The Restless Shore: The Wilds

by James P. Davis

  The various pains of his injuries seemed distant and unimportant, minor details compared to the icy ache in his stomach, the bitter-sweet taste that filled his mouth, and the strange sense of calm in his arms and legs. His hands did not tremble as he raised them to rub at his eyes and splash water across his face. His legs did not falter as he slid his weight forward and slowly stood upright, studying the walls of the basement as if seeing them for the first time. Though his half-elf eyesight had always served him well in dim light, he had never before seen such intricate detail, even in the deep shadows of the chamber’s far corners. Amazed, he caught a glimpse of his own sword beneath the water’s surface and picked it up, marveling at the flash of wet steel before returning it to its sheath.

  As if in a trance or a dream, he placed his hands over his stomach, and though a strange need still tugged at the back of his mind, it seemed to have little to do with the silkroot and his addiction. A pang of nausea gripped him as he recalled the bloody flower and his own unbidden hunger as he had devoured each fleshy petal, but it passed quickly as a soft gust of air hummed across his delicately pointed ears.

  The faint strains of a familiar melody filled his mind, long chiming notes accompanied by a female voice. The song had indeed returned to him as Sefir had said, a pleasant summoning that he could not deny, though it did not command. He followed it to the bottom of the stairs, curious as to the strange will that urged him onward. The singing intensified at the top of the stairs, and he remembered his previous sense of urgency, the anger, pain, and bloodlust that had driven him to attack a member of the mysterious Choir.

  A part of him recoiled at the blasphemous thought, but he forced it away, confused by his sudden disgust.

  Sounds of battle drew him through the kitchen, and he peered into the gloom outside. Ghaelya and Uthalion battled against Sefir, though their struggles seemed awkward and stilted as the singer batted away their clumsy blades with an inhuman quickness, assaulting them with his powerful voice. His nearly boneless body twisted unnaturally, long whiplike tentacles sprouting from his pale-blue flesh—a monster seemingly more suited to water than land.

  Brindani instinctively assumed a stealthy crouch and crept slowly toward the singer’s back, pausing briefly to squeeze his eyes shut and shake his head, conflicted by a sudden sense of fear. Sefir’s voice rang like a hammer against his skull, like the voice of a god warning him to stay his traitorous blade. But the beguiling song on the air grew stronger at the sight of Ghaelya, banishing his doubt.

  The genasi spun and dodged, almost dancing to the rhythm of the song in his mind. He swayed to the sound of it, studying the writhing form of Sefir, somehow knowing when and where to strike, what he should wait for, but not understanding why. Gooseflesh rose painfully on his arms and neck in the singer’s presence, though he paid it no mind; the sweet scent of the red bloom cleared his mind of all but the task at hand.

  He followed Ghaelya’s feints and lunges. The music built toward a crescendo, a swift momentum that could not last, ringing like a thousand arcs of lightning through his brain until a flash of steel called his sword to strike. Their swords scraped against one another as they pierced Sefir’s chest, one from the front and the other from the back, buried in the singer’s left lung.

  Sefir spun around in shock as they withdrew their swords, hissing through his fang-filled maw. His rising voice, ruined by a gurgling cough of sweet blood, was no more powerful than a babbling brook. The singer fell to one knee, spitting blood as Ghaelya and Uthalion fell upon him, viciously bashing him down as Brindani stepped back, shaking his head in horror despite the sense of victory that stole over him.

  He shivered as the song faded, leaving him alone and frightened by his conflicting emotions. Terrified, he spat the sweet taste of the red flower from his mouth, and he wondered what it had done to him even as he absently scratched an itching patch of skin on the back of his neck.

  10 Mirtul, The Year of the Ageless One

  (1479 DR)

  Caidris, Akanûl

  Rain dripped into Ghaelya’s eyes as whistling wind cooled her skin to a color of watery seafoam. Thunder pounded in time to her bloody fists as she hammered the twitching body of Sefir. His pale skin was tough and rubbery, covered in a network of long arcing veins that pulsed weakly as she bruised her knuckles and took grim satisfaction in the monster’s gasping breaths. His roping tentacles, once so strong and constricting, wrapped feebly around her wrists and flopped against her legs as she knelt in the mud at his side.

