A/N: Thanks to everyone who's left feedback! It seriously makes my day, and I'm glad people seem to like Sir Aren. I kind of assume that the main draw of my stuff is the sketchy warlocks and/or dreadlords, so at first I was worried that a nice-guy paladin as a major character would put people off. (Though don't worry, the sketchy characters are by no means going to become less frequent or sketch-tastic). I've been debating changing the sub-genre of this fic to Romance, but I can't decide if readers will get to the end of what I've written so far and declare false advertising. Hah. Maybe I'll leave it for now…
Long after the last shivers in the air from Callista's exit had stilled, Aren continued to study the length of bright steel that lay in his lap. The ritual with the oil and the worn piece of sharkskin was entirely unnecessary – the blessing that lay on the plain-looking blade would keep it from ever rusting or growing dull – but it was an old comforting habit now, relic of a time when the weapon had been an ordinary sword in truth, given to him by a captain long dead in defense of a kingdom equally so. He'd been young, then. A city guard who'd never drawn blade in anything but mock battles, dreaming of heroism in a war naively clean of blood.
Lamplight flickered from the steel, spattering the planks of the ceiling with light. He'd since found his war, and it hadn't been clean at all. Of anything. When he'd been a boy, reared on tales of Lothar and Turalyon and the fall of the orcish Horde, he'd believed that war was about courage; when he'd joined the guard and imagined himself very grown and wise, he'd believed it was about killing; when he slashed his blade across the throat of his first human enemy, a cultist who'd laughed at his white rage even as he choked on his own blood, he'd realized the truth: war was about annihilation. Of people. Land. Decency. Faith. When all your enemy sought was death, killing wasn't enough.
He slid the sword carefully back into its reinforced leather scabbard and stood, buckling it at his belt over his left hip. The danger was past, now, but the other passengers would be skittish, and the sight of him and the rest of his company held in readiness might be reassuring. Not that they'd been very useful last time. It was the one thing he envied Callista and her ilk; a skilled arcanist had little need of weapons other than herself.
Checking one last time that he'd scrubbed all of the dried blood from his hands, he pulled open his door and headed into the corridor. Thoughts drifting back to the warlock, he suppressed a mental wince at the way their conversation had ended. The woman seemed to vacillate solely between more-or-less tolerant amusement (he tried not to let the arrogance implicit in it bother him) and vicious irritation, and whatever cues triggered the switch were completely mystifying to him. Maybe it was simply that she hated him. She did think he'd tried to blackmail her, after all.
And the things she'd said about Felwood…
The mist sent a chill through him as he stepped out of the stairwell and into the feeble daylight. A breeze had sprung up to twist the fog into tattered shreds, dispelling some of the heavy dread that hung in it even as it worsened the cold. Only a few huddled figures remained on deck, and none turned to watch as Aren returned to his familiar place at the rail, staring contemplatively down into iron waves streamered with mist. Mercifully free of wreckage, now.
Callista had confirmed all the Dawn's worst suspicions about that corrupted forest, and done it as though she'd thought them complete fools to believe anything else. The casualness of the revelation disturbed him almost as much as its substance. How had she come by such knowledge? Did all warlocks know as much? She'd implied so. Perhaps they'd been wrong to so alienate those regulars of The Slaughtered Lamb. Or perhaps she was lying, the knowledge peculiar to her alone, and maybe letting her on this ship was the mistake. But no, that was unfair. She hadn't even volunteered for this, and all she wanted was to go home.
Movement at the corner of his eye snagged his attention, and he glanced over to see Luciel lean against the mist-beaded rail to his right. She smiled at his regard, expression nudging the dark leopard-like spots of her tattoos into new lines. He'd known the night elf for some time now, but had never quite gotten used to speaking with a woman head and shoulders above his own by no means inconsequential height. She had none of the awkwardness very tall women of his own race sometimes displayed; on the contrary, she moved with the graceful economy of a hunting cat.
"Your people's hunger for travel always astonishes me," she said, tilting her gaze wryly at the sails luffing in the breeze.
Aren followed the line of her glance with mild surprise. "Does it? I saw much larger ships at Auberdine." Much more beautiful, too, lantern-hung and carved with cunningly-wrought natural scenes.
"Yes, and I have no doubt you remember them because they were each unique, while this ship has dozens of sisters. My people do not build fleets. There are too few willing to be borne by them."
He turned, leaning his back against the hard rail and crossing his arms against the cold as he watched the white canvas ripple. "That…surprises me. There are quite a few elves in the Dawn, now. And even more in Outland."
Her smile was wistful beneath the hard silver of her eyes. "We have always understood necessity."
Necessity. Yes. Luciel's people were the first guardians of this world, charged by dragons before the first human cities rose and gifted immortality in exchange. He heard that at Mount Hyjal they had surrendered that gift, though he had never dared ask Luciel if it were true. Even so, they were ever at the front lines in the battle against the demons.
"Are you…sorry…that you're no longer alone?" he asked haltingly. He knew they had always been an insular people, wondered if they resented being thrust into the crowded politics of the Alliance.
