A Bitter Cup

[Teron_Ashfiend]

All flames burn themselves into nothing. All fires that I have seen, pyres and siege burnings, drift to ash and silence. All save one. All save my own.

There was gray stone. A broad walk, made treacherous by uneven and unsure footing, wound its way in a broad and dull scar through the ancient, worn stone. The walls reached up on either side, embracing him like a broad and open grave. Wind whispered and muttered in secret, ageless, colorless tones. Lifeless, save for the wind. Ageless even by his standards, the ageless eternity of those things sculpted by the hands of the Unconquerable, the One Above.

There was also a broad sky, blue and streaked with the bleeding wisps of mummified-gray clouds. They drifted into view like incompetant sculptures abandoned to a cerulean sea, clumbsy and childlike, the markers of some dumb and alien intelligence.

There was also unlife as he rose to a kneeling position. The tattered length of black cloak sifted about the breadth of shoulders clad in ancient, blackened and altogether ruined armor. Stirring like a drowsy guardian a distinct chill slithered about him, drawing in from where it had bled out over the mountainside with his minions, his wasted flesh, and what remained of his weathered soul. Perched upon his knees, he peered about his desolate surroundings and noted the absence of anyone, or anything, Flaked bits of ruined metal, once a part of his armor, crunched underfoot as he clambored upright and took in his surroundings through baleful, burning crimson eyes.

As Teron stood, he took up his scarf from the ground and wound it about the lower half of his ruined visage. Instinctually he pulled the dark hood, trimmed with gold, back into place in order to hide his countenance beneath cloth and shadows. There had been a battle, and magic, destruction, and loss. A powerful loss. As the recollection of that battle bled into his clearing consciousness he spied a lone figure standing further off in the canyon.

Immediately an armored hand moved swiftly to the empty scabbard at his side, seizing for Arak's Ruin and closing only about empty air. Puzzled, he risked a glance towards the empty scabbard and then towards the willowy stranger. Still clouded with confusion, his mind searched for those magics he knew by rote, as he started forward.

Despite being clad in ponderous blackened plate, his steps made little sound, as the world hushed the secret misery of his existence and attempted to ignore the walking blight. A great shadow swept out behind him, steady and strong, wrought from the scoured remnants of his heart. Anger pulsed through him with every footfall, thundering in false pulse, as his hollow words arched towards whoever had been watching over his apparent grave.

"Who are you?"

He drew to a stop some two dozen paces away. The figure stood a bit over five feet in height with wavy blond hair and slender shoulders. Bright blue eyes peered out from a peaceful face, undeterred by the monster's chill that sought to envelop him.

"You have been asked that by many," came the reply. The words bore a weight no youth could birth. "Mostly by enemies, and what you have the passed, once, for friends. I," he continued with a soft sigh, "am the answer to that question. Or at least," he paused, somewhat unsure of his own words, "part of the answer."

The Ashfiend snarled coldly, armored fingers parting upon a maimed hand. The ligaments throbbed with memory of Deliverance's punishment, visited upon him by the treacherous gypsy-woman. "Do not toy with me, boy," the words laced with stirred fury. "I will not be mocked by an errant squire."

The youth, for his part, crossed his arms and held the creature's ferocious gaze with his own. "You always thought the truth mocked you. Maybe, just maybe, it is the other way around."

Teron noted, as his livid gaze narrowed, that the boy revealed no fear, no tremor, no shirking courage. His hooded head raised in intense appraisal as the wind whispered between them, sharing a secret with the stones underfoot.

"Where am I?"

The boy nodded as if in approval at the hollow tone that reached out towards him. "Now we're getting somewhere. This is the aftermath of the battle, when all the enemies you had made, and all of Myrken Wood, said with one voice - that they would not die at your hand. This is where you were defeated. And imprisoned."

"Imprisoned," Teron muttered icily as memory drifted through him like a gentle brook through aged, stubborn weeds that bent with the current. Lostness had made him pliable through the silently screaming hatred that coiled at his core. There had been many Myrken warriors of note, many leaders, and much battle. There had been death, defeat, and evidently imprisonment.

"This," he rumbled at length, "is no prison. It is an open mountain, and the farms and villages of Myrken do not lie far from here."

"Technically correct," the youth replied. "They are not far, but you are seperated by a great gulf. This is not the world, Teron," he hesitated over the name before continuing. "This is you. The prison is you, your memory... and your hate. All bound up because of the sorceress' magic."

Teron remained silent as the youth's words began to worm their way through his protective hatred. The chill recoiled about him in slavish devotion as the truth spilled out from the stranger's lips like a caustic river. Dark eyes flickered with hate without voice, vengeance without object to be visited upon. Alone, swallowed in his own shadows, there was no escape. For his part there was nothing to say.

"We had better get going," the youth offered, daring a few tentative steps towards the towering figure and extending a hand in reserved welcome.

"There is nowhere to go, warden," the Ashfiend sneered, his eyes brightening as his hands curled into fists at his sides. "As you said, this is a prison."

"Partially correct," the youth offered again. "There is, rather, only one way to go," and his extended hand closed save for one finger, left to point at the Ashfiend. "Into you."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The Ashfiend's derisive laughter raked the air between them, a cold and hollow thing that echoed up from some black pit. "You speak in riddles, youth," he sneered, a hand sheathed in mail raising between them, one finger extended. "And my patience for them has ended."

With practiced ease, he traced a burning symbol into the air. The sorcery rent the air itself, leaving sears and ozone in its wake as, completed, the arcane symbol sputtered with dark fire and reached towards the youth with greedy arms of black electricity. In an instant they struck him, bringing the youth to his knees, as each jarring bolt found a muscle and drew it ever-tighter.

Taking a step forward his fallen tormenter, the Ashfiend felt a distinct ache jarring the length of his side, his shoulder, and tickling the remnants of his still heart. The black bolts snaked towards him and darted easily through armored plate. They snared his tendons and rent his sinews, drawing each like a winch without pity as pain, true and real, lanced along each limb. The bolts sizzled and arced from limb to limb, highlighting his teeth and drawing him heavily to his knees.

