-command anyone who dares to get within fifty yards of them. 

Six gryphons at once find this out the hard way, and plummet out of the sky. 

(They're pretty badly injured by the fall, but will probably survive it if Blai does end channeling, and will still be unable to move.) 

It would be faster to blast his way through but that would, uh, kill Leareth the rest of the way. Vanyel will grit his teeth and do it the slow careful way and start levering up broken rocks with carefully shaped cups of mage-energy and tossing them aside. 

Seldan can help keep a lookout if Blai wants to help move rocks, he can't do as much as fast as Vanyel but it could still help. 

Sure, Blai will get down and help shift rocks.

They shift rubble. A few more gryphons try and go down and after that the rest stay out of sight. (Judging by the shrieks coming from out of the darkness, there are a few of them.) 

Vanyel shifts a slab of rock and - he's not as good at this as Nayoki, but he thinks now he can feel Leareth's mind. 

:Do you need all of him uncovered or just at least one body part - I think we're close -: 

:A body part will do.:

:All right.: Maybe if he gets this one... 

There are some humans on the ground trying to approach. Nayoki set-commands them well before they can even get into sight. 

And then one of them - doesn't stop -

- a tall figure with waist-length white hair walks into the circle of light from Blai's holy symbol, and Nayoki's third attempt at a set-command seems to bounce off entirely, just like the others. 

:Problem: Nayoki snaps to all three of them. 

Vanyel doesn't stop trying to lift the slab of stone - he's using his Gifts, not his hands - but he stands up. 

:Brightstar, please stop. It's me - I'm not dead, it was a trick -: 

:You are not my father.: No expression at all in the young man's mindvoice. :My father would never work with Leareth.: He takes another step toward them. 

Well this is not going great does Blai have ideas. 

"Problem" isn't a very specific sitrep. He doesn't know what Nayoki tried, or even that she tried anything.

"Brightstar" is better. He has some context on Brightstar.

Brightstar himself, somehow, is the most helpful person in the room as regards Blai choosing a reaction.

"Qualm," he says.

Brightstar stops moving. He gets a very odd expression on his face. 

:The Death Bell rang for Vanyel: he says after a long moment, almost plaintively. 

:I know.: Tired, gentle. :It was - something wrong with the Web.: Saying the Star-Eyed Goddess did it might do the opposite of help. 

Seldan is still trying to pull a sense from Blai's mind of what that spell does and, in particular, how long they should expect it to work and whether they'll have much warning if it stops working. 

(He's also still processing that Brightstar can apparently block Mindhealing set-commands. Seldan had genuinely not known that was possible - ugh, probably Jisa figured it out because she's a prodigy and then taught him because she's a naive kid and he's her brother - incidentally, the part where Vanyel is both of their father is a STATE SECRET, though all the Companions know and it's one of the first facts he learned about Jisa...) 

It does seem like the spell helped with plan: Vanyel keeps Brightstar talking, but - is there anything Blai can do if he decides he's done talking and just - calls a Final Strike, right here and now? Because Seldan can't think of anything that the rest of them can do, short of Gating out and abandoning Leareth, which isn't an option.