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Chapter IX
Saure always loved the blue-purple cast the sky took on at twilight. The sunset had been a spectacular red and orange mass viewable between leaves in the canopy above them. As awed as she was at the sunset, she was also disappointed she had to close her book for the day. She had just touched on a simple ether spell she thought would come in very handy in the future: truth-seeing.
Hermit Thrushes had always been her favorite songbird. She rarely heard them this late in the summer, but it's as if one had been following them since they left the village. It trilled and warbled its haunting melody that always reminded Saure of casting spells, or crystal tinkling in long, empty halls. It was an echoing, mysterious sound. It made the woods feel enchanted, and impenetrably deep.
Far, far from here, the opened eye that had so carefully marked their progress now squinted toward the horizon. It waited for the sun to set… and for his energies to rise with the muddled starlight.
With a great effort, he grasped for the unseen ethereal silk that flowed about his gnarled bare feet like a lazy flooding of bile. His arms quaked with the struggle, and he swore to himself in a language much coarser than the one I use to tell you of it. A swear in that language could slay a sheep, if spoken within earshot of it.
He dropped the ropes of ether-matter with helpless abandon, enraged and exhausted. He had not yet recovered from his last misspell… one which had all but obliterated his former deformed shell.
He meditated only for a moment. Only until the last of the blue glow of twilight had faded from the cool autumn sky. Then, with a dire grin exposing wicked, twisting fangs, he seized the ether once more.
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He called upon the darkness, the darkness between the darkness. He enveloped his vile self in its malessence. It became a visible dark aura that rippled violently like flesh over a muscle spasm before settling into something more substantial; like a great, violet callus.
He felt out the corpses of harriers, a week since their half-hearted burial by victorious sellswords. They were not far from the road… and this was- to his rotted mind- very convenient indeed.
I dare not repeat the words to the spell he uttered. It is not something even possible to write; such as its deathly wrongness is only ever spoken. The page would smolder under the quill were one to attempt to pen its phonetics.
Twisting his gnarled, spindly hands, the enshrouded yanked the ethereal fabric upward. His corpse- minions jolted upright, forest duff falling away from their festering forms along with a showering of maggots and beetles.
With the cold rasp of a whisper… the sound of frosted stone against a dry hand… he sent his new minions forth to do his bidding.
The chill came with nightfall, and Saure bundled up in the thick blanket again. Fred insisted upon resting his forehalf on the bench beside her. His night vision was far keener than hers, and his irises had fully dilated. She wondered -when, rather than if- she would learn a spell to help her see in the darkness as he could. She reckoned that was another fauna spell.
The hermit thrush called again, making its echoed cry twice, and then it fell suddenly silent.
Fred's ears shot upward, making Saure start violently and gasp. The cat hushed her, tail lashing, eyes wide.
"Damn thee, child. I warned you." he leapt down from the cart, frightening the steed and causing him to attempt a buck. Nag tried to bolt, and the whole cart listed violently to one
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