Breaking the Dawn.

[Cinnabar]

Inside the orphanage a few hurried words from the Constable has the matronly ladies who tend to the children's care tumbling out of bed, hurrying in nightdresses and bedjackets to rouse their charges with hushed urgency. The children wake quickly, many of them with small cries and wide, frightened stares, still fearful of the monsters that come in the night and snatch their friends away. But the Orphanage's workers are competent, comforting, and bustle the children into jackets and shoes over their nightwear; then down the stairs, quiet as you can, out of the door.

Like anxious mother hens the matrons usher their wards out into the chill air of dawn, a chain of small figures hurrying along hand-in-hand-in-hand; some of the children stare into the courtyard and freeze where they are, puddles growing about their feet as they see this armoured figure, the Ashfiend, creature of terrified nightmares and fearful rumour, but a push or quiet word from those tasked with looking after them has them moving onwards with haste, around the side of the building and away. We can't stay here, we mustn't stay here, come along now, this way, hurry, hurry, that's good, shh, this way. They move for the back wall of the compound, where the children will be lifted over the wall and led further away still, hopefully to safety.

Meanwhile the Constables stand between the evacuating children and the two figures in the courtyard; fearful and yet standing firm for now. Until the innocents are out of the way.

[SinVraal]

From the corner of obsidian eyes he spies the faithful servants tending to their charges. Shepherds of a sort, he supposes, of the heart favored by the One Above. The display curls serpentine lips into unctuous contempt, reminding him of the necessity of it all, of the work preaching, building, lying, and in the end to have resorted to such a final plan. Yet the charging figure, armored in darkness and death, soon demands his attention.

Here, he mused, at the opposite end of the world, the great doom between them might be ended - or truly begun. For the moment, the Ashfiend needed to be dealt with. A slow, measured breath constricted the mild knot of fear in his chest measured out with every footfall the nightmarish horror took. For his part he raised an empty hand, sheathed in supple leather, calling to himself the sword of white flame given him before the stars were born. Manifesting in a slender rod of white fury, its heat rolled into the air about him with the scent of ozone, and he flared his delicate nostrils in response.

It galled him to no end that a servant should threaten its master, that his slave's words railed against the Right Ordering of things. For all that he had manipulated and diverted Teron to destroy that which he desired to see annihilated, the Ashfiend had yet trodden heavily upon his plans - and all for what?

For love?

A bitter sneer blossomed upon his countenance of hard angles and pale sculpture. A few soft steps carried him towards his charging foe, legs set and weapon raised to deflect the first incoming assault with a cloud of sparks and ringing echo of steel and heavenly fire. Impact drove his heels into the earth, dust complaining with small clouds and a distinct crunch of impact as he side-stepped, gracefully stepping to the creature's flank and deftly bringing his weapon down to thunder with surprising strength against Ashfiend's armor.

The metal plate groaned beneath the baleful impact, screeching in the wake of Vraal's leashed flame. His bitter smile unwound, taut and tight, as he fenced with the fury of the Fallen around the potent 'Fiend. He ventured a half-step back, taut wasit turning as he angled the blade, back-handed, towards his armored once-slave's burning eyes.

"Come, Teron," he hissed through clenched, white teeth beyond the firm pink of his lips. "Kill me if you can."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Vraal's blade met his own with surprising strength that nested in the Fallen's heart and pumped through him like blood. It swelled and stormed through his ancient, fleshly body as needed, leaving him weak or potent as the world demanded or as he demanded of the world. A bitter snarl parted his lips as his former master countered with a swift pair of countering swipes that tore at his armor with heavenly fire, abated but unquenched by Vraal's ancient descent.

Teron felt his armor buckle and begin to break, strained beneath such swift and brutal punishment. A third attack drove the superheated weapon towards his hooded countenance, gouging through cloth and bloodless flesh. The momentum tore his head aside, the scarf loose and the golden-hemmed hood free.

