Meanwhile, at the village of Athena’s Rest…

Homes and shops alike had been boarded up and abandoned by their owners in the face of approaching doom certain like death itself, and not even the soldiers of the Royal Guard remained at their posts. Now, under the night sky, all was silent, save for the skittering of vermin and wildlife taking refuge in the shadows and the earth, fearful of what was drawing closer and closer with every passing moment.

Leaning idly against a wall belonging to one of the many boarded-up shophouses in a place that had once been home to a crowded bazar in the town square, Elena de L’Enfer crossed her arms. With the red hood of her longcoat pulled heavily over her yellow hair, the gaze of her crimson eyes rested quietly and carefully upon the Sand Wraith, Belial Alhazred, who sat cross-legged upon a wooden stool that she had brought over from a nearby market stall.

“That Wight you want deader than dead. She’ll be here soon, yeah?” Elena asked Belial, breaking the cold silence of the desert night. “I haven’t got all day, y’know? Or night, considering where we are…”

“Neither do I, Vizier of the Eye,” Belial answered politely, as she looked up towards Elena’s cowled visage. “Patience, though. The Wight’s path passes through this place, without fail. Her Majesty fought her here last century, just as she did the century prior to that.”

With her arms still crossed, Elena raised a brow at Belial, who nodded and smiled at her in turn.

“I have served Her Majesty’s will for that long, Lich,” Belial added. “The Empire of Arcadia has existed for three centuries, and I’ve been with her for two of them.”

“Right, of course…” Elena remarked nonchalantly, as she gazed around the empty marketplace. “How’d you end up with her, anyway?”

Belial tilted her head sidewards, albeit slightly.

“You’d like to know?”

Looking Belial in the eye, Elena shrugged her shoulders and grinned.

“Sure, why not? Got time to kill, anyhow.”

“I suppose we do, Vizier of the Eye.”

“Yup, so how about it?”

Belial nodded. Quietly and carefully still, Elena watched as the Sand Wraith’s red eyes gazed up momentarily towards the stars high up in the night sky, only to return soon enough to the earthly sands to rest solely upon the crimson-eyed gaze of her own.

“Like my fellow Sand Wraiths of the Ashpit, we fought on the side of elven Emperor when he plied us with the blood and souls of his people, making his wish for Revenge upon Elicia,” Belial explained, her words both wistful and quiet. “Up north, I was defeated on the field of battle by a sorcerer of the Cathanian Imperium, a dragon with red scales and burning orange eyes. The one they call the Sorcerer King, if my memory serves.”

“Terask Dagon?” Elena asked out loud. “Bastard’s a tough one, I’ll give ya that.”

Looking Elena in the eye, Belial nodded grimly.

“Indeed. He wanted me to serve him, or die. I refused, and I chose death. He refused to deliver, and he had me sealed within an enchanted lamp of his own creation, to be thrown into the Vault of Chi Xi Hung with the rest of his little trinkets.”

“You’ve been in there, then. The Vault, I mean.”

Gracefully, Belial shook her head.

“Thankfully, no. The convoy carrying my prison was waylaid by elven rebels, remnants of the Emperor’s loyalists. I thought they’d come for me, but they didn’t. And I suppose, amidst it all… I was lost in the chaos. Proverbially speaking, of course, since I was stuck in that accursed lamp.”

“And then?”

“I spent the next century going from owner to owner, still in that lamp. In exchange for releasing me to serve them, I’d grant them one wish.”

“Only one wish? Why not three?”

“Three seems a little excessive, doesn’t it?”

Elena nodded quietly to herself. The Hellbourne of the Ashpit, the Sand Wraiths, deadly as they were as illusionary warriors, also possessed the innate ability to grant wishes. At least, if one’s wish was material wealth from the realm of Chaos, or something could be delivered swiftly from the eldritch edge of a sharpened blade. It was truly a shame, or in all honesty, not at all, that the Sorcerer King had lost his trophy, however trivial a Sand Wraith was to his own power and possessions in the Forbidden City. Though knowing the dragon, he probably wanted it for himself, if only that no one else could have it.

“And besides, there are only three wishes that my kind can grant to the beings of Melodia. A wish for Power, a wish for Wealth…” Belial added with a playful smile. “Or, like the elven Emperor of old… a wish for Revenge.”

“Mortals are a tad predictable, no?” Elena remarked with a wry smirk of her own. “I’d have asked one or the other, if I was still… well, alive.”

Belial nodded thoughtfully.

“Now that I think of it, none of my wishes ever granted happiness. One way or another, my owners would die broken, and damned.”

“Oof, that sucks. But that’s how it is with the Hellbourne.”

“Indeed, Vizier of the Eye. And then, after all that, I met Her Majesty. My previous owner was one of the Nine Kings bearing her favour to do business in her dominion. My presence in her lands had caused… a turf war. She put an end to it, claiming my lamp for herself.”

“So, uh… what’d she wish for?” Elena asked. “Revenge?”

“Not at all,” Belial answered, smiling brightly as she eyed the hint of surprise she spied upon Elena’s face. “Her one wish was a wish not for her, but for me – a wish for Freedom. The rest is history, Vizier of the Eye. I swore myself to…”

Before Belial could finish her sentence, she raised a hand and silenced herself. Quickly, as a pair of eldritch scimitars materialised within both her hands, she shot a glance at Elena and the tears of dust trickling down her crimson eyes, eyeing the thorned sigils bearing that same dark colour that had made themselves manifest upon the Lich’s gloved palms.

“She’s here.”

“Mm hmm. About time.”

“Lucid…”

The Wight’s voice, distorted and discordant like a choir of shrieking souls screaming for release, howled forth from across the road like death’s whisper. Wielding a jewelled truncheon in one hand and a massive, blood-stained war mace in the other, her physical form was little more than a shifting energy writhing like the flames of a funeral pyre, that formed the faint outline of an elven lady encased within a hooded suit of black and grey armour bearing pauldrons adorned with spikes. And like death itself with her weapons in hand, she towered over the Lich and the Sand Wraith who stood in her way.

“Hold. You… are not… her. Has she sent the two of you in her place…? COWARD…”

“Yup. Sorry to disappoint,” Elena mocked, her crimson sigils glowing potently in her hands as she took a single step forward, while the red coattails of her hooded longcoat billowed violently in her wake amidst the gathering storm of magic around her. “Don’t worry too much about it, though. You’ll be just as dead by my hand, when I’m done with you.”

“Such bravado. The MURDERER sends you to your doom…”

The Wight then released a shrieking chorus of noise, a deathly distortion that Elena could only assume was laughter. Belial seemed to think so, and she had her blades at the ready.

“C’mon, then,” Elena taunted, yet again. “We’ll see about that!”

“Foolish Lich, so eager to die once again…”

In silence, Elena licked her lips in anticipation, grinning wickedly as her crimson sigils burst into a symphony of white-hot flames and crackling arcane energy burning feverishly and potently upon her hands. Now, after all this time and everything that had happened thus far, the thought of the violence to come was rather… invigorating, to say the least of it.