Darkened
The second part of Hadeon's story. There will probably be a third, to wrap up some stuff, and I don't anticipate him getting anything else. Then again, this story was a surprise to begin with, so who knows.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Darkened
. . . . . Slowly, the death knight Retz lifted a huge hand to the left side of his head and felt behind the horn jutting forward there. A grimace settled on his face as he felt the deep dent in his skull and the subtle grating feeling of the bone shards he had just pressed upon. "Herix," he mumbled, having difficulty shaping his mouth around the Orcish syllables, "do you have any of those blood worms handy?" When did he start speaking Orcish? Why couldn't he turn his head and look around?
. . . . . The warlock Herix went to a large tray and came back with a dark red grub wriggling in his hand. "Excellent," death knight Retz said. "Thank you." His voice had a strange echoing resonance, as if underneath his words lay another set of unintelligible syllables. Stretching muscles stiffened by death, Retz reached out and took the blood worm. Hadeon recoiled at the feel of it and tried to drop it, but his hand would not obey. Retz popped the grub into his mouth and inhaled swiftly, drawing the blood worm into his sinus cavities like one inhales milk when a friend makes one laugh at the wrong moment while drinking.
. . . . . Although the brain itself held no nerves, he felt an odd scraping sensation against the inside of his skull as the worm made its way to the dent in behind his horn. Retz grimaced again as the worm pushed upwards against the damage, bulging the dent outwards. Hadeon's eyes rolled back in his head from revulsion and pain at the sensation of the tiny bone shards in his skull being forced back into place. Retz pushed away the nausea, an annoying remnant of living much like the unnecessary breathing he caught himself doing.
. . . . . The vision in his left eye improved; it was still a little watery, but it would suffice. His brain still feeling sloshy, Retz turned his head slowly to look at the slab next to him. Another draenei body was stretched upon it, nearly decapitated, the chest a collapsed pulp. That would take more than a few blood worms to fix… Retz saw a corpse. Hadeon saw a corpse…of Ramdor; trying to free itself from the shattered body, Ramdor's soul was half-stuck within it still. He had to free Ramdor! He had to sing Ramdor's soul back to the Light! Why couldn't he open his mouth to sing the prayers?
. . . . . As panic descended upon Hadeon, Retz finally noticed this strange parallel layer of thoughts in his head. He looked down at the jeweled truncheon in his head. The necrolyte? No, those souls were destroyed in the crystallization process. The draen-… Oh bother.
. . . . . In a desolate grey wasteland divided by an endless road, two mortal enemies circled one another. Death-speaker Hadeon recognized it as the twisted shadow kingdom of lost souls. Shadow Council warlock Retz narrowed his eyes at the circling, plate-clad warrior and cast a shadowy green coil of death magic at the draenei. The coil splashed against the holy warrior's shield of Light and slid down it.
. . . . . By Velen's beard, Death-speaker Hadeon rumbled in Draenei, what is going on?
. . . . . You don't know, Light-addled goat? asked warlock Retz in Orcish, using a pejorative term for the devolved talbuks his people herded for food. Despite their language difference, the two understood one another. You're dead, Retz continued. For that matter, so am I. Your body is my vessel now. I just wonder why you're still here...
. . . . . With a roar of fury, Death-speaker Hadeon threw himself at the orc warlock. The two locked in combat for several moments before a blast of pulsing red light separated the struggling souls.
. . . . . Outside the twisted shadow kingdom, the jewel on the adamantite mace pulsed a very slow heartbeat. Death knight Retz wrenched himself from the mental landscape and looked at the draenei corpse next to him again. This time, he saw the trapped soul.
. . . . . "Herix, you FOOL!" he roared, sliding off the slab and planting his hooves solidly on the mausoleum tile. "How many of us have you made?"
. . . . . "Th-three, sir. Including you. That one will be the fourth shortly." Herix looked terrified at the suddenly murderous expression on the massive draenei's face.
. . . . . "Bring them here. Now!"
. . . . . Herix scampered into the next room of the mausoleum and returned with two stiff-legged, vacant-eyed draenei. Death knight Retz looked at them with Death-speaker Hadeon's eyes and saw. The female's face fluctuated wildly between her physical shattered mess of a face, an orc's harsh red skin, and the panicked expression of a ghostly draenei woman. The male's face was his own physical visage, overlaid by an orc warlock's ghostly red face.
