The time was nigh, that much Mataius knew. This instinct was never wrong. The Pandaemonium counsel has called him for a reason, and important reason at that. With the northern border having been breached multiple times in the past few months everyone knew something was increasingly wrong. Scouts had come back burned, but not burned in the sense of normal flame. These burns were dark, poisonous. Within days they had fallen ill and died. It mattered little what the healers did. The burns festered and worsened. Fever would set in within hours. Cold shakes, nausea, and everything in between. Mataius watched as his brethren fell to the black burns, never to be heard from again.

Without a doubt the Balaur were behind this treachery. They had proven themselves capable enough to surpass the defenses in which the herds took great care in creating. Not once was that wall to be left alone. But even Mataius had to reconcile with the fact that the Balaur were tricky. They could confuse and defeat the weaker minded of the soquili scouts. Hence, when he walked into the council chambers that evening, into the grove made up purely of moss of the great oak and willow trees, the meeting was to be a game changer.

And game changer it was.

The powerful herd alliance leader Marchutan ordered him to go down south. The barrier between the north and southern lands had been torn to pieces, and the kalona and ulun’suti calling themselves the Balaur had poured into the Kawani. That in itself wasn’t what unsettled Mataius the most. It was the fact that the Deadly Black Shadow had escaped her prison. That alone made Mataius’ blood run cold. If the Shadow was free, no soquili little or big was safe from harm. And so he took the orders immediately, leaving his family behind to pick up the pieces and headed south into the Kawani lands. As place where he dare not tread, for that place was where his sister was exiled.

Matania…he snorted dismissively as he made his way down the mountain side and into the forest. The very name of her made his blood pressure skyrocket. Because of her all of the soquili in Gelkmaros were killed. Because of her he lost nearly everything. Because of her Siriva lost her life to the flames of the Shadow. He lost the love of his life because of his sister and for that; he wished to never see Matania ever again. But alas, circumstances were not on his side this eve. For the Shadow had escaped, and for all him and the counsel knew, that beast was here in the Kawani. Therefore, Matania had to be found and alerted.

This did not sit well with him, not in the slightest.