Tag: Body horror

I come to my feet, and feel a new cloak laid across my shoulders, a white woolen thing that hides my rapidly-drying skin from the warm light of chandeliers overhead.

I glance behind, but do not see my benefactor. Nor do I see the door through which I careened, defying directional sense. I see walls of gray brick, red mortar, and silver filigree. Something within me insists that these substances are organic. Broad windows look out over an oceanic expanse of opaque white liquid, into which countless colorful waterfalls are deposited, somehow declining to stain its purity, perhaps even committing themselves to it. I note nearby the termination of one such downpour, whose sharp envious color is familiar beyond doubt.

I return my gaze to what lies before me, and behold a fine parlor with many armchairs and bookshelves. A light layer of smoke hovers around the ceiling, thinning around the flickering candles that decorate an iron candelabra. Beside the closest chair is a small table with a wooden backgammon board opened up, stone pieces neatly organized in playing positions. Across from me is a pair of open wooden doors of stout mahogany.

I walk. My feet recall that they ought to ache some for all they have crossed, and make me stumble as I pass into a hallway of dark navy carpet and regal paintings. Each portrait depicts a personage I have lately become acquainted with- Toxin, Pathogen, Fortress, Nect’rus, and more all stare haughtily down upon me. I lean against the top of a wooden paneling that decorates the bottom half of the walls, and shuffle forward into a moderate dining room. I halt, and look with apprehension upon a gathering of ghastly faces, or lack thereof.

Nukteos, Mallea, Fortress, Nect’rus, and Pathogen all sit on the left side of the table. On the right sit Toxin, Tower, and three I do not recognize. The first is a man wearing a horned helmet strapped to his neck with barbed wire, whose arms are pierced with bars of glowing hot metal. In the darkness of his helm I can see his gritted teeth, and eyes like novas. Next is a blob of quivering, sizzling ooze, who possesses just enough form to suggest shoulders and a head above them. My head throbs painfully regarding this being, so I move on. Last here is a terrible deformity, a creature whose face is a permanent grin of madness, with fleshy tubes connecting its olive cranial bulge to its neck and shoulders. Its eyes like mine lack eyelids, and its body is a contorted mess of joints and gaunt protrusions, with uneven legs tucked under the table. It leers at me unceasingly, and I shy from its gaze at the behest of my instincts, which regard this creature as a threat only fit to freeze before.

At the head of the table is a standing figure. Alike to Fortress, this one appears to be wholly synthetic in form- its body is a humanoid automaton with basic framing and casing, and elegant decoration in the form of cloth wrapping and ceramic plating- as though one thought to dress this being for a trip into an arid climate, but forgot it did not possess skin to fret the assail of sand on wind. The head is little more than a half sphere atop a series of metal discs that become the neck. When it speaks, I shudder.

My ears tell me that I am in fact listening to a man with a thick and ancient accent whose lips exist in the air before this machine. My stomach twinges, and for a moment I see a dark outline around this thing, that swirls and twitches. At the back of my mind I recall the shadow-wreathed figure depicted in the iconography that has accompanied my descent. I know at this moment that I am at last faced with that entity.

“Welcome. Please, sit. Be assured, my family will not harm you in my presence.”

I find that I am already seated opposite to where he stands, and as he seats himself, the others bow their heads in unison. A flash of green light emits from the entity, and all sound but his voice stops. I find that I am locked in place- in time.

“I am glad that your journey has come to its end. I found myself quite invested in your troubles, watching you dance and drift into and through danger. I could not resist helping you along once in a while.”

From behind him briefly flap a set of wings wrought in gold webbing so thin it becomes invisible when they steady- wings more angelic and divine than I have seen attached to anything yet.

“You seek answers.”

I jolt. We have changed locations in the blink of my eye. I am alone with the entity, seated in the parlor, while he stands near at hand, seeming to stare out from a window.

“The first question, who am I? In truth, this is the most difficult to answer in full. I have not taken a name since dispensing with the title given to me during servitude. I was then called Regent. A name alike to those still held by some of my kin, an abstract term bestowed upon an abstract being. The masses have names for me, of course. To them I am The Least, or Ixhem. You may think of me as such, should your mind require a label for reference.”

He pauses and seems to look over his shoulder. The dome of his head is the color of fossil. His hands, with seven thin fingers each, are clasped behind his back.

