Chaos engulfed the far side of the Great Hall with benches and chairs thrown over as improvised barricades and people milling about in various states of panic. Some knights had drawn their ceremonial swords, waving them uselessly through the dark tendrils stretching out from the throne, while others had formed ranks, standing shoulder to shoulder between the lords they protected and the unfortunate victims of the dark sorcery.

Most, however, were simply frightened and desperate to put distance between themselves and the darkness, with a few noticing that the tendrils weren’t able to approach anyone on the side of the hall occupied by Lady Ashlynn’s followers. A few had already begun rushing to the apparent safety offered by the High Inquisitor and the Saintess’s followers.

Ollie charged into that chaos like the point of a spear, trailed by Sir Beathan and the Templars from Blackwell. The men had said a brief prayer as they moved, surrounding themselves in faint, golden halos of light, though Ollie had no idea if their simple sorcery would actually protect them from the throne or not.

"Move aside!" Ollie yelled as he pushed his way through the crowd in a desperate attempt to reach Charlotte Otker’s mother. Behind him, he could hear the sound of steel ringing on steel as Ashlynn resumed her duel with Owain, but he had no time to look over his shoulder, no matter how much he wanted to.

Seeing the approaching Templars, Serle Otker fell to his knees in wide-eyed panic as he looked from the radiant Templars to his tormented wife and back again.

"Please, you have to believe me, I, I don’t know what’s happening here," Serle blubbered. "I, I don’t have anything to do with this, it, it’s all her! I would never have anything to do with dark witchcraft and..."

"Shut up!" Ollie snapped as he drew the darksteel cleaver from his waist and strode toward Melsinde Otker. Her hands were tangled in her hair as the dark tendril wrapped around the intricately carved wooden comb that had previously been the centerpiece of her elaborate hairstyle.

Melsinde had curled into a ball on the floor, sobbing in pain as the dark tendril feasted on... whatever it was extracting from her. Her once ruddy, healthy complexion had turned deathly pale, and her lustrous brown hair now looked as brittle as dried straw.

Far more concerning to Ollie, however, was the broken sound of Melsinde’s helpless, pitiful sobs, like a hound that had been beaten and left in the rain outside while everyone else shunned it for fear of being bitten.

"My lady," Ollie said gently as he knelt beside her. "I’m here to help," he said as he raised his cleaver up high.

"No! No, you can’t kill her!" Serge Otker said, pushing his way forward as he realized what the blood-stained knight from Ashlynn’s retinue was about to do. "She’s not evil, she’s my mother, and you can’t!"

"Stand back, your lordship," Sir Beathan said firmly, placing himself between the flustered young lord who reeked of wine and Sir Ollie like a wall of steel. "Sir Ollie is here to help!"

"Help, but he..." Serge said, only to choke back his words when he saw the cleaver fall.

Ollie had no time to be gentle, and his Severing Knife had never been meant for the sort of delicate unmaking that Heila and Ashlynn were capable of with their own tools. Ashlynn had warned him when he chose to transform the darksteel blade into his Severing Knife that it might be a powerful tool against the sorcery of the Inquisition that way, but it would force him to be ruthless when unmaking his own witchcraft with potentially painful consequences.

Ollie accepted those tradeoffs because his trail of witchcraft had allowed him to experience the horrors of the Inquisition’s sorcery firsthand. Without something that could cleave through the Church’s sorcery, severing it in a single blow, he was afraid that he’d lose much more than he could save by adopting a more precise tool.

-TIIIING!-

The cleaver whistled through the air, slicing through the dark tendril with the same amount of resistance Ollie would have encountered using the knife to cleave through the neck of a chicken on a chopping block before embedding itself half an inch into the stone floor of the Great Hall.

One of Serle Otker’s knights prepared to speak up, to tell the flame-haired knight that it was useless, they’d tried severing the tendril with their swords only to find that their blades passed through the dark energy like smoke, but as he watched, the severed tendril pulled away from Baroness Melsinde, rearing up like a serpent searching for its meal.

"He... he cut it... like a rope..." the knight muttered, staring in wide-eyed shock at the knife that not only cleaved through the darkness, but stone as well.

"I’m sorry, I don’t have time to be gentle," Olle said as he pulled Melsinde’s hands from her hair before reaching for the comb. Her body had gone limp as soon as the tendril was cut, though she still sobbed softly, even as consciousness faded.

The comb was too tangled in her hair to remove easily, so Ollie did the only thing he could, retrieving the cleaver to cut the comb free before tossing it toward the nearest Templar. The tendril tracked the motion of the comb through the air and as soon as the Templar caught it, it struck like a viper, only to stop short as it collided with the faint golden aura surrounding the Templar like a second suit of armor.

"Sorry," Ollie told Melsinde apologetically, though he wasn’t certain she could hear him. When he stood, however, his eyes were already searching for the next victim of the throne.

"Run that comb to Sir Ignatious," Ollie told the Templar, who had started backing away from the dark tendril. "You don’t want to be carrying that longer than you have to," he warned the man. "The same goes for the rest of you, too," he told the others. He wasn’t sure how their protective prayer worked, but he was certain that they were paying a price they didn’t understand to maintain it, and that price likely grew higher the more they were forced to rely on it.

"Everyone else, follow me," Ollie said as he found the next closest person in the crowd who was struggling against the darkness.

The Templars followed closely behind him, but not before Sir Beathan paused to give a drunken, distraught-looking Serge Otker a final word of advice.

"It’s an honorable thing to protect your mother, your lordship," he said. "A knightly thing. Even if you have to protect her from a husband who would sell her out to save himself," he said, giving Baron Serle Otker a dark look.

"Keep her safe," Sir Beathan said as he turned away. "And prove that you’re the better man..."