Azurus

The world was ablaze; slick rafters hung limp from the ramparts, fire-glazed and oozing heat, while charred bodies adorned the turrets and towers lining the inner wall, garlanded along its entire length. Azurus was an orgy of burning gold in the aftermath of the assault, the pungent odor of sulfuric vapors thick in the nighttime air, stilling a dozen gazes that cared to look anywhere.

Attacks were unheard of after sunset, but the Council wouldn't be persuaded: the camp reeked of sorcerous intentions, spells so powerful that they had to be cast over time, locked with moments, fermented for weeks before they could gather the momentum necessary to fell the ancient stronghold. In the sky, a murky green storm swirled around a spinning black vortex, a wound in the empyrean that had bled the darkness that came before the blight, and now throbbed gently with a festering pus of decapitated limbs, falling gently instead of a freshwater monsoon.

A few feet from the metallic pedestal upon which they had been bound, the generals of Azurus looked on from behind the capricious, but altogether serving a simple purpose of their own, jute ropes that hung limply from their wrists and ankles. The undersides of their feet were already covered in blisters scorched onto their pale skin, but the pain of their flesh was nothing against the pain of their losses: the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who had decided to camp with them for the night were all dead; a deathly mist still susurrated over the ground gathering within its phantasmagoric embrace the remnants of a hundred thousands souls. They would be drawn into the ground, the soil made rich with their visions and memories, and the power would accumulate until it could be drawn again by their sorcerer.

Their sorcerer! Where was he, their mighty sorcerer? He had warned of some perils earlier, but none had heeded him, not even himself - unmindful as he had been with the confidence of a thousand warriors standing guard, even the most conspicuous of threats are ignored when knowledge of resurrection, victory and salvation is secure.

The general named Hundar was the first to give voice to their fears, stepping onto a mound of the dead in front of him, and shouted, loud and clear, "Valan!" There was no response, if the stirring of winds could be discounted, and those around him stiffened: Valan was their strongest sorcerer, a man invested with such skill that he rivaled the gods themselves, and if Valan had fallen with the culling, then their hopes stood for nothing.

While Knath and Del raised their arms skyward and prepared to conjure a mana of rejuvenation, Hundar continued to shout into the young and weeping world of aurum, looking for his brother. Quivinen, a shapeshifting huntress, quickly sprinted away on the swift paws of a giant wolf to scout around the perimeter, perhaps to look for anything that might help their cause that dreary night. A moment or two after she had disappeared from sight, a dull and argent glow began to spread around the grounds, a Healing Tide, that would awaken those still alive from their merciful stupors of injury, as Knath would prepare the Ankh of Resurrection. A hundred, perhaps two hundred at best, would be released from lifelessness and into life, a journey that would leave them dazed and disoriented, but they would be released nonetheless.

Just then, a form stood up, erect, on a ridge to Hundar's left that banked the subterranean transportation corridor that spanned the barracks from the armory, aubergine in texture, a grease-soaked loincloth in place. It was Valan, great Valan, screaming in agony, his skin devoid of all moisture and beginning to peel off to leave exposed his bankrupt flesh, his eyeballs having long before abacinated with the incubating heat.

It was an arresting discovery for the three generals simply because Valan, though resurrected, was blind, deaf and, in all likelihood, mostly paralyzed, and his screams were completely the depiction of all his pain, neither chamfered nor muted in any measure with any emotional persuasions. He was like an infant doused in a greedy acid, one moment nestled in a blanket of contentment and the next, tugged back quickly into the depths of his failures and left to face...

No, left not to face all that ordeal and torment on the road to freedom once more but something else much simpler, the torment of conviction. If he could have bawled, he would have until he had fallen to the floor once more. Hundar ran to his side to assist him as he stumbled on the loosened and sifting soil, and the moment Valan felt those hands on him, he sunk into unconsciousness.