“You failed,” she said simply. “And you will die here, a failure.”
Again came the wheezing, horrifying laugh as Sefir writhed in the mud, craning his head as though looking for someone.
“No child,” he said, a gurgling chuckle still in his throat. “I have delivered you… as sure as I die… our Lady’s will and song… shall walk at your side…”
She puzzled over his words and slowly backed away. The others stood by, listening to her strange conversation with furrowed, thoughtful expressions.
“Kill it,” Brindani said suddenly and turned away. Lightning ripped through the clouds, the rain growing heavier in a resounding peal of thunder as the half-elf wrapped his cloak tight and headed south.
Uthalion and Vaasurri waited a moment then turned away as well, leaving her to quietly contemplate the mutilated man’s mysterious claims. His broken body’s twitching movements slowed, and his jaw went slack, though a thin, raspy breath still rattled from between his rows of sharklike teeth. She left him, dying in the mud, and stared at the dark, sweet-scented blood on her sword as she followed the others out of Caidris.
Uthalion felt strange as they made their cautious way out of the abandoned town. His body felt light, his step too soft in the mud. His arms and legs were unprotected by chain mail or greaves; no shield hung upon his arm. The foul blood so real in his nightmares of the town did not mar his skin, did not grow sticky in between links of chain armor, or gum his eyeB shut when he closed them for too long. The storm overhead bore dark shades of blue and gray, coloring everything in azure tones instead of the pall of unending black he had once fought within.
With each breath he realized he had not been dreaming, that this time Caidris had been realand that horrors still haunted the places in his nightmares.
He could not release the tight grip on his sword, and stood ready to draw the blade at the slightest threat. He flinched as Vaasurri or Brindani splashed through a deepening puddle. His heart pounded as he searched the hollowed homes and shadowed stables they passed, knowing with a grim assuredness that they contained more than nesting birds and rats.
Nothing hurtled from the dark, baring needle teeth and twisted limns hnt he imairineH them there all the aame
He searched, obsessively for Khault, or rather the thing Khault had somehow become, but the old farmer was nowhere to be seen. Instinct kept Uthalion on guard, a paranoia that had served him well in years past. With Sefir fallen, Khault might come slithering back to finish the job. A shiver passed through him. Though both of them had been truly hideous, the mutilations of Sefir’s visage seemed almost trivial in comparison to those of the brave, kind farmer who had given strangers shelter and had sacrificed so much.
The shallow wounds in his leg burned with sweat and exertion, forcing him to measure his long stride. But the pain cleared his mind some and kept him focused on staying alive until Caidris was far at his back.
The last farm faded to a dim silhouette, and the rain lessened again, rumbling thunder growing softer as the storm traveled north. But Uthalion did not let go of his blade and continually scanned for threats in the tall grass. He paused occasionally, sensing something and holding out his hand to halt the others, lowering it only when he was reassured that danger, if there had been any at all, had passed. He caught a questioning, concerned look in Vaasurri’s eyes, but he ignored it, wordlessly gesturing instead to the path.
His jaw ached, and he unclenched his teeth, trying to calm his shattered nerves. He had the sense that the world would fall away at any moment, that the nightmare would end, and he would awaken in the Spur, back in th amp;Grove, and Vaasurri would question him about the nightmare. He would jest, avoiding the subject, and try to forget the dream.
But he hadn’t slept in four days, and the silver ring had not left his finger.
“We need to stop,” Vaasurri said at his side, and Uthalion flinched at the break in the long awkward silence in which they marched. “We need to rest, and you are bleeding.”
“Shallow wounds,” he replied numbly. “There’s still some light, such as it is, and we shouldn’t waste it.”
He glanced at the others, searching for-dissent. But Ghaelya and Brindani only trudged along, watching the faint outline of the overgrown path and little else. Quietly he cursed their inattentiveness, shaking his head and ignoring Vaasurri’s solemn stare.
“You’re not the only one who’s wounded,” Vaasurri pressed, an edge of anger and concern in his voice. “And not all of us can stay awake for tendays on end.”.
“We’re not stopping,” Uthalion said a little louder. “Too far to go, not enough distance behind us.”
“Distance from Caidris you mean,” the killoren replied.
“Not now, Vaas. Let it go,” Uthalion grumbled. His eyes remained firmly on the southern horizon as if glued there, drawn like the needle of a compass. He found, after several tries, that he could not look away from it for long. He couldn’t hear the mysterious song, but its constant pull was unmistakable.
“Fine, keep your secrets,” Vaasurri said and turned off the path, gesturing for Brindani and Ghaelya to follow. “We are stopping. Should you happen to work things out and stop for a moment, perhaps we’ll catch up.”
Uthalion did stop and turned on the killoren angrily, his sword half drawn and a swift rebuke on his tongue, but he caught himself. He let the unspoken words go and sheathed his sword, staring at the leather bracers on his arms, the tired half-elf and the genasi. The storm was passing, and he was no longer the Captain he’d once been. These were not his soldiers.
Vaasurri led them to a growth of rock that curled from the ground like the tail of a burrowing dragon. Uthalion cooled his anger somewhat, though he could not quell the sense of eyes spying upon his back, of beasts crawling through the grass waiting for him tn let. Hrram hin cmnrr) It felt aa tVuvucrh they were everywhere, and naught could banish them save reaching Tohrepur and dealing with Khault.
The Choir had been to Airspur at least once, he thought and suppressed a shudder. Might they take my family next?
He shivered and made his slow way to the little camp, not sparing a glance for the killoren as he climbed the curl of rock, seeking higher ground from which to observe the surrounding area.
“I’ll take first watch,” he muttered.
From above he noticed the haunted look on Ghaelya’s face as she cleared an area to he down, though Brindani, he noted, looked nothing less than a ghost. He pondered this briefly, then looked again to the south, slowly turning the silver ring upon his finger as the muted sun crawled to the western horizon.
Vaasurri sat quietly by the small fire, rubbing the chill from his arms and keeping a worried eye upon Uthalion until well after sunset. The human seemed as though he’d been hollowed out and filled with something else, bearing little resemblance to the man Vaasurri had known in the Spur. Though Uthalion did eventually tend to the wounds on his leg, it was the wounds of an older conflict that the killoren spied in the blank stare of his friend’s face, in the anxious paranoia that started at every sound.
Brindani appeared to have fared little better since leaving Caidris. He was pale and wrapping himself tightly in a wet cloak, trembling with something beyond just the cold. At first Vaasurri had suspected the silkroot, but he had witnessed the addictions of mortals in the Feywild silkroot having been a popular method of easing the fears and inhibitions of those caught in the fey realmsand the half-elf suffered far differently than he recalled.
The encounter in Caidris had marked both the man and the half-elfin a way that Vaasurri could not fathom, though he suspected both had seen something in Sefir that had been wholly unnatural and yet familiar at the same time. In all his life, even in the fantastic beings of the Feywild, he had never seen anything like the mutilated singer. He had no word for such a thing as Sefir, though he had witnessed sorcerous infectionsdiseases that affected not only the flesh, but the will and spirit of the infected. Some had worked according to nefarious design; others, occasionally, had spread like wildfire, epidemics attributed to the Spellplague and beasts caught in the terrible blue waves of its chaos.