Anomus died.

All the mortal functions ceased; he felt himself to be no more than cooling meat, and with a faint puzzlement, he wondered why he remained in such a broken, dead vessel when he could simply – leave it. Somehow he knew he could do so, and so he did. He rose up out of his mortal shell, and such a feeling of lightness and relief washed over him – whatever constituted ‘him’ – that he felt almost giddy.

That same well of deeper knowledge that had urged him to free himself of his mortal flesh was now tugging at him, gently but insistently, urging him to move on. But to where? He reached for an answer, but all that he understood of it was a sense of some further, greater thing. It was like a silver cord that he could sense but not see, leading upwards. He began to follow it, but once he reached the chamber’s ceiling, the rough stone rebuffed his immaterial form just as firmly as if he had still been wearing flesh.

So soon you mortals forget, after death, said a voice from below. A voice he knew that he knew, but could not remember. He turned his attention downwards, and saw a light floating above a stone. At the same time, that stone was like a wide black well, and a creature of even greater blackness was crawling out of it. The sight of it struck his very essence with terror.

It was man-shaped, but so much more, and more vast. It had a head, limbs, a torso, but all of it was made of the stuff of utter dark, and that stuff sloughed off of it like rotting, putrid flesh from an ever-decaying corpse. It had no face, but Anomus knew, somehow, that where a face should go, that darkened physicality was wet with ichor and the rot of the space between the stars.

You fear me. You find me revolting. But no creature of the light came to your aid, did they, mortal? No beauty of the aether offered to ease your suffering, to salve your grievous wounds of spirit and flesh. And none of the shining court, old or young, stepped in to stop the slaughter of ten thousand men.

As the monster spoke, all that Anomus had just suffered came rushing back to him. The silver cord blackened, withered, turned to dust that drifted away and disappeared.

Do you know how the high gods remain so shining, so pure? I will tell you. They never stoop to soil themselves in the muck you mortals struggle through. They do not care. For all my faults, Architect, I do. The awful thing raised its arm and beckoned to him. Come to me.

Anomus fluttered down to the Faceless One, like a moth to a flame. The Old One snatched him from the air, and then held the spirit of Anomus ip Garma in cupped, shadow-bleeding hands for a long moment.

This will hurt, He said. And then He squeezed.

The Faceless One took his immortal, immaterial soul and crushed it down, down into a thing as hard as it was small.

What the dark god did was not quick, and it was far from painless. Anomus discovered that even a soul could experience such agony as to drive it away from consciousness. He had no mouth with which to scream, but he shrieked throughout the torment of his remaking nonetheless, until his spirit was overwhelmed, and he knew nothing at all, for an unknowable time.

~ ~ ~

It was the smallest of sounds that brought him back to awareness, the sound of water – no, not water, but some liquid perhaps thicker than water – steadily dripping down from one worn, misshapen step to the next.

He tried to turn his head, and discovered that he had no head, nor any other part that makes up the human frame. It seemed at first that he was pure thought, until he turned his thought toward himself and discovered a small gem, smaller than the fingernail of a child’s smallest finger. He understood in an instinctive way that this clear, blue-white, faintly glowing gem was all there was of what he could call himself.

He remembered he had once had a body other than this, and that it had been lying on a floor. He looked for it, but there was no sign of such a thing. Still, he was sure he’d once had a body of flesh and bone.

At first, there was no emotion attached to his thoughts. He was only knowledge, and little enough of that. But slowly understanding came to him, along with memory – memory of the emperor’s betrayal, of the Faceless One’s offer and his subsequent transformation. He remembered that he had bargained away his afterlife for a chance at vengeance. Or so he’d thought.

The Faceless One had obviously played him false. How would he ever get his revenge trapped inside a crystal, powerless?

After memory and understanding came emotion – rage. Blind, incoherent, impotent rage. Time had no meaning in the hell of emotion Anomus fell into then. He might have spent eternity raging at his fate, had the rivulet of blood not finally followed gravity down to the chamber’s floor.

