4. A Weak Little Thing

Time passed differently between realms. Days in the mortal realm shrank to mere hours in the shadow realm. Thus, when Silane and her friends tumbled back through the Worlds Gate after two full nights of carnage, they returned just in time for the portal sentinels to notice their absence. As thunder crashed and blue fire blazed in the wake of their arrival, ropes of black mist sprang from the ground, lashing around ankles and spider-legs before the friends could flee. Silane crashed face-first into the volcanic rock of the Shadowed Isle.

“There’s our security breach,” Sentinel Khond said triumphantly, uncoiling his serpentine length from the base of the Worlds Gate. A smaller vulture, the dread Sentinel Vala, hopped up onto Sentinel Khond’s massive triangular head, peering down at Silane and her friends like a particularly bothersome meal.

“Three solids. Fantastic,” Sentinel Vala said. “You, spiderkin. Who else snuck through?”

Elrach’s legs curled defensively. “No one.”

The Worlds Gate loomed behind them, a circular monolith of black stone that connected the Shadowed Isle to the mortal realm. Glyphs of an ancient script wriggled across the rim, seeming to shift and morph the longer one examined them. The native mist of the Shadowed Isle gathered thickly around the center of the Worlds Gate, twisting into shapes that resembled faces or limbs beckoning travelers forth.

Even after the blue flame of realm travel faded, the portal retained each traveler’s shapes: wisps too insignificant for comment, smoky and formless; specters in humanoid or animal form yet grotesquely distorted by the hunger and bloodlust more fundamental than sentience; a girl, a spider, and a young man, forms almost lifelike in adherence to their original existence, modified only in intentional ways for intimidation or hunting purposes. The evidence was irrefutable. Silane and her friends hadn’t been the only Mistforged to undertake forbidden travel through the Worlds Gate, but they were the strongest of the lot, the only ones with the skill and means to activate a portal between realms. The other recent travelers had simply followed through in the few seconds before the portal deactivated again.

Silane shifted from solid to insubstantial mist, but the ropes trapping her phased out alongside her body, binding her in both forms. Kicking, thrashing, twisting—no application of force could break through. She curled over and gnawed on the nearest rope. It was tough and stringy, but Silane’s teeth were sharp. She chewed halfway through the rope. Then, it wiggled between her teeth. She reflexively spat it out. The frayed ends knitted back together, undoing all of her hard work.

Sentinel Vala landed on the ground in front of Silane, vast smoky wings wafting about the scent of decay.

“Pathetic. Look at you three—threadbare and sunburnt, barely even maintaining corporeal form. You weak things are an embarrassment to those of us with real power. I certainly hope that none of the mortals saw you, lest you make a laughingstock of us all. They’ll tell stories for generations of the Mistforged who burned like kindling in the light.”

The words cut straight into Silane’s core, dredging up the terror of being trapped under daylight, fleeing from pitchforks and murderous townsfolk in a shambling wreckage of borrowed flesh she could neither leave nor maintain. Her hand still stung from grazing the faintest ray of sunlight before figuring out how to possess mortal bodies. Head bowed in shame, she grasped for a reply she could not voice.

“Easy, Vala. They’re young, perhaps too young to know better,” Sentinel Khond said, slithering up behind his partner. “Trespassers: your swift return lessens the severity of this incursion, but no violation of our laws may pass without consequence. As punishment, you shall bear a sentinel’s Mark.”

The ropes around Silane’s left wrist tightened beyond the point of pain, sinking through her skin to embed in the shadow and mist beneath. She cried out and curled over, biting desperately at her bindings. They dissipated into the wind, crumbling like dust the moment Sentinel Khond released his hold over them. Silane collapsed to the ground without their support. The newly applied Mark lingered: a dark stain wrapped like a cuff around her wrist, spreading cold numbness up her left arm. As soon as she could move again, she fled.

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Upon the volcanic cliffs bordering the Shadowed Isle, Silane dared to climb the highest peak, piercing through the black clouds to glimpse the limitless sky beyond. There, perched amid the jagged spires of rock, she beheld the moon at its fullest. It was the most stunning brilliance she could ever recall seeing. It also burned her skin like nothing had before. Touching unscreened moonlight felt like dying, charred and shriveled on a grill, even though Silane was already long since dead and reborn as Mistforged. Her hands burned; her grip failed, and she fell.

