The Tears of Kas̆dael

A pained cry erupted from her lips as a talon hand swiped across her shoulder, spinning her around in the mud with its sheer force. The dead's victory was short-lived, though, as a terror-fueled bolt of lightning struck it in the chest, so powerful that it cored its heart out altogether and vitrified the rest of the body.

Oops. While there was something about Imhullu's lightning that called to her in a primal way, Tsia was trying not to use it, as the spells were absolute essence hogs compared to her wind magic.

The vitrified dead shattered as another creature rushed out of the mist and straight through it, and, this time, she made sure to use a wind-blade. In a blink, the creature fell to the earth, stone-still as its head was shorn off. As long as they didn't get the drop on her, they really weren't that hard to defeat, but their sheer speed-

"Watch out!" A loud thump immediately followed the warning cry, and Tsia nearly whirled face-first into an undulating wall of wood that hadn't been there a second before. Clawed hands protruded from the liquid wood as the undead fought to free itself, but it was a hopeless struggle. With a clenched fist, Erin drove the creature to its knees as the wood tightened around it, and then he let it harden, trapping it in an impromptu coffin.

Already, the scout was looking a little pale as he jogged over to her - his spells even worse essence hogs than her lightning - and wordlessly nodded his head to her left. A windblade had already left her fingers as she spun to the side, but it wasn't her spell that killed the creature creeping up on her.

With a garbled cry, it dropped beneath the arc of her windblade as an arrow buried itself in its right eye, quivering violently as the head turned red and began to expand. Tsia looked away quickly, cringing as the exploding head speckled her with bits of rotting brain matter. Yuck.

"You alright, princess?" While normally the nickname irked her, Tsia could have cried for joy as Ihra stepped out of the mist - although her joy somewhat deflated as she realized the girl was alone.

"Wait - where's Jasper?"

"I lost track of him almost immediately," she replied glumly. "I tried to double back, see if I could pick up his tracks, but I couldn't find a trace of them in this fog."

"No sign of S̆ams̆ādur either?" Erin chimed in, limping slightly thanks to a slash in his thigh as he took a stand beside her.

"I thought I heard his voice once, but by the time I got there, he was gone."

"If he was ever there in the first place," Tsia replied darkly. "I'm pretty sure this mist is some grand illusion spell, but I haven't the foggiest idea who's behind it."

Ihra's brow crinkled. "You don't think it's the Bloodspiller?"

"The undead might be his work, but this?" Tsia passed her hand through the thick mist around them and shivered as cold droplets formed in her palm. "Whoever cast this spell has either water or ice affinities, perhaps lunar as well - Mother always said that most illusion mages were followers of Selene; the Bloodspiller had none of these. No, if I had to guess," she continued contemplatively, "I'd say our mage is elf-kin, but I don't know why they'd attack us."

"Maybe we could save the theorycrafting for later," Erin interrupted her, rubbing his hands together as a cold breeze hit them. "How the hell do we get out of here?"

"I was getting to that," Tsia replied irritably. "If we're going to break the spell, we need to understand how it works."

"Sorry," he raised his hands placatingly, and she sniffed.

"As I was saying, I think the spell was cast by an ice mage, but the mist has lasted too long to be a simple cast. They're either using a ritual or an artifact; find that, and we should be able to dispel the mist."

"And of course, Selene only knows where that is," Ihra sighed.

"Actually, I have a guess….where were we when the mists first appeared?" Tsia asked.

"The tavern, wasn't it? You think that's the focal point?" the elf's eyes lit up.

"Not quite," Tsia shook her head. "I suppose it could be the tavern, but the abandoned shrine beside it seems like a more fitting choice, if our mage is one of us and not a stoneflesh."

"I forgot that run-down shack was even there," Ihra frowned, biting her lip in thought. "But even if you're right, how do we find it?"

"You can sense the wood in the buildings, can't you?" She asked the scout, who waggled his hand uncertainly.

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"Eh, sort of, but it's kind of muffled compared to how it usually is. I'm pretty sure there are some buildings that way, though," he said, pointing to the mist behind Ihra.

"Looks like you're our guide, then," Ihra grinned. "Try not to get us lost."

Despite Erin's ability to sense wood through the mist, finding the right buildings proved harder than Tsia had expected. The village wasn't that large, maybe thirty or forty homes at the center with another dozen or so outlying farms at its outskirts, but somehow they seemed to find every building but the one they were looking for.

The endless sea of mist that surrounded them certainly didn't help, a chill blanket of fog that muffled all noise save for the occasional howls of the undead in the distance. Together, the three of them had little issue fending off the increasingly infrequent attacks, but even though Tsia suspected they had nearly stomped out the creatures, she was beginning to grow impatient when a familiar blue hue loomed out of the mist.

