For a long time all I could hear and think and remember was an incessant hammering. And heat. Lots of heat.

-----

Boss shook her head at the grizzled smith. "If you fuck this one up I'll kill you and use your body to fix him." She warned. She looked at the small gem set in the middle of the plate of soul steel and shook her head.

When Ivan had died, Catastrophe had been heart broken. Absolutely destroyed to the core. The griffon beauty had taken to not wearing the faux skin to cover her fake limbs and walking around the castle with tears running off of her beak. They had made a lovely duo; they were always together, laughing and joking.

Heck, when he decided to confess that he was secretly an interstellar alien ape, it didn't phase her in the least.

The dog touched the two swords cross on her back and drew them, letting the twin blades sparkle faintly with the solar powered magic cells. She swung the one meant for her right paw and as always felt it clumsy.

----

And the shriek of things buried in the earth far longer than I had been burning and churning up heat.

----

Catastrophe looked over the casket and let a few more tears slip out. "Hey... it's my birthday. Not that we ever really celebrated birthdays..." Her claws crushed through the bouquet of flowers as they twitched involuntarily. She shook her head. "The others say that I shouldn't mourn you. That you were a monster..."

She sat down beside the open tomb and opened up the body bearer. She grabbed a lifeless hoof. "I learned so much from you guys..."

One of her tears spattered into his fur and she carefully tucked the limb back into the box. "Remember when the shades first attacked and you burnt out all of your soul to save us?" A pair of soulless eyes stared back at her from the casket, dull, the ocular orbs looking almost burnt out from a few years of not caring for what the magic did to him.

She sniffled a bit. "We were lucky that we had a prisoner... it almost didn't work, but you took the soul and made it your own." She shut her eyes tightly to not shed any more tears.

"Rej is better now. We don't have to worry about slavers anymore. The dragons have stopped coming, just like you thought they would. Marty was here... He gave me his best regards." The satchel was open and she gently lifted out the contents with her talons.

Her eyes opened wide. There was a single gem missing.

----

And the feeling that I was supposed to be sleeping and that I was being awakened. Like I had been drug back from paradise.

----

Canary carefully guided the feather into his earring, pinning it into his skin. He licked his lips and carefully lifted another piece of wood into a bottle. Trying to find a way to cope with the certainty that his best friend was a soul sucking nightmare beast was pretty hard.

The sails on the ship were completed and he smiled lightly before turning to his shelf. He sighed.

His shelf was full of bottles and ships of all sorts. "Damn." He nodded and smashed the bottle against the wall. "I can't believe you really were insane the entire time." He muttered.

"That village. It didn't do anything to you. Why did you kill them?" He asked, looking over at a picture of the group. A few glass shards were embedded into it and he sighed, gripping it with his magic and gently bringing the shards out of it. The painting glowed green at the same time Canary's eyes did and the holes in it disappeared.

"Catastrophe blames me. I should've seen the signs." He shook his head.

"I was so blind. I was the healer, I should've known that you were suffering. All those souls... all of that knowledge of other people. Convicts. Rapists. Killers." He lifted the picture back to the wall and lifted up the tiny ship fragments scattered about.

"It's amazing that you held on to who you were for so long." He lifted a yew staff from the corner of the room, and the large ruby at the tip twinkled lightly.

"I miss you..."

----

I wanted to sleep. I was free from the game at last, free from the paranoia and the fear.

----

The island of Rej looked like a utopia half destroyed by disaster. Shades of all sorts crawled over the barren landscape and lapped at the pristine buildings. A peal of thunder quickly answered the bolt of the storm's wrath that seemed to doom the large castle. A single large spire of metal diverted the course of it and light dashed out from it in a shock wave, blasting out the first few notes of a a song.

The rest of it was drowned out in the torrential down pour. It seemed stifled, like the life in the island was snuffed out.

Light shout out from rune inscribed surfaces on the stone work on the large castle that took up most of the island.

The screams of the shades were also drowned out.

A single flag bearing a brown hoof mark on a red background remained waving high in the air in defiance of everything.

----

I couldn't hear Malice. He was gone, dead. Smashed. Like me. Soulless...

----

The last of the rivets were smashed into place and Boss looked over the armor. It was the shape of a strong predator; sinewy and wiry strong mixed with the most graceful of birds.

She knocked on the armor and was glad when she could hear the noise. The room around her seemed to lighten up as she gently lifted up a large diamond, lightning crackling through it and the faintest hint of darkness clouding it, and placed it into a single hollow point of the armor.

Runes exploded on the surface of the armor and a pair of blazing blue eyes slowly formed in the sockets of the metal face.

She laughed and knocked on the head.

----

And then I could see again, just like I was supposed to. The memories of paradise flew from me as I took in the world.

And then I could just faintly smell the blood in the air. Boss had a fine coating of it on her body. "Boss...?" My voice seemed like it had an echo. I was alive.

She hugged me tightly and I could just barely feel her arms.

I flapped my wings slightly to avoid falling over.

It took me a minute to realize what was wrong. "Wings?"