Who I Am...

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The cartographer's question haunted the Ashfiend as he stepped from the shadows that laired within the hollowed, burned chapel. The toppled, mold-crusted pews greeted him with a ruined embrace while the chipped, scarred stone altar sat silent and helpless vigil over this festering monument to decay.

Past and present interwove once again as he made his way towards the central aisle. Black boots trudged over the spreading blanket of moss beside the still, tepid pool that squatted beneath a gaping hole in the ceiling. Half rotten leaves stirred about him in a foul wind stirred from outside.

"Who are you?" Glenn's question echoed in the silence, tenaciously clinging with the man's raw-voiced anguish.

"I am no longer a man..."

"But you were once. Who were you? What was your name?"

That name squirmed and coiled in his mind, with ancient tendrils linked to the purposefully forgotten corridors of his memory. Memories that spoke of an ancient land remembered only in myth, of goodness and mercy beneath piety, and a woman that perished twice in his arms. He and she rendered doubly dead and doubly damned.

Penroll...

The name escaped him in the weakness of a shadow, the space of a coarse breath that momentarily escaped the wreck of tattered, lifeless lips. And in that word he felt the ashen call of justice, a call that fell into a strangled, bestial snarl as a mailed hand curled into a trembling fist. Around him the room convulsed and transformed, painting its interior scarlet with the sight and stench of blood. Childhood friends lay strewn amongst the battered pews as the battle raged on outside, beyond the sealed doors, and the last of their defenders fell beneath the approaching army.

Penroll...

Holy statues wept and their crimson tears joined those who wailed for the dead and for themselves who yet lived. Armored fingertips scraped violently over the stone alter and, seizing hold, overturned the squat construct. It thundered and shattered against the floor, sending dust into the air to settle onto his armored shoulders.

Yet in the altar's echoing doom the name haunted and teased, abrasive against the still, black heart that rested within his dessicated flesh.

Penroll...

[Teron_Ashfiend]

... who were you Teron...?

"Penroll..." she intoned, laying in his arms with her paling brow anointed with her own blood. The ghastly pure white of bloodless death crept along her features, slowly enfolding her within the dark embrace as she played delicate fingertips along the length of his raw arm.

His peripheral vision crawled with the spilling crimson life of family and friends, his home watering their temple withe god-forsaken terror and heart-wrenching sobs. As her white grew to match that of his cloak, shredded and torn, he felt a taloned hand grasp his heart, puncturing the soul with the only promise of peace in vengeance.

Elysia...

He shook her violently as the woman's features, restored, flushed and gaped for air like a drowning woman. She floundered upon her own sarcophagus, rose petals fluttering about them in crimson rain. She mocked his sacrifice with tears, suffered and wilted beneath his unyielding iron grasp that betrayed a strength previously unknown to either.

"Penroll!" he bellowed, the stale air of stagnant breath washing over her. "You must believe me..." he ran an agitated hand over his pale, translucent brow in a vaguely human gesture as her cruel joke drove him to the brink of a yawning black abyss. "I am Penroll!"

Anguish...

"Penroll," Vraal murmured in the tenseness between them. "I have seen your star rise from afar, in the manner of the first stars, when the Light strewed them carelessly over the heavens."

A sword in his his armored hands, sweating beneath the chain mesh and armor plate, a steadying breath. Steps forward, a reckless charge for love and fury and some measure of peace that offered only a view of its silhouette. A silhouette torn aside as stage curtains for the opening act.

... who were you before Vraal...?

Vraal...

Vraal sneered again in the memory madness that seized him. The black walls of the temple bled with the life of his fallen brethren, lost for centuries to all the world though it lingers on in his mind. All the time since his first visit to Vraal's temple and the rage simmered and seared.

... when he did it to you were you not a man then...?

Rage...

"Again you have come," Vraal offered derisively. "Again you fall," he offered as the world went black. Time and meaning, painted with strangled fury, choked his lifeless lungs with the mockery of breath. "Only to rise again from your ashes. Only to serve again, a fiend for a fiend."

Fury...

... who were you ...?

Hate...

"Arise my servant."

Penroll...

"Arise, Ashfiend..."