A Harder Kind of Dark

The crevice was sealed. That was the last of it — stone hauled and stacked until the opening Thaddeus had fallen into was closed for good, Hendrik's people helping until their arms gave out, the light already failing by the time the work was done. There had been no time afterward for anything but the walk back to Thornhollow ahead of dark, and the inn there gave them an uneventful night — no bells, no knocking, nothing worth telling anyone about later. In the morning they set out for Grayvault at last, a report several days overdue riding with them.

They were an hour or so up the north road when they saw a lone traveler coming the other way, heading south as they headed north, and stopped to trade the road's only real currency — word of what lay ahead in either direction. She introduced herself as Gyllianthara — Gilli, to anyone who actually knew her, and she said so herself before anyone had the chance to ask — newly arrived in this country and no less strange to it than they'd been on their own first day. She had a feeling, she told them plainly, that she was going to meet a witch today. And a feeling — she said this part almost as an afterthought, like it was the less interesting half of the same thought — that these three would be coming with her.

Nobody laughed at her for it. Whatever else she was, she wasn't stopped mid‑thought or listening to something unheard — she'd already decided, and she said so with the flat, cheerful certainty of someone reporting the weather. Makani offered his company before she'd finished the sentence — a woman walking alone off the road, in this country, needed no better reason than that — and Edric came along reluctantly, muttering that he had a bad feeling about wherever this was going, and bringing it anyway.

The road gave way to leaf litter and standing fog within a few dozen paces. Somewhere off to the left a stream ran fast over stone, and once, distant and directionless in the murk, something large howled and was answered. They found human footprints pacing back and forward toward the water — not a struggle, just habit worn into the ground — and followed them to a small stone cottage with a healthy plume of smoke over its chimney and a garden kept for use rather than looks.

Makani's hand found Edric's chest before either of them reached the door. Are we sure? This could be a trap. It was Gilli who knocked anyway, and the door opened on a short, hunched, thoroughly unkempt old woman who looked her up and down and said, not unkindly, “You're not quite who I was expecting. Who are you?”

Her name was Ysolde. The valley called her the Witch, and she wore the word the way a smith wears sawdust — an occupational hazard, nothing more. When Gilli produced the shard of Clear Light the party had been carrying since Millstead, Ysolde turned it over in weathered hands, held it to what light there was, and pronounced it a fine piece, uncharged, an Ember — and then, unprompted, noticed the other two crouched behind the treeline and invited everyone in for tea rather than make a production of it.

Inside was a single crowded room stacked floor to ceiling with books, dried herbs, jarred things, and the accumulated clutter of a very long, very solitary life. Over tea poured into wooden cups, Ysolde talked the way old women talk when nobody has asked them anything in a long while. She had followed a dawn greeter once, as a girl — one of Lathander's own, an old woman even then named Ms. Helen — chasing every Clearing the valley offered, learning the incantations and the songs by heart. “You need a Clearing to charge a stone like this,” she said, turning the Ember over once more. “But it'll hold. Good piece, this.” The craft, she explained, wasn't in the words so much as the stone itself — a particular vein of silver‑flecked rock this valley used to be known for, before the mines played out, before the world stopped sending kings here for arcane instruments and started sending only fog. She showed them the verse in an old hymnal bearing Lathander's own sunburst on the cover, flipping straight to a chapter and verse she plainly knew by heart, and let them read it for themselves.

Pressed about the things that come crawling up out of the ground — the ghouls the party had barely survived at Thornhollow's wall — she went pale at the description and admitted, without any of her earlier ease, that she'd heard of the dead not staying dead but never once met it herself. She was still working out where such a thing might have happened when a carriage rattled to a stop outside.

A man in a dark, well‑made coat came to the door. He looked past Ysolde, saw three strangers where he'd expected none, and asked, carefully, who her friends were. He wanted a word alone; Ysolde, flustered but unafraid, sent the party back outside to give him room, then closed the door on him entirely, insisting she couldn't find the piece he'd come to buy — perhaps another time. He withdrew to his carriage. Through the window they could see him talking to something inside it.

The sky went wrong within the minute. Not overcast — Karrowmoor's overcast was the baseline, the water they swam in — but flatly, unnaturally dark, full night dropped over a stretch of woods where it had been late afternoon a breath before. Ysolde opened her door onto three figures already walking toward it, and the fight was upon them before anyone had finished being confused about it.

