Suggested Listening

Two days of travel later, the teams found each other near the southeastern edge of the Engeval mountains. These were tough lands of foothills and deep gulches carved by heavy storms. Scratch made direct contact first, by virtue of being able to ignore all terrain.

"Look at you," the ghost said while floating above like some sort of arbiter spirit. "That is classy armor, for a classy necromancer. Lady Elruin na Cali, your dear, deceased, big sister would be proud of you."

"I can hear you," Cali came around the bend on Mister Clackybones. "And I can strangle your nonexistent neck."

"True, but can you fly?"

"Don't test m-woah!" While Cali threatened Scratch, Mister Clackybones began to trot toward Elruin.

Elruin ran up and gave the bleached skull of the mare a hug. "Mister Clackybones. I know, I missed you, too. I'm sorry I couldn't see you for so long. I'll try to do better from now on, I promise."

Lemia and Calenda shared a look, before Cali reached out and rubbed Elruin's head. "Thanks for letting me borrow your horse, she was very well behaved. Oh, and Ketak wants you to send a couple of your dollies back to help her. There's a river not far back that she needs help crossing. Oh, right, and she's got some sarite shards to give you."

"Hey, to be clear, those are my shards," Scratch said. "I earned those helping clear out goblins, and I am the one gifting them to Lady Elruin. Especially that time sarite, I think House Cali owes me an official title for it."

Cali either sighed or growled at the ghostly provocateur, and even she wasn't certain which.

Suggested Listening

Elruin heard the screaming song moments before pain radiated from her back. She slammed face-first into Mister Clackybone's neck, which would have caused further injury if not for her superhuman resilience. In her back was an arrow, white light pouring off of it for a few moments before it was blown out like a candle by her own power. The spell dissolved, but after the projectile severed her spine

"Cover Ell!" Cali reacted first, and rushed to where the source of the attack had come from. Lemia was as capable of healing magic as she was, but Calenda knew she was their best option to stop the attacker from killing them all ahead of time.

Lemia and Ketak rushed to Elruin's side, preparing their own sets of spells to stop arrow attacks. Earth and air magic twisted around them, concealing the three of them and, with any luck, stop future projectiles. With the opponent undetectable to their eyes and magic, there was little else they could hope to accomplish.

Then the resonance shifted, distorting the light and air around her until a jumbled swirl. "Lumusis!" She shouted, her words were so muddled that she couldn't recognize their meaning. Then she realized it wasn't the world being distorted, but her own mind. She stopped, turned around, and began walking toward Elruin, still laying atop Clackybones.

I'm sorry, I can't stop it! She tried to shout, tried to scream, but not a sound came from her mouth. As part of training all members of the Scouts are exposed to mind control magic, so that they can get some experience fighting the magic, but never before had she been puppeted like this. The magical energy cost for taking absolute control of a body was fatal to most mages, so the majority relied on far more subtle methods, and the few who thought themselves above the slow method found themselves dead in short order.

She did as her training bid, and flooded her body with her natural magic, not to retake control of her body, but to make control too expensive for the puppeteer to maintain. As with most forms of magic, it was easier to break the caster than it was to break the spell.

More important in this situation, however, was that it alerted everyone that something was wrong with her. Black mist roiled and blended across her native blue-green light like a storm at sea as seen from under the waves, and it would be a small miracle if they didn't attract monsters from the beacon of energy she had turned herself into.

Or would it? She was no longer alive, so perhaps the monsters wouldn't find her energy so appetizing. Such were the thoughts that ran unbidden through her mind while she lacked all control of her body. At least her puppeteer didn't know how to use her speed and agility, so she walked toward Elruin, and bought time for the others to react.

"Cali?" Lemia took a step back, uncertain of of the situation. Her short time as an adventurer had not prepared her for such magic.

Scratch, however, had been around longer and seen more stuff than everyone else in the team combined and multiplied by ten. He dropped down in front of Cali's face. "So, I'm about to possess you again. You know the drill, this time without the Faustian bargains and I can't kill you."

"No!" Elruin gasped. "Taint. Not safe." She hummed a few short, painful notes, and Clackybones began to trot away faster than the controller could make Cali walk.

Scratch backed away, for he still didn't understand the nature of Calenda's construction, and had to defer to Elruin's judgment. If he had to save the little necromancer by destroying Calenda, he would do so without hesitation, but it appeared to him that there was a less drastic solution that would hold up for the time being.

Calenda felt the control slacken, leaving her paralyzed rather than attacking. A relief, until Clackybones began to buck under Elruin. Weak at first, but growing in wildness with each alteration of the notes. It's not a mind controller, it's a necromancer. In her time with Elruin, the girl had never once exerted upon her the power that a negation mage could exert upon the unliving. She was not prepared for this.

"Fine!" Scratch flew away from Cali, and into barely controlled horse monster. It calmed, then froze. "Now can one of you do something!? These guys just disabled three of us and we don't even know where they are!"

"Get Elruin off the horse!" Ketak commanded. In spite of her solitary nature, she was an experienced commander and veteran warrior. "Work on healing her. If we're fighting necromancers, we're going to want her fighting before... Merat!"

The whip-like tendril bones of a void monster began to roll toward them, moving in slow, jerky motions.

Lemia began taking Elruin from her saddle. "It's not a skilled necromancer! If it was, we'd be in a lot more trouble!" Which served to explain why they went for Elruin first. With her unable to give commands, the enemy necromancer could take control.

Ketak took a step forward, facing off against the void monster. It lashed out with tendril that was more annoyance than threat, far from the machine of death that it was before. Ketak swatted it away with her sword that had once belonged to Claron. She could have burned the corpse to unmoving ash if she wanted, but that would have given the necromancer reason to take control of another of the stationary corpses and revealed the full extend of her strength. There was a time for every strategy, and now was the time to be underestimated.