For a moment Luciel was silent. Hair the deep blue of shadow fell across a pointed ear as she canted her head in thought. "For myself…no. Though there is much to trouble us about you. You harbor so many arcanists. You tolerate consorters with demons but disregard all life that can't raise a blade in its own defense." She smiled again. "But you stood with us against the Legion, and after all, your races are all so young. My own people made much more terrible mistakes in our own youth. Perhaps history will be lesson enough."
And how much of that history have you seen? He wanted to ask, but didn't. He had no idea how old Luciel really was; any event she mentioned that happened before Hyjal belonged solely to her own people, and he had no means of gauging its antiquity. He suspected, however, that she'd seen more than a few human lifetimes. Sometimes he wondered if she resented serving under the command of an officer with only a fraction of her long experience.
"Perhaps," he agreed.
The heavy clomp of boots and cheerful ring of voices marked Ander and Nathanial's arrival on deck, Vorthaal in their wake. They'd all donned their black and silver tabards, though only Nathanial had a scabbard hanging at his hip.
"So you're not an oozeling!" Ander called, grinning at Aren.
This was a weird kind of greeting, but then, he'd learned to expect that from Ander. "Was I supposed to be?"
"Maybe." He tipped his chin mischievously at Luciel, and she raised a long brow in return. "We saw Callista storming out of your room with a face to freeze hellfire. Since you weren't with her, we assumed she'd turned you into something disgusting."
This was said with a certain amount of relish, as though Ander might not have minded the spectacle.
"You assumed," Nathanial corrected, crossing his arms with a clink of chainmail.
"I assumed and you didn't correct me…"
"Would that not be a serious breach of discipline?" Vorthaal wondered, frowning in bemusement. The draenei stood as tall as one Redbranch sitting on the other's shoulders, and had to crane his neck downwards to study the two curly-haired humans. "I was not aware your warlocks were skilled in such transformations."
"It would be, and they aren't," Nathanial said, rolling his eyes tolerantly at Ander. "My brother thinks he's funny."
"I just want to know what he said to her."
"Why?" Nathanial asked with an air of something not quite suspicion.
Luciel smiled at Ander's suddenly cherubic expression, showing canines just a little too pointed to be human. "Probably so he can repeat it," she said dryly.
"Hey!"
Aren snorted, shaking his head. Sooner or later, he'd have to gather them all together to share some or all of what he'd learned about their mission since leaving port, but now was not the time.
"Callista is more familiar with Felwood than I am," he said, trying to be as truthful as possible without saying too much. "I wanted her opinion on our approach."
Ander snickered. "I guess she didn't like it."
"She had…concerns," Aren admitted. He pushed himself away from the rail, cloak sticking to his back where the mist had dampened it. "But nothing we don't have plenty of time to work out before we disembark."
As Ander nodded, interest already waning in light of his dull explanation, he silently prayed that it wasn't a lie.
Not long after, Callista sat in the galley beneath the swaying light of one of the lanterns hung on the wall. The sun had begun to set, staining the threads of mist outside the porthole the color of wet blood. A sheet of parchment lay on the table before her, blank except for an address in the Mage Quarter and a greeting – "Dear Tun."
Wrinkling her nose thoughtfully, she knocked the excess ink off against the side of the inkwell and set the nib of her quill to paper. She wouldn't be able to mail the letter until they made port, but her earlier conversation with Sir Aren had agitated her, and she needed something to do besides pace the deck and unnerve superstitious sailors. The problem was, writing required her to marshal her thoughts into some kind of order, and at the moment she was finding that difficult.
Dear Tun,
Two days out of port and the fog is as thick as soup. Or maybe graveyard mud would be more appropriate, since it's also full of corpses. We've already been attacked by undead. We managed to fight them off, only slightly hampered by the fact this ship is ferrying idiots. Tried to warn them about Felwood but they wouldn't listen. Will probably try to stroll through Jaedenar and get eaten. No, I am not sarcastic because this bothers me, why would you think that?
Dropping her quill back into the inkwell with an unconscious scowl, she waved her palm above the parchment, blue flame devouring the ink in its wake. When the offending paragraph was gone, she leaned back in her chair, eyeing the innocuous rectangle of paper as though wondering what it might look like on fire too.
This lopsided staring contest was interrupted when someone slid onto the bench across from Callista and thudded a large tome down on the table.
She probably would've ignored the new arrival, except it decided then to speak to her.
"I saw what you did."
The voice was high and feminine and entirely unfamiliar. In no state of mind to make friends, Callista looked up without tempering her scowl. The human girl – for that's what the newcomer was – flinched a little before setting her jaw stubbornly. She looked to be in her middle teens, the hood of her student's cloak pulled up over her mousy brown hair despite the heat of the galley. A mage, then.
Irritation growing, Callista said nothing, continuing to study the strange girl with a hostile contempt she hoped she'd find intimidating enough to flee.
A vain hope, it turned out, as the girl's already large eyes grew even larger (or maybe it only seemed that way as she tried to shrink deeper into her cloak) but she didn't rise from the bench. "I saw what you did," she repeated, dropping her gaze before meeting Callista's again determinedly. "To that ship. The captain says you're a fire mage, but I know you're not."
