e lay in the darkness with her silky back pressed against his breast and the sweet smell of jasmine in her hair. She was weeping and nothing he did could console her. Mog held her gently, kissing her ear and the back of her neck until she grew calm and clasped his hands against her belly.

“I’ll come back for you,” he whispered into her ear.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said tearfully, “You are my only happiness.”

“My love, I do your work. I must honor the vows I have made to you.”

“But if you are killed, I will never forgive myself. Every minute you are gone is an eternity.”

“And I will return after I have done my duty.”

“But if you die…”

He kissed her silent, the salt of her tears mingling with the sweetness of her lips. Their minds melded as their bodies came together. She made a last shuddering sob of grief and ecstasy and he was lost to her, their joy and sorrow becoming one.

“Even in death I will cleave to you,” she told him, “I will find you, I will sing of my love for you so long as I have breath and voice. I will not despair so long as you live.”

“I love you,” he repeated in that white hot moment of bliss, “I want you and only you. You are my sun and moon. O Goddess, I will serve you and only you.”

“Come home to me, Mog Ruith,” she pleaded, “Come home to me. I am here waiting for you.”

He awakened weeping. After the Searing, he had taken comfort from that memory during his loneliest hours. Mog counted himself fortunate that during his short lifetime he had been offered a taste of paradise, a privilege offered to few mortals. That morning, however, he could only feel the terrible wrenching loss. Maeve was gone. He had not kept his promise to return to her, and once they had been reunited, he had failed to see her until it was too late.

“Idiot!” he told himself, reining in his emotions and rising stiffly from his place on the floor amid the piles of Norn bodies. Someone had tossed a bearskin over him after he had collapsed in a drunken stupor. He had little memory of the prior night and decided it was just as well. His dream of Maeve and the accompanying grief reminded him that succor could be found in the heady brew of his new clan.

Mog caught his breath as the world spun into focus. An unfortunate ball of pain lodged behind his eyes as he looked for one of the enormous steins the Norn passed around. He vaguely recalled telling a story. His Risian training had proved useful yet again for gaining acceptance, even among these strange beings. They loved stories; the more ridiculous and grandiose, the better. In a few short weeks he had gone from an arena mascot to a nightly source of amusement as the old sagas of their native skalds were inter-spliced with his novel and often lewd ramblings about old Ascalon and the myths of humankind. Songs were also a favorite and soon they had furnished him with the nearest thing they had to a set of pipes. No bellows, of course, so he was relegated to inflating the enormous bladder of indeterminate origin with his breath, and if he was still conscious after that, he could play the upper scales while plugging the keyholes he could not reach with beeswax.

If he was drunk enough, he could deceive himself into being happy about his new found friends. They loved his music and stories and they honored his ability to hold his own in the arena despite his inferior stature and build. As far as the Norn were concerned, he was one of them and treated as such. The mornings, however, were unbearable. The amount of ale required to keep him blind to his grief seemed to increase daily. The liquor could dull the pain for a while, but not the increasing sense of self-loathing.

He staggered outside to relieve himself, squinting in the bright white glare of the late winter morning. The midden pit reeked of vomit and filth but he managed to stump giddily back to the hall and its welcome fetid warmth without throwing up. He found a quarter of a mug of ale and took it back to his nest of bear skins while the others snored obliviously around him.

“Don’t drink that,” some small part of him pleaded, “You don’t belong here.”

“Shut up,” he snarled, bringing the stale swill to his lips and pounding it back.

“She’s trying to reach you. Don’t you see? She’s not dead. That’s why you can still feel her in your dreams.”

He swallowed, closing his eyes as his mind fogged and the grief dulled. Mog was grateful for the emptiness. Once more he nestled into the mound of sweaty furs and fell asleep. Dreams rose up to meet him and he was back in Ascalon standing beside a silvery pool at the heart of the temple’s inner sanctum. It was midnight and Akemi was with him. The two of them were clad in the garb of Tenebrae serving out the will of Lyssa -- vengeance, cold and unyielding in the heart of the night.

The two of them were bound until death, door and key, dagger and spell. He knew the words that opened the portal, he was the key that sung open the lock, and the hand that parted the ethers. Akemi gave him her energies, cleaving to him as he uttered the fatal incantations. The darkness above the mirrored waters split open and a jagged portal of chaotic light took shape. Now it was her turn and she sought for her target, the shadows engulfing them and dragging him along with her.

It was the last time they would perform this rite. Over the years it had been necessary only eight times and that night their quarry was far from home in distant Orr. Maeve had pleaded with him not to go into a hostile land, but Lyssa’s vengeance could not be denied. They stalked their quarry to his lair, appearing in a silent flare of chaotic energies and dispatching him easily in his bed.

