“He just froze like that?” Ilsevele asked. “Who was he? How did he get here? Did the daemonfey kill him?”
Starbrow glanced at the dead mage and said, “Look at him. He might have been here for a hundred years, just like that. I doubt the daemonfey had much to do with it.”
“I can try to question his spirit,” Filsaelene said. “But I must prepare the proper invocations to Corellon Larethian first, and that I cannot do until moonrise tonight.” The sun elf girl frowned then added, “On the other hand, if he’s been here for a long time, this husk will hold no memory of the spirit. He might have been dead too long for my spell to work.”
“We’ll try to question him if we find nothing else here,” Araevin decided. “He isn’t going anywhere for now.”
From the chamber at the bottom of the stairs, an archway led into a long, barrel-vaulted gallery or redoubt of some kind that was illuminated by a row of shuttered arrow slits looking out over the steep mountainside. Araevin wondered who the builders regarded as enemies. The place was in such a lofty locale that it seemed hard to believe that any conventional army, the sort of enemy who might be stopped by stonework and arrow slits, would be able to reach the watchpost, let alone attack it. Then, along the back wall of the room, they discovered no less than five portals, each framed in its own stone archway, the lintels worked in the designs of various flowering plants and vines. Araevin recognized felsul and holly; the others he could not name.
“What is this place?” Ilsevele asked as the wind moaned eerily in the ruins above them.
“A portal nexus,” Araevin said. “Many portals are simple two-way devices, but sometimes portal builders wanted to link several destinations together in a network of portals. This is clearly such a place. You could step through one of those portals, and in a few moments use any of the others, choosing from a number of destinations.”
“In other words, the daemonfey could be behind any of those doors,” Starbrow said. He frowned. “Damnation. What if they lead us into a whole daisy-chain of magical doorways? We might be at this for days.”
“Or longer,” Araevin answered. “This explains the dead mage outside the room. He was probably a portal explorer, who used one of the doors leading into the nexus but then lacked the key to open another door to leave by. Without the right key, any or all of these doors would be nothing more than empty stone arches.”
Maresa shuddered. “Gods, what a lonely way to die. It just goes to show you that you should never break into a place you can’t break out of.”
“Well, I anticipated that I might have to decipher several portals today, so I have prepared a few of the right sort of spells,” Araevin said. “Give me a few moments, and I’ll see what I can divine about these doorways.”
The rest of the company stood watch, while Araevin chose the first portal on his left and spoke the words of his seeing spell. He realized at once that at least that one was damaged beyond repair. Only a fraying remnant of its magic remained, not even enough to guess at where it might have once led. He suspected that simple time and decay had been enough to ruin it. The second portal was still working and he divined its key-a small token of wood, marked with a few Elvish letters. Anyone who carried or wore such a token could use the portal, but no one else could.
I’ll wait on that one, he decided. If he needed to, he could attempt to manufacture a proper token to awake it, but first he wanted to examine the other possibilities.
The third portal was functional. Its key was a simple spell-inscribing an arcane mark on the door would open it for a short time. Many, if not most sorcerers or wizards knew that particular spell. But perhaps the dead mage in the other room hadn’t known it, or had been caught without the right spell ready. Araevin moved on to the fourth portal, and he found that this one had something close to the same key that the portal beneath Myth Glaurach had used, a rellana-blossom and a short phrase in Elvish.
He turned his attention to the last of the portals in the gallery, and he recoiled at once. It was an insidious trap. It was keyed to a simple pass phrase that was actually carved in the stone lintel above the arch, but Araevin observed that its magical strands were designed to unravel after conveying the user to some unknown destination.
“Stay away from the portal on the right,” he warned his companions. “Don’t say the word that’s carved there, and don’t touch the stone. I don’t know where it leads, but it is designed to strand you there for a tenday or more.”
Maresa happened to be nearest the trapped portal. She glanced at it suspiciously, and carefully stepped away from the device.
“Not that one, then,” she said. “Which door did the daemonfey use?”
“The third or the fourth, I think-maybe the second, but I doubt it,” Araevin answered. “Take your pick.”
