![]() ‘Always they say they will be the one to prevail. ‘You must know how few of you find what you seek,’ said the haemonculus. You will never find another drug quite as intoxicating as the changing of the flesh, little bird. ‘I will leave this city of filth behind.’ He felt delicate frills of flesh there, and the nerve endings he found fired back sensations from skin and muscle he had never possessed before. ‘Then I will.’ Skanis reached a hand behind him. Commorragh will not let you go with ease. You need thermal currents for the first time. I am so glad I found a home for them before they decayed.’ ![]() ‘Indeed, it is as you wished,’ said Urviel. Skanis craned his neck, trying to get a glimpse behind him. My speciality.’ Urviel’s fingers folded in on themselves like the fronds of an anemone. Do you like vertebrae? You have many more. Your pelvis is new – something of my own design. ‘What have you done?’ he asked, his throat so raw that the words came out in a croaking hiss. He moved an arm experimentally, and the limb reacted with an insect-like quickness. His whole body felt tuned up and tightened. The pain was pooling now in the areas the haemonculus had worked on – his knees, hips and shoulders, two hot red strips down his back, a deep throbbing ache in his bones. He still wore the battlegear of his warrior clan, now opened up in several places, recut and cinched in around his new, slenderer frame. His body felt different – tauter, quicker and more sensitive. He stumbled, his legs unsteady beneath him. Skanis released his ankles and slid off the slab. Rib spreaders, circular saws, industrial shears, bottled organs and a bowl of eyes. Every workbench and operating slab was covered in the detritus of Urviel’s work. The floor was swamped with noxious fluid. Cages held heaps of spoil and rags that might once have been alive. Body parts from a dozen species hung on the walls, arms and legs racked together, heads hanging by lengths of chain from the ceiling. The laboratory was almost pitch black and infernally hot. Skanis pulled at the strap around his remaining wrist as the haemonculus backed away. It released the buckle holding the strap around Skanis’ neck, then freed one of his hands. A mockery of contriteness passed over its mutilated features. He realised the creature’s promise to transform him could have been a trick to lure him upon the slab in order to experiment on him forever, to turn him over and over again into new shapes of malleable flesh until his life finally gave out. A panic welled in him and he wondered if he would ever leave the haemonculus’ lab. The tide of pain was receding, slowly relinquishing each joint and organ. One of its extra arms ran bladed fingers down Skanis’ chest. A filthy length of hide was wrapped around its waist, with pockets and loops holding blades and drills of every dimension. Four many-jointed arms sprouted from his shoulders, each ending in medical implements and powered saws instead of fingers. Its emaciated ribcage was skinless and organs slithered between the white bones. The haemonculus’ face was a mask made from the skin of another creature, fastened to the front of its skull by metal staples. The face of the haemonculus grinned down at him. ![]() He forced his eyes open and his sight, sharpened by hours in darkness, picked out the glimmer of metal. Another restraint around his neck choked him as his body arched against the slab. He felt his wrists and ankles straining at the straps that held him down. It would become a part of him from which he could not separate, and he would never wake up. He felt it galloping up and down his spine, accompanied by the slow suffusing of his brain until his senses were bathed in red agony. It was a rising and seductive pain a delicious, serpentine thing that wound around his bones and seethed through his muscles. But Commorragh is covetous, and it will not let anything escape without a fight. Now, he must reach the sky in order to join his new bretheren. He has been remade into a scourge, winged eldar who fly far above the city, living among the spires that scratch the dark heavens of Commorragh. He has betrayed his kabal, paid in blood, and bought his reward. ![]() To do this, he has sought out a drukhari flesh crafter, one of the dreaded haemonculi of Commorragh. This is the story of Skanis, a kabalite warrior with dreams of escaping the dark and petty world below, for one of freedom and meaning. What motivates a kabalite soldier, a wych cultist, or a petty lord? What motivates their schemes and treacheries? So when I read this short story, I had to share it. I don't know much about the day to day life in Commorragh, and certainly even less about every day life of an ordinary drukhari. Raids onto imperial worlds for slaves, harvesting tyranids for the gladiator pits, or sitting there doing that finger arch thing muttering "Just as I planned" before cackling menacingly. When I think of the Dark Eldar, I think of them on the hunt. ![]()
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