Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon (26 page)

“What? Why?” asked Dougal. Before he could say
more, Gullik cut him off with a tremendous snore that echoed through the cave.

Riona nodded and spoke up to be heard over the rumbling. “I thought you said that traveling during the day would be dangerous.”

“Yes, but we are close to the Dragonbrand,” Ember said. “We would be better off not attempting to cross it at night.”

Riona caught Dougal’s eye and signaled that she would take the first shift today, along with Ember. He was too tired to realize that there wouldn’t be a second, and he leaned against the back of the cave and tried to ignore the norn’s snoring.

The time passed so fast that when Dougal woke up, he felt as if he’d not slept at all. He felt a hand covering his mouth, and his eyes flew wide open to see Riona hunched before him, a finger pressed to her lips. After Dougal nodded that he understood, Riona removed her hand from his face, and he sat up. She stood up and beckoned him to follow her. They crept past Ember, who watched them silently with her large eyes, then rose to follow them.

Riona led Dougal to the mouth of the cave, where she knelt down and pointed at a pair of pale figures meandering up the hill in the light of the breaking dawn. Dougal rubbed the sleep from his eyes and squinted down at the figures: an old shepherd and his young apprentice. For a heartbeat he wondered how such people could have possibly brought their flock this deep into Ascalon, and he even gazed around, looking for the sheep. Then he realized what the shepherds really
were.

Dougal signaled for Riona to follow him back into the cave. When they reached Ember, they spoke in whispers.

“They’re ghosts,” Dougal said. “They must have been working the fields around here when Adelbern brought down the Foefire.”

Riona rasped. “And their spirits have been trapped out here for over two centuries. Horrible.”

“They seem harmless,” said Ember.

Dougal shook his head. “Anything but. I run into a lot of ghosts in my line of work. Most restless spirits have some sort of reason for hanging around a place: an unfinished task, a wrong that needs righting, and so on. They’re often coherent, and you can hold a reasonable conversation with them. They can be obsessive, or angry, but they’re sane—sane for ghosts, at least.”

“And those two are not?” asked Riona.

“The spirits created by the Foefire are frozen in time. To them, it’s still the day of the Foefire, Adelbern is still their king, and the charr are still threatening at the gates.”

“Like in Ebonhawke today,” said Riona softly, but both Dougal and Ember ignored her.

Dougal continued. “When they run into someone still alive, they see that person as charr, or at best an ally of the charr. It doesn’t matter who or what the person really is. It could be Queen Jennah herself, or a sylvari. To them, every person who invades their space is charr.”

“The Foefire killed every human in the entire
country,” Ember said. “The Sorcerer-King’s atrocity extended far beyond his city’s walls.”

Dougal nodded. “It affected every bit of the nation except for Ebonhawke.”

“What should we do about them?” Riona asked.

“Nothing, unless they come into the cave,” Dougal said. “We don’t need a fight with them.”

“That’s too bad,” Ember said. She moved back into the cave and picked up Bladebreaker’s sword. The two humans followed her.

“You can’t tell me you’re going to go hunt those ghosts down,” Riona said, shocked.

“I don’t need to,” Ember said, pointing her snout over Dougal’s shoulder. “They’re already here.”

As Dougal spun about, the two spirits entered the cave and froze there in its mouth. They looked much as Dougal supposed they had in their breathing days, but with every ounce of life drained out of them. They were pale reflections of their former selves, and they trailed wisps of pale bluish ectoplasm behind them as if blasted by a wind only they could feel. It made them look as if they were constantly burning, and the way their faces contorted with rage and pain only added to that impression.

“Charr!” the old shepherd’s ghost said. He brought his crooked staff forward and unleashed an inhuman screech.

“Kill them!” The young shepherd drew the sword at his hip and charged forward, matching the other ghost’s cry in a horrible harmony that Dougal feared might make his ears bleed.

The others in the cave awoke in an instant. None of them, including Dougal and Riona, could do a thing before Ember threw herself between the two ghosts and began slashing about, her blade and claws cutting clean through their spectral forms as if they were no more than mist.

The ghosts’ twinned screeches rose higher and higher in pitch until Dougal felt his eyes start to roll back in their sockets. Ember’s snarls and growls added to the cacophony.

Ember yelped as the ghosts’ pale weapons passed through her, not breaking her skin but harming her just the same. The ghosts screamed as her claws and sword cut through them. Her strikes drew no blood, but with every swipe they dragged away more of the glowing ectoplasm that made up the ghostly figures, diminishing them more each time.

