[˙✧˖]
Tʜʀᴏᴜɢʜ ᴛʜᴇ Cʀᴏᴍʟᴇᴄʜ
And into the mind of the greater
[ ♫ ]
artwork by @winterblood
I
No other name is worth knowing
You are a powerful thing.
You know this: feeling the aetheric gravity of your own consciousness and the immensity of your limitless pride. Nothing in this realm can be anything but your inferior. Apparitions who linger within your territory recoil when you pass, scoured raw by the rancid breath of your presence until their forms unravel into shrieking ribbons. Yet even their ruin cannot let those lost souls escape you; they reassemble as trembling thralls, trailing behind like broken tarandus—starved, hollow things desperate for the scraps that fall from your path.
For you are terror incarnate — an unkillable beast prowling the celestial night, commanding silence and awe. The other shapes, the half-born things that drift here, kneel at your passing or dissolve beneath your gaze. This is your realm, after all, and you slither and glide past the greater things you killed to secure your plane.
This plane. What a charming word — first spoken by a trembling soul you ingested centuries ago. You kept it, savoring its quaint mortal simplicity. The hell you strive to command stretches endlessly, an expanse with tides and eddies like some infernal sea. Here, the currents are not of water but of mist—a churning fog that murmurs as it swells, coiling around dunes of pale ash and gray dust, swallowing the bones of the dead and the forgotten. The path ahead ripples in shades of drowned blue and pale gold, the colors crawling like insects across the horizon, uttering prophecies that no living mind could endure.
They whisper. All colors whisper here.
Even the wind argues with itself here. One draft sighs your name, reverent and low. Elsewhere, a cool breeze hisses it like a curse. You take this in stride — for what Caesar would not ignore the souls in the wind? They are mere echoes of the gargantuan dead, monuments to the Master's game, nothing more. They are taunts, false music played on instruments fashioned from timeless bones. But a shift in the wind is coming, carried on the distant tremors of this tunneled space, and they will be swept gently away. Those voices, those faces in the clouds — the thin and tall things — will dissolve into the fog. Yes, they will trickle off, and either they will change their minds or be cursed to regurgitate their wrong opinions for eternity. Until then, the air softly hums with a sound not unlike the pulse of some great, unseen heart.
Far off, beyond the very edge of your vision, three stars glimmer — cold, patient, impossibly distant. Around them swell ghostly worlds whose shapes refuse to hold still. Towers of bone and pale rock wind through this eternal labyrinth, forming it as much as filling it. Here, reality and unreality intertwine like breath and shadow — ever touching, never at rest, and never equal.
The ascent of power here is endless, and so, gloriously, are you.
Not only that, but you live this, you embody it in the leaping dances you plunge your corporeal form into. You can sing, too, and it is serene. It instills fear in the souls you've encountered, and it makes the monstrous thing locked in your jaws squirm with deeper anguish. You beckon it to hush with a sickening snap of its spine. You taste the horror trapped in its blood like some mysterious broth poured over a slab of meat. Its eyes twitch in that final gasp of realization, and from its mouth comes a bubbling wheeze. It stills at last, eyes vacant, unblemished by any sentience.
The soulfire, that swirling drink that fills your gullet, is sweeter. You taste the centuries folded within it — the memories, the triumphs, the small joys the creature clung to before your mercy found it. You drink them all, cracking open their spirit as one splits a clam, feasting upon what it once refused to give. The rush sings through every vein. Revitalized, colossal in certainty again, you leave the carcass to your pets — and the realm itself hums in satisfaction, as though it too takes pleasure in your meal.
You were not always so perfect, either.
You are old, and you do not hide this. It would be shameful to ignore the primordial pearls that drove you on through this realm of infinite darkness — to turn away from the very dreams that forbid your stagnation. Your audience is but a skittering shroud, clawing at the dark, braying into the void, kneading at the nothingness. If one's soulfire is as tasteful as lilac wine, then yours would be a legendary vintage. Well-guarded, too. But from what?