  “Where is she? What have you done to her?” she yelled fiercely, each question accompanied by another blow to his stomach or his bleeding face. The constant beat of her fury numbed her aching knuckles.

  His only answer was a bubbling stream of bloody bile, a pink froth that squeezed through his fangs and ran down his cheeks. Life was yet within him, and she was determined to extract every moment of it from him.

  Uthalion paced nervously nearby, his sword still drawn as his eyes darted in all directions, watching for something. Brindani had wandered some distance away, cleaning his sword and averting his gaze as Ghaelya violently interrogated the singer.

  “Leave him,” Vaasurri said and laid a hand upon her shoulder. She roughly shrugged it away, not bothering to spare the killoren the withering stare that crossed her face as she landed another punch in Sefir’s gut.

  “He’s as good as dead,” Uthalion shouted above the thunder. “And he isn’t alone! We need to—”

  “No!” she shouted back. “He knows! He told me!”

  “I’m not disputing that!” Uthalion replied, kneeling down and catching her fist in an iron grip. “But we need to leave this place! Now!”

  She narrowed her blue-green stare and matched his stone gaze until he released her hand and stood with an exasperated sigh. He sheathed his sword and limped away, motioning for Vaasurri to join him as he turned to the southern road out of town. Gritting her teeth and rising to one knee, Ghaelya spared the singer one last glance and caught his wide pale eye staring back at her.

  “Not dead yet … child,” Sefir rasped, the effort of speaking leaving him gasping for air and coughing. The others turned, alarmed as a weak hand clawed lightly at Ghaelya’s boot. “I was chosen … to bring you home … to Tohrepur.”

  Ghaelya knelt again, suffering his touch if only to keep him speaking, to glean what she could from him before leaving him to die.

  “What have you done to her?” she asked, forcing herself to remain calm and clear.

  Sefir arched his head back, a scratchy sound like laughter escaping his tortured throat, a haunting noise that grated painfully in her ears.

  “I do naught but that which my Lady bids,” he answered at length, pausing as a fit of choking coughs left him unable to speak for several breaths. “No one lays hand upon your sister. Only you may have … that glorious honor …”

  “You said—” Ghaelya began angrily, then caught herself, clenching her fists. “You said she was in pain.”

  Sefir’s twisted smile faded, his morbid mirth draining as he regarded her. His remaining pale orb turned in its scarred socket to look upon her with a solemn seriousness.

  “Oh yes …” he replied, sighing and sounding as though he might weep in a sudden ecstasy. “Her pain shames all who gaze upon her … Her blessings outnumber even those of the Choir … as will yours … when you are delivered … upon her restless shore …”

  Ghaelya’s breath came quickly as she stood. She could not tear her gaze from the dying thing before her or banish his words from her mind. Yet she wanted nothing more than to take back her question, to erase the sight of his twisted body from her mind so that she could still doubt her quiet fears.

  “You failed,” she said simply. “And you will die here, a failure.”

  Again came the wheezing, horrifying laugh as Sefir writhed in the mud, craning his head as though looking for someone.

  “No child,” he said, a gurgling chuckle still in his throat. “I ha
ve delivered you … as sure as I die … our Lady’s will and song … shall walk at your side …”

  She puzzled over his words and slowly backed away. The others stood by, listening to her strange conversation with furrowed, thoughtful expressions.

  “Kill it,” Brindani said suddenly and turned away. Lightning ripped through the clouds, the rain growing heavier in a resounding peal of thunder as the half-elf wrapped his cloak tight and headed south.

  Uthalion and Vaasurri waited a moment then turned away as well, leaving her to quietly contemplate the mutilated man’s mysterious claims. His broken body’s twitching movements slowed, and his jaw went slack, though a thin, raspy breath still rattled from between his rows of sharklike teeth. She left him, dying in the mud, and stared at the dark, sweet-scented blood on her sword as she followed the others out of Caidris.

