Juvenus

[Kobra]

AYAN'TE MAELHIM ESTHI VETUUN
-----------------------------------------------

-----------------------------------------------

[Kobra]

*******

The girl lay dead before him.

Legs wide, knees bruised; arms draped against her bare chest like a lifeless bird. A broken doll. But Senin had no such poetic thoughts for her. She was meat, and she was dead.

He wiped the sweat from his brow as he stared down from his kneeling posture at the beautiful, bruised corpse.

the harlot shouldn't have screamed.

She wasn't the first he'd taken in that alley. She wasn't the first he'd left broken, shamed and sobbing. Bleeding. But she had been the first to break ...like this.

if she'd shut up and taken it I wouldn't have hit her so hard

A pool that looked black in the dim light spread on the cobblestones. Beneath her skull. Hanging, matting that lovely hair.

no witnesses

But if the guards found the body...

do you know what they do to fops like you in gaol?

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Paranoia came and went, a bitter wave crashing over him for a brief instant, leaving its reek to soak him.

the shadows aren't moving. the walls don't have eyes.

But they did.

Senin was aware from the corners of his consciousness of a squeamish undulation in the dark; dizziness plagued his sight as he blinked back at the wall, trying to make out the source of the movement; but all his eyes could see were shadows swaying, painted dull grey over the lines that marked the edges of the mortar, the textures of the interlocking bricks.

hide the body. get rid of it. don't leave it there. they'll find it.

Lily-white her skin seemed, drained so of its colour. The colour oozed thick and dark from the back of her broken skull. He picked her feet up and dragged; dragged her down the alleyway.

The sound began; he felt it, rather than heard it at first, a hollow heartbeat rising at the back of his mind; each pulse like the thrust of a spider's hairy foot brushing along the arch of his spine. Rhythmic and shrill it came, a whooping pulse...a sound muffled by the distance of unnameable dimensions.

A whimper broke his moistened lips; a whimper that came forth as a breath of fog on the air.

Cold

Senin dragged his body backwards, feeling sweat drip down his back in rivers, freezing into flakes of frost, surely, for it was so cold. His fingers slipped on the dead girl's ankles, but he refused to give up his grip. His heels dug in; he scrambled.

Dancing like faery-lights upon the wall, from slits to full globes the pale glows opened; yellow, were some, jaundiced and sickly - others, foul sanguine red - others, vomitous green. They drifted in pairs about the bulbous ends of each rising clump of shade, while about them unfolded the silhouettes of spindly limbs...

A cry tore Senin's throat; the dead flesh beneath his fingers wet with his perspiration, even as the rest of her was spattered with his fouled issue. His fingers kept slipping, his gait kept haulting. But he had to take the body. He pulled her further, screaming profanities at the spidery, moving shadows.

The whooping pulse came in reply, the maddening gibber of some unspeakable Thing hiding just beyond the wall of shadow. The thin firmament that separated the real from a squamous Unreality beyond the grasp of babbling mortals and their simpering and self-styled gods.

Wild-eyed, Senin realised he should have reached the end of the alley by now, and turned his head swiftly about - daring to take his eyes off the Hidden Ones for a moment - to stare behind him. He found his stare lingering, as with horror he saw that the alleyway had no end.

The walls stretched on into the infinite, meeting in the dark at some half-imagined vanishing point, the same windows repeating endlessly, set at odd intervals in the walls; walls which seemed now to lean over him, at obscene and unnatural angles. He turned back to his pursuers, and saw that they flowed from an endless sea of tenebraeic shadows, pouring itself up the alley whence he had came - an alley as infinite in that direction as it was in the other.

His screams became stifled by a panic that had no room for them. He dropped the girl, and turned to run - but as the body flopped to the alley-stone the shadows flowed over it, obscuring the dead girl's features in their rivers.

Then, the miasmic umbra swallowed Senin into itself.

You were there, before the stars were born. You were floating. Formless, unborn in the dark between the aeons. You existed before there were Gods to give you the name; "Ayan'te", the Shattered Ones, or define you as "Maelhim", the Dark Embodied, as it was spoken in that ancient tongue crafted by the Elaurim in the seventeen sky cities of U'elle in the time before the Revelation of Sefiqul. You were denied of form, emotion, being, and you drifted unseen about the living world, a mere fragment, a shard of pure spirit-element. You had no thoughts, no feelings, no concept of time, or of self, but without eyes you watched and sensed the Kagen'te, the mortal-beings, as they laughed and loved and cried and warred and hated and died. All the things you could not do. Was it envy, or curiosity, that drove all your kind to seek to be embodied? Or, lacking any true emotion, was it merely an echo of Need?

