Storm's Apprentice

The wooden beams of the ancient inn creaked around me as I stepped through the doorway.

Inside, the structure was shot through with fetid life from the swamp. Dark green cords squeezed between the planks of the walls and swelled out, criss-crossing the floorboards until the floor was more green than black, strangling the legs of the rotting stools and tables, snaking along the walls in their search of anchor points and higher ground. Fungal growths crowded the corners of the common room, molds and mushrooms blooming out of the permenantly damp wood in a riot of earthy colors. The dark corners of the room were alive with crawling shapes, beetles and millipedes navigating shapes that it took me a minute to realize were bird bones.

There were still a few bottles on the shelves behind the bar; cloudy, cracked and compromised, a few with something that might have been liquid inside of them. At the far side of the room a door rested open, the half circle of floor around it the only place really clear or debris.

A curved sign above the counter still had the remains of the inn’s name, The Archer.

That matched up with my assignment.

Five hours journey along the South-Southwestern road stands the ruins of an inn called The Archer. The property has previously been used as a shelter by apostate students. Those students are now dead, but their spirits have become disruptive to the area. Search the building for any signs of human spirit activity and purge any remnants found. Bring your report to Master Devaus.

I didn’t know who’d tried to build an inn here, half a day’s journey from the academy on a disused road, but whoever it was had abandoned it decades ago. Now it’s only relevance was as a makeshift shelter out in the depths of the swamp, a place that past students had apparently tried to hide.

Human spirits weren’t a completely new idea to me. Losiris had its share of ghost stories. But from my research over the past week I knew that only people with the mage talent left spirits behind. That meant real human hauntings had to be vanishingly rare almost everywhere, except the swamp around Windshriek, where they were probably pretty common.

As I stood looking around the room, the door at the far side swung closed. The ancient hinges squealed the whole way, and there was a bang as it slammed into the doorframe. There wasn’t anything around that could have moved it, and the motion had been all wrong for being blown by a breeze.

I reached down to my side and drew my short sword from its birch bark sheath.

Gritting my teeth, I pulled the notched blade along the back of my forearm, drawing blood. I let the blood well up, then smeared it across the blade.

This trick was the combination of two scraps of information I’d picked up. The first was that intangible spirits, normally only vulnerable to maja, could be affected by maja-infused objects. The second was that the blood of a mage was weakly maja-infused, something accessible to every sorcerer as a reagent of last resort.

The bare metal of my sword wouldn’t even be able to touch an intangible spirit normally, but coated in my blood, it would work as a weapon against them, at least until the blood dried and the maja in it boiled away back to the Fold.

Looking inward, I pulled a thread of maja from my struggling core and spun it through the skin of my arm. My maja was still almost completely gone, but this wouldn’t use much if I kept it within my body.

The bleeding grew sluggish. The blood on the skin started to clot. I had enough maja in my reserve to hold the wound until it scabbed over.

The idea I’d stumbled on of flooding my body with maja to stave off the cold was apparently a recognized technique, the simplest of the body reinforcement techniques. It didn’t give increased strength or resilence, those techniques needed aspect manipulation of internal maja, but it reinforced the body’s natural processes.

In the extreme, it could even keep a powerful sorcerer’s mind alive after the heart had stopped beating. Which was either useful, or horrifying, depending on their chances of being healed. In theory it was another incredible power, but I couldn’t shake the image of a sorcerer dying and remaining conscious for as long as their maja lasted, locked inside a body that was decaying around them.

I held my sword out ahead of me as I crept forwards, moving towards the door that had moved.

I hesitated in front of it. I didn’t really want to see what was on the other side.

The door’s latch looked rusted to scrap and then when I touched the handle the wood was soft with rot. I reached out and caught the edge with the tip of my sword instead, carefully prying it open. I grabbed the edge as soon as I’d freed it, pulling it open the rest of the way.

Past the door was an empty corridor, the same overgrown floorboards and mold-rashed wooden walls. It ran twenty feet through the building, passing doors on either side, before ending in a larger space where a staircase doubled back up in the other direction.

“It could take hours to find them all,” a male voice said to my right.

I slowly turned my head to see an indistinct figure standing next to me.

His body was light gray, his head an irregular lump of tanned skin. His face was nothing but two flat black eyes that seemed painted onto his head, and a slash for a mouth. Two rows of lumpy teeth jutted out from the edges of the slit, exposed by a lack of any lips. It was as if an artist had tried to make a human figure out of wet clay, but had forgotten what a human looked like and given up halfway through. The whole apparition was slightly translucent, dark enough to look solid at a glance, but with details of what was behind it showing through. Only the figure’s voice was perfect, loud and close in the room, indistinguishable from the voice of a real person. He sounded younger than me, even though his body was a darker gray than my robe, which made me think he’d been a more advanced student.

