Azrael

Nineteen

The two lone figures slowly made their way up the rocky hillside. It was the dead of night, when only the most ominous creatures were active, and there were more shadows than light to find. The sky was bleak and grey, the moon's illumination barely getting through the hazy clouds.

They stopped at the top of the hill, standing under a maple tree that housed a rather noisy owl. The last winter snow had melted away several weeks ago, and all the wildlife should have been in full bloom. Instead, the ground was muddy and smelled of dampness and decay. A place once filled with life was now a world of shadows, and the towns left had no names.

Their gaze was fixed on the plains beyond the hill, where a small town resided. It was completely isolated from everything else, an island in the middle of several miles of forest. The two were standing far away enough that the sentries around the compound couldn't notice them, but the guards themselves were visible as they crisscrossed on their patrols around the camps below. Massive torches burned along various points on a rough circle around the town, allowing some visibility. There were also campfires along the outside of that boundary with people sitting around them, eager to keep away the bite of the chilly winds.

"This is it," the man in the red cape spoke first, waving a gloved hand towards the town. "The forest around them is filled with Spiders. It's a risky life, even for elves, but it keeps intruders out."

"Smaller than I envisioned." The wearer of the black cape muttered. Her feminine voice was a few octaves higher than his, but it rang with a similar composed tone.

The frigid temperatures had not completely subsided, and Azrael tightened the black fur coat she wore around herself, more out of habit than necessity. There was something about dark elves that tickled her the wrong way. Shadow magic was her dominion, but their twisted way of using it in addition to necromancy was taking it to a level beyond her own.

The dead were meant to stay dead.

"Is that a good thing?" Raphael asked, turning to face her. The little moonlight meant he couldn't see her expression, not that it mattered. He had always found it hard to decipher what went through her mind by reading her face.

"It should be," she replied. "But it probably means they have an ace up their sleeve. They wouldn't have survived this long with just torches on the walls as an advantage. And if they have an Architect, it would have taken a significant amount of power to hold him."

Raphael stifled a yawn. He had been asleep when Azrael had barged into his chambers and told him to go with her. Had anyone else even dared to attempt such a thing, they would spend some time in the dungeons thinking about their decisions. He was the future elven king for goodness' sake. But for the tens of years that he had known her, Azrael didn't care for nobility. Disappearing for decades and then returning in the middle of the night to carry out a raid on a dark elf prison was not out of the ordinary for her.

He had heard the rumours of course, from some of the foreign guards around the castle as they sat around campfires and got themselves drunk. Azrael, they called her, a name that had been reserved for the god of death in their culture, a name she had taken on herself. He had asked her about her real name once before and she had replied that it had been too long for her to remember.

One thing she remembered though was Malaki. Raphael had never met the other elf, only heard tales of the crimes that had gotten him locked away. It was odd to imagine the pair having been friends or even partners before. Whereas Azrael was calm and composed, Malaki was said to be unstable and spontaneous. Both were powerful, but while her power was clean and efficient, his was destructive and turbulent. She killed with grace, he murdered with brutality. In all honesty, Raphael thought the world was better off with such a malevolent being locked away to never see the light of day again. Azrael however, was determined to free him, despite the knowledge that elven prisons were impregnable strongholds.