Speed, adrenaline, the sharp, metallic taste of blood in the air; these were the greatest joys of life in Commorragh. The whining hiss of jetbikes cut through the air, drowning out the lower wail of the pursuing skimmer ships. Blades of light danced around the riders, searing afterimages into unprotected retinas. The lights of the luxury spires and gladiatorial revels reflected off of sleek, black bodysuits, and the riders howled and jeered at their pursuers as they sliced through hairpin turns and dove wildly in the smoke-choked air.
Xarok flew near the front of his pack, feeling his jetbike pulse beneath him. The machine’s vibrations shivered up through his body making his nerves tingle. His short, black hair stood on end, and his sharp, filed teeth rattled in his jaw. He loved the feeling.
The crimson raiders of the Cabal of the Caged Sun gave chase, with their aethersails unfurled above their arrowlike hulls. They hovered far above the forest of spires and rooftop gardens. Their gunners aimed low, unleashing streams of darklight down towards their quarry.
Another ganger whirled his jetbike around and hollered a cry of defiance to their pursuers. A burst of black light struck him square in the chest. It left a burning afterimage on Xarok’s vision as he watched his comrade and half of their vehicle burst into a cloud of ash.
Xarok screamed an order to the rest of his gang, and as one, they pivoted sharply, relishing the crushing forces the manoeuvre pressed against their bones. Moving from horizontal flight to nearly vertical in the space of a second, they hurtled down a chasm between two mirrored palace complexes which scratched the edge of the false sky. Xarok felt the sharp pain as he was nearly pulled from his jetbike and he laughed and spread his arms, allowing the burn of acceleration to spread through his whole body.
‘Don’t lose our prize!’ laughed Kresh, another wild rider, through his filed fangs. He pointed to the remains of a man, hooked with chains behind Xarok’s jetbike. Only the torso and head remained.
‘We still have the head, and we have repaid the Cabal for the destruction of our old spire. Blood for blood!’ Xarok laughed. He barked another order, barely heard over the howling winds that danced around the gilded minarets of the upper spires. The remaining members of his gang converged around him, preparing to bank into the safety of a mountain range of clouds. The rolling, cumulus landscape was stained red by the imprisoned star suspended over the Caged Sun’s domain. The gangers cut their engines and began a silent freefall. They came through the first layer of cloud cover and saw the undercity far below, emerging from the murk of Commorragh.
The light of the kidnapped star warmed Xarok’s pale skin and he stretched his still pleasantly aching limbs in its warmth. His gang hurtled downwards around him, savouring the adrenaline-pumping freefall. The wind screamed in agony, filling their ears with noise so loud that Xarok did not even hear the explosion that ripped through the ganger nearest him. The burst engulfed the rider and his bike; secondary explosions from the bike’s propulsion systems embedded a cloud of splintery, superheated shrapnel into the frame of Xarok’s bike. Another burst came, engulfing another ganger in a ball of superheated plasma that trailed away from the gang like a comet. The engines of the jetbikes growled to life, and Xarok put his body through a mad dance to try and evade the incoming fire that blossomed flowers of boiling plasma in the air around them. He saw Kresh barely dodge a burst of disintegrator fire, his arm bursting into flames as it passed too close to the shot. Xarok’s gaze panned the cityscape. There were still deadly minutes of fall time to the next layer of the Dark City, and more disintegrator fire bloomed around the gangers, pouring from a flotilla of ravagers hiding in the red glare of the star.
Xarok screamed for the gang to retreat, to put more distance between them and their attackers, or make it harder for their shots to find their mark. The reavers dove down and away from the skimmers, hurtling down to the forest of barbed spires below. Kresh had extinguished his arm, now covered in blistering burns, and joined in the frantic dive. Others were less fortunate. The disintegrator fire followed them all the way down, catching the gangers in mid-descent, turning them into shrieking fireballs or detonating their bikes in a hail of fragmented shrapnel.
Xarok took a deep breath, a moment to savour the muscle-stretching pull of adrenaline. Sweat beaded on his face despite the cold of the winds and dripped down over his frantic smile. The enemy fire had stopped, their quarry lost in the forest of metal, glass, and stone. The remaining reavers rode for the edge of the Caged Sun’s domain, a layer of city just ahead where the forest of spires gave way to a section of city mired in fog and crisscrossed by walkways suspended over bottomless chasms. It was a long-neglected niche of the Dark City, and none knew its tunnels, access loops, and dark corners like the reaver gangs.