After a moment's recovery from the off-balancing blow, his horrid countenance twisted to regard Vraal with a terrifying mask of mummified hate. Cold, dead flesh clung to the high cheekbones and sunken angles of an emaciated countenance white with bitter unlife to the point of near translucence. Grey, torn lips framed white teeth and ragged stalks of blond hair spilled about his armored shoulders and framed his ruin in the memory of a halo.

Shadows still clung to his countenance, encircling his searing gaze in livid charcoal. Unmasked, the raw fury coursed through his visage, drawing his gaunt mask even tighter as his jaw parted around teeth clenched, biting off a livid snarl. Deliverance angled in for Vraal's side as he planted his booted feet, its black blade tearing cloth and leaving a crimson trail in his wake.

Pressing his attack as Vraal's sword descended, he took the onslaught full upon his mailed arms and brought his weapon down again in a swift, brutal arc to vivisect his enemy in one solid strike.

[SinVraal]

Deliverance had once been a holy weapon, forged in the blessing of Light to reap the wages of those who had turned to shadows. Now the weapon itself was but a shadow, stained dark with the lives it had taken beneath Ashfiend’s and, at one time, Vraal’s command. There was no command, ay longer, that could be given to deny Deliverance’s hunger for destruction save for the riposte of a sturdy weapon and the murder of its wielder.

As Vraal had often considered over the centuries, how does one kill that which has already perished? In Myrken, it had revolved around luring the pawns to you, in bringing them to bear against the Ashfiend’s sword and fist and blind, merciless fury. Yet in so doing they had spoken with him, some perhaps even sympathized with him. Others had maligned his followers who hid, even in their own ignorance, beneath a layer of good works and compassion.

Now the black king stood alone.

Alone, but armed, and with his burning blade he caught Teron’s blade with his own while a free, empty hand clutched suddenly at the crimson stream that emerged to paint his shirt in Deliverance’s wake. Torn flesh and cloth laid bare his pale chest that flexed ands trained, with one arm, against Teron who bore down upon him with tireless fury. Slowly the spectral knight began to push Vraal’s sword beyond the point of no recovery from a soon-to-be-suffered final blow. Pride bore him along, even in the face of a swift end, until the sweat that whispered along the cruel contours of his face muttered secrets and truths and taunted him with the future.

A future dependant upon the present.

A hot gasp of air, the complaining of two swords as they groan together beneath inhuman stress, as Vraal stumbled away from his foe; struggling to put his feet beneath him as the Ashfiend closed, lunged, only to have his weapon drive against the temple’s outer wall. With only a moment to spare, he raised a hand streaked in blood and carved a twisted rune into the air, a black, pulsing thing that throbbed with a perverse pulse. A knowing smile sent black bands of crackling, arcane energy screaming into Teron’s limbs, pulling them away from his armored torso, leaving him bare as the remnants of muscle pulled taut and strained against his ancient bones.

Vraal’s obsidian eyes followed the imprint of his wound upon his gloved palm with a choking sneer of disgust. The flickering flames that darted along the length of and composed his sword cast half his visage into maddening, imperfect shadows. As Teron strained against the sorcery even now visiting mortal agony upon his immortal foe, he slithered forward on quiet, graceful feet.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

He remembered launching the mapmaker through the air beneath the furious onslaught of a single symbol that could induce pain. A symbol taut to him during his slavery to Vraal. A symbol that, in the hands of his former master, could elicit pain even from the dead and the undying. The sorcerous black bands wound about his armored torso, constricting his wrists and pinning his feet to the earth. With every passing moment he felt his aged musculature being wound tighter, as if every tendon and viscera had been hooked to a mighty and merciless winch that continued to rend and tear.

The magical force even prevented him from pressing his lips together while each finger slowly began to curl as far as it might towards the back of his hand. The forced paralysis moving through him with a ghostly touch yet anchored to the world. It seized his shrunken heart and dust-filled lungs, stirring both in a piercing grasp that forced stale air from time choked lungs.

