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With a painful sudden deep gasp for breathe V’rklar awoke curled on the smooth cold metal floor, he could barely make out his helmet lying on the floor near his face as his vision began to un-blur and slowly fade in the details of the room. For a moment he forgot where he was and how he had come to be laying here his incubi retainers shattered and bleeding out around him in a nearly perfect circle, and then he saw her perched in the distance, head turned to the side unnaturally like a leering gargoyle, sleek and covered in black ghost skin armor with a silvered featureless faceplate.

He should have never come…

V’rklar began to push himself up with one arm to try and rise and with a preternatural swiftness the creature lept across the room and was bearing down on him, pinning V’rklar to the ground. V’rklar reached up quickly and put his right hand near the creatures head, in one fluid motion quickly snapped his hand back, grinning wryly. The creature shook its head ever so subtly and V’rklar heard a distant giggle from behind what must have been its mask, followed by a soft female voice “Do you really think I left your weapons on you?”

Panic ran through V’rklar suddenly, somehow she knew about his concealed venom blade. The only people who had ever seen it left that secret with their lives at the end of his blade. The creature seemed to want him to panic, and did nothing for a moment relishing in his panic. Right as V’rklar began to regain his composure and was debating what he could offer to save his life the creature moved quickly, lifting V’rklar from the ground with both hands and in a rolling toss throwing him across the room to where she had been waiting watching him as he came to from unconsciousness. He flew gracelessly through the air and slammed into the wall, hard. Pain wracked his body, it was welcome to him and jolted his system, and quickly he pulled himself up into a defensive position ready to attack.

The creature did not follow up on him; she had taken a crouching position as if ready to leap and pounce on V’rklar again but made no move. Slowly her hands moved up in a pattern like how smoke would move if made flesh and grasped her facemask, small red lights flashed on the smooth surface around her fingertips in recognition patterns followed rapidly by soft hissing sounds as her face plate detached from the rest of her armor like a hemisphere revealing her face, a hideous almost insane grin stretched across her alabaster skin from ear to ear, row upon row of sharp needle like teeth exposed. Her pupils were dilated to the extent that her eyes looked like solid inky black pools of darkness.

V’rklar was actually shocked for one of the few moments in his life as he stared upon the dark elder woman across from him. “Surprised?” he heard the creature whisper. It could not possible be her, it looked like her but the teeth had been filed down into needle like points with more needle like teeth implanted between them, her eyes were completely drugged out looking but she was too composed for the amount of drugs that requires, it had to be something else.

V’rklar snickered feigning to not be surprised and cynically stated, “You must have paid off one of the haemonoculli well to go against Vects wishes that you never be brought back” he noted how amused she looked at his statement. She seemed eager, almost waiting for the question and began circling slowly to her left, eyes always on V’rklar as his were on hers, “oh, there was no deal. It was not they who brought me back” she paused ever so briefly and narrowed her eyes at V’rklar, “do not worry your little head archon, for I will answer what you really want to know. Why Vect ordered my death and barred my resurrection for all time”
V’rklar knew this was his chance, he couldn’t look down at the dead incubi in the room, that would give away what he was thinking, but he remembered when he was on the ground the demiklaive that lay on the ground near where he had tried to get up from, and she was circling away from it. He would in a quick move lunge to where she was heading, then tumble the opposite direction across the ground and grab it, spin and lunge slash at her. He narrowed his eyes slightly at her and her grin just got bigger and she nodded ever so slightly almost approvingly of all that was happening.

Even though V’rklar was unnerved slightly it didn’t show, he didn’t care what was going to happen this was actually exciting in a way. He lunged towards her extremely quickly, and in an almost impossible series of rapid movements pivoted all his force away and curled into a ball tumbling across the room, not even an instant later he found the demiklaive in his grasp and as suddenly as it was right under his hand some force seemed to pull on the demiklaive as if reality itself had folded or snapped in the space between the weapon and the woman across the room. She stood there merely smiling as her hand gripped around the hilt of the demiklaive, her head rotated to the side in an impossible angle like an owls and her tongue lashed out between her needle-like teeth in delight, a long fleshy tendril of blackness.

V’rklar simply sneered in disdain and muttered in obvious anger, “impossible” then in pure rage he yelled out an ancient curse word in disbelief at what had happened.
She turned the demiklaive blade downward to the ground and snickered stating as if to a child, “Vect killed me because unlike the rest of you I understand what lies beyond the void, I know what lies in the shadow. Like those we disdain I have foresight. Foresight that draws them ever closer, yet when they came to me it was not for my flesh, not for my soul, but for my loyalty.” Her tongue lashed out of her mouth and licked the hilt of the blade like a long tendril of darkness then quickly retracted back into her mouth

“You will let Vect know that it is not revenge I seek, and I no longer want anything to do with Commoragh.” Before V’rklar could curse her out and tell her he would never be her messenger, she had charged across the room and in one fluid motion lashed out with the demiklaive and severed V’rklars outstretched right hand. The hand fell to the ground before V’rklar realized what had happened, blood spurting from the stump on the floor below him. The sudden drop in blood pressure made everything turn fuzzy and grey before he felt the stim injectors in the back of his armor prick his spine and flow coagulants and stim straight into his system. The blood stopped spurting out quickly as pain washed through V’rklars body, the stim made his heart pound hard in his chest as blood flow was restored, his vision coming back from the brink of passing out.

“Oh I didn’t miss your head, and you will surely be dead and when they bring you back so you can tell them I live, considering the story I plan on engraving onto your skull for them I don’t think that will be much of a question. Which is of course what I meant by I would tell you why Vect ordered my execution. Before that however, you will suffer. Greatly.” the woman hissed as she lunged the demiklaives blade down and across V’rklars foot, the powered weapon slicing through his armored foot as if it were air and severing all the toes in his right foot unevenly. V’rklar howled in pain staring in horror at his foot as he fell to the ground, the leering woman’s grin impossibly huge with needle like teeth drooling down on him. He thought he saw the shadows come to life and move around her watching him in pain like many things drawn to a fire…

Coldly echoing through the room the last thing he remembered hearing over his own screams was “my pretty little archon, do not worry what I cut away will be less and less each time before you die, we don’t want this to be wasted after all.”