happening. One eye floated in the air above him. He was looking up at it with the eye still in its socket. A thin taut rope of nerve fibre seemed to connect it to his head. With the other eye he was looking down on himself as he wept tears of blood. The daemon reached out and put out his good eye, so that now he seemed only to be looking down on his body. His vision settled and he saw that he was lying on a pile of skinned corpses, held in place by ropes of entrails.
‘Yes,’ said the voice, simply malicious now. ‘That is what awaits you in the end, although I confess I am tempted to animate the corpses and re-enact the Masque of the Fleshless. Perhaps later...’
It reached forward and touched Sardriane’s forehead. As the elf watched he saw his own skin split and begin to part and the daemon peeled his body like a grape. He tried to swallow his own tongue but this was expected and the daemon prevented it.
‘No, Blood of Aenarion,’ it said. ‘This game has a while to run yet.’
Sardriane was a long time dying. Everything the daemon promised came true.
This evening N’Kari wore the form of a mighty, muscular human warrior with the head of bull and the lower body of a horse. It allowed him to move quickly and he enjoyed the sensation of being a quadruped. There was something about that he had always found stimulating.
It was easier to hold the shape for longer now. He was growing accustomed to this reality and its restrictions. He was learning to use the flows of its magic almost at will.
Behind him his army awaited their instructions.
It was not as impressive a force as he would have liked but it was growing. It now consisted of a few dozen bound daemons, and several hundred cultists. Some of them had been recruited from farmers and smallholders encountered en route to Tor Annan. Many more had joined him after the destruction of their town.
The souls of those who refused to submit to the ecstatic disciplines of the Cult of Pleasure were swiftly dispatched to the netherworld, bait and sustenance for the daemons N’Kari had used them to summon. In general that had not proved necessary in more than half the cases. There was a strong pleasure-loving streak in most elves, and given the choice between death and a life of drug-fuelled, esoteric pleasure a significant number made the right choice.
The rest had provided an interesting distraction.
Sometimes the allegiance of families had been split and N’Kari had required the new recruits to prove their loyalty by sacrificing those who refused to join. Sometimes this had engendered second thoughts in the recruits, sometimes in the recalcitrant converts. In any case, it had provided a few moments of relief from ennui. He delighted in the savour of any strong emotion, and these elves were good for that, at least.
‘You have orders for us, Great Master?’ Elrion asked. He was beginning to look haggard as the toll of nights of pleasure and days of horror overtook him. He twitched and frothed and broke into tears at odd times. Sometimes he would rant at the other cultists, delivering terrifying if somewhat unimaginative sermons on the nature of Chaos and the goals of their master.
N’Kari enjoyed the storytelling and the embroidery of the facts and so far had seen no reason to contradict him. If anything, some of Elrion’s more visionary passages had made the rest of his cultists even more devout. The elf had acquired his own small harem among the impressionable worshippers but did not seem to take much pleasure in it.
Typical mortal really. So hard to please. Give them what they claimed they wanted and they would inevitably discover it was not what they expected or desired. Even to a devotee of the Lord of Perversity this sometimes seemed a little too perverse.
He thought about those he had killed back in Tor Annan.
N’Kari felt the desire for vengeance swell within him. His desire for it grew with every death. Feeding on the souls of the Blood of Aenarion made him hunger for more. There was something about the spirits that gave him more nutriment and more power than any others he had ever consumed. He was going to need it, for his plan was approaching its most difficult stage.
It had taken longer than he would have liked to find this place due to the restrictions this