Ed Greenwood - All Shadows Fled

Three living heroes and a ghost dared to take an enchanted blade out of the world, hunting shapeshifters in their ancient Castle of Shadows

For centuries, the Malaugrym had been dark figures of legend, fey sorcerers who could take any shape they chose. They came to Faerun to impersonate kings and reavers and archmages, to entertain themselves with the havoc they could wreak-and to seize mortal women as breeding slaves, carrying them off across the planes to the place they called Shadowhome.

When the famous archmage Elminster of Shadowdale caught Malaugrym in Faerun, they paid with their lives. Twice he journeyed to the Castle of Shadows to humble the House of Malaug but no mere mortal had ever made such a foray and returned to Faerun to tell of it.

Until Lady Sharantyr, Knight of Myth Drannor; Belkram and Itharr of the Harpers; and the ghostly remnant of Sylune, Witch of Shadowdale, went up against the shapeshifters armed with the Sword of Mystra. And with that sword, Sharantyr cut her way back from the brink of death and out of the Castle of Shadows, slaying many of the evil shapeshifters as she went.

Unfortunately, most of them still lived, and vowed revenge on four new foes. More entered Faerun with the returning heroes and escaped to wander the Realms at will.

Even worse, Faerun was much as they'd left it: in the throes of the magical chaos, bloodshed, and lawlessness of the Time of Troubles, when the gods themselves walked the Realms, no magic could be trusted, and fire and fury raged across the lands.

It was a time for heroes, and the four who'd escaped the Castle of Shadows found Elminster, the Old Mage, waiting for them, with orders to undertake still more perilous tasks in the desperate work of saving civilized Faerun.

And the Malaugrym were waiting for them, too

Kythorn 20, Year of Shadows

The wind rose and whistled through the stones of a roofless, ruined manor house on a grassy hillside in Daggerdale. The trampled slope was strewn with tentacled, jellylike, eye-studded nightmare bodies.

Three weary, wild-eyed rangers and a ghostly lady hastened up the hill from the monsters they'd slain, running like starving men to a banquet table. They hurried toward a man who sat in the ruins.

The gaunt, white-bearded old man sat on what was left of a crumbling wall and serenely smoked a pipe. He looked at them all, smiled, and spat out this smoke belcher. It rose smoothly upward to float by his ear, spouting wisps of smoke that curled away to be lost in the quickening breeze. "Ye deserve congratulations for one thing, at least," he announced.

After the silence had begun to stretch, Itharr sighed and asked in tones that were just respectful, "And what, Lord Elminster, would that be?"

"Keeping thyselves alive," Elminster told him dryly.

"I heard an 'at least' in there," Sylune put in. Her silvery tresses hung still around her eerily translucent face despite the gusting wind. Beside her, the blood-spattered lady ranger Shar shot her an amused look through her own wind-whipped hair.

Elminster glared severely at the ghostly Witch of Shadowdale. "There is a little matter of bringing a trio or more of Malaugrym into Faerun, and allowing them to wander off untraced and untrammeled, to work their wanton wills across the land."

" 'Work their wanton wills' I like that; 'twould fit nicely into a purple Harper ballad," Sylune replied serenely. "My choice, Old Mage, was between the lives of these three heroes-nay, no wincing, now; they've more than earned the title-and those of a few shapeshifters. I think my decision was the right one and if you disagree so strongly, why did you not take action yourself? You must have been here watching us."

"Been here, aye. Watching, no," the Old Mage replied, eyes on the hillside below them-where, at his magical bidding, the horribly distorted bodies of the Malaugrym were rising into the air and catching fire. "I was tossing meteor swarms over the turrets of Telflamm, half a world away."

"By the gods, the bardic phrases keep flowing, like" The ghost sorceress paused meaningfully.

"Nightsoil from a hurled bucket?" Belkram offered helpfully.

Sylune rolled her eyes and continued, "And your reason for this ah, fiery behavior?"

El grinned. "I was feeding a wild magic area to make it grow into a shield against Red Wizards so I could turn my attention closer to home."

Belkram caught the first whiff of burning flesh and spun around, raising the gory daggers he held ready in both hands. Seeing the source of the smell, he relaxed. A certain grim satisfaction grew on his face as he watched the bodies of their foes burn. Sharantyr gave the midair cremation a single quick glance and turned her gaze back to the Old Mage.

"I know you well enough, Elminster," she said levelly, "to know that such words always lead us to another of your 'little tasks' and I'd appreciate knowing what this one is without a lot of clever tongue-fencing. Several Malaugrym-one in particular-have about used up my patience for today." As she stared challengingly at the Old Mage, Shar flexed her aching jaw. Her mouth, scorched by a Malaugrym tentacle whose foul taste she could still remember, was throbbing painfully, and her tongue was a thick, numb thing.

As her companions looked at the usually merry Shar in surprise, Elminster inclined his head and said, "Plain speaking is wise in any case, Lady Knight. Know, then: thy swords and spells-and all of ye, with them-are urgently needed in the coming defense of Shadowdale. I'm here to send ye where ye're most needed in that fight."

"The Zhentarim?" Sylune asked shortly. It was more statement than question.

As if her words had been some sort of cue, the world around them was suddenly a cold place of endlessly streaming white flames, and her companions stood frozen amid the conflagration. The last thing the Witch of Shadowdale heard was Elminster's disgusted cry: "Ah, no! Not again!" And then his tattered words were whirled away from her, and all that was left was the ceaseless roaring

After what must have been a very long time, Sylune knew herself again. She was all that was left of the woman widely known as the Witch of Shadowdale

She was Sylune. Still a ghost and still in Faerun. Hanging in the heart of the roaring.

All around her, flames that did not burn streamed endlessly past her motionless friends and the crumbling stones of the manor. But she could move and think though the cold white flames made her tremble uncontrollably as they roared through her.

Sylune found she could move, if she bent her will hard to the doing. Let us be doing, then.

With slow determination, she drifted nearer the Old Mage, sitting motionless on his bit of wall. His hands were uplifted and his lips open, wearing the disgusted frown of his realization that whatever it was had caught him again.

So they were in some sort of trap. A magical trap, though its flames-which didn't seem to harm anything-had withstood the wildness of magic stalking Faerun for some time; it seemed. Some of the wildflowers growing amid the stones had bloomed and withered since the magic had begun. The companions had been here for days, then. Sylune wished she could sigh. I've not been a ghost long enough to learn patience for waits that may well take years.

She looked at the Old Mage's pipe, still floating beside his head where he'd left it, and saw that the flames bent around it.

They seemed to be avoiding it! Sylune stared at the spell-flames narrowly for a time; they boiled up out of nowhere on one side of the ruins, arced over her frozen companions, and then returned in an endless rush to nowhere on the far side of the broken walls. It was some sort of stasis field that avoided Elminster's small, curved, ever-smoking pipe.