“I sense also that you wonder how you came to exist as you do now. To this, I will give no answer. The masses ascribe a thing like history to the nature of things, describing the passage of time. Time is a thing that governed all once, but it has become another denizen, and so is unrecognizable to itself. Indeed, I may pluck and twist it as easily as I opened the door to you.”

Ixhem returns to gazing out the window, watching steam rise from the placid white substance, steam that seems to contort and form shapes, condensing and expanding without cause.

“You existed outside of this realm, and you exist within it. I mean to make this true of all things and nothings. One may wonder as to why.

“If I were to put it into some sort of narrative, I might describe my own abhorrence for endings. I reject certain absolutes, though I am one in my conquest of others. I saw once the great suffering caused by eventuality, and so eradicated it. Everything is forever. Stars are not born only to burst and snuff out, lives that would naturally wane instead change forms. I have created an infinite expanse of infinites, one that you have explored only in the slightest sense.

“It is for this reason that I have turned my attention to you.”

Ixhem turns from the window and approaches a shelf, from which he withdraws a box that seems carved from a huge diamond. He undoes the clasp and opens the box, holding it out before me.

“You are an observer, a witness. You have not wavered in your descent, and have seen much of what is. I would have you continue to see.”

Within the box is a darkness so deep that I feel it must extend down past the bottom of the box forever. Something gleams within, something with many eyes.

“As my reach expands, as those who escaped me through time and space are brought into this existence, I would have you witness. Your experiences, they are as salt to sugar. Experience more, so that I may see through your eyes, and experience things as you do, as I presently cannot.

“Should you accept, I will erase the last of the memories that hound your thoughts. I will make you as absolute as my kin, and release you from the cycle.”

I raise my hand over the box and waver, looking upon Ixhem. It strikes me that his body is silent. No motors, and indeed no strings move him.

I am pulled upon by all my thoughts, all my recollections. I strain, and recall one word spoken by the man beside me in my memories.

“Acceptance”

It seems a comfort, and I relax inside, my hand dipping into the abyss contained by the box.

I dissolve into nothing, and am drawn as if through a sieve, filtered and refined, and reconstituted. I cease to exist.

I am created again, shaped by hands of darkness in a void of light. I am sight, I am countless eyes, scattered through existence, witness to everything.

I watch as surgeons chase prey through the labyrinth of corridors and decrepit rooms, I see creatures of pain and pleasure rolling in sheets of nervous tissue, anointed in blood. I watch Pathogen weaving a ring of red light around the head of one of the angels, as a doll etches a scenic vista upon its face.

I watch as a new spectacle begins in the coliseum above the mountains, attended by the felt creatures. I see a field of sentient stalks soaking in poisonous light, harvested in turn by the many-limbed monsters that haunted the valley.

I watch as legions of metal soldiers march across puffy pink ground that has grafted itself as a bridge to an effervescent, smoky island in a sea of golden radiance. I witness the slaughter of countless creatures for which I have no name.

I no longer exist except as sight and reaction, and in time, my lingering ability to think is swallowed up in the sea of visions of inexorable change.

I am falling towards one of the green pools. My tattered robe flaps and waves around my face and chest, and I feel my wounds sting with the bite of the wind.

As the viridian glow grows to swallow my vision and eventually me, I glimpse the crowds gathered at the fringes, some falling face first, others wading slowly, all plunging into and dissolving in the ooze. Before I can make peace with this being my fate, I am once again grabbed by talons, around my midsection. Face down, I cannot raise my head to view my savior, were my remaining strength enough to perform such an act.

The creature stops my fall, but not before I briefly splash in the sludge, and feel it burn my skin raw. This thing, with many flapping wings, hauls me through the air over the mountains, croaking and squealing like a boar. My arms and legs dangle beneath me, dull wind chimes anointed in viscous oil. Miles flow like eddying currents in a river, each peak and crag a nail in the bed below, until we arrive at a vast misty valley where the green rivers coalesce into a monstrous current that roars and surges towards a sheer cliff dropoff, a height so imposing I cannot guess where it ends through the fog.

The flying thing lowers me, and drops me on the west riverbank of this foaming torrent, my body coursing with pains. I black out in shock, and sink into the depths of dark dreams.

