The Stone Heart's Lament
Here be Monsters

“Doctor?” A femaletechnician poked her head around the door, cutting off the argument betweenRuthy and Baillargeon. The woman, who was around the same age as Rasharihimself, looked harried, almost panicked.

“What is it?”Baillargeon rounded on the technician, whirling on stick-thin legs, his whitecoat flapping. The technician flinched back a step.

“S-sir, there’s aproblem with subject Thirty-Two. Doctor Monsell asked me to come and get you.”

“Can that bloodywoman not do her job without constant supervision?” Baillargeon demanded ofeveryone and no one at once. “What is the problem this time?” He snapped outbetween precise clicks of his teeth.

“Sir,” The technicianbit her lip. “It’s happening again, just like subject Seventeen.”

Baillargeon paled, heopened his mouth and then closed it without making a sound, teetering on hisback foot, caught on the edge of taking a step back. He caught himself at thelast instant. Rashari was surprised when he turned to glare directly at him.

“Get up, you arecoming with me. I will not lose another test subject.” He whirled and strodetoward the door, forcing the technician to take a hurried step back.

Rashari was hauled tohis feet by his two guards and frog-marched out the door. He was aware of Ruthyand Jaquard falling into step behind him. Assistant Thibeaux and the femaletechnician ran along at the very rear. They formed an odd procession marchingthrough the complex. Rashari looked around him, noted the many small roomscrammed with computers and work stations, staffed with white coatedtechnicians, most of whom didn’t even look up at their passing. There wereseveral security doors, manned by Imperial soldiers, and a series of gangtrywalkways suspended over a mass of pulsing generators and pipes. They crossedinto another of the buildings adjoining the tower and past a series of offices.Another checkpoint and a set of stairs led them into the tower proper – Rasharicould tell immediately. There was an ache in the walls, which fairely groanedwith ghosts pressed into the masonry.

The moment theadjoining door hissed closed with a whisper of pressurised air Rashari becameaware of the screaming – a hideous, mangled sound – barely human. It was comingfrom below them, the walls of the tower echoing with the sound. The reek ofphantasma and anima hit his nostrils like the proverbial blast from the past ashis guards marched him down a spiral stair. He knew where they were headed,down into the bowls of the tower –the big hollow chamber where the pipes cameup from the ground - the place where his father had imprisoned Smith all thoseyears ago. Dread settled like a rock in the pit of his stomach. The screaming grewlouder the lower they went.

The stench of animaand phantasma gas at the bottom of the stairs was thick enough to make him gag.The basement laboratory was much as he remembered it; a large stone chamberfilled with equipment. The walls were lined with humming machinery, the stonefloor striped with heavy cables feeding power between relays. Dozens of pipessprouted from the floor and climbed the walls to the ceiling like steel platedcolumns. Instead of Smith’s glass and steel bell-jar cage, a series ofexamination tables had been bolted to the floor inside a transparent glass room.It had four walls and a glass ceiling and sat in the middle of the chamber likean upside-down fishtank. Ventilation grates were set high up in the glass wallsand there was an almost invisible door cut into one side. The screaming wascoming from one of the -things – strapped down to the examination beds.

There were six bedsin total, and five of them appeared to be occupied by people. They had arms,legs, heads and torsos –and he was reasonably sure they were human. Each wasrestrained to the bed in four point restraints. Clumps of electrodes and wiressprouted from their chests like fungal growths. Each person on a bed wore anodd contraption around their head. It looked like a cross between a helmet anda halo; an almost delicate mesh of dainty wires criss-crossing back and forthbetween sunction pads and electrodes attached directly to the shaved head ofeach test subject. Twinkling lights sparked between the wires framing theirheads, glittering in jewel bright colours like the nodes on a technomanticinterface. More tubes and wires crawled down the test subjects’ arms, whichwere skewered with needles. Four of the test subjects were pale skinned, andthe flesh of their arms was livid with the tell-tale mark of necromanticpoisoning - under grey skin their veins burned black as coal. All five of thediscernably human test subjects were completely still and limp, lying naked anduncovered on the beds; only the upward rise and fall of the thicket of wires,tubes and electrodes clumped over their hearts suggesting their bodies stillbreathed. The sixth test subject was another story altogether.

“Chaos take me,”Jaquard breathed at Rashari’s shoulder sounding genuinely shocked. “What isthat thing?”

