It does, actually, involve attacking him. Not really to do damage, though that'll definitely happen, because: sneak attack. But the damage is incidental, the purpose is to prevent counterattack so he has just a smidge of space to do the real work. Some say his blades can be, hm, confounding? Was how it was put? Anyway.

Was Deskari expecting a sneak attack? No? Well, too bad, because Veron's ability to stealth is 'yes' (+49 to all stealth rolls, when not accounting for any gear or other buffs, which he did stop to do first, thank you) and so he can sneak up on this guy anyway. So Deskari gets to experience a truly splitting headache, courtesy of a dual wielding hasted (via scroll) mythic level rogue who did in fact take the feat 'hammer the gap,' and whose sneak attack dice are almost, but not quite, in the double digits. Also, Deskari cannot make attacks of opportunity for the next several seconds. Oops. Accident, really. Who just stabbed him? Who knows, someone has hide in plain sight and attacked from a shadowy corner. Okay, bye.

Then he takes the round of Deskari not being able to do shit to get close to Terendelev's corpse, and use his shadowdancer nonsense to unceremoniously shove it into the Plane of Shadow. Look, it's not exactly safe there, but it's safer, so. Better than leaving it with this guy. This would normally provoke an attack of opportunity, because it's a spell-like ability or some nonsense, but: that was why that attack earlier, actually.

This complete, he gives the demon lord or whatever he is a cheerful salute before he disappears into the darkness this time. Pleasure doing business with you, don't try to play the player!

Deskari makes a sound when the sneak attack connects. It has no comparison point. If anything else sounded like this, the unique and piercing horror of it would be lessened. And this cannot be any less than the worst sound that could be made, because if anything was worse, the goodness of the world would no longer be enough.

But Veron makes his will save, so whatever.

Deskari is unable to make attacks of opportunity. But what he can do is ready an action, and he does that, and when Veron salutes him, his scythe flashes down into the ground, and a chasm is opened up. Almost to the wall of the city, where there was solid earth there is now air - not air. There is nothing, because the air had no chance to filter in. It sucks Veron into itself on a purely physical level, but more insidiously, it sucks him in metaphysically. This is what happens, when Deskari, Lord of Locusts, makes it so; his blade, Riftcarver, knows your fate.

Does it, though? Does it really? Because Riftcarver's master saw Veron for just the briefest of moments, it's pretty implausible to expect he, let alone his weapon, knows his fate. You can't fool him with your intimidation tactics, thank you. This is more of an impotent temper tantrum than a proper counterattack, really.

Unfortunately, this particular tantrum doesn't allow for a reflex saving throw to avoid the area of effect entirely, but that doesn't really make it any less impotent. See, he is himself, and the +5 competence to acrobatics check given by his gear is mostly just superfluous. So: yes, fine. This rogue is going down in a literal and physically downwards direction. But that's kind of it, he catches himself on the rocks quick enough to avoid any real damage from the fall. So, uh, good job, Deskari, you just gave the shadowdancer that stabbed you a lovely dark rift full of shadows. That would be perfect to hide in. What an impressive closing move in this short battle in what's likely going to be a very long war. Truly inspired. Okay, now go away back to the plane you're bound to, the rules of the multiverse say your time on this material plane is up.

He'll check through the carved rift for survivors, though. He doesn't regret anything exactly, securing Terendelev's restoration was almost certainly worth the incidental death and destruction, even if it pains him, but, well. He's vaguely responsible in a sideways fashion if you squint, and so he'll happily assist various survivors that were unluckily caught in the wake of metaphysical giants having a pissing match. While he's here. Low hanging fruit, and all.

There's this paladin who fell about twenty feet away, picking herself up and dusting off her armor pretty nonchalantly, until she notices the woman next to her, whose leg has been pinned by a large rock. "Shit!" she says, rushing to try to lift it away.

"Careful," he says, and the way he seems to materialize out of nowhere is neither magical nor on purpose, "get proper leverage first, jostling it there would redistribute the weight wrong and make it harder to get her out."

Not that she can... see that... because she is human and humans do not usually have darkvision. And this is very, very dark. Right. Uh.

"Here," he says, passing over one of his rings instead of waiting for any reply. "It'll light when you twist the thing around the gem. I'm going looking for anyone else."

And then he's off to go check for more survivors without so much as a 'how do you do.'

???

?????

Here's a survivor. She's a few minutes down the path, even for his shadowstep. By the time he reaches her, she's already taken stock. She's crouching by a badly wounded man; he broke a number of bones in the fall, and he's crying. Her eyes are warm, but not merciful. Loving, but not kind.

"You won't survive your wounds," she whispers, holding a knife to his throat. "But you can take heart, that your death will be beautiful. It will mean something. That, I can give you."

