03 - The Hour of Shadows

by C. L. Werner - (ebook by Undead)

  Knew of it, and were determined that the grey seer would never get the chance to use it again!

  Ywain passed through the fence of gnarled trees and thorns which surrounded the Golden Pool. The foliage seemed reluctant to part, responding with a lethargic truculence that she had never encountered before. It was almost as if the guardian trees were frightened to allow her entry.

  The spellweaver stood upon the edge of the black earth, staring out at the circle of amber at the centre of the clearing. Ywain could almost see the dark energies rippling about the pool, the untapped power emanating in response to the Hour of Shadows. It was similar to the awful strength she had sensed swirling about Huskk Gnawbone, but magnified a thousandfold. This was the raw, primordial energy of a volcano, of a typhoon, all locked within the pool. All waiting to be used, shaped by any mage brave enough to claim its might.

  Evil calls out…

  The words of the Warden flashed through Ywain’s mind. Almost as soon as she heard them, they were smothered by a panoply of frightening images. The skaven and the undead running amok through the forest, burning and killing with savage abandon. Thalos, his body broken and bloodied, strewn before Huskk’s feet only to rise again, a lifeless puppet enslaved to the necromancer’s fell will.

  Ywain could not allow such visions to be fulfilled, not while there was any hope they could be stopped. She knew the power locked within the pool was evil, but her convictions were pure. Her purity would allow her to reshape the pool’s magic, force it to a good and noble purpose. The evil locked away for so very long would be compelled to protect the forest. She would save Thalos.

  The spellweaver strode across the barren ground, each step more difficult than the last. Intangible spiderwebs seemed to drag at her, trying to draw her away. Fear and doubt struggled to overwhelm her, to force her to turn back. Always the vision of Thalos lying dead at the feet of Huskk gave her the strength to prevail.

  After what seemed an eternity, Ywain stood at the edge of the amber pit. Here, this close to the Golden Pool, she could feel the eerie emanations rising from it as a slimy coldness that pawed at her flesh and groped at her soul.

  Steeling her resolve, Ywain placed her foot upon the surface of the pool, opening herself to the power rising from the amber pit. Instantly a shock passed through her body. She felt as though she were on fire, burning from within. Aethyric energies blazed through her flesh and spirit, howling and raging like the winds of a tempest. It took every ounce of her willpower to force the crazed malevolence to relent, to subside into currents she could see and understand.

  The Golden Pool beneath her feet was in turmoil, shivering and bucking, shuddering as its essence became amorphous and watery. Like a geyser, the core of the pool exploded upwards, rising high above the clearing in a writhing column of molten amber, dancing and swaying in the starlight, pulsating with a weird melody at once tragic and lascivious.

  The surface of the pool remained solid beneath the spellweaver, borne aloft by the turmoil beneath it. Ywain stared down from the swaying, twisting summit of the sorcerous geyser, seeing the forest spread out below her. How small and inconsequential it looked. How unworthy of the power now flowing through her body, thundering through her soul.

  Ywain railed against the prideful madness. She knew it for the evil force of the pool, and recognizing it for what it was, she bent her will to silencing its temptation. She would use the power of the fulcrum to protect others, not to aggrandize herself.

  At the spellweaver’s thought, the entire column shifted, facing about that she might gaze in the direction of Hawk Heath and the battle she knew was still raging there. Closing her eyes, Ywain drew upon the power of the Golden Pool, focusing it upon the battlefield, directing its energies against the invaders. The skaven had thought to plant a crop of evil in Athel Loren. Now the monsters would reap what they had sown!

  As she worked her magic, Ywain was oblivious to the changes stealing upon the clearing below, of the gnarled trees and thorn bushes that were slowly, inexorably and reluctantly crawling away from the fence, making their way across the forbidden ring of barren ground.

  She had sent the Golden Pool’s magic into the forest. Now the forest was coming to the Golden Pool.