“One moment, then,” Filsaelene said. She pressed her hands together before her chest, and looked up at the blank stone overhead, murmuring the words of a prayer to Corellon Larethian. “Which door did the daemonfey use?” she asked.
The others watched as the slender sun elf waited for a long moment, eyes closed. Then Filsaelene shook herself with a small start.
“Go left,” she said. “The third door is the one the daemonfey passed through.”
“Very well,” Araevin said. “Everybody, be ready to pass through the portal quickly after I activate it. Portals opened by spells normally remain open for only a few moments, so you will have to hurry after me.”
His companions gathered close around the portal. Araevin checked to make sure they were ready, and he whispered the word to the spell and traced on the stone surface the mark he used as his own sigil. Blue fire awoke in the ancient gate, rippling around its perimeter, and Araevin was snatched away to somewhere else.
He found himself in deep, near-total darkness, with only a faint glimmer of light spilling down from somewhere overhead. Despite the lack of illumination, Araevin took three quick steps away from where he had arrived, knowing that his friends would be arriving right on his heels. He barked his shin hard on something, stumbled and caught himself on a stone pedestal in front of him. Muttering a human curse-and any human tongue was much more suited to profanity than Elvish, after all-he managed to call a light spell from his staff and see where he was.
The room was a vault or cellar below a large stone building, evidently in ruins. A stairwell leading up stood across the room to his right. The soft glow of daylight filtered down, the glimmer he had seen when he first entered. He looked down, and discovered that he had very nearly tumbled headlong into a deep stone well in the center of the room. The knee-high lip surrounding the shaft was what he had walked into in the darkness.
“Damn,” Araevin breathed. He might have managed a quick spell of flying while falling in darkness-or he might not have.
Blue light crackled behind him, and Araevin turned to guide Starbrow away from the doorway. The moon elf had Keryvian out, and looked around, anxious for any sign of a foe.
“Are they here?” he hissed.
“I don’t know. Now, step aside, the rest are coming,” Araevin said. One by one Ilsevele, Maresa, and Filsaelene arrived in the same manner, simply appearing in the air next to the blank stone archway marking that end of the portal.
Araevin carefully studied the chamber of the well. It was another heavy stone room, built in the form of two intersecting barrel-vaults made of large stone blocks. At the end of three vaults stood empty stone slabs, perhaps meant to hold sarcophagi, but no such crypts were in evidence. The stairs climbed up at the end of the room’s fourth arm. The vault opened out in the center, providing a little space around the well. The portal was set in one curving wall ringing the well, with another old portal opposite. He couldn’t begin to guess what the place might once have been.
“Another portal,” Ilsevele observed.
“Let’s check the stairs and see what’s above before we try the next portal,” Araevin said. “Or for that matter, the well shaft. It might lead somewh
ere, too.”
Maresa leaned over to look into the dark well. A cold breeze faintly sighed up from below, musty and damp.
“There’s some light down there,” she said in surprise.
Araevin frowned. He didn’t remember seeing any such thing before. He leaned over to look, and he saw it too, a faint silver phosphorescence that danced far below them. It glimmered and swirled for a moment-then it started to rise, climbing swiftly toward them. For a moment, he continued to peer at it, trying to figure out what he was looking at, but then he decided that anything in such a place that was moving toward him and moving fast was not likely to be friendly.
He recoiled from the well, and called out a warning to his comrades. “Watch out, it’s coming up!”
Maresa retreated from the edge, too, just before a swirling stream of spectral silver light exploded up out of the well. In the baleful glow Araevin could see the misshapen form of a person, a human face with an oddly dark and downcast gaze, the suggestion of regal robes hanging in tatters, and a shining silver staff clutched in ghostly fingers.
“It’s the wizard!” Filsaelene gasped. “The one from the mountainside!”
The apparition hovered in the air above the well, its features cruel and proud. It fixed its empty gaze on Maresa and snarled out something in a tongue Araevin did not recognize.
“Hai zurgal memet erithalchol na!” it said, its voice imperious and demanding. “Memet na irixalnos nairhaug!”
