***<<The following events transpired in the West End of RhyDin five nights ago>>***

"It is in these times that we praise the Heavens for bestowing unto us their chosen heroes. Thank thee for your guardian spirits." -BOOK OF COMMON LIGHT

As she concealed her tall, cloaked form in the gloomy darkness, her thoughts drifted back to the Island of Shadow. Such delusional times they were....a true illusion to her blackened soul. The salty scent of the whispering ocean coupled with the fresh breath of revitalizing wind often brought her to a place of clarity. The serene isolation was oftentimes a godsend. Such life........no ravenous, blood-sick rage.

Voices drawing near. A man's confident tones. A woman's gale laughter. Her emerald green eyes snapped open like a sleek serpent arising from its deadened slumber. Those eyes immediately fixated upon her unknowing prey as they moved out into the dark night.

This was not the Island.

The ill-famed alleys of the West End......the place stank of stale sweat and fresh urine. The stranger paused in the alcove...not hesitating, but just watching for a moment. Drug addicts and dwellers of the street looking like skeletons draped in dirty brown skin and filthy rags, sat shaking and moaning in their hellish euphoria. There must have been twenty of them scattered about the damp alley. Their unwashed bodies were lined up along the wall and stuffed into the corners like piles of living garbage. A thick, smokey haze hung low in the air, obscuring the finer details of the vermin infested street.

She had been stalking these two lovers for the better part of the evening. Something drew her to their union. Perhaps it was the way he looked at her......or conceivably it was her innocent smile. Truly, it mattered not.

They were poor or at the very least of simple means. Not depraved, mind you, like their surrounding neighbors in this sinful maze of winding streets and black pathways...just of meager earnings. There was no promise of a wealthy future nor of a luxurious life for this pair. No. They held in each other the promise of a new life....of new dreams.....together. This couple were no strangers to this part of town.....the drunkards of the city seemed to pay them no mind as they continued on their course to a destination that they would never reach in this fleeting lifetime. They turned down a deserted alleyway. How nice.

He was of muscular proportions, this man. He wore impressive steel on his belt. A warrior perhaps? If this was so, then his skills were as meager as his lifestyle. T'was a pity for him.

He felt a cold iron grip on the back of his shoulder as he was suddenly spun around. The man's lovely female counterpart let forth a single high-pitched scream when Giminicka thrust her serried dagger upwards through his strong chin. The cruel blade was forced completely into his leathery flesh until nothing but the skeletal hilt was visible beneath his trembling mandible.

Strangulation was truly a divine deed to partake in. Watching this fragile woman choke and hearing her suffocate was a sheer symphony to Giminicka. With effortless flexing of her dominant fingers she controlled the destiny of this meek creature. Oxygen had become a scant luxury indeed. Her pink, velvet tongue seductively danced along the dry border of her gasping lips. Finally, when the victim's struggling began to quiet and her gorgeous eyes rolled into back into her head, Giminicka decided that this little one was bowing out of their game far too early.

The relentless warrior irreverently dropped her body to the grimy street. The ensuing flurry of gasping which sprung forth from her prey's bruised throat and quivering lips only served to arouse Giminicka even more. Within her powerful and sinful body, deadly passions were awoken. Like a dark spider descending from its webbed fortress, she lowered herself onto the much smaller female. Straddling her, Giminicka lowered her face to the gasping mouth of her quarry. Their lips met..........soon after, there was a kiss. And such a kiss it was.......

Giminicka's "tender" embrace was firm and determined. Using her own lengthy tongue she vigorously herded the tongue of the stunned woman into her hungry mouth. She slowly opened her malicious eyes. As soon as she experienced the sound and twisted sensation, it stung her mind and caressed her depraved persona. That sopping, slushy noise, which caused her to silently orgasm in this dim alleyway, was a doorway to her own private Eden. Powered by her strong muscles of mastication, Giminicka's teeth tightly clenched shut. Into this piece of raw quivering meat they sank. Like a famished beast, she tore and minced with her set jaws. With a final deliberate twist of her neck, echoed with an animalistic snarl, she tore the girl's tongue from her mouth. Blood spewed forth from the woman's mouth like a completely full glass which had been carelessly split.

Giminicka rose to her full, towering height......her own malevolent face spotted with shreds of torn flesh which clung to her chin and neck. Crimson raindrops covered her corded throat in a chaotic array. She slowly drew the deadly sword from off of her back.

A cleaving swing through the stale night air. The priestess of Bhaal severed the woman's legs from her body, adding further to the grim magnum opus of gore which decorated this lonely roadway. Tissue, muscle, ligament, and bone simply split and surrendered their unity under the razor-sharp assault of this cursed weapon.

She did not wait for her prey to bleed to death before she continued her demonic work. Giminicka stoically carved the inverted Scales of Justice on the woman's exposed back with the very dagger she had used to skew the woman's hapless lover. It easily tore through her soft flesh and left behind a harsh mockery to those who had dedicated their lives and pledged their souls to upholding the doctrines of righteousness......such silly dogmas these "justice bringers" followed.

Another person had mentioned it to her. The blood on the Scathachian poster. The word "SIN" frozen in time for all the world to see. Isuelt, herself, had been seeing it in her own mind, even when she desperately fought to wipe the image clean. She and her Sisters were being targeted"again.

She had been on patrol since she had been made aware of the grizzly murder in the West End; the two people slain, mutilated frankly, in an alleyway. Frustratingly, she had seen no one who really knew anything. Or at least she had found only people who were afraid to talk, either way she was getting no where fast. And that was simply something that this Scathachian loathed more than most.

Impatience was an art form with Isuelt. Over and over in her life she had fallen under its spell and had been told that nothing good would ever come from pushing too hard. If memory served her correctly, the last person that had said that to her had ironically, himself, been pushed".pushed out of a second story window by the impatient Judge.

But these were not things that were to be thought of now, Isuelt chided herself. She was back in the West End once again, though she had sworn up and down to her Sisters that she was taking the night off and getting some rest. The truth was, she had one of those proverbially "bad feelings" about this whole business. It was not because the murder was senseless".most murders in the West End were. It was not because it was gruesome".she had seen worse on battle fields. What did not sit well with the dark Scathachian was the nagging feeling of d"j" vu. Granted, she had never seen any of this before, but there was an odd, parentless sense of familiarity that she could not ignore.

It haunted her.

She could not get the image of the two bodies out of her mind. She had seen them"though not until the next morning. On routine patrol, she had come upon a small group of citizens who were frazzled and frightened. She found that they had good reason to be. That, coupled with the obvious venom spat on the poster for the Sanctuary, left goose bumps on her flesh and a severe chill in her bones

Isuelt was in the West End once more tonight. She was standing on a corner before a dilapidated warehouse, absently fingering the garnet at her throat. If ever there was a night when the gypsy needed the protection and the sight of her patroness, Scathach, it was tonight. It was on nights like this when Isuelt didn't think of herself as Isuelt"but as Illea.