With one step of her journey behind her, one frozen corpse left to lie amidst an unknown farmer's abandoned fields, Lyra walked her way to the warm wastes, wearing a short and loose dress as rough as the sands, as bright as the sun.

She only had to take one look at the new landscape to know that her choice of attire had been correct.  Gold was the color of this place.  The gold of the bright sun beating down with all its fierce and oppressive pride, the gold of the parched earth drinking up the endless rays and burning her bare feet as she walked upon it, the gold of lost glories buried beneath sand and stone, now marked only by the towering stone ruins that still protruded here and there, great petrified beasts rearing their carved heads and sheer slopes forming vast wide arrows that pricked the sky itself.  What she might have given, to see these empires in all their splendor!

All she found, however, were sand and rubble and solitude.

These, too, had a beauty of sorts.  The skeletons of kingdoms, merging once more with the barren lands from which they had sprouted.  The earthen bones cast long shadows beneath the sun, which turned about as the day slowly crawled by, tracing the same paths they had for thousands of years and would for thousands of years more before wind and time wore the last ruins down to nothing.  Occasionally, Lyra would glimpse a snake basking in the light of day, or see the wide wings of some great predatory bird silhouetted up above.  If one took the time to observe, these regions were never so dead or empty as they first appeared.

Nevertheless, she felt a sense of relief when she finally neared her destination and buried herself within the Shroud's cold embrace.  The crushing heat had left her skin slick with sweat, and by this point she'd have rather faced the thread of dragonfire than spend another hour exposed beneath that harshest of skies.

She approached the mountainous edifice with a cloud of darkness surrounding her in full, seven feet high and seven feet deep and ten feet wide.  Not the slightest ray of sunlight made it past the Shroud's surface, and heat soon died within it, leaving Lyra free to take the last steps of her journey with a certain refreshed tranquility.  She stood slightly to the left of center within her eldritch aura, spear held in the crook of her right arm while her left hand rested on the hilt of a short dagger at her hip.

If she'd estimated the time as well as she'd hoped, she wouldn't be far behind the other one.  The being who would, within the hour, become either her victim or her murderer.  Another half-remembered body, or the last face she ever saw.

The man waiting within the pyramid would see the light from the entrance quite suddenly black out, as a smoky cloud the color of emptiness [i]surged[/i] forwards into the tomb, rapidly ascending one slope before coming to a sudden halt some ninety feet away from him, rippling and churning like a living thing.  The fallen chunks of a mighty pillar between them would obscure his view somewhat, yet the Shroud was large enough that at least some part of it would be visible.

Lyra had come running in, but the Shroud drank up the sound of her every footstep in an instant, absorbing just as easily the faint noise of her breathing, slowing now as she halted in her tracks.  Her eyes did not see the man in white, but the light reflecting of his bright clothing struck the Shroud from several angles, letting her glimpse her new enemy.  Handsome, lean, dressed as if he were attending a formal function rather than a duel.  Armed, of course, and surrounded by buzzing power, but she couldn't help but smile a little at his dandy appearance, so at odds with the nature of their meeting.

A shame, perhaps, that he might never lay eyes on her.

Even if her mind allowed itself to drift just a little, her body already moved, doing what it would need to do to escape this place alive.  Her right hand dipped into the pouch at her side, even as her left drew her dagger and slit open her right forearm lengthwise, careful not to cut to the bone.  The man in white would likely strike first, but she'd have her reply ready once he did.

As for Mazono, he'd be left to make what he would of the ghostly black mass before him.  An electrical current was [i]there[/i], but ever so faint- Lyra's nervous system lay dead and silent within her, not one signal traveling down its branching lengths outside of the rapid activity in her skull.  She moved, and thought, but a physiologist would have hesitated to call her 'alive'.  The electric man would have relatively little to extrapolate from, when it came to the question of what threat lurked within the lightless borders of the Shroud.

Two unknowns, with but one fate to share between them.  This would be a fierce moment indeed.