. . . . . "Herix… Why didn't you check these corpses for souls before you shoved us in here?" Death knight Retz's voice had gone dangerously soft.
. . . . . The warlock Herix looked puzzled. "Why would I, sir? Souls flee the body upon death. You know that."
. . . . . "Not draenei souls, it seems."
. . . . . Herix's red skin went nearly white. Death knight Retz pointed his jeweled truncheon at the corpse on the slab. "Siphon that one before you put another warlock in it." Herix pointed his hand at the corpse and spoke a demonic incantation. Retz watched the soul shrink away from the fel energy, but it could not hold out for long.
. . . . . Warlock Herix was so startled by the appearance of the magenta shard which crystallized in his palm that he dropped it. Retz bent down quickly and stopped it skittering across the floor, scooping it up. He found a leather pouch tied to his belt, stained navy and stiffened with blood. He plucked a crystal vial from it and tossed it over his shoulder, replacing it with the soul shard. Blasphemer! Abomination! He must set Ramdor's soul free! Hmm. This should be interesting…
. . . . . Finished with its repair work on his skull, the blood worm wriggled its way back into Retz's sinus cavities and down into his mouth. He swallowed it. Might as well let it start gnawing away at the internal organs before they made the body go rancid.
. . . . . Death-speaker Hadeon began screaming himself hoarse in horror. Worms were eating his body and he was still trapped inside it! The room smelled of charnel house and good rum. Preserver Tena's broken corpse looked at him with an orc's demonically twisted face. He had Ramdor's soul in a crystal on his left hip. Worms were devouring his body and he was still in it! Hysteria set in.
. . . . . Recognizing the weakening of Hadeon's soul, Retz threw a solid, sickly green wall of energy between himself and the draenei in the twisted shadow kingdom of the dead, sealing Hadeon's screams off.
. . . . . For decades, death knight Retz was the sole voice inside the body Herix acquired for him. Somewhere behind a wall of fel energy, a draenei raged and wept and screamed himself mute. Retz served Teron Gorefiend with distinction, but he was a canny orc. He had not been a powerful warlock because he was loyal…or stupid.
. . . . . After Gorefiend's demise, while the other death knights marched to Karabor to show their enduringly idiotic loyalty, Retz gathered a few similarly canny - or cowardly, came the unwelcome thought - knights and fled through the Dark Portal. His fortune lay with whatever had destroyed Gul'dan - at least, until he could destroy it.
. . . . . Something about this new land weakened the wall between Retz's and Hadeon's souls. In the twisted kingdom, the draenei was bruised, bloodied, covered in gouges and scratches - as if he had spent decades tearing at his own flesh in grief. Death-speaker Hadeon seemed beaten; he no longer railed against warlock Retz's fel wall. From time to time, he even offered a piece of knowledge: a better way to hold the jeweled mace, a stronger stance for balancing on hooves. As death knight Retz and his handpicked squad of Black Riders settled in a desolate pass far from the Dark Portal and Teron Gorefiend's vengeful spirit, Death-speaker Hadeon became a familiar shadow in death knight Retz's mind, often meditating on his side of the fel wall.
. . . . . Retz, came the quiet voice from the twisted shadow kingdom of lost souls.
. . . . . "What, goat?" asked death knight Retz.
. . . . . That truncheon is a danger to us. We need to discard it.
. . . . . "You will not fool me. You know it is what powers us. Go away, goat."
. . . . . In the twisted kingdom, Death-speaker Hadeon placed an open hand over a closed fist and bowed. He sat back down in the nightmare world and resumed his meditation.
. . . . . Another year passed with the raging draenei oddly quiet. Death knight Retz was grateful for the peace. For a little while there, he had started to wish he had his imp back instead of the Death-speaker, and any day a warlock would rather speak to imps was a bad, bad day.
. . . . . For all his canniness, the warlock never suspected the Death-speaker could also be crafty. He was taken entirely by surprise, then, when Hadeon strode out of the twisted shadow kingdom and into death knight Retz's mind, his unadorned mace over his shoulder, and bowed. The Death-speaker murmured a prayer to the Light which set Retz's ears ringing, then swung his mace full-bore into the fel energy wall between the souls.