The shock of it jolted him from his psychic tempest. On one level, he knew somehow exactly what it was – human blood, neither hot nor fresh, but not yet rank with decay. He also instinctively knew that the blood did not come from a single source.

On another, completely different level, he experienced the blood as power. It was a key that unlocked something within him, and he began to understand, if only vaguely, that he did indeed have some form of control, some species of agency. He had no limbs or digits, no eyes or ears – but he had senses nonetheless, and that first drop of blood, small though it might be, he instantly recognized as some sort of strength. And what was strength but potential action?

He turned his attention once more to the place where the blood was now slowly, steadily dripping onto the chamber floor, and instantly his senses, his whole mind was there, at that spot. He saw it, in a way that was infinitely more complete and comprehending than mortal sight. Curious now, he turned his attention to the chamber itself, and instantly he knew its every surface, every crack and fissure, bulge and jag, every mote of dust. He beheld himself again, a tiny, blue-white, faintly glowing chip resting in the bowl-shaped depression atop the black stone that had once housed the Old God’s flame.

There was no sign of the Faceless One’s presence. The god had transformed him, and then left him this ancient place of His power. Left him to his own devices, to succeed or fail, to learn to conquer this, his bizarre new existence – or to be trapped by it.

Remembering once more how the emperor had stolen ten years of his life, and then life itself from him, Anomus swore he would not fail in his quest for retribution. He would learn to adapt. He would gather his strength. And then, somehow, he would have his revenge. He had to believe the Faceless One would not have made it impossible – not the Reaper God, the Blood God, the god of darkness and vengeance. Why would He play such a cruel trick? No. The Faceless One was no trickster, not like Halik, the Desert Hare. Whatever obstacles may face him, his revenge would not be impossible. He would see Irobus destroyed.

Somehow.

But first he had to understand the rules and restraints of his new existence, and he had to puzzle out whatever uncanny strengths and abilities he might now be in possession of. And he had to do it as quickly as he might – for he had not forgotten the fact that Irobus would bring his courtesan to the Tomb for her final interment in three short months. Unless he could somehow spirit himself to the capital without the benefit of a body, that might well be his only chance to meet the emperor again, this side of death’s door.

If, indeed, death was still something that could affect him.

The terrible shock of his transformation was fading, now, and he began to think more clearly than ever before. More clearly, and more quickly. Perhaps it was part and parcel of being… whatever he was, now. He was certainly no creature of flesh. It seemed to him that he was now almost wholly a being of thought, and will. And emotion. He pondered this briefly, but set it aside. There was much to do, and he sensed that if he allowed himself, he could easily fall into a black rage from which he might never emerge. Better, he decided, to focus on what was before him than what was behind.

What lay before and all around him was the chamber, and the blood-soaked stairs. The blood came from the undertomb above, of course. He sent his attention exploring, and in an instant, he was at the concealed door that he had caused to be constructed, to hide the Old God’s sacred space. Blood seeped in, viscous and slow, from the narrow crack between the bottom of the door and the floor. He tried to push his attention through the door, and discovered that he could not.

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He felt the rage he had so recently escaped begin to build once more, and with an effort forestalled it.

Think, he admonished himself. The Reaper would not have trapped you in this one chamber, with no means to affect the wider world. Think.

He could move his attention at will through any open space, just as he might fly if he were a bird. But like a bird, a door balked him. He had no hand with which to open it. He had only his will, and the slow trickle of power that the blood afforded him.

He had designed the door with a hidden catch, and a spring that would see that it closed automatically – for what good was a secret door that might be left open on accident? When he had flung himself down the stairs with his last, dying breath the door had closed behind him just as he had designed it to.

He had designed the door. He knew its workings, intimately. He would not be balked by one of his own creations.

Anomus focused his entire will and attention on the door and, after a slight resistance, something surprising happened. In some uncanny fashion, as he focused on the lifeless thing of wood and iron, he learned it, down to the smallest bits of matter that made up its existence. More, by learning it so thoroughly, he had an almost indescribable sensation of claiming it. It was as if the door became a part of him, in an unequivocal, physical sense. He was no longer a being composed solely of thought and will. Now, he was a thing of thought, and will, and a door.