Trembling arms slowly rose, unsteady like a drunken puppetteer, as mailed fingertips strove towards his hooded head in order to contain the pulsing anguish that tormented his deadened flesh beneath.

"What," Teron began through clenched lips and a jaw that pulsed as if to detonate in agony. "What magic is this?"

"Only your own!" came the strangled reply, colored with the youth's own pain. For each jolt that toyed with his body an identifcal tremor wracked the deathly knight as they stuttered, trapped withint heir own tortured flesh.

Struggling to remain upright, Teron strained towards the glittering symbol and closed the extended hand into a tight fist, diminishing and ending the sorcery. In the silence that followed in the grey tomb-like chasm, he remained on his knees, ancient mind attempting to process the ramifications of his own magic turning upon itself, himself. He watched the youth's slender, cotton-clad chest fall back into the easy, sustained rhythm of the living, and took in the silence that settled around them.

A prison, he had been told. His thoughts began to gather like the eye of a building storm as he rose to his feet, the tattered length of his black cloak tumbling along the length of his armored legs and back. Searing eyes of crimson flame wander down the length of his arm, to his hand, as the fading pain into nothingness sharply reminds of only dead and bloodless flesh. The landscape reflects this grayness in blank, jagged stone and the clouds wander mutely by on some celestial errand.

You would sit yourself down in a world gone quiet, and have an eternity to want for oblivion.

Ariane's words to him, alone in the darkness of the forgotten well, not long before the final battle against a united Myrken. Ariane's question as to his ultimate aims, his goals, even his dreams for the world - inasmuch as the dead do dream.

He spared a glance for the youth, who was struggling to his knees in a fit of coughing. He looked over his shoulder and, in a moment, started forward towards the angled slopes. He did not notice, in the unnatural silence of his unnatural passing, his his own steps incrementally increased with each passing moment.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

One by one his steps fell in silence. He descended one craggy slope only to ascend another, the plane of his travel never certain. Yet despite the jutting stones and stumbling rocks each boot fell with a swift and sure silence. Surety for the unnatural strength that quickened what remained of his flesh, and silence in nature's denial of the continued blight of his existence. Tendons did not strain, bones did not ache, searing eyes knew nothing of blinking - for the Ashfiend there was only drive, the driven force of the flame lashed and bound in his blackened core.

He came to a stop at the edge of a short, jutting cliff and gazed out upon the expanse of Myrken countryside. He had wandered the quiet, green land from border to border, slaying its people and compelling their flesh into forced, decaying service. He had driven some of its populace mad with the touch of his memories upon their own. Glades, lakes, rivers and roads all a map with which he was somewhat familiar. Not terribly far squatted the township itself, home to the Broken Dagger, the shattered orphanage, several enemies and many memories.

Memories.

Memories tickled each shadow with meaning, gave shape to every relationship and flattened each just the same. One teased at his memory just then, a particular shape that snared his attention and drew it towards the broad, tepid puddle near where he stood. In its placid depths he found an image reflected.

The image was of a figure clad in blackened, battered plate armor. Enormous rents had been dug into the arms and torso where, beneath the soot and ruin from an ancient blaze, he bore the symbol of two weeping, wilted roses. Two empty scabbards bore testimony to his lost weapons. The length of a gray scarf hid the lower half of his visage from view while a hood cast it into shadows from which flared two eyes that burned with livid crimson flames. The hood flowed into a cloak, trimmed with golden thread, that spilled to his knees with countless tears. As he watched the puddle grew darker as if polluted by the shadow he cast upon it, until his reflection was swallowed into darkness - the image of the roses lingering longest.

It affirmed and reminded him of who he was. He was the Ashfiend. He was darkness, anger and hate. A hate that flickered as if stoked as one mailed hand fell to rest upon the urn at his side and closed only about empty air.

As he probed the countryside with his searing gaze, unsure of where to begin in his exploration of whatever supposed prison contained him, he beheld two figures who stood not far from the base of the mountain. From the distance it was impossible to note who they might be. Guardians or a sort, if this indeed were a prison. Watchers if he were still in Myrken.

Either way they would provide him with answers.

Starting forward, he began to make his way down the cliffs and slopes.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

He risked a backward glance over his armored shoulder, expecting to see the youth closing the distance between them. Only the blue sky crawling over gray rock met his gaze, solemn and silent, as he turned his attention to the waiting figures. Time and death had dulled many things in the Ashfiend, and burned others into ruin, Time and death had taught him that, left to his own, he would never know true and final death. That his enemies had possibly imprisoned him testified to just that truth. Many had sought his destruction, and some had come quite close to learning of the damnable combination that would end him forever.

Some were waiting for him among the foothills of the mountain.

One, a sleight figure, clad in gray and tested armor. It was an armor he knew well, largely for its mercurial properties in responding to attack or the wearer's will - he was not sure which gave the armor its ability to flow like quicksilver. She bore a similarly slender blade at her side which she could wield with particular deftness and skill.

The other wore hardened, boiled leathers and let her hair fall free. Her stance, even her features spoke of an easy, almost arrogant confidence. She, too, was armed with those paired weapons. What had she called them? M'tai? They were exotic for these parts, but the gypsy was notoriously well-travelled or so she had claimed.

They had both opposed him. Indeed, they had been among the forefront of the Myrken resistance. They had also, in their ways, struck something of a respectful relationship, however one-sided, with him. They were, perhaps, the two mortals he had traded the most words with since his arrival.

Ariane Emory and Khalika Quiller, respectively.

Khalika had seized Deliverance, even as he sought to strangle the life from Ariane, amidst the battle on the mountain. The gypsy wounded his hand, forcing him to release Ariane and, in his fury, he turned on Khalika...

"You will return Deliverance to me," he offered in a hollow voice that echoed up from a tomb. "Return what you have stolen, gypsy," he rumbled in a harsh, grating voice flavored with stale hate. "Or I will not be merciful."

