Another wave of black light poured over them, this time saturated with the tortured wails of spirits the ghost-eater had consumed.
“You can’t stand in Midrigar casting Holdfast spells on every ghost this thing pulls through the gate.” He had to shout the words.
“I don’t have to!” Siora yelled back. “The spell relies on naminga spirit to enslave it to the caster.” The wails died away, and she lowered her voice to its customary softness. “I knew my father’s name and Kalun’s. The dead outside Kraelag called themselves Forgotten. I was able to tether them to me by using that name.”
Gharek’s eyes widened as he followed her line of reasoning. “Meat,” he said. “The thing calls them meat and drags them to it with that term. It’s a name.”
She nodded. “I can’t save all it’s taken, but surely enough can be drawn back. Enough to weaken its presence here.”
“And lose the foothold.”
It was a hope, a fragile one with consequences that made him recoil inside if Siora failed. His heart wrenched at the knowledge of what it would cost if she succeeded. “All sorcery has a price to be paid, Siora,” he said softly.
She caressed his cheek. “And I may pay with my life, but it’s a sacrifice worth making.” Her palm remained chilly on his skin. “If the gods haven’t abandoned us or this world, it won’t come to that, and you and I can watch as Malachus cleanses this horrible place once and for all in fire.”
She ran a hand over the spot where Asil’s charm lay obscured by the folds of his shirt. Gharek started as Siora’s features once more regained a vitality lost. She seemed unaware of the change and only lifted her head for him to kiss her.
He pressed her hand to the charm even as he pressed his mouth to hers. Her lips warmed under his, plumped with life. She tasted of berries and summer, those pleasures this warped city had long forgotten and which the ghost-eater would never know or understand.
When they parted, Gharek wasn’t surprised to see Sioraalmost glowing with health. And all around him hundreds of spectral shapes, unseen before, shifted and roiled around them. Spirits in thrall to her. Prey for the ghost-eater who slavered for the power they gave it.
Asil’s charm, gifted by Halani, was more than just a protection ward, more than a shield or an anchor. It was earth magic in its purest form. Life unrefined and unfiltered. A way to save the woman he loved as she strove to save the dead and the world of the living.
“I had hoped to kiss you one last time,” Siora told him.
“And I hope to kiss you many more times,” he retorted. “And swive you all night.” He made her laugh again, the sound a welcomed one after the din made by the damned. “Are you ready to end this game and go back with me?” She nodded, no longer laughing. Fear pinched her face, but there was resolve there too, and the courage that had gained her his respect from the moment he met her. He held her clasped hand against his chest, against the charm. “Remember, you’re not alone in this. I stand with you.”
Siora invoked the Holdfast spell once more, her voice no longer soft but thunderous, as vast as the ghost-eater’s and more commanding. “Hold fast!” The spell amplified her command, making the ground shudder beneath their feet. “I am bound to earth and you to me. I name you, ye whom the abomination has calledmeat,to serve my will and only my will. Hold fast!”
A shockwave of dark power exploded out of the temple in a bludgeoning tide. Gharek was nearly thrown off his feet. Siora stumbled with him but didn’t fall. He bent his knees and braced for another wave, holding her to him. This time a blast of cold burst from the temple and with it a miasma gravid with soulsnewly freed from one prison to become slaves of a well-meaning necromancer.
Triumph and fear lit Siora’s face, even as the vitality of life drained out of her like water through a sieve, leaving her once more on the knife’s edge of becoming a shade herself.
Gharek almost broke her fingers in the grip held on her hand, and the charm beneath it. The smell of charred cloth filled his nostrils, and a hot pain burned a circle in his skin where the charm rested. Its power too was being leached away by the Holdfast spell, and the sheer number of spirits responding to its summons.
The compulsion that the charm had fended off returned with punishing force, pounding through every fiber of his being like a drum before the call to battle. Gharek’s muscles seized, and he clenched his teeth against the nearly uncontrollable urge to shove Siora from him and race up the temple steps to fling himself into the abyssal maw. His face felt frozen or clad in stone, smoothed over, and his vision began to fade at the edges. Siora’s horrified expression filled his diminishing view.
“No!” she wailed. “Please, gods, not you!”
Whatever she saw as she stared at him raised a deeper fury inside her. Once more her voice took on the vast echo of a being far greater in size than her own delicate frame. “Return what isn’t yours, defiler! You are outcast and unwelcome. All here ARE MINE!”
A shrieking maelstrom blasted across the plaza, blowing out the weakened walls of several ruins, shattering columns as if they were glass. Gharek was thrown backward, Siora still in his unyielding hold. He landed on his back, she atop him, her weightthat of a feather. The compulsion’s vise grip shattered, and he gasped from the shock and pain of its release. Color blossomed across his vision, and his face felt almost liquid compared to moments earlier.
A last whistling scream of air followed by a distant wail above him made him look up. The stairs to the temple were mostly unchanged except for the shrapnel of stone and brick littered across the treads. The temple itself was gone, completely wiped away as if builders had finished the steps and walked away, never to return to construct the place of worship. Above them, the sky arced in a peaceful, slow-moving vault.
Gharek tucked his chin down to look at Siora. A new fear surged through him at her stillness. He rolled them both to their sides and gently tilted her face up to his. Nearly a wraith herself, she opened her eyes to stare at him.
Her pale tongue flicked out to lick her equally pale lips. “Is it gone?” Her voice was a thready whisper.
He caressed her cheek, ice-cold under his palm. “It’s gone. And you closed the door.”
“That’s good.” Exhaustion weighted her words. “I can set them free now.”
Gharek stiffened when two misty shapes suddenly took form and came to hover on either side of them. Siora only smiled. “You’re free, Papa,” she told one of the shapes. “And you, Kalun,” she told the other. “You are all free. I release you from my service.”
The pair of specters lingered a moment longer, one to curl around Siora in a diaphanous embrace before drifting back to join what looked to Gharek like a massive fog bank that roiled acrossthe plaza. There was no dramatic exit of ghosts, no moans or wails, just a gradual, silent fading until the square was clear and still.
Siora’s eyes rolled back and her head lolled. Gharek lifted her easily. She felt no more substantial than a cobweb, and he prayed nonstop as he raced through Midrigar with his precious burden that she wouldn’t soon join her father and those thousands of souls she had so valiantly saved.