For a moment, the heat is everything and he knows it against his skin as surely as yesterday. The buildings had torn apart like paper, he could remember that so clearly. Soot and ash and flame had made his single functional eye water even as he reigned flames and pain and death upon the townsfolk. They screamed and pleaded, children burned, fused to their mothers where the flames were too fast, and the wetness of his one eye had left a trail down his face, the other too acid-scarred to produced much. They'd brought this on themselves, hadn't they? All they'd needed to do was give him the ring and he would have left them alone.

The screams of his victims fade as the dream breaks and the shattered glass of reality cuts back in. No. He'd done that to them, that had been his decision. 'If they have it, retrieve the ring by any means necessary. He could have chosen other means. He could have simply returned empty handed and report there was no ring. Their blood was on his hands-

He blinks and the room smells not of ash but of Jaeger and his hand is full of blood, but there's something solid beneath it. A body. His glaive is gone, lost from the dream, and where he'd been stabbing her before, his hand is wreathed in the light of his maledict as he digs his fingers into the wounds she still bears. The wounds they all still bear if the pulsing in his cheek and shoulder indicate anything.

Before he can draw breath to say anything more, she shrieks something horrid and unnatural and her body shifts under his hand as she seems to try and draw away from him.