He faced the mirror, a sheet of silvered glass framed in ornate, polished copper. The face of a man he did not know stared back, its features obscured by the clinging vapour. He stripped away his dirty, blood-soaked clothes, the sticky fabric sliding over skin that was not his own.
Xayn: "Are we such fools to think stolen forms can restore what we've lost...?"
The words were a low murmur, spoken to the stranger in the glass. He stared until the reflection ceased to be a face, until it dissolved into a monstrous collage of textures and shapes he could not recognize.
Xayn: "I'm not sure any magics can revive the memory of who I used to be. My face, my body... time and distance have long since eroded even my recollection of them."
He placed an open hand flat against the cool, damp surface of the mirror, studying the spread of his fingers. They were well-formed, fleshed out, the nails clean and whole. Nothing like the skeletal claws he had known as his own for so long.
Xayn: "This existence as a revenant has far eclipsed mine own as a human... How many millennia has it been...?"
The hand clenched into a fist, knuckles pressing white against the glass.
Xayn: "Whatever Bazren sees in these shapes remains foreign to me. As alien as the putrid carcass disguised beneath."
His head bowed, his new eyes shutting against the sight of the stranger.
Xayn: "I am no form, but substance..."
In his left hand, a small gathering of ethereal blue flames crackled to life, the light cool and familiar. The fire coalesced, hardening into a single, spectral arrow, its tip sharp as a shard of ice.
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Xayn: "... And I grow sick and tired of the false meaning behind a shell."
He didn't hesitate. With a smooth, deliberate motion, he plunged the arrow into his own chest.
Pain, searing and absolute, blossomed beneath his ribs. It was a horrifying, welcome sensation. A gasp tore from his lips as blood, shockingly red and vital, welled from the wound, a single, perfect droplet tracing a path down his torso.
Before it could fall to the pristine marble floor, he stepped into the shower stall. The arrow remained embedded in his flesh, a defiant beacon of his true nature. He turned the valve, and a torrent of scalding water poured from the lion's-head fixture above. As the heat cascaded over his skin, another alien shock, the ethereal arrow began to dissolve, the blue light fading into motes that were washed away.
As it vanished, the wound began to close. Flesh knitted with unnatural speed, the torn muscle and skin sealing over until not even a scar remained.
Xayn: "It should've been you stepping foot back into this world, my friend... Not I."
In the crimson-stained water swirling at his feet, the memory rose unbidden, as vivid and terrible as the moment it had happened. He was there again, standing on the cracked, ashen plains of a dying world.
A wound in reality, a screaming fissure that bled the light of another dimension, tore the sky asunder.
Bazren (past): "Raxyas..."
Xayn (past): "What are you doing, Raxyas?!"
Before them stood a titan, a colossal undead figure clad in void-slicked obsidian armour from which golden, divine light bled at the seams. Countless tendrils of that same light swayed from his back like a seraph's wings, a paradox of divine decay. Black, tar-like energy clung to his frame, consuming him, his very form cracking and shivering under the strain of the power he contained. Before him, the portal pulsed, an unstable pillar of raw potential.
Raxyas: "The only thing... left to do..."
His voice was the sound of a mountain breaking. His body was coming apart, overflowing with a power he could no longer control. He stood before the shrieking pillar of light, a final, desperate bulwark.
Raxyas: "Help me out here... you guys..."
With a final surge of will, he created a focal point, a singularity of shimmering energy hovering before the portal. A synchronous assault, a storm of power from Xayn, Bazren, and a dozen other desperate revenants, hammered into that point. It was a catalyst. The blast that erupted was monumental, striking the pillar of light, forcing it, for one breathtaking moment, into a stable gateway. Through it, they could see the impossible green of a living world.
Raxyas: "Tentoria... said... Deep in the Eluvian... white magic... find it..."
The words were gasped out, a final testament as his colossal carcass dissolved into motes of golden ash and void-black dust.
Raxyas: "Lights... Out..."
Xayn rubbed his eyes, the steam of the present doing little to cloud the clarity of the past. The echo of his own voice, frantic in the aftermath, haunted him still.
Xayn (recalling): "Where is it? Where is his soul, Bazren. Do you see it? Where... Where is it?"
He clenched his hands into tight fists under the running water, a hotness welling behind his eyes that had nothing to do with the steam. Tears, foreign and salt-sharp, mixed with the water on his face.
Xayn: "I'm finishing what you started... if it's the last thing I do."
He braced his arms against the cold stone of the wall, his head hanging between them as the water sluiced over him, washing away the blood, but never the memory.
Xayn: "Your sacrifice will not have been in vain...!"