Deep, deep within the Belly of the Beast, furled within the bowels of a living, bleeding, eternal Nightmare, I made my peace with Piety as she made her peace with God. And now I struggle against the Beast, the Nightmare himself. Malachai flays my skin, stripping me of muscle and sinew, down to my very bones. I struggle against the pain, the fear, the torment. Then, without pause in the heat of battle, Malachai asks me, “Why are you so in love with death?” I do not answer with words, but flash an arrow of brilliant light into his torso, leaving in its wake a Reflection that looks nothing like me. No, Malachai. I am not in love with death. Death is in love with me. Death has gripped me in its smothering embrace since my inception. I have never wanted anything more than to die. When I was a youngling in Oriath, my elders praised me for my visions of corruption. They thought I would be a thaumaturgic prodigy. I rejected their praise. My nightmares were nothing to cheer for. Voices of the damned, screaming, reaching through the void to tear my soul from my body. This was no gift from God. It was a curse. Nonetheless, I was forced into an apprenticeship as an acolyte of the “faith”. Virtue gems and experimental theology captured none of my interest, nor drew forth any of my talents. As it turned out, I was no seer. The damnations and machinations of the voices in my mind were merely ceaseless noise, no more tangible than echoes in the fetid halls of my academy. I was sick, they told me eventually. Affected by a sickness of the mind. There was no magic in me; just hellscapes and hatred. It became clear to me over time what it was they meant. The visions grew darker, the voices louder. Death wished so much of me, and I could no longer ignore its pleas. I slaughtered my master and my peers. Turns out I was much handier with a dagger than a wand. From then on I led the life of a killer, doing as the voices demanded in the hopeless hope that they would one day have had enough with me. Each time I felt blood run down my hands, a piece of my soul bled too. Cowardice was the only thing keeping me alive by this point. It was easy enough to kill others; killing myself was another matter entirely. In time, I had made perhaps too much of a name for myself. The Shadow, they called me. A simple job, I was told. Silence a big mouth; get a big payout. And no one was going to be the wiser. Tidy. Except for one loose end—me. The next thing I knew, I was on some stinking crate bound for Exile. For most, this would be a fate worse than death. But secretly I had hoped there would be horrors real enough to put to bed the nightmares in my addled mind. “Not another word from you,” my Reflection speaks. She knocks an arrow and looses it into Malachai’s throat faster than he can react. “I will not let you harm him.” Malachai chokes and sputters as blood spurts from his fresh wound. He tears the arrow from his neck and unleashes the pits of hell unto my Reflection, but she disappears safely in a swirl of mist. I was sick, they told me back then. Affected by a sickness of the mind. There was no magic in me; just hellscapes and hatred. Oh, but how wrong they were. It wasn’t until I washed ashore the twilight strand that my most incredible self was revealed to me. A survivor on the shoreline turned to me once I had regained my wits, but he was torn apart by a risen corpse before he could even finish his greeting. I scanned my surroundings and darted for the nearest weapon, a trusty little dagger. Its weight and sharpness were not much to my liking, but it was sufficient in removing the fell creature’s head from its shoulders. I had survived my first encounter, much to my disappointment. With a surge of pragmatism I checked the bodies around me for any usable equipment. Amidst the wreckage and the rotting heaps, a certain familiar gleam caught my eye. A bow, a quiver of arrows, and… a virtue gem. I took it into my hands and in an instant I knew a piece of myself that had long been dormant. A bow, eh? Perhaps I felt like taking a fresh start. Perhaps I had wanted a disadvantage, hastening my death in a way I could never bring about myself. But when I faced down the mammoth miscreation that was Hillock and loosed my first arrow, I knew it was neither of these things. My arrow pierced Hillock’s flesh and from his oozing wound burst a figure of light, manifesting for the first time in my horrid life the beauty and grace that was my Reflection. She turned her head to look at me, and in that moment I knew her thoughts. “Fight. Live. You are loved.” My battle with Malachai rages on. As I take more and more of his precious lifeblood he attempts to replenish himself by summoning his many hearts of the Beast. My Reflection and I destroy two of them when he speaks again. “You are