Just ahead was the last ring of the Caged Sun’s structures, chief among them a towering spire of spongy stone and glass stained the colour of blood. The building blossomed at its summit like a ribcage cracked open for the vultures. A wide thoroughfare led to the building, the surrounding buildings seeming to lean up and over the path, enclosing it like clenching fingers caught in the grip of death.
They were close now, so close to the weaving, shrouding mists. The leading gangers raised their fists and hollered in triumph. One turned around to Xarok; his mouth opened to issue a cry of victory.
His death came in an instant. All at once, his face and body above the waist were crisscrossed with red lines where monofilament wires had passed cleanly through his body and armour. The dead reaver and the others in the lead with him burst into crimson mist and hundreds of small chunks of flesh and bone showered down upon the boulevard below. Behind him, Kresh began a yell of warning but Xarok was already in motion. In the millisecond he had, Xarok inverted his jetbike as the monofilament net raced towards him. If he could get just a bit lower.
The net took his legs from mid-calf, segmenting them into so many strips of meat. Xarok watched his body and bike come apart in slow motion, somehow able to perceive the net moving through him before blood was even able to pump from the wound before the pain of the mutilation could reach his brain.
The pain exploded as Xarok began to fall, hurtling down through the acrid air. His amputated legs trailed a spiral of crimson as he fell. He saw a blur of colour as we went, bursts of red as more of his fellow gangers lurched in the air to avoid the net, though few were successful. He saw the bright explosions of jetbikes as they spiralled off without riders to detonate against the wide boulevard. Xarok landed with a crunch. He felt his body pulp and saw the ripples of the impact ravage and tear his flesh from the sheer momentum of his fall. He remained conscious only long enough to feel the deluge of blood from his fellow gangers spatter down onto his shredded skin like warm rain.
Xarok’s eyes opened, yet he could not see. Darkness enveloped him. Pain gnawed at him. He felt cold metal against his back, wrists, and ankles. Both ankles. The memories of his frenzied flight through the Dark City came rushing back to him, along with the image of the bloody stumps of his legs. Xarok gingerly flexed the toes of his right foot. He gently turned the ankle joint. There was pain there, but it was the dull pain of old scars and long-healed wounds.
The air reeked of an artificial, chemical smell, barely covering the familiar scent of blood. Xarok did not scream; his mind worked in a mad rush, wondering if these were the Cabal of the Caged Sun’s dungeons where so many of his gang had disappeared over the years. Perhaps he was being held below one of their gladiatorial pits and would be made to fight. Xarok hoped that was the truth; at least he would die on his feet, it would explain why he was given back his legs.
To his side, the darkness was sliced through by light as a panel in the wall opened and pale, stark illumination poured into the room. A figure was silhouetted in the light and Xarok restrained a gasp as he realised that this was no gladiatorial pit nor even the Cabal’s dungeon.
A woman hovered in the doorway, illuminated by a sudden spotlight that shone down on Xarok from above. The flesh of her waist had blossomed, cascading down in thin sheets supported by spindly bone splinters to give the grotesque growth shape and definition, like the leathery wings of a spire-bat. The sheets of flesh cascaded down over her legs and even her feet could not be seen. The growths resembled nothing more than a squirming gown that flexed and swayed with an undulation not unlike the wriggling of deep-sea invertebrates.
Her ribs extended and grew outward like a carapace over her chest, supported by the stretched and frilled flesh of her stomach, which had been drawn up to resemble a lacy bodice. What Xarok had mistaken for a tall bun of braided hair was the flesh of her scalp, grown and groomed in fungus-like polyps which knotted around each other in a tangle of pale, fleshy tendrils. They pulsed as grafted veins pumped blood through her living coiffure. The only part of her clothing not grown from her own body was the string of barbed filament that held her wriggling hair bun in place.
Next to this, the face of the woman was shocking in its simplicity. The skin was pulled tight over bone by the loop of barbed wire that styled her living hair. This gave her browless, black eyes a wide, manic stare. Despite this, her face seemed unmarred, if stretched, and she stared down at Xarok and smiled. It was then that Xarok noticed the rows of serrated teeth. She did not walk away so much as glide. There was no sound of footfalls on the smooth, black floor but her membranous dress still swayed from side to side as she went.
