Shadowrealm

CHAPTER ELEVEN

5 Nightal, the Year of Lightning Storms

The storm moved inexorably toward the refugee encampment. Wide eyes watched the growing darkness, exclaimed at the thunder, and recoiled at the lightning.

Abelar, Regg, and Roen stood at the far edge of the encampment, drenched in rain, in darkness, watching time drain away.

"They are terrified," Roen said, nodding back at the refugees.

"The storm is nearly upon us," Regg said. "We can wait no longer."

"Agreed," Roen said.

A void opened in Abelar's stomach. "Regg, hold until the last possible moment. If Cale and Riven have not returned…"

But Regg was already shaking his head. "You know we cannot wait, my friend. We march on the hour. And by our lives we will purchase as much time as we can for the refugees. We do not have wards enough for men and horses so we will leave the mounts behind. If Cale and Riven do not return, rush the Stonebridge. Dare the river."

Abelar mined for words in the earth of his mind but found none. He nodded, a fist in his throat.

"Gather the company," Regg said to Roen, and the tall priest nodded. "Tell them mounts stay. And volunteers only. Any who wish may remain behind with Abelar and the refugees."

Abelar knew that all would volunteer. Only he among the company would remain behind.

Only he.

Roen embraced Abelar before he left to pass the word. The priest's long arms engulfed him.

"I am honored to have followed you into battle, Abelar Corrinthal. The light is in you still."

Abelar's tears mixed with the rain. "And you, Roen."

The priest jogged off toward the camp, his mail chinking, shouting as he went. Regg and Abelar stood alone in the rain. They didn't face each other, but stood side by side and faced the Shadowstorm, their enemy, as they had so often in previous battles.

"We have known each other a long while," Regg said, his voice choked.

"I am the better for it," Abelar said.

"As am I."

They clasped hands, and held onto each other for a moment.

"I always thought that if we fell in battle, we would fall together."

The tightness in Abelar's throat made his words stilted. "As did I."

"We stand in the light," Regg said softly.

"You do, my friend," Abelar said.

A shout from the gathering company below turned their heads. Jiiris ran toward them, her face stricken, as red as her hair.

"I will leave you," Regg said, and headed toward the company.

Jiiris ran past Regg to Abelar, stopped before him, her breath coming fast.

"You will not lead us?" Her green eyes swam in tears she refused to let fall.

"It is Regg's company to lead."

The space between them seemed much larger than it was. Abelar bridged it. He stepped forward, and took her arms in his hands.

"You could stay with me," he said.

She looked up at him and he saw her consider the offer, but then she shook her head. "You know I cannot. Come with us."

"You know I cannot."

Both clung to the other as if they could delay the inevitable if they hung on hard enough. At last he released her.

"I love you," he said. But he loved his son more.

"And I you."

He kissed her, passionately, fully, and both of them knew it was the last kiss they would share. He let himself fall into the moment, into her, the taste of her, the smell of her skin and hair. When they parted, neither looked the other in the eye and both were crying, tears born in the regret of what might have been.

"Go do what you were called to do," he said to her.

"And you do what you were called to do," she said, and left him.

Abelar stood alone in the rain, thinking of his son, his life of service, wondering what it was that he was called to do. He was unmoored.

Ephyras's wind gusted, blew up a blizzard of black sand. The shadows around Cale and Rivalen deflected the particles. Riven, without any such protection, kept his hood up and his cloak drawn tight.

Cale tried to pry open the mental door Magadon had left ajar in his mind.

Mags?

He received no response and his worry manifested in a swirl of shadows.

"Which way to the temple?" Riven asked, as lightning bisected the sky.

Cale and Rivalen held their respective holy symbols, and both intoned the words to a minor divination.

"That way," Rivalen said, pointing.

"Agreed," Cale said, when the magic of his divination pulled at his body.

The prolonged rumble of falling stone sounded in the distance, the thunder of collapse. The ground vibrated under their feet and for a moment it felt as if the entire world were about to crumble.

"Over there," Cale said, and pointed.

In the direction they were to travel, a cloud of dust rose into the dark sky, the only landmark of any significance for as far as he could see.