Riona grabbed her own sword, but Dougal held the others back with a raised hand. “If we try to help her, she’ll wind up slashing us too,” he said. To the others he shouted, “Gather your things and get ready to move!” When Kranxx, Killeen, and Gullik hesitated, he turned toward them and barked, “Now!”

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 until they formed a gray-violet dust that coated everything near where the tree had once been.

Ember elbowed Dougal. “I thought you had been here before.”

“We came through the Shiverpeaks,” he replied. “In any case, that was before all this.”

Killeen goggled at the scene. “How terrifying,” she said softly, “and yet starkly beautiful.” When she saw the others staring at her, she asked, “A dragon did this?”

“Yes,” Kranxx said, once more perched atop Gullik’s shoulders, “and without any effort at all. Its name was Kralkatorrik. The creature is such an aberration that this is what happened to the land it simply flew over. It didn’t even have to touch it.”

“Bear, Snow Leopard, Raven, and Wolf,” said Gullik. He spoke quietly, as if his voice might invite more destruction.

“It’s horrific,” said Riona, aghast. “A crime against nature.”

Dougal nodded. “This is why we’re doing this, right? If we don’t find a way to work together, we don’t stand a chance against the creatures that did this.”

“Statistically, we don’t have much of a chance no matter what we do,” said Kranxx. When Riona scowled at him he added, “But uniting the peoples against the dragons would elevate us from ‘No chance at all’ to ‘Very little chance’ instead.”

Without a word, Ember did the one thing that every fiber of Dougal’s body screamed at him not to do. She launched herself down the hill and toward that raw, crystal-packed wound in the world. A moment later he found himself loping after her, along with the rest of the group.

The path to the Dragonbrand was wide and easy, the smoothest going since the team had left Ebonhawke behind. The sun shone down on their heads, and the grasses around them swayed in the gentle wind like waves in the sea. It felt good to be out in the open air and sunshine again.

Dougal glanced at Killeen. She had seemed a bit off after having had to spend so much time in the darkness of the night and then in the shade of the cave. Now, though, she grinned from ear to ear, seemingly one with the nature through which she passed. Looking at her, Dougal couldn’t help but smile himself.

It did not take long to reach the Dragonbrand. It seemed as if the corrupted landscape sensed they were coming and gathered itself closer to be able to entrap them faster. Or maybe it was just how Dougal tried to treasure his last few moments in the untouched land that made that time slip by so fast.

Ember came to a halt on the edge of the Dragonbrand, just before she reached the border of the
purplish, crystalline obscenity. The others fell into rank alongside her, each of them staring out across the twisted atrocity to wonder what horrors it might hide from them.

Then, after drawing a deep breath, Ember stepped into the weird landscape, and the others followed.

The glassy grass crunched to dust under their feet, and soon the shards of it became deep enough to cover their ankles. The air crackled with electricity that made Dougal’s hair lift up. Although he could see no threats, he sensed danger from every angle. He drew his sword and saw the others ready their weapons too.

“This is fascinating,” said Killeen. “It’s as if all these plants have been frozen in this state between life and death. Do you think they still grow?”

“Not after we step on them,” said Kranxx.

“I wonder how this works,” the sylvari said. “It’s so curious.” She picked a sapphire bloom from an amethyst bush and watched it slowly crumble in her hand.

“Let’s keep moving,” said Dougal. “The sooner we’re through this place, the better.”

“Bear’s blood!” said Gullik. “This is all very strange, but it can’t be worse than Ascalon City itself, can it?”

There was the distant, faint sound of an explosion, and something skipped off the ground in front of the norn’s feet. Once it had been a standing pool of water, but now cracks spiderwebbed from where the bullet had shattered it.

Dougal spun about to see where the shot had been fired from, but Ember had already spotted the source. “There!” she said, pointing back the way they had come.

A charr warband stood on the edge of the Dragonbrand, ten soldiers all told, heavily armored and ready for battle. The warrior in front raised his rifle and roared, and the others echoed his call.

“Run!” Kranxx said, batting Gullik on the top of his head.

The norn laughed and pulled his axe. “If they’ve already seen us, my tiny friend, then the time for stealth is over!” He hefted his weapon in response to the challenge. “Wolf’s teeth, the time for battle has begun!”

“Hold it!” Dougal said. He cast a wary eye on the warband. “They don’t seem to be charging.”

Battle lust danced in Gullik’s eyes. “Then we shall take the battle to them!”

Ember grabbed the norn’s elbow before he could stomp off to fight. “If they meant to fight us, they would have attacked already.” The other charr of the warband were scrambling with their rifles as well.

“Oh-ho!” The norn beamed with pride. “They are wiser than they would seem if they fear to engage us in battle!”