Later, within the bloody dominion of Anna de la Lune…

Human and elven corpses lay slumped upon furniture and floor alike, impaled by the black blades of eldritch chains stained red with blood. Like iron headstones, they remained all around the mansion as remnants of the violent power held by the Hellbourne, of eldritch magic wreaked upon mortal flesh and bone.

“Yearning…”

Now that everyone else was deathly quiet, Anna liked it. Now, she stood atop the staircase leading down to the hall. Lost in thoughts, all alone. There was a serenity to the sounds that remained, be it the whispers of her own voice, or the grating melody of her black chains lagging upon blood and marble. It was all, to her, a rhythmic certainty – slow and steady like her every breath upon this world. Just like her heartbeat, echoing in her thoughts like a tambourine.

“Forever blessed… yet haunted…”

Her heartbeat, indeed. In silence, she placed a bloodied hand upon her left breast. The Bloodstone that was now her black heart felt like a chunk of ice upon her fingers, cold and distant from the softness of flesh to her right.

“In reverie…”

Whatever it was, it had made her powerful. She could still remember, even now, the look of despair upon the faces of the remaining followers of Izoria Vhal when she stood before them atop this same staircase, tossing the dragon’s decapitated head down the marble steps. After that, those who had drawn their weapons had died. Those who tried to flee from their sins, died as well. And those who had tried to pray to her as they did the old master, were all dead.

Since then, the survivors were but a simple matter to hunt down. Within the four walls of this mansion, their fear was palpable in the air like the scent of prey. And they led her, perhaps unwittingly in their desire to survive, into the basement where the prisoners of the old master languished. When the last of the black-robed vermin had fallen bloody and broken upon the floor, she remembered shattering the cells with a flurry of bladed chains brought forth by a mere gesture and tears of blood, freeing the test subjects who feared for their lives like she once did. And she remembered how they fled from her, screaming.

“Sis…”

Truly, was this what it meant to be Hellbourne? To have this strength, to lay waste to everything and everyone before her? She remembered the word, and its alien and ugly intonation. Now, the sound of it made her smile, for it was this power that would be her salvation. That she, despite all that had been done, would have the strength to reach into the depths of the afterlife, and save her elder sister.

“I’m…”

“Hey there.”

In that brief moment of lunacy and reverie, it had slipped her notice. But now, across the hall, standing by the front door that had been closed shut, she could see the elven girl who was dressed in red, whose yellow hair slipped from her hood like luscious locks of gold. And she could spot, so clearly in her bloodied vision, the fiendish gleam of golden earrings shaped in the symbol of Elicia that adorned the lobes of the elven girl’s knife-like ears.

“Anna de la Lune, I presume?”

“No…”

“Oh? Care to tell, then?”

“Why, to you and to everyone here, I am death incarnate…”

With tears of blood streaking down her green eyes, Anna willed forth a flurry of bladed chains. Emerging from the very fabric of reality itself in runic circles of black and gray, they sliced through the air as though to make it bleed. And in the resulting explosion of fire, festering sparks, and broken eldritch links that sizzled into the bloodied mire around them both, her lips formed into a demented smile as she eyed the crimson light of her opponent’s sigil.

“I am Hellbourne!”

“Hmph. Seems like it, huh?”

Looking each other in the eye, they brandished their palms towards each other. Their sigils, a clash of crimson and green, made themselves manifest once more upon the world.