Meanwhile, Elruin helped as best she could to be laid down on her stomach by Lemia.

"Jeez, Ell, what is with you and arrows? Next chance we get to upgrade your armor has got to be anti-projectiles." Lemia spoke to calm herself as much as the wounded girl, while working out how to extract the arrow and heal the wound. "Huh, this wood is alchemical. Probably how it cut through your defenses. I'm going to be here for a while, but at least I can use this to heal you through your armor."

While Lemia worked with minor bursts of healing to halt and undo the internal bleeding, Elruin dragged her violin up near her, then set the bow on it. She couldn't speak, but her arms still worked, so she could play. The disjointed strings of music did not amount to much, but they shattered the chains holding Cali with but a few moments of effort.

She would have to trust her elder sister to handle the rest. She closed her eyes and struggled to catch her breath.

Calenda moved the moment she was released, having gained a reasonable idea of where the controller was hiding during her time trapped. With her magic, a general idea was all she needed.

First, the forest exploded into a cloud of dust, as she dumped a massive amount of power into the lifecycle of the plants. The area blossomed into pollen and flower petals, blinding better than her fog cloud ever had, for it even worked against lifesight and choked the lungs of most things unfortunate enough to breathe the reproductive spores.

The best part was that she could still see through it, to an extent suitable for combat, so she was prepared when a humanoid attacker came out of the woods at her. He felt her, and didn't bother trying to play a long game against a guisarme. He got close, swung again and again with pair of short swords that forced her to back away, unable to get the distance to exploit her weapon, or close enough distance to use her gloves.

It reminded her of her practice sessions with Juna, who exemplified the art of turning a full offensive assault into the best defensive strategy. In comparison, this opponent was an amateur, but an amateur in comparison to Juna was still a skilled enough frontline fighter to force Cali back a step with every swing, each one a little closer to hitting home than the last.

At this rate, she could lose before buying more than a minute, until she felt her strength increase with the power of Elruin's music.

Elruin continued to play her violin while still laying on her stomach. The shaft still wedged in her back, but her body as restored as one could hope for without removing the weapon. It was sloppy, imprecise, and ugly, but it was enough.

"No!" The attacker shouted. "NO!!!" With a burst of power that exceeded what Elruin had granted Calenda, he began assailing his opponent until a minor mistake left Cali missing a forearm, and her guisarme on the ground in two pieces.

Ketak moved to intercept, but she was not an agile fighter the way Calenda and this attacker were, so she found herself watching in horror as Clackybones rammed into the man in order to shield Elruin from harm.

Lemia turned her attention away from healing in order to generate a burst of disruptive magic of her own. One of the few offensive spells an aspectless mage could cast, that of dismantling the structure of another spell. In this case, the numerous enchantment spells which their foe relied upon. It wouldn't hold forever, but for a short time it could render an enemy without magic protection.

It failed, and Clackybones was bisected.

"Amplify his spells!" Elruin gasped upon giving the command. She began to work her violin, desperate to eek out what little power she could.

Lemia hesitated for but a moment before deciding to pray Elruin knew what she was doing. She began a general spell which would improve the power supply available to an enchantment, and by doing so give it a temporary increase in power. Destructive over the long term, but in the short term it could make the difference between life and death.

Then Elruin changed the nature of the spell, infusing it with her own necromantic power. That spell then changed the enchantments on the assailant, turning them into spells which worked by siphoning necromantic power from the environment instead of more general magic. Power which Elruin was supplying in greater quantities than any normal human could survive.

He reacted fast, forcing all of his enchantments to deactivate and dissipate before the necromantic power scoured any semblance of life from his body.

Then he stumbled, swayed, and fell sideways.

Suggested Listening

"Four below, he's a boy." Calenda stood over the kid, looking down as sweat ran from his face like rainwater. He was, at most, a year older than Elruin, though with his soft green skin and yellow hair, age was the only thing they had in common. "Sylvanesti, at least half, with the pointed ears."

"M-my sister. Give her back." He tried to sit, stand, call on any magic he might have left, but all he could do was lay and gasp. He lacked even the strength to use magic to kill himself, so long as Lemia kept maintaining an antimagic effect over him.

"Sister?" Calenda said. "I've seen three Sylvanesti in my entire life, and that was years ago."

"Liar. Necromancer. Abomination. Kill. All."

"Don't get too attached, Sis," Scratch said. "He's seen far too much for us to let him go, we have to kill him."

"Why?" Elruin looked from her position on the ground. For now, she was stable, if still paralyzed.

"Yeah, the look in those eyes, that's the look of a fanatic. Betcha money our abomination prey took his sister, and now he's out for revenge. He'll never believe we're not allies, either, mortals can't tell the difference between one army of walking dead and another. Kid's got skills as a mind mage, too, so we can't hold him forever, we can't change his mind, and we sure can't let him go."

Cali couldn't believe what she was about to say, but she said it anyway. "What about your oathbond magic?"

"In his condition? Great way to add a resident to the doll house. But maybe you should do it, what with the missing arm and all."

"N-no." Somehow, the child found strength enough to lift his head off the ground. Then he fell back and began convulsing.

"What now?" Cali stood back, and moved to place herself between the boy and Elruin.

"Fairie dust." Lemia recognized the symptoms, there weren't many from the slums who didn't.

"What?" Elruin kept looking at the boy, whose life energies began to surge to superhuman levels in some areas while dimming to less than the soil beneath them in others, fluctuating back and forth in a chaotic, nonsensical pattern that was sure to kill him.

"It's a drug," Cali said. "Small amounts give a boost to magical power for a short time, but this kid overdosed himself to fight us."

"Well, then I retract my statement, we no longer have to do a thing but hide the body. Unless we we still want a new doll."