“We’ll plan it all out, every detail,” Serafina said. “We’ll use the crows to find him. Then Waysa and I will lead the attack, charging at him from two different directions at once. Braeden will bring in our animal allies at the same time, and Rowena, you’ll attack with every spell you have. We have to hit him so fast and so hard that he never gains his footing.”
Serafina looked around at her three companions. They were ready to fight. She waved her hand up at the sky. “Forget about this weather, this rain, this wind. This is nothing to us. We attack now, right through all this. We are the storm.”
As night fell, Serafina and her companions made their way up into the rugged terrain of the mountains. She traveled in panther form with Waysa, the two of them slinking quickly and quietly through the underbrush. Rowena traveled on foot, her dark robes and hood gathered around her against the wind. Braeden rode his horse, with Gidean at his side.
Braeden made a dashing sight, a lionhearted boy in a dark outdoor coat riding atop his black horse, with his black Doberman dog at his side, and his black crows flying above him, and she herself a black panther gliding alongside. She was beginning to notice a trend in his choice of friends.
As they moved up the slope of the mountain, the wind was still blowing, but they had left the rain and lightning of the storm in the valley behind them. They moved quickly through the highland forest, following the crows that led the way. The crows didn’t normally fly at night, but tonight they flew with purpose. They flapped hard through the blowing wind, some of them tumbling in the air, others diving headlong through the buffeting gale, all of them cawing to each other, pressing each other on.
As Serafina and her allies began to reach the top of the mountain, the wind finally died down and the air became deathly still. They entered a forest crowded with large, slanting, jagged rocks. Many of the rocks towered over their heads, jutting up from the ground, cracked and crumbling as if they had been broken by powerful earthen forces. Mottled gray lichen and dark greenish moss covered the rocks, and gnarled trees grew from the cracks, their roots clinging to the stone like the long black, creeping legs of giant spiders.
Making their way slowly up through the denseness of the rocky forest, they came to a bank of fog so thick that they couldn’t see ahead. Just as Serafina was wondering how they were going to get through it, she felt a stinging in her eyes and a bad sulfurous taste in her mouth. Suddenly, her nostrils burned. Her throat hurt. A wave of confusion and dizziness came over her. Braeden was suffering as well, coughing badly, his horse throwing its head in agitation as it tried to turn away.
“The fog is poisonous,” Rowena said.
Serafina shifted into human form. “Everyone pull back!” she shouted, coughing and rubbing her stinging eyes as she stumbled down the hill.
“What is going on?” Braeden asked, covering his mouth.
“He’s using a spell to protect the top of the mountain,” Rowena said in frustration, “but I don’t know how to counter it.”
Once they retreated down to a safe position, Serafina looked toward the ring of fog that surrounded the peak. “It’s a line of defense,” she said. “He must be up there.”
“But there’s no way to get through it,” Braeden said.
“Not like this,” she agreed. “But I have an idea. Everyone stay here.”
As she made her way alone back up the slope of the mountain, she remembered all she had learned. She raised her hand in front of her and pushed it through the air. When she felt the air around her moving, she smiled and tried it again.
She walked slowly up into the poisonous fog, sweeping her hands back and forth, concentrating on the movement and the flow, the wisps of air and vapor, pushing and sliding, until rivers of fog moved to her will through the sky.
She cut a swath through the fog, clearing a narrow path, then called her friends forward to follow close behind her, Braeden on his horse, Gidean at his side, Waysa and Rowena coming up behind.
When they finally reached the other side, the air was clear and the fog behind them. They took cover in a thicket of heath behind a large rock.
“How in the world did you do that?” Braeden whispered to her in astonishment.
“Just something I picked up in my travels,” Serafina said, pleased that she was able to hone her powers to useful purpose. But as she looked up toward the mountaintop, she grew more serious.
Like many of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which were some of the oldest mountains in the world, the top of this particular mountain wasn’t a sharply pointed peak but a rocky dome, what the mountain folk called a bald, worn down by millions of years of wind and rain. Hundreds of the forest’s spruce and fir trees lay on the ground like they’d been blown down by the high mountain winds or struck by the vengeance of a sorcerer. The trunks of the fallen trees lay crisscrossed over one another, their limbs broken and twisted, like a hundred titan soldiers lying dead on a hilltop battlefield.
“This is the place,” Rowena whispered, as they crouched behind the cracked and weathered rock. “He’s close. I can feel him.”
Serafina looked back at Braeden on his horse just down the slope from them. “Call in our other friends now. We’ll do everything just like we planned.”
“There he is!” Rowena whispered, ducking down.
Serafina’s arms and legs jolted with sudden strength. The battle was near.
Taking a deep breath, she slowly peeked up over the edge of the rock.
The dark and giant figure of the storm-creech Uriah loomed in the clearing, with the smoky-white haze hanging about him like the fog of the graveyard. He did not appear to be aware of their presence. He wore a long, ragged dark coat so shredded and torn that it looked like the rotting carcass of a dead animal. He stood on two long, bent legs like a gangly man, but he was impossibly tall, grotesquely hunched over, with his long, crooked arms in front of him and his white scaly clawed hands protruding from the ragged sleeves of his coat. The oily strands of his gray hair hung stringy and twisting down the side of his skull. His cracked and leathery face had been slashed by Serafina’s four claws months before, and the open wounds still bled and festered after all this time. Uriah paced, lanky and stooping, in the center of the clearing, rocking back and forth as he gazed impatiently toward Biltmore, far in the distant valley, watching over the storm that he had sent to rip it from the earth.