Tar-Baphon has ludicrous spell resistance.  It doesn’t take. He flings another Disjunction, and a quickened mythic Meteor Swarm, at a spot where a knot of the Shining Crusade’s casters are raining fireballs down on the fortress’s defenders. Normal meteor swarm is an underwhelming spell; this isn’t. It rips through everything in its path, deafens everyone around, and takes down several dozen people in four enormous searing explosions. Some of them stay in the air; some don't.

(Feather Falls stop the falling ones just shy of the ground; stopping their fall too early would just make them easy targets in midair.)

Iomedae’s Teleporter gets line of sight and drops her right on top of Tar-Baphon. (And then, himself, immediately goes down to simultaneous attacks by all of Tar-Baphon's guards.)

Iomedae shrugs those off. She Smites Evil and is then impossible to see except by afterimages of her flashing blade dancing around Tar-Baphon, moving at thrice the pace of his guards and flatly ignoring their efforts to interpose themselves. The glowing sword rips into the lich once, twice -

He activates the Boots and Teleports.

(Some other liches now have an informed guess about where Elie is and are flinging Greater Dispel Magics in his general direction. Malyas Smites Good and swoops in to fight Iomedae; neither side of that fight is possible to track with the naked or even the substantially enhanced eye.)

Informed guess about where Élie was.

By this point the sky is sufficiently full of Glitterdust that he’ll soon be out of places to hide. 

(His escort, which was in the area of Tar-Baphon’s first disjunction, is now visible but out of contact with him.)

Elsewhere, a great black dragon is zipping around trying to beat concealed wizards out of the sky with sweeps of its great wings. Elsewhere elsewhere, skeleton archers assembled on the battlements are firing thousands of arrows at Iomedae presumably in the hope that she cannot dodge them all at the same time. Then someone drops a Sirocco on them; it’s hard to fire through that. Elsewhere elsewhere, a lich spots Alfirin and tries a Disintegrate, and then gets himself speared through by a charging cavalier on a pegasus, and then breaks apart into a swarm of several hundred individually hostile bones.

This isn’t the hardest battle Élie’s ever fought, or the biggest, or the most dangerous to him personally – but it’s certainly the most confusing. 

Fights with this many powerful spellcasters don’t happen in his day and age. They haven’t for the past thousand years. They probably haven’t for three or four thousand years before the shining crusade either, since the great wars between Nex and Geb, and maybe not even then. Half the combatants are invisible, he doesn’t know how many aren’t detectable to his Arcane Sight  – everywhere he looks there are paladins fighting ghouls and shadows and nightwings and vampires and thousands and thousands of skeletons – 

He can’t begin to tell where he’d be most useful, so he’s tossing around Chains of Light  – it’s a paladin spell, but his are harder to dodge than any paladin’s could be – 

His Chains of Light freeze liches in midair where they're descended on with smites or just turned into a pincushion by archers at a great distance.

“Relaying that your escort can’t find you, asks where to go,” says his relay back in Vigil. 

The fortress explodes, the sound spectacularly loud enough to be heard even over all the other sounds of a pitched battle. It looks like they’d secretly replaced all of the lower walls with dismissible spellwork, trying to time it to trap as many invaders inside as possible.

Malyas, his work of having kept Iomedae distracted done, Dimension Doors away from her and towards the most powerful mage he can identify.

(She obviously ordered them to take the fortress only with summons once they realized it’d been rigged; casualties should be minimal. If they had only the one archmage she’d call a retreat at this point, their having succeeded at getting Tar-Baphon to blow up his own fortress and Tar-Baphon having succeeded at making the city much less useful to take. But it’s in fact worth holding Marian Leigh even if they’ll have to rebuild with Wall of Stone.)

Has anyone got a good look on what Malyas is using for sun protection today? She’ll fling a disjunction his way anyways - it won’t suppress his items, but once they've identified which it is they can get that with a dispel.

Iomedae didn't have a chance at identifying Malyas's magic items before, because he was Mind Blanked, but ha, now he isn't; she'll chase him down. She’s faster, with his Haste disjoined.

Iomedae does not have wizard-tier spellcraft but the wizards are going to have a hard time telling which of his magic items is the one keeping him intact, when the items are layered beneath other items on an extremely fast-moving extremely magical vampire lord from whom they are advisedly keeping their distance. 

She intercepts Malyas before he can rip Heleer to shreds and re-engages him in their swordfight, which won’t be much of a fight now that he’s Disjoined - except that four of the graveknights close in as well, and that’s enough to keep her thoroughly distracted except to reply to Alfirin that she isn't getting a good look -

The nightwing’s caught sight of Alfirin and she’s racing up toward the sunlight and restored invisibility

Elie can you get eyes on Malyas -

The range on his Arcane Sight is 120 feet, which is closer than he’d ideally like to be to this situation, but Iomedae seems to have it handled. Malyas is very fast, and very magical, and flashing in and out of his vision as he dives in and out of the tangle of equally fast equally magical combatants – 

He must be unusually slow today, because it takes him just over ten seconds. It’s the moonstone amulet on his belt. 

