Hello!  Welcome back to Lodoss.  We begin where the last episode of the OAV left poor Ashuram, pretty much destroyed beneath Marmo island, killed by the crazy mage Wagnard....or so you thought!  This has nothing at all to do with the new story line in the TV series!  Feh...  Nor the Legend of Chrysania. Anyway.  Of course, Ashuram , Pirotess, and co. are certainly not mine, only the story is.  Lodoss isn't mine either.  Darn.

Enjoy! ^-^

                                                                                Chapter One: Awakening

Darkness.

One breath.

Another, uneven and weak.

The pause between breaths seemed interminable, and his ears ached for sound in the absolute absence of it.  The distant rasp of air hissing though his teeth relieved the ringing in his ears briefly before the deep silence fell again.

Consciousness was a tenuous thing, separated from dreams by an elusive, twilight threshold.  He slipped in and out of it helplessly, his thoughts vague and half-formed.  Dim colors came and went against the backs of his eyelids, drifting across his mind's eye lazily.

He dreamed.

Faces came and went before him slowly, familiar and unfamiliar alike.  Lord Beld's ugly, leathered face he recognized, surrounded with its lion's mane of golden hair.  The proud arrogance in the narrow eyes overshadowed by unruly brows and separated by a fierce, jutting beak of a nose seemed smug somehow, full of cynical irony.

The young Knight from Valis he also recognized, face earnest and eyes yet dull with unformed youth, holding both Soul Crusher and King Fahn's sword above his head.  They came and went.   His awareness flickered dimly and subsided again.

The pale face of Khardis' pet mage appeared before him.  Wagnard.  His eyes burned red with the utter possession he had given himself up to, shocking in a face gone pale and haggard with feeding the carnivorous power housed inside his bony, tall frame.  His grin was missing teeth, split into bloody halves that  seemed to be held together only by willpower.  Wagnard's horrible, high laugh filled his ears, and his body flinched in reaction.

The rustle of his skin against the armor that encased him like a shell might as well have been thunder in the heavy silence that blanketed him.  It startled him out of dreams for a brief moment, and in the darkness he felt his heart beating painfully in his chest.

Time flowed strangely, passing around him without seeming to take notice.  He lost track of how many breaths had filled his lungs and been pushed out again.  He floated back into dreams.

This time.

This time, it was her face he saw before him.  The clarity of his vision was almost  painful, each detail of her face in perfect resolution.  She was so beautiful it hurt him, filled him with a melancholy so sharp he could taste it, bitterly, on his tongue.

"Pirotess," he sighed, although whether he spoke her name out loud or not, even he did not know.

"Lord Ashuram."  He seemed to hear his name being called from far away, in her low, velvet voice.  "Lord Ashuram."

He found himself looking down into a bronze face that seemed to glimmer softly of its own wan light.  Pirotess.  Dark amber eyes looked up at him with that same smoldering  intensity he knew so well, always as though she was holding a little something of herself in tight restraint whenever she looked at him.  The small mouth was bent up at one corner in an ironic smile.  Silver hair fell unbound past her shoulders, the long pointed ears that were one of the most distinguishing features of her kind hung with small, pale gold rings.

"Pirotess," he said again, almost a question.  He was unsurprised to see her here as he had been unsurprised at the other faces that came and went in his mind, although the sight of her moved him far more.

"Yes," she replied, her voice shivering in his ears, low and soft.  "It's I."

He stared at her, as if afraid she would melt away before his eyes.

"I'm dreaming," he stated.  The Dark Elf nodded.

"You do dream, my lord," she affirmed.

"I am dying," he said bluntly, sounding markedly unaffected by the prospect.  Pirotess shrugged gracefully, shadows shifting across her dark skin.

"You are on the threshold," she said.  "Else we could not meet like this."

He gave her a thin-lipped smile, nodding.

"I am ready," he said.  "I follow you."  Her mouth curved into a small smile, and she shook her head.

"You cannot come to that place yet," she said.  "You yet breathe, my lord."

"Pirotess," he said again, very quietly, his deep voice a low burr.  "I would follow you."

"I know," she replied, the shadows around her mouth deepening in a small, melancholy smile.

He reached out a hand to her, the desire to touch her face almost overpowering, but stopped himself.  Even in this place, something held him back.  He wondered if his hand would pass right through her as if she were smoke, and the thought was unbearable.  His pale fingers hung in the distance between them briefly before he let his hand fall.

"How do I come...to be able to meet with you here?" He asked.

"Do you know where you are, my lord?" Pirotess asked him, stepping closer to him.  "Your body lies in the very depths of Wagnard's shrine to his crumbled Goddess.  Soon it will be a sunken stone ruin."

He had not forgotten, exactly, but now he remembered the circumstances beyond this twilight consciousness, and nodded slowly as it came back to him.

"I should be dead," he said in disbelief.  "This is surely the creation of a dying mind.  Wagnard..."  Pirotess took his hands gently and the wonder of it was that he could feel her skin, soft and warm, against his own.

"My lord, Wagnard did deal you a mortal blow," she said.  "Yet you still live.  Something stands between you and the Forever Dreaming."  He took her hands and drew them up, pressed against his heart.

"Ah," he breathed, at last moved beyond his customary coolness.  "You?  Pirotess....have you saved me again?"  She shook her head slowly, smiling self deprecatingly.