No one is here, apart from you and the things that whisper your name. So quiet, so faint, you cannot even hear it whole. Can they even pronounce it correctly?
You call them your apostles — those leal shivers of the night. They are always so kind, so sweet, uttering their praises and making offerings of worship, yet never so rude as to interrupt your majesty.
You remember when you were much like them. Younger. When you were nothing but a collection of hissing blood and noise, born from the scarlet mirror pooled beneath the slit neck of the first beast ever consumed, you permeated this blackness. The manifestation of eternal night. It is only right that you enact the tithe as you have.
You have waged a campaign across life itself. Were it not for the overwhelming darkness that shrouds your realm, a faint glow would betray it — a glint of gold. Your crown. Composed of the finest jewels in all the universe. Amethyst. Emerald. You know of these, after all — learned of them when something wandered into your dominion: something stout, fat, and wholly ignorant of the dangers its bearded self had waddled into.
Oh, if only that creature had carried the crown with it, not merely the memory of one.
You would be the eternal flame in this bleak plane. Every vibrant hue of smaragdine and violaceous shadow is tucked within the gemstones, drawing all toward you. Devils and horned things with long snouts and eight legs would come from every corner to honor you as king of the world. The Great Master — the one who opened this small corridor of interdimensional dark — would come as well. You would be lauded, praised, and declared sovereign by the master you serve, yet have never met.
No, you think to yourself, as a god.
Their praise is intoxicating.
II
Preception is reality
Your ascension, as far as you can tell, was as ineluctable as any tectonic drift — not imperceptible, though, for you have always known where you were climbing to. You knew, with certainty, that it would be you who was crowned, obliged in the honorifics of leadership, the swirling bones of your laurels resting upon your scalp. For any lesser being, perhaps, it might have gone unnoticed.
But not you, you hiss to yourself. Never you.
For so long you carved your soul through this dark and twisted realm, snatching at scraps, snickering at the shapes in the dark while other lords prowled about. So proud, you thought. So foolish. Not like you. You could be more. You will be more. You see them sometimes — those theroid and ambiguous shadows crawling along the edges — and they remind you of who you once were, toiling as they do, busy with the same arduous tasks. You know what it is to be one of them, to claw your place out by effort alone. You have not forgotten.
You even humble yourself as you whisper to the dead thing dissolving in your jaws, absorbing its dreams and memories. It has no need of those any longer. Releasing what remains, you let the midnight jackals feast and turn away. Something within the marrow of your shape shudders — so singular, yet so familiar. Several of your eyes fix upon it now: something in the distance beginning to manifest. A jolting crack splits the air, the wind snapping with some insidious charge, and then a ripple of golden-blue lightning erupts close by. Something you have not witnessed in a very long time. It calls you, clear as a bell.
At last, you sigh — audibly, unguardedly. At last, a great supper appears.
You peer out at that vibrant flare. The shifting hues of gold and silver command your eye as surely as blood commands the heart — such a wick of luminescence, such grandeur. You marvel at the sight of this true soul, for there is more than enough here for you and your legion both. The generosity of your black heart knows no measure, and so you have loosed an energumenical pack of reavers upon the entity, every hungry soul eager for a share. They will gnaw at the scraps if they must. The true heart of the course will be yours alone to savor. Your tongue trails along the sharpened fangs behind those shadowed lips, savoring the mere thought of it.
That soul radiates power. Its fiery veil illuminates the supernal abyss with such intensity that you already know — this will be the most remarkable feast in over a hundred years.
You behold the dozens of brass-crowned butchers and blue-skinned thirsters whining and writhing around its footing, their bodies folding in shameful misery. Talons ripple through the shadows cast by its cloak — glassy, obsidian, impossibly liquid. Tusks click and graze against one another beneath the wide arc of flame, a burning teardrop that seems to have pierced the very foundations of your reality. Swells worm their maggoty way toward the intruder, suffering horribly, their chests and skulls and spines erupting as his warblade appears — white fire trailing burning magnesium ribbons like the flayed corona of a sun.