He started forward then, each footfall the cadence of a private drum-beat of personal war about to unfold. For all that the two had established some rapport with him, they could not be counted allies, and certainly not friends. The Ashfiend did no business with such things. Although, given Khalika's final words...

Teron? Stop, Please! I don't want to die alone...

The memory settled heavily upon him, within him, as he approached and, being only an arm's reach away, stopped. She had not moved, nor had Ariane. Instead a small rock rolled down the slopes and into his booted heel. Turning towards the mild distraction he beheld the slender youth catching up to him at a slow and careful gait.

"She can't hear you," the youth offered quietly, his chest settling with the exhertion of catching up. Despite the treacherous terrain, Teron noted, he seemed none the worse for it. He bore no scrapes or bruises from the sharp and unyielding stones. "Neither of them can. They are not them," he hesitated with a sigh. "Not really."

"What, then," he snarled as confusion and mystery plagued him from the lips of this strange youth. "What are they? Where am I!" His voice roared in promised rage, heedless of how his magic had damaged them both earlier. He started towards the mysterious warden, guide, squire, youth.

"You are in you," the youth offered. "You lost the battle on the mountain. They imprisoned you. The prison is you, or more precisely, your memory."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Teron's livid gaze raked over the youth from beneath the shadows that attempted to seal away his hate from the world. And a false world at that if what the youth said was indeed true. The ponderous silence of this world, the stillness of Ariane and Khalika, the chaos of his own sorcery turning upon him. His gaze slowly crept Heavenward, probing the skies with an anger dimmed by dawning curiosity as memories shifted beneath the rubble of aged violence within his mind.

They shifted with a heavy rumbling, metallic and grating like his own voice, running through and over the corridors in his mind, with stirred and unleashed memories begun to run rampant. There had been many battles, many who had sought to put an ending to him and bury his hate beneath blade, bow and battle. His gaze grew dim as the memories arose, jarring against one another, painting the present lonely landscape with the violent past...

Turning back to Malaroth he beheld the knight lunging at him not with sword but with an open, pale hand set to a soft but constant glowing. Teron caught the offending extremity by the wrist, his thumb leaving the snaking frost upon his opponent's pale flesh. The creeping cold that laired about him, and bled out as a perpetual miasma, of ever-whispered death, began to wreak a painful tautness to Malaroth's features.

"I cannot take enough," he snarled in a guttural, echoing voice of ponderous stones grinding together. "Never enough to match what Vraal stole from me."

The Shepherd Knight, Teron recalled with increasing clarity, as they dueled upon the mountain. Malaroth, tainted with sorrow and regret, whose hollowed soul had brought him to these distant shores in the first place. A hollow in which his battered form had rested, and waited, to reconstitute himself.

Glenn had been trained for this, for this exact situation, this exact positioning of the Fiend. The massive sword was extended. It left an opening at the armpit and that's where the blessed sword struck at with all of Glenn's might. Unaware of whatever Niall was doing, all he knew was that he would not let Kyra die so easily, no matter the cost.

Glenn Burnie, the Mapmaker, whose inquisitiveness had sparked the search for the Ashfiend after he had visited the Library of Mudd. The mapmaker whose tongue lashed out sharply, bludgeoning him with the truth, and unwittingly wielding memory with potent skill.

"Constables! Take him!" The response from the ring of officers surrounding the Governor's group is immediate; all have had their instructions, their training, each knows what to do, and so they act as a unit, as closely-synchronised as the conditions of battle permit. Those canvas-covered shields are held before them, directed towards the Ashfiend, held and braced as if anticipating some powerful blow.

Cinnabar Calomel, High Constable and one of the architects and greatest warriors Myrken Wood possessed. Clad in the dull gray of the constabulary, or the heavier armor occasionally donned to fight the Ashfiend.

Seth had held himself back from charging to engage Teron in physical combat. Oh how he wanted to judging by the look of sheer frustratrion marring elven features. However, he knew that if he gave into this want of physical confrontation, he would never heed the call when it came for the confrontation of wills.

Bloodmoon, the tall elf warrior who swore justice for Teron's kidnapping the girl Teddi from the tavern.

One by one the faces overlaid one another, man and woman, warrior and mapmaker, elf and human, all surging through his ancient consciousness amidst the remembered roar of the living, the dying, and the undying. Even himself in those final moments, his words for his lost beloved, for Ariane, as all graspings of sanity had fled him. His anger scorching even that which he prized above all else, levelled in accusation,

"You left me behind..."

And Ariane, for her part, pleading with trembling lips to mouth those words beneath the crushing weight of his hands about her delicate throat. Even in the midst of fury, pleading with him in silent, offered absolution for his near-confession.

You are above this. Let go.

Let go, she had begged as her features flushed beneath his crushing grasp. Let go, she had asked, as she struggled not to die in his grasp. With that thought his simmering gaze flickered down towards those hands, clad in battered armor. One gauntlent rent nearly in half, exposing the charred, pallid flesh beneath. They were hands sheathed in metal, blood, and death, bent only towards destruction.

But they were all he had.

And so he had hung on, for as long as he could, to vengeance, to Elysia, to the battle - before Kyra's sorcery. Before the prison.

All at once his memory cleared, tattered lips parting with the knowing of what he had known, and all that had transpired. He muttered in empty, hollow tones, as he had confided before his defeat.

"I remember." His eyes flickered like candle flames beneath a stern wind.

"I remember everything."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Tattered lips parted with that chorus, as his memory swelled within him, sharpening each outline before his livid, burning eyes. The weight of the final battle settled uneasily upon him, the searing pang of hatred lessening a moment to allow shadowy and unwelcome truth to whisper into the remnants of his heart.

"I remember everything," he repeated in a hollow, graveyard tone.

He tore his gaze from his hands, the image of his extremeties settling into an uneasy quiver within his core, and regarded Khalika and Ariane in silence. No air disturbed him, no sunlight blinded him as it peppered out through the wispy, torn clouds.

