Khara

	The two of you stand together, in still snow.

	She looks at the obelisk, and so do you. Surrounding the base of the small spire is a whole cacophony of gold and colorful gems, laid at its feet—in honor, in search of help, in prayer, all for different reasons. Winding up the jagged, harsh black stone are runes carved into it, offering it what little shreds of strength and faith a mortal could render unto such a cosmic power. At its peak is a distinctly smooth and well carved ring, just a bit taller than you and your partner, which seeps with deep blue power and seems to have several new cracks in it… one of which is so large as to have completely broken the top of the ring.

	You can feel an immense energy here, like the fallout of something inscrutable and awful. The air around you feels tight and heavy, yet bone-chillingly cold, seeping through your robes and winding around your insides and squeezing. Little wisps of blue energy hang in it, dancing around as if pulled by an invisible current, though the air is grimly still. Time seems hesitant to move around the still-present awe of whatever occurred here, as the snow simply dangles in the air.

	Looking up, the sky is empty, but the firmament offers no light. The sky is empty and dark, even Vask’s great eye, set into the Gilded Moon which consumes the night sky and which you have always felt watching over you, is closed in apparent sorrow.

	You brush a gloved finger across the obelisk, feeling a spark of arcane energy that causes you to recoil. Your partner comes up behind you, placing a hand on your arm and gently urging you back.

	“Don’t touch it… we don’t know how unstable it is,” she admonishes you.

	“I know what I’m doing, Khara.”

	“Do you really think… that someone broke it?” she asks, looking up at the shattered ring.

	You don’t respond. You don’t want to face the answer, yourself. Would someone really do such a vile thing, would someone truly break one of the Seals that holds your world together? Why? You feel the questions start to well up inside your chest as anger, and suck in a deep breath through your teeth, dropping to your knees at its base.

	“What are you doing?” she asks.

	“I need to see. I need to see who is responsible for this. I hope it can tell me.”

	You gently place both of your hands on the obelisk, and allow your essence to mingle with its. It roils with something, but you can’t make it out. Is it anger? Is it even an emotion? You can see flashes of something in your periphery, you catch the faintest glimpses of a familiar face, of a lot of familiar masks, standing in a circle around the Seal Obelisk. You look up, at the ring, and you can see it; a spectral chain, streaking off into the sky, that shatters when some kind of magical force strikes it. You look behind yourself, and you see a tall figure standing over you, drenched in the vestments of the occult.

	You push, and you try to gather more, and the Obelisk's residual energy creeps up into your arms as yours does into the top of it, and suddenly, at the top of the ring where it is broken, your partner witnesses a bright white spark.

	The energy of the Obelisk surges into you, and with a blast of force sends you sliding back a foot or two, coughing and smoldering with blue. Your body twists and contorts in strange ways, and you can feel something eating at your joints… or, rather, the Ichor that holds them together. As you open your eyes, you are immediately blinded with scorching light. Your partner rushes to your side, expressing her horror at the way you seem to move, but worse is the bright white light crowning the Obelisk.

	It burns… the heat reaches through your clothes, though does not seem to burn them, searing at your skin. You howl in rage and pain at its betrayal, and the light grows to a fever pitch, and your partner seems confused. She looks into the light, and she feels it grace herself like the warmth of a loving parent, and realizes that it is the Architect’s light, spilling forth. You know what it is in the moment, too, but you are blinded both by its radiance, and the hatred that you feel for the hatred that it feels for you. You know no such love from the light anymore, only the insistence that you exist in error.

	The look she gives you is one of betrayal, but you unholster and raise your gun and fire a bright white shot, streaking through the air in glittering light and striking the head of the obelisk, shattering the ring further and causing the light to flare up and dissipate. You cough, gripping at your chest and trying to recover, your hand weakly clutching your gun as you stagger to your feet, with none of Khara’s help.

	“What the hell was that?” she demands, her voice full of anger… at you.

	“What?” you look at her in confusion. “How am I to know what that was?”

	“That was a brilliant spike of Its light! What do you mean how are you to know what that was!? That was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and you, you… you burned,” she says, her words dripping with trembling, hesitant accusation.

	What she is saying dawns on you, and your eyes go wide behind your mask. You take a step back from her, keeping your gun at your side, as the air seems to grow only more tense around your quarrel. It winds around your throat, and seizes you by it as you lock eyes with your partner.

	“I don’t know what it was… maybe it thought that I was the one who severed the chain?” you stammer, though you know there is no way out of this. Her glower is fixed on you, as she begins to draw her gun, her voice quivering.

	“The only things which burn under Its light are not meant to be with us, Willoh,” she insists. You watch her finger wind around the trigger and her trembling hand slowly point the gun at you. You do the same, and under the faint blue light, the two of you hold each other at gunpoint, in silence. It feels like a moment that lasts for an eternity.

	It is broken, though, when she is the first to pull the trigger. That same streak of white light strikes your mask, shattering it. You feel the spectral portion of the bullet pull at your soul, trying to drag it out of you along its path, and for a moment it almost feels like your soul drifts out of the back of your body, black and gold and white and lilac, but its hand reaches desperately out, sinks its claws into your back and pulls itself right back into you.

	The moment you come back to, you pull the trigger too, and you watch that very same line of glittering white spear straight through her heart. Her soul drifts back as well, but unlike yours, does not manage to hold on no matter how very much you see it try, scrambling and clawing at the cold air, her eyes wide and terrified of what lies beyond the veil as her soul crumbles into glittering light. Her body drops to its knees, before landing face-down in the snow, into which red creeps beneath her.

	You stand, quietly, shaking. You feel at your cracked mask, no blood gracing your face because you're a disgusting creature that doesn't even have the grace to bleed when hurt. You look over at her, and see her in the snow, an empty husk.

	You approach her, slowly, gun slipping from your fingers and landing in the snow. You stand over her, and for a moment you become a fixture in the frozen time of the area around the Obelisk, your body perfectly still even as throbbing pain wracks your skull. You stand, silent, not even the sound of breath being drawn into your blighted lungs. You watch as tendrils of red seep into the snow, your eyes stay locked on her as though you expect her to twitch or to start to awaken from unconsciousness, but that moment never comes.

	You drop to your knees, finally. Your hands hesitate to touch her equipment—as if you're worthy of that—but you take the lamp from her back. Carefully, you open the cage, and reach into it, drawing from it the small ball of white-gold fire and ushering it softly into your own lantern. You turn her over, and gently undo her mask, being sure not to look at her face the whole time. You affix the mask to your back, and lay her hands over her chest.

	You turn, and kneel in the snow away from her, and cradle the now shared lantern in your lap, just feeling its warmth. The air is no longer heavy and tense, and instead it feels as if you are floating away in your confusion, anger and remorse. The sky once again glows with its thousands of stars, the wind rattles the towering pines, and the snow builds freely on your shoulders in the cold vacancy of the forest. You feel tears well up in your eyes and sorrow knots in your chest, and alone, what has happened starts to crystallize in you, its reality squeezing at your lungs and hardening over your heart.

	You look up at the Obelisk, and through bleary eyes see a spark of that glow, lingering between the prongs of its shattered ring. You sneer, in terrified disgust, at it, and the way it glints in the blue darkness of the forest shows that same exact contempt for you.