Xayn stood amidst the carnage, a solitary, tall figure surveying the ruin. He glanced over at Mola, who had staggered away to lean against the splintered remains of a wall, seeking a moment of solitude. Then his gaze fell to the still, broken form of Bazren, her usual fire extinguished. To have clawed their way back to the world of the living only to be nearly undone so swiftly... it was more than disheartening. It was a chilling omen.
He had thought that after millennia in Mortmundus, an eternity spent in a desert of lost souls, that death would no longer faze him. He was wrong. The finality of it here, in this world, affected him more than he cared to admit.
For the accursed, death was a preamble to endless stagnation. There was no cycle, no rebirth, only the eternal limbo of a prison realm -- Mortmundus. It was a truth stolen from them, a perversion of the universe's great design. He had suffered it himself, his soul cursed by rogue practitioners, by arbiters whose moral compass was guided by little more than coin and spite. Beings unjustly cursed, forever severed from the path of reincarnation.
And now, what could very well be one such practitioner stood just metres away. The sorceress Mola. The witch bitch, as the dagger had called her with such intimate venom. Had they been so unlucky, to cross paths with someone so steeped in forbidden power so early in their return? Or was there no luck involved at all? He could not shake the feeling that their arrival here, in this specific place, was no coincidence. That their encounter had been assured.
More questions piled atop the old. And with them, a new, immediate danger festered.
The rot.
He looked down at the black, viscous corruption marring the rent in his chest plate. It pulsed with a faint, malevolent energy, a familiar and profane wrongness that seemed to have chased them from their dead world into this one. To see it channelled with such terrifying potency by a mere human... It was deeply unsettling. Her presence felt almost as discordant as theirs, neither meant to walk the earth... the same could be said of the dagger she'd supposedly fought.
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Those two -- entities that reeked of the void -- should not belong in the world of life, he thought. The irony was a bitter taste in his mouth. It was a power so akin to their own that now threatened to unmake them completely.
As Xayn's attention turned to Bazren's ravaged body, Mola slid down the ruined wall, her back scraping against the gore-stained wood until she sat in the dirt. Her hands trembled in her lap, not from fear, but from the fading mirage of power. A shaky, incredulous smile touched her lips, a desperate cork attempting to contain the hysterical laughter that bubbled deep in her chest.
Mola (muttering): "W-what the hell was that...? How did I... do that?"
She flexed her fingers, half-expecting to see the black, corrupting energy bleed from them again. Though she had channeled the void before, it had never been so... unleashed. So chaotic. The scariest part was that she had done nothing different. The same words, the same sacrifices, the same desperate plea to the abyss. Yet the result was catastrophically, monumentally greater. It was as if fetters had been undone, limiters disabled without her knowledge.
She felt as if she was back at square one, a novice grappling with a force far beyond her comprehension.
And gods, a treacherous, thrilling whisper reverberated in the deepest part of her mind, it was exhilarating.
But as the phantom energy receded, as her body settled fully back into its simple, human form, so too did her perception shift. The terror of her power was swiftly eclipsed by a more mundane, yet no less potent, dread.
Her Master would have her head.
Not only had she failed to protect the village -- an utter, undeniable failure -- but she had used the dark arts again. Blatantly.
No matter, she thought, the familiar mechanisms of self-preservation clicking into place. I'll think of something. I always do.
She forced herself to her feet, brushing dirt from her torn robes. A long, awkward, and entirely unwelcome trek awaited her, in the company of two undead revenants who looked upon her with a mixture of hatred and suspicion.