I ducked beneath a foe's lunging strike, his battered weapon lashing overhead with a wounded hunting bird's shrill cry. Cinder pulsed in time with my heart as I pivoted around his clumsy thrust, and drove my own blade between his ribs. He crumpled, a curse on his lips and blood curling over his cracked teeth. Another blade hissed past, and its owner was rapidly dispatched, yet they clustered around me now, their weapons rapidly slicing the air, crying out in primal hunger for the blighted blood that swelled in my veins.

Steel tolled with solemn cadence as my armour crumpled beneath their blows, and my own strikes tore limbs from bodies, and splattered foul life across the stones. I was driven to my knees beneath the force of their onslaught, rolling and leaping desperately as steel rained upon me. Once more I fell, and once more I rose; fire in my blood, frost glinting in dark eyes masked by crimson spectacles.

With terrible force, my halberd  crashed through their ranks, hurling back the dark tide, yet like waters compelled by Lunar hand, they merely flooded back in. On my knees again, I slashed wildly, yet this time they did not retreat; several fell, yet not nearly enough.

"Damn!" I scuttled backward, my radiant blade carving a broad arc in the air before me. Again they closed in, their numbers dwindled yet far from extinguished. My back struck stone, and a chord of pain rippled along my spine, clattering through vertebrae and wringing a cry of pain from my burning lungs.

"Or'do." My feet ground against the earth, as swaying wearily I stood. "Have you forsaken me?" Light flared, and the Darkborn before me averted their seared eyes, reeling back with anguished and hateful cries. Or'do rolled from a seam slashed in the stone, his halberd freeing legs from knees and cleaving their numbers as well as their limbs in two.

"Stop being dramatic and take this!" He tossed me a dull, rust mottled bell. "Ring it when you need to summon me again; the Cinder levies a great toll on the body here."

I nodded, and with my comrade at my side, I lowered myself into a steady if shallow crouch. "No matter how strained it is, the Flame will burn the Darkness from this realm."

"Of course it shall." Or'do said. "For we are the ones who wield it."