Freedom at last.

It thought it had escaped, all those months ago, claiming the mind and the life of he who dared invade his territory, in search of someone he had placed there — not a decoy, but more like bait.

The boy was still alive, it thought. It had fled to the other side, past its boundaries. But it was okay with that. It didn't want the younger one. He was a scared child, far less to claim than the older brother who came searching.

And its bait worked. His energy set it free from the eternal prison that was the Stygian Wildwood. But soon came another prison; it was called to the Cyllene Mountains.

Something told it that the other one would be there. Another like it, that had grasped many from the endless grips of time and pulled them into these days, that had shattered the fabrics of time and space to make herself eternal.

It thought the other one was free, and it craved that freedom.

But its kind, as it learned, were the malicious, manipulative sort, the kind that would trap their own people in the icy peaks only to bring themselves higher up.

The life of its kind was far stronger than that of a human being, theirs being so temporary, little flickers of flame in the endlessness of time. And they could never die, so it was even better — endless energy to feed on, at the expense of the prey.

Trapped in the ice, betrayed by its own people, it wished for one thing: that the other one would leave it.

And that wish, for once, came true; the other one disappeared and left it alone.

But there was still one dilemma: it was still locked into the mountains, roaming them but never able to leave.

Until destruction reached the nearby city of Cydonia. The volcanoes erupted for the first time in centuries. The skies were grey with ashes. Everything was burning. It began with a nuclear weapon — the people were quite familiar with those; they knew what to do — but even their bunkers and anti-radiation poisoning medicines were not enough to save them as the world erupted into flame and molten rock cascaded through the city. The former President, Ari Valoris, was seen pulling people out of burning buildings, despite their own injuries, and the people they had saved, along with themself, were in a hospital in another city. The rest of the city was gone.

But the energies of life and death still hovered like fog over the ruins of the city. It sensed that, and it wanted freedom to consume that energy, to be stronger than ever before.

And as the ice cracked, it felt something change.

The prison bars had fallen to pieces.

And it was, at long last, free.

---

If anyone remembers the stuff that happened in the Stygian Wildwood, well, the global crisis just triggered that to basically start again. So, well, you'll probably be seeing more of [REDACTED] in the days to come.

But, really, Eden's Gate's newest bulletin is what prompted this one, so I just wanted to say, it's a great bulletin, and I think that it'll lead to some really interesting RP.