“If we can avoid starting another war until we obtain the contents of this infernal chest, I will be greatly obliged,” Jamie said to her Family members. And with that said she ripped the iron door off of the hinges of the Dark Tower.

As Tyr and The Crimson Lady dance the dance of death. Soldiers from both sides of the armies fall like wheat to the scythe.

For a moment it looks like Tyr is lost in the reverie of war and death. Suddenly he stops,
a spear thrusts through him and enters her, transfixing her heart, the steel tip passes through and the wooden shaft immobilizes her.

Then he speaks softly in her ear.
“Did you think summoning me was a game you could play without consequences? Only one other of our kind has dared summon me, and she was much more careful than you, my Crimson one. She held me in a place where she had control, and where the risks were minimal.”

He laughs savagely and pulls himself from the spear shaft, his wound closes immediately afterward.

“Did you truly think that I hadn’t noticed the likeness of my love here? She points the way to the Dark Tower.” He pauses.

“You asked why I chose this place for the summoning, because I knew she was here.”

He cuts down a few dozen more soldiers with Savagery swirling around him. The Crimson Lady’s immobile form is untouched by the carnage around them.

He whispers again to her.
“Whereas our lust was transitory, Kara’s and my love is infinite.”

Suddenly, a cage carried by a murder of large blood-stained crows appears and encapsulates The Crimson Lady. As she is being carried back to Tartarus and the Oubliette, he calls out to her.

“My sword Savgery learned before you, that summoning Murder to a battlefield is setting yourself up to lose, too many chances to be murdered and thus to fall under my domain.
You may not be dead, oh Crimson one, but by the rules you belong to me now.”

He steps over to where his love stands, the battle around over, all are dead or wounded beyond help.

He whispers to Kara.
“I will free you, you will come back to me. What lies in yonder Dark Tower shall help me do this.” He then follows Jamie into the Dark Tower.

Amaryllis steps in cautiously behind her siblings, her boots steeped in the blood that floods the fields outside. The antechamber of the Dark Tower is a scene of horror. The light is dim, sourced only from the outside through the open doorway. The echoes of the sound of tearing iron reverberate through high arched ceiling of black, pitted metal.

As the echoes die back, they are replaced with the sounds of whimpering and wailing, soft and raspy. Human figures are strapped chain to the wall opposite the door, naked and dirty. Together, they appear to wrap around the entire internal structure of the Tower - a living wall of people.

Amaryllis gasps as her senses extend outwards to encompass the fullness of this blasphemy. It is a paradox to her own mind: a wall designed to protect which creates harm by its very existence.

“I can tear it down, but I cannot,” she whispers to herself. “What mind can create such terrible things.”

She looks with a desperate eye to her siblings, trapped in indecision.

“We’re not here to tear it down, Mary,” Prosperpine says softly. “But if you want to tear it down when we’re done, I can help you send them to their rest.”

The air inside the tower is heavy, oppressive, making it hard to move in any direction. Proserpine looks around the tower–though it extends hundreds of feet into the air, with something glimmering at the pinnacle, there are no stairs. And though she wishes for her flock to lend her their wings, their help does not come.

Then she looks a little closer, and sees that there are no stairs in the traditional sense of the world. As she extends her senses, she gasps. “Some of them have already gone to their rest.” Her dark eyes trace a curved line from the floor on which the familia stands, up and up and up the wall. “That is the path. I’ll be quick.”

Like a bounding rabbit, Proserpine flits up the inside of the tower, using some of the bodies as hand and foot holds as she goes. She moves nimbly, and none of the bodies she touches cry out.

When she reaches the top, her head cocks to the side, and her voice echoes down the inside of the tower. “It’s a lost soul!” Then her arms move, and envelop the light, plunging the tower into a murky twilight.