[Narrative] The Vadinax Crusade, V | In The Land Of The Blind

 INT War Room, Harvester of Sorrows

“Why won’t it die?”

Khatar, champion of Your Faith Lost, was confused. He was sure he’d seen Skallagrim slapped around by the Cabal’s daemon engine, and then there had been the blast from the explosion. Nobody should have survived that – and yet there Skallagrim was, empty eyes unblinking, hammer resting on his shoulder, a statue in flesh and ceramite and silent hate.

“I do my work well,” Mercurio growled. “Too well, I think. The weapon still wants him alive. I fear to even attempt unbinding him, now.”

“You’ll have to do something. None of us are prepared to take orders from it, now, but… we were driven from Steadfast Repentance, now we’re humiliated by the ashes of the Fifteenth when we try to fall in with the Warmaster’s will. Even if the plan fails – “

“It won’t fail. The Blood God’s eye is on us – I felt it unbind the Cabal’s wizardry, rewind the flow of time. I’ll simply have to… rejuvenate him. Bring back the man, to contest the daemon.”

The Warlock looked across at his station – what had been his station, the broad slab of metal in his shrine for maintenance, contemplative arts, the rare and treasured downtime of the Crusade that had become the Heresy that had become the Long War. Mercurio’s was a shrine. A shrine to what was not quite clear: disarray, perhaps, decay maybe, diabolism certainly. Candles dribbled perilously close to scraps of vellum. A sightless eight-eyed head crawled with insects. The surface had been graven deep with the whorls and spirals of the demonologist’s trade, and those had been filled with wax, with blood, with creeping mould.

The Warlock looked, and he saw what must be done to heal his creation; to begin, perhaps, making good on the debacle this campaign had become. Mercurio took up the thinnest of his ritual blades, spat acid in his palm and wrapped his hand to cleanse it, passed it back and forth through the flame.

“An eye for an eye,” he mused, and raised the athame to his face.