I swallowed the lump that had forced itself into my throat and tried to breath around my thudding heart.

“Find- all of what?” I asked.

“You know,” the spirit said. “You’re here for them too. This place was a shelter for runaway students for years. They all found their way here, and they all died.”

“You were here for the spirits too,” I guessed. “Except that something here killed you.”

A real person would have noticed the tremor in my voice, but the figure didn’t react to it.

“Nothing here is a threat to me,” the spirit said. “They wouldn’t have sent me if I lacked the strength to handle a few Initiates.”

“I’m sorry. They did. You died here.”

The spirit was silent for a few seconds, then disappeared.

It reappeared ahead of me, further down the corridor, then vanished again, then appeared in another position, five steps forward. It stuttered its way down the hallway, fading in and out of existence. When it reached the stairs it vanished and didn’t reappear.

I took a long, shuddering breath. These were things I was here to fight.

I moved through the doorway and started heading down the corridor. I stopped at the first side door and pushed it open. It opened on a small dining room. A table sat against the far wall, still set with a pair of bowls and wooden utensils. The bowls had been left with the remains of food, but the swamp had come here too, and now they were overgrown with vibrant mushrooms and strange, colorful flowers.

The fact that there was anything left of the food at all told me that it was more recent than the rest of the ruin. It must have been some pair of runaways’ last meal.

The next door led to a broom closet filled with more spiderwebs than anything else. I closed that one quickly. There was a small lounge room with moldering and overgrown couches, and an empty kitchen that had been been stripped of anything useful years or decades ago.

I reached the end of the corridor and rounded on the stairs.

The spirit from the common room appeared briefly at the top of the stairs, a beacon, leading me on. I eyed the steps warily and started climbing.

The stairs led to a landing that opened out on a wide corridor, running the entire length of the building.

I’d only taken a single step when a new spirit appeared.

This one was in much better shape than the one downstairs. There was definition to its body, a robe with drapes and folds, the outline of a pair of sandals beneath the hem. If not for its faint translucency I might have mistaken it for a living, physical person. It appeared facing away from me, and its long brown hair was tied back in the style I’d seen on wealthy merchants.

“I won’t go back,” the spirit said, still only presenting the back of its head.

“You’re not going back,” I said. “You died. You’re a spirit.”

“You’re weak,” it said. “You won’t make me go back. They should have sent a Master.”

The spirit raised its arms, and the figment of a sword came into view over its shoulder.

My sword was short, no more than fifteen inches long, with a stabbing point and a blade wide enough to chop with. It was the sidearm for an archer or the like in the Antorxian military. The techniques in The Opening Arts of Arrenshu barely applied to it. I’d had more luck training with the dagger form called Forsecare than the duelling art.

The sword that the spirit held was a real sorcerer’s weapon. The blade was three feet long, double-edged, thin enough to move quickly but thicker at the spine to give it strength. It was a weapon designed for duelling other sorcers, blocking arrows and blades, and acting as a vehicle for maja.

If it had been a real weapon, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. The fact that it was as insubstantial as the spirit who wielded it gave me the advantage.

Without warning the spirit lunged. The spirit stabbed backwards without even turning their head, the ethereal blade striking out in the gap between their body and arm.

The attack completely blindsided me. The blade was sinking into my chest before I’d even realized what was happening.

The figment of the sword passed through my heart, leaving what felt like a line of ice through my flesh.

My heart skipped a beat.

When I directed it internally, my own maja was a salve to my wounds, an anaesthetic, and a reinforcement to the natural functioning of my body. The spirit’s felt like the opposite. It was a hard, cold, flinty presence, an invasion and a pollution, burning at my heart like frostbite.

I stepped backwards off the blade and swept my own blood-soaked sword upward, trying to knock the longer sword away. The two blades met with the sound of steel on steel and the spirit’s sword was knocked upwards.

The spirit paused. It was still facing away from me.

“I won’t go back,” it said.

A second later the spirit sword was flashing towards me again and again, flicking around in an unyieldin onslaught of slashes and stabs.

I swung my short sword around chaotically, up, down, left, desperately trying to deflect the blows. I forgot everything in The Opening Arts of Arrenshu. I was fighting like a farmer with a stick.

The spirit never deigned to look at me as we fought. All of its attacks came around its body, over its shoulders, through the gaps beneath its arms, like it couldn’t bear to show its face.

The spirit’s sword lunged towards my head. I swung to deflect, only for the spirit to pivot at the last second and slide the sword past my parry.

The sword plunged directly through my eye, through my brain, and out the back of my skull.

For a moment I was somewhere else, in a dark room at night, with rain pouring outside, and a feeble fire flickering in a metal pot by the window. Then the vision was gone, and the spirit was withdrawing its sword.

