"Hurt?" Orindil echoed vaguely, before glancing at his shoulder and hastily replying, "I'm fine." He stroked back Nakaida's sweat-drenched hair. Her skin felt clammy to the touch. He waged an internal skirmish then and there. Tell her? Or did she already know? Could her current state be attributed to her absence in spirit only half an hour ago?

Or had he simply been hallucinating?

One mere glance at her troubled expression decided it. His own hallucinations could wait. "You dreamed," he surmised gently.

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Nakaida caught at his hand where it smoothed back her silvery hair, expression anxious behind her unhealthy pallor. "I dreamed," she repeated, low, and scanned his face before dropping her eyes. "Aye...that was all." But she herself did not believe it, and unconsciously she grasped his hand as if never to let it go.

"You were not wounded...before." Nakaida gestured helplessly. She had no idea how long she had lain unconscious. Stabs of pain lanced through her head and she grimaced in pain. "What happened?"

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Orindil's hand tightened around hers. He couldn't bring himself to meet her cobalt eyes, afraid that once he did, he could never look away. Instead his attention shifted to the fallen citadel. He couldn't repress a shudder, though from physical or mental cold one couldn't distinguish.

"I reentered Okandar's fortress to salvage supplies," he murmured. "I was attacked... but no, that is irrelevant. I had a vision..." Not wanting to alarm the others, he stumbled over his words. He looked back and found himself predictably yet inexorably drawn to her gaze. "I saw Naidele... and you. You were... trying to tell me something, yet I know not..."

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If not for the seriousness of the situation, Naidele might have smiled at the attraction she saw between Orindil and Nakaida. It seemed that not all bad things had come from this mission for her and her sister. But as it was, she pushed that from her mind.

"A vision?" she asked, cold fear welling up in the pit of her stomach. Good things rarely came from visions and the like. She listened to what he said it was of. "Did you see nothing else?" she asked after he had spoken.

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I'm back!

"Perhaps what might be dismissed as a dream should not be so readily put off..." murmured Nakaida. Her hand in his tightened convulsively, as though without his support she would be lost. She drew a shaky, uneven breath. "I too saw myself in a vision. Orindil - "

Nakaida stopped. The breeze had let off, leaving the air still, and her normal careless gesture could not bring it back. A horrible sense of things gone terribly wrong pervaded her senses.

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Midst the crumbled ruins of Okandar's once daunting bastion of power, a single tower stood intact, seemingly unblemished by the wrath of the Goddess. Hellish light pulsated from a single window upon the tower.

The Soul Shard, the Dark Lord's last measure of vengeance, had awoken.

Such was the power that Okandar had amassed that his essence, the very fiber of his being, was no longer human. With his defeat instigated a lightless vortex, channeled through his most iniquitous yet greatest creation.

The Soul Shard grasped this swirling vortex. The Soul Shard subjugated it, compressed it, until the palpitating power nearly exploded from its bounds.

And a rift opened between the planes.

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A sepulchral sense of forboding reeked from the remains of the citadel. Sensing it, Orindil stiffened. "We'll talk later," he breathed, giving her slim hand one last squeeze. "We must move. I sense evil on the rise."

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Nakaida felt as if her last remnant of surety was slipping away as Orindil's hand left her own. Trying to quell her trembling, she clasped her hands together and looked determinedly at the ground.

That was his cloak. Blushing a little Nakaida got carefully and unsteadily to her feet, and lifted it to brush the wisps of grass and leaves from the underside before holding it out to him. "Thank you," she managed, attempting a smile. It didn't quite succeed, mayhap due to the dull pain in her head and the heaviness of her limbs combined with the pulsing aura of evil emanating from the fortress. "You're right. We should move."

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Naidele looked around with worry. Why could things never be easy? She patted Nakaida's shoulder comfortingly, although she felt that she needed comfort herself.

