He found himself in deep, near-total darkness, with only a faint glimmer of light spilling down from somewhere overhead. Despite the lack of illumination, Araevin took three quick steps away from where he had arrived, knowing that his friends would be arriving right on his heels. He barked his shin hard on something, stumbled and caught himself on a stone pedestal in front of him. Muttering a human curse-and any human tongue was much more suited to profanity than Elvish, after all-he managed to call a light spell from his staff and see where he was.
The room was a vault or cellar below a large stone building, evidently in ruins. A stairwell leading up stood across the room to his right. The soft glow of daylight filtered down, the glimmer he had seen when he first entered. He looked down, and discovered that he had very nearly tumbled headlong into a deep stone well in the center of the room. The knee-high lip surrounding the shaft was what he had walked into in the darkness.
“Damn,” Araevin breathed. He might have managed a quick spell of flying while falling in darkness-or he might not have.
Blue light crackled behind him, and Araevin turned to guide Starbrow away from the doorway. The moon elf had Keryvian out, and looked around, anxious for any sign of a foe.
“Are they here?” he hissed.
“I don’t know. Now, step aside, the rest are coming,” Araevin said. One by one Ilsevele, Maresa, and Filsaelene arrived in the same manner, simply appearing in the air next to the blank stone archway marking that end of the portal.
Araevin carefully studied the chamber of the well. It was another heavy stone room, built in the form of two intersecting barrel-vaults made of large stone blocks. At the end of three vaults stood empty stone slabs, perhaps meant to hold sarcophagi, but no such crypts were in evidence. The stairs climbed up at the end of the room’s fourth arm. The vault opened out in the center, providing a little space around the well. The portal was set in one curving wall ringing the well, with another old portal opposite. He couldn’t begin to guess what the place might once have been.
“Another portal,” Ilsevele observed.
“Let’s check the stairs and see what’s above before we try the next portal,” Araevin said. “Or for that matter, the well shaft. It might lead somewhere, too.”
Maresa leaned over to look into the dark well. A cold breeze faintly sighed up from below, musty and damp.
“There’s some light down there,” she said in surprise.
Araevin frowned. He didn’t remember seeing any such thing before. He leaned over to look, and he saw it too, a faint silver phosphorescence that danced far below them. It glimmered and swirled for a moment-then it started to rise, climbing swiftly toward them. For a moment, he continued to peer at it, trying to figure out what he was looking at, but then he decided that anything in such a place that was moving toward him and moving fast was not likely to be friendly.
He recoiled from the well, and called out a warning to his comrades. “Watch out, it’s coming up!”
Maresa retreated from the edge, too, just before a swirling stream of spectral silver light exploded up out of the well. In the baleful glow Araevin could see the misshapen form of a person, a human face with an oddly dark and downcast gaze, the suggestion of regal robes hanging in tatters, and a shining silver staff clutched in ghostly fingers.
“It’s the wizard!” Filsaelene gasped. “The one from the mountainside!”
The apparition hovered in the air above the well, its features cruel and proud. It fixed its empty gaze on Maresa and snarled out something in a tongue Araevin did not recognize.
“Hai zurgal memet erithalchol na!” it said, its voice imperious and demanding. “Memet na irixalnos nairhaug!”
“Araevin, what’s it saying?” Starbrow asked in a low voice. He kept his sword raised before him in a guard position.
“I can’t even begin to guess,” Araevin replied. The elves exchanged looks with each other. “I have heard stories of travelers dying in portal networks, which their ghosts then haunt. Let’s just leave it alone, and try the stairs. Move away slowly.”
Maresa carefully backed away, feeling her way along the wall toward the stairs leading up out of the vault. Filsaelene followed close behind her. But before the two had moved more than ten feet toward the door, the ghostly wizard muttered something else in its incomprehensible tongue, and attacked. It flung out one spectral arm, blasting at Maresa with a sickly purple-white bolt of crackling lightning.
The genasi cried out and dived away from the bolt, which gouged a fist-deep scar across the stone wall behind her. Smaller side-bolts stabbed out at Filsaelene and Araevin. Araevin managed to parry the lightning bolt before it struck him, grounding it with his staff and a quick defensive spell, but Filsaelene was spun around and knocked off her feet.
“That was a stupid idea!” Maresa shouted.
The genasi scrambled to her feet and snapped off a quick shot from her crossbow, which passed clean through the center of the ghost’s chest without leaving the faintest mark-though it made Starbrow curse and duck on the other side of the well.
Ilsevele whispered a spell as she put an arrow on the string of her bow. The arrowhead burst into cold silver flame as she loosed it. The missile tore a dark hole in the ghost’s torso. The ghost howled in its forgotten tongue, but it did not recoil or crumple as a living person might have done. It simply ignored the wound, even as streamers of mist blossomed from the ragged hole and faded into nothingness.
The ghost seemed to gather itself for a moment, glaring at Ilsevele, and its eyes flashed with a pale and terrible light. Ilsevele screamed and raised her arms to shield her face, but her hands and arms turned dead white and smoked under the ghost’s awful gaze. Her bow clattered to the floor.
“Ilsevele!” Araevin shouted as he wheeled on the ghost.
He hurled a spell of his own, riddling the spectral figure with a barrage of glowing blue darts. Like Ilsevele’s arrow, the magic punched black holes in the silver image. More missiles followed an instant later, repeating the attack as Araevin threw his best effort at the specter. But the ghost, though hurt, kept its baleful eyes fixed on Ilsevele, searing her with its chill gaze.
“I can’t reach it!” Starbrow snarled. Keryvian glowed in his hand, a shining blade of holy fire, but the ghost hovered over the center of the well, outside any conceivable sword-reach. The moon elf reversed the enchanted sword in his hand, cocking his arm as if to throw the blade, but he hesitated. Ilsevele wailed again, writhing under the ghost’s cold-burning stare, and Starbrow muttered a curse and straightened up.
With calm deliberation, he walked over and interposed himself between the ghost and Ilsevele, turning his back on the apparition and shielding his face.
The pale glow surrounding Ilsevele faded at once, only to spring into existence on Starbrow’s back. He groaned, but keeping his back to the monster, he seemed to avoid the worst of it.
“Araevin… somebody… kill this damned thing!” he gasped.
“Maresa!” Araevin cried. “Use your wand!” Then he seized one of the wands at his own belt and snatched it out, blasting the ghost with dart after dart of glowing energy. Maresa dropped her useless crossbow and did the same, pelting the ghost from the other side.
The ghost howled again, and wrenched its gaze away from Starbrow and Ilsevele. The moon elf crumpled to his knees, collapsing on top of her. Then the specter intoned another spell, and blasted Araevin into senselessness with a mighty word of power. Araevin staggered back and tumbled to the hard stone floor, eyes seared white, ears ringing, blood streaming from his nose. He could see nothing, hear nothing, could scarcely even move as his thoughts reeled drunkenly.