Amphisbaena
Quidquid homo est, aperit pestis natura profana.
"All that a man is, the poison’s wicked nature shows."
-- Lucan, Pharsalia.
Baigan had never killed anyone before Mist. He'd fought a handful of things that looked human enough -- goblins, the odd leshy -- and skirmished with a number of bandit gangs and militias, but there was quite a difference, he found, even between cutting an opponent down in the heat of battle and really making sure they were good and dead.
After that earthquake, Baigan doubted there was much left to clean up in Mist, and the fact that their airships crossed the mountain without suffering any magical bombardment from the ground seemed to prove there was not. His Majesty, however, had wanted to make certain -- and, he'd added, he wanted Baigan to rendezvous with the new Lord Commander. Even if His Majesty doubted the callers of Mist had been entirely wiped out, he seemed utterly certain at least that Cecil was dead. The old Lord Commander hadn't even been gone two weeks and the king already had a replacement lined up.
Baigan had never heard of the man -- "Golbez" or something like that, a foreign name if Baigan had ever heard one -- but he had to be better than Cecil, who would usually do what he was told but sulk about it, which Baigan found even more irritating than outright treason. At least a blatant seditious act would have given Baigan an excuse to break the Lord Commander's nose, a fantasy he'd had been harboring for months now.
When he arrived at Mist, the place was in utter ruins -- the king's signet had done its job admirably. Baigan ordered the handful of soldiers he'd brought with him to fan out and search for survivors, but it didn't seem like there was much point in the endeavor. Now on his own, Baigan stalked through the smoldering town center, wrinkling his nose at the stench of brimstone and scorched earth.
Baigan mistook the woman for a corpse at first, stepping right past her before he felt something slice clean through the leather of his boot and lodge in the flesh just above his ankle. Baigan snarled, his leg buckling under him as he dropped to one knee, hand reaching for his sword. The knife in her hand was buried in Baigan's leg, and her grip on it was so powerful her knuckles were bloodless.
Baigan let go of his sword, instead turning to grab a handful of the woman's hair. She barely even cried out -- apparently she had used the last of her strength to stab him in the leg. She was basically dead already -- it was hard to tell how old she was, or even what she looked like under the dirt and blood.
In a hot surge of rage driven by the searing pain in his calf, Baigan jerked the woman's head up briefly before smashing it, as hard as he could, into a broken piece of masonry.
The crack of bone reverberated all the way up Baigan's arm, so powerfully it sent a chill up his spine. One blow was enough to make her go limp, but Baigan slammed her back down again for good measure. He could feel the way the shape of her head deformed under the blow, the noise of the impact wet and grisly, and he dropped the woman in disgust. She fell to the ground, unmoving save for the thick blood oozing onto the ground and pooling in the grass, floating out fragments of skull and stringy globs of gore like uncooked meat.
Baigan spit profanity and stuck a finger into the slice taken out of his boot, prodding at the wound. Not deep, thankfully, but his fingertip came away bloody. They hadn't brought a white wizard with them, as they hadn't anticipated finding anyone to fight, so he'd just have to grit his teeth and limp.
"Are you all right, Lieutenant?" It was one of the Red Wings gunners, young and freckled and looking a little sick at the sight of the corpse. The boy's expression of consternation suggested he thought the scene before him was the aftermath of some fierce battle. Not a terrible assumption -- the callers of Mist were dangerous folk, after all, which is why they'd had to resort to underhanded means.
"Fine," Baigan snapped. "Do you have something to report?"
The boy started to talk about landslides and the effects of the earthquake, which had been felt all the way in Baron. Baigan could barely be bothered to listen. He didn't exactly care about the state of the landscape, and would have been happier if the quake had buried the entire place under nondescript rock for the rest of time.
"...wanted to see you, sir." Among the soldier's rambling, Baigan caught something that struck him as important.
"Who did?"
"The Lord Commander, sir."
"I thought--" Baigan almost said, jumping at the chance to insult Cecil out loud, but then recalled the circumstances. "Right. The Lord Commander Golbez, of course. Take me to him."