"Magical transport will be dangerous," Rivalen said.

"We do not have time to walk," Cale said, thinking of the Saerbians, thinking of Magadon, thinking of Ephyras's death throes.

"You serve no one if your body materializes underground or in a stone. The currents of magic are wild here. You do not feel them?"

Cale did not, and had to rely on Rivalen's word. "Let's move, then."

The three men melted into the darkness and started out on foot, moving fast. The earth felt brittle, hollow under Cale's feet. The tremors that shook it from time to time nearly knocked him down. He imagined the entire world to be as hole-ridden as a sea sponge, ready to crumble into pieces were too much pressure applied to it.

He sweated despite the cold. They saw nothing of interest for a league and the flat, featureless landscape made distance hard to estimate. The sound of still more collapsing stone and the ever present cloud of dust ahead kept them roughly oriented.

Time weighed on Cale. He pressed the pace until all three men were soaked in sweat and gasping.

Ahead, mounds dotted the landscape like burial cairns. Eventually the mounds took shape and Cale recognized them for what they were-crumbling structures poking from the dried earth, ghostly hillocks lit by lightning flashes and covered in the dust of a destroyed world. Little remained, but he discerned partially collapsed domes, crumbling arches, hollow columns.

"Your goddess is a bitch," Riven said to Rivalen.

Rivalen said nothing, merely eyed the wreckage of a ruined world. A minor divination fell from his lips and, presumably led by its pull, he stopped from time to time to pick at this or that in the black sand. He finally lifted what he had sought-a coin of black metal, the markings upon it nearly worn away entirely.

"You collecting trophies, Shadovar?" Riven asked.

"Reminders," Rivalen said, and the coin vanished into his shadows.

The dying sun made its way across the dark sky as the three men made their way across the dark world. The ruins grew more frequent as they progressed and Cale thought they might have been moving through the remains of a city. The skeletons of some buildings remained standing here and there, lonely, hollowed out testaments to the remorselessness of time and Shar.

Holding his holy symbol in hand, Rivalen whispered imprecations and Cale could not tell if the prince was awed or appalled.

Bones appeared in the dust. First just a few-a thighbone jutting from the earth, a skull leering from the ruins-but then more and more. Soon they couldn't take a step without walking over remains.

"This place is a graveyard," Riven said.

It was as if an entire city had been murdered at a stroke and the bodies left to rot in the open. Cale could not help but think of Ordulin.

"Keep moving," he said.

The wind kicked up, moaned.

"That's not the wind," Riven said, his eye narrowed.

The three men stopped and closed the distance between them. Shadows swirled around both Cale and Rivalen.

The moans, prolonged and agonized, sounded distant, muted, as if heard through thick stone walls. Cale looked around, up, and down. He stared at the black ground beneath his feet.

"Dark," he said.

"Ready yourselves," Rivalen said, his holy symbol dangling on its chain from his left hand. "Not all life is gone from this place. Not yet."

As if summoned by his words, the spirits of the dead rose from the corpse of Ephyras. Hundreds, thousands of gray, translucent forms floated out of the barren earth all around them and filled the sky. Their forms were humanlike, though slighter, with elongated heads and tiny ears. Their overlarge eyes were as dead and hollow as their world. Despairing moans issued from the holes of their mouths.

They were everywhere.

"Spectres," Rivalen said, and started to cast a spell.

Haunted, despair-filled faces fixed on the three men. The specters' miens twisted with hate and the moans turned from agonized to rage-filled.

Cale reached through Rivalen's shadows and grabbed him by the cloak, interrupting the casting.

"We cannot fight this many. We hold them at bay and keep moving. The temple is why we're here."

Rivalen's eyes flashed with anger for a moment before he nodded.

Cale held his mask in a sweaty hand, and the shadows around Rivalen's flesh curled around it. Riven empowered his blades until they bled shadows. The specters swarmed forward from all sides, a fog of dead souls so thick it obscured their vision.

Cale held Weaveshear forth in both hands, called upon Mask, and channeled divine power through the blade. Shadows poured from it, expanded, and formed a hemisphere of translucent darkness around the three men, under their feet.