Your lessers, you say to yourself. Your pawns, you say to your court — for the courtiers always require gentler terms. What if they begin to doubt? What if they refuse to pursue that exquisite rush of righteous flavor bearing down on you now? You must be seen as the heroic liege.
Their deaths open vacancies for all of those yearning to bask in your company, and this howling varmint shall serve as the finest meal for you and all of your cohort.
Still, you announce softly — to yourself, and to the imps trumpeting in your shadow — we will feast on this soul.
Its passionate incandescence makes you drool.
III
Hunt, and gather
It can scream.
Whatever the thing was, it fought on relentlessly — driven now not by bloodlust or the drunken joy of slaughter, but by the dull tyranny of habit and instinct. Its bellow had grown ragged and hoarse, a sound like hot wind flaying old leather, cracking and snapping through the murk. Yet it moved with hideous grace, each stride flowing into the next, halting only when the reeking ichor of some lesser spawn splashed against its legs and thickened about its gait.
What was it saying? No, not it, him.
Yes. Him. A mortal who, when all is said and done, is only a man. And so he shall die worse than the gutted wretches beneath your heel — for even your pawns are fashioned of stronger clay than he could ever dream to be. He took your bait and, with the blind boldness of a fool, charged headlong into your snare. He entered your kingdom. You control everything here. You are the master of the board, and every move played is yours to command. No imp, no shadow, no whisper of the dark disobeys your thought. For this is no mere husk of some greater beast's ribs fastened into a fortress — it is a place of execution and apotheosis. Your apotheosis.
The outlander before you is a man. You have relished the taste of a hundred of his kind — these wandering rats who trespass upon the old highway of the Red One, that benevolent Master of Hells to whom you owe this realm of weeping twilight. Without Him, what god or devil could have wrought something so infallible as yourself?
You learned the truth of this burglar's soul only when you braved a nearer glimpse — when you watched one of your finest hunters cloven from crown to core after nearly casting this pariah back into the void that birthed him. Now the man drives forward, wading through the storm he has raised. You watch him rip into the rugged red hide of another thing crawling on its forty-seven thin legs, screaming in terror as its mandibles are hewn and melt away. That was one of your champions, you realize — that chitinous thing which helped you secure this foothold in the very beginning. You feel something stir. What was it? Loss?
A sound draws your attention. With a violent wheeze you realize the intruder's throat is spent and silent — but there is no need for voice. His whole body screams in its stead, and in that harsh, wordless tongue you hear all you need to know of him.
He burns to howl his fury, but cannot find the breath to curse. Exhausted mania drags at his limbs, pinning him beneath its slow, suffocating weight. Never has he felt so emptied, so bled of strength.
Another of your caprine followers charges forward, only to be hacked through the torso, blood dappling his armor like rain. Emaciated tendrils of splintered bone and banners of torn flesh carpet the fog-slick earth on every side. Your lesser kin — those few still upright — flounder upon a hill of their own severed limbs and the freshly fallen. The wailing shades and muttering fiends closing on the knight are strangers to fear. They throw their lives away like spare shillings, galloping forward in a single screaming tide.
But he moves barbarically, every staggering motion heavy with murder. You see the twist of his frame as he sends blood and fragments of bone arcing through the air. You are splattered by the ash of limbs bursting beneath his flame, hear skulls rupture like hollow gourds, and look up just in time to witness squirming bodies fold about his weapon in obscene embrace. A dozen of your varmints embellish the ground in charnel heaps, a hecatomb slowly built for your alcove. You have seen aeons of warring daemons — but this is mindless, sapien slaughter.
This, the whispers think for you, is a serf’s attempt at art: a profanation of the Master’s dream.
