"And who are you?" Tezac said.
"Julius Agrifficus Nyar." One of the others proclaimed in a voice loud enough to be heard over the winds. "Imperadux of the First Penal Legion of Cocytus; veteran of the Taan Conflict and Third Reclamation War; Vizeopt of the third grade; Bane of the-"
"Spare me the titles." Sejanus said.
"Oh Sejanus." Nyar said and went to him and forced their eyes to meet by his grip upon the sides of his shaven head. "If you'd shown proper respect for your betters, you might’ve avoided the situation that you’re in now. All the same: there will be time enough to cure you of these – sentiments."
"I'd hate to ruin your Blackblood speciest party," Leargam said. "But it doesn't look like you'll have time for much of anything."
He nodded at the effulgent clouds and as though it awaited for his acknowledgement alone, as though the old man were the porter for the universe, what lay beyond then broke through. Tendrils writhed out from within the sky's burning nebulae and so great that Tezac knew them for those he had seen in sleep, those that had thrown down the aspirant towers of antique empires and had wrapped their sickly grasp round the foundations of cities renowned across the race of their builders and rendered them unto ruin. They elongated and grew as they emerged until at length was revealed the crooked, grotesque maw to which the ancient tentacles were anchored and then the great eye which loomed terrible and despondent in turn above it – caught all within the tumorous flesh parasitized onto the body of the machine that bore the entity forth out of the heavens and which next appeared as it descended.
The thing levelled out over the glacial plain and soared as a ship a thousand times greater than any those there had seen. It droned then, by some unseen machination hidden deep within the rotting bowels of its mouth, and drowned out the wail and blow of the storm and contained within its cosmic noise the screams of the dying and the tortured and the mad. Those below whose heads were naked clutched their ears and, when it failed to shut out the cacophony, drew their knives and drove them into the canal so as to hear nothing if never to hear such a sound again.
A light bloomed forth from its underbelly and there yawned an orifice as wide around as a dozen dropships and from within the emerald light it cast a great deluge of like colored bile spilled out and turned the men or machines it poured onto to smoking goo that moved of its own accord, burbling. It melted great pits into the glacial plain and disappeared the HEVs that had avoided its cataract.
Points of darkness appeared within the glow that fell from within the recesses of the living ship, few that in moments became many and in their descent the distant blots became humanoid shadows in the radiance that flowed round them. But as the moments passed things began to part from the prevailing indistinguishability of their forms that squirmed from their heads which in turn pendulated as bulbs at the end of long, lilting necks and as their limbs did from their bodies.
They drew nigh the inmates upon the field below, now in battle array with their makeshift legions and centuries, and who fought against the animated globs of human jelly that cared not for their bullets. They then opened fire upon these newcomers too, these emaciated grey things from beyond the stars that had set down upon them. The creatures dropped from their places in the air, caught in seizure by the impact of bullets from rifles and HEV turrets, and they fell dead as sure as stones do. But in their illimitable numbers these progeny of the ship came on still and took men from the earth with the long tendrils of their faceless faces and drifted away again toward the glow.
"Sir," One of the Blackbloods said over his shoulder to Nyar, his captain.
"Stay where you are." He said. "Keep your guns where they are."
"Sir." The man said again and turned round to face Julius Nyar.
The Imperadux turned as well and drew his sidearm and fired a burst into his visor. The duraglas cracked into chaotic webs where the bullets passed through and the Blackblood fell dead into the snow upon the ridge.
"I won't have any dissent." He said to them and said no more so that his words, with the death cries of those below and those of the planet itself, took hold of their thoughts. "Elreist, Richards: get in the piloting wombs. The rest of you load into the personnel bay. Shoot the prisoners."
A darkness drew over the viridian light that flowed about their shoulders and a new shadow joined their own and the Blackbloods turned round on their commander. He held the pistol out at them still and looked between them, unaware of the thing that hovered over him. They raised their rifles at its horrid, desiccated grey flesh and limbs long to uselessness and the tendrils that spasmed madly in the radiance that streamed round it and Nyar aimed his gun at them. They fired at the pallid flesh of its head that then leered down upon their Imperadux from atop its neck that was as a serpent and he depressed the trigger at random into any form he could find.