The warlock had never had any particular love of children, especially nosy ones, and very especially ones she suspected were about to lecture her on the evils of unrestrained magic. Her eyes flicked to the book the girl had dropped so vehemently onto the table – Compendium Pyromancia, a mages' sixth-year textbook. Callista had studied it herself, briefly, before her expulsion for meddling with demons. "Yes, which means I can't help you with your homework. Go pester someone else."
The girl shifted uncomfortably on the bench, but the stubborn lines of her jaw didn't relax. "Can you read demonic?"
Oh, Twisting Nether, this was worse than a self-righteous speech. She narrowed her eyes, examining the girl's book more closely, and finally caught a weak breath of fel magic. Illusioned, though not well enough. "The enchantment on that is failing," she observed irrelevantly. If the girl was too inexperienced to read whatever spell she was trying to cast, she was almost certainly too inexperienced to be messing with it anyway.
"I know it is," the girl said, still fidgeting. "But I can't help it, it's not mine."
Callista raised a brow, causing her to squirm even more.
"The spell isn't mine, I mean. The book is. Please, I'm trying to learn."
"Whatever you want with demons, it's probably not worth it. Throw that thing overboard before one of your magisters does it for you. And tosses you after it." Resigned to the fact she wouldn't be finishing her letter until she shooed this girl away, Callista screwed the top back onto her inkwell and seared the damp ink from her quill nib with a twitch of her fingers.
The girl scowled. "How can you say that after what I saw you do."
Dishonestly, that's how. But just because Callista didn't regret her choices didn't mean she'd recommend them to children. She snorted. "Burning a pile of dead wood isn't much of a show of power."
"It is when you make a firestorm to do it," she said, watching her suspiciously.
Alright, so maybe she had used a little overkill. But there had been undead on that ship, and the necromancy that animated them wouldn't fail if the bodies were just singed; she'd needed to annihilate them. And so she had. "A mage could've conjured a better one." And that captain wouldn't have had fits over it.
The girl crossed her thin arms over her chest. "I don't want to conjure a firestorm. I want to kill demons."
"Kill demons?" Callista echoed in a mixture of amusement and disbelief. "You do know what warlocks do."
Annoyance flashed over the girl's face, or maybe it was just the shadow of her hood in the swinging lamplight. "You have power over them. You can enslave them, and that makes them easier to kill."
Callista laughed, intentionally making the sound unpleasant. "Does it now?" She wasn't sure where this girl was getting her ideas, but she had best abandon them before she learned the truth through nasty experience. "Do you know what the problem is with leashes? They only work when they're held at both ends."
The girl scowled uncertainly at her, sensing a trap. "But only one end has the power."
Callista scoffed again. "You've never seen a big dog drag a serving boy through the mud? Why do you want to kill demons anyway?" She had a dim view of demon-slaying as a hobby even for people who were good at it, if they were doing it for anything but the coin. Trying to exterminate the Burning Legion by killing demons one by one was like trying to empty the ocean with a teacup.
Undeterred, the girl continued to stare at her with her arms crossed obstinately. "If I tell you, will you help me?"
"Probably not."
The girl made a face, unsure whether to take that seriously. "My brother died in Ashenvale forest," she said after a moment. "During the war. Satyrs killed him." She intentionally kept her voice hard, but the awkward stiffness in her expression betrayed her grief anyway.
Oh, plaguing hells. Callista hated touchy scenes. She was terrible at finding the right thing to say, something she found strangely uncomfortable considering that in normal conversation she often said the exact wrong thing on purpose. She eyed the girl skeptically. "Then I'm sure he'd be thrilled to know you're trying to bargain with demons."
"Not bargain!" the girl said, bristling. "I want to – "
"Enslave them, I know," Callista interrupted. "But the first thing you learn about enslaving demons, at least if you want to live very long, is how to pick your battles. Otherwise you'll be too tired to fight the important ones, and then you might find that leash you're holding wrapped around your neck. Just because a demon's a slave doesn't mean it stops acting like what it is."
The girl seemed to chew on that, but only for a moment before her stubborn glower returned. "I'm not going to – "
"Oh, save it," Callista said, toying irritably with the feather of her quill. "I don't know you, and I don't care what you do or why. Or what you tell yourself about why. Go join the Argus Wake for all it matters to me, but don't expect me to help."
The girl's mouth fell open slightly at such a blunt dismissal, but she snapped it shut once she noticed and an angry flush rose in her cheeks. Standing (finally), she swept her book off the table. "My name's Dinah," she said. "Now you know."
She whirled off, exit marred only a little when her cloak snagged on a splinter in the table and she had to tug it free.
Callista repressed a snort as she stalked away. Had she been so dramatic at that age? Probably. Very likely she'd been worse. Thank Light and Shadow she'd never had to deal with herself.
"Why did you discourage her?"
She jumped, knocking over her inkwell, as Vorthaal's heavily-accented voice rumbled from above her right shoulder. The draenei moved very lightly for an eight-foot-tall armored creature with enormous hooves.
Righting the inkwell, which had fortunately remained closed, she twisted around to look at him. "Tw-Holy Light, don't do that!"
Tail swishing in a gesture she imagined was sheepish, he offered her a smile. "My apologies. I did not mean to offend, I was only curious."
