Ishkinil found herself standing back by the rune covered ur-enkuzu stone in the clearing beside the waters. On the grass beneath the stone lay Amuzad, his face one at peace. No sign of wounds marred his body yet he was dead. Ishkinil could sense it, without having to check. Of the gnarled staff there was no sign.
She knelt down beside the body. He had done that which many attempted to do, to escape from Enkurgil’s embrace when the end came, all to no avail. Yet, in this, she felt no anger, nor need to rectify it. The Heart of Arkech Usor had taken up Amuzad in a way she did not understand. A soft dirge she began to sing over his body, a mournful tune of remembrance for the fallen. A hush settled over the clearing and a beam of sunlight drifted down across the body as she sung, a gift, no doubt, from the Heart.
When at last she was done, she rose back to her feet. The body she would leave. In other times and other places, she would have buried it or burned it, but there it felt right to leave it, to let nature and the earth spirit honour it and reclaim it in their own way.
Ishkinil turned, and saw before her Heshberu, bloodied and clutching at a gaping wound in his side. He could not stand, but was slumped with his back to a tree, his face grimacing with pain.
“Curse you,” he wheezed, blood flecking his lips. “I should have killed you here while you were still in the primal realm.”
“You could not have done so,” she told him. A whisper of wings circled in from above and the raven landed upon the ur-enkuzu stone. “You would have been stopped.”
Heshberu tried to force himself to his feet, but strength departed him and he fell back again. “It is not too late,” he promised. “Power you can still have for the taking.”
“I had power once,” Ishkinil replied quietly. “More than enough, and yet never enough. In time you learn that it is not important.”
“You were a fool to give it up.”
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“The price was too great,” she promised him. “As you are discovering. You threw it all away for your lust for power. Death approaches and will soon have you.”
“You must stop it,” Heshberu grimaced. “I cannot die.”
“We all of us die, in time.”
“But it is not yet my time. I was promised. Listen, much I know that I can share with you. You could have power over life and death both if you but just stop him taking me. Think of all you can save. Think of all those you can bring back.”
Ishkinil walked over to Heshberu and squatted before him. Her pale eyes were tight with pain and loss. “Do not speak of what you cannot give,” she told him, voice curt. “The dead cannot return.”
“I can make it so,” he promised urgently, a trickle of blood running down from the corner of his lip. “Just help me.”
Ishkinil rose back to her feet and the shadows closed in about her. “No,” she said and turned her back on Heshberu, walking away.
A wail came from the man, one that was cut off by coughing and then was silent. A presence she felt arrive, one overwhelming in nature. She turned at it, to see an ethereal form standing above the body of Heshberu. Tall the man was, and robed in black, his features indistinctive. Old he could have been, or young, fierce or compassionate, strong but weak, and many other conflicting states besides. Enkurgil, the Bringer of Ends, who saw to it that all died as they should and passed beyond the world.
He reached down to the body and his hands slid through it, emerging holding the ghostly form of Heshberu, a form that squirmed and resisted but could not break free from Enkurgil's grasp.
Enkurgil looked back up, to where Ishkinil stood and his eyes were filled with a deep understanding and sorrow. “You are weary, my child,” he said, voice both distant and everywhere, a whisper from the ages.
“I bear a heavy burden,” she replied.
“Do you regret what I have asked of you?”
“There are days where it is heavy than others,” Ishkinil said quietly, “But never regret.”
“A while longer is all that I ask,” Enkurgil told her, grasping tight on the still struggling form within his hands, “And then you can lay down your burden.”
“I will rejoice when that day has come.”
Then did Enkurgil fade away, taking with him Heshberu, leaving Ishkinil alone once more.
“Come,” said she to the raven, “I would leave these parts. The troubled waters of Arkech Usor will once more run clean. A new enku in time shall rise to guard the land, but I would be elsewhere. There is much to be done before I lay down my burdens and I would be about it so that it may end all the sooner.”
Thus saying, Ishkinil strode off, shadow cloaked and with the sword of death at her side, feet ever on the long road that her journeys took her, until her burden was fulfilled.