I see a rusted barge on a black ocean, unpopulated, drifting. I seem to inhabit the wheelhouse, staring through broken windows over dead instruments, past a wheel that rolls untethered from whatever steering mechanism it used to govern. The sky is red and wet, full of black storm clouds that sob down sheets of black rain. The deck is strewn with decayed shipping containers whose contents have long been swept away by the thieving waves. An unnatural light clings to the air above the ship, glowing and swirling in a minute aurora. I feel a hand lay on my shoulder and prompt me to turn around, then wake with a jolt.

I lay beside the river, my face inches from where the current drags the alkaline liquid. As I sit up, I feel my flesh fighting to remain stationary, and look down to my palms. My hand is soft, indistinct, like a sandcastle recently buffeted by waves. My porcelain parts seem to have melted into my flesh more agreeably, and my whole exterior claims a sort of doughy consistency, as though I might be folded up and molded without much pain or protest. The air is humid, and prolongs this sensation, though I can intuit that I may soon dry out and become firm again with enough time. My back no longer stings from a ragged wound.

Examining my surroundings, I see that the beach is of glossy black sand, some of which has become embedded in the side of my body that laid upon it. The mountains rise all around me, and offer their streams to the river. I see no sign of the thing that brought me here, though sparse figures encrust the mist around the river, shuffling into it to be unmade. I do not yet share their compulsion, and instead follow the flow of the water, recalling the sheer dropoff that descended blindly into fog.

I can, as I walk, occasionally glimpse more than just the silhouettes of creatures and mountains through the mist, and recall the monasteries into which some of the afflicted embarked. I still pursue the course of the river as it descends into the valley. I am occasionally presented with the obstacle of a stream that deposits its body into the flow, but each time I am graced with a paired outcrop on either side of the would-be barrier which I can, with some effort, leap.

My journey is once in a while marked by a harrowing encounter with one of the creatures I saw from above. While all others seem obsessed with their sought end at the hands of the acid, or pilgrimage to the monasteries, the red, abstract things seem only occasionally possessed by such urges. Though they are few and far between, I am compelled to call them denizens of this realm. They wander without apparent reason, and often strain against their design- most are little more than a pair of legs, a waist, and a ponderous mass of arms that converge with little symmetry at the elbows, the wrists, even the knuckles, and begin over, until they resemble more tangled roots than proper limbs, each ending in individual fingers. Often the biceps and triceps will pull in different directions, causing great consternation, but never enough to topple the thing. I am forced to view their plight at a distance- approaching causes great suffering in me: my sight begins to blur and speckle with flashing dots, and my gut wrenches painfully as though being pulled taught and plucked at. Thus, I give these unfortunates a wide berth every time they appear in my path. I do note some that seem to possess purpose other than that they might share with the suicidal masses- there are those that march almost parallel to me, many on the far bank of the river. The writhing and swaying of their upper extremities poses but little difficulty to their pace- they leverage these irksome arms to vault the joining streams when they appear, insisting that their lack of eyes does not mean total blindness.

My eyes, I later realize, are now stuck forever open- my eyelids melted away while I slept on the riverbank.

The valley deepens, and the mountains around become steep cliffs before being lost altogether in the mist brought about by the falls- which I now hear roaring as they cascade down. My pace is lessened for lack of want to careen off the edge, but I see the reddish outlines across the river hurtling along with increased ferocity, as though their unfathomable task approaches completion. Too late I notice the blurring and speckling at the edges of my vision, and am doubled over in pain when one of the things comes barrelling towards me, knocks into me, and sends us both tumbling down over the lip into the chasm.

Falling, spinning end over end, I am acutely aware of the darkening of the air as I plummet into the abyss, dim green light announcing that I still follow the now-vertical course of the river. I attempt to right myself, and stabilize in an upward-facing position; this enables me to witness the edges of the pit that now swallows me, a jagged ellipse of tar surrounding and closing around the harsh light of the upper world, so far below. I jostle, and turn over to face the darkness beneath me, and still cannot see to the bottom. No crashing declares the well into which the substance pours.

Then, as I am grappling with the immutable nothing of my peril, a rectangle of light swings open below me, an unquestionable door pivoting along its hinges. Into this, I am powerless to avoid falling, and am compelled to heave nauseous breath as my sense of direction protests that the wall to my side has become the floor. I hear the door close behind me with a click as I roll along, soft limbs preventing harsh bruises and scrapes with their unnatural give.