"No, it's alright, you just startled me." She cocked her head, brushing a stray lock of hair back behind her ear as she eyed him. How long had he been listening? "Do you really think I should've encouraged her?"
Purple crystals pulsed gently at his pauldrons and the center of his breastplate, set in hammered metal thicker than her hand. Nether, except for the choice of colors he really did look like an eredar. "Of course not," he said. "It is a very narrow path you walk when you bargain with man'ari. But it is a path you have chosen, and you do not seem to regret it."
"No, I don't," Callista said. "But just because I'm happy with my choices doesn't mean they've all been good."
"You have been lucky," he said, narrowing his bright white eyes speculatively on her face.
The close regard made her uncomfortable, but she was too used to the feeling to squirm. "Not just luck, I hope," she said, vaguely nettled by the implication. "But it helps. And 'Be lucky' is hardly useful advice."
"No, it is not," he agreed.
Silence followed his words. With Dinah's abrupt departure, they were the only two passengers left in the galley. The last glow of sunset had faded behind the portholes, now nothing but circles of inky blackness, and though lanterns still burned in the galley, a dwarf with a long cork-handled snuffer was edging around the room and dousing each one.
"The sun is gone, and it seems it is time to retire, yes?" Vorthaal said finally, watching him. The draenei was even more imposing in profile, the half-light emphasizing the bony ridges on his nose and the tendrils snaking down from his chin.
"So it seems," Callista said. She wondered what he'd made of their conversation, gathering up her writing supplies and still mostly blank parchment and following him as he made his way out of the galley. The draenei's tolerance surprised her, especially from a paladin. He had better reason to hate warlocks than anyone aboard, even Luciel, yet he showed her far less hostility. Odd, considering her own probably obvious discomfort in his presence.
She found herself strangely glad of him now, however. They walked the unlit hall alone, and, on this night at least, The Fortitude seemed to her an unfriendly place. Pitch blackness and lonely corridors, the sigh of waves and the groan of straining wood. She mentally scolded herself for her sudden fear of the harmless dark. Probably that scene on deck earlier – all those ghastly plague-eaten corpses staggering through the mist – was preying on her nerves. She'd walked without hesitation in much more dangerous places.
All the same, she felt a foolish stab of relief when Wynda opened the door to her knock.
"Ach, I was wondering where you went," she said, opening it further to spill a golden wedge of light into the corridor.
"Just writing a letter. Well, trying to," Callista amended as Wynda snorted at her pristine piece of parchment.
Vorthaal dipped his head courteously at the two women. When he straightened again, the ridges that climbed from his forehead almost scraped the ceiling. "Dream in the Light."
Callista thought that was rather unlikely in her case, but she appreciated the sentiment anyway. "And you."
His soft hoofbeats faded down the corridor as Wynda closed the door behind them.
She wasn't sure what woke her, but it wasn't the sun. Opening her eyes groggily in the unrelieved darkness of her room, she pulled her quilt closer around her shoulders and rolled over so she could see out the porthole. The fog that had clung to the glass earlier had dissipated and cold pinpricks of starlight glittered in the sky. Wynda's soft breathing floated up from the lower bunk, slow and even with sleep.
Yawning, Callista rolled back over and shut her eyes, trying to recapture her pleasant drowsiness. Probably she just wasn't used yet to going to bed with the sun. In Stormwind, she often stayed up late into the night, practicing spells or carousing or doing any number of things best tried in darkness, but on this ship there was little to do after sunset. She was sure she just needed to adjust.
Even so, a niggling sense of unease fouled her efforts to relax back into sleep. Her heartbeats came fast despite the comforting stillness of her room, and she somehow found her fingers tangled tight in her sheets. When she unclenched them the fabric was damp with sweat.
Silently berating herself for foolishness even as she did it, she quested outward with her magic, searching for anything awry. She closed her eyes, hiding the green glow that would've risen in them in case Wynda woke up to be alarmed, but after a moment it faded anyway. There was nothing there, of course. She hadn't really expected to find demons miles out to sea.
Throwing an arm over her eyes, she shifted deeper into her warm nest of blankets, cursing the way her ears pricked at every night noise of the ship. The creak of wood, the slap of water against the hull, she swore she could even hear the scratch of canvas against the spars high above. Clearly she wasn't cut out for sailing.
Something thumped out in the corridor.
Last tendrils of sleep banished, Callista stiffened, ears straining, even as she continued to scold herself. So what if that wasn't just some sailor dropping a bundle? What did she expect to find on this crate that she couldn't maul as easily as thinking?
The idea wasn't as comforting as it usually was.
Scritch, scratch.
Pause.
Scratch. Scratch.
The thump didn't repeat itself, but that curious furtive scraping continued. Canvas against the spars, indeed.
Breathing a low hiss, Callista sat up and found herself frozen with dread. Suddenly, she knew – knew, with the same certainty that told her night followed sunset and fire would burn – that there was something in the room.
She hunched down against her pillow, heart hammering in her ears and eyes straining futilely against the dark. Inky shadows coiled along the floor, shelter for things with long teeth and pitted eyes, and didn't she know better than anyone that such creatures were real? Listening to the ragged gasp of her own breath in the silence, the urge to simply curl up against the headboard to wait for dawn was very strong. If she didn't move, she would be safe...
