There exists a certain urban legend now, which originated from the minor city of Bièremarché that death rides a dying horse. The phrase itself has been passed around for generations now, often repeated by people misappropriating the words. They act as though it is some profound warning when the meaning was quite literal. A man once arrived at Bièremarché, caped and hooded in the night, with cryptic reasons and foreign coin. Those who saw him believed they witnessed a demon, and the proof of their claim was the death of his horse shortly after he left. Not merely a bursting of the heart from exertion, but the creature was long since necrotic as though it had died several days past and continued to carry the stranger to his destination.

As one might guess, this legend came about during the Jeameaux rebellion when I took lone action. While attention was far to the west, and Lucius gathered his forces for a mountain siege, I slipped unnoticed to where no one was watching.

I strode down the cobblestones, by all appearances elderly and slow. I leaned on a cane and muttered to myself, not out of senility but to sort through the traces of magic that lingered in the city the way the rich smells of bakers linger long after their ovens grow cold. Several remarked about me, that it was no time of night for an old fellow to be alone, but that was one of the beauties of the city. Whereas scoundrels skulk the shadows of grander places, even the drunks were quiet and polite in Bièremarché. Town guard patrolled, saying early good mornings to the workers bringing firewood into the city and they chided those that hadn’t made it home yet, but crime was nearly a foreign concept.

It is truly sad that such quaint living is not something all people the world over can enjoy, but it does require a certain effort of the citizenry. I would say most bloods of peoples would never be able to create such a society, even if they too had a benevolent guiding hand, a continuation of divine right that saw fit to yearly proclaim that the laws were good, the people were good, and nothing should change.

Alas, the Bièremarché of today is little like the city a skulked through. The wars of later years pulled too many mercantile companies through the crossroads and swindlers found themselves drawn to the city like threshed wheat. But that is a tale for another time.

Originally, I had planned to only visit the city with a cadre of warriors about me. Leomund at the least. But I didn’t even require the presence of Golden, who I’m sure would have salivated at the thought of feasting on such a corpse as I was to make. Though, it would be unfair of me to say that he played no part in the affair. It was because of him that I was able to reproduce certain sigils, pass keys, and forge documents that identified me as an anointed priest of Shepherd.

Even these were not enough to give me free entry to the cathedral, but it was enough to summon one of the elder scholars. He was a hard man, firm in his resolve to protect the image of their angel. Had I been a mere pilgrim, I’m sure I would have had to stay in Bièremarché a fortnight, whiling away hours in the public library and dining in the gardens where locals played trireme and drank. However, the man was but a man. He had a most curious stigmata which let him transform honey into mead at a mere touch(1), which I learned almost as soon as I had him talking. Changing the subject to the loss of life at Fallen Crest Abbey, I easily cracked open his defenses and knew I had the heart of him when tears dribbled down his cheeks.

Of course, even that wasn’t enough to get me into the same room as the angel, but it secured me lodgings sufficiently close for my task. It might seem that there was a risk to my actions, that I was exposing myself to danger without allies to fall back upon. To that I say the risk would have been great if I sought to deal with Aurum this way. Lumi’el was another matter entirely.

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Mighty though the divine beast was, he had long ago been slain by the disease of despair. While a human would have become consumed by alcohol, by opiates, or gambling perhaps, Lumi’el had to seek stronger pleasures, delving inot the arcane at a level that could twist his mind into a form that could not conceive of the fact that his creator was dead and, as all living things, he faced an eternal life of worry and strife, that every breath he took in opposition of death would be one taken against usurpers, backstabbers, parasites, and all those that craved his power of authority.

Lumi’el was weak, far lesser than Aurum.

Because of this weakness, he locked himself in the deepest sanctuary of the cathedral, treating his body like a merchant treats his gold at a bank. And similarly, he cast out his mind into a new life as a daemon within the body of an unwitting servant.

Truly he disgusted me. That I had to leave him alone, avoiding the wrath of Aurum, for so long makes bile rise up in my throat even to this day. But, by the other face of the same coin I may still experience the echo of the joy I felt the night I ruined him. It was by a weapon I thought I would never discover, given to me by Anubi. Not almighty by any stretch, but it was a key that fit the lock of Lumi’el’s power just as Lupa could break the stigmata of a common man.

The process was slow, effort filled, and uneventful. Sitting in the room provided me, I had to recreate the spell from pure memory and further complicate it by routing the effect out my window and to a room I could neither see nor hear save by the enslaved efforts of a bird. But there, the great beast slumbered. On a bed of hay like a common animal, stained by his own filth from days to weeks of inactivity, the lesser angel of the central kingdoms slept. He was guarded by paladins, a now defunct order of children raised by the clergy and brainwashed into servitude. They stood with steel in hand, vigil against any intruder. Had I gone there myself, they would have struck me down without hesitation, but those humans were blind to my magic just as they were blind to the magic Lumi’el used on himself, the hedonistic soma of distant dreams.

Just as Aurum could pay visit to Jeameaux by borrowing a body, so to did Lumi’el send his mind into a pit of flesh and depravity. He shirked responsibility and forced others to play guardian for him. He drank and fornicated until his mind rotted, piling sensation into a hole he continually dug out of his own soul. It was this cleavage between power and mind that made him vulnerable. It was that spell I attacked with the hungry wolf of the desert, twisting and fraying the lines of connection between the two halves of the divine beast.

And then I had to do nothing more with my own hand. I tarried in Bièremarché only long enough to fill my stomach and acquire a fresh steed. The clergy forgot my arrival and swift departure by the time they had woken up the next morning and those diligent guards within Lumi’el’s room recognized no change. The body still lived. It still breathed and shat across the hay, and would continue to do so for weeks after.

What I had done was nothing more than what Lumi’el desired. I stripped him of power, of responsibility, of his unasked-for life. I made him powerless and by destroying his ability I removed his need to worry. He no longer had to think about how he should act because it didn’t matter. All paths for him were out of his hands, the responsibility of others.

I stranded his mind in the body he had stolen, down in the depths of the Emerald Jawhara.

I thought perhaps his stigmata was a restricted form of time acceleration, one of the most sought after spells that I’ve even heard speculated, alas it was not. Almost more improbably, he had the entire fermentation process for honey written into his stigmata, which gave it an enormous size, spilling even to his hands. It is no wonder the man was taken into the temples from a young age, long before they understood just what it did.