Context: A man named Abrahem Locke is reliving the memories of an Arco-Flagellant, formerly known as Lukasz Krol.
Piezo-edged bone saws extruded from the arms of the throne and sliced through his wrists with ultra-rapid precision. Blood jetted explosively, but even as the agony cut through his diminishing chemical haze, cauterising heat was brought to bear, sealing the stumps with a single pulse of agonising heat. As horrifying as the removal of his hands had been, it was nothing compared to what came next.
Clicking machines with calliper hands like the nightmarish claws of a demented toymaker began stripping the skin, muscle and nerve tissue from his forearms all the way to the elbow. Surgical flesh-weavers layered replacement nerve-strands over the reinforced bone and grafted fibre-bundle muscle in place of the discarded organic tissue.
His chest heaved and his limbs thrashed against the restraints. They simply tightened in response. He couldn’t move. He could only watch as his entire body was pared back and remade. Sealed caskets rotated up from the floor and opened with pneumatic hisses of condensing air. The monotonous stream of binaric nonsense the tech-priests were chanting faltered fractionally as the caskets opened to reveal the weapons within.
Such awesome tools of destruction required reverence.
Through a haze of tears and hate, he watched two of the machine priests step forwards and attach the devices to his arms using implanted bolt-drivers, neural shears, flesh grafts and sacred unguents. He felt every insertion, every bolt driving down into bone and every screaming horror of exposed nerves being spliced together. A burst of power surged through him, and telescoping carbon-steel electro-flails twitched and danced as ancient, barely-understood circuitry meshed with his crude organic functionality. The gurney tipped backwards, and the drills, excising machinery and clamps went to work on his skull. Trepanning picks bored through bone and the clicking, mechanised hands inserted neural control implants before finally removing the upper dome of his skull. He felt the lid of bone creaking upwards and the horror of his mind being exposed was almost too much to bear.
Sacred arrangements of sacred oil were dripped into his brain cavity, with each anointing accompanied by the sixteen names of the binary saints. Spinning orbs with mechanical blade limbs as thin as spider legs clicked into place before him, whirring with demented glee.
No, no, no, no, not my–
The whirring orbs stabbed forwards and plucked out his eyes.
This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body!
Delicate clamps kept his optic nerves taut as complex targeting arrays, broad-spectrum threat analysers and visio-cognitive orbs were attached in place of his eyes and implanted into his skull. A cranial cowl that was part devotional feed, part cortical inhibitor and part death-mask was slotted home, lowered over his slack features and wired to the frontal lobes of what remained of his brain as hymnals blared from unseen augmitters. Like the grinning skull faceplates of the Chaplains of the Adeptus Astartes, it was the rictus agony of the Emperor, and all those whose doomed fate it was to look upon him would know he had been punished by an agency beyond that of mere men. Detailed schematics of the body-plans of the men before him sprang up on the inner surfaces of his eyes, complete with endurable stresses, violation tolerances and a hundred other measures of how they could be ripped into screaming ruin.
The work continued for another hour, agony upon agony, horror upon horror, until there was little sign that a human being had once sat in the throne-gurney. The mortal meat of Lukasz Król had been scraped away and replaced with an instrument of death and annihilation. Only Abrehem remained and even he was a ravaged shell, cored out by the same processes that had made sport of this man’s flesh.
Yet even as his consciousness wept and wished for extinction, he felt the soaring ecstasy of having the power of life and death. For all intents and purposes, he was no longer human, his body enhanced to lethal levels of killing power and stripped back to the most basic physiological functions.
Lukasz Król had effectively ceased to exist, and in his place sat something else.
Something altogether more dangerous and more appalling. ‘It is done,’ said the pontifex, with a solemn nod, stepping forwards and dipping his fingers in an inkhorn of sanctified pigment that a genuflecting tech-priest held out before him. He drew four parallel lines of crimson down the skull mask.
‘In Thor’s Blood are ye anointed. In Thor’s Blood shall ye awaken,’ said the pontifex.
Rivulets of paint slid down the mask like tears of blood, dripping onto a chest that now bulged with cardio-pulmonary enhancers, adrenal-slammers and dormant steroidal compounds. Spinal implants snaked down his back in a chain of injectors, and stimm-reservoirs on his shoulders gave him a hulking, over-muscled proportion to his upper body.
He was a killer now, a render of flesh, a weapon and an act of retribution all in one.
Abrehem revelled in this new incarnation, a being of almost unlimited violent potential to whom no atrocity was beyond his capabilities, no loathsome act of utmost cruelty beneath him. With all need for moral pretence torn away, Abrehem saw the full horror of what Lukasz Król had done, the torture palaces, the rape gulags and the experimentation camps where he had personally overseen all manner of unimaginable affronts to the Emperor.
This was good.
They thought they had taken away his life and made him their own, but they were wrong.
The killer had always been in him.
All they had done was strip the mask of humanity away to rebuild him stronger and more lethal than ever.
‘I take from you the name of Lukasz Król,’ said the pontifex, dipping his hand in the pigment once more and drawing another series of four vertical lines down Król’s chest. The ablative polymer coatings introduced to his dermal layers made the skin feel hard and plastic.
Abrehem watched the pontifex check the serial identifier codes on the requisition form held out by another of the tech-priests and verify them against the name the doctrinal abaci had generated. ‘I dub thee Rasselas X-42, and may the Emperor have mercy on your soul.’
뭐 기계파 서비터 비스무레한 겁니다.
