Chapter 9: Confirmation

Valeria sat in the sand with closed eyes while waiting for night to arrive. The others had already left to carry out their parts in the plan, so it was just her all alone. The wait didn't take long. After a few hours the sun had set over the horizon, shrouding the land in darkness.

Opening her eyes, she took in the sunless sights around her, and a small smile tugged at the corner of her lips. This was the time of day she was at her strongest. The shadows were her domain, and right now her domain spanned as far as the eye could see.

Her attention turned to the village that had haunted her mind for the past months, and her smile disappeared. It was time to get to work.

Shadow extended out of the ground below and wrapped her in a gentle embrace. Then, just as what had been done to so many objects in the past, Valeria herself was dragged into the darkness. The darkness robbed Valeria of her normal sight, but she gained so much more. She could feel everything that the shadows around her touched. She was shadow and the shadow was her.

She began to move. Her consciousness swam through the shadows as if a fish through the ocean. The world rushed around her as she sped through her black sea. The village that was could only be seen through binoculars grew larger and larger until after a mere minute of travel, Valeria had arrived at its edge.

Here she fell into concentration, and expanded her senses outwards to envelop the entire village. The flood of information pouring into her mind would overwhelm a normal person, but after thousands of years of practice the feat has become as natural as breathing.

A map of the village formed in her mind as she probed her surroundings. Various battle-scarred buildings, blind spots in her senses due to a flames light, various Lord ameer soilders both on night patrol and asleep in their bunks. Her search continued until she found her target.

Focusing her attention, she observed where the night patrols were heaviest. There was a collapsed building that had been singled out from the rest. It seemed this was where the soilders were focusing their investigation for clues towards the relics whereabouts.

Police tape sectioned off the building and a path leading up to it from the surroundings. Curious about the path, Valeria decided to start there.

Her form rose out of the ground once more startling a couple of soilders patrolling nearby. Before they could utter a single sound, their own shadows cast by lantern light turned against them. A dark spike shot out from behind piercing their hearts while another dark mass wrapped around their mouths muffling their shouts. The spike then dragged their convulsing bodies down into the black abyss below leaving nothing more than disturbed sand as their last mark on Terra.

Similar scenes happened the other patrols in the area. One by one they were snuffed out. Not even the sleeping soilders were spared. Valeria had learned long ago to nip any potential trouble at the bud without mercy. Soon, only her own heart beat within this newly born ghost town.

Casting her eyes on the path that caught her attention earlier, she approached. It wasn't hard to figure out what was so special about this path as she found two sets of footprints forming a trail in the sand. Not much could be gleaned from this trail as sand would not leave an imprint, but there was superficial knowledge to be found. Combined with the right context it could prove to be quite valuable.

The first was the direction. The prints led away from the collapsed building to the edge of the village. After that, the blowing wind has removed any prints. The only reason this trail remained was because the surrounding rubble blocked the wind here. As for where the trail pointed to at its end, it was the same direction that Nadeemah had been sent in search of the Sleeping Sargon.

Then the second piece of information came from the shape of the footprints. One set was slightly larger and sank a little deeper in the sand while the other one was slightly smaller and and didn't cause as much of a disturbance. This inferred that the there were two individuals where one was smaller than the other.

This lined up with her vision. One of them was a young researcher from the sand soldiers that barely made it into his teenage years. While the other... Valeria's eyes grew sharp and cold as they bore into the larger set of footprints. She could feel her trembling body run hot as anger began to surge within. Taking deep breaths, she forcefully suppressed the fury that threated to burst out. There wasn't enough evidence to definitively say it was her.

She turned her now razor like gaze towards the collapsed building. There was one thing left to check before she could be sure, before she could acknowledge her visions as true.

The collapsed building had some of the rubble cleared off to the side, but most of it still lay dormant where it originally fell. The soldiers seemed to have had a tough time moving the larger pieces without the aid of heavy machinery. For Valeria, it was a mild inconvenience. Sturdy dark tendrils rose around the collapsed building and began moving the peices one at a time without much difficulty.

A few minutes later, all of the debris was neatly placed off the side. None of the rubble itself was of particular interest. What drew her attention was what lay beneath. The sand concaved downwards as if a great force hit the ground here. Scanning the crater, her gaze soon fell on blackened bone partially buried under the sand.

Valeria quickly approached her finding and knelt down on the ground for a closer look. Running her hand acrossed the skeleton, she concluded the source of the discoloration. It had been burnt quickly by an intense heat. This coincided perfectly with her vision. This skeleton should be the body of the the surviving sand soilder's teacher. This blast was a mid combat burial for the man given there was no time for a proper send off. A burial given by her.

Valeria could deny the visions no longer. They were real. Everything that they told her would happen had happened. However, that was not her focus right now. If the visions were real, that meant that she was here.

A myriad of emotions fought for dominace within her until one supressed all the rest: Anger. Fury flooded her veins with an even greater fervor than before. Her blood boiled, her thoughts raged, and a deadly light appeared in her eyes as she spat her name.

"Kal'tsit."

At the thought of her name, Valeria's turmoil only grew. An unquenchable fire roared in her heart and her arts responded in kind. All around, darkness whipped through the air gouging into the sand below and toppling buildings. The land heaved with her fury. Sand spewed into the air in a torrent of destruction as any standing building was reduced to ruin.

The raining sand pelting her face brought Valeria back to reality. Her composure slowly returned as her heart stabilized. Standing up from the ground she looked around her, and saw the damage she had unconsciously wrought. Rage was replaced by annoyance that she had lost control so easily. Pushing the blame onto Kal'tsit, she marked one more score to settle in her heart regardless of whether or not it was deserved.

Putting that scene behind her, Valeria pulled a linen sack out of the darkness and began to gather the burnt skeleton at her feet. Thankfully, the immediate vicinity remained unharmed from her outburst, so the skeleton remained whole. After collecting the remains, she stored the sack into the darkness once more with a small smile. Since the visions have proven to be true, then there was much to look forward to and much to do.

Valeria peered into the night, focusing on the direction the two sets of footprints pointed to. Her eyes grew firm as the ember that persisted within her heart, the ember that she has attempted to smother for two hundred years, burst into an inferno. Gazing ahead her head raised higher than it did moments ago, her back straighter. She stepped forward not as Valeria, but as something much more. For she stepped forward as The General of the Kazdel army, The King of the Alecto royal court, The Mad Dog of Kazdel, she stepped forward as the Queen of Ruin.