As they crossed the bridge into Malodell, Audren did not see any wraiths. Yet, he felt watched, as if the eyes of lost souls already followed his every move. It was a nauseating feeling, nerves prickling all over his body. He wondered if Terry felt it too.

Malodell was a simple village. It consisted of tiny cottages lined up on both sides of the main street, occasionally branching into smaller streets and alleys. The island the village had been founded on was not spacious, giving the place a cramped look. Had its population not been viciously killed, it could have been cozy.

He halted his horse in the main street briefly, staring ahead. The unpaved road stretched on for a good while, leading to the unkempt village green in the centre; Audren could vaguely make out an old stone shrine to a deity there, withering with age. A blanket of ruin, dark as night, lay draped over the settlement. The thatched roofs of many a cottage had burnt away, the walls crumbled and cracked, with vines and moss creeping up towards the sky, nature reclaiming what man had destroyed.

Though Malodell had fallen over a century ago, Audren still smelled fire and death in the air. Proof of the place's unsettling, forever-haunted nature. And it was quiet, too quiet, not even birds making a sound. The life had been sucked out of the village so thoroughly it looked as if such life had never existed there at all. The only things Audren could hear were the clacking of his horse's hooves, the rhythm of his breathing, the beating of his heart against his ribcage.

"If you were the countess, where would you choose to hide?" he asked Terry, voice lowered to a whisper on instinct. He couldn't explain why; Malodell simply wasn't a place where one felt comfortable speaking out loud.

Terry shrugged. "The building that's the least likely to collapse on me, which is... essentially none of them." She, too, whispered. "Although... Forgive me for making assumptions about the nobility, but I think a countess wouldn't settle for just anything. If I were her, I'd take the markerichter's home."

That made sense. The markerichter had led the marke, the collective of farmers regulating the use and ownership of the village grounds. The markerichter had been the closest thing to a leader in Malodell, which could make his home the most appealing to Countess Limnaia.

He nodded in approval and slowly led his horse farther into the main street, in the direction of the tallest building by the village green, the only one with two stories and sturdy enough to have gotten through an attack and years of neglect relatively well. The hooves of his and Terry's horses connecting with the ground sounded like thunderclaps in the silence. He prayed to the gods to grant them safety in this long-broken place.

The gods didn't listen.

It began with a soft noise, easily audible, a low hissing, like a mangy stray cat full of hatred. It grew louder, louder, and Audren felt himself cower involuntarily, trying to determine where the sound came from. Within seconds, it reached a disturbing crescendo, culminating into a harsh shriek.

The first wraith appeared in the derelict doorway of a cottage to his right. Audren's heart skipped at least three beats. The creature looked horrifying: its hands pale and skeletal, crooked fingers bloody, face emaciated and mutilated both. It wore threadbare black robes, typical in the depictions of malicious spirits still dwelling in the realm of the living.

Audren reached for his sword.

Alarmed, the spirit let out another shriek before lunging at the lord and the mage. Audren, still trying to shake off the petrifying fear coursing through his body, heard Terry voice a spell, almost yelling it this time as opposed to her usual mumbling. She focused her attention on the wraith, holding its glassy gaze with her own as the words kept spilling out. Before the evil creature could reach them, it stopped in its rapid float mid-air, hands flying to its face as if trying to soothe a terrible headache. A gut-wrenching cry left its mouth as it dissolved into the air like mist.

"Well, fuck!" Terry shouted when she was done. "I'll be damned if that noise didn't wake them all!"

Audren didn't know if she'd banished the spirit permanently or temporarily, but didn't get time to ask. Two more wraiths emerged from wretched ruins, floating towards him and Terry at a fast pace. The mage focused on the one on the right, repeating the same spell.

Would she be able to banish the other one in time? What if she couldn't?

He had to act. He couldn't let Terry do all the work.

With his sword poised to attack, he got off his horse and assumed a fighting stance, glaring at the wraith as it sped towards them. "Here, you bastard!" he called out to it, hoping it would lead to the being concentrating on him and him alone. "It's me you'll want to fight!'

To his horror and relief, the creature listened. It came for him, skeletal hands outstretched, and Audren glared as it came closer and closer. He'd hack those hands right off when it arrived.

From the corner of his eye, he could see Terry turn to him as her second wraith dissolved; the expression on her face was one of mortification. "Wait, Lord Audren, they're not actually-"

The end of her sentence didn't register in his mind. Adrenaline-filled, he swung his sword at the wraith, prepared to give it the same treatment as the Cursed.

His plan backfired.

Instead of slicing through robe and rotting bone, Audren's sword struck nothing. The undaunted wraith didn't stop, came right at him, flew through his body. He felt all air be knocked out of him, ghastly hands reaching into his soul, and doubled over, mind drawing a blank.