Startled by her own thought, her eyes narrowed briefly against the dark. Safe? Would she be? Why? A small suspicious corner of her mind stirred awake to struggle against the terror, but it was so hard to think about anything but weakness. Like her thoughts were being shoved down some claustrophobic tunnel with nothing but fear at its end.
Being shoved. Yes, that was exactly what it felt like. And there was a certain familiarity to the feeling, flashes of a dark corridor on a strange world, artificial terror and the sardonic sneer of a dreadlord...
Oh, she didn't think so.
Fear magic was a nasty enough trick even from the other end. And Callista didn't like being steered.
Holding on to that flare of defiance, she slid silently out from her covers until she could rest her bare feet on the first rung of the bunk ladder. Easing her weight onto it to avoid the groan of wood, she climbed down, pausing at the bottom to take a few deep breaths and still her shaking hands. A particularly loud creak almost sent her scrambling upwards again, but she snarled viciously at herself until the fear ebbed.
Deep shadows crevassed the floor, but all of them were still.
She glanced over at the lump Wynda made under the quilt, toying with the idea of waking her, but no, not yet. If she turned out to be wrong, she wasn't about to have some paladin chuckling at her for being afraid of the dark.
Slipping the two short steps to the door, she laid a palm against the heavy wood and leaned to the peephole with breath held, swearing silently when her trembling almost made her knock her eye against it.
The scratching sound was louder with her ear almost to the boards, but for a moment all she saw was blackness. Had someone painted over the peephole?
Then the dark faded, and she was glad she'd held her breath because it meant she had no air to make a sound. Tattered grey flaps, like moth-eaten curtains but strangely moist, a flash of something white, a coil of rope on the floor on the other side of the corridor…it took her a moment to realize she was staring into the decayed cheek of a ghoul.
She stifled the urge to leap away from the door. Twisting Nether, the thing was right there! How hadn't it smelled her?
Lank hair flashed before the peephole as it lurched past, clawed toenails scraping against the floorboards. Movement across the corridor caught her attention as another ghoul staggered into view, the milky ghostlight of its eyes shining in the dark.
This wasn't right. Where had they come from? Why hadn't anyone raised an alarm?
Backing quietly away from the door, Callista leaned close over Wynda's ear, hand hovering near the other woman's mouth in case she woke too loudly. "Wynda!" she hissed.
The dwarf stirred with a groan, tousled red hair emerging farther from the blankets, but she didn't open her eyes. "For Light's sake – "
"Shhhh! Wake up and be quiet!" Callista rasped. "There's ghouls in the corridor."
That took a moment to penetrate Wynda's haze of sleep, but once it did her eyes flew open and she grunted in disbelief. She rolled over to face Callista, throwing off her covers. "What?" she said, voice barely above a whisper this time. "How many? What are you on about, lass, we left them all behind!"
"Only two that I could see, but there may be more. We sailed pretty close to some of the ones in the water, maybe they managed to grab on under the hull." That relentless fear was still there, slinking beneath the surface of her self-control, but the presence of another living creature helped. Callista rummaged quietly through her pack as she spoke, unfolding her black and red set of robes and pulling them on over the shift she'd worn to sleep. She didn't bother with socks or calfskin leggings, yanking her boots on over her bare feet. She'd just have to remember not to go up any ladders first, assuming anyone even cared about such things during a ghoul invasion.
In typical fashion, Wynda had gone to sleep in her leathers, putting her a step ahead of the half-clad warlock. "I believe you, but if they're out there why can't I hear screaming? And why do I feel like there's spiders running up my spine even though I haven't even seen the fiends?"
Callista shrugged, knotting her tangled hair up and away from her face. "I was right up against the door before and they didn't seem to notice." That was odd, but she thought the dwarf's second question was the better one. Callista's mouth was dry and her heart raced in something near terror, far out of proportion to what the sight of two ghouls should have caused. There was foul magic in this for certain, but whose? Those rotted corpses outside couldn't possibly have enough mind left for spellwork.
Wynda hefted her thick silver breastplate easily, ducking her head through and then tightening the straps with practiced jerks. "Then there's probably more mischief than the two you saw about, but we'll get to the bottom of it starting with them." She pulled on her armored boots and gauntlets and lifted her warhammer from where it rested against the bedpost, golden light already welling up from its inscriptions. "I'll go first and you follow close. Finish it quietly. Don't want anyone sticking his head out the door to get it clawed off."
That sounded fine to Callista, who wasn't about to quibble over the privilege of leaping first into a Scourge-infested hallway. She gave the pouch of soulshards linked to her belt a tug, checking the binding. "Alright. Let's go."
Wynda rested her hammer against her shoulder, pausing to peer though the peephole and grunting in disgust before turning the doorknob carefully. She slipped through, and Callista heard the wet crunch of steel hitting bone before she'd even followed her out into the passage.
She ducked out at her heels, iridescent shadow coursing through her fingers as she hunted for targets.
