Ashok’s vision.
Tuva was right, Ashok thought. They’re all ghosts.
Ashok’s panther jumped and swung its graceful body around in midair. Not wanting to release the chain, Ashok let himself fall. The beast dragged him across the ground in an attempt to shake off the chain, but Ashok wrenched the weapon back and let the spikes dig in and do their work.
Frenzied, the beast rolled over on its back and bit at the spikes. The flesh at its jowls tore-all Ashok could see were the whites of its eyes. A wailing howl issued from the beast’s throat, and the panther surged up and charged him again.
Madness drove the creature. Ashok could see it in its eyes. The Shadowfell panthers had the power to become insubstantial-it took specially designed, enchanted cages to hold them. The creatures should have run from the dust storm, not come back to attack them all. They were looking for death.
Skagi reappeared beside Ashok in his corporeal form. He drove his falchion into the leashed panther’s flank. The beast dodged aside before the weapon could penetrate too deep, but the strike slowed it down, and Ashok kept his grip on the lethal spikes.
“The fourth one’s out on the plain,” Skagi said. “I saw her when I teleported. She took a swipe at me before she realized she was hunting a shadow. She’s a big one, but she’s just watching us right now.”
“Biding her time,” Ashok said, his voice strained with the effort of keeping the panther in check. “She’s waiting for the others to wear us down.” He looked for Cree, but the dust clouds obscured that battle. Tuva and Vlahna kept the other panther at bay, but they both bled from multiple wounds and were already tired from fighting the beasts earlier.
Ashok ripped his chain away. He gripped the spikes now covered in blood, hair, and flesh. The panther stumbled from the pain of the punctures and the gash Skagi had opened on its flank, but it wasn’t down yet.
“Think you can finish this one?” Ashok yelled at Skagi.
The shadar-kai was already coming in for the attack. He absorbed a claw swipe against his shoulder to land another stab to the panther’s rib cage.
“What, you’re giving me your scraps now?” Skagi bellowed. He batted aside claws with his falchion, severing two amid the creature’s howls.
“Help Cree when you’re done.” Ashok teleported to the open plain before Skagi could retort.
He wanted to find the big one.
In the aftermath of the storm, the dust-covered wreckage of the caravan lay strewn about the plain for miles. Ashok limped back to the portal, bleeding from a torn calf, his chain stained with the last panther’s lifeblood. He saw the other three corpses near the overturned cage. More guards had come through the portal to tend to the wounded. Tuva and Vlahna as well as three more caravan guards had survived the storm.
The brothers stood a little ways off from the activity. Skagi wore a sullen expression.
“Told you,” he said, nudging Cree and pointing to Ashok’s gore-covered chain. “He went and stole all the fun we might have had hunting that queen she-cat.”
Ashok grinned, but he noticed Cree wasn’t smiling the way he usually did at his brother’s temper.
“What’s amiss?” he said.
“Neimal says we’re to report to Uwan right away and tell him what happened out here,” Cree said, adding, “We didn’t know where you’d gone. For all we knew, that she-cat might have been dragging your corpse back to feed her cubs.”
Cree’s tone took Ashok by surprise. “You had a battle of your own,” he said. “Or would you have taken on two at once, a katar for each?” He tried to keep it lighthearted, but he knew he sounded defensive.
“And you made sure I had help,” Cree said, nodding to his brother. “Why didn’t you let anyone help you, and why didn’t you wait a breath or two for us before you went charging off through the portal?”
“Is that what’s worrying you, Cree? That for once I might have been faster than you?” Ashok wrapped up his bloody chain and hung it from his belt like a trophy. “Maybe you need more training.”
Cree took a step forward, but Skagi got to Ashok first.
“I’ll take your other leg out from under you, pup,” he growled. “Then we’ll see how well you swing that pretty necklace around.”
Tuva and a couple of the guards glanced over at them. Cree put a calming hand on Skagi’s arm. “Enough, Brother. Ashok’s trying to bait us,” he said quietly. “He’d rather fight than confess what’s on his mind.”
Skagi looked at him with narrowed eyes, but Ashok, shaken by Cree’s insight, didn’t reply. Finally, Skagi sniffed and stomped away.
“Well, come on,” he muttered when neither Ashok nor Cree moved to follow. “I won’t keep the Watching Blade waiting, will you?”
“Go on ahead,” Ashok said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Cree nodded and left to follow his brother. The guards gathered up the caravan debris. Absently, Ashok picked up a dusty wheel and threw it into the back of one of the few intact wagons. Blood covered the ground where Ashok stood, but he couldn’t tell if it was shadar-kai or panther blood. Luckily, Cree and Skagi had appeared unscathed after the battle. The panther claws hadn’t penetrated their armor.
Their accusations cut Ashok deeper than he wanted to admit.
Ashok had admittedly gotten caught up in the fighting frenzy, but that wasn’t unusual for his race. Over the last few months, as he adjusted to his role as a Guardian, he’d cultivated restraint in his fighting and adapted to working his deadly chain with allies nearby. He hadn’t intended to leave Cree and Skagi behind. He’d focused on the battle in front of him, and he’d known, when he ran after the big panther, that his companions would come through their battle. That, not his own safety, had been his prevailing thought.
A high-pitched cry from the plain distracted Ashok from his thoughts. More survivors. He sprinted north in the direction of the sound. He ran until the wreckage ended and there was only the open plain scrolling away in broken ridges to the horizon. A line of dim gray clouds riding low overhead reinforced the perpetual twilight of the Shadowfell. Earth and sky were dismal mirrors of each other. No kindling trees or scrub grass grew on this stretch of land. The unbroken sameness blurred his vision and made him squint, disoriented, into the distance.
The wind whistled sharply, and Ashok thought he might have imagined the cry for help. He was about to turn back when the sound came again, echoing like death’s shriek on the wind. The cry shuddered through Ashok’s body, and he stumbled and fell.
He knew that sound.
Ashok staggered to his feet. He absorbed the shooting pain in his leg where the panther had wounded him, and he used it to lengthen his stride back toward the portal. He wanted to lose himself in the pain, to block out the piercing, malignant summons that issued from somewhere deep in the Shadowfell.
The nightmare was calling to him.
After eight months of peace, the beast sought Ashok again. It had followed the inexplicable connection between them back to the city where once they’d both been prisoners.
It craved blood. Ashok wondered if the nightmare had found the corpse of the she-panther out on the plain. Did it smell Ashok’s hand in the killing?
He tried to ignore the cry. The nightmare’s shriek, the smell of blood permeating the caravan wreckage, all of it took him back to that terrible hole in the ground-his former home.
Ashok had come from an enclave of shadar-kai that, to keep their souls from fading, had lost them in the process. They kidnapped a caravan party from Ikemmu, then tortured and killed most of its members. Only the witch Ilvani survived, rescued by Ashok and his companions. Ashok had betrayed his enclave that day, but he’d reclaimed his soul.
To escape from that place, Ashok and the nightmare had forged a path of destruction through the caves that had obliterated a good portion of his enclave. He didn’t regret what they’d saved that day-the lives of Skagi and Cree, Chanoch, Vedoran, and Ilvani-but Ashok would never forget the screams of his people as they died. He heard them now in the nightmare’s scream.
There had been so many lives saved, but so many more lost. Chanoch and Vedoran-those comrades were gone now-one to the shadows, the other dead by Ashok’s hand.
Ashok went through the portal without speaking to anyone. When he came out into the Shadowdark, the nightmare’s scream finally ceased. Ashok stood for a moment in the silence and waited for the memories and the
