Elric: The Necromancer

He looked back at Imrryr and felt a tightness in his throat as he realized that he was truly rootless, now; a renegade and a womanslayer, though involuntary the latter. He had lost the only woman he had loved in his blind lust for revenge. Now it was finished – everything was finished. He could envisage no future, for his future had been bound up with his past and now, effectively, that past was flaming in ruins behind him. Dry sobs eddied in his chest and he gripped the ship’s rail yet more firmly.

He had caused to be destroyed the last tangible sign that the grandiose, magnificent Bright Empire had ever existed. He felt that most of himself was gone with it. Elric looked back at Imrryr and suddenly a great sadness overwhelmed him as a tower, as delicate and as beautiful as fine lace, cracked and toppled with flames leaping about it. He had shattered the last great monument to the earlier race – his own race. Men might have learned again, one day, to build strong, slender towers like those of Imrryr, but now the knowledge was dying with the thundering chaos of the fall of the Dreaming City and the fast-diminishing race of Melniboné.

Michael Moorcock, The Dreaming City.

Which is how Elric, the last Emperor of Melniboné, came to leave the Dragon Isles whose downfall he had wrought and became the White Wolf of the Young Kingdoms, the pale prince of the cursed blood, doomed to kill in order to sate his sword’s thirst for souls in search of a peace that destiny itself refused to deliver…