The pot hit the ground and the impact sent luke-warm soup flying all over the room.
Angie froze up only a few feet inside of the doorway to her apartment. She was caught in the shock and the gears in her head raced to comprehend what had been awaiting her in her home.
Jarred back to reality by the sound of the pot denting the stone floor, she spit out a stiff greeting. She wasn’t armed. Or prepared for a fight. Much less against something like this. But, could she talk her way out of it?
The pot hit the ground and the impact sent luke-warm soup flying all over the room.
Angie froze up only a few feet inside of the doorway to her apartment. She was caught in the shock and the gears in her head raced to comprehend what had been awaiting her in her home.
Jarred back to reality by the sound of the pot denting the stone floor, she spit out a stiff greeting. She wasn't armed. Or prepared for a fight. Much less against something like this. But, could she talk her way out of it?
"H-hello. You're Reggy, aren't you?"
The composite beast rose up, spreading its hideous wingspan to further make itself imposing. Something large. A threat. One that almost didn't fit in the spacious apartment now. Avian in form, massive in size. A creature pieced together from hundreds of birds of prey. Its voice was like a whisper. Soft, hissing out of its beak but by no means quiet. It laid down what it had to say adamantly.
"I asked you a question."
The cleric's hands came together, fingers weaving tightly to hide how badly they were shaking. Her expression hid all of the fear that welled up inside of her.
"I'm not the one you're-"
The monstrosity lunged faster than Angie could even think to react. Pinned to the ground under massive talons, she braced for the inevitable pain of being gutted... But it didn't come. Still, the breath was knocked out of her, and she was trapped.
The eyeless creature's armored beak pressed to her throat. A threat? It wanted to be a threat. It wanted to be respected.
"Stop!"
One word was all it took. The talons pulled back, but only slightly. Still a threat, they hovered over her with the vacant gaze burning through her.
"Why did you leave us down there for so long?"
Each word flowed from it, stained with strained emotion. This was more than a simple question. This was condemnation. The first on a long list of crimes it wanted answers for.
"It wasn't me!"
Angie's terrified rebuttal fell flat.
"You are the part of her that made us. I can smell the magic on you. I can smell the blood. You're the same as you've always been. You are the one who was cruel and careless. You are the one who made us. With no intention of letting us free or giving us a purpose. You couldn't be satisfied with what you brought into this world. We weren't good enough. And now it isn’t good enough that you don't remember."
The creature's talons twitched anxiously. The trapped priestess didn’t know why they hadn’t come down on her yet, but they still lingered in the air and she was still alive. Angie could still work her way out of this. She chose her words carefully. Calculated them even as they slipped from her mouth filled with feigned surprise.
"But.. You're amazing...”
“You said us; what do you mean by that?"
Reggy knew Angie for what she was. A deceiver... It could tell lies from truth for most, but with Angie it could only draw a blank. Was this actually genuine? Her scent, the sound of her heart, the pace of her breath. None of it even hinted towards a lie. Deep down, at its very core it wanted to believe her. It wanted to be valued. But the appreciation of others weren’t enough. Just little crumbs to satiate it’s pained and starving ego.
"There were others who died after you left. They starved in their cages. Now there are more of us. More of me. And I speak for the whole here as you've wronged us all.”
“How am I amazing?”
There it was. She had opened a path through the situation. She could see the glimpse of light at the end. Survival. Reggy became slightly agitated hearing her heartbeat begin to slow.
"You're fast. And strong. And you survived through all of that. I don't...intend to create anything like you. But if I did, I would consider it a thrilling success."
Angie's hands slowly, carefully rose up and she pushed away the talons to make herself some space. Reggy didn't have to move. The tiny cleric had no hope of overpowering it. But it was caught up in the shock of the situation. Still skeptical of the vile human it beared down on, it allowed some space, hopping back slightly and planting both taloned feet on the cold stone.
Angie only continued to butter the creature up with half-truths cherry-picked to twist the situation into her favor.
"You're more than I ever thought these magics could make. And to think my hand created you... It fills me with pride."
The cleric carefully got to her feet. No sudden movements, nothing to make Reggy think she was going to run. Even standing, it dwarfed her. She choked down that fear, it would give her away.
"You said there's more of you. A whole that you were a part of. Do you intend to return to that whole?"
The skeletal head tilted rigidly. Its gaze was piercing. A critical inspection. It didn’t understand why she wanted to know and that was far from comforting.
