The following night and day was a long one.
Simo had buried herself in her strange work again after the savage battles of the previous day, dissecting corpse after corpse and scribbling down notes and diagrams in the volume she always had at her side. The scholar barely paused to eat and drink, let alone to rest or converse; neither Sorus nor Degel could get so much as a word in edgewise, so absorbed in her work was she. But she worked swiftly enough, and with the curious fervour that seemed to have gripped her showing no signs of abating, the two mercenaries decided to occupy themselves as they saw fit.
Sorus ransacked the dwellings above for anything she could fashion a light source out of, cobbling together bundles of cloth and brittle twigs into a crude torch before igniting it with a few sparks from a flint and her sword. It stank like burning rags, but it was better than working down in the dark, and far better than painstakingly dragging each of the corpses and corpse-pieces up the slippery stairs to be examined under natural sunlight as Simo was. Neither of the humans were willing to work down in pitch dark among the corpses and the endless drops, where every sound was an enemy waiting to spring from ambush and every whisper movement a deadly threat.
Degel had no such qualms, however. Whether by sight, scent, or some preternaturally sharp sense of his species, the Hand was easily able to navigate his way through the darkness of the pit. While Sorus went about finding a light source and Simo with her work, Degel carefully went from goblinoid body to body, using the edge of one axe to slit the corpses’ throats just in case any vestige of life lingered within them despite the wounds they had been dealt. Once that was done, he searched them for whatever might prove useful for the journey ahead – weaponry, armour, commonly-bartered trinkets; all went into the pack for him to sort out in the coming hours.
Finding little else to do, the pair occupied themselves with the tunnels overhead. The corpses that choked the passages were dragged out and disposed of, either thrown outside or barred within the tributary rooms and left to finish decaying. Little could be done about the pervasive stench, however. Sorus had already silently resolved to burn the clothes she wore the moment a replacement set could be found. Degel seemed able to ignore it as he set to sorting through the loot, throwing aside whatever pieces proved too rusted or damaged to be of use to rot with their former owners. It was a long and grim process, for the goblins seemed to have an almost uncanny talent for accumulating useless odds and ends beside the useful items.
By the time he was finally finished sorting the wheat from the chaff – a bronze battle axe, a couple pieces of repairable armour, and a single unrusted dagger – Simo was finished with her long process of notetaking and dissection, while Sorus was about ready to explode from boredom and frustration. Her frustration would only grow when the doctor called for a rest break, the cost of her physical exertions in the earlier battle and her subsequent dissections finally catching up to her; her own tiredness only made it worse, despite recognising the necessity of the action.
Over the time they spent down in the pit and its tunnels the sun had set and risen again, such that when they finally emerged back onto the land before the tower it was approaching midday. A great shroud of grey and black clouds had drawn over the sky, accompanied by a strongly blowing wind and rain, churning the ground beneath them into sticky mud and forming a thick pall of fog, such that as they trekked on back through the forests and toward Simo’s next destination, there came a constant shifting of the vapours and sights around them. Here it would part to expose the bare branches of a dead tree; later, to reveal the shattered wreckage of a long-lost caravan colonised by plants; and once or twice, it would break entirely to allow a few brief flickers of daylight to reach them.
As they drew toward the hamlet Simo had circled on her map, the fogs lifted for a moment to leave their surroundings bare. It was an unremarkable place, by all appearances; a large hall at the centre, dingy, dirt-paved streets, a handful of desolate houses clustered together, and the ragged remnants of what might have been stalls or mercantile buildings; then the fog lowered once more, cutting the group off from a clear sight of their surroundings. Degel led them onward, his adapted eyes giving him a better sight of what lay ahead – the blunt, weathered façade of the hamlet’s main hall, and the easiest place to start their search.
They were drawing up on the road to the hall when Degel suddenly paused in his tracks, head rising up. He cocked his head to one side as the long nostril-slits of his snout waved in and out, his analogue to sniffing.
“Wait.” The scales of his face shifted as it creased in distaste. “…I smell something.”
“What?” Sorus turned toward him, eyebrow raising. “What is it?”
“Here – there’s something not quite right here. I can smell something. Not a good one, neither.”
“I don’t.” Sorus shook her head and turned to look back at Simo. “Doc, are you getting anything?”
Simo shook her head, stepping around Sorus to stand beside Degel. “I do not smell anything, least of all an unpleasant one. Is it possible you happen to be mistaken?”