And, he realized, a chamber – for he knew the god’s sacred space just as intimately, just as instinctively.

Now, let us see if I can cause this door to move, as I would make a finger of my once-body move.

He concentrated on the door and, with a focused thought, caused the door’s catch to disengage.

He did not get the chance then to see if he could force the door to swing open – a tide of corpses did that.

~ ~ ~

Vast as Anomus had made the undertomb, it could not contain the mortal remains of ten thousand men. Coldly, analytically, he estimated less than half that number could reasonably be fit in the space. The gruesome logistics of stacking so many heavy, ungainly corpses would have defeated any effort to fill the volume of the undertomb with anything approaching efficiency.

Still, the reality was sufficiently horrific. The undertomb was now something out of nightmare. Corpses lay in heaps. In no space would the accumulation of cooling meat be less than waist-high on a man of average height. The Eternal Guard must have labored for hours to dispose of so many.

So much death, so much horror, all to fulfill the emperor’s mad whim.

Anomus had never thought overmuch on the nature of good and evil while he was a mortal man; once he had learned the thoughts of the empire’s philosophers sufficient to please his tutors, he had let that wisdom, those concerns drift down in the slow current of memory, to settle beneath common, every day concerns. He had been much more focused on learning and mastering the arts of construction and engineering, so that he might one day shape into reality the visions that only existed in his head, that had visited his waking and sleeping dreams since childhood.

Now, faced with the fruits of mass murder on a scale nearly unimaginable, Anomus did not need the reasoned words of long-dead wise men to understand evil. If he’d still had eyes, he might have wept. If he’d still possessed the means, he might have vomited. Instead, as the trickle of blood that leaked down to the deepest chamber became a turgid flood, he drew on the power it gave him and silently swore to use it to bring down the one who was the architect of all this horror.

Among them, almost certainly, was his servant and oldest companion.

There was no way to search through all the bodies, not even for him in his new condition. They were cast together like broken dolls, closer and more intimately entangled than lovers, four and five and six corpses deep. He recognized every face that was visible, after a decade working with them. He knew almost every name. But he could not shift the bodies, nor sort through them as one with a physical body would have been able to. He could only turn his attention to what was visible, or dive down into the spaces between the jumbled corpses – untouching, untouchable. At first it did not even occur to him to merge with the corpses as he had done with the door, and then when it did, he recoiled from the idea in revulsion.

Nowhere did he see Orthus. Most likely his oldest friend was down at the bottom of the press of death, or perhaps he lay broken above. Anomus hoped he had somehow escaped, perhaps by throwing himself in the river. He hoped, but did not believe.

Anomus dwelled with the dead for a time, his whole being consumed with darkness, but eventually he roused himself. He could do nothing for the emperor’s victims by mourning them. With their blood they were giving him the gift of power, just as they had gifted him the strength of their bodies while constructing the Tomb. He took that power and continued to explore his limits.

The undertomb was vast. He knew the space – he had designed it, after all. But in his altered existence, he did not know it; not as he knew the Old God’s chamber below, nor as he had learned to know the concealed door. He had not yet claimed this space, he realized. It seemed that his new reality was about claiming physical space, incorporating it into himself. In one sense it seemed a bizarre proposition to a man used to the paradigm of the flesh. But in another sense, Anomus wasn’t unduly confused by it. So much of his life had been focused on the construction of physical spaces, either by the artful piling of stone and wood into coherent, purposeful shapes, or by the creation of purposeful shapes within living rock.

He knew, understood, and felt the world of chamber and passage, room and stair and window nearly as well as the reality of stretching arm, grasping hand, muscle and sinew and bone. He always had, and years of study and experience had only deepened his understanding. Purpose and interconnection were to be found in both flesh and architecture. Strengths and weaknesses as well.

So be it, he thought. If this tomb is to be my body, then let me learn to inhabit it.

Just as he had the concealed door, Anomus turned his attention and his will to the physical space of the undertomb. Walls, ceiling, blood-drenched floor, he claimed it all and made it his – made it him.

