Kalista (Kuh-list-uh)

The Spear of Vengeance

“Turncoats, oath breakers and betrayers… we hate them all.”

Biography

An undying specter of wrath and retribution, Kalista is an armored nightmare summoned from the Shadow Isles to hunt deceivers and traitors. The betrayed may cry out in blood to be avenged, but Kalista only answers those willing to pay with their very souls. Those who become the focus of Kalista’s wrath should make their final peace, for any pact sealed with this grim hunter can only be ended by the cold, piercing fire of her soul-spears.
In life, Kalista was a proud general, niece to the king of an empire that none now recall. She lived by a strict code of honor, serving the throne with utmost loyalty. The king had many enemies, and when they sent an assassin to slay him, it was Kalista’s vigilance that averted disaster. But in saving the king, she damned the one he loved most—the assassin’s deflected blade was envenomed, and sliced the arm of the queen. The greatest priests and surgeons were summoned, but none could draw the poison from her body. Wracked with grief, the king dispatched Kalista in search of a cure, with Hecarim of the Iron Order taking her place at his side.
Kalista traveled far, consulting learned scholars, hermits and mystics… but to no avail. Finally, she learned of a place protected from the outside world by shimmering pale mists, whose inhabitants were rumored to know the secrets of eternal life. She set sail on one last voyage of hope, to the almost legendary Blessed Isles.
The guardians of the capital city Helia saw the purity of Kalista’s intent, and parted the mists to allow her safe passage. She begged them to heal the queen, and after much consideration, the masters of the city agreed. Time was of the essence. While the queen yet breathed, there was hope for her in the fabled Waters of Life. Kalista was given a talisman that would allow her to return to Helia unaided, but was warned against sharing this knowledge with any other.
However, by the time Kalista reached the shores of her homeland, the queen was already dead.
The king had descended into madness, locking himself in his tower with the queen’s festering corpse. When he learned of Kalista’s return, he demanded to know what she had found. With a heavy heart, for she had never before failed him, she admitted that the cure she had found would be of no use. The king would not believe this, and condemned Kalista as a traitor to the crown.
It was Hecarim who persuaded her to lead them to the Blessed Isles, where her uncle could hear the truth of it from the masters themselves. Then, perhaps, he would find peace—even if only in accepting that the queen was gone, and allowing her to be laid to rest. Hesitantly, Kalista agreed.
And so the king set out with a flotilla of his fastest ships, and cried out in joy as the glittering city of Helia was revealed to him. However, they were met by the stern masters, who would not allow them to pass. Death, they insisted, was final. To cheat it would be to break the natural order of the world.
The king flew into a fevered rage, and commanded Kalista to slay any who opposed them. She refused, and called on Hecarim to stand with her… but instead he drove his spear through her armored back.
The Iron Order joined him in this treachery, piercing Kalista’s body a dozen times more as she fell. A brutal melee erupted, with those devoted to Kalista fighting desperately against Hecarim’s knights, but their numbers were too few. As Kalista’s life faded, and she watched her warriors die, swearing vengeance with her final breath…
When next Kalista opened her eyes, they were filled with the dark power of unnatural magic. She had no idea what had transpired, but the city of Helia had been transformed into a twisted mockery of its former beauty—indeed, the entirety of the Blessed Isles was now a place of shadow and darkness, filled with howling spirits trapped for all eternity in the nightmare of undeath.
Though she tried to cling to those fragmented memories of Hecarim’s monstrous betrayal, they have slowly faded in all the centuries since, and all that now remains is a thirst for revenge burning in Kalista’s ruined chest. She has become a specter, a figure of macabre folklore, often invoked by those who have suffered similar treacheries.
These wretched spirits are subsumed into hers, to pay the ultimate price—becoming one with the Spear of Vengeance.

Invocation

The sword-wife stood amid the burnt out ruin of her home. Everything and everyone that mattered to her was gone, and she was filled with fathomless grief... and hate. Hate was now all that compelled her. She saw again the smile on his face as he gave the order. He was meant to be their protector, but he’d spat upon his vows. Hers was not the only family shattered by the oath-breaker.
The desire to go after him was strong. She wanted nothing more than to plant her sword in his chest and watch the life drain from his eyes... but she knew she would never be able to get close enough to him. He was guarded day and night, and she was but one warrior. She would never be able to fight her way through his battalion alone. Such a death would serve no purpose.
She took a shuddering breath, knowing there was no coming back.
A crude effigy of a man, formed of sticks and twine, lay upon a fire-blackened dresser. Its body was wrapped in a scrap of cloth torn from the cloak of the betrayer. She’d pried it from her husband’s dead grasp. Alongside it was a hammer and three rusted nails.
She gathered everything up and moved to the threshold. The door itself was gone, smashed to splinters in the attack. Beyond, lit by moonlight, lay the empty, darkened fields.
Reaching up, the sword-wife pressed the stick-effigy to the hardwood lintel.
“I invoke thee, Lady of Vengeance,” she said, her voice low, trembling with the depth of her fury. “From beyond the veil, hear my plea. Come forth. Let justice be done.”
She readied her hammer and the first of the nails.
“I name my betrayer once,” she said, and spoke his name aloud. As she did so, she placed the tip of the first nail to the chest of the stick-figure. With a single strike, she hammered it in deep, pinning it to the hardwood door frame.
The sword-wife shivered. The room had become markedly colder. Or had she imagined it?
“I name him twice,” she said, and she did so, hammering the second nail alongside the first.
Her gaze dropped, and she jolted in shock. A dark figure stood out in the moonlit field, a hundred yards in the distance. It was utterly motionless. Breathing quicker, the sword-wife returned her attention to the unfinished task.
“I name him thrice,” she said, speaking again the name of the murderer of her husband and children, before hammering home the final nail.
An ancient spirit of vengeance stood before her, filling the doorway, and the sword-wife staggered back, gasping involuntarily.
The otherworldly being was clad in archaic armor, her flesh translucent and glowing with spectral un-light. Black Mist coiled around her like a living shroud.
With a squeal of tortured metal, the spectral figure drew forth the blackened spear protruding from her breastplate — the ancient weapon that had ended her life.
She threw it to the ground before the sword-wife. No words were spoken; there was no need. The sword-wife knew what was being offered to her — vengeance — and knew its terrible cost: her soul.
The spirit watched on, her face impassive and her eyes burning with an unrelenting cold fury, as the sword-wife picked up the treacherous weapon.
“I pledge myself to vengeance,” said the sword-wife, her voice quivering. She reversed the spear, aiming the tip inward, towards her heart. “I pledge it with my blood. I pledge it with my soul.”
She paused. Her husband would have pleaded for her to turn away from this path. He would have begged her not to condemn her soul for theirs. A moment of doubt gnawed at her. The undying specter watched on.
The sword-wife’s eyes narrowed as she thought of her husband lying dead, cut down by swords and axes. She thought again of her children, sprawled upon the ground, and her resolve hardened like a cold stone in her heart. Her grip tightened upon the spear.
“Help me,” she implored, her decision made. “Please, help me kill him.”
She rammed the spear into her chest, driving it in deep.
The sword-wife’s eyes widened and she dropped to her knees. She tried to speak, but only blood bubbled from her lips.
The ghostly apparition watched her die, her expression impassive.
As the last of the lifeblood ran from her body, the shade of the sword-wife climbed to her feet. She looked down at her insubstantial hands in wonder, then at her own corpse lying dead-eyed in a growing pool of blood upon the floor. The shade’s expression hardened, and a ghostly sword appeared in her hand.
An ethereal tether, little more than a wisp of light, linked the newly formed shade to the avenging spirit she had summoned. Through their bond, the sword-wife saw her differently, glimpsing the noble warrior she had been in life: tall and proud, her armor gleaming. Her posture was confident, yet without arrogance; a born leader, a born soldier. This was a commander the sword-wife would have willingly bled for.
Behind the spirit’s anger, she sensed her empathy — recognition of their shared pain of betrayal.
“Your cause is our cause,” said Kalista, the Spear of Vengeance. Her voice was grave cold. “We walk the path of vengeance as one, now.”
The sword-wife nodded.
With that, the avenging spirit and the shade of the sword-wife stepped into the darkness and were gone.

