All of them stepped into the same dreamscape, all of the companions who had traveled to Elysium together and stopped the rogue lupinal and his Yugoloth conspirators; all of them dreamt the same dream. And at the same time they did, Duke Lucan of Elysium, one of the seven companions of Talisad, awoke in the night with a sense of dread and a feeling that something black that he had felt once in the past had awoken and for a moment stared at him and laughed.
Everything was shrouded in darkness that swirled like ebony mist around three standing figures. Staring at them out of the dream stood Vorkannis the Ebon, the overlord of Carceri, a study in black with only his gleaming reddish-pink eyes standing out from the darkness that seemed almost part and parcel of the archfiend. Behind him stood the red and gold wrapped form of Helekanalaith the Keeper of the Tower Arcane in Gehenna. A third figure in green completed the triad and was wrapped in obscuring shadow, her face indistinct and hidden but for the glint of light upon her fangs. A glowing blue gem hovered in the jeweled hand of the third arcanaloth and another hovered in the open hand of The Ebon.
With a voice like honey touched with poison, wrapped with the warmth of a lover and the cold of a betrayer’s blade, The Ebon spoke to them in mocking triumph.
“Now my puppets I thank you. Know that nothing you do, nothing you create, nothing you aspire to, nothing your souls crave happens but by my will. Nothing you have done, no plans you have spoiled, no blood you have spilt, has been but by my wish and determination. By my will your hands this night are awash in blood and the death screams of Rubicon, my symphony in which you play your own parts. At the breaking of the first light of dawn on Belerian, witness my work and despair.”