A trio of lab coatedscientists had gathered around the sixth examination bed. Two of the three weretrying to hold down the thrashing, screaming body just barely secured to thetable while the third – a woman in middle age with salt and pepper hair pulledback into a severe bun –tried to inject the subject with something. That wasn’twhat stole the breath from Rashari’s lungs and made him feel weak at the kneeshowever.

There was a shard of greencrystal growing out of the test subject’s chest. It was about as long and aswide as Rashari’s forearm, and was the colour of a rain washed emerald. Atfirst Rashari thought the test subject had been impaled. Then the test subject– a man – bucked up from the bed, his spine bowing, and Rashari saw that theflesh of his torso was studded with much smaller outcroppings of the same colouredcrystal. His skin, once a rich ebony was now dark grey, thin and flaking awayaround patches of glittering multi-faceted crystal. The major protrusioncentred over his chest looked like a geode. Smaller spears of crystalline stonesprouted like sunbeams from his breastbone in all directions, framing thelarger spear which struck straight up out of his chest. Rashari had never seenanything like it. The man was becoming living crystal.

Baillargeon grabbedhis arm, his bony fingers digging in sharply. “Do something. Fix this.” Thescientist hissed, all but throwing him toward the glass box. Baillargeonslapped his hand on the computerised security pad, wrenched open the glass doorand hauled Rashari toward the sixth examination bed. Rashari was too stunned toresist.

Up close the sightwas even more horrifying. He looked down at the man’s face. Wild eyes stared upat him. (Gods above, the man was awake.)A ridge of crystal crusted over his eyebrows and down the bridge of his nose.Sharp crystal spikes ruptured his left cheek, and the man’s jaw rolledunnaturally, lips spreading open oddly, as if his mouth was full of crystalinside and out. Rashari tried not to imagine crystals crawling down the man’sesophagus even as the man screamed his throat raw. There was nothing sane inthe man’s eyes. They rolled wildly in their sockets, the whites yellowed withold blood from numerous burst capillaries. When Rashari caught the man’s gazebriefly all he saw was acres and acres of mindless animal agony. Rashari jerkedhis gaze away, and ended up staring down at his chest and the mass of crystalgrowing there. There was something at the very centre, sitting at the base ofthe crystal protrusion. The crystal shard wasn’t growing directly out of the man’sheart after all, instead it was....

“....No. No.” Rasharijerked back, ripping his arm free of Baillargeon. He felt as wild and crazed asthe man on the bed looked. He thought he might throw up. He stared atBaillargeon. “No you didn’t. Tell me you didn’t use the scion stone for this.”

He took another stepback and crashed into the nearest examination bed, his back thunking agains thethe stainless steel edge. Unthinkingly he reached out behind him to steadyhimself and his fingers brushed against cool, clammy skin. He flinched, whirledaround and stared at the woman lying on the bed. Embedded into the fleshbetween her breasts sat a very familiar piece of dull grey-white stone, nolarger than a coin, smooth as an ocean pebble – a piece of Smith’s shatteredscion stone. A piece no different than the one he’d carried embedded in hisleft palm. Rashari clenched his fists reflexively, acutely aware of the roughedged hole in his palm. He’d known that more pieces of Smith’s scion stoneexisted. He’d known that his father and DeLunde must have them, but he’d neverimagined, never dreamed that they’duse them for this.

“What did you do?” Hedemanded, voice rising and cracking but he just didn’t care. “Pit damn you – what have you done?”

The man on the bedscreamed again, bucking off the bed, head thrown back, broken jaw open wide ona garbled, horrendous howl. Baillargeon snatched his arm and threw him forwardagain.

“You can control it.”He hissed in Rashari’s ear, the spindly man somehow replaceing the strength to allbut bend Rashari over the bed, until his face was dangerously close to thelongest point of crystal. “Fix this. Stop this from happening.”

Rashari stared atBaillargeon, shaken out of his horror just enough to feel something likestunned incredulity. “Fix it? How can I fix this? I don’t...I don’t even thoughwhat you’ve done.”

Baillargeon openedhis mouth, might even have answered him, but whatever answer he might havegiven was cut off before it could begin when the man on the bed lunged forward,head lashing up like a striking snake, and one arm twisting free of therestraint. He grabbed Rashari as the nearest warm body. The man’s cold, clammyhand latched around his left wrist.

“No!”

