"What did you do?" Alaric mounted his horse and hauled the boy up behind him. The animal stamped its hoof and snorted.
"Why is your first thought to ask me that?"
Prince of Illusions. The hair on Rowan's arms stood on end.
"Because this boy's first thought was to come to you for help, not the Order."
The boy fidgeted on the saddle, looking somewhat shocked at being dragged onto a horse by someone who was clearly a high-ranking member of the priesthood.
Rowan bristled. "I sang a parting song for the dead."
Alaric narrowed his eyes.
"What? Are you going to tell me I'm not even allowed to do that?" Rowan said.
"You know you shouldn't get involved unless absolutely necessary."
"I decided it was necessary. Who is the Caretaker here?"
"Please…" The boy started to say something, but one look from Alaric over his shoulder, and he closed his mouth.
Alaric squeezed his eyes closed while he released a long breath. "You stay here. I'll handle whatever it is." He kicked at his horse and took off down the trail with the boy.
Rowan immediately started after him. The pain behind his eye throbbed as he thought about the man sleeping in his bed. Hopefully he wouldn't wake up when Rowan was gone, and if he did, hopefully he would stay put. He refused to think the worst. New beginning meant new beginning, at least for now. He didn't believe he was capable of creating something bad.
Alaric and his damn horse. They'd reach the graveyard before he'd even made it halfway through the woods. Stay here...it's not like Alaric wouldn't need Rowan to clean up the mess when he was done anyway. There were some things even the next head of the Order couldn't, or wouldn't, do.
On a whim, Rowan turned off the main trail. He'd never gone this way before, but as he thought about the village, a path jumped out at him from between a jagged line of oak trees. He'd learned to trust his instinct, so he hurried down the overgrown path, stepping over roots and rocks and following the faint thread of magic that tugged at his feet.
Before he could curse Alaric a second time in his head, the path dumped him out on the main road, right on the outskirts of the village. This surprised him even more than the short walk here the other day. He knew magic when he felt it, but the question remained.
Did the woods purposefully help him, or did he reshape the woods?
He didn't know either was possible.
Rowan made his way to the graveyard, not sure what to make of the observation that people didn't shy away from him quite as much as usual. As he approached the low stone wall that marked the boundary between the living and the dead, the clatter of hoofbeats fell on the road behind him.
"How in the gods' names are you here already?" Alaric dismounted. His jaw ticked as he looked down at Rowan. He was alone now, so he must have deposited the boy somewhere safe.
Rowan held out his hands in a hell-if-I-know gesture. "I took a different path."
Alaric's brown eyes darkened. "I think you are treading a line that would displease Master Ciprian."
Right. Similar to the one that involved kissing Loma in secret. But Rowan didn't say that out loud. He and Alaric seemed to be on less-murderous than usual footing lately. No need to ruin things by pointing out the obvious.
Besides, he really was treading a line himself. Alaric's might involve inappropriate actions toward Ciprian's beloved daughter, but Rowan's involved creating a full-grown man from a questionable soul in his bedroom.
The way Rowan looked at it, they were both taking a risk, more or less.
"So report me for being faster than you are. I probably deserve to be punished, anyway. What's it been...a week?"
Alaric slapped him in the back of the head with a light blast of energy. "Shut up, idiot. Now's not the time. We will discuss this later."
Both men fell silent, the aura of the place putting an end to their bickering. Though it was a sunny day, shadows cloaked the cemetery. Long, dark shapes wavered on the ground, cast from nothing in particular. When Rowan looked at them with his liminal vision, the shadows stretched to fill the air and blurred reality with opaque smudges that seemed to erase whatever they touched.
"What do you see?" Alaric had a whip of energy at the ready by his side. It crackled like liquid lightning between both worlds.
Rowan shuddered. The energy of the creatures he'd dispatched by the river had made him sick. He still ached from taking it all in. This was different. The presence was almost…bewitching. It seemed like it wanted to suck him in and make him part of the strange, solid nothingness that was now threatening to take over his sight.
When Rowan didn't respond, Alaric tapped him on the arm with his energy. "Stay with me. Stop looking at it."