"Yes, sir," the gunner boy said.
It wasn't hard to see which one was the new Lord Commander, even from a distance. He was a full head taller than everyone else, not even counting the elaborate horned helmet he wore, more ostentatious than Cecil's ancient heirloom gear had ever been. The armor was black as midnight but polished so aggressively it reflected the sunlight in near blinding sparks, and was fitted with a cape that fluttered in the breeze.
He looked fucking ridiculous, Baigan thought. Definitely a foreigner.
A small knot of soldiers was clustered near a pile of rubble that seemed to have once been the largest building in the village, situated on top of a hill. One of the only structures built of stone, its collapse must have been spectacular; one wall still stood partially intact, decoration stripped away by the disaster into a pile of crumbling masonry and dust. Just beyond the building's remains the ground dropped away precipitously, the once gentle path down into the valley transformed into a steep incline of mud and sharp rock dotted with the remains of a few small structures that the landslide had swept away down to the bottom of the gorge far below. It was a hell of a drop, and there was no sign of life below. The landslide had even stripped away the grass and uprooted a few of the smaller trees.
"Baigan," the Lord Commander said as he approached, without turning around. Baigan bristled, but it was probably better to get on the new favorite's good side, no matter how insufferable he turned out to be.
"My Lord," Baigan said, bowing. "Have you found anything of note?"
"No," Golbez said. His voice was cold as ice, and he sounded as though his thoughts were far away. "Maybe a few things that will be of use, I suppose." Finally, he turned to face Baigan, the plates of his armor clinking against each other.
"My Lord," Baigan repeated, and bowed again for good measure, but behind the helm it was difficult to tell if Golbez was pleased. The face plate had a slit across it that gave the impression of a single eye peering out of the blackness. It had to restrict his vision significantly, and if he refused to take it off, Baigan decided Golbez must be terribly ugly and too vain to show his face. Embarrassing combination.
The horned head inclined slightly as though Golbez was looking him up and down, which Baigan had to admit was a little intimidating, given his size -- though he noticed the man seemed unarmed. After a moment of scrutiny, Golbez waved his hand in the direction of the soldiers clustered by the rubble.
"See to it," Golbez said, not elaborating on what 'it' even was. "I have business elsewhere."
With a flutter of black fabric and another slash of blinding sunlight reflected off his armor, Golbez was gone. At least he'd left Baigan nominally in charge before vanishing. A distant prick of a commander was better than his spineless, meddling predecessor, and at least this one recognized Baigan's authority.
A few of the soldiers shifted around; one of them knelt down, and Baigan could finally see what they were all looking at. Clutched in one of the soldier's hands was a familiar helm, heavily dented and with one of the frills bent at a right angle. At his feet lay a corpse, both legs and one arm buried under the stone rubble. Very little was visible except for the body's long golden hair, matted with blood and dirt and covered all over in a fine layer of masonry dust.
No, not a corpse. The body's one visible hand twitched, and he made a strangled gurgling sound when the kneeling soldier attempted to move some of the rubble.
Sighing, Baigan moved to help dig Kain out of the destruction, privately hoping he'd be dead by morning.
Golbez ran a tight ship, as the proverb went. It only took one argument for Chief Engineer Cid to completely vanish from Baron Castle grounds (hopefully straight into a shallow grave somewhere, as far as Baigan was concerned). As though they even needed his expertise anymore -- Golbez seemed to have come with technicians of his own, a group of gangly men with identical smiles that might have all been printed from the same wood block. One by one, Cid's own assistants vanished, and the airship hangar went quiet except for the banging of hammers and the soft giggling of the new engineers, who seemed to find almost everything funny.
That was how Baigan noticed the changes, actually -- things started to get quiet. He stopped overhearing conversations around the corner, the soldiers' dining hall was deserted every time he passed by, and one by one the housekeepers vanished from their laundry rooms and the bureaucrats from their desks. Things kept running as efficiently as ever, though, so Baigan supposed they must have all been superfluous. The floors stayed spotless. Gil shuffled between projects effortlessly.
