Steven Montano: Black Scars

Black splashed her drink onto Kane’s face. Kane laughed, Black laughed, and Cross laughed, too, and they kept laughing together deep into the night.

Steven Alan Montano

Black Scars

It stirs. It breathes.

It slips through oceans of pain. Eyes like sharp white blades blink and struggle against the tide of blood that washes its body down the river. The flow is turgid and thick. Unknown fish, eyeless and pale, slither against its legs. Its body thuds against rough stones in the river.

It is underground again, confined to black fluid.

Another prison.

No. This is different. Not a prison. An escape.

It fell. The Pale Goddess has bested it again. Her servant found a way to reform, to pass its powers on so that they could be yielded by the warlock.

The Sleeper will do the same. Even now, a fragment of its greater whole lives on. It rests in the consciousness of this man, this barely living creature who floats in oil-black waters in an underground river. The body is not whole. It has been engineered, modified by unnatural means. Some of those means are familiar to the Sleeper, as the science is based on its own physiognomy.

Curious, the Sleeper looks closer, into the heart of this man. He has been re-imagined, organs and limbs replaced. His blade, an unholy thing made of fused realities and twisted thaumaturgic science, is still in his hand, and its power sustains him, keeps him alive.

He will do. Even that fragment of the Sleeper's form is enough to animate this dying husk, this hybridized being. He will live as a host.

His muscles darken as the Sleeper takes full control of his faculties. It slides into his pulsing muscles and forces itself into the space behind his eyes. It activates necrotic engines in the man's circulatory system so that they pump blood into his darkened heart. It grips the blade, and dark power that even the brilliant architects of the weapon couldn't fathom pour through its body and lend it strength.

When the waters exit the ruins beneath the ice city and spill into the arctic wastes, the man called Jennar rises, infused with the power of The Black.