Pain.

He had screamed when it began. No, if there was such a thing as a beginning to his suffering, it was now lost in the foggy halls of memory. Pain fiddled with reality, warping time. In this state, he had always been; a slave to a suffering that defied reprieve even in the murky depths of unconscious thought.

Reduced to a husk of tormented emotions by horrors birthed from his own tortured mind, time and space became irrelevant. Everything faded, chased to distant corners of cognizance by the burning light of pain.

Lost in his torment, he almost missed a vague, ephemeral sound. A sound so alien in his cocoon of agony that it threatened to upset the delicate balance of his psyche and nudge him past the edge of sanity.

Vulnerable but unyielding, his mind warred against the intrusion and rationality won out.

Someone was speaking and despite the jealous efforts of his own suffering, their words came to him, carving open the insensate void and bringing a jarring halt to monotonous torment.

‘The worst is over now my love,’ a feminine voice echoed in his mind.

To the shriveled piece of consciousness that held him together, it was a lifeline. Desperate, he grasped unto its frayed end and pulled, dragging himself breathless into the light of groggy consciousness. He awoke to a world rife with aches, spasms and a myriad of other unpleasantries, all vying for immediate attention. Blessed memory returned, turgid in its emergence and trailed by a bittersweet sense of lingering vitality.

Curses had been wrought, blood-flecked spittle sprayed and tears borne in twin streams of shame and anguish. A deep self-loathing bloomed, further clearing the heavy clouds of confusion in his head.

Belatedly he realized his torment had dissipated, but with its retreat came the terrible realization that he couldn’t feel a thing.

Muted were the morose calls of the carrion birds that circled the air above him, numb was the press of the unyielding forest floor beneath his form.

Protesting eyelids opened to a world lacking a tenth of its color, strange shadowy shapes haunted the boundaries of his vision, vanishing with any attempt at focus.

The world swirled with a headiness that summoned bile from his gut and tortured his vision. Sore eyes blinked against the amber-tinted light bathing the foliage upon which he laid.

Perhaps it is only fitting that my end transpires in twilight's somber mien.

Tentatively, he strained to look upon what he could see of his form and despaired.

Once he had been a creature of wary pride and ineffable strength, the lastborn of the Anwarija; servants of true-light and sentinel against the devices of the Dark one. For a millennia he had stood with his brothers, firm in purpose against the Dark one's corruption and the ill-fated dreams of the god-child wherever they spawned. A lifetime, oath-sworn to hold the final bastion of the Ifera, the ancient ones against all that would seek to breach its adamant walls.

His kin had long departed from the material, their storied vigil brought to an end by the blessings of time. He had stood; witness to their successive passing, knowing-fearing-that when his blessing came, none would hold vigil in his name.

How wrong I was.

Perhaps it was this fear that had led him astray. Forced him down a path that had culminated in his destruction. Here he laid;

throat parched, tongue mangled, skewered limbs, sore-eyed and broken pride. His brutalized form, a testament to a feeling so alien to his experience its acquaintance still left him in doubt.

Failure.

Lost in his pain, he had forgotten that it wore many forms. It had rewarded his return to the waking-world with the arrival of a shame so deep it tore a savage grunt from his broken lips. The sound raw and grating in the relative silence. Panic danced across his chest, a return to oblivion flirted, halted only by the return of the voice in his head.

‘Anwa,’ the voice beckoned, this time demanding his focus. It was a thought-send, separate from the chaos in his mind and the name was his, but it soured in the speaker's sending, tainted as it was with the patronizing undertone of one who addressed a child.

‘Curse your hapless vitality, even with my vaunted gifts you still managed to make this a headache for me.’

The words came directly from the mind of a figure kneeling somewhere beyond his line of sight. They had employed the thought-send knowing his physical senses failed.

‘Juma?’ he replied using the pathways that linked both their minds.

Silence...She must have deemed his inquiry undeserving a response.

‘Why do this thing?’ he sent…'why betray me, why betray us'?

