User:Forgottenlord/Fallen Warrior/Epilogue

Epilogue By RelentlessRecusant

"Know that as energetic and tenacious as life is…it has an antithesis just as powerful. It is this thing that we must obliterate."

- AdjutantReflex, Forerunner intelligence

The walls were visceral, slick, and exuded the pungent odor of organic decay, a reek of colonies of porous fungi laying their unholy tendrils upon shattered bodies and oily fluids that had taken residence within them. It was an unearthed gravesite: placid light streamed through colloidal air as faint, distant rays shone through the spore-laden air, illuminating dozens of bodies so closely intertwined upon the floor that they appeared to be a haphazard matrix. The gentle, dappled light silently glided over smooth, honed cyan armor plates, articulation lights on their surfaces that had winked our months ago as the Elite bodies within the plates had died. Sprayed limbs marked the hundreds of thousands of crumpled corpses: two Jackals laying upon their backs from a worn pit in the floor where a Carrier Form had detonated, and webs of protozoa that had taken up upon the surfaces of their exposed chests…a Brute whose blood-spattered grayed armor plates could not conceal the morbid, horrid open wound in his neck that partially disconnected the head, and the vile, contorting, swelling infectious sac that hungs there, running its tendrils through its bad and disseminating unholy decay underneath the Brute’s fur…

As the body pulsated violently, its chest and limbs trashing in a spasmatic explosion of movement after the body’s months of dormancy, a shadow flitted over the trashing beast, the slain boar being resurrected under an undead flag. The slender umbra exactingly wound through the crumpled bodies, the morbid corpses, its slender feet transversed sagging limbs, discarded ammunition, and pungent pools of intertwined blood. It moved with a deliberation, with a peculiar energy, a vivid purpose. This darkness was unusual in the way it had coalesced itself: the enfolds of twilight’s light had chosen to merge seamlessly into an organic body, to rest their chthonic might among a living vessel, to entrust their most violent secrets into a being that was of flesh, blood, and nerve. How did the nightfall’s murky fire lay within this woman? How did bereavement’s powerful sorrows laid upon her brow? Ruination’s demonic head reared within the crevasse of whatever was left of her soul, her heart: a capacitator from which she drew her existence, a being of mere shadow.

The being’s step drew with careless nonchalance, as if she was perfectly aware that nature had shaped a woman of such masterdom that all other objects of the real realm parted before her, and within her birthright was the prerogative to adjudicate all matters of life, dying, and death’s abyss herself. Darkness had treated its archangel kindly: