Mark Sehesdedt - Cry of the Ghost Wolf

The candle in the middle of the floor guttered, drowning in its own wax. Soon the flame would die, plunging the stone chamber into absolute blackness. Dim as the light was, though, Argalath could not bear to look at it. Its meager glow stabbed into the back of his skull like hot needles. It had been a long day, fraught with effort, and his strength was failing him. Despite the power that burned inside him, his body would have to rest soon.

He sat cross-legged on the stone floor. He must hold the power in check. But it was more of a struggle with each moment. If she didn’t return soon …

When Jagun Ghen had first possessed Argalath, joining with him at the most elemental level, it had felt like riding the back of a dragon-lord and master of all he desired. Argalath could do so much more now. The price he paid had been worth it. But over the years, he had begun to suspect that the power was consuming him, like the wick’s fire ate away the candle wax., Each time he allowed Jagun Ghen to bleed through, it left Argalath feeling like a burst wineskin. And the distinction between them … he wasn’t sure it was there anymore. He and the thing of flame and hunger had become one, and darkness was his lone comfort from the burning. Only in darkness could Argalath touch the last of his humanity. He looked down at his hands in his lap. They were shaking like those of an old man.

The air in the room stirred, causing the candle flame to dance.

“Kathkur returns,” said Guric, his voice coming out of the darkness. The former lord of Highwatch stood against the far wall where the light of the flame could not reach.

The breeze in the room rose to a scream, snuffing out the candle and plunging them into absolute darkness. Argalath allowed himself a moment of relief.

And then the air in the middle of the room split. Black as the chamber was, Argalath could see with more than his eyes, and he watched the thing surge into the room.

Kathkur stepped through the door, but Argalath saw at once that the demon wore a new form. The woman Merah was gone, and the demon stood clad in the frame of a tall eladrin, his face and hair caked in drying blood and grit. The portal closed behind him and he stood, the symbol gouged onto his forehead still dripping tiny bits of red-orange light. The eladrin swayed on his feet a moment, then fixed his gaze on Argalath. “She was there.”

It took Argalath a moment to grasp his meaning. “The Hand?” he said. “She is with Maaqua already?”

Kathkur growled his assent.

“Why didn’t you kill her?”

“It was all I could do to get away. This one … is not like the others. Far more powerful. She … she reeks of … of him . His stench bleeds out of her pores. I could not go near her. Not alone.”

The symbol on the eladrin’s forehead spit one last flicker and died. He took a lurching step forward and fell to his hands and knees, his long hair falling over his face. A tremor passed through his body so violently that Argalath heard his teeth clack together.

Then Argalath sensed the power change in the room, like a chord in which one note suddenly turned high and shrill. Guric must have sensed it, too, for he rushed forward. The eladrin shrieked, thrust one fist in front of him, and the air in the room swirled and coalesced into a solid current that he sent outward like a whip. Guric’s body took the brunt of it, and he flew against the wall with bone-crunching force.

“Let me go!” the eladrin screamed. “Hweilan, help me!”

Jagun Ghen stirred inside Argalath, like a dragon rising from its nest. The demon’s power combined with that of Argalath’s spellscar, and the blue skin that swirled and splotched over his entire body flared with a sickly blue light. Argalath’s muscles cramped, and he felt his eyeballs turning up in his skull.

Power surged in him, filling him with fire, both agony and ecstasy, like dark wine running through the threads of cloth, staining it. Argalath felt it, reveled in the strength that connected him to everything in the room.

Like a spider detects the vibration of one thread and so knows where the moth struggles in its web, Argalath could feel the eladrin struggling against Kathkur. Argalath followed, writhing under skin, through muscle, flowing over bone until he found the vessel that supplied the brain with blood. Argalath surrounded it, like water covering a root, and when it was completely enmeshed, Argalath flexed. His power moved like water no longer, but solidified and tightened, like jagged ice. Argalath groaned at the pain this caused his own body, but he did not weaken his grip.

The eladrin’s cries of fury and defiance turned to pain. “Let me …! Hweil-!”

And then he pitched forward.

Argalath released the power. He wanted the eladrin unconscious, not dead. Hot blood resumed its flow into the eladrin’s brain. The glow of Argalath’s spellscar faded, and the last of the power dissipated, like smoke scattered by cold winds.

He crumpled to the floor. As the last fragment of consciousness shattered and fled from him, he thought he heard, just for a moment, the sound of laughter-a rumble of consuming fire.

Howling. It filled Hweilan’s ears, and her first thought was that the Master was coming for her again. Hunting her. He would find her. And he would kill her teacher while she watched.

Hweilan had grown up listening to wolf songs, and they had never before frightened her. Scith had taught her all about the animals held in great respect by the Nar people. It was the wolves that had first taught men to hunt.

But since that night in the Feywild when Nendawen hunted her and she swore herself to him, the howling had haunted her dreams. It was a reminder that the Master was never far away.

She sat up.

The sheer weight of the evening sky almost pressed her back down again. No forest. No Feywild. She sat near the crest of a long highland, looking down upon a gold and green steppe that disappeared into forever. She could see from horizon to horizon in every direction. Not even a wisp of cloud marred the firmament. Off to her left, where heaven met earth, the sky still glowed a pale blue where the sun had just dipped beneath the rim of the world, but in the east darkness was swiftly gaining hold, and the first stars were already out.

Howls drifted over her again, as if borne on the breeze hissing through the grass. Looking down into the lowlands, she saw a stain marring the steppe, a vast dark blotch moving across the land. Looking closer, she saw it was not a solid mass but made up of many hundreds of shapes moving across the grassland. Swiftstags or something very like them.

Other shapes, some dark, some pale as snowflakes, nipped at the edge of the vast herd. Wolves.

Hunters. Like you .

The voice spoke directly into her mind, but she sensed something watching her and turned.

On the crest behind her, no more than a few paces away, stood a wolf, white as frost. More milled around behind him-a gray-and-white female, her tail held high, signifying her as the chief’s mate. A huge male, brown as a cave bear. And others, some wise and lean from years of hunting; others small and hale, barely more than pups. As Hweilan’s gaze took them in, stars blazed to life in the sky overhead, and their light glinted off the wolves’ coats in dozens of colors, like moonlight glinting off ice. The chief wolf’s eyes drew her in. The pupils were black and wide in the dying light, but around them was a blue that shone like a cloudless winter sky.