Down into Darkness, Up into The Light of Salvation

[Marcus Kobra]

Marcus knelt in prayer beneath the great Ankh inside the Chapel. His prayers going out to Avatar for guidance. He prayed with such a fervor that sweat beaded on his brow and upper lip, poured down his chest and back. After many hour his prayers were pleas, cries for help. Finally, late into the night he collapsed to the floor in silent sobs, the cloud cover shifting to let the moon shine in through the stained glass windows.



It was months before, while fighting alone that it happened. Marcus had backed himself into a corner again. He often went out alone to train, usually with the determination to improve or die trying. It looked then as if he would indeed die. The sound of bone on cobble stone came to him. That incessant *click-clack, click-clack* He held his stomach as blood seeped through his fingers. His bandages were exhausted, his potions dried up, and the meager fire he'd started was dieing. The undead had some uncanny fear of the stuff. He knelt on one knee, leaning mostly on his sword to keep upright. He prayed now, begging not for his life, but the strength to destroy his enemies before he succumbed. *CR-RACK* The sound of the door being nearly bashed in broke him from his prayers. He slapped his hand into the embers of his fire and made the Ankh upon his forehead the staggered to his feet. "Come one then! Guardian spawn come and send me to Avatar! I welcome it! But you shall meet your judgment!" In a blink they broke through the door swarming the room. Marcus shield rushed them but soon had his shield ripped from his arm as he was battered into the back wall. Bony fingers clawing and tearing at him pulling him down into blackness. It was in a voice full of denial that he screamed, the most primal noise he had heard in over twenty years. "Avatar damn you all!" As the curse left his lips, as he felt his body giving out and over to deaths sweet embrace, as he saw his loves face before his eyes again, he flung his shield arm out pointing into the midst of them all just as a roaring fireball formed and then shot forth.

He awoke hours, days later maybe. The charred remains told him enough. He never reported the action to command, and told no one of it. Each night he went and he prayed at the chapel. In his heart he knew it was not enough. He was damned, right with the guardian spawn he would condemn. That had led to this.

He knew that he had to die, the wytch must burn, the thief must be strangled, the heretic must be hung. But which fit his crime. As a wytch he should be burnt, as the thief of the energies that created the world he should be strangled, and for hidding the information form the church he was a heretic...

Marcus didn't know how he should die, but he knew that he had one last quest. In the midst of the Great Forest, east of Yew, there were a number of unmarked graves. He would go there, find the body of his beloved and bury her not on native soil, but in the one place she might have truly called home. Cove.