The assault had ended as quickly as it had begun. Storm, satisfied their work was done, had sheathed his daggers and now trudged past the bloodied corpses towards where they had moored Attila and Slepnir. Shinsou was lagging slightly behind him, straightening tall and turning to survey the chaos. His bloodied hands still tightly clung to his sword, and as his eyes swept across each anonymous cadaver for any signs of life, he could still feel its sealed power simmering to the very edge.

Settle down, Enpera. The work’s done.

The Telgradian slowly meandered amongst the dead, stopping only to kick his toe underneath one of the nameless face-down bodies. As the force barrelled the man onto his back, his arms lopped over to reveal the bloodied, naked skin of his forearms. The spellsword was about to move on, but something caught his eye and he stopped suddenly, cocking his head.

What the…?

Beneath the slick crimson spatters, a mark was discernible. Not just any mark, either, but a tattoo. The pattern was instantly recognisable to the Telgradian; a gordian knot, tied through the eye sockets of a dull grey skull in a manner that was so elegantly Brotherhood, for lack of a better word. It was a design he had seen often, because it belonged to the ‘Reavers’ during the Siege of Radasanth, a unit which he and his Raiaeran bodyguard Durandel had led into the fray. At first, Shinsou questioned whether his eyes were betraying him, but even if it was late at night, the sky was clear and sprinkled with the light of a thousand stars.

There was no mistaking it.

The Telgradian’s lips ran dry as they parted, but before he could say anything to the electromancer, his attention was drawn back to the forest. Something pulled at the fringes of his senses; a familiar presence slithering towards them, a friendly aura that he knew well, but felt somehow different. Instinctively, he lowered his weapon.

He did not expect the arrow that sliced the air right in front of his eyes, only a fraction away from embedding in his cheek.

“Fucking hell!” Shinsou exclaimed, as another arrow tore past him, smacking into a nearby tree with a hollow thud.

“A straggler?” The question was moot, but Storm, who was already alerted to the danger and running back, allowed his blades to slip back into his hands and duly slipped to the ground to avoid a third arrow. “Who now? I’m getting fucking-“

Whatever else he had been prepared to say dissipated like cloud amongst the wind as a fourth arrow flashed from the treeline and struck the mud ahead of him. The ageing wizard took a staggering step forward, then another, before loosing a vicious bolt of lightning in the general vicinity of the arrows’ origin. The smell of charred wood and ozone hung on the air as the blindly cast electric tore into the darkness ahead, apparently striking nothing of note.

“It's Durandel, and I'm guessing these are his men. All former Reavers.” Shinsou finally found the time to growl to his friend, righting his balance and flicking out his sword. Storm had never particularly gotten to know the Raiaeran, but the Telgradian’s words told him all he needed to know in the moment. The rot had truly set in within the Brotherhood ranks.

Low, rumbling fog began to roll across the treeline, carried by a fell wind that snuffed out the still burning campfire as if it were a mere candle-flame. The only light now came from the white moon hanging unnaturally large and heavy overhead, but it did not burn through the conjured mist, instead only illuminating its fringes and ethereally bending around it.

“I was hoping to give you both quick deaths. Probably more than you both deserve, out of the little respect I have left for you.”

It wasn’t so much the silky elven voice that grated on Shinsou’s nerves as the words. Another of his supposed friends had turned on him, which was bad enough, but on top of the treachery, the sheer arrogance was too much. A million emotions bubbled to the surface of the usually stoic Telgradian.

“Don’t lecture me about respect.” Shinsou snorted into the grey, his eyes scouring the fog for who he now knew was Durandel, “Not when you're betraying everyone who ever gave a shit about you. Why are you doing this?!"

Almost instantly, the fog rolled away at the edge of the clearing and in its place stood the elf. Two narrowly slit, ocean blue eyes peered at them; their whites smouldering with barely suppressed power. Shinsou immediately noticed that Durandel’s physical form had changed since the last time they had met: the impossibly beautiful musculature of the Raiaeran race seemingly twisted into a sad, wiry and blackened thing. His weapon, a longbow that seethed in icy shadow, whistled forlornly in the wind.

"Why am I doing this, you ask? I have a better question. What choice did you leave me? If you cared so much for those people, where were you two when Arius came to Whitevale? When he burned the women and children alive in their homes?!" The Raiaeran responded, a note of emotion tinging his cracked voice. "I'll tell you where. Nowhere to be seen."

“You ignorant fuck. Are you dense?" The Telgradian's nostrils flared and skin bristled at the elf's retort. "We gave everything to stop him at Whitevale, and before we got a chance to kill him he flung us all over the fucking planet. It took weeks to get back, and when we did, everything had been replaced with debris and corpses. Your job was to mind the shop, but you were nowhere to be seen. So, what is all this? Insurrection? Why did you let everyone die?"

"I didn't." The elf's reply sounded somewhat forlorn. "I negotiated with Arius; in return for letting a number of us live, and giving me some of his power, I would stop you both from interfering with his plan. The others are safe, but I couldn't save everyone. That's not on me; that was the cost of your weakness."

Without waiting for the his words to extinguish, the fog thickened once more. Then, there was a snapping sound as Durandel immediately loosed a magical barrage of ethereal arrows from his spectral bow. They danced through the air like puppets on strings, synchronising their movements perfectly despite the tight quarters.

Only when he was close enough to see the shimmer of the arcane arrow shafts was Shinsou able to react. Tapping into the well of his augmentations, he instinctively ducked the arrow from the left, evaded another by leaping backwards half a step, and pre-empted the third by lashing out with his sword to destroy it. The manoeuvre bought him the precious two seconds needed for the incantation.

I'm going to turn your little coming out party into a funeral.

Ten, and then twenty, spears of pulsating dark matter burst into life between the Telgradian man and his corrupted opponent. They lingered for only a moment before arcing through the fog towards Durandel, bursting around him and burying him in a marbled black and purple splendour.

A moment passed before a voice spoke out across the fog.

“Too predictable.”

The elf was alive. Shinsou couldn’t see him through the fog, but could sense it, and cursed as he realised what had happened. As he had previously learnt the hard way, Durandel was notoriously difficult to hit because he could separate into a corporeal body and a physical body; effectively producing an autonomous doppleganger. And that was saying nothing of whatever enhancements he had received from Arius.

Even so, Shinsou wasn’t worried. His act of defiance a moment earlier had used one of the more predictable spells in his arsenal, one that Durandel had seen many times, but the Telgradian’s hand had always been played close to his chest. His most powerful techniques were always kept from public displays, so much so that even his true friend Storm Veritas had only witnessed a handful of them. Thus, even before the failed Enpera Kurohitsugi died down, even before Durandel had started moving again within the fog, Shinsou had made up his mind.

Raising his with a flick of his wrist along its silken cord, his body held low and muscles tensing with the effort, he turned and uttered to his friend next to him.

“If you can distract him for thirty seconds, he’s a dead man. Unless you kill him first, of course.”

The last thing Storm saw, only moments after he nodded and darted through the fog, were the white whorls of Enpera’s arcane power.

“Hakai.”