‘The little razorwing got caught in a web and had his wings clipped.’ Her voice was melodic, ululating and reverberating as though many different organs pumped her words through a latticework of pipes in her throat. She smiled, showing her lamprey teeth. ‘But I picked up the little razorbird. They’re not so fierce. I gave him back his wings, but maybe he won’t fly away.’ She sang, indulging herself. Xarok recoiled from the voice of the haemonculus.
‘Who are you?’ He hissed through the fog of remembered and anticipated pain. The woman turned to him as though seeing him for the first time.
‘My name is Malanthis, an artist.’ She glided closer. ‘One fortunate enough to have the patronage of the Caged Sun.’ She added as an afterthought.
‘You healed me?’ Xarok asked, pulling himself as far as his restraints would let him.
‘You were still alive! Your heartbeat cried out to me like a vat-born babe, shrieking for help. So, I helped you. I regrew your leg from a chunk of cubed flesh and hid you from the Cabal.’ She settled beside him, the tendons of her living dress rippling with each dainty motion.
‘The Archon wants you, wants you badly for what you did to his little dracon, but even he will not move against my will when I hold the keys to his long, long life in my hands.’ She reached out with a taloned finger and traced a bloody line down Xarok’s newly grown leg. ‘But I am offering you a choice, little razorwing, and that is something that few in this city truly have. I can release you from my care, without your pack or your wings, and with the Archon’s finest out hunting down the last of your kind. Or, you could stay with me and serve as my canvas.’ Her piping voice echoed in her throat. Malanthis hovered over him, watching him with her lamprey grin. Xarok froze under her predatory smile, he felt that any move to leave or even move from the table would only lead her latching onto him with her ravenous maw and draining his blood.
‘What is the price for my safety?’ he asked, pulling himself up a little straighter. Malanthis’s smile widened again, opening up over a part of her skull which should have contained her cheekbones.
‘There is no payment, but you must allow me to work on you, to sculpt you as I have all my servants. You are excellent material, with a wonderful bone structure, and such perfect scars. I hate working on unmarked skin, a blank canvas is so vexing.’
‘Then you will just let me leave if that is my choice?’ Xarok asked, recoiling still further in his restraints so that they cut into his wrists.
‘Yes, the choice must be yours, now that I have offered it.’ Malanthis said, tracing a talon up the lines of muscle along Xarok’s side. As she spoke, figures began to file into the room, forming a circle around the table on which Xarok lay. He strained his head to look at the stooped things encircling the room. Their skin was marked and marred by swirling patterns of scar and jutting bone. The darkness screamed from the vision slits in their expressionless metal masks.
‘You could be like them. Like all my servants, you will be a work of art, utterly unique. I will pull beauty screaming from your eager flesh,’ she said as she drummed her talons together.
‘But I must agree?’ Xarok asked again.
‘Oh, yes. You are free to go if you wish. Of course, the Archon’s kill-squads await you beyond my palace. I will not hand you over to them, but I cannot stop them from seeking you.’ She lowered her head so that she was staring directly into Xarok’s eyes. ‘It would be a shame for what could be an endless life of beauty to be cut short.’ She finished.
‘I am not a servant. I would rather die like my brothers and sisters that you slaughtered.’ Xarok hissed, his body clenching simultaneously, awaiting the first cut.
‘Very well,’ Malanthis sighed. ‘But know that my doors will always be open to you, it is a shame to let such an excellent canvas go to waste.’ She hesitated for a moment, staring frozen at Xarok before shaking her tentacled head and motioning to one of her servants to join them. It moved forward noiselessly save for the dull thump of its boots on the steely floor. At its touch, Xarok’s restraints melted away like mist and he bolted from the slab, expecting the woman to pounce on him.
‘Escort our guest to the exit. Bring him a weapon as well, he will need it with the Caged Sun’s soldiers about.’ Her grin stretched wide again as the shambling, broken thing led Xarok away. Xarok looked back at her staring back at him with a ravenous expression before the door slid shut.
The faceless servants had brought Xarok down a twisting, narrow corridor, concealed deep within the layers of the Dark City. It opened into a maze of walkways and narrow streets high in the air. Only the dim, greenish lights that floated along the darkened alleys brought any illumination. This suited Xarok just fine, especially when one of his attendants pressed a splinter pistol into his hands. Xarok checked that it was loaded and slipped into the darkness, sparing a long glance at the nightmarish slave. The blank spaces of their masks no longer screamed but hummed a vibrating whisper. Their stooped, twisted form seemed to move to embrace him with their mechanical gauntlets, sporting syringes for fingers. Xarok shivered, not merely for their mutilation, but for the invisible chains which pulled the wrack back into Malanthis’ lair.
