A suit of armor stands atop a sand dune. He has almost forgotten where he came from. His body is badly worn down, one leg longer than the other, and a piece of his pauldrons missing to reveal a dark, empty interior. His sword has also shattered, seemingly broken when wielded towards one of his own kind. He had been hiding in a windmill, begging for him to wait for sundown before striking. That way, all the children playing inside his body would have already gone home. He agreed. Two or three hours meant nothing to beings such as them. He sat on a hillside until the sun went down, then returned and slew the whooshing windmill. Ghosts dwelling in the depths of an ancient tower, books buried beneath the ruins of the Great Library, an unmanned pirate ship, a scale that measures the weight of lives... He remembers his promise to the King of Sarkaz, the reason for his travels: to bring his scattered kind back to Kazdel, and he would be the very last. But what is this endless golden expanse before his eyes? A desert, an ocean, or one of infinite Kazdels? The suit of armor is sinking. The delineation between body and sand blurs, just as he can no longer distinguish between what he thinks and what is true. When the sand completely covers his head, he will disappear for good. 'Tap, tap tap.' A tapping sound comes from the top of his head. Perhaps it is just a fowlbeast hoping to find food in the bits of grass growing there. 'Clang—clang—' The sand entombing him begins to shift. No, it is not the sand that is moving. Someone is kicking him. From the sound of things, someone is treating him—the eldest revenant, the first guardian of Kazdel, chief advisor to all Kings of Sarkaz—as a ball to be punted around. 'You—' 'Can you hear me? If you can, then stop playing dead. I've been lugging you around for so long, you'd better start pulling your weight. Otherwise, I'll pawn you off as scrap metal when I get back!' '...What do you want?' 'Whoa, you've sure mellowed out. Back when you had that big ol' body, didn't your vocabulary consisted mostly of words like 'hatred', 'flee', and 'wretched outbloods'? I was worried for a sec that you were even more illiterate than me and those were the only words you knew. 'To think Her Highness chose someone so crass...' 'Now that's what I'm talking about. But no rush to get back to your old self. Time to get to work.' 'Doing what exac—?' Before he could finish, he was already up in the air. 'Is that enough? Or do I need to throw in more explosives?' He is flying. Flying high, high above the dunes, over the ruins, until— Kazdel. A place he thought he would never see again. With the way he's going, he'll soon crash into the meeting hall of the former Royal Court, the place where he once made a promise to King Yliš using all the remaining soulflame of his people— 'Wiš'adel, *Sarkaz cursing*—! 'Haha, that eager to curse yourself, o venerated ancestor?' The young Sarkaz laughs mirthfully. 'Go on then. Use that rage, blow everything up, and once you've gotten rid of all that junk, I'll take you home.'