- Caer Akris -

Nils

For him there were long spells of darkness and mental blackness that merged finally into an orange-burr of light through which vague thoughts at last wove a web of reality.

He was lying on a stone slab of similar make to those used in Knox's grisly experiments, and after a brief intake of solid, sand-caked Everloftian air, Nils began to realize that he was back among the ranks of the living.

His eyes flew down to the scars that ran along his neck, his arms, and then finally down to his naked scrotum where the girl had cut with her hidden blade. His every appendage had been knit together with a tight attention to detail. Only Knox could have done it - and now that the world of the palace interior was becoming less of a muddy haze he could make out the glum specter of the creepy wizard standing over him - with decidedly less eyes than Nils remembered.

"I owe you one, but yer still a spooky bastard."

He was revived, he was reformed. And he was vengeful. His mind now settled on the flashing images of the Argent girl and her sickening, malicious smile when she and her bitch friends knew they had the upper hand. He'd been careless. It wouldn't happen again.

"Ah!" a steely voice croaked from somewhere distant. "Dearest Nils, you have returned to us."

Nils looked up with a jerk to see the Don striding into view before him, the sliding wall of the room doorway shutting tight as he glided into the room. He spoke softly, with eloquence, and yet Nils knew that behind the steel veneer of control the bird-man maintained, there was fury.

"Revok," he said slowly. "It was your mistress. That red-haired bitch. She helped them - that scum human thief and the cunt Argent girl. He-"

The Don held up a torn, frayed wing, and Nils was immediately cowed into silence.

"I've heard the report, dear Nils," he said as Knox moved to his side. "And I must say, this Yelena showed such admirable ferocity as she made her exit. A shame the same cannot be said of the traitor Red-Woman and the lowly thief, but such feats are beyond the capabilities of mere mortals, yes?"

Nils slowly nodded his head.

"Yer - er - yer not angry they fucked off?"

"Anger doesn't serve me, Nils," came the cold, calculated response through the blackened beak of the blind bird. "You know that. Anger would not make the Argent girl give me what I wanted. Instead, patience would. Patience and time. And a little magical assistance, of course."

He nodded towards Knox with an impish grin, and licked his glittering beak.

"You see, Nils, now I have a way to end our war - our damnable conflict with the Gnolls."

Nils double blinked.

"Well, do tell!" he exclaimed. Those unwashed hyena-freaks had been the personal bane of his life down here ever since they took over.

Don Revok nodded to Knox who grunted and took a sharp intake of air. At Nils' incredulous look, he then held up his closed fist and opened it like a scarred flower to reveal a tiny, almost imperceptible little eye, floating just above his fingertips. At another nod, the eye zipped around the room like an energetic bee - the only difference being it made not a sound as it conducted its flight path around Nils' head, then up and down the blank, windowless chamber, till it finally came to rest on the shoulder of the Don.

"An Oculum," The Don explained. "Ingenious little Glance incantation. Seeker-Level Wind, obtained by Knox here from one of the Gnoll shamans with the help of a little...persuasion."

I'll bet, Nils thought. "What's it do?"

He took the tiny eyeball between two serrated, onyx nails, and squeezed it once. For a moment, Nils thought he was trying to pop the thing, and then all at once a familiar voice emanated from the tiny eye, along with the stuttering image of a man: the thief, Marius.

"All I know from the Red-chick is that the Lightbringer's supposed to arrive at the 'Temple of Bhashera' today. And, of course, she knows how to get us there. That's part of the whole reason she's coming with us."

The Don's smile grew as the image of the thief uttered each new word, and slowly, Nils joined him.

"Ye've done it, ye've done it!" he shouted. "We know where their precious chosen one's gonna be, and where the bastards have run off to. My Don, give me four men, an hour, and one beetle and I swear to you I'll cut them down in time fer dinner."

Stolen story; please report.

It was only as Nils began now to move with excitement that he realized something was definitely off about his seating arrangement. His hand was constrained, his legs similarly restricted, and as he looked down, expecting to observe some form of rheumatism that they said usually followed a resurrection, he noticed instead the iron chains that held him in place.

"Yes, dearest Nils," the Don said with another licking of his dark beak. "An ingenious little device, this Oculum. I had Knox set it up the moment we threw the Argent girl down there. It's been there with her the whole time, and I must say - it is thorough in what it is able to record."

Once again, he squeezed the little eye with firm, yet controlled, force. This time, to the mute horror of Nils' increasingly widening eyes, he saw himself talking to the Argent girl:

"Maybe I'll have myself a piece just before I take ya to the Don. The big bird doesn't gotta know. Old blind fuck's senile at the best of times - probably won't even know the difference between a soiled human girl covered in shit and piss and a regular one! Still though, I'll let yer pussy dry out first then take ya ta see him. Seems only fair ye get broken in before ye become the bird's new little snack. It'll be our little secret, eh?"