  * * *

  Grey Seer Nashrik chittered with insane glee as he burned another warhawk from the sky with a bolt of warp-lightning. He had overcome his momentary and uncharacteristic fright, dismissing the feeble efforts of the wood elves and their allies to oppose his mighty powers. Using the warpstone Huskk had so foolishly given him, Nashrik had become a dynamo of destruction and carnage. What were the crude weapons of Clan Skryre beside the magic of a grey seer? Entire stretches of the forest had wilted beneath Nashrik’s magic, withered from branch to root. The grey seer had taken a special delight exterminating the greenery, exposing the elves in their hiding places. He had unleashed the dread transformation of the Thirteenth Ritual upon the elves, twisting their bodies into verminous shapes, obliterating their identities under the mentality of a change-scent skaven.

  The spellsingers still made their puny efforts to stop him, sending swarms of spites and beasts of the forest to end Nashrik’s sorcery. One and all they had perished before his magic. He was unstoppable! A living engine of destruction! A walking pestilence! The glory of the Horned Rat made flesh!

  Nashrik tugged at his whiskers as he felt a change steal upon the battlefield. He glanced hurriedly at the skaven warriors rampaging across the heath. They sensed it too, their ears folding back close against the sides of their skulls, their tails lashing in agitation. The hint of fear-musk was on the wind now, where before there had been only the smell of victory.

  Before the grey seer’s stunned gaze, shapes began to materialize, emerging from nothingness to stand between his army and the elves yet opposing him. Nashrik’s hackles rose as he saw those lithe forms dance across the borderland between worlds, springing across the heath in ecstatic gyrations. Supple and sensuous were the figures which now capered among the ratmen, curvaceous bodies of pale, furless flesh with a husky scent of wanton desire. Many of the ratmen forgot their fear, squeaking happily as they rushed forwards to embrace the prancing figures. The strange laughter of the breeder-things tinkled across the field as they returned the amorous charge of their admirers with a crimson flash of slashing claws and tearing pincers.

  No elf or dryad, these hellish apparitions. Nashrik could smell the fell energies saturating the dancing harridans, the abominable stink of blackest magic. Daemons. Creatures of the Outer Dark!

  The stink of skaven blood made Nashrik’s warriors belatedly recognize their peril. The ratmen tried to reform into a more defensible posture, some fragment of Nahak’s tactics yet lingering in their minds. Nashrik shrieked orders to them to fall back, to retreat from this weird new menace that had formed to oppose them.

  It was too late. Too many of the murdering daemonettes were already mixed among the skaven ranks. Nashrik could see more of the infernal spirits manifesting, these mounted upon long-legged steeds that seemed to mix all the qualities of worm, serpent and peacock. The daemon cavalry descended upon the confused ratmen, spitting them upon golden lances or ripping them apart with slashing claws.

  Victory, so close a moment before, slipped through Nashrik’s grasping paws. Simple survival became the grey seer’s only ambition. While the daemons were busy slaughtering his army, there was a chance he might be able to slip away.

  The grey seer turned to flee, coming up short as he saw his way blocked by a grotesque daemon-thing. It was as big as an ox-rat, scuttling towards him on six spiky legs, its snake-like head tapering into a puckered mouth from which an obscene tongue flickered. Enormous claws sprouted from its shoulders and arched over its scaly back was a club-like tail tipped by a dripping stinger.

  Nashrik cried out in fright, focusing his mind upon a spell to obliterate the disgusting monstrosity. Yet even as he tried to work his magic, his nose was filled with a strange, sickly-sweet scent. His
thoughts became fuzzy, coherence collapsing beneath a warm idiocy. The warpstone fell from Nashrik’s slackened grip, rolling away into the grass. The grey seer stood unmoving as the daemon-beast crawled towards him. He didn’t even try to escape the mangling claws that snapped tight about his body or cry out when the poisoned stinger stabbed into his chest.

  From the shelter of the trees, the elves watched in dumbfounded horror as the daemon host exterminated Nahsrik’s army. They had been delivered from their enemy.

  Delivered by a force far more terrible than either skaven or undead.

  Thalos dashed through the benighted forest, desperate to reach the battlefield. He did not blame Ywain for the magic which had caused him to vanish from the heath and reappear within a copse of ash trees some half a mile away. He trusted that the spell-weaver had a good reason for working such magic upon him. However, his place was in battle, leading his kinband against the enemies of Athel Loren. Whatever peril that might mean.

