The surprise attack disrupted the durthan’s casting, and as the earth spirit sought to drag her under, Jhesrhi urged her motley squad of warriors forward. Perhaps they could reach Nyevarra before she struggled free.
Alas, no. Too many undead and dark fey were in the way, and Nyevarra retained the presence of mind to exploit her vampiric abilities. She dissolved into mist, flowed upward, and took on human form again above the earth elemental’s reach.
Her whipping hair and robes revealed that a wind was holding her aloft. Other such entities screamed at Jhesrhi and her companions, battering and chilling them and slinging snow in their eyes. Men cried out and stumbled backward.
For a moment, the only thought Jhesrhi was able to think was that fire countered cold. Then she thrust the notion away and conjured a floating luminous shield to deflect the brunt of the blast.
Next, she sought to grow the arms and clutching hands she’d already drawn from the soil into a complete manlike figure like the ones she’d summoned previously. But Nyevarra conjured a whirlwind that ripped the new creature apart, half-formed.
Air wasn’t intrinsically stronger than earth, and Nyevarra wasn’t inherently a more powerful mage than Jhesrhi. In fact, in their previous combat, Jhesrhi had decided she was the stronger. But apparently not when malignant darkness was grinding at her and her adversary bore the Stag King’s scepter. Not when she’d forsworn the use of fire.
So burn Nyevarra! Burn Lod! Burn everything! Where was the good if the “soul” of the forest survived but as a corrupted precinct of the Shadowfell and Rashemen fell to the undead?
But if Jhesrhi resorted to that tactic, it would be like surrendering. Like admitting that all of Aoth’s training and all her hard-won sellsword experience had been for naught because there was nothing left of her but the raw strength and mindless greed of fire. And she recoiled from that possibility in disgust.
Because the soil-and-stone warriors she’d evoked previously were making little headway against the localized gale and were too short of stature to reach Nyevarra anyway, Jhesrhi bade them crack and crumble, and then commanded the resulting debris to throw itself at the vampire. None of the missiles reached its target. Living earth and rock forfeited a portion of their strength as soon as they lost contact with the ground, and the durthan’s allied winds tumbled each attack off course.
But as the futile barrage ran its course, Jhesrhi whispered a spell.
A final stone veered in flight and thumped down in the snow. The vampire in her mask of blackened silver swung the Stag King’s staff, and as the weapon swept through its arc, shadowy disembodied racks of antlers burst from it and hurtled at Jhesrhi.
She dodged and rattled off a counterspell at the same time. The antlers shredded away to nothing. But by the time they did, Nyevarra, still riding the wind, was plunging down at her. No doubt to uncover her mouth, she’d removed her mask, and her snarl revealed extended fangs. The blood thirst was on her.
But even the frenzied urge to slake it didn’t keep her from faltering in shock when something tore the antler-axe from her hands.
Nyevarra had summoned several winds to attend her, but that hadn’t prevented Jhesrhi from calling one of her own. It had simply kept the durthan from sensing the newcomer when several other such invisible presences were already moaning and gusting around.
As instructed, Jhesrhi’s ally had hovered and waited for an opportune moment to snatch the talisman. Now it was sweeping the staff away over the heads of the combatants on the ground, taking it where she hoped it would do the most good.
Jhesrhi spoke a word of power and lunged to meet the descending Nyevarra in the moment of her consternation. Charged with force, the head of her staff stabbed into the vampire’s chest like a stake. Jhesrhi recited a rhyme to send a bit of her own vitality streaming down her weapon and poison the impaled creature with the essence of natural life.
But as she spoke the final syllable, she realized she was reciting the wrong spell. It was flame that leaped from the core of her, surged down the length of the staff, and burned Nyevarra from the inside out.
As Jhesrhi looked down at the blackened, smoking husk crumpled in the snow, panting all the while, she told herself the lapse didn’t matter. She had, after all, fought in the way she’d intended. She’d only used fire to finish off an opponent she’d already beaten, and then in a way that couldn’t possibly start the forest fire the hathrans feared.
But it didmatter. For a moment, at least, and despite her resolve, fire had wielded her and not the other way around. A tear slid from her eye, and when she furiously wiped it away, she saw it was burning like ignited oil.
An Old One wielded a shimmering wand and a fey warrior with gnarled bark for skin and moss for hair were fighting ghouls just a few paces to the left. Still, for Cera, the frenzied, roaring mundane part of the battle seemed vague and far away. She was chiefly aware of warmth that seemed to flower in the core of her and shine down on her from above at the same time and of the poisonous darkness with which it contended.
She couldn’t afford to let her focus stray anywhere else. Because so far, her prayers and words of anathema showed no signs of lifting the unnatural gloom. In fact, the murk was still thickening.
Perhaps she’d been foolish to imagine she could dissolve it. The durthans had been weaving their enchantments for tendays, and the Urlingwood was a place of power for them even if the hathrans had previously cast them out.
Scowling, she strained to shove doubt out of her mind. If she only remained steadfast, her god would find a way to help her.
She took a long, centering breath and recited another spell of exorcism that proved as ineffective as the last. Then, however, Yhelbruna strode out of the murk with the Stag King’s antler-axe in her hand.
“I discern that this,” said the hathran, hefting the fey weapon, “was used to bring Shadow. If so, it can help banish it as well. Continue your rites, sun priestess, and I’ll support them with my own magic.”
Cera resumed her prayers, and Yhelbruna chanted and brandished the staff as if she were clubbing and raking an invisible foe. Despite their disparate mystical traditions, they were soon declaiming in counterpoint, reinforcing one another’s incantations in the manner of accomplished spellcasters.
Gradually, the twinges of anxiety and incipient aches, the malaise trying to worm its way into Cera’s mind and body, faded away. Then the physical gloom began to lighten.
At those moments when Vandar was within striking distance of a foe, he didn’t think. Rage singing inside him, guided by instinct, he attacked relentlessly and ducked and dodged as necessary.
When he was between fights, however, his anger subsided just enough to allow flickers of reflection. Now was such a moment, and it occurred to him that the undead must still include Nar demonbinders among their number, for the thing several paces in front of him looked more alien and unnatural than even the most grotesque dark fey. A headless, asymmetrical tangle of huge bony claws and projecting spikes, it walked on four crooked, mismatched legs and bore a cluster of little round eyes in the middle of its body.
At present, the demon was smashing an iron construct in the shape of a small wyvern to pieces. Vandar rushed it, hoping to catch it by surprise, but it pivoted and lifted its giant claws to threaten him. He kept charging.
A claw jabbed at his head, and he sprang out of the way without breaking stride. That put him on the verge of flinging himself onto one of the immobile but still potentially deadly horns that bristled from the demon’s shell. He twisted past the point, leaped, and cut at the cluster of eyes.
The demon fell over thrashing, and as it rolled back and forth, the flailing of the various claws and spikes was almost as dangerous as if it were attacking deliberately. Fortunately, Vandar had to avoid them for only a couple of heartbeats before the convulsions came to a sudden end.