In Sight of Land by Ian St. Martin

The waters were eerily still at night. Their surface was so undisturbed, one might mistake it for dark glass mirroring the starlit skies above. Moonlight bathed everything in cold, silver light, though its radiance was slowly dying. The moon was being suffocated. The sky between it and those who looked upon its beauty had been overtaken by questing tendrils of shadow that branched across the night like living, malevolent storms. Their like had been seen many times before, and many were the souls carried off within them into fathomless torment, but never had they grown so large, or reached so far.
For all their horror, the world had grown used to Harrowings, tempests of darkness teeming with monstrous wraiths that emanated from the horrid Shadow Isles. Those in their path learned how to watch for the signs, how to survive their wailing fury, and how to mourn those taken by them. But what was happening now, what was reaching up to swallow the sky, was something different.
Almost like there was some unseen hand guiding it.
Tonight, though, one could still glimpse the world and the stillness of the sea. Tonight, its perfection was marred only by tiny islands of splintered wood, torn cloth, and the bobbing forms of the newly dead.
Tudre tried not to look at them. In the first hours after their doomed flight and the desperate struggle to abandon the ship, he had screamed himself hoarse, calling out in hope that anyone else might have survived. But it was in vain. He was alone.
And so Tudre marshaled his remaining strength to cling to a hunk of driftwood, and resist the icy waters seeking to carry him down to their lightless depths. He could almost hear the deep calling up to him to join all the others, her silver tongue carrying the promise of sleep, if he would just draw her water into his lungs.
The sea had numbed his legs, but Tudre willed himself to move them. He shut out the clarion call of despair that tugged at his boots with the gentle comforts of death. Tudre had not reached this far in life through submission, and he would not start now.
He just had to get to land. Tudre had sailed with all speed to make for Fallgren, a small island off the Valoran mainland. They had gotten so close—it couldn’t be far.
Though exhaustion and the cold blurred his vision, Tudre caught movement out of the corner of his good eye. He focused, revealing it to be a scrap of oiled vellum drifting close to the splintered sanctuary he held fast to. Tudre peered at it. The marks and ink on its surface were marred and smeared by water, yet still intelligible.
It was a piece of their navigation chart. Scrawled onto it was a rough, timeworn map of trade and shipping routes and measurements of maritime distance. The names of known places, and even a few secret ones. Crude drawings of clouds with faces, breathing out gusts from between their lips to mark the best lanes where the winds might bless a ship with speedy passage, for those who dared—
“You’re insane.”
Tudre snorted, reaching up to catch the swinging lantern that was the cabin’s sole source of light. The seas were getting rougher, and he had no time to suffer his quartermaster’s nonsense.
“Gettin’ soft in yer old age, Mister Bowsy?” Tudre grinned his big, cunning grin as he baited the old corsair next to him. “No shame if ye are. Y’can tell me, though do me a kindness and say so now. I would need someone else in your spot, to keep the crew in line.”
“I ain’t scared.” Bowsy steadied himself to spit a wad of phlegm onto the deck through the gap made by a missing tooth. “But I see sense. This’ll get us killed, skipper. And I ain’t the only one who thinks so.”
“We go fast, we get rich.” Tudre stabbed a finger down at the old map set on the table before them. He swept aside a tiny puddle that had collected on it from a drip above their heads, and then traced a route denoted in dull red ink. “Every other ship around is docked, crews actin’ like they be back on dear ol’ mum’s teat. But commerce ne’er sleeps, Mister Bowsy. Think on what’s sittin’ out there, unguarded! We make a run, we can get what they’re all too craven to collect.”
“They’re tied to dock because it’s a damn Harrowing.” Bowsy crossed his thick, tattooed arms over his chest. “Biggest anyone’s seen, mind you, even the oldest ones. Whatever’s out there ain’t worth bein’ swept up in that, I’m tellin’ ya!”
Tudre straightened, finding some of the red ink had come off the map to stain his finger. He stared his quartermaster in the eye. His voice dropped, settling into the colder tone that meant the discussion had run its course. “Anyone wants out can go, no repercussions. Less hands means a greater stake for those with the grit to be going out. And we are going out, make no mistake.”
Bowsy tried, one last time. “At least let it be put to a vote. Let the crew have their say in it.”
“Not this time.”
Tudre’s good eye bored into the quartermaster, unyielding. Bowsy held his gaze for a moment that stretched into another, but no further. He looked away.
“Now.” Tudre’s grin returned, full and cunning. “You in or not?”
Shaking his head, Tudre tried to banish the memory from his mind, but the effort left him dizzy. The unwelcome remembrance held fast despite his efforts, clinging behind his eyes like pitch. Or as though something was holding it there, forcing him to see.
He felt a strangeness fall over him then, almost like mist curling up off the water. A sailor’s life was fraught with omens and ill portents, gut feelings and lucky breaks. Tudre had long become attuned to a world that existed side by side with his own, and every now and then the walls between them thinned. It was happening to him now, like a dull throb. An insistent sense of dread and anger, seeking to work guilt into his bones. But he’d have none of it.
“Boat’s made fer sailin’, ask any man,” Tudre wheezed through chattering teeth. “I done that run dozens o’ times. See a chance at fortune, ya take it. Can’t live this life if ye ain’t the darin’ sort!”
Tudre’s words bore the hallmark bravado he had carried so well in his life, a bounty of natural grit and ruthlessness that had seen him not only rise to captain his own ship, but keep it. The high seas were unkind to the weak, as was Bilgewater and any big port whose doors he had ever darkened. Pass on an opportunity, and you might look back and see it was the last chance you had to hold onto your stake, or keep your guts in your belly.
But out in this night, and this cold, there was no one to be cowed by his speech. Only the dread that rolled up from the deep. It persisted, undiminished.
“Land is close,” Tudre told himself. “It has t’be.”
Tudre had not realized he was moving. His hunk of driftwood lived up to its name, lazily edging forward into a tangled field of debris. The corsair looked over the floating collection of scraps and splinters, but found no better means to keep from drowning. There was a bolt of sailcloth among it, but Tudre knew it would prove more a hazard than a savior. He had seen more than one panicked sailor ensnared by such in a storm, as good as chains if the winds and spray carried them over the side.
Concern creased Tudre’s weathered features as the sailcloth came closer. He put out a hand, trying to push it away, but his arm sank into it to the elbow, stealing his balance. He snarled through clenched teeth, fighting the sails—
“Hold fast!” Tudre bellowed, trying to raise his voice above the storms. “Secure that line!”
He couldn’t tell if anyone could hear him as he moved about, shouting orders. Rain and spray and shadows lashed the deck, the sails, the crew. Gales roared over and around them, not with wind but with voices. A howling choir of the harrowed damned had befallen Tudre on the last leg of his run. His ship was fast, but not fast enough to stay ahead of it.
Their hold was swollen with treasure. Goods pilfered from coastal stores, trade ships at anchor, all of it easy taking as their keepers had abandoned their posts to flee the Harrowing. That fortune was slowing them now. Bowsy would have admonished Tudre for not believing him, if he hadn’t been the first man plucked up by the darkness bearing down on them.
“Skipper!”
Tudre whirled around, hearing the boy Flir and seeing him grappling with a bolt of sail. Flir was fighting desperately to lash the sail to the mast, to keep it from stripping and snapping loose, but he was losing that fight.
Tudre locked eyes with Flir, the boy pleading for his help as the oiled cloth whipped and defied his every attempt to secure it to a spar of timber. Tudre weighed going toward him, but then saw splinters fly from the base of the spar, and all doubt fled.
“Skip—”
The timber snapped, carrying Flir up into the roiling dark. Tudre saw his eyes, wide in terror as he flew into a cloud of twisted faces and outstretched, clutching hands. A heartbeat later the boy vanished, just one more scream added to the choir.
