Page 1
An oppressive dusk settled over the woods , shrouding the eve in a darkness that bore an omen. The song of night birds and crickets went silent and the whistling wind in the leaves was a blatant portent, sending dread prickling through me.
An owl cried as it soared alongside me over the peaks of long-lived trees.
The sharp screeching call carried a warning, followed by the veil of night descending over the mountains and valleys of my home.
The bird was a harbinger of something worse than humans steadily nearing the edge of my sanctuary.
Something harboring malicious desires and cruel intentions, prowling after the scent of wondrous magic.
I floated in that direction, and though weighed down by uncertainty, I saw clearly a vision—a prophecy of a red river bleeding into the land and poisoning everything within. What force existed in the world with the power to pollute a forest steeped in centuries of magic?
Windborne, I soared through the starlight-kissed woods, gliding over a path well-worn. I fluttered past a familiar bubbling brook that split off into a wide, coursing river. Undaunted by visions of crimson stained corruption, I swept through the sky, the breeze, and found solace in my thoughts.
Horizons brightened and darkened. The moon changed again and again, and the winds whistled their usual tune as days, maybe months, passed. Though each time I glanced to the west, visions of a red poison crashed beneath the shadows.
And the moon changed again, forever chased by the sun, whether waxing or waning.
On a night like any other, when the moon was full in the sky, pregnant with silver light, another disturbance breached the land.
An abnormal force of magic infringed on the protective barrier of my sanctuary.
It crept in, slithering like a snake in a garden.
I drifted toward the fracture, half expecting to find careless mortals. Instead, I found a bat. A black bat larger than any I’d seen before. Emblazoned on her back, spread across her fluttering wings, a skull.
“Where were you?” the bat cried in a woman’s voice. It had been so long since I’d heard voices spoken aloud. It took me several moments to remember their words, their strange languages. Wind spoke with howls and gusts, not tongues.
Startled, I floated away from the creature.
The bat swooped in the air and flared her wings. Lightning cracked across the sky and her body erupted into clouds of smoke. A gasp escaped me, as the inky smoke twirled upward into the shape of a woman garbed in form-fitting robes.
“It is my luck that I would find the last. And now it is too late,” she said, looking up at me. “It’s too late for the sylphs.”
“What do you know of sylphs, witch?” My thoughts stalled. “ Have you seen others of my kind? Do you know where the sylphs are?”
“You don’t know?” The witch swiped at her cheeks, stumbling to her feet. “There are no more sylphs. They have been hunted to the edge of the world.”
“No.” I drew back, shaking my head. “ It is not possible.”
“I would not lie to you.” She pressed her hands, wrinkled one second and spotless the next, to her chest. “I am afraid that the mage is coming for you.”
She spoke of the thing returning to my dreams—the witch knew of the crimson haze. The dreams were true visions, after all.
“Who are you to know the fate of the air spirits ?”
“I am the High Witch Aradia, and I have searched for sylphs for a hundred years.” She dazzled me with a show of her magic; sparks shot into the air from her fingers, the ground rumbled, and the wind rushed.
I floated a few paces back. “ How do I know you are not hunting my kind, Aradia ?”
“I would never, blessed sylph.” Even as her magic stilled, the wind continued howling, shaking the boughs together. She glanced over her shoulder, sensing the same shift in the air I called home. The brittle tension carried a portent of doom. “Listen to me, listen please, you are in danger, sylph.”
“There is no danger to me. I am one with the air and sky.”
“He is coming, the last mage, and he will find you,” Aradia said.
“What mage?”
Aradia opened her mouth to speak, but a ruby glow from above cut her off. The witch and I glanced up. Her breath caught and I watched in horror as the pearly light of the moon wept red. A crimson ring haloed the once silver orb, casting a bloodied glow on the land.
A tidal wave of terror dawned on me. There was no more denial in the face of my visions erupting in the sky.
“It is too late; he is coming for you!” she warned.
“Who? Who is this wizard?” I urged. “What has become of the sylphs?”
“The wizard, Gustave Roan. A monster obsessed with dark magic and exterminating magical creatures. He’s spent decades hunting spirits such as yourself!
” The ground shook again, rumbling and quaking all around us.
Not from her magic or mine. “The wizard seized power across several centuries, labeling himself as the Crimson Mage. He is to blame. He has chased mythical creatures and elemental spirits to the cusp of extinction, and now he is coming for you!”
All around us, the nature of the forest reacted to the encroaching disturbance.
A wave of red assaulted the edge of the woods, a barrage of dark magic cascading over everything it touched.
Miles away still, yet I heard the clamber of hundreds of soldiers, the thump of boots, and weapons singing for blood as their wielders cradled them.
At the head of the horde, I sensed him—I felt the magnitude of the darkness enveloping the wizard who hunted creatures of magic.
He stood at the forefront. I knew without seeing him; I sensed his motivations, the sticky sludge of his wants aimed in my direction.
The madness clinging to his mind and the venom of his magic reached far and wide.
He was the red haze in my visions. He was a few harrowing seconds from infiltrating my forest, from violating my home.
I wished for the wind to carry me away, to take me back to a time ages ago when men were still living in caves and beating each other with clubs.
I wished for the sun to shine down on the crimson moon and wash away the crippling fear in my spirit.
I knew no names for the mortal gods, yet in that moment I flung prayers into the heavens, hoping they caught something—anything.
Frightened, I reared back, gathering the energy to soar higher into the air.
A silvery wave of glittering magic erupted out from my incorporeal form, rippling over the forest. The burst of magic rushed through the trees, over the grass, mingled with the wind.
It clashed against the invaders at the edge of the forest, erecting a glittering shield.
A temporary additional protection, I knew. The wizard’s noxious magic brushed against the surface of my power, twisting my stomach into greasy knots. The soldiers lacked the ability to breach the newly erected barrier, but a wizard would manage it.
