They had been fighting for a while now, him and her. She was uninjured, fresh from the backlines and ready to finish him. He had been fighting for the past half hour, and had already begun to feel exhausted, much less ready to confront her.

Her thrust forward was clean though, and forced his hand. He pivoted, bringing his blade up in a swift counter on instinct. He felt the blade sink into her torso before he even realized he had moved. A vague sense of mourning filled him, even as a distant part of him was disappointed. To think years of work would culminate in a single stroke he barely noticed, it seemed to say.

He knew that this was revenge. She had killed his entire clan, burnt their Avendsora and rendered his kinsmen dead for eternity. And yet - he had thought he had known her well enough that she would not betray him. He felt her memories slowly rush through his mind, and a cursed understanding washed over him. He sank to his knees, almost wanting to scream from the horrible understanding that was flooding his mind.

He held her in his arms again. She was dead, he knew - the memories rushing through his mind were evidence enough of that, yet part of him wanted to believe that the warmth remaining in her body was proof of natural life - that he could reverse things. That he would not be forced to choose between his sanity and her life.

And yet he knew he would bring her back from the afterlife. What choice did he have? Behind him, the shadowy hand stirred. He bent over the maddening pages of the necronomicon and began to weave. He didn’t even see or register the fact that it stabbed through him and had put another heart in his body. But on the edge of his awareness, he could feel his soul or whatever distant sense of self he had begun to darken as he welcomed the unnatural flows into himself…

But then the dark dream simply ended. He was home, in the old tavern with Syr. She looked at him with concerned eyes. “You were talking in your sleep again,” She said. Her eyes were framed by her freckled face and hair, her stress and exhaustion obvious. She had been here with him for a while.

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“The same dream as last time. It’s alright now.” For some reason, he felt the urge to focus on her, and to commit it to memory, despite his perfect recall.

He ran his fingers through her hair, simply lost in the vast comfort her presence brought. In moments like this her beauty was blinding. And then, a thought brushed by the edge of his consciousness - something important he needed to tell her - but before he could open his mouth to speak, he-

Opened his eyes. Awake, this time. And he remembered. Alone, he curled into his sheets and let out a dry keening sob for a moment. Slowly, as if mortally wounded, he came off the bed, covering himself with the thick sheets, as if incapable of the act of dressing. Wandering slowly down the hall, the servants that would often call out to him and converse as he walked the hall stayed out of his way, completely silent. They knew how to act on these rare nights of mourning.

He wandered out the hall to his Garden, where they rested. As always, there were the musicians playing her song, as they did at all times of the day in shifts - a wasteful honor guard, one of the few extravagances he allowed himself. He lowered himself to the headstones, where the two rested, amongst a few other headstones of his other companions. He wrapped his blankets around Syr’s warm stone face, crying into it. The stone was hard and unforgiving despite its warmth, but it was the only warmth he would accept. They had been dead for nearly a century.

And yet he would remember it. Forever.

Rising, his grief attended to, he let the blanket fall, striding naked to the door by the garden, and entered. While he changed, a servant ran in and removed the blanket. Throughout all of this the musicians played, without pause, without regard for the events unfolding in front of them - in its own sort of otherworldly immortality that would outlast the headstones if they were not replaced at the first sign of wear, which they were. It was his final gift to them, an easy kind of immortality - to remain as beings of stony flesh, unthinking and unknowing yet known and remembered.

The door opened and out strode an impregnable emperor, his near century old grief conquered for the next short while.