(ooc: Sorry, but I haven’t been able to post for the past two days. Hope the wait was worth it though! And there’s no need to react to this now… this is a set-up for the future.)

Soul Reaver stands in a field of devastation. Dead and wounded men lie around his feet in expanding pools of their own blood. All the bodies upon the ground, whether dressed in silver chainmail or black plate armour, are spattered with crimson. Moans of pain ring over the battlefield. The Outriders return, tending to their wounded comrades… and swiftly dispatching any wounded Chaos Warriors. Soul Reaver understood their actions well – no kind act could ever sway a Chaos Warrior from his path. He thought briefly of Asaki, and the Chaos skills she commanded. He swiftly pushed the thought out of his head.

Instead, Soul Reaver felt himself being drawn up to the top of the ravine, where the mortally wounded Dark Sorcerer still lay, impaled upon the stone. As Soul Reaver approaches him, the Sorcerer stops groaning. His eyes become wide with fear.

“You! No! I… I know you! Stay back!”

Soul Reaver stops in front of the Sorcerer. He has never seen this man before. He can feel some greater force at work here.

“What do you mean, Sorcerer?”

The dying magic-user continues babbling, blood flecking his lips and a fevered light shining in his eyes.

“I saw you! In my dreams! Since the day I made the dark promise… every night… I saw you! Smeared in blood, and holding my death in your hands! The promise… the promise! I was told I would have victory! Glory! Power! But from that day forward, I saw my death in my dreams every night!”

Soul Reaver realises that something is wrong. He can tangibly feel something else here, another presence, bringing events to a terrible climax. Soul Reaver reaches forwards with his gauntlet, placing his palm on the Sorcerer’s forehead. The Sorcerer screams and flails about in fear, but grows silent as Soul Reaver makes a psychic connection, trying to find what it was he had been feeling…

Reality rushes away with a whooshing sound, replaced by an infinite emptyness, in which stand only Soul Reaver and the dying Sorcerer. But from the Sorcerer extends a thread of black silk, shimmering in an inconceivable spectrum of darkness. The thread stretches out for an impossible distance, and Soul Reaver’s awareness follows it. He becomes aware of thousands… millions of other threads, each woven into a terrible, intricate web. With horror, he perceives the blackened, dried husks of thousands of dead lives caught in the web, sucked dry and discarded. Many thousand more glowing lives lie entangled, dancing madly as the strings are pulled by an invisible puppeteer, unaware that they are being drawn ever closer to their inevitable destruction.

And in the centre of the web… an abomination… a bloated, massive spider, bile and acid drooling from its fangs… countless legs plucking and pulling the threads, siphoning off lives and souls to feed an insatiable hunger… and directing fate towards a final, endless shadow.

Even the fleeting glimpse of the artisan of this destruction alone is enough to horrify Soul Reaver beyond words. A normal man would have lost his sanity there and then. And even now, he knows what he saw was merely an image, a pale representation of the true evil he faces.

But his sight travels once more… spinning at impossible speed across the web… towards glowing lives caught in the threads… they are…

Tamrissa… Fei… Jihon… Jharm… Kawanua… and many others… people he knew, knows, and will know, all jerking and dancing even now to the beat of the terrible puppeteer, being drawn inevitably to the terrible spider… and among them…

“Asaki!”

With another whoosh, Soul Reaver’s awareness is ripped back to his own body as the Dark Sorcerer finally dies. Something channelled the vision through the Sorcerer… and with his death it ends.

But even now, with that awareness fading, Soul Reaver sees, in abject horror, the black, silky threads wrapped immovably around his own body, extending off into infinity. Slowly their appearance fades away, leaving only blue sky in their wake.

The commander of the Outriders climbs up the beside Soul Reaver, who is staring in shaken disbelief at his hands.

“Thank you, stranger, for your aid! I have never seen one fight with such-”

Soul Reaver turns to him.

“Thank you for your praise, but I have no time. Aid your wounded men… I must go.”

The Commander begins to speak, but Soul Reaver has already turned his back to him. With a grating sound, he quickly pulls Blooddrinker from the Dark Sorcerer’s corpse. The body tips forward and falls gracelessly into the dirt.

Soul Reaver, without speaking, shreds open a Warp Gate and steps through.

There would be no sanctuary here.