Both women had fought against him. Both had turned their weapons against his in defense of what they loved. The gypsy he had left for dead in a field at their second encounter, wounded and unconscious, with no desire to end her life as he had many others. It was a paltry thing, the killing, all the killing over the ages that had stained his ruined hands black and pitiless. In the end, despite her attack to save Ariane from his hands, she had called, pleaded...

Teron? Stop, Please! I don't want to die alone...

The words echoed like a ghost from the still memory who stood before him. Her request, her plea, for her to not die alone.

For him to cease.

Please...

The words coiled and clenched about his spine, forcing his gaze to the other, the silver-clad Ariane. The woman who had fought him several times, whom he had nearly slain at least thrice, who yet reprimanded him not out of anger or ferocity.

What then?

You are above this, she had said. Let go.

Those words whispered with a sick and potent venom that crawled along the length of his tortured flesh, the flames of his hatred dimmed beneath the burden of memory. All within the battered armor. All within hooded death with nowhere to go, nowhere else but inside. It was a venom he recognized like the sun rising on a distant horizon and revealing one's home.

It was pity. Pity and compassion.

Compassion after what he had threatened to do, and what he had done.

Teron turned his gaze from one to the other before starting forward abruptly, ruined cloak fluttering behind, lengthy shadow bleeding painfully out across the gentle grasslands. Where his shadow touched so did death, leaving a curling, browning swath in his wake. His silent tread painted the earth with destruction.

"Where are you going?" the youth tentatively called out as he began to follow.

One mailed fist brushed against the delicate chains suspended from his belt. He noted the lack of presence there, the nothingness at the end of those chains which put a falter into his strides.

"Myrkentown," he rumbled at length. "I will explore this prison of mine. I will find my answers." His lips paused before forming the next words, "I will find my freedom."

Behind him, keeping a respectful distance but trailing the deathly knight all the same, the youth listened with anticipation.

He smiled.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

His path led him along the remnants of crags and foothills. Each silent footfall thundered with creeping memory, each moment stirred the venemous whispers and pleas from his enemies not for their sake, but for his.

You are above this.

Stop, please...

Let go.

Hands sheathed in battered, broken and blackened metal worked themselves into loose fists as piercing words stirred what they could within the dessicated and ruined flesh coccooned beneath that ancient, battered plate. They stirred his emptiness. They stirred his hate. Their figures, atop the mountain and among the slain of Myrken, wrought their compassion upon him. Their compassion narrowed his vision, tightened the seething flames of his gaze, and bade him forget the path that lay before him until he drew to the top of the last foothill before the land gave way to the smoother grass and farmlands of Myrken.

It also gave way to a sea of people. Their features were paled, faces bloodless, bodies marred, and yet they stood still. The weight of their eyes arose from the plain and skewered him to the mountain's roots. As one they watched him with a powerful magnetism, beholding him in pregnant silence, yet the birth of that pregnancy remained unknown. They carried some great shadow and, from that unwavering gaze, The Ashfiend knew it was a shadow born for him.

"Who are these?" He whispered through ruined lips and beneath the scarf that hid his visage from sun and sight.

"They," the youth began as e caught up to Teron's shadow," are your victims. All of them." He paused, pursing his lips as he studied the towering figure of the Ashfiend. "They are waiting for you."

"Some have waited for long," he rumbled at steeled length, one hand curling into a prepared fist. "You said this was my prison," he snarled, turning to face his apparent guide. "What are they doing here? What devilry is this?"

"No devilry, other than your own," came the measured reply. The youth stepped down the slope, passed a twisted fern, and stopped beside the deathless prisoner. "I was going to ask you the same thing: what are they doing here?"

The Ashfiend left his cloaked back to the youth and regarded them once again. Truly his victims, they waited with admirable patience for he, the ender of their lives and bringer of their misery. "Your answers are meaningless."

"Many things in this place serve no purpose," the youth replied with a heavy sigh as he crossed his arms. "This is your prison, as we have both said. I did not invite them, and they were not here while you were still.. adjusting... to this place. You must have brought them with you. I was wondering why you would do such a thing."

Teron's searing gaze settled upon one member of the horde, then the next, probing their lines for a break in the formation, a weaker point that would fracture beneath his strength. The guide's words slithered into his mind, causing his gaze to begin to move listlessly among them, planting dark seeds into his thoughts. Attempting to bury those thoughts beneath his feet, he started forward, hands taut, sorceries called to mind, each footfall bringing him closer to the onslaught of all his battles at once, all his murder, frenzy and death.

"They remind you," the youth offered, moving to keep pace with the 'fiend. "I can see no reason you would even remember them, nor even to care for their presence," his voice raised as the Ashfiend drew close to their ranks. "Unless Khalika was right, Teron! Unless the gypsy read your soul better than you thought!"

They were upon him in a moment. They tore, they bit and clawed, flailing with bare limbs, pummeling with fists and feet, some even biting with broken teeth. His armored fists landed and broke one and another, yet still they arose from their most grievous wounds. They tore his ruined cloak to ribbons, catching it in their reaching hands. Their sheer numbers caused his armored frame to stumble. Worst, their cries were strangely muted just enough for the guide's words to reach him.

"You need them, Teron!"

"I hate them," he snarled, arms trembling as they brought him to his knees. Armor groaned in submission as they tore open his breastplate and he felt bones snap within the remnants of his chest. "I hated them all!" The hate, hot and comfortable, stirred and sped through his frame, lending him strength in fury. But it was old hate, and it was old fury. Tired. Worn.

"You hated them so you could kill them," the youth's voice was at his damnable ear, worming, slithering, uprooting. "And you killed them to hate yourself, to give you that reason."

The Ashfiend spun around, seeing only the pressing victims, clawing, biting, flailing. He snapped an arm and hurled the offender into the horde whereupon he was swallowed within the murderous ranks. "Face me," he muttered into their faceless ranks, each visage silent in its condemnation and icy, murderous placation. 'Face me!"

