Guild Wars_ Ghosts of Ascalon - Matt Forbeck [83]
Ember spun about like a wolf, flailing all around her and doing her best to ignore the pain when the ghosts struck her back. Soon the older ghost dissipated entirely.
The younger ghost howled in the grip of his insane fury and redoubled his attacks. With only a single foe now, Ember concentrated on taking the ghost apart. Dougal realized that if the shepherds had been living, Ember would have killed them each several times over by now. As it was, the others were ready to leave by the time she managed to dispatch the second apparition.
Dougal scooped up Ember’s pack. “Are you all right?” he asked her as she staggered over to him.
“I’ll be fine,” she said as she took her pack from him. “It only hurts when I breathe.”
“I think I have something in my pack to help,” said Kranxx, unlimbering his satchel.
The charr just waved him away. “Ghosts hurt the soul more than the flesh, though they are no less deadly.”
“Well done!” Gullik said. “You made quick work of those spirits. I only wish I’d been allowed to destroy them myself !”
“You’ll get your chance if we don’t get out of here fast,” said Dougal. “It is difficult to really kill a ghost.” He pointed to the swirling gray mists that still moved about the cave’s entrance. “They’ll re-form in a matter of minutes. Maybe less.”
“Let’s not be here when that happens,” Kranxx said as he crawled up onto the norn’s shoulders again.
“I’d love to be able to remain here and study them for a while,” Killeen said. “They probably used this cave as a resting place when they were tending their sheep.”
“We have our mission to think of first,” Riona said as she headed for the cave’s mouth.
Moving fast in the growing, muddy dawn, Ember led the group around from the cave’s entrance to the crest of the hill. As they topped the hill, the sun cleared the horizon, and Dougal saw the Dragonbrand for the first time.
He felt as if he’d been stabbed. If the arrival of the ghosts had disturbed him, witnessing the damage done to Ascalon shook him to the bone. While the hilltop they were on stood in sunshine, to the north a ribbon of storm stretched from one side of the sky to the other. Dougal thought he could see a bit of daylight peeking out on the far side of the storm, but to the north and the west the darkness stretched out to the horizons. The storm seemed like a river that flowed from the north to the west. The thunderheads scudding over it ignored the prevailing winds in the rest of the region and raced along the same path like logs being pulled downstream through a set of rapids.
Lightning arced through the storm clouds, and thunder rolled along the ribbon and out across the surrounding lands. Now that he saw this, Dougal knew that he had heard the noise while he’d been trying to sleep but had simply chalked it off to Gullik’s snoring. Rain fell in patches in some sections of the wide ribbon but not in others, and the lightning paid it no mind, zapping down from the sky wherever it liked.
The terrain below the clouds disturbed Dougal the most. The land had turned entirely to sharp-angled crystals that appeared to glow with power, although Dougal could not tell if that light was simply reflected from the sun or actually came from within. Bent and twisted amethyst trees stood by the side of a frozen cobalt stream that rolled through a landscape covered with scattered scrub brush and patches of grass all transformed into crystals both fragile and sharp. Where the ground was bare, it was twisted upon itself in gray lava-like swirls and dotted with half-shattered bubbles that looked like hatched ebony eggs clustered at the base of the glittering trees.
Lightning smashed down into one of those trees, and it exploded into uncountable fragments of amethyst. The crystal shards tinkled against the glassy landscape as they cascaded to the ground and shattered again and again