"Yes. Why are you asking me this."
A weak little fit of laughter escaped the cleric. Perfect.
"I'm a part of a former whole. I have no intention of being anyone but myself. She made me, too. And she cast me out. Now I'm my own person. Not imagined, not destined to be a part of her once more. Are you going to stay as yourself? Or just be one of many?"
Reggy twitched, a sudden outburst of rage. Its voice almost raised to a shriek.
"You're trying to manipulate me!"
Angie feigned defeat, letting loose a sigh and looking away from the living mishmash of birds.
"I am. Yes. Because I want you to stay here with me, instead of just leaving. I owe all of you safety and care. But you're the only one who had the strength to confront me. You're different from the others, even if you don't feel so."
It caught her. Reggy caught her in her own web of manipulation, and this was its prize. It was beyond its wildest expectations and it truly, truly wanted to believe this.
"What would I be then?"
"The strongest part of the greatest creation wrought by my hands. Offered a rightful place at my side. Given all of the respect and love that you deserve. If you'll give me a chance to."
No pain. No injury. No blade or gun. Nothing had ever punctured the rogue monstrosity like those words. So directly through its chest. How could something so important be laid out in so few words.
Even when offered everything it wanted, it couldn't overcome the simple truth. It was bound to Angie's word. She didn't need to offer this. She could have demanded it. Did she even know she could? It could still flee. Return to grove. It was meant to. Always meant to.
This wasn't supposed to be a choice.
"If you care for me. I will care for you.”
“If you hurt me, I will kill you."
"I agree to those terms."
That constituted as permission. It wouldn’t forget this.
Creation and creator gambling their lives and freedom with one another. One will inevitably come out on top, but that really had already been decided.
What a sight. The young cleric curled into a tight ball on the blanket-laden loveseat squeezing the life out of a colorful, plush bee who didn’t really seem to mind all that much. Most of the choked-up sobbing and incoherent babbling had ceased as she tired herself out.
The jester watched from the other end of the loveseat. On one hand, the sound of her own voice distressed and crying was a little unnerving. On the other, her shadows seethed in the presence of such ripe emotion. Only a few weeks ago she would have reveled in this, contributed to it even. But something had changed in their relationship.
At first, it had been Angie’s willingness and excitement to learn. To grasp new magics eagerly and delve into any task placed before her. It filled Adola’s chest with pride. She made this. In some roundabout way, Angie was her creation. A little legacy she had abandoned, only for it to grow and continue on without her. She got to relive the joys of learning vicariously through the cleric.
She couldn’t help but see Angie as family of some sort. Really, she desperately wanted family. Something she had found and lost several times already. To say what their exact relationship was…was hard. Adola wanted to settle on ‘teacher and student’, but there was something deeper than that. They were on many levels the same person.
Adola slowly scooted her way across the loveseat, jingling a little in excess to assure the cleric knew she was getting closer. She reached purple gloved hand out, offering it to her distressed ward.
The cleric’s voice wavered, but managed to produce something like words. “Don’t touch-” She stopped when the hand arrived near instead of grasping at her. After wiping away some tears the cleric took hold of it, squeezing tightly. “It was right… There’s something wrong with me.”
“Go on.” Adola’s voice rung gently. Curiosity overcame care. In what ways has this fucked Angie up? “I already know everything about you. Tell me what it said.”
“It..it said I was weak.” She choked on the words briefly, pausing to blow her nose into a tissue before continuing, slightly more composed. “I’m a hollow facsimile of a stronger thing. It talked about..you. I think. It called you ‘The Thing I Was’. It knew I wasn’t a whole person. It told me that it was going to kill you.. Or you would die, and I would be free of your sins.”
Adola let out a little sigh. “That’s a very uncharitable way to refer to our circumstances.” A finger tapped against her heavy mask. “It was just pulling from Leshii’s memories. It didn’t know anything special or new. It just picked up on things that *anyone* would have felt insecure and afraid of.”
“It said you were instrumental to its rise.” The words spilled from the cleric’s mouth. A rebuttal in favor of fear and paranoia.
But fear and paranoia were Adola’s domain. Fear, paranoia, the unknown, the depths, dreams. It didn’t get to her. “I may have. Address did a great deal to try to escape from me. Undoubtedly Leshii made some poor choices along the way as well.” She let out a little sigh. She wasn’t helping… “Angie, when I was you. ..At this point. I stood no chance against something like that either. The Admiral poisoned me with darkness, and that was my introduction to the shadow. Life-long fears were cemented into me, plucking at my mind constantly for years. But, we can overcome that.”
