The Curse-breakers of Avondor || ONC 2022 || ✔

Chapter 14: An Affliction of the Soul

As they crossed the bridge into Malodell, Audren did not see any wraiths. Yet, he felt watched, as if the eyes of lost souls already followed his every move. The feeling nauseated him, nerves prickling all over his body. He wondered if Terry felt it, too.

Malodell was a simple village. It consisted of tiny cottages lined up on both sides of the main street, occasionally branching into smaller streets and alleys. The island it had been founded on wasn't spacious, giving the village a cramped look. Had its population not been viciously killed, it could have been quaint. Cozy, even.

Audren halted his horse in the main street briefly, staring ahead. The unpaved road stretched on for a good while, leading to the unkempt village green in the centre; in the distance, the lord could vaguely make out an old stone shrine dedicated to a local deity, withering with age. A blanket of ruin, dark as night, lay draped over the little settlement. The thatched roofs of many a cottage had burnt away, the building's walls crumbling and sporting many cracks, covered in vines and moss creeping up towards the sky. Nature reclaimed what man had destroyed.

Though Malodell had fallen over a century ago, Audren still smelled fire and death in the air. Proof of the village's unsettling, forever-haunted nature. And it was quiet, too quiet, not even birds making a sound. The life had been sucked out of the village so thoroughly it looked as if such life had never existed there at all. All Audren could hear were the clacking of his horse's hooves, the rhythm of his breathing and the beating of his heart against his ribcage.

"If you were the countess, where would you choose to hide?" he asked Terry, voice lowered to a whisper on instinct. He couldn't explain why; Malodell simply wasn't a place where he felt comfortable speaking out loud.

Terry shrugged. "The building that's least likely to collapse on me. Which, in this place, is essentially none of them." She, too, whispered. "Although... Forgive me for making assumptions about the nobility, but I think a countess wouldn't settle for just anything. If I were her, I'd claim the markerichter's home."

That made sense. The markerichter, back in the day, had led the marke, the collective of farmers regulating the use and ownership of the village grounds. He'd been the closest thing to a leader Malodell had had, which could indeed have made his former home the most appealing to Countess Limnaia.

Audren nodded in approval and slowly led his horse farther into the main street, in the direction of the only two-storied building by the village green, tall and sturdy enough to have gotten through a massacre and the subsequent years of neglect relatively well. The hooves of his and Terry's horses connecting with the ground sounded like thunderclaps in the silence. Audren prayed to the gods to grant them safety in this long-broken place.

The gods didn't listen.

The trouble began with a soft noise, a low hissing, as if springing from a mangy stray cat full of malice. It grew louder, louder, and Audren cowered involuntarily as he tried to pinpoint the source of the noise. Within seconds, the hissing reached a disturbing crescendo, finally culminating into a harsh shriek.

The first wraith appeared in the derelict doorway of a cottage to Audren's right. The lord's heart immediately skipped at least three beats. The creature, with its pale, skeletal hands and bloodied, crooked fingers horrified him to the core. It wore threadbare black robes, typical in the depictions of malicious spirits still dwelling in the realm of the living, and stared at him with empty eyes in an emaciated, mutilated face.

Audren reached for his sword.

Alarmed, the spirit let out another shriek before lunging at the lord and the mage. Audren, still trying to shake off the petrifying fear coursing through his body, heard Terry voice a spell, almost yelling it this time as opposed to her usual mumbling. She focused her attention on the wraith, holding its glassy gaze with her own while the words kept spilling out. Before the evil creature could reach the pair, it stopped in its rapid float mid-air, hands flying to its face as if trying to soothe a terrible headache. A gut-wrenching cry left its mouth and it dissolved into the air like mist.