Chapter 16 Araphi #3
That’s almost more terrifying than the shriek that rings throughout the clearing, closer this time, before a maelstrom of fog, snow, sticks, ice, and pine needles begins to spin upward from the forest floor.
Wind and debris spiral through the frozen air, gaining speed and force around them, like a hearth fire encouraged by strong hands on the bellows.
“What the devils is this?” Araphi yells to be heard above the howling. Her borrowed dagger is in her hand, her eyes flying around the grove, but she can’t find a target either, can hardly see through the churning fog…
Until the gleam of pale and glittering eyes cuts through the maelstrom just in front of her.
“Down now!” Sage commands, shooting above Araphi’s head as she drops to one knee obediently. Whatever it was vanishes in a blink, but unaccompanied by the sound of impact or pain. Could Sage have missed at such close range, even in this confusion?
“Are there more?” Araphi cries, standing again. “Can you see them?”
“I can’t even see our party. Where are you all?” Sage calls into the whirling ice fog.
“Here!” Remy calls back, his voice thinner than usual. It comes from the left of the grove…or is it straight ahead? Sound is almost impossible to track, echoing about the grove as it’s whipped by the wind.
Then the mist parts briefly, Nura’s staff slicing through the maelstrom with precisely zero effect. Beside her, Remy stands frozen, his eyes wide in horror. Then the fog closes in and they’re gone again.
Another unearthly cry, this time a low and rattling croak—the sound of bone on bone—reverberates in Araphi’s ears as two ghastly ravens the size of jackals pierce through the wind wall to dive at her and Sage.
They appear to be dead, yellowed bones showing through blood-matted clumps of ragged black feathers, the dark scales rotting off their claws.
But their talons—each a handbreadth long at least—remain very much intact.
“Gods, what are those?” Sage cries, panic in her voice.
It’s a sentiment mirrored in Araphi. “I don’t know, just shoot them!” she shouts back.
One of the horrifying birds swoops down, either driven by a surge of ice and snow, or trailing one after it.
Araphi braces the dagger in front of her, blade steady as she can hold it…
but the raven somehow slips through, slicing at Araphi with its talons before wheeling off, just missing her skin.
Before it can disappear into the fog, Sage’s arrow finds it, only to slip through with as little impact as if it were piercing water. Then it’s gone again.
“Stop shooting at us!” Nura bellows from somewhere across the grove. “You almost nicked Bramble with that one.”
Sage swears. “How do we bring down something that blades and arrowheads can’t touch?”
“Watch out, they’re coming in again!”
Araphi presses her back to Sage’s and the two of them raise their seemingly useless weapons as the terrible ravens swoop down, claws extended.
This time, talons rake across Araphi’s temple.
Hot blood trickles into her eye, half blinding her.
The tornado of ice and snow whirls faster, lifting Araphi’s hair, and distantly she feels pain from her wound, but none of that matters because it’s nothing compared to that unearthly screeching…
Suddenly, Remy stands in front of them. He seems unbloodied but deeply shaken nonetheless.
Arms outstretched, he shouts something in a quavering voice—a spell?
The words aren’t spoken in a language Araphi recognizes, and the wind tears them from his lips before half can reach her ears.
A giant bird dives toward him, only to scream as it incinerates in a burst of blinding light, not a bone or a feather left to float to the snow.
Through the fog and debris, similar balls of light burst like dandelion heads in the wind.
Then the maelstrom dies, and deep silence fills the grove.
Can Remy cast?
“It wasn’t a spell,” he says, reading Araphi’s stunned expression correctly. “It was…more of a prayer than anything. Not magic. Just soldiers’ last rites, written in the old language of Harrow. I don’t speak it, but I know those words in my bones.”
She’s about to demand a further explanation when Sage wheels Araphi around to examine her, the ranger’s eyes wide and wild.
“I’m so sorry,” she mutters. “Are you hurt badly? My weapons were useless, I couldn’t—I panicked.
” She’s babbling, oblivious to the blood streaming down her own face from a cut on her cheek.
“Let’s go sit down over here,” Araphi says, taking the ranger’s arm. She leads her to a natural pine-bough seat made from a branch. “Bramble and the others will gather their gear, and we’ll get out of this horrible place.”
Sage’s hands shake as she holds them in her lap. She curls them into fists, more rattled than Araphi could have expected. The birds were terrifying to be sure…but she’s never seen Sage frightened.
“Why did I freeze like that?” the ranger demands. “What kind of party leader am I if I—”
“Sage.” Araphi takes the ranger’s face in her hands, cradling it. Not caring who else in the party sees. “I need you to breathe.”
The ranger hauls in a long, shuddering breath.
“Now do it again. And again.”
Sage complies, each breath a little steadier than the last.
“We’re all okay.” Araphi fights to keep her own voice steady.
“We’re a party, and all of us have strengths.
Yours include stabbing things that have an actual body, negotiations with recalcitrant villagers, that thing you did in Briarwall with your tongue…
” A ghost of a smile from Sage, which makes Araphi’s heart thump in her chest.
There she is. There’s the confident, slightly cocky ranger Araphi met in the garden of a manor house.
“Let’s get moving, then. We have a mysterious, impossible-to-find river to locate before nightfall.”
“We do indeed,” Araphi says, offering the ranger a hand and helping her to her feet.
It’s so good to be needed. To be more than a pretty face. To be part of something larger than everything she’s ever known.
Even if it’s only until the end of this adventure.