Deliverance clanged noisily to the ground, his hands peeling away from all else, fingers from each other, muscle from bone. All the while his countenance, turned towards the temple's outer wall where a moment ago he had sought to pin Vraal there with his sword. The pain slithering through him hissed another, humiliating and horrifying plan. It spoke to him of another defeat at the Fallen's hands.

The pain's grasp reached long, through his flesh and into the dark mist of the ancient past. Beyond the pale wall he beheld the far-reaching forests and plains of Arak's homeland and his people's shrill cries for battle. For their last battle before they were wiped from the face of the earth. Ruin and death seared his thoughts, in the shape of his own home as it fell down around him, huddled and weeping in the blackened chapel.

Slowly, struggling against the magic's lightning pulls, an armored hand fell heavily against the stone wall as he pawed it, answered only by a repeating grating sound as ancient mail and burned metal scraped against the wall. Just out of reach sprawled Elysia, dying, and he again unable to reach her. Muted lips trembled, struggling for a breath that convulsed in his dead lungs.

Until a piercing cry escaped him as she, too, was consumed in the conflagration. And, as he slumped forward, forehead rocking against the wall, he beheld Vraal's burning blade held him fast.

[SinVraal]

"I know you have put my magic to good use," he hissed through clenched teeth, clicking them together in mockery as he leaned forward. The Ashfiend's chill enfolded him in its morbid embrace, coiling invisible tendrils about his throat and back, as his torn chest stung with the biting cold that bled from Teron's armor.

"It was created for the purpose of punishing errant slaves," he explained, exhaling warm breath over Teron's ear. The ghoul's coarse, stalk-like hair drew across his countenance like petrified cobwebs and stirred beneath Vraal's whispered breaths. The unfolding smile nearly split his visage in twain as he heard the forced gasps of Teron's lungs and felt his trembling, helpless frame beneath his enduring sorcery. Long, tapered fingers squeezed his burning blade and twisted the handle, leaving the spectral knight to groan in impotent protest.

"Six thousand years, and this is all you have to show for it?" He tore his weapon free, glaring with naked contempt that sparkled in the bottomless depths of obsidian eyes. "Your home and fortress destroyed, your servants scattered and lost, and you all alone in a foreign, backwards land." Bitter condescension flavored every syllable, twisted his lips to spit the words upon his magically bound enemy.

With a sudden snap of the arm, he seized Teron's hair to bend his head back and, snarling, drove his weapon through his former slave's dead flesh. The hot, sizzling of his fiery weapon scored dead flesh and seared the heart's remains. He leaned with greater weight, every moment, upon his burrowing weapon and coughed up a pitiful little chuckle.

"And Elysia lost to you, forever. A pity you never learned that you never had any hope. Else you might have spared me much trouble, and crawled back for my mercy." He tore Teron's head back further, arm trembling with the exertion, lips quivering in delight at his slave's choked cry of pain.

"Without me you are nothing!" he vehemently cursed through a sharp, hissed breath. "You would be a story, not even a memory! Without me there would be nothing left, Penroll." Errant strands of ebony hair tumbled about a pale countenance of bold, harsh lines and sunken eyes that sparkled with heaven's first designs, before they were marred by stars.

He dragged his weapon free with a loose wrist, enabling the weapon's weight to carry it deeper into his servant's injury and tear further away at whatever encased the fury locked away beneath his ancient armor. The elongated drawing, accompanied by a steady, echoing groan from Teron's lips, sent a tremor down the Ashfiend's spine.

As Vraal's sword tip found the back of Teron's throat, voicing a sibilant joy against pallid flesh, he voiced a single question.

"Now, am I not generous?"

[Teron_Ashfiend]

"Without me, you are nothing!"

"You would be a story, not even a memory!"