One ghoul already down, head crushed to pulp by a hammer swing, and two more near the stairs whirling to face Wynda. The whole engagement was strangely quiet; no moans or snarls from the undead, no battle cries from the paladin, just the light thunk of Wynda's boots on the wood as she stalked towards them.
Checking once over her shoulder for an ambush (not that ghouls usually ambushed, but something had been off about this fight from the start) she loosed the spell she'd gathered into a seething mass of dark tendrils that rocketed towards the ghoul on the right, knocking it back like a rag doll just as it sprung for Wynda. After the helplessness she'd felt earlier, she found the act immensely satisfying.
The other ghoul leaped as well, hunching towards the paladin in an unnatural bestial lope before barreling into her. Its claws and broken teeth scrabbled across her breastplate as it sought her throat, but she grabbed it by the scruff of its moldy tunic and threw it from her. She edged around its thrashing body, trying to gain enough room in the narrow corridor for a finishing swing.
The ghoul mired in Callista's spell writhed on the floor, the shadowy ropes that bound it corroding through rotten skin already seared down to bone in some places. Not good enough – the magic that animated these corpses was a product of Shadow too, and it was resisting her. Gritting her teeth, power flared through her and the ropes constricted, the ghoul falling still as its skull burst like a grape.
Luckily, Callista was out of spatter range, but Wynda wasn't and she grimaced as black ichor slashed across her knees. "Muradin's beard, I think I liked it better when you burned them." She nudged the crushed corpse of the last ghoul with her hammer, now blazing with light, but it didn't twitch.
Callista flicked her eyes around the corridor, still skittish under the last vestiges of that strange fear, but saw nothing stir. "Me too, but do you know what burns even better than ghouls?"
For a moment Wynda frowned, then she barked a humorless laugh, gaze skimming across the varnished wood that surrounded them. "Aye, I take your point. Muck it is, then. Now, let's get the others out of their rooms, no reason we should have all the fun."
Callista was turning to do just that when a frightened yell shattered the silence of the corridor.
She spun to see a man leaning half out of his room, eyes wide as he stared down at the dripping corpse that had fetched up against his door.
"It's alright, lad," Wynda said, keeping her voice low and reassuring as she moved towards him. "Just go back inside and shut your door. We'll take care of – "
"What's going on?" he demanded shakily, cutting her off. His gaze was still pinned to the ghoul's caved-in head. "What happened to it?"
Doors slammed open up and down the corridor as heads emerged to gawk at the commotion. Shrieks rang out as passengers noticed the gore strewn over the planks, and the murmur of conversation rose towards a terrified roar.
"Everyone calm down!" Wynda shouted, trying to chivvy a pair of gnomes back into their room. "Go back inside and don't open your doors!"
She was almost universally ignored as some of the braver passengers began milling out into the passageway still in their nightclothes, cries for someone to find the captain floating above the din.
Ander and Nathanial chose this moment to stumble out of their room, both clad only in loose-fitting pants and rubbing sleep out of their eyes.
"What's happening?" Nathanial called to Wynda.
Ander made the mistake of taking an extra step over the threshold, putting his bare foot down in a congealing puddle of decayed blood and almost stumbling over the dead ghoul. His eyes widened, and for a moment Callista thought he was about to yell as loudly as any passenger in the hallway, but then his nose wrinkled and he began shaking his foot off violently. "Ewww. Who didn't mop."
"Don't mess around, lad," Wynda said impatiently. "Help me get these people back inside!"
Buffeted by bodies and noise, Callista began shoving her way towards the stairwell that led down into the hold, partly out of a vague idea that there might be more ghouls but mostly because she was tired of dodging elbows. The thought of being conscripted by Wynda to herd a bunch of shrieking passengers back into their pens like cattle was extremely unappealing. She'd already had enough of this night.
A hand closed around her arm, and she spun around to snap at its owner until she recognized his face. Sir Aren looked down at her still squint-eyed with sleep, a haze of golden stubble on his chin and cheeks. "Callista?"
She looked him over, taking in the rumpled state of his thin shirt and the disheveled way his hair fell across his forehead, suddenly acutely aware of the warm pressure of his fingers against her arm. His sword belt and scabbard were flung incongruously over one shoulder. "Put some clothes on," she advised, tugging away in consternation at her own reaction.
He blinked and glanced down as though expecting to find he'd forgotten his pants, releasing her arm. "What?"
Callista shrugged, mingled relief and disappointment at the broken contact quickly transmuting into annoyance. "I suppose if you want to fight Scourge in your pajamas, that's really up to you…"
"What are you…" His brow creased, then he paled as an eddy in the crowd revealed the crushed remains of a ghoul. "Light," he muttered. He shook his head, gaze hardening. "Where's Wynda and the others? Has anyone seen Captain Verner?"
"Trying to get all those people back into their rooms, and no, no one – "
The rest of her words were lost as the background murmur of voices rose in pitch, shrieks building into a wave. People jostled blindly past her, and though some had the presence of mind to jump into open rooms and slam the doors shut, many continued past her to flee up onto the deck. Which was, Callista suspected, a very bad idea.
"Hey! Don't go up there!" she shouted, only to be completely ignored.
