Kyle stared, unable to suppress a gasp. The thing before him was huge, with six
sharp legs and a long, flattened body of a shiny leathery brown. A terrible scent,
horribly pungent and one that could only be described as an odor, reached Kyle in
astral space. The spirit lashed out with one of those legs, a smaller front one, and
caught the mage across the upper part of his right arm. Blood jutted from the
wound, spraying the other guard and the spirit.
The second spirit, Kyle's elemental, sputtered near the floor, dim and weakened
from an obvious clash with this many-legged thing. Oblivious to Kyle's arrival, the
dark spirit moved in on the collapsing mage.
Kyle acted quickly, thinking to attack the spirit while it was distracted. His
choices were simple—attack it directly with the raw energy of his own form or
through a spell. Both were dangerous. *
He enacted the spell, pulling the energies of astral space together with blinding
speed. The spirit looked up at him, though its form seemed to have no true eyes.
Kyle had no doubt it could sense him quite clearly. It began to hiss.
The energy flowed, violet, white, and blue, into him as the final pieces of the
spell came together in his mind, and the spirit leaped, spreading its short,
apparently vestigial wings, as he released the spell.
The spell caught the spirit square on, a bolt of astral power that impacted
against the creature's head and splashed backward along nearly the whole length of
its dark, shiny body. It squealed, the sound of its cry alien and painful in astral
space, then seemed to shake its form as though to trying throw off the remaining
energies of the spell tearing at it As it thrashed, its legs flashed about, ripping tears
in the walls and threatening to dismember the others in the hall. Its long feelers
slapped against Kyle.
Burning Bright - Tom Dowd