With no reply forthcoming, he moved in a bid to bring her within his gaze but was suddenly held immobile by dark words of eldritch power. Bound by the holding spell, his form went rigid. A gnat took that moment to skip across the white of his left eye, partially blinding his vision. The eye watered but even its tears were turgid, so potent was the spell.

If the speaker noticed his discomfort, she made no move to alleviate it.

Idly, Anwa mused on the unusual origin of the spell, for while it held the flavor of the ancients, it was far too ominous and its dark grasp hid something he could only vaguely identify as malevolence.

Just who are you truly?

He barely heard or felt movement but suddenly, she was above him, straddling him with thighs he could barely feel, her face leaned in to his, almond-shaped hazelnut eyes searching for something in his expression. He tried to deny her enquiry, avert his gaze but the spell held true.

The architect of his current disposition was wickedly beautiful. Coal-dark braided locks of hair left unbound framed an oval face with sensual features. Her light-brown eyes were empty of their once-held affection, but they still retained their uncanny brilliance. Her ebony dark skin was unblemished and glowed a faint blue from the effects of the ritual. A narrow nose banked to a point above lips sensual in their parting. She held him in her gaze until a wry smile teased the corners of her mouth before moving away, leaving behind the mental equivalent of an exasperated sigh.

Lazily she fingered the arm-length spike that impaled his elbow. Anwa noted that it made up the sixth barb she had planted in his flesh. 

'I was hoping the paralysis would not prove so...complete,' she said with a wicked smile and a suggestive shake of her waist.

Anwa ignored her taunt, ‘Know you the horrors you have forced on this world may never be undone,’  he sent. Even now, as he lay helpless and bound, he realized he had fought himself against using her pet name. Some habits died hard, for that he was mostly thankful for the spell's potency.

He found himself watching as the light played across her ebony skin, catching golden reflections in tiny beads of sweat that dribbled down her lithe form even as she tilted her body back for a stretch, feline in its execution. Anwa should have known there was an absolute truth to her name; Anjumari, it meant lightblinder in the elder dialect.

He had taken to calling her Juma which loosely translated into light, but he had been naïve…one did not change the nature of a thing by calling it another.

Juma…light of my eyes

Betrayal.

He cursed himself for his weakness. Her perspiration meant that the spell was taxing, perhaps if he could somehow delay her, the spell would run its toll and weaken her enough for him to recover the more subtle aspects of his abilities.

A few moments passed–interspersed with her stretching– when she quickly moved, her arm shot out just above his head and snatched at the gnat that had been sampling the meager delicacies offered by his left eye.

'This is a party for one,' she hissed as she crushed it between thumb and finger before turning to him.

'It would seem that our time together is at an end my love,' she sent as she bent towards him once again.

In a moment, he was beneath her shadow. The scent of her forced its way through the numbing grasp of the spell and Anwa was curiously reminded of the smell of rain. A deathly chill permeated her skin as her palm caressed his beard and her brown-eyed regard dominated his view.

By the old ones, may I be twice damned but she is beautiful and I yet, remain a fool! Juma...thief of fire.

Her hair fell across his face, as her eyes held his ‘I know very well what I have done my love’, she sent. The words coming easily into his mind.

He tested his bonds but the wards remained potent. Ancient magic, forbidden even to his kind but Juma wielded it as if born to it. She had always been his greatest weakness but he had blinded himself to her threat. How could he not?

Juma…herald of darkness, blinder of light. 

‘Little good will come of this! This is not the way!’ He strained to get his thoughts through a haze that slowly held his mind hostage. ‘The pact of the ancients cannot be broken so easily. I was merely a check on the potential of this age, a watchdog…I fear that you are unprepared for the consequences of your actions.’

Juma laughed. Her mirth was cruel and the sight sent a chill through him. ‘That is where you fail my love’, she sent as she raised a final spike. Its obsidian point glistened with her blood and crimson beads fell to pool at the hollow of his neck.

‘I free them from your tyranny. You and your kind are naught but fragments of the past. Destined to be the ghosts of a new age…and you underestimate yourself my love', she drew in close, her full lips were slick with perspiration but she pressed them softly against his mouth.

