As you wish. Myshik stepped closer to the figure.
Fighting the urge to grip his axe, the half-dragon knelt down beside the figure. He reached one clawed hand out and tapped the woman once, softly, on the shoulder.
She did not budge.
Myshik tapped again, then he took hold of her shoulders and shook her.
With a shriek, the woman rose up lightning fast, turning with fingers outstretched. She lunged at Myshik, who fell back involuntarily from her unexpected onslaught.
Her wrinkled and pale face framed eyes as black as midnight that burned with hatred, or perhaps insanity. Her gray hair hung in long, limp clumps around her face and nearly down to her waist. Her breath smelled foul, and Myshik could see only a few cracked, yellowed teeth as she sucked in air for another scream.
She came at him where he had sprawled, hands outstretched to throttle him or claw his eyes out. He let her momentum carry her forward, over his own body, then used his feet to propel her past himself. She soared beyond him and struck the sloping side of the sphere with a gasp and a thud.
She's enraged! the half-dragon said as he clambered to his feet. Wants to rend me! How do I stop her without maiming her?
There was a soft laugh in his head not of his own mind's making. She is harder to maim than you might imagine, came the answer. Speak to her. Call her name. Kashada.
Myshik turned to face the crazed woman and saw her gathering herself for another charge. Her face contorted in rage or fear, and her eyes glazed with it. The half-dragon doubted she would make sense of his words.
"Kashada!" he called out. "I am not here to hurt you!"
The woman shrieked and rushed at him, her fingers bent into the shape of claws. She reached for his face, his eyes, but the draconic hobgoblin leaped high and used his wings to gain even more elevation. Her pell-mell charge overbalanced her, and she stumbled into a heap against the opposite slope of the sphere.
Myshik dropped deftly to the surface once more. "Kashada!" he said, more forcefully. "Hear me! I have come to take you from this prison! Let me help you!"
Kashada whirled, staggered like a drunken thing, and glared at her would-be rescuer. "Shadows!" she screamed at him. "There are no shadows!" She swayed where she stood and began to sob, clenching her eyes shut in misery.
Her mind is lost, Myshik thought, projecting to Tekthyrios. She has no reason left. She screams of there being no shadows.
Of course! Tekthyrios said. How clever. Myshik, you must create a shadow for her. You can restore her mind if you can show her a shadow. Do it!
The half-dragon scowled, looking around the sphere. He had not noticed it before, but with light glowing from the entire inner surface, no shadows were cast anywhere. He could see no way to shield any area from the light.
Kashada howled, a forlorn wailing that reminded Myshik of the jackals in the great desert of Anauroch, singing to the moon at night. She kept her eyes closed, uninterested in attacking him further.
A thought struck Myshik. Working quickly, he removed his cloak and draped it upon the lowest point of the sphere, essentially the floor. He reached into an inner pocket and pulled out an oblong bundle. Unwrapping it, the half-dragon produced a glowing, prism-shaped white crystal twice as thick as his thumb and as long as his hand. He knelt down upon his cloak and held the crystal over it. He placed his other hand between the glow of the crystal and the dark cloth of the cloak. A faint shadow formed there.
"Kashada," Myshik called. "Look, a shadow."
The crone's eyes flew open, and she ceased her wailing. She stared at Myshik for a moment, cocking her head from side to side like some predatory bird. Then she spied the light in his hands, and the patch of darkness he had created. She shrieked in delight and rushed forward. Myshik flinched, expecting her to strike at him again, but instead she knelt down, cooing softly.
"Darker," she demanded, still staring at the shadow. "It must be darker. Make it darker!" she finished with a scream.
Myshik frowned, uncertain. Then inspiration struck. He rose to his feet again and loomed over the crystal, blocking as much of the sphere's light as he could with his body.
The shadow of his hand upon the cloak deepened.
"Yes!" Kashada shouted in triumph. Her voice had changed. It was stronger, less shrill. "You've done it!" Then the woman lunged forward and dived at the hand-shaped area of darkness.
Before Myshik's eyes, she melted into the shadow and vanished.
Tauran rested upon his favorite protrusion of stone, high above the Lifespring. He sat a pace away from the edge, leaning back against a towering pinnacle of rock pointed skyward like a poniard. A tumbling waterfall roared next to him, emerging from a cleft in the cliff face and plunging over the side of the protrusion, out of sight.
"We should be inside!" Micus said, shouting to be heard. The other angel sat next to Tauran, huddled against the spire of rock, trying to avoid of the worst of the wind. "Why in the Hells are we out here in this?"
Tauran ignored his friend and crawled toward the end of the protrusion. The howling, lashing storms whipped the spray from the churning torrent, peppering him with a fine, cool mist. The dampness made the stone beneath his hands and feet slick. The wind tore at his tunic as if it wanted to rip him from the precipice and carry him away. Ignoring the gale, Tauran reached the edge and peered over.
It was a long drop.
The spire behind him rose as the tallest, most impossibly thin peak in a high, sharp ridge of jagged, jutting stone. The ridge formed a deep basin surrounding the Lifespring on three sides. Most days, the waters shimmered in golden sunlight, a tranquil pool of divine healing magic. That day, they churned and frothed in a blue-gray maelstrom covered in whitecaps.
Tauran could barely see the distant shore, where the water spilled over a lower lip of the ridge to other basins even farther below. Remnants of clouds, shredded and reformed by the whipping wind, slashed across his view, giving the whole plane an eerie, translucent look.
Tauran crawled back to his friend. "Do you remember the first time you asked me about diving off here?" he asked Micus. "Right before I began teaching you how to do it?"
The other angel frowned but nodded. "Yes," he replied. "Right before we tried to save that marilith's child. What of it?"
"Do you remember what you asked me that day?"
Micus shook his head. "Something about why you did it. But it was a long time ago."
Tauran nodded. "That's right. I told you that I did it to remind me that the easiest path is not always the right one, and that I must remain vigilant against complacency. Right?"
"I suppose so," Micus answered, his face filled with doubt. Then his eyes widened. "You're not actually planning to-you must be mad!"
Tauran held his hand up, gesturing tor his old friend to relax. "No," he said. "I'm not mad. No diving for either of us today."
Micus sagged back in relief. "Good," he said. "Because if you tried, then I'd know you had lost your way."
"That's just it, though," Tauran said. "I feel like what I face right now, with Aliisza and Vhok, is just like diving off this precipice. The easy thing would be to remit them to the High Council, let them lock the fiends away, and move on to other things."
"Sounds like a fine plan to me," Micus said dryly. "And the one I'm advising you to go with."
"But don't you see? That's the easy path. It's the safe path. I don't think it's the right path." Please understand me, old friend, he thought. You of all my companions might recognize what I'm trying to say.
Micus was silent for a moment, then said, "Sometimes, we need others, wiser than ourselves, to tell us which path to follow. Sometimes, like young children, we try to climb over boulders in the road, rather than go around them. Why does every path have to be hard?"