Nightmare Woods

Chapter Twenty

Porthios tumbled back into the clearing, shouting an alarm, waving his sword, frantically stabbing … at what? Despite the aura of menace, the bone-chilling horror he felt, there was no substance, no mass of flesh to these attackers.

For the writhing shapes seemed to be nothing more than pure shadow, insubstantial patches of darkness that closed menacingly around him yet had no bodies, no physical form. But when he recalled the empty helm and cuirass, he knew that somehow these bizarre nothings had destroyed the life and the soul of at least one brave elven warrior. And they were relentlessly determined to close in, to kill again and again.

The steel long sword in his hand, hallowed weapon of his family and cherished artifact of elvenkind, tore through one of the shadows with a sound like water sucking down a drain. Porthios felt the resistance, knew that he had gouged one of these shadows. But there were more, dozens more, oozing out of the darkness. They came at him from all sides, clearly attacking, though he could distinguish no details of face or body on any of them. At the same time, he knew they were real, and he sensed the deadly menace in the chilly and silent advance. They reached with tendrils of horrific darkness, lashing limbs that changed in shape or size as he dodged and retreated.

He shouted as loud as he could, desperately trying to raise an alarm in the camp. Then he stabbed and slashed again with his sword, lunging forward, dodging to the side, striking like a snake as he made sure than none of the tentacles of inky black could reach far enough to come into contact with his skin. Each time his sword cut through the tenuous shape of a shadow, he heard that awful gurgling death and saw the darkness wisp away.

But there were so many of them! They began to close a circle around him, and in seconds, his retreat was nearly cut off. Spinning frantically, slashing in every direction, he cut at the things, dissolving more of them, opening a gap in their ranks that allowed him to tumble past. Porthios rolled across the ground until he slammed against the trunk of a tree. Instinctively he knew that to be touched was to die. He was on his feet in a half a heartbeat, slashing and parrying, holding the eerie things back as once more he raised his voice in alarm.

“To arms, elves of Qualinesti! We’re attacked!”

In the camp, the elves were already aroused, griffons growling and screeching, warriors raising their weapons, other elves streaming into the woods, fleeing the mysterious attackers that were now emerging from between the trees. Most of the outlaws abandoned what few possessions they had brought with them, splashing through the stream, racing through the woods around the base of the Splintered Rock bluff. Porthios saw that Alhana had already snatched up Silvanoshei and fallen back, joining the flight that threatened to become a panic. Only then did the elven prince turn back to the fight, brandishing his blade, striking at any of the shadows that came within range of his steel.

He saw a dozen brave elves charge, instinctively forming a battle line, but their blades sliced harmlessly through the looming shadows. A moment later the tendrils of darkness reached forth, and the elves were simply gone. In their places, weapons dropped to the ground, shirts and belts and boots still tumbling from the momentum of the charge, but of the flesh and the lives that had been there, Porthios saw nothing. It was as though the courageous warriors had never been there.

More shadows swirled toward him, and his blade cut through them, killing some and driving the others back. Already he was realizing an important truth: His weapon, blessed by ancient powers, was potent against these things, but the blades of nearly all of his warriors were utterly useless against these beings of foul magic. The elves as a whole had no means of fighting this unnatural enemy.

Another rank attacked before Porthios could call them back, and these, too, perished, vanished utterly except for the tools and clothing that they had carried into the fight. His elves did not lack in courage, but they had no effective tools for battling this foe. More of them were turning to run, overcome by fear and lacking any means of stopping the horrific assault. Griffons, too, were winging away after too many of them had flown at the shadows, only to vanish in utter, complete dissolution.

“Fall back!” the prince shouted, still wielding his own blade against a press of attackers. “Get out of here! We’ll regroup on the far side of the bluff!”

Many of the warriors heeded his command, fleeing with the elders and children. But others stayed behind to wage the fruitless fight. Porthios recognized a brave warrior, silver sword flashing like lightning in his hand as he raced to defend his prince.

“Tarqualan!” cried Porthios, watching as that elven warrior came up against the rank of seething, squirming shadows.

