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[Azrielle Aeirs]

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It was little more then a pen, a place to store sacrificial animals, in better days it wouldn’t have held her. In better days, older days they would have valued her captivity too much to be this careless with her. It didn’t matter though; she was to far gone to have any meaningful awareness of her captivity much less affect any sort of escape.

Her entire existence now was focussed on the task of trying to understand the voices in her mind. A familiar, yet alien presence spoke in soft whispers against her consciousness. Her past had become a jumble, she remembered nothing and everything, past and present blended into a chaotic incoherence of imagery. Moments of peace and pain blended, her ability to sort it into a linear pattern, make sense of her past and direct her actions in the present was completely lost.

As she sat huddled under a persistent drip of cold rain, a small tattered figure with insensible green eyes, her thoughts drifted carelessly away to a happier time. She was kneeling on a polished wooden floor next to a low cot. In the bed sat a small boy, clean scrubbed and fresh, smelling of baby, sun warmed grass, and lavender. He leaned over extending chubby childish arms for a hug. She snuggled the sleepy eyed boy into her arms pressing her face to his hair and letting his scent wash over her as she began to sing an old lullaby.

The moment was split by a voice, in some corner of her consciousness she knew the voice was not part of the moment but she could not separate or order the events. The voice called out, demanding that she run before it was too late. It was a frightening voice, growling and savage and familiar somehow, though not part of the past she had been visiting most recently. She remembered then, the dark figure that had been lurking about and wondered briefly if woman or voice were real.

The second voice answered for her. “Its already too late, it happened here.”

Agony shot through her then, a memory as palpable as real and present pain. This was not simple memory but the real and living horror of the events of that last night. Knives flashed across her vision flickering and then gone and she could hear voices screaming her own and others painfully familiar and precious. She knew this place and blood, it danced in and out of her vision, memories of different times, overlapping in confusion.

“What is it talking about?” The voice was a dark and icy, a sibilance of horror. Familiar and different, perhaps the change would work in her favour, perhaps this time he would hear her plea for mercy.

“No, Azalin please, I beg you I cannot undo it.” She begged for compassion, and her mind questioned it: compassion, from that quarter? That thought pierced her with a hopeless clarity. She was mad and she had condemned herself to this suffering. When had it been that she made the choice that brought her here, a year, an hour in the past? She had no sense of time.

She had lost time in a small dark room with blood splattered walls. Pain took away the passage of time as for untold days she knew only suffering. Hatred, vengefulness and cruelty descended around her to replace the love and joy of her life, she had shattered herself to protect some vestige of his light. But it would be those very things which would save her in the end, hatred and vengeance would keep the dark one from taking her life.

A time of changes was in place, and in the waning of old powers they were beset by enemies and taken. Trapped and desperate she had gripped every last vestige of power within herself, and with the guidance of her few small inborn magics, powered by the sheer force of their love and all of their faith, she pushed him beyond the reaches of the dark powers that assailed them, and in so doing condemned herself.

Suddenly she looked up through the rain and saw the horrifying countenance of the Lich Lord standing beyond the bars observing her with cold disdain. “It’s still alive.” She looked up trying to focus, confused as to the identity of this figure now dragging her out of her jumbled thoughts into the present.

“Who are you?” Her voice was frail a shadow of itself a shadow of the warmth it had once held.

“We are Admoreth Nazduin, Lich Lord of the Order of the Ebon Skull.” It was the same dark sibilant voice from the night before and not right.

“What happened to the Master of the Tower?” Questioning this figure made no sense but she had to know, had to make some sense of the jumble of past and present.

“We are the Master.” He hissed. “Before? He vanished.”

She shuddered as something came to her with the clarity of lucid thought. “Vanished, vanished? No banished” The words she said aloud not even realising it, that’s what had happened she had banished her beloved and in so doing fallen into the clutches of Azalin in the dying days.

Azalin had tortured her, torn her unborn daughter from her very body and shattered her sense of self and will to live. But in the end she could not give him what he wanted, she did not have the knowledge to bring Aleph back and could not appease the wrath of the monster that held her. It was cruelty not kindness that saved her, for it had given Azalin some manner of twisted pleasure to keep the raving shattered remains of the woman hovering about the tower, and so he had not killed her. One day it was all simply gone, no more tower, no more lich lord and no armies to keep her in her place and so she set about drifting aimlessly.

Then her perception altered, it was as though there were a physical movement in the very fabric of the universe and she saw it, “you will be the cause of my death.” There was strength in her voice that had not been there in years.

“The past rises and in the past is the key to free us both. You will try to prevent it in the end but you will not see the power of it until it is too late.”

He stormed off hissing savagely and insisting that he was eternal but all this was lost on her as she sank out of conscious awareness again. For a moment of absolute clarity she had understood what had become of her husband and how to mend things. For a flash of thought she had been Azrielle Aeirs but now she had faded again into the abyss of her own muddled memories.