Transformation process

Lucius stared at Krysithius, his marred green eyes cold. He flung out his arm, hurling his lash at his brother. A barbed tentacle snapped a hand’s breadth over the renegade Space Marine’s head, decapitating another of the cyborg soldiers as it poised itself to strike at Krysithius’ back.

‘Am I?’ said Lucius, before hauling back the lash with a whip crack.

---

Tobias woke with a start. He clamped a hand to his mouth, stifling a cry and breathed deeply through his nose. Once his heartbeat had steadied, he swept back the clinging locks of his hair pasted to his brow by cold sweat.

Gingerly, he sat up, careful not to wake his wife and daughter sleeping next to him. He swung his legs over the edge of the cot and stood, moving slowly through the dark to the washbasin next to the kitchenette.

Vestiges of the nightmare clung to Tobias’ mind. Half-formed images of bleeding things and inhuman screeching. And laughter. They faded as he splashed water against his face.

(...)

The most beautiful sight he had ever seen watched Tobias as he left the domicile, just as they did every morning when he left for his shift. He put on his cap, careful not to show the sleeplessness of the past nights in front of his daughter, and slid the door closed behind him.

Tobias took a wheezing breath as he left the tenement building. The wheezing became coughing, and the coughing retching as he vomited a glob of black slime onto the street corner. Tobias’ breath caught in his throat, his eyes wide as he watched the ooze hiss and bubble on the rockcrete. Vertigo weakened his knees and blurred his sight. He panted, holding a hand out to steady himself against the wall until his vision cleared.

‘Tobias?’ said a voice from behind the reeling factory worker. He dragged a hand down his face and turned, seeing a group of his fellows, Solk at their fore. ‘You all right, brother?’

‘Fine,’ he lied. ‘Long night, that’s all.’

Solk chuckled. ‘I guess you do your drinking at home.’

‘Right.’ Tobias forced a laugh. ‘Go on ahead, I’ll catch up with you.’

The workers made off down towards the factory. Tobias gasped. His skin felt burning hot to the touch. He pulled up the sleeve of his jacket, and gagged as he saw the dark lines of his veins threading through flesh that had gone deathly pale. He had to breathe, to just take a moment to collect himself.

(...)

‘Papa?’

Tobias could barely make out Grace as she buried the child’s face into her chest and carried her away from where he lay shivering on the cot. His vision tunnelled sharply as he curled into a ball, gripping the thin sheet over him so tightly his knuckles cracked.

Death was a fact of life for those who toiled in the factory. Men falling ill, to mould or rustlung or plain exhaustion was far from uncommon. Tobias had seen more than one of his friends carried from their stations by the overseers, to be provided with ‘medical treatment’. None of them had ever returned.

This was something different. It was as though Tobias’ nightmares had infected him with fever. They were no longer content to remain in his dreams, hauling themselves out into his waking life. Tobias gritted his teeth against the pain, a marrow-deep agony that filled his guts with razors.

‘Tobias?’ said Grace, tears streaming down her face as she cradled their child.

Tobias squeezed his eyes shut. For days, people had stopped being recognisable to him. All he could see were horrible, skinless things that grinned with broken fangs.

(...)

Tobias could only hear screaming now. There was no other sound than the din of agony that howled from behind his eyes. Black ropes bulged and squirmed beneath his flesh, his veins aflame with poison. He stumbled through the streets, his mind knowing not where his body was carrying him.

Twisted, inhuman faces leered down at him at every turn. He recoiled as they jostled and shoved him away, their shouts and curses muted by the shrieking.

Tobias burst into the factory, his arms flailing as black ooze streamed from his eyes. He stumbled blindly through a corridor, moving towards the sound of machines. He collided with a doorframe and was bowled over, collapsing at the entrance to the assembly line.

The workers who witnessed Tobias fall called their fellows and ran to his aid, ignoring the shouted warnings from guards and overseers. Screams and cries of alarm sent them staggering back from their friend’s stricken form.

A revolting wet tearing sound filled the air as Tobias’ skin split into flayed ribbons, spraying everything around him with an oily mist of blood. The flesh beneath was discoloured, the deep red of it morphed to an unsettling shade of purple that glittered with an oily sheen like an insect’s carapace. His skeleton snapped as it reformed, some bones elongating far beyond that of a normal man, others splintering and sharpening into alarming spikes.

The workers fled from what Tobias was becoming. His body writhed in bone-breaking convulsions, a lump of meat that twisted as its wet, slick noises changed to those of a cracking, squealing shell.

Limbs burst out from the mass: arms and armoured fists holding weapons that condensed into being from blood and shadows; legs ending in cloven hooves. Tobias’ skull collapsed, his face never halting in its cries as it receded and was drawn tight over a rapidly forming breastplate of purplish-pink armour. In its place another skull breached the quivering knot of transformation, skinned with hairless consumptive flesh that was covered in hideous overlapping scars. A savage maw grinned as it was filled with needle teeth and a vile, reptilian tongue. Two sunken pits twitched, fighting the blood and mucus gumming them as they strove to take in the world once more.

The eyes opened, and the screaming that had filled the assembly line was overtaken by laughter.

‘Yes, I know,’ said Lucius, rising with a grunt to tower over the group of stunned factory workers. ‘I am truly beautiful to behold. The worm giveth birth to the butterfly.’

***

Lucius: Pride and Fall