“Araevin, what’s it saying?” Starbrow asked in a low voice. He kept his sword raised before him in a guard position.
“I can’t even begin to guess,” Araevin replied. The elves exchanged looks with each other. “I have heard stories of travelers dying in portal networks, which their ghosts then haunt. Let’s just leave it alone, and try the stairs. Move away slowly.”
Maresa carefully backed away, feeling her way along the wall toward the stairs leading up out of the vault. Filsaelene followed close behind her. But before the two had moved more than ten feet toward the door, the ghostly wizard muttered something else in its incomprehensible tongue, and attacked. It flung out one spectral arm, blasting at Maresa with a sickly purple-white bolt of crackling lightning.
The genasi cried out and dived away from the bolt, which gouged a fist-deep scar across the stone wall behind her. Smaller side-bolts stabbed out at Filsaelene and Araevin. Araevin managed to parry the lightning bolt before it struck him, grounding it with his staff and a quick defensive spell, but Filsaelene was spun around and knocked off her feet.
“That was a stupid idea!” Maresa shouted.
The genasi scrambled to her feet and snapped off a quick shot from her crossbow, which passed clean through the center of the ghost’s chest without leaving the faintest mark-though it made Starbrow curse and duck on the other side of the well.
Ilsevele whispered a spell as she put an arrow on the string of her bow. The arrowhead burst into cold silver flame as she loosed it. The missile tore a dark hole in the ghost’s torso. The ghost howled in its forgotten tongue, but it did not recoil or crumple as a living person might have done. It simply ignored the wound, even as streamers of mist blossomed from the ragged hole and faded into nothingness.
The ghost seemed to gather itself for a moment, glaring at Ilsevele, and its eyes flashed with a pale and terrible light. Ilsevele screamed and raised her arms to shield her face, but her hands and arms turned dead white and smoked under the ghost’s awful gaze. Her bow clattered to the floor.
“Ilsevele!” Araevin shouted as he wheeled on the ghost.
He hurled a spell of his own, riddling the spectral figure with a barrage of glowing blue darts. Like Ilsevele’s arrow, the magic punched black holes in the silver image. More missiles followed an instant later, repeating the attack as Araevin threw his best effort at the specter. But the ghost, though hurt, kept its baleful eyes fixed on Ilsevele, searing her with its chill gaze.
“I can’t reach it!” Starbrow snarled. Keryvian glowed in his hand, a shining blade of holy fire, but the ghost hovered over the center of the well, outside any conceivable sword-reach. The moon elf reversed the enchanted sword in his hand, cocking his arm as if to throw the blade, but he hesitated. Ilsevele wailed again, writhing under the ghost’s cold-burning stare, and Starbrow muttered a curse and straightened up.
With calm deliberation, he walked over and interposed himself between the ghost and Ilsevele, turning his back on the apparition and shielding his face.
The pale glow surrounding Ilsevele faded at once, only to spring into existence on Starbrow’s back. He groaned, but keeping his back to the monster, he seemed to avoid the worst of it.
“Araevin… somebody… kill this damned thing!” he gasped.
“Maresa!” Araevin cried. “Use your wand!” Then he seized one of the wands at his own belt and snatched it out, blasting the ghost with dart after dart of glowing energy. Maresa dropped her useless crossbow and did the same, pelting the ghost from the other side.
The ghost howled again, and wrenched its gaze away from Starbrow and Ilsevele. The moon elf crumpled to his knees, collapsing on top of her. Then the specter intoned another spell, and blasted Araevin into senselessness with a mighty word of power. Araevin staggered back and tumbled to the hard stone floor, eyes seared white, ears ringing, blood streaming from his nose. He could see nothing, hear nothing, could scarcely even move as his thoughts reeled drunkenly.
His vision cleared a little, and he looked up through unfocused eyes as Filsaelene picked herself up off the floor. She steadied herself with one hand on the wall, and presented the star-shaped holy symbol of Corellon Larethian, shouting out a prayer that Araevin couldn’t hear through the ringing in his ears. A great ring of golden light burst from her raised hand, racing through the chamber. When it touched the ghost, the apparition’s substance simply boiled away into nothing. The same golden glow washed over Araevin and the others, bringing vigor, strength, and renewal.
