Path of Dragons

Book 6: Chapter 54: The Vale of Whispers

“I really don’t like this,” Elijah said, focusing on the sense granted by One with Nature. So close to the forest, he could feel its atmosphere so intensely that it verged on overwhelming. His previous supposition that the forest was in pain was only partially accurate. Nature didn’t cry out, but strangled by shadow, it did whimper slightly. It was like looking at an abused animal. A beaten dog that cringed at every turn. “This place is evil.”

“Worse than the Spires of Fallen?” asked Dat.

Elijah nodded. Bad things had happened within the challenge of the Underrealm. But the very nature of the world around it hadn’t been changed. That was not the case with the forest laid out before them. Perhaps in another frame of mind, Elijah would have marveled at the endurance of nature, that it could persist through such a torturous existence. However, with the metaphysical whimpers of a ruined forest filling his mind, he could only feel sadness.

It was tinged with anger, though.

“Do you want to sit this out?” asked Sadie. “We should be capable of –”

“No,” Elijah said, his tone firm. He didn’t want to turn away and flee. Instead, he wanted nothing more than to find the culprit who’d corrupted nature so thoroughly that it felt like an enslaved and abused animal. And when he did track them down – whoever they were – he would unleash the full fury of nature’s vengeance upon them.

As a Druid, his role was often to protect. To nurture. To heal.

But there was another side to who he was, and one that he’d only let loose a handful of times. It harkened back to when he’d stalked those hunters and slaughtered them for their indiscriminate murder of the guardian bear. Or when he chose to kill the people who’d invaded his island.

Looking at that shadowy forest and seeing the twisted shapes of the trees within, Elijah was driven to avenge the injustice imposed upon nature. In that, all three parts of his spirit were aligned.

By that point, their pattern of exploration and travel was well established. So, Elijah shifted into the Shape of Venom and slipped into stealth. Dat did the same, and together, they set off into the shadowy forest. Since coming into range of the challenge of the Umbra, the rain had been pervasive. As a result, the atmosphere was overcast, with very little sunlight peeking through the clouds. Every now and then, lightning lanced down from the clouds, briefly illuminating the area, but even that was insufficient to truly pierce the gloom.

And it got worse the second Elijah stepped into the forest itself.

The darkness behaved like fog, drifting between the gnarled trees and obscuring everything outside of a three-foot radius. Ten feet away, Elijah could see nothing but black mist.

Then there was the cold.

It was similar to what he’d felt around the Spires of the Fallen, but different, too. The amorphous chill of fear versus the rigid cold of a corpse. It was as if the warmth of the sun had entirely faded, giving way to the chill of eternal night. To call it uncomfortable would have been a vast understatement.

Normally, Elijah wasn’t prone to intense fear. He felt it from time to time, but it was usually fleeting – the result of an extremely dangerous situation. However, the note of terror wafting through his Mind was ubiquitous and enduring. It was like stepping foot into an alien world where nothing made sense, and the resulting feeling twisted his stomach into knots of anxiety.

He shunted that discomfort aside, quarantining it in its own facet of his Jade Mind. Although he quickly discovered that that strategy, which he usually used to deal with intense pain, was insufficient in dealing with the shadowy fear. It stretched out its tendrils, infecting every other facet of his Mind with formless anxiety. It was weaker, but still there, ubiquitous and undeniable.

With a subtle shiver, he continued on. The others would soon follow, and he needed to do his job as a scout. Gradually, he covered ground until, at last, he received the notification he’d expected:

No sooner had Elijah read the notification than he felt something via One with Nature. He jerked his head in that direction, expecting to see the vaguely humanoid shape he’d sensed, but instead, he saw nothing.

Another darted past on the other side.

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Then another.

Elijah could barely feel them. Likely, the only reason he could sense them at all was due to his specialization. Without it, they would have been just as undetectable as Dat had once been when under the effects of Ghost Cloak.

However, as he remained rooted in place, Elijah knew the shadowy figures had not used a stealth skill. Instead, they were perfectly suited to their environment, seemingly made of similar stuff. Elijah focused every facet of his mind until he got a vague sense of their nature. The creatures were shaped like ka’alaki, though it was difficult to sense enough details to determine their ultimate origin. More interestingly – or terrifyingly – they seemed to emanate the same shadowy energy that pervaded the environment. That was the source of their near invisibility.

And it was a serious issue.

As far as Elijah knew, none of his companions possessed any significant sensory abilities. Dat might have something that helped him out, but the rest of the group would be blind and deaf to the presence of their enemies.

And they were clearly enemies. Elijah could sense the demeanor of a predator in their every gliding step. It wasn’t difficult to imagine one of them stalking and slaughtering someone like Ron or Kurik before either even knew it was there.

With that in mind, Elijah retreated, finding the others on the verge of entering the Vale of Whispers. He stopped them just in time, dropping Guise of the Unseen and saying, “Retreat. I think it’s too – ”

Just then, a grey limb cloaked in darkness reached out and grabbed hold of Elijah’s tail. He reacted instantly, jerking away just as a dagger wrought of pure shadow descended. It grazed him, tearing through his scales with ease before hitting the ground and kicking up a spray of loamy turf.