The passage is long, as long as any that I have yet taken, and twice I stop for sleep. My dreams are fitful, and no consistent theme threads them. When I wake, I continue onwards, fully aware that my stomach has ceased to growl at me. I can remember now, the face of someone, a friend I believe, a thin smile and an outstretched hand, looking down at me. He seems troubled, in this memory, but his eyes seem hopeful, encouraging. He grasps my arm and tells me something I feel sure must be of great importance. I can feel that I did not take him seriously, but that I should’ve, that it mattered very much to him. I remember seeing him walk away, and laying back in my seat, watching the light overhead sway from side to side.

This memory stays with me as I traverse the passage, sometimes crawling on my stomach at a very steep downward incline, other times walking upright with plenty of room. The air is stale, but bearable, and the walls are of a dark stone that I can see clearly in the red light my eyes now cast. My thinking and remembering is eventually broken as I shuffle through another narrow pass into a round chamber whose walls are adorned with skulls with open mouths, as if they find my arrival humorous. The floor is a mosaic of femurs and shin bones, and fingerbones point down from the ceiling as stalactites. I hear the echo of dripping water nearby, and see an inscription in the same jagged language over the door out of the chamber. The knob to the narrow wooden door is a clenched skeletal fist encased in amber.

The creak of the door hinges announces my passage to the next chamber. I enter a tremendous knave from the left side and look out across a cathedral made from iron and stone, with tapestries instead of stained glass windows. In every pew sits a skeleton, jaw agape or even missing, every head tilted to face the door from which I have entered, as though I am expected. I walk up the aisle to the crossing, and regard the altar with apprehension. Upon it, behind the podium, stands a figure in a long black robe with a golden circle floating freely behind his head. His face is a skull without eye sockets, and his neck is a bundle of hay. The altar itself is an obsidian chunk with a wooden carving of a man pierced through the chest resting atop it. The man’s face is contorted in pain, and the implement piercing him appears to be a spear wrapped in thorns. I withdraw, and hear cracking as the sermon giver’s head turns to follow my movement. His jaw opens, and a sound like the rushing of wind is produced. Similar sounds rise from all over the knave, and I begin to run back up the aisle towards the main door. The gruesome tapestries bordering the door catch my eye and I glance over my shoulder to see the congregation has disappeared, including the priest. I shudder, and return my attention to the tapestries. I have clearly begun to succumb to stress.

On the left is an image of what I take the altar to be glorifying; a man spreads his arms out to a crowd under a blue sky, and is run through by the thorny spear from behind, by a strange figure wreathed in dark threading and signified with many silver and gold rings about their head, all before a metropolis of skyscrapers. On the right is an image of the same dark figure holding their hands up to the sky, where green clouds have gathered. All around, horrors rise from the ground. I recognize in the second tapestry a cluster of individuals standing off on either side of the border- one is the scientist called Tower; one is Pathogen, the porcelain queen; one is the tall machine that directed me onward. Others I do not recognize are with them, each with grisly countenances. Shepherding the clouds is a pair of creatures with red halos: white winged humanoids with white bodies lined with red, their faces sporting open mouths with sharp teeth. In their hands are long cruel scythes. The background is a series of bodies impaled over a field, their blood watering a familiar marshland.

Disturbed enough, I elect to no longer study the image, and instead pass through the double door. I find that I am standing at the end of a cobbled road, which leads through an otherwise impassable forest of rusted iron spikes, some of the barbs reaching well over the height of the chapel, which is set against a sheer cliff face on its left. A stout figure covered with a thready blanket and holding an iron staff hobbles eagerly toward me, and despite my repulsion, I allow her to come close enough for me to smell her rancid odor. A face like that of an elderly woman’s stretched over the skull of a farm animal leers out at me from under the blanket, and gnaws at its teeth, drooling heavily.

“Been waiting, I have. Tell you to go onward. Oh yes, oh yes.”

I look down the path to which she points, and grit my teeth. My left hand clicks and taps as I flex it into and out of a fist. The hag thing speaks again, shaking her staff vigorously.

“Hurry on now, hurry on! Pathogen has sent her angels, she has. They’ll not catch you in the forest, and they’ll let you be once you blend with the masses, but Tower, oh yes, he’ll send his snatchers for you, they’ll be on you right quick. Hurry on!”