  Uthalion felt strange as they made their cautious way out of the abandoned town. His body felt light, his step too soft in the mud. His arms and legs were unprotected by chain mail or greaves; no shield hung upon his arm. The foul blood so real in his nightmares of the town did not mar his skin, did not grow sticky in between links of chain armor, or gum his eyes shut when he closed them for too long. The storm overhead bore dark shades of blue and gray, coloring everything in azure tones instead of the pall of unending black he had once fought within.

  With each breath he realized he had not been dreaming, that this time Caidris had been real—and that horrors still haunted the places in his nightmares.

  He could not release the tight grip on his sword, and stood ready to draw the blade at the slightest threat. He flinched as Vaasurri or Brindani splashed through a deepening puddle. His heart pounded as he searched the hollowed homes and shadowed stables they passed, knowing with a grim assuredness that they contained more than nesting birds and rats.

  Nothing hurtled from the dark, baring needle teeth and twisted limbs, but he imagined them there all the same.

  He searched obsessively for Khault, or rather the thing Khault had somehow become, but the old farmer was nowhere to be seen. Instinct kept Uthalion on guard, a paranoia that had served him well in years past. With Sefir fallen, Khault might come slithering back to finish the job. A shiver passed through him. Though both of them had been truly hideous, the mutilations of Sefir’s visage seemed almost trivial in comparison to those of the brave, kind farmer who had given strangers shelter and had sacrificed so much.

  The shallow wounds in his leg burned with sweat and exertion, forcing him to measure his long stride. But the pain cleared his mind some and kept him focused on staying alive until Caidris was far at his back.

  The last farm faded to a dim silhouette, and the rain lessened again, rumbling thunder growing softer as the storm traveled north. But Uthalion did not let go of his blade and continually scanned for threats in the tall grass. He paused occasionally, sensing something and holding out his hand to halt the others, lowering it only when he was reassured that danger, if there had been any at all, had passed. He caught a questioning, concerned look in Vaasurri’s eyes, but he ignored it, wordlessly gesturing instead to the path.

  His jaw ached, and he unclenched his teeth, trying to calm his shattered nerves. He had the sense that the world would fall away at any moment, that the nightmare would end, and he would awaken in the Spur, back in the Grove, and Vaasurri would question him about the nightmare. He would jest, avoiding the subject, and try to forget the dream.

  But he hadn’t slept in four days, and the silver ring had not left his finger.

  “We need to stop,” Vaasurri said at his side, and Uthalion flinched at the break in the long awkward silence in which they marched. “We need to rest, and you are bleeding.”

  “Shallow wounds,” he replied numbly. “There’s still some light, such as it is, and we shouldn’t waste it.”

  He glanced at the others, searching for dissent. But Ghaelya and Brindani only trudged along, watching the faint outline of the overgrown path and little else. Quietly he cursed their inattentiveness, shaking his head and ignoring Vaasurri’s solemn stare.

  “You’re not the only one who’s wounded,” Vaasurri pressed, an edge of anger and concern in his voice. “And not all of us can stay awake for tendays on end.”

  “We’re not stopping,” Uthalion said a little louder. “Too far to go, not enough distance behind us.”

  “Distance from Caidris you mean,” the killoren replied.

  “Not now, Vaas. Let it go,” Uthalion grumbled. His eyes remained firmly on the southern horizon as if glued there, drawn like the needle of a compass. He found, after several tries, that he could not look away from it for long. He couldn’t hear the mysterious song, but its constant pull was unmistakable.

  “Fine, keep your secrets,” Vaasurri said and turned off the path, gesturing for Brindani and Ghaelya to follow. “We are stopping. Should you happen to work things out and stop for a moment, perhaps we’ll catch up.”

  Uthalion did stop and turned on the killoren angrily, his sword half drawn and a swift rebuke on his tongue, but he caught himself. He let the unspoken words go and sheathed his sword, staring at the leather bracers on his arms, the tired half-elf and the genasi. The storm was passing, and he was no longer the Captain he’d once been. These were not his soldiers.

