Whimpers rose from what few throats hadn't choked shut in mortal dread, and more than one blade scraped the stone floor where it had fallen from nerveless fingers. For nary a Guildmaster or noble present failed to recognize the man-the thing-looming before them.

Plates of steel armor, enameled black as the inside of a closed casket, encased him from head to toe, showing only thin gaps of equally dark mail at the joints. Across the chest, the shoulders, and the greaves were riveted plates of pale white bone. Spines of black iron jutted from the shoulder plates, and from those dangled a worn purple cloak. But it was the helm, a gaping skull bound in iron bands, to which all eyes were drawn.

It was a figure out of nightmare: the nightmare of an entire nation, dreamt first more than two decades ago, and again six years past. A nightmare that should never have been dreamt again.

"You promised us…" It was a whisper as first it passed through Duke Edmund's lips, but rose swiftly into a scream of lunatic terror. "You promised!"

And the unseen face behind the skull laughed, even as he strode forward to kill. A VICIOUS CLATTER, a sullen clank, and the grotesquely armored figure stepped through a very different doorway, entering a woodwalled room several streets away from that cellar-turned-abattoir. Soot and crimson spatters marred the armor, as did the occasional scrape where a soldier's blade had landed in vain. Without pause he moved to the room's only chair and slumped into it, oblivious to any damage he did the cheap furniture.

And there he waited, so motionless within his cocoon of bone and metal that the armor might have been vacant. The sun drifted west, its lingering rays worming through the slats in the shutters, sliding up the walls until they vanished into the night. The room grew dark as the armor itself, and still the figure did not move.