“I know I smell something!” Degel forged on ahead, scowling, leaving his companions to scramble after him. He slowed a dozen feet from the main doors to the hall, dropping from his stride to a walk. “Do you smell it now?”
“All I can smell is –” Sorus stopped mid-sentence, recoiling as the wind shifted
just enough to let her catch the what Degel had been implying. “Gods’ teeth! Have you been foraging again?”
“You’re not pinning this one on me, ‘Rus!” He protested, one eye twitching at the reminder. He raised a finger to point to the hall, nose-slits flicking rapidly again. “I can smell it – it’s coming from there, and getting stronger all the time.”
“Then we need to go in, and find out what it is.” Simo stalked past the two of them without a backward glance, her face grimly set. The scholar grabbed the handles of the hall’s doors with both hands and flung them wide, letting the cold air rush into the hall – just as the stale air within came pouring out.
“What is – oh, SHIT!”
The inside hall was an abattoir.
Junk and random clutter lay scattered across the worn stone floor, piled up into large stacks at the ends of the room or poking out through burlap sacks. The flagstones were dark with dirt and deep brown-black marks, staining the gaps between the stones or pooling near roughly cut channels and grooves in the floor. Clouds of fat black flies burst from a dozen different directions and went swarming past them, disturbed from their rest by the wind creeping along the floor; with them came the full force of the stench, and the constant, droning buzz of countless wings.
The true horror, however, lay in the centre of the room: a tangled morass of bodies and limbs and gear, flung out at odd angles or piled upon one another until it almost reached the ceiling. Some of the bodies were whole; others were monstrous, mutated, bloating up with the early stages of decay. Many showed signs of being hacked apart, carved up, or otherwise mutilated, missing entire limbs or being reduced to nothing but stained skeletons. A great many were animals of one kind or another, wolves and bears and a handful of others forming a broad base; then goblins, and then humans, and a handful of other, stranger beings.
One in particular crowned the pile – a Hand of Planegifts, no more than a few days dead. Her chest had been split open down the centre by a blade and the ribs cracked apart to reveal the empty cavity beneath; the arms and legs were recognisable only as a few scraps of meat and off-white bone, poking out from the smooth stumps. Her head was a butchered, eyeless mess: the jaw ripped away, the nose-slits peeled open to reveal the workings inside, the empty bowl of the skull, where the bone had been sawn through and the brain cut free.
Sorus spared a single look for the ruined rags of the Hand’s face. It was enough for her to tell the unfortunate creature had been alive when she was cut open.
She felt the bile rise in her throat at the sight and the pressure against the underside of her jaw and tried to hold it back; then the stench hit her as she fumbled her way backward, and there was no stopping it.
The next thing she knew, she was on the ground a dozen steps away from the building’s doors, heaving until nothing but noises came. Some part of her derided how weak she was, to lose her lunch at the sight of a corpse; the rest of her drowned it out with horror. Someone had taken that Hand – a living, breathing person – and ripped her open, torn out whatever they wanted, all while she was alive and aware. Simo, at least, had the decency to kill things first.
After a long few minutes she managed to stagger to her feet, wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand.
Several feet to the right Degel was kneeling in the dirt, breathing hard as he carefully re-adjusted his helmet. Behind him, emerging from the fog, Simo loomed, her expression caught between instinctive disgust and concern for her suddenly sickened comrades, one hand resting on the hand of Planegifts’ scaly shoulder. She turned slightly, head cocking to the side as she noticed the rising figure of Sorus, and shot her a grimace before beginning to rummage around in her pack.
“Here.” Simo handed Degel something – a small phial of greenish glass, filled with a colourless fluid. “Drink this. It should help.”
“And ‘it’ is…?” He managed to rasp.
“A little remedy I picked up from an old friend.” Simo gave a slight, strained-looking smile. Her eyes were wrinkled at the very edges, as though struggling not to water. “Something to help with the… distasteful sensations, and relieve the worst of the aftertaste.”
Grimacing, Degel downed the phial. It felt watery and entirely too reminiscent of the bile cooling at his feet to be deemed “pleasant,” but its strongly minty tang was at least enough to drown out the worst of the aftertaste.
“Thanks, doc.” He managed a weak grin as she moved onward to Sorus, already drawing out a second phial from the bag. Then, at more of a mutter, “Good to see you’ve got something for those moments when you randomly toss your guts.”
