Yet there was something else. If he agreed to her will, there would be a hand over his life, turning him this way and that, as a child at play moved a doll. I will be but a plaything, and her my master. All that he could and would rule would only be at her behest….
Cracks began to grow in the shell of his bliss, and more quickly still, fear wriggled in through those rents, sinking into him. He blinked rapidly, trying to focus not on her promise and the visions, but on her being. He saw beauty, to be sure, but also something menacing, unholy.
Her eyes, black through and through, narrowed, as if she had read the thoughts written on his soul and found them wanting. A part of him perished when her lips parted, revealing a mesh of perfectly mated black fangs. When she spoke again, her voice was uncompromising.
“Take what I offer, and live a long and full life of ease and power … or deny me and suffer the blackest ways of death, again and again, forever.”
Kian swallowed, his previous bliss fled as new visions, all of horror and pain, shrieked through his being. He had never known such pure terror. Against his will, his thoughts slipped again toward accepting everything she had put forward, if only to spare him the torments she threatened.
“My patience has limits. Do you accept what I give?”
She glided toward him, floating above the marble tiles, until she was near enough that he felt a terrible cold pouring off her marvelous flesh. She seemed less substantial than before, somehow transparent. Despite this, the frigid touch of her presence wafted off her, draining from Kian all hope.
She leaned close enough that he could see the tips of her obsidian teeth digging into befouled black gums. “Answer me,” she grated.
“Who are you?” he stammered, hoping for time enough to clear his mind.
“Humans,” she said with loathing, “ever inquisitive about that which you can only have the most rudimentary understanding.”
She abruptly swept a hand over him and, by means beyond his ken, lifted and moved him across the floor without touching him. She halted him and forced his eyes to look directly upon three wizened figures, materialized from nothing save the very air he breathed. The figures had nearly transparent gray skin, withered into hanging folds, and sunken pits where eyes had once been. Even in their deteriorated states, Kian gleaned that these creatures were no more human that the woman controlling him.
“To know and accept who I am, you must first know who they were,” she said, pointing to the woman. “There is Hiphkos the Contemplator, the Leviathan.”
Kian’s lips moved, trying for words that would not come. None of this could be real, but if not then he had gone irrevocably insane.
She inclined her head toward the man next in line. He was striking, even in death, a stern grandfather. “Attandaeus the Blood Hawk, the Watcher Who Judges.”
Next she swept a hand toward a huge, bluff-featured man. “Memokk the Bull, the Vanquisher. They were my creators-my parents, as it were, the Three, dead long ages of men.”
The woman rounded on Kian, beautiful despite the terrible jet fangs lurking behind her lips. Suddenly she shone bright from within, like the sun seen rising behind a wall of morning fog. But for all her radiance, he saw that she was a creature of absolute darkness.
“You are a goddess?” Kian asked, his brow slicked with icy sweat.
“Some have named me so,” she said with a mischievous smile that stilled his heart.
“Then,” he rasped, trying to understand, to voice aloud what his heart knew but was afraid to bring into the light. For a season I have felt and watched you. The memory of her words roared within his mind like a storm-tossed sea. He squinted against her dazzling glare. “Are you-”
Her laughter, cruel and mirthless, cut him off.
For a season he had known he was hunted. Whatever and whoever she was, this creature had hounded him since he had fled Varis’s impossible power at the temple in the Qaharadin Marshes. She had come to him in the flesh of Fenahk, later as Bresado, and too, wearing the skin of a hedge witch.
As his understanding grew, he saw a fleeting shadow under her luminous, shimmering beauty change into a monstrosity. From within, tentacles pushed against her translucent skin, distending and distorting once perfect flesh. Before he could cry out, her hand streaked to his chest, her touch was hate and agony.
“You would know who I am, Kian Valara?”
An ugly purple tongue, incredibly long and slick, flicked out between her fangs and slid between his lips, probing at his teeth as if for an intimate kiss, then slithered back with a horrid squelching sound. He gagged on the reek of corpses.
“I am Peropis, Eater of the Damned, Queen of Demons and Ruler of Geh’shinnom’atar!” Like thunder, her voice rolled through the palace, quivering its foundations, before gradually fading. In the ensuing hush, she leaned close and whispered, “Will you accept what I would give, or will you deny me and suffer for a thousand and a thousand lifetimes?”
All that Kian was quailed in fear … but his fear served as a keen blade, deftly cutting away the fog of confusion born of her presence. His gaze rolled toward his fallen friends, Hazad and Azuri, his brothers … and the corpse of the woman he had barely known, yet loved with all his heart. He would not despoil their deaths by accepting the accursed gift of this creature, which had given rise to the living weapon that was Varis, who in turn had brought about their deaths. If his destiny was to suffer, then he would gladly do so, even if it meant only that he remained undefiled by human weakness and treachery against the memory of his companions.
“Keep your gifts, demon whore!” Kian roared.
Peropis instantly dropped him to the floor, regarding him with a menace unlike any he had ever known. He almost wished he could take back his defiance, but knew that everlasting pain was better than bowing to such a damned creature as this.
The last of her beauty broke apart, while that which lived under her skin ripped completely free. Splits showed in spectral skin, lashing tentacles sprang from her torso, legs, and arms. As she continued to change, his bowels boiled to water, his tongue withered like a worm dropped on a blistering rock. Every muscle in his body began to shiver, and his skin seemingly tried to crawl off that dancing meat.
With a cry, Peropis lurched forward on her own legs, and also upon a writhing tangle of thrashing black appendages. The motion was sickeningly inhuman, a rolling, bouncing gait. Her fingertips ruptured, exposing talons as black as her fangs, and she reached for him, her arms thinning as they lengthened.
“As you have chosen to deny me, now you will taste my wrath!” she cried, spraying the air with spittle that carried the putrefying stench of bodies dragged from swampy graves.
The force of her words smashed into Kian, sending him sliding over cold stone toward the blazing portal to what could be no less than Peropis’s domain, Geh’shinnom’atar, the Thousand Hells. His fingernails clawed frantically at the smooth tiles, dragging him to a halt bare inches from falling into that nightmare realm.
At a deranged shout of protest, Peropis abruptly ceased her attack and wheeled, her twisted and tentacled figure swaying.
Varis, snarling like a rabid wolf, jabbed his dagger in her direction. “You gave me your gift! It is mine, not another’s. With it, I will destroy you-though not just yet.” He spoke as if he held the power to do so and, as impossible as it was to conceive, Peropis recoiled as if she, too, believed.