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Jillian's last words to him before he would cast Shadow Image were enough to actually break the careful focus he had built up in preparation for wielding this particularly difficult magic. Again with the promises, and this time she even had the nerve to request a promise that may well not be possible to keep, should he give it. He was a scholar and a mage, not a tactician or a fortune-teller; he was a chess-player of average prowess at best because while he logically knew the rules of the game and could see all possible outcomes several moves ahead, he could never anticipate what the other player would actually do. It was the same now, here, in the midst of true battle that was far from as orderly and even less predictable than the battlefield of a chessboard; he could logically see all the possible moves of the pieces before him, but he had no true way of knowing which of the moves would be made and in what sequence. He could not possibly be prepared for all futures... he knew that if all else should fail he at least had to escape the forest, but although this ranked at the top of his priorities he could not even say with absolute certainty that this was possible. It may well be that he would have to leave behind Jillian to save himself, which he would do, or that he would simply be incapable of keeping her safe. His power was not great enough to ensure success in all things. Someday it would be grand enough, according to his plans; one day he would attain true immortality greater than the false one stolen by liches, and gain such immense arcane potency that he would command the very aspect of life and death, but now?
Any promise was worthless in Gerald's eyes, as they were ultimately just words spoken by flawed beings that did not understand their own inability to prevent the breaking of that promise if circumstances were against them, but this promise bore so low probability of being possible to keep that the thought of giving it was almost laughable. And yet he found that strangely, condescension was not the emotion that was foremost in his mind. He found that he actually [I]wanted[/I] to make that promise, to feel bound by his word and inflicted with a duty to bring this woman out of this accursed forest. He wanted to, but he knew that he could not, as he was already inflicted with a duty even more dire than the responsibility for a human life.
"I'll do what I can," was the best he could do to fulfill her request. He recalled her having asked for a similar promise just minutes ago - but then, they had only known each other for minutes - and that he had given a similar response, but this time he actually felt somewhat regretful that it was all he could do.

Shadow Image was in itself spell of very high difficulty to use, to the point where many of the Zerulic greatest wizards and most powerful magi had been incapable of using it at all, and even those who naturally had shadow-attuned souls could not master it; the ability to use Shadow Image was rare indeed, especially since it required such extremely delicate mastery of energy-manipulation that only a necromancer could ever hope to master it. Even when using it normally it required incredible concentration for Gerald to cast and maintain it, to the point where he could not move while projecting the spell - with his body or the projection - because doing so might desynchronize his two selves and disrupt the flow of energy, undoing the Shadow Image prematurely. He had mastered casting spells through the Shadow Image only by training long and hard, yet now he expected himself to be able to immediately obtain not one, but two abilities to expand upon the capacity of the Shadow Image. It was unlikely to succeed, he knew... yet he had to try.
It took several tries to even manage to cast Shadow Image successfully at all, and when his first one did appear it did just two feet away directly in front of his body, at ground-level as always; projecting his Shadow Image into the air was even more difficult than he had expected, and it took all of his restraint not to let frustration overcome him, as he knew that this would only make succeeding at this even harder, and succeed he had to. The next Shadow Image appeared only inches from his actual location, actually, but this time it was [I]above[/I] his body, not in front of him, so he accepted this as a small victory; for the first time ever he had managed to create a hovering Shadow Image, proving that it was indeed possible.
Finally the third Shadow Image was a massive success, as Gerald abruptly found his awareness floating in mid-air above a sea of green and the colors of autumn, stretching out before him like a true ocean, the sheer enormity of the Anaxim Forest spanning past the horizon as he gazed to the north, where a profound peace and stillness seemed to dominate everything in view; everything in that direction was quiet, and nothing moved but the gentle waves that passed through the sea of leaves beneath him. And there, off in the distance, was the visage of what they were trying to prevent the Crusader's Guild from reaching; a single entity that reached up even further than the already abnormally large trees of the Anaxim Forest, a tree that towered above the rest as the mountainous behemoth it was, its branches stretching far to the sides as its leaves formed a massive cloud of all the colors of the rainbow: the Tree of Life of the Anaxim Forest.
Turning his Shadow Image around to look sound, Gerald was stricken by the harsh contrast between what he had just seen and what he saw now. Before him was Gariel Downs, cast into chaos as the crusaders surged against the desperate defenders with relentless force, even as wyverns swarmed in the sky, screaming like evil spirits when they were not diving at the ground and unleashing greenish clouds of lethal toxin, making it even harder for the few surviving druids to keep their dwindling number of champions standing. It was even worse further to the south, where the trolls - the main distraction that had kept the crusaders from bringing their full might to bear on the Anaximite defenders - were all but eliminated, with only a couple of them still weakly struggling against their human assailants, vainly fighting the wyvern's breath that was inexorably killing them from within. Very soon the crusaders would have nothing to distract them anymore and would once more drive their full strength northward, and when this happened there was little doubt that the defenders, impressive as their survival thus far had been, would be crushed. They needed the dragons to weaken the crusader forces, and quickly, or all would truly be lost.

