More shadows swirled toward him, and his blade cut through them, killing some and driving the others back. Already he was realizing an important truth: His weapon, blessed by ancient powers, was potent against these things, but the blades of nearly all of his warriors were utterly useless against these beings of foul magic. The elves as a whole had no means of fighting this unnatural enemy.
Another rank attacked before Porthios could call them back, and these, too, perished, vanished utterly except for the tools and clothing that they had carried into the fight. His elves did not lack in courage, but they had no effective tools for battling this foe. More of them were turning to run, overcome by fear and lacking any means of stopping the horrific assault. Griffons, too, were winging away after too many of them had flown at the shadows, only to vanish in utter, complete dissolution.
“Fall back!” the prince shouted, still wielding his own blade against a press of attackers. “Get out of here! We’ll regroup on the far side of the bluff!”
Many of the warriors heeded his command, fleeing with the elders and children. But others stayed behind to wage the fruitless fight. Porthios recognized a brave warrior, silver sword flashing like lightning in his hand as he raced to defend his prince.
“Tarqualan!” cried Porthios, watching as that elven warrior came up against the rank of seething, squirming shadows.
And then the valiant fighter, veteran of so many of his prince’s battles, was gone, vanished in body and sight... and even, Porthios realized with a chill, in his very memory. He couldn’t recall the name of the bold commander who had stood so staunchly in the face of a nightmarish attack, who had ridden at his side through twenty years of campaigns in Silvanesti.
And finally all the elves were running, stumbling through the undergrowth, fleeing in mindless panic through the dark, haunted woods.
Dawn broke as Porthios was still following at the rear of the band. He had no idea how many of his elves had been lost to the horror, though he took some minimal comfort from the observation that the shadows were not vigorous in their pursuit. Samar now fought beside the prince, the two of them forming a rear guard as the rest of the elves had crossed the stream and made their desperate way through the woods. The Silvanesti’s dragonlance, like Porthios’s sword, had proven to be lethal against the dark and insubstantial attackers.
Finally they pulled away, leaving the shadows lingering in the deep woods as the elves gathered around the far side of the Splintered Rock bluff. The sun was up, the heat already pressing downward like a sweltering blanket. Amid the milling band of wailing, crying elves Porthios found his wife clutching Silvanoshei. The baby was squalling loudly. The elven prince tried to think, but the shrieks of his son were driving daggers through his mind.
“Can’t you make him stop crying?” he asked, fear and helplessness boiling over.
“He’s terrified!” Alhana snapped back. “And so am I—so are we all!”
“I’m sorry. Here, let me hold him,” Porthios said softly. “We’re safe here, at least for a while.”
“Do—do you think so?” she asked, trying bravely to conquer the quaver in her voice.
The baby fussed and twisted in his arms, and Porthios couldn’t lie to her. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what attacked us, where they came from, or what they want.”
All around him, elves were gasping for breath, lying in various states of exhaustion around the tree trunks and rocks at the base of the mountain. Somehow they had made their way here through the darkness, but now he had no idea of where to go, of what to do next. And through this panicky confusion, his son’s distressed wails had pierced his awareness like a knife cutting through soft flesh.
“How many of us got away? And what about the others? They’re just... gone.”
Alhana spoke numbly, but Porthios knew what she meant. He remembered acts of bravery, bold warriors lifting steel to stand against the shadowy attackers that had emerged so silently from the woods. But when he tried to recall individual battles, the last fights of brave elves, some of them warriors who had fought under his command for two decades, there was simply nothing there.
Desperately he tried to remember a name, to picture the stalwart face of a loyal lieutenant. It was as though the shadows, having killed an elf’s body, had also sapped away any memory of his existence, any legacy he might have left behind.
The griffons, too, had fought the attackers valiantly. Many had perished during the battle, vanishing into space like the bodies of the elves who had been touched by shadow. The others had finally flown away, seeking the safety of the skies when the entire camp had been overrun. Now a few of them had returned to light on the upper slopes of the craggy bluff. Though Porthios looked upward, scrutinizing the heights for a sign of Stallyar, he had seen no indication of the familiar silver-feathered wings.
“My lord Porthios!” cried an elf, gliding low on the back of a griffon. Porthios recognized Darrian, a courageous and skilled archer and a veteran of the Silvanesti campaign.
“Here!” he shouted, waving from the ground.
The griffon came to rest on the forest floor, and Darrian leaped from the saddle and came stumbling toward him. The warrior looked haggard, his skin scratched and torn by brambles, though he didn’t seem to be otherwise wounded. Indeed, Porthios reflected grimly, the shadowy attackers didn’t seem to have injured any of his elves. Either the outlaws had escaped, terror-stricken but whole, or they had been touched by those chill tendrils and vanished utterly.
“What? Are we attacked again?” asked the leader of the ragged band.
“No, but soon! The shadows are coming around the bluff, blocking our flight. They’ll hit us from the other side within the hour.”
“How close?”
“A mile, no more. They move slowly, but deliberately. They don’t seem to stop for anything!”
Porthios looked at Darrian’s empty quiver. “Did you damage them, do any harm at all, with your arrows?”
The warrior shook his head. “Not at all—save once, when I used an arrow given to me by your father, the Speaker of the Sun.”
“Was that missile unique?”
Now the elf nodded. “My king told me that its head was of purest steel and that the shaft had been blessed by Paladine himself.”
“And what happened when you used it?”
“I shot into a mass of shadows, lord, and it seemed as though they were all torn, ripped into scraps of darkness. They made a hideous screeching, and then they vanished.”
Porthios described the small success he had had with his own sword, and Samar with his dragonlance. “And those, too, are weapons blessed by the gods, imbued with powerful magic. As to the rest, even the keenest of elven steel seems useless against them.”
The sun remained high, as if it was going to stay at zenith forever, and as the rays drove downward through the leaves, the forest grew hotter and hotter. Insects droned, and the sounds of grief and despair wailed even louder within the elven prince’s mind.
“What are we going to do?” Alhana, who had been listening anxiously, asked.
“They’ve cut us off from the east and west,” Samar noted. “We have the lake to our north and the mountain to our south. Do we stay and fight them here?”
“We’ll have to climb the bluff,” Porthios declared, instantly making up his mind. “I don’t know how we’ll stop these things, but we’ll roll rocks down onto them if nothing else.”
The stronger elves helped the weaker, and slowly the band of outlaws made its way up the steep, jagged boulders that lay scattered in profusion on the slope of Splintered Rock. As they gained altitude, they could look across the canopy of the forest, and they saw many places where smoke billowed up from the distant trees. The sun was a fiery orb, a searing spot of red in the white sky, and it blazed with merciless force onto the trapped elves.