Cale braced himself as the specters crashed into it by the tens, by the hundreds. He staggered under the onslaught and the sphere began to collapse inward. The moans and wails grew louder.

One of the specters stuck his hand through the sphere, tore open a gash about as long as a short sword, and started to squirm through. Hundreds of others lined up behind him, screaming, clawing at one another to get through.

Riven bounded forward, blades whirling. He caught the specter halfway through, and slashed it across the arms and shoulders. He dived under its incorporeal touch, drove both sabres up through its chest, and it dissipated with a dying moan. The other specters tried pushing through the hole.

"Rivalen!" Cale shouted, and held out his left hand, his shadow hand.

Rivalen took it in his own, called upon Shar and joined his power to Cale's, to Mask's. The sphere darkened and the gash resealed, severing in twain a specter caught halfway through the opening.

"Keep moving!" Cale said. He tried to ignore the unexpected kinship he felt with Rivalen. The divine power they each channeled meshed comfortably, much more so than Cale had ever felt when joining his power with Jak's. Cale chose not to ponder what it might mean.

The specters thronged around the hemisphere. Their moans drowned out the wind and their forms nearly blotted out visibility. Twisted faces, malformed mouths, and dead eyes pressed against the barrier. Cale had to peer through and past their translucent forms to keep his bearings. The intermittent flashes of lightning helped.

They moved as rapidly as they could, attracting more and more specters as they went. Sweat beaded Cale's brow and dripped into his eyes. Rivalen said nothing, merely gritted his teeth, held his holy symbol aloft, and joined his power to Cale's. Shadows poured from both of them to replenish the hemisphere as it weakened here or there.

The press of the undead caused Cale's head to ache. His body weakened with each step. His breath came hard. He felt like he was yoked to a wagon.

"I am failing," Cale said.

Riven pulled threads of darkness from the air, spiraled them around his fingers, and touched them to Cale. Healing energy poured into him, refreshed his mind, renewed his strength.

"Holding?" Riven asked.

"For now."

Cale looked at Rivalen, who also looked strained.

"Do what you can for him, too," Cale said.

"The Hells with him," Riven said softly.

"If he dies, we die. I cannot do this alone."

Riven frowned, went to Rivalen's side, and touched the prince with healing energy. He didn't wait for thanks or acknowledgement, and Rivalen offered neither.

The hemisphere shrank incrementally as they moved across a desert of bones and ruins. The moans of the specters wormed through Cale's ears to his skull, causing his temples to pound. The ground vibrated with the distant rumble of collapsing earth.

"What the Hells is that?" Riven asked, bracing himself against another tremor.

Cale could hardly see through the strain, the sweat, could hardly hear through the wind and moans. "How close are we, Riven? We cannot hold this much longer."

As if to prove his point, one side of the hemisphere collapsed, pressed in like a squeezed waterskin. He and Rivalen both groaned, sagged, channeled what power they had left.

The specters swarmed, but the border of divine power held-misshapen, failing, but intact for the moment. The moans of despair turned to wails of frustration.

Riven moved to the edge of the barrier and peered through the darkness, through the specters. Only the veil of Cale and Rivalen's power separated the assassin from hundreds of undead. The specters, driven mad by the proximity of their prey, scrabbled against the hemisphere, moaning desperately.

"I see it." Riven gave a start, went pale. "Dark, Cale. The world is disappearing behind it."

Again the ground shook under their feet. Cale had no time to ponder Riven's words. "We're out of time. We use the shadows. I will take us. Rivalen, hold as long as you can. I need only a moment."

Shadows churned around Rivalen but he nodded. Darkness poured from his holy symbol, supporting the shrinking hemisphere.

Cale ceased lending his power to the support of the barrier. The release elicited a strained grunt from Rivalen. The hemisphere shrank in on them. The specters pounded against it like mad things.

Cale peered through them, looked in the direction Riven had indicated.

He saw it in a depression below them-a temple.

