* Content warning: quick dagger cut, undead
They set off through Duskmere’s west gate towards Nightstar Temple. The evening weather was exceptionally fine. A cool breeze with scents of late spring in the air dried the raindrops from the day’s squall, leaving no trace of the unseasonal heat and humidity from earlier. Moya listened as Zander happily chatted about the last time he’d gone camping (and had somehow fallen into a creek), crowed about his superior stew recipe, and the proper way to build a long-lasting fire. Now and then, Ahn would say something in response to the odd question, but Moya didn’t feel like talking.
At least I’m not the only one.
Talli stalked behind the group, taking a rearguard position. She would pause and sniff the air, examine a twig, or just stand and listen.
“You’re a tracker?” Moya fell into step next to her, curious despite herself.
“I am.” Talli nodded, looking pleased.
“Talli is the best tracker in Ahra, if you ask me,” Zander added with a note of genuine pride, slowing to match their pace.
Ahndras moved to Moya’s other side and opened his mouth as if to speak, but Zander launched into another story—this one about Talli shutting down every upstart in the village who dared cross her in a knife-throwing contest. Moya tried to listen, but her mind wandered to Ahn, and what was going through that aethermage head of his.
She needed to force herself to step outside the discomfort she’d been warring with since she had met the man. He was the one who could best help them. And he was likable, and good. It was hard to reconcile the horrible potential of aethermagic with Ahn’s gentle demeanor. Moya glanced at Ahn sidelong.
“Are you always this quiet, mage, or just when trekking through corrupted woods?” She asked, forcing herself to hold his gaze.
Ahn smiled faintly, expression softening. ‘Only when in particularly charming company. I’ve been meaning to ask, you were the one who made sure Archmage Miir got safely back during the Northgate incident, yes?”
Moya noticed with some annoyance that Zander had fallen uncharacteristically quiet.
“Ahem.” She cleared her throat as if that would allow her to focus on the situation at hand. When she realized what she’d done, her cheeks heated and she tried to remember what she’d been meaning to say.
“You swallow a fly or something?” Zander didn’t miss any opportunity to tease.
Moya glared at him, then turned her attention back to Ahn.
“That was me, yes. It was the first time I’d ever been so far south. I like it here,” she added.
“It’s wonderful, yes?” Ahn grinned. He looked suddenly boyish, his smile shy and eyes bright. “I hoped it would not be a punishment for you to be here. Some folks are not very fond of our weather and terrain. All the tangled forests, hollows, and bogs. Plus the insects, which are plentiful.”
“I don’t mind, since apparently I enjoy eating flies.” Moya jostled Zander, who had ambled to her other side.
“Hey, we all have our own peculiar tastes,” Zander laughed.
Moya rolled her eyes at him. “I enjoyed my time with Archmage Miir, brief though it was, and am glad she thought of me for this assignment.”
“Archmage Miir is choosy about who she trusts,” Ahn said quietly.
Something about his tone stuck in Moya’s awareness. If she didn’t know better, she’d think that he was shy.
“Stop and be quiet,” Talli said. Moya halted in her tracks, Zander nearly crashing into her from where he’d fallen behind.
“What is it?” Ahn asked, all traces of levity gone from his face. He clutched his staff in one hand, a frisson of blue leymagic sparking around his fingers.
“Footfalls. Faint.” The Xereth hunter unsheathed both of her daggers. She tilted her head, silver eyes glinting dangerously, and took a step forward, quiet as a duskcat. Zander and Moya both readied their weapons.
“Fall to the side, now. Hide,” Talli said, a note of cold certainty in her voice that sent shivers of alarm skittering up and down Moya’s spine.
Talli leaped back, fading into the underbrush in her forest leathers. Moya tried to step quietly to join the other woman, but every footfall broke a twig or dislodged a stone.
Ahn crouched next to her, peering intently ahead of where they had been walking. Zander unslung and then wound and loaded his crossbow, silent and watchful.
Nothing happened. The clearing was silent, the sky above them abruptly darkening, roiling with heavy, bruise-yellow, and gray clouds outlined starkly by the setting sun. Just like before the Dregs attacked…
They waited, hidden in the thicket that bordered the dirt path, for what felt like hours. Ahn raised one hand, tilting his head toward the road. Something was moving toward them. Ponderously slow, wreathed in what looked like clouds of dust, shuffling over the packed earth. The dust, Moya saw with horror, was the wrong color. Was not dust at all. Buzzing filled the air as several creatures bore down on them. The shape of people, hunched, dragging ruined legs or feet angled the wrong way as if their bones had been broken —
“Awakened?” Ahn murmured, such loathing and terror in his voice that Moya’s breath caught in panic. “But how?”