. . . . . The shattering of the wall and subsequent whiplash of released energy knocked the death knight Retz flat on his back. To his misfortune, he had been patrolling alone in the Deadwind Pass that day. His body lay forgotten on the dirt as the warlock Retz and the Death-speaker Hadeon fought in the desolate plain of lost souls for control. Hysteria and despair and a terrifying resolve gave Hadeon unexpected strength. Death magic flew. Holy Light flared. Exhausting their magics, the two souls fell to wrestling to best one another. Retz, for all his years in Hadeon's body, did not have that same stolen strength in the twisted kingdom.
. . . . . The Death-speaker won.
. . . . . Nearly too soul-weary to move, the massive draenei simply sat on the warlock's back, pressing his face into the grey dust of the plains. The death knight Hadeon flexed his hand and watched his own heavy blue fingers twitch against the dirt of Deadwind Pass.
. . . . . "Mine, now," he rumbled with his own voice.
. . . . . Trapped beneath the Death-speaker's soul, the warlock Retz began to scream.
. . . . . "Shut up, Retz."
. . . . . The Black Riders were puzzled by the change in death knight Retz. He swaggered more, growled less, and spoke not at all for several days. They were more puzzled when he suddenly ordered them to break camp and march back to the Dark Portal. However, death knight Retz had saved them from Gorefiend's wrath before, so if he told them that returning to the shattered land of Draenor was what they should do, they trusted him. Trusting fools…
. . . . . They were most puzzled, though, to find themselves following Retz all the way to Karabor, where their canny leader turned on them with a bloody, vicious frenzy to startle even the orcs. Retz ripped their jeweled truncheons away from startled grips and tore five death knight bodies to pieces with his bare hands, his own truncheon-mace never leaving his belt.
. . . . . Death-speaker Hadeon had learned the warlocks' secret in the decades he had shadowed Retz's mind. Without the pulsing red gems, the death knights were merely corpses. He sat down amid the carnage and reached for the stack of truncheons. Methodically, he pried the jewels free from each one and shattered them with the head of his adamantite mace. Then he laid his own mace across his knees and reached for the red jewel adorning it.
. . . . . NO! shouted the warlock Retz, bound in a bubble of holy energy in the twisted shadow kingdom. No! No, you stupid goat! Don't! You'll destroy us!
. . . . . Death knight Hadeon chuckled quietly at the screaming warlock's soul. "You underestimate my sense of duty, Retz. Filthy warlocks wouldn't understand anyway…" He diverted his hand from the jewel on his own weapon to one of the shards scattered around him which had formerly powered the Black Riders. After finding one to his liking, he picked it up and pierced his own chest with it, right where his death had met him decades ago. The nerves were mostly deadened by now, the blood a sluggish navy gel. Bare-handed, he pulled back the stiff, dead skin over his chest, then pushed his fingers into the badly-healed break in his sternum. With a loud crack, he broke the bone again and pulled his own chest open.
. . . . . Somewhere in the back of his mind, both he and the warlock were screaming at the horror of it, but Death-speaker Hadeon had spent decades planning this. His internal organs were long since dust, the cavity within mostly ice and blood worms. While the warlock was still reeling, the death knight Hadeon reached out and snapped the pulsing red jewel from his mace. The world tilted, wavered, and began to go black. Quickly, he plunged his hand into the mass of worms in his chest, depositing the jewel inside his body.
. . . . . The dark red jewel lay against a chunk of ice and pulsed twice, then the world righted itself. Carefully pressing his hands together, Hadeon pushed his ribs back into place. "Good thing you didn't see fit to throw out all my gear, Retz," he rasped as he fumbled at the pouch on his hip and pulled out a slim leather journal. It opened to reveal a set of platinum needles and a spool of runethread.
. . . . . As he threaded the needle, he kept speaking aloud to the warlock's soul locked within his body with him. "I know you're already plotting, Retz. You know that you're clever enough to do to me exactly what I did to you, given enough time." Pinching the rent skin together with one hand, Hadeon started stitching himself closed with the other. "But remember this, warlock: you cannot reason with a dead man. A dead man has nothing left to fear or cling to. I have duties that I must perform, and we will do it my way, or we will do nothing at all." He tied the stitching off and slid the needle back into the case. Eyes wide open, he looked at the bodies scattered around him. "Remember this, warlock. Because if you want to continue this hideous unlife you cling to, you will be doing it as a parasite in my mind. If you take control of me again, the next time I get free," he tapped his chest lightly and picked up his now unadorned mace, "I will rend us apart, and neither of us will be able to stitch the pieces back together."