Thankfully, Sadie was on her guard, and she moved the instant the creature’s arm darted out of the shadowy mist. Her glowing white sword arced out, hitting the shadow monster in the torso. Sparks flew, and the sound of sizzling meat filled the air, followed by an unholy scream of pure agony. It pulled away, disappearing into the shadows, though the echoes of its pain remained, bouncing here and there for a couple of seconds before fading away.

Elijah let out a hissing breath, then dropped the Shape of Venom. As soon as he returned to his human form, he inspected his wound. It was just a scratch, but he could already feel cold tendrils of some sort of foreign ethera spreading from the point of impact. He used Soothe, then Nature’s Bloom. Ron added his own heals to the mix, but that cold, ethereal infection resisted. It took a few more moments before it retreated, then disappeared. The wound healed only a second later.

“That was…”

“It was too strong,” Ron said. “Poison?”

“It didn’t feel like it,” Elijah answered. “It was more like…”

“Shadows, bro,” said Dat, who’d just exited the forest. He made a point to plant himself just out of reach of any monsters that might reach out. “I can feel it. It resonated with my attunement.”

“Which is?” asked Kurik.

“Darkness,” Dat stated.

“Really?” Elijah asked. “How does that work with having an angel core? I mean, it’s not like –”

“There are all kinds of angels, bro.”

“This isn’t the time to discuss it,” Sadie reminded them, never taking her eyes from the dark forest. “Let’s get somewhere safe, then we can figure out how to proceed.”

Everyone agreed with that plan of action, so they headed back to their previous camp, where Elijah laid out what he’d felt. Dat added a few details, like the fact that the shadow creatures weren’t actually monsters. Instead, they were ka’alaki who’d completely embraced their shadow-related attunements. That Elijah hadn’t sensed as much was a little troubling, but he reasoned that he needed to accept that the ability – even bolstered by Connection – wasn’t entirely foolproof.

Or maybe he just needed it to evolve. His other spells had progressively grown comparatively weaker to the increasingly powerful enemies he often faced, so it wasn’t out of the question that One with Nature would follow that same trajectory. It was still an incredibly powerful ability, but Elijah expected that factor was at least as much due to Connection and his Core cultivation as it could be credited to the ability itself.

Regardless, the situation they’d been presented with was enough to derail their normal plans. It wasn’t until Ron spoke up that they were able to pivot. He said, “The way I see it, all of these challenges have ways you’re supposed to overcome them, right? There’s probably something like that here. A path we can follow. We just need to find it.”

That was how Elijah found himself once again cloaked in Guise of the Unseen while he explored the Vale of Whispers. Thankfully, if he narrowed the focus of One with Nature – a trick he’d been working on of late – he could get a better sense of the shadowy ka’alaki that populated the forest. What he felt was still fleeting, but it was enough to guide him along.

So he went, exploring the area. The creatures still couldn’t see through Guise of the Unseen, but Elijah expected that if he lingered for long enough, that would change. He kept moving, steadily weaving between the gnarled trees as he tried to simultaneously keep an eye on the shadow creatures while attempting to ignore the feeling of wrongness that pervaded the area.

He was moderately – but not entirely – successful on both counts.

But he found nothing. The area seemed devoid of any important points of interest, though he did find a collapsing wall that looked like it would have been more at home in a fancy garden than as a defensive fortification. He followed the wall for a few hundred yards until it ended abruptly, leaving him a little unsure of where he should go next.

In the end, he opted for a search grid that saw him crisscrossing the same areas over and over as he looked for anything of note. That netted a few discoveries – like a couple of dry fountains and small, abandoned buildings – but there were no hints as to how the challenge was meant to be conquered.

Like that, hours passed until night began to fall. Thinking it would be best if he wasn’t within the challenge after dark, he retreated to the camp where he’d left the others. Surprisingly, Dat had already returned after searching his own side of the forest.

Once he was in the circle of flickering light provided by the campfire, Elijah let Shape of Venom drop away and returned to visibility. “I didn’t find anything,” he said before the others could respond to his sudden appearance. “But I’m pretty sure I’ve only searched a tiny fraction of the challenge area. So, this might end up taking longer than we thought.”

The last was said with a significant degree of disappointment.

Dat grinned. “I don’t think so. I found the way through,” he said.

Before Elijah could respond, Dat explained what he’d found. Most of it was similar to what Elijah had discovered over the course of his own search, but he’d found something that would hopefully change everything.

“Are we sure about this?” Elijah asked. “I mean…no offense, but that feels like a leap of logic, there.”

“I’m sure,” Dat said with complete confidence. “This is the way.”

He glanced from one face to another, and he saw that everyone else seemed to feel the same. So, Elijah said, “Then I guess it’s settled. We’ll go back in at sunrise.”