“Why won’t you die?” it whispered. “I won’t go back. Just die.”

The sword swung at my neck. This time I ignored it, weathering the blows as I rushed forward. I swung my sword at the spirit’s body, brutal, artless swipes that no swordsman would be proud of. Its body parted before the blood-soaked blade like smoke.

I switched my grip on the sword, moving it into the dagger grip described in Forsecare. From here I could strike down at it with fast, deadly stabs.

Around the fourth stab the spirit started wailing, an inhuman sound closer to wind through trees than a scream.

Over the next few seconds it fell apart, the substance of its body fragmenting and floating away like paper in a fire.

I was left alone in the room, out of breath, feeling icy trails all through my body where the spirit’s sword had cut.

The bleeding on my forearm had stopped, so I pulled the maja away, circulating it through my body to touch the places that had turned to ice. Slowly the feeling faded, leaving me merely exhausted.

A knocking on the door made me jump in place.

I turned to look. The door wasn’t even closed.

The knocking came again, loud and insistent. I moved the door, looking behind it, then closed it.

The knocking came again. I opened the door, and jumped back when I saw a pair of spirits standing outside.

These were closer to the one I’d seen downstairs. One was small, three feet high, shaped in a way that implied a robe without depicting any detail. The other was impossibly tall, wearing what was distinctly a gray Initiate’s robe, but its face was blank.

The tall one came at me before I’d even raised my sword.

Past the sleeves of its robes, its arms ended in four-fingered claws. It was on me in a second, striking at my face and throat.

Ice flowed through my skin and I scrambled to get away from it.

No part of the spirit had substance, so I was able to back away. I raised my sword in a reverse grip and stabbed out it, gouging its head and chest.

It reeled back, revealing the shorter spirit standing behind it.

The small spirit raised an arm and I felt a bubbling maja spike from its location. A moment later I was hit by a wave of Force.

I stumbled backwards, almost overbalancing.

The spirit was still able to use an echo of the powers the sorcerer had when it was alive. It followed up the wave of Force aspect with a swipe of its hand that sent me spinning to the ground.

Spikes of cold appeared in my back, and I knew the clawed spirit was back on me.

I thrust out blindly with my sword, stabbing between my body and arm, without even the feeling of resistance from hitting something to guide my aim.

After a few thrusts the clawing cold stopped spreading, and I twisted to see the tall spirit breaking apart.

The shorter one was holding a ghostly red flame between cupped hands. As soon as its partner was out of the way, it threw the flame.

I caught the spell with the flat of my sword. The blood drying on the blade sizzled and flaked at the impact, but the flame was deflected away, vanishing to nothing a foot away from me.

I didn’t give the spirit time to muster up another ghost of a spell. I strode forward and stabbed it through the heart. It fell apart as easily as the others.

As I stepped out of the room, I caught sight of the spirit from downstairs. It was standing by a door at the far end of the corridor, crouched with the side of its head to the door like it was listening to something on the other side.

It turned to me and spoke.

“She’s the last. If I kill her, I can go back and take my reward.”

It faded away a second later.

I checked the state of my sword. The blood was starting to get sticky, but it was still wet enough. I held the sword out and started walking down the corridor.

I looked in each of the side rooms as I went. I didn’t find anything but bones, overgrown by vines and covered in hip-high piles of fuzzy white mold.

When I reached the door at the end I paused.

The spirit I’d been following had been playing out a scene from its life, like an actor in a play. The sorcerer who’d left it had been alive when they reached this room, and they’d died some time later. I couldn’t shake the thought that whatever had killed them had been in this room.

I put my hand on the handle and took a breath. I wouldn’t fail the same way he had. I’d fail in a different way. If I came across a spirit that I couldn’t deal with, I was going to run.

I turned the handle and threw the door open.

The first thing I saw was another corpse. Bones and a little red matter, wrapped in dark gray cloth and covered in vines that had burst through the window. From the size of the remains and shade of the robe I thought it might have been the body of the spirit I’d been following. The second thing I noticed was the woman.

She wasn’t a spirit. She was solid, as real as I was, lying on a pile of clothes in the far corner of the room. Her skin was pale, her hair was unwashed, and there was a smell of decay hanging in the air around her.

The vines that had colonized the corpse were touching her as well, wrapping around the lower half of her right leg. The parts of the leg that were visible were withered, the flesh wrinkled and practically hugging the bone. I doubted that she’d be able to walk on it.

I was at a loss for what to do. I’d been sent to destroy spirits. The scroll hadn’t said anything about a living student.

Her eyes snapped open while I was standing there. She spotted me, then grabbed the hilt of a long dagger laying at her side.

