Dallan

“This is the body?” Dallan asked.

The gravediggers looked at one another. “The place was just like you described it,” one said, “so yeah. It's the body.”

Dallan stared at them. Their gazes inevitably drifted to his mechanized arm and its deadly blade. “Your money, then.” He tossed them each a coin and waited as they filed out of the catacomb.

The corpse lay on a stone slab. It had been buried for some time. There was no flesh, and most of the interment robes had rotted away. Dallan closed his eyes and held his hand over the remains. As the strands of his magic coiled around the dry bones, visions flickered through his mind. A dark-garbed thug, the flash of steel, a blade across the throat—memories of the poor soul's final moments.

Dallan pushed them aside and delved deeper. And there it was—the name he had been searching so long for.

Morena Calarook.

The stench of death wafted up as the bones rattled. Dallan opened his eyes. The skeletal remains shifted, and the skull rose into the air to hover before him.

“You seek Morena?” Its voice was a dry husk.

Dallan's heart pounded. “Yes.”

“Then you must travel to the Garden of Demise where her shade is doomed to wander forever.” The skull shuddered and descended back to the stone slab.

“Then she is dead?”

The skull's mouth hung open, motionless, and its words were only the faintest of whispers. “She is more than life or death. She is the witch that guards eternity.” Dallan Moonfall was fifty years old when a tornado almost killed him. The first thing he remembered was lying on a padded cot in a small room with stone walls. A peculiar monk sat in a chair at his bedside. Pain dragged him back into unconsciousness.

When he came around again, the pale light of a moon glowed through the room's only window. His left arm itched painfully, but when he scratched it, he felt not flesh but metal. He threw back the covers. His arm was gone. In its place, a limb of steel and cogs was attached to his shoulder.

He promptly passed out again.

As Dallan slowly recovered and his health returned, he learned that the tempest that had nearly taken his life had torn his arm from his body and left him bleeding and broken in a field. He remembered being tossed about like a rag doll. He remembered a broken headstone whirling within the tornado before slamming into his head. Before that, his memory was gone. He didn't know who he was or where he came from. The only thing he remembered was the name engraved on the headstone: Morena Calarook.

He learned that the Divinity of Oblivion—an unorthodox order shunned by most Veorgaron's—had saved his life and nursed him back to health. They gave him the name Dallan Moonfall to replace the one he had forgotten. They taught him how to use magic to harness the life force that clings to corpses after death. Dallan had a natural affinity for their magic. He wondered about his past—if there was something there that explained his gifts.

His power soon surpassed all others in the Divinity. He manipulated their magic in ways they had never dreamed. Over the years, there was one thing that continued to plague him. A vision that never faded. A name on a headstone.

Morena Calarook.