by M. R. Forbes
"Just keep making noise," Eryn said, fighting against it. "That way we know we're still together."
"A good idea," Davin said. His voice sounded murky in the fog. He coughed to clear his throat, and started to hum.
"The Dance of Light?" Saretta said. "Fitting." She began to hum along.
Wilem knew the melody too, and added his voice to the mix.
"I don't know this song," Eryn said.
"Just follow along," Wilem replied. "It's not-"
He shouted, and then Eryn heard a thump.
"Wilem?"
"I'm well. I - ahhh!"
"What is it?" Davin asked. "Wilem?"
"A... a corpse. A man, I think. It is nothing but bone and shreds of clothes. I tripped over it."
Eryn stopped walking and looked down. She couldn't even see her feet. She crouched and felt along the ground, her hand brushing against damp grass and rounded stones. At least, she thought they were rounded stones. She wrapped her hand around one and lifted it directly in front of her eyes, and then dropped it with a gasp.
"Another here," she said. She shuffled forward, keeping her hands near the ground, feeling more of the stones that weren't stones.
"Here," Davin said.
"Here," Saretta said.
"It's like a battlefield. The bones and corpses are everywhere." Wilem's voice was dry and brittle. "I haven't found any weapons. What if they were trying to get in, and this is what happened to them?"
Eryn tried to calm herself. She took deep breaths and closed her eyes, preferring the gray blindness to the white.
"What if they were trying to get out?" Davin asked. "What if something chased them down?"
It was impossible not to wonder about, but it wasn't helping.
"There is no way for us to know what happened here," Eryn said. "We need to get past it without tripping and breaking our own bones."
She had heard the first few notes of the Dance of Light, and she started humming. She had to repeat what she knew a few times before Wilem joined in. Davin and Saretta followed after.
Travel was slow. They were all on their hands and knees, picking their way blindly across a descending slope covered in the remains of the dead. As Wilem had noted, none of them carried a weapon, and Eryn found none laying anywhere on the ground. Even more frightening to her was that for all the corpses she ran her hands across, every bone was smooth and full, unbroken by the elements, or by whatever had killed them.
She lost track of time. She lost track of where she was. She fell into a rhythm of inching forward, shifting around the corpses, keeping her eyes closed and humming the Dance of Light over and over again. Her voice was growing hoarse, and she was so thirsty she wanted nothing more than to stop singing and give her throat a rest, but she didn't dare. They had to make it out of the mist, if there was an out of the mist. She tried not to think what it could mean to spend days trapped in this state of blindness. She tried not to consider that they would have to do the same to get back up. Maybe the other side was an easier climb?
Silas, if you are with Amman and watching over me, please help me find a way through this. Please give me the strength to go on. I hate it in this place.
Still, the mist continued. Hours passed. Her throat was on fire, and she could hum no longer. She stopped and listened.
There was only silence.
"Wilem?" She tried to shout, but it came out only as a whisper. "Wilem?"
There was nothing.
She had become so consumed by moving forward she had stopped paying attention to the others. She felt the panic rise in her chest.
"Davin? Saretta?" She couldn't raise her voice. She put her hands to her face, trying not to sob.
Why wasn't I listening?
She tried to look around, but there was nothing to see. She was still blind. How far had they gone? A thousand feet? A hundred? The only reason she knew she hadn't gone in a circle was because the slope had continued downward.
"Eryn." Davin's voice was loud in the mist. He had the water skins, he must had saved his throat. "Eryn."
"I'm here," she said. She couldn't make enough noise.
"Eryn."
She leaned down and found two larger bones, and began to hit them together.
"Eryn." Davin's voice was louder. A moment later his face appeared right next to hers. "There you are."
She threw her arms around him without thinking. His hand found her back and held her for a moment. "We need to find Wilem and Saretta."
Echoes sounded in front of them. Someone was copying Eryn's effort.
"I can find Wilem," she said. She forced herself to calm and reached for her Curse, feeling the tingle move its way along her spine.
A face formed in the mist, a dark, boney face composed of sharp angles and hard flesh. Yellow eyes peered out at her, and lips twisted in an evil leer.
Eryn pushed herself away from Davin and fell backwards. Her magic moved through her and into her ring, sending a bolt of blue energy into the fog over Davin's shoulder. He shouted in fear.
The face was gone. She let go and lay prone on her back, her breath ragged and her heart pounding. Davin leaned in over her.
"What happened, Eryn? What did you see?"
"I don't know. Did I hurt you?"
"No."
"Eryn?" Wilem's voice cracked, but he was there, his hand reaching out and finding hers. She took it and held it tight.
"You found me."
"I felt your magic. Are you injured?"
"No, no. I thought I saw something in the fog, but it was just my imagination. This place is going to make me crazy."
"Me too," Davin said. "We need to find Saretta."
Eryn shifted off her back. As soon as she was back on her knees she reached out and found Wilem's shoulder, tracing it until she could take his hand again. "Don't let go."
"I won't."
The sound of bones banging together was still coming from ahead of them. They crawled downward, soon finding that their hands were no longer touching anything but grass and dirt. By the time they reached Saretta, the fog was thinning, and they could see one another once more.
"What took you so long?" Saretta asked when they appeared. Davin wrapped his arms around her and kissed her forehead.
"We made it through," Wilem said. He tried to pull his hand away, thinking Eryn didn't need him anymore.
"I said don't let go." She tightened her grip and leaned her body into him. It was comforting to have someone close who could always find her, even when they couldn't see.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Wilem
The heavy clouds above them didn't block the light of the sky, but it did diffuse it in a strange way, causing the illumination that navigated through the fog to cast an eerie, almost purple glow on everything in the valley. The mist itself had never dissipated completely, continuing to hang around them as they moved, as if to remind them that it could take back control of their senses at any time.
They had found no dead and no bones beneath the fog. Instead, the slope had taken a sharp dip downward another two hundred feet or so, and then leveled out into the edge of a thick forest. The trees and brush here were densely packed, leaving low, heavy branches and thorny bramble for them to navigate around or pick their way through, making travel continue almost as slowly as it had been inside the mist.
That anything was able to grow at all was a mystery of its own, but everything seemed to have adapted to the ethereal glow that surrounded them, and indeed the leaves and needles of the vegetation appeared to feed on it, with nearly every plant sharing an awful purple,brown, and blue coloration that reminded Wilem of bruises.
Much like he was from the trip down.
He squeezed Eryn's hand again, taking comfort in the soft feel of it in his own. He felt his heartbeat increase when she squeezed it back. He wasn't expecting any affection from her, so even this small symbol of care was enough to help give him strength to fight the fear he had been feeling since they had ent
ered this place.
He wondered if the others felt it. It wasn't a normal fear, or even the same fear as had been born of the white-blindness they had experienced. It was almost as though his Curse, his magic, his disease, was afraid of something, and was passing the emotion on to him.
"Eryn," he said, getting her attention. "Do you feel it?"
"Feel what?"
"The Curse. The magic."
"It's afraid."
"Yes. It feels weird."
"I agree."
The other thing that was making him uncomfortable was the landscape. It wasn't just the mottled, ugly color of the foliage that was unnerving him. It was that the plants were all there was. No chirping, no croaking, no insects or deer or rabbit. No stones, no water, no wind.
Nothing.
"Have we reached the bottom?" Davin asked. His eyes continually scanned the area around them, and he held his sword ready in case anything living or otherwise made an appearance.
"We don't seem to be descending any more, but with the fog I don't know how far down we've dropped." Saretta looked back the way they had come, but the mist made it impossible to judge the distance.
Wilem took a deep breath to calm himself, and summoned his magic. He reached out with it, trying to find his cloak at the lip of the Dark above them.
He was rewarded with a sharp pain in his temple that caused him to release Eryn's hand and stumble to his knees. He gripped his head and cried out, the tingle of his magic growing into a furious cacophony of wild energy that made his whole body go numb.
"Wilem?" Eryn knelt down next to him, putting her arm around his shoulders.
"Hurrrrtssss," he said. He held his breath and tried to relax, to calm his out of control power.
"What did you say?" Eryn asked. Her face had turned white.
"I said it hurts." The pain was subsiding. "The Curse. I tried to find the cloak, to see how far we had come. Don't use your magic. It isn't safe."
She nodded and helped him to his feet.
"No Curse?" Saretta asked. "Let us hope this place remains as dead as it seems."
Eryn put her hand to the hilt of the sword on her hip. "I've trained with Silas for over a year. I'm not half the swordsman he was, but I'm not defenseless either."
"I'll hide behind you," Wilem said. "Most Mediators are given basic melee skills, but we aren't required to be very good at it."
She laughed. "As you will." She clapped his shoulder and moved ahead of him.
They walked for another hour, picking a path through the wood, headed towards the center of the Dark. Like the mist, this new landscape seemed to continue forever, and like the mist in time they began to lose all sense of where they were, or how long they had been there. What was clear was that though they were all tired, no one wanted to waste a minute to rest. If there was something useful to find here, they wanted to find it and escape.
More time passed. Wilem was sure that the sky must have darkened hours ago, and yet the purple glow around them remained undiminished. He took a deep breath and stretched his neck, rocking it back and forth, and then shook out his arms. His legs were exhausted, and his attention was fading.
Eryn had been walking in front of him, and he nearly collided with her before realizing she had stopped. Stepping behind her, he could see why.
The trees were gone.
No. Not gone. They're still here.
They were spread on the ground around them, the path of destruction stretching in a circle almost as far as they could see. They were dead husks, having lost their leaves and branches to the decay a long time ago, but they revealed a clear source to their demise through the pattern in which they had toppled.
There, in the center of the devastation, a thick cloud of white mist rose in a column from the ground, like smoke from a fireplace.
Wilem felt a pain in his gut, like something had just kicked him in the stomach. His whole body wrenched and knotted, and he felt the tingle begin to run along his spine. In front of him, Eryn dropped to her hands and leaned over, the little bit she had remaining in her stomach finding its way to the grass ahead of her.
"Eryn? Wilem?" Saretta put her arms around him, keeping him from falling over. "What's happening?"
"No," Wilem said. "Let go." He tried to get his hands up, to get her to safety.
It was too late.
The crystal clasp in his pocket scalded his leg at the same time a burst of flame launched from it, catching Saretta full on. She screamed and fell away, landing on her back and reaching for her face. Her hair was on fire, and she rolled and writhed on the ground, smacking at it in an effort to put it out.
"Saretta!" Davin rushed to her side, joining her in the frantic effort to extinguish the fire, while Wilem collapsed onto the ground. The clasp had burned a hole in his pants and it fell away, deactivating as it lost contact with him.
Wilem joined Saretta on the grass, convulsing and coughing, his insides feeling like something was ripping him apart. He closed his eyes and shook, bile rising into his mouth.
"Wizards. It has been such a long time."
He opened his eyes again, searching for the source of the voice and seeing nothing but chaos around him. Eryn had fallen onto her stomach, and Davin was leaning over Saretta. The flames had gone out, but his cry of anger and sadness told him what the end result had been.
"Only the Nine may return. Only the Nine."
He got onto his side just in time to vomit onto the grass. He could sense Eryn's power growing, and he watched an army of lightning bolts explode from the ring on her finger, lancing into the trees around them and setting the dead trunks ahead of them aflame.
"It knows. It knows to be afraid. Turn back wizard. There is no succor for it here."
Wilem took a deep breath, using every technique he knew to try to keep his magic calm. He could feel the pressure of it, the terrifying fear of whatever it was whose voice was in his head.
He sensed Eryn's power growing again. He had to get the ring away from her! He pulled himself forward on his elbows, fighting to remain as calm as he could and at the same time ignore the throbbing of the burn on his leg.
"It is the directive. Protect the secret of the Nine. None are to leave Genesia and none are to enter. Wizards least of all."
He put his body on top of Eryn's, pinning her to the ground. He grabbed her hand and twisted at the ring. If she activated it now, his whole arm would be burned to ash.
Davin screamed behind him. He turned his head to look, and saw only that he was no longer hunched over his wife. He didn't have time to find him. He pulled at the ircidium band, turning it and trying to get it over her knuckle.
Eryn groaned, her body spasming so hard the motion almost threw him. He finally wrenched the ring from her just as he felt her power release. There was nowhere for it to go, and so it went everywhere. Her head lifted up and she cried out in pain as a shockwave of magic sped away, sending Wilem into the air and uprooting the trees behind them. He fell a dozen feet or more, coming down hard on his back and remaining still.
"It cannot fight. It cannot hurt. It never could. It never did. It doesn't fear wizards. It fears the Nine."
Wilem could still hear the voice, which meant he was still alive. He opened his eyes.
Something was standing over him.
It was vaguely humanoid, large and black, all sharp angles and jagged edges. It had a face of some kind, with yellow eyes and a small mouth from which rolled waves of moisture. Its skin was thick and scaled, and it reflected the purple glow of the mist as though it were made of dark iron.
In its jagged left hand was a large, straight sword, the blade so thick and wide that it looked more like a butcher's cleaver than a weapon of combat.
Blood dripped from its edge.
"It should never have come to Genesia."
Wilem tried to move. He tried to pick himself up. He couldn't fight on his back. He couldn't run away on his back either.
He couldn't get up.
&nbs
p; His legs were too tired, his body too battered. His magic was reacting violently to this place, and it had left him exhausted.
His attacker raised the sword up and stepped forward. Wilem could see the blade above him. He could see it descending on his stomach. He fought against the tiredness, against the fear. He fought against everything there was to fight against. He needed to get out of the way. He needed to live, or this thing would kill Eryn next.
His body refused him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Eryn
Eryn choked and gasped, fighting for even the smallest intake of air. Her lungs burned, her heart burned, and every inch of her skin felt like it was being pricked with needles.
She had lost control of her Curse. It had gone wild in an effort to somehow defend itself, and in doing so had left her spent again. She was glad to have the cure Wilem had taken from Kelkin. She was going to need it.
She could still feel power tingling inside her, along with the strange feeling of intense fear. She gritted her teeth and forced it away as if she could will the disease into remission, or at least into hiding. The fear didn't vanish, but she did feel a small amount of her strength return.
"It cannot fight. It cannot hurt. It never could. It never did. It doesn't fear wizards. It fears the Nine."
She heard the voice again. It was dry and raspy, and sent waves of dizziness through her head. She focused on her anger, pulling herself to her feet.
"Wilem?" She didn't see him. She looked back, finding Davin and Saretta on the ground. Her face was unrecognizable. His body was covered in blood. "Wilem?" She was more desperate now.
Where is he?
She saw his attacker first, its dark skin and angled body standing over his prone form. She saw the huge sword it held and the blood that ran along the edge.
"It should never have come to Genesia."
It lifted its sword and shifted forward.
He was going to die if she didn't do something. She knew using her power might kill her, but she had no choice. "Opire!" She called on it, bringing it forth, begging it to slam into the creature and knock it away.
The magic came.