A rapture — cold and bladed — grips your soul as you behold this orchestra of chaos. Another of your lupine praetorians has had its ivory jaws divorced from its throat, the notes of its scream flooding the hall with such ferity that you lose your inner monologue entirely. It crumbles into a vile pit of sludge, its remains already being fought over by the smaller atrocities that had been lying in wait. Pitiable, ignorable things. They will eat the dregs of this juggernaut to grow stronger, and they will promptly pursue this empyreal alien.
You creep closer, weaving between your kin as they rush into uncreation headlong. Their screams fill the air raggedly, but you move through the silence — the pauses where his sword claims one life and hungers for the next.
You want to see his eyes. More than that, you want to count his breaths, measure the tremors in his limbs, and memorize the pattern of his demise. If he dies, you must learn its cadence — so you can mock it, bend it, and perfect it.
You crawl closer, just in time to see another figure block his path, intercepting him with an impact like two carnosaurs colliding head-on. That bastard is right next to you; you can see the red steadily pooling from the wound half-concealed beneath his cuirass. One of your badgering fools managed to—
The world shatters in a blaze of torment, white as the heart of a sun you have never seen. Through the roaring glare, a fire-cloaked shape sweeps low, moving faster than thought — a limb spins free in a comet-trail of black ichor and your own chitinous plating. Agony lances into your core. But you do not fall. You hardly even lose the ground you hold. Limbs are something you possess in legion, and pain is but the iron hymn of your faith.
He has maimed you. Good. Now his strength is known. If he is a storm, then you are the black, breathless eye of a hurricane, hellbent on smothering him in his own fumes. Chaos will hound him into error. The coiled witchcraft you leeched from the shrieking souls of your inferiors unspools through the dark, tasting his fear, savoring the exhaustion at every raw nerve it brushes. Soon he will blister and char in that unseen grip — cooked down to a roasted shell, a celebratory coquille cracking open upon the stone of your favored altar, reserved for your solitary feast.
A howl bubbles from the abyss within you as you drive your mass through the poisonous muck. Steam vents from your nacreous wounds, and still you exult, pouring forth the imprecations you will unleash upon him. Let your slavering thralls bear witness. Let them see how their master endures. Ebony hooks of electricity halo your silhouette against the lightless ramparts, bruising your hall in oceanic radiance. From each ruin you are reborn — Elder of Hel, sovereign of nightmares, towering, blasphemous, eternal.
And, you nearly rasp aloud, to rend him an unforgettable suffering in kind.
IV
What the little things call time
You have fought this man for what is best described as a farce played upon the bones of eternity. His defiance mocks you — an insult to your absolute power. Your thralls no longer join the slaughter; they linger on the fringes, spellbound, as if caught in the crescendo of some infernal symphony. A few gibber sullen praise or spit their crooked laughter at the foe; others turn against each other, slashing and gnawing, jostling for a clearer view of the trial of three.
Three. The realization curdles your mind. Something else moves with him — a presence not made of flesh but of absence, a shadow hollowed of light, tethered to the righteous glow of his cloak. From it, smoking plumes of holiness spill outward, thick with incense and penitent sorrow, drifting to shroud your court in clouds of blinding sweetness. Your gargoyles and fiends cough and shudder as it coats them, their eyes leaking black sludge. You remain unmoved. This, too, is beneath you.
The other intruder is small and fragile, like a candle against a storm — yet his strength feeds on the fires consuming your hall, drinking deep from rivers of gore shining with unclean light: first blue, then green, and finally a fevered gold that etches divine pathways beneath his steps. A bull-headed behemoth struggles against him, crashing into the wall before wheeling to lash out with its horned snout. Fire greets it. A guttural cry steams from the brass-hoofed thing as it dies and is hurled back into a fresh cluster of fetid challengers.
Enough.
You croak something toward a thrashing pawn on the flank — a shard of will flung like a hunting spear — and feel its paltry mind snap into submission. You drain its terror and strength together, scouring away pain and insult until your form swells again with the splendor befitting your throne.