Rowan reached out through the veil and felt around the edge of one of the shadow spots. His mind grew distant. "It's like there's nothing. Pure nothing."
At the brush of his energy, the shadow he was touching melted to the ground in a shimmer of black somewhere between solid and liquid.
"It's coming." Rowan could barely hear his own voice.
"I said stop looking. I can sense it without you."
Rowan really wanted to stop looking, but he couldn't. Only when he felt Alaric's spirit lasso tighten around his arm did he come back to himself. With the anchor of Alaric's energy, he was able to keep his vision in the Veil, but his mind in the Order, where it belonged. He didn't have time to think about that nifty trick, because the shadows had merged into a churning mass at their feet, like an angry sea of otherworldly blackness.
Alaric stepped toward Rowan, whip lashing at the ground. The roiling black withdrew a bit, then climbed up itself to form a towering shape that looked roughly like a man, if the man had joints in places that shouldn't have joints and if the insides spilled randomly beyond the natural boundaries. It manifested itself on the Orderly plane in that same half-solid, half-liquid way, and a giant hole appeared where a mouth might have been, darker than the rest. It curved up at the ends, and Rowan realized it was supposed to be a smile.
The lasso tightened on Rowan's arm, and Alaric amplified his aura. Rowan's whole body buzzed with the other man's display of power. Impressive. Did Ciprian even know his protégé's strength?
Rowan himself pulled from the reserves of death energy he stored in his center and drew the magic into his hands. He had received the same training at the Branch of Strength that all novices of the Order received, but combat of this type was purely theoretical to him.
"You are not the one I asked for." The shadow creature spoke, its voice as deep and shapeless as its form. "A priest and a...what are you exactly?" It leaned toward Rowan, two eye holes appearing over the slash of its mouth.
"Don't answer it." Before the shadow being could make another move, Alaric flung his magic at the thing. The long cord of his energy wrapped snakelike around its neck.
The shadow being laughed, a dry-leaf sound that burrowed worm-like into Rowan's ears. "So quick to think the worst, priest? I don't need an answer. I can tell he's not like you. Hmmm...he's not the one I'm looking for, but he's close. Maybe he's the one I felt."
"Think the worst? It was you who threatened to unravel this place and the innocent people here," Rowan said calmly. "Is that not the case?"
The thing shrugged. "I said it."
"Where is the Prince of Illusions?" Alaric constricted the rope of energy around the thing's neck. The shadow being merely changed shapes to accommodate.
"Why are you asking me? I want to find him myself.."
"Why? Did he summon you? Has he found a way into this realm?" The length of Alaric's spirit rope throbbed with a blue-white light, vanishing into the creature with a slight hiss. "Cooperate now, and I will kill you as gently as possible."
The thing bowed slightly. "How generous, priest. But who did summon me? Or perhaps banish. I've been trapped in this awful reality for so long, I'm not sure it matters anymore. I just want to go home."
Rowan held up a hand to stop Alaric from squeezing the shadow being's head off. "The Prince of Illusions has been sealed out of this world. The Order has made sure of it."
"You don't say? What do you know of it, Shadow Walker?" The creature turned its black eyes to Rowan. "I'm tired. Are you sure you won't help me?"
"I will never help a creature of Disorder. I stand with the Order, and always will."
The shadow being threw its head back and laughed. When it was done, Rowan couldn't shake the feeling that the smile it wore was directed only at him. "I see."
"Enough of this. There's no place for you in this reality." Alaric released another whip crack of energy from the hand that anchored Rowan, simultaneously lashing his magic around the shadow being's torso while maintaining the lasso around Rowan's arm. He pulled on both the whip around the thing's torso and the one around the its neck, squeezing tighter and tighter until it could no longer change forms to keep up with the pressure.
"But that's exactly what I've been trying to say." The shadow being grabbed the energy ropes, one in each shapeless hand. It stepped into the ropes, taking them into its body.
The roiling black form opened and closed around the magic, swallowing it whole. A white-blue light flashed from inside its chest, and it imploded. Liquid-black spirit swirled in a vortex around the shadow being's core as it unraveled itself.