"Mother. I believe I had a nightmare," I said rising from my bed.

"Oh? But if you do not know, then how can it be called such?", she replied. Her black skin of obsidian shone with blood and the flames that were her hair still carried the scent of scorched flesh. It was obvious that she had just returned from some battle.

"I dreamt of thunder and lightning...

Thunder and lightning cracked the sky into fragments. It was a brief prelude of what was to come. This shadow and everything in it, infinite in it's boundary, was but a glorified field of battle. The forces amassed against me shook the very foundations of what reality could contain without collapsing in upon itself in a wave of inconceivability.

The number...

Oh but to speak of them in numbers would be a folly, a misdirection into believing the uncountable could be counted. Entire shadows had been emptied to fuel this. They surrounded me not in any direction, but in all dimensions.

The Logrus told me such.

Not the fleets of all the greatest navies that now sailed upon the boiling methane seas of this world or the ships that soared upon the sky was the extent of this, and they were counted as one counts the atoms in the sun. No. They were only what could be contained in this miniscule infinite universe that I stood in. In truth the shadows around me teemed with mirrored force. So grand was it to be compared to the ancient Thunderbirds of legend, whose form was so mighty that the most one could take in at once was a single feather, and that feather took up the sky.

Silhouetted by 100 suns brought in to illuminate the battle was the form of the god of war, confident, expectant, and eager to meet the challenge of a brash child who would play at his game. Perhaps he was even a little hopeful to find something he had not seen in so many ages.

With silence, for no sound could exist that could drown out the ambient rumble of this war machine, the silhouette raised his spear and his forces fell upon me.

With fury, I gave my battle cry in return and it was heard. For it was with the Logrus that I brought into these worlds the death cries of the fringe shadows as they fell into Oblivion and Chaos. The sound which cannot be described and survived knocked down the first wave of my enemy, infantry equal to 10 shadow worlds of men, I say.

Horribly they died.

But more were to come.

My forces began to rise.

The God of War smiled, but all I had for him was a grin of sharpened teeth.

Woken by the sound of oblivions call, each grain of sand and every blade of grass grew into demons of the Abyss. They fell upon my enemy. The living stars in the sky began to fall at my command, collapsing in upon themselves as the entropy of my heart tainted their fusion souls. As they struck my foe each went nova then black, taking a world of men each time.

The battle continued still.

No longer did our armies of armies meet upon the field, for the field had become naught but the layers the of felled and broken before them. It was not long that mountains were buried under bodies and the oceans had been overflowed by 100 times their amount in blood. This infinite shadow had been one vast world, but even that battlefield had been too small for out meeting.

Finally there came the time when no more could die. The shadows were all full. It was as if the rules laid out by Chaos and Order in the beginning of time had not accounted for our scale of death and had passed into shock. It was then that I faced him.

We were unrecognizable, more gore than anything else. It is a truly disturbing and exhilarating thing to discover the amount of death one can carry upon his or her person. We had found this limit a million times over before this meeting, and the only parts of him I could still see were the whites in his eyes.

...and that was my dream". As I spoke these last words I realized that I had closed my eyes to relive the vision and quickly opened them again. I noticed that mother had closed hers as well. Moments passed in silence.

Patting my head as if I were still a child she spoke softly to me. "My daughter Aife. It was not a nightmare that you had but the Dream of Hendrake and the destiny of our Great House." Mother gently pushed me back into bed. Caressing my tired face once she whispers, "now go back to sleep and may you find sweet dreams again".

I laid her body down on the cooling sands. Brushing the hair from her eyes, I could now recall the same subtle gesture of affection she always gave to me. It was the first memory of many and not in the least painful. More would certainly come soon. Grief would consume me even though I felt nothing now, and then I would cry alone. No one else was worthy to do it. As I planted my blade into the ground in front of me I took my position by her side for the last time.

Here I held the vigil of my mother, Inixia.

The first day, I spent looking at her face, now dark with death. Every tiny feature and every expression that it had ever shown me, I etched into my memory. There were some days when I couldn't remember what my father had looked like and I did not want that to happen with her. Father had always been a rare sight when I was growing up and when he had died it was as if a certain piece of reality had died with him. Maybe it was because he had just vanished to me, but it was as if he had become less solid, less... real. I began wondering if the memories I had of him were figments of my imagination even though I knew they were not. I would never forget mothers face, however. And mother had many faces.

She was a shapeshifter.

The next day, I remembered the years I was together with her and tried to force myself to feel something. Although those times had both started and ended in Amber, that place accounted for only the minute or two when she had taken me from Benedict and then when I had taken her from Benedict. I loved and hated Amber so much now that it hurt. I neither loved nor hated Chaos. Even though it was the new world she had given to me, ever changing and infinite in its possibilities, it was always the place I would remember home from. Why did I feel nostalgia for the place she had died?

She was a shapeshifter. She kept her heart on her right.

By the third day, grief had still not come and I began instead to contemplate the mortality that lay before me. Fear crept in as I wondered about the ending that lay waiting for me, perhaps in the not so distant future. The sight of Helioventar, that creation of my father's that Benedict wielded, struck me now with fear. It was death. More so even than the void of oblivion that the Courts of Chaos perched over, it was death. The sight of Ellison's blood upon it flashed into my mind and her gurgled words to her brother and murderer wouldn't leave my ears. I began to shake. A thing colder than the dead body of my mother before me crept into my body and gripped at my heart. Was this terror? Overcome by it, I spent the next several days shivering and wet with the sweat of fear.

After a full week, shame surpassed my fear, for I had cursed my father's name for making that doom. I had gone so far to deny the fact that I was scared not of a sword, but of Benedict. Why was it so difficult to admit? Everyone else feared him, why couldn't I let myself be afraid too? Where had this useless pride come from?

It hit me suddenly that Benedict never showed any fear. He was the only one I'd ever known who was like that. Surely I didn't want to be like him. The thought filled me with disgust. No, that was not it. I did not want to be outdone by him was more like it. I always hated him a little for that quality, and that resentment had festered inside me and grown over the years. I had molded a part of my being based on a person I hated. I could not help but look down on myself for that. I was quickly growing tired of self-realizations.

She was a shapeshifter. She kept her heart on her right. Had she been strong...

I lost track of time before fatigue began to overtake me. The terror was gone now, and so was the shame. My disgust, I had grown accustom to and it plagued me no more. Now I was merely numb, my emotions exhausted too.

I don't know if it was another week or a month, but eventually I realized that the droplets that were hitting the ground in front of me were not rain, but tears. The numbness began to fade and suddenly I couldn't stop crying. Something had broken, finally. That hard cold shell that my heart had crawled into after drawing Sgathaich in the throne room had shattered and now I felt that I would drown. I couldn't even breath. Maybe my tears were, in fact, rain and my wailings, the wind. If so then I was a hurricane.

Mother was a shapeshifter. She kept her heart on her right. Had she been strong I would have driven my sword into her chest with pride instead of shame. We would be laughing at them together now.

Maybe I am strange, a mental masochist, but I wanted to feel that pain. I wanted it to rip me into pieces, to destroy me. Perhaps then I would hurt enough to reflect the love that I had killed with my own hand, that big chunk of myself that was now dead and empty. Death was supposed to hurt, right?

Eventually I couldn't hurt anymore and I collapsed.

***

So ended the vigil.

When I awoke, years had passed in me. I felt spent and newborn. Every part of me was sore, and that included my soul. As I rose, joints creaked and muscles remembered their purpose. Walking away I rubbed the grey sand from my hands and dusted myself off. Sgathaich was, once again, by my side.