Angie let out a startled noise as the elven jester yanked her by her hand, pulling her into a tight hug. She let out a wheeze of discomfort, but at the very least she felt…safe.
Adola’s grip loosened a little bit. A comforting embrace. With herself? How awkward. “In the face of something immortal, what do we have?” She offered no chance for response. “Willpower. We possess the ability to defy the world around us. To bend it to our whim. We have our own will and our own volition. It is bound, forced to serve its master for eternity. It envies us for what it will never have. Freedom. The god it serves is dead or defeated and bound. And without that? It has no purpose. These are its death throes. A desperate final attempt to make itself relevant. Where it is static, we **will** grow. And we can grow together. With the people we trust.”
The cleric didn’t look up at her. But Adola could hear that the cleric’s sobbing has come to a stop, and feel her racing heartbeat had quieted to a gentle thump. She waited for a moment… Before realizing Angie had finally tired herself out and slipped off to sleep.
Without anyone to hear it, Adola offered a tired goodbye. “Good night, Angie.” All before settling the priest back onto the loveseat and slipping away. Angie needed no nightmares of the Abyss. Not tonight, at least.
There were worse places to die than a pink bathroom. The thought swam around Archelaos' mind as he relaxed into the hot, sudsy water of the tub. A soft sizzle sound bubbled from the bath bomb near his foot, and the room smelled like roses. The late-afternoon sun speared through the window and into the floral clouds, draping Archelaos in the sunlight that he loved so much. He'd never been one to spoil himself, but he was coming around on the fancy soaps. Shame he'd only ever use them once.
Archelaos had cut himself a slice of cotton-candy heaven for his last moments. The pink walls, floors, and tub gave the room an alluring ambiance. In the corner of the room, a record player cracked a gentle, wordless beat. He heard indistinct conversations from the window as the residents of Old Town went about their day.
Beside the tub, sitting on a stool, lay a sliced cucumber and a sharpened knife. Archelaos slipped a sliver of cucumber between his teeth and bit down with an audible crunch. The coolness of the juice invigorated him, and the thus-far-uninterrupted plan left him feeling happier than he had in years. For the first time since the fall of Lordaeron, everything felt right.
So few men had control over their last moments; the Scarlet Crusade had taught Archelaos that. Even he couldn't fully control his own fate. Maugrim's early return or Levant's interference in his father's affairs could disrupt his wonderful, rose-tinted scheme. Either would thwart him; not to spare his life, but to control when it ended. Archelaos would never let himself be controlled again.
When all but one slice of the cucumber had been eaten, he lifted his hand from the pink water to grasp the knife. It still carried the faint, crisp scent of the fruit it had sliced before he ran the bath.
"Light," his voice, hoarse from screaming, prayed: "Bless this merciful blade and the sinner who wields it. May it be a tool of righteousness, delivering those who should have passed on to a peaceful afterlife. May its victims never be revived or corrupted by necromancy. So let it be." A golden hue shimmered along the edge of the blade as divinity seeped into the steel.
Archelaos slid the last cucumber wheel into his mouth, savoring the last taste of life he'd ever have. He then leaned his arm against the blush-toned porcelain of the tub and lined the tip of the knife up against a puffy horizontal scar, one born of similar methods and different intentions. He flinched as he put pressure onto the blade, cutting deeper into his wrist than he had before. Blood pooled at the base of the blade and wept down his wrist towards his elbow and into the pink water.
A deep breath later, a quick flick of his wrist tore the blade through veins and arteries, scraping past bone until the blade fell out of his hands and into the murky rose tint of the water. He could feel his lifeblood pumping out of his wrist, leaving thick crimson streams up the rim of the bathtub. His eyes squeezed shut as he tried to relax. This is what he wanted. Everything would be fine. He crushed the last slice of cucumber between his molars, focusing on the refreshing flavor. Then the deep sensation of calm. The warm, cozy drowsiness that filled him as his blood gushed out of his body. It wasn't long before the pain was a distant, dull sensation, leaving him at peace for the first time in his life.
