Lost and alone, disheartened by failure and wanting only to go home, Thomas Gown and his companions face the darkest hour of their lives when they stumble across a remnant of the once mighty Agglemonian Empire. There they make a stunning discovery t...
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Malefactos spent a week exploring the outer reaches of the Shadow, ranging, under the directions of the captive ghost Sharmos Attwin, all the way from the shores of lake Ua in the north to the shores of Great Lake Megra in the south, and from the impenetrable darkness of the Overgreen Forest in the west to the rocky pinnacles of the Loris Heights in the east. So vast was the area covered by the Shadow that the rak was able to see very little of it in the short time he’d been there, but with the ghost as his guide he believed he was seeing most of the interesting parts, and what he saw delighted him.
The ranks of the Shadowarmies, both the living and the undead, were vaster than Tragius had feared in his worst nightmare, having swelled during the past year as new recruits flocked to the Shadowlord’s banner, to the point where the figure given by the Emerald Oracle was hopelessly out of date, and Malefactos was already savouring the expression on the wizard’s face as he described it to him in all its mind numbing immensity.
He was just thinking that he’d seen enough of the Shadow’s outer reaches, and that the time had come to move to the denser, inner regions where only the undead could go, when he sensed a sudden quickening of interest in the ghost and pulled the diamond out of his pocket to look at it. “What is it?” he demanded. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a disturbance in the Shadow,” replied Sharmos, staring nervously out of the softly glowing gemstone. “A big one. There’s fighting going on somewhere nearby.”
“Fighting?” said Malefactos, puzzled. “Inside the Shadow? But how? The Beltharans couldn’t possibly have sent a force this far in, the Shadow would drive them insane with terror. It must be the Shadowsoldiers, fighting amongst themselves. Two rival tribes of humanoids, probably.”
“Impossible,” replied the Ghost. “The Shadowlord would never allow it.”
Malefactos was inclined to agree and nodded his shrunken, mummified head. “Well, let’s see what it is, then,” he said. “What direction is it in?”
“North,” replied the ghost. “About half a mile, as far as I can tell.”
Malefactos activated the Crown of Auros, amplifying his vision, and looked in that direction, but a low range of hills blocked his line of sight so he activated his Robes of Flying and flew closer.
He landed on top of the tallest hill and activated his Runes of Concealment, hoping that no-one nearby had the ability to detect invisible people by watching disturbances in the Shadow, as Sharmos did. With the Crown of Auros, he was then able to scrutinise the scene in the wide stretch of stunted yellow grassland below as though he were ten times closer than he actually was, but even so he could make no sense out of what he was seeing and he stared in bafflement for several minutes.
There seemed to have been some kind of battle and the survivors, mainly humans with yellow skins, oriental eyes and long, black hair, were collecting the dead and piling them on the backs of wooden carts drawn by draft lizards, probably to be butchered and added to the Shadowsoldiers’ food supply. That a battle had taken place inside the Shadow was unusual enough in itself, but the thing that really puzzled the rak, and had him scratching his dry, leathery head in confusion, was that many of the dead appeared to be fell men.
