[IP] Duskborne Skymarcher

...

Jarl stared at the painting, just one of hundreds among the dark corridors of the shadowed halls. His eyes traced along in darkness, details found and followed past within the encasement of the thick metal frame.

It was a portrait of beauty, and pain. Of tragedy, and perhaps in its own special way: cruelty as well. It seemed fitting. From what Jarl knew of them, the history of the Dark Elves was of all those, and many more. Traitors, cowards, demons: titles and curses piled atop themselves like the corpses of their own kind. A species reduced to nothing more than slaves.

Yet here one was before that long and awful plummet, frozen in time by the falsehood of color by a master's hand.

There were rarely other people allowed this far up in the Blackened Spire. Truthfully, there were rarely any people at all in the west, and of those, there were many less among that number actually privileged to stand where Jarl now did. Certainly, many had died trying though.

Jarl knew this, because he'd done it.

Personally, and more times than he was willing to look back and count, he had often not even make it as far as he now stood. All for the deluded task of ending the life of a monster. Jarl had sacrificed everything for the sake of retribution, and found it fruitless.

There had been a price for his actions. A cost for the means that he might one day slay the existence that rested peacefully only a few floors further above his head. The Dark Lord was an being of evil that held little regard for the world or those within it. People, to that man... that monster: Jarl knew they were nothing more than puzzles and games, at best. To that man, there was nothing sacred. There was no line that couldn't be crossed. The concept of life and death was but a joke. Yet, standing where he did, Jarl couldn't help but feel that the humor was at his own expense.

Jarl... he still used the name. Jarl Congrad, it lingered still.

Out of respect, or perhaps guilt? What was one truly supposed to feel when ripping away another soul's body, and then taking it for his own?

More, probably.

Much more than he currently did.

He'd grown numb to it centuries ago, the existential dread of murder. If he tried though, focused on just what it was: the horror of the deed could still be rationalized. Long, long ago, he'd felt that the intentions behind the magic which brought this curse would be righteous. A noble story of ends that could to justify the means. What was his crime to dabble in such things, when compared to the evil he wished to defeat?

But time passed. Onward and onward, the waves came and crashed against the rocks of reality, and he'd achieved nothing.

For all the magics he knew, for all the talents he'd mastered, for all the lives burned away beneath his own ambitions: The Dark Lord still lived, and had become more powerful than ever. No longer simply a mortal man with corrupted strength: they were an immortal and undefeated construct. The Dark Lord was now seated comfortably at the threshold before ascension to something for more sinister. On the edge of divine, a cruel God of death before life.

How many times had Jarl tried to kill him before he'd found himself here, in this place? Before his steps had taken him to walk down the corridor of paintings; memories of history almost forgotten by the world- kept by the monster that ruled it?

Hundreds of times, at least, and each one of those likely tied to one or more lives wasted- none of which were his own. Futile flailings of a man completely out of his depth, batted aside like jokes made in poor taste.

The Dark Lord struck men down like flies, but was Jarl any different? Centuries of taking from the innocent, forcing life and nature to bend the knee- all for his own desires? Everyone else who'd resisted the Dark Lord was dead, or worse. The great nations of men had been torn down, their descendants clueless and fearful enough to erase the histories with pleasant lies and mindless faith. The Dwarven peoples were little different, so shattered and broken, nothing would ever repair them to their former glory. So lost from their heritage, it might not be a stretch to place them beside the modernized delusions of the humans themselves. In Jarl's eyes, only the Elves had truly taken the righteous path.

They had fought, and died. For the small exception of the traitors among them, or perhaps some long-forgotten tribe that might have hidden away from the known continents: not a single member of their species was likely to remain among the mortal plane. In their efforts to defeat the Dark Lord, they had been bested. For all their pride, their hopes, their talents: they had ceased to be.

Dust and ashes, bones crumbled to the fragments of sand.

And yet, all Jarl felt for them was envy.