The sword began to thrum with increasing energy the closer they drew to the Crucible. Pilgrim soon realised his first sight of it had misled him as to the statue’s size, thinking it approximately man-sized. In fact it stood at least twice the height of the tallest man. The metal from which it had been fashioned was weathered but lacked any sign of rust, despite the many years spent in proximity to the constant pall of vapour from beneath. Although it remained utterly still as they came within the scope of its shadow, the sense of scrutiny was strong, birthing a certainty that more than just a void lurked behind the empty and impassive eye-slits of the warrior’s helm.

However, it wasn’t until they came within a few paces of the plinth that Pilgrim began to feel it, a hard, prodding sensation behind his eyes. It wasn’t painful at first, but the sense of intrusion that accompanied it roused an instinctive aggression. He found himself trying to shield his mind, force out the intruder with visions of unyielding walls or endless seas. It shattered them with laughable ease and, for the first time in many years, Pilgrim knew panic as his memories were laid bare.

“No!” he grunted, eyes closed tight and hands clamping to the sides of his skull. “No. I don’t want to see!”

He was dimly aware of stumbling, his shoulder colliding with the plinth as his feet lost purchase on the bridge. The cries and exclamations of his companions reached his ears, but it was all far away, lost in the tumult of memory that consumed him. Fire, battle and blood flitted through his mind, glimpsed briefly but with terrible clarity. Every death, every torment suffered and inflicted, every plea ignored and every cruelty indulged. One image lingered longer than the others, this one bloodless, but also the worst. A young woman with long, honey-coloured hair that fell to her waist, smiling as she whirled in girlish glee amidst a field of poppies. The petals rose in her wake, scattered like rubies into a clear sky.

“Loise!” he heard himself voice her name, one he never spoke aloud, the word emerging as a strangled cry from a cage of clenched teeth. The memory of her death was a waking torment, but the memory of her alive and joyous at that first meeting lashed at him, cut him worse than any blade.

Perhaps it was the sense of being cut that caused the intruder to move on, fix upon the image of the sword, lying bright and untarnished amidst the dusty forgotten archive in which he had found it. The memory of the first thrum of the handle in his grip when he claimed it, the dark exhilaration of knowing that with this all the vengeance he craved would be his.