The further he moved from the compound, the better Xarok felt. The darkness was natural to him. He half expected Kresh’s wild, orange eyes to flicker open in the darkness ahead but Xarok was quite alone. He moved with the inborn stealth of his people, born and raised in the worst slums of Commorragh. He moved so quietly that the most elite kill-squad of the Caged Sun would seem cacophonous by comparison. Eventually, he ran, leaping from spindly spire-lanes and exalting in his freedom. He felt the adrenaline course through him as he bounded across deserted lanes of open air, hundreds of miles above the next layer of the sprawling city. He relished the cool air on his face, his nostrils free from the chemical reek of Malanthis.
He savoured the painful jolts as his hands found purchase on perilous ledges. He was alive and that was the most important thing. As he rounded a narrow corner, the bladed wings of a razorwing unfurled in front of him. Its wild eyes flashed and its beak snapped in protest as it launched itself at Xarok. The discharge of the splinter pistol was nearly silent. After carefully plucking the metallic feathers from it, Xarok ate the bird raw, sinking sharpened teeth into soft flesh and feeling the still-warm blood drip down his throat. He was alive.
After hours of constant darkness, Xarok came to a gap in this layer of the Dark City, allowing the bloody light of the imprisoned sun to shine through. With this light to guide him, Xarok moved deeper into the alleys and tunnels of the city, towards the outskirts where his gang made their home. He knew that many had died, their numbers would be few and it would be many cycles before they could strike against the Archon again. Xarok realised that if Kresh had taken command of the gang, he might need to kill his comrade if he did not step down. One would die and the other would laugh and carouse and drink the blood of the loser to raucous cheers. Xarok’s heart quickened at the thought. It would be decadent.
Xarok stepped from the low, lightless tunnel he had crept through and steadied himself on a cluster of cables, each as thick as his torso and pulsing slightly with some viscous fluid. The city spiralled out and down away from him. He was nearly to the outskirts. He was hungry and he had slept little, but he was nearly home. Xarok moved slowly to swing himself down to another ledge when his vision was bisected. The burst of darklight exploded against the wall behind him, leaving a wide afterimage of darkness slashed across his eyes. The blast severed the cables, sending him tumbling down, hardly hanging onto a lower ledge. Figures in chitinous armour the colour of fresh lifeblood moved from their hiding places across the chasm, and raised their weapons. Their visors were black, opaque, and expressionless. A crimson shadow steadied his long rifle and fixed his aim for a second shot at Xarok. The Caged Sun’s trueborn had found him.
Xarok dove behind the dangling cables, which now leaked a deep purple sludge into the abyss. Splinter rifles sang, peppering the cables and the walls on either side of Xarok, saturating them with tiny, monofilament needles. Xarok angled his pistol around the cables and snapped off two quick shots of his own but he could not risk exposing his head to aim, the hail of needles would drown him in an instant. Below him was the opening of another tunnel, back into the belly of the city with a thin walkway leading to it.
Xarok waited for the trueborn to slow their fire. He could hear some advancing along the catwalks towards his position. They assumed him dead. He leapt from behind the cables, landing hard against his shoulder, dislocating it in a sudden lance of pain. He embraced it, let it fuel him. Besides, he shot with his other arm.
He started towards the tunnel at a run. He heard another burst of black light slam into the walkway behind. The shrapnel ripped past him, stabbing into his back. A red-clad soldier dropped from a walkway above, his helmet betrayed nothing of his face as he levelled his rifle. Xarok was a moment faster, his pistol rang out, and the flechette punched through the black visor. The corpse pitched over the walkway and down into the abyss.
He was at the mouth of the tunnel by the time the rattling hail of needles began anew. The walkway where Xarok had been a moment before sprouted thousands of lethal quills. Xarok threw himself forward, landing hard, knocking the wind out of his chest. He tried to rise, to begin to run, when he felt the pain in his leg.