It wasn't as though the castle was completely deserted, though. There were still people -- even people Baigan recognized -- but the ones that remained had a kind of hollowed out look that made them seem like strangers, faces that blurred into the general mass of humanity even more readily than usual, as though they wanted to be ignored. His eyes slid off them like water running down polished glass.
There wasn't much time to worry about any of this, though. The King had a lot of plans, and bit by bit everyone standing in the way of them was removed, one way or another, with ruthless efficiency. Baigan's expertise in military logistics was more necessary than ever -- after all, Mist had never been the goal. Baron's sights had been firmly set upon Damcyan from the beginning, and eliminating the callers had been merely a first step, something to ensure their airship fleet could cross the mountains without being shot down by meddling wizards or wrecked by their enslaved monsters. With them out of the way, there was little to stand between Baron and the kingdom to the northeast, least of all the Damcyani themselves. They were largely a peaceful nation -- peaceful and rich, a truly dire combination. It was only an accident of geography that they hadn't been invaded already -- the desert was difficult to traverse without technology that, until very recently, had been the sole province of Damcyan itself.
Baigan didn't have to watch his tongue around the new Lord Commander, which was a relief -- nobody objected to anything he had to say about those prancing bug-eaters across the mountains, though Golbez seemed resolutely uninterested in any plans for a sustained invasion or conquest, which frustrated Baigan to no end. Damcyan was a wasteland, true, but there was much more to the place than just the capital, and maintaining control of the desert would mean, in essence, absolute power over practically every trade route in this half of the world, which was a prize well worth the effort of killing a little more of its vagrant population. The new Lord Commander didn't seem to MIND Baigan bringing proposals like that to the table, but Baigan felt distinctly ignored. Golbez had a way of talking that made it seem like he was always thinking about something else, something far more important to him than you were.
Still, it was an improvement, and Baigan didn't mind indulging Golbez's more ridiculous ideas, like mounting a full scale invasion of a monastery or sending spies all the way over to Troia -- which was a tempting target to be sure, but far away and possessed of a kind of wealth far more difficult to steal. Privately, though, Baigan did wish that the King wasn't so enamored with absolute crackpots.
Eventually, Baigan received a summons for a personal audience with the king. At least he presumed it was an audience with the king -- the summons actually came from Golbez, but it directed him not to one of their war rooms or meeting halls, but straight to the throne room. As far as Baigan knew, the King had not held audience with anyone, at least not publicly, since the destruction of Mist.
The new Lord Commander was conferring quietly with the king with Baigan arrived, a level of confidence even Cecil had never enjoyed while he still lived. On the dais near the foot of the throne lay, strangely, what looked like a massive pile of rubbish, something that stank of moldy earth and was covered with a dirty, tattered heap of fabric. As Baigan stared, the rubbish heap moved, and a pair of baleful yellow eyes peered at him from beneath the filthy cloth, two sickly pinpoints like lanterns struggling to stay lit through a wet, foggy night.
"Lieutenant," Golbez said. The king scoffed at this with a level of vitriol and derision that Baigan had never heard out of him before -- it sounded almost like a different person. Regardless, Baigan bowed. "I will be requiring your assistance on a matter of great import," Golbez went on.
Baigan could barely suppress a grin. "Of course, my lord." Golbez could only be referring to one thing -- their raid on Damcyan was imminent.
"The details will be solidified by tomorrow, and I expect the Damcyani royal family to be dead and the crystal in my hands before the week is out," Golbez went on, as casually as if he were discussing the weather. "But there is something I wanted to do for you first, Baigan. You've comported yourself admirably since I arrived, which I feel ought to be rewarded. Archfiend Scarmiglione will assist you. I suggest you show him all the same respect you would show to me." Golbez gestured with one armored hand at the trash heap on the dais, which writhed and shifted and produced a pair of clawed hands and a worm-eaten face permanently frozen into the emotionless smile of a bare skull. The whole thing was some kind of CREATURE, Baigan realized -- something ancient and foul folded up beneath a cloak to hide its hideous appearance.
