Author's Note: I was going to add Paul in here, but he didn't quite fit the pacing.

There was no food in the dimension he had come from. There was sustenance, perhaps, that tasteless, formless, ethereal substance that nourished them, whether they wanted it or not. The Ancients accepted this, although they preferred the taste of sorrow and suffering that sometimes seeped from the Other Side of the Veil. It was like a narcotic for them. In their separate cells, their centers of containment, they still managed to squabble over it, although it was Ulyaoth, who had mastered the planes and magick who gained an avatar and began to take the lion's share of the ambrosia that leaked from a secure connection to Reality, which was slowly becoming less and less real.

Being the greatest servant of Ulyaoth, he too had tasted the essence of suffering, but found it, while perhaps more tasteful than the generic nourishment provided them, only slightly more so. No, it was his summons to the Other Side that at last provided him with the sweet, intoxicating substance that satisfied him, all while increasing his cravings.

Flesh.

Bone.

Nirvana.

At times he'd resent that so many people died beyond the grasp of his temporary "master", where their corpses were wasted. He had shook with rage to learn that the good, delicious meat was often interred, if they were not burned on the pyre. Blasphemy!

He would guard the artifact, as Ulyaoth had commanded, and obey this Liche, as his Lord willed, but he would no longer do so for nothing. No, the day they had sacrificed the first of those stupid, gullible monks to him he had found his price, his addiction. It had been meant as a peace offering, a gesture of "goodwill". Done once, and then forgotten. It would not be so. While the Ancients might have found it to be a repulsive manner in which to nourish himself, the Black Guardian decided that his was the only True sustenance, and dreamt of the day when his Lord came and made this world his. On that day, he would know not only the sweetness of flesh, but the thrill of the hunt.