Lothor seethed.

  For all of his long years of life, he had never known such troubling times as these. The old ways were forgotten. It seemed he was doomed to live out the rest of eternity in a persistent state of agony. Were it that he could, he would sequester himself in a dark, dank forest and deny mortals his presence, the power that came with it, but Hanzo—that bastard—had taken the right to solitude away from him. The scum who took his place was no better. Eight even less palatable men and women, each with their own agenda, their own desires, and each had left the world an uglier place in their wake. This last one had known something they did not, and even he had proven an incompetent ruler.

  A door opened somewhere in the west, almost at the end of the world. A sonorous scream tore past his mandibles, echoed through the shadows. Agony ripped across his thorax. He squeezed his abdomen against it as pressure built in his joints. It was like someone was squeezing his bristly legs, splaying them apart. At any moment, they would be divorced from his body. Pulp and fluid would leak from the craters they left behind. His carapace would be prized apart by firm but delicate hands. The one who called him relished his pain, drinking in his cries like song as he twisted him to his whims, compelled him to do what was needed.

  The door opened in the shape of a man. Through it, he glimpsed the world outside. Torchlight and smooth, gray stone filled the man-shaped cavity. The light played off a pallid form, his hair black as ink and falling almost to his waist, his ears tapering sleekly to points just behind his head.

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  He saw the man falling into shadow, the world outside, through eyes sheeted with water. He hated him. Hated what he represented.

  “I’ll kill you one day.” He promised. “I’ll kill you all.”

  The figure twisted at the last moment, landed soundly on his feet. There was a grace to his movements, a feline reflex, a soft adjustment that spoke of long practice.

  Shadow flooded into the door, and it was shut. A lesser ache leaked into Lothor’s body to replace the sharp pain he had felt for those moments while the Wraith fell from a world of light and warmth into shadow. He quieted, and the ambient whispers of countless men and women filled his ears, whispers inspired by dark thoughts, the dark hearts of mortals. He invited them, for there was relief in the familiar, and he knew they were no friend to the intruder.

  The Wraith walked freely, confidently, through the endless gloom, ignoring the whispers of the shadows. He denied them as he crossed his tiny corner of Lothor’s domain, navigated toward his destination by some sixth sense the poor creature knew would come with pain for another, less experienced traveler.

  A fresh wave of pain wracked his body as a new door opened in the long shadow of a dirt-floored cell. The Wraith rose into the cell to his sternum, stole something—a pewter tray, a cup and a bowl—and sank back into the shadows once more.

  The pain faded. It resurged as the Wraith rose through a final door—a battered, old table, a water trough along a stone wall, the harsher light of a bulb powered by electricity filling the amorphous space around him—and left him, finally, alone.