Sir Aren must have been of much the same mind, because she watched him try to grab the arm of a stumbling dwarf woman only to earn a set of knuckles to the ribs for his concern.
A man in an embroidered nightshirt tripped, landing almost on Callista's boots, and she narrowed her eyes. Oh, honestly now, this was ridiculous.
She flicked her hand in a terse gesture, magic flaring. A wall of black fire that rippled blue at its edges sprang up across the stairwell, causing the nearest passengers to skid back on their heels.
The flame was almost entirely an illusion, just a twisting of shadows, but they didn't know that. She watched in satisfaction as the man in the nightshirt looked over his shoulder, then to the blazing stairwell, then yelped and scrambled on hands and knees into an unlocked room. Much more sensible.
Sir Aren flinched at the sudden dark conflagration, then seemed to realize what she'd done (the planks beneath the fire weren't even singed) and nodded to himself. "Follow me!" he called to her, buckling the belt around his rumpled shirt and half drawing his sword from its scabbard.
Typical paladin. Fighting zombies in his underclothes it was. For a moment she considered taking point, since the enchantments woven into her robes would provide far better protection than Sir Aren's thin linen, but she was hopeless at hand to hand fighting anyway. Instead she fell in behind him as he shoved through the press of passengers still looking for safety, craning her head to try to see what had frightened them. Not that she couldn't guess. Ghastly moans and the ring of steel echoed from further down the passageway.
They broke through quickly, most of the crowd having abandoned the hallway, and Callista caught a brief glimpse of a forest of broken, bloodstained teeth beneath unseeing eyes before a flash of blue light obliterated her vision.
She cursed and stumbled against the wall, rubbing at the bright spots swimming in her eyes as shouts and pained wails clashed around her.
Luckily the blindness was short-lived, and when the arcane glow faded she found a glittering wall of ice blocking the corridor from floor to ceiling. Frost rimed the walls around it and her breath came in white pants of mist.
"Luciel!" Nathanial called, shouting through hands cupped against the crystalline barrier. "Luciel!"
"She's on the wrong side, you idiot!" Ander cried, whirling with a snarl on a man clad in wrinkled yellow robes.
Sir Aren stepped forward to grab him around both forearms, arresting his leap at the alarmed-looking mage. "Hold, Ander!" he said, a steel in his voice Callista had never heard before. "What's happened here?"
Wynda stepped forward, black blood spattered in an arc across her breastplate and cheek, expression grim. "Ghouls came up through the galley corridor, at least a dozen. We tried to get there in time, but…" She shook her head, wiping gore from her face with the back of a gauntlet. "Too many frightened people. This mage here raised the barrier, but not everyone was on the right side. Including Luciel." She shot the yellow-robed man a hard look at that.
Sir Aren nodded, sliding his sword into its scabbard but letting a hand rest on the hilt. "What's your name, mage? Can you undo your ice?"
The mage was a tall, gangly sort, hair streaked with grey, and when he raised a hand to tug down the sleeve of one arm Callista noticed the Academy signet ring on his finger. "I am Magister Sabrice. And no, no, I'm afraid the magic doesn't work like that."
A muscle in Sir Aren's jaw tightened, but he didn't press him further. "Callista, can you – "
"Not without burning down this ship." She only had half an eye on the paladin, unable to tear her gaze away from the translucent plug of ice. Dark shapes lurched in its depths, but the movements were too unfocused to be a battle. Nothing on that side could possibly be alive anymore.
Magister Sabrice seemed to notice her for the first time, eyes narrowing on the runes sewn into her robes, and his posture stiffened. "The black flames were yours, then. I should've guessed."
"If I may interrupt." Vorthaal stepped forward, face lit by the purple-tinged glow from the crystal head of his warhammer. He must've shared Wynda's habit of sleeping in his leathers because he was clad in them now, a small pendant of wrought silver and green gems that Callista assumed was enchanted hanging against his chest. "Luciel is a warrior, and she will not expect aid we cannot give. We should use this time to prepare, because there will be more."
"Sound advice," Sir Aren said, but from the way his eyes lingered on the frost-veined ice it was obvious that the idea of leaving Luciel to her fate, however necessary, didn't sit easy. "Wynda. Callista. Stay here with the magister while the rest of us – "
"With all due respect, I can't stay here," the mage said, tugging absently at his sleeve again as he watched the shadows move behind the frozen barrier. "My students will – "
"Be perfectly safe inside their room," Sir Aren finished for him. "I won't ask you to stay long, just until the rest of us are ready."
The mage still didn't look pleased, but with Wynda edging casually up to his side to lean against her hammer he had few places to go. "Very well," he said sourly.
"Thank you." Sir Aren's gaze flicked around the corridor, halting briefly on Nathanial and Ander's piecemeal armor and Vorthaal's leathers before he turned. "Come on. We'll arm ourselves properly and then split up to look for the crew."
"Why not have her do it?" Magister Sabrice asked sharply, jabbing a finger at Callista. "Don't you have an Eye, girl?"
Startled, Callista narrowed her eyes at the mage's long pale finger pointing at her chest. "Actually, yes." She could, in fact, conjure an Eye of Kilrogg, and she'd intended to use it, but it was an odd thing for an instructor at the Academy of Arcane Arts to be familiar with. "A kind of scrying," she explained in response to Sir Aren's blank look. "I can try it, but I'll be blind to anything happening in front of me."
