Hello again!

Kura-Ookami: thanks for review and for your good words :)

Mystiquefan: thanks for the review :) I hope you still like the emotional conflict in this piece of story.

BloodHeron: hey! Welcome back! It's nice to hear from you again and to know you haven't stopped reading my stuff, even if you didn't review. Thanks for your nice words :)

Kyubak: thanks for the review :) If you're interested in hearing more of this sorceress, I would suggest reading Archangels learn (sorry, I can't help plugging my own stuff, but hey, what do you expect from a review-addict?). It's nice to know that you read Wisdom and Corruption. I'll take you comment here as a token of appreciation for the precedent story, because if you hadn't liked it, you wouldn't be here reading and reviewing this :) So double thanks for the review ;)

Please, anyone, feel free to review :)

Chapter IX. The Dead and the Ascended

Liria's ghost cried of sadness and screamed of anger as it rose from her body, dead at the hands of her friend, whom she had loved in secret. She looked at him planting the stone in his forehead, and she felt the pain as if it was happening to herself.

"You have done everything you could, my friend," she heard, a voice she had never heard before.

She turned, knowing with unearthly senses that the voice was addressing her. There was an angel there, and she stared in shock.

"Who are you?", she asked.

"I am Arkaine."

She stared in silence a little more. "I am… I am honoured to meet you."

He nodded once. "And I am honoured that my armour was retrieved and worn by you in such glorious battles."

This sentence dispelled the awe he had inspired in her. "Glorious?", she yelled. "I just died at the Burnt head's hands!"

"You died a glorious death, trying to pull your friend away from the clutches of Diablo. You were very close to succeeding, and only that is a great accomplishment."

"An accomplishment?", she screamed with the fire that made Shurvi call her "Red head". "It's as though he just committed suicide, and he is a lot worse off than a suicided soul! I can't believe I'm hearing this! It's a tragedy! It's unfair! It's the most terrible thing that's happened in my life, and it's the most, utterly most evil thing that could ever happen to him! Why did he deserve this? How dare you say that my failure is an accomplishment?"

Then she began crying.

"Do not rebel," the angel said soothingly, touching her shoulder gently with his wing. "He has met his fate, and you have met yours. This is how things are. His soul is not yet lost, and there are other events unfolding."

"What events?", she asked in a bored tone, indicating clearly that she did not believe anything would save him.

"In time, child. In time," the angel answered. He then took her body, and she followed him through the levels of the cathedral until they were in the catacombs. He removed and repaired Valour with a touch of magic, and replaced it within its crypt, although now it would bear the name of Liria's Valour, even if no one would forget it was once Arkaine's. Then, he took her body, and buried it within one of the places of the dead.

"You are buried here, among Horadrim and sages of great renown," Arkaine said.

She looked as he made her body rest within a crypt, next to other dried bodies and skeletons. She was indifferent. She was dead, and Shurvi was damned. It hardly seemed to matter that her body lay between Horadrim of renown or among the carrion.

Then she was carried upwards to the High Heavens by the angel. There he put her in some white antechamber, where the atmosphere was calm and soft, and told her this place was hers to do with as she wished for the duration of her wait.

"Wait… what wait?", she asked.

"In time, child," Arkaine repeated, although kindly. "There is one other thing I should tell you. Although you believe yourself a disincarnated soul, your spirit has hold on the material world; you will want to know this in the near future," he said, and he disappeared.

Once alone, she stared in disbelief at the whiteness of the place she was in, and collapsed in what she imagined was a corner. She took her head in her hands and cried for a while, almost feeling the despair she figured the damned soul of Shurvi would feel at that moment.

She was not one to tolerate inactivity well, however, and eventually she turned to look at her new "residence" with some interest. It took her a while to figure it out, but she had some sort of control over the place. She could give it the appearance that she wished, and she made it look like Ogden's busy tavern, or the quiet of a riverbank, or the Rogue Monastery where she had trained. She could also observe the mortals, and she spent a time travelling through kingdoms she would not have seen any other way. Finally, which she discovered last, she could, with some extension of the exploration she was allowed of the mortals' lands, travel through time also. That is how she renewed in a way with her family. Going back in time to a fateful night before she went back to Tristram, she saw the monsters come out of the cathedral for their first venture on the surface. She learned with a strange gratefulness her family's quick death at doomknights' hands; they were not desecrated or demonized. They just died, and their souls travelled upwards through the planes until they crossed the plane where she resided, and further up until they disappeared from her knowledge. She understood, with her new unearthly and unsettling senses, that they had reached Paradise, and were there beyond her ability to see.

And, one day, Arkaine came back, arriving in her "residence" unexpectedly. She had been observing the past, revisiting quiet memories of her childhood and seeking to forget about the destruction and rise of demons she had observed earlier in Khanduras, in the Wanderer's wake.

"The events have unfolded," Arkaine announced. He took her hand and guided her away from her shelter, downwards through the planes.