[Yshania]

She saw him fall, and despite the raging chaos around her, a heavy quiet descended over her elemental mind as she lost the connection. Her consciousness, in its innocence and inability to rationalise, was first soothed, and then crippled by the sudden darkness that descended. She collapsed to the floor and gently lifted his earthen head upon her lap, now confused by an emotion alien to her form. Her dying fire was beyond damaging his dry stone flesh, and she sensed his aura fading as her flames dimmed simultaneously to a dark ember, mourning a loss she could feel but not understand.

Nothing mattered now, but this bled connection, nothing else touched. Her own sulphorous black clouds were all she could see, could taste, and they swirled thickly and blinded. Her molten flesh now black and barely alight, she closed her arms around his great neck and leaned her head to touch his. She felt the last echoed thuds of his great, rock heart and then he was gone. A spark of remembrance on contact was not her own in this form, but she sensed the death acutely and distantly began to realise the magnitude of this loss. Her elemental mind inept, she could only feel…and the source of this sensation was all consuming, she ached to “know” and within her a spark was rekindled, yet in her confusion she fought it, denied it access, suddenly not wanting to understand or realise the permanence of this loss…

"My child" He looked kind; this swimming vision that appeared before her now, as she held tight to her dead comrade. Though kindness, like grief, was a sentient perception playing in the darkened periphery of her elemental vision, something deep within suddenly ached to touch the skin of this known but unremembered friend. A moment of abstract tenderness her smouldering hands would deny "You know me but you don't, and I love you Yshania, but you have to listen to me now"

She closed her eyes, growled and shook her head, frustrated that she was unable to respond, unable to question logic far beyond her comprehension.

"Yshania, you have to let the fire burn, and nurture the flame! …
You are not lost unto others until you are lost unto yourself!"

“He…lost…” Was all she could manage, like the crackle and spit of a dying coal, the dust being all that ignited its final whispered death: a molten tear tripped its way through her almost indiscernible features. Except her eyes, they burned red hot and passionate amidst the black.

Then with realisation, she began to close down, and to the comrades she was now unaware of, her flesh blackened further, cracking and beginning to disintegrate into ash. Dust to dust. Then she heard his call again…so, so distant…

"Embrace the flame, Yshania, dance with the shadows until they synchronise…
When you see the light you will know"

“The…light?” what light in this darkest hell?

"Rillifane Rallathil be with you, my child" Then he, too, was gone, his image dissipating with his dying words. Her charred heart thumped, and then calmed its heavy loss…her breath deepening as she waited…waited…