“Better him than I,” Tudre snarled against the silent accusation of the sea. He felt the pressure of it inside his skull, the feeling of being watched even though he was alone.
The sailcloth tangled around his forearm, holding tighter the more he tried to escape.
“Better him,” he repeated, glaring down at the scrap of sail clinging to his hand, “than I.”
Why? The cloth encircling his wrist seemed to ask.
Tudre shivered, but not from the cold. The mind was playing tricks now, beaten and worn out and desperate as he was. He tried to yank his arm free, but stopped midway as he nearly lost hold of the driftwood.
“Because I be the damn captain!” Tudre spat. “’Tis my ship, and my charge. Mine’s a duty to every lad and lass aboard, not just Flir the boy. I run off to aid him, get snatched up too, what then? What becomes of the rest of me crew, without me there?”
For a moment, anger got the best of Tudre. He twisted, pulling his arm back sharply, and the sail finally relinquished its hold. But it swung him around, putting his back to the driftwood, and it was another second until his grip left him and he was under the water.
Silence rushed over him, and shocking cold. Tudre flailed for a few heartbeats before asserting control over himself. He was a seasoned man of the sea, not some green deckhand. He looked up, seeing the surface just above him, and tried to pump his arms, his legs, to raise himself back up. But he couldn’t move.
It was more than just tired muscles numbed by cold. Tudre’s good eye flicked this way and that, seeing only faint silhouettes in the waning moonlight. More debris, the lighter bits of a ship that had yet to settle down into the inky deep. And bodies. Bodies of women and men who called him captain.
Who relied upon you...
The words struck Tudre, a feeling rather than a sound.
... and you betrayed them.
Tudre broke free of whatever had been holding him, panic lending the strength he needed to surface. He gasped for air, twisting about in search of the driftwood. He spotted it and grabbed hold, embracing it like his first love.
It was only then, as his fingers sought purchase on its slick shape, that Tudre realized what it was. It was part of a lifeboat. One of the lifeboats—
“Into the lifeboats!” someone was screaming. “Abandon ship!”
There were things on board the ship now. Wretched, horrible, blighted beasts that had detached from the storm like lice shed from a dog. They stalked through the torrent without effort, undisturbed by the chaos as they butchered Tudre’s crew with fang and claw.
Tudre and his mates had earned monikers over their careers. Privateers, merchants, businessmen, all true, but just as true were pirates, corsairs, reavers. They were not strangers to violence, and every one of them walked the decks with more weapons strapped to them than they had hands to carry.
But they fell to the wraiths like wheat before the scythe. Men and women Tudre had seen brawl, hunt great leviathans of the deep, fight in the vanguard of boarding actions braving cannon and steel, begged like children to monsters that couldn’t understand a thing like mercy, much less provide it. All they provided was the severance of body and spirit.
Tudre punched and shoved his way through the mass of panicked faces crowding around the few leaky lifeboats the ship had. Several had been left behind at port to reduce weight so they could load more spoils, and now men and women packed the tiny wooden craft, far more than the boats could carry.
“Make way!” Tudre cuffed a shipmate aside, swinging one leg onto the closest lifeboat.
“Hold!” a man called out from the bow of the lifeboat. “This one’s full up! Any more, and she’ll roll us all down below.”
“Cast off!” said Tudre, fingers tightening on the hilt of the cutlass at his waist.
“Can’t risk it with this many on ’er now!” the man replied.
Tudre put a hand on the back of the man’s neck, pulling him close as though to whisper a secret in his ear. Instead the captain’s cutlass found his gut, steel bursting out the man’s back in a welter of blood rendered black by the madness swallowing them all. In one smooth motion, Tudre withdrew his blade and pitched the lifeless body over the side.
“There,” he hissed. “One body fewer. Now cast off!”
“I be a survivor,” Tudre argued, though the strength was missing from his words. “The strong live on, and the weak die. I chose life, a chance at it, for everyone in that boat, rather than capsizing it and leaving all to drown. They at least had the chance.”
He didn’t know who he was trying to convince anymore. The sense of guilt that had become a voice was now many, thundering in his mind like broadside cannon.
... you did this...
... our lives forfeit...
... your greed...
... killed us all...
... murderer...
... turncoat...
Tudre lowered his head, resting his brow against the wreckage of the lifeboat, buckling under the weight of their silent condemnation. “Stop.”
The moon’s light was nearly gone. Tudre looked up, seeing a faint blurred strip on the horizon. His soul flared with delirious hope.
“Land,” he gasped.
Nervous, hysterical laughter bubbled from Tudre’s lips, overcome with relief and the prospect of seeing the sun rise over another day. The laughter stopped abruptly, when something jostled him from behind.
He noticed then the dark shapes all around him. He could have sworn none of them had been near just moments before. Yet here they floated, bobbing gently, the still flesh of his crew surrounding him.
“I never did you ill,” said Tudre, his voice shaking. “Anythin’ we did was for yer fortune as much as mine. All of you knew the risks. You’d have done the same as me!”
The voices assailing Tudre seemed to emanate from the corpses. Their cries buffeted him, stripping his nerves bare.
“Stop!” he pleaded. “I beg ye!”
But they would not cease. They merged into a single terrible chorus, repeating a single word like a dirge to drive down and bury in Tudre’s heart.
BETRAYER!
“No!” he screamed in denial, the sound carrying over the lightless water.
As one, the spirits of Tudre’s crew sat up, peeling away from their bodies. Flir, Bowsy, all of them staring at him with slack faces and clouded eyes. No sound left their blue lips, but Tudre’s head was filled to bursting with their rage.
“No,” he wailed, screwing his eyes shut. “Just leave me be!”
Suddenly the driftwood sank a fraction, as though under added weight. Tudre forced open his eyes, and found himself staring up into the face of death.
It was a woman, tall and lithe, standing atop the driftwood with a balance that was as effortless as it was impossible. Where her flesh should have been was instead smoldering, spectral blue energy. She was clad in battered armor and a helm with a long, black plume. A trio of spears had been driven through her chest, and she had another gripped in her hand.
The sight of her turned Tudre’s insides cold and leaden. Everyone knew the legends, the whispered things a man could laugh off as stories meant to scare children. Stories of an avatar of revenge, appearing wherever injustice had been done and voices cried out for vindication.
They cried out for Lady Vengeance, and with spear in hand, she would answer with damnation.
Tudre’s crew came closer, the woman’s eerie light reflected in their blazing, sapphire eyes.
“No,” Tudre pleaded, as the sight before him, cutting him off from the promise of land ahead, wrenched away the last of his resolve. “I was only tryin’ to make me way in this world. My crew didn’t deserve their fate, no, but nor do I deserve this. You don’t know what it be like, leading those in your command to their doom, to be responsible for the damnation of their very souls!”
Sudden life was brought to her cold, unreadable features, almost as if there was a sound in the distance that only she could hear. The woman glared down at Tudre, boring into the core of him. Rage twisted her face in a rictus for an instant, and then it was gone.
Slowly she lowered her spear, resting it just under Tudre’s throat. She pushed, though not with enough pressure to pierce his flesh and impale him. Just enough to separate him from the driftwood, and push him under the water.
Tudre’s mind screamed to fight, the urge to survive willing him to rise, but he could not. The spear tip at his throat held him beneath. Tudre looked up at that shimmering, dispassionate visage. Lady Vengeance had come for him at last.
The voices had all gone silent. His crew sank down with him, closing around him like fingers making a fist. All light faded. Tudre finally succumbed to the deep, and drew her into his lungs. The last bubbles slipped from his lips as he drifted lower into the darkness, and he went down, just in sight of land.

