[Cyril Darkcloud]

Originally posted by Larry_OHF: The Tavern thread was not big enough for you...so you had to branch out...mettle in my doings and try to become that dark hero that all the girls will adore.....

Elsewhere – A place where the Sky is terribly close

He glances about. There are, of course, no adoring girls to be seen in this place – unless one were to include a certain small owl in that category. “Tell me, Whisper,” he says, “are you really so attracted to the dark hero type?”

HOOT!

For a moment the tension lessens as a bit of humor rises unexpectedly between them. The moment is quickly and decisively cast aside, however. “Is that what you want?” There is no warmth in his voice. “A return to the spammy silliness which passed for your kingdom before the clouds gathered about this game? Consider well what you were despite your power, O Mage – a joke of a ruler whose power was not respected and whose singular victory involved the turning of a group of do-gooders into monkeys. And for a creature of shadow where did you dwell but in a brightly humorous little world of no depth nor any real darkness. No, my enemy, you realize as well as I that there is nothing of either substance or of significance waiting for you in those former things, you who were far greater in death than ever you had been alive......”

His voice trails off and he stiffens. The air is still beneath the silent and heavy expansiveness of the Sky. And within the stillness, a readiness and ..... a call:

Finish it.

Here where death is final and even immortal lives are fragile.

Finish it.

FINISH IT.

FINISH IT.

FINISH IT.

FINISH IT..

“Hurricane ....... at the very least,” he whispers. “Yes. At the very least.” His fingers tighten around the handle of the Stormreaver. He exhales slowly, and the air about him begins to move in time to his breathing.

In the distant days of the original game there was a conversation much like this between himself and the Mage. A conversation with a subtext that none know save he and the Mage, a conversation that narrowly avoided producing a blood-letting and a conflict within the outsider lands of IronWorks unlike anything those forums so far from the Sky had ever witnessed – battle joined beneath the open Skies and in the free and living air between a silent and reckless foreigner and the One Who Mods at the height of his power, between these two and no others. No paladins. No self-styled heroes. No minions. No generals wielding uber-abilities. Only these two beneath the open Sky and before the great and terrible Stillness, Death Who neither moves nor breathes......

His own story did not permit such a battle to be joined that day.

But this day. In this place. That is another matter entirely. Hurricane at the very least.....

At the very least.