Such weird illumination befitted the curious land Sithicus had always been.
If Inza Magdova Kulchevich ever saw the light of that strange moon, she kept her thoughts to herself. The Vistana hadn't been seen since the Hour of Screaming Shadows, as the Sithicans had come to call that terrible afternoon. Still, the brave souls who ventured close to the Great Chasm often told of a woman's mocking laughter from the depths. Those who tarried at the brink had also heard grim murmurings in Patterna, the Vistani dialect pilfered from a hundred other tongues. Wisely, they never lingered long enough to make out just what ghastly confidences the murmuring revealed.
Nabon knew the truth of those tales. He knew, too, the dark things Inza whispered deep within the shadow- choked scar. With Alexi and Piotr and Nikolas, the remnants of Magda's caravan of outcasts, the giant walked a ceaseless patrol around the chasm. Wanderers all, they shared stories of Inza's perfidy and waited for the traitor to show herself. When they met again, the fragment of Gard they had recovered from Magda's grave would be their gift to her, a stake destined for her black, loveless heart.
Two last wayfarers made their way through the strange light of the triple-hued moon. One brought hope to the farmers and miners and villagers of Sithicus, the other dread.
Few were the men or elves who did not recognize the soft clank of Ganelon's leg brace as he made his way through the countryside. The road he traveled was lonely, but he never failed to pause long enough to offer aid and comfort to those in need. Through the severed ear left him by the Beast, he cultivated reason in minds overgrown with madness. With the Cobbler's blood spattered silver knife, he cut away sickness and despair from the innocent, life itself from the hopelessly corrupt.
The blade could not exorcise his own suffering, though. For all that he longed to see Helain again, Ganelon knew that her life was forfeit should they meet. If his resolve ever weakened, he needed only to recall the deaths of Ambrose and Kern and Ogier in the Black Chapel to remind him of the power of Inza's curse. So he drifted through the Sithican night, hoping for and dreading a reunion that should never be.
Fewer still were those who did not recognize the ear-splitting howls of Azrael as he raged through the Fumewood and the Iron Hills, or the clatter of his carriage, still armored with the teeth of his fallen enemies, as it raced along the Merchants' Slash. To meet the dwarf in the flesh was to meet death. The tenuous strands of restraint and rationality that had kept his wildness in check had withered at the Hour of Screaming Shadows. If he was not mad, he was as close to that abyss as any sane creature ventured.
It was not just the defeat of his grand scheme that so unhinged the dwarf. All his life, he had trusted the dark, and the dark had lied to him. He could not think about that betrayal without a greater, more awful question pressing to the fore of his troubled mind: If this much of what he had believed was a lie, how much else was a lie, too? The answer was there, but he did not want to hear it. The dwarf's was a common enough problem in Sithicus in the wake of its old master's departure. The nature of the domain had changed with the death knight's passing, transformed by the White Rose's magic and the nature of Soth's original curse. The place that had fostered so many half-truths and deceptions, lost histories and corrupted memories, revealed its new nature in a hundred horrible ways. To those, like Azrael, who had armored themselves in illusions for so long, the transformation of Sithicus was the most harrowing.
Like everywhere in the domains of dread, grim things lurked in the Sithican shadows. They preyed upon the minds of the weak, whispered tales that opened the portals of madness.
But in Sithicus, those things in the darkness now spoke the truth.
