Within the Void: The Pernicious Allele of Hope.

[Kylerryth]

Sometimes when fire
Flails inside the nauseous wave
With stirring taffeta tongues against
Anonymous ink-stained memories
Mentioned in passing, ashes carving
Careful down, across the cruelest bridge
Before arriving to when sometimes
Some burning idol redeems us.

"Altias, Ariane," Kylerryth whispered, his voice piercing the endless velvet darkness. In response, a small star was born in the Void.

It burst into life above him, and with eerie similarity to the fragile helplessness of a human newborn, blindly struggled against the sudden shift in environment, all the while issuing long silent wails in the form of pulses of light. Both struggle and wails increased in intensity, becoming harsher, more frantic. Meanwhile, the star's physical mass diminished.

The dry black soil quivered beneath him, groveling at his growing gravity. Kylerryth, however, lifted a pale hand to the panicking incandescent orb, touched his fingertips to its swirling curve, and let their names drift through the vast dimensional oceans between them.

[Carnath-Emory]

We fought our way through streets lit bright by the passionate flame of rebellion, and by buildings long-since put to the torch. We severed the snaking throat of Insurgency with ruddy blades and dispassionate steel - five men at his feet and four at mine - and when the harbour burned as the world had long burned we set a bloody grip into their hair and turned their faces towards the sight of incandescent ships, stunned eyes reflecting back one smoldering wreckage and then the next -

We were never assassins.
But perhaps it was only circumstance that allowed us to be something more.

Four men at my feet and five at his, but this was only that one, burning day. The city is Orvere, the city is Zwell; the city is so much kindling and death, hungry to fall around our heads so that we, too, might burn. The city is marble and stone, cracked through with irresistible heat and corrosion, and we laugh as we leap its treacherous rubble. We do not know the words they speak, but we know their faces and that is enough: You, sir, you may live and you must die -

The whisper which is her name ricochets down this narrow avenue, guttering flames and scattering ash.
A turn of her head. A grey-eyed glance that spans eternities.
The dry, dry earth is soft like sand beneath her boots.