“I didn’t think they were real,” Zander sputtered, eyes wide in terror and confusion.
Talli simply stared, her mouth slack with shock.
“There is nothing any of you can do here,” Ahn said. “You can’t hurt them, not with the weapons you have. Fall back now,” Ahn ordered, turning a fierce frown on the group. His face blanched, lips tight with fear, but Moya could feel the determination radiating from him.
“I said, go.” he commanded, voice low and resonant. He shoved Moya so that she nearly knocked Zander over. “Head towards Duskmere. Rally others, especially any leymages you can find. I’ll follow when I can.”
Talli nodded, grim. When the Xereth saw Zander rooted to the ground in fear, not moving, she grabbed him by one arm and dragged him until he understood.
Moya gazed at them, stricken.
“I stay with the leymage I guard,” she said, determination flooding through her. “It’s my sacred duty.”
“Go with them,” Ahn said. “Please.”
Moya moved next to him, shaking her head. When she spoke this time, her voice was firm. “Not a chance. I could help last time, right?”
Ahn reluctantly nodded. “Talli and Zander, run. Run at full speed, with everything you’ve got. Source willing, we will see you at the leytemple.”
Talli and Zander obeyed, their footsteps fading into the distance. Moya watched them for a moment, then turned to Ahn.
“What do you need me to do, Ahndras?”
In answer, Ahn exhaled a long, shuddering breath, then walked from his hiding place, planting his feet on the dirt of the road. The creatures were still yards away, moving with a disquieting lack of urgency, the buzzing clouds of flies around them growing louder.
“I’ll create a voidfall. It’s the only way we get out of this alive,” Ahn said.
“Voidfall?” Moya echoed in disbelief. “You would use such magic?”
Voidfalls were terrible things—aether brought to a nightmarish semblance of life by the blood of an aethermage. Moya knew this firsthand since a spell like it had nearly killed her. Dark, dangerous magic that demanded blood sacrifice: the most terrifying of all aether powers.
“Moya, nothing else affects them, short of an entire Priory’s worth of holy spells,” Ahn turned to her, desperate and pleading. “Are you with me, or not?”
Moya nodded, dumbfounded. To defeat evil with such darkness seemed like madness, but if she’d learned anything about Ahn, it was that he knew how to control his power. Moya’s reflection halted abruptly as distant noise snapped her attention outward, pulse quickening—there was no time to dwell on past shadows, only action.
“Good,” Ahn said with a brief, fae quirk of his lips that was gone in a blink. “Get ready to fire mage-treated shot or arrows, just like last time. And have restorative potions ready for me. And do exactly as I say. Please.”
“Yessir,” Moya managed, then dug in her pack, shoving three bottles of potion into a pouch at her belt. She bent her bow, readying an arrow tipped with rare and expensive fire, air, and earth-treated breakaway blades—fire leymagic to wound, air spells to guide the missiles to their target, earth power to hobble the foe.
Ahn was already chanting under his breath—not the musical phrases from before but words that sounded harsh and strange to Moya’s ears. Words like they had used to make the Kraah corporeal that day at the Mageguild. There was a high, sweet sound of steel that signaled a drawn dagger. Moya looked away, not wanting to watch, but thought better of it. Ahn was her charge. She had to protect him, no matter what.
So suddenly she nearly missed it, Ahn jabbed his hand, squeezing several drops of blood onto the dirt at his feet. As he chanted, mist and shadow curled up from the drops, expanding in the air like blue-black fog. The temperature plummeted. Moya’s breath ghosted from her lips in little white clouds, and goosebumps pricked her skin.
As if sensing their presence, the creatures staggered at a lurching run along the road, their fetid stench and clouds of insects poisoning the air. Moya gagged from the carrion reek, trying to keep her attention on Ahn, and on her targets. Ahn raised his arms, his staff in his left hand, and shouted a string of words in the same harsh language as before. A shock of dark blue leymagic tore from him, rippling over the dirt path towards the Awakened.
There were so many of them. Ten at least, that Moya could count. Once people of Ahra,they trudged on ruined legs, decaying flesh hanging from moldy bone. Sickly green fire kindled in empty eye sockets. Green fire like Kraah magic—
They did not seem to notice the carpet of dark power that slid under their feet. They trudged toward Ahn and Moya with growls and gibbers, no actual words among them.
“Shoot. Shoot as many of them as you can,” Ahn said shortly, arms still raised, then he began chanting again.
Moya held her bow steady, aiming toward the middle of the phalanx of monsters. A zap of leymagic shocked cold against her finger as she let the arrow fly. The breakaway tip dispersed, its air leymagic triggered by the arrow’s movement through the air. Shards of fire and earth-treated metal tore through the ranks of undead. The creatures, riled by the attack, lurched faster, their mutters and shrieks swelling through the woods in a crescendo of horror.
