Ok, yeah, that summary is fine for someone catching up to a story, but for trying to write the next part I'm still pretty confused.
I don't even know what's supposed to have happened to Rethil. He got swallowed by a shadow? 0K. I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how to handle these nebulous "spectral beasts" at all.
I mean, usually I can write by simply asking my characters what they would do and say in a given situation, but if the obvious course of action is "run" I can't narrate a half-decent-sized post of a person running. That's so bland someone else might as well write it for me, in under a sentence somewhere in their post. I need more to go on than that. If the course of action is "fight", I need to know about the enemy. The nature of these enemies is right in that place where it's too ambiguous to know how we're expected to fight them and how they're expected to react, and too specified to just improvise from scratch and expect anything consistent to come out. At least with the undead I had a general set of assumptions to work with, but what are these things? What does "Spectral" even indicate? Ghosts? Demons? Angels? If they're intangible, why are we so afraid of them? If they're tangible, why are they so hard to fight? If their tangibility is self-determined or selective, then obviously someone like Jair would just be punching air. URGH.
A person like me needs to at least have a list of the known traits of a given enemy when I start trying to write a character fighting them. I remember thinking the flying beasts were human-sized or something, and they're actually supposed to be just like large bats or something? Wait, maybe that's backwards, I don't even know.
Considering there's rarely enough time for more than one round of posting battle scenes before we're all carted off to the next chapter anyway, I don't even know why I'm fretting so much.
The real kicker is that none of this is why I haven't posted lately. I haven't posted lately because I've been swamped with schoolwork. Essays, reading, more essays on what I read. That kind of thing.