Buffeted by torrential rain and blinded by flashes of lightning, XJ-V ran.

He didn’t stop even as Fai-Deng roared at him with a tone just as furious as the thundering heavens above.

“Cog!” he yelled in the storm. “Do not do anything stupid! Only I have the right to kill you!”

XJ-V acknowledged his shout only with a curt nod before barreling through the gates, ignoring the flabbergasted guards standing always to attention.

Outside the monastery, the pillar of smoke coming from Tanak could clearly be seen. Every village for miles around could probably see it. Every village that sat in the shade of Mt Ramor would know that the Cultivators of the mountain saw it, too. They saw it, and did nothing.

The Cog couldn’t stand for it.

As he ran against the increasingly brutal lashes sent by the storm he was noticed by a few villagers who had barricaded themselves in their homes. Those of the hamlets of Marsul and Narsis prospected him with fearful eyes before realizing who he was – the stone-man of legend who had come to stand before the Sects of the mountain and succeeded in becoming one of the chosen.

The few young boys and girls who dared to offer him cheers of support were quickly silenced by their parents, and in any case XJ-V paid no attention to anyone who attempted to hail him or offer him what meagre support they could. As far as the Cog was concerned, he was alone.

When finally he came to the outskirts of Tanak he beheld the burning buildings of the hamlet from afar, dashing behind a rocky overpass that gave him a good vantage point from which to observe the goings on. Between the smoke, men clad in jagged armor trudged, holding the villagers by their hair or necks. By the double-headed eagle emblem they wore upon their pauldrons and chest plates, XJ-V knew they belonged to the Divine Order. His worst suspicions were confirmed when he traced the curvature of their armored torsos and saw the gleaming blades of the double-edged Jian that lay in the scabbards at their waists. These were no basic soldiers. These were Xu’Jan – the Paladins of Light. The Order’s trained marauders, recruiters, and executioners.

They dragged the people from their burning homes to the town’s center and threw them in a great, disjointed heap – their faces strewn with blood and skin scarred by soot. Few deigned to fight back. XJ-V saw the eviscerated remains of those that had littering the streets – their limbs torn and cauterized by the killing light that flowed in the veins of the devilish paladins.

But at the very foot of the pile of living dead, a particularly bulky prisoner sat.

Ori’un! XJ-V almost exclaimed.

He was sitting as he usually would on the rooftops or communes of Ramor-Tai, hunched, shoulders forward, neck trained on the horizon beyond reality. They had done a number on him – that much was clear from the new scars and bruises that lined his face – but he still looked the very picture of defiance.

He sat as calm as stone and yet drained of energy, and XJ-V realized then what must have happened: they’ve taken his Qi from him. Even a single slash from the light-imbued blades of the Xu’Jan could kill the power of a Cultivator. That, the Cog knew for certain.

As he watched the proceedings unfold, he saw the hovels and straw huts of Tanak crumble to dust and ashes, the town becoming nothing more than a smoking ruin before its crying residents. Children clung to their mothers’ ragged clothes and fathers tried to comfort their grieving families. Some did not cry out. They just stared at the corpses that lined the streets, their eyes dead and dull, and said nothing at all.

And through the chaos, Ori’un sat amongst them.

What is he doing? The Cog thought. Does he not mean to escape?

A few of the paladins pointed out young boys amidst the crowd, and the children were swiftly, and forcefully, extracted from the arms of their parents. They were dragged off to the Order’s carriages that waited at the end of the village, bound for their strongholds.

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XJ-V knew the sight he was witnessing as it unfolded before his fiery eyes. This was the Order’s method of ‘recruitment’. They stole the children from the settlements they raided and indoctrinated them with the High Eagle’s beastly rhetoric – rhetoric that perverted the teachings of one of Qing’s own Prophets, Ming’Bao. Rhetoric that told these children that their parents were weak, and deserved to be conquered. In time, those boys would grow up to become just as brutal as the Order’s enforcers, and then they would look into the mad eyes of screaming parents as they plucked their babies from their breasts.