. . . . . There was nothing to preserve in the scattered corpses of the humans Hadeon had torn apart in his frenzy. Lacking a proper way to even dispose of them, he simply piled the parts together in a heap and said a prayer for the souls of the orcs. Even the orcs' dead deserved that much. The prayers to the Light made his dead tongue burn, but he said them anyway, surprised he could even feel it.
. . . . . He walked along the outside of the walls of the Black Temple and listened intently for two particular souls, two cries he never wanted to hear but knew he would. By the time he heard them, the wails of the lost souls around Karabor were a cacophony he could not ignore. Death knight Hadeon stopped at a stretch of ground that appeared no different from all the rest. With his training, he knew what to really see there. Shades, the last remnants of distressed and untended souls, clung to the ground.
. . . . . Hadeon knelt on the ground where Preserver Tena and Death-speaker Grenar had met their final deaths at Gorefiend's hand. He touched two bloodied fingers to his forehead, leaving a navy smudge behind, and then began to sing. Alone, a single Death-speaker giving voice to the ancient hymns of the Light is a sad thing, for the hymns were meant to be voiced in harmony. But the rusty, rasped tones Hadeon managed were still a thing of eerie beauty.
. . . . . Within his body, the soul of the warlock stilled to listen. The two shades approached. The wailing souls of Karabor gathered curiously around the dead man who knelt in the barren dirt and sang to them of peace and rest, of the Light and forgiveness, of surcease of suffering. His heavy baritone rang against the shattered rocks outside the Black Temple. With a soft cry, the two shades and many of the lost souls gathered around faded into the Light.
. . . . . The first of so many neglected duties completed, death knight Hadeon touched his fingers to his forehead again, bowed reverently over the spot where his comrades had fallen, and began the long walk to Auchindoun.
Written while listneing to Darkangel (Azrael mix) by VNV Nation. (Sadly, this was the only version of the mix I could find.)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Darkened
. . . . . Slowly, the death knight Retz lifted a huge hand to the left side of his head and felt behind the horn jutting forward there. A grimace settled on his face as he felt the deep dent in his skull and the subtle grating feeling of the bone shards he had just pressed upon. "Herix," he mumbled, having difficulty shaping his mouth around the Orcish syllables, "do you have any of those blood worms handy?" When did he start speaking Orcish? Why couldn't he turn his head and look around?
. . . . . The warlock Herix went to a large tray and came back with a dark red grub wriggling in his hand. "Excellent," death knight Retz said. "Thank you." His voice had a strange echoing resonance, as if underneath his words lay another set of unintelligible syllables. Stretching muscles stiffened by death, Retz reached out and took the blood worm. Hadeon recoiled at the feel of it and tried to drop it, but his hand would not obey. Retz popped the grub into his mouth and inhaled swiftly, drawing the blood worm into his sinus cavities like one inhales milk when a friend makes one laugh at the wrong moment while drinking.
. . . . . Although the brain itself held no nerves, he felt an odd scraping sensation against the inside of his skull as the worm made its way to the dent in behind his horn. Retz grimaced again as the worm pushed upwards against the damage, bulging the dent outwards. Hadeon's eyes rolled back in his head from revulsion and pain at the sensation of the tiny bone shards in his skull being forced back into place. Retz pushed away the nausea, an annoying remnant of living much like the unnecessary breathing he caught himself doing.
. . . . . The vision in his left eye improved; it was still a little watery, but it would suffice. His brain still feeling sloshy, Retz turned his head slowly to look at the slab next to him. Another draenei body was stretched upon it, nearly decapitated, the chest a collapsed pulp. That would take more than a few blood worms to fix… Retz saw a corpse. Hadeon saw a corpse…of Ramdor; trying to free itself from the shattered body, Ramdor's soul was half-stuck within it still. He had to free Ramdor! He had to sing Ramdor's soul back to the Light! Why couldn't he open his mouth to sing the prayers?
