With dinner all put away, Tric plops down on the river’s edge alongside his brother, who is still mending gear damaged during the fight earlier that day. Aglana floats in the water in front of where Ash is sitting. “So, how often do you encounter necromancers or dark sorcerers or even dark adepts—practitioners of the dark arts—here?” Tric asks.
“I don’t generally encounter them in the rivers I frequent,” Aglana says. “I have occasionally seen evidence of them, such as a group of skeletons passing by. Unlike Ash, I do not pursue and destroy such things. If I were to come across a solitary undead on my own, I would blast it. But if there are multiple, I am not to put myself at risk in that way.”
“I have not come across such a threatening caster on any of my personal missions,” Ash tells Tric. “I’ve encountered groups of skeletons and walking corpses, like the undead bears I told you about. Earlier in my training, before I earned my avenger hood, I went out with others in scouting groups. On one such trip, we did come across some human doing dark magics and raising undead. We wiped them out. Wesmere doesn’t want that at the forest edge. But that was over twenty years ago. So you recently fought this Kachen person; how many other necromancers have you fought?”
“No, no, no, no, no,” Tric hastily corrects. “He’s not a necromancer. He’s just a regular human mage. We did fight a bunch of shadow mages, though. They maintained they were not necromancers, but I feel like calling forth a wraith from the ground makes you a necromancer.”
“It’s all the same thing,” Heppa calls over from the fire pit. “The woses said so. Other than the wraith, there were no undead that they were intentionally summoning. But the magic they were using had the side effect of stirring up undead.”
“Personally, though? I’d say we fought six. Gaenyn and the three helpers he sent at us, and then also the two that summoned the wraith.” Tric sees no reason to mention that those last two got away. “The sword wrapped up on Butterbell came from that whole thing.”
“So you’ve only fought them in the Grey Woods then,” Ash says.
“Yeah, and they left a mark.” Tric tilts his head to the side so that Aglana can see the lightning scar on his neck that Ash tattooed a tree over. Every other time we’ve encountered undead there has been no necromancer around, just Kachen or some dark artifact, Tric reflects. What he says is, “We’ve just had walking corpses, skeletons, the occasional ghost… There was the time we fought a revenant in our forest…”
“So no direct tactical experience of a human casting this type of magic,” Ash observes.
“Well, humans can do fire attacks and lightning attacks,” Heppa contributes, stepping over now to join them for a moment while something simmers. “I don’t know what else is in forbidden magic because nobody tells you what’s in that!” She sounds aggrieved by this.
“There is some sort of lightning attack,” Ash confirms from his own personal experience. “Also some sort of draining cold attack.”
“The lightning and the draining cold, we definitely want to take the necromancer down before he does those because that corrupts the fae energy in the area,” Heppa says.
“We don’t necessarily have a say in when he casts those things,” Ash observes. “We can simply attempt to take him down as quickly as possible. But as we saw earlier today, the necrophages are—”
“Are not to be trifled with,” Tric completes.
“But, we will not be surprised by them this time, so we will fare better,” Ash says, encouraging with his words, though he does not sound terribly hopeful.
“So, tomorrow morning then?” Tric asks.
“Yes. I don’t know that it necessarily matters what time of day,” Ash muses.
“Once you’re inside a cave, it doesn’t matter so much,” Tric agrees.
“That is something I can help with,” Aglana announces.
“You can change the time of day?” Tric asks.
“In a manner of speaking.” Aglana reaches into her netting satchel and draws forth something that Tric initially thinks is a glass vial, though upon closer examination it turns out to be an extremely thin shell. There is a source of light within it that shines through the translucent material. A cord goes through a piercing at the top of the shell.
“What is that?” Heppa asks curiously.
“It’s light,” Aglana says simply.
“Is it magic?” Heppa wonders if it might contain some sort of glowing plankton or other deep-water natural phenomena.
