"Accept it," he whispered. "Allow Gaea's power to work through you toward the beauty of life's never ending cycle. Find in your memories the strength you remember from other lands you've passed through- other lands that touched you and you touched in return. This place has similarities to those if you look."
Gwenna tried, and as the darkness began to glow a subtle green she fought for any memories that might banish the pervasiveness of the decaying bayou-that might banish the shadow.
But it was not so easily dismissed.
Despair roiled up under the surface of Temken's promise, challenging the place he had won inside Gwenna's mind. Dark energy touched her, washed over her in a stronger wave than Temken's meager offering. The shadow moved through her, never long enough to make itself completely known, but a presence nonetheless filled with raw power. Gwenna felt the clammy touch of death against her left hand, in her heart and mind, coursing through her veins, threatening to burst if she did not find some way to release it. She struggled against it, despising its basic nature but unable to throw it off. She did not want it. She had never truly wanted it, and she would do anything now to be rid of it.
The power surged against the life-force running through Temken, overwhelming and consuming them both. It bound the two of them together, draining away strength. Gwenna opened her eyes and stared into the face of Temken as he paled and gasped for a sudden lack of breath. The elven mage jerked away, breaking his bond to Gwenna in an effort to stave off the pain invading his own body. The dark rush of power faded. The two staggered to their knees.
"It hates," she said weakly, the vestigial memories of this attack and others remaining with her. "It needs. It will never let us go."
Then the veil fell back into place, churning her thoughts to mask its own intrusion and leaving in place the well of sorrow and loss that Gwenna had carried with her since Argoth's ruin. Suddenly at a loss for words for what had just happened, she watched as Temken struggled to his feet. He looked at her strangely, a mixture of pity and dawning horror.
"I know it now," he said, voice cracked and weak. Without further word or expression, he turned and walked from her, into the dark embrace of the bayou.
Clinging muck squelched with Temken's every step in protest of his passage until the peninsula of marshy ground ended abruptly, plunging into the black and fetid waters of the bayou. A light, patchy mist roiled the surface, chill and clammy as ghostly tendrils worked their way through the seams in his trousers. Lonely cries sounded to his right, then left as a pair of mist lynxes challenged each other. A black-feathered marsh ibis glided by, then soared upward in an attempt to penetrate the thick canopy.
Temken settled back on his haunches, shaking off the draining effect that had channeled through Gwenna. He still felt its dark touch trailing icy claws along the base of his spine, clutching at his heart, clouding his mind. It hates, she had said. It needs. A malevolent intelligence was working through her. It was keeping her-keeping them all, he was sure-imprisoned within the bayou. Something slithered up from the waters, crossing the muddy ground behind him, and paused with its sense of his body heat. Temken whispered to it a piece of Gaea's song, urging the viper along its way. Never once did he need to turn and look at it, so attuned to nature's forces around him. In this same manner the elf mage knew his adversary was not of nature and so was not truly alive. A blind spot in the preternatural sight gifted him with the wielding of the land's magic. As a worker of the forest's mana, Temken had recognized in the bayou its sources of nature's magic. He had ignored its darker aspects, a mistake that had proven near fatal today.
No longer.
He glanced over his shoulder and found the lights of the village cookfires, a distant and dim glow between trees and brush. Far enough, he decided, wanting no distractions. Temken swallowed against the taste of mildewed plantlife, now acutely aware of the aura of death that held the bayou in its grip, and prepared his casting. A cascade of stringy, bilious green moss blocked most of his view to the right. The living waterfall turned black and was decaying where it met the water's scummed surface. He focused on it, drawing mana from first the bayou's living side and then from his memory of Kroog's struggling young forests and the frozen taiga north of Argive. He took it into him, feeling the suffusing glow of life and turned his focus on the hanging moss.
It responded immediately. New color brightened central fronds and then spread outward and down. Rotted stringers reformed, growing thicker with new life until the entire cascade of vegetation was once more vibrant with Gaea's energy. Against that backdrop of nature, within the twisting strings of moss, Temken looked for Gaea to tell him the name of his adversary. The first stage to understanding a battle, was to name your opponent.
Shadow. Simply shadow.
Temken frowned, having expected more. Nothing could pass through the world without Gaea's knowledge, without leaving behind some kind of imprint-even a noncorporeal force. Unless Gaea, too, suffered a blinding to things not of nature. The thought unsettled Temken who believed Gaea's power absolute. Magic was derived from the living lands of the world. What was Gaea if not the essence of all things living? Bleak despair swam in his thoughts, and Gwenna's words whispered up from the depths of his mind. False promises. Lies.
But not Gaea's lies, the shadow's!
Its intrusive presence could be felt, almost measured in the amount of misery welling within him. Shifting his focus, Temken drew upon the mana already at his disposal to enshroud and protect him. A sublime warmth flooded his veins, giving strength and clarity of thought, driving out the despair and sorrow that for a moment had intruded. Temken cast nature's energy outward, scattering it over the landscape. In his preternatural vision, he saw pieces of the magic attach themselves to that which was living-nurturing and strengthening. The magic also attacked that which opposed it: the disease and decay inherent in the dark side of the bayou, in the plague-ridden insects and swamp rats, and in the life-draining miasma. The shadow.
It hovered there, not ten arms' lengths off his left shoulder. The frosty mist curled up to cloak what would have been the feet and legs on a normal creature. Upward from there ran the blackness. It was not a true shadow, not the absence of direct light. Instead it was evil-foulness and corruption somehow made incarnate here in the bayou. It turned and twisted, as if swatting out the magic attacking it like an insect. It folded in upon itself, at times almost corporeal, at other moments merely an indiscernible piece of night broken off from the rest.
Then it was gone.
His senses charged, Temken caught the wave of surprise and loathing that rolled off the shadow before it flitted away faster than his mortal eyes-elven or not- could follow. But there was more: alarm, the hint of fear at being discovered. How many years had it been since anyone had looked upon it? How many lives had been consumed by this thing of evil? Now it stood exposed, and if it was afraid, then it could be defeated. Temken took heart from its panicked flight.
His courage was ripped from him by the soul-rending scream that shook the bayou.
This time it did not take the shadow's influence to cast a pallor over the elven mage. He had acted too soon, he realized. Weak from the last attack, his defenses only half-ready, he had challenged the shadow and set it loose upon the village of Survivors. It hated, and it was afraid. In nature, no beast was so terrible as when it was cornered.