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I spoke to Fenris of his demons, once. He said little of it, and seemed glad I was willing to drop the subject. He may hide it well, but he is afraid of the things beyond the veil. His fear alone scares me more than anything else in this world.

-Damien Malcus

The citadel was as intimidating on the inside as it had been beyond the walls, with vaulted ceilings that dwarfed entire cathedrals, the odd proportions of the architecture clearly designed for beings of massive proportions, and within it, they seemed as ants.

Lady Albion moved at a mercilessly quick pace, and Kath soon found herself falling behind as she fought to keep the illusion of decay. Varg had an easier time of it due to his longer stride, but soon he too was being dragged forward by the grip of the chain around his throat.

They climbed upward slowly, the slope of the floor moving almost indiscernibly upward with each footfall, with the gloomy view of the Deadmount through the windows of the fortress marking their ascension.

Aric himself managed to keep his stride even with the woman, and he was kind enough to grant the two 'undead' a greater length of chain as he witnessed their slower pace.

"What the hell are we doing?" Kath asked, keeping her voice low enough that only the dragon could hear her.

"I don't know," the dragon hissed back, "But we are getting closer and closer to an absolute disaster."

"Will Morgana recognize you?" Kath whispered, her heart pounding as they began to encounter undead wandering the halls, each more ancient than the last, all bearing the tell-tale stitches of foul modification and experiment.

"Almost certainly," the dragon answered, "And after the battle, she'll be looking for you too."

"Wonderful," she spat, "Remind me again why I agreed to come along with you?"

"Greed?" the dragon offered, managing what little comedy he could, though in their predicament, it fell flat.

Their journey ended at the foot of a gate. The thing was massive, even by the gargantuan standards of the Shoggoth ruin, a sheening plate of metal taller than a medium-sized mountain, carved in explicit detail all manner of unnamed monsters and atrocity. In the door were reliefs of figures so horrifically detailed and disturbingly rendered that her stomach felt sickened merely at the sight of them. The images were, she supposed, that of the Shoggoths, and, true to the dragon's words, they strained her mind with their mere presence, even in this limited form.

In smaller scale were depicted her people, and that of all other mortal races, suffering under the rule of the horrors. Impalement, dismemberment and immolation were the least of punishments wrought on her ancestors in the carving, so thoroughly detailed that she shivered in empathy for the poor creatures forced to live under their reign. She was faced with the daunting prospect of restraining herself from vomiting as they approached the door, every hair visible on the poor sods shown, their tortured expressions too lifelike to be anything imagined.

The necromancer lady motioned for them to wait, and slipped between a narrow crack in the door, the sheening plate of iron moving on invisible hinges without the slightest sign of tension. The door slammed behind her, the echo of the steel ringing through the citadel and beyond, rattling her teeth in their sockets.

"We need to leave, now," Varg said, his voice hushed despite their solitude.

"I know," the crow hissed back, the cold demeanour he had been hiding behind falling as the woman disappeared, "But if we try to leave now, I'll have to contend with Albion, maybe Morgana as well if she decides to intervene."

Before they could discuss the situation any further, the cold vixen returned, gesturing for them to follow. Aric hesitated, though only for a second, before moving to follow her into the darkness beyond.

The two 'undead' were even slower to approach, but ultimately succumbed to the call of the dark void.

The throne room of the citadel was impressive, even by the high standard set by the city it commanded. It was a different sort of impressive though, not the domineering mass of sheer size that characterized the rest of the city, but rather an atmosphere of oppressive weight.

The walls were sheer, with more carvings of horror and torture. While at first glance they seemed flat, the walls sloped ever so slightly into a peak hundreds of feet above them. There was only a single source of light in the room: a ball of greenish flame that spiralled slowly in the centre of the room, hanging high above the floor in a manner that cast short, peculiar looking shadows, all the while bathing the room in more light than seemed possible from so small a source.

Or perhaps, Kath thought, the light is so far up it merely appears small.