“’Ang on a second,” Sorus rasped, pulling herself back to her feet with a deep breath. Simo stood beside her, helping to steady the nausea-struck mercenary. “That got me and Degel, but you? What’s the deal with that?”
“I’ve smelled worse.”
“What?” Sorus jerked her head about in surprise. “When?”
The bleak expression on Simo’s face was enough to kill any further attempt at inquiry. With her question dying on her lips, Sorus settled for shaking her head and sucked in a breath, before nodding her thanks to the black-robed doctor and pushing off toward the hall again. Degel followed moments later, staggering to his feet and beginning to stump his way after her.
“Fuck me, it looks like one’a Alocasi’s early works in here.”
Shutting out Degel’s muttered commentary, Sorus began searching the room with a wary eye, one hand on her sword’s handle. An increasingly large number of eviscerated corpses, severed limbs, and battered equipment. A chipped workbench streaked with ruddy stains, standing against one wall. A few further stains – darker, these ones – in the grooves on the floor; the half-shattered neck of what might have been a bottle of some sort. Nothing that would answer her questions. If only, it only raised more – both as to what had happened, and why it had seemingly been abandoned.
The door swung open with a creak and a deep gust of stale air, as though the room beyond was taking a deep breath. It exhaled, and with it came the reek of acid and ammonia, and a deeper, noisome stench.
The room looked as though it had once been some kind of dining hall, or meeting place for the former occupants. Scuffmarks on the stone suggested the former presence of chairs or great tables, dragged out of the room or smashed up for firewood where they stood; there were brackets in the walls in which long-extinguished lanterns hung, long burnt out by time. Only a few wavering fingers of sunlight reached into the space from the open doors of the hall, but that was enough to let their eyes adjust to the gloom.
Dozens of bottles and beakers stood in neat rows along the room’s sides, lined up on bookcases and hastily constructed shelves or kept upright by small tripods. Many were filled with thick, glutinous substances; others, these ones stoppered and packed into crates as though intended for transport, contained watery-looking fluids with neat labels tied around their container’s necks. On a handful of the shelves and several tributary tables, a series of bell-jars stood filled with murky oils, dark shapes coiling within.
Around them: dozens of them cages, small and cramped, like those used to contain livestock at a village market. They had been crammed into whatever space could be found along the walls in rows and columns, stacked atop one another until they scraped the stone of the ceiling. Each one was secured with some variety of chain or lock, draped over with a sheet of heavy, dark cloth to obscure their contents – or to prevent the contents seeing outward. Most seemed empty, though the blackened stains around their base spoke of the reason why.
“What the hell happened in here?” Sorus muttered, grimacing as she began to carefully pick her way between the cages.
At the rough centre of the room, back turned to them, was a high-backed chair. Degel could just make out the curvature of a spindly limb and slender hand, resting on one arm of the chair.
“Hey! What happened here? Are you alr— motherfucker up a pike!”
Degel practically threw himself backward from the figure seated in the chair, features twisted in a mixture of horror and shock. Sorus didn’t hesitate a moment, breaking off mid-sentence and sprinting to where Degel was pressing himself against the wall, breathing hard.
There was a corpse in the chair. His skin was desiccated, grey and tight on the bones, as though he’d been dead for weeks. Thick leather straps looped around his badly bruised torso and arms, pinning him to the wood of the chair; red muscle peeked out around those at his wrists, where the unfortunate man’s struggles had worn away the flesh. Crude restraints had been tightened upon either side of his head, wooden blocks attached to tightly wound screws that kept the blocks clamped firmly to either side of his head so as to prevent movement. The top of his skull had been removed like a lid, baring the brain beneath; long metal rods and probes had been inserted into the tissue, driven into the organ like the work of some demented acupuncturist.
At the sight, it was Sorus’ turn to swear loudly and throw herself back from the chair, sword raised as though to ward off the corpse. Her leg caught on the edge of a protruding cage and she went over in an undignified heap, before scrambling back upright and bolting back into the main hall. Her heart was thundering in her ears as she drew to a halt, leaning on one of the walls for support. Degel was barely a step behind her.
“I don’t get it,” Sorus said, breathing hard. “Who’d do this? Hell,
why would they? What the hell is the point of
that?”
“Aye, that’s not normal,” Degel agreed. He crossed over to stand beside her, reptilian eyes narrowing to dark slits. “Violence an’ killing... that’s not unusual for this realm, particularly this far out. But that – that looks almost… ritualistic. Purposeful. Like a sorcerer’s handiwork.”