I was injured by hostile maja and tired from fighting. I wasn’t in any position to fight another living person, let alone a student in a darker robe than me. I was ready to run. I didn’t get the chance to.

She jerked her dagger and a wave of force caught me, dragging me into the room. Another twitch and she’d slammed the door behind me. She pointed her dagger straight at me and a sheet of force slapped my body, throwing me against the back wall, pinning me, threatening to crush me. My sword flew out of my hand, clattering to the ground.

“Why are you here?” she asked, speaking in a thick native Antorxian accent. She sounded exhausted, like even drawing breath was an effort.

I was instantly aware of the danger in telling a runaway student that I was here on orders from the academy, but I didn’t think she’d just take a lie on face value. I chose honesty.

“I’m only here to get rid of the spirits,” I said quickly.

“You’re here on assignment?”

“Yes. But just to deal with the spirits. I had no idea there was someone alive out here.”

She peered at me, suspicion jostling with weariness on her face.

“What are you, an Initiate?”

“Yes. In my first year.”

She stared at me for a few seconds.

“If they sent you, they must think I am dead.”

“I think they do. My assignment only mentioned spirits.”

She nodded, satisfied.

“Let’s keep it that way.”

She twisted the dagger in the air and the pressure on my chest doubled, then tripled, like she was turning a giant screw. The force squeezed all the air out of my lungs. I felt it hissing out through my throat, powerless to stop it. The same pressure dug into my throat, constricting my veins and windpipe. The sound of my heartbeat was deafening in my ears, and unlike with Master Sectus’s Stillness spell the lack of breath was already making my head pound.

The woman’s maja was raging in her body the whole time, an energy that felt like rushing cold water. She looked halfway to dead and she still felt more powerful than I’d ever been.

My vision started to darken at the edges. She’d killed the person who’d left the spirit, and now she was going to kill me.

As my vision started to grow dark, I saw a new figure appear in the room. The misshapen Initiate spirit flickered into existence behind the woman. She didn’t seem to notice. It crouched down and a glint of silver appeared in its hand, then it was drawing the figment of a blade across the woman’s throat.

The pressure vanished from my chest. I dropped to the ground, gasping.

My head was pounding. I felt dizzy enough to faint.

Looking up, I saw the woman choking, grasping at the phantom blade sinking into her throat. The spirit pulled its ghostly dagger back and stabbed it into the side of her head.

“Come on,” it said. “We can kill her together.”

I knew from experience what she was feeling; icy trails her through her flesh, the painful effects of hostile maja on her body.

I recovered enough to get on my knees. I grabbed my sword from where it’d fallen at the edge of the room.

I twisted to face them. This spirit was clearly more dangerous than the ones I’d fought. The woman was struggling to hit it. Every punch just glanced off, moving the misshapen spirit, but not damaging it. Its own strikes on the other hand were landing, and she was getting weaker. She swung her dagger, but it was only steel. She blasted it away with a punch of Force aspect, but it only vanished and reappeared on top of her, bringing its dagger down into her chest.

I stepped forward and swung my sword at the spirit’s neck.

The blood-coated steel made contact with the translucent figure. The spirit’s misshapen head drifted away from its body like mist. The two parts of it hung in the air for a few seconds, moving slowly apart, before they both disintegrated into smoke and embers.

I had a moment of looking into the woman’s startled eyes, then I ran.

Maybe saving her would have convinced her I didn’t mean her any harm, that I was closer to being on her side than the academy’s, but with my life on the line I couldn’t count on it. I’d done the job I’d been sent for, and I certainly didn’t need any more blood on my hands.

I slammed the door behind me, throwing myself down the stairs, then around the corner. Within seconds I was back in the common room, swaying drunkenly as the dizziness caught up with me. I made it to the main door and ran out into the swamp.

I didn’t stop running until I couldn’t run any more, sinking to the soft ground fifty feet from the inn, putting a wide tree between myself and its dark, overgrown windows.

When I was getting my breath back, I heard the woman’s voice again, shouting from the room’s window.

“Where did you go, Initiate? Come back. I won’t hurt you.”

I stayed hidden. As much as I would have liked to believe her, I wouldn’t stake my life on it.

After a few seconds she shouted again.

“What are you going to tell them? Nothing! It would be pointless. I’ll be gone by the time they send anyone, and you’ll be punished for filing a false report.” She was quiet for a few seconds, then called, “You can come out. I have no reason to hurt you.”

I slipped away without letting her see me, sneaking away through the undergrowth until I could double back to the road.

Part of me felt guilty for abandoning her, she could probably use my help, but I was afraid how much she’d already absorbed of the Sovereign’s Path. I was afraid that she wouldn’t risk leaving me alive.

I’d be back at the academy before dusk. I’d worry about what I was going to tell Master Devaus when I faced them.