'Face yourself," came the even-handed response, spoken by one, by all and by none. "You need this, the murder and hate and death. And so much! To prove it to yourself, Teron."

A mailed fist breaks one of the horde's visage, an elbow drops another, yet still they press onward to bury him beneath their endless ranks. Amor snaps and falls free, bearing the remnants of humanity encased within.

"To prove to yourself that you are evil. That you are a monster."

Another is flung into the ranks even as a vambrace parts and lands, only to be trampled underfoot. Mail is caught in reaching fingers, stretching, straining with screeching complaint even as the world rims red with inarticulate rage.

"Because if you're not a monster, there is no reason for this. Yet there is. You need to be a monster."

A hammering blow drops the 'fiend to his knees once more.

"If you weren't a monster, you would crumble."

The victims filled his vision.

"I am hate," Teron hissed through clenched teeth as another blow rocks him in his side, jarring bones against bones, tearing the hood that hides his features away. "And fury," the snarl still weakening beneath the tearing, wrenching, breaking. "And hate never dies!"

Even as he roared his battle-cry, the slain and violated filled his vision, his hate unable to keep them at bay any longer. His arms began to tremble with the strain of it all, shoulders to slouch beneath the weight of ages, knees to buckle beneath the burden of revealed sin.

"That is how you have survived," the guide offered in pity. "But you have not lived. You have died a thousand deaths, and will die a thousand more. Your hate is for you, for what you allowed to happen, for what was taken from you."

In the darkness, the pressing justice that blotted out the sun, the Ashfiend's naked lips parted as they tore even his scarf away. The injustice of it all, the relentless battle, the unbridled frustration and thundering truth of it all erupted from him and pierced the sky. His hate floundered beneath the Truth.

"Truth," came the voice from just beyond the darkness. "Truth never dies."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Silence.

Darkness.

The quiet rolled over and consumed him. It swallowed the pressing horde of avengers, even his warden's words, and left only his reaction to them. There was neither sun nor sky, moon nor grass. There was only darkness and death. It was a cold and empty death, the spark of his venemous hate supperating beneath the heavy-handed truth. It quieted his wrath and emptied his fists.

Fists which he slowly turned his gaze upon. He slowly uncurled the fingers and beheld the ghastly flesh beneath, marked by blackened scars and dark swaths of ruin. One hung to the arm, limp and almost lifeless, where Khalika had struck him at the battle and bade him catch her in the midst of madness and folly, swordplay and ruin. And endings.

She had struck him, and begged him even, bared and helpless before his fury and yet he could not bring himself to kill her.

That palm bore the permanent imprint of a sword handle, the smallest finger partially curled as if always ready to grasp an implement of murder. Curled hands were a murderer's hands, relaxed ones were a saint's, or at least a mortal's. The other extremity was only partially clad in metal, for the horde had ravaged his armor. Mail crawled, wrecked and ruined, towards the shoulder-guard. The back of his hand mapped the tendons like tiny battlements in a plain of pallid flesh.

A gentle breeze stirred the landscape and the trees beyond that cradles the central lands of Myrken Wood proper. That wind caught his attention, raising his eyes from the nothingness he grasped, noting he no longer bore hood or scarf with which to mask himself. The hood had been torn away. The scar hung in rags about his lifeless throat.

You need them, Teron

He took in the lay of the land as those words echoed without and within. The movement of the trees, the swaying of the grass, the lazy drift of darkening clouds beneath the tapering sun.

You need them to be a monster

He lurched silently to his feet, no longer mvoed by muscle or sinew, but by will alone. It was a slow thing, and yet this moment it required an enormity of effort. Thoughts of the gypsy flickered through his consciousness, their encounter at Snowstill where she had stolen along in his shadow-step to the township of Foggy Bottom. Her encounters with himself, Alastir Savoy and the accursed mapmaker, where they had sought to learn more and possibly undo him. Their wrestle of wills, wallowing in grief, agony, despair and pain where the woman had proclaimed herself the victor. He had tried to murder them several times yet they always had been saved or won through.

Or had they?

He thought of Khalika as he caught her in his final stand against Myrken, and his inability to destroy her. Alastir had exposed his mind to him and had suffered the consequences. Glenn had suffered beneath his sorcery and sword on several occasions, all swarmed about by friends. Yet how simple a thing, he mused, to have stepped into their shadows and murdered them even as they fled? How easy a thing to track down Alastir and crush him utterly?

And why not, he snarled to himself, as he began to set off towards the waiting treeline. Why not shatter those who had bested him. What had they ever done except interfere and oppose him? What else other than use him against Vraal?

"Plenty," came the warden's voice from behind him, bringing the Ashfiend to a halt. "They got to know you. And, in a way, in knowing them you came to know a bit about yourself. You... missed that." A pause. "You... "

The words remained unspoken, with neither need to ask or pitilessness to thrust the point home through his weary, ruined heart.

You...

Do not think such things, he told himself, remaining motionless. Thoughts and fears skewered him to the ground, beneath the baleful eye of the waning sun. The clouds had begun to move in and sweep away the Ashfiend beneath their protective layers. Best for such a creature to not be seen by the sun.

You miss them...
Even as enemies, with them you were never truly alone.

Teron started forward as the rain began to fall. The clouds trembled and wrung out their misery upon him. Raindrops splashed and scattered against his broken armor, wormed their way through the ragged features bared for all the world to see in this prison of one.

They knew you.

The rain fell loudly but not loud enough to drown out his thoughts.

And, in a way, you knew them.

The rain would hide him from the view of any other inhabitants of the prison that yet contained him. It would hide the looming shadow of his wrecked frame. The heaven's grief would hide much. Even one's own tears.

The grave, he mused, was a lonely place when it was empty. Even empty of one's own corpse.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The rain fell harder, quicker, eventually lashing his frame and soaking ruined flesh. It rattled perpetual rhythm out upon his shattered armor and left the torn and tattered cloak a length of tattered banner as it trailed through the dampening muck behind him. Each footfall silent, leaving the barest of tracks in white deathfrost upon the deadening grass. The darkness began to swell above and beyond him, as if the shrieking howls wrenched from his memorial heart colored the skies apart from him.

