I kick the door behind me hard. I dive out of the room as Mutovinatum roars in rage behind me. Well, it was nice while it lasted, right?

||||||||||

I slam into a rogue piece of the Ismar Trading Co. headquarters. I ricochet off the stone and concrete, spiraling through the air. Wind whips around me, blowing hot hair into my many wounds. The last vestiges of my clothes that weren't incinerated billow around me. Maybe not "billow". "Flutter weakly like a butterfly stricken with raging AIDs" would be a more apt description. And I'm nothing if not a man of expansive vocabularic skill and culture; also intense dastardly charm. But that's neither here nor there.

The pain of my physical body hits me all at once. It's too overwhelming to elicit even a groan from me. My entire body simultaneously tenses and goes limp repeatedly as I fall through the air. I feel like a misplaced contradiction, hurtling towards my inevitable demise. A piece of sharp metal hurtles past me, cutting me across my back. Something wraps around my waist and I'm yanked away from another large chunk of rubble. Concrete falls down and hits Wikolia's whip, which unwraps from my waist. I collide with the Wyvern in mid-air and we spin around, barely managing to avoid stone shrapnel flying past us. We do not, however, avoid a large slab of blast shield.

"Seven hells!" I shout. My words are nearly drowned out by the screams of those being crushed and burned in equal parts below, and around us. Thankfully, I was in choir for a brief stint as a child, and can be very loud when I need to be. The impact with the rapidly rotating blast shield shocked my system into full-on adrenaline overdrive. "Hang on," I warn Wikolia.

"Like I would let go!" she shrieks in hysteria. I look over at her, and nearly lose my grip on the blast shield. The Wyvern...has no eyes. Two empty sockets look like they were gouged out by a great many claws and teeth. I take my eyes off the blind assassin and look down at the rapidly approaching ground. This is going to hurt.

As the blast shield hits the ground, I leap off with Wikolia before our bodies are jarred by the impact. I hold her tight against me, and feel my body heat radiated back by her scales. I spin in the air and collide with a mostly shattered wall. I skip across the rubble and charred bodies like a stone before finally coming to a rest in cluster of corpses. I untangle myself from seared limbs and blackened wood. Looks like today was a bad day to protest government, guys.

I collapse almost as immediately as I stand, my injuries finally threatening to catch up to me. I drop onto my hands and knees. My palm brushes across a discarded toy sword, and I fight back the vomit. Come on Namonai, don't give in. I look around and see small bodies mixed in with the larger. A few even have most of their skin, and one man whose eyes weren't melted by the explosion looks at the sky without seeing. The gravity of the situation threatens to crush me, and I curl into a ball while ashes flutter down like snow.

"Cover me and bury me," I whisper. Why did I have to come back? Why didn't I stay in my head?

"We don't have time to mourn Namonai," Wikolia hisses.

"I can't," I whisper.

"Get up, we have to go!"

"I'm tired!" I snap. I sit up and grimace, clutching my ribs. I glare at the eyeless Wyvern. "I'm tired of doing this again, and again. Live a century, endure a calamity. Look around you Wikolia!" I gesture around, and try to tune out the whimpers of the last few desperately clinging to life. "Everyone dies, and I've stomached as much as I can. If I have to see something like this again...it'll choke me."

She remains silent for a moment. The soft crackling of rogue fires add a hellish backdrop to the screams and cries of those unlucky enough to survive.

"This smells like home," she says and sits next to me while I hug my knees. "How long have you been alive, Namonai?"

"Nearly a decallenium," I respond after a moment. Wikolia nods and flicks her tail around my thigh.

"I was one of the first Night Stalkers. Save a few, I am one of the eldest of my kind, and have been alive nearly as long as death has existed. When there are unruly souls, there need to be those who keep them in line. A warden of the Underworld gets no rest, no reprieve." She flicks her tongue out, and her voice nearly drops too quiet to hear. "No friends or family. No love. Time does not exist for me. This," she waves out to the countless souls in suffering, "is but a drop in my life's bucket. I was warden when Abel was slain, and I will be warden when you pass too, Namonai. We can go against the grain, but at a price." She turns to me, looking at me with her empty eye sockets.

I ponder her words and let them sink in. "What did you rebel for?"

She sighs and leans back on her palms, bones crunching under her. "What else but love?"

"And the price was your eyes?"

Wikolia snorts. "My punishment is dealing with your endless barrage of tasteless comments and shameless insinuations." But she says it with a small smile, and I feel the corners of my mouth turn. I accept her extended claw and she pulls me to my feet. She flicks her tongue out and I look at the massive destruction laid waste by our explosives.

The financial district of Malor looks like a huge bite has been taken out of it, reducing its orderly sprawl by a fifth. There must have been magical components in those explosives Khalil gave us. Combined with the safety violations, it's a wonder there's anything left standing at all.

"I can't believe we did this," I say quietly. Wikolia nods and wraps a new cloth around her eye sockets.

"Let us remember it, and make a difference. If we fall back into our old patterns, it will have been for nothing. That," she points to the large field of bodies and rubble, "will have been for nothing." She's right; this has to mean something. I have to change, or this will happen again, and I'll spend another ten thousand years waiting for death.

"Namonai!" The Wyvern and I turn towards the sound of a familiar voice. Esilea is navigating the field of death with an unconscious Icarus slung over her shoulder.

"It's good to see you're alive, Esilea," Wikolia says.

"You too," she says, and I feel she means it. Surrounded by corpses, you don't get to pick and choose your friends. The Amazonian avoids looking at the collapsed buildings and burnt bodies. But the way she's constantly wiping moisture from her eyes means she can't block out the screams either. We lock eyes for a moment, and she looks away.

"I'm—"

"I'm sorry," I blurt out and interrupt her. "These have been a rough couple of days for all of us. And I haven't made that easier. I'm sorry. A team has to trust each other."

"Are you sure?" Esilea asks. I don't blame her for being suspicious. Hell, I don't even know myself. What I do know is that I have something to prove; not just to myself, but to those three as well. Maybe Ghelly and Naiomi too.

"Positive. But we have to go."

"Help me!" I turned and spotted a small girl trapped under a large metal beam. She extends a broken hand out to us, and I feel my spirit collapse in my body. I did this. Gods, we're monsters, aren't we?