As the blood banshee, a name I pulled out of my ass, rose from the churning tide of death and dark magic, I steeled my frain' nerves.

  Even my tendrils seemed affected by the wave of palpable fear and malice that rode the keening wind of the newly arrived demon. It's form was a mass of writhing tentacles and eyes. Each limb was the color of old bruises and cold blood. It's form was almost female, beneath all the cancer and mutation, beneath the wretched pulsing flesh and the endless black pools that were its countless eyes.

  There was just enough person in it to make to season the horror with disgust.

  With guilt, as I drew a bead, and pulled the trigger.

  Boom!

  White fire and consecrated shot tore through the air, punchin' through the haze of Entropic mana like a hot coals through deep snow.

  In response the thing only screamed more, a thousand black orbs twistin' and twitchin' to take me in as her blood soaked maw yawned wider still. I could see a void in it, with my cursed eye, could see all six of the ghosts that were trapped in the demons gullet.

  I fired again, this time throwing myself into cover as I rode the Douce et Doux Drift. I glimpse just enough of it, as I hid behind the back of the grand stair, to know my Scaras made rounds weren't doing shit.

  Well.

  No.

  They were at least pissin' it off.

  The demon exploded from it's birthplace within the circle of death and sanguine sacrifice, propelled by an endless torrent of blood. The force sent the six corpses flying, their bodies slamming into the wall opposite, breaking and crumpling like dolls dropped from the height of a Chantry's bell tower.

  I flung myself forward as the demon punched straight through marble and hardwood, shattering the stairs and the stone wall behind where I had just stood.

  Chthonic Dexterity ensured my hands executed an impossibly fast reload, but just as I slammed the breach shut the thing exploded from the rubble of it's own charge, flyin' toward me like all the fury of the hells.

  I didn't even have time to curse before my body reacted.

  My arm snapped up, the scattergun leveled and fired, the recoil ripplin' down the length of my body as I was yanked to the side by the recoil.

  I tasted blood and felt the skin on my face split as the pure, unmitigated speed of the demon seemed to tear the narrow space of my dodge. It's claws, long and thin as razors, passed inches from my face and neck, and yet they didn't touch.

  Boom!

  As it impacted, I fired, more white fire sizzilin' out somewhere in the cloud of blood and meat it wore like unholy armor. Every second we fought I felt more and more Entropic mana floodin' the confined space of the manor hall. Unlike the unrestrained power of the Wyld, this magic had purpose, and it had a will.

  Cold.

  Hungry.

  Heavy and dark.

  It was the kind of magic that would drive a man to suicide, or worse, if left unchecked. The essence of malaise, depression, and slow, inevitable ruin. It was the force that made tyrants of good kings, that brought eternal empires to fated ruin. The shit that ensured all the heroes of man would eventually fall, because, in the end, nothing good can ever really last.

  I wished I was a little more pious just then. Whished I had drank away every prayer I learned with pilfered sacrament wine. Wished I memorized a tenth of what my sister Sarah no doubt knew of invocations and incantations, and holy chants and scripture.

  But I didn't.

  So, instead, I did the only thing a man like me could.

  I bit down, reloaded, and fought.

  The demon howled, the sound echoing through the room, rattling the windows and shaking the chandelier above. Then, the thing was on me, it crossed the space I'd made in the blink of an eye, a dozen seekin' tendrils, like my own but tipped in frozen blood, exploded from its form and-

  Wham!

  I rode the supercharged recoil of the brilliant shot, the rush of power that was the Drift carryin' me through the air and across the hall in a graceless dodge as the demon's arms wrent space, stone, and air alike.

  As I tumbled, I barely caught my feet and pulled the trigger-

  Click.

  Two barrels.

  Both empty.

  Pain.

  I smelled alchemical smoke and fresh blood as a tendril tore through my chest. Only the fact that I still stood told me that it had missed my heart.

  A small miracle.

  Or a fate far worse.

  Eleven other bladed appendages rose to perforate me as the first coiled out from my new orfice to warp around my waist.

  I panicked, raw, animal, like a coyote in a snare.

  I tore the sling that kept my scattergun place and threw it like a damned javelin. The weighty stock struck the demon in the middle of a dozen or more eyes and, for reason, somehow, this finally had an effect.

  The thing flinched, not from Steel Pix rounds or the power of Scaras' best, but the sheer kinetic force of my desperation. My vision swam, pain, shock, and mortal fear leavin' about half as stunned as it.

  Thankfully, my mutated arms didn't follow the same rules as my frail mortal body. Before I could react the tentacles split through my glolves and dover for the pair of pistols in the hostlers at my hips.

  Just as they cleared leather and leveled, the demon screamed again. This time though, there was something more.

