“My love. There is no-one here; surely you must see…” Elenha - the Sultan’s consort - gave her husband a pitying glance. His final moments were not long away and it seemed now that he had slipped into the indignity of delirium. There were none present but the two of them.

The bitterness and cruelty of the mortal plane had been made plain to her, having to watch this; watch, as the man she loved slipped away moment-by-moment like sand slid so easily through the fingers. Perhaps he was already gone and this shape in the bed but a spectre, a shadow left behind…

Still, for all these fallow thoughts of his passing Ateret would not relent, appearing only stronger in the grip of this mania.

“He is there… the pact is honoured!” He looked to his wife and pointed, yelled into the darkness inhabiting the opposite corner of the room with such fervour that his voice reverberated around the chamber. Yet his raving was quick to subdue. Whilst still brimming with impatient energy, his posture became directed, conversational, before seeming to address a third party that he believed to be there in the corner.

“One of my sons has come for my sake. So begins the accord, yes?” he called out.

Silence, followed by a gentle huff from his beloved - the bitterness was hers, now. She did not believe his attempt to bring his bastard son here would bear fruit. Of all his children, why would the one barely spared a passing glance be the one to save him? The one which was not hers?

“Then do it! You must do it now; my terminal breaths escape me!” he continued.

Elenha sighed – but was forced, suddenly, to question herself. For a fleeting fraction of a second, a shadow had manifested in the corner that ought not to have been. It was a flicker of black, one which most would dismiss as a trick of the light or tired eyes toying with one’s perception. However, what followed was something that none could deny.

In a swirling, shining vortex of every hue imaginable a hand reached out of the gloom, detached from any sort of host body. Its shape showed great age: thin, gnarled fingers clad in sallow skin stretching and contracting as it crawled through the air. This phantom appendage propelled itself towards the moonlight, towards the Sultan’s bed - but before it crossed the threshold of the shadows it was halted, as though an invisible pane of glass divided the room.

The fingers curled inwards save for the index, which pointed accusingly in the direction of the Elven royalty and both were frozen in abject fear and reverence.

An uncomfortable feeling crept through the pair, settling in the pits of their stomachs as though the entire world were set to turn upside-down. The room did not appear to change, though in an instant there was something fundamentally different about it. The gentle night’s breeze had suddenly disappeared – not dissipated, merely vanished. The air felt more difficult to move through. Ateret glanced sideways, and found that the bedside candle’s flame was no longer flickering. No longer moving at all. Everything was static, even the moonbeams that shone in from the veranda.

His wife lifted a hand and found the jewelled ringlets around her arm to be heavier than usual, requiring great effort to move; her clothes felt weighted as though sodden with water. They did not relent in the way that they should.

All things save those alive had been arrested mid-action.

Frozen in time.