"And what will that command be, Mordankell?"<br/><br/>It was difficult for a moment to tell where the voice had come from--there was no obvious source, but after a moment's patience it stepped free of the shadows in an unoccupied corner of the kitchen for all to see. Clouded in shadow, it's shape no more than a billow of smoke, as it spoke its features began to paint themselves in airy grey. Though it looked to have been a noble in life, hatchet-faced in middle age with a prominent but receding widow's peak and dressed in ethereal finery, it was long since dead. The longer it spoke the more it dilapidated, it's clothes rotting off it's brittle form and it's flesh beginning to curl from its features.<br/><br/>It smiled, its eyes hollow where they'd been gouged out for the blackness, and continued.<br/><br/>"In truth I pity you, you mismatched thing. You were not meant for this." Its clouded skin was aging, lines beginning to spiderweb across its middle aged face as the hair pulled back from the scalp. It started walking towards him, footsteps making no sound at all as it slid through the air and stepped, unbanished, into the light. "Who are you, after all, to hold their lives in your hands? A debonair schoolboy who winked and charmed his way into a candle of something real..."<br/><br/>He tutted quietly, shaking his head, and when he looked at the false carpenter once more his lips pulled back in the rictus of death, skin drawing tight over old bones.<br/><br/>"This was never meant to be your burden. You were never meant to command a war you can't win. You were never meant to order men and women to their deaths--and make no mistake, they will die."<br/><br/>"In droves."<br/><br/>It paced around him, skin falling away and decaying, muscle and meat rotting away to reveal crisp, ethereal bones carved with dark sigils.<br/><br/>"Perhaps you should leave them in the hands of one meant for such a task." The figured pondered, a skeleton now in the tatters of nobility, the sockets of its eyes dark as night. "One raised for such a fate, groomed and trained and born to it..."<br/><br/>And at this it looked to Raven, it's teeth in a dead man's grin.<br/><br/>"Oh, wait. She left."<br/><br/>Turning from her, even the bones started to fall to ash as it walked for the corner, the smoke of it's features fading away. It looked to no one and spoke to them all.<br/><br/>"Every one of you could end this tonight. Bring her to me and no more will die. It's your last chance to save them, the innocent you damn with your sentiment and nobility."<br/><br/>The last thing to disappear were the eyes, two pits of black with something worse behind them.<br/><br/>"But you won't, will you. Poor things."