Senin floated in the sightless abysses between the stars and there his wretched mind was filled with such glories and blasphemous secrets as could scarcely be imagined by the minds of envious archmagi; he trod within shadowed dimensions where not even the most black-hearted demon had ever breathed and there he saw the face of the Maelhim, and his soul broke apart like a flimsy shack in a hurricane. It was a pity; for a moment beyond time one pitiful little rapist had stared into the face of cosmic mystery. But he had not understood. None of them ever had.

[Kobra]

heartbeat

Cold cobble beneath his cheek, beneath his palms; like the knobbled scale of some monstrous and unfathomable beast. Senin opened his eyes and found the pale, blood-smeared ankle of the girl he had brutalised and murdered, what must have been only minutes before.

It felt like years.

He pulled himself up, and gripped the corpse's ankles once more. Hide the body. Hide the evidence. His mind locked the nightmare away, as he dragged the raped girl's carcass behind him down the alley, smearing her ruination in red-black gleam upon the cobble with each wet, crunching bounce of her broken skull to the pavement. Her arms had since left her chest and dangled behind her, fingertips dancing lifelessly as she was hauled to ignoble disposal.

Only a short distance further, though, Senin noticed something white upon his battered coat. He looked up, and around.

it's snowing

White and delicate blossoms of down descended from the heavens; such tiny feathers as would be plucked from the body of a baby bird. They drifted and flowed upon invisible zephyrs, guided to their quiet rest upon the cobblestone.

Senin backed away, staring, for upon the stone the fragile feathers began to curl as if of their own volition.

Whispers rose in the air.

The down began to blacken about him, and the air once more grew cold; even as those pristine pinions folded in upon themselves and charred to ebon as though they were burning.

Another sound, though, caught Senin's attention; a soft squelch that drew his gaze down between the legs he held, and he let out a choking gasp of horror as something squeezed itself forth from the womb of his victim's corpse. He dropped her ankles and backed away.

Upon her face was a maddening, post-mortem smile.

Upon the ground between her thighs rolled an egg. Bigger than an ostrich egg. Pure-white.

Senin tripped over a loose cobble and ended up on his backside; he scrabbled to get to his feet as he felt an aura of sheer and absolute horror leaking from that innocent object; though now he could see the arcane sigils etching themselves across the white shell as if a red-hot knife were burning them there; he could hear the scratching, the whispers...

A tiny fist burst through the egg; five pudgy fingers.

a baby

Five pudgy fingers from whose tips tore, suddenly, black fish-hook talons.

The egg shattered soundlessly.

None will remember you. They erased all traces of your existence. You were born to be one of us. One of Them.

What crawled forth was an abomination.

Wet black wings, their down glued into tangled atramentous tendrils parting away from the round white face, the bleached visage of what had been a newborn human infant. The skin was deathly white, now, livid and clammy; the folds of flesh hung loosely about the soft bones of the face. The eyes were black, slick, like the bulbous orbs of an insect; the tiny, fat legs backjointed, their knees broken into reverse; their toes splayed in half-formed hoofs. A befouled cherub, a satanic Cupid. Juvenus, the Newborn.

Senin's eyes flew open; their capilliaries burst, and blood trickled from their corners; his hair turned white in an instant and his jaw dislocated as he released a maddened shriek no-one would hear. He threw up his hands to hide his distorting face but he could not block the horror from his vision. The form it took was merely the beginning. The realisation, of what it was, of what it represented, was a thousand times worse. Now, he understood...

Juvenus' plump white lips parted, and from the gums where new teeth should have sprouted within coming months of growth instead, in this obscene parody of a child forever halted in newborn stage wiggled black spider-fangs pushed through with a nigh-inaudible squelch.

The tiny wings spread and Juvenus flew, hovering above the ruined, grinning corpse of its surrogate 'mother'; then it flew like a thunderbolt into Senin's body, clawing his face as it breathed into the mouth that would not close; cold infant lips blessed the rapist Senin with a fitting fate.

Another fell spirit was loosed from its nihilistic limbo; Senin's broken mind felt it coiling like a cancerous worm at the back of his soul, slowly eating at his memories, cruelly dissecting all that he was and had been, breaking his thoughts into pieces and slowly beginning to reassemble them like a wasp forming a nest from digested paper. Breaking him apart and rebuilding him...in its own image.

First had come Viator, the Messenger; an infant stolen from its crib became Juvenus, the Newborn. The first and second as they always had been.

Now, the man who had been Senin McJarl would go from rapist to Rapax.

Flesh distorted, flowed outward, a bloated sac of rancid fluids and fast-hardening skeletal structures; a festering limb lashed forth to impale the murdered girl's corpse and fuse with her remains like a fist thrust into a hand-puppet; the shadows of unspeakable limbs rose...and a cry resonated from the depths of the Profane.

The shell changed to match the spirit.

The Grasper was embodied.