“…Should I be concerned, Degel?” Sorus cast a mock-wary eye toward the Hand.
“You’d be surprised how much you learn over time, ‘Rus.” He answered, features twitching into his odd approximation of a grin. “Particularly when you actually learn to read.”
“Oi!”
Degel snickered at her response, turning his head slightly as she clipped one of his ears. He rose from his half-slouch, head turning to seek out the last member of their party.
“What about you, doc? You ever seen t— Doc?”
The young, ash-haired woman stood in the doorway of another connected room. She had grown paler than ever before. The colour had drained completely from her face, leaving a dead, grey mask in its place. In one hand she clasped a slender volume, thinner and longer than the large tomes she carried with her; the other was clenched into a fist hard enough to draw blood from under her nails.
“Science requires sacrifice.” Simo’s voice was barely above a soft murmur, but the sheer, visceral disgust in her words spoke volumes. “But this…”
She shook her head wordlessly, tossing the volume against the ground with a sudden, convulsive movement of her arm. The scholar walked away from it and slumped against one of the walls as though exhausted, kneading her brow in apparent pain.
Sorus and Degel exchanged a hesitant glance, before walking to the door she had emerged from and peering inwards.
The sight hit them before the smell.
Corpses. Most of them were hunched over in their cramped cages, bent almost double or curled into knots to fit, while others were slumped forward, stiffened fingers gripping the bars, twisted faces shoved up against the iron. Only a handful of them were recognisable – humans, goblins, Hands of Planegifts. The rest were monsters that bore no resemblance to anything born of nature.
Sorus’ eyes flicked left and right across the bodies. A twisted sack of flesh supported by four humanoid arms, featureless save for a single orifice and the mouths nested inside. A horse-sized brute of skinned muscle festooned in bone barbs. A centipede-like creature, its flesh sheathed by fingernail horn, the limbs green-skinned arms and legs. A hunched quadruped, its exposed flanks little more than a mass of dripping sores and coarse hairs. An octopoidal form of translucent intestine, featureless save for the distended mouths at each tentacle’s edge.
Others seemed to serve no purpose other than disgust. A snakelike mass of gristle, wound together into a heap. Something made entirely out of braided, still-twitching nerve. A mass of interconnected arms, joined hand to hand, empty eyesockets formed within the palms and on the elbows. Another quadruped, bloated to the side of a wagon, tumorous intestines pouring out of its distended maw to pool on the caged floor. Several dozen glistening, wet eyes fused together into a vaguely rounded blob. All had been ripped apart in a similar fashion to the corpses in the main hall.
“I know who was responsible for this.” Simo’s voice sounded behind them, as brittle as pig iron. One hand gripped the crook of her elbow with crushing force, the other clenched into a shivering ball at her side.
The facts had been coming together since the moment she stepped into the hall, and the portrait they painted was a sinister one.
The mercenaries were not the hardiest of people, but they had seen enough combat over the past couple weeks and however many years they had been in the profession. They’d been in almost daily battles with thralls and the rotting bodies undead, fighting almost nose to nose with them in environments that even a troll would be hard pressed to call “good smelling.” A pile of bodies – even dissected, butchered, and decaying like that – should not have caused such nausea in them. Not to that severity. Not from that distance.
That had roused her suspicion to begin with. While her companions were busy regurgitating outside, she had taken the opportunity to slip into the hall. That distinctive scent had hit her in moments, and it confirmed exactly what she had feared.
The bodies had been doused with a poison intended to create a sense of nausea and discomfort in anything that came too close.
Sorus being quickly and severely affected was unsurprising. The mercenary was already tired from the previous day’s battles and the long march that had followed; she further doubted that the mercenary had ever been exposed to anything like that particular chemical, based on what little she had said of her past experiences. The mixture had affected her somewhat even at a distance, but up close it was near incapacitating.
Degel had been dizzied by the concoction even at a distance, his unique sense of smell picking up on it long before they did, but it had taken direct exposure to a large quantity of it to knock him down. Idly, she wondered if the experiments that had created his curious species had increased or decreased their resilience to such things.
And as for herself, well…
It was always wise to carry a cure for your own creations.
Had she not managed to feed the mercenaries the cure under the guise of a simple folk remedy, the nausea would have proven painful – even crippling – for the better part of the day, and possibly the next. They would have been easy targets for anyone with malicious intent. A lone thrall would have been able to tear the two mercenaries limb from limb with scarcely an effort. A proper swarm would have meant death for them all.