A swarm of summoned locusts is now munching its way across the sky. Someone puts another Deeper Darkness up. Élie’s relay once again communicates his escort would love to know where he is. Chain Lightning is crackling relentlessly across the ruins of the fortress. 

Fine fine fine he is in this-and-such a location, he’ll try not to move too far but who’s to say what might happen in the next few moments. 

(He makes a mental note to talk to Alfirin afterwards about how she deals with having a much less mobile escort – he’s used to fighting with his own party, who can get around the battlefield by themselves). 

Alfirin has peeled free from the nightwing and can fly by Malyas hitting the deeper darkness and his equipment with a greater dispel. He flinches in the sunlight, tries to teleport with his boots, and then dives into the shade of a nearby half-collapsed wall. Alfirin turns her attention to the weaker liches, who without Tar-Baphon’s or Malyas’ abilities to resist magic can occasionally be caught with a threnodic dominate.

And the nightwing Jalanara goes for Élie, while some liches in the distance pepper Élie’s vicinity with Dimension Lock. The dozen greater shadows around the nightwing drain strength on a touch, and can kill a wizard at once by swarming it; Élie has Death Ward up, of course, but the nightwing can strip spells off with a bite. The first bite has Élie almost halfway to dead even through his Stoneskin, and strips the Haste off him as well. 

Iomedae turns, sees the bite tear at empty air and guesses at the target, grimaces, takes off in his direction even though this lets Cosarra and Alamathus rip chunks out of her as she goes.  Someone throws up a Wall of Force to stop her. 

Get Malyas. I can handle it. 

This isn’t the first time Élie’s been half-eaten by a nightwing; it wasn’t fun then and it isn’t fun now. The nightwing, though, isn’t the problem – the shadows will kill him first. It looks like there are four or five dimension locks, it’s hard to tell with all the overlapping spell signatures. He might get them all with a greater dispel, but then again he might not – so his best option is a Sunburst. 

He’s not exactly panicking yet, but it does occur to him that this would be a really stupid way to die. 

The Sunburst takes out more than half of the greater shadows; the nightwing herself rolls and recovers; a dozen enemy spellcasters who heard his incantation now fling Feebleminds and more Dimension Locks and one Disintegrate at him -

- none of them hit, either through wild luck or the work of his escort, which is frantically flying towards him and ripping spells out of the air with Paladin’s Sacrifice to hit them instead.

The nightwing bites him again and one of the paladins in the escort takes the damage and Elie feels nothing at all, though the nightwing’s spell unravelling still affects him - gets his Moment of Prescience, this time, and its jaws keep him in its grip -

Of course, there are too damn many spellcasters, hadn’t he thought to himself less than a minute ago that there are too damn many spellcasters, just not that this might involve a change in tactics – 

– post-mortem later. Salvaging the situation now. Time Stop. Quickened Greater Dispel Magic. Greater Dispel Magic – and that does it, he can teleport back to safety, at the cost of every lich on the battlefield knowing that the Shining Crusade has another archmage. 

They take Marian Leigh in about three minutes, which is a usual duration for a skirmish between both sides’ high level forces (as opposed to a battle between both sides’ armies). They’ll be sleeping out of extradimensional mansions for a while while they build walls with conjuration, but after three minutes of pitched fighting Tar-Baphon’s forces teleport out in near unison, and the not-capable-of-teleporting ones attempt a mostly-futile retreat through the city itself; presumably word has reached their master that the Shining Crusade has some new tricks up its sleeve, and he’d rather lose Marian Leigh than lose half of them. 

They want the Teleportation Circle, at that point, to bring in a flock of less high-powered-combat-specialized people, Forbiddance the place extensively, march through the sewers murdering ghouls, slap alarm spells everywhere, etcetera. The city has a terrified civilian population. Most places in Ustalav do. The undead can make more undead only with living to prey on. They shower them in healing and herd them away from those areas of the city which they’re attempting to actually secure against a return incursion and call a couple of angels whose job it is to watch over the civilians and complain vociferously if they are wronged. Teams retrieve bodies from the ground and the nearby river and drag them to the operations center for identification (done by arcane mark, unless they were disjoined).

Élie is going to find a staff officer and learn the name of the bodyguard he got killed. 

His relay in Vigil knows! Nikantos. He hasn't gotten word on whether they retrieved the body yet but he can pass it along to Élie once he hears.