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[Bailos]

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Late on one particularily cold Malas night, a crescent moon waned overhead and a few clouds slowly passed over, seeming to avoid the moonlight, letting it's soft glow dance over the piles of bone that covered the walls and floors of Vorik Dyn, the place he now called home.

On the third level of this fortress, where his study was, a small bed say in the corner, with worn off-white sheets and a gray blanket to cover it. A small, probably hard pillow topped off the Spartan look quite nicely. Just as a clock on the wall turned over 1:30 in the morning, Bailos staggered up the steps, groggy with fatigue, dragging his feet. removing his cloak and unbuttoning his doublet, he pulled the blanket down and slid into bed.

As his eyes fell shut swiftly and sleep came to him in minutes, the cold air embracing him as the soft speech of the long dead spirits that haunted this place played over him and throughout the tower. He was used to it now...their screams, soliloquies, soft chants, all of it fit nicely together to serenaded him at night.

An hour or so passed before, despite the cool night's air, sweat formed on his brow and alook of convern came over him as he slept. Visions came to him, flashbacks over the years. Ancient by any humans standards, lifetimes of corruption, deception and the sort were flooding his mind. He usually never had regrets over what he'd done. Everything had been calculated, the best choice, the most to gain by doing. Why was his mind doing this to him?

The reason was simple....every year or so, as it always happened, and always would happen, for the last 400 years and probably for the next 400, that horrible symbiant deep inside of him woke up, craving.

In a sudden jolt, he sat up in bed, still half asleep with a sharp pain in his stomach. Turning and swinging his legs out from the bed, he held his head in his hands and gently massaged the sleep from his face and wiped the cold sweat from himself. Standing up and moving to the window, the clock now informing him it was 2:30 in the morning, he looked out and could still see the high walls of Luna. The moonlight illuminating them almost more now than in the bright glint of daylight.

Holding his stomach and cringing, he felt it. That cumbersome feeling of being drained. The being inside of him starting leeching off his soul and whatever other souls he could find in there. It was customary for Bailos to visit Ilshenar every few months, picking powerful humanoids from Terort Skitas, to imprison within himself and feed the creature for another few months. This had been his way, for years and decades and centuries.

But it felt different now...His appetite was now, somehow less. He had found the power he had craved with his mortality now. Long since having mastered eldritch and arcane forces. He being one of the few still using the Old Magiks long forgotten by present day Sosaria.

His recent embrace of Oblivion has led him to see what only took 400 years to realize...There is only so much to gain in this life, no matter how many times you live it. Soon enough he would die if he didnt placate the spirit inside him.

This time he had made a decision....It was time to die....430 years was long enough to walk the mortal path for anyone, let alone a human.

Looking down at his hands, seeng how his flesh now lost it's palor. Malas and his proximity to Oblivion's hand and the Ebon Skull were begining to exert their draw on his mortality.

It was time to embrace the inevitable......it was time for a change

[Bailos]

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Quiet....so quiet....so very quiet and peaceful. Almost frighteningly peaceful. There he lay, disembodied in a cold sea, completly devoid of light, except for one shaft coming down from what appeared to be the mouth of a well up above him. Turning over to see his surroundings, he looked beneath him. A swirling black abyss, almost like a vortex beneath him seemed to groan, but nothing moved...the water was completly stagnant, as was he...Suspended....alone...and cold. Was this what is was like to be dead? No heaven...no hell...at least not yet...Just nothingness.

He flashed back to what seemed like days ago...but could have verywell been months ago....even years? He didnt even know...time held no meaning all of the sudden.

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He could remember perfectly...The sweet sick smell of the air, stagnant near Umbra, the waft of the masses that were gathered at Black Mass...he even remembered exactly what everyone was wearing and their faces too....Then the shrill cry....from Charnel Hill. Was it a beast? No, far worse...it was the Ebon Skull. It cried out, barked at Darrien, making It's will known in tongues that only the few could understand.

....then he pointed. That moment seemed to take forever. Darrien extended his boney hand at Bailos and pointed at him like he was sentancing him to death....if he only knew! Facing Darrien, the altar and Charnel Hill, the next wave of memories becomg too painful to relive in detail...flashing points is all they were...the chant, the spell, the swift but painful death...it came to him.
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Now there he was. Trapped beneath the entropic water of the Well of Souls. Should he feel privelaged? Had Oblivion reserved a spot for him, in his own personal hell? Why was he here? No one else...just him.

Returning belly up, he hung in the water, just -being- whatever it is he was now. A spirit? A soul?...something worse?

In what may have been a few short minutes, or a few days, or a few years, who knows, he finally noticed that he had begun to sink downward. An unwillingness to move left him just stare upwards, twords the mouth of the well....thinking....as he continued his descent to the miasma below him.