-Ferro
A tension rolls over us along with the descending mist. Power hums down the length of my staff, buzzing as it collects. As the white clouds falling down the slope touch me, a chill runs up my leg a fog fills the hollow.
A flash of light. Dovik appears in the air above the monstrous wolf, his swords descending toward its neck. The blades pass straight through where it should be, Ghostflame’s body puffing away into a spray of mist at first touch. He lands, eyes whipping up as more fog pours in around him. The air is so cold that it seems almost like we add to it, our breaths puffing into smoke in front of our faces.
“Eyes,” Dovik says, searching the fog. He doesn’t need to tell us; we are busy searching already. Jess walks backward toward us, looking around the fog with her huge weapon twirling lightly between he fingers. Jor’Mari searches, his eyes still black, scanning the rising mist.
I am more surprised than anyone by the sudden disappearance of the beast. Up until the last moment, there had been a name window above its head, but in the instant just before Dovik struck, it vanished.
“Behind,” Galea warns.
I lunge forward, rolling, and feel the air snap just behind me. As I roll back to my feet, spinning and pointing my weapon, I catch sight of the vanishing head of a wolf made from mist fading back into the fog. A metallic crash to the side draws my attention. Jess stands with her chakram planted in the mouth of a white wolf’s head, holding its jaws wide on the edge of her weapon.
Jor’Mari snaps forward, hand striking out, but the head of the wolf vanishes into fog once again as they collide. As his blow disperses one wolf, another leaps out of the fog, planting the end of its horn in his back. Blood sprays across Jess as Ghostflame’s horn punches out of the front of Jor’Mari’s chest as the great wolf drives him to the ground.
My ball of dragonfire crashes into the body of the beast a second later, but again it vanishes into mist. There is a crash in that instant from up the slope, but the fog is too thick now to see. Jor’Mari groans on the ground, his body shifting once more to better handle the wound. Crimson leaks from him as he struggles on the ground. Grabbing his arm, hauling on him with all my strength, I only barely manage to pull the giant to his feet.
“Keep your eyes up,” he says weakly to me as he kneels. I continue pouring mana into the head of my staff, but a feeling of dread is starting to creep up on me.
“You need to get up,” I tell him, trying to put some steel into the words. I flinch as a metallic cling echoes from the air just beside my head, Jess catching another strike coming out of the mist on her weapon, scattering the wolf to mist with her counter-attack.
“I’m trying to do just that,” he says. Jor’Mari’s left-hand struggles on his knee, trying to push himself up to his feet, while his right hangs limply at his side.
I see the hole in his chest and have to restrain the instinct to gag. The hole is clean, a punch of black driven right through him, bone, muscle, viscera absent. It looks both to have been burned open and frozen at once, snakes of black veins running back into his shoulder from the impact.
“How is he?” Jess asks as she keeps her eyes up.
“Bad,” I say, not caring to spare feelings. “He needs to get out of here.”
“What about Dovik?” Jess slides sideways, cutting a lunging wolf out of the air as it appears, scattering it into more mist. There is another echoing sound from up the slope, the clash of metal and the howl of a creature.
I push out my aura and the incredible pressure all around us almost makes me regret it. It feels as if my very bones have been chilled. It is no surprise to discover that this fog is in actuality Ghostfire’s aura as it tries to clash with my own. Our two presences come into alignment overlapping in a sphere that overtakes a large part of the hollow. Then I feel him, Dovik, fighting at the top of the slope. He notices me, and for an instant, there is resistance as my aura swells to encapsulate him. He stops fighting me. My image of him spinning at the head of the slope becomes clear.
“He is fighting like we are,” I say. “The fog is Ghostflame’s soul presence, we need to get out of it.”
“So, we leave him behind?” Jess asks, her weapon spinning.
“Dovik!” I yell. I feel him turn his head in our direction from inside my presence. “Come this way, we are retreating!”
A moment passes when the sounds of battle off in the fog vanish. Jess turns toward the sound of scattering leaves, straining her eyes to see through the earthly cloud. Dovik is almost upon us as he appears out of the fog, almost so close that Jess takes a swing at him. The man takes one look at Jor’Mari and nods.
