"...Prelate, hello. We found these folks trying to burn some other folks. This one had this on him," the Baphomet symbol. "If we can just turn them over I'd like to pursue what might be a route to repairing the failed Wardstone."

Good, nobody tried to stay out of range.

"We'll get to that in a minute. First things first; have any of you noticed yourself or your companions acting out of character? Any discontinuities in your memories? Things you were planning that don't make sense? Or of course outright commands? If there's anything even plausibly a candidate, speak up; embarrassment is unimportant compared to not getting turned into a puppet. Even a magic circle against evil won't guarantee you make your saves against a Lilitu, but with this many paladins and adventurers one of you should."

"Hm - I'm not missing any time, and can explain everything I've done and plan on to myself..."

"I still endorse everything I remember."

The rest of the eagle's watch will sound off their confirmation.

"Good. I'm going to step away, wait two moments, then return. This won't give you another chance to resist, but it might let you notice a compulsion by it suddenly taking effect again or turning off."

He does so; their answers stay the same.

"I'll want to check again when I have spells to spare, but frankly I could say that about everyone in this demon-infested city. You don't seem particularly more likely to be dominated than any of the other patrols checking in. Alright, now make your report."

Ky will describe all of their heroics in a nice clear voice!

This story is so suspicious but in fact he is basically certain they aren't demons, it's unlikely they're being mind controlled, and while it's theoretically possible they could be cultists he would not have missed the entire eagle watch being cultists instead of paladins. If they could somehow fake all of those tests then Mendev wouldn't exist anymore. His leading alternate hypothesis is that Kybele is actually a much higher level adventurer than she's pretending to be; if so, the fact that she's hiding it is not an encouraging sign but even if he knew for certain he's not in a position to turn down her help over that. He wouldn't be even if they weren't in the middle of a demon attack. Which means, implausible as it sounds... the story is probably mostly true.

"I don't like the sound of bringing Deskari's blood to the wardstone, but miracles of heaven are in short supply right now and everything else sounds worse. If the storyteller doesn't have another solution, I don't think there's anyone in Mendev with the skills to second guess the storyteller, and he had to pass a very thorough background check before he got anywhere near the warstone. Plan approved, but don't take any stupid risks. I'm not sure yet how we'll get you to the wardstone without the Lilitu stopping you but with enough paladins massed fire might work. I'll see if Nerosyan or Lastwall can spare us any help and put together the least bad plan - Irabeth, find the least bad time to stop by this evening for that. We'll take these cultists off your hands; good work.

"Inheritor's blessing with you."

"Thank you, Prelate!" Ky bows neatly and trots off in the direction her sword is dowsing her.

It wouldn't be a hard path to follow even without the sword, frankly; Deskari is many things, but "subtle" is apparently not one of them. Along the way there's a small group of heavyset individuals that scatters in advance of their approach and Anevia identifies as Vermlek; one of them goes down to Anevia's arrows and disgorges a large 4-tailed worm that promptly dies itself, but the others manage to break contact. The feeling picks up in earnest at about the midpoint between the festival grounds and the temple, which when she gets close enough to see it is coming from a discarded knife just off into a side alleyway, drenched purple by what is presumably Deskari's blood coating it. Surprisingly, it seems to be made of stone, but the hilt is covered with delicate-looking golden engravings.

"I'm surprised that managed to hurt him. I wouldn't have expected anything other than a paladin to be able to manage it, since demon lords are famously immune to anything except us and legendary adventurers, but I'm pretty sure I'd know if any of us deployed to Kenabres had a knife like that. Good on whoever did it, though if it's still lying around here I can't imagine it ended well for them."

"It kind of reminds me of these bracers I don't remember making, they've got silvery markings on them, but while I can imagine there turning out to be some reason to do that I can't imagine why I would have chosen to work in stone..." She picks up the dagger anyway.

It seems to almost pulse in her hand, creating a brief spike of pain in her chest, but it subsides as quickly as it comes, not leaving any lingering pain.