"Nope!" says Veron, who will not be allowing this nonsense, thank you. "Nope, none of that, your knife privileges are hereby revoked."

This survivor's knife: is Veron's now. He's not going to turn down a free knife, even when it's not even a masterwork, who do you take him for.

Her eyes aren't warm anymore, really. They're hot. Her smile has gone maniacal.

The silver snake-spine amulet around her neck writhes, taking on ectoplasmic flesh, uncoiling and falling to the ground and growing until it's an enormous silver-and-black constrictor.

She, meanwhile, is suddenly wielding an enormous ghostly axe, one that her slim arms certainly shouldn't be able to heft as casually as they do.

"Mireya will feast, then," she sings.

Wow, okay.

".... none of that, either," he says, but this sure is a 'roll for initiative' situation now, isn't it.

She's a divine caster of... some kind, druid-alike or something maybe, without the shapeshifting, but, uh. Caster. In melee. With him. The shadowdancer. In the dark. She was smart enough to open with a buff to her own melee abilities, but there was really only one way this was going to go.

(If it's any consolation to Camellia, she did in fact do more damage to him than Deskari himself. Mostly because he opened with a disarm instead of a proper murder attempt, but still. It counts!)

"Hey there, sorry about that," he says, over her rapidly cooling corpse, with all of the casualness of a man who's been at this for arguably a decade. "I'm here to help. I've got a healing potion," several, actually, and he's probably just going to use the light wounds one on this guy, "anything broken?"

The man looks at him with the very mixed expression of someone who understands that being sarcastic to the man who just slaughtered some kind of snake-witch and saved his life is both rude and a bad idea, but would definitely otherwise be saying take a wild guess.

"Yes," he says eventually.

"Right, dumb question, sorry. The murder lady threw me off a bit. Where...?"

He will, carefully and efficiently, make sure bones are set before he gives this guy a healing potion. Which might make this guy wish the snake-witch of some kind actually had killed him, but, well. He will live! And soon enough, when his limbs won't be permanently twisted by the healing, he gets a potion! (It's cure medium wounds. Because he's a softie.)

Fortuitously, he falls unconscious after about the third bone. But he can be shaken back to life and drink the potion, and he's very thankful.

He is happy to help, and points the guy in the direction of where he left the paladin with his ring. He'll swing back around to her to retrieve it, after all, and it's a good idea for the survivors to get all organized and whatnot.

Then he's off to see about getting more of those.

By the time he circles back around to Seelah and Anevia, he has sent them a somewhat motley group, retrieved from lots of weird places that are hard to get down or the like. There are a number of injuries, but anyone that had been in critical risk isn't anymore, and all broken bones have been set and splinted, if not healed.

"Hey," he says casually, materializing into view in the dim light of a little ring's glow. "I grabbed everyone easily retrievable. Do any of you need anything before I head up topside and poke about and maybe see about getting a Sending?"

The first man he rescued has apparently been staring at the Commander's Ring for some time, engrossed.

"Where'd you get that ring?" Anevia proposes. "Because the wizard over there says it looks almost mass-made, but I've never heard of an organization with anything like them. ...you don't actually have to answer but I'm deathly curious."

This is the first thing to give him real pause. Including the lady who tried to commit murder. Hm.

"... looted from a sorceress's stash," he answers, after a brief moment of thought. The pause was not to think of a lie or anything, but because he didn't immediately remember the answer. He got it years ago, at this point, from a long-dead and very unpleasant woman known as J'Nah. "Home plane of Toril, the people that make them probably didn't share their notes over here." He looks at the aforementioned wizard. "If you're any good at item crafting, you can study it a bit to try and make something like it when things are a bit less, er." He waves vaguely. "Like this. Help this plane's artificing progress, or something."

     The wizard looks up. "I am very good at item crafting. I've never seen a technique like this, the - piecing together of discrete enchantments by literal recombination of discrete enchanted pieces - it's not that no one thought of it, it just requires such precision! You could make items with no thematic coherence, just whatever magical effects you needed in the field - it's beautiful! And so mundane!"

Anevia coughs loudly. "Anyway, yes, if you're done with the rescues we'll have Aldo there get Seelah to Fly us up. We've been looking around with his Clairvoyance, and it seems like there's been a lull in the fighting and Hulrun's staked some territory-"

A sour-faced nobleman interrupts. "Horgus Gwem would pose a question for the noble hero."

(If one listened very closely, they might hear several of Anevia's joints crackle with the effort of not doing anything rash.)

Veron gets the impression that this man is attempting to impressively announce who he is, instead of having the sort of verbal tic where he speaks in the third person. He really would have preferred if he just wanted to speak in the third person.

"I guess I count as one of those sometimes, sure. Yeah?"