Arc 2: Chapter 13: The Paladin
It got worse.
As I unhooked my axe from beneath my cloak, stepping back from Lorena’s towering gaunt form, the surrounding mist seemed to sink into the ground. I felt a shudder ripple through the earth, and a spike of dread shot through me.
The ground heaved, and dead hands began to burst from the surrounding graves. Ragged shapes crawled up from below, pale light clinging to their desiccated forms and shining in their hollow eyes. Thin, stretched limbs twitched with unholy energy.
Though they wore different bodies, I knew these dead. Lorena Starling hadn’t been the only rogue spirit to escape the clutches of the Underworld. She’d brought her castle’s garrison along with her.
Shit.
Rotten corpses animated by disquiet spirits shambled through the graves. As the ghosts tightened their grip on those stolen bodies, they began to move with more vigor. Not grace, per se, but they possessed an eerie sort of dexterity. At first they held no weapons, and wore only the threadbare remnants of whatever funeral garb the commonfolk who’d buried their loved ones here had dressed them in. However, as I watched, mist and witchlight began to form spears and axes, crested helms and breastplates, and all the accoutrements of a castle guard.
There were dozens of them. I recalled my desperate escape from Castle Strekke, and steeled myself for a hard fight. I’d been on my last legs when I’d dueled Emery Planter. Now, rested and healed, I didn’t feel like death and dismemberment were guaranteed.
Only likely.
The real threat towered above the others. Lorena Starling had become something worse than a mere ghost. I lifted my chin to her ghastly visage as it loomed over me, that serrated thing that resembled both a guillotine and a scythe clutched in her sharp claws.
I focused on the core of golden power in me, conjuring the image of a wall of gleaming shields in my mind. I felt my aura reshape itself at my will and the murmuring of ritual words. Pale light spread out from me, small and wan compared to the overbearing presence of the undead, but steady. I lifted my axe, almost as though to kiss the top of the bit. With a flash of light and a scattering of gilded petals, that same circle of ornate shields I’d imagined in my thoughts burst into life, each floating equidistant several feet from me to face in all directions, all circling me like orbiting bodies.
All Auratic Arts have names. They are writ into the very fabric of reality, along with the deeds and wills that gave birth to them. The phantasmal kite shields I summoned were part of a versatile technique named the Aureate Aegis by its creator, one of my Alder forebears, or simply the Aureshield. It makes for a strong defense, especially against purely supernatural foes, but it is short lived and draining. I could only hold it for a few seconds.