With trembling hands he released the dagger. The night air was tainted with the smell of blood; he could feel it forming in a warm puddle around his knee as he knelt beside his dead comrade. It soaked into the thin cloth of his pants, and made it stick to his skin.

Jace Serac had just become a murderer.

“Well done, lad.” A voice came from the dark doorway that led to the hallway of the Inn. “He would have only brought you strife in the future.”

Still trying to grasp the nightmare in front of him, Jace failed to say anything. He failed to breath. His face was white, and his lips were pressed tightly together. He was frozen; the only life in him was the horror that resonated in his green eyes.

He fell sideways as he felt a hand on his shoulder. Scrambling away, he pressed his back against the closest wall in the room, confused and afraid. His eyes started to burn at the thought of looking at his hands. They were red. They were red with Mathew’s blood. He dug his fingernails into the wood, splinters piercing his skin as it sank in. The pooling blood looked black in the moonlight.

“You are going to become great, Jace.” The man’s hollow voice resonated through the room as he knelt down and gave the dagger a sharp twist before yanking it harshly out of the Mathew’s chest. “We can all see it in you.”

The man was dressed in dark robes, the indigo color a stark contrast to the blood on the dagger. His hair was black and long, well kept and left to fall around his shoulders. His eyes were like black inkwells in the dim light. The hand that held the dagger had a black tattoo that spiraled up from his palm, over his wrist and disappeared up his long sleeve. The robes made him look ominous and bigger then he might have been. Where the man had touched his shoulder it felt as though all the warmth had been pulled from him, and to Jace he looked the very vision of death come to collect a soul.

His stomach heaved as a sudden heat overwhelmed him, and he emptied his stomach onto the floor. Panic. He needed to run. He needed to get out. He couldn’t breath, couldn’t think. Gasping for breath, he forced himself to move toward the door. Tripping over his own feet, unkempt brown curls falling in his eyes, his vision blurred with tears. He just had to get out and wake up from this nightmare.

It was never that easy.