The Black Pilgrim at Darkenhold

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The ringing thunder of catapult fire echoed across the blasted landscape. Fires had broken out amid the city-state of Morland and the smoke threatened to choke the will to fight from the armies and people trapped within. Arak would spur them on to death until the last man, such wa his hold over those who worshipped him, and Vraal would see this enemy crushed for inspiring such powerful control. Teron's searing gaze probed the Thresher's Spire in the distance, well beyond reach of his siegecraft, while another tower thundered to the ground in ruin.

Ruin. Soon it would all be ruin and ashes and silence.

The last time he had come before Darkenhold he had been mounted, and without his Elysia. Once again the chains tapped empty of their cradle upon his armored hip. Arak's Ruin likely abandoned to the Shepherd Knight, Deliverance with him once again, and the terrible burden of ash and memory. Last time he had come with barely constrained, strangling fury. Now he came in the dimmer light of hate threatened if not abated. If offered him a certain hesitancy to behold something as beautiful apart from the contents of the urn-grave carried always at his side. This black pilgrim stood, a grim and ponderous traveller, the length of his shadow bled out in quiet awakening to such things.

Not all the world was embers and kindling for his hateful flame.

Teron resumed his approach, a lengthy stain in sunlight, his armored frame swallowing whole what light cascaded down upon those brutal shoulders. The length of his tattered cloak announced him like a banner, scarf and gold-hemmed hood hid his features and sealed them within darkness that was not ready to be breached. That same light, however, caught at the diamond set in Deliverance's hilt and set a star upon his midnight back.

Light and dark he came, again, to Darkenhold at the gypsy's words. Teron craned his infernal gaze for battlement's heights as secreted lips parted like muffled siegecraft in rote, memory, and the daring of such a thing as hope.

"Ariane Emory."

The name echoed against and crawled up the carefully crafted fastness before him.

"Come forward."