The Shield of Weeping Ghosts - James P. Davis [125]
"What's wrong?" he asked. "I thought this was what you wanted."
Force gathered around him, and he willed it outward, watching as Anilya was slammed backward. Her body flew through the air and crashed against a spire of ice, then slid to the ground. The sound of breaking bone echoed, the reverberations tingling across his skin.
As he witnessed the violent effects of a mere whim, he wondered what he had done to himself. The swirling power clenched on his innards, twisting and stretching as it sensed the presence of his doubt. Gasping in pain, he pushed away his brief fear and breathed heavily as the pain subsided.
Anilya coughed, blood staining her lips as she pushed herself to a sitting position. She cradled a broken arm and one leg was bent at an unnatural angle. In the distance Bastun could see shapes diving and winging through the clouds. Black feathered wings bore tiny figures ever closer. Waves rolled in the ocean as beasts rose to the surface, spiny backs breaking the water before submerging again. Wiping her mouth on het sleeve, Anilya turned and saw them as well.
"They're coming for you," he said, shaking with the strain of maintaining the caged chaos that flowed from the Breath.
"So it seems," she replied, shifting her shoulders and looking away from the awakening denizens of Stygia, "though I suspect they'll have an eye for you as well." She shook with cold, frost forming in patches on her face and arms. "We could leave together, use this power for the greater good."
"I told you once before," he said. "Your passion lacks sincerity-and there is no good in this."
Pale arms, encrusted with ice, broke the ocean's surface and gripped the edges of the small island. Humanoid bodies, their faces frozen in grotesque expressions, pulled themselves sluggishly onto solid ground, flopping and sliding as they piled over one another. Dark angels, screeching hideous dirges overhead, circled and cast black eyes onto the procession of the damned.
Slowly, Bastun turned his head downward, unable to look upon the foul souls as they sought purchase on the ice. The slight weakness pained him, but the unnatural strength did not fade. The power did not so quickly punish this flaring spark of humanity. Claws scraped and drew his attention to the left where he spied a serpentine monstrosity writhing over a distant block of ice. Its pale blue eyes met his and he found a part of himself hiding in its multifaceted gaze. He shuddered, and the pain grew a bit more, but subsided more swiftly as if the power of Stygia were reshaping each lapse to its own design.
"Don't look away, Bastun," Anilya said hoarsely, and he looked at her blue-tinged lips, frozen droplets of blood clinging to her chin. "Remember this. Remember all of it."
The first of the condemned souls grasped her ankle, and she winced as her injured leg was tugged. Try as he might, he could not look away, could not abandon the need to see the fate of his friends' murderer. He whispered under his breath, in equal parts praying to the Three and recounting all that had brought him to this moment, this choice, this grim acceptance.
Anilya had not the strength to scream or cry out, but the damned did it for her as they pulled her inexorably to the ocean. Bastun heard in their voices a lament for their own existence, the dim memories of lives and deaths and torments suffered. He realized the curse of Shandaular and its Shield was birthed in the depths of this place, in the unceasing repetition of a frozen hell. Its power rushed in his ears, leaving him numb as a tangled mass of limbs and faces engulfed the durthan.
"Remember it, vremyonni!" she called out. "Remember the power! Rashemen may yet have need of it!"
The first splashes of falling bodies broke the water, and she was gone, the voices of her captors gone with her. In a daze, Bastun lowered his eyes and stared