Too weak.

Silane crashed to the beach and laid in the shadow below that rocky peak, solid body rendered to human-shaped pulp by the force of the fall. Waves crashed in the distance, faraway as the tides sank ever lower with time. Pain pulsed through her chest: a gaping hollowness, a rending of heart and lungs that was in truth impossible, for her physical body was a mere facsimile of humanity formed and repaired in accordance to her will.

What use was pain to the unliving?

Peeling her splattered body off the ground, she healed the impact damage with a thought and punched the cliffside. Rock split, as did her rough approximation of a fist. She doubled over, shaking with the helpless frustration of being caught in a trap just barely beyond her strength to break. Black wisps of barely sentient mist descended from the sky to encircle Silane, feeding upon her despair. The dark swarm shielded her from the cruel light of the few lunar rays that pierced through the perpetually overcast sky.

Sulking about undisturbed was impossible when anyone with working eyes could see the Mark of a sentinel on Silane’s arm. Ranha and her squad soon arrived, drawn like scavengers by the concentration of wisps. They cornered Silane against the cliff face. One solid-rank against four: it wasn’t a fight Silane could win.

“Weren’t your friends bragging about how you’d taste human flesh? Where’s all that bravado now?” Ranha taunted. She looked like a human teenager with extra fish scales and gills and fins, proudly showing off the remnants of successful hunts. Silane had worked hard to purge such traces from her own solidform in favor of human features, which unfortunately placed her at about two-thirds of Ranha’s size.

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“None of your business,” Silane spat.

“That’s a sentinel’s Mark on your wrist, isn’t it? So you got caught snooping around the Worlds Gate. Ha! Caught by that old bird and a sleepy snake—what impressive slowness you must have.”

Demix materialized from the shadows behind Ranha. She dodged the blade of his hand, but Demix switched directions lightning-fast and swept her legs out. Ranha crashed down hard. The ground shook. Silane lunged for Ranha’s throat. Her teeth sank into spongy solidform, piercing through the meat-tissue not quite correctly formed. Ranha shrieked.

Two of Ranha’s lackeys grabbed Silane, dragging her away. A clump of Ranha’s flesh ripped out. Blood spattered everywhere, soaking the ground and streaming down Silane’s chin. She spat out the bite of Ranha’s gills and grinned. Demix was pinned beneath a shark-looking Mistforged, speed rendered useless under his captor’s immense strength, but he laughed against the ground.

“Who’s slow now?” he jeered.

Light split the sky in answer. A beam of white fire pierced the night, slashing from east to west. Thunder cracked, and the ground trembled beneath their feet. Small dark blobs rained from the sky: wisps, burned and disoriented all along the path of that light beam, dropping like hail from the thunderheads. Since when did wisps succumb to the pull of gravity?

The hands pinning Silane went lax. She swayed and dropped to her knees, captivated by that terrible light.

“Sun,” Silane whispered. The beam rotated slowly across the sky, wiping out thousands of wisps with every degree. Clouds vanished in the wake of the light, unveiling a star-dusted night beyond. Spots swam before Silane’s eyes. The skin of her face and arms began to steam from secondhand light exposure. The pain didn’t register through her astonishment.

“Hey, Elrach!” Demix shouted distantly. “What took you so long?”

Silane looked up. Elrach clung to the vertical cliffside over them, spider legs curled in close and defensive.

“We have a problem.” Elrach’s voice was grave. “The Worlds Gate has opened.”

They left for the Worlds Gate, abandoning Ranha and her lackeys amid the cliffs—what became of those four, Silane didn’t know or care.

The Worlds Gate has opened, Elrach had said. Not, someone went through.

The distinction became evident once they came within visual range of the Worlds Gate. A column of pure sunlight blasted out of the portal and off toward the horizon, burning through everything it touched between the Worlds Gate and the sky. There was a new gash in the faraway volcanic peaks at the heart of the Shadowed Isle; the sunlight had carved across the Stargazer Mountains, wreaking untold devastation to the landscape and cities there. As Silane watched, that beam of sunlight pivoted farther still around the Worlds Gate, annihilating thousands of aerial wisps in its wake.