Morgana and her throne were almost comically small in the setting of the Shoggoth keep. The throne sat atop a low plateau, clearly formed from different material than the rest of the fortress. The throne itself was nothing more than an uncomfortable-looking affair, composed of obsidian with silver accents, but raised as it was, the seat, and the woman within it seemed all the more intimidating.

"My lady," the fox woman said, bowing before the throne. Morgana was drenched in shadow, the darkness seemingly clinging to her in a shroud.

"I present Lord Ardic, appointed representative of the Gravewing, Maester Harkon," the vixen continued, stepping back into an unassuming position behind the crow.

"Interesting..." the word was simple, yet the way she spoke it sent shivers down Kath's spine. It fluttered between interest and boredom, concern and indifference and a myriad of other minutia that all but failed to conceal one thing: madness.

It was a madness that spawned such horrendous fear, anger and disgust that despite what was clearly her best effort, Morgana couldn't help but radiate it. It was as if one looked down into deep waters, and tried to explain the fear they felt; to give words to the childish fear of darkness that lurks in even the most hardened heart.

It was a madness without cure, and without reason, or at least, no reason sane men dare to uncover.

"It was my understanding that Maester Harkon died at Wien," Morgana said, the shadows that embraced her flowing like water to reveal her features.

She was beautiful, in the same way that one might consider a tsunami beautiful. The beauty of power unconstrained, of arrogance born of certainty and solidity; the knowledge that your greatest enemies pose no more threat to you than a cricket before an avalanche.

She was a wolf, born with the delicate features and light complexion that was favoured in the noble houses she had been raised in, with pale grey eyes that seemed to track everything in the room simultaneously, and with equal ferocity.

"Maester Harkon is hard to kill," Aric said, his changed voice still sounding off to her.

"Oh, I know," Morgana replied, her voice raising in pitch in an utterly manic way, "The old bird never did know when to die."

"My master has sent me to request asylum here in the Deadmount," Aric continued, never flinching before the wolf's piercing gaze.

"Has he now?" Morgana said, rising from her throne in a fluid, graceful manner. Kath felt something peculiar shift in her gut. Something was very, very wrong here, but she didn't dare move an inch.

From the darkness behind the throne, three shambling figures emerged. They were difficult to see in the darkness of the throne room, but there appearance was obvious to see.

The corpses of the crows were little more than ashen bones, their flesh and feathers burned away leaving only blackened corpses behind. They wore medallions identical to Aric's around their necks.

All three of them tensed, but remained silent.

"What is your name?" Morgana demanded of one of the corpses.

Instead of the silence Kath had expected, the body moved, unhinging its jaw slowly while its words poured from its maw, "Lord Maer Ardic..." the crow's corpse droned, emotion non-existent in its words.

"What if the fate of Maester Harkon?" Morgana demanded, turning back to face them, smirking devilishly.

"Trapped and burned in the crypts of Wien..." the creature said, the source-less words echoing harshly in the chamber.

"Did you see this?" Morgana asked, sinking into her throne once more, tapping her long claws against the cold stone.

"I burned with him..." the creature said, closing its mouth and sinking to a bony knee at some unseen command.

"So you see," Morgana said, pride swelling in her voice, "I know the truth of things, trespassers. I applaud your attempt, however. Blind submission can get oh so boring after a while."

Albion smiled grimly with her mistress, and with a flick of her hand, no fewer than ten of the monstrosities they had encountered before moved from the shadows to stand in a circle around them.

"Such a shame, too," the mad queen said smugly, "I would've rewarded you quite handsomely for bringing these two to me," she gestured to them behind Aric, and the illusions they had been wearing fell off them like running water, leaving them bare before her.

"Now," Morgana said, "Tell me your name, stranger, so I might know who I have killed."

Aric was silent, and reached upward. With slow, deliberate movements, he pulled the ebony cloak from his body, letting it fall to the floor in a silent mound.