A movement at his feet caught the attention of simmering eyes.

Pausing, he peered down and caught a shallow pool in the expanding darkness. A pool dominated by a single figure with ineffable clarity that seized his blackened heart in an icy grasp. He beheld a figure, looming and clad in darkness. He beheld a face of taut, pallid and lifeless skin drawn over the sharply angled bones beneath. Gray, ripped lips, raw like frayed and bloodless rope, framed the sharp white of teeth and shadows nestled beneath the eyes and over the nose.

Above the nose rested a pair of livid furnaces. They were searinge yes full of raging, barely leashed hate. In that inferno he beheld the horde that descended upon him, he beheld the enemies that sought to break him upon the mountainside. He saw, in a moment and in those dancing, damning flames the moments with those who vexed him and drew his fury.

He also saw that fury restrained, if barely, time and again.

You need them, Teron

[Teron_Ashfiend]

There was something he had missed.

Fingertips peering through broken armor marched along the length of etches into that taut, bloodless flesh. He followed their winding, wandering course, down the remembered length of his features framed in uneven lengths of hay-like hair. He travelled that trail and followed it back to the darkness of the deeps beneath Myrken, and his captive Ariane.

You would sit yourself down in a world gone quiet, and have an eternity to want for oblivion. How... how can you stand it?

Her simple question, spoken in the secret darkness shared beneath the earth, echoed about the opened vaults of his mind. The battle in the mountains had torn open all such cages in his soul, unleashed all memory, all betrayal, all regret. With all the world murdered and his betrothed raised he knew, as Ariane had probed him, how it would all have ended even if he had won the battle in Myrken Wood. It would end how it ended before.

I have had her once before he had confessed in the near-solitude of his awakened sorrows buried and dimmed by the light of his hate. I have had her once before and it was not enough then.

He would likely have strangled her to death once again. How could he have stood it?

I cannot.

The futility of it all had wearied him, weakened him, had torn the tears from his livid gaze to marr his features with the torment of such potent regret. Lost in the thought of it all, the vast hopelessness of vivid memory and the yawning maw of truth, he sat quiet and alone. His will briefly shattered in the battle of Myrken Wood, there had been nothing left to shield him. And in the end, as Khalika pleaded, as his rage screamed, as Ariane confessed and all Myrken protested with swoord and blood and fire, it had all found confession upo n his lips.

Upon his cold, dead lips.

What have I done?

His features struck him as remarkable, a remarkable ruin of a once-man. A half-man. A hollow man. A wreck suffused with wrath, but a wrath dimmed and weakened under the onslaught of truth so that now, like an unfurling map, it lay open for all to see. Perhaps his enemies had already seen, or tried to see. Alastir, Glenn, Ariane, Khalika, Calomel, Elspeth, Patience.

It had become an almost easy thing, despite the agony that came with being named Penroll, the Wilted Rose. It was almost easy to listen to their words as they learned and shared the truth of what they unearthed in him. It gave him a focus for his hate. It had also, for a time, given him some ones who had actually... listened.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

So then, he asked himself while wandering the corridors of his aged and bereaved mind, As he wandered amongst himself, he could hear the echo of his own footfalls in protest to this damning reverie. His eyes found his own eyes in the depths of that puddle and ventured in, and beyond, the flames that burned there.

An Ashfiend that can never be loved, Calomel had said, and a Trevellyan that ever will be.

And yet not loved, for he was not Penroll any longer. Elysia had not recognized him in the dark and secret ways of his blasted home, the decade ago or so he had first raised her to life. She had screamed and wept and clawed and cried, a victim, not a bride. He caught her by the throat, and in desperation, in anger, in unbridled terror he...

Who were you, Teron?
Glenn's inestimable question that rang and burned and bit deep into dead flesh, and into what? To something that still lived beneath?

Who were you before Vraal?

"I," he began at length to himself, to the world, to the hollow emptiness of his prison: the prison box and his own wearied soul. "I was Trevellyan Penroll. And now," he stopped short and exhaled slowly through clenched teeth. Every fiber and sinew, charred and wrecked, commanded him to cease. To stop this nosense and bring his wrath to bear upon this prison, upon the impudence, upon the injustice of all of this, of six thousand years of Hell. Perhaps, he conceded, there was no justice in Hell. There was certainly no peace.

"Now, I do not know," the confession. With the confession a shifting, a loosening, a difference immeasurable and yet potent.

He beheld Ariane then, their last encounter before the battle in the mountains that led to this fate. Her words had planted seeds... no, he corrected himself, they stirred things others had planted. Calomel, Alastir, Khalika, Patience, Glenn... the mapmaker perhaps most of all. He recalled how Ariane had held that crossbow, how they had spoken, how he had threatened, how they had come to some semblance of an agreement. He recalled the poignancy with which he hated her both most and least at that moment. The rise and fall of her chest with steadied breath of the living, the color in living cheeks and flesh, the resolve in living eyes.

He noted how her chest rose with steady breath, how her eyes wavered with the occasional blink above the frost of her deadly tears upon which his attention lingered and bid him withdraw a ponderous half-step. For all her living indecencies she indulged in before him, he hated her as well. But sometimes he hated someone even more than her, Burnie, Calomel or even Vraal.

Sometimes he hated himself the most.

She had blinked above her tears. Those tears frozen in his chilling cloud of miasmic death.

She had wept... for him? For his words? For what had happened, Elysia's theft.
As had Khalika, who not only wept, but pleaded, even begged, for him to catch her. She had suffered being hunted by the law, he suddenly recalled, for her efforts to.. speak.. with him? Or, at least, to speak with whatever was left.

Without me there would be nothing left, Penroll.

Vraal's words. "There is nothing left," he offered at length. "I am only hate, and hate is not a.. thing. It is the absence of a thing. And I," he paused before the conclusion. "I am the absence of a man."

