The Wraith
"Really?" Korah asked.
Lief ignored the question, it was rhetorical in the extreme, and all three of them knew it. Elle had been talking, lowly of course, about a time when Korah and she were younger and used to sneak through their parents home late at night to grab snacks from the cupboards in the pantry.
"Yes, really, brother. Anyway, our parents knew all along, we just didn't know that they knew until we were, what, fifteen?" Elle asked Korah.
"I was 17, you were fifteen, yes, sis." Korah spoke as lowly as he could, his voice as deep as it was.
They moved down the corridor that led to a final, grand chamber. While most of the catacombs were decorated once but had decayed and hadn't been cleaned recently, falling into decay, once they reached a certain depth. The need for cleaning changed dramatically and, though dusty in the shadowed part of the bricks and concrete. Leif was still trying to determine how something like that could even happen and wasn't completely paying attention to the world around him.
"This is it," Elle said, "this used to be where a Dark Lord held court, in The Last Age. Terrible, really. I can't get into Adams' head, somethings blocking me. They were inches from the door to the final room. "Lief?"
Lief knew something terribly dark was behind the door, his third-eye, tired, had nearly faded, his foresight gone. But the Philosophers Stone spoke to him loud and clear. Not in images or words but in emotions and feelings.
"We have to get inside that room, now!" Lief shouted.
Korah ripped open the heavy, marble door into a vast chamber of black. A giant red wraith hovered over A'Rann Adams, shivering and cowering into a corner thirty-feet from where Korah stood. Korah ran in three paces, then stopped.
Elle, like lightning, was quickly at Adams' side. By the time that happened the wraith, nearly as large as the room, black and red as anything Leif had ever seen hovered over the cowering intruder.
The Wraith reared it's phantasmal, red face with eyes the color of blood and as large as watermelons, turned towards Korah's direction. Lief was feint-hearted, but the adrenaline had began to course through his veins and Lief leaped beside his lover, his hands glowing green.
"Somebody help me! Help me, please, I beg ye!!!" Adams cried out. Elle was between he and the wreath, and looked empathically at Adams.
"You'll be, fine dearie, " she said in a voice so soft it was almost a whisper.
"MORTALS....MERE MORTALS...." the Wraith screamed in a voice that sounded like the wailing of a thousand lost souls.
The earth below them shook in violent warning at the sound of the voice of the wraith, as though it controlled not just a few things, but all of them. Lief didn't know an easy way to defeat him, subdue him; he panicked a little.
"You have no place here, demon." Korah shouted, waves of blue-white channeling into the center of the mass of the Wreath, who was large enough to take up half the room. It's skin was like obsidian and absorbed all color with its curved, blade-like cloth of some kind, cracking in the air like the sound of a blade whirring out of that initial sound.
"None at all!" Lief shouted, his hands waving in front of his face until white domes of light encapsulated each and every mortal in the room, then he pulled out his quarter-staff, and his hands began to glow more white than green.
What the spells Korah sent into the middle of the wraith sounded like a tornado building in the domed chamber. He could already hear the granite, marble, and stone beginning to crack under the pressure of the magics at work in the room.
The Wraith began to wail and scream in horrific, nightmarish sounds like Leif, nor the others had ever heard. The creature began to hunch over and looked like moving glass, half-wailing, half-laughing.
White beams of light launched from Leifs hands causing a rip in the fabric of the black void-born creatures side. It fell to one knee and looked over in Leif's direction. A black vacuum sucked up the four mortals nearer the center of the room, when what could only be described as a black flash occurred, and the demon fled, and with it chaos had taken leave.
"Are you crying?" Elle Fairheart asked lowly once the demon had fled, as they often did, but not quite enough.
Lief seen Korah's grimace change into a smile, for he had heard what Elle had said to A'Rann Adams, then looked towards Lief, who scratched at his blonde locks. "Are you okay?" He asked Korah.
"I'm fine, love," Korah said softly and caught him in a quick embrace.
"Stand up," Alana said to Adams.
"You don't know the things I've done---I'm doomed, doomed!" Adams wailed as he walked towards where Lief and Korah stood, talking lowly to the thin, malnourished Adams along. The old man wiped his eyes with both hands, and after a few minutes added: "What happens now, old friend?"
Lief couldn't imagine who he might've been talking to, but it was Korah that answered. "You know very well that you fled, you were not exiled. I do believe Lord Drakkhar will have a great interest in what you have to say, given you masqueraded as White Guard and then, without permission, invaded the catacombs and brought that black, swirling thing with you!"
"I took nothing, I only came back for-for-for my journals," Adams sobbed.
"I've read many of them," Lief interceded,"and their all very…interesting."
"Maybe to you, youngling...but there isn't much wisdom in my writing; I'm not wise I've just grown old." Adams confessed.
"You're not that old, A'Rann," Korah boasted, "you've many years left..."
"I truly hope so...." Adams replied and then became silent.
"What do we do now, brother?" Elle asked Korah.
"We walk him back up to General-Knight Jenners of course," he replied.
"Why must we walk?" Lief asked.
"Because Jenners likely to have sent the whole damned lot of us down here in waves, for no good reason."
"Still stubborn, is he?" Adams asked. There wasn't an answer.
Elle grabbed hold of his shaking hand, and thought that she'd never seen anyone so deflated as A'Rann Adams just then, but held her tongue and let the boys move on ahead.
Twenty paces ahead, at least, Leif and Korah walked together back through the way they came, with less of a problem than Leif might've thought. After they were a considerable distance away from Elle and A'Rann, Lief said, "We've a great deal to talk about, Korah."
"About?" Korah replied, apprehension in his voice.
"I can't get into it now, it has nothing to do with what has happened today or any day since we've met. It's my past that you need to know about. It may take quite some time."
"We have all the time in the world, Lief."
"No, really, we don't. You'll understand once you've heard what I have to say." Lief said softly and looked up at Korah. "I really do love you. I mean that, more and more each day,"
"I feel the same, love. Tomorrow is ours, I give you my word and my life." Korah promised, quite sweetly, his alluring eyes locked on Lief's with great intensity.
"I never thought you a thief, but you've stolen my heart....be kind with it." Lief replied.
"Always, Leif. Always."