Jocasta pelted up the stairs ahead of Beren and Buri. She realized that she didn't even have a weapon, her knife having being lost sometime in the confrontation with the dragon. It was a mind boggling thought to realize that confronting a dragon wasn't even the most dangerous thing she had done today. She reached the door at the top of the stairs, a massive thing with carved lintels and began furiously scribbling sigils and wards on the floors and step with a stick of charcoal from one of her pouches. Battle magic wasn't her specialty but she knew a few spells that might be helpful.

"Time to go," Beren called as he and Buri carried the heavy stone slab up the stairs. It wasn't going to be enough to block the door vertically but laid sideways it would make a serviceable barricade. Jocasta finished the rune she was working on and was forced back into the room beyond the door as Beren and Buri laid the stone in place. She stepped forward and put both hands on it and spoke several words in a grating tongue that almost dislocated her jaw. The stone fused to the lintel and the floor, beyond the power of any number of gundarogs to pull free.

"Where did you learn that?!" Buri demanded, glaring at her from under his heavy brows. The language had been the arcane tongue of dwarves, recognizable even if not spoken commonly by those hardy folk.

"Don't worry about it," Jocasta replied evasively, continuing to inscribe runes on every surface she could fine. Buri might have continued to worry about it if the chorus of hunting calls and scrabbling claws hadn't drowned out further discussion.

The room beyond the door was large and square filled with a ruin of what once had been grave goods. It had long since been looted and a jumble of smashed ceramics and shattered funerary urns covered the floor. Jocasta crossed to a glint of metal and pulled an ancient shortsword from the wreckage. It was heavy and probably never meant to be used in combat but it was better than nothing. She ran her thumb along the edge with a shower of metal shavings as she magically sharpened the ornamental weapon.

"Here they come," Beren warned as the screaming hunting calls grew deafening.

Beren and Jocasta suddenly heard something hard scraping against stone, which would not be too disconcerting if the sound was not occuring in two dozen places at once, all around them. Jocasta spun, trying to gauge if there were other entrances they might have missed, anxious even after getting confirmation from her drones to the contrary. Beren understood how she felt. Chitters and screeches echoed in the wide cavern, but chillingly, Beren realized were not the random, animal noises one might suspect.

There were words in those cries.

Buri looked nervous, but there was very little room for cowardice in the culture of the daurgrim. Even if he was shitting his pants, he would stand his ground or be sent to the halls of the dishonored at his death. Even Beren knew very little about that bit of dwarf theology, but whatever that involved, it was worse than anything a dwarf could rightly imagine. Beren made it to the stairway, but was nearly bludgeoned by a ball of dark glass. The object sailing past him, and were it not for his finely honed reflexes, there was little doubt it would have shattered near the center of the floor. Instead, Beren spun and caught it, completing the spin and sending it flying back down the stairs. Screams arose as a small VOOMPSH and a ripple of concussive force blew up the stairway. Whatever it had contained, it smelled like urine and dead fish.

"Acid flasks!" Buri cried with an accusatory tone. The dwarf had a handful of jagged stones in his arms, hustling to the lip of the barrier.

"Good catch," Jocasta said to Beren just after an appreciative whistle.

"No big deal," He replied with (fake) smugness, shrugging his big shoulders. Jo's eyes widened, and Beren caught her look, turning to see a Gundarog that had ascended the barricade quickly, launch itself from the top of the newly formed stone barrier, leaping at Jocasta with its spindly limbs out and hands aimed at her throat. Its grotesque face contorted in a scream of violence. Jocasta squealed and ducked even as Beren leaped, his foot snapping out to hit the thing in the side of the head, breaking its neck with an audible crack of bone. The thing landed in a tangled heap just as Beren himself landed, knees bent and feet shoulder width apart, his hands splayed in a curious stance of the far east.

"Ok, now you're just trying to impress me." Jocasta laughed, albeit a bit nervously.

"Yeah, I shouldn't press my luck," Beren responded curtly, still in a jocose fashion.

"Little help!?" Buri yelled, tossing large stones down at the horde now teaming on the stairway. Beren leaped forward, seeing a tide of ugly, malformed humanoids with sallow, mottled skin and covered in black, serrated armor pushing against one another and running up the stairs on all fours. A few, somehow, were even crawling along the walls. Behind them, the warband gave the central ground a wide berth, as acid still sizzled on the ancient stone. A few limbs still smoldered from the unfortunate creatures that had been hit by their own cruel device.

"You have any spells that can hit a bunch in a group!?" Beren called to Jocasta, ducking a spear thrust and yanking the weapon out of the hands of its user, tossing it to the floor. He grabbed his axe in time to block a sword cut with the haft, shoving the smaller creature back into its companions, pushing a number of them down for a moment. Buri did his best to pelt the wall climbers, too short to use his own axe with the barricade in front of him.

"Uhhhh..." Jocasta replied, inspiring little confidence in her allies. She wracked her febrile brain for something that would be more useful than coat the enemy in a liberal splash of bacon grease. The screaming mass of beasts hurled themselves against the barricade. If the obstacle had been on flat ground they would have swarmed the defenders in seconds, but the steep climb up the stairs and over the bodies of the fallen was hampering them. Jocasta saw a clawed talon grab the top of the stone in an attempt to pull its owner over, only to see Buri's axe take the appendage off at the wrist in a spray of blood. The thing hissed hatefully and Jocasta's ear twitched as she tried to figure out the syntax of its language.

"Any time now!" Beren shouted as he drove a bare palm into the face of one of the creatures, smashing its nasal bone up into its brain. Jocasta put her hands on her hips to retort that she wasn't a battle mage but trailed off as her eyes fell on the jagged sword that lay at her feet. The ugly weapon was the jawbone of some kind of giant bettle, black and glossy except where it had been sharpened against bare rocks. She picked it up, wincing at the lice ridden grip, and began to etch patterns in the ground infront of her. Arrows were falling around her now, the angle was too steep for a direct shot, so the beasts were trying to drop the points on them by bouncing them of the roof.

"Don't be so impatient!" Jocasta shouted back, making a number of small adjustments to the sigils she had scratched on the floor.

"I'm not, but I cant speak for our other guests!" Beren shouted as he seized on of the creatures, lifted it over his head and pitched it back into the mass of its fellows, carrying score of them to the bottom of the steps in a snapping hissing heap. Jocasta made a few more scratches then dropped the sword and began to chant. There was a sudden crunching sound followed by screams of agony the flow of monsters slacked but the screams of rage and pain redoubled.

"What did you..." Beren asked and peered over the barricade. The narrow corridor was now crisscrossed by ribbons of black insect carapace each one extended from a sword or spear tip to form a glittering lattice of sharpened chitin. The gundarogs at the rear of the pack were still trying to surge forward, unaware that their weight was forcing their companions into the net of blades in much the same way that cheese is forced against a greater. Within a few moments the panicked front ranks had turned their weapons on those behind them to avoid being forcibly dissected the internecine fighting continued for a minute or two before the penny dropped and the whole group of them fell back in snapping frothing fury.

"Why didn't you do that before?" Buri asked gruffly, cuffing blood from a superficial cut above his eyes.

"Maybe I just have a flare for the dramatic?" Jocasta suggested peevishly.

"Can they get through that?" Beren asked, partially interested, partially trying to diffuse an argument.

"If they have wizards, or they get hammers or something to break it out of the way," Jocasta admitted. Chitin wasn't really very strong, especially if you came at it laterally.

"But we might have a few minutes to catch our breath..."