The elf hit the floor with a resounding thud, instantly enveloped in a mushroom cloud of dust as his eyes rolled into the back of his head and consciousness drifted away. Some twenty-odd feet above, there was a hole in the ceiling of his home, a recent addition put in place by a free-falling Lucairus just moments earlier. He had experienced the sensation of waking up after a particularly deep, and long (three years" four" more"), sleep, and then found himself falling through the starlit sky some miles above his manor tucked away in a pocket between realities that he had bought many, many years ago from an eccentric old wizard who hadn't bothered to mention the sharks, or the fact that there were no neighbors to invite over for tea or to steal lawn ornaments from after an evening of boozing.

In short, he had been ripped off. The neat and ginchy factor of living inside ones own little world had worn off quickly, leaving him only with the mystery of where the sharks that swarmed about in his moat day and night in the hopes of the sloshed fae finally tripping and falling in got their food. While he hadn't gone down and checked, he was fairly certain there was no surplus of smaller fish (Were sharks even fish' He didn't recall) swimming about waiting to be devoured. Furthermore, the manor had, for a time, developed a nasty habit of talking to him. While it had eventually gotten over this, the experience had nearly driven poor Lucairus insane.

Well. Driven him *further* into the depths of insanity than he had already gone by himself.

However, most of these facts and others were now little more than vague and muddled memories to the unconscious and probably close to death elf. This was not the first time that he had been hurled out of the afterlife like yesterday's slop du jour. Just as with the last time, his memories had been shredded apart, stomped on by a particularly offensive variety of stiletto heels, glued back together at random, and stuffed back into his head under the notion that all would be well. This was one of, if not the most significant, drawback of having multiple lives.

The previous reincarnation had left him with little more than his name and alcoholism intact, along with the vague notion that he had once been a thief of some sort. His solace had come in the form of the Red Dragon Inn and its particularly well stocked bar, where he recalled many a pleasant night of falling asleep in his own drool and waking up to peanuts stuck to his face, being forced into a marriage with a woman that very well may have been the cause of his latest demise (sadly, he had never been able to recall any of his various deaths), and other interesting events, many of which might have scarred him for life had he not died and forgotten some of the worst.

There was something else, too: the hazy memory (Actually it wasn't quite a memory, there was something different about it. A premonition, maybe? He'd read about a woman that had those once; and later learned she had been burned at the stake by an angry mob wielding standard-issue pitchforks and torches) of a dark alley someplace foul, in a night with no stars, and the dead walking the streets, searching for something that they couldn't find, but he saw it. A woman with milk-white skin and fear in her eyes. All around her, the dead closed in, as if drawn by something.

The wings that blossomed from her back were torn and bloodied. Her once glossy black hair was dull and unruly, dry and littered with ashes. There was a dripping sound somewhere very close, and it chilled him, he couldn't locate nor identify it, but it filled him with dread that he had never before felt.

That's when he realized that he was leading them right to her. And then he woke up, for a few moments anyway, with a headache so bad that it put him right back out.