At this, the king grinned, inexplicably, and Baigan had the impression of a mouth crowded with teeth.
"I'm afraid I don't understand, my lord," Baigan said. Beneath that sense of pride, that feeling he was finally getting his due, some kind of animal fear had started to bubble to the surface like shards of ice on the sea. Golbez was some kind of sorcerer, that much had been obvious from the beginning, but for the first time Baigan started to wonder what KIND, if there was still some magic in the world too old and cruel to be bound into textbooks for field medics and artillery mages -- if whatever Golbez knew had been the final piece that Baron had needed to overcome Mysidia and Mist, the two greatest centers of arcane knowledge in the known world.
"I'm giving you a gift, Baigan," Golbez said, sounding already bored with the whole affair. "You'll like it, I'm sure, though there will be a period of adjustment. Scarmiglione," he said, and the trash heap shuffled forward with scratching like bone being dragged across rock.
The creature's tongue lolled from its mouth, coating its teeth with something sticky and sulfurous. The stench was almost overpowering, so caustic the air seemed to burn behind his eyes and so foul it chased out rational thought.
"I don't--" Baigan protested, but it was pointless. He was frozen to the spot -- and he wouldn't have dared flee in any case, no matter how his blood screamed in his ears for him to run.
He'd always known terrible things would be required to make Baron the most powerful nation in the world, and he wasn't a COWARD.
"You won't remember this part," the creature -- Scarmiglione -- hissed, its voice rattling like a man's dying wheeze. "Lucky for you."
Baigan eventually found himself curled up in his own bed with no recollection of how he got there -- only a series of vague impressions that squirmed inside his brain like a handful of worms, too slippery to grasp.
Groaning, Baigan tried to push himself upright, only to find his right arm barely responsive. Shoving himself sitting with his left, he tried to shake the sleep from his limbs.
His fingers twitched and spasmed in response, and Baigan stared blankly as his palm split in half -- painlessly, bloodlessly -- with a crack of bone that echoed off the walls of his chambers.
Reflexively he grabbed at his broken hand, too stunned even to panic. He must still be dreaming.
His wrist twisted of its own accord in his grip, suddenly wet and slick -- around, and around, until he felt a snap somewhere near his elbow, inside, and his thumb went abruptly slack. Baigan let out a choked scream at the sight, but it was more the sense of wrongness made his stomach twist. There was still no pain.
The hand -- HIS hand -- jerked violently out of his own grip. Sections of flesh came off on his nails, sticky with putrefaction and reeking of rotten meat. He'd seen gangrene before, walked impassively past wounded soldiers sobbing for a white wizard's attention, and the mess in his hands looked like he'd been suffering from it for days.
Beneath the rotten tissue there was more skin, a gleaming pale violet beneath the filth -- vibrant and alive next to the blackened and blistering flesh around it. His arm was rotting away before his very eyes, but rotting away to reveal something else, something NEW, like a cicada sloughing off its carapace but far wetter, far ranker, and far MESSIER.
Choking back bile that burned in the back of his throat, Baigan feverishly scraped off handfuls of necrotic slurry, shot through with congealed blood and yellow-white pus, and threw them to the ground beside his bed with a nauseating squelch. The flesh underneath was firm, corded with powerful muscle, and the more fervently he dug at his arm the easier it was to bear the crunching of bone and tendon reshaping itself that reverberated all the way to his shoulder.
Soon, or maybe not soon enough, Baigan could bear it no longer. His head swam, the walls blurring around him, and he fell back onto the filthy sheets with his mutilated arm stretched above him, grasping at nothing. He coughed, saliva pooling in his mouth and running down the sides of his cheeks.
On the unfamiliar shape that used to be his hand, a flap of purplish skin, pebbled with scales, slid open to reveal a slit-pupiled eye.
Once he could move again, Baigan pulled himself to his feet and dragged his numb body to the waterway. There, he plunged gratefully into a waterfall of river runoff, the filth quickly washed away by the rushing water. Still feeling sick, he tore off the shirt he'd worn to bed and discarded it into the river, watching it flow away and catch briefly on a grate before vanishing into the underground aqueduct.
