That’s the second time she’s saved herself with the scepter, he thought. Clearly it was enchanted to absorb magic. He would have to figure out how to get it away from her. Thinking furiously of the spells he had ready that might serve, he prepared himself for her next attack.
But Selydra did not strike immediately. She studied him avidly for a moment, perhaps considering her own tactics.
“Enough,” she said. “I think you are perhaps a little too dangerous to toy with any longer, and I am growing hungry.”
Araevin started to speak a defensive spell, but Selydra fixed her eyes on his and opened her mouth wide, looking for all the world like she was giving voice to a silent scream, and inhaled deeply. Shadows dark and potent seemed to rush into her open mouth, and Araevin felt something in him tear free from his body and fly to her. The Weave tore away from his grasp, and spells held in his mind faded and vanished as the Pale Sybil literally drank them from his soul.
Appalled, he took several steps back and staggered to a knee. He could see it as a visible phenomenon: a nimbus of ethereal silver light ringed his body, but over his heart it streamed out toward Selydra like a plume of white sand driven by a wild wind. It should have been intensely violent-the wind should have roared in his ears, his hair and clothes should have whipped and flapped in the force of that ethereal blast-but Selydra’s hunger was something that was not at all physical. Even as tatters of his soul seemed to tear loose and fray in the awful storm, Araevin suffered in silence, the blackness of Lorosfyr’s night still and cold around him.
“What are you?” he gasped.
“You are strong, Araevin,” Selydra said. Her voice was a deadly moan. “I have rarely encountered your equal. You will sustain me for many long years, I think.”
“Araevin!” shouted Maresa. “Fight it off! Do something!” She snapped a shot at the Pale Sybil with her crossbow, but the quarrel struck an invisible shield around Selydra and shattered.
She is a vampire of some kind, Araevin thought. She drinks souls and magic, not blood. Any spell he had that might guard him from such an insidious attack was gone already, consumed by the Pale Sybil in her hunger. More were being ripped from him with every moment, and he could feel himself literally fraying away. In the space of moments she would tear his soul free from him, and that would be his destruction.
“Magnificent,” Selydra crooned. Her eyes blazed with a sinister purple light, and there was a feral cast to her face that had not been there before. “Not since I consumed the archmage Talthonn have I tasted such as you!” She stalked closer, reaching out one white hand as if to hold him in place through sheer force of will.
Fight it, he told himself. Saelethil Dlardrageth taught me something about battles within the soul, if nothing else.
With great cry of anguish, Araevin threw all of his heart, his will, into battling Selydra’s consuming hunger. For a moment he stemmed the awful tide, and in the space of that instant he lashed out with a blinding bolt of lightning. It was a deadly enough spell in its own right, but all he really wanted to do was to drive her back and gain a moment to gather himself.
Selydra drank the spell the instant it left his fingertips, and laughed in evil delight. “Surely you can do better than that, Araevin! Have you no more powerful spells than that left to you?”
Araevin’s other knee gave out, and he found himself kneeling on the cold tiles. Think! he raged. She will simply consume any spell you hurl at her. How else to strike back, to break her deadly grasp?
A sudden intuition sprang to his mind. Desperately clutching at the remnants of his magical power, Araevin conjured up a wreath of deadly green flame around his fist. It was a spell meant to smite an enemy, but deliberately he brought his smoldering hand up and set it against his own breast. Searing emerald pain exploded against his chest-but then it vanished at once, drawn away by Selydra’s black hunger.
A tiny green flame sprang into life above the Pale Sybil’s heart. She frowned and looked down in puzzlement-and the small spark burst into a roaring sheath of emerald fire. She shrieked in pain and staggered back… and with that her connection to Araevin was broken, and the black consuming void ceased with the suddenness of a slamming door.
Araevin toppled forward as his soul seemed to snap back into his body with startling force. He heaved a great sobbing breath and clutched a hand to his burned chest, momentarily defenseless. But Selydra was engulfed in green fire, wailing like a banshee. Somehow she managed to gain enough control to rasp out the words of a countering spell and extinguish the flames.
Wreathed in acrid emerald smoke, almost doubled in on herself, Selydra glared at him. Her face twisted in a murderous fury. “I will have you yet,” she hissed. She barked out the words of a teleport spell, and vanished.
Araevin pushed himself to his feet, looking around for any sign of the enchantress. The Pale Sybil’s warriors pressed Donnor, Maresa, Nesterin, and Jorin from all sides. Several of the hunched giants lumbered up after the dead warriors, huge mauls gripped in their massive fists.
“There are too many of them, Araevin!” Nesterin cried. He wheeled and gave voice to a piercing shriek that blew several of the undead warriors into shards of bone and crumpled bronze plate. Jorin and Donnor fought furiously side-by-side, giving ground as they backed out into the courtyard.
“Leave that to me!” Araevin took a deep breath, trying to find his strength again, and took a quick look around. Selydra’s servants crowded both the doorway through which he and his friends had entered, as well as the passage she had emerged from-there was no easy escape in either direction.
He wasn’t about to let that stop him. He faced one wall of the narrow court, and deliberately incanted his next spell. Parting his hands slowly, he phased a six-foot wide plug of the wall into nothingness, creating a safe passage out of the courtyard.
“This way!” he shouted, then he hurled himself through into the still, silent chamber beyond.
One by one, his comrades broke away from their own fights and hurried after him, abandoning the cloister to Selydra’s minions. Donnor was the last one through, pausing before the gaping hole to brandish Lathander’s sunburst and blast a half-dozen of Selydra’s warriors back into the true and final death from which they had been called.
“To dust with you!” the cleric shouted. “Return to your graves, warriors of Lorosfyr!”
Jorin and Nesterin reached out to pull Donnor through the hole. Several of Selydra’s giants reared up before the opening, mauls raised over their heads, but Araevin made a single curt gesture, and the stonework phased aside by his passage spell suddenly returned to its rightful place. With a rush of displaced air and an echoing boom! he walled off their pursuers behind them.
“Well done, Araevin,” Nesterin said. The star elf wiped blood from a shallow cut across his forehead. “Our enemies are confounded, at least for a moment. Now what do we do?”
“We find the second shard,” Araevin answered. “We’re not leaving Lorosfyr without it.”
The smoke of burning fields left a yellow-gray pall over the Moonsea’s shores. Scyllua Darkhope saw little point in the destruction, really. The grain was shoulder-high and close to harvest. It would have been better to capture Hillsfar’s fields rather than fire them. But at least the burning induced the folk of Hillsfar’s westerly farms and hamlets to flee east to the city proper, carrying panic, despair, and disease within the distant city walls and clogging the roads for miles.
“All is in readiness, High Captain,” reported Marshal Kulwarth. A fierce soldier who had been born among the barbarians of the Ride, Kulwarth was in charge of Scyllua’s cavalry. Other marshals led her archers, ogres, footsoldiers, and spellcasters. “We await your order to attack.”