. . . . . As panic descended upon Hadeon, Retz finally noticed this strange parallel layer of thoughts in his head. He looked down at the jeweled truncheon in his head. The necrolyte? No, those souls were destroyed in the crystallization process. The draen-… Oh bother.
. . . . . In a desolate grey wasteland divided by an endless road, two mortal enemies circled one another. Death-speaker Hadeon recognized it as the twisted shadow kingdom of lost souls. Shadow Council warlock Retz narrowed his eyes at the circling, plate-clad warrior and cast a shadowy green coil of death magic at the draenei. The coil splashed against the holy warrior's shield of Light and slid down it.
. . . . . By Velen's beard, Death-speaker Hadeon rumbled in Draenei, what is going on?
. . . . . You don't know, Light-addled goat? asked warlock Retz in Orcish, using a pejorative term for the devolved talbuks his people herded for food. Despite their language difference, the two understood one another. You're dead, Retz continued. For that matter, so am I. Your body is my vessel now. I just wonder why you're still here...
. . . . . With a roar of fury, Death-speaker Hadeon threw himself at the orc warlock. The two locked in combat for several moments before a blast of pulsing red light separated the struggling souls.
. . . . . Outside the twisted shadow kingdom, the jewel on the adamantite mace pulsed a very slow heartbeat. Death knight Retz wrenched himself from the mental landscape and looked at the draenei corpse next to him again. This time, he saw the trapped soul.
. . . . . "Herix, you FOOL!" he roared, sliding off the slab and planting his hooves solidly on the mausoleum tile. "How many of us have you made?"
. . . . . "Th-three, sir. Including you. That one will be the fourth shortly." Herix looked terrified at the suddenly murderous expression on the massive draenei's face.
. . . . . "Bring them here. Now!"
. . . . . Herix scampered into the next room of the mausoleum and returned with two stiff-legged, vacant-eyed draenei. Death knight Retz looked at them with Death-speaker Hadeon's eyes and saw. The female's face fluctuated wildly between her physical shattered mess of a face, an orc's harsh red skin, and the panicked expression of a ghostly draenei woman. The male's face was his own physical visage, overlaid by an orc warlock's ghostly red face.
. . . . . "Herix… Why didn't you check these corpses for souls before you shoved us in here?" Death knight Retz's voice had gone dangerously soft.
. . . . . The warlock Herix looked puzzled. "Why would I, sir? Souls flee the body upon death. You know that."
. . . . . "Not draenei souls, it seems."
. . . . . Herix's red skin went nearly white. Death knight Retz pointed his jeweled truncheon at the corpse on the slab. "Siphon that one before you put another warlock in it." Herix pointed his hand at the corpse and spoke a demonic incantation. Retz watched the soul shrink away from the fel energy, but it could not hold out for long.
. . . . . Warlock Herix was so startled by the appearance of the magenta shard which crystallized in his palm that he dropped it. Retz bent down quickly and stopped it skittering across the floor, scooping it up. He found a leather pouch tied to his belt, stained navy and stiffened with blood. He plucked a crystal vial from it and tossed it over his shoulder, replacing it with the soul shard. Blasphemer! Abomination! He must set Ramdor's soul free! Hmm. This should be interesting…
. . . . . Finished with its repair work on his skull, the blood worm wriggled its way back into Retz's sinus cavities and down into his mouth. He swallowed it. Might as well let it start gnawing away at the internal organs before they made the body go rancid.
. . . . . Death-speaker Hadeon began screaming himself hoarse in horror. Worms were eating his body and he was still trapped inside it! The room smelled of charnel house and good rum. Preserver Tena's broken corpse looked at him with an orc's demonically twisted face. He had Ramdor's soul in a crystal on his left hip. Worms were devouring his body and he was still in it! Hysteria set in.
. . . . . Recognizing the weakening of Hadeon's soul, Retz threw a solid, sickly green wall of energy between himself and the draenei in the twisted shadow kingdom of the dead, sealing Hadeon's screams off.
. . . . . For decades, death knight Retz was the sole voice inside the body Herix acquired for him. Somewhere behind a wall of fel energy, a draenei raged and wept and screamed himself mute. Retz served Teron Gorefiend with distinction, but he was a canny orc. He had not been a powerful warlock because he was loyal…or stupid.
