As Halkrath laid bleeding, close to a painful and dishonorable death not on his terms, he drifted through states of unconsciousness. Not dreaming or a comfortable sleep, but stages of exsanguinated delirium (he presumed, as strongly as a man dying and losing his grip on reality can do).
A cold washed over him, a darkness closed in, and he braced himself, thinking this would finally be his time.
As expected, the Black Hunter reared his white head just aside Halkrath's, not stirring the air until he breathed down the side of the fallen hunter's face. Sugary sweet, the scent of rot and the uncomfortably low temperature of a body long lost its heat.
Halkrath's eyes were closed tight, straining, rumbling. Yet in the shadow of his eyelids, that white head against the black persisted. His sight could not hide from him.
The Black Hunter reached his arm over the lain individual, gripping the shoulder opposite of him with a hand so cold, it soothed the acidic burns and yet burned all over again with frostbite Halkrath had hardly ever felt in his hunting career, on all the worlds he had shown his might to.
The sudden sensation of pain that his unconsciousness had initially spared him from cause Halkrath to seize, to flinch as he waited for his breath to be stolen away; for the pain, and everything, to end.
But it did not ever come.
Instead, the head drifted ever near parallel to Halkrath's face, him unable to tell if the Yautja skull staring at him with empty eye sockets was the true face of Death, a decoration on an obsidian-black helmet, or merely a mask for something he couldn't comprehend. The icy grip grew ever stronger, certainly breaking the skin.
An even hotter, sweeter, more rotten breath billowed over the nooks and crannies of Halkrath's face, then finally.
He spoke.
"Live with your dishonor."
Slowly, Cetanu the Black Hunter slid away, his chilled hands sliding across the chest and down the other arm, as the head similarly backed away into the darkness. It never was enveloped in shadow, though. The grinning white spectre of death, with its pale white arm and leg, merely shrank into the endless black until it was just a speck, and then no more.
And then it all ended.
The Enforcers' job of surveying the Blooding temple grounds was over, as they had overturned the rubble that buried Halkrath. They managed to surmise his location thanks to his disembodied arm peering out from a nearby mound of debris, as if waving to its rescuers.
Such visions were naturally the product of the trauma of battle, of loss, of exsanguination. Nonsense to be forgotten by the rational mind upon wakefulness.
But no matter of how it came about and whether it was recalled, because he still did what Cetanu told him to.
Halkrath lived with his dishonor.