He was too afraid to look at his arm. He could feel it trembling like an animal ready to pounce, tense and strong, as though it possessed a will of its own that it was holding back out of courtesy. Instead, he stared at the flowing water, thoughts empty.
Soon, threads of viscous red seeped into the stream again. This time, Baigan did not try to find where he was wounded -- if you could call it wounded. He simply sat, stock still, until the water ran clear. It might have been hours he waited there, watching globs of now-indiscernible flesh and occasional clumps of hair slough from his body and flow away.
Eventually, the water was clear again, and the terror had faded into numbness and finally into a strange vigor, an irrational eagerness that Baigan could not recall ever feeling before. His heart was racing. He opened his eyes and found his vision sharpened even through the water flowing down his face, into his eyes.
He didn't feel like he was dying anymore. Quite the opposite, really.
He was HUNGRY.
Fortunately, the transformation proved easy enough to hide. Baigan had never been a wizard, but some reservoir of power had suddenly welled up within him, and it flowed out as easily as exhaling. It wasn't quite perfect, and more of an illusion than a shifting of shape -- not like the thing on the throne, whom Baigan had since learned could reshape its flesh and bone into new configurations like clay and wire -- but it was enough. It looked perfect at a casual glance, at least as far as he could tell in the mirror. Even if he found himself stooping under doorways a solid foot above his human head. Even if occasionally, if he wasn't careful, his arm would bend impossibly in the middle, bones snapping into vertebrae for a single instant with a visceral crack before they righted themselves again.
Even if his fingers wouldn't hold to the buttons of his jacket, the metal slipping out of his stiff, awkward grip. Even if his palms left smears of poisonous saliva on the fabric that ate away at the threads like acid, and their fangs -- his fangs -- tore holes in the lining.
Eventually, Baigan gave up and threw the jacket over his shoulders like a cloak, unbuttoned. Not regulation at all, but it would have to do.
He’d already eaten, and on top of that drank enough ale to knock two soldiers to the floor, but some ravenous urge he could not quite identify still gnawed at his guts. The alcohol didn’t even seem to have made him drunk, and his new form seemed to possess a manic vigor he was still unsure how to satisfy.
In the days before the invasion, Baigan delegated the details to any available underlings and stalked up and down the halls of Baron castle, restless and frustrated.
Wandering without much thought behind it, Baigan found himself standing in front of the heavy door that lead down into the dungeons. There were still a handful of Mysidian prisoners left, but it stood unguarded.
“Baigan.”
He’d thought he was alone, so hearing a rough voice spit his name with obvious disdain startled him, filled him with a bolt of irrational wrath as though he’d caught a stranger eavesdropping on his private thoughts. Besides, Baigan recognized the voice.
“You know, it’s thanks to me that you’re not rotting under a pile of rock in Mist,” Baigan snarled. “You could at least address me properly.”
It was the first time Baigan had seen Kain since then, and though he was aware that the dragoon had unfortunately survived the ordeal, Baigan had been privately hoping he’d at least been maimed. Tragically, the man seemed whole, if a bit worn down — he leaned against the wall heavily, his eyes hollowed and bruised with sleeplessness. In fact, Baigan sort of remembered Kain cutting an intimidating figure — tall, taciturn, with the sharp eyes of a raptor and a prideful streak a mile wide. The dragoons as a whole might have been laughable, obsolete relics barely a step above parade chocobos in their overall battlefield utility, but all that hardly mattered when their captain gave off the definite impression that he’d put his lance between your ribs without a second thought if you pushed him too far. From recent rumor around the castle, Baigan gathered he now functioned as some kind of lapdog for Golbez.
“Fine then, Lieutenant,” Kain said. “Where are you going?”
“Downstairs.”
“Why?”
Baigan was already infuriated with the conversation. “None of your goddamn business,” he snarled, but Kain moved to block his path, hand across the door frame. "Come on. Don't pretend like YOU have scruples."