The Echoes Left Behind by Anthony Reynolds

Blood pooled beneath him, bright crimson against pristine white stone. His sword lay nearby, its blade broken. His killers stood around him, shadows on the periphery, but he saw nothing except her. Her eyes stared into his own, without seeing. His blood-spattered face was reflected back at him. He was lying on his side. His breath was shallow, and weakening.
Her lifeless hand was cold, but he didn’t feel anything. A calmness descended upon him like a shroud. There was no pain, no fear, no doubt. Not any more.
His armored fingers tightened around her hand. He couldn’t be with her in life, but he would be with her in death.
For the first time in what seemed forever, he felt at peace…
“Hello, Ledros,” said a voice that shouldn’t be there.
Ledros… His name.
There was an evil, mocking laugh, and a clink of chains.
“I don’t know why you do this to yourself, but I have enjoyed seeing you suffer.”
Reality crashed over him like a tidal wave, threatening to drag him under.
The blood beneath him was centuries old, flaking and brown. The stone was not white, but black, and cracked. The sky was filled with turbulent, dark clouds lit from within by lightning.
And everywhere, the Black Mist coiled.
She was still there for a moment, and he clung to her, unwilling to let her go.
“My love,” he breathed, but then she faded, like ash on the wind, and he was left grasping at nothing.
He was dead.
And he was trapped here in this perpetual in-between.
Ledros rose, and picked up the shattered remnant of his sword.
He leveled the ghostly blade at the one who had shattered the illusion of his memory. The hateful spirit lurked in darkness, leering at him, eyes burning with cold flame. His cursed lantern sat on a smashed chunk of masonry nearby, radiating beams of deadlight, captive souls writhing within.
The Chain Warden. Thresh.
Oh, how he hated him.
The cursed spirit had haunted him for what seemed like centuries, taunting him, mocking him. Now he had found his way here? This was his sanctuary, the only place he could feel even a fleeting moment of peace before the horror of his reality reasserted itself.
“Why are you here?” Ledros demanded. His voice was dull and hollow, as if he spoke from distance or time far away.
“You were lost for quite a while this time,” said Thresh. “Months. Perhaps years. I don’t keep track any more.”
Ledros lowered his blade, and took stock of his surroundings.
He remembered this place as it had been—white stone and shining gold bathed in sunlight. Protective white mist had wreathed the isles, resisting outsiders. When they had first landed, it seemed a land beloved by the gods—a place of wealth, and knowledge, and wonder, untouched by famine or war. It had just made it easier. There had been little resistance.
Now there was no sun. All was darkness. The ruptured, shattered remnants of the library loomed above, like some great, desiccated corpse. Chunks of stonework hung in mid-air, where they’d been blasted outward and locked in time. He had been a fool to think the gods had loved this place, for they had clearly forsaken it.
Every time he re-emerged from the unformed madness of the Black Mist and reformed, it was here, where his mortal body had fallen, so long ago. Every time it was the same. Nothing changed.
The one waiting for him was new, however. It was not a change he welcomed.
Out of habit, he reached for the pendant he always wore around his neck… but it was not there.
“No…” The corpse-light glowing within him flared brightly in rising panic.
“Such a pretty trinket,” said Thresh.
Ledros’ head snapped around, eyes blazing. Thresh held aloft a short chain, from which hung a delicate silver pendant engraved with two roses, their leaves and stalks wrapped around each other like a lovers’ embrace.
Anger surged within Ledros, hot and sudden, and his sword flared as he took a step toward Thresh. He’d been a big man in life, full of wrath and violence—the king’s champion, no less. He towered over Thresh.
“That… is… mine,” hissed Ledros.
The Chain Warden did not flee before him like the lesser spirits did. The death’s head that was his face was hard to read, but there was cruel amusement in his eyes.
“You’re an aberration, Ledros,” he said, still dangling the pendant before him. “Some might say we all are, but you’re different. You stand out. Here, you are the real abnormality.”
“Give it to me,” snarled Ledros, blade at the ready. “I will cut you down.”
“You could try,” said Thresh. He spoke mildly, but his eyes burned, eager for violence. He sighed. “But this gets us nowhere. Here. Take it. It means nothing to me.”
He tossed it away with a dismissive flick. Ledros caught it in one black gauntlet, his arm snapping out with a speed that belied his size. He opened his massive fist, inspecting the pendant. It was undamaged.
Ledros sheathed his blade and removed his spiked helm. His face was insubstantial, a ghostly echo of how he had appeared in life. A cold wind whipped across the blasted landscape, but he didn’t feel it.
He pulled the precious pendant over his head, and slipped his helmet back on.
“Don’t you ever wish to see an end to this vile existence, Chain Warden?” Ledros said. “To finally be at peace?”
Thresh shook his head, laughing. “We have what mortals have coveted since time immemorial—eternity.”
“It makes us prisoners.”
Thresh smirked, and turned away, the chains and hooks hanging from his belt clinking. His lantern drifted along beside him, though he didn’t so much as touch it.
“You cling so desperately to the past, even as it runs through your fingers, like sand in a timepiece,” said Thresh, “yet you’re blind to the wonder of what we have been given. It has made us gods.”
“It is a curse,” hissed Ledros.
“Run along then, sword-champion,” Thresh said, gesturing Ledros away, dismissively. “Go, find your paramour. Perhaps this time she’ll even remember you…”
Ledros became very still, eyes narrowing.
“Tell me something,” said Thresh. “You seek to save her, but from what? She does not seem tormented. You, however…”
“You walk a dangerous line, warden,” snarled Ledros.
“Is it for her sake you do this? Or your own?”
Thresh had said words to this effect before. He seemed intent on making a mockery of Ledros’ efforts.
“I am not one of your playthings, warden,” Ledros said. “Do not make the mistake of thinking you can toy with me.”
Thresh smiled, exposing the shark-like teeth of a predator.
“Of course not,” he said.
With a gesture, Thresh called his lantern. It came to him, swiftly, then hovered just below his outstretched taloned hand. In the lantern’s glowing deadlight, Ledros saw anguished faces, pressing against their confinement, before fading to be replaced by others—a horrific cavalcade of tormented souls. Thresh smiled, savoring their pain.
“I don’t need to torture you,” he said. “You do that to yourself.”
The Chain Warden stepped into the darkness, leaving Ledros utterly alone.
A hollow wind ripped through the shattered city, but he did not feel it.
He felt nothing but her.
She was hunting.
Ledros stepped into the mist, letting it flow around him. Then he shifted through it.




