Yelena

Their every step on the golden floors sent shockwaves through her mind.

“The throne room,” Antethra growled as she kept pace with the rest of them, daggers flashing under her sleeves. “That will be where the fiend waits.”

“And therefore, exactly where he wants us to go,” Marius said.

They smashed their way through to the Great Hall with ease, meeting not one guardsman still manning their posts.

The place was nothing but a wreck. The golden walls stood in stark contrast to the upturned glass drug-pipes, and the once luxurious cushions were rent apart at the seams, destroyed it looked like by weapons or in a struggle. Yelena looked to the floors and saw they were smeared with a slimy liquid she didn’t recognize.

“Booze,” Marius said after taking a single whiff. “Yep. I’d recognize it anywhere.”

Amara grunted as she stepped through the sludge. “What’s the point in this?”

Yelena blinked, trying to stay focused. In truth, the closer she got to the heart of the palace, the more her own heart felt heavy – weighed down by the pinnacles of darkness that she’d thought she’d gotten rid of already. She could almost hear its voice. It’s call coming through the stained glass walls that still stood all around them.

Anthethra’s quiet demeanor suddenly shifted as her eyes flew to the ceiling. Her arm grabbed Yelena’s shoulder, and the latter only now realized how much her momentary lapse had just cost her.

High up in the rafters, under the golden roof, a single figure stood. And in his hands rested the invisible power that was known only to him as the last Windcaller of the Sands.

Knox.

“Think you’re some fancy Glancer?” Amara shouted up at him. “Let’s just see how you deal with this!”

“Amara, no!” Yelena screamed as she saw the macabre smile that spread across Knox’s face.

Too late – she launched a fireball directly at his smug grin and a single swipe of his arm repulsed the flame and sent it cascading back - right into the alcohol soaked ground.

“Damn it! Everyone, retrea-!“

The Argent’s voice was lost as the flame traveled up through the floor and ignited the still filled tubes of Okhra, causing a chain reaction of explosions that tore clean through the palace floor and sent the four of them hurtling into the bowls of the earth.

Yelena’s blade struck forth almost of its own accord, slashing once to give her the momentum she needed to rise:

[Searing Strike]

She felt herself rise through the descending flames and grab Amara by her waist.

“That’s why we listen before we strike!” she shouted in the Lightbringer’s ear.

“Don’t lecture me at a time like this!”

She managed to grab hold of a stray piece of flooring and hoist them both up into an adjacent room who’s door had been blown clean through.

“Marius!” she called out. “Do you live?”

After a few seconds of nothing but smoke and ash, she saw the thief hurtling towards her with a beleaguered, and bloody, Antethra.

“You really have to ask?”

They fell beside them as Yelena made one more strike at the door beams above them, blocking the way should the sadistic Windcaller come after them.

“You have an uncanny ability for staying alive, thief,” Amara coughed.

“And you’ve got an uncanny ability for losing your cool, little missy.”

Yelena had to practically restrain Amara from moving forward to crush the coughing thief where he lay with Antethra beneath him.

“Can you walk?” Yelena asked her as she started up her [Guardian’s Ward] incantation.

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She nodded grimly as she rose, shaking off her wounds and looking at her restored arm that had once been covered in splinters.

“So this is the power of a Guardian,” she mused. “But enough of this. The Windcaller is being wounded. He is resorting to trickery to save his Master. He will fall with the rest of them.”

“Old cat’s blind as a bat,” Marius agreed. “Can’t be too tough to take down now. Looks like our pretty Argent leader did quite a number on him last time they met.”

The distinct sound of ferocious energy slamming into the blocked doorway then spilled out from its depths, and the four readied themselves to press on.

“Forget him,” she said. “We kill the Don, and this is over.”

They ran down the corridor they’d been forced into, seeing nothing but broken images of the silver haired Jael and the empty quarters of the guards and the old servants rooms – all vacant, all as utterly discarded as the hovels outside.

“How can you be so sure?” Amara asked.

“Your dream, right?” Marius chimed in from his stealthed form beside them.

Yelena nodded. “He thinks to wear us down by using the souls of these people against us. But if we defeat him. If we…neutralize the energy he’s let loose, I’m sure we can…we can still save them.”

She stopped suddenly, clutching her head and looking at the ground as distinct cracks began to appear across its surface.