She Waits In the Eternal Sunshine of the Deathless Dream
An aggressive silence stripped the tremors from the air around her, leaving it a blank and weathered canvas unfit to carry the fathomless, epiphanic utterances that rapaciously consumed all other sounds.
Unsheltered, flashing imagery greeted her with its icy embrace. Colossal cenotaphs bathed in blinding white light above a bleak, defoliated plane.
Then came endless rocky steppes devoid of color and feeling, stretching eternally into a yawning maw of shade and void. The visible invisible, baffling, and insane.
Yet more, a stretching maze of nonsensical and non-Euclidean stupidity wreathed in messily entangled, malodorous tendrils that glistened in the everlasting evenfall. An ever-shifting death trap of colossal proportions.
A sense of final dread tunneled its way into her chest cavity, through squelching flesh and snapping bone. It wriggled up vessels and veins, toward her heart.
Sll'ha naf'ygth vq'phoen lw'nafh syha'h.
Finally, peace. That everlasting second reached its end. Her eyelids came together and parted again. Blink.
spiralization of tender flesh
an allegorical interlocking; body and soul.
blood brothers out back behind the bar
tinny garbage, natural born loser, you
cannibal. what’s it like to ‘really’ sink your teeth in?
vice grip crocodile death roll
smoking barrel of a hunter’s gun, shouting
‘fuck yea’ with raised fists across the park
hollering caterwaul, haunt like feral felines
i lit my cigarette with the embers of yours,
watched ashes fall before lofting into the night air
Death's cold embrace wrapped itself around her like a leaded blanket, flushing the heat of her body down into the cold stone below her. Feeling left her extremities.
The sky close above was a murky, roiling ocean of grey-green gloom, an ever-changing surface that almost felt as if it could descend and unmake anything it abutted. As she scanned the sky, that tangle of foggy, intangible tendrils, the color drained from her sight.
She felt the chill of the stagnant air on her skin. It crawled from her fingers, up her arms, and into her very core. Her heartbeat slowed, sounding off like a great drum. Then it thumped its last.
Quietus est. The coarse squawking of the birds grew quieter before returning tenfold in volume. A cruel cacophony of vacant gnashing unfit for word and sound, weaving themselves into the very fabric of her mind to make messages of the racket.
Her blurry eyes traced out across the sprawling plain before her. An aqueous mirror of stars, transcendental vastness shielded from her by only a gossamer film.
Eel-like creatures disturbed the stagnation of the threateningly null reservoir, writhing under the surface to speed themselves through the astral mere.
At the apex of it all came a terrible epiphany, numbing the wriggling up her chest that forced a gasp from her lungs. The churning fog, the cold stone, the glassy water - it was no dream.
The abhorrent babble of want, skirting scores of sickening solutions. A pull from one and the other, an eternal struggle of seraphic sensibilities that guides the mind down sibylline esplanades. She sits both insouciant and scandalized in the face of it.
Between the inky wells of awful scarring on her hands, the point of most contention: a focal barb in the stinging, brackish air. The gulls holler 'heresy!' and the stinging breeze shies away. The very earth below her feet abhors her whispering candor.
All her schismatic veracity, brought to bear in a single point unfolded over the surface of the imagined edge. Then, her gospel cheats her in a most distasteful fashion.
Your family left you. Excised you like a cancer. I would never leave you. You would never have to be alone.
She sits in the verity of it all. In the fathomless trickery, for just a moment. Weighing the chance. Then, a swift pronouncement: maybe another time. That precise, controlled struggle of seraphic sensibilities finds its ethereal unity, flying forth with the flick of a wrist and cleaving stone clean in two.
Discuss soul magic with D.E. — Provided solution: break soul gem, new body will be created. If it isn't, soul is tethered to Tree. Safe to proceed. Spoke of outstanding needs of the family. Immediate needs: Kill Tree, deliver green dragon to frog.
Establish new identity for Family — Communications fell apart without intervention. Introduced P.H.O.N.E. communicator system to prevent unconscious magical corruption. Removed source of strife and corruption. New name pending. Old Town Solutions.
Priority #1 Tree — Best solution according to D.E. is to drain it of mana, then uproot it and let it starve. Discuss with group.
Priority #2 Redridge — Touch base with Crumb. Scout to get a gauge on Blackrock and draconic activity.
Priority #3 Front — Establish base in Old Town. Blood drive. Charity/mercenary company.
Priority #X Vault — Discuss with Kiran.