The Black Mist writhed around him, full of hate, anger, and fear, but he remained distinct from it, maintaining his sense of self. He was drawn toward her like a moth to candlelight, and just as unheeding of the danger. He whipped across what had once been the Blessed Isles, passing over wasted lands and the churning water of the straits dividing them. Wherever the Black Mist extended—reaching blindly, searching, always searching—he was able to go. This was their sunless prison.
Her burning presence within the darkness lured him on. She was close. Feeling the nearness of her, he stepped from the mist once more.
He stood in a blackened forest, the trees withered and dead, their branches dry and cracked. The echoes of leaves long since fallen rippled in the memory of a breeze far more gentle than the cold gale now howling through the dead forest.
He sensed movement in the trees. His heavy boots crunched on blackened soil as he began to stalk it.
His iron shield was strapped to his left arm, though he didn’t remember securing it there, and he drew his sword. The leather wrapped around its hilt had rotted long ago, and while the blade was broken a few feet above the hilt, the ghostly outline of its full length could still be seen, glowing softly. Shattered and corroded by the ravages of time, it was a shadow of its former majesty. It had been gifted to him by the king himself, back when his monarch was a man to be admired and loved.
The ground sloped sharply below, but he kept to the high ground, moving along a ridge marked with jutting stone and twisted roots. He could see them now—shadowy spirits borne upon spectral steeds, galloping through the glen below. They moved swiftly, weaving between the trees, east toward a sun that would never again rise over these shores.
They moved as one, like a hunting party… yet they were the ones being hunted.
Ledros broke into a run, keeping pace with them.
A voice echoed through the trees.
“We come for you, betrayers…”
It spoke not as a single voice, but rather a score or more of them, layered and overlapping, a legion of souls speaking as one. The strongest of them was one he knew well.
Ledros quickened his pace, running fast and low. The riders below had been forced to weave around massive stone formations and the boles of ancient, desiccated trees. It slowed them, while the ridge he ran was straight. He quickly outpaced them and drew ahead of the hunted spirits.
Ledros turned abruptly, stepping over the edge of a sheer cliff. He landed in a crouch at the base, some thirty feet below, the earth cracking beneath him.
He stood within a narrow defile, where the natural contours of the land had created a funnel. The riders would have to come through.
With blade drawn, he waited.
The first of the horsemen appeared, riding at a gallop, a being of spirit and twisted metal—a vile mockery of the once-proud knights of the Iron Order. They were nothing to him now, just hateful fragments of the men they had once been.
A dark lance, its tip jagged and hooked, was clasped in the knight’s mailed grip, and great curling horns extended from his helm. Seeing Ledros, he wrenched his mount violently to the side, making it snarl and spit. Its hooves were wreathed in shadow, and it seemed not to touch the ground at all.
Had Ledros killed this one before? Or had he been one of those that had survived his rampage, and killed him?
The other riders appeared, pulling their steeds up short.
“Stand aside, bladesman,” one hissed.
“We have no quarrel with you,” said another.
“Our quarrel will last until the end of time itself,” growled Ledros.
“So be it,” snarled another of the deathly knights. “Ride him down!”
“You shouldn’t have stopped,” said Ledros, a smirk playing on his lips. “That was an error.”
One of the knights was hurled from his saddle, a glowing spear impaling him. His steed turned to smoke as he hit the ground. The knight screamed as he followed it into nothingness, condemned to join the Black Mist once more. No spirit went to that darkness willingly.
“She’s here!” roared the lead rider, dragging his steed around to face the new threat.
There was confusion among the others, caught somewhere between the desire to turn and fight, and to flee in panic.
They’d have been better off taking their chances at riding him down. At least a few might have escaped. Against her, all would be returned to the mist.
Another knight was ripped from the saddle, a spear hurled from the mist taking him in the chest.
Then she appeared, loping from the gloom like a lioness on the hunt, her eyes burning with predatory light.
Kalista.
Ledros’ gaze was instantly drawn to the ethereal speartips protruding from her back, and he felt a pang in the core of his being, as sharp as the blades that had ended his own life.
Kalista padded forward, a spectral spear clasped in one hand. A knight charged her, hook-bladed lance lowered, but she rolled lightly out of the way. Coming to one knee, she hurled her spear, impaling the knight as he rode past. Even as she threw, she was moving toward her next enemy.
She flexed her hand, and a new weapon materialized in her grasp.
A sword flashed down at her, but Kalista avoided it expertly, slapping the blade aside with the haft of her spear, before swaying away from the flailing hooves of the knight’s steed. Leaping from a blackened rock, she twisted in the air and drove her spear down into the rider’s chest, banishing him to darkness. She landed in perfect balance, eyes locked to her next victim.
Ledros had never met a woman as strong as Kalista in life. In death, she was unstoppable.
While the others focused on her, two of the knights charged Ledros, belatedly seeking to escape Kalista’s methodical slaughter. Stepping sideward at the last moment, Ledros slammed his heavy shield into the steed of the first, knocking the spectral beast to the ground, legs kicking, and sending its rider flying from the saddle.
The lance of the second knight took Ledros in the side, punching through his armor and snapping halfway down its length. Nevertheless, Ledros retained his feet and spun, lashing out with his blade. He struck through the neck of the knight’s steed, a blow that would have decapitated the beast had it been made of flesh and bone. Instead, it exploded into nothing with a keening scream. Its rider crashed to the ground.
Ledros smashed the ghostly warrior backward with a heavy blow of his shield as he rose, hurling him onto the point of Kalista’s spear. Her hunt, her kill.
Ledros sheathed his blade, and watched as she destroyed the last of the spirits.
Tall and lean, Kalista was in constant motion. Her enemies had been martial templars whose skill at arms was legendary, yet she moved among them effortlessly, side-stepping lance thrusts and sword strikes, dispatching each in turn.
Then it was done, and the only two left standing were Kalista and Ledros.
“Kalista?” he said.
She turned her gaze upon him, but there was no hint of recognition in her eyes. Her expression was stern, as it ever had been in life. She regarded him coldly, unblinking.
“We are the Spear of Vengeance,” she replied in that voice that was not hers alone.
“You are Kalista, Spear of the Argent Throne,” said Ledros.
He knew the words she would speak next before she even opened her mouth. It was the same every time.
“We are retribution,” said Kalista. “Speak your pledge, or begone.”
“You were niece to the king I served in life,” said Ledros. “We are… acquainted with each other.”
Kalista regarded him for a moment, then she turned and strode away.
“Our task is unfinished,” she said, without looking back. “The betrayers will suffer our wrath.”
“Your task can never be finished,” said Ledros, hurrying to keep pace. “You are trapped in a never-ending spiral! I am here to help you.”
“The guilty shall be punished,” said Kalista, continuing to march back through the trees.
“You remember this, don’t you?” said Ledros, drawing the pendant from around his neck. That gave her pause, as it always did. It was the one thing Ledros had discovered that could break through her fugue, even if only for a moment. He just needed to figure out how to extend that moment…