“Again,” Ahn ordered, voice strained.
Moya obeyed. The Awakened were upon them, their noises and movements frenzied. Rushing air stirred hairs that had come loose at her neck. Three of the beasts converged on Moya before she could act, and pain blasted through her raised arm.
Moya yelped. A sharp, bony finger had found the space between her bracer and hide sleeve, gouging deep enough that blood soaked through the cloth padding under the leather. Moya floated a silent prayer to the Source then fired again, drawing two more arrows while she ignored her burning arm. Howls echoed all around her as the creatures staggered back from the mage-tempered arrows and barrages of Ahn’s aethermagic. Moya tried to keep her aim true, but shot wide, too unsteady to focus.
What had happened? Why did she feel so fuzzy?
Ahn moved in front of Moya, blocking her with his body.
“Close your eyes, Moya. Now,” he said, command in the words that Moya could not ignore.
She again heard the ting of a drawn blade, the sharp intake of breath when Ahn wounded himself to draw yet more precious blood. A wet-iron smell surrounded them—salty, warm with life, unlike the carrion stench of the Awakened. Ahn shouted something—a word, final as death, as the void itself.
A crack of thunder, a whiff of ozone and a frozen breeze all slammed into Moya’s senses. The gibbers and growls, the buzzes of the corpse flies ceased. There was only silence, and the smell of cold. Huge, impossibly bright-white flakes of snow whirled in the surrounding air. Moya stared in awe. The Awakened were gone. There was no trace of where they had stood, or of their corruption.
Ahndras stood in the clearing next to her, gazing out in the direction the monsters had come from. After a moment he turned to Moya, and she stumbled back a step, shocked. His eyes were flickering with blue fire. He raised his hand and opened his mouth to speak, but fell suddenly to his knees, slumping in exhaustion. The magic radiance around him faded to nothing.
“Ahn!” Moya, forgetting to be afraid of his aethermagic. She pressed one palm to his cheek. The skin of his face was freezing, snowflakes suspended like tiny jewels in his eyelashes.
“Sorry, just a little tired,” he said with a weak laugh.
“Hush, you,” Moya scolded. She set to work, rolling up Ahn’s sleeves, only for an instant shuddering at the wicked gash on his arm that he’d used for the voidfall spell.
“I offer my strength in the name of the Source. I offer my touch in service of the light, so that it may restore that which has been exhausted.” Moya pressed a hand to her amulet and intoned words every Tanahran guardian learned when young, smoothing her palm over Ahn’s cheek. She ignored the weakness and pain in her own body, focusing on channeling healing and light over Ahndras.
The impossible snow fell with tiny whispering noises around them. For a time, there was only silence. Then, as suddenly as the snow had come, it disappeared, sunlight spearing through dispersing clouds. Moya and Ahn basked in a pool of wholesome, golden setting sun. Ahndras stirred, the blue fire fading from his eyes.
“Thank you, Moya,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” Moya said, the words thick with relief. “I’ve never seen anything like that, Ahn. It was as cold as winter, snowing—hey,” she broke off.
“What is it?” Ahn sat up suddenly, brow creased in worry.
“Just, you’re still bleeding, is all,” Moya said, frowning. Aether leymagic that needed blood—or even worse—for its strongest spells scared her, and the wound on his arm had reopened, reminding her of the voidfall’s cost.
“Oh, is that all?” Ahn replied with a hint of wry humor in his tired voice. He dragged himself upright, then fished in a pocket. With practiced ease, he wound a length of feverbane-soaked bandage over the cut on his forearm. He tucked the end of the bandage into place and then stopped, turning to look at Moya with horror.
“You are wounded!” He knelt at her side so quickly she did not have time to draw away or hide her arm.
“Oh, just a scratch. One of them had terribly sharp fingers,” she said, forcing conviction into her voice that she didn’t quite feel.
“Awakened carry deadly poisons, at least that’s what I’ve read. Are you breathing normally? Does the wound burn like acid?”
Ahn didn’t wait for an answer, slicing his dagger through the fabric and leather covering her wound. Moya tried to protest, but realized her vision was fading, her legs and head were blocks of immovable granite.
“My turn to fall down.” She registered the ground moving towards her face, a strong arm pressing against her chest, a mind-breaking shock of pain in her left arm before everything went black. In the second between waking and oblivion, Moya froze in a fresh wave of terror.
A woman stood on the road, smiling—lips wet with blood, skin corpse dull—as scarlet-flecked snow whirled violently around her. A familiar woman. Someone she thought she’d never see again…
Moya tried to scream, but there was nothing. Nothing but silence and death.
Lizzie Sinclaire 