Sejanus took the rifle from the corpse of the Blackblood that had been first shot and scrambled away from the firefight and watched from afar as the bullets fired at the thing passed harmlessly into black nothingness before it, the somber expression of the horribly human mouth they could now see unchanged. Tezac rose up, a giant in the light that bathed the ridge, and threw one of the Blackbloods from it and took his weapon from where it lay in the snow. Nyar turned his pistol on him and the lips of the thing that hovered above him opened, so wide that even for its size it was not possible, and in it the teeth were human.
It descended upon him and engulfed him and when its jaws had shut closed again it did not swallow, but neither did any body remain to encumber its gaping maw. Its tendrils lashed out at the Blackbloods that yet stood and took the three into three of its arms and crushed the life from them and floated onward as it did so, drawing nigh to where Leargam kneeled before it like the mad worshipper of a mad god.
A spear passed over his head and the airjets along its ebon haft activated and sped into the sunken breast of the creature and plowed into it. The thick, runed blades of the spearhead punctured the bone with a bloody thud and a sickly fluid spewed out from the wound as the spear bore away with it its target. The thing let loose a hollow, crazed kind of moan as it went and sailed back through the wintry air, falling away somewhere beyond the ridge. Their ears were filled then of a sudden with the rush of air and above them passed a chariot of black steel drawn by the winged beasts of some outer hell and in it the sleek-armored figures of their jailors in the mortal realm.
"Maerazians." Sejanus said and sped over to Tezac at the edge of the plateau, helping Leargam to his feet as he went. "It's the Maerazians."
A fleet of such craft stormed over where they stood and upon the winds from the east and joined battle with the airborne hordes of the creatures descending from the ship. The spears they cast often disappeared into the spontaneous voids brought about the forms of the things when under threat, being now aware of them, and so those who watched from below began to see the weird works of the magicks they brought with them from the depths of the Gulf.
They saw from their place upon the ridge the figures that stood protected at the heart of each vessel and which worked their staves in the air and, as those knew who in lifetimes past had fought against them, called upon the power of the names writ as runes into their blackened armor. Gouts of baleful flame shot forth in great bursts from the coursing chariots and the beasts that drew them across the skies nipped and tore at the travellers from beyond the stars. Shrieking, spectral zephyrs blew shimmering through the air and all of those they touched fell to the earth lifeless. Serpents of sinew and bone sprouted large from the shoulders and spines of their hosts in some few of the crafts and at turns spat sprays of boiling blood upon the alien flocks they passed and bit at or constricted those lone enemies they happened upon.
Soon there entered into the midst of the squadrons, lowering of its will down into sight from above, a stagnant glow. A globe that scintillated and crackled as if with eldritch lightning and contained within it, they saw, the massive and lank abomination release
d out of a buried epoch and a magnetic tomb deep in the earth. The warlord of the Maerazians had come and had begun to draw earthward toward the figure that in the depletion of the escaped inmates stood alone still in the emerald brilliance of the living ship, untouched by the beings that issued from it, and as his attendants skirmished with those of the man they knew as Tobias Simms.
"Come on." Sejanus said to them and slipped over the edge of the ridge and skidded down the rocky slope beyond.
"Sejanus," Tezac called after him. "Godsdamn it."
"We better follow him," Leargam said and they set to doing so. "Before he gets himself killed."
Below, the Maerazian warlord stretched his hand out to Tobias and the characters that smoked black upon his white skin tore away and formed from within their patterns in the air a lance of blackest fire that overtook the man, oblivious of his presence, and burned the clothes from his body and the skin from his flesh. Tobias stopped and turned, smoking and bubbling and crisping, and waved his hand at the pale giant in the distance.