The wolf-queen's mouth fell open stupidly, as did Lady Albion's, and silence reigned over the citadel.

"You!" Morgana spat, filling the word with more confusion and hatred than Kath had ever heard before.

Aric used the brief span of confusion he had generated, thrusting an arm out before him to send a massive wave of telekinetic force towards the throne, simultaneously closing a fist behind him, picking his two compatriots and himself off the floor, throwing them backward with the same force as the attack before him.

The invisible barrier that carried them smashed through the line of undead, striking with force enough to dismember and shatter limbs. In less than a second, the energy was expended, depositing them at the base of the massive door, having delivered them more than fifty feet.

"The door!" Aric shouted, motioning the two of them towards the massive sheet of metal. The crow turned and faced the enraged necromancers, the two women having recovered from the blast with minimal injury. He started by launching a fireball that measured easily ten feet wide at Albion, catching her off guard and throwing her to the ground, even as she blocked a majority of the force behind the attack.

His second attack was a wave of invisible energy that swept low, tearing the legs out from under the undead mass that had recovered and started towards them, though from what they had seen, it was unlikely to be enough to put them out of commission.

Kath and Varg struggled with the massive door, tugging desperately at the edges of the metal, achieving only a slow, ponderous movement inward.

A scream of rage filled the room, and Kath looked back to see the queen of the dead stalking down the steps from her throne, lightning building and sparking from the edges of her fingers, crackling downward to shatter the stone below her. She extended her arms in a wild motion, arcing towards them a furious storm of lightning greater than any natural cell she had ever seen.

The tempest ran across the room in a blinding fury, arcing from floor to column with the speed of an arrow, leaving the smell of ozone and scorched stone in its wake.

Aric raised his arms to meet the storm, and the pillar of energy struck him directly, casting a halo of light around him as the doorway was illuminated with the light of a thousand suns.

Kath expected she would die then and there, but after the initial burst of sound and light, the room returned to its original state, and left her to behold Aric.

The crow's armour was charred, the metal and leather having been dried out and shattered, leaving a large area of his chest exposed. The crow stood in bold defiance, a stream of lightning flaring between his thumb and forefinger as he held it up for Morgana to behold.

With a vicious smile, Aric pointed his index finger towards the light orbiting above the room, and sent the bolt of lightning back.

The energy the crow had stolen from Morgana flew towards the strange light source, dashing through the air in a display just as impressive as the first strike, disappearing into the ball of fire in an instant.

For a second, nothing happened, then all hell broke loose.

The orb of fire shifted, the colour changing from sickly green to red, then finally to blue before exploding outward, overpowering whatever spell had contained the fire, and falling downward in a sea of flame.

Even from their place leagues below the thing and a good distance from the centre of the room, heat struck them in a physical blow, creating a gale of superhot wind that threatened to take them off their feet.

The area around the orb was quickly filled with an inferno of proportions hard to conceive, the heat of it turning stone of the walls near it to magma, casting balls of liquid earth to splatter to the floor below, raining down on the throne room.

Kath lost sight of Morgana as the fiery wind threw the doors open, and didn't waste time looking, practically diving through the opening as soon as physically possible.

Aric and Varg weren't far behind, and the three of them began sprinting down the citadel stairs as quickly as they could manage. Kath spared a second to look back as they reached the floor below, turning just in time to watch the fire stream from the doorway against the outer wall, blasting through it like it had been a sheet of paper, raining brimstone down on the dead city below.

They ran, slowing only when the odd undead minion confronted them, and even then, they did nothing more than cut through them, putting as much distance between them and the madwoman as possible.

They stopped only once they had gotten several miles from the citadel, nearing the outer wall of the mountain fortress on the opposite side they had entered.

Fire and smoke still poured from every crevice of the building, rising towards the peak high above, filling the dread city with the sombre light of a pyre, made all the more terrifying for its scope, matching that of the Shoggoth city.

They waited only long enough to catch their breath, and continued running for the side of the Deadmount, wanting only to be gone.