This was not the exultant pain of muscle strain or stretching skin. Not the pleasant agony of wind burn. This pain was death. As Xarok looked down at himself, he saw the bloody line of a grazing splinter round traced across his leg. The poisoned needle had stuck itself to the floor, a cleaner hit would have been Xarok’s end in moments. Now he would enjoy minutes of writhing, twisting agony before death.
Xarok crawled, pulling himself along. His leg was useless and that numbness jabbed through his body. He moved as quickly as he could, putting space between himself and the Archon’s kill-squad. They moved into the tunnel, slowly, carefully. They had seen the thin lines of blood he had left along the floor and knew he did not have long. There was no rush. Xarok knew this too. His vision faded more with every motion, quickly blinding him. He reached out with straining fingers to pull himself along. With a great lunge, he pitched himself blindly over a ledge, landing in a thin pool. The splash would certainly alert the kill-squad and Xarok lay there, raging against his death.
He could feel nothing but the pain, not even the thick sludge he wallowed in. His mouth and nostrils were full of blood that leaked out in chunky gobbets. His ears overflowed with the sound of his own screams as they burst forth. He cursed the kill-squad even as their steps grew louder, shrieking every obscenity that his upbringing in the gangs had taught him. Finally, he screamed for life. He screamed for no other reason than to beat back the mist that smothered his mind. He did not want to die; he was not ready. Xarok squirmed and writhed as though he could beat back the talons of death. He could hear razorwings settle around him, waiting for him to go still. They were poised to seek revenge for their kin he had killed and eaten. Xarok screamed that he would do anything to live, and a voice cut through his own noise, right next to his ear. The voice was familiar, soft and hungry.
‘Anything?’ it said.
‘Yes, yes…’ Xarok panted, barely able to form the words
‘Wonderful,’ said the voice. Xarok heard the buzzing, droning whispers. Something splashed through the thick fluid towards him, scattering the razorbirds. There was a cracking sound as something jabbed through his breastplate, into his chest and filled it with warmth. Xarok’s mind went blank.
Xarok lay face-down in a cell that night, feeling his skin crawl. It slithered over his flesh like a rippling sea, tearing itself up from the raw sinew only to settle again elsewhere on his slender body. Sometimes it bundled together, layering up and forming lattice-like structures along his back, like fungal growths on fertile soil. Later it would stretch itself thin, pulling itself taut over Xarok’s sharp musculature, squeezing his soft innards so hard that Xarok was sure he would be strangled by his own skin. That is not to mention the pain. Xarok had felt pain before as the straps of his jetbike had cut and dug deeply into his flesh so that when he landed, his waist wore a bloody ring. He had endured knife wounds and survived shots from splinter pods whose bolts had lit up every nerve in his body with liquid flame.
Malanthis’s concoction flayed him alive within his own skin. It made his skin into a separate, slithering thing that flapped and wriggled around him. The alchemical mixtures kept his body from destroying itself as he was remade. He bucked and slammed against the metal slab, pulping overwhelmed nerves. The pain lessened for Xarok only when Malanthis’s potion allowed it to, in the depths of that cavernous night, when his skin finally settled into a form that pleased it and Malanthis. Xarok gasped, eyes bloodshot as he stared down at the table, the metal warmed by his thrashing. Saliva and blood trickled from his open mouth and flowed over his sharpened teeth. At last the edge of the concoction began to ebb, and unconsciousness began to steal over Xarok. He told himself the pain was over, that Malanthis would allow him rest.
Then Xarok bloomed. His skin had settled into its chosen form, but another part of Xarok had yet to be moulded. It happened in a matter of seconds. His spine burst and elongated. Its growth was stimulated by incredible metabolic processes brought on by Malanthis’s cocktail of chemicals. The bone burst from Xarok’s back but not in an explosion of blood and tissue. Instead, it grew like blades of grass poking up through the pliable spring soil, grew like a vine curling upwards and outwards from Xarok. Each vertebra blossomed into hooks and spines until a veritable tree of bone had burst from Xarok.
The remembered pain of a bone broken from a tumble off a jetbike was wiped away by the sensation of this burgeoning. Xarok coated the slab with spit and blood. He bucked and writhed his prone form against the weight. His own spine held Xarok down and kept him from moving. All he could do was scream. He felt branches of the bone tree brush against the back of his head and curl like vines around his legs, locking him in a prison of bone, unable to move and hardly able to endure.