Kain's eyes narrowed dangerously. A month ago, Baigan would have held himself back. He would have turned around, went back to his quarters, and sat with a bottle of wine and several unsatisfying fantasies the rest of the night. Kain outranked him, technically, and more importantly he seemed likely to fight back, which Baigan never liked, but it felt like his inhibitions had rotted off and fallen away with the rest of his body. Impulse surged through his veins like poison. What did he have to be afraid of anymore? Kain was still HUMAN.
He lashed out, the viper on the end of his arm curling its head back and opening its mouth before it struck Kain right in the face. It was a powerful blow, enough to stagger even a trained warrior, and the serpent’s fangs dragged open the skin on Kain’s cheek. Blood hit the tongue in Baigan’s palm and could taste it like he was drinking it down himself, better than spice and wine. He could feel the magic cloaking his monstrous form unravel as he drank in the feeling, but he didn't care. Let the dragoon see it.
Kain recovered from the blow immediately, glaring at Baigan with his hand pressed to the slash on his cheek, but for one glorious, fleeting moment Baigan saw the kicked-dog look in his eyes. Maybe Golbez had put it there, but Baigan was happy to enjoy the fruits of the Lord Commander's labor.
Baigan stood for a moment, ready to knock some more sense into Kain, but it didn't seem necessary. All he did was glare as Baigan stormed past him.
"I suppose Master Golbez told you it was an honor," Baigan heard Kain hiss as he passed. "And not a last resort to wring some use out of you."
Lapdog or not, Baigan thought as he let the door slam shut behind him, he was going to kill that dragoon if he was still there when he left. That thought and the taste of blood lingering in the back of his throat spurred Baigan onward, and by the time he found himself standing in a cell with some Mysidian academic that Golbez had forgotten to kill, his heart was racing and his head was pounding.
The cells were outfitted with something that kept the prisoners drained of magic, and while Baigan could feel it creeping around the edges of his awareness, it barely bothered him. Whatever magic he had, it was different -- superior. The black mage, though, seemed half dead, staring at him listlessly while he fumbled with the buckle of his belt, which was just as much of a pain in the ass as his coat had been. After a moment he gave up, snapped the damn thing in half, and grabbed the black mage by the hair. His fangs sinking into the prisoner's scalp got a reaction out of him, at least -- a startled, strangled yelp that turned into a helpless whimper as Baigan clamped his other arm's mouth around his jaw.
The black mage lost consciousness halfway through, and by the time he was done Baigan's serpents had chewed a hole in the mage's shoulder and upper arm the size of a fist, a flash of bone gleaming wetly in the depths of the wound. He was probably going to die, Baigan thought, and went to bed feeling better than he had in months.
In the middle of the night, he woke up hungry again.
Damcyan did have a military, but there had been very little need to use it in recent memory. Once even the royal family had been formidable foes, their magic songs commanding the fierce beasts of the desert and even the hearts of men, but that was long enough ago that it might as well have been a fairy tale. Now they had no idea how to handle any problem they couldn't solve with coin.
Their ultimate prize, at as far as the Lord Commander was concerned, was the Crystal of Fire, which was situated in a chapel behind the castle’s main audience hall. Bombing the entire place until it was indistinguishable from the sand around it would have been faster, but the Crystal was both precious and somewhat volatile, so a ground invasion it was. When it came down to it, Baigan was glad — the place was full of both people and gold, and there was nobody left in Baron who cared what happened to any of it.
Baigan was left in charge of ensuring a clear path back to their airships while the Lord Commander and his pack of demons cut their way to the Crystal. The soldiers' quarters, such as it was, had been their main bombing target, and it had been reduced to so much rubble in minutes; the only ones left alive with any fight in them were royal guards -- armed, but largely ceremonial -- and a handful of assorted wandering sellsword types and caravan guards who happened to escape the shelling. They even had a couple of mages in the central courtyard, which was suprising -- maybe scholars from Mysidia come on a diplomatic mission or something, who knew or cared. And of course, there were still a number of ordinary folk who had given up hope of escape and entertained delusions of fighting them off.
