Light greeted Anubarak as his eyes opened; not the soft, ethereal light of the Halls of Enkurgil as he had half expected, but warm, inviting firelight that came flickering from a torch. Ishkinil squatted beside him where he lay on the ground, torch in hand, Dirgesinger sheathed at her side.

Anubarak blinked his eyes, trying to get a bearing on everything. His face was on fire, not cold as before, and the pain seemed localised to just it. The agony of before had faded.

“Has it ended?” he asked.

“Almost,” Ishkinil told him. She extended her free hand, taking his hand and helping him to sit up. “We completed what we set out to do, to sever the bonds that bound the spirits of the Shahadi to their mortal forms.”

Anubarak touched his face, feeling the cuts across them, curiously without blood. “How bad is it?”

“There will be scars.”

“Noticeably so?”

“Yes.”

Anubarak lowered his hand and nodded slowly. “I suppose it could have been worse.”

“You still live, you did not loose an eye, it is true. All of us bear scars. Yours are just more noticeable.”

“I doubt any will believe them if I tell them how I received them, and from what.”

A touch of a smile touched Ishkinil's lips. “That is likely so, yes.” She stood up. “All that we have been through will be for nothing if we do not destroy the bodies.”

Anubarak scrambled to his feet, recovering his sword, a thing of plain steel once more.

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“My sword, it was golden,” he said.

“It was a reflection of your spirit,” Ishkinil explained. “Your true sword was of this world and so could not go with you.”

“Yours was.”

“Dirgesinger is not exactly of this world,” she told him. She moved over to where the bodies lay upon the stone slabs. To Anubrak they appeared different than before. Less imposing, less harsh. Less terrifying. They looked shrivelled and weak, a shadowed reflection of what they once had been. “Once before I instructed you to strike them. If you do so again, the results will be different.”

“You do not wish to do so?”

Ishkinil shook her head. “Nay, this victory should be yours. You have paid a price for it after all.”

Anubarak took a two handed grip upon the hilt of his sword and swung with all his might, putting all his emotions into it. The sword glistened in the torchlight as it arced through the air, to strike one of the bodies across the neck, cutting clean through it. The now detached head rolled away from the body, to the edge of the stone slab.

Anubarak raised his sword again, then shook his head. “It is not enough,” he said.

“How so?”

“This will not truly destroy the bodies, not this way.”

“No, it will not.”

“Then why instruct me to do so?”

“You needed this final victory. Not just over this foe, but your fears and doubts. You have faced near the worst that this world has to offer and triumphed. But to truly destroy them will require fire.” She extended the burning torch towards him.

Anubarak took the torch, and one by one touched it to the bodies. Desiccated, brittle, fragile, the flames easily took hold and soon the cavern was filled with bright flames that licked and twisted, flames edged with strange colours, not burning pure. Acrid smoke also rose from the bodies, higher into the air. Anubarak backed away from it, so as not to breath it in.

Together they watched as the bodies were consumed, until nothing remained of them but ash and dust laying on the stone slabs. These Anubarak swept aside, to let fall and mingle with the dust on the ground so that none might tell that once the bodies of ancients had lain there, or of the efforts to return them to the world.

“I think we are done here,” he announced.

“Truly it is so.”

He looked around the cavern one last time before shaking his head. “Now if only there had been wealth here as well, it would have capped off the day.”

Ishkinil laughed at that and clapped him on the shoulder. “There is treasure to be had elsewhere, if that is what you desire, but you have gained wealth from this in other ways. Come, let us depart this place. We are done with it and long roads await, and dark places still to find. Who knows, in one may be the treasure you seek.”