Lyra's fingers twitched - and balls of thick, bubbling mud shot out of her palm. They smelled musty and something even worse - a sweet smell of decay that irritated the nostrils.
Sharon dodged with a precision practised over the years, feeling the cool breeze of alien, foul magic on her cheek.
- 'Lyro, damn it, it's me! Listen to me, woman!
The words dissipated into the mist, as if they had encountered something she could not see - an invisible wall, heavy with spells of primitive power. No answer.
Another ball of mud swished past her, splashing a sticky brown smear onto the grass. Sharon wrinkled her nose in distaste.
She clenched her teeth. Lyra's energy was wild, dirty, chaotic - and still powerful. Too powerful to be underestimated. She raised her hand with innate elegance, drawing protective runes in the air that sparked for a moment with a cool, contained light. Their fight was like a ghastly dance - step with grace, dodge with precision, counterattack with prudent strength - all within the blinding maze of that cursed mist. Sharon blocked those sickening projectiles, but the mud was coating her shields with every passing moment, crippling her spells, weakening her painstakingly built concentration. She had to get closer. She had to touch her. Break her from the grasp of this... thing.
- Lyra, by all the powers... - Sharon's voice was not pleading. It was as sharp as a dagger, as firm as a sentence, as true as steel. - A shadow of a former consciousness, a twitch of a trapped soul - flashed through her dead eyes. Lyra's step slowed, the movement lost its imposed certainty for a moment.
But she immediately tensed again, like a shoddy puppet on the strings of an unworthy puppeteer. A snarling, animalistic hiss left her throat.
And then Brito appeared. Wet, with dripping red hair, with terror and rage painted on her straight, stubborn face.
- Sharon! - she screamed, pushing her way through the bloody fumes. She was not alone.
The mist ripped through for a split second, revealing a phantom. His figure shimmered, rippling like a foul reflection on the surface of the stinking water. The cold that beat from him was almost physical, piercing to the marrow of his bones.
He looked at Brito with palpable contempt.
- "So another villager has come to add to my collection," he said quietly, and his voice was like mucus creeping over naked flesh. - 'Wet Lady, take care of this sorceress. I'll play with the screaming villager.
Lyra reacted immediately - her attacks took on a wild, uncontrollable fury. Mudballs lashed at Sharon one after another with primitive force. The sorceress retreated reluctantly, forced on the defensive, feeling her energy, so painstakingly accumulated, begin to drain. Each shield cracked faster, each movement becoming heavier, sluggish.
The phantom disappeared into the mist, dragging a screaming Brito behind her. Her muffled scream disappeared somewhere in the cursed fumes.
Sharon was left alone. Alone with this mutilated version of her friend. Alone with her rage and that alien, penetrating cold magic. She struggled to dodge, but another strike of that dirty mud hit her in the shoulder. A brief, sharp pain that forced her to clench her teeth. She wobbled, her knee bogged down in the muggy mud. She was coming. Lyra. Unrecognisable. Tainted. Ready for the final, inevitable blow.
Sharon knew it was the end.
But she wasn't going to die here. Not like this. Not by her, tainted, hand. She clenched her hand with determination. She felt something deeper, beneath the layer of fatigue, beneath the throbbing pain. Rage, pure and cold. A memory of the old Lyra, her laughter, her strength.
The magic exploded in Sharon violently, unbridled, primal, as if it tore itself from her body by sheer force of will. There was no elegance in it, only raw power.
She held out her hand with determination and let it all go. The impulse hit Lyra with a force that Sharon herself could not have anticipated. The air trembled, the mist parted for a split second, revealing her friend's tainted face for a moment. Lyra recoiled as if struck by an invisible battering ram. Her body arched in an unnatural curve, and a roar - not human, not hers - came from her throat.
A scream full of pain, fury and something that sounded frighteningly familiar.
And then... silence. Lyra collapsed into the mud, heavy, inert. The white, ghostly glow in her eyes dimmed, replaced by... something else. Something Sharon preferred not to understand.
She fell back to the ground, her hands gripping the sticky, smelly ooze. She was breathing shallowly, struggling to catch air. She was alive. But that didn't mean it was over at all.
Where was Brito? What had this wraith done to her? And would it be possible to save Elric?