Michael Manning - The Line of Illeniel

The first indication things were not as they seemed was the sound of a twig snapping not five feet behind me. The sound would not have been so surprising, except I knew there was nothing there, no animals, no life at all. I came awake suddenly and then I felt it, an absolute emptiness. It was as if something had carved a void in the air behind me, a place where nothing existed.

I stood and whirled about, the darkness was absolute so my eyes were useless; yet I could feel the empty place with my extra senses. I reached for my sword but a hand grabbed my arm. It went through my shield as if it didn’t exist and when it touched me the world changed. Everything vanished… my sight was gone, and I could sense nothing but a vast void drawing me in. It was absorbing the light within me, and crushing the light from the world as well. A few moments longer and I would have been lost.

Something knocked me sideways, breaking the contact, and the world rushed back in at me. I could sense Penny there, grappling with something so black my mind could not reveal it, something that was sapping her energy. Her life force wavered in front of me, being drawn rapidly away, like a candle guttering in a strong wind.

“Lyet,” I spoke, conjuring a ball of light, and then I could see it. In the stark light I saw Penny struggling with Sadie Tanner. Ordinarily Penny would have easily overpowered the smaller girl, but now her strength was waning quickly. Whatever this thing was, it was a mockery of the girl we had known. It looked like Sadie, but the emptiness revealed by my magesight made it clear that she was nowhere within the creature we faced now.

“Sadie?” Penny exclaimed.

“I don’t know what that is… but it isn’t Sadie,” I yelled back, and then I continued in Lycian, “Stirret ni Pyrenn!” A line of fire lanced from my outstretched hand. I had learned to focus my power in such a way that it would burn a hole through the thing… yet my fire disappeared the moment it touched the thing.

Sadie, the thing, whatever it was… looked at me then, a hideous grin on its face. With a shove it threw Penny back six or seven feet, to strike a tree, and then it reached for the ball of light I had created. As it touched my spell the light vanished, winking out as suddenly as it had appeared. I felt a sense of shock. This thing, whatever Sadie had become, consumed my magic as quickly as I had summoned it.

I drew my sword and lashed out at her even as the light disappeared. I hoped cold steel would do what magic could not. I felt the blade meet resistance and then it passed onward. Stepping back I conjured more light. My eyes were wide now; fear had replaced my confidence.

The new light showed a hideous scene; Sadie Tanner’s body lay in two parts upon the ground, both still moving, struggling to reach me. I tried another fire spell and it disappeared as quickly as the first. The moment my magic touched the grotesque thing on the ground the fire winked out of existence. “Penny! Are you ok?” I called.

“Yeah, I just hit my head,” she answered, sounding tired and disoriented.

I moved toward her, making a wide circle around the creature still writhing on the earth. “I think we found it,” I said. What an understatement… it had found us. A thought occurred to me and I checked my blade. To my relief the magic within it still glowed in my sight. Why hadn’t it been extinguished as well? This shit just keeps getting weirder, I thought.

I reached Penny and ran my hand over her, making sure she was still in one piece. As a precaution I examined the landscape around us with my mind, and this time I was looking for holes, empty places where nothing existed. Finding none I began to relax. “I think this is the only one,” I said to Penny.

“You don’t sound so sure of yourself,” she replied.

“I’m not. That thing walked up on us without me sensing anything.” I created several more globes of light, spacing them around us at a distance of ten yards each. We wouldn’t be surprised again, and then I started thinking.

I took a moment to methodically cut Sadie’s body into several more parts, separating arms and legs from the rest of her. There was very little blood, and what did seep forth from the severed pieces was thick and black, like old blood that has already begun to congeal. My sword still showed no sign of being affected by her ability to consume magic. I tried my staff as well, poking the torso, and its enchantments were unaffected as well, yet when I conjured a light globe near the body it went out like a lamp that had been doused. Maybe it has something to do with the structure of enchantments, I thought. To test my theory I set a light within the head of my staff, where it would be held by my variable enchantment, and then I touched the torso with it.

Nothing happened, the light persisted; whatever it was, it could eat magic, but not enchantments. I could only guess that the rigid structure that contained their magic also protected them from being absorbed like my normal spells had been.

Penny spoke up, “As interesting as this thing is, we can’t leave a bunch of twitching body parts lying around here.” I loved her pragmatic nature.

“Alright, I have an idea,” I replied. I gathered up some dead wood and leaves, piling them around the still moving body parts. Using my power I set the makeshift pyre ablaze, till the wood was burning brightly. The fire consumed the flesh that lay among the wood, and what magic couldn’t accomplish normal fire did. We continued to add fresh wood until there was nothing left of Sadie Tanner’s body. I learned an interesting lesson that night… it takes a lot of wood to burn a body completely to ash.

“What was it?” Penny asked while we watched, but I didn’t have an answer. With more questions than answers we headed back home, too tired to do more that night.

The sun rose entirely too early. I wish I could have found the fellow who arranged that, he obviously had a poor sense of humor. Despite our late night Penny and I both woke not long after the sun came up. I think we were both anxious.

Sleep and some early morning thinking convinced me that there had to be more of those things out there. To begin with, Sadie hadn’t been like that before she disappeared, and something had to have taken her. If something similar had happened to the others that meant there were at least three more of those things out there… that we knew of. It was a chilling thought.

The only good news was that no one else had been taken, though I felt sure that there would have been, if we hadn’t encountered the creature first. Penny and I discussed what had happened but neither of us could understand it. In the end we decided to keep it to ourselves to avoid a panic.

I wrote two letters, one to the Duke of Lancaster, detailing everything that had happened, the second I addressed to Dorian. I hoped he would be free to come stay with us for a while, if magic wasn’t effective against this new creature his sword would certainly be more useful. After that I went looking to see if I could find a farmer or someone heading toward Lancaster.

As things worked out there wasn’t anyone planning a trip that day, but I ran across Joe McDaniel and he offered to go if it was urgent. Joe was a transplant from Gododdin, the neighboring kingdom. He didn’t talk much about his past, or his reasons for leaving, but I gathered it must involve the change in government there.

Technically Gododdin wasn’t a kingdom anymore. The royal family had been thoroughly exterminated some time before I was born and the country was now a theocracy, controlled by a cult known as the Children of Mal’goroth. Joe had never had anything good to say about them.

“I don’t mind going for ya Lord Cameron,” he told me, “I was planning to go in a few days anyway, to order a new cask of ale.” Joe was working to build a tavern, the first Washbrook had ever seen. At the moment it consisted of a few benches scattered around his house where he sold beer in the evenings. Being a beer enthusiast myself I had thoroughly supported his efforts.