"Without me there would be nothing left, Penroll"

***********************************************************

[I]Penroll raggedly inhaled, the breath bringing with it a deep, lacerating pain that knifed through his chest. His heart thundered in his ears and pounded against his ribs as he sought to steady himself. The exchanges with Sin’Vraal had revealed the damned creature’s great, otherworldly strength, and though he had been bloodied, Penroll knew that he himself was in a far worse state. With a heavy sigh, he raised his eyes towards the tense Demon Lord, who held his blade at the ready, and who mocked him, his cause, and his love with a cruel smile upon thin lips.

With the monster’s cold, silent gesture of unyielding contempt did Penroll grit his teeth and prepare himself. Before him loomed the ghostly specter of Elysia’s delicately beautiful face, peaceful in the still calm known only to the dead. The heavy sword within his hands seemed lighter than a feather, and he was unsure he even held the tempered weapon any longer as he thrust the pain aside and took a daring step forward.

“Give her back to me,â€

[SinVraal]

Deliverance, darkly stained, plunged through the writhing bands of magical energy and drove hard for his chest. At once his magic dissipated, the Ashfiend's hate driving him onward and through the oppressive magic. Wreathed in Vraal's punishment, Teron's blow narrowly missed its mark as he threw himself away from the incoming blade. Deliverance still bit into pale flesh, gouging an angry red furrow along his chest and side.

Struggling to get his feet beneath him, Vraal parried away two follow-up attacks, wrist deftly twisting and arm shuddering beneath each thundering assault and shower of sparks. As a third swipe came for his neck, Vraal fell hard onto his knees and brought his burning blade in the way. The impact sent a shivering groan of steel across the courtyard. Teron's offensive stirred the dust from the ground into a dull haze through which seared his burning gaze marking Vraal for judgment and death.

Delvierance arched overhead again as its wielder prepared to attack once more, relentless as the perpetual chill that bled profusely from the armored horror. The kneeling stung deeper than the wound that freely wept crimson years and yet, through the pride that now failed to shield him, he knew to remaining kneeling meant a quick death.

Abandoning his sword, which soon guttered and vanished, he sprung towards the Ashfiend. Gloved fingers snaked about Teron's descending arms after he darted too near to allow Deliverance to strike again. Planting his feet, he strained, wrenching and twisting Teron's wrists, and taunted his former slave with a bitter sneer as Deliverance again fell to the earth to be trampled by their twisting, stepping feet as each struggled for dominance over the other.

Their pale countenances hovering close together, Vraal flashed a broad, taunting grin before plunging his hands into Teron's twisted, battered metal plates. The armor gave with a petulant cry as he tore handfuls away. In an instant, as Teron lumbered forward, the burning blade graced Vraal's carefully gloved hands once more and, spinning aside and away from the Ashfiend's grasp, he buried his sword's edge deep into his enemy's chest.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The weapon cut deep, deeper as he stepped into Vraal's attack and felt the weapon burning and cleaving through his dead flesh. With every passing moment that scored his body, searing jolts lanced along his limbs and punctured his quivering heart. Another step, another grating, echoing snarl as he twisted fully into the buried blade and stretched against his own pain, the weight of memory, and the very metal armor that shielded him in the scorched reminder of his former self. A self that, beneath Vraal's assault, had become torn and tattered, barely held together and against his chest.

His strain provoked Vraal's eyes into broad, staring orbs suddenly dull with realized terror. For with his last step Teron had thrown his hands out and as the chill that poured perpetually from his dead flesh scourged his hated enemy, his own fingers tightly caught Vraal's neck.

"Die," he snarled through his tattered gray lips, willing his enemy's end with the relentless crushing despair of chill and touch. Bearing down, he felt Vraal's knees begin to tremble beneath his armored weight while his fingertips drew even more crimson to the violent palette of his once master's body.

Joined in a pythonic embrace, each struggled to bear up beneath his own injuries and telling wounds. Every fraction of movement curled Teron's lips in snarled, muted paint hat ached and throbbed in the aftermath of Vraal's sorcerous attack and the numerous wounds that burned because of the flame-wreathed blade.