The castle was decked out for a wedding when the Baron army got there. Charming.
Baigan had about thirty soldiers with him, which turned out to be more than enough. Starting at the castle gates and moving to the central courtyard, they cut down anyone they could see, armed or not. Arrows whistled through the air, streaking toward Baigan’s soldiers, only to snap on armored plate and hide. Sword and makeshift club and bone all cracked beneath the crushing force of toothy maws. All around Baigan there was screaming -- screams of pain, of horror, of desperation. Fleeing clerks and maids wailed for help, then when help arrived it joined the mess of broken bodies on the floor until there was no one left to answer.
Eventually, they fanned out to sweep the corridors. It likely wasn't necessary, but it beat standing around in the courtyard under the blazing desert sun waiting for Golbez to finish his esoteric work. Besides, there were a lot of people left to kill.
Baigan rounded a corner alone. He hadn't brought a weapon -- any sword he tried to hold rolled out of his grasp and caught on the teeth at the end of his arms -- but it hardly mattered. A handful of guards charged at him. He threw them aside, and they hit the wall with a satisfyingly wet crunch and did not get up again.
They had a mage, apparently -- as Baigan realized when a bolt of fire crackled down a hallway, blasting the already-parched air with heat. Baigan didn't even bother to step out of the way. The transformation had laid some kind of spell on him that made him impervious to magic.
The flames licked harmlessly at him, not even singing his clothes or drying out the wet salamander flesh of his face, before they leaped like arc lightning to the nearest other target -- a royal guard in a suit of red and gold lacquered armor, a flower crown still jammed down over his forehead from the wedding celebration. The metal superheated in the blink of an eye, cloth and hair going up like kindling, and the corridor flooded with the smell of burning meat as the soldier dropped to the floor kicking in agony, tearing at the straps of his breastplate with blistering hands.
The mage was too stunned to speak, or even react. Several yards away, sillhouetted by the smoldering destruction of the caved-in roof behind her, lightning crackled around her raised hands un-thrown. Whatever magic was on him, it had shocked a wizard into stunned silence. It must be powerful indeed.
The serpents bolted forward without his command, their fierce straining pulling painfully on the joints of his shoulders. For once, though, he thought they had the right idea.
Baigan did not grow hungry after that for three days, and then it came on all at once. Maintaining the illusion of a human body was growing more and more difficult, so he barely bothered anymore unless there was a compelling reason.
As it turned out, monsters and wicked men still had to eat, so there were still cooks in the castle, and ordinary food as well. Baigan badgered a servant into bringing some to his quarters after the sun had set.
The serpents needed to eat, or at least demanded that they be allowed to, but they didn't seem to require any nourishment -- or at least they tended to vomit up a great deal of what they consumed. After tearing apart the Damcyani mage, Baigan had stayed kneeling over the corpse for a long while as the twin snakes writhed and disgorged bloody splinters of bone and wet fabric. It made sense, he supposed -- he knew owls at least were wont to swallow their prey whole and let their stomachs sort out what was and wasn't meat -- but the process left him feeling nauseous himself. At least eating the dead wizard had stopped the ravenous hunger that wracked his mind, but much to his frustration he still seemed to require ordinary food once in a while.
The meal was nondescript -- bread, duck eggs, stewed turtle from the river, cabbage and beets cooked so long together that they'd become a uniform indistinct scarlet. Baigan's first attempt at grabbing the mug of mulled wine ended with spilling the entire contents all over the plate when the slick metal would not stay in the serpent's mouth. It didn't seem to like the taste of the metal fork either, as it violently rejected the implement, hissing and twisting back on itself in what seemed like rage.
They weren't exactly separate creatures, but they also were not exactly part of him like his arms had been. They were instead something in between, impossible to fully control but incapable of truly making decisions by themselves, and the longer they lived on the ends of his arms the more they seemed to feel spiteful at being stuck there.
