I normally found fortresses filled with handsome men to be a comfort. As I watched the prostates rush to their positions I wondered if this was going to be an exception. The rain was coming down in warm slashing sheets now. Covering the cleared ground with little muddy impacts and back splashes so that it looked like rice being bounced on a drumhead. Another tree went down, close enough that I was able to hear the animals and birds squealing in dissaproval.

"What in the stars?" I asked confused as to what could possibly be unleashing such destruction. Everything suddenly grew very quiet, no calls or animal screens. Only the steady rattling hiss of rain falling. Up on the wall I could see soldiers pointing their crossbows outwards, though they must have known the strings would be sodden to uselessness within a scant minutes.

"This is an actual question," I added for Beren's benefit. He was, afterall, supposed to be a local expert. He shook his head to silence me and peered out into the rain. Lighting lit the sky and I felt Beren tense.

"What?!" I demanded, trying to follow his eyeline. 

"Something," he replied, "the rain.."

My eyes settled on where his view was focused. It looked just like any other part of the downpour until I began to realize that there was something wrong with the way it was falling, like the drops were twisted ever so slightly as though viewed through a glass. Armed with that knowledge my brain began to pick out the pattern of something vast out in the rain, no not just out in the rain, it was rain. Its shape picked out the way a pattern might appear when you scattered pebbles on a pond.

"Ware!" I shouted then snapped my fingers, sending a trail of sparks out towards the thing. They struck it and stuck, burning in mid air against no apparent object, the light casing the barest outline of something. There was a sudden hissing roar like a torrent in a canyon and then twenty feet of the eastern palisade exploded into splinters that rained down all around. A huge footprint splashed water and mud up from the encampment as the soldiers began firing their crossbows at the invisible enemy that stalked them.