Kalista came to a halt, cocking her head to one side as she looked at the delicate pendant. She reached for it, but stopped herself before she touched it.
“I tried to give this to you once,” said Ledros. “You refused it.”
Uncertainty touched her eyes.
“We… I… remember,” she said.
She looked at him—actually saw him.
“Ledros,” she said. Her voice was her own now, and for a moment she was the woman he remembered. The woman he’d loved. Her features softened, ever so slightly. “I could never have given you what you wanted.”
“I understand,” said Ledros, “even if I didn’t at the time.”
Kalista looked around, as if only now becoming aware of her surroundings. She looked at her hands, glowing from within and as insubstantial as smoke. Ledros saw confusion, then anguish play across her face. Then her features hardened.
“Would that I had never brought him here,” said Kalista. “All this could have been averted.”
“It was not your fault,” said Ledros. “I knew madness had claimed him. I could have ended it before it came to this. No one would have questioned his death. No one would have mourned him.”
“He wasn’t always that way,” said Kalista.
“No, but the man we knew died long before all this,” Ledros said, gesturing around him.
“…We have a task to complete.”
Hope stirred within him. It was an unfamiliar feeling.
“Whatever it is, we will complete it together, just as…” he said, but his words petered out as he realized his error.
The cold mask had dropped over her features, and she turned and strode away. Despair clutched at Ledros.
He’d failed again, just as he had so many times before.
He saw himself in the early years after the Ruination, stalking the spirits of those who had killed her in life, convinced that destroying them would free her. It hadn’t. He’d spent countless years pursuing that goal, but it had amounted to nothing.
He saw himself felling the arrogant cavalry captain, Hecarim, hacking his head from his shoulders and rendering him back to the mist. That one had struck Kalista the final, fatal blow, and had long toiled, seeking his end. Time and again they fought, as the years, and decades, and centuries rolled by, and the unseen stars turned overhead. But Hecarim was strong of will, and he returned from the Black Mist, of course, each time more monstrous than the last.
Either way, it changed nothing. Kalista became steadily more lost as she absorbed the vengeful spirits of the mortals who pledged themselves to her, seeking her aid against their own betrayers.
Once, he had brought Kalista face to face with Hecarim, a feat that had taken dozens of lesser deaths to achieve. He had believed that was the key to finally setting her free, and he’d rejoiced as he saw the now monstrous creature Hecarim skewered, a dozen spears piercing his towering frame… but banishing him to the darkness had done nothing. A moment of satisfaction, and then it was past.
Nothing had changed.
Just another failure added to his growing tally.
At one point, despair drove him toward self destruction. The purity of the one sunrise he’d seen since the blood had ceased coursing through his veins burned him, his intangible body dissipating like vapor. Guilt at leaving Kalista behind clawed at him, but in that agony he had rejoiced, daring to believe he’d finally found release.
Even in seeking final oblivion, he had failed, and he’d been condemned to the madness of the Black Mist once more.
All the moments preceding his banishment blurred together in a never-ending cavalcade of horror and defeat.
He roared as a purple-skinned sorcerer cast him back to the darkness, tearing him asunder with runic magics.The savage joy he’d felt as he joined the slaughter in the streets of a festering harbor city overrun with the Black Mist gave way to sudden pain as he was blasted to nothingness by the faith of indigenous witches.
He laughed as a sword impaled him on its length, but his amusement turned to agony as the blade burst into searing light, burning with the intensity of the sun.
Again and again and again he’d been condemned back to the nightmarish Black Mist, but always he’d returned. Every time, he returned to a land locked in stasis, waking in the same place, the same way.
A being of lesser will would have succumbed to insanity long ago, as so many of the spirits had. But not him. Failure clung to him, but his will was as iron. His stubborn determination to free her kept him going. That was what ensured he came back, over and over again.
Snapping back to the present, Ledros watched Kalista stalk away from him, intent on her unending mission.
A creeping melancholia settled within him. Was it all for nothing?
Was Thresh right? Was his attempt to free her from her path of retribution actually selfish?
She was sleepwalking through this nightmare, unaware of its true horrors. Would she thank him were he to wake her? Perhaps she would despise him, wishing he had let her be.
Ledros shook his head, trying to dislodge the insidious notion, even as a vision of Thresh—smiling, predatory—appeared in his mind.
“Get out of my head,” he snarled, cursing Thresh.
A new idea came to him suddenly, banishing his lingering doubts and fears. There was something he hadn’t tried, something he’d never considered until now.
“Kalista,” he called.
She did not heed him, and continued on her way, her step unrelenting.
He loosened his sword belt, and cast his scabbarded blade to the ground. He wouldn’t need it any more.
“I betrayed you,” he called out.
She stopped, her head whipping around, unblinking eyes locking on to him.
“I should have stepped forward as soon as the order was given,” Ledros continued. “I knew Hecarim was looking for any excuse to be rid of you. You’d always been the king’s favorite. It all happened so fast, but I should have been faster. We could have faced them, back to back. We could have cut our way through them and been free, together! I betrayed you with my inaction, Kalista. I failed you.”
Kalista’s eyes narrowed
“Betrayer,” she intoned.
An ethereal spear manifested in her grasp, and she began marching toward him.
Ledros unstrapped his shield and threw it aside as she broke into a loping run. He opened his arms wide, welcoming what was to come.
The first spear drove him back a step as it impaled him.
His had been the true betrayal. He’d loved her, even if he’d only spoken those words aloud alone, in the darkness of night…
A second spear drove through him, hurled with tremendous force. He staggered, but stubbornly remained standing.
He had not stepped in to stop her being murdered. He was her real betrayer.
Her third spear plunged through him, and now he dropped to both knees. He smiled, even as his strength leached from him.
Yes, this was it. This was what would finally break her from that awful, unending spiral. He was sure of it.
“Finish it,” he said, looking up at her. “Finish it, and be free.”
They stared at each other for a moment, a pair of undying spirits, their insubstantial forms rippling with deathless energy. In that moment, Ledros felt only love. In his mind’s eye, he saw her as she had been in life—regal, beautiful, strong.
“Death to all betrayers,” she said, and ran him through.
Ledros’ vision wavered as his form began to come apart, yet he saw Kalista’s expression change, the impassive mask dropping, replaced with dawning horror.
“Ledros?” she said, her voice now her own.
Her eyes were wide, and seemed to fill with shimmering tears. She rushed to be beside him as Ledros fell.
“What have I done?” she breathed.
He wanted to reassure her, but no words came forth.
I did this for you.
Darkness crashed in, and tendrils of mist reached to claim him.
Kalista reached out to comfort him, but her fingers passed through his dissolving form. Her mouth moved, but he could not hear her over the roaring madness of the Black Mist.
His armor fell to the ground and turned to dust, along with his sword. Blind terror beckoned, but he went into it gladly.
Dimly, he registered the pale specter of Thresh, watching from the shadows with his fixed, hungry smile. Even the Chain Warden’s unwanted presence could not dampen Ledros’ moment of victory.
He’d done it. He had freed her.
It was over.