Two men in black moved with an unnatural, snapping speed, quicker than flesh had any right to be — one of them the same dark‑coated visitor who'd been standing politely in the doorway not five minutes before. A third — pale as a corpse, clawed, dressed too finely for the work he'd come to do — pressed straight for Ysolde, and it was Ysolde herself who did the explaining even as steel found her: a leather‑wrapped weight was buried beneath the flat stone in her own courtyard, the one she kept her charged stones stacked on in better days. “The heart is under the stone,” she called, already bleeding. “Get it. Break it. Release the sunlight.”

Gilli answered with her own blood — not metaphorically. Aasimar heritage woke behind her eyes and in her open mouth, and she stood there radiating true, searing light in a widening circle, indifferent to the cost to herself. The pale one caught in it screamed as his clothes caught fire and his flesh began to cook, and fled the light rather than stand in it a second longer. It bought the only room anyone had.

Ysolde would not wait for rescue. Bleeding, staggering, she heaved the flat stone up on its edge with nothing but her own two arms and held it there, shouting for Edric to grab what lay beneath. What lay beneath was too heavy and too buried to simply lift — so Edric called instead on Bran — one of his six spirit companions, a lean, translucent shape of pale ghost‑light, a bow of that same glow drawn taut in his hands. A spectral arrow struck the buried bundle dead center with a crack of raw force. The stone Heart of Clear Light shattered. And Karrowmoor, for one impossible moment, saw daylight.

Real daylight — not the grey the whole valley had learned to call weather, but warm, green, wind‑touched sunlight, the kind none of them had felt on their own skin since crossing under the Shroud. It fell across the courtyard like something poured, and the pale, clawed thing standing in the middle of it had no time to make a sound before it went up entirely — clothes, flesh, the lot — and left nothing behind but scorched ground where it had been standing a heartbeat before.

The two in black did not run. Whatever paid their wages, it paid enough that they kept fighting even with their own monster reduced to ash.

One of them settled into a private, brutal duel with Makani that neither of them could seem to finish. He swung and missed, swung again and missed again, his morning star finding nothing but air far more often than it found flesh — and every time his attacker's blade connected instead, it connected hard, the kind of wound that should have put a smaller man on the ground and kept him there. It didn't. Something in a goliath's blood simply refuses to fall on schedule, and Makani leaned on that stubbornness like a wall at his back, shrugging off blow after blow that should have felled him three times over, until he was still standing and swinging long after he had any right to be.

Edric fought a different fight, at a range no blade of his could reach. A word and a flash of will locked one of the two men rigid where he stood, paralyzed on his own feet while the others worked around him. And when the fight needed him somewhere his own two legs couldn't get him fast enough, he simply didn't use them — one of his spirits hauled him clean off his feet and into the air, twenty feet up and clear across the fighting, and let him fall. He came down boots‑first and full weight, straight onto the man still cutting at Ysolde. It was not elegant. It worked.

Ysolde went down once, twice, three times over the course of the fight that followed — struck low, dragged back from the edge, struck low again — while the party fought two enemies who never once flinched from Gilli's light, because whatever they were, sunlight wasn't their weakness. “Please stop bringing me back,” Ysolde managed at one point, half‑laughing through the pain of it. “Let me die. I've got so many holes.” They didn't listen. Gilli spent spell after spell keeping the old woman breathing, right up until the very end, when the last of the two attackers landed a final, spiteful pair of blows on her while she lay helpless on the ground, then turned and fled rather than press an advantage against a party that had just burned his companion out of existence.

He didn't get far. Makani chased the second attacker into the stream that ran past the cottage, refusing to let him make good the escape, and finished the job in the water while the current pulled at both of them.

Ysolde Karn did not get back up. Whatever the stone she'd guarded was worth to the men who came for it, it wasn't enough to save her — she didn't survive three separate deaths in the same afternoon — the sunlight that killed her would‑be abductor, the same sunlight she'd insisted the party set free, was the last thing she gave the valley before the valley finally took something back.

They searched the carriage before the light — hers or the day's — had finished fading. Two potions of healing. A pair of well‑made boots that, once tried, proved to grant a startling leaping stride, which went to Makani without much debate. A hundred and eighteen gold coin, split three ways. And, tucked into what passed for a glove compartment, a folded letter that had nothing to do with Clear Light at all: ignore your previous orders — we need to remove Isolde — the old lady Ostrend is getting suspicious, she's hired outsiders, don't let them reach her. Signed with two initials and nothing else.

R.A.

Nobody at that carriage door had the first idea what the letters stood for. It was the second time this exact signature had crossed their path without a name to put to it, and neither time had it explained itself.

They stood in the last of a light that wasn't going to last the hour, next to a scorched circle of ground and a dead woman who had spent her whole life giving strangers the last thing she owned, and none of them had an answer for what came next except to go through what she'd left behind and see what it told them.