The Curse of the Mistwraith

‘Across time?’ Sethvir closed his eyes, savaged by awareness that continued to span the warp through weft weave of reactions that marked a city’s plunge into turmoil. The strain did not just leave him vague; today, he looked whitely haggard. ‘Had we Name for the one wraith responsible, we might have unriddled its intent. But prevent? The conflict etched by the strands has not altered. And Arithon is in retreat, not dead.’

Which was close as he could bear to come to pleading faith in a major miracle.

In answer to unvoiced forebodings, the torch-flame streamed in its bracket, then extinguished as Luhaine’s presence unfurled with untoward violence in the armoury. ‘I’ve lost him,’ he announced in reference to Arithon. The ongoing thud of the rams clipped his words as he added, ‘I managed to track him across the square but his life- pattern’s drifted severely. I mislike the evidence, that Desh-thiere’s wraith wrought black sorcery whose taint has afflicted both half-brothers.’

‘It’s accomplished more than possession, we’ve confirmed.’ Sethvir’s admission came tired as he joined Asandir beside the litter and cradled both hands under Lysaer’s head.

‘But not what,’ Luhaine fired back.

‘Let Cal work and he’ll tell you.’ That Asandir used Sethvir’s ancient and all but forgotten mortal Name laid bare the depth of his distress.

Luhaine disregarded the lapse. ‘No one of us can afford to stand idle while you check!’ He departed in a whip- snap of wind more Kharadmon’s style than his own.

Fibres of dry-rotted fletching spiralled away on the draft, faintly visible to mage-sight against a chiaroscuro of dark.

‘It’s bad,’ Asandir concluded softly. ‘How bad?’

‘Ah, the unsuspected craftiness of the creature.’ Sethvir’s voice seemed blurred to distraction as his awareness realigned with his flesh. ‘Desh-thiere’s plot has been deviously thorough.’ He sighed and smoothed the ruched laces of Lysaer’s formal collar. ‘It understood that its bane was comprised of paired strength. What better protection than to sunder our princes through hatred and set their gifted talents against each other?’

‘It cursed them to enmity, so.’ That implied long-range planning, a chilling fact. Asandir shared Sethvir’s unsettled wariness, that the wraiths left under ward at Skelseng’s Gate were far from secure as they stood.

But that complication must wait.

‘What else?’ Asandir prompted gently.

Abject in misery, Sethvir released his findings.

Not surprisingly, the Mistwraith’s malice had begun that night when the half-brothers had been cornered outside of Paravian protections at Ithamon. Cognizant of them as its enemy, Desh-thiere had imprinted their personalities then. The Fellowship’s night-long search to uncover damages in the aftermath had been wasted effort: the wraiths had done no meddling, not then.

In shock and raw pain Asandir voiced the appalling conclusion. ‘Desh-thiere had already encompassed the scope of Arithon’s training in that first split-second of contact!’

Fenced by battered racks of weapons, the Warden of Althain propped his forehead on laced knuckles. ‘Worse.’ His words fell deadened against his sleeves. ‘The wraiths withheld from action, brooding upon what they had learned.’ And then when language failed him, he set his ugly findings into thought. Deep damage had not occurred until Lysaer’s barehanded, heroic exposure, in the throes of the last struggle to confine the entities at Ithamon. New knowledge reshaped the decision to shield Arithon’s learning to a tragedy of broader proportions.

‘Our protections were wrongly aligned,’ Asandir whispered, anguished. ‘We sought harm too soon and protected craft teachings too late.’ Woe to Lysaer, his integrity left ruthlessly forfeit to an enemy that took him defenceless. The irony wounded, that Arithon’s schooled protections might have deflected the attack; or at least sensed the presence of an invading wraith before it could move to possess. ‘Dharkaron damn us for fools, we threw the wrong prince into jeopardy.’

Too late, in hindsight, to reverse a choice miscalled through crisis and desperation. Sethvir closed dry, chapped fingers over his colleague’s wrist. ‘Without Desh-thiere’s true Name we were blinded. And still are.’ Gently, despondently, he clarified: that a stolen memory from Lysaer’s trials in the Red Desert had offered foothold for Desh-thiere’s revenge; when, for the sake of survival, Arithon had once resorted to magecraft to break the recalcitrance of a half-brother whose hatred eclipsed hope of reason.

‘The Mistwraith seized upon discord, then borrowed deeper knowledge from the bindings Kharadmon attached to Lysaer’s consent on Kieling Tower,’ Sethvir said. ‘The spell-curse just cast interlinks with the half-brothers’ life- force. To dissolve or countermand its hold would separate spirit from flesh.’

‘Death,’ Asandir mused bitterly. His remorse did not lighten, for past mistakes. While the Mistwraith’s entities encompassed such grasp of the mysteries, the Fellowship and two princes from Dascen Elur had achieved no small feat to bind and confine all but one. There remained the unresolved menace of Lysaer’s possession and an entity that must of necessity be exorcised now.

‘Are you ready?’ Sethvir asked. Though the eyes of his colleague mirrored trepidation, the two sorcerers took position across the makeshift pallet and placed hands upon the prince’s brow and chest. Around them, the gleam of a thousand weapons lay quenched in darkness, kept keen for blooding mortal flesh. Yet against a phantom entity, steel offered only brute ending; the sharp, final agony of the mercy stroke that exchanged live suffering for the grave.

Cruel comfort. Asandir snatched a shaky breath. ‘You know, if we fail, we’ll have to kill him.’

Sethvir chose not to answer. At some point the shivering boom of the ram had stopped. Deep quiet spread over the armoury until a sorcerer’s profound concentration could pick out the sigh of each settling dust-mote. Aimless air stroked the blades in their racks and rang from them tone that sang of death. Distanced from such distractions, Sethvir stilled into trance. His awareness merged into Lysaer’s to ferret out the elusive energies which comprised the enemy wraith.

No simple exorcism, this delicate unravelling of spirits, since the entity they sought to extricate stayed unNamed.

To Asandir fell the task of safeguard. Submersed in Sethvir’s labours, he paced a hunt through the complex, interlocking auras that comprised Lysaer’s spirit. Like inventory, each strand and loop and whorl of light became mapped; those that belonged to s’Ilessid were set under ward by Asandir. Any that felt alien, Sethvir marked aside. The nuances of identity were perilous, slight; in some cases outside logic or intuition. A wrong choice would cause a