She helped gather what few things they had and prepared to be off. She was just as eager as everyone else to leave, but still she couldn't help but wonder what it was that was making her and everyone else so uneasy. Still, she didn't think she wanted to stay and find out.

She thought about how slow the traveling would be without horses. Their mounts had undoubtedly bolted when they were captured, and were certainly too far away now to retrieve.

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I'm back!

Khienro slowly stood to his feet and went up beside Naidele,

"I don't suppose they have any decent mounts around here..." He looked back at the abandoned ruins, pondering how on earth he was supposed to get out of this one. The building itself, in its crumbled, smoking, shattered state, seemed to be oddly alive. Not because there were a few surviving demons here and there, but the ruins seemed to be boring a hole into his soul as it stared at them with huge, unseen eyes. It was the power of Okandar. Trying his best not to show fear, Khienro turned back to Naidele.

"But Orindil is right. We need to get moving." He smiled slightly, and silently linked their hands, "But it'll be alright." He gave her hand a squeeze and turned to Orindil, "And just for organizations sake, in what direction do you plan to go in?"

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You may (or may not) know me elsewhere as Elfpen

"Does it matter?" said Nakaida, an undertone of bitterness to her voice. "Far away from here."

The forbidding fortress, menacing even in ruin, seemed to simultaneously draw and repel her gaze. She shivered. "The evil here is not yet vanquished."

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Naidele was thankful for Khienro's hand in hers, and she tenderly ran her thumb over his nuckles. Despite everything that was going on, she managed to smile up at him. "Thank you," she murmured when he reassured her. She continued to hold on to his hand, not wanting to lose the comfort that he offered.

She looked to Nakaida when she spoke. "I don't suppose it does matter," she agreed, looking around, avoiding settling her gaze on the remnants of the fortress. When Nakaida spoke of the evil not being vanquished, she finally forced her gaze to it. The sight sent a forbidding chill up and down her spine, and she didn't need Nakaida's words to know that evil still lingered in that place. "What could it be?" she asked softly, not really expecting anyone to know the answer.

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I'm back!

Khienro returned the silent affection, and with one last sqeeze pulled his hand away, so that he could retrieve the sword on the ground beneath him.

"Alright then, If it does not matter, I say that we head in the opposite direction of our foes and their horrid blacksmiths." With that he tucked the crude sword under his belt, still disgusted by its poor shape, and started off in the direction he indicated without another word.

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You may (or may not) know me elsewhere as Elfpen

Orindil accepted his cloak back with a faint smile. "Strength," he reassured her softly, offering her shoulder a small squeeze. Turning, he lengthened his steps until he drew ahead of the others. Cresting a windswept bluff, he surveyed the landscape. Campfires to the east immediately piqued his attention. Silver eyes narrowing, he motioned for the others to linger back as he dropped to a stealthy crouch and darted forward.

He didn't know what he'd initially expected, but it was certainly not this.

A diminutive army of perhaps three score human soldiers. Shivering in the cold, they clustered around their unimpressive campfires. A third of their number consisted of wounded, which the others tended to with affectionate care. Watching them now, Orindil remembered the stroke-of-luck incursion that'd engendered his and the his companions' release. With all likelihood, these were the paltry survivors.

He crept back to the others and reported, "Human survivors from the resistance we glimpsed earlier."

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Aeryn stayed silent and alert. He brought up the end of the group as they moved quickly. Aeryn listened to Orlinil's reports and nodded, glancing behind him nervously.

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Just became a college freshman; be on sparingly

Naidele waited impatiently as Orindil scouted ahead. She was on edge. Evil still lingered in the atmosphere, and she did not know if they could ever be far enough away from this place to satisfy her.

Naidele thought about what Orindil came back and told them. "Do we trust them?" she asked. True, they had been against Okandar, but still she was suspicious. She didn't want to take any chances.

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I'm back!

"Our group is large enough as it is..." Aeryn said. If they where to try and sneak past evil, the more people, the worse.

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Just became a college freshman; be on sparingly