Regardless, its mere presence was unnerving in itself. She had made it years ago, during her wilder days, and shared it with no-one. A tool to incapacitate someone was of great use, be it benevolent or malevolent, and she had no intention of helping her competition.
When the mercenaries had chosen to busy themselves examining the adjacent rooms, Simo had taken advantage of their preoccupation to examine the pile of cadavers in the hall, pretending it was little more than her usual notetaking about their anatomy or their wounds’ nature.
Rooting around in a pile of corpses didn’t bother her. Her findings did.
The condition of the hand of Planegifts’ corpse had roused her suspicions already; that of the others only crystalised it. Every one of them had been similarly mutilated – restrained, then rendered down for parts – by a bladed instrument. From some, an organ had been taken; from others, entire bones, tendons, or lengths of muscle had been torn from the body and seemingly taken away by their slayer. Disquieting in itself, the methodology behind the murders suggested further possibilities. None of them were appetising; even fewer assuaged her fears.
More than that, there was the nature of the blade.
Years spent studying the anatomy and workings of living bodies had given her an almost preternatural sense for recognising injuries and their cause. The skills with knives and blades she had developed over the months and years did the rest. The cuts were too smooth to be the work of an outright weapon, without the tearing or raggedness most combat injuries showed. They were too deliberate, as well – each one had been delivered with a painstaking degree of precision, indicative of a skill beyond most laymen.
These cuts had been done with a scalpel, not a sword. This was the work of a surgeon, rather than a soldier.
Dread growing in her heart, she turned from the pile and searched the rest of the room. All her search yielded was a simple version book, as mundane as any to be found in an alchemist’s laboratory or doctor’s abode. Familiar, spidery writing crawled along the pages: names, dates, ratios of ingredients whose names she recognised with a slow, creeping dread. Brief descriptions followed each entry – many of them were terse to the point of opacity, no more than a single word: “Double,” or “Triple,” perhaps six times; the word “Failure,” or “Defective,” appeared many times more; and once, very early on in the versions “Utter failure!” had been appended to a name, followed by several marks of exclamation. She flicked on through the pages, trying to count the number of individual names, but trailed off in appalment as they spiralled into the hundreds.
Simo turned on her heel and toward another of the rooms. Cages in all directions, holding the corpses of monstrously deformed things, living flesh and bone warped in ways it was never meant to be.
She kept on digging through the bodies, excited and fearful for what she might find. Scraps of steel. Shards of obsidian. The cracked remains of a glass phial. With each new carcass, the unlikely was becoming dreadfully possible. Her heartbeat began to rise as she drew closer to the end of her task, tossing aside rotted bones and dried scraps of tendon to reach the final scrap of evidence she needed – either to confirm her fears, or to defy them.
Fate, it seemed, was not in her favour. Simo Cosmoscleaned felt the blood run cold in her veins as her hand struck upon something hard, closing around and pulling it loose from the bodies in a moment.
The second she recognised in a heartbeat, and with it the creeping dread in her heart crystalised into a leaden weight. It was a silver brooch with gold filigree, large enough that she could barely hold it in her closed hand. The metal had been carefully forged and worked by a skilled hand, shaping it to take the form of a rare bird of prey, its pinions resembling claws grasping a simple amber jewel, its beaked head raised to provide further support. The silver was tarnished and the gemstone dusty, worn down and scratched by years of age; the whole thing stained with viscera and dried blood from the bodies under which it had been buried, but its core design was still intact.
Beneath it – a constant, loathsome quivering; a slickness against her skin from no discernible source. A low, twitching pulse of discomfort and pain, as of a joint bent too far or a muscle over-stretched. The distinctive marks of the Shapeling Arts and their parent science, abused beyond sensibility.
And it was his. Not a forgery, as she’d fleetingly hoped. Not a reproduction. Not a look-alike. The filigree, the jewel, the bird-shape of its body were all as recognisable to her as it had been the day it was made.
There was only one person who could have left it here. It had been a long time since she was bitten. How long, she did not know. Time was easy to lose track of in the nightmare half-life she now found herself in.
Trying to keep track of the days was an exercise in futility, like trying to keep count of those dead to her - its rampage. She couldn’t – musn’t – think of it. To think of the creature was to give it power.
She could see through its eyes. The ragged bone claws of her former hands. The grotesque, half-skinned muscle of her former arms.