The whole of it was composed of smoky quartz streaked with veins of black. A dome capped the structure. Spires stood at each corner, just more bones of the dead jutting from Ephyras's dust. Long threads of shadow weaved in an out of columns, arched windows, statues. Closed double doors faced toward them. Cale was surprised to see the temple intact. The fact that it stood whole on an otherwise dead world struck him as somehow obscene. Magic-or something else-must have preserved it.

Beyond it, he saw what Riven had seen. The earth fell away. A black hole several bowshots in diameter yawned in the earth, a void in the world. The ground immediately around the hole slowly turned, like the flow of water around the edge of a maelstrom. It cracked, crumbled, sent up a cloud of dust, collapsed into the hole that was eating the world. It was getting larger as it fed.

He wondered if there were other such holes on Ephyras, other voids devouring the world.

"Transport us!" shouted Rivalen.

Cale pulled his eyes from the hole and drew the darkness about them. For a moment, he considered leaving Rivalen behind. He looked back, met Rivalen's gaze, and saw in the Shadovar's golden eyes that he realized what Cale was thinking. Cale saw no fear there.

Cale included Rivalen in the shadows he gathered. They would need him to defeat Kesson Rel. The darkness deepened around them as Rivalen shouted, fell, and the sphere collapsed entirely. The specters swarmed them, arms outstretched. Their touch reached through armor and flesh, cooled bones, slowed hearts, stole life. They filled the air, turned the already cold breeze frigid.

Cale held his focus in the midst of the chaos and rode the shadows to the temple, Riven and Rivalen in tow.

Regg mounted Firstlight so that his company could more easily see him. She remained calm despite the rain, thunder, and the onrushing Shadowstorm. Regg turned his back to the darkness to face his company, knowing as he looked upon them that all of them would die in the darkness and some would rise again as shadows. In the distance, Sakkors hovered in its cloak of ink.

Regg did not shout. He did not draw his blade. He spoke only loud enough to be heard over the rain. As he spoke, Roen and the priests moved from soldier to soldier, using spells and wands of pale birch to ward the men and women against the life draining power of the Shadowstorm. A flash of soft rose-hued light denoted the wards taking effect.

"Turn and look," Regg said to his company. "See the men and women and children you are bound to protect."

As one they turned, looked down on the Saerbian refugees huddled in their wagons and blankets against wind and rain, against evil and darkness.

"That is why we fight," Regg said. "They need time. It is their only hope. We must give it to them."

He patted Firstlight's neck and dismounted.

"Go," he told her, and swatted her flank. "Bear someone to safety."

She nuzzled him then trotted off to rejoin the rest of the company's horses.

Regg nodded at Trewe and the young soldier sounded his horn to signal the march. Heads emerged from wagons, tents, and carts. Hope animated the gazes of the refugees, though fear lurked behind it. Shouts carried over the rain-well-wishes. A small boy stood at the back of his cart, soaked by the rain, one hand in a trousers pocket, the other raised in farewell. He didn't wave, just held a hand aloft, as still as a statue.

Regg returned the gesture, turned, and led his company on foot toward the darkness.

"That is why we fight," Trewe said from beside him.

The lightning framed the silhouette of a horseman on a rise to the right of the company-Abelar on Swiftdawn. He held his blade in hand and with it, formally saluted them.

Thunder boomed.

Every blade of every man and woman in the company came from its scabbard and returned the salute as they passed and marched into darkness.

Abelar sat his saddle in the rain and watched his company march on the double quick toward the Shadowstorm. He felt drawn after them, pulled by the faith that had been his companion for years. But his love for Elden tethered him to the camp. He could not abandon his son again. Elden couldn't take it. And neither could Abelar.

But he feared he could not take abandoning his company either.

He watched the company until darkness and the rain began to swallow them. They looked tiny, insignificant as they marched into the black wall of the Shadowstorm. He tried to catch their silhouettes in the frequent flashes of lightning but eventually lost them to the smear of night.

The Shadowstorm roiled and churned, as if eager for their arrival. Abelar had his doubts that mere men would be able to slow it. But he had no doubt that they had to try. He would hold out hope.