Time passed faster in the mortal realm. Between the hours of morning and noon, only a few minutes had elapsed in the Shadowed Isle. Thus, the slow ascent of the sun in the mortal realm made that sunbeam rotate around the open portal with incredible speed, drawing a circle of molten destruction across the entire Shadowed Isle. When it interrupted Silane’s scuffle, the Worlds Gate had only been open for a few minutes—just long enough for the sunbeam to liquefy the peak shadowing their location.

When high noon struck the mortal realm, humans began to emerge from the Worlds Gate—so Elrach reported. Now, humans swarmed everywhere, smearing the brilliance of their lives all across the comfortable darkness of the Shadowed Isle. The charred remnants of Mistforged specters and solidforms spilled over the ground near the Worlds Gate, motionless or moaning weakly as their torn essence bled into mist. Several brave Mistforged still fought on, scarred by flashes of light and thunder from the invaders’ strange pipe weapons.

Eight white-garbed humans encircled the Worlds Gate, drawing arcane glyphs in the air and chanting in unison to maintain the deadly sunbeam that carved through the sky. A terrible blue-white glow surrounded each of the clerics in some weaponized perversion of edible life essence. The light barrier repelled ranged attacks, burning up the spears and arrows that Mistforged locals flung at the clerics from afar. Armored paladins ventured farther afield, charging after clusters of fleeing Mistforged and slaughtering them on the spot. The few Mistforged who foolishly tried to surrender were vacuumed up into mist-binding jars, trapped for all time within the ancient spellwork written across those magical vessels.

“The sentinels wouldn’t let this happen. Where are they?” Demix demanded.

Elrach sank low on his heels and clawed at the ground instead of replying.

“Down there.” Silane pointed to where metal-clad feet trampled the remains of a dead sentinel into puddles of darkness. A second sentinel faced off against three paladins, losing badly. Smoke bled from dozens of gashes across the sentinel’s leathery wings. Two of the paladins shouted a command in unison, and light burst into existence beside them: two incorporeal human silhouettes that burned with the same light as the dreaded sun.

Demix gasped. “Specters born of cursed light.”

Weapons appeared in the two light-specters’ hands: a scimitar of white flame, a trident dancing with lightning. They converged on the injured sentinel from either side, herding him into the paladins’ waiting blades. More black smoke spattered the ground, and the sentinel wailed in agony. The central paladin drew from his belt a jar painted in arcane glyphs that seemed to leech energy out of the very air. A tremendous force vacuumed the thrashing sentinel into the jar. Afterward, the paladin closed the lid and sagged in visible relief. His fellow paladins patted him on the back. One of the light-specters raised a fist in victory.

“Traitors. False imitations,” Elrach raged, finding his voice at last. His claws stabbed into the ground, cracking through stone. “They will pay for this!”

“They beat a sentinel. What can we possibly do?” Silane asked, small and lost.

Elrach thought for a while, and then he spoke. “Lure them offshore. The Sea of Rebirth judges all in equal measure.”

Without waiting for a reply, Elrach dissolved into mist and shot toward the two light-specters. Silane and Demix exchanged a glance and chased after, dark streaks flying over a landscape filled with their crippled and broken kin. They charged through the cluster of paladins and light-specters, dodging the blades swung in their direction, and fled.

One light-specter gave chase. Demix pulled ahead of Elrach, fastest among them by far, and led them toward the cliffs overlooking the sea. There, they shifted to solidform and plunged down in vertical freefall, driven by gravity’s pull. The light-specter roared in triumph and dove after them, his lightning trident held high.

A massive silhouette cut through the roiling mist below them.

“Split!” Elrach shouted, and they all scattered sideways.

Titanic jaws erupted from the water and snapped shut around where they’d been a moment before. The light-specter was too slow to dodge. His cry cut off to dead silence as his lightning extinguished in mist blacker than the deepest abyss. Far away, a human voice shrieked in agony.

“It worked, it actually worked,” Silane said, giddy with relief as that great sea-dweller slipped beneath the waves in absolute silence. It was so quiet that she couldn’t even hear her own voice.

Floating beside her, Demix flailed his incorporeal mistform arms and mouthed soundless words.

“Huh?” Silane asked.

The air reverberated with a subsonic pulse of hunger that thrummed through her very being. Jaws burst from the sea again, this time coming right at Silane. Demix swept her out of the way just in time, and the sea-dweller took a house-sized chunk out of the cliff beside them.

They fled.