Paul Kemp - Shadow witness

Jak regained consciousness. Apart from the soft rush of an uncomfortably warm wind, Jak heard only silence. He lay on his back and remained perfectly still, afraid to move* afraid, to dispel the illusion that he was still ah've.

Still alive? How can that be? he wondered;

He had expected to awaken in whatever happy afterlife awaited servants of the Trickster. Brandobaris's teachings were frustrat-ingly, and Jak suspected, deliberately, vague on this point-but he knew from the aches in his body that he was still composed of flesh and bone, not spirit.

Surprising, he thought. He knew the gates in the guildhouse to be voids, empty pits in reality that ate away at his home plane like pools of acid. He had assumed that flesh-and-blood beings could not withstand contact with them, and had figured physical death in the gate a better fate than the death of his soul at the hands of the shadow demon. But he hadn't died, and here he was.

Wherever here was.

He dared not open his eyes, at least not yet. He knew from the smell in the air and the coarse earth beneath his body that here had to be some demonic wasteland of the sort he had heard of in adventurers' tales. He was not yet ready to face that.

He took mental stock of his body and realized with alarm that breathing came only with difficulty. His muscles, his body, and his very soul felt dulled, like a once-colorful painting faded by time and sunlight to drabness. His brain felt sluggish, his thoughts thick and muddy. A side effect of passing through the gate, he assumed. Yet he was alive! His hand fumbled ineptly for the luckstone at his waist.

The Lady still favors us, CaleHis happiness at finding himself alive vanished. Jak had left Cale back in the guildhouse, left him alone with the shadow demon helpless on the wall, left him alone to feed the demon with his soul.

I'm sorry, Erevis, he thought, and tears trickled out from under his closed eyelids. I couldn't die like the Soargyls. I couldn't be drained by the demon into dried hunks of soulless flesh. I just couldn't.

But I left Cale to die that way, he accused. He hadn't planned it that way, he just hadn't wanted to die that way himself. He realized now what he had done and the realization pained him beyond measure. Cale could not have survived on that wall.

More tears leaked out, ran along his hairline, and pooled in his ears. They did nothing to quiet the accusatory voice he heard in his head. He didn't try to fight the grief and the guilt. He couldn't fight it. He had abandoned his best friend to an ugly death.

I'm sorry, Erevis.

He had known Cale for over ten years, and had never met a man more loyal to his friends, or more fearless in the face of danger. Cale had lived for so long on the fine line that separated life from death that he walked it with the practiced ease of a festival acrobat on a tightrope. Jak had loved him like a brother and abandoned him like a coward.

I'm sorry, my friend.

He lay still and let the tears flow until the pangs of guilt began to dull. He had to get up, to try to find a way back. If their situations had been reversed, Cale would have carried on. Jak would, too. He would take up Gale's cause as his own. Yrsillar had one more death to account for.

He forced his sluggish lungs to draw in a deep breath. The acrid air left a foul grit on his tongue that tasted sulfurous and smoky. He cleared his throat to fight off a fit of coughing. Ready, he sat up with a slight grunt and snapped his eyes open.

I should've kept them closed, he immediately reprimanded himself.

As he had suspected and feared, a wasteland of coarse gray ash surrounded him in all directions. It rolled in dunes in the ceaseless breeze like sand in a great desert. Jagged slabs of basalt as sharp as spear tips occasionally jutted through the ash, tombstones in a graveyard that extended for infinity. No plants and no life. A wasteland of emptiness. There was no sign anywhere of the gate he had traveled through. The trip here was one-way. He was trapped.

I'm in the Abyss, he thought. Yrsillar's home plane. The realization hit him hard and made him weak.

He looked skyward to see an unbroken blanket of soot-colored clouds as lifeless and gray as the sea of ash under his feet. Occasionally, flashes of sickly blue-the color of ghoul flesh-backlit the sky. Rather than enlivening the sky, the sudden, silent bursts of color served only to accent the drab desolation of the gloom.

Low on the horizon hung a gigantic vortex of swirling nothingness. A maelstrom that was a mirror image of the gates in the guildhouse but magnified in size a thousandfold. Streaks of ochre and viridian mixed with the-gray and churned toward the empty center of oblivion. No sun or moon hung in the slate sky. Jak felt certain that this hellish realm had never seen the light of a sun, that it stood forever illumined in only perpetual twilight. He clambered to his feet and brushed a stray hair out of his eyes. When he did, he saw- "What in the…"

Wisps of white vapor steamed from his exposed skin like smoke from a leaf fire. Dumbfounded for a moment, he merely stared. Contrary to the direction of the wind, the vapor rose from his flesh and floated inexorably toward the vortex in the sky as though drawn by a lodestone. Then the realization dawned on him. My soul is slipping away.

Small wonder he felt so torpid. The negative energy of the maelstrom would eat his life just as surely as the demons that dwelled here. Thankfully, he had prepared for something similar back at Brilla's place.

Hurriedly, he pulled forth his holy symbol. The green tourmaline in the eagle's talon looked so dull as to appear nearly black. He began to incant the syllables to a spell that would protect him from negative energy. He had memorized the spell several times to protect himself and Cale when they fought the demon, but he thought it would work equally well against the pull of the maelstrom.

He began to cast, but stumbled over the incantation. His voice sounded strangely muted. The unnatural gloom and ash-laden air strangled his voice the moment he made a sound.

Jak's life-force leaked through his skin. He felt himself grow weaker with each heartbeat.

He cleared his throat and began again, louder this time. The vigor in his voice warred with the torpidity of the air. With great effort he forced out each magic-pregnant word, moved his holy symbol through the gray air to trace the appropriate sigils. His lungs heaved and sweat beaded his brow but he stubbornly plodded on.

At last he finished, and when he did, a golden glow took shape around him and sheathed his entire body. It crackled and popped energetically as its positive power held the negative energy of the void at bay.

"Interesting," he observed, and held his arms before him for examination. Now protected by the goMen aura of the spell, the white vapor no longer seeped from his pores. His flesh had lost its gray pallor and returned to normal. Equally important, he felt himself again. His mind and body once more moved with their habitual deftness. As long as his protective spell stayed in effect he would be safe from the draining effects of the energy maelstrom.

But how long will it last? he wondered nervously. The spell was supposed to protect him from creatures that used negative energy in a single concentrated attack, not from the persistent, slow-draining negative energy of an entire plane. He couldn't know for certain, but from the way the golden aura sizzled, he did not think the spell would last long. He could cast it again, of course, but sooner or later, he would run out of protection.

"Unless I can find a way out of here." Within the protective aura, his voice again sounded normal. He allowed himself a smile and enjoyed his small victory over an impossibly grim situation.