You deflect his next strike, metal and chitin screeching as you twist his sword wide and hurl him staggering to your right. The knight reels, and with his stumble the reeking incense and the shadow-thing haunting his heels falter, forced to dance around him rather than blind you. He moves more slowly now, each step dragged by weariness; he has hewn his way through your court and hurled himself upon you with obstinate valor — valor he has wasted.
With rheumy eyes, your poppet convulses and slams into a long-dead beast, shattering one of the calcified statues. It bursts into vermilion ruin, claws raking its skull as it strains to choke out some warning. Its torment only feeds you. Something has caught its attention — but that is of no concern. Not while this rancorous vermin is within your grasp.
The mortal lurches. Twelve of your mantodean limbs seize his right arm, halt his charge, and begin to bend it with slow, deliberate malice — savoring the rigid shock in his body, the first flicker of dread that taunts your palate with its charming scent. Triumph surges through your vast being. Finally. The prey that has eluded you for so very long is within reach.
Across the chamber, the hive of your dominion stirs. The eternal murmur of enslaved souls swells into a storm; the air congeals, humming with pressure, and from within that rising din, a whisper breaks.
What did it say? You could have sworn that it was—
< ? ? ? >
Something unseen slams into you, rippling through the minds of those nearby like skulls cracking from within. Chains snap and rattle free. Filaments of silver light lance through your host, branching in webs of pain. Your spellcraft's iron leash lies sundered; black ichor weeps from ruptured skulls. Even the melting wrecks of the half-dead twist to feral life, surging into a squall of talon and fang.
< Dɪᴇ! > The syllable glides like silk on steel. Your courtesan's form convulses, collapsing atop the dissolving carcass of a lesser thing and merging into one obscene mass of leathery ruin.
The flesh of sinners near the enemy rends and re-knits in vile paroxysms. Limbs lengthen into barbed scythes; faces bloat into gnashing pits ringed with venom-slick teeth. In the same breath that shattered your chains, the hooded figure has unleashed your plebeians to raw, primal urges untasted for centuries — their hymn curdling now into the most animal of reactions, answering only to some ancient thirst for carnage. Your imps, once sleek and haughty, swell grotesque, spines splitting to birth lashing tendrils like whips of night. Several explode simultaneously, their viscid hides destroyed as if set aflame from within. Lesser devils slough their stolen skins like foul molts, baring pulsing sinew and bone; their bellows shift from despair's dirge to slaughter's anthem.
< Dɪᴇ! >—a balding farmer's rasp.
< Dɪᴇ! >—a cyclopean warlord's bark.
< Dɪᴇ! >—a blonde-haired child with forest-green eyes.
The voices flood your skull like molten lead. They rupture the minds of your horde — your servants bursting from their flesh in trails of corruption that spiral in a corrosive mess about your onyx throne. It is as if the heavens themselves have reached down to still your heart.
Your shriek floods the chamber like a herald from the abyss, a thunder from the deep that lashes your feral thralls from their mindless procession of self-slaughter. Yes, your numbers have thinned — carcasses litter the floor in moiling heaps, your once-vast fellowship bled to ragged caricatures and cannibalizing shadows — but you are their master still. You are Majesty incarnate. No paltry freedom shall steal them from your grip. Salvation be damned. Ancient magic burns in your core. You wrench souls back with abyssal will: claws freeze mid-rend, maws snap shut on bloodied air, tendrils coil inward, and the inferiors' limbs quiver and still.
The shade of hope makes itself known at last, manifesting as the wheezing tide becomes your weapon once again. The fire ahead burns brighter — and all the sweeter as you close.
He's there, that damned human and his insufferable little mutt that never stops trailing his heels.
Get through the smoke, glide into the left flank—
Your teeth bare; your acidic saliva melts the impurities from your regal carapace.
—He's right there! He's right there!
