The compound was, on the outside, quiet and fiercely ominous. The building looked like a mansion, larger and grander than any house should be in this part of the world. It sat inside a vast clearing that rested in a valley in between to towering mountains. The area had been swept clean of the jungle which loomed about on all sides, welcoming and green, and deadly. Guards paced along the wide porches and upon the roofs of the various portions of the grand estate, armed heavily even in the sweltering heat that was coming to its end. They would soon begin to deeply regret their sweat in the cool of the night ahead. In some parts of the country, the night could be just as hot as the day, inexplicably, but here, lodged as they were in this valley, the temperature would drop almost drastically, with none of the trees or wetness to retain the warmth. Yet they stood, burly and threatening, not that they had any reason to be there. This place did not exist, well, so far as any living being not within the complex at the moment knew. And what other warlord would dare challenge the might of Aswad Nakisisa? he would tear them apart and the glory of Africa would come under his control. Yes, he was running at the moment, but tactical retreats were necessary to win wars, and that was all that this was, a tactical repositioning of his troops...
Inside, the place was abuzz with persons. Analysts, willing, captured, and enslaved were all working together with ferocity to aid in planning the next move of their commander. The leader himself, along with his closest cabinet members, was currently looking over freshly made charts and reports themselves. All was chaos, or so it seemed, but this had an order to it, Nakisisa's order. The same guards stood within the building, all over. They were armed to the teeth, even more weapons hung from their extremities than from those of the guards without. Their gaze was steel and they turned it on anyone who stopped moving for even a second, as though it were the muzzle of a gun that was primed to fire at the littlest provocation. Titanic muscles rippled over their arms and chests, but even they could not match the powerful build of Aswad. He was a huge man and so it was with all beneath him, giants who were trained to kill. So it was that they rushed about, planning a month's worth, a year's worth of murder and slaughter. It was in the midst of this chaos that one of the persons received, inexplicably, a scrambled call on one of the satellite phones that was lying beside on of the computers. It was moved to a private room where one of the lower ranks tried to finagle with the man on the other line. He, however, would see no other reason than that he must speak with Nakisisa. So, after several different officers went through the motions, Nakisisa was told of the call. Intrigued and a bit perturbed, he left his men to go receive the message. After dismissing his man and 'encouraging' the analysts to decrypt the call, which they had not been able to do despite the line having been open for over thirty minutes, he picked up the phone.
The man had only been speaking in French at first, then had apparently switched to Russian, Czech, and finally the Queen's English. Nakisisa started with a more obscure African dialect for his introduction and then powered his way into the English language with an incredibly strong lack of accent. He exercised his own control to push whatever advantage he had. "I have been told that you desired desperately to speak with Aswad Nakisisa. Being somewhat interested in why someone would want to reach me for nothing more than a friendly conversation, I decided to grace you with a minute. Speak quickly," he kept his tone somewhat mocking and definitely condescending. The answer came in an accent of its own, dark but intelligible. "My name is Pleiadies Yaega. You don't know me. I'm coming to kill you," it was quick succinct and completely to the point, "You have been-" Nakisisa cut him off, he was still calm and controlled and very cool, "What makes you think that you will be able to even touch me?" The other end was silent for a moment, and it almost sounded like there was a chuckle on the other end, but then it could just have been imagined in Aswad's current state of anger. "You have been warned. Use your last moments well," the voice slowly seemed to fade into the darkness, its black tones vanishing with a sort of ethereal strain. The warlord no longer cared if his men could trace the call or if they had heard the conversation he was about to slam the phone down and crush it to little pieces. That was when he heard the voice, just above a whisper, it was counting, "Ten...Nine...Eight...Seven-" he grimaced and held the phone delicately, obviously barely keeping himself from destroying the thing. "What do you think you're doing?" he nearly yelled at the man on the other end. "Two...One." There was a click and static as the man with the strange accent hung up.
Three days previous: Diaes swept through the library's 'hall of biographical works'. He ascended to the second level where the wide balcony that stretched around the whole room provided him ample space to look for the intended home of the book which he currently held. He gently set it in the slot where he knew it was meant to sit and proceeded down to the first floor once again. As his boots hit the floor, he noticed a slight hissing sound, and behind him an inky shadow writhed. He only paused a moment before continuing on, without a backward glance. His long and sure strides brought him through passageways of closely fit stone slabs and into a far larger room than the one which he had left. It was what some might call the 'main hall' or 'atrium' of the Library. It was a circular room that might have possessed a diameter of whole kilometer and stretched upward for about seven stories where its huge dome arched above. Books lined every inch of wall and more than a few book cases stood, holding parchments and papers of unimaginable numbers within their shadowy recesses.
With purpose, the darkly clad being of sickly paleness marched. His end point was the room's center. There was a podium made of marble upon which sat a book small enough to be a man's traveling journal. He walked up to it and gripped the edge of the podium fiercely. His knuckles turned white as he simply stared down at the thing before him as though it were somehow responsible for some grievous offense. The hair, which hung down around his face, clouded what view might have been seen of his eyes with its, almost black, brown strands. Pleiadies' back heaved slightly as he drew in one ragged breath after the other. From somewhere, a ticking noise could be heard. It was the slow second hand of a clock, marking the breadth of every moment as it transpired and then passed away. Each stretched on longer than the last as he stood there. Time itself seemed to slow, as though it knew that it could not afford to miss the events which it was about to witness. Death is not often turned back upon itself, but it is even rarer that a creature upon whom providence has bestowed the gift of everlasting life would seek to throw down this blessing in favor of the welcoming darkness that is the last journey from this world. This beast of the shadows, this Child of the Night, this Nosferatu sought even now to betray his very nature, to dismember his own immortality, and for what? The love of a woman...