being selfish.” Selfish, Malachai? Me? All I have ever wanted was peace of mind. I did not ask to be born into this wretched world. I did not ask for Exile. I did not ask for the Nightmares; not mine, nor yours. Yet here I am. It was through the Mirror Shot that I was able to tap into that wellspring of goodness that had for so long eluded me. All the love I did not have for myself, I held for her. My Reflection was as much a part of me as the chilling voices that drove me to my sordid career. But she would teach me, after years of torment and strife, to tune them out. My Reflection was naturally gifted as a marksman, and in our travels through Wraeclast together she taught me everything she knew. She taught me to breathe, to still my mind and bring to razor focus the singular thought of piercing my target with each arrow. Soon, slaying the monstrosities of Wraeclast became a meditative act. I killed not to appease the voices, but to silence them. Is that selfishness, Malachai? To steal to lives of others to bring myself peace? Perhaps. It was no cure for my ails, but it was sufficient balm. Three hearts, ruptured and spewing ichors. Malachai heaves in his fatigue, as do I. With tenderness in my heart and the desire to see my Reflection one last time before the world around me ends, I breathe through tattered lungs and knock one final arrow. In that moment, Malachai opens a portal to hell and unleashes a swarm of writhing tentacles. “Surrender to Nightmare!” he screams. A flash of light, and my arrow strikes true. Malachai’s screams tear at my ears even as his final blow tears at what remains of my flesh. There is an eruption of gore, of melting flesh and bone falling from the sky. I can no longer distinguish between my own blood and that of my fallen foe’s. Painfully, I roll onto my back. My reflection comes into view from behind me, kneels down and rests her forehead against mine. “It is over, love. Rest now. At last, we may be at peace.” Slowly, my vision turns to black. At long, long last, endless silence seeks to claim me. Within my mind I hear one last voice. Hers. Lilting, lyrical, she sings to me a lullaby. “A Shadow, once, cast out the light. A Nightmare lived, an unending blight. A life of pain, a heedless name. Then, in Exile, more the same “Until he met a stone of light; His own Reflection, shining bright. Newfound love, please do not die. Let us build a castle high “Above the shroud of death, Into the clouds we may draw breath For one last time, before we part; A gentle love, a gentle heart.”

The grit beneath her cheek was a welcome reminder that she had, in fact, survived the storm and shoals they’d thrown her into. “Swim straight for shore,” they’d said. More eager to discharge their duties than to offer useful assistance, but then, the Oriathan legionnaires hadn’t earned the epithet of “Blackguards” through dereliction. Given the crawling, quivering, hungry feeling the sand beneath her revealed to her more eldritch senses, however, one could certainly think of other reasons they might be reluctant to step ashore themselves. Beside her, the wand her gaolers had allowed her. Not much more than a twisted talisman of vine and driftwood to the Artless eye, but they’d been wary enough when they gave it to her. Her home, her Sisters, had burned; she might have as well had the sentence not been exile, had she displayed even a fraction of the fury roused when the mob had put its torches to her hut, ignorant of her absence, ignorant of the presence inside of a lonely, frightened, would-be mother. That memory of fire drew her eye to an iridescent, gilded jewel, flickering in the cradling palm of the fellow exile slumped against a log. The poor fool no doubt thought the Virtue of that gem proof against the weather, unaware of the toll it extracted from the wielder. No Sister of the Art would be so naive… though on closer inspection, he did appear to be impaled by that same log. The blood had ebbed to a mere trickle by now, the rest washed away by the rain and the tide. The gem likely was all that kept him alive by now. So much the worse for him, then. She stirred - and so, unnoticed by her companion of circumstance, did the corpse of a less able swimmer. He spoke, his voice haggard, harrowed from the struggle to shore, but she wasn’t listening. No, she mustered the will to stand, to reach down and take her makeshift wand - and to channel three shards of lethal force through it to finish what the log had started. Too late, at that: the corpse had already torn out his throat, and the bolts had in turn severed its spine. She plucked the gem from where it had spilled onto the sand; and a smile ghosted across her lips as she nestled it into a carefully-selected crevice of her instrument, the promise of fire whispering into her mind.