Unaru had just about decided he’d had enough of waiting when a familiar scent hit the air.

He’d not taken more than a step from the impact crater since arriving nor had the orange men moved. Each one too scared to even breath at this point lest their heads explode like first one’s had and still someone new had arrived all the same. A doorway formed of things between darkness appeared. Through it a gaunt man with a black sword stepped out and before a word could be spoken he said.

[color=008000]“So it’s you, Lysander? I should have guessed…”[/color]

He never had met a bad situation he wasn’t willing to make worse.

Six times now they’d nearly taken each other’s lives, sometimes it was for a cause, other times it was because they had over the course of hundreds of years grown to dislike the look of eachother’s face. Unaru liked to hold it over his head that he’d won that first fight of theirs on some distant world surrounded by burning grasslands but since then it had been one fuzzy finish after another…

So why was he staring at Unaru with unfamiliar confusion his eyes?

[color=008000]“Have you forgotten? Or has that bastard Athanasius stripped you of your memory and dignity.”[/color]

He’d heard rumors, but that’s all they were, to hear them confirmed riled a great fury inside of him. Anger that spilled out into the world in slithering waves of emerald pressure and spread the crater cracks furthermore, size wise, Lysander had always been tall and lean while he was large and brolic. Lysander carried a sword made of uncertain evil things honed to a metal edge while Unaru no Hebi carried a sword made out of wood, polished and red like a glass of wine, impossibly heavy even as it swept through the air at his side and writhing with a life all of its own…

[i]It[/i] wanted Lysander’s sword for the collection and it always had.

And Unaru promptly silenced its voice by slamming it to the stone. Burying it a foot deep. Weapons were never his preferred method of combat anyways, only something he adopted of convenience, the Bloodwood Sword just a safe place to house to the Forbidden Sword Index where he kept all the world ending weapons he’d pried out from the hands of fallen foes. He’d use it again if necessary. But with the way fingers cacked in his palms that wasn’t how he’d prefer to do things.

[color=008000]“Very well, out of respect I will let you choose, shall we use all our arsenal or settle this like men?”[/color]

A stab at his pride, the old Lysander never let those go, but what of this cruelly confused creature? The courtyard was quiet, the sky still cloudy pink save for a few slivers of light, and all of Candy Land waited with bated breath to hear how the darkling would answer.