3rd Day of Flocktime, 565CY
Drachensgrab Hills, The Pomarj
Nesco was now glad for the magical silence.
If she gave in and screamed in terror, no one would hear her.
There was no rational reason for it, but in the last two or three minutes, Lady Cynewine had been growing steadily more nervous and even fearful. Nesco wondered if at least some of her fellow party members were also feeling the same way, but she couldn't be sure and Elrohir's crude hand gestures including nothing for asking a question like that.
The room beyond that first door was a long-abandoned guard post. It contained little other than broken furniture and cobwebs. Elrohir had knelt down and pointed out some old bloodstains and fragments of bone, but that itself was no cause for alarm. There was another door opposite where they had entered and a set of stone steps along the south wall, leading down. Nesco was all for taking the stairs at once, but Elrohir and Aslan had insisted on heading east and checking out the entire second floor.
The other rooms had added nothing. Nesco could tell that once, a battle had raged here. It had seemed to her, that despite the silence, she could almost feel some kind of sound, coming up through the floor and up her legs.
Men shouting. The clash of steel weapons.
Shadows danced at the edge of her vision. Whenever she turned to look though, there was nothing.
Even her own shadow, indistinct amid the intermittent moonlight and the two magical swords, didn't look quite right. It seemed as if sometimes, it wasn't quite where it should be.
The doors behind them had been left open, and once they had reached the far eastern walkway and found nothing, the party turned and started heading back. Nesco glanced about frequently, her hand tightening on the grip of her sword.
Now the party had returned to the western walkway and was starting to turn, snake-like, as it prepared to descend the stone staircase to the outer courtyard. After another quick look out the window they had climbed through, Nesco glanced back once more to the east.
The ranger froze. Far back, in the east walkway, the dust motes in the air, illuminated in the moonlight, had seemed almost to glow faintly. Now, they were unmistakably emitting a soft light. A kind of mist was filling in the spaces between the motes, growing, shaping. It was either becoming larger or moving closer.
Nesco blinked and looked again.
It was in fact doing both.
She turned back again to the others. They had stopped moving.
It was hard to tell from where she was standing, but Nesco thought that Elrohir had stopped about ten feet down the stairs and was fiddling with or examining something he had found on one of the steps. Next to him, Aslan was looking up at the others. From his gestures and pantomimes, Nesco thought that the paladin was motioning for the rest of them to step over whatever Elrohir had found, but she couldn't be sure. Nesco was certain that the look of panic on her face would have given Aslan pause but apparently the paladin didn't see it, because he turned around and with Elrohir, started cautiously down the stairs again.
The mist had now assumed a roughly humanoid form. It was already in the center room that lay directly above the passage adjacent to the drawbridge.
And it showed no signs of stopping.
The second and third lines of the party were now slowly descending the stairs, but Nesco and Tojo remained above. Lady Cynewine's eyes were now glued to the approaching figure. She had no idea whether Tojo had seen it or not.
There was no additional detail that Nesco could ascertain in the shape. There were no features, translucent or otherwise, such as in the stories she had heard about ghosts. Two dark holes in the mist might have been the creature's eyes, but she couldn't be sure.
It was now in the western guard post, only one room away.
To her horror, she noticed that Tojo was not looking back. Apparently satisfied that they had secured the area, the samurai was now beginning to descend the stairs, his eyes peeled ahead and downward for whatever the obstruction was.
Nesco swallowed hard, reached out and tapped Tojo on his left shoulder.
The samurai's head whipped around, a scowl already in place, but his gaze quickly followed Nesco's outstretched sword arm. Tojo's narrow eyes widened, and then he turned back to Nesco and brusquely motioned for her to get down the stairs. His hands held low, the samurai gripped his katana and faced the oncoming apparition while slowly turning around so as to be able to descend the stairs backwards. Lady Cynewine was relieved that Tojo apparently had no desire to rush at the whatever-it-was and immediately engage it, as she had feared.
Elrohir and Aslan had already reached the door at the bottom of the stairs. In her eagerness to rejoin the others and warn them, Nesco never felt the trip wire bend underneath her descending boot until she felt it silently snap.
Lady Cynewine had heard of a spell called slow, but she honestly didn't know if she was under the effect of one or if things were just moving with a horrible, snail-like pace in her own mind. Just as her mind registered that she had forgotten completely about the others gingerly stepping over something on their way down the stairs, her eyes saw a small glass globe fall from the ceiling from the shadows over Aslan's head.
The globe struck the paladin's helm just as Nesco screamed out a warning that no one could hear. There was a brilliant and painful flash of white. All she could see were yellow and red spots, and her eyes felt like they were burning in their sockets.
Blind, deaf and under attack, Nesco thought.
I've killed us.