The flaming shapes of man and companion swell before you, teetering on the brink of holy combustion, their outlines blazing like twin suns straining to burst. The chanting never ceased, you realize — it festered beneath the tide of chaos, ceaseless and patient as rot. Three stumps along your shell twitch their warning of fatal nearness, and the air grows heavy.
You are illuminated. All you can see are the blanched waves of force reaching out toward you — and the radiating heat instantly bakes the pooling filth into dry riverbeds, cracked in odd patterns across the stone.
V
With righteous fervor
You wrench yourself upright through the rolling fog of pain, holding onto rage as your only raft in a sea of madness. Limbs spasm in betrayal, meat twitching over splintered bone, your vision shaking with writhing shadows. Even they grow frustrated now. Even they howl damnations from the edges of your sight.
Deep inside, the old magic festers — a tumor of black coal pulsing with wet, hateful life. Around you, the tattered horde snarls from the shadows, thirsting to recover, praising your strength.
Parry, counter, and parry again.
His blade sings through the air, shattering your claws with scorching whipcracks of fire. One by one they melt — vaporized into golden steam, thrown into shards, or slammed down in smoking chunks. You riposte, catch his shoulder guard, and notice the shift in his blade's direction just as you arch the aculeus of your fourth tail to stab through the plate around his thigh. It hits — but coldness seeps into the tail, and you see it has chipped and bent uselessly aside. You have no time for this pain. Suffering will slow you if you let it. One part of your mind urges you to loose the horde; another insists you hold them back and let the duel unfold. They need a show. They need a display of prowess.
Redirect, strike low, aim for his legs.
Five talons reach into the second lunge and return empty-handed, lacerating only a swirling cloak.
You stagger through the wreck of the hall, dragging torn flesh over ruptured chitin and crusted trails of gore — a desecrated pilgrim crossing his own shrine. Every step smears heat and blood; every breath tastes of iron and rot. Your wounds gape, but you wear them like medallions. Agony is an old companion, a whetstone to your fury. Ahead, the knight reels, gasping through his helm, and you glimpse it — the dimming of his light. It flickers like a candle drowning in its own wax. You will snuff it..
Attack. Attack. Attack. He reels on the defensive, and you bide your time.
Deflect. Deflect. Deflect. See him stagger back, boots scraping bloodied earth.
Madness has its savage rhythm—but you've danced this butcher's reel long enough.
His sword heaves down, and four of your plated arms snap their claws out to snare him in the hanging guard.
Idiot. Fool.
You glide into the embrace with pavonine grace, every limb thrumming with the cold calculus of the kill.
A scream from all nine of your throats drives into your enemy's ears — wet, serrated — and the vault above shivers, dust raining like gray snow. Your furious ballad throws back the melting dead, sends their burning corpses tumbling, and drives your devils back into shadow; their courage peels away before your hunger. The incongruous spires encircling you weep flakes of blood already spilled by your fallen. Then you leap with a banshee's shriek and descend once more upon him, three clawed limbs lashing for his throat, another seven scrabbling to wrestle the sword from his grasp and make it yours at last.
Yes — you are the king. He owes you tribute. You shall drink deep from his skull like a chalice, wield that blade as your scepter of slaughter. Already you taste the unborn triumph, its shape burning bright in your mind. His spine will sing when you snap it, and his soul will flail when you swallow it whole.
He moves, and you taste the lactic burn in his muscles as he begins to falter — threaded now with the psychic tang of dread seeping from his pores. The outlander no longer dances with the graceful power he once had, but with a ragged, desperate drive toward deliverance from this Hell. His salvation lies in slipping your grasp, and that you cannot permit. His body twists within your reach, cloak billowing wide; your claws grasp only smoke. That spiteful piece of sanctity bucks in his hand like a living thing and lashes out in a low, savage arc.
And light explodes against your side.