It felt like he’djust shoved his head into a phantasma engine; it felt like he’d just drained awhole magazine of necromantic bullets. A connection formed between Rashari andthe man-monster on the bed. He felt the negative space that had eaten the manalive – his body was a ruined sepulchre, a breathing graveyard for ghosts, anytrace of the man who once lived in this body devoured by the death energy he’dbeen forced to channel through the scion fragment stuck in his chest. Rasharisaw it all, like a play enacted before his eyes. He saw what DeLunde had done,how they’d charged the scion fragments with necromantic energy, like a miniphantasma battery, and stuck it right over the man’s heart. He felt the ghostmemory of necromantic poisoning creeping through the man’s body, leaving himneither dead nor alive, his heart rotten and cold but still beating. He feltthe ghost aftershocks reverberating through the man’s still breathing corpse ashe was blasted with wave after wave of phantasma-anima fumes. DeLunde had hopedthe scion fragment would start to convert the energy, becoming a deificcatalyst, drawing on the tiny whisper of life still trapped in the man’s bodyto power the conversion.

This was how DeLunde was producing their deific power. Thesepoor bastards - they were nothing more than living batteries, short lived andeasily discarded. None of these men and women would ever be catalysts; theywere dead in their souls and their ghosts had been devoured by the wraithsinside the phantasma Baillargeon had poisoned them with. There was no way to fix any of this. The bodies on the bedswere beyond any help. They weren’t people anymore. They weren’t monsters, likeRashari and his scorpion. Their bodies were turning into pure deificcrystal.

Rashari didn’t havetime to pity the poor bastards, nor did have any chance of stopping what wasabout to happen. A connection had been forged, and just like he would whenexposed to any direct source of death magic Rashari felt the scorpion’s hungerrising up. The scorpion used Rashari’s shock to its advantage, surging upwardsto the surface. To the scorion the man strapped to the bed was another meal, nodifferent from a phantasma engine or a handful of necro bullets. The scorpion’shunger flooded his brain until Rashari couldn’t tell where it ended and hebegan. (Maybe there was no difference? Maybe he was the hunger and the hungerwas him.) His fingers curled around the man’s cold hand, gripping tight. Lightflared in front of his eyes, his vision washed away in cold white. He tastedstatic, the clean bite of shaved ice, and smelled the sickly sweet reek ofspoiled meat. He heard a rushing in his ears, a roar like the crash of hugewaves, or the howl of a gale through a tunnel. The scorpion drank deep.

It was over quickly.He felt a surge of energy, his heart skipping a beat, his breath catching in ahiccup of brief euphoria as the ghosts festering inside the man’s body flowedup through his arm, sparking free of the spikes of crystal bursting out of hisflesh, and into Rashari. They flowed into him, and the scorpion swallowed themall down, down into the vast emptiness at its heart. He felt it when the man’sheart stopped.

Rashari opened hiseyes, releasing the man’s limp hand. The dead man’s eyes stared upward, cloudedwhite like the eyes of a dead fish. There was a powdery residue covering theman’s face. Rashari looked down at his chest. The outcropping of crystals hadshattered into tiny shards, little splinters of glittering glass and greentinted powder. Pieces of the crystal covered the man’s chest and the tableunderneath him. Powder residue also covered the front of Rashari’s coat, andcoated his lips when he flicked his tongue out to wet them. It would be wrongto say that the man looked restful laying there, the crystal extrusions thathad crusted his body like open sores nothing more than shining powder limninghis dead skin, but he at least had the dignity of looking human in death.

Slowly Rashari liftedhis head to look at the other people gathered against the far wall of the glassbox. Baillargeon stared at him, expression caught between fear and outrage. Thefemale scientist with the silvered bun looked pale, Jaquard was not smiling andRuthy was frowning. Rashari blinked, feeling strangely quiet inside, his oldwounds not quite closed, the coldness of the hunger still clinging to his skin.The scorpion was with him, sitting just behind his eyes, but sated andquiescent. Distantly he knew that the scorpion was always the most dangerouswhen it appeared resting but the thought was dull and vague. He couldn’t makehimself feel alarmed about what had just happened. Everything seemed just alittle unreal. (Perhaps he was in shock? Perhaps all this was just aparticularly hideous nightmare? Maybe he’d wake up if he pinched himself?)

“You were supposed tostop it.” Baillargeon said, voice quavering not with fear but anger. “Youstupid boy; you were supposed to save the subject.”

“I did.” He replied,and his voice sounded odd to his ears. He thought that he should worry aboutthat too. He smiled instead, smiled and fixed Baillargeon with eyes he didn’tknow burned blue. The scientist blanched. Rashari laughed and felt the scorpionshift a little, like a lazy predator curled around his thoughts. His smilestretched wider, showing teeth. It was about time these bastards rememberedthat he was the biggest monster inthe room.