The trail wound through the blackened mountains like a stream of blood, weaving past broken tree limbs and gutted fires. Below, a small camp of Naga spread out in the clearing - likely the last good cover they would have before the hillsides became a barren expanse of rock. Even here, shaded by the forest beneath Kyuden Hitomi, the heat of the Immortal Eye shone down from a reddened haze. Blood in the sky, blood on the mountains.

Balash snorted, running his fingers over the worn shaft of his bow and feeling the faint traces of strain in the wood. Soon, he would need another. This one had borne enough of death. A half-empty quiver of arrows at his side waited patiently for their release, and Balash scanned the broken patches of forest beneath the setting Eye.

Soon, the Pale Eye would open above them. The Dark One, the Unmaker. Balash looked up at the twilight warily. Soon it would be the Time of Undoing. Beneath him, the warm ledge began to cool as night seeped into the cracks. Darkness began to spread like a blanket. Like a festering wound. A sore, an injury to the light of the Mother Eye.

A rustle in the bushes. Behind Balash, the forest moved. With a whip-quick tremble, the bow was in his hands, the arrow nocked before his mind registered the movement. Words poured from his mouth - the ancient tongue of challenge. "Halt, stranger, and speak your name."

The only response was the guttural, spit-noises of the huu-man tongue.

With a snarl, Balash twisted his mouth around the unfamiliar phrases and harsh sounds. "Make no move unless I tell you, or you will die." The bushes froze. "Step out, toward me. Make no sudden motion."

The bow strained, the arrow quivered. The Eye touched the horizon.

It stepped out from beneath the trees, but the shadows stained it even in the last light of the sunset. Yellowed eyes, beast-teeth and fur along its arms and face. All around him, the scent of the Foul. Balash hissed, a great wellspring of rage, and his hand lifted from the arrow.

But the Akasha held the shaft, and the bow was silent.

"I bear a message" the huu-man began.

Within his mind, Balash cried to his brothers, and heard the echo of the Mind. They would come. "Your message is of no interest to us. If you have come here, you have come to be purged, or die."

The huu-man's face stretched, and the twisted blood-marks on his arms writhed beneath his skin. Marks of the Eye. "Then I will die serving my Lady, as she bids me." Unafraid, even in the face of certain death. Even facing destruction, these beasts were arrogant. The Shashakar said that the strange blood-taint made them so. The unknown evil. The Foul.
The arrow pulled, twisted, longed to be set free. Each breath promised the huu-man eternal rest, great peace and oneness with all that Was. But the misty fingers of the Akasha held strong against the bow, and Balash's tail slid angrily across the rock.

"A message, offered in good faith." The huu-man's pink flesh moved disgustingly, but Balash nodded. Behind the Naga guard, he heard the soft sounds of movement from the path toward the camp, and felt the gentle touch of minds within the Mind, seeking his. The Ashlim

"Unless you offer us your Lady's head, your messages are meaningless."

"Do not presume to know the riddle's answer before the question has been asked." The tattooed male grinned up at him, eyes glowing hollowly in their cavernous sockets. "Filthy Naga. Dare you to trespass on our lands? You will know Her wrath" The serpents on the man's shoulders fought for dominance, writhing in their mad, blood-shrouded embrace. "You will feel the power of Her will, as we do. As your brother does."

"You will know Her, as we know Her and you will love her, as we do" The voice echoed in the darkest parts of the Akasha, from the pool where the visions rose. The pink-fleshed beast before him grinned, but the voice was not his. It belonged to another.

The Heretic. Servant of the Foul.

By the all-knowing Eye! This thing must not be allowed to live! Balash struggled to release the arrow, to slay the beast, fought against the tug of the Eternal Pool, but the Akasha's call was deep within his soul. It fought him with the power of thousands of souls, the pool of the Mind, the conscience of all Naga that had ever been, but Balash's hatred of the huu-man beasts consumed him. He looked up, his hands shaking, white-knuckled against the bow and his eyes bleeding from the strain of the fight. Below them, on the path, voices rose in the ancient tongue.

"I have taken your brother." The tattooed man whispered to Balash. "I have tasted his soul." The words - words no human could pronounce, words in the ancient tongue of his people. "As I will have yours"

Shashakar!
Qamar!
Qatol!

As his fingers slipped from the string, Balash felt a devastating snap within his soul, an aching loss. The arrow sprang to life, arching across the distance, its metal head screaming against the wind. Revenge something no Naga had ever tasted, before this single arrow was released, on this dawning night..

And its price was blood.

The devastation tore through Balash's body as if it were a plague sent by all the fields of the Shadowlands. Each shivering touch of agony, each place within his being where he had held cherished thoughts - all were ripped away. The Foul tore through him, bearing memories which were not his, thoughts which had no meaning. Shreds of hope devoured by meaningless emptiness. Nothing filled the void. Aching need, divine loss, as if he had been cast forth from all life. Cut off from his very soul. Balash screamed, howled, but his voice was as empty as wind, and nothing answered. He was alone.
Alone.

In the silence, Balash felt the soft touch of a scaled hand, the strength of the earth below his shoulders. Aching, cold, he could only feel a desperate absence. He would give anything to fill it Words from years away drifted to his ears. Blood, rich and red, trickled across the dry ground toward him. Mocking him.
Emptiness.

Then, a surge of light. The Shashakar. The Akasha.

"I have lost a son" The Qamar's voice wrapped itself around the ache. "I will not lose a brother." Balash's vision began to clear, and the rush of Mind held him in a gentle blanket. With the cool sweetness of water, voices filled him, carried him aloft, soothed his soul.

He was not alone.

"Hitomi" The voice belonged to the Qamar's pet beast. The Daini. "She has done this. Her evil is a force which seeks to destroy all who oppose her." His gibbering tongue pounded against the ache in Balash's mind, and he heard the Qamar whisper approval and agreement. Then, a softer tone opposed him.

"No, my brothers." The quiet man. The huu-man who smelled of the Sky. "Her goal is not evil, as you understand it." He whispered, but his voice rang through the earth - and the Mind Good and Evil are meaningless. There is only the Riddle."

Balash looked up, his brutalized vision blurred and stained red from his own blood. The ground swam and tipped lazily from side to side, and only the gentle hands of Shashakar's new Ashlim kept the Eye above from falling down to Unmake him. As the Qamar and his pet moved away, back toward the camp, the quiet huu-man stared up at the star-filled sky. Balash groaned, and his bleeding hands clutched at the Ashlim's strong arms.

"I was torn from the Akasha," he began, "and you brought me back."

The Ashlim looked down at him, her pale eyes troubled as she cradled his head in her lap. "I did nothing. You had no Taint." With a whisper, she looked at the quiet man-beast. "Not as we understand it.." Her hand stroked Balash's cheek, soothing the rage and anguish. "It was the Foul."

"He returned you, not I." she murmured, looking at the man who smelled of Sky.

"The beast the huu-man said" Balash spat blood, "He had a message. But he brought nothing"

"Nothing?" The huu-man looked up at the shadow of the castle, his face pale beneath the gaze of the Unmaker. "Hitomi's message was clear. If you did not understand it, young Balash," his words hissed in the ancient tongue, and it made Balash recoil to hear them, "you will never understand what she seeks." He turned to look at the Naga, the blood of the dead tattooed man pooling between them. A single arrow was buried in the dead man's throat, between the now-silent serpents. In the guttural human tongue, the man-beast whispered, "What we seek."

Around them, the wind flickered through the wasted trees and over the hollow rocks of the northern mountains, bringing with it the chill touch of snow.