And then the valiant fighter, veteran of so many of his prince’s battles, was gone, vanished in body and sight … and even, Porthios realized with a chill, in his very memory. He couldn’t recall the name of the bold commander who had stood so staunchly in the face of a nightmarish attack, who had ridden at his side through twenty years of campaigns in Silvanesti.

And finally all the elves were running, stumbling through the undergrowth, fleeing in mindless panic through the dark, haunted woods.

Dawn broke as Porthios was still following at the rear of the band. He had no idea how many of his elves had been lost to the horror, though he took some minimal comfort from the observation that the shadows were not vigorous in their pursuit. Samar now fought beside the prince, the two of them forming a rear guard as the rest of the elves had crossed the stream and made their desperate way through the woods. The Silvanesti’s dragonlance, like Porthios’s sword, had proven to be lethal against the dark and insubstantial attackers.

Finally they pulled away, leaving the shadows lingering in the deep woods as the elves gathered around the far side of the Splintered Rock bluff. The sun was up, the heat already pressing downward like a sweltering blanket. Amid the milling band of wailing, crying elves Porthios found his wife clutching Silvanoshei. The baby was squalling loudly. The elven prince tried to think, but the shrieks of his son were driving daggers through his mind.

“Can’t you make him stop crying?” he asked, fear and helplessness boiling over.

“He’s terrified!” Alhana snapped back. “And so am I—so are we all!”

“I’m sorry. Here, let me hold him,” Porthios said softly. “We’re safe here, at least for a while.”

“Do—do you think so?” she asked, trying bravely to conquer the quaver in her voice.

The baby fussed and twisted in his arms, and Porthios couldn’t lie to her. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what attacked us, where they came from, or what they want.”

All around him, elves were gasping for breath, lying in various states of exhaustion around the tree trunks and rocks at the base of the mountain. Somehow they had made their way here through the darkness, but now he had no idea of where to go, of what to do next. And through this panicky confusion, his son’s distressed wails had pierced his awareness like a knife cutting through soft flesh.

“How many of us got away? And what about the others? They’re just … gone.”

Alhana spoke numbly, but Porthios knew what she meant. He remembered acts of bravery, bold warriors lifting steel to stand against the shadowy attackers that had emerged so silently from the woods. But when he tried to recall individual battles, the last fights of brave elves, some of them warriors who had fought under his command for two decades, there was simply nothing there.

Desperately he tried to remember a name, to picture the stalwart face of a loyal lieutenant. It was as though the shadows, having killed an elf’s body, had also sapped away any memory of his existence, any legacy he might have left behind.

The griffons, too, had fought the attackers valiantly. Many had perished during the battle, vanishing into space like the bodies of the elves who had been touched by shadow. The others had finally flown away, seeking the safety of the skies when the entire camp had been overrun. Now a few of them had returned to light on the upper slopes of the craggy bluff. Though Porthios looked upward, scrutinizing the heights for a sign of Stallyar, he had seen no indication of the familiar silver-feathered wings.

“My lord Porthios!” cried an elf, gliding low on the back of a griffon. Porthios recognized Darrian, a courageous and skilled archer and a veteran of the Silvanesti campaign.

“Here!” he shouted, waving from the ground.

The griffon came to rest on the forest floor, and Darrian leaped from the saddle and came stumbling toward him. The warrior looked haggard, his skin scratched and torn by brambles, though he didn’t seem to be otherwise wounded. Indeed, Porthios reflected grimly, the shadowy attackers didn’t seem to have injured any of his elves. Either the outlaws had escaped, terror-stricken but whole, or they had been touched by those chill tendrils and vanished utterly.

“What? Are we attacked again?” asked the leader of the ragged band.

“No, but soon! The shadows are coming around the bluff, blocking our flight. They’ll hit us from the other side within the hour.”

“How close?”

“A mile, no more. They move slowly, but deliberately. They don’t seem to stop for anything!”

Porthios looked at Darrian’s empty quiver. “Did you damage them, do any harm at all, with your arrows?”

The warrior shook his head. “Not at all—save once, when I used an arrow given to me by your father, the Speaker of the Sun.”

“Was that missile unique?”

