His vision cleared a little, and he looked up through unfocused eyes as Filsaelene picked herself up off the floor. She steadied herself with one hand on the wall, and presented the star-shaped holy symbol of Corellon Larethian, shouting out a prayer that Araevin couldn’t hear through the ringing in his ears. A great ring of golden light burst from her raised hand, racing through the chamber. When it touched the ghost, the apparition’s substance simply boiled away into nothing. The same golden glow washed over Araevin and the others, bringing vigor, strength, and renewal.
Buoyed by the cleric’s spell of healing, Araevin climbed to his feet as his eyes focused again and his ears stopped ringing. He groped for the magic wand he had dropped, closed his fingers around it, and hammered the ghost again with more of the magical darts. The spirit’s whole form flickered and danced uncertainly, as if it was having trouble keeping itself together.
“Keep after it!” Araevin cried. “We can destroy this thing!”
The ghost drifted down toward the floor of the chamber, reaching out with one spectral claw for Filsaelene. The cleric quickly recoiled, backing up as the apparition drew closer.
“Shield me, Corellon!” she cried, and she spoke a prayer, guarding herself with a shining golden radiance that the ghost could not seem to reach past.
She whirled her long sword in front of her, but the weapon simply passed harmlessly through the ghost.
Araevin tried another spell-a bolt of fire-but the ghost’s otherworldly body simply wasn’t affected.
Think, he told himself. What other spells do I have that might destroy a ghost?
Before he could determine the next attack to try, Starbrow scrambled to his feet and charged at the ghost’s back, Keryvian in his hands. The ancient sword burst into brilliant white flame as he slashed at the specter. Unlike Filsaelene’s sword or Maresa’s crossbow bolts, Keryvian proved quite capable of damaging the spirit. One slash dragged Keryvian through its torso from shoulder to hip, and Starbrow’s spinning follow-up drove the point of Demron’s last and greatest blade through the center of the ghost’s forehead.
The ghost groaned horribly, a sound that chilled Araevin to the bone, and it slowly dissolved into nothingness. Starbrow held his sword ready, in case it re-formed, but the phosphorescent mist simply dimmed and vanished.
“Thank the Seldarine that’s over,” the moon elf breathed. He looked around. “Is everybody all right?”
“Thanks to Filsaelene’s spell, I am unhurt,” Araevin replied. He hurried over and knelt by Ilsevele, who still crouched by the floor, broad swaths of her flesh dead-white and ice-cold to the touch. “Ilsevele is injured!”
“S-so c-cold,” Ilsevele gasped.
She locked one of her hands around Araevin’s forearm, pulling herself close. Araevin hissed with the cold of her touch. Then Filsaelene hurried over and knelt beside them. The cleric spoke the words of a healing prayer and set her own hand over Ilsevele’s injuries. Beneath the warm golden glow of her touch, the pallor of Ilsevele’s wounds faded, and her shivering stopped.
Ilsevele shook herself and stood up slowly.
“Thank you, Filsaelene,” she said. She rubbed her arms vigorously, and the color returned to her face. She retrieved her bow, and looked over at Starbrow. “And thank you, too, Starbrow. You risked your life to shield me from the ghost. I don’t know what to say.”
Starbrow said with an awkward smile, “It just seemed like the best thing I could do, since I couldn’t reach the ghost as long as it hovered up there. I couldn’t stand there and do nothing.”
Ilsevele stepped over and reached up to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you, again.”
Araevin couldn’t help but smile at the sheepish look that came over Starbrow’s face.
“Well, come on, then,” the wizard said. “Let’s see where we are and where the daemonfey went from here.”
Curnil Thordrim stalked something terrible through the forest gloom a few miles from the old Standing Stone. He didn’t know for certain what it was, but it had killed two of his fellow Riders of Mistledale in their simple camp a few hours before, and they had died badly indeed: bodies marked by odd punctures surrounded by swollen, blue-black flesh, limbs broken and twisted, and awful bites gouged out of faces and skulls. He knew all the dangerous animals and most of the deadly monsters that haunted the depths of old Cormanthor, but he had never in his thirty-five years seen anything in the woodland that killed in that manner.
Curnil was a burly man with thick black hair on his forearms and a heavy black beard. Despite his size, he glided through the underbrush without sound, his dark eyes flicking from sign to sign as he followed the trail of something that stood as tall as an ogre and had long, narrow feet with small claws at the toe. He was not entirely sure he wanted to catch up to it, if he was to be honest with himself.
He came to a small stream trickling through the woods, and looked and listened for a long time before breaking out of the ground cover. Curnil had learned his woodcraft from some of the best, the moon and wood elves of Elventree, a hundred miles to the north. Nothing but the burbling of the stream greeted his ears. Curnil drew a deep breath, and slipped out of the bushes to the stream bank, looking for a print that might show whether his quarry had continued on or turned aside there.
It only took a moment for him to find the end of the track. The creature’s footprints simply ended in the wet sand, as if it had taken to the air or just vanished outright.
“That’s impossible,” he muttered, brow furrowed in confusion. “What in the Nine Hells vanishes into thin air?”
He grimaced-the Nine Hells indeed. The pieces fit together all too well. Something wicked, something strong, something that disappeared without a trace. Myth Drannor was not far off, and he’d heard plenty of stories about the horrible devils that haunted the ruins. But they were supposed to be trapped within the old elven mythal, weren’t they?
“Some idiot set one of those things loose,” he decided.
Some cruel new plot on the part of the drow who lived in the shadows of the forest? Or a stupid blunder by some glory-hunting adventurers in Myth Drannor. Who would set such a creature free?
For that matter, why assume that only one was loose in the forest?
Curnil looked around at the silent woods, and shuddered. He was sure that he had not seen the last of the monster he’d just tracked to the empty streambed, and he didn’t look forward to finally meeting it. He didn’t look forward to that at all.
The structure above the chamber in which they fought the ghost turned out to be a mausoleum of some kind, buried deep in a forest unfamiliar to Araevin. Starbrow believed it might be one of the woodlands near old Myth Drannor, possibly the old realm of Semberholme in western Cormanthor. Araevin had never visited the eastern forest, but the fact that it was near dusk when they emerged gave him reason to believe that the portal had carried them a fair distance to the east of the mountaintop stronghold.
“Why would the folk of Myth Glaurach or Semberholme have built that mountain stronghold we first explored?” Ilsevele asked Araevin. “Are you certain the portal-builders were elves?”
He nodded. “All the portals we’ve seen so far have shown the same workmanship and design. I suppose it’s possible that someone carved newer portals and attempted to match the workmanship of the older ones, but the spells that bind the portals together all seem to be about the same age, too. I favor the simpler explanation that the whole network was constructed at one time-most likely by mages of Myth Glaurach who wanted to join their city to several distant destinations.”
Starbrow studied the forests, rubbed at his jaw, and said, “You know, it might have been mages of Myth Drannor who built this portal network. They were masters of such magic, and created portals to many distant places. Myth Glaurach might have been a destination, not an origin.”