"He's still standin', Rolf," one of the men in the back observed. "You can't have got him too square."
"It was the bowstring," Rolf complained. "If it hadn't broke, I'd have put the arrow clean through the bastard." He tossed the bow to the ground and sauntered toward Aeron, drawing a heavy knife from his belt.
Aeron could feel warm, wet blood trickling down his back, and the arrowhead burned with a white-hot fire just under the last rib. He could feel metal scraping on bone when he gasped for breath. He pushed himself away from the signpost and staggered away down the road, one hand holding the arrow in his lower back.
"Hey, don't you run off with my arrow, you sorry bastard!" Rolf called, to the harsh laughter of his fellows. Aeron ignored them, trying to get away, but when he looked up again, he saw that the highwaymen were easily pacing him, moving up to surround him.
He reeled to a halt, turning to watch them move closer. "I don't want any trouble," he gasped. "Just let me go."
"Doesn't matter what you want," the first highwayman said. "Trouble's what you got." He leaned closer, scrutinizing Aeron. "Say, what kind of man are you? You don't look right to me."
"Those're elf ears," Rolf announced. "We've found a half-breed, lads. Now, what'll we do with him?"
"Whatever it is, better make it quick," the last bandit observed. "This fellow's bleeding like a stuck pig, Rolf. You might've got him after all."
Aeron felt his knees buckle and he sagged to all fours, fighting to remain conscious. He felt nauseous, and his vision swam drunkenly. I'm going to die, he realized. It made him sick and sad, but he didn't feel any real fear yet, just surprise.
"Ahh, you're right, I guess. Besides, the king's men might come along. No sense wasting time." Rolf advanced on Aeron, knife held casually in one hand.
Aeron forced himself to look up at the burly brigand. "Stay back," he warned in a weak voice. "I'm a wizard."
"Is that so?" Rolf said. "You'd better use any magic you've got, boy, 'cause you're going to be a dead wizard in just a moment." He leered wickedly at Aeron and seized a handful of Aeron's hair, jerking his face up to the sky to bare his throat.
One last spark of resistance flared in Aeron's heart. Closing his eyes, he banished his pain for one moment, long enough to unlock a spell from his mind. He stretched out his senses to work the magic, knowing what would happen. Dark, potent force rushed to fill him, springing out of the quiescent blackness in the marrow of his bones, filling him with remorseless strength. Aeron locked his eyes on the bandit's and spoke the words for the fire hand spell.
With nothing more than his force of will, he directed the jet of raging flame against the highwayman Rolf, charring his arms and face to brittle cinders. Aeron allowed the searing heat to play against the toppling bandit until he vanished in a pillar of fire, then swept the jet around to scorch Rolf's companions. With a distant fragment of his mind, he noted that the flames were a shade of black or purple that made his eyes ache.
One of the highwaymen nearly escaped, but Aeron greedily drew power enough to beat the ruffian into the ground and blacken his flesh until it sizzled and smoked. When all four had stopped moving, he allowed the dark flames to gutter and fade, leaving a roaring, buzzing sound in his ears and bitter ice clinging to his bones. The world began to grow ghostly, and he looked down to see his body fading into insubstantiality. But dusk isn't near, he thought irrationally. The unearthly chill of the crossing blasted him, freezing the flow of blood down his back to a dark trickle. Aeron howled in pain as the shadow claimed him.
He opened his eyes and found himself standing in the phantasmal gloom of the twilight plane, looking at the hills and the burned-out tavern as if through dark, smoked glass. Aeron realized that he felt neither the cold nor the pain of his wound. He reached behind him and set his hand on the arrow shaft. As if he'd done it for years, he willed himself to intangibility and watched the arrow clatter to the ground, passing through the dark wisps of his body. He was part of the shadow plane now. There was no going back.
He turned in a slow circle, his thoughts sluggish and indistinct. He wasn't hungry, he wasn't thirsty, he wasn't cold. There was no pain, no urgency. He remembered that he'd been walking east, but it was hard to recall why he'd chosen that path. Closing his eyes, Aeron tried to decide what to do.
He could dimly sense a brilliant hint of power somewhere to the north. He turned his thoughts that way, trying to discern what it was that he felt, and suddenly in his mind's eye he saw the Shadow Stone, pulsing in its vaulted chamber beneath the ruined monolith. Its energies were intertwined with his, and it responded to his silent call, flaring into life and reaching out with an inarticulate demand that dragged Aeron ten paces to the north before he opened his eyes and realized that he was marching mindlessly in that direction.
From the cold ashes of his razed soul, the first stirrings of fear arose. "I'm not dead," he said, willing his feet to stop moving. "I'm not dead. Not yet. I don't know if I'm alive, but I know what that damned stone will do to me if I let it."
But that's the price you paid for your knowledge, Aeron, a voice inside his mind mocked. You wanted power, and you found it. Now you try to flee your fate?
"What fate? Oriseus deceived me. I didn't choose this."
You knew exactly what Oriseus offered, and you didn't shy away. He didn't deceive you. You deceived yourself.
"How can you say that? Who would want this?" Aeron deliberately turned his back on the insidious pull from the north and willed himself over the road. He hardly felt his feet strike the ground, and with every few steps, the gloom around him seemed to shimmer and he found that he'd covered hundreds of yards with a step. He decided that it didn't matter and continued to argue with the cynical voice. "He won't fool me again," he stated.
He'll have no need to. You're a slave of the stone. Where's your life, your substance? You're nothing more than a wraith, hollow, empty. The voice seemed to relish this thought. As long as you struggle against the darkness, you are a mere phantom, a ghost caught between the worlds.
Aeron stopped, unwilling to confront the bitter thought. "You're lying. I'll leave any time now. Dawn can't be far off." He realized that he was speaking to himself, yet the argument seemed to have a fearsome weight to it, as if his very soul depended upon the outcome. The stars danced and burned in frozen glory overhead, but Aeron ignored his surroundings. The internal battle was much more significant; anything that he saw or thought he saw around him was a mere manifestation of the contentious struggle within.
You begin to understand.
Aeron thought carefully for a long time, holding his mind to the task with iron discipline. "I touched the stone with my magic, and so it is my magic that is tainted."
Had you set your hand on the stone, as the others did, you would have been lost without hope of redemption.
"And it is my magic that keeps me here. I don't belong in the shadow land; no living man does. And so by daylight I've been free to walk the waking world. At night, the Shadow Stone grows strong enough to drag me into its own plane. And each day that passes, each night I walk in the realm of the shadow, my reality fades."
You are almost spent. You lack the strength now to return to the daylight against the stone's influence.
"I must expunge any magical power that I have left to me in order to eliminate the stone's hold." Aeron mulled that over. He still had a half-dozen spells remaining in his mind, spells he'd managed to preserve throughout his travels. The only way he could imagine to rid himself of magic would be to speak each spell, cast it here in the shadow, and dissipate its energies. When all the spells were gone, he'd have no magic for the stone to retain its hold on him. And he might escape the shadow prison that sought to claim him.