Restless Forsaken

>The servants, men with the likeness of birds and goats, finished securing the chains about the great beast
>The creature, a mass of shaped metal and ornamentation, struggled, letting out a roar
>The Beast of Tizca, the lesser sorcerers called it
>A fitting name, as that's what it contained.
>The souls of nearly every civilian of the former capital, all removed from physical form by the first captain's rubric
>And unlike her own brothers and sisters likewise affected, mortal humans kept next to nothing of what they once were
>Where once there was hopes, dreams, and love, now there was only anguish and hate
>And now she was to bind it all within a mystical construct to bring further death and destruction.
>She thought of her human mother, of her human father, or her little brother who could not pass the tests to join the legion as she raised her staff, which had grown cancerous with new runes signifying her new master.
>The warp bent to her will as similar runes wrote themselves on the armor that floated on the ethereal form of this mass of souls
>It was done.
>The thing was now a machine of war
>The people of Tizca would never know rest now
>Somewhere in the tower above, the sorceress could hear Ahriman scream in anguish for what he had caused
>If only they could have simply died, and left it at that
>The beast was done with. It's collar was one of sorcery, and it would never be broken. Even if its physical body was shattered, the contents of its soul, the product of tortured Tizca fused together, would return to this place
>Kavro was training it now, like one would train a dog
>Is there anything left of the scholars or families left within?
>She hoped not. The innocent should not be subjected to that kind of hell.
>The sorceress stalked through the halls of the new complex; a dark facsimile of her home on Prospero, its foundation on a dark un-reality.
>So much more of an empty place, devoid of both mortals and most of her siblings
>Not that the siblings weren't there
>It's just that they weren't there
>She stopped by one of her brothers, clad in battle armor even within their own home
"How do you fare brother?"
>The man, or, what was once a man, took many seconds to respond, as if blinking out of sleep
"I... do not... fare... where is Mother?"
>The sorceress sighed and left her brother
>Most were like that now, the Rubric having robbed them of both form, emotion, and some important piece of the soul that could not be identified.
>Not all though, she thought as she passed by a court yard, open to a sky in which hung a newly birthed star.
>In that court yard her siblings sparred in new bodies, forged from old armor. They had given their armor, the thing that gave form to a ghostly existence, bestial shapes. Here were two common ones: The harpy and the lamia.
>Much protection had been shaven off both, for what was there to protect that could be harmed by conventional means? The harpy had sprouted ghostly wings and shaped its boots into talons, while the lamia had forgone legs to replace its lower body with a powerful snake tail, segmented pieces of armor floating over coils of the former marine's own soul, the head shaped into a cobra's
>These had not lost their emotion, they had lost all else