Though I do not see him, or hear him, I look over my shoulder, expecting to see that surgeon standing nearby, holding some motorized tool and grunting. I begin to walk again, and leave the hag standing on the steps of the church, muttering to herself about royalty and hunting. The sky is black, but a yellow moon hangs overhead like the lure of some anglerfish fit to swallow a world. This celestial orb seems to me far too close, as though it is instead the hole in the roof of some great cavern, through which the sun is emanating. Small specks drift occasionally down in front of its luminous face as I walk, and I wonder if they are the angels which the hag mentioned. I recall the red-ringed toothy faces from the tapestry, and begin to jog.

Through the thick metal trunks of the spikes, I sometimes glimpse a surge of movement like small horizontal waves, the flank of some great serpent, I imagine. The road curves and snakes unpredictably through the forest, and a rain begins to fall, the air smelling of a foul chemical. At first, I hear only the spattering of the rain, but soon I begin to hear moaning and sobbing. It seems to come from above me, but when I look up, all I see are the tips of the spikes backdropped by that ponderous moon. I increase my pace further, beginning to trudge down a moderate hill. I imagine that I hear the grunts and pleasured groans of the surgeon amid the sobbing, but soon realize I am not imagining things. Ahead of me is a slow moving cluster of people in robes and blankets. Some are like the surgeon, lead spheres and ovals for heads with empty holes around the eye area with shoddy bleeding mouths; some are like the maids, porcelain and silicone threaded with blood-filled tubes; others are like the surface dweller in the city, assorted bits and pieces fitted together without rhyme or reason, with life-supporting machines strapped and wired to them, giving them an uneven gait. At the head of this group is a clergyman in a black robe with a silver disk behind his head held aloft by a golden collar at his neck. From behind he looks like a peculiar friar or perhaps a monk, but the front of his face is a sheer iron slab ending just above his lower jaw.

Recalling the hag’s instructions, I cling to this group, blending in well enough with my porcelain hand and red robe, though I know not how my face looks from the outside. We leave the forest behind for a sort of obelisk garden, with flat black stones rising haphazardly all around us, scenes of sacrifice and torment etched into their surfaces. It takes a moment, but I soon hear that our guide is murmuring in a low drone, speaking in the language I heard Julia speaking to her companion. With a start, I realize that I can understand it, as though coming this far has attuned me to the meaning of each syllable, each harsh hiss and clattering consonant. From time to time, members of the group chant in assent with a certain phrase.

“Once the darkness was all, was less than any. And from the blessed dark came light, sickly and impure. Worlds did come then, and one of these was peopled by lowly worms that groveled in the dirt, and one was peopled by hungry lizards in deep cold, and one was peopled by beetles that scrounged and whimpered, and one was full of fish things in murk. We are but worms. We are but beetles. And the worlds and the peoples sought greatness, sought might, sought glory. So the worms fought. And the lizards, and the beetles fought. We are but lizards. We are but beetles. And the worms, and the lizards, and the beetles, and the fish things too, all fought, and sought glory. And then the wretched worms, remembering what they did not know, sought the blessed dark. Praise the dark, oh, praise the dark. From the dark they drew the less, and they gave the less form. The wretches touched the divinity, sought to soil it with their wants. But the mighty Least withstood their scrabbling, and won their nothing wars, and learned of the light the less had never known. And when the worms sought to return him to the dark, the Least brought the dark to them. Oh holy dark, oh magnificent Least. The Least then vowed unto the worms, the lizards, the fish things, and the beetles that he would make them again, and that he would make the light holy as the dark was. Oh blessed be we worms, blessed be we fish things, oh bless us, bless us all.”

So goes the sermon and the chant, and when he reaches the end, the pastor begins again.

The monument garden ends, and we begin shuffling into a town of hovels and leaning shacks, in which I can see all manner of strange creatures, some stitched together from many species, some little more than puddles with a trio of holes for a face. All seem to sport installations of metal or porcelain, or both, and others are completely transfigured into cybernetic organisms, looking like they have spent much time under the hands of the surgeons. Looking up, I see that barbed spires rise in all directions, atop each is a squirming, writhing thing, some looking nearly human, others masses of unrecognizable limbs, all pierced by the tip of the temple below them. And clinging to some of these spires are warped angels.