The ice shattered before the Maerazian and from beneath it rose a tendril as massive and ichorous as it was malodorant and knobby with sores. It whipped at him and knocked him aside in its suddenness. He rolled to his taloned feet across the glacial plain and vanished to reappear beside the thing and with the long claws of his long hand severed it into two. Then he braced his feet and seemed to peer hard at Tobias and from his eyes spewed forth a legion of wailing spirits that swamped him and took him up so that he could not move and tore at parts of him that could not be seen with mortal eyes.
The Maeraizan cast his taloned hands to the sky and those who followed them and looked themselves to the stars saw one of their number to shift from its place in the northern heavens. There were then two such points and of them the lower sped toward them until at length a sphere of luminescence appeared at odds with the three moons and descended upon their world. It grew so bright that nothing but the brightness could be seen and the earth shook beneath their feet so that they were thrown from their feet.
The warlord studied the pit that he had made and approached it through the carnage of the battle that went on around him. He crept near the edge and peered down into the blackness beyond and so listened faintly to the voice that sounded to filter up from below. Its words rose from the deep watery places that are the domains of the dismal forgotten aberrations of time and spoken by no mortal throat and which in that moment became a roar that blew him backwards through the aerial fray.
A green light flared from the pit and the Maerazian got to his feet as a figure rose into the air within its radiance, warped and twisted with the impact of what had fallen upon its body. It reached out with the single, working arm left to it, the only limb left whole save a leg yet crooked and bent to uselessness, and a shimmering wave blew towards him. He held up his arm to it and the miasmatic symbols written there flew apart and so met the blast with the umbral shield they contrived to form.
The energies flowed round to what parts of him were left uncovered and the skin upon his legs peeled back from the bone, flayed away so that it draped as skirts might where the flesh was yet attached. A swarm of spiders skittered outward from the destroyed characters thereupon and over the bodies of the dead that they nearly outsized and from beneath the glacial depths rose a beast of four arms and molten skin that raged away into its enemies, which were any among the living. The Maerazian waved its taloned hand across the wounds and the glyphs scrawled upon his stomach spun astray to conjure over them the hide of some scaled daemon.
The broken figure of Tobias Simms gestured once more while he ministrated upon himself and the ice fell out from beneath the Maerazian and he with it into the opened jaws brought into being there. The thing to whose mouth they were rose blind from the fissure in the glacier upon chitinous scythes that then drew its bulbous, worming bulk forth to its master.
The broken man, the burned man, spun about in his place in the air as though one thought at once gave way to another and so recommenced his journey upward into the thickening arms of the ship's inner glow. Spikes then erupted from within the beast that he had created and it made a deep bleating noise and as sudden as it had been given life fell over dead. The fat of its great stomach commenced to bubble and to steam and the Maerazian, shrouded roundabout within his molten sphere, appeared from within.
He hurled himself by his will through the air toward Tobias Simms and dispensed with his shield as he did so and crashed into him so that upon impact the worms that were the tongues of the maw within his breast coiled about his foe. They careered then down to the ice entwined together and black wings of shadow unfurled from the shoulders of the warlord so that he glided down to land upon his feet, the frail and obliterated form held out before him by the tongues – ready to be devoured.
"I cannot be destroyed." Tobias said through his jaw broken sidelong with the rest of him, through his cooked flesh that had been scourged by flame of all but its most intrinsic parts. "I am destruction itself – until all are none."
He began to shake violently in the Maerazian's grip and his scorched body began to misshape and devolve into some discord in the creation of the multiverse. Pale tissues slick with the oozes they extricated overtook the burns and sears that had become his skin and his neck spasmed and elongated until at length it was twice again above the Maerazian and the head atop it an eyeless, toothless thing that sucked at the air. His stomach bulged with the rest of him so that it appeared the warlord held now a gluttonous parody of such worms that dwell beneath lightless seas and which burst open then at the behest of what seemed to those who watched bundles of fleshy ropes that began to bind the Maerazian up. He cut at them with his long claws and kept them at bay, but they were many. The arms of the thing that had been Tobias Simms began to split and change so that they joined as greater cousins the tentacles that writhed now upon his back, which became more and more the proverbial spine of an invertebrate wriggling mass.