Recruitment — Interview and establish lawful guild and payroll.
Angie Brice — Northshire Cleric. Sadist. Testing boundaries and getting to know the world again.
Sin — V. Addicted to risk. Homeless? Lone wolf agent.
Ashafael — V. Sensitive to blood spill. Struggling with accepting self, wants to work towards absolution. Good tank. Good personality to keep the social atmosphere light. Uncomfortable with murder?
Hierei — New. Weird. Corrupted dragon. Competent medic with a wide range of magical applications. Interested in non-combatant roles. Good to pair with Angie for now.
Bigsby — Paladin. Green affiliated. Okay with mild law breaking. Not okay with murder.
Arthalia — Up-in-coming adventurer. Archaeologist who specializes in elves. Good at disarming traps. Give her leadership position on the field to get confidence up. Not okay with murder.
Miss Rosey — Druid (Drustvar), medic, baker. Sweet face. Good for front and magical dealings. Good for morale. Not okay with murder.
Crumb — Gnoll. Business in Redridge. Unsure of commitment.
Pippa — Gnoll. Connected to Crumb. Unsure of commitment.
Drowner — Horde ambassador, loose commitment.
Urissa — Interested but not yet signed on. Good for Tree. Not okay with murder.
Kiran — Unsure of commitment. Not okay with murder.
Rolance — Unsure of commitment.
Kazu'ran — New. Unsure of commitment.
Quitti — New. Unsure of commitment. Mage. Don't hit him with magic. Address shit-stirring.
Imon — Unsure of commitment.
Adola — Uninvolved.
Fishbone — Uninvolved permenantly.
Address — Interested. Wants a piece of the Tree to study.
Leshii — Unsure of commitment, likely to follow Address. Not okay with murder?
“It’s been a struggle to get used to the new way of things. There’s so much to learn. So much to see. There’s like five lifetimes of history packed into the last ten years.
People know me. I have no idea who any of them are. They have expectations, fears, baggage, grudges. All related to me, but... I didn’t do anything. Well, not me-me. The other me.
It’s just so complicated. I wish I could take my mind off of it and just be anonymous. The random priestess wandering around Stormwind, making friends, doing what I want.
This new life though. It comes packed with a friend. You met him. Archelaos. He’s been holding my hand through a lot of this. He’s someone I think I can trust. Someone who has proved multiple times he...cares about me? We’re like family or something.”
Angie let loose a sigh.
“I have trust issues. But, thanks to you I can put it all to the test. All at once.”
There was no response from the other participant in the discussion. Just a steady drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Red liquid falling into the metal washtub at Angie’s feet. The blood’s source, a woman dangling upside down, strung up like a deer to be bled out after the hunt.
Her shocked and terrified expression was softened by the severe lack of eyes filling her head.
It helped to tell herself that this wasn't even so different than a few weeks ago. She still didn't know much of anyone, even having lost everyone she knew.
At least no one from the Abbey was probably still looking for her. And she had someone to help. Someone who seemed to want to take care of her. What a weird feeling.
Her fingers gripped at the reassuring weight of the metal laid across her lap. Archelaos' gun. To curb that annoying buzz at the back of her head she applied her attention to the weapon, looking it over. Taking stock of the parts, imagining how they fit together.
She was tempted to start taking it apart, just to find out how it really worked, but she knew her lack of experience had a strong chance to leave her with a damaged or dismantled weapon. Potentially when she truly needed one.
She eventually fell asleep curled up in one of the heavy wooden chairs near the fire.
CW: Blood, gore, body horror, implied murder, guns, implied people death, briefly implied animal death.
Watching.
It is what she did. It is all she could do.
At first, every day was a new experience. She would watch from her small place, wedged into the corner of this grey stone wall. And she would watch the room around her change and grow, not in size but in complexity.
Simple, bare furniture and dusty walls were soon covered in all manner of instruments and objects she didn't understand.
Just as the room changed, she did as well. Her life was enriched with many different things. Taste. Smell. Hearing. Touch. Sometimes these senses were taken from her. Sometimes they were given in such abundance the stimulus lost all meaning.
She soaked in everything she could about the room around her. She counted the stones in the walls. She tasted the ground, felt the air, listened to the creaking of the wood above. It took her a long time to realize the sounds were other people moving through another room above this one. People she would never see. Except for one.
A small human, with red hair. The singular force of chaos in her quiet life. The reason everything changed, including her.