  The highborn hesitated as he rounded a turn in the narrow path through the trees. He felt a change in the air around him, almost as though the forest itself had shuddered. There was an unpleasant clammy sensation slithering across his skin, setting his hairs on end. It was an obscene feeling, ripe with the corrupt tang of evil. Thalos felt as though his very soul were being violated by the slimy phantasm which caressed his flesh.

  The sensation crawled along his chest, crept down his arms and up his legs. Thalos could feel its progress, probing and groping, causing each nerve in his body to tremble with the thrill of abomination. Then the coldness seeped across his fingers, towards the amber sword clenched in his hand.

  At once, the corruption fled from him, recoiling from the Dawnblade as though from a raging fire. Thalos could almost hear the unseen force screeching in terror as it fled, abandoning the elf once more to the darkness.

  Thalos felt his gorge rise at the vileness that had assaulted his senses. It was a struggle for him to regain his composure, to keep from running, to keep from screaming. Only the knowledge that the foul presence had fled from him allowed the elf to retain his courage. Whatever the atrocity had been, it had feared the Dawnblade.

  The foul stink of carrion struck Thalos’ reeling senses. The highborn forced his mind to clear itself of nameless fears. Sufficient to the moment were the evils thereof. The stink he smelled could only belong to some of Huskk Gnawbone’s undead slaves.

  Crouching behind the bole of a maple tree, Thalos waited while the smell grew stronger. Soon he saw a ragged mob of zombie ratmen shuffle into view, each of the hideous things bearing a clay jar in its decayed paws. Following behind his slaves, the emaciated form of the Black Seer crept into view. Even upon the bestial, leprous features of the necromancer, there was no mistaking an expression of malevolent triumph.

  Thalos leapt out from behind the tree, striking with his sword. Before the invaders even knew he was there, three of the zombies were cut down. The others shifted awkwardly, laden down with the heavy canopic jars. The mindless things took no move to defend themselves against the ambusher.

  Huskk Gnawbone snarled, his voice raised in a shriek of fury. A grey miasma, glowing with corpse-light, flashed from the Black Seer’s paw. The malignant energy sped towards Thalos, but as it drew near to the highborn, the Dawnblade blazed with light. The magic shifted in flight, drawn towards the sword instead of the one who held it. Before Thalos’ wondering gaze, the grey miasma crashed against the amber blade, sucked down into its translucent depths.

  Huskk shrieked again, this time gesturing wildly with his claws. From the blackness behind the necromancer, the cockatrice appeared, leaping onto the path, its talons digging at the earth. The bird-beast snapped its beak, the feathers of its ruff shivering with agitation. Thalos felt the monster’s beady eyes glaring at him. The cockatrice seemed to remember who it was that had cut its wing.

  The beast’s rage was all that preserved Thalos from instant destruction, for he doubted the Dawnblade would protect him from the cockatrice’s gaze as easily as it had Huskk’s magic. So incensed was the monster at the sight of its attacker that it chose to forgo training its petrifying gaze upon the elf, instead leaping forwards to rend him with beak and talon.

  As Thalos prepared to defend himself, there came a sudden motion from the tree behind him. An immense cluster of branches, bound together in the semblance of a hand, reached down and closed about the body of the cockatrice as it charged him. The avian horror thrashed about wildly as the wooden fingers clenched tightly about it, plucking it from the ground and raising it high into the air.

  “Attend to the root-chewer,” the groaning voice of Daithru rumbled from above. Thalos looked upward to see the treeman’s gnarled face, aware for the first time that his momentary refuge had in fact been the ancient forest spirit. “This doom is mine.”

  Thalos blanched in despair as he saw Daithru’s body grow pale, stiffening as the cockatrice directed its lethal gaze upon the treeman. The groaning sigh of the treeman’s voice fell silent as his wooden body became petrified.

  The cockatrice cackled as its hideous gaze brought destruction upon the noble ancient. The monster kept its stare fixed upon Daithru until the treeman’s body became stone, until the last spark of life had been extinguished. Then it allowed the deadly membranes to slide back. The cockatrice resumed its struggles to free itself, pecking and clawing at the treeman’s now frozen fingers.