Eventually, he gave up just as he had with his jacket. Clamping the two mouths onto the wooden table, splinters rubbing against the forked tongues uncomfortably, he first tried to eat without using his hands at all. When that proved unsuccessful, he shoveled a handful of bread into the maw of his right serpent and spat it back into his own mouth, warm and soggy with saliva that burned when it hit his tongue. He chewed, swallowed; the taste of bile flooded his mouth, and he didn't know if it was the venom or his own stomach revolting.
Left with no other option, Baigan scooped up another clump of wet meat, then another that caught on the serpent's fangs, forcing him to pull it shred by shred out with his teeth. After a few more mouthfuls, the venom had started to raise blisters on his tongue and the insides of his cheeks. Baigan chewed as carefully as he could, but one of the boils still burst, flooding his mouth with salty fluid and leaving an open, bloody sore.
He swallowed as much as he could, then had to dunk his head in the wash basin to shock himself out of vomiting it all up and having to start again.
Scarmiglione was dead. Cecil was alive. Golbez was furious. Baigan couldn't have cared less about any of it.
You could always hear Cagnazzo coming -- he made a sound like someone dragging a sack through a waist-deep swamp. The Archfiend of Water had long since stopped pretending to be human, so the throne stood empty now as Cagnazzo lumbered through the halls on obscure errands, sometimes still vaguely wearing the form of the dead king like a threadbare shirt.
"Lord Golbez wants to see you," Cagnazzo said. He didn't knock, or even bother to actually enter the room -- instead, he flowed through the gap underneath the door, a puddle of brackish water that rippled when it spoke. At least he hadn't dripped out of the walls this time. Baigan wondered how far Cagnazzo was spread throughout the castle -- if there was anywhere you could go where he wasn't listening in.
"About what?" Baigan said. He'd been laying on his bed staring up at the ceiling for some time now, and he didn't feel like getting up without a good reason.
Curled up across his chest, the serpents hissed and twisted. Baigan hadn't slept in days -- the beasts had been distressed after the death of the Archfiend of Earth, who seemed in some way to be their creator. Absent Baigan's conscious control they began to tear at the bed sheets and thrash him awake if he did manage to drift off. Once, his left hand had even swallowed a ball of feathers from the remains of his pillow, and he'd spent half an hour on the floor choking up the damp mass. It was a sensation his brain could barely comprehend, something like a muscle cramp and something like choking to death. Fortunately, his magic was powerful enough that incinerating anything the serpents vomited up was trivial, but for all his newfound strength there wasn't a single scrap of it that seemed useful for soothing his pounding head or granting him a good night's rest.
He was hungry, and THEY were hungry too -- the dungeons were empty now. Monsters didn't bother taking prisoners.
"Your assistance is needed," Cagnazzo reiterated, his voice slimy like he was just barely managing to hold back mocking laughter. "You remember the old Lord Commander? The dark knight?"
"Fuck him," Baigan growled, in no mood to be diplomatic. Cagnazzo laughed.
"I believe Lord Golbez wants you to kill him," the monster warbled. "But I suppose whatever you do before or after is your business."
"Is he sending us out to find him? Honestly, I don't know why it even matters -- just let the sniveling bastard tromp around the world if he wants--"
"He's coming here." There was a brief silence as Baigan pondered this, punctuated by the occasional drip of water. "Right into our jaws."
Baigan thought for a moment. Cecil wasn't a wizard, so Baigan would have to kill him with his bare hands. He'd have to break a leg to get him on the ground, maybe maim an arm to get him to drop his weapon -- ordinarily not a problem, but if he still carried the arms of a dark knight, Baigan worried might not to be able to tear through that as easily as he did ordinary metal. Once he got past that, though, Baigan could pin Cecil down and batter him until his jaw cracked, exactly as he'd always daydreamed about doing when arguments in the King's audience hall dragged on too long. He could do worse, if he wanted.
Distantly, Baigan felt like he ought to be excited, but his body might as well have been made of lead as he dragged himself unsteadily to the door.
Fresh meat, after all, was fresh meat.
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