Something sinister brewed beyond them, coiled, contorted, distorted through the balms of furtive grips – and he couldn’t see through the murk, the mystery, the enigmas poured over veils. Ignorance frustrated him, pulsed and pervaded through the reticent requiem of his existence, because he pried, he nettled, he scorned and mauled, and still, naught showed or reared its head along the intertwining shadows and baleful moans. Herd members disappeared, gone, there one minute in the clambering of collected munitions, vanished the next, drifting on the despicable wind into some unknown measure of time and space. The calculations scraped and scathed against his Machiavellian convolutions, festering and withering in the treachery, in the trenchant guise, in the burning queries and meticulous bounties, answers unchanging, rippling into incomprehension. He seethed in the caverns, he slithered in the midnight oils, and he searched for something along the slinking entrails, clues hidden in the midst and murk. Who dared to snatch from him? Who dared to abscond from him? Who dared to pass over the wake of their icicle valley, their glacier hold, their menacing, ominous air? What prompted the impulsive actions, the evasive maneuvers, the secretive reign of minatory barbarism? And what did they seek from it – his loathing, his contempt, his licentious creeds driven upon them, over and over again? Did they yearn for his rapier thrust into their chest? Did they yearn to draw their last breath in his deadly presence? Did they seek demise through destruction, eradication and slaughter offered, bestowed, planted into their foolish endeavors? As he pondered, as he lurked, as he twisted his hatred into malleable form, a quietus croon building from his limbs, seeking to attach its dominion to some living fiend, watch it ripple and steal – the cry, the scream, of a familiar creature, a patriot, an ally, flew across the kingdom, calling for his appearance.

He recognized the voice immediately, because she, amongst so many of their gathered cretins, fiends, fools and soldiers, was a loyal comrade, a trustworthy dame. Arah - the ivory maiden who’d helped him drag bodies from the floor of their home, who managed to desecrate minds, plucked back into their threshold. He answered in kind, a pulse, a beat, of steady, statue crescendos, seeking answers, explanations, anarchy reveling in the promise, the touch, the taste, of solutions to the maelstrom twisting along his corridors. The piercing slate of his eyes ghosted across her form, her child’s, as he appeared, and the hatred reawakened, an anointed abhorrence, a haunting abomination, fueled, instigated, reviled by her wounds. Someone, somewhere, would pay for their actions, and he’d delight in the way they bled, they decayed, they lain across the ground, stained, bleached, damaged, beaten and broken. The deep, chiseled lacquer of his voice sprang from the gallows of an impassive face (not hinting at anything but the pure fixation of his licentious convictions – because she carried lacerations that would be unleashed upon another twofold, and he’d remember each one, carefully carve and etch the lesions into the perpetrator’s flesh). “What happened?” Who did this? Then, the quieter assertion she’d require healing, maybe the other demanded for (the GildedBlade, stirred from her chambers) would snag the Mender on her way, as the Reaper examined, procured, and set forth to annihilate.