The shattered form of the Shrike of Hsira - a mess of broken bones - crashes to the ground barely muffled by the tattered remnants of his robes. A deathly silence numbs the senses of those who had been locked in mortal combat with him, and though wounds are swiftly mended to ensure survival should it all be a ruse, the onlooking survivors measure the next minute by the sound of their hearts beating in their ears. His now-brittle bones still collapsing, the necromancer lies still.
Gradually muscles relax, joints release their white-knuckle hold, and spells are stilled on the motionless tongue. Relief and hope tease their way to the front of the mind. Eyes are permitted to blink.
But they would not, if they knew the importance of this moment. A moment that has not come to pass since the Age of Stone; unwitnessed since the Age of the Inaethri. All across Myzelis, fear had spread with a name, and onto that fear the name was etched. All the death, all the terror, all the destruction caused by the weaponization of Xultras had one engineer - the Shrike of Hsira.
Anger spread as well, of course, but it was anger born of fear, the fear that a threat cannot be ignored and must be stopped. Even now, the connections that had at one time carried naught but hope and unity from the Rhuddinwyd to the furthest reaches of the leylines was tainted by the resonance of the peoples’ terror. For as those who cultivate the Leylines into Realms combine their hopes and belief into gods, so too do they bind their darker emotions… into darker gods. Via the ascendant path of godhood - the Inaethrid.
The corpse lay still, but the soul had long since transcended it. The spirit that was once the Shrike of Hsira drank deep of the fear and supped upon the death it had sown, lurking and growing in the ethereal like a titanic weed. The form grew from the psychic link to not just Gylidd’s fear, but Myzelis’ fear. The terror of undeath and chaos… and evil.
Myzelis bore witness to the Inaethrid of the Shrike of Hsira.
The Shrike reached into and through the earth, grappling with a dark and evil cancer unseen and hidden away, and snatched divinity from it. Another inaethri, the Master, now rendered little more than a patron with a spiritual jerk of the Shrike’s ethereal beak. The Shrike was the Gylidder Inaethri of Chaotic Evil Death, now, and the Master was exposed for the outsider it truly was, a mere interloper demon prince, whose days in this world were already numbered.
Bristling with newfound depths of power, the Shrike prepared to will the world to change to suit its needs. It manifested visibly in the material plane, towering over Gylidd Syn Aethri and distorting the skies around it. But for all of the Shrike’s planning, he forgot the rule of natural law, and failed to account for its eternal enforcer.
The Brume in every Realm began to bristle and seethe at the audacity of an aethrin god in her World. Vrokíva would never again tolerate reckless, limitless power, and so she surged forth across the borders of Gylidd, her Brume headed into the sky but uncaring about the tiny villages she smothered in her wake, blotting them out forever.
The inaethric Shrike recoiled, withdrawing from the touch of the Brume, and chose like so many others before it to exile itself to the outer planes rather than be permanently destroyed. There it would remain, granting magic to those who saw wisdom in his madness. As for Vrokíva, once the threat had gone, its Brume retreated without apology.
In the coming days, the world would find balance again, adapting to the new emergence of leylines of fear alongside the leylines of peace. In many places, the threats of Xultras’ presence and the Shrike’s influence had been banished, but not all, and that would be a terror for another day. But with all hope, a stronger, more unified Myzelis would rise to defy them.