"You can follow me or stay here and die." Sejanus said and charged forth from the melted wreckage of the HEV they crouched behind.
"Where in the Hells is he going?" Leargam shouted at Tezac.
"Some place with an idea better than this." He said and followed after him, the old man after him.
They advanced together across the field and amidst the corpses and destruction that littered it. A chariot crashed down before them and its crew were at once descended upon and taken away by the creatures that had driven it aground and they dashed round it, went on at Sejanus's lead. He stopped ahead on the other side of the wreck and took from within its debris one of the propellant spears of the raiders that had piloted it and turned to Tezac.
"How far can you throw me?" He said.
"Throw you?" He said and looked him over. "Straight up and without an exo-suit, no more than six or seven feet. Why?"
"Just do it when I tell you." Sejanus said and Tezac grabbed hold of him by the back of his suit and waited for what was to them an inexplicable happening. "Now."
The big man lifted him from his feet and, bearing his weight with the awkward length of the spear he carried, threw Sejanus into the air with as much strength as his limbs and the exo-suit he wore afforded him. They watched as he ascended and appeared at several meters up would begin to drop down again. Then he triggered the airjets of the spear he bore. Sejanus launched with it and it carried him up through the skirmish that went on above until it bored into the hull of a passing chariot.
He held fast to the spear through the inertia and then undulated himself by his grip upon the haft to swing up into the galley of the chariot. He landed in a low crouch and faced down the two that were left of its crew and his rifle that he brought round upon its sling was knocked away by the flash of a sword. The lone Maerazian left to give fight drove his dark blade down at him and he leapt backward from it and its point sparked against the steel of the floor. He got to his feet and its edge swept at his throat and he leaned out of its reach, threw ba
ck his arms. The driver of the winged beasts that drew it along looked back at them over his shoulder.
He shouted some word or phrase that went unheard by one and not understood by the other, to Sejanus a name or a warning. The sword came on and the grim death mask of the raider beyond it came on and silently, as if death itself confronted him. Something inside of him wished it were so. Then draping tendrils and stretched, grey limbs flitted before him and death himself screamed and proved he was not so. Sejanus glanced at the thing as it spun about with the Maerazian fighting and shouting within its grip and then looked at the driver, the driver at him.
He left the reins and made for the rifle that lay nearest him in the corner of the galley before the helmsman's cockpit and Sejanus dove for the sword which lay between them, knocked clear of its swordsman. His hands wrapped round its hilt and the pilot had gotten his own round the body of the gun and so he at once came up from the floor of the chariot and stabbed him through the throat, in that place where the breastplate of his armor ended and the helmet had not yet begun. The Maerazian fell sputtering and bleeding and clutching at the blade stuck fast in his neck and Sejanus rushed forward to catch hold of the reins.
He drove the chariot onward and until he could circuit back round to the combat that took place. The ram plate of the craft broke the skulls of inmate and Maerazian and traveller alike as he bore down upon the plain, levelled out above it to speed toward the warlord and the half-abominated form of Tobias Simms who struggled still in each other's clutches. He drew near and hefted from the rack beside him an airjet spear and with the strength of his exo-suit both held it aloft and kept hold of the reins.
The sinuous ropes of the bowels of Tobias Simms had enveloped the Maerazian about his shoulders and kept his arms at his sides so that his claws were of no more use to him. The beak of the maw within his own breast snapped at them and cut them away from the knotted innards of the man who spawned them, but for every one there grew more to replace it. The worms that were its tongues sought some hold of their own, that they might wrestle Tobias away. But his form in no way yielded and instead the mouthing eel that his neck had become squirmed up through the air and snapped down as a serpent upon the Maerazian.
Prisoner 52 Page 29