[I]I need to get their attention,[/I] Gerald reminded himself, tearing his gaze from the multitude of corpses that riddled the bloody ground beneath him, many of which had risen anew under the vile influence of Hazzergash's power. Had they had time Gerald might have used his necromancy to neutralize these animated corpses or even turn them against the crusaders, but as it was there were more important things to worry about. It was a problem, though; Shadow Image was far from a spell that could be cast effortlessly, and he could feel within himself that this and all those previous castings of the spell had taken a dreadful toll on his magical reserves. He would have to do this with just a few spells, at most, or chances were that he would not have the strength to return to the battle afterwards... or escape from it, should Jillian fail.
So he began to weave magic, uttering words of the arcane in his shadowy form, and soon the black contour of his right arm was enveloped in white lightning, which was held there only briefly before Gerald commanded it to leap forward in a form reminiscent of that of a spear, which managed to strike a wyvern and knock it out of the sky, pass through it and successfully hit a second one, which was momentarily stunned but caught itself before it would have fallen. A few wyverns turned towards him, but not all. A bolt whirred through his incorporeal torso from one of the wyvern-riders' arbalests, and it struck Gerald that he actually felt an echo of pain when that happened. Interesting.
Another spell was cast, and another Spark Javelin picked a wyvern out of the sky, and most of the wyverns now turned to him, approaching him quickly, and another bolt tore through the upper left arm of the Shadow Image, doing no damage but providing an unhelpful distraction. A spell he had not memorized but only looked over quickly came to mind, and the warlock decided to take the risk; the next moment a thundering boom emerged from his form, rolling across the open plains around him and effectively making everyone on the battlefield aware of his presence, and drawing the attention of every remaining wyvern. The wyverns flew in close and swarmed around him, filling the air around him with their breath and tearing at his misty form with their wicked talons. He felt softness and warmth around the hand of his body. Now was the time.

It turned out that he did have to use the Withering, at least for this to succeed in this very instant, but once he had awoken the plague within him it seemed that Jillian's energy and awareness flowed surprisingly easily and naturally through him and into the spell, and he found that it was nowhere as hard to maintain her Shadow Image as he had feared. Her form appeared next to his immediately, and Gerald felt a surge of joy at the realization that he had just effortlessly accomplished something that logically should have extremely difficult. And with Jillian up there, she was free to invoke the spell that she had -
Gerald had to stop himself from starting in surprise, as he knew that doing so might still disrupt the Shadow Image. The words Jillian spoke were not arcane. [I]Black magic?[/I] he thought, now realizing why she had been so uncertain that she could prevent the spell from hitting their own bodies, but also stricken with a sense of fear, because with black magic physical injury was rarely the most significant danger. And sure enough it was not long until she completed the spell and Gerald, acting as the conduit between Jillian's body and Shadow Image, felt how torrents of her magical energy were siphoned through his own soul and fed to her spell to fuel it. There was nothing he could do, though, but maintain their Shadow Images and watch with horror and greedy desire as the witch's magic absolutely decimated the wyverns, obliterating them all in but a few moments, and then continuing to spew fireballs around them, doing great damage to the forest below - although looking closely he knew that the damage could have been much worse, had the trees surrounding those that caught fire not uprooted themselves and crawled away from the fiery doom that threatened them - and also sending one towards the crusader army, slaying another chunk of misguided minions; and all the while he kept feeling more and more energy passing through him and into the spell. It truly had amazing destructive power, but...
It stopped, and as it did, the Shadow Image beside Gerald's dispersed, and he felt the hand that had held his relinquish its grip.

The transition between being in his Shadow Image and sitting up straight in his real body was so abrupt and so hurried that he was inflicted with vertigo, even as he felt a spike of white-hot pain searing through his brain as it struggled to adapt to the instant change. He inhaled deeply and coarsely, his eyes wide with terror, before he turned to Jillian's motionless form beside him. Her breathing was shallow and irregular, she was bleeding from her nose and another tickle of blood escaped from between her lips. She was unconscious.
[I]Phase three magical exhaustion,[/I] he thought, feeling suddenly angry even as fear and desperation gripped him, pushing him to move despite his own weakness, pain and dizziness. He had to move quickly, do... [I]something[/I]. She had used far too much energy on that spell of hers, and unless he did something immediately her chances of surviving were probably slim to nonexistent.
"Veldaine!" he barked at her furiously, leaning over her and seizing her shoulders - almost as thin as his own - with her hands and shaking her in a way that was less than gentle. "You stupid, selfish girl! Why would you ask me to promise to keep you alive and then kill yourself in such a stupid way? How in the Planes did you expect me to be able to keep that promise? Fool!"
And yet he stood up, leaving his precious staff on the ground where he had lain to use both of his hands to hold on to Jillian's shoulders, and began dragging her across the forest floor as quickly as his body could manage. He gasped and panted with exertion, but kept dragging her northward, toward the trees that surrounded them.
"You will wake up from this," he hissed at her, struggling to move her the scant few feet to the nearest tree trunk even as he heard the roars of dragons above him and cries of fear from the battlefield to the south. "You hear, Veldaine? You'll wake up and take responsibility for your actions! You trust me on [I]that[/I], you thoughtless, reckless little witch!"