Shadowy fingers grew long and thick across the valley as the day wore on. Patience wasn’t one of William’s strengths, but neither was foolishness. He sensed as much impatience in his companions as he himself felt, but knew that it would be their own folly to enter the valley too soon. All three of them knew what the plan was, and what needed to be done to bring this plan to fruition.

As he’d explained when he’d recruited Atzar and Ioder, William’s homeland was a nation that revered the spiritual essence. Fundamental conceptual forces, it was taught, each had an essence. Through deification these essences could be given form, features, and will. Offerings made to nature, for example, resulted in the spiritual personification of forests, rivers, and vineyards in the form of protector spirits or elemental guardians. In Amra, William’s homeland, deification of the essence of nobility had given rise to the church of the Lion, the spiritual figurehead for the entire nation.

These personified spirits, he’d gone on to explain, were linked to the essence from which they were formed and could draw power from it. Spirits of nature could control and protect their lands, while the noble Lion of Amra could give strength and fortitude to his worthy chosen. Because the spirits were created from symbolic deification, the more symbolically defined a spirit was, the more closely they were tied to their essence and the more power they had available to them. Symbolism meant everything.

William had made the determination that the being known as the Horseman of Pestilence existed as a personification from the essence of corruption. He’d learned of the Horseman during the time he spent with the contingent of the Knights of the Apocalypse that’d been assigned to the Ixian Knights. Though the faction had ultimately failed in its duties and had faded from Althanas, they had planted a seen in William’s mind. Pestilence was a being who’d had an entire army of worshippers sacrificing themselves in its name, believing the Horseman would assist them in bringing about the end of the world.

“So very noble of them,” William thought, “but all that useless faith will only serves make me stronger.”

That would have been the end of William’s supposition had he not found a passage in the Tome of Kal’Necroth during its translation. The sorcerer had put a great deal of effort into studying spirits and had discovered that the duality of the beings meant that they existed on both a spiritual and a physical level. Their physical bodies could be slain, just as any other creature could, and the power they drew from their essence could then be manipulated. One couldn’t kill the corruption itself, but they could kill a symbolically powerful representation of it.

William hadn’t enjoyed having to explain so much of his origins to his companions, yet he had begrudgingly realized there was no other option. Even as strong as he was, William knew that he couldn’t kill Pestilence by himself. And as intrigued by the prospect of power as Atzar and Ioder both were, neither was foolish enough to blindly accompany William.

“It should be happening any moment now,” William thought as he eyed the lengthening shadows. As if on cue, William felt a faint trace of the evening’s wind stirring around him. The trace turned into a stream as the cold night air rose behind the Mountains of Dawn and chased the sun towards the horizon. Soon enough it had built enough that it poured off the ridge and into Dragon’s Folly, stirring the mixture with building intensity.

“A living sea of corruption, the first symbolic link,” William said, breaking the long silence. “Ready yourself, mage. It’s time.”

William took a last breath of fresh air and plunged into Dragon’s Folly.