[center][h3][color=black]Tears in Rain[/color][/h3][/center]

Thunder cracked overhead as rain poured over the battlefield below. It flooded over the trampled and pockmarked earth, steadily washing bloodstains into the brooks and streams. Its downpour sounded against the armor of fallen warriors like a snare, though the beating of war drums had ceased some hours ago. Torches burned weakly in the storm, but the inferno engulfing Castle Sturmkirk continued to blaze defiantly. This was the end of their cursed line, purged at last from the world with steel and fire. Like any tragedy, the final act ended in tears. There were none left to cry for the fallen wardens of the Stormlands, and so the world itself wept.

A man was left alone among the ruin. Though he moved, bled and drew breath, he was not alive. If the the once-noble blood of Sturmkirk was to be eradicated, he was to die as well. It was only that his moment had not yet come. On hand and knee he crawled through the wet muck of blood and earth, flaxen hair stained and stuck against his face. The man panted with exertion as he crawled, a mist of blood expelling from his nose and mouth with each labored breath. The dawn was rising, the day was won, and his end was near, and yet there was one final task at hand.

Clutching tightly to a sword of mirrored ebony, he painstakingly climbed a gentle slope that stood across the field where his allies and enemies alike had been slaughtered. The wooded foothills of the Stormlands had been his home as a child, and as an adult they would be his grave. Reached the subtle peak of a small hill, he pushed himself back up against a withered tree. Wrenching his eyes shut with agony, he clutched at the wound in his chest as blood poured forth out of his cracked armor. His skin was ash, veins burned black. [i] Not yet[/i], he thought, [i]soon, but not yet[/i].

His eyes slowly opened once more, eyes glassy as midwinter ice. There it was, shining like the sun. His ancestral home burned, and before long would be naught but ash and ghosts. This was the best he could accomplish; the sins of his fathers had been too great to be forgiven. Volkimir hoped only that the Sturmkirks could be forgotten. The task was done, his final gift to his ancestors complete. Volkimir closed his eyes for the last time, wishing to feel the warmth of the pyre on his face.

A great and pleasant light; he saw it even as he slipped from the world of the living. This was the final wonder that had evaded him for untold centuries. He had seen such things that no man would ever believe. The skies on fire at the ends of the earth. The sea and skies inverse in the greatest storm. At at the very end, he was gifted with the simple sight of dawn that had eluded him for so long. So many moments lost, as secret treasures cast out into the void of time. Volkimir thought no more on it.

Time to die.

[i]Fiery fell the angels, as thunder rolled about their shoulders. They burned the fires of of life. And so he had flown, wings ablaze, and he had burned so very, very brightly.[/i]

Volkimir awoke to a cold and empty world. He was not sure where he was, only that this place was strange to him. It felt as though it should have been familiar, but had changed since he last beheld it. He blinked slowly, feeling his eyes adjust to the sight of a moonlit forest, a monochrome of night sky and snow-cloaked trees. He had not awoken from sleep; his vision was perfectly sharp and adjusted to the dark of night. His was not stiff of body, either, despite laying prone in the snow against what seemed to be the husk of an old, dead tree.

His right hand clenched, and he found in its grip something strangely familiar. It was damned cold to the touch, like a bone of winter. A sword, as black as a sliver of midnight, stuck in the snowy ground, positioned as though Volkimir had always held it there. His fingers coiled about the hilt, and at once he felt the demon's call. Vengeance, it whispered. There were not enough living souls in this world to satisfy its thirst for retribution. Volkimir stood, and held Elbus, the Bound Blade aloft. Its familiar weight harkened back to a time now lost.

But how far lost? How long had he slept here? Volkimir stalked through the stark and snowy wood, swift and silent as a dark memory. Naught stirred in the shadowed forest in the dead of night; no rodents scurried, no vermin crept. He found no birds aloft nor any tracks of greater beasts in the powder snow. What was this place that stood as an open mausoleum? Volkimir descended into a glen, and a small clearing emerged. Here, rock and gravel lay scattered about on beds of leaves, overcome by moss and worn down by ages. One of these monoliths caught the eye of the forgotten wanderer, and so he swept it clear of snow and detris. A single name was engraved deep into the stone; etched so that all the trials of time could not erase it.

[i]Sturmkirk.[/i]

Volkimir had come home, even though he had never truly left.