The Cog was becoming more aggravated by the second. Why Ori’un did nothing as he witnessed this chaos unfold, he could not understand. He made to rise and descend at once, pondering which targets he could take down first. There were at least a dozen of the Xu’Jan guarding their ‘prizes’ from the village that he could see, and probably a dozen more searching the burning buildings for any survivors they could drag from the ashen remains of their homes. XJ-V rose, flexed his fingers, and made ready for combat.

But as he moved, he saw something that told him to check his haste.

Something – someone – was beginning to address the waiting crowd.

“I’ll make this simple,” the voice was saying – a dry voice tinged with the harsh, guttural tone native to the Badlands beyond the mountain. “Give us safe passage to the monastery, or watch these infidels die.”

Ori’un’s head rose to address the speaker – a man covered by a plume of smoke to the North.

“Imagine,” he chuckled hoarsely. “Being lured and cut down by the promise of booze. A fitting end for a Planeswalker, don’t you think?”

The circle of Xu’Jan closed in, their hands itching to unsheathe their blades and finish the job they started. But the voice cut through the tension in the air like a knife being drawn across a chalkboard.

“You’re a funny man,” it said. “I think I’ll cut your tongue out, first.”

The speaker moved like a wolf through the smoke and the dust of the burning village, embers from his Paladins fires stroking his grim, bone-bleached skull. He wore nothing but a set of leather straps across his emaciated torso, his waist covered with a think half-robe that obscured his feet, giving him the appearance of a man gliding across the ash of the village. His right hand rested on the long Jian blade glimmered at his hip, yet his arms looked much too frail to even hold the vicious weapon upright nevermind swing it at a foe.

To look upon him was to look upon the ghostly visage of a pale specter that looked close to death, and yet when XJ-V looked at his snarling face, he saw where the true power of this warrior lay. He saw lips tinged with soot and sunken eyes – more akin the pair of black voids held by an Aoyin than those belonging to a human. His pale face was inked with the grim, black markings of the two-headed eagle standing atop a Cog’s skull which lay just above the ghostly demon’s heart.

To look upon him was not to observe the passing of an envoy of light. It was to look upon the dispassionate face of death itself.

And without a single twitch, with no emotion at all, the pale horseman drew his sword and aimed it at the crowd of wailing villagers.

“Bring me the infants,” he said. “Let’s test the resolve of a man who walks the wastes.”

Ori’un smiled right in death’s face as XJ-V began to move.

“If you think you’ll force me to help you, you’re mistaken. I’ve seen worse than you can do, old boy.”

The pale reaper turned as he was presented with a mother’s screaming babe, torn from her hands while her throat was slit before it.

Through it all, Ori’un watched. The villagers wailed like banshees for him to intervene. They practically threw themselves at his inert body. They kicked and struck him with their thin, frail fists. But he did nothing.

Through the melee, the pale executioner never took his eyes off him.

“Look how they beg you, child of the Dao,” he sneered. “Look how the weak cry out for a savior. Do you now see what the path tread by you and all your people shall lead to? It is inevitable.”

“So is death,” Ori’un said in all but a whisper. “I learned not to fear it a long time ago.”

“Then watch them die, Planeswalker,” the head of the Xu’Jan replied. “And know that you have no one to blame but yourself.”

“UGH!”

A bolt of fire cascaded through the air and hit a young Xu’Jan in the back of his head, sending him flying face-first into the burning wreckage of a house. The reaper turned, leveled his blade, and strained his eyes to focus on the creature that stood at the edge of the village, skeletal fingers smoking, body twisted in a perfect Siliubu stance.

“That’s the thing about the path we’ve chosen,” Ori’un said quietly. “It takes the strangest turns.”

As the pale demon fixed his dead eyes upon him, XJ-V stared right back.

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