Buoyed by the cleric’s spell of healing, Araevin climbed to his feet as his eyes focused again and his ears stopped ringing. He groped for the magic wand he had dropped, closed his fingers around it, and hammered the ghost again with more of the magical darts. The spirit’s whole form flickered and danced uncertainly, as if it was having trouble keeping itself together.
“Keep after it!” Araevin cried. “We can destroy this thing!”
The ghost drifted down toward the floor of the chamber, reaching out with one spectral claw for Filsaelene. The cleric quickly recoiled, backing up as the apparition drew closer.
“Shield me, Corellon!” she cried, and she spoke a prayer, guarding herself with a shining golden radiance that the ghost could not seem to reach past.
She whirled her long sword in front of her, but the weapon simply passed harmlessly through the ghost.
Araevin tried another spell-a bolt of fire-but the ghost’s otherworldly body simply wasn’t affected.
Think, he told himself. What other spells do I have that might destroy a ghost?
Before he could determine the next attack to try, Starbrow scrambled to his feet and charged at the ghost’s back, Keryvian in his hands. The ancient sword burst into brilliant white flame as he slashed at the specter. Unlike Filsaelene’s sword or Maresa’s crossbow bolts, Keryvian proved quite capable of damaging the spirit. One slash dragged Keryvian through its torso from shoulder to hip, and Starbrow’s spinning follow-up drove the point of Demron’s last and greatest blade through the center of the ghost’s forehead.
The ghost groaned horribly, a sound that chilled Araevin to the bone, and it slowly dissolved into nothingness. Starbrow held his sword ready, in case it re-formed, but the phosphorescent mist simply dimmed and vanished.
“Thank the Seldarine that’s over,” the moon elf breathed. He looked around. “Is everybody all right?”
“Thanks to Filsaelene’s spell, I am unhurt,” Araevin replied. He hurried over and knelt by Ilsevele, who still crouched by the floor, broad swaths
of her flesh dead-white and ice-cold to the touch. “Ilsevele is injured!”
“S-so c-cold,” Ilsevele gasped.
She locked one of her hands around Araevin’s forearm, pulling herself close. Araevin hissed with the cold of her touch. Then Filsaelene hurried over and knelt beside them. The cleric spoke the words of a healing prayer and set her own hand over Ilsevele’s injuries. Beneath the warm golden glow of her touch, the pallor of Ilsevele’s wounds faded, and her shivering stopped.
Ilsevele shook herself and stood up slowly.
“Thank you, Filsaelene,” she said. She rubbed her arms vigorously, and the color returned to her face. She retrieved her bow, and looked over at Starbrow. “And thank you, too, Starbrow. You risked your life to shield me from the ghost. I don’t know what to say.”
Starbrow said with an awkward smile, “It just seemed like the best thing I could do, since I couldn’t reach the ghost as long as it hovered up there. I couldn’t stand there and do nothing.”
Ilsevele stepped over and reached up to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you, again.”
Araevin couldn’t help but smile at the sheepish look that came over Starbrow’s face.
“Well, come on, then,” the wizard said. “Let’s see where we are and where the daemonfey went from here.”
Curnil Thordrim stalked something terrible through the forest gloom a few miles from the old Standing Stone. He didn’t know for certain what it was, but it had killed two of his fellow Riders of Mistledale in their simple camp a few hours before, and they had died badly indeed: bodies marked by odd punctures surrounded by swollen, blue-black flesh, limbs broken and twisted, and awful bites gouged out of faces and skulls. He knew all the dangerous animals and most of the deadly monsters that haunted the depths of old Cormanthor, but he had never in his thirty-five years seen anything in the woodland that killed in that manner.
Curnil was a burly man with thick black hair on his forearms and a heavy black beard. Despite his size, he glided through the underbrush without sound, his dark eyes flicking from sign to sign as he followed the trail of something that stood as tall as an ogre and had long, narrow feet with small claws at the toe. He was not entirely sure he wanted to catch up to it, if he was to be honest with himself.
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