He dismounted Swiftdawn, took her to the outskirts of the camp where the company's other horses gathered, heads low, whickering in the storm. He rubbed Firstlight's nose. The other horses neighed, pranced nervously. Perhaps they smelled coming battle in the wind.

"Keep the rest of the horses calm," he said to Swiftdawn and Firstlight. "We may need them yet."

Both horses tossed their heads and neighed.

If he had to, Abelar would do as Regg had suggested. He would put every refugee he could on the company's mounts and charge them over the Stonebridge. The Shadovar would resist, but perhaps some would get through.

After seeing to the horses' needs, he left them and walked through the rain among the Saerbians, asking after their spirits, calming them with his presence. They smiled gratefully for his attention and asked Lathander to bless him. He looked off in the distance, in the direction of his company, and felt unworthy of blessings.

A young mother with a child at her breast looked up at him from out of a rain soaked tent. Rain pressed her brown hair to her head. Tears streaked her thin, wan face.

"Will we make it to Daerlun, Abelar Corrinthal?"

Abelar looked at her, at the suckling child, and found that his throat would not dislodge words. He nodded, forced a smile he did not feel, and turned back into the rain.

Frustration bubbled up in him, needing release. He wanted to shout his anger into the sky but held it in for fear of alarming the refugees. Instead, he walked the camp with clenched fists and clenched jaw, until he regained control of himself.

When he had, he fixed hope on his face and returned to his covered wagon, found Endren and Elden within. Elden's brown eyes brightened when Abelar entered.

"Papa!"

He hugged Elden while Endren looked a question at him. Abelar shook his head in answer. Endren sagged.

"You all wight, Papa?"

"I'm all right," Abelar said to his son, and cradled his head. But he was not. Nothing was all right. His body was with his son but his thoughts kept returning to his company.

Cale, Riven, and Rivalen materialized in a dust-choked courtyard. The ground shook and Cale imagined the earth upon which the temple stood cracking, crumbling, falling into the annihilating hole devouring the world.

"All right?" he asked Riven, and the assassin nodded.

"As am I," Rivalen said, though Cale had not asked.

They did not have much time. In the distance, he heard the moans of thousands of specters. The undead would find them, if the world did not end first.

A sculpture of glistening black stone dominated the courtyard. It depicted a tall, faceless woman in flowing robes. A circle of tarnished silver, ringed in amethysts, adorned her breast.

Before her in a fighting crouch stood a shorter male figure, a man clad in a long cloak. Leather armor peaked from under the cloak and he held a slim blade in each hand. A black disc adorned his chest.

The three men stared at the statue a long while, the implications freezing them in place. Shock stole anything Cale might have wanted to say. He heard his heart in his ears. Riven and Rivalen, too, seemed dumbfounded.

The shaking ground and the roar of a collapsing world roused them from stupor.

"How?" Riven said. "Is that…? That cannot be right."

Cale just shook his head, staring at the statue, seeing in the male figure the form of the god he had faced in an alley in Selgaunt.

It could not be what it appeared to be.

Rivalen glided forward to the statue, and the shadows around him stilled. He stared at the sculpture for a time then whispered a prayer. Kneeling, he brushed dirt and dust away from a pedestal of silvery metal to reveal engraved words, weathered by age. He waved a hand over the letters, mouthed a couplet, and his magic undid the weathering. The writing appeared clear against the stone.

Cale didn't recognize the jagged script and didn't want to know what it said. The statue was enough. The affinity between his power and Rivalen's was enough. He needed no more, wanted to know nothing more. He held his mask balled up in his hand. Shadows leaked from between his fingers.

"Do not," he said, knowing what Rivalen intended.

Rivalen looked over his shoulder, his golden eyes afire.

"How can I not? We must know."

Cale remembered his discussion with Mask on the Wayrock, remembered what the god had left unsaid.

Do you serve her? Cale had asked.

He didn't want an answer.

"Why must we know?" Cale asked.

Rivalen smiled, showing fangs. "You know why."

He cast a spell that Cale recognized as one that would allow the prince to understand any written words. The ground shook as the magic took effect and the Shadovar prince read aloud.