The tapestry did not do them justice. Their bodies are sleek in white steel armor, full breastplates and greaves and gauntlets. Red tabards hang from them, swaying in the wet wind, and most have four arms, two of which clutch long staves topped in cruelly spiked circles or cross spears. Their wings are equally majestic and unnatural, boasting spans longer than they are tall, with silvery feathers and sharp talons, folding as the wings of moths rather than birds. Their heads are shaped blocks of the white steel, which causes me to realize that their armor is embedded in their flesh. None have eyes set in their heads, only mouths, but all have glowing red halos, from which emits a radial shimmer suggesting great heat. Behind their sharp teeth slither long pointed tongues. Some have horns like rams boasting from their metal skulls, others have twisted pastorals engraved in the front. These malevolent shepherds watch over the growing crowd that I am a part of, approving of our collection towards what I assume to be the center of town. This assumption is based on the increasing density of the torturous spires, the mounting grisly spectacle.

We flow like water across the streets and down steps like the edge of a basin, until we are a mass at least a mile across in a tremendous square dominated by a cathedral with at least a dozen pinnacles, each decorated with a writhing figure pierced from behind. Atop this monument is a whole flock of the angelic creatures, chittering like dolphins and snapping at each other with aggression.

At uneven intervals in the crowd, taller monsters stand, broad chested flayed creatures with iron horns surrounding their faces, hooked swords in their hands. Many boast rusted protrusions of metal from their back and shoulders, and their four eyes glow orange like flame. Their mouths are crowded with tusk-like teeth, and their chests are decked with spiked piercings. I watch as one is pushed into by the crowd’s shoving, and he brutishly picks up the individual that was pushed into him. He laughs gutturally and squeezes the porcelain woman’s head till it shatters, then drops her to the ground where the masses swarm over her, to what purpose I cannot see, though I can hear screaming and giddy laughter.

Ahead, I see the doors of the chapel swing open with a thunderous groan, and from them emerges a towering cyborg with flaming eyes, whose face appears stretched thin over his skull. His hair is long and stringy, and his lips have been peeled away over his metal teeth. His body is swarmed with flies, and it seems what little flesh he still has is writhing with maggots. He seems familiar. Until now I was shuffling through the crowd to get closer to the church, but I stop short and watch as he wades in, every figure reaching up in supplication to him, chanting.

“Nect’rus, Nect’rus, Nect’rus…”

He stops but a few feet from me, and what remains of my sense of smell urges me to move the other way of the jostling, as the stench that rolls off him is fetid and rank. He holds out his arms over those around him and grins, or at least seems to. His voice is grating, a gravelly cough supported by synthesizers and organ pipes.

“Come! Come all you filth! Let go of your hope and fear!”

The masses shake and jump, and shout with raucous fervor, surging with the want to get closer to this cybernetic carcass. I move counter to them, inching my way towards the church, each body I pass eagerly using my passage to slink closer.

“Our glorious crusade nears! Word comes from below, through me, unto you! Another great battlefield, a world that revels in the stench of light!”

The jeering seems to increase tenfold, and many of the creatures raise crude weapons. I duck my head down to avoid being unintentionally stabbed or burnt by the improvised instruments of those nearest to me. I am so close to the open doors of the cathedral, I can see candlelight behind them, and hooded figures moving around within. I hesitate and look up to where one of the angels hangs above me, its hand clutching the head of a statue depicting a man being pierced by eleven spears. Other statues over the doors hold these spears, each recognizable to me as the important figures in the tapestry, including the tall form of the rotted thing that emerged from within the church. The man looks down in sorrow, and the rain seems to become his tears as it trails along his face. I feel that I recognize him, though I know not from where. The cyborg continues his message.

“The time comes soon, wretches. Whet your appetites, and offer yourselves wholly! Serve the dark as it will ever serve you!”

A frenzy breaks out, and the crowd begins attacking each other at random, to the glee of the angels and monsters, who soon join the fray, gorging themselves on the easy prey below them. I manage to hide in the shadow of one of the saint statues on either side of the door, and watch as the crowd is nearly halved before the violence ceases. Those that have died are collected up by those around them, and dismantled. I fail to look away as arms are torn from the dead and added to the bodies of the living with no difficulty, returned to life as flesh knits itself unbidden. The angels and brutish things simply feast on their winnings. The goliaths seem to increase in size from this measure, and develop their horns further, sometimes sprouting additional arms. The Angels are granted more concentric halos, and their armor becomes more ornate.

Finding myself more than sated for sight, I slip into the cathedral, and pull up the hood of my robe to match the other denizens.