They had found the tavern.

Ihra broke into a run as they reached the courtyard, kneeling in the mud as she examined the dead body of a horse and a series of charred corpses. "Jasper's been here, and the lady too," she murmured, "but most of the blood here is the horse's, thankfully. They must have survived the fight - think they're in the tavern?"

Tsia hesitated; she'd been nearly certain they'd find the spell's focus in the abandoned shrine, but if the others had taken shelter in the tavern…

Surprisingly, it was Erin who spoke up first. "Do you still think the focus is in the shrine?" he asked.

"Well, it makes the most sense, but I don't know," she hemmed.

"Then we should deal with that first," he argued, pointing to the dilapidated roof of the shrine that peaked above the courtyard wall. "We can see the shrine now, but if we go to the tavern first, what if we lose it again?"

Despite the unhappy look that flitted across Ihra's face, the elf reluctantly nodded her head. "He has a point. If you think that's where we should go…"

Retreating from the courtyard, they hugged the wall until they rounded the corner. The little shrine was exactly as she remembered it, four crumbling stone pillars holding up a rotting wooden cupola overgrown with moss and vines. A small statue of Selene sat beneath the arch, so thickly caked in verdigris that not even a trace of the once bright copper could be seen, but it was the set of stairs descending into the darkness that Tsia was looking for.

"Anyone got a match?" she asked, as they gathered around the pitch black entrance to the village catacombs.

"And maybe a few hundred tons of gasoline," Erin joked nervously. "How much do you want to bet there's a bunch of those nasty creepers down there?"

No one replied, knowing full well what was likely waiting for them as Ihra pulled torches out of her bag and passed them around. "Who's taking the front?" the elfling asked, lighting the last one.

"I will," Erin pushed his way to the front, and reaching his hand out to a nearby tree, pulled the wood into a floating shield in front of him that was just narrow enough to fit the stairs. "I can't do this long," he grunted, "so let's get this over with."

It was only ten steps to the bottom, but those ten steps felt like they led to a different world. It was hard not to feel claustrophobic as Tsia stepped into the burial chamber, its ceiling so low that even she was forced to duck down to avoid banging into the rough-hewn rock.

Even for village standards, the room was small, with most of the floor space occupied by four coffins that must have belonged to some of the wealthier inhabitants and a score of niches dug into the wall where the least wealthy had been stashed.

They paused warily, half-expecting the coffin lids to fly open and monsters to spring out, but when nothing happened, they continued toward the dark arch on the far side of the chamber.

The passage was even smaller than the stairs, and Erin was forced to drop his wooden shield and turn on his side to squeeze through the gap. It was a good thing the scout had gone first, as he'd only made it a few steps before he paused and called out a warning. "Step carefully - there's a tripwire."

It was the first of three traps, none of which she would have spotted herself, and Tsia breathed a sigh of relief as she finally squeezed out of the narrow passage and stopped at a place Erin had identified as safe.

"We've got to be in the right place," Erin greeted her, "there's no other reason to put a trap in a catacomb."

"Probably," she agreed, "but the question is where?" The chamber they had exited into was slightly larger than the last one, and unlike its predecessor, appeared to be a dead end. Most of the chamber was occupied by coffins crammed into every nooky and cranny of open floor space, but there was a second idol at the back of the room, a sculpture of S̆ams̆a slightly less tarnished than his sister's outside.

Maybe it's there? Tsia begged forgiveness of the dead as she was forced to climb up and over several of the coffins in order to reach the statue, but to her surprise she found nothing there. No levers, no traps, no odd trinkets of metal or brightly glinting gems. The only thing in front of the statue was an old offering bowl filled with long-rotted fruit and a few copper coins. Was I wrong?

"Over here!" Turning round, she saw Ihra crouched over a coffin near the front of the room. "This lid's been moved recently," the girl called out. "Give me a hand."

It took all three of them to move the old stone lid, but as the granite slab crunched into the floor, Tsia saw what she'd been looking for. The entire inside of the coffin had been transformed into a ritual spell, with crystals at each corner feeding it essence to keep it going. The ritual was too far beyond her knowledge to make sense of, but destroying it was another matter altogether.

For one brief moment, day broke on the eternally dark chamber as a torrent of lightning rolled across the formation, shattering the crystals simultaneously, before the darkness returned.

"Did it work?" Erin asked, blinking rapidly as his eyes struggled to readjust to the shadowy torchlight.

"We'll have to go outside to check," Tsia replied, pausing before the charred coffin to once again offer a prayer of apology, before following the others back to the narrow passage. But she'd only made it a few steps when she heard an ominous cracking behind her, and chanced a look over her shoulder.

It seemed her prayers had been rejected.