The growths did not stop all through the night and small twigs of ossified tissues continued to sprout long after the most potent stimulants wore off and allowed Xarok to plummet into dreamless unconsciousness. Even still, his face locked in an unending scream. When Malanthis came to him, Xarok was nearly dead, wrapped in voluminous skin and bone, robbed of anything that Malanthis could not mould and shape to her whim.
Xarok awoke to her bending down to look him in the eyes, though Xarok hardly had the strength to open them, hardly had the energy to hear the words she spoke.
‘The canvas is prepared,’ she whispered. Her servants came again and fed a long tube down Xarok’s throat, pumping nutrients into him to feed the massive tree of bone that grew from him. Xarok felt it plunge innumerable hooks into his throat to inject more chemicals and hold itself in place, not that he had the power to remove it. Meanwhile, Malanthis set about pruning the tree. Tools descended from the black shadows of the ceiling, mechanical arms tipped with shears and files. Malanthis clipped and hacked and wrenched off stubborn branches, shaping the tree of bone-like topiary. Xarok lay there, utterly helpless and allowed himself to be shaped. Even as each snap of the bone shears shook his body, all he could do was scream noiselessly into his feeding tube. Malanthis examined the changes wrought upon his skin and flesh and bone. She floated wordlessly for minutes at a time, admiring and planning her next cut. She did not leave Xarok’s side for the entire day.
Eventually, Xarok slept in a haze of agony and was awakened only by sharper pangs of it. Malanthis was not there. It was her servants, with the dead metal faceplates and curling spires of bone winding out of their backs. They worked on him with shears, pruning and slicing at the delicate spires of bone. Xarok’s voice was a ruined thing yet he could not stop screaming.
The wracks came with sharp cleavers and crudely marked the joints of his arms and legs.
For all the artistry of his torture, the amputation of Xarok’s limbs was quick and brutal. The useless hunks of meat were discarded. A mechanical limb snaked down from above and evaporated his arms and legs with quick bursts of plasma. Xarok begged the wracks to stop even though he knew they would not. He had agreed to this. Eventually, he could no longer speak, his throat destroyed by his own cries and burned by the acidic cocktail of chemicals injected into him. Xarok wallowed, his stomach sloshing with strange fluids, his eyes glazed over with pain. Finally, he did not scream, did not even move when the wracks went to work with their shears. That is when Malanthis finally returned to him. She clapped her taloned hands when she saw him and exclaimed with glee.
‘You are ready to join us!’
‘The gardens are lovely this cycle,’ Malanthis hummed as Xarok was lowered slowly onto a bed of thorns. They dug into him, rooting him in place, wrapping around his wrists and legs. The gardens teemed with ossified life. Polypus flesh buds flowered from the agonised, shivering forms that lay half-immersed in a nutrient gel. Their porous skin siphoned up the nectar and fed the swirling vein fronds that formed spidery vines among the living, breathing jungle. Xarok took shallow breaths of moist air and turned his head to face Malanthis, tearing rivets in his cheek on the bony thorns.
‘What comes next?’ he managed to rasp. The feeding tube had retracted, but his screams had left scars coursing up and down his throat. Malanthis smiled and ran her taloned hands along his gnarled spine.
‘I will complete my latest work and you shall be beautiful,’ she sang. As she spoke, her nails elongated further, twisting and changing with a slight cracking sound as they narrowed to surgical blades.
‘Did I ever have a choice?’ Xarok managed to ask as she began her first cut. Her nails extended deep into him, carving swirling patterns of scars upon his organs. He did not cry, did not even writhe. Malanthis withdrew her hand from his side, clutching a fistful of bloody, tumorous meat.
‘Of course you did, but I knew you would make the right choice. It would have been such a shame to see you be discarded.’ Her hand pierced him again, digging deep, caressing his nerves as her nails snaked through his body, through the marrow of his bones. Still, Xarok was silent.
‘The net… the Caged Sun’s patrol… your wracks waiting to retrieve me. You planned it, set it up for me,’ he whispered.
‘I have had so many centuries to perfect my art. I like to think I’ve become quite adept at it.’ Malanthis’s nails inched up Xarok’s neck, reaching for ganglion to pluck like cherries.
‘I never had a choice,’ Xarok stated. A hunchbacked servant approached and set a metal mask upon a spinal branch. The mask’s empty visor beckoned to Xarok.
‘You chose to live, did you not? Anything is preferable to death,’ said Malanthis as the tips of her nails punctured Xarok’s brain.