She could hear it, too. Snarling. Howling. Scratching at its own flesh. Roaring as it sighted a victim. Then the crunching, the wet crack of bone and the slick sensation of blood running down her throat –
No! Her roar matched the creature’s own, pushing back with all her will.
I am human. Not a thrall.
I am human.
I am human.
I am human.
HUMAN!
She trod the edge of the Dark Shore with every day she remained in this form.
She forced her mind to turn to other things. Forced herself to think, back to the life she had once had. She remembered her comrades, standing around a campfire as the sound of crackling wood and merriment filled her ears. She remembered fighting her way through a pit choked with murderous goblinoids, blood boiling in her veins with every swing of her hammer. And finally, she remembered that last day – that black act of treachery that had seen her made into a monster.
It was a scene that had replayed itself hundreds of times since that day. The terror as teeth sank into her bared elbow. Her friends dying, one by one, under her teeth. And now another had joined them.
He had done nothing wrong. He had offended no god, struck no living thing. But he had found them in their current resting place, and the Thrall had made him pay for it with his life. She could see him in the corner of their vision, bleeding into the dirt. It sickened her, just as it made the Thrall’s mouth water.
The Traitor was speaking again. The words came dully to her. Rheumy eyes blinked, twitching as the thrall’s damaged brain struggled to understand them.
Look up, Thrall. Look up. Now.
The beast obeyed, reluctantly.
“Cowards, the lot of them.” He turned to face her. His pallid face was strangely flushed; his words came slurred from his lips. “Hiding away in their castles and holds, never coming out to do the dirty work. No, that’s what we exist for. Don’t have the belly for even half of this.”
“They didn’t care about you to begin with, you know.” The Traitor said, taking another long swig from the container at his side. “They didn’t care about any of you, about any of what you’d do. That tin-plated bastard thought you were just another bunch of brainless mercenaries, with loyalty brought and sold. And that stunted one – I wonder if the gods took his brains along with his height. But that witch, that creature leading them; she just had to decide you were too big a risk. And all because I got too close with you.”
“I…” The Traitor bowed his head, letting his hat’s brim shroud his face. Then quite without warning, something seemed to break in him: he seized his sword and swung it hard against the nearest tree, sending wood chips in all directions as the blade bit deeply.
“Why?” He growled to himself, bloodless face contorting. The words came out of him in a rush, a river finally breaking its banks. “Why did I choose this path? You’re a rotting shell of who you were, of what you could have been; all of you are, because I was too much of a gods-damned coward to stand up to that creature and her monsters when it mattered. I could’ve told them both to piss off, and would’ve rotted in the end anyway.”
He wrenched the blade free of the wood and struck again and again. Bits of shredded wood pinged off her armour and scraped bare skin.
She tried to respond, straining with all her might. Even as little as a hiss would satisfy her. But the thrall’s grip on her body was as strong as a vice, and no sound escaped her shredded lips.
The Traitor finally seemed to reach the peak of his dudgeon, spinning about on his heel and smashing a fist into the already damaged tree. It gave a deep, low groan that mingled strangely with the crack of shifting bone from his fingers. He held his position there for a moment, chest heaving, arm still outstretched.
“Damn me.” He said softly, turning his head away. “Damn me to the Abyss.”
Her focus lessened for a moment at hearing that word. It felt inherently wrong, even in her diminished state.
And in that moment of distraction, the Thrall surged to life.
She felt her jaws clench together, felt the wet crack of bone and the sick, hot sensation of fresh blood and flesh sliding down her throat. The Thrall snarled and dug in deeper, relishing the kill. It was hungry, so hungry; and the sweet flesh before it would silence the voice for a time.
The Human pushed back, clung to the memories of her friends as a drowning man would to a rope. She prayed to whatever might be listening. She fought back, trying to make their mindfleshbody flail or flinch or stutter. It was in vain.
Feeling the control she had over it begin to slip, the human let herself go with the scarlet tide. Warm, red waters washed over her, submerging her in an ocean of iron and heat. Her vision reddened, darkened, grew cloudy once more.
She refused to bear witness to this horror, for her own sake.
And as the Thrall began to trek away, plodding through the muck and the blood after its fellows with its eyes fixed on the black-clad back of its master, four thoughts repeated in the back of its mind:
I will endure.
I will be strong.
I am human.
I am Mori Festivereigns. I am human. And I will never succumb to your corruption.