It was a kiss bereft of affection but wholly lustful in its attention. Anwa felt himself crumble, his body struggling to respond while his mind reeled in revulsion.

Slowly she pulled away and regarded the spike as she sent, ‘you are more than an unassuming lock on the entrance my love. You are the key!’

Throwing her head back, she shut her eyes and whispered the final words of a dark spell. Her thighs tightened around his form, stirring uncomfortable desires even as his demise surely approached.

And thus, I remain...a fool till the end.

Anwa physically felt the malicious enchantment fall over him. Its nature was one of pure evil. Within moments the edges of his vision blurred and a sinister gloom slowly crept forward to crowd his vision.

It was again fitting that his sight should be his final sacrifice. The light of his world had betrayed him. Anwa felt himself drifting away, lost and marooned in a place devoid of sense and nature.

As he faded away – awareness slowly eroded by the malignant darkness – doubts assailed his final moments. 

Perhaps Juma was right.

For too long he had believed in the forewarnings of the old ones. An eternity had found him standing guard at the gates of an primordial path, defending the legacy of ancients, a pact securing the ignorance of those left behind.

For eons he had observed the world change while he remained stagnant; the muted custodian at the dawn of the new age championing the legacies of a forgone order. Long forgotten by any but him.

I am, was…the listener, audience of one to primordial voices long silent; the final executor of the eternal will of the Ifera.

I was, am, and will forever be…the fool.

Juma, when she came to him millennia ago, she had – between the furtive caresses and stolen kisses – promised him a release from his endless watch. She had held true to that promise. She had in betrayal, granted him his one true wish. She had unknowingly stood vigil. Even now, he found that he feared not the void, not its coaxing call, bidding his surrender.

This time there was no pain to anchor him, he drifted away, welcoming the nothingness.

The spike came down. Its blood coated point pierced and drove through his neck, puncturing his throat and impaling him to the moss covered ritual floor. There was no pain this time– Juma had granted him a small mercy in the end – his blood flowed freely. His body bathed in the epileptic showers of his lifeblood.

The warmth of her stalked the fool...even into oblivion.

…

Anjumari stood aloof from the body of the conscientious fool as she wiped his blood off.

It truly was a shame.

She had been fond of the guardian but his time had passed and he would not fold to her design, obstinate even in the face of betrayal and death.

She had cursed his stubbornness, but ultimately understood its purpose, just as she understood hers.

It was her time…the last of the Anwarija lay dead at her feet, his lifeblood spilled in a ritual that would sever the old accords, and usher in a new age. The time of mankind slaving under the restrictions of the Ifera and their peons was at an end. Her people will have no need to depend on the magnanimity of the ancient ones to face the darkness that lurked beyond their cookfires.

The lands of Arafe were now ultimately free of Ifera and Anwarija control, and she would lead the Ansawe to their glorious inheritance.

Progress had demanded a certain nudge to set the new order in motion, Anjumari had gladly given herself to the cause.

In the distance, a nightbird called. Anjumari raised her eyes to the distant figure of Ankar’na as his rounded outline appeared faintly in the sky. The guardian was gone, Arafe was hers to shape as she saw fit.

Singing softly, she strolled away from the ancient ritual site. There was work to be done, dark work, her ritual had been observed by one who would need humbling, then kings of men would come next. There were still others like her, hiding amongst the squalor of human civilization; cowards afraid of their own abilities, to them she would teach anew. Awaken them to their inheritance.

The Ansawe had to take up the mantle and solidify their hold on Arafe before the Ifera returned.

Anjumari stopped to take one final look at the last of the Anwarija before vanishing into the dense forest that surrounded the ancient ritual ground.

Some moments after she had departed, a lone gnat buzzed lazily around the body of the dead guardian. Finally content that it would not be disturbed, it settled across an open wound and greedily lapped at smidgens of blood.

Halfway through its feast, it felt unexpectedly bothered and took flight.

A sudden silence descended upon the ritual site. Everything held in perfect stasis as the very world seemed to hold its breath. Moments passed and then an infant's wail broke the spell. In the direction that Anjumari had left, blood red footprints the size of a newborn’s carefully trailed her larger tracks.