His vision cleared in the silence of his thoughts. The hate roared and raged, dismissed for the moment as mere noise, and with that gesture a sudden weakness overtook his limbs and even the fire in his gaze. That dimming brought his attention back to the puddle and the ruined peering back at him.

Sometimes, he recollected, he did hate himself the most. Leaning forward, length of hair spilling about armored shoulders, he beheld all that he was and all that he had become. Hands clad in ruined armor that revealed porcelein-and-scorched flesh braced on either side of that pool as he leaned closer, dampening his hair in the water, and shared his secret.

"I hate you."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

There was something about loneliness and shadows, the still unbreaking quiet, that granted Teron permission to share certain secret things. For while the particulars that rotted away in his carcass of a mind bespoke countless experiences and untold destruction, the particulars of pain, and of torment, easily broke from him them. In such moments they were not secrets to himself, to Ariane in the dark of the old well, or necessarily to anyone.

Perhaps those things which he shared were never realy secrets in the first place.

It is a secret in the open, an acknowledged thing never dwelt upon after such, this self-loathing and inward hate. With that confession the flame stirs within him once more, a rising cloud that pulls at all semblances of truth to obscure and annihilate under an aegis of hate and spite. Hate he had mastered. Spite was an afterthought, measured out with every footfall taken and every glance for a living thing. Truth, however, that was something else. Hate was easy.

It was kinder to him, after a fashion.

This unkindness then, this spilled truth brings with it the inward trembling and threat of... what, he wonders? A loss of control? Of hurt?

Of death.

Dead lips twist into a contemptuous sneer at his confession, stoking his rising anger onward, heavenward, outward and allward. "Why shouldn't I," he snarled through clenched teeth, "why shouldn't I hate them?"

For living, for breathing? For being able to die? Your hate for them is your hate for you.

That accursed voice, the riddling warden, whose damnable mindspeak brought ruined hands to clasp and cover his ears. "Enough!" he roared into the overwhelming silence. "What do you want from me?"

What do you want from yourself?

The truth's fingers wormed deeper into his thoughts, setting walls to crack and walls to rumble as their foundations groaned beneath the foreign invader. "How can I hate myself when I don't even know who I am," the words left him in hateful litany, a piercing question of cold truth for this invading truth. Truth, too, could be wielded with hate.

And even without the inner voice, hw rose to his feet and set a livid gaze for the forest that awaited him and, more importantly, what awaited him beyond. Myrkentown. A specific place in Myrkentown. He started off at once, leaving the blasphemous reflection and awful truth of that puddle behind.

Except for the memory of it.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

A lengthy trek then, through the forest of Myrken Wood. He passed several farms whose fields bloomed but were not tended. In the gray-streaked heavens the sun wandered further yet not far enough to be forgotten completely. He crested hills and descended into valleys, each step requiring a certain focus, a particular exhertion so that it was difficult to fall easily into anything resembling an even stride. The fire of his hate had dimmed, leaving Teron to propel himself forward with other fuel. Even if, at times, it was nothing but determination.

Who were you, Teron?

The question, or rather its unspoken and potentially unknown answer, drove him ever onward. It lashed a merciless whip across aged shoulders and urged what speed could be had from the shambling wreck of a once-man. He trod through the outskirts of town, through the avenues and empty streets. Here a merchant's cart squatted, half-full, yet without thief to seize the opportunity. There a door stood ajar yet without the owner coming or going. It was a strange world, this place gone quiet. As if eternity had been paused, or all living things had been eradicated.

He did not stop to consider his last thought, even as Ariane's question whispered to him in the silence. You would sit yourself down in a world gone quiet? How could you stand it? For he knew the answer well enough.

It stood apart from all other buildings, in its own square. His destination brought several memories flickering through the furnace of his thoughts. He remembered the woman, one of his first victims. He recalled interrogating the overweight councilor and the tea house proprieter in the dead of night. Before many in this land knew his name or knew him to be a thing worthy of fear. Before so much had gone terribly wrong and horriffically right.

The Library of Mudd.

In a few moments the Ashfiend had crossed the diminutive plaza, the tattered length of black cloak fluttered out limply behind him in the memory of a gentle breeze. A stilled heartbeat later he had entered through the same door, beheld the rose that wilted in his presence, the puddle beneath the leaking roof, the books the librarian had led him to all scattered about the hard floor.

In a slow, shambling shuffle he retraced his steps. There was where he had grabbed the librarian when she attempted her first escape. And here was where he had torn out the pages concerning Deliverance and destroyed them. Yet most of the tomes he had punished were those who dared to record certain stories, even fables and myths, that he had known too well. Stories he recalled as he plucked one such book between thumb and forefinger so that its dried parchment hissed against the floor like an uncoiling serpent. Crimson eyes wandered lividly over the title.

"Children's Stories from Myth and Yore"

At the heart of the book, framed by waterstained pages wearied under the eager press of excited children, began one particular chapter:

Trevellyan Penroll arose from where he knelt, and pledged before the entire kingdom to see the bridge built before the storm came...

A bitter snarl crossed tattered lips, frayed like coarse hemp rope. "It was not the entire kingdom, it was only..."

An admittance that dragged his reverie to a jarring halt. Chains had fallen about his memory, a bondage through which he could see and yet a powerful hand and hideous strength bade him to proceed no further and leave the memories to the ash and dust of time, myth and legend. Yet the legends were enough to arm and equip Glenn Burnie and his companions to unearth his name, his once-name.

Penroll.

Who were you before Vraal?
Without me there would be nothing left, Penroll!

"Penroll," the name left him strangely, as if heard from a vast distance, over a grat chasm. Or from an unearthed grave. A grave with two corpses entwined in their dessication that it was no longer possible to tell where one began and the other ended. And yet the two still struggled in their murderous womb, tearing apart from one another.

In the process they threatened to tear him apart as well.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Who was Penroll?
The question again, the damnable questions with no fire strong enough to consume them. For whether he admitted it or not the flame of hatred had bowed considerably, allowing for all manner of errant thoughts to thrive due to not being immediately consumed in his fury. Hate abides no such foolishness. It is drive and rage and passion. It is hands that clutch fire and cannot let go.