Piezo-edged bone saws extruded from the arms of the throne and sliced through his wrists with ultra-rapid precision. Blood jetted explosively, but even as the agony cut through his diminishing chemical haze, cauterising heat was brought to bear, sealing the stumps with a single pulse of agonising heat. As horrifying as the removal of his hands had been, it was nothing compared to what came next.
Clicking machines with calliper hands like the nightmarish claws of a demented toymaker began stripping the skin, muscle and nerve tissue from his forearms all the way to the elbow. Surgical flesh-weavers layered replacement nerve-strands over the reinforced bone and grafted fibre-bundle muscle in place of the discarded organic tissue.
His chest heaved and his limbs thrashed against the restraints. They simply tightened in response. He couldn’t move. He could only watch as his entire body was pared back and remade. Sealed caskets rotated up from the floor and opened with pneumatic hisses of condensing air. The monotonous stream of binaric nonsense the tech-priests were chanting faltered fractionally as the caskets opened to reveal the weapons within.
Such awesome tools of destruction required reverence.
Through a haze of tears and hate, he watched two of the machine priests step forwards and attach the devices to his arms using implanted bolt-drivers, neural shears, flesh grafts and sacred unguents. He felt every insertion, every bolt driving down into bone and every screaming horror of exposed nerves being spliced together. A burst of power surged through him, and telescoping carbon-steel electro-flails twitched and danced as ancient, barely-understood circuitry meshed with his crude organic functionality. The gurney tipped backwards, and the drills, excising machinery and clamps went to work on his skull. Trepanning picks bored through bone and the clicking, mechanised hands inserted neural control implants before finally removing the upper dome of his skull. He felt the lid of bone creaking upwards and the horror of his mind being exposed was almost too much to bear.
Sacred arrangements of sacred oil were dripped into his brain cavity, with each anointing accompanied by the sixteen names of the binary saints. Spinning orbs with mechanical blade limbs as thin as spider legs clicked into place before him, whirring with demented glee.
No, no, no, no, not my–
The whirring orbs stabbed forwards and plucked out his eyes.
This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body! This is not my body!
Delicate clamps kept his optic nerves taut as complex targeting arrays, broad-spectrum threat analysers and visio-cognitive orbs were attached in place of his eyes and implanted into his skull. A cranial cowl that was part devotional feed, part cortical inhibitor and part death-mask was slotted home, lowered over his slack features and wired to the frontal lobes of what remained of his brain as hymnals blared from unseen augmitters. Like the grinning skull faceplates of the Chaplains of the Adeptus Astartes, it was the rictus agony of the Emperor, and all those whose doomed fate it was to look upon him would know he had been punished by an agency beyond that of mere men. Detailed schematics of the body-plans of the men before him sprang up on the inner surfaces of his eyes, complete with endurable stresses, violation tolerances and a hundred other measures of how they could be ripped into screaming ruin.
The work continued for another hour, agony upon agony, horror upon horror, until there was little sign that a human being had once sat in the throne-gurney. The mortal meat of Lukasz Król had been scraped away and replaced with an instrument of death and annihilation. Only Abrehem remained and even he was a ravaged shell, cored out by the same processes that had made sport of this man’s flesh.
Yet even as his consciousness wept and wished for extinction, he felt the soaring ecstasy of having the power of life and death. For all intents and purposes, he was no longer human, his body enhanced to lethal levels of killing power and stripped back to the most basic physiological functions.
Lukasz Król had effectively ceased to exist, and in his place sat something else.
Something altogether more dangerous and more appalling. ‘It is done,’ said the pontifex, with a solemn nod, stepping forwards and dipping his fingers in an inkhorn of sanctified pigment that a genuflecting tech-priest held out before him. He drew four parallel lines of crimson down the skull mask.
‘In Thor’s Blood are ye anointed. In Thor’s Blood shall ye awaken,’ said the pontifex.
Rivulets of paint slid down the mask like tears of blood, dripping onto a chest that now bulged with cardio-pulmonary enhancers, adrenal-slammers and dormant steroidal compounds. Spinal implants snaked down his back in a chain of injectors, and stimm-reservoirs on his shoulders gave him a hulking, over-muscled proportion to his upper body.
He was a killer now, a render of flesh, a weapon and an act of retribution all in one.
Abrehem revelled in this new incarnation, a being of almost unlimited violent potential to whom no atrocity was beyond his capabilities, no loathsome act of utmost cruelty beneath him. With all need for moral pretence torn away, Abrehem saw the full horror of what Lukasz Król had done, the torture palaces, the rape gulags and the experimentation camps where he had personally overseen all manner of unimaginable affronts to the Emperor.
This was good.
They thought they had taken away his life and made him their own, but they were wrong.
The killer had always been in him.
All they had done was strip the mask of humanity away to rebuild him stronger and more lethal than ever.
‘I take from you the name of Lukasz Król,’ said the pontifex, dipping his hand in the pigment once more and drawing another series of four vertical lines down Król’s chest. The ablative polymer coatings introduced to his dermal layers made the skin feel hard and plastic.
Abrehem watched the pontifex check the serial identifier codes on the requisition form held out by another of the tech-priests and verify them against the name the doctrinal abaci had generated. ‘I dub thee Rasselas X-42, and may the Emperor have mercy on your soul.’
뭐 기계파 서비터 비스무레한 겁니다.
난 아르코 프레질런트가 가장 제국스러워서 좋다.