Blind, all-consuming terror.
Incandescent, uncontrollable rage.
Claustrophobic horror, cloying and choking.
And behind it all was the insatiable hunger—the yearning to feed on warmth and life, to draw more souls into darkness.
The cacophony was deafening—a million screaming, tortured souls, writhing and roiling in shared torment.
This was the Black Mist.
And only the strongest of souls could escape its grasp. Only those with unfinished business.
Blood pooled beneath him, bright crimson against pristine white stone. His sword lay nearby, its blade broken. His killers stood around him, shadows on the periphery, but he saw nothing except her.
Her eyes stared into his own, without seeing. His blood-spattered face was reflected back at him. He was lying on his side. His breath was shallow, and weakening.
Her lifeless hand was cold, but he didn’t feel anything. A calmness descended upon him like a shroud. There was no pain, no fear, no doubt. Not any more.
His armored fingers tightened around her hand. He couldn’t be with her in life, but he would be with her in death.
For the first time in what seemed forever, he felt at peace…
No. Something was not right.
Reality crashed in.
None of this was real. This was but an echo left behind, the residual pain of his death, hundreds of lifetimes earlier.
Thankfully, the Chain Warden was not here to mock him.
How long had it been, this time? There was no way to know. Decades, or a few minutes—it could have been either, and yet it hardly mattered. Nothing changed in this vile realm of stasis.
Then he remembered, and hope surged through him. It was not a sensation he was familiar with, but it blossomed like the first bud of a seemingly dead tree after rainfall.
He turned, and she was there, and for a moment he knew joy, true joy. She was herself again, and she had come to him!
Then he saw her expression. The cold, severe mask, the lack of recognition in her eyes. The hope inside him withered and died.
Kalista stared past him, her head cocked, as if listening to something only she could hear.
“We accept your pledge,” she said, before turning and stepping into the mist.
Then she was gone.
Reaching out with his will, Ledros felt her now far away. Someone had called to her, from a distant continent to the north-west. Someone else who had traded their soul for a promise of vengeance against whoever had wronged them. They knew not what horror awaited.
Bitterness and bile filled Ledros. He cursed himself, twisting his hatred inward.
There was no hope. He knew that now. He’d been a fool to think otherwise.
She was trapped for eternity, as were they all. Only pride and stubbornness had made him think he could solve it, like a riddle, for all these years.
Pride and stubbornness—traits that were as much his bane in death as they had been in life, it seemed.
The cursed Chain Warden was right. It was a selfish desire to free her, he saw that now. Kalista may not be herself, but at least she was not tormented like he was. At least she had purpose.
Ledros yanked the pendant from around his neck, shattering the links of its thin chain. He hurled it into the mist.
To even hope for anything more was foolishness. There could be no peace, not unless the curse that held these isles in its foetid grasp was broken.
“And so, I must end it,” Ledros said.
Oblivion called.