"Don't worry your head, lass," Wynda said, clapping her on the arm with a gauntleted hand hard enough to make her wince. "Anything nasty pops up and I'll give you a nudge."
"Thanks for that," Callista said wryly as she rubbed her stinging arm.
"Alright then," Sir Aren said. His eyes met hers just long enough to make her skin prickle oddly before he jerked his gaze away, seeming to study a line of ichor trickling down the woodgrain perilously close to his bare toes. "See what you can see. We'll be back soon." He turned then, nudging his belt back up with his knuckles (his linen pants didn't have loops and the weight of the scabbard kept dislodging it), and padded down the hall with Vorthaal and the Redbranches in tow.
Resisting the urge to follow his retreating back (and what was Sir Aren to her anyway, she'd never liked paladins) Callista took one last look around the corridor before she began her spell, marking for the first time the copious smears of blood on the floor. There were no bodies to be seen, however, and she assumed they all must be locked behind that glistening core of ice. Poor unlucky fools. At least the screaming had stopped.
Green mist drifted between her cupped palms and began to coalesce as she focused, spinning into a glowing chartreuse ball. She couldn't help but notice Magister Sabrice's stare fastened to her spellwork, and met his eyes squarely, unappreciative of the attention. "You have quite an interest in fel magic for an Academy mage."
He jumped a little at the observation, pulling more insistently at his sleeve, but recovered quickly. "Unless I'm much mistaken, I could say the same for you, young lady," he said sternly. "Oh, I don't know who you are," he continued, waving a hand dismissively at her surprised expression, "but that curtain of black flame…illusory, of course…" He examined her face more closely, as though searching for some familiar feature despite his last statement. "One of Jessera's tricks. Not that I mean to impugn her by implying she dabbles in the fel, because no, no, of course she wouldn't. But the principles are the same, yes? You studied under her once."
He had her there. Callista was thrown off-balance enough by the sudden reminder of her old instructor to almost lose focus on her spell, the sphere of green mist wobbling before righting itself in its spin. "Not since I was fifteen."
He clucked his tongue at her. "She'd be disappointed at what you've become, I think."
Callista scoffed, collecting herself once again. She didn't like to be reminded of her mage training, memories tinged as they were with embarrassment and old guilt, but she'd set that path aside long ago. "Yes, she looked quite annoyed the day she expelled me…"
"Oh." He didn't seem to have much to say to that, which was just as well because she'd finished her conjuring and the switch of perspective it caused when she blinked was distracting.
Clearing the last of the irritation from her mind, she closed her eyes, switching her vision to that of the sphere of green light nestled in her palms. She saw the ebbing black flames at the mouth of the stairwell over the tips of her own fingers, then the hard glitter of starlight as she sent the Eye up above decks with a flick of a thought.
There was no blood on the stairs, but it lay up top in blotches that gleamed with silver moonlight, already congealing around ragged lumps she didn't care to examine too closely. All those people who had fled upwards…slain now, obviously. But where were the bodies? Callista didn't like any of the possible answers.
She directed her Eye on a quick lap of the deck, rolling it to stare up into the rigging and the billowing forest of sails.
No movement anywhere. No shambling undead, but no crew either…which meant no one was sailing this ship. Callista swore inwardly, hoping they'd already cut far enough away from shore to avoid reefs. Gut twisting with suspicion, she sent the Eye on a quick pass near the lifeboats, but all still appeared to be lashed down beneath their tarps. So, where were the sailors? Her mind jumped queasily back to all that blood.
The Eye completed its circuit as it returned to the forecastle stairs, hovering in place as Callista hesitated. Captain's quarters, or try the hold? The hold was larger; she'd start there.
The bright moonlight dimmed to black as her Eye descended the stairs, but it didn't matter. Magical vision didn't need it. She nudged the Eye up to the ceiling and then forward, slowly because she'd never ventured down below the passenger quarters and she didn't want to miss a cross-passage, alert for the milky shine of ghostlit eyes.
Nothing to see but sealed crates and stillness.
Wait…one of them must have splintered. Pieces of wood littered the floor, and beyond it she saw dark stains on the planks. Were the undead raiding the cargo? That didn't make sense. They were dead. What could they possible need? Her Eye edged closer, knotted wood gliding past below.
A flash of algae-streaked bone, claws gouging at her face –
Callista yelped and stumbled backwards against slick ice, hands scrabbling for purchase as her vision flickered back to the blood-smeared corridor. Wynda whipped her head around at the noise, concern on her face, while Magister Sabrice simply looked ill.
"Plaguing hells," she muttered, righting herself and giving her head a sharp shake. She rubbed her palms against her robes, trying to chafe back the warmth the glacial barrier had stolen. That ghoul's strike had dispelled her Eye, and oh, that wasn't right at all. No mindless undead should've even noticed her scrying. All they cared about was the warm reek of flesh, and an Eye of Kilrogg had none of that. No, this had nothing to do with hunger.
Something was down there…and now it knew that she was here, too.