. . . . . After Gorefiend's demise, while the other death knights marched to Karabor to show their enduringly idiotic loyalty, Retz gathered a few similarly canny - or cowardly, came the unwelcome thought - knights and fled through the Dark Portal. His fortune lay with whatever had destroyed Gul'dan - at least, until he could destroy it.
. . . . . Something about this new land weakened the wall between Retz's and Hadeon's souls. In the twisted kingdom, the draenei was bruised, bloodied, covered in gouges and scratches - as if he had spent decades tearing at his own flesh in grief. Death-speaker Hadeon seemed beaten; he no longer railed against warlock Retz's fel wall. From time to time, he even offered a piece of knowledge: a better way to hold the jeweled mace, a stronger stance for balancing on hooves. As death knight Retz and his handpicked squad of Black Riders settled in a desolate pass far from the Dark Portal and Teron Gorefiend's vengeful spirit, Death-speaker Hadeon became a familiar shadow in death knight Retz's mind, often meditating on his side of the fel wall.
. . . . . Retz, came the quiet voice from the twisted shadow kingdom of lost souls.
. . . . . "What, goat?" asked death knight Retz.
. . . . . That truncheon is a danger to us. We need to discard it.
. . . . . "You will not fool me. You know it is what powers us. Go away, goat."
. . . . . In the twisted kingdom, Death-speaker Hadeon placed an open hand over a closed fist and bowed. He sat back down in the nightmare world and resumed his meditation.
. . . . . Another year passed with the raging draenei oddly quiet. Death knight Retz was grateful for the peace. For a little while there, he had started to wish he had his imp back instead of the Death-speaker, and any day a warlock would rather speak to imps was a bad, bad day.
. . . . . For all his canniness, the warlock never suspected the Death-speaker could also be crafty. He was taken entirely by surprise, then, when Hadeon strode out of the twisted shadow kingdom and into death knight Retz's mind, his unadorned mace over his shoulder, and bowed. The Death-speaker murmured a prayer to the Light which set Retz's ears ringing, then swung his mace full-bore into the fel energy wall between the souls.
. . . . . The shattering of the wall and subsequent whiplash of released energy knocked the death knight Retz flat on his back. To his misfortune, he had been patrolling alone in the Deadwind Pass that day. His body lay forgotten on the dirt as the warlock Retz and the Death-speaker Hadeon fought in the desolate plain of lost souls for control. Hysteria and despair and a terrifying resolve gave Hadeon unexpected strength. Death magic flew. Holy Light flared. Exhausting their magics, the two souls fell to wrestling to best one another. Retz, for all his years in Hadeon's body, did not have that same stolen strength in the twisted kingdom.
. . . . . The Death-speaker won.
. . . . . Nearly too soul-weary to move, the massive draenei simply sat on the warlock's back, pressing his face into the grey dust of the plains. The death knight Hadeon flexed his hand and watched his own heavy blue fingers twitch against the dirt of Deadwind Pass.
. . . . . "Mine, now," he rumbled with his own voice.
. . . . . Trapped beneath the Death-speaker's soul, the warlock Retz began to scream.
. . . . . "Shut up, Retz."
. . . . . The Black Riders were puzzled by the change in death knight Retz. He swaggered more, growled less, and spoke not at all for several days. They were more puzzled when he suddenly ordered them to break camp and march back to the Dark Portal. However, death knight Retz had saved them from Gorefiend's wrath before, so if he told them that returning to the shattered land of Draenor was what they should do, they trusted him. Trusting fools…
. . . . . They were most puzzled, though, to find themselves following Retz all the way to Karabor, where their canny leader turned on them with a bloody, vicious frenzy to startle even the orcs. Retz ripped their jeweled truncheons away from startled grips and tore five death knight bodies to pieces with his bare hands, his own truncheon-mace never leaving his belt.
. . . . . Death-speaker Hadeon had learned the warlocks' secret in the decades he had shadowed Retz's mind. Without the pulsing red gems, the death knights were merely corpses. He sat down amid the carnage and reached for the stack of truncheons. Methodically, he pried the jewels free from each one and shattered them with the head of his adamantite mace. Then he laid his own mace across his knees and reached for the red jewel adorning it.
. . . . . NO! shouted the warlock Retz, bound in a bubble of holy energy in the twisted shadow kingdom. No! No, you stupid goat! Don't! You'll destroy us!