"The Mistress of Night and the Shadowlord, her… herald."

The word hung in the gloom, the three men processing the import. Like Ephyras itself, Cale's world shook, circled the edge of a bottomless hole. The shadows around him whirled and spun.

"Herald?" Riven asked.

Cale tried to keep his feet, his bearings. He clutched his mask so hard it made his fingers ache. "We've been played," he said finally. "Mask and Shar are not enemies. They are allies."

Riven stared at him, mouth partly open. "No."

"Riven…"

The assassin shook his head. "No, Cale. No. There is another explanation."

"What explanation?" Cale said, and darkness shot from his flesh. "We freed Kesson Rel. Kesson Rel caused the Shadowstorm. Mask wanted it all the time. We've been duped. He is her herald. Her herald, Riven."

Riven paced a circle, agitated. He glared at Rivalen as if it were the Shadovar who had betrayed them. "No. Freeing Kesson was an accident. We were supposed to kill him."

"So we thought," Cale said. "But Mask knew. He always knows."

"It's too much, Cale," Riven said. "Even for a god. No."

Cale made a gesture that took in the dead world around them. "This is what we've wrought. Look at it. We killed Toril."

Saying the words placed the weight of what they had done squarely on Cale's shoulders. He sagged, wanted to sit down, to sleep. He had been trying to become a hero. Instead, he had unwittingly ended the world.

Riven stopped pacing, took a deep breath, a deliberate calm. "I don't believe it. We're not seeing something-something fundamental."

"We see it," Cale said. "It's just ugly."

"We don't," Riven insisted. "And stop giving up, damn it. You aren't what Fleet wanted you to be so you want to quit. To the Hells with Fleet."

Anger caused the shadows around Cale to whirl. Shame caused his face to warm. He advanced on Riven but his anger faded before he had taken two steps.

"I am not giving up. I just… this is the opposite of what I've been trying to do."

"There is something you have not considered," Rivalen said, his deep voice cutting through the space between Cale and Riven.

Cale had almost forgotten the Shadovar was present. They looked at him, waited.

"Kesson Rel is a heretic," Rivalen said. "Shar tolerates him but he does not serve her. She wants me to stop him. If Mask is allied with her, then he wants you to stop him, too."

Cale nodded at Rivalen's holy symbol. "How do you know he's the heretic? Maybe she only tolerates you and it's Kesson who serves her. Maybe you've been played, same as us."

Rivalen tilted his head to concede the point. "We'll know soon enough. I intend to drive back the Shadowstorm. He intends the opposite. Which of us prevails is the true servant of the Lady. To succeed, I need you."

Riven clutched at Rivalen's words, nodded as if he and the Shadovar were blood brothers. "He's right. And there's more to this, Cale. We cannot see it all, but we need to keep faith."

"Faith," Cale said, the word bitter and dry in his mouth.

Riven nodded at Rivalen. "He wants to stop the Shadowstorm. You want to stop it. That's enough. We see it through."

Cale heard in Riven's statement an echo of Mask's words to him back on the Wayrock.

See it through.

Perhaps there was something he could not see. He decided to think so. He had no other course. The alternative was calamitous. To do nothing was to allow the Shadowstorm to spread across Toril, to turn it into Ephyras.

"Faith, then," he said to Riven, and uncurled his fingers from around his mask. He held it up, looked through the empty eyeholes. "I hope we're right."

"We are," Riven said.

Cale gathered himself, licked the dust of Ephyras from his lips and asked Rivalen, "The weapon we came for is in the temple?"

"Yes, but I do not know where exactly," Rivalen said.

"Describe it. Or name it."

With either a description or a name, Cale could divine its location.

The ground shook again. The rumble of crashing earth sounded close. Too close.

"The Black Chalice," Rivalen said.

Cale and Riven shared a look as the walls of Fate closed in a little closer. The spirit of Avnon Des had told them of the Black Chalice back on the Plane of Shadow, had told them Kesson Rel had drunk of it in defiance of his god.

"The chalice is a weapon?" Cale said.

Rivalen hesitated long enough for Cale to conclude that he either didn't know or was about to lie.