“I don’t know how to attack this thing,” Dovik says.
“I know. We make a plan and come back later.”
Dovik gestures in a direction, but inside the fog, one way is very much like another. With my help, Jor’Mari is able to limp as Dovik and Jess take positions on either side of us, their weapons up to guard. I check Jor’Mari’s wound again as we move; it isn’t healing.
My eyes are barely worth using. The fog is so thick now that I can’t make out Jor’Mari’s expression as he leans on me for support. Dovik and Jess are just vague shapes in the white; the shuffling of leaves and the heaving of our breath is the only sound.
Waves pulse through my soul presence, and my mind accelerates, trying to keep up with all of the sensations. Any regard for reigning in on the aura is abandoned as I strain it to the limits. My team are small pips inside the mist, as real to me as if I were able to see them with my own eyes as if I were touching each of them with a hand. Ghostflame, however, is nowhere to be seen. I should have some notion of him, some sensation that my soul is affecting him as his continues to chill and blind me, but there is nothing. Our two auras come to perfectly overlap one another, forming a huge hemisphere, but I sense nothing of the creature inside.
Mt foot collides with something solid, ungiving, and I stop dead. I reach out with my staff, finding once again something preventing any movement forward, and it starts to dawn on me. It isn’t that my aura coincidentally overlaps with Ghostflame’s, it is that the beast has trapped us within a dome made of his soul presence. My staff clinks again against the barrier ahead of me, a sheet of white that bends and soars overhead to form the walls of the trap.
“We can’t leave,” I say.
“What is it?” Dovik, just off to my side but impossible to see.
“It has made a wall in front of us.”
A hiss comes out of the fog a moment later. “Ah. Don’t touch it.”
“What is it?!” Jess asks. Without my soul presence I wouldn’t even be able to guess at where she is. There is panic in her voice.
“It's freezing,” Dovik says. “It will take the skin off of you.”
“Put me down here.” Jor’Mari pulls away from me, falling to the leaves. His breathing is unabalanced coming in shallow gasps.
Mana continues to pool into my weapon as I wave it out at the fog, still searching for the beast. With the first magical wolf I fought, I was able to tell where it was inside my aura at all times. This shouldn’t be any different. If Ghostflame has trapped us inside this mist with it, then I should know where it is. It isn’t as if the beast could have left the field of its own aura.
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As the thought forms in my mind, my soul presence flexes, detecting the shallow streak through the barrier of the aura. I spin, weapon coming up, but even with all my speed, I am too slow. The wall of the barrier is already rippling, the snarling head of Ghostflame coming out of the wall as if breaking the surface of the water. Its jaw opens wide as it plunges toward me, and I know I can’t bring my staff up in time. Black sand snaps out of my vault around me, but instead of condensing into a shield of sand between me and the open maw, the sand scatters into grains that puff into the air. A shadow passes over me as Ghostflame’s jaw stretches around me. I’m going to die.
A sound like a thunderclap explodes through the air, pushing back the fog around us for a good ten feet as Jor’Mari plants his fist in the side of Ghostflame’e head. The wolf’s head jerks up, teeth snapping shut like a trap just above my head. Jor’Mari is falling to the ground, eyes tilting back, his leading hand turned suddenly black and cracked as he collapses unconscious to the ground. Time seems to slow as Ghostflame is dragged further out of the wall of white by the blow, its whole body dragged upward by the force of Jor’Mari’s punch. The moment is so serene, the two brutes falling away from the point of impact, that it seems almost a shame to break it.
The head of my staff comes up, a swirling mass of orange at the end. I release the stored mana and my vision is seared by the flash of light. A beam of flame punches straight through Ghostflame’s chest, exploding against the white wall of the dome and rendering it in a wash of flamework that climbs high into the sky overhead. The beast howls as it falls to the leaves once more, the hole through its chest trailing a line of smoke behind it.