And he saw himself unbutton his leather pants and lick his lips in anticipation. Only then, in a moment that stretched for him like an agonizing eternity, did the Don end the recording.

"Ye - ye have ta-" Nils began, only now feeling the tension that had gripped him since first he'd woken in this empty place. "Ye have ta understand - that is - I was doin' psychological warfare, like. Wasn't really go-"

His lips closed and his breath caught in his throat, racing back down to his sand-filled lungs and dying there.

"Shhhhh," the Don replied. "Dearest Nils, my most treasured lieutenant, long have you served me well. And so you shall continue to do so. All life is a resource, after all. And your flame has only just begun to burn. Remember?"

Nils felt his head gripped from behind and pulled back - slammed against the hard stone of the medical slab as Knox glided around the back of his skull.

His eyes screamed for mercy. For a trial, for justice!

But they met nothing but the quiet fire burning behind the Don's own silver eyes.

"Dearest Nils, you shall continue to serve me. Your wish for vengeance shall be fulfilled. As you die, here, today, know that you are not really leaving this world behind, but becoming something greater. Something most of us can nary dream of."

His eyes flew towards the ceiling, trying to find Knox's form and what it was preparing from behind him. The growing knowledge - the certainty - that he was a dead man now - that was not what terrified him. What was gnawing at his mind with more ferocity than he'd ever experienced was the fear of how he was going to die.

To Knox, he would not have consigned even his worst enemy.

He didn't have to wonder for long - he felt the bony, skeletal hands of the Glancer stroke the base of his skull and stretch down towards his eyes, whereupon his senses were abruptly filled with a shooting, paralyzing pain as his tear-ducts were forcefully torn open to create perforations large enough for what the mad-mage had in mind.

"Even now, you obey me with silent rage, dearest Nils," the Don was saying as his mind screamed in terror. "It is a sad thing to watch your friend move on like this. But it is for the best. And this is a great gift I am giving you - for you shall be the first to see the fruits of so much time, and hope."

Nils' bleeding eyes then beheld a wriggling mass of grey-black flesh writhing in Knox's hand just above him - a piece of skin thrashing around, drizzling blood onto his face as though it were itself sentient.

"You see, Nils," the Don whispered. "I did not need supplication from the Argent. All I needed were pieces of her I could use. Scraps of flesh and blood imbued with the darkness that reigns within her body. Morsels of her self that she rejects, even as it offers up power beyond our imagining. You can feel it, can you not? The capacity for destruction in the tiny thing Knox holds in his hands?"

As he watched Knox lower the thing towards him, he could swear, by Amarata, by Yevua, by all the Gods and patron spirits of his homeland he'd ever forsaken, that he heard the mirthless laugh of something sinister echo in his brain.

Then he knew nothing but a world of agony.

"REVOOOOOOK!"

As he screamed, the Don watched him change - watched his chained limbs elongate and grow, watched his teeth mutate into bloody, bone-like swords, watched his torso flail with corrupted, vituperative life until the scales were split apart and bladed talons soaked in a blood-spattered midnight veil sprung up from him like budding plants.

"Beautiful," Don Revok whispered as he moved away. "Simply beautiful."

Knox stood by his side as they heard Nils undergo the transformation - their first success in many weeks. Though both of them could not see the splendor of the creeping shadow that slowly formed in front of them, they felt it in their bones. The calling that seeped through their skin and caused every fiber of their muscles to tingle with excitement.

"I give you the piece that was closest to her heart, dearest Nils," The Don said with reverence. "You shall be the most blessed of them all."

He turned slowly towards Knox and knew how transfixed the old Glancer was. For a moment, both of them simply observed the writhing Nils suffer in the unbearable agony of his forced transformation till the screams that escaped his parched, frayed throat were no longer his own.

"Knox," the Don said. "Know that, should you fail me again, you shall join your test subject."

Knox bowed, but did not turn to face his Lord. Instead, he immediately moved off to prepare for the battle that was now to come.

Only the sudden touch of the Don's ice-cold feathers stayed him.

"No, Knox," he said. "You shall remain here, and tend to the rest of our subjects. Your vision may be gone. But it is your will that I need. Not your eyes."

Knox's hollowed-out eye sockets looked at him quizzically before his mind caught up to the suggestion. Yet, still, he could not quite believe the urgency of the implied command.

"Nils shall be our vanguard that will cut off the head of the snake," Don Revok continued, savoring the irony of the statement. "But he is only the first of our soldiers. To sear away the filth of my Shifting Sands, we shall need an army."

Knox bowed, concealing the wrinkled, avaricious smile that was now breaking out across his scarred features - his blind eyes sweeping over the rest of the girl's peeled skin on the table.

"Bring the servants to the Throne Room."