[i][b]Swords clashed and the air sizzled from the heat, as the two legendary warriors clashed again and again.[/b] They were surrounded by hundreds, no, thousands of spectators, cheering for one combatant or another. He was a large man who emanated an air of authority and majesty. She was beautiful and terrible in equal measure. They were the highest champions of their people. For those in the audience, it seemed like they were demigods. They were both bloody and tired, yet did not relent, nor soften their blows. The Man was lying in a pool of his own blood, unable to move. She was kneeling over him, holding his head, crying tears of despair, and all around them the world seemed to disappear, fading out into a mesh of the mundane and the unimportant. He looked at her sadly. "Was it worth it?" he asked softly.[/i] --- Eyrn shook herself from the vision, devastated by it as she always was. I had to, she thought, trying to convince herself. [i]He gave me no choice; I had to save our people.[/i] She received many such visions, of the past, present, and future, yet only this one tortured her so. Over the millennia, it had all her willpower to prevent herself from going mad at the dream, the memory. She could not afford to wallow in self pity or regret. Her people needed her guidance; there was no undoing the past, no matter how strongly she willed it. Her existence was what the gods must feel like, she supposed. She could feel every part of the Tower as if it were her physical body, see every human struggling along around her throughout the ages like a human sees ants, always frantically running from death, unable to see its inevitability. Everyone and everything died, from the lowest peasant to the greatest king, from the highest mountains to the oldest trees. Everything except for herself. She always remained, unmoving, unchanging, simply existing, doomed in her own fashion. And then came the visions. --- She saw the same scene she had seen many times in the previous days: The burning city, the falling Tower, the darkness, and her own death. She saw a land of red grass, stained from the blood of mortals in a far away land. She saw a rot within her own heart, a darkness spreading under her watch, with war consuming the land as men clashed and died, with an unspeakable evil laughing throughout it all. She saw her Oracle, lying dead in an ocean of corpses, surrounded by her fallen children. --- All this she saw, and it occurred to her that time was no longer a luxury she possessed. Her life was now finite, and Doom crept ever closer. She reached out, and felt the mind of her Oracle. She touched his consciousness and spoke to him, feeling his agony as his mortal coil struggled to contain her presence. [i]The End comes,[/i] she whispered to him. [i]Millennia of our existence is threatened by the coming threat. You must seek out those who would stand against the Shadow.[/i]