The arcane light reminded the knight of the raging fires that claimed the castle, though he hardly had it in him to feel frightened. The horizontal slit in the steel visor barely let in any of the eye-straining brightness, and when it dimmed to a gentle moonlike glow, a mere tilt of the head was enough to force it out of view completely. The knight closed his eyes for a moment, but snapped them open quickly, startled by the vibrant images that clung to the back of his eyelids, disturbingly fresh in his otherwise clouded memory.

He couldn’t find the remains of His Lordship, nor those of his closest servants. The only bodies still at least partially intact belonged to his personal steel-clad guard – the knight counted each and every one of them dutifully, as though the mere act of recognition would give valor to their gruesome demise.

The first one lay crushed beneath the collapsed ruins of the northern tower. The second suffocated, the smoke forcing air out of his lungs – the knight knew the feeling well, his own chest tight, unable to breathe in full no matter how hard he struggled. The third and the fourth perished together, their molten breastplates fused into a grotesque lump. Natural fires weren’t meant to burn that hot. Whatever destroyed the castle had not come from this world. Perhaps that was why the knight’s memories of it were so… disjointed.

The greeting startled him. The stranger before him was hard to look at, his hair – a snap of silver, his cloak – a whirlpool of colors. There was an air of fortitude about him, of knowledge and power of a different kind to that of a mere armored fighter, but it didn’t frighten the knight, nor was it what made him avert his eyes and turn his gaze to the dust-covered ground, bleak and dull.

Before the fall of the castle, for as far back as the knight could remember, the world had always been… dim. Drained of the radiance of color and sharpness of sound. The stranger spoke in a calm, level voice, but it fell harsh on the knight’s ears. The light from the decorated staff was gentle, but the knight’s eyes still couldn’t bear it.

He stood up with a soft grunt, swaying only once before regaining his composure. He was tall even for a knight, the pommel on the longsword barely coming near his waist, and his shoulders were broad, bearing the weight of armor with practiced ease. With his right hand pressed horizontally against his abdomen, he bowed slowly, the movement small and dignified even though his left hand clutched the sword handle for support as the tip of the blade scraped the stone floor.

“Hail, stranger,” rough, toneless voice boomed from inside the closed helmet, the echo of it grating on the knight’s ears, nearly making him flinch.

He wondered if the man before him had seen the others like him. The fifth was at the stables when the disaster hit – there was hardly anything left to identify him by, save for a torn edge of his surcoat with a gold-embroidered inscription. The sixth fell from the top floor when it gave out under his feet, the body left intact, the neck angled unnaturally, suggesting a quick and certain death. The seventh and the eighth succumbed to madness, turning their blades on each other and eventually proving a match in every skill. The ninth ran a dagger through his stomach to escape the carnage around him, unable to resist the overwhelming pull of despair.

“There are no survivors,” the voice in the armor suit went on, flat and detached, the weight of the tragedy that surrounded the castle too great to even acknowledge. “Tenth of knights, at your service.”