Dance With Darkness
Prologue
A lone streetlight burned, the only one within half a mile. The light stood in front of a dilapidated old house. The wooden boards on the front and sides of the house had once been pristine white, but through years of neglect, they had faded to a sad, lonely grey-brown. Most of the windows were covered in thick boards, and what little glass remained in the frames was grimy with dirt. The yard was overgrown with tall weeds. Vines snaked across the ground in an un-holy attempt to claim the old house as their own.
Rats had long since moved into the house and had eaten away at the walls and floor to make the nests they needed to survive the bitterly cold winters. As they bred and their numbers grew, so did the amount of holes and nests the old house held. The tired house was never silent because of the hundreds of small feet running within it's walls. Upstairs, in the attic, there were no rats. It was the one room they didn't dare breach.
The room was a pristine as the day it had been created. Plain dark blue carpet covered the large expanse of floor. The walls were painted white, which lent the room an air of sterility. Two high backed arm chairs sat facing out of the stained glass window. They were both occupied, though the spark of life that had once filled the pair of lovers sat there had long departed. The bodies were covered with dust. The only thing wrong with the room was the smell. It should have smelt musty and of decay. Instead, it smelt of the sea.
Outside, a lone figure surveyed the house from the back of her motorbike. Apparently satisfied with what she had seen, she sped away without looking back. Her long dark hair streamed out behind her like a flag in a stiff wind. She took the corner at the bottom of the street without breaking, her tires squealing as the fought for purchase on the slick road. No-one came to see what the noise was, for the few unfortunate people who still lived in the area had learned that it paid to not to hear or see what went on in their little slice of the world.
The lucky ones had long since fled the squalid neighborhood. The unlucky ones were forced to stay, through poverty or just hard luck they were tied to the neighborhood until they died. And sometimes, they were tied there after death too. For the woman on the motorbike, she had no concerns abut becoming trapped in the hellhole called Morgans borough. It had been created in the early Twenties to house the workers at a newly built mill. The mill owner, a tall, good looking, man called Justin Morgan, had given the neighborhood his name.
She wasn't planning to stay long enough to become trapped. She was there for two reasons. The first was purely selfish and self motivated. She had come to the worst part of suburbia in the state to reclaim something that had been taken from her family. The second was not so selfish. She hoped that by removing the object she was seeking, the curse would lift from the place.
In the wrong hands, the small Norse sacrificial knife drew the worst dregs of evil to it's carrier. It then turned on them and killed them, spreading out across the area like the waves on a disturbed pond. Anyone caught in the epicenter was destined to live the rest of their life in purgatory, never being able to quench the thirst that debilitated them to the point were they gave in fighting. They were locked in a never-ending cycle of pain and terror.
The two lovers in the attic of that jaded house had unleashed the evil of the blade. They had found it amongst a chest of thing gifted to them by the widow of a dead adventurer. The knife she was looking for was called the Dagger of Entropy, for it was the harbinger of evil. It had been made by the Norse gods themselves to collect all the evil in their world. It was almost as long as a short sword, with a black blade that did not reflect any light. In the hilt, there were twin black gems set into the metal of the handle. The handle never warmed. It was always cold.
Lara planed to reclaim it and put to right the wrong it had caused. She had on doubts about her own power or her place in the scheme of things. Once the dagger claimed enough souls, there would be no stopping it. It's power would grow until there was not a person in the world untouched by it's brand of evil. She felt sick at the thought. Famine would quickly spread to cover the earth. The sky would blacken and no sunlight would reach the earth. Hell would rise from it's depths to pronounce the earth it's own.
The death toll would be terrible. The suffering would be worse. The journey she would have to undertake would take her through all nine of he Norse worlds. She had to find the scattered pieces of the sheath the blade belonged in and bring them together. It would most likely kill her if she succeeded. She didn't like to think about what would happen if she failed. It was not an option.