  Vaasurri led them to a growth of rock that curled from the ground like the tail of a burrowing dragon. Uthalion cooled his anger somewhat, though he could not quell the sense of eyes spying upon his back, of beasts crawling through the grass waiting for him to let down his guard. It felt as though they were everywhere, and naught could banish them save reaching Tohrepur and dealing with Khault.

  The Choir had been to Airspur at least once, he thought and suppressed a shudder. Might they take my family next?

  He shivered and made his slow way to the little camp, not sparing a glance for the killoren as he climbed the curl of rock, seeking higher ground from which to observe the surrounding area.

  “I’ll take first watch,” he muttered.

  From above he noticed the haunted look on Ghaelya’s face as she cleared an area to lie down, though Brindani, he noted, looked nothing less than a ghost. He pondered this briefly, then looked again to the south, slowly turning the silver ring upon his finger as the muted sun crawled to the western horizon.

  Vaasurri sat quietly by the small fire, rubbing the chill from his arms and keeping a worried eye upon Uthalion until well after sunset. The human seemed as though he’d been hollowed out and filled with something else, bearing little resemblance to the man Vaasurri had known in the Spur. Though Uthalion did eventually tend to the wounds on his leg, it was the wounds of an older conflict that the killoren spied in the blank stare of his friend’s face, in the anxious paranoia that started at every sound.

  Brindani appeared to have fared little better since leaving Caidris. He was pale and wrapping himself tightly in a wet cloak, trembling with something beyond just the cold. At first Vaasurri had suspected the silkroot, but he had witnessed the addictions of mortals in the Feywild—silkroot having been a popular method of easing the fears and inhibitions of those caught in the fey realms—and the half-elf suffered far differently than he recalled.

  The encounter in Caidris had marked both the man and the half-elf in a way that Vaasurri could not fathom, though he suspected both had seen something in Sefir that had been wholly unnatural and yet familiar at the same time. In all his life, even in the fantastic beings of the Feywild, he had never seen anything like the mutilated singer. He had no word for such a thing as Sefir, though he had witnessed sorcerous infections—diseases that affected not only the flesh, but the will and spirit of the infected. Some had worked according to nefarious design; others, occasionally, had spread like wildfire, epidemics attributed to the Spellplague and beasts caught in the terrible blue waves of its chaos.

  He shivered, considering their destination, the strange wolflike dreamers, and the thing called Sefir, only one representative of a group Ghae
lya had called the Choir. Muttering a curse under his breath, he let the first glimmer of doubt cross his mind. Though he’d been well intentioned when he agreed to help, he doubted one city dweller’s ability to survive for so long, surrounded by such nightmares.

  As the idea settled in, darkening his already somber mood, he looked to Uthalion and Brindani. Casually shielding his eyes, he glanced at Ghaelya, dreading what he knew he must attempt. He felt very much alone in that moment, but as the seemingly sole voice of surviving reason, he could not remain silent. Certain that only madness and death would greet them in the ruins of Torehpur, he said what none of them wanted to hear.

  “We should turn back,” he said, forcing the words out and shattering the awkward quiet that enveloped them as surely as the darkness of the chill night air.

  In truth, he spoke only to Ghaelya, his green eyes watching her reaction closely. She said nothing at first, her expression unreadable as he waited. But it was not her voice that first protested.

  “No,” Brindani said, stirring lethargically beneath his cloak, his shadowed eyes reduced to two flickering glints of light in the campfire. “We will not turn back.”

  Vaasurri ignored the half-elf, waiting only for Ghaelya to respond. It was her quest he had agreed to, and he would abandon it only by her word. She blinked and looked down, her hands balled into fists as a mix of emotions crossed her troubled features.

  “We’ve come too far,” Uthalion said from above, glancing down only for a moment before returning his gaze to the south. “Best to just see it through now, stop these … things … If we’re able.”

  Vaasurri glared at the human, wondering what mysterious force had Uthalion in its grip and fearing where it might lead them when all was said and done. He held his tongue for the moment and turned back to the genasi.

  “Ghaelya?” he said, and she flinched as if startled from her thoughts. “You heard what Sefir said and saw what he was—or rather, what he had become. I hate to suggest the worst, but your sister—”