“Yes,” Aglana confirms. Turning to Ash, she says, “You are usually traveling stealthily or hiding for your ambushes, so I haven’t thought this would be useful to you before. But if you are heading deep into a cave system, you could benefit from the daylight it produces. You can wear it around your neck and keep it concealed until you wish to change the lighting level.” She places the glowing shell in Ash’s hand and folds his fingers closed over it, dimming the light. “In a time of desperation, it can be shattered to release the magical energy inside if you urgently need to cure a poison or an infection.”
Heppa gives Aglana a pleased smile, grateful for the explanation. “Interesting!” Then, her curiosity somewhat abated, she returns to her makeshift lab at the fire. If they are going into the cave first thing in the morning, she needs to get this poison worked out tonight.
Ash dons the vial of light like a necklace, laying it against his chest under his cowl. Then he takes hold of Aglana’s hand, wrapping his fingers around all of hers. The salmon-colored webbing between her blue digits prevents the intertwining of fingers.
“I could attempt to make another one of these,” Aglana tells Tric, but he can hear the hesitancy in her voice. He turns down the offer, sensing that it would require a great investment on her part. It is one thing for Heppa to stay up late with her concoctions and quite another to demand similar work from Aglana when she and Ash get to see each other so seldom. The interactions between the two are very subdued, but Tric can see the affection there.
Setting aside the topic of necromancy for the moment, Tric pulls out the dowsing rod he picked up in Wesmere for Nasir. He holds the branched aspen lightly with both hands and tries to get a sense of the water around here. His assumption is that it is probably very clean, coming as it does from snow melt and there being no obvious signs of dwarvish industry around. It is novel for him to have the company of a water creature who is not trying to murder him, and he wants to take advantage of that. He would like to know whether a merfolk’s understanding of water quality is similar to the elvish understanding.
Strangely, the dowsing rod janks toward Ash. C’mon, focus! You can do this, Tric encourages himself, confused why that would happen with a river right in front of him. That water is indeed pristine, with nary a crate of bad potatoes or rusty weapons around. When Tric sorts through all he is sensing, he realizes that what drew him at first was the shell Ash now wears against his chest. The luminosity actually comes from magic water.
Tric shares his findings on the water with Aglana, and she confirms his evaluation. Ash ignores the conversation, it being of little interest to him, but he stays alongside Aglana. “Of course, I spend a good part of the year in water far more salty than this,” she comments. Tric looks at her quizzically. “I’m not here when the rivers ice over,” she explains. “I go back down the river out to the Great Ocean in the west.”
“Ah, so you’re quite traveled. Then let me ask you this: is the Ford of Abez cursed? It’s cursed, right? It seems like something bad always happens whenever land-dwellers try to cross there.”
“I haven’t been there myself. I’ve heard that over the centuries there have been some very bad naga attacks in that area. And some sea serpents do go that far up the Great River. It could very well have gained the reputation of being cursed because there are these dangers there.” With strong forearms, she boosts herself up onto the bank so that she can sit between Ash and Tric.
“It really is convenient that you showed up when you did,” Tric observes.
“I knew Ash was here the moment he set foot in the water,” she says, flexing her tail up out of the water and then bending it so that the fin is submerged again. “The fae currents told me. I am always listening to the water.”
After his recent experience meditating with Ruthiel, Tric understands better what she means. Elves draw their power from the plant aspects of the fae, and it makes sense that the merfolk would tend toward its watery aspects. “Ah, it’s like someone storming through the forest, breaking every branch,” Tric says. “Or like the root network.” There is a natural system that exists, and those who know how to listen can hear it. “I’ve come to think of elvish magic as the Magic of Stillness, and this sounds like the same thing.”
“Although water is constantly moving,” Aglana says, flicking her tail again.
“Plants are constantly moving too,” Tric points out. “There are brambles everywhere.”
“A fair observation,” Aglana agrees.
Tric muses about the magics associated with aquatic plants like lily pads, which walk the line between the elvish and merfolk aspects of the fae. Seeing Aglana’s slimy kelp-like hair up close, he wonders about seaweed, too.