Landmine

‘With me!’ roared Lucius, waving his warriors forward with the power blazing across the Laeran Blade. Then he was charging ahead, moving so effortlessly and so swiftly that he barely noticed the piece of shaped iron he brushed against with his hoof.

Lucius experienced the world in a blur.

A burst of light and sound.

Silence, and the feeling of weightless spinning.

The earth and sky alternating.

Earth. Sky. Earth. Sky. Earth.

Blackness.

Death swallowed Lucius, just as it had before. And then the screaming began.

---

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 took stock of his surroundings, bloodshot green eyes flicking here and there. It was then that Lucius realised where he was. He was standing in the centre of a munitions factory. He thought back, retracing his memories to the last moment he could recall, before the blackness of death had engulfed him.

A landmine. By Ruin, it had been a damned landmine.

Such a revelation galled Lucius, on a great number of levels. He couldn’t fathom which was worse – that he, the greatest champion of the entire galaxy, should meet such an end, or, equally infuriating, that such a creature as this would dare to derive satisfaction from its miserable existence.

‘You were proud of this?’ Lucius glared down at the wailing visage of Tobias. Of all the Ruinous Powers that could have bestowed their blessings upon him, Lucius had to have been chosen by the one that possessed a sense of humour. He wondered how many of the Cohors Nasicae he would have to kill before any word of this embarrassment was quashed forever.

***

Lucius: Pride and Fall