They're not actually corporeal, he managed to think. That's what you were trying to say.

He'd gotten too used to the Cursed.

The world spun around him, black spots dancing before his eyes as he stumbled, body too heavy for his feet to carry. He heard more wraiths shrieking, heard Terry tell him something, but the words sounded like gibberish to his ears, distant and far away. He felt cold, so cold it burned, his insides, oh gods, his insides had frozen over. He trembled all over, as if he'd forgotten to wear warm clothes in a mountain winter, and sank to his knees.

He grappled, but couldn't prevent his consciousness from slipping away, dissolving as a wraith into the sky.

~~~~

Terry watched the lord fall. It dawned on her she'd made a mistake.

A grave one.

Shit.

She cursed herself, but not out loud, for she needed her voice to perform the banishing spell, over and over again now, without a moment's rest. Audren had slumped to the ground like a sack of lordly potatoes. Damn it. For Terry, knowing wraiths weren't corporeal in spite of their solid appearance was nothing but common knowledge. Her studies had made that explicitly clear. She'd forgotten those with no affinity with magic and evil spirits would not have access to that information.

And of course Audren would be fooled by their appearance; he'd been slicing through undead Cursed left and right since they'd embarked. Why would these undead be any different? Except they were different, and Terry knew it, could have mentioned as much but neglected to, and now the Lord of the Mountains paid the price.

Not that she would last much longer.

The amount of horrid wraiths pouring into the main street was impressive. Like weeds in a garden, they kept popping up. Their terrible noise bounced off of the cracked walls of Malodell and Terry, who'd also abandoned her horse by now, nimbly dodged a wraith's assault, never once faltering in uttering her spell, but unable to prevent breaking eye contact with her target. An alarming development. The more time she spent leaping away from the wraiths, escaping their tainting darkness, the less time she spent actually banishing them.

She glanced around, saw three wraiths, five, eight, ten. If they touched her soul like they had Audren's, corruption would spread. A deadly corruption, capable of killing quicker than the plague. How much time the Wraith's Affliction needed to end a life depended on the strength of one's soul, but if it went untreated for too long, it would inevitably be fatal.

Terry accepted the fact they were doomed.

She narrowly avoided another wraith's wicked touch, a skeletal hand that had tried to claw at her heart, only to spin around and see a face far too close, fast-approaching and gaunt and depraved, and she knew it was too late to get away, too late to avoid the fate of the duke's men in that silly old story, and-

Her eardrums practically exploded as the wraith screeched and retreated into one of the ruins, back into the darkness and away from her. The other wraiths did the same. Terry blinked in confusion, too puzzled to be relieved just yet. What was it that had saved her from a certain demise?

And was the alternative better?

"Don't just stand there, necromancer. Your companion needs immediate medical attention."

Terry turned around to face the speaker, only to be baffled even more. The woman behind her had kneeled down next to the lord and studied him; his skin had gained an odd blue-blackish tint. The lady matched the description Terry had heard Audren give the nymph earlier. Countess Limnaia of House Acestor.

The nymph hadn't lied. She did live.

Hadn't she been able to come to their aid faster?

"I know," Terry told her, feeling a little lost. "The Wraith's Affliction. He needs medication before full necrosis sets in."

The countess held a staff, she saw, with a small, purple gem set into it. Wraithsbane. That was what kept the spirits away. The material was a rarity and the art of enchanting receptive objects to keep spirits away was lost to time; library fires and the outlawing and persecution of necromancy in many regions of the continent were an awful combination when it came to preserving necromantic knowledge. That staff had to be an old, priceless artifact. Could it have belonged to Credi?

"He does. I have a small supply of it in the house I'm staying in. Help me carry him inside, will you?" The countess continued to critically examine Audren. "Gold in his ears," Terry heard her mutter. "From the Wretched Mountains, undoubtedly. Looks familiar. Audren. Was that his name?"

"He's Lord of the Mountains, Countess Limnaia," the mage noted, not entirely above bragging with someone else's title, though the statement also served a practical purpose: Terry didn't know much about the relations between Santonshire and the Mountains, but if they were good, it could render the woman more willing to help.

Countess Limnaia flinched upon hearing her name. "That must be a recent development. He was only a lord's son when I last saw him. But why isn't the Lord of the Mountains with his people right now?" She rose to her feet. "I have questions for you and you must have questions for me. We'll combat the Wraith's Affliction and sit down to talk. I reckon that's reasonable."

And if it wasn't, Terry thought to herself, you wouldn't heed my protests, anyway.

She nodded. "Let's not waste any time."