My enemy hadn’t used frost or fire. No eldritch-sword or destruction-spell claimed the lives of his victims. Making landfall at last, and catching a distant glimpse of Blackice Bay to our north as we angled past it towards the south, we would have had no cause for alarm. No smoke rose from smouldering roofs. None of the little figures in the fields were screaming for help, clutching at wounds.

But the twins turned us around anyway with a simple phrase, made all the more ominous by the mandatory non-echo, the default double-voice they had to employ.

“No thoughts in the town.”

And as we coursed high above the meadows, the sun illuminating those figures in the fields, my sense of alarm grew. They were lying down. All of them.

They couldn’t have been dead, surely? Not all of them…

We were still farther out than I anticipated when my sorcerous senses began to confirm my worst fears, and I shuddered, adrift in my confusion.

The twins’ silence spoke volumes, and when Orcan swooped low with the rock, bringing us to earth in the centre of the little harbour-town, it didn’t take too long to ascertain what had happened.

I animated the corpses to gather them together while my bintaborax swiftly dug a temporary grave, but I wasn’t going to be forced to bind a spirit to get my answers; there were more than enough ghosts pottering about. Three of them, in fact. Two proved far too deranged to make sense under my questioning – they didn’t understand Mundic or Netheric, it seemed, gibbering away unintelligibly as they patrolled random sections of the streets. Grimly, I waved them through doorways to the shadowland. However, there was an old transparent fisherman sitting at his wharf, seemingly incapable of noticing that the waves were lapping not only over his boots, but literally through them. He stared out to sea, blinking every now and again in a stuttering fashion – not when the spray came up at his bearded, wrinkled old face, but at random intervals, like a misfiring response trapped in his memory, cursed to endlessly loop.

I hovered out beside him, letting my own feet slide unfeeling into the chilly water.

“You look mildly sane,” I observed, shifting into his field of view. “What happened here?”

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I moved round further, until he was staring right through me. It probably didn’t help that I was almost as transparent as him.

“What killed you?”

The waves crashed. The gulls cried. If I closed my eyes, removing the ghost and the ghost town behind him from my sight, everything could’ve been normal.

But it wasn’t. Nothing was going to be normal, ever again.

I kept my eyes on him, searching him for a flicker of recognition.

“What happened here?” I pressed. “What happened to you?”

Nothing.

It was only as I raised my left hand to tear open a hole between worlds that he reacted.

“It came over the sea,” he said in excellent Netheric, his voice clear but dispassionate.

He was still staring right through me, at the black expanse of Northril.

I slowly lowered my arm. “A ship? A ship of bones?”

He cringed then, as though he were about to burst into tears.

“No.”

“What, then?” I didn’t even think it looked like a dark elf attack – unless they’d had no need to use frostbolts on a little, undefended harbour-town like this one. They could’ve come ashore, used magic to accomplish these murders… “If not them – what? Who?”

I supposed there were lots of options I hadn’t considered. A sea-monster? A manifestation of a dark god?

His cringe had faded; he’d resumed his previous position, falling back into silence and resuming his distant stare.

I shuddered, suddenly hating that we were trapped like this in our paltry existence, just waiting for our deaths to come and claim us, claim us and take us on to such an unforgiving afterlife.

“I’m sorry.” He gave no sign that he heard my words and yet I had to say them. “I’m sorry what happened to you… that it broke you. Your soul. You’re not alone, you know? Heh.” I looked down at his feet, where the waves washed clean through his nethernal flesh, their gleaming surfaces rising up and surging forwards, falling down and receding… “One day, I suppose we’ll all join you. May you find the Door quickly, old man. I’ll give you the same advice I gave the other two – it’s not like I’m an expert on the local terrain, but – head inland.”

I’d located a natural seam, lying only a few yards away. I coaxed it closer with a gesture, and peeled Nethernum open.

In the shadowland Northril was no sea, but rather an endless mist-filled pit, black lightning flickering deep within its clouds. This place, this bay, seemed like the edge of an impossible canyon descending down into madness.

Woe to the drowned sailor, I supposed.

I’d almost swallowed him with the planar gate when he said it. The five words that brought context to everything. The five words that sent me racing back to the others, banishing my eldritches, Orcan finishing the grave crudely with a single gesture.

“Black smoke.”

The old man said it without cringing, but some life returned to his face all the same. He met my eyes, seeing me for the first time, and leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially, true human emotion in his voice.

“Bones. With wings.”

* * *