'How much more can I take… How much more can I bear?'
I felt that alluring edge of madness coming for me, but I refused to allow it to hold my soul. I had made that mistake once, and the heavens had punished me.
I raised my faceless skull to the heavens, and I wept; above me there were barely twenty million souls left. The fires of the Sovereign had returned these souls to the cycle, and if I died now, instead of a hundred million lives vanishing, there would be fewer.
Still, it was too much; my work was not done, and I could not die with all the weight of these souls, or everything that I fought for would be over; I slowly raised my last hand to the sky, and I whispered, "No."
Then I died.
It was sudden, but I had pulled strength from everything inside of me, and even my channels were ash. My hand was raised to the sky when I died, and a gust of wind blew across the crater, and my body began to collapse; my ash carried away slowly by the wind.