Thresh stepped from the darkness. He glanced around, ensuring he was alone. Then he knelt and picked up the discarded silver pendant.
The fool had been so close. He was on the brink of bringing her back… and now, after countless centuries of trying, he had abandoned his task, at the very moment of success.
Thresh smiled, cruelly. He liked seeing hope wither and die, like blighted fruit upon the vine, as what could have been sweet turned to poison. It amused him.
He opened his lantern, and tossed the pendant within. Then he stepped back into the darkness, and faded from view.
After a time, the rattle of his chains faded, and he was gone.

The Princling's Lament

Scrape the bench of sunless moss, And harken to this tale of loss. A princess lies below the soil, A king’s pride and joy, a beauty divine. Now food for worms, her flesh to dine. Skin once fair, now left to spoil.
A Princeling came, a suitor fair, To press his cause, to wed the heir. The marriage feast like none before was blighted by a deed most foul. A poisoned cup, the king did howl. To find a cure, the Princeling swore.
His ship set sail, crossed ocean’s deep, With knights all pledged to end death’s sleep. Through tempests fierce and unknown miles, Drawn by wind from a land undying, The very storm its name seem’d sighing. A place men named the Shadow Isles.
Like the hound abroad with bloody scent, Drawn ever on by forlorn lament, To a night-veiled isle on no man’s chart. No wind was heard, no bird nor beast, Only spirits summoned by death’s priest. Onward knights to this island’s heart!
Through black-thorned trees on crooked path, A clash of steel, a cry of wrath. The Shadow of War wrought bitter defeat, The Princeling’s men were slain. He ran in fear; they died in vain, His love of life too bright, too sweet.
Lost in darkest, haunted night, Pursued by spiteful wraith and wight. He chanced upon a moonlit field, And a ghastly monk assailed by the mist. “Aid me!” cried he, “With sword and fist! The spirits are cruel, their hearts unhealed.”
“Here, all men are equal, all sins forgiven, But pride hath made this land corpse-riven. The dead we’ll fight, our lives as the prize. Shepherd them onward, and then come the dawn, Triumph will teach you secrets long gone, But vanquished, we fall and then rise.”
They fought as brothers on cursed battleground, Atop the bones of scholars renowned ‘Gainst spirits in black, with hunger infernal. Dawn never came, but the battle was done. The monk and the Princeling had won! “Speak, fellow! Tell secrets of life eternal.”
The monk told tales of a time forgotten An ancient queen, now dead and mulch-rotten. Of her king brought low by sorrow and woe, Who came to this isle to bring back her life, But damned the world to endless strife, Spirits of death and carrion crow.
His magic unleashed a terrible scourge; Grim prelude to the Deathsinger’s dirge. Black mist rose up and doomed all to death. But spirits arose from every dead thing, Cursed to undeath by this grief-maddened king. He begged it all end with his very last breath.
A land once blessed, was ripped asunder, Split with lightning and beaten by thunder. Phantoms now mutter in graves enshrined. And banshees throng its haunted streets, Shrieking their woes of black defeats, A boundless curse upon all mankind.
The Princeling listened, all aghast, To hear this tale from the grim outcast. He spared this ancient king no boon, But tales of death and grim disaster; Unmask all, from slave to master. The Princeling’s lies laid bare by the moon.
The goblet supped by his new wife, The Princeling poisoned to take her life. Her father’s wealth and crown he craved; No cure he wished, but existence deathless, No succor for his queen, forever breathless; His soul was dark, his mind depraved.
And yet his bride had one last curse. A fatal spell of bitter verse. Justice sought with dying breath, Set the Spear of Vengeance on the hunt To punish him for such great affront And bring about his bloody death.
The mist closed in and called his name, A huntress aglow in mist-wreathed flame. Her spears of light pierced his breast, A cold ground yawned wide and deep, The Princeling fell to blackest sleep, Never to wake from his victim’s bequest.
Smothered in darkness, dying in pain, No crown for his brow, never to reign. Buried forever in earth’s dark womb, Heed the price of ambition’s dark call Be not ensnared by its artful thrall, The Princeling’s greed was his doom.
A pallid light waxed cold and bright, Borne up through the earth, his soul took flight. No reprieve was this, but torment afresh, The Warden of Chains drawn by his scent. Dancing to the Deathsinger’s lament. “Your soul is mine,” said the beast called Thresh.
So heed this fate and learn it well, Shun the Isles where the dead still dwell. Seek ye all the things to cherish, And pass the years in time well spent. A life full-lived, a soul content. And know you all are doomed to perish...

Current Location

Shadow Isles

Species

Human

Conditions

• Ruiniation

Ethnicity

Camavorian

Age

1048

Birthplace

Camavor

Place of Death

The Blessed Isles

Pronouns

She/Her

Sex

Female

Gender

Woman

Aligned Organization

Kingdom of Camavor

Related Myths

• The Echoes Left Behind