"A drink from it transforms a Chosen of Mask," Rivalen said.

Cale had been transformed enough already. "Into what?"

Rivalen stared into his face, finally shrugged. "I do not know."

Riven cursed. "You don't know? How can you not know?"

Cale held up a hand to forestall anything further. "Doesn't matter." They had no choice. He held his mask in hand and spoke the words to a divination. When the spell reached its apex, he spoke the words of the item he sought.

"The Black Chalice."

The shadows spiraling around Weaveshear coalesced into a single, thick stream and flowed toward the temple. The weapon tugged at his hands, pulled him along. Cale felt like a fish who had just taken the bait.

"Follow me," he said.

The rain grew worse as Regg and the company approached the border of the Shadowstorm. Lightning veined the sky. Thunder shook the earth. The wall of black loomed, churned, spun. The Shadowstorm became Regg's world. He could not take his eyes from it.

"Dawn follows night," he said to himself. "Always."

Animals fled before the storm as though it were a forest fire-birds, rabbits, deer, foxes. The creatures broke around the company, howling, chittering, squeaking.

Regg said nothing to his company. He didn't need to. None wavered. They served the Morninglord and feared no darkness.

The wall of the Shadowstorm loomed before them, tangible, a black veil that hung across the world, separating the before from the after. It pulsed and expanded as they watched, lurched forward like a serpent, gulping the land. The grass and trees writhed at its touch, twisted into bleak caricatures of themselves.

"Light!" Regg shouted, and Roen and his priests withdrew wooden wands capped with ivory and held them aloft. Light blazed from the wands' tips. Magical daylight defied the darkness.

Thunder boomed.

Regg spared a look up and down his line. Men and women faced the darkness with blades and shields bare, light above them, light in their eyes.

"Onward," he called.

So illuminated, two hundred and fifty servants of the Morninglord breached the Shadowstorm, and Lathander's light did battle with Shar's darkness.

The wards on the members of the company shed motes of rosy light as the life-draining darkness of the storm eroded their efficacy. Darkness crowded close around the wands wielded by Roen and his fellows, dimming but not eliminating their luminescence.

Regg had no strategy other than to fight and survive as long as they could. He hoped to draw out the intelligence guiding the storm, give it pause, slow the storm's advance, and win the Saerbians some extra hours to wait for Cale and Riven to succeed.

The company walked through a rain soaked nightmare land of twisted, wind-stripped trees, and shriveled grass and shrubs. Nothing moved. It was only them and the storm. No one in the company spoke, except to give occasional orders. All had their eyes on the darkness around them.

"There," said Trewe, and pointed ahead.

Two dozen pairs of red eyes materialized in the darkness before them, rose up out of a copse of twisted trees. They started dim and distant, but grew bright as they closed.

"Shadows," Regg said.

Trewe's trumpet did battle with the thunder as two dozen living shadows streaked out of the darkness, red eyes bright with hate. They uttered a high-pitched keening as they closed, the sound enough to raise the hairs on Regg's neck.

"Roen!" Regg shouted. "Your junior priests with me!"

Four of Roen's junior priests rushed forward to Regg's side, their armor clattering.

The shadows shrieked, closed.

Regg held forth his shield, enameled with Lathander's rose, and the priests brandished their holy symbols. Regg waited until the shadows were within twenty paces.

"Now," he said.

He and the priests channeled divine power and their symbols luminesced. Power went out from them in a wave of pale light and hit the advancing shadows.

The shadows' keening died with them. The Morninglord's power turned all two dozen into stinking ribbons of black vapor dispersed by the wind.

"Perhaps they know we're here now," Regg said to the priests.

Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. When the spots cleared from Regg's vision, he saw that his words had been prophetic. Ahead, so many pairs of eyes blinked into existence in the darkness that they looked like a clear night sky filled with red stars. There were thousands upon thousands.

"Gods," Trewe said, and faltered in his steps.

Regg did not know how much time the company's stand would earn the refugees, but he intended to acquaint the darkness with Lathander's light.

"Ready yourselves, men and women of Lathander!" he shouted.