The worst was that their proportions were…wrong. Their figures were slim, their arms far too long for their bodies, hanging so low that they seemed to scrape the ground as they moved. And then, there were their faces, at least what he could see of them. Faces that were long and narrow with mouths which seemed to stretch up on either side nearly to the top of their heads. Mouths that, as he saw their silhouettes, were filled with sharp, razor-like teeth.
“Oh gods,” he muttered, “oh gods help us.”
Suddenly, there was a face only inches from his own, and he saw that it was Maeve, the woman’s own skin pale and waxy. “They’re not real, lad,” she hissed, but despite her words he saw that she too, was afraid, that her words were little more than a harsh whisper. “Remember that—they are not real.”
At first, Matt’s panicked mind could not seem to understand what she was saying, but then he remembered the mage, Challadius, who had climbed up on the ruined house. They’d told him that he would know what the man was doing when it came, but surely this could not be it. No, there was no way a man could create this mist, could form those creatures lurking within it, moving and looking out of it with eyes as pale as hoarfrost. Eyes that, it seemed, were looking directly at Matt.
The soldiers posted at the inn also began to notice those figures moving in the mist around them. And they, like Matt and the others, were afraid. They began to shout and point, drawing their blades, yet despite this, they made no move to charge the figures in the mist, and those at the door of the inn instead remained where they were, their backs hunched against the building’s outer wall, frozen in their fright. Matt could not blame them.
He might not have been a soldier or a warrior, but even he could see that such creatures as lurked there in the mist could not be bested in combat, could not be conquered, and a man faced with them could only run. Could only pray.
And indeed, it seemed that as he watched, the men began to do just that. Two of the four turned and with cries of terror, sprinted into the night as fast as their legs could carry them. Matt watched them go, struggling to keep his teeth from chattering and to control the worst of the trembling. That was when he noticed something strange—the mist had risen all the way to the top of the inn and was darker there, thicker.
He frowned at that, something striking him wrong, and then he realized what it was. It was not mist at the top of the inn after all—it was smoke. Which only meant—
“They’re firing the inn,” Priest said. “We have to go—now.”
Before either Matt or Maeve could respond, the man drew the bow from his back and broke into a sprint, directly at the inn and, closer still, at those forms lurking in the mist—in their dozens now—which seemed to have grown somehow, towering nearly to the top of the inn itself, so high that their great elongated faces disappeared somewhere above, in the mist.
“W-what do we do, Maeve?” Matt asked.
“Damn,” the woman cursed. “Stay here, boy.” She gave her head an angry shake. “I’ll try to keep that damn man’s virtue from getting him killed.”
“B-but I-I want to help,” Matt said.
The woman glanced back at him from where she’d risen, and he saw that there were two knives in her hands, though where they had come from he could not have guessed. “Help?” she asked, not cruelly, but with what sounded like genuine curiosity. “How? No, lad. You stay here—watch Chall. Best you don’t get involved in this. Chall is vulnerable when he’s casting, and he’ll be weak after he’s finished. He’ll need looking after. His magic will distract the soldiers—the gods alone know there’s few things more distracting than the Skaalden—but if one of them happens on him and puts an end to him while he’s concentrating on minding the spell, we’re all done.”
Matt wanted to protest, opened his mouth to do exactly that, but before he could say anything, the woman was turning and sprinting toward the inn and in moments, she vanished into the mist after Priest. As he watched her go, another feeling crept past the overwhelming fear—anger.
Anger that, once again, he was to be left alone, anger that he, a man grown, was to be treated like a child and left to be a nursemaid to a mage instead of helping to rescue the villagers. Which meant that the others would get all the credit, and he would be left with nothing at all. It wasn’t fair, particularly since without him, they would not have come back in the first place, for all the others would have happily left the villagers to their grim fate.
But Matt was not a child. Neither was he a nursemaid. Matt had heard many stories of heroes throughout his life—some from his mother when he was a child, and others he’d discussed excitedly with his friends, and in none of those stories had the heroes of the story ever sat back and hid while others did the fighting, the saving.
Besides, he told himself that Chall was fine—the mage was still hidden on the top of the wall, and the soldiers were far too busy being frightened of the Skaalden to pay him any mind. Matt took a moment to climb up the wall—a far longer moment than the man, Priest, had taken, a thing he noticed and which bothered him—and looked at the mage.
The heavy-set man was hunkered over, staring out at the mist and the creatures moving within it. There was a strained