The last thought has him pausing again. So many pauses since.. since his arrival he knew not how long ago. Day and night had lost nearly all meaning, or what remained of their meaning since his imprisonment. They were a farmer's tools and a socialites calender; what means day, dark or dusk to one who neither sleeps, ages or breathes? No plants to save yet all of them to reap with one season as good as another. Now all seasons were meaningless as he had ever sought to make them.

"Penroll was a warrior," he began in a distant and echoing rumble that unearthed each syllable from a deep grave. "A man, a young man, raised to fight and to serve." A pause again, a lengthy one as the description settles about him like disturbed dust. "He enjoyed reading," he murmured through the expanding distance of memory, constricting at once with each word spoken. "What little was written then. And sunlight and starlight."

"Sometimes..."

A shift in his armored frame as he took in all the many other books he had left undisturbed. He wondered how Penroll would have enjoyed them, how quickly he might have devoured them if left alone in this library for a length of time, a month, a year, an epoc... time had lost so much meaning as to lose the distinctions between each. With each thought and ghost of a memory at the start of that lengthy chain of damnation, the entirety of his being rocked with the sudden crossing of so long a period of time.

"Sometimes the thought of it all is despairing. Crushing." He crossed the handful of stairs, withdrew a chair from beside an overturned table and eased himself onto it. "Tiring. Too tiring to outrun that which is always with me." He regarded one of the nearby books. "To outrun the past."

Riding horses across the foothills, the wind in one's face and the scent of grass in the breeze. Laying with his head in Elysia's lap as her fingertips roved across his scalp and jawline, caressing the length of his brow. The quiet moments spent with Azeron in the farm fields as his master taught him to unearth vegetables with his bare hands and lectured him on the importance of preserving the simple lives of the simple people in their charge.

"I wonder," he confessed to the darkness. "I wonder what else I might have seen, and done. I wonder, sometimes, what might have been." Thoughts churned the hate through him anew in a welcome, empowering surge. His hand curled effortlessly, his sinews pumped with unholy fire as he leapt to his feet. Snatching the overturned table by one leg he hurled its length, twice that of a man, against the nearest shelf. With a groad the table sundered even as the case toppled, and the next in a steady thunder of ruin and raining tomes. The destructive echoes filled the chamber and drummed a certain pleasure into his shriveled heart and livid gaze.

"Sometimes the hate is a kindness."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

My grace is kinder than the grace of men

A start at that comment as his livid gaze took in the mildly altered scene of destruction before him. The empty, moldering tomb of books echoes still with the recent notes of violence perpetuated in the present upon some past memory, mistake, misery. For it was all misery and burning and hate and exhaustion. That thought, however, tugged and wormed away at some secret, hidden thing buried within and long since forgotten. It stirred him upon the chair which creaked beneath his armored weight.

"Grace is not kind," he snarled, that hand falling readily into a welcome, comforting fist. With a surge he clambored to his feet, ruined cloak spilling behind the breadth of slouched shoulders. "It is a terrible weight to burden, acceptance without merit. Love," his stale breath caught in the surrus stirring of his dead heart. "without qualification."

You did not always think so. Elysia loved you, and she was full of grace.

"Elysia loved life," he snarled through clenched teeth, taut and bloodless flesh drawing tighter yet, straining to contain the sharp-visaged death beneath. "She loved faith, and family." Each word began the pouring of his hateful litany to douse the sun and shred the clouds into vaporous ruin. A hate strong and aimless, outward and allward and spared in his ruined core. "She loved me," offered as he strode to the nearest wall and raised trembling fists in broken plate overhead.

"She loved me," he sneered through lips shaped in the contemptuous memory of a man. The fists came down to batter that wall, the wall of this library-cage, the cage of memory and misery. The wall thundered beneath his assault, biting fingernails into pale skin, knuckles into stout beams, and rage into whatever lay before it. The battering continued with heavy, powerful measures to beat down whatever lay before him.

"She loved me," he whispered as his fingertips found purchase within the thundering wall. Bracing himself, his hate poured through an ancient frame. Armor groaned with the exhertion as the wall itseld trembled, shuddered and with a fountainous roar he tore it asunder. The rubble fell outward, inward and about the looming, burning Ashfiend.

"She loved me," he confessed into the quieting ruin before him, and to the quieting ruin that he was. "With all that she was. She loved all of me. And there was nothing left of me for her to love."

That confession again as he stepped from the shattered wall with the library trembling behind him, struggling to remain together with its weight displaced and having received the only benediction the Ashfiend had to offer: a benediction of fury.

The hate is kindness so you don't need to feel these things ever again. You prefer the silence of a grave, the world-grave you were so intent on making.

"Yes."

Myrken proper stood before him, the place where it all began. The streets and avenues he had wandered in the dark, slaughtering Myrkenfolk and leaving buried in wells and basements to arise and destroy. Terrorizing its inhabitants for information as to how best begin his world-grave here and dig outward to murder all the world. And in making the world a charnel house, return his Elysia to flesh and blood and bone.

And his arms. Save that she had rejected those arms once, and would likely do so again.

Why does it pain you that she loved you?

A pause in his thoughts, a gentle quieting of his raging and bound soul, or its remnants, lashed at his burning core even as his tread carried him further abroad and to a place known only by his memory. The question plunged deep into tepid thoughts that had not been disturbed for centuries, possibly longer, time being difficult to measure in a grave. Even as he approached his destination, a small and forgotten smithy, the answer escaped him.

Unless, it was because you were... unlovely.

A halt outside that smithy, where he, Calomel and Ariane had first crossed blades over an unknowingly common foe. The words resounded through his inner hollowness and echoed through that entombed emtpiness like silver bells in a deserted church.

"It is the way of it with heroes," Teron murmured as he stepped inside. "Many are not so heroic as history proclaims. Many were terrible people."

And you?

"I, too, was a terrible man."