"No, my lord, it was not I.  This smells...of something darker.  I sense the Demon Sword at work.  It is that which has spared you."

"Spared me," he repeated, in a barely audible rasp.  "It seems no one will let me die."  He gave her a thin smile, but the pain that came with the sudden memory of watching her shield him from Shooting Star's deadly fire was too much even for his stoic nature, and he closed his eyes against it.

"You are too important," she replied, and there was no regret in her voice.  " My lord, you are the Sword Bearer."  He opened his eyes and gave her a calculating gaze.

"No longer," he said abruptly.  "The Knight from Valis carries it now."

"Be that as it may," Pirotess said, dismissing Parn with a contained wave of her hand.  "He is not the true Bearer.  SoulCrusher may have changed hands, but you still carry that power in you.  Perhaps that is what has saved you, in the end.  You are still bound to the sword.  It is bound to you, and it needs a Bearer."

"It failed to save Lord Beld when he wielded it,"  he pointed out, remembering the lance that had come from nowhere to impale the Dark Emperor where he stood, like a flash of lightening bringing down a great old tree.

"He was not suitable," she replied, almost as though it should be obvious to him.  Perhaps to her, it was.  Elves saw things that humans didn't.

"Do you tell me that the sword has possessed me?" Ashuram asked, fine black brows drawn into a frown.  "I fought the Demon.  I won."

"I cannot say, my lord," The Dark-Elf replied, frowning in turn, looking puzzled.  "Only some things are clear to me.  Whether it possesses you or you possess it, the sword saved you because you are the Bearer."

"Will it drag me back from death forever?" He said, cool voice skeptical.  Pirotess' fingers moved slightly in his tight grasp, turning to grip his hands strongly.

" I do not know, my lord," she admitted again, "although I suspect that it might be the case until a new Bearer is found.  There can be no imbalance between the two swords."

"That sounds like something the Grey Witch would say," he replied evenly, with no rancor for all the dislike he had carried for Karla.

"Perhaps," Pirotess replied.

He gave her a gaze that looked cold and distant, and then warmth sparked to life  in his dark eyes and he smiled, thinly.  The warmth in his eyes saved it from becoming his customary indifferent smirk.

"You...you came to me in this place..." he said, bring one of her hands up to his face and cradling it between palm and cheek gently.  "...to tell me all of that, and....I thank you."  The weight of how much it meant to him gathered between them, words he had never been able to say before to her.  He looked down at her, her hair and eyes bright in the gloom.

Before she could stop him, he quickly stepped forward and gathered her into his arms with an almost violent intensity, circling her waist and drawing her against him.  Her arms wrapped gently around the back of his neck as he buried his face in her hair.

"Pirotess," he said in a rough whisper.  "Pirotess, that which we have never spoken-"

"Shh," she replied, a warm breath in his ear.  She stroked his hair with soft fingers, soothing him.  "My lord, Elves know many things which are left unspoken.  It is one of our talents."  He held her tightly to him for a moment more, then relaxed and stepped back just far enough so that he could look down into her catlike amber eyes.

"Why?" He asked, and now his voice was uneven and throaty with emotion that he kept under taut control. His grip on her shoulders was tense, demanding.  "Why did you do it?"

He could still see the flames all around them, parting at her slender, bronze body  as water parts around a rock, the fire licking on either side of her but missing him completely.  He remembered holding her limp body to him as she struggled to breath her last, slipping away from him before he could speak to her what he had just come to realize as he had reached to save her from falling from the cliff in Shooting Star's lair.

She looked at him, the hint of a smile deepening the corners of her mouth.

"You know why," she said very deliberately, and reached a hand up to smooth his brow with cool, gentle fingers.  She looked past him suddenly, and then found his gaze again.

"There is not much time," she said: a warning.  "Soon you will have to leave this place."

"I know," he said, not taking his gaze from her face, as if he could memorize her every feature.  "I know this is a dream.  I don't want...to leave...you."  Even in this place, even now, it was so very difficult for him to say.

"You must," she said.  "Your body lays now in Marmo's tomb, which is crumbling slowly even as we speak together.  You must escape, or you will be lost under the island."

"One tomb is as good as another," he said.  Pirotess shook her head.

"My lord," she said, "I'll be waiting for you.  But now you must leave here.  You must live." She wore an odd expression, a softness he was not used to seeing, and something else, a sadness that he felt mirrored his own melancholy.  Silver had gathered in the corners of her eyes and she blinked it away.  She took a step back from him.  He reached for her hands and caught them, trying to keep her from retreating any further.

"You must live, or otherwise my...otherwise my saving you will have been in vain," she said, looking away.  He could say nothing to that, and she looked up at him again.  "Lord Ashuram, you must wake up," she said with regret.  "You have to reach the surface.  You have to awaken."

"Pirotess," he said, and the word was steeped in sadness.  She bowed her head.

"I'll be here, always, and someday, should you still wish it, you will come to this place and not have to leave it."  She was stepping back from him, sliding out of his grasp like smoke.  The shadows reached up to claim her again.

"Wake, my lord," she said, half hidden by shadows, her voice commanding.  The strength of it rang in his ears.  "Go from this place.  Live.  Wake, and remember me."

…if you liked it please tell me what you think!  Thanks! ^-^;