Dovik is there in a flash, swords descending, but the moment of vulnerability has passed. Ghostflame whips its head around, catching one of Dovik’s swords on its horn as his other cuts a shallow gash in the wolf’s shoulder. Instead of rising, Ghostlfame rolls back, the wall of the dome absorbing him as easily as water does a fish. Jess’ blow lands against the wall a second later, but it has become as hard as stone once more.
“It is climbing the edge of its soul presence,” I say, trying to drag Jor’Mari away from the wall. Already, the fog is trying to press back in on us once again. “Maybe it is in a pocket of its soul presence or it is running along the outside of it; I don’t know. It has to be in contact with its soul, but it is outside while trapping us inside. It might not come back in and just let the mist pick us off.”
“I won’t let that happen,” Dovik says.
Jess is there at my side, helping me drag Jor’Mari back away from the wall. We stop after only fifteen or so feet, the fog already pressing back in on us. A wolf head appears out of the fog, leaping for Jess’ back only to be cut into churning mist by the swing of Dovik’s blade.
“Stay near me,” he says. Dovik’s aura rushes over us as we huddle together, enveloping each of us in the wash of its cool color. I feel for a moment his senses almost overlap with my own, but I push that distraction to the side.
I need to find a way out of this.
Two wolf heads appear out of the fog, snapping at us. Dovik puts his blade through the head of one while Jess beheads another.
“I need my blades, Charlene.”
Again, my attention reaches out toward my vault, and a lacquered wooden case falls to the ground near me. I snap open the brass buckles, revealing the six sword blades that Jess purchased back in Grim for me to hold onto for her. “I have them.”
Jess springs back, dodging the lung of a fog wolf and landing next to me. She never takes her eyes from the appearing faces in the mist as her steely aura washes over me and the case. One by one, the undecorated blades float up out of the case, forming a ring around her. Two more wolf heads lurch out of the fog toward her while Dovik is busy with another, but this time Jess doesn’t move as two of the blades lash out in unison, spearing through the heads of the phantom wolves as she turns and cuts apart another I hadn’t seen with her chakram.
She becomes a stationary stand of spinning blades while Dovik begins to vanish and reappear all around us. His movements grow smoother, like that of a dancer, his motions never ceasing, one strike becoming two or three as he vanishes and reappears inside his aura seemingly at a whim.
Entire packs of wolf heads snap out of the pressing mist, a small clear circle forming around us from the constant fighting of the two swordsmen standing over Jor’Mari and me. I snap out bolts of fire at the phantom wolves as they press in, but my attacks sail through them just as ineffectually as the swords, scattering them, but bringing us no closer to victory.
My hand runs over the case, finding a trail of black sand scattered on its cover. Why hadn’t that worked? For the last few weeks I have been able to manipulate the sand however I want, but now I can’t even bring the few grains to floating. Has my power abandoned me?
I look over Jor’Mari. His breathing is so shallow that I wouldn’t even know he was alive if he weren’t lying inside my soul. He doesn’t have much time.
Gritting my teeth, I force myself to think. No, of course, my power hasn’t abandoned me, I am still able to call fire to myself. Even earlier today I was able to use the black sand; I used it to kill Satrix. Later, it had scattered to dust when I tried to attack the brown wolf with it. The sand had collided with To’Terradon’s aura like a solid wall and scattered; I hadn’t been able to call it back until the beast was dead.
It behaved the same way that it is now, becoming useless as it met with another’s soul presence. What had been the difference between that and now?
Then, it comes to me in a flash. When I fought with Satrix, I changed my aura, pushing my fire affix into my soul presence and discovering that it lessened the burning pain from Satrix’s aura. What if that had done something more? Satrix’s soul presence had been one of fire, and that had resonated with my own fire infused soul presnece.
Performing the same trick again will be impossible. My infant magical sense tells me that this fog-like aura permeating everything has a hint of cold in its makeup, but it is something more like the cold affix is only a part of it.
The leaping heads out of the mist come in fives and sixes now, Dovik and Jess pushed into wild and dangerous strikes to keep pace with them. The phantom wolves come faster and faster as the fog presses in.
