R. Salvatore - Bastion of Darkness

She had been here only once, and on that occasion, Corning had been in desperate preparation for an imminent and overwhelming invasion. Yet even that frenzied scene of screaming folk and frightened children seemed far more pleasant to the young witch than the blasted image of Corning now, for even the grip of winter could not begin to erase the visual memory the place revealed: the wake of Morgan Thalasi’s devastating passage. Nearly every building was no more than a burned-out shell, with only its stone walls standing, peaked on two ends, skeletons like the picked bones of the thousands of dead who littered the fields outside of Corning, who littered the streets and the parapets of those few sections of the city wall that had not been flattened. The visual stain of the blood was gone, covered by the snow, but the smell remained, sickly sweet, conjuring images of a massacre.

The predominance of elongated skulls, the sloped foreheads of talons, showed the witch that more talons by far had fallen in the desperate battle for Corning than human-or elven, the witch reminded herself, thinking of Meriwindle-defenders, but if that number had been a hundred to one, a thousand to one, the loss of beautiful Corning would not have been worth it. Corning had once been the second city of Calva, behind only glorious Pallendara itself. It was a place birthed in war and built for the defense of the western fields, but in the centuries of peace the region had known before the return of Thalasi, Corning had grown beyond its pragmatic roots, expanding into something far more wonderful, an expression of artisans and craftsmen, a place of wonderful sprawling gardens and decorated houses.

Now it was only a burned-out skeleton, a collection of walls and bones for the ages. What might someone uncovering those relics in a future age think of Corning, Rhiannon wondered? What riddles would these bones-house, defender, and talon-present? Would the world even remember the scourge of Morgan Thalasi then, and his attempt to invade Calva? Would the world remember Belexus and Andovar, King Benador and Bryan of Corning, and all the others who gave so much to beat back the evil tide of the Black Warlock? Given the recent revelations about the waning of magic, Rhiannon feared that it would not, that all of this would pass into history, to be distorted perhaps, if not altogether forgotten, by those seeking to twist the tales to fit their own personal agendas.

The myriad of thoughts that assailed her as she looked upon the ruins, in themselves, seemed more than a little curious to Rhiannon. She was barely more than twenty years of age, with little experience in the ways of mankind, in the history of mankind. How, then, and more important, why, were such concerns suddenly so paramount to her?

With a deep breath, she shook all the curious thoughts and the questions of them away, and concentrated instead on the task at hand, the grim business that had brought her to Corning. The source of the darkness was close now, she knew, somewhere within the walls of Corning, perhaps, or at least in sight of the wall. Perhaps in sight of her.

She waded through the piles of bones, to the burned and battered eastern gate. That sight also was telling, for the main attack had come not from the east, but from the west. The Black Warlock had apparently sent a sizable number of his monstrous troops around the city to cut off any escape by the defenders. Yet even here, even with the main fighting on the other side of the city, the defenders had obviously held well and killed many of the talons.

With a deep breath, the witch moved through the gate, into the city. There she found the bones of humans mingled with those of talons. Piles and piles of bones: broken skulls, skeletons hanging over the parapets, held together by no more than their frozen, ragged clothing. Rhiannon, so sensitive and perceptive, heard the calls of those dead, the shrieks of agony, the mournful laments. She closed her eyes and remembered her own near-death experience, after her magical battle with Thalasi when she had entered the gateway to the nether realm, when she had watched the solemn procession, the endless line, of those slaughtered in the war.

Hardly conscious that she was gasping for breath, the young witch opened her eyes, and there, all around her, she saw them. The ghosts of the Corning battle, so many wandering spirits, were moving about her, apparently oblivious to her. The ghosts of talons and of men, remnants of those who had died here, their energy emptied into the air by the cut of a sword. The pair of talons she had spied upon on the road the night before had spoken of such specters, advising to a group of their wicked kin who had brought their wagon in to the inviting campfire to avoid Corning at all costs.

Indeed, the place was haunted. And even though Rhiannon’s experience with the supernatural was far beyond the norm, it took some time before she could comfortably understand that these spirits were no threat to her, were nothing tangible, were nothing that someone who was not sensitive to, or terrified of, such things would even notice.

A movement to the side, a dark shadow slipping behind the stone of a small cottage, tuned her back to the living world. A talon, she supposed, braving the ghost stories in search of easy loot.

Rhiannon started for the spot, but then hesitated; she had noticed the shadow when her eyes were looking into the realm of the dead, when her eyes were watching the ghost dance. If the moving creature was not of that realm, partially at least, would she have even noticed it?

With that warning in mind, Rhiannon turned about and made her way instead to another nearby cottage. She tried to use her insight, her magical nature, to better sense the presence, and she was not surprised, though surely stunned, when she felt that cold darkness again, the one that had touched her in the Baerendils so many miles away. It was here, so close, feeling her presence as keenly as she perceived its own.

Suddenly the young witch wished that she had not left Bryan, wished that she was still far, far away in the mountains, away from the darkness, this darkness that she feared too profound for the light of Rhiannon. She looked back to the eastern gate, measuring the distance and the time it would take her to cross out of Corning. She considered her magical energy, to transform her into something more agile, more quick, or to attempt to teleport, perhaps, though that was surely a difficult spell to enact, even before the waning of magic.

She thought and thought, seeking an escape, her mind a whirl of possibilities.

She heard the evil laughter, and all those thoughts melted away, false hope indeed.

“Morgan Thalasi, I suppose,” the young witch said in a loud voice, as calmly as she could manage. “So ye crawled from the field after me and me friends beat ye down…”

That last word stuck in her throat as she turned about to see not Morgan Thalasi, but a creature she did not know. It resembled a large man, and certainly a dead one, though the edges of its features constantly blurred, seeming somehow indistinct, as if the thing was not fully of this realm.

Rhiannon did not know its name, and could not know that this perversion, this stain upon the living world, was indeed the creation of Thalasi. She could not know that this creature was all that remained of one of the ancient ones, that this horrid being had once been a companion of her father, torn from the grasp of Death by the Black Warlock.

What she did know, though she did not understand how she could possibly hold such certainty with the thought, was that this creature, this evil unnatural perversion, was the murderer of Andovar.

“Well, what pleasure has fate sent my way?” the wraith of Hollis Mitchell asked, the timbre of its voice matching its unearthly appearance, a supernatural and evilly charged tone that stung the young witch’s sensibilities and set her back on her heels.