Fights!
The protection spell helped, too. It turned gutting swipes into slashes and bone-splintering chomps into bites, and the party could fight back. You hear stories about elven archers? It turns out they’re all true. ‘Bob’ in particular was a whirling dervish, leaving three knives in three naked lizard eyesockets in four seconds before buckling down to shoot in the suddenly-cleared space around him. He emptied his quiver in moments, but that didn’t matter; I saw him plucking arrows out of the actual air as the archers tumbled and dodged their way around the fight. The elves call it the nurulilte, the Dance of Death, and seeing it made me very glad that Virginia and the Elf-Lands were at peace.
I was doing some cavorting on my own, looking for the team. The fighters were fine on their own; the Carver brothers had lived up to their own name, spraying lizard blood and guts about them as they hewed a way to the fallen archer; and Elanor — dammit, Elanor was in a circle of flame, surrounded by a ring of angry, scorched naked lizards. Worse, the flames were flickering. Alchemy is wonderful, and sometimes even better than magic. It just doesn’t last long.
Anyway, I know a hint when I see one.