“Yelena?”

She ignored Marius’ hand offered from the shadows.

“It will work,” she said as she pressed on. “It has to.”

“I am hoping so,” Antethra replied. “For all our sakes.”

At a crossroads familiar to Marius they passed through another vibrant courtyard left virtually unmanned and undefended. The Tigran Guards that were still posted there merely bent their back and bowed, as though they’d been ‘shut down’ like mindless automatons.

All by design, Yelena thought as they moved on by them, ignoring their supplicant forms entirely. I wonder, Marius, were you more right than you think?

They wound their way through the golden labyrinth following Marius now. Yelena stayed in the rear, watching them with gradually fading vision. Her eyes gradually watched the golden walls become corrupted with dripping, oozing ink. Every step she took the corruption grew until it began to creep in from the side of her eyes, and then it was accompanied by…a voice. A song?

You aren’t there, she told herself through her clenched teeth and intense focus on the feel of the blade in her hand. I’ve beaten you before…

…and you’ll beat me again, will you? the voice spat back at her. After all this chaos, you still do not understand. You still haven’t come to realize what you really are.

She’d felt the same voice bear down on her with every slice she made through the flood of evil outside – evil that she knew had come from her. The people of this place had been warped by the very power she struggled to deny. She watched their screaming, desperate faces, and knew that it was her fault. She could have slain the Blackbird the first moment she met him if she’d let the Voidspawn within her breast take over…the thing that referred to itself as Numinos…

That’s what you want, isn’t it? You still think I’m going to give up, don’t you?

“This way!” Antethra called back to them as she palmed a crumbling sandstone wall. “I am knowing shortcut.”

Yelena tried to focus, but the booming blackness in her brain stopped her from seeing anything but slight, ancillary details before her.

…my dear daughter. Everyone gives up eventually. They only need the right stimulus.

Antethra had taken them to an ascending staircase Marius was familiar with. From within, they were given views of more and more eroded, empty, or decimated rooms. There had been a struggle here before the end came for this place. Signs of resistance were clear from the blade-marks that were embedded in every pillar and mural that still remained in every room.

“The people of the Sands fought,” Antethra said, the tears welling up in her eyes giving way to pure fury. “They did as free people should.”

“But they did it too late,” Marius remarked as they stopped before the image of a strange oval room, entirely coated in mirrors.

“It’s not so easy to fight alone,” Amara said, walking passed him and, with an approving nod from Antethra, blowing through the translucent wall with a shockwave from a discharged fireball fireball. “Especially when those at the top are against you.”

She spared a look over her shoulder at Yelena before she jumped down to the room below, and the latter felt the fury of her other-self bunch up and rise in her gullet. She was sweating now. Her composure was crumbling away with every loose thread of her hair that now fell from the top of her head.

The fury was fixed not on a person. But on an impulse.

Kill. Kill. Kill till your body can no longer sustain your lust for vengeance. Only then shall you call upon me.

“SHUT UP!”

She said this as she landed beside the rest of them in the room below, and her voice echoed through the reflective surfaces of the room’s walls and each and every glass mirror that shone in this strange chamber.

“Looks like even Argents get stressed out,” Amara said with a smug grunt. “Where are we now?”

“The room of reflection,” Antethra told them all. “The Don and his confidantes are coming here often. It is said it is a place where the Silver One frequented. A place for intimacy with one’s own mind. A place of contemplation.”

Her scowl was visible even through her veil.

“The fiends turned it into a place of spectacle,” she then spat. “A place where they would watch the debase acts they committed on my sisters through every reflected surface.”

“Kinky fucks,” Marius snorted, and then promptly apologized at Antethra’s stare of bloody murder.

“This is being the backdoor to our objective,” she said. The throne room is but two halls further. Let us –“

A flash of light shone in the upper right-hand corner of the room. A mirror up there exploded into shards of glass that rained down on the party of four, and a single cloaked figure clad in a bubble of air floated eerily down to meet them.

Finally, Yelena thought, clenching her weapons tighter in her grip, surprising herself with the sense of excitement climbing up her limbs. You don’t wear the face of another, do you, Glancer?

The blind eyes of the sadistic Windcaller fixed on her as her companions readied themselves for battle.

Good, Yelena thought. That means I can kill you without a care.