He had awoken in Cepheus's palace.

The shattering of his oilstone-streaked Onyx had been a confusing few moments: a powerful thrust of limbs and a baffled peer around the cellar room. He'd found his halberd in his chrysalis, and found--to his bafflement--that he could see through it. That it had an eye.

An eye he could look at. An eye that could look back at him.

It was immensely dizzying, and he'd stumbled through the room--its floor loamy with Oil that had soaked into the carpets, like fertile ground for horror--and left.

Now? Now he was here: back in Draco, before the Black Spire. He'd told Vargas of his intentions: to create another creature for the Forge, using the Oilstone he'd been given as his reward for finishing the Deathmatch. Vargas had agreed.

He'd considered allowing himself to be reborn once more, but Vargas had told him that his was already, it seemed, a near-perfect shape. 'There is no point in trying to improve upon a Champion,' he'd explained. No way of knowing if such changes would be for better, or worse.

So now he knelt before the Wombs, and ran a clawed thumb over the Oilstone in his hand. It was a spike, some two feet long, broad and sharp.

He didn't know what sort of beast it had come from. Neither did Vargas. Nemean likely did, but The Sentinel hadn't bothered to ask. He did not, in fact, really care.

His thumb stroked over the Oilslicked stone, and he regarded it thoughtfully.

This is to be my first, he thought, somber.

A multitude of blue eyes narrowed. Even the halberd, propped at his side, narrowed its single eye.

It would be his first--and his proven.

A surge of magicka fluttered into the stone from his clawed hand, and he felt it take--felt his Corrupted power flow forth and settle there. He let out a long exhale from his skullshaped face, and settled the shard in to wait.

He knew that Vargas intended to make a second Sentinel, should this one prove to be shaped like him; but what if it were not?

That... That would be an interesting question.