Now the elf nodded. “My king told me that its head was of purest steel and that the shaft had been blessed by Paladine himself.”

“And what happened when you used it?”

“I shot into a mass of shadows, lord, and it seemed as though they were all torn, ripped into scraps of darkness. They made a hideous screeching, and then they vanished.”

Porthios described the small success he had had with his own sword, and Samar with his dragonlance. “And those, too, are weapons blessed by the gods, imbued with powerful magic. As to the rest, even the keenest of elven steel seems useless against them.”

The sun remained high, as if it was going to stay at zenith forever, and as the rays drove downward through the leaves, the forest grew hotter and hotter. Insects droned, and the sounds of grief and despair wailed even louder within the elven prince’s mind.

“What are we going to do?” Alhana, who had been listening anxiously, asked.

“They’ve cut us off from the east and west,” Samar noted. “We have the lake to our north and the mountain to our south. Do we stay and fight them here?”

“We’ll have to climb the bluff,” Porthios declared, instantly making up his mind. “I don’t know how we’ll stop these things, but we’ll roll rocks down onto them if nothing else.”

The stronger elves helped the weaker, and slowly the band of outlaws made its way up the steep, jagged boulders that lay scattered in profusion on the slope of Splintered Rock. As they gained altitude, they could look across the canopy of the forest, and they saw many places where smoke billowed up from the distant trees. The sun was a fiery orb, a searing spot of red in the white sky, and it blazed with merciless force onto the trapped elves.

By midday, the surviving outlaws had all gathered near the jagged summit, and Porthios wasted no time in appointing lookouts to hold stations around the entire perimeter. The deadly shadows seemed to move up the rocks behind them, though they came only very slowly, creeping a dozen paces over the course of an hour. Still, from the top of the bluff, the elves could see that it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed.

Dallatar, who had wielded an axe of legendary power against the shadows, found Porthios and reported that every ravine, every gully down the slopes seemed to be guarded by the slowly climbing shadows.

“There would seem to be no escape from here,” he concluded grimly.

“Then we’ll fight them,” the prince replied with more determination than he felt.

“At least we will die as warriors … but still, I would prefer not to die at all, at least not yet,” noted the wild elf, with a shake of his head.

“We can use the griffons to escape,” Samar suggested. “There are at least a hundred of them up here, and maybe four times that many elves. Over the course of half a day, they could carry all of us to safety, set us down somewhere in the woods where we can gather again.”

“But who knows what we’ll find there?” Porthios asked in despair. “We’d leave part of our band hopelessly exposed while the rest are being moved!” His mind quailed at the thought of Alhana and Silvanoshei exposed to these horrible attackers while he was off with another group, unable to protect them, to do anything to save them.

“The griffons in the High Kharolis!” his wife said suddenly. “You were talking about them just a little while ago—where they gathered after they left Qualinesti. You should fly there immediately, ask them—beg them if you have to, for help! If they came to our rescue, we could all fly at once, stay together, fly away from the shadows if they try to come after us in the forest.”

“It’s our only chance!” Samar agreed. “I saw where they laired when we flew here from Silvanesti. I can describe the spot to you.”

“It’s a chance, I admit,” Porthios said. At the same time, he was thinking about this wonderful elf woman and about the son they had brought into the world. He remembered especially the long years in Silvanesti, while she had worked in Qualinesti, doing the work that was really his own legacy. How much of their current troubles had arisen because he had been willing to leave her for so long?

“But I can’t go,” he said firmly.

“Why?” demanded the Silvanesti warrior-mage.

“Too often I have neglected my wife for matters of state and leadership. Now we are in our worst danger, and I will not abandon her.”

“But you’d be coming back!” Alhana tried to persuade him.

“No … because I won’t be going.” The prince turned to Samar. “You’ll have to go in my stead. You know where the griffons are, and Stallyar will take you.”

Samar looked at Alhana, then nodded slowly to Porthios.

“I understand … and I will do this, my prince,” pledged the warrior-mage.

And the shadows crept closer from below.

“So it was you who flew to the High Kharolis?” Aerensianic asked.

Samar nodded. “I went on this quest with heavy heart, for I truly believed that I would never see my queen again.”