The human was always busy, always talking to herself, always focused on something new. But the human always had time to visit her. She would give her new things. New faces and eyes. New noses and mouths. Hearts and livers and lungs.
Seeing the human work brought to mind an artist at first and the many projects strewn around the room were her pieces of art. Rather than paint, she rendered forms in flesh and bone.
She did not have the pleasure of being art though. She was simply the palette. She was where the colors were held and combined, where they would remain until the human needed them.
It took a great deal of watching and listening to truly understand though, the human was not a painter. The human did her work for understanding. Understanding how flesh fit with other flesh. How bone could be made stronger and sharper. How a heart could be made to pump gallons of blood, rather than a few pints. The human did not value the artistic merit of her works. The human never even spoke of the concept of art in her long-winded muttering and speaking with the numerous shadows in the corners of the room.
That left her with only one question… In all of her life here in her corner, how had she ever learned what art is? How did she know what a human was? How did she know she was a she? Why did her eyes feel so wet when she pondered these things?
Click.
The final pin slid into place and the lock turned. Mordekai let out a sigh. It hadn't been a particularly difficult lock, but chasing after this sort of witch often meant dealing with sinister traps, but there was no magical retort to his finessing the lock open.
The door slowly opened and he peered through the crack that lead beyond the threshold. Taking a moment to survey the room beyond and steady his breath. A bare room, almost as if no one lived here at all. He would have never assumed anything about the building, set outside of Eastvale.
He had tailed a cart in from Stranglethorn Vale, all the way from Booty Bay. Uncovering a goblin cartel who made their profits buying and selling cadavers along the way. Their business was unforgivable, but they were at the center of a larger web of vile individuals who were likely doing more harm than a bunch of bodysnatching goblins.
He left the rest of the Argent Crusade to investigate the cartel while he sought out the ones who were buying the dead.
This one was different though. To bring bodies in closer to the city. To work on them in Elwynn Forest itself. Necromancers never set up so close to a city as big as Stormwind. The utter boldness of this one shook him.
And despite the pristine nature of the empty home, Mordekai knew something was off. Even with his age and fading sense of smell, the metallic twang of blood was still clear to him. The floor was much too clean for the building to be truly abandoned, not even the slightest layer of dust remained on the floor.
This was definitely the right place.
The hammer on Mordekai's revolver drew back as he peered around the corner at the bottom of the steps. He took in a sharp breath… This was far worse than he had thought.
The doorway opened up to a well-lit stone basement. Tables surrounded the outside wall of the room, covered in strange instruments bridging the gap between the tools of a butchery and a place of medicine. So many jars coated the tables, each containing clear water, and a single piece of flesh, some he could identify and some so inhuman and twisted he had to assume they were from a beast. Magical runes glimmered across the cap of each bottle, he didn't recognize them but he assumed they were keeping the contents from fouling.
The center of the room was dominated by a wide table set over a drain at the center of the floor. The table had been scrubbed clean, but the slightly slanted floor was still red with blood that pooled at the drain. A hunched, emaciated figure was already huddled underneath the grim workplace. A woman with red hair, wearing an incredibly heavy smock.
The woman wasn’t hiding. She was elbow-deep in the drain, muttering to herself as she dredged clotted mounds of human hair and discarded flesh out of it, dumping them by hand into a bucket next to her. The drain gurgled and all of the pooled blood began to drain away.
The woman had only just begun to back up out of underneath the table when she heard a single footstep accompanied by a worn voice. “Don’t move.” Her head jerked towards the doorway, staring up the barrel of Mordekai’s gun.
Her expression shifted and tears began to pour down her eyes. “Thank the Light you’ve come! They...the goblins… They’ve been forcing me to work down here.” Her voice cracked as she let out a sob. She crawled in his direction, out from under the table.
Mordekai’s gun sagged towards the ground briefly. “Light help us all. What are they making you…” He went silent and his gun flung back up. As she passed into the sterile light of the electrical lamp over the table, she cast no shadow. To someone with his experience, he recognized it immediately for what it was. He pulled the trigger before she could even react.
So much happened in an instant. The red-haired witch tumbled backwards across the table, caught in the chest by the round. In this enclosed space the sheer noise of the firearm discharging was deafening, but an unholy roar of pain erupted from deeper in the room, around a corner beyond his sight. Dozens of mouths screaming in unison.
