Shouting, he slashed a shadow, stabbed another, another. One of the creatures struck him in the chest and arm, turned his sword arm numb. He waved his blade ineffectually as the shadow reached into his chest. His breath left him. His heart lurched.
Another abrupt dive by Furlinastis left the shadow behind and saved Abelar's life.
He gathered himself and looked back, expecting to see the shadow army in pursuit. Instead, he saw them peeling off, streaking in the opposite direction.
Below and behind, a cheer went up from the battlefield. Trewe's trumpet blew a victorious note. The dragon, too, roared.
Abelar watched the shadows wheel away, gather some distance away, and felt only dread. The shadows swarmed around a point perhaps two long bowshots away from the company. Their numbers stunned him. The swirling column of their forms seemed to reach from the ground to the clouds.
"So many," he said, marveling at their numbers.
Without warning the rain and thunder stopped. Trewe's horn and the cheers of the company went quiet. For a moment, all was silent, pensive.
Cold seeped across the battlefield, a deeper cold than that of the shadows. Supernatural fear accompanied it. It reached into Abelar, sent his teeth to chattering, stole his nerve. The dragon growled his discomfort. Abelar heard inarticulate whispers in his mind. He discerned no words he could understand but the sibilant tone touched something primal in him, set his heart to racing, lit his mind afire with terror.
A moan went up from his comrades below. He heard Regg shouting to the company, his old friend's voice on the verge of panic. "Hold! Hold!"
Abelar fought through the terror as best he could and scanned the darkness for the source of the cold and fear. He could see little through the impenetrable cloud of living shadows. He sensed something at the fringe of his vision, something large, dark, remorseless, terror given form and set loose in the world.
"What new evil is this, dragon? I cannot see!"
Furlinastis extended his neck to look behind them, hissed, and veered left.
"A nightwalker," the dragon said. "But I have never seen nor heard of one so large. Terror lives in its eyes, and death in its hands. This foe is beyond your companions, perhaps beyond even me. They are lost, human, as is the battle."
The cloud of shadows parted like a stage curtain and the nightwalker stepped between them. It towered as tall as ten men, looming over the field like a siege engine. It had the shape of a man, but hairless, featureless, its entire form smooth and black, like an idol carved from onyx by the jungle savages of Chult. The shadows broke ranks and darted around its massive form like flies around a corpse.
It regarded the battlefield, Abelar's company, and another wave of terror went forth from it. Thousands of shadows keened.
Abelar's company answered not with another moan, not with shouts of terror, but with the clarion of Trewe's trumpet.
"Back, dragon!" Abelar shouted. "Turn back!"
Furlinastis shook his head as he flew, completing his turn. "It is over, human. I will take you to-"
"Turn back! Now!"
"My service to the Maskarran does not extend to self-sacrifice. It is over."
From behind and below, Abelar heard Trewe's trumpet issue the order to form up.
Desperate, Abelar took his sword in both hands, turned as best he could in his makeshift harness, and put it in the divot on the dragon's back between his beating wings. He made sure Furlinastis felt the point.
"You will turn back or I will sink this to its hilt! They will not stand alone!"
The dragon's head whirled around, jaws open, streams of shadow leaking from his nose and throat.
Abelar pressed down on the blade. "Do not test me, wyrm!"
Furlinastis hissed in rage.
"Try to dislodge me or use your killing breath on me and I'll do it. It will take but a moment. You may not die, but you will not be able to fly and you will face the nightwalker on foot."
Anger stoked the fire in the slits of Furlinastis's eyes
"How will you have it?" Abelar said, and pushed the point of his blade harder against the scales. "How? Decide!"
The dragon roared with rage, snapped his head forward, and started to wheel about.
"You are no servant of the Morninglord," Furlinastis shouted above the wind.
Abelar considered what he had done, knew that he would do it again if necessary.
"Perhaps not," he said softly.
Abelar looked over the dragon's wing as they came around and saw his company assembling not for a last stand but for a charge. Trewe's clarion rang out again, sounding the ready. Illuminated blades at intervals held the darkness of the Shadowstorm at bay. Dead men and women lay scattered about the field. Abelar presumed their souls, raised by the Shadowstorm, had already joined the army of shadows. He hoped that Jiiris was not among them.
The dragon continued its slow turn.
Regg stood at the forefront of the company. Abelar heard his voice but couldn't make out his words. He saw Roen and another priest moving quickly from soldier to soldier, healing with a prayer and a touch. The company answered Regg's words with raised blades and a shout.
The nightwalker held its ground, dark, ominous, surrounded by an army of shadows.
Trewe blew another blast, and Regg shouted, turned, raised his blade and lowered it. The company lurched into motion.
The shadows keened at their approach. The nightwalker watched them for a moment, then met their charge with one of his own.
Abelar cursed.
Each of the creature's strides covered a spearcast. The impact of its feet on the soft earth left deep pits in its wake, open graves waiting to be filled with Lathanderians.
"Turn, damn you!" Abelar said, striking the dragon with the hilt of his sword. "Faster, wyrm!"
The Lathanderians, a small island of light in the night of the Shadowstorm, charged to their doom. Regg led them, shield and blade blazing.
Trewe's trumpet sang. The nightwalker closed, hit the company's formation like a battering ram. Men and women screamed in pain, shouted in rage, light flared, winked out. The nightwalker crushed men and women under its feet or with its fists. Weapons slashed its huge form but seemed to do little. The company swirled around the nightwalker, surrounding it. The creature stood heedless in their midst, the black center of a whirlpool that drew into itself the light of the Lathanderians.
The dragon wheeled around at last and straightened. He roared and the beat of his wings propelled him toward the battle. The wind almost peeled Abelar from his harness.
He watched his companions, side-by-side, fighting, dying, aglow with Lathander's light. The nightwalker reaped a life with each blow of its maul-like fists, yet none of the company around it broke, none ran-not one-and their courage chased the despair lurking around the edges of Abelar's soul.
He understood them, then, in a way he had not before. They served Lathander, but fought and died for one another, for the men and women standing beside them. Abelar knew well the strength of feeling that bonded warrior to warrior, man to woman, father to son.
He thought or Elden, of Endren, recalled his father's words to him-the light is in you-and realized, with perfect clarity, that his father was right.
The men and women of his company did not stand in the light. The light was in them. Lathander was merely the reagent that allowed them to shine. They were the light, not their god. And they, and he, had not burned as brightly as they might.
The shadows saw the dragons approach and a massive cluster of the undead peeled off from the assembled mass and streaked toward Abelar and Furlinastis.