Armour

The swollen pits that had once been ears did not react to the ­pittance of his own bloodshed, as they strained to enthral his mind with symphony.

Dozens of undulating faces covered the walls, shrieking a ululating lament of ceaseless torment. They were the shackled essences of men and women, kings and slaves, champions, aliens and those touched by the Dark Gods themselves. All were murderers. All shared in the same perdition. They thrashed, rolling and pressing in vain attempts to win their freedom like creatures eternally drowning within tar pits. The captive souls screamed in an endless choir of the damned, each wailing the dirge of their own individual torment to meld into a discordant song of anguish.

Glistening creatures writhed upon the floor before the throne. Some were human, some were not, and then there were others who had once been born as men and women, but had renounced the boundaries of their race to become something more. They moaned and hissed, clawing and cutting and coupling, their every action perpetrated to satisfy the desire of drawing the ecstasy of sensation from flesh. Their softer, warmer cries melted into the howls from the walls. Their song was mellifluous to him, beautiful.

Perfect.

(...)

The faces shrieked all the louder, spiking in a hopeless crescendo as they melted from the walls, exposing the bloody frescos and sweat-soaked tapestries beneath as they slid down with a sickening slowness to the floor. They were dragged towards the enthroned figure, captives in an angler’s net being hauled in for harvest. For a moment they pooled quivering beneath him, before slipping upwards, wrapping themselves around muscular limbs and a torso rapidly resolving into form and definition.

A hiss of pleasure-pain passed from the figure as the jelly of bound souls hardened into segmented plates of baroque armour, continuously emitting a cracking, splitting noise as the faces upon its surface bobbed and wailed their futile cries. The figure braced himself internally as the calm solitude of his mind was shattered.

Dozens of voices cried out behind his eyes. Pain, despair, pleading and rage all mingled and overlapped inside his skull as the stolen howled their torment within his mind. They begged him for deliverance, swore vindication or taunted him in their despair, scratching and needling and ringing in a never-ending discordance of the damned.

***

Lucius: The Faultless Blade, I.III