A vain thread of hope wavers in front of me, and I grab ahold of it. The affixes inside soul presence seem to react with one another. I might not have whatever affix permeates this soul presence, but perhaps there is something I can still do.
“Galea,” I call out in my mind, and the fey spirit appears in front of me. “Reference the affix index. Show me every interaction between my own affixes and the affixes of mist, fog, and cloud.”
Windows appear in the air in front of me, hundreds of pages of text rendered into simple descriptions of interactions. There isn’t everything, some of the interactions so esoteric that they would likely only be in the most advanced of enchantment guides, but something does catch my eye. I just have to see if it will even be possible.
My soul presence shrinks, rushing back toward me in the space of a heartbeat, pressing in on me as tightly as I can make it as I speed to push magic into it. The swirl of gold and red becomes a dark red as I add the fire affix to my soul and the leaves brushing against my feet begin to char. Pain stabs into my head as hot and persistent as a fire poker as I push the cold affix into the aura. My vision blurs, all sight in my right eye vanishing as I choke down a scream. The color ringing around me becomes a swirl of red and blue, each fighting and clashing with one another in a destructive churn that tries to cut me apart from the inside.
I already knew the two would interact destructively, all my texts on affix interactions say so. More, even attempting to push two affixes into the most physical representation of my soul is beyond someone as inexperienced as I am with soul presences. To succeed, I will need to add a third. Even attempting would be madness. The pressure weighing down on me and the pain slicing through me tell me that mixing three is impossible. I force my mind into quiet, exhaling a slow breath through clenched teeth as I push back against the pain. It might be impossible for someone else, but I have the Emperor Conflux, and in this area, I am made without such limitations.
The wave of color explodes out from me as I pour the sky affix into the unstable mixture. My soul pressure explodes off of me as I scream out the pain, rocketing through the entirety of the dome Ghostfire has trapped us inside of, sizzling as it touches and mixes with what I now know to be the Mist Affix. A shudder passes through the air as the barrier around us cracks and shatters in an instant, my uncaged soul presence breaking through the confines and pressing out to encompass more than half of the hollow. Mana formed into white and red arcs of lightning rise through the air as my and Ghostflame’s auras sap the magic from each other, pushing terrifying thunderheads of power to condense over our heads, bolts of chaotic mana striking out at random and scoring burning lines in the earth and trees.
I spin the head of my staff, my senses pulling my attention out toward the left. The fog is gone now, risen into the expanding storm overhead, and standing clear as day in the fallen leaves is Ghostflame, its attention drawn up to the clouds overhead. I give the beast no time to recover.
A line of burning orange appears in the air between my weapon and the beast as the dragonfire races out far faster than my eye can track. It explodes over Ghostflame, setting the forest aflame for a good fifty feet behind the great wolf. The plume of flame does not even last a second, the churning orange pulled away and sucked into the glowing horn on top of Ghostflame’s head. The beast stands regal, its white fur charred and burned, power welling in the horn it thrusts skyward. Such a beautiful creature.
A spear of the deepest black stabs up out of the mixed leaves beneath the wolf, impaling it through the chest. More come, growing lengths of black sand snaking through the underbrush, stabbing from the ground like stalagmites to push through the magical beast. I do not stop, pouring all of my sand from the vault out, forming spears and pushing them through the body of my enemy.
I am still attempting to create more spears when I realize that I am out of sand. I am out of everything. Ghostflame’s body is held off the ground by the spears impaling him, red blood running in small trails down the lengths of the spears. Life still stirs in its pale eyes as its head leans forward, its horn falling to point toward me, toward Jor’Mari. Dovik and Jess pant to either side of me, neither of them realizing yet where the monster is.
Again, I see something in that pale eye. Ghostflame, power burning at the end of its horn, stares into my eyes, and I feel my heart ache at its focus. It doesn’t fire. Ghostflame lets out a long wheeze, its head drifting down, the light of magic dying around it. The beast dies, choosing not to take me and Jor’Mari with it.
You have defeated Tar’Alu’Alukeen, Ghostfire
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
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