A dead hush lasts one heartbeat. Within that insignificant speck of time there is a stunned, crystalline silence, as if the world is listening to its own echo. Then the fire blossoms. It rips through your side — a carbonizing torrent scouring inward, seeking your heart, gnawing through your flesh like a flood of maggots. Chitin blackens and splits; ichor boils forth in a sizzling updraft, steaming the air with rancid sweetness. When air finds one of your lungs, your scream erupts across the chamber and devils swirl like ash in a pyre.
You clutch at the wound, feel your own ribs splintering under your grasp. Strength gushes out between your fingers, hot and black. The chamber tilts, swaying like a ship in a cursed sea. You try to draw breath, to shape another command, another roar, another incantation — but the air has been stolen from your lungs, replaced by the burning taste of iron and incense.
The knight blurs before you, his edges fraying into ragged shadow. The sword droops, light sputtering like a gutted lantern. Still, he faces you. Even now, after all you have shown him. He should kneel, gibber, dissolve — this is your lair, your festering throne. You will unmake him at whim, as his companion flings his feeble sorceries.
You reach for him one last time — not with claws, but with will. To bind, rend, glut upon his essence. This time it is you who reaches into that void dogging his heels. Talons snap and click as you drag yourself against a pillar, nearly pinning his smoldering frame against its base. You see it now: the opening in his posture, the slightly lowered guard that would let you surge forward and grasp him.
Lightning crackles across the floor, snaking up one of your countless limbs like a traitorous serpent. That stalking shadow at the warrior's cloak is trying something — you feel it. But its power is feeble, its existence insufferable. Insolent gnat. You sneer, unhinging two of your maws to birth a curse — a guttural syllable of unmaking that should split your blackened hall asunder and hurl the mortal screaming into the soul-sea roiling beneath your fortress. Distant shadows of fallen siege engines splinter against carnelian mist as the word of oblivion erupts, a thunderclap shuddering the walls with hateful promise.
Yet you are not given the destruction of the man and his companion. You are not given their hearts and souls as offerings for your sovereignty. The jagged kiss of your own witchfire skims your hide, guttering mid-glide into mocking emerald flecks that flit and die. Worse — your own spell-wrought hands explode from your body, spinning into the dark like traitor seraphs cast down.
No. The only reply you are given is that frigid nothingness as the wound at your side festers, devouring light, sound, and thought. It is agonizing, and it is slow. You watch with utter terror as your own spellcraft is turned against you once more — numbness flooding the stumps of your arms and feasting inward, your own soulfire chewing itself to slag. Your body convulses, thrashing in futile rebellion as your unnatural metabolism wars against your own spell and your eight stuttering hearts begin to fail.
Your limbs betray you. Insentience lays claim to every leg and mandible; even your venomous drool thins to cold vapor, a ghost skimming your rows of perfect, useless teeth. Jowls sag, scraping weakly against your own shell. The distant thunder of your thralls fades to a dull, oceanic murmur. The shadows of your court thicken and fold inward until the knight is only a burning point in a vast and darkening sky.
You fall, but you never feel the ground.
He was there—you… You had him!
The echo endures, faces of what was and what shall be flashing in mythical throbs that melt and rekindle your eyes and ears. Now gentle — utterly inexorable— < Dɪᴇ! Dɪᴇ! Dɪᴇ! Dɪᴇ! Dɪᴇ! >— until your vision is lost as the world drowns in golden blood.
VI
A wintry extirpation
Your hall is frigid as the northern poles of realms glimpsed only in the dreams of the devoured.
The first sensation is merciless gravity, binding you to the fractured floor, pressing the husk of your body into what remains of your domain. The world hums faintly — a fever buried beneath, infecting every bone unclaimed by fire. Breath comes jagged, each inhale a blade's edge dragging across the throat of existence. You awaken to pain before you awaken to yourself, choked by the lingering porcine nidor of charred fat.