Anomus learned two things in the process. First, the claiming came at a price. The strength that flowed into him from the blood of the slaughtered workers flowed back out as he inhabited the undertomb. This concerned him greatly, for he instinctively knew that the power the blood offered him grew less potent as it aged, and it was a finite resource in any event. If his power relied solely upon the blood of men, he would soon find himself starving in the desert.

The other thing Anomus learned was that the emperor had caused the concealed door to the undertomb to be blocked up, to be sealed. He sensed the mortar and masonry that had been used; the mortar was not yet dry, not yet fully hardened.

No, he thought. This will not do.

He forced his will and attention into the obstruction, just as he had the door below. Stone and mortar were less yielding than wood, and it took more time, more energy. But he refused to be trapped down below the Concubine’s Tomb. A prison cell, however vast, was still a prison cell.

He had been able to physically release the door’s catch, once he had claimed it. He could affect the physical world, with effort and an expenditure of his strange, blood-soaked power. So he decided that if he were a prisoner, then he would try to tunnel his way out of his cell.

Anomus once again turned his will to claiming a physical space, this time the stone and mortar that now blocked the concealed door that granted access to the Tomb’s Well. Only this time, as he claimed the physical structure of the mortar and stone of the blockage, atom by atom, he willed it to dissolve, to release the bonds that made up its matter.

Slowly, painfully slowly, by the thickness of a fingernail at a time, mortar and stone turned to dust at his will. But as he advanced through the obstruction, what was already a difficult, straining task became exponentially more difficult. He did not understand what was balking his effort, and he feared that, if he continued, he would exhaust the limited supply of strength the blood of the workers had given him. He paused in his efforts, to try and understand the nature of the problem.

Was it the dissolution of the physical stone and mortar that taxed him? He turned to a spot in the undertomb, a part of the wall opposite the stairs and above the corpses, and replicated his effort. He found it a nearly trivial task there, consuming only a trickle of his energy. Not only could he dissolve the stone, he soon discovered, he could shape it, even build it up – though that consumed more energy than simple destruction.

So. Something about the emperor’s blockage, specifically, opposed him. The knowledge made him furious. He would not, could not accept it. The rational portion of him realized that it would likely be possible to shape a new passage to the Tomb above and avoid whatever obstruction Irobus had placed, but he rejected the thought. Part of the reason was that he did not want to mar what he had built – though the tomb had been built at the order of a murderous madman, it was still Anomus’s finest creation. But the greater part of his reason was that pure hatred for the emperor. He could not accept being thwarted by whatever his killer had done to the entrance to the undertomb. It was as if the emperor’s golden sandal was on his throat, and he would remove it.

He realized he was being stubborn, perhaps foolish. But while he was as much a creature of reason as will, his whole new existence was set in opposition to the emperor Irobus. He could not turn away from destroying whatever the emperor had left at the door to trap him down in the dark. He was incapable of it.

Still, he was not heedless of his limitations.

It seemed that it cost him nothing but time to work his consciousness into his surroundings; only when he attempted to shape, alter or destroy physical things did he expend his limited energy. Relentlessly, remorselessly, he drove his consciousness into the stone and mortar that other hands had set in his tomb. As he inserted himself into the unyielding matter, a sort of revulsion slowly built in him. He pressed on.

Eventually Anomus broke through to the outer surface of the undertomb’s stoppage – and learned that something had been affixed to the doorway’s seal. Whatever it was radiated what he could only think of as antipathy, and pure disdain. He answered like with like. Rashly, he began to force his consciousness into whatever the hated thing was.

In that instant he realized his mistake.

The thing was a plaque, made of solid gold. But more than that, the plaque was in the shape of the sacred symbol of Mordun, emperor of the Subori gods. His word was law, and no being, immortal or otherwise, could gainsay Him. Around the sigil were glyphs that only priests were taught. Below Mordun’s sigil, in the High Script of the empire, the words ‘NONE SHALL PASS’ had been inscribed into a stone block.

So much Anomus understood in the fractional moment before the psychic wrath of the emperor-god’s will burned him back into the darkness.