The Curse of the Mistwraith

off from the others by the mist, he closed his fists.

And knew terror, for his gifted powers failed to dissipate.

Lysaer reached to recover control but another will struggled against him: as if the mists had changed nature, without warning turned from a stubborn, resistant barrier that needed ever to be driven, into something repellently uncanny: a creature voracious and alive, that now fed off the very energies summoned to achieve its defeat. Lysaer felt the graze of unseen presences across his flesh. Things seemed to twist at his clothing and hair, while a heaviness dragged his thoughts.

Then a surge of overweening elation displaced all trace of alarm. They had triumphed! Desh-thiere now collapsed in a sucking rush toward annihilation.

A shout from Asandir ripped through that giddy unreality. Lysaer’s mad urge to crack the sky with his powers became dashed as someone’s hands snatched his wrists apart. Spell force slapped over his unshed light like soaked woollens thrown down to douse a wildfire.

No victory had been immanent on Kieling. Lysaer gasped in recovery. Murk wrapped him, dank as marshvapours, and his body dripped sour sweat. ‘What happened?’

‘Desh-thiere!’ cried Asandir above winds that keened like death angels whetting their armoury of scytheblades. ‘It’s hurled itself into the breach for a purpose!’

Magelight flashed and the air cleared, or seemed to. Only a circle closed off by some boundary of sorcery answered to Asandir’s will. Beyond Kieling’s walls pressed darkness, damp and impenetrable as shroud felt. Lysaer blinked streaming eyes. Brushed by settling snow, he noticed the winds no longer buffeted his body. Instead he felt crowded by noxious warmth the characterless temperature of shed blood. Pressured by nameless foreboding, Lysaer braced to continue, then flinched as Asandir cruelly tore his wrists apart again.

Affronted by the physical handling, Lysaer tensed to strike off restraint. Asandir met his glare, wordless, until reason displaced princely pride. Shaken to discover how near vanity had come to eclipse his good sense, Lysaer squared his shoulders to apologize.

Asandir forestalled him. ‘I’m not offended and you were never rude. This Mistwraith has aspects that can turn the mind, and now you are warned. Stay guarded.’

Upset and humiliated, Lysaer strove to pick sense out of chaos. ‘The mist flung itself on us like a suicide.’

From across the battlement, Arithon said in a voice scraped and hoarse, ‘That last assault sheared out more vapour than we ever burned away through a half-day. I presume the damage is done?’

‘We’ll see. Luhaine!’ His hold still tight on Lysaer’s wrists, Asandir cracked out, ‘How diminished is the radius of the fog?’

The discorporate mage forwent his tendency to patronize. ‘Only Kieling Tower remains enveloped, which leads me to suppose we have problems. If Desh-thiere’s entities were subject to natural death, why should they rush their destruction?’

Kharadmon agreed. ‘It’s too dangerous, now, to finish outside the tower. Whether our wards are found wanting or not, to cut the mist down on open ground is to beg a bid for escape. These ruins offer a thousand crannies. If the wraiths escape their bindings, they’ll surely scatter and hide.’

‘That’s Desh-thiere’s intention, no doubt,’ Luhaine snapped. ‘Or wouldn’t it just lure us to take an outside stand, then make the two princes its target?’

‘It could be attempting to do both.’ Asandir looked like a man faced with torture as his hands slackened, then at last released Lysaer. ‘We have a second choice of action.’

‘No!’ cried Dakar in protest, half-forgotten where he huddled on the sidelines. He strode to the centre of the battlement. Nose running, eyes bloodshot, his hands bunched in fists before his chest, he bristled like a fat banty rooster. ‘You wouldn’t dare sully the wards of compassion on this tower! Merciful Ath, how could you think to disarrange the irreplaceable work of ages, and draw evil inside these protections?’

Asandir visibly hardened. ‘I would do so, of sheer necessity.’ His look blazed back at his apprentice. ‘These wards are all that can dependably fence the Mistwraith. I will open them, and let Desh-thiere be driven inside, and see this land safe under sunlight. For the survival of the Riathan Paravians who sanctified this haven, you’ll lend your strength to that cause.’

Shocked, shaking, visibly afraid to hold his ground, nonetheless; Dakar stayed stubbornly rooted.

‘Desh-thiere has three times shown us guile,’ said Luhaine, his image indistinct through the turmoil of darkness and mist. ‘We could be the ones driven, and purposefully, to try just such a desperate action.’

‘The risk must be taken.’ Lysaer came forward. ‘Of us all, I’m the least fit to weigh risks. Yet I cannot set my life above the need to confine this monster. Kieling’s protections will not fail the land. Though we all were to die here, sunlight for Athera would be secured.’ His hair like drowned gold in the gloom, he deferred to Asandir. ‘I prefer to trust you can protect us from the wraiths, as you did on the night my half-brother and I were attacked.’

That mishap had occurred well before Desh-thiere’s teeming entities had been crowded inside shrunken boundaries; yet Asandir kept dread to himself as he switched his most merciless regard back to the Teir’s’Ilessid. ‘So be it, Lysaer. But let your heart not falter. When I call, you will act, and do so without question, to the utter dregs of your strength. Your gift of light will partner Arithon’s shadows, and burn mist until all of Desh-thiere’s entities are driven inside of ward boundaries.’

The words and their depth of commitment struck Lysaer with strange force and finality, as if magic would be bound to his consent. Though warned he must forfeit any later change of will, he scraped up a ragged smile. ‘What resources I have are freely yours.’

Wary though he remained, Asandir showed sincere respect. ‘Ath’s blessing on you, s’Ilessid prince. You do seem to understand the stakes.’

Ever the pessimist, Luhaine said, ‘Let Dakar leave the tower now, then. Should the worst befall, someone must stay outside to guard until Sethvir can set seals on this tower to permanently block chance of reentry.’

‘I’ll get my nose sunburnt and blistered for nothing, waiting for you to come out!’ Yet in his eagerness to quit the site of conflict, Dakar tripped over his feet in the stairwell. His peeved oaths faded with his hurried steps, first muffled by the close-pressed mists, and finally drowned by the moan of the eddying winds.