"Die," he chanted again, riveting his satisfied eyes upon Vraal's paling visage and trembling lower lip while the Fallen's fingernails broke and bled in a futile attempt to break the strangulating grasp. Pain blossomed upon Vraal's features, wide-eyed and quivering, with a satisfying bloom.

[SinVraal]

"Die," Teron had commanded through clenched teeth and a grating voice filled with the earthen rage of a terrible avalanche. An avalanche visited mercilessly upon his throat as armored hands dug and crushed his slender, pale neck. He vainly scraped at the vice-like grasp, fingertips trailing burning wakes over the dented metal while the little air that he received burned its way down to pitifully fill his lungs.

The world began to swim, drifting as if unhinged. At the center of the swirling world brooded the looming Ashfiend whose burning, relentless gaze drew in all that he beheld as fuel for his unending fire. A fire that might reach out to rain ash and ruin upon Myrken Wood and the surrounding lands.

In a vibrant flash of light, a pair of wings sprouted from his shoulders and tore through the remnants of a white, collared shirt painted with his life and dismissed a black, silk cloak to the ground to be quickly trampled. Outlined first in white phosphorescence, they quickly took fleshly shape to reveal that both had been wounded by blades - one terrifically so. Still, with a trio of ragged, struggling inhalations his fingers, burned white with exposure to the Deathfrost that lurked about Teron like a funerary shroud, seized his enemy by armored forearms. The wings fluttered, strained, and bore them aloft.

He felt Teron's hands release in surprise, until their arms wound about one another in a chaotic cloud of clawing fingers and beating fists. Caught up in the other's embrace, darkly armored fists pummeled pale, porcelein flesh that, in turn, hammered in response with burning palms and knuckles. A gentle rain of broken armor descended with a soft, dry echo of dry bones rattling together.

"There will be no peace for you," he coughed into the midst of their struggle, his words nearly lost int he beating of wings and the feathers that fluttered between them. "Even should I fall, your hate will burn forever."

"Unless the world should burn first."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Vraal's wings struggled to bear them into the heavens lighted with dawn's fire. Amidst the fluttering feathers the ancient foes struggled, fists bruising flesh and shattering armor that rained down upon the courtyard below in metallic hail. Teron's fist swatted aside Vraal's reaching grasp before hammering his enemy in the chest, only to suffer a swift blow to his own jaw a moment later.

With every stretch he felt the woudns he suffered from Vraal's burning blade open anew, scoring down to the bone. Yet through the echoing cry of his pain, the pair of them buffeted by the wind, he saw Vraal's serpentine lips twist into an impossible curse. A curse of the world's dying, of needing to be broken open and reseeded with but one seed: Elysia's.

"Then it will burn," he snarled before doubling up his opponent with a swift, forward strike. The Fallen's blood clawed over armored knuckles and between fingers as Teron then grasped Vraal's shoulder by reaching beneath his arm and spun his former master about, their bodies interspersed by a pair of mangled, bitterly brutalized wings. Wings that he seized and bent backwards while driving his knee into the small of Vraal's back.

The world loomed large before them, hesitating before a swift plunge earthward, wings bound in hateful fists. As Teron stretched out his enemy beneath him, he strained forward, dead lips drawing across his former master's own in a mummified kiss.

"You will not see the first of those fires, Vraal," he vowed as their ascent trembled, the wind howling its warning for what soon awaited them. His fingers tightened in furious tension, voice straining through the shrieking air as the pair began to fall. Mindful only of the broken promise he held in his mailed fists and drove towards the ground he managed the barest of smiles.

"There will be no dawn for you."

Bound up in each other's arms, the fallen Vraal and fallen man fell once again.

[SinVraal]

Wings pinned behind him, Teron's words wormed their way into his mind. Below, the world spun about itself, the panoramic display diluted through a veil of fluttering feathers. As the orphanage's roof approached at bewildering speed, seeming both quick and slow at once, he slowly closed his obsidian eyes.

He felt his heart beat.

