By Rook, Wrath, and Ruin (Solo)

[Leopold]

“It is time for the Old Gods to rise, to wake, to take back these lands from the bastard children of the al-Thayne!” an echo of her declaration shot out over the tundra, washing over the caravan and dancing out into the cold beyond. Her words would echo in the peaks of the Ahyark Mountains for centuries, whispers on the wind to tired minds.

The flame column began to descend. It diminished until it rose only up to the creature’s head. It still burnt so bright that Leopold had trouble looking through the coruscating flicks of spirit. Orange, red, and gold swirled about in the conflagration. There was a scent of cinnamon and hot sand in the air that even Berevar’s blank and empty landscape could not quell.

“Leopold,” Clarissa pleaded. Though she was still mortally wounded she turned her attention briefly to Raven. There was sadness in her voice that humbled the merchant. “I am sorry…I am sorry I was blinded by my own rage…” in the new found calm of the tundra, the necromantic energies that fuelled her half living state began to fade.

Leopold could only mouth “I know…”

Before they gave up entirely she clicked her arm so that it rose in front of her face. Concealing her ugliness was her own doing, but Rook spent the last of its power to do something more human than deity.

“Fight for your freedom…I am sorry it took me all this time to realise we were never meant to be…”

A blast of energy flew out of her body and danced across the ice. With a high pitched screech it smashed into Leopold’s wide girth. He was winded before his heavy, snow covered boots lifted up from the ground. He was screaming before he could acknowledge that gravity was failing him. He was mortified as he flew back through the dark sky in a flutter of cloak, falling top hat and cigars. He finally vomited. Gravy and dumplings returned to his pallet.

Phoenix turned and screamed. As her voice ascended to the peaks and troughs of the clouds above, a peal of thunder broke the skies. The crackling lightning descended through the heavens with the force of a hurricane. It briefly illuminated the worn wood of the wagon train. The eyes of the on looking guards and the edges of the shattered hole in the veil shone for a few precious seconds.

“No!”

As Leopold vanished through the bright, heavenly gate the lightning struck the broken splinter. He fell into a heap at the foot of the first of the great ice columns that formed the ancient monument to the Tap.

Time seemed to slow, for just a brief second.

In that fractal moment a raven fluttered out of the Ice Henge and rose into the sky.

The bolt of lightning struck the crack and sealed it shut. A thunderous clap rocked the very fabric of Althanas as the two worlds were torn apart and sealed from one another once more. The deep thud of the air as it rippled out in a shockwave tightened chests and winded lungs. A small circle of outwardly moving snow formed around the entrance to the Ice Henge, marking its location for just a few moments before the wind resumed and the snow began to fall properly on the Dunbar Tundra.

“If I cannot have him,” Rook said, feathers pushing through her skin, “then you cannot have him either,” she smiled. A cackle pierced Phoenix’s mind, but it was burnt away by the sheer intensity the creature’s memories burnt with.

Phoenix turned slowly back to the cowed Rook, the heat of her throne of flames keeping her aloft over the spiral of molten rock.

“You have delivered to me the last piece of the puzzle…all the exiles as one, all the children in the arms of their parents…soon, it will Rise.”

An arc of flame hotter than the sun shot through the air towards Rook. In the last moments of the bird’s life her eyes shone and the flames illuminated a single tear. For the first time in her long life, Clarissa Montague realised that she had been quite mistaken. Leopold was not hers to control any more. Love, she thought, was the ficklest thing of all. Love was an emotion that could destroy worlds with more certainty than the warring and capricious Thayne ever could.

She relished another death.

“By Rook, Wrath, and Ruin…” she mumbled, repeating a promise she had made a thousand years ago, on that very spot.