"And my cursed wound doesn't like it, but kind of tepidly. Are we ready to go back to the wardstone?" she asks, wrapping the stone dagger up in paper.

"Unless Minagho's moved or you think you can do that pillar multiple times now, I'm not sure that would get us anywhere. We could try to buy you time to fix it, but after we got away the first time she's unlikely to do much jobbing and she could probably kill the rest of us inside a minute if she tries. Faster, with help from other demons. Properly buffed it'd still be worth a shot but Rathimus is almost certainly out of spells, Beth and Staunton are out of channels, and we can't count on Ramien assisting; my guess is he would probably be willing to buff us for saving the city even if it meant Hulrun got his hands on him with an excuse but he's not exactly advertising his location. Kenabres has plenty of soldiers and paladins but real casters are pretty short on the ground.

"My guess is that unless a rapid response force shows up for backup or we get a sending from Lastwall that it's going to fall before then, any attack should wait for when we're fresh and capable of seeing it through. Dawn tommorow, at the earliest."

"Understood. What is Ramien's situation generally?"

"He's an Aasimar and the top priest of Desna - chaotic good goddess of travellers, dreams, luck, and stars - in Kenabres. He takes being good very seriously and is probably the second strongest cleric in the city, but he and Hulrun have always clashed badly. Usually Terendelev would step in whenever it got bad, but with her currently dead and the city in crisis Hulrun has convinced himself that Ramien's an enemy. I'm pretty sure he's wrong about his dominate theory, high level clerics are hard to turn; my guess would be he knew the people Hulrun was imprisoning were innocent and decided he didn't care to wait and hope about someone talking Hulrun around when he needed more trustworthy adventurers to keep people safe, so he just broke them out instead. Unlike Rathimus he's also not averse to getting personally involved in fights, which would also be great since he's pretty good at it."

"Currently dead" is such an interesting phrase.

"Where would we find him to get him on-side?

"He would have told someone at the temple of Desna where he was if he left, he wouldn't be out of contact in an emergency, but it could go either way on if he's sticking around there himself so people know where to get healing or if he decided to prioritize not forcing people to choose between helping him and not getting in Hulrun's way; if the latter, he's probably out hunting demons or helping survivors. it probably depends on what he figures the odds are that Hulrun decides to force the issue."

"Well, if we can't mount the attack now we can spend the rest of the day recruiting. This would be that same temple we passed earlier?"

"Yeah, that's the one. It's one of the obvious places to evacuate to in a crisis and with all the paladins out in the city proper the temple of Iomedae wouldn't be safe."

Back to the temple then.

The lay priests standing watch at the gates are nervous about a large armed group getting entrance, both in the sense that they could be demons and in the sense that they're lawful and Ramien sure did just pick a fight with the ambiguous leader of the city, huh, but luckily they and Anevia know each other fairly well and it's not like Paladins could lie about why they were there. After some back and forth, one of them will run off to report to a more senior priest of ambigous identity while the others let them in past the gate. There are a lot of people in the temple, but mostly they seem to be taking shelter inside the building rather than in the courtyards, so there's space to wait.

And a few minutes later someone will start making their way through the crowds between them and the church's inner sanctum, though they're a bit delayed by frequently stopping to exchange a few words or reassure people en route.

"Anevia! It's good to see you, and Irabeth too! What brings you here today? I assume you're not here to shelter from the attack, but if you need it our doors are both literally and metaphorically open."

"We're actually here because of her," Irabeth replies, gesturing to Kybele. "It turns out the wardstone is in danger and we need to get her there to fix it, but there's a Lilitu and some followers occupying the grey garrison so we need a distraction big enough to get her attention. We were hoping to get your support."

"A nasty business, that. We tried to warn Hulrun about the corruption and the oncoming attack ahead of time, but he wouldn't hear anything of it without evidence. He doesn't really like 'it doesn't work like that' as an answer. Some of my friends are a bit more hot-headed than I and decided if he wasn't going to do anything they'd solve it without them, which was quite admirable of them but also meant I needed to cause a bit of an awkward mess to rescue them. You're confident you can solve it?"