[center][h2][color=teal]Auric Sturmsbled[/color][/h2][/center]
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	Auric resisted the urge to rub the tattoo and brand on his right shoulder as the paladin introduced himself. The hunter could feel the creep of anxiety as he did every time he encountered a devout member of the church. It was the anxiety of a man for whom the assessment was always guilty regardless of the actions he had taken or the burden he had shouldered. So it was with a suppressed kernel of anxiety that he greeted what was to come. The first note was the keening of metal rings on the metal curtain rod as the crimson curtains slowly parted creating an eerie noise. As his eyes turned to the sound, lurking beyond the window he beheld dreadful darkness, in the form of the supernatural fog now fully encircling the manse.

	He watched as the servants with trepidation trod towards the yawning expanse of the window. Beyond shrouded in the thick fog was a sight to set the moral soul to wailing, a sound beyond even the eerie keening of the curtains withdrawing.  Blood drained from their faces as the wail tore loose from their throats. One of the two with fingers curled like claws into his own skull collapsed to his knees, the other with strength beyond his ilk had turned to flee, he made it as far as the door. With all the strength of his kin enhanced by fear and the desire to survive he pried at the portal, but despite his enormous strength he too collapsed the door held fast as though by some fell sorcery.

	As this was happening the hunter slid from his seat turning to the corner and retrieved his spear. With it gripped tight in his hands the unsettled feeling of the room, and the sheer dread at what they had witnessed began to creep through his tightly controlled emotions like rivers of ice down the back of his neck. He turned the spear and his body towards the window prepared to defend himself even if he could save none of the others. He turned his eyes returning to the window, the soul-rending wail of the two servants reverberating through the room. He took one step toward the window when like a fall into a cold lake the room plunged into darkness, and what warmth the light had offered was snuffed out replaced by cold dread.

	His eyes strained in the darkness sudden as it had come, he found the lack of light stifling when from behind them, the door the orc had tried so hard to open let out a sickening creep. He turned and the dim light from beyond the portal revealed the sickening sight of a skeletal hand. The digits curled around the heavy door slowly forcing the portal open. Beyond the door, as his eyes adjusted the cowled form of a grisly evil now stood in their midst. At first, the figure hovered there shrouded in the dim suffocating darkness and a sense of madness given palpable form by the keening of the two servants. That moment could have lasted hours so distorted was the scene beyond the reasoning of man. Then the figure moved to raise one skeletal digit before its shrouded skull in a twisted mockery of the way one might shush an infant. As though bespelled the wailing became silence with all the suddenness of the earlier plunge into darkness, and like the darkness had been blinding this was deafening.

	As the silence filled the space like a physical substance the two servants could be seen collapsing to the floor, they seemed to be dead, or unconscious. But that as was about to be evident was to be the least of these would-be champion's problems. A wave of fell evil darkness to seep into the spirit washed into the room as the creature waited beyond the threshold. The first thing to happen was the destruction of the symbols of the maker all around them the metal ones turned to slag, the wooden ones shattered and snapped, and the stone ones crumbled under the onslaught.  But the darkness was not meant only for the maker's symbols, nay it was meant for would-be heroes as well.
	
	As the darkness saturated their souls, it brought with it cursed images infecting their minds like a virus as words poured from the damned lips of the black figure. [color=crimson]“A hunter whose emotions blind him, death following for each he kills.”[/color] The words echoed like some prophetic doom, as in his mind he bore witness to a lone hillock, upon which a single great oak took root, from its branches the hell borne breeze stirred, a figure wrung from the neck by a hang man's noose secured fast to the branch above. That figure bore Auric's face, but more than that the hill below him was littered with corpses, each a man or beast, all had fallen to Auric's sword, or spear, and their dead faces in skeletal grins turned up to bear witness to his fate.

	Through all of this dread, anxiety and panic had crept through the young hunters slipping control, and while he was lost in that vision eerie blue light spilled from his irises. But the sight of his form hung from that tree on that hill did not instill the hunter with raw fear, for as a young man he had faced the noose for a curse far more palpable and immediate, fear resolved into cold determination a steely feeling that despite the risk he could do anything he must, and the fell light of his eyes dimmed. As the image in his mind shattered with the fear, he came back to the paladin's righteous fury burning in the room like a source of light and hope.

	As his determination manifested he slid into a fighting stance edging up alongside the paladin the spear leveled at the figure for a clean thrust if it seemed appropriate. [Color=teal]"Proclaim my doom all you want, you are not the first to try to see me into in an early grave and by my will, you won't be the last. Now I stand by Lord Locheborne, leave or face the bite of cold steel."[/color] He lacked the fiery conviction of the paladin, but he offered steel-hard determination in his own and a measure of self-control that would make lesser men question themselves. His eyes matched his tone the blue-gray of his eyes showing all the hardened determination of a man who had for many years scorned humanity and faced the wrath of nature and outlasted it.