The world began ending two hundred years ago. This slow, inevitable end began at the center and stretched to the edges, like a drop of ink in a puddle. A puddle that was dirty with life, language, magic, and worst of all, politics. To the northeast, the arid deserts of Barrid. To the southeast, the wetlands and marshes of Prisnidine. To the southwest, the steppes and plains of Adalaant. To the northwest, the forested realm of Ecliptica and its many fragments.

  All was one horizon away from extinction.

  The Fade was a towering wall of poison, heat, and erosion. A violet, seething mist, slowly crawling across the world and absorbing everything in its radial path. It ate less like a great monster which opens and shuts its jaw, and more like a slime that slowly envelopes its meal, digesting it from the outside. This mist left nothing behind but bones. The bones of people, the ribcages of cities, and the skeletons of civilizations. The ruins sat as if there'd never been color or life in them. They were the only decorations in the bare, rolling deserts of the smoky world within the Fade.

  The Fade was a heap of paradoxes. The Fade didn’t hunger, but it consumed miles every year. The Fade didn’t care, but it did its work more passionately than the most driven laborer. The Fade didn’t sense, but none could escape its hearing and sight. Especially if they made the mistake of shedding blood.

  The Fade was not unlike a reanimated corpse that holds its head in its hands instead of on its shoulders: it uses something else to hunger, care, and sense. A Servant, the Servant, of the Fade. A repurposed human body and mind, which hosts the Fade’s strategy, ruthlessness, and, on the occasions when it has them, thoughts.

  Disembodied intelligence has advantages and disadvantages. Today, a disadvantage came due. The time had come for the Fade to replace its head.

  The Fade withered everything away eventually. Even its own Servant. In this, it was no different from a craftsman who must replace their old tools, for wear or for upgrades. The only trick was that replacing a Servant of the Fade necessitated a window of release.

  ***

  Lady Deledrim sat on her knees in what had once been a throne room, her arms stretched to either side by chains lashed to thick pillars. The ceiling of the palace room had long crumbled to the floor around her. The pillars supported nothing but the purple winds and mists curling by overhead. The proud marble was stained black with death and damnation, along with what curtains and windows remained.

  Deledrim knelt on a long, tattered, dull rug. Her dark hair trailed out behind her for several feet. Her eyes were a green stained purple by her years of service, like her brown skin. The Fade had just left her body and mind. She remembered everything in a completely new light, one in which she could finally think for herself about all the uses she had been to the Fade for the past decade.

  Lady Deledrim breathed quickly. She was finally allowed the unfiltered thought of her deeds as the Servant of the Fade. Her worn and tainted eyes were moist. Her skin scratched with burns. She couldn’t move, couldn’t bring herself to her withered legs and feet, couldn’t pull against the chains binding her wrists in the air. Her hair felt as if it could be blown away like ash. If the Fade left her here, at its epicenter, she would die in hours at most.

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  But she knew the Fade was a better disposer than that. She'd been its glove for long enough. The Fade had planned Deledrim's own discarding using her mind, after all, just as it had forced her to chain herself here and discard the weapon it had fashioned and bestowed upon her for her tasks. Deledrim’s eyes widened as a figure appeared in the darkness down the rug, at the top of the stairs from the courtyard. The great doors lay to either side of the silhouette. The weapon she wielded was all too familiar to Deledrim, even as it regained its shape from the mists that formed it.

  “I…” Deledrim rasped, then tried again after taking a deeper breath, “I know you’re going to kill me… no matter… no matter what I say.”

  The Servant of the Fade, who Deledrim could now see as she emerged from the dark, was a young woman. Her death mark, denoting the injury that had killed her, rested across her throat. Deledrim once had a death mark, every Servant did. But sooner or later it became camouflaged in the decay of their flesh. She didn’t even remember where it had been.

  The new woman’s hair was long, sheathed and trailing on the ground behind her. Already patches of her orange Adalaantian skin were tainted with something that looked like ash. Her teeth were black. Her eyes looked as though they'd been an Adalaantian purple to begin with. Beside her, the massive axe she dragged on the stone took form. It was as weightless to her as the mists, but as heavy to its victims as a battering ram.

  “That is correct,” the new Servant said. “But that never stops any of them from talking.”

  Deledrim sighed. “And I’m no exception… who is this girl, who is to replace me?”

  “She is the Fade, just like you were.”

  Deledrim shook her head. “I was a noblewoman. My lands were prosperous. I treated my husband well. How do you decide such things?”

  “The Fade doesn’t decide. Only its Servants do.”

  Deledrim shakily lifted her head again to see that the new Servant stood over her, like a frog looking hungrily down at its old skin. With all the energy left in her body, Deledrim found the only words she knew could make the wraith pause. She didn't even rasp them.

  “How is a Fadewraith chosen?"

  The axe was raised. Deledrim flinched. There was a grating sound.

  Deledrim looked up to see the axe being sharpened. The Servant was running a solid piece of mist like a whetstone across one of the blades.

  “Do you know why few people have death marks?”

  “N...no…”

  “It’s because a death mark can only be cast on oneself, not by another.”

  Now Deledrim remembered where her death mark had been. She hung her head. A gesture with ugly echoes.

  “Oh…”

  The Servant nodded. “You gave yourself away, just as the person before you, and just as this person after you.”

  The whetstone vanished in a puff of purple smoke. The servant adjusted her grip on the weapon.

  “I stayed still for too long…” Deledrim mumbled. “I thought my apathy protected me, but it … only paralyzed … me …”

  "You weren’t going anywhere else,” the Servant said as she raised the axe over her head, “but here.”

  With that, the axe came down, splitting the frail husk of the former slave like a log. There was no blood. There was no scream. The chains binding the wrists pulled either half of the corpse their way. That was the last time Lady Deledrim died.