He felt himself breathe.

Slowly, probing the descending world with a lingering gaze as he raised his eyelids, he returned Teron's burning stare with his own: dark, impenetrable, and annotated with a small, private smile.

A smile that survived the thundering explosion as the pair descended through the roof and crashed onto the floor beyond. There was pain and a grim, looming shadow. There were what felt like knives piercing his flesh, wings shattered beneath him, the surrounding wreckage graced with feathers. He smiled into the dust that choked sight and sound, yet through which he dimly beheld the Ashfiend's ever-burning gaze.

"I can feel," he began in a trembling voice that soon dampened his throat with a distinct, copper taste.

"I can feel them move..."

And all was suddenly silent.

[Khalika]

The battle, the fallen angel and the fallen saint. fighting to be the first to take the other to hell. Fire met metal, and bone crushed beneath each massive blow.

All through this battle there has been silent observers. One fled early terrified in to the temple, weeping for the loss of her teacher. The second watches with a curious eye, perched somewhere upon the outer walls of the temple, claws used to grip into the stone, finding an advantagous view. The third, is below, sliding too and fro watching the battle with a stricter eye, follow its every blow...every shift. When the two combatants take to the air, again the third shifts, to gather abetter view, while the second seems in the end more concerned with the movements of the third.

The first?...is gone, racing now through tears and anguish to the secrets of the temples...to secrets even she herself does not know exsist...

They plumet now, back towards the earth, wrapped within each other, this deadly aerial masterpiece destroyed suddenly as the movement is interupted by the splintering of wooden beams, the orphange roof crumbling before their wake...

Now the third moves, suddenly...quickly..covering the ground to the orphanage with fleet foot, nothing hinders this one, a natural ease is each foot fall....No mistep as the door is reached and slamed open, the Gypsy moves towards the sounds of groaning wood, not sure of what she is to find. Not sure what she wants to find...

The second though arrived first, scaling the outter wall like an animal, again...still.. and always hidden, the Vertex looks down upon the scene...The last moans of the winged demon Vraal, and the arrival of his R'ial. The Gypsy herself, falls upon the scene, an uncounious hint of relief escapes her lips..


The first now stands in a small room, shaking...confused, nails broken, knuckles bleeding from beating upon the heavy door that finally gave...she just wanted to get away. Away from this place, that took her childern, only to fail them not two night later...She prayed...

"I am the god of my own fate

Again and again those words fell, as she fell to the ground in that very small room, so dark at first she cannot see...but she believes..

"I am the god of my own fate

There before her like a pray answered stretches a web it covers full an entire wall...Faith...

"I am the god of my own fate

She touches it.....and Rebecca is gone...

[Teron_Ashfiend]

***************************************************************

"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 from your ashes. Only to serve again, a fiend for a fiend."

****************************************************************

Wrapped in the oncoming threat of oblivion the pair had plummeted, master and slave, angel and saint. Now they shared a shallow grave covered in the timber sued for the orphanage's roof, nails erupting from the sprawling wood and scattered shingles. In memory of heaven, their eulogy and benediction had been the gentle scattering of angel feathers over their shared destruction.

A destruction shared for only a brief moment in time. For first there was echoing silence that consumed them as hate had already done. The quiet spoke of tombs and solitude that overwhelms and consumes, devouring even memories until one has nothing left - not even one's self.

First there was movement.

"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.

There was movement as armored fingers, protruding through the battered, broken tips of aged gauntlets, scraped at the rubble and set it to shifting and painting him grey with dust and ruin.

Then there was memory.

"Only to rise from your ashes..."

Probing fingers found the floor, distinguished it from the chaos strewn over him as a childish blanket. As his palms bore weight, remaining bits of armor, battered and broken, tumbled away with the dissonant jangle of dropped, glass bells.