Aradia looked at me, jaw dropping upon witnessing a sylph’s magic. Her hair bled with gray before morphing back into a glossy black. Overhead, the blood moon cast flares of garnet, ruby, and crimson. The ruddy light over the woods warned of my fate despite the brief wall of magic.
The presence of doom I’d tried to ignore had come for me. Heart shattering, I realized that this must be it—I truly was the last sylph. Soon there would be none. Nothing more than a myth whispered about in folk tales.
“Run far away from here, Aradia. Go!” I had to send her away from the mad wizard.
“No, I won’t leave you!” She slapped her palms together and magic crackled in the thin air.
“As a magic user, as someone who respects creatures such as yourself, it is my duty, nay my responsibility, to protect you! I will not let the Crimson Mage wipe out the sylphs. I cannot let him snuff out the spirit of the wind and sky!”
“If it is my fate to be taken, I will face it.” Even without me the wind would blow, the breeze would rustle the leaves, and clouds would float in the heavens. I was an embodiment of the elements, but they would persist without me coaxing them through the seasons.
A thunderous crack rendered my recent barrier nonexistent. The wizard’s magical barrage ruptured it apart. His horde would be watching a filmy, iridescent wall pop like a glass bubble at that moment.
The crimson light radiated brighter, sending a wave of terror through me. A blast of heat and smoldering red fire crashed through my forest, turning the layers of my magic into cinders. My chest squeezed my lungs, and my heart hurtled as that magical, murderous fire descended.
“The Crimson Mage is coming!” Aradia cried.
“There is no escaping.” I hovered nearby, wispy form rippling as I floated away from the licking blood-red fire.
The high witch’s appearance drastically flickered from old to young as her emotions swelled. Her fear gripped her, sending her magic into a swirling frenzy that lifted her graying-black hair and whipped up the layers of her robes.
“The fire will drive you to him. It will force you toward the Crimson Mage!” She stepped between me and the towering wall of fire. “But he will not take you if you are not a sylph!”
My head shook faster as the heat licked at my indistinct, cloudy form.
It wasn’t fair. I was the last and I would die not having known what he did with my kind.
He would exterminate me, and I wouldn’t know where my sisters were or what stories men would tell of magical creatures in the centuries to come.
High Witch Aradia flung her arms into the air, flowy sleeves billowing as the wind picked up, thunder crashing overhead, and visible sparks of lightning crackled in the clearing. A wide plume of pitch-dark smoke swelled from behind her. Smaller bolts of magical light zapped and sizzled within.
“As above, so below, magic come to me and do as I will!” Her voice lifted, booming over the woods. The trees bowed, the flowers wilted, and her dark magic clouded the blood moon. Tendrils of fire assaulted her shadowy barricade, fiery magic hurling itself against her thunderous, black blockade.
My form cracked, ripping a scream from my throat.
Incandescent greenish light flared and wavered.
Scalding heat flushed through my wispy blood, melted into my cloud-like muscles, and seeped into the elemental air of my marrow.
Whatever dark magic Aradia called upon cracked open my intangible body and plunged into my aerial heart with all the force and sharp pain of a dagger.
Whispers of her power draped over the luminous, spectral essence of my being, the center of my magic, and caged it behind irrevocable bars of iron.
The darkness of her magic twisted inside of me, sickened me, tainted something ethereal and vital within me.
An agony beyond mortal understanding ripped me to shreds and proceeded to build me back up. The pieces of me, reshaped and transformed, slotted together into something new. A creature never before seen by gods or man.
Aradia dropped to her knees, eyes fluttering closed as she crumbled.
Her shield of crackling black smoke withered away into wisps.
The barrage of magical fire leapt over us, tickling our skin—searching, assessing as my heart stopped beating—then it soared away.
Floating around us, away from us, exiting the clearing before fading from sight altogether.
My body, a now tangible, physical thing, collapsed into the ashen grass, with cinders staining newly solid limbs. And I felt different, grotesquely wrong. I dropped my head, panting from the lingering pain in my muscles and joints. A pale hand rose in front of my face.
An abomination.
Tangible hands, fingers, reached up and caressed my face—skin. I had skin. My body—now a mortal thing of skin and flesh—it failed me, rotting away from within.
“What have you done?” A tortured cry, a wail full of centuries of misery, flew free from my human lips. Breathing fitfully, limbs quivering, I screamed, mourning who and what I was. “No, please no.”
“The Crimson Mage came for a sylph. He cannot take what you are not.”
“What have you done to me?” I repeated, and a whimper followed. My hands, filthy with ash, pawed at my soft, vulnerable body. Nails dug in, scratching and clawing at the ill-fitted flesh and muscle. “I am one with the wind. A sylph!”
“Only in this shape do you have some hope of escaping the Crimson Mage’s clutches,” Aradia panted, quickly losing her energy after that exhausting display of magic.
“This body is mortal!” I shouted, hugging unfamiliar arms around myself. “This is not an elemental body. It will die. I can feel it. You should have let the Crimson Mage have me, because now I will rot and fester, regardless! You—you have cursed me. I am cursed.”
“But you will survive. Only like this can you survive the hunter.” Her eyes closed, hair fading from luscious black to brittle gray.
Her shoulders slumped and her supple, youthful body shrunk, becoming shriveled and etched with folds and spots of age.
“I have saved you. I have saved the last sylph.”
“You shouldn’t have.” I ran a soothing hand over her face, and the single tear leaking from her eye coated my thumb.
“Now you must run. Flee this place, sylph. Find the darkness who will embrace you. Only he can save you now.” Aradia withered into ash in my arms. The high witch ceased existing in the same rattling breath as the last air spirit fled.