Xarok moved into the operating room, the cold metal of his new limbs pressing into the raw nerves of his stumps. He wondered if, with so much of him reshaped or replaced, how much of him actually remained. Behind the cold metal mask, was there anything even left? The pain he had once savoured had taken everything from him. It had scooped out his insides and nestled itself in their place.
The pruned branches of bone still dug their roots into his back and his skin still felt loose, terribly disconnected from his flesh. His arms and fingers hurt most of all. The pain surged up the stumps of his limbs, and there was no way to soothe the steel prosthetic gauntlet now wired into his nerves. The chemicals pumped from the syringe banks embedded into his back did nothing to dull the pain. If anything, they enhanced it. An apron of his own flayed and regrown skin was tied around Xarok’s waist, right around the scar left by its removal. It flapped at his heels, dried and preserved as leather, strangely unmarred compared to the terrible scarring which covered the rest of his body. Aside from that, he was naked.
‘I would be dead,’ he thought. He was now a work of art, eternally preserved in Malanthis’s gallery.
‘I would be dead.’ The cold metal of his new hand jabbed into his side.
‘I would be dead.’ The spire of bone growing from his back creaked.
‘I would be dead.’
Malanthis moved to a table in the middle of the operating room. A body lay on the table, covered in a sheet of skin. It moved slightly, as whoever lay beneath it shivered, their rapid breathing causing the top of the sheet to flutter slightly.
‘This is your first exhibition; I am so proud of you,’ Malanthis said, gracefully floating up to the operating table.
‘Everyone will be watching, my other apprentices and colleagues, trueborn of the Caged Sun, perhaps even the Archon himself! Put on a wondrous performance and let them drink deeply of yet new and undiscovered droughts of pain.’ She turned and moved towards the door, the tendrils of flesh which made up her hair shuddering in anticipation.
Xarok waited for the door to slide shut. He stared around at the dim room, at the flat black walls behind which observers peered and whispered of the sights they were about to see unfold. The inky darkness of the ceiling where all the tools Xarok would need would descend at his command. His gaze returned to the table, lit by a soft spotlight. He reached out with his new metal talons and pulled the sheet away. There, lying bound to the table was Kresh, pale and wide-eyed. He was unmarked and defiance glinted in his eyes.
‘Kresh?’ The name slipped out of unfamiliar lips. The voice was hardly his own, but his companion seemed to recognise it. Kresh’s amber eyes blazed.
‘Xarok? Is that you? What… what have they done to you?’ He snarled in anger and confusion. ‘No, it can’t be you! Who are you? This is another trick!’ He grimaced, still defiant. Xarok reached up slowly and unbuckled his mask, slowly drawing it down from his face.
Kresh recoiled in fear. Xarok had never known him to do that in all his years ruling the reavers. Xarok knew his face had changed, had been warped, moulded, but his deep blue eyes gazed down at Kresh and his former friend knew the truth.
‘You… What is this then? Get me out Xarok! After all the years!’ He strained against his bonds which had been left just loose enough to let him squirm. With a whispered word from Xarok, the mechanical arms descended from the darkness, bearing their blades and tools and surrounding Kresh like a cage.
‘No, you can’t be Xarok! You just have his face, you took it! I’ll kill you! Kill you for what you did to us!’ Kresh’s fiery eyes bored into Xarok, who slowly returned the mask to his face and clasped it in place, feeling the barbs dig into his skin. ‘Xarok, if that is you, you can’t do this! You can’t do this to me! They slaughtered us! Trapped us! I saw them die Xarok! I saw them get shredded by that net! Chunks of us falling everywhere! We need to hurt them back Xarok! Help me!’ Kresh yelled with his fresh, unmarred voice. Those eyes, Xarok remembered those eyes glowing with rage and laughter during so many raids, so many murders.
‘Kresh, I am going to offer you a choice,’ Xarok said slowly, carefully, talking over the protestations. He did not hear Kresh’s frenzied response, though Xarok was too fixated on his old friend’s eyes. Xarok reached for a pair of razor-edged tongs. Those eyes would have to go first, then the real work could begin.
About the Author
Christopher is a 30-year-old adjunct professor of writing and literature. He has been fascinated with science-fiction and the Warhammer 40,000 universe since high school. He can usually be found hunched over a desk, painting miniatures, or getting lost in the woods while daydreaming a new story.