Wooden boards fell away from armored shoulders as, setting himself, the armored Ashfiend drew up to his knees and, amidst the shingles that sloughed from his shoulders in testament to the sought for release with his victory, he pressed on, wearily, to his feet. Dust left him bleached gray as it clung to the crevices in his armor, mail, and bits of tattered cloak and scarf. Innumerable dents and gaping holes revealed the ancient doublet clinging to his dead flesh beneath, seared in Vraal's punitive wrath.

Finally there was meaning.

"Only to serve again, a fiend for a fiend."

For through the shroud of rubble and destruction that toppled from his back and before his burning, probing eyes he beheld Vraal's battered, broken body. It lay crushed beneath his own strangulating weight, the Fallen's throat caved beneath his mailed grasp, wings shattered and useless beneath him. Covered in feathers and the weight of destiny, he saw his former master as he had never before fully seen him.

He saw Vraal undone.

He stared for unknown time, probing the future, the present, and the past with his searing gaze. He waited and struggled for a breath, willing to taste freshness in his dessicated lungs. He hoped for the dry, tinder-like quality of the world, that spread before him as ever ready to burn, to flee into the deepest recesses of memory. He waited.

Against the far wall stood a tall, slender mirror. Through the filth that now caked it after raining down and billowing out from his explosive entrance, he probed its reflective surface for some speck of what lay beyond. What he saw was a tall figure, clad in torn and skewered armor, scorched and broken, wrapped in a tattered cloak. His features were angled and sharp beneath taut, pallid skin with burning eyes wreathed in shadow and framed in a broken halo of uneven stalks of blond, shoulder-length hair.

He saw death.

He saw death as he had seen it over the past, countless years. With a ragged sigh he began to move from the room, limping and slouching, towards the doorway and the stairs beyond. In dutiful silence, his long shadow followed after.

[SinVraal]

Rebecca is gone, across countless miles over trackless seas to a land left desolate in the wake of recent war. A land that groans beneath the insidious burning of a terrible conflagration that shook the nation to its core and seeded devestation to bloom across its rolling vistas.

She is not gone forever. Rather she falls through a deep pit, laced with cobwebs that twist into sneering faces at the limits of her vision only to hide again when she gazes directly upon them. The webs themselves glow, phospherescent linen to wrap this falling, living mummy. A mummy delivered over to the other end of this mystic descent.

A mummy who finds herself in a small alcove, the wall behind her covered in the same, crawling webs lit with a light bound up in its wispy strands. Beyond looms a chamber whose walls draw towards a central point, slanted towards a pinnacle lost in darkness overhead. A darkness that bleeds and pulses throughout so that to breathe is to breathe it, to walk is to swim in it, and to see is to strain against it like a thief struggling with the limits of his reach for a small bauble.

At the center a calm, tepid pool caught up in a broad, circular basin large enough for eight grown men to link arms in order to surround it. The stone is dark, like that of the wall and ceilings, drinking the gentle glow that bleeds from the undisturbed waters penetrated by a spire, taller than a man, arising from its center that holds several smaller bowls that overflow with water. Water that, upon falling into the basin, creates neither wave nor movement.

This small magic, Vraal's scrying pool, remains overseen by four monolithic statues whose crowns are also shrouded in the shadows overhead. Their enormous eyes, glassy and jewel-like, regard her with a sickly green, pulsing illumination that is equally possible their own sick sight or the reflected light from the pool.

At one end, upon a raised dais flanked by diminutive obelisks twice as tall as Vraal himself, squats a kingly abomination. It is a throne, bleached white, constructed of knit bones. A pair of yellowed skulls perch at the end of each arm, staring with empty eyes that encompass the pregnant darkness throughout the chamber - welcoming it and peering through it. The twisted bones are joined by sinews, all of them appearing thoroughly kneaded and corrupt like dry, withered limbs cleansed of impure flesh and blood.

Opposite the throne, across the great width of the chamber, squats a looming pair of double doors shut against whatever world lays beyond. Their breath is a cold thing, the occasional stirring of wind just beyond, howling of windswept plains and escape from the surrounding, secret darkness.