Page 116 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

They had begged Silas for release.

Now he was their destroyer. And the longer this went on, the more his own inner beast roared.

He was torn in two as he broke them apart, savaging their wretched, manipulated bodies with hands that had been made for exactly such things. Silas stumbled. Seeing himself for what he truly was.

He was Nephilim.

A monster destroying monsters.

He was dreadful. He was death. And a tiny part of him relished it.

Another teratism hurled itself at him, the surrounding mass seeming to adopt a twisted herd mentality, awaiting their turn to come at him. All the while their melodies screamed, bastardised by long-held rage and rich with a hopelessness that coated the chamber like soot.

Silas could not discern where one refrain began and another finished. He was a drunkard on his feet, struggling to keep upright as horror after horror came at him. He was saturated with sorrow, fairly drowning in the blood and ruin of the damned. It was staining him, making him heavy and in danger of sinking too deep.

Each strike added another stone to his pockets. Another weight to drag him down.

Silas’s sob thrust itself free, making his ribs ache, his eyes water. A saviour, the ghosts of Castle Coombe had called him. Fuck, what would they think of him now?

He shook his head. ‘No more,’ he whispered, as another came for him.

As another was torn apart by his hand. One after another they came. One after another he took them apart. Their blood and bile running over the shaven contours of his face, his skin a ruin of split flesh, his own blood mingling with those he killed.

‘Stop,’ he said, weakly. ‘Please, stop.’

He cast away another severed head, flesh thick beneath his fingernails.

‘No more.’ Louder this time.

The stench of the carnage was sickening. The drag of sorrow picking him apart. His feet slipped in cool puddles of entrails, and Christ almighty, it was too much

‘No more!’ he shouted.

Silas’s nails bit into his palms. No one in this cursed chamber should exist, himself included. They wouldnotexist, were it not for the manipulation of those with great power.

For the teratisms it was Macha and the Blight.

For Silas it was a traitorous angel. Izanami too perhaps. But at least the goddess had allowed him to keep something of himself when all else was stripped away. He’d lived. Likely loved. Certainly lost.

Another tortured soul took its turn next. A spindly thing, a rag-and-bone collection so fragile to be filled with such suffering. And Silas saw it plainly then. His image caught in the blackness of the teratism’s eyes.

They were the same. He and these broken, manipulated unfortunates.

They were, at least in some part, human. Monsters of a very different kind.

Silas separated skull from spine, and he was washed with blood the colour of juniper, thick as warmed honey.

Another tormented creature took its place. There were so few now.

Enough.

He pursed his lips, unsure what sound he sought to make until the air was rushing from him.

The whistle was high and as sharp as the bandalore’s blade had ever been. Silas played the note across his tongue, and it stretched as long as the horizon. Exquisite and unreachable. A tonality that could be made by no other than him.

Death’s chord, for death’s envoy.

The creature’s head snapped to one side, its face a smoothed, tight sheet of skin with no eyes, no nose, just a tiny hole where a mouth might have been. The teratism did not take another step. And the melodies of the last of the Blight’s miserable army faltered.