  It did not notice the tiny lights emerging from the hollows of the treeman’s body, the little spites that had sheltered within Daithru’s wooden frame. Hidden from the cockatrice’s baleful gaze, protected from its petrifying power, now the spites surged forth to wreak vengeance upon Daithru’s killer. The fey lights assumed fearsome shapes, ghastly bodies of thorns and claws and fangs. Flittering upwards in a ferocious cloud, the swarm of spites engulfed the struggling cockatrice. The monster’s cackle became a pained shriek as the swarm descended upon it, savaging its body with barbed tails and hooked swords, with serrated jaws and razor wings.

  Thalos turned away from the gory spectacle of the monster’s destruction. Sight of his pet’s distress had spurred Huskk into action. The Black Seer was in flight, scurrying down the forest trail. The necromancer had drawn upon his occult powers, infusing his retinue of shambling corpses with the vigour of living beings, enabling them to keep pace with their master as he fled.

  The elf clenched his teeth, chiding himself for being distracted by the cockatrice. He could not allow the necromancer to escape. Not after the sacrifice Daithru had made.

  The highborn dashed off in pursuit of the fleeing skaven, but at the first turn in the path, he discovered that his foe had taken steps to cover his tracks. Thalos recoiled as a rusty sword flashed through the darkness, then ducked as a second chopped down at his neck. The elf back-stepped away from his attacker, trying to give himself a respite to take the measure of Huskk’s rearguard.

  The thing was an abomination, a horror constructed from three skaven. Swords were clenched in each of the thing’s hands, six blades against the elf’s one. Malignant fires smouldered in the depths of the undead nightmare’s skulls. Its jaws clattered in a silent echo of a war cry, then the fiend surged forwards on its six bony legs.

  Thalos met its charge, the Dawnblade dancing before him in a whirling pirouette of death. Only the reflexes and speed of an elf could have matched the crashing clamour of the rat-thing’s six blades. Only the keenness of the Dawnblade could have shattered each of the enemy’s swords, snapping them as though they were dried twigs.

  The mindless horror did not falter as each of its swords was broken by the Dawnblade. Instead, it pressed its attack, seizing the elf in its bony claws, lifting him towards its snapping jaws.

  Thalos drove the Dawnblade between the horror’s fangs, stabbing the sword upwards, driving it through first one, then another of its stacked skulls. The entire abomination shuddered as the power of the amber blade cut away at the dark magic sustaining its unholy semblance of life.
The undead nightmare slumped to its knees, gnashing its fangs as it toppled to the ground.

  The highborn pulled himself free of the rat-thing’s lifeless claws. The mighty Dawnblade had protected him once more. Next it would be Huskk Gnawbone’s turn to feel the enchanted sword’s power.

  Pulling the Dawnblade free, however, Thalos made a horrifying discovery. The rat-thing’s gnashing fangs had shattered the sword, breaking it six inches above the hilt. The magic blade had been reduced from a sword to a dagger.

  Thalos felt his body go numb at the discovery. Would the Dawnblade’s magic still remain in the fragmented sword? Could it still protect him from the Black Seer’s sorcery?

  Whatever the answer, the highborn knew his decision was already made. He must pursue the necromancer and prevent him from reaching the Golden Pool.

  Huskk Gnawbone scurried down the forest path. The Golden Pool was near; he could smell its tremendous power all around him. He could feel its energies swelling under the influence of the Hour of Shadows, far surpassing what Nahak had led him to expect. The liche had insisted the might of the Golden Pool could not manifest on its own, yet the Black Seer had felt its malefic power rippling across the forest. Nahak had been mistaken.

  The necromancer’s paw closed about the skull dangling against his chest. A savage smile spread across Huskk’s withered features. Nahak had been mistaken about many things. Most importantly, the liche had deluded itself into believing Huskk would share the power of the Golden Pool.

  Ripping the chain from around his neck, Huskk swung the skull of Nahak against the trunk of an oak. His mind quivered with the liche’s spectral shriek as the skull shattered against the unyielding bole. The Black Seer lashed his tail in amusement as the fragments exploded across the path. He hoped that the liche enjoyed oblivion.