Sister Friede's screams of anguish ripped through the silence, tears burning along her cheeks like rivers of shining glass. Cold, hollow anguish sharpened into burning anger. She strode through the archway, tendrils of fog reaching toward her in plaintive streams, darkness glinting along her scythe's wicked edge.
Without warning or preamble she sprang, scythe a crescent of moonlight in the air before her,yet in a single, blurring movement Or'do pivoted where he stood, catching her blade upon his palm as if it were nothing more than a child's wooden plaything. Twisting, Or'do slammed his free hand against her chest, shattering her ribs like brittle twigs, turning her organs into ribbons of limp, ragged flesh that erupted from her back like a macabre cloak; wings stripped of feathers, fingerless hands reaching desperately for heavens.
Sister Friede neither slowed nor stumbled, releasing her trapped scythe, pivoting past him in a whirl of hissing cloth, and driving a crooked elbow into the nape of his neck, paralyzing him with a flare of agony. Then, he was upon her once more, snagging her wrist with fingers of iron, crushing her bones into dust, her flesh a limp waterskin sloshing with the half liquid ruin in contained. With the cataclysmic force of a landslide he bore her to the earth, the stones quaking and screaming in their shrill tones, caving around her body like water curling around dropped stone.
Most would lie broken and frail, would gasp as breath was ripped from their lungs, would lie still as heart failed and mind stilled. But not Friede. Her anger spoke of a hatred deep and dark, of the anger an Ashen feels for the Flame that enslaves and binds, of the sorrow a sister feels when her siblings lie dead upon distant stones, felled by irreverent Ash. She dug her fingers into the stone as if it were nought but honey, snapping her neck forward and hammering her brow against his. Or'do reeled, one hand clutching his forehead, dark blood leaking between his fingers.
One second his onslaught lapsed.
This was all she needed.
Friede surged to her feet, the Dark flaring from her body, its black fire clinging to her slender frame like a dampened cloak, its tendrils rippling over the earth, burning long cracks into the stones. In that single breath of serenity, when Or'do was reeling, Noraan only now moving to join the fray, she reached deep into the Darkness, and with its eternal shadow quenched the Ember's Light. Noraan coughed and retched, falling to his knees, the vines of radiance fading from his skin. Weakness sundered him then, his heart lurching in his chest, stuttering and convulsing. Trembling, he raised bleary eyes in time to see Or'do fading away, vanishing like mist in the morn's warmth.
He was alone, and weaker than he had been in life or Undeath. Noraan collapsed, darkness stealing the edges of his vision. Despair swelled in his breast as with rhythmic notes of skin on stone, his adversary approached.
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