He spun around, his free-hand pulling a thin bottle from beneath his cloak only to whip it downwards at his own shadow. His unusually dark silhouette across the ground burst into flames on contact with the holy water and erupted in its own chorus of screams. He reeled away from it back towards the bloodstained center of the room but it remained, his true shadow peeling from the living darkness as it struggled to claw its way up from the floor like someone crawling out of a deep, dark hole. Its shapeless ink-like form refusing to manifest into anything more than a smouldering, screaming black husk as the blessed water tried to force it from this world.
Mordekai moved with practice and precision, holstering his revolver to draw a different handgun, a single-shot flintlock weapon. He loaded a single, glimmering round and fired through the creature. Its form bloated on impact from the magical ammunition, the bonds that held it to this reality fraying as it finally popped like a zit, tangible shadows spattered against the doorway he'd came through.
Without a single moment of hesitation, he spun back towards the witch, reloading the gun with a second blessed round, but she was already gone. A trail of blood left behind her leading around the corner deeper into the horrible flesh laboratory.
He followed hastily, but with caution. His breath caught in his throat when he rounded the corner and found no witch, but rather the source of the horrible chorus of screams. “May the Light preserve me…” A wall of living flesh stood before him, dozens of crying eyes peering down upon him. He saw beating hearts, breathing lungs, drooling maws. A large gap was cut down its center and it bled like a punctured wineskin. Beyond the bloody gash was a rough path. The witch’s escape route.
Mordekai could not bring himself to push past the horrible, sorry creature. This was not necromancy. This thing, whatever it was, whoever it used to be...was alive, woven into the stone of the wall, sagging forward off of it with dozens of twitching, immobile limbs. The monstrosity didn't react to him, only keeping its numerous misplaced eyes upon Argent Witchhunter.
“I’m sorry… So sorry I wasn’t here earlier to save you from this.” He holstered his gun and took two small satchels out from under his cloak. One he placed directly up against the horrific creature’s gurgling mass. “I don’t know if you understand me. Part of me hopes you don’t, but if you do you deserve to know what I’m doing. I’m going to kill you. It will be as fast as I can make it, and you won’t hurt anymore when it's done. You can be mad at me, you’ve every right to. I pray by the Light’s mercy you find peace and safety in the afterlife, far from anyone or anything that can do this to you. And I pray the Light will forgive me for ending your life.”
Turning to walk away, he set the second charge at the bottom of the stairs as he quickly made his way out. With trembling hands, he set off the explosives. The deep thump shook the ground briefly and the whole building buckled inward, collapsing into nothing but a pile of rubble.
“And I want you to know, I won’t let this happen to anyone else.”
The treasure in the chest was laid bare. Angie had opened it with all of the deftness of a skilled safecracker, but where pins might have been set in a lock, ribs had been skillfully removed to prevent the damage of the riches within.
Lungs and heart and liver, all on display. A sharp blade made quick work of anything else that was in the way. She rolled her sleeve up, feeling a familiar tug at the corners of her mouth as she laid a finger on the liver. It was almost enough that she could ignore the SKITTERING.
Her fingers pressed down around the organ, wanting to assure it’s safety as she lifted it from it’s former home. She felt something else, something moving. With a curiosity, she pulled the liver upwards, just enough to see what it could be.
A black mass of writhing creatures filled the gap. Maggots. Roaches. Beetles. A living pestilence that fed upon corpses. This body was infested.
Angie wrenched her arm back, but it would not come. Something clamped around her fingers, dragging her arm further in. Her fingers. Her wrist. Her elbow. Bit by bit, her face was drawn closer towards the vivisected body.
The mass of horrible insects burrowed into her skin. Under her fingernails, between her bones. It moved further and further up her arm as she was dragged deeper and deeper in.
Try as she might, there was no escaping it. She needed help, but no one was here but her and the cadaver. As her shoulder approached the gaping maw of the infestation, she could only hold her head aloft to prolong it reaching her face.
Desperation set in. She cried for the Light. A prayer at the top of her lungs.
“LIGHT-”
A shudder of disgust ran through her. Heaving and gagging racked her body. Fresh vomit was already all over her pillow when she regained consciousness.
She bolted upwards to look at her hands. Only one came into view. The other was gone. She already knew it wouldn’t be there. Her trembling fingers balled into a fist.
She could still feel it. Still feel them under her skin.
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