Welcome to Gaia! ::

His anger stayed with him in flight, but his exhaustion overtook it. Caressed on all sides by the cool wind and rhythm of the mighty dragon's path, the Anima's mind sank into a woeful slumber, leaving only his white knuckled grip keeping him aloft.

He dreamt of clouds made of tempered silver in a sky of gleaming white; motherly warmth across an Oasis made of emerald stone and rushing sapphire streams of water carving sun-sand into glistening serpentine shapes. There was Azur, hands folded gently over her belly. They were together, and traveled across a lake of daystars to lay in cold water, wrapped around each other. Bound together at their hearts, whispering words without shape but full of meaning.

We have everything. We have each other.

The cold water surged up over him, and he was sinking. Their hearts stretched out between them, blue-purple veins distended as their merged organ quivered in its beating. Cold shafts of white cut through the darkening water to illuminate his lover's face. A funerary mask. The heart tore in two; blood billowing out between them as an inky cloud to hide him from her. As he reached out, his fingers broke, his arm snapping back on itself and into the pumping cavity in his chest. He tried to call her name and spoke only bubbles of pitch. He sank, and sank, and sank... past drowning, past death, into nothing.

The Anima's eyes split open to the sounds of war and carnage. His evaporating dream still coiled around his mind, reminding him of the inescapable. Reminding him why he was here.

To kill.

"Nox'Sala, hear me."

His eyes never left the battlefield below. They were searching. Smelling. He knew what he had come for, and that she had to be here. It was time for one Murderer to murder another, and in that sea of flashing souls and fading light he saw it. Within the rocks. Gold burnished black in its fiery descent. The soul of Sephra.

"Open your eyes to the weight of one being. It's merits and deeds. It's primal powers. See it curling off them. A soul is no different than a body; a footprint. It wanders with its body and betrays it with a trail all its own, a testament to their being. A trail you can track. SENSE IT!"

His right arm thrust outwards, pointing down to the battlefield. With so many souls present and the blessings of their Dark Patrons, Blood would have no difficulty sensing their being. A storm of souls raging and falling to the Dead Lands.

"Find one that calls to you, a soul that deserves your justice. A soul that should cease to be. There-"

The Anima's arm swept out towards the two hulking beasts that blocked the way tinto the mountain. All that stood between The Anima and The Fallen.

"-see those abominations that guard the way to our true enemies? Focus! Sharpen your mind as a knife, honing it on every detail of their soul until it is known like your weapon. Stab into it the one to the right. Mark it! Do not let go until it is dead and yours!"

Krayth shared this knowledge with his protege as he practiced what he preached. That glimmer of desecrated divinity, the body invisible to his eyes but its soul unmistakable, was just out of reach... but not for long. Nothing would stop him. Darkness reaches farther than Rykros' beloved Sun, and nestled under Sephra's wings. He would take them from her.

As he glared down upon the same Plague Guard that he indicated to Blood, he began to mark it's soul. It was nothing but a perverse shell of life, puppet to plague and destruction without a will of its own. Together with his Nox'Sala, it would know the peace of death.

Beyruun could feel its sibling's singular and dangerous focus, and shifted into the familiar contours of an onyxian cannon. There above the battlefield, The Lord of The Devil's Eye began to mark Sephra of the Swift Advance for death, and waited for landing.