Mog watched Akemi burn the eight-fold claw emblem of the Tenebrae upon the man’s brow with a cold flare of magenta energies and her specially enchanted signet ring. As the adrenalin of the brief struggle faded from his blood, he often retreated from Akemi’s side and let her carry on without him. Despite his training and preparation, killing did not come naturally to him as it did to his partner. Akemi delighted in it, her graceful dagger strikes part of an elaborate dance of death. If there were beauty in such things, she embodied it. To Mog it was a hideous ordeal and he participated because he must. It was what Lyssa required of him.

The killing had gone as planned: swiftly and with no alarm. Through the narrow slits of his demonic mask he saw evidence of the man’s crime. Pillaged murals and golden relics plundered from the ransacked temple at Hilance were proudly on display in one corner of the room. Mog remembered the morning that news of the temple’s destruction had reached them. A priestess of Grenth and a priest of Lyssa had been slain in its defense. The cries of outrage and grief that had gone up among the holy people tainted the serenity of the temple for weeks.

In remote regions only the threat of divine vengeance protected such places. Even the most hard-hearted rogue gave temples wide berth rather than risk the wrath of the gods. But insanity, hubris, or old fashioned greed made some discount the tales of the Tenebrae born of Lyssa’s screams of rage. When that threat was taken lightly, he and Akemi had no choice but to demonstrate that it was real.

“Did you find the temple’s relic?” Akemi asked him when she was done. She drew the flat edges of her daggers over the man’s silk-clad breast to clean his blood from them before shoving them with a well-oiled hiss into their sheaths.

“Yes,” Mog replied grimly. Every temple had a sacred relic sealed within a golden coffer. It was sacrilege to open it, but he had been told that it could contain anything from the hem of a god’s robe to a shard of pristine bloodstone. It fell to him to ward the item and give it to Vivane during the cleansing rite when the taint of murder would be removed from their souls.

“Let us complete the ritual,” Akemi said quietly, “You have done well. The goddess smiles upon you.”

“As she smiles upon you,” Mog repeated automatically. He wondered if Akemi ever felt the fear of their victims as vividly as he. It was that fear around which he delivered Lyssa’s curse of damnation, a hex that told the doomed man that the demons had come for him in the night. Sometimes old wives’ tales were true.

He pushed aside his disgust and began the incantation that would deliver them back to the temple. A sensation of heat and fear washed over him as he reached for the familiar beacon of home. Something was wrong, but he had no idea what that might be. When he failed a third time to open the door, Akemi slapped him as if his failing were little more than an inability to focus and a flaw she found repulsive.

“Idiot! We’ll be discovered and it is growing light outside!” she hissed at him.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” he stammered, reeling both from her strike and the wrongness he had detected. Her anger curled around him, a noose drawing tight around his psyche. How could he explain to her that the way was sealed, as if it no longer existed? There was nothing to anchor to, yet it was impossible. How could a temple vanish?

“Figure it out,” she snarled, “We’re in enemy territory and I doubt they’ll look favorably upon a giant ginger Ascalonian dressed as a demon wandering around near the corpse of a well known guild leader.”

“I can try to focus on a closer temple,” he replied angrily.

“Ocair is about three leagues from here,” Akemi said, “They might give us sanctuary. Then again, they might consider us enemies of Orr first.”

“They must give us sanctuary,” Mog said coldly.

“Until the mask comes off,” Akemi laughed darkly, “Get chanting. If that’s the best you can do, it’s better than nothing.”

Her words stung him. He sensed her disdain, knowing that Akemi considered him incompetent because he had no enthusiasm for this work. Mog swallowed a bitter retort as the soft glow of dawn filtered through the ornate draperies of the strange bedroom. Akemi was right, they had little time. At any moment a servant might open the door and then they would be cornered in a strange hostile country. Their final duty to one another and their temple was death. He was not looking forward to the bite of her daggers, and he fancied she did not wish to know the insidious power of his nightmares to tear her apart from within.

Which gave his mind all the clarity it needed. He was not prepared to die. He was young and he longed to return to the side of the woman he loved more than life itself. For her, for his goddess, he would endure, and he prayed to her softly, drawing upon the ethers a fourth time as he sought for the faint beacon of Ocair. He had visited that sister temple only once, but once was enough. Mog had only to sip of the sacred water at the heart of the sanctuary once and it would forever after provide an opening to him.

And it was there, among the wails and lamentations of the little temple that he learned he had not failed to find the Temple of the Sacred Twins. It was gone, destroyed that morning with the rest of Ascalon. He would never go home again.