. . . . . Death knight Hadeon chuckled quietly at the screaming warlock's soul. "You underestimate my sense of duty, Retz. Filthy warlocks wouldn't understand anyway…" He diverted his hand from the jewel on his own weapon to one of the shards scattered around him which had formerly powered the Black Riders. After finding one to his liking, he picked it up and pierced his own chest with it, right where his death had met him decades ago. The nerves were mostly deadened by now, the blood a sluggish navy gel. Bare-handed, he pulled back the stiff, dead skin over his chest, then pushed his fingers into the badly-healed break in his sternum. With a loud crack, he broke the bone again and pulled his own chest open.
. . . . . Somewhere in the back of his mind, both he and the warlock were screaming at the horror of it, but Death-speaker Hadeon had spent decades planning this. His internal organs were long since dust, the cavity within mostly ice and blood worms. While the warlock was still reeling, the death knight Hadeon reached out and snapped the pulsing red jewel from his mace. The world tilted, wavered, and began to go black. Quickly, he plunged his hand into the mass of worms in his chest, depositing the jewel inside his body.
. . . . . The dark red jewel lay against a chunk of ice and pulsed twice, then the world righted itself. Carefully pressing his hands together, Hadeon pushed his ribs back into place. "Good thing you didn't see fit to throw out all my gear, Retz," he rasped as he fumbled at the pouch on his hip and pulled out a slim leather journal. It opened to reveal a set of platinum needles and a spool of runethread.
. . . . . As he threaded the needle, he kept speaking aloud to the warlock's soul locked within his body with him. "I know you're already plotting, Retz. You know that you're clever enough to do to me exactly what I did to you, given enough time." Pinching the rent skin together with one hand, Hadeon started stitching himself closed with the other. "But remember this, warlock: you cannot reason with a dead man. A dead man has nothing left to fear or cling to. I have duties that I must perform, and we will do it my way, or we will do nothing at all." He tied the stitching off and slid the needle back into the case. Eyes wide open, he looked at the bodies scattered around him. "Remember this, warlock. Because if you want to continue this hideous unlife you cling to, you will be doing it as a parasite in my mind. If you take control of me again, the next time I get free," he tapped his chest lightly and picked up his now unadorned mace, "I will rend us apart, and neither of us will be able to stitch the pieces back together."
. . . . . There was nothing to preserve in the scattered corpses of the humans Hadeon had torn apart in his frenzy. Lacking a proper way to even dispose of them, he simply piled the parts together in a heap and said a prayer for the souls of the orcs. Even the orcs' dead deserved that much. The prayers to the Light made his dead tongue burn, but he said them anyway, surprised he could even feel it.
. . . . . He walked along the outside of the walls of the Black Temple and listened intently for two particular souls, two cries he never wanted to hear but knew he would. By the time he heard them, the wails of the lost souls around Karabor were a cacophony he could not ignore. Death knight Hadeon stopped at a stretch of ground that appeared no different from all the rest. With his training, he knew what to really see there. Shades, the last remnants of distressed and untended souls, clung to the ground.
. . . . . Hadeon knelt on the ground where Preserver Tena and Death-speaker Grenar had met their final deaths at Gorefiend's hand. He touched two bloodied fingers to his forehead, leaving a navy smudge behind, and then began to sing. Alone, a single Death-speaker giving voice to the ancient hymns of the Light is a sad thing, for the hymns were meant to be voiced in harmony. But the rusty, rasped tones Hadeon managed were still a thing of eerie beauty.
. . . . . Within his body, the soul of the warlock stilled to listen. The two shades approached. The wailing souls of Karabor gathered curiously around the dead man who knelt in the barren dirt and sang to them of peace and rest, of the Light and forgiveness, of surcease of suffering. His heavy baritone rang against the shattered rocks outside the Black Temple. With a soft cry, the two shades and many of the lost souls gathered around faded into the Light.
. . . . . The first of so many neglected duties completed, death knight Hadeon touched his fingers to his forehead again, bowed reverently over the spot where his comrades had fallen, and began the long walk to Auchindoun.
Written while listneing to Darkangel (Azrael mix) by VNV Nation. (Sadly, this was the only version of the mix I could find.)