Heat lingers beneath your cracked armor — the cruel residue of rekindled soulfire, gnawing and clinging like a wounded beast desperate to survive. Hunger follows close behind, rising from the marrow, urging you to stand, to devour, to endure. The instant you move, pain flares — a lance of empyric energy twisting down scorched limbs until muscle spasms and bone remembers its shape. Flesh shudders and knits, weaving itself anew with reluctant purpose. Your skull is bitter with the afterthought of your own undoing.
Silence breaks with gossip bleeding in from the perimeter of perception, threading through the cracks of your awakening mind. The world flickers; shadows lean one direction and stretch toward another, gathering substance where none should remain. The aristocracy of eyeless poltergeists and the warrior-caste of hunched brutes have dwindled to phantoms, echoing your name in arrhythmic titters. The noise swells into a growing undertow, slithering against the crumbling shores of your sanity.
A tremor rouses the gloom. The faint, flickering favor of the crowd withdraws from you — retreating instinctively, like a creature that remembers the hand that swung the whip. Something unseen studies you from behind the veil: curious, discreet, and unkind. You take another breath, feel the furnace inside you stir — weak, but defiant. As your sight steadies in the gloom, you realize your witchcraft has been annulled.
Shadows and specters coil at the edge of your fading vision, obscuring the truth with whispers you cannot yet understand. Each movement tears at your once-masterful physique, and within your own ears rises the echo of something foul, stirring and swelling to life. Here come the voices — half-born things that slither through the rift between worlds. Their gaze lands on you, empty of reverence, for the chant that once thundered your name was silenced the moment the flaming blade punched your lungs empty.
When that soulfire tore through your chest, it seared away more than flesh — it devoured the faith of your court. The silence spreads like oil on water, thick and iridescent with doubt. Your horde, once a writhing sea of snarls and slavish zeal, now crouches in the settling dust, eyes dulling to milky slits.
A legion of free-thinkers bloats from within, gravid with mutiny.
‘Failure,’ chittered the hairless cadaver in the auric haze, its many-faceted eyes glimmering like tarnished coins.
‘Defeated,’ came the venomous whisper from a second shape, oozing from between the stones.
Deeper still, more beasts susurrate as they gnaw and bloat among the mashed pulp of the vanquished. Their litany begins as swinish taunts, then swells into a rising hum of betrayal — maggots feasting in the marrow of a fresh kill. Your title is condemned, twisted into a warble of sibilations. You cannot shout back. If you could, you would vow to rend these uncultured pigs for their disloyalty — but your voice is ash. You can only writhe, dragging your bulk through the cloying haze of incense, still smoldering where the intruder mutilated you.
Some of them convulse, driven by the same ravenous enthusiasm that once lifted you among your kind. Those closest endure a lingering suffering, spasming like hooked bait. Antiochrous foam flecks their fangs; eyes and toothless jaws bulge with profane fire.
Three of those heartless husks remain still — predatory in their poise, claws curling inward, souls already scenting weakness. Tendrils and tails slither through the gore pooling at their feet.
Yours, you realize.
A hundred eyes and mouths shift in muted thought, opening and closing as the ichor of a thousand shades drips from their unholy jaws. Beyond them, spirals of cosmic pyres jolt and writhe against a horizon of titanic bones — the hollowed silhouettes of greater amalgamations you once served. Of those who once built this now-desecrated hall. The whispers grow hyperphagic, conspiring. Tusked things and horned brutes that once sulked back into shadow are still emerging, some still partially dissolved into the ruin the outlander left them in — all of them trading blasphemies, their laughter slick and twitchy.
The hall stands hollow. Frost creeps in to claim the leavings of treachery. Above the feast of betrayal, those faraway stars you once praised and yearned to reach lie utterly indifferent to your regicide. Still, you beg for mercy as their teeth close around the last ember of your light.
The darkness draws breath and exhales, erasing your form until only the echo of your heart endures, faltering beneath the weight of eternity. And when the silence at last descends, even the darkness forgets your name.
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