over her and pulled back one of its massive tendrils. Arya, shocked at its sudden, majestic appearance, stared into death itself.
'Arya!' shouted Walker.
He slashed down into the mass of flame and the weapon pulsed with cold, ghostly power. It bit into the elemental, disrupting its essence and causing the creature pain. It bucked and turned toward the ghostwalker, growing a new fiery arm to lash at him. Walker stabbed his sword at the creature, warding it off, and ducked its swipe. He retreated and the elemental followed.
The knight, broken from her spell, swung down from Swiftfall and slapped the horse's rump. With a whinny, Swiftfall ran and Arya stalked back toward the ghostfire elemental, drawing her sword.
'What are you doing?' hissed Walker as he thrust at the elemental again and ducked its countering swing. 'I told you to run!'
'You told Swiftfall to run,' corrected Arya. 'I have no intention of leaving you behind!'
She slashed her sword into the elemental with all her strength, but the blade passed through the ghostfire with no effect. 'What, by Torm's blade?'
'I told you to flee for a reason!' shouted Walker. 'Your blade is useless! Look-'
His warning cut off, incomplete, as a fist of ghostfire slammed into him. The elemental was certainly material enough to knock the man tumbling back through the air. Walker's body cracked against the thick trunk of a fir and he slumped to the forest turf, momentarily dazed.
The opponent with the stinging sword defeated for the moment, the creature turned its attention to the opponent whose hair resembled its material body in the moonlight.
The knight ducked as fiery tendrils struck out at her and scrambled back, leading the creature from the inert Walker. As she went, she uncorked a potion from her belt and splashed a silvery substance onto the sword. It suddenly glowed in the firelight with a cold blue radiance. 'Come!' she shouted. 'Come, demon-spawn!'
The elemental was only too happy to oblige, and flames roiled as it flowed toward her. Before Arya could escape, the creature raged around her. Arya swiped, slashing at the beast with her fine steel, but the blade swished through the ghostly flame with no effect. The elemental flickered between the planes, such that it was only really there half the time-the other half of the time, it was hopelessly ethereal.
She ducked an attack and slashed again, and this time the sword did not pass through harmlessly. Instead, the blade bit into its essence, causing it pain.
The creature swung a huge, fiery tendril at her, and Arya drew up her shield desperately. The ghostfire arm, however, passed right through the stout steel shield and struck Arya's arm full force. The knight screamed as the ghostfire tore at her flesh, her strength, and her spirit. Arya fell to her knees.
The scream jolted Walker from his stunned daze and the ghostwalker climbed to his feet. He ran toward the elemental, retrieving his blade from the ground. The elemental raised a fist in the air, preparing to bring it down on the staggering knight, but Walker lunged in and stabbed his shatterspike into its fiery depths. The creature whipped away from Arya.
Walker snapped his blade up to block the elemental's swipe. Its punch did not pass through the weapon, enchanted as the shatterspike was, but the force threw Walker to the ground. The ghostwalker struggled to rise, but the elemental slammed its arm down on his sword again, crushing him to his knees. The elemental flowed over him and held him down, manifesting entirely into the Material world, preventing him from rising.
The forest was suddenly lit with red, raging, material flame, and those flames licked at Walker around the sword. He gritted his teeth against the heat. Walker delved into his ghostly focus and distanced himself from his body so that he could ignore the pain.
Arya, seizing her opportunity, slashed at the elemental with two hands on her sword hilt. The temporarily enhanced blade cut into its fiery body but had little effect. The elemental countered and the knight managed to block the incoming punch with her shield. Though the fire did not strike her flesh, the force of the blow sent her reeling back. A second strike sent her flying into a fir tree on the other side of the clearing, where she crumpled to the ground, thrashing and moaning.
Amidst the pain of the flames, Walker blinked through the blood in his eyes and looked at the elemental standing over him. He stopped moving, allowing his body to go limp as though he had died from the flames. It was not a difficult task, for Walker could feel his flesh blistering and blackening and see that his bracers were white hot. He could endure, though, if only he could convince the elemental to leave-
Sure enough, the weight on Walker's chest vanished as the ghostfire elemental faded from the Material. His tearing eyes could see that it was not gone. Rather, the creature had turned from Walker's inert form and now flowed toward Arya.
With the elemental no longer standing on him, Walker struggled to push himself to his feet. It was, however, to no avail. Scorched and blackened, his body would not obey his commands.
'Ar-Arya…' he called, but the knight was unconscious.
Walker felt his concentration wavering and his burned body crying out in pain. The burning specter loomed over Arya and raised its two fiery appendages to crush her. He tried again to move, but he could not even lift his scalding sword from the ground.
Arya was about to die, and there was nothing Walker could do.
Nothing, except for the last action he would ever consider.
'Gylther'yel!' Walker shouted, blood spurting from his lips. 'Aid us! Gylther'yel!''
He called for his mentor with all the breath he could muster. He knew that she was watching and he knew how much she hated humans such as Arya, but he knew that she could not leave him to die, not after she had spent fifteen years to mold him as her guardian.
Nothing happened.
The elemental paused in its attack as though to laugh at him, though it made no sound.
In that moment, Walker felt hope die. Gylther'yel was too far away. This creature would slay them both. He felt like a fool.
The beast turned and raised its fiery tendrils to batter the knight to a scorched pulp.
Then the forest became utterly black as a dark cloud moved over the moon. The ghostfire provided the only light.
The air around the elemental chilled and hail began to fall. The creature paused, as though it heard something Walker and Arya could not, and shifted again, shedding its body. Hail battered at its suddenly diminished flames. The magic struck it even though it was incorporeal-the spells were halfway between the planes.
'Gyl… Gylther'yel…' rasped Walker.
Then a bolt of lightning shot from the sky and slammed the elemental to the earth. The elemental burned low, stunned, and another bolt struck it. The elemental struggled to rise and lash out at the knight, but a third bolt struck it, then a fourth, and a fifth. Lightning bolts flew from the clouds and battered the beast to the ground.
The elemental, reeling from the blows, managed to rise, but then the hail increased and a veritable ice storm descended upon the creature, icy shards tearing apart the flames.
When the dust and fog cleared, the elemental was no more. The last flickers of ghostly flames licked up into the sky and vanished. Arya slumped against the tree, knocked out cold but unscathed save for several burns and a thin stream of blood that trickled slowly from her split lip.
Gray-green cloak billowing and whipping around her slender figure, the gold-skinned Ghostly Lady stood in the elemental's place, hugging her arms around her stomach. Her waist-length golden hair wafted around her cold face like fire. She looked down upon Arya exactly as the elemental had.
Walker, as he watched, was not sure he was any less afraid for the unconscious knight.
'I am your teacher and your friend,' Gylther'yel said to him. The slow, beautiful Elvish sounded out of place on the battlefield. 'I brought you back from death and raised you as my child, taught you all your skills and powers, and this is how you repay me? With betrayal?' With the last word, Gylther'yel's voice rose in volume above an undertone-it was the loudest Walker had ever heard her speak.
She stared down at Arya, and her hand pulsed with black energy, the killing magic that she had wielded against the Quaervarr soldiers.
'Gylther'yel, please,' croaked Walker. His voice was broken and wretched. 'Spare her… She saved me… If you must be angry… be angry at me…'
'I am not angered that you disobey,' replied the Ghost Druid. Her fingers, blazing with destructive power,