  Fear.

  I heard it.

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  And a part of me rejoiced.

  My arms pulled the triggers and a storm of mundane lead, jacked in dull iron, plain old man-made shot, punched into the demons hide.

  Again, the beast flinched, the tendril around my waist loosening, the others snapping back as a forest of tentacles gathered to shield it's humanoid core from the fury of nothing more than simple black powder and hollow points. Every shot sizzled, filling the air with the smell of cookin' offal and the taste of copper and decay.

  The combined force of twelve shots slammed into me, I guess delayed by some new function of Ability as grew right then and their. The hammer blow of so many shots flung me back, snappin' the demonic blood tentacle like too little rope around the neck of too much man.

  I tumbled and fell, rolling head over heels until the ground, and the world, came to meet me.

  Brick first.

  I head but that wall like it stole a glass of whiskey straight from my mutated hands.

  Bam!

  Stars exploded.

  Everything went fuzzy, and I swear, it was all cause I'd lost my hat. It weren't just propriety that made a hat essential to any Roche man. My daddy had more than once impressed upon me the true lore of the gentlemanly wear, and while I might not remember much, the most important lesson was hammered into my skull. A hatless Roche, was a dead Roche.

  I think I might have died then.

  But no.

  Instead, I fell.

  My catastrophic tour of the manor's architecture continued as the rotten floor beneath where I'd hit crumbled, and the wall I was pressed against broke.

  Crash.

  Down.

  And down.

  And into a new, and consuming dark.

  I hit solid stone, not good brick or fine marble, but old, watercut limestone, and it shattered. I didn't even feel the impact.

  All was numb, and black.

  Dark.

  Then.

  Red.

  A flicker of life.

  I drew in a sucking breath as cold water washed all around me. Earlier I had though my flight through the manor's wards had done a number, now I knew the truth.

  I'd been lucky.

  Because this?

  This really fuckin' hurt. Forget cracked ribs, torn muscles and the like. This latest fuck-up in my storied career as a suicidal dipshit was enough to make me wish for the sweet mercy of the void.

  Seriously. I was messed up that I downright despised every Ability that kept me conscious and alive.

  Without Ice-Cold Blood I'd at least pass out from the pumpin' bright red blood leakin' from a half dozen orifices. Without Chthonic Dexterity I'd have probably been cleanly torn apart by the blood banshee that still wailed somewhere up above.

  Even Skullduggery was at least a little to blame here. If I'd just activate the wards on the door and been annihilated?

  Well, that'd at least be quick and painless.

  No, instead I was alive.

  Alive, and hurt, and drowning.

  My body spasmed, the need for air overriding every other sensation. Instinct overrode terrible pain as the muscles in my neck flexed to keep my head over the shallow flow of freezin' water. I tried to crawl my way up the slick, mossy limestone wall I lay shattered against-

  And to my horror, Chthonic Dexterity ensured I did.

  Agony. Specifically of the variety that makes a grown man void his bladder and whine like a broken child, exploded through my every being as my mutated arms grasped the wall and hauled the wreckage of the rest of my up and free from a drowning' death.

  "Please, please, please...." I muttered to nothing an no one, choking on blood and sweet spring water.

  I lay against the stone, doing my best impersonation of a beached fish, for a long moment. Long enough for the pain to recede, for my pulse to stop thunderin' in my ears and my vision to clear. When it did, the reality of my situation hit home.

  I was at the bottom of a long drop, the faintest glow of magelight visible far above. I guess the mansion had been built over some sea tunnel or grotto, hell maybe I was even in another Ascended aqueduct like the one beneath the Cellar in Augusts' Hope. That'd certainly explain all the evil shit that was running around Murkwater, probably some fool magic machine powered by tortured souls or...

  Somethin'.

  The how and why barely mattered. Fact was that I needed to get back up there, and find my way to the processing plant as soon as possible. Mercifully, I spied a set of stairs in the dark, a dozen paces up along the natural stone water way.

  The climb was a special kind of misery. The kind that makes a man question why he'd ever chosen the life that he did. Nothin' except my own fool choices and a pathological need for violence had brought me here. I could've just gotten an honest job back in town, hell, I could've found a nice girl and started a family instead of ridin' pigs and fightin' cosmic evil.

  What the fuck is wrong with you Roche?

  The question hung in my mind as I gripped the handle to the door at the top of the stairs. Havin' leaned my lesson about wards the hard way, I took a second to inspect the frame.

  Nothin'. And even if the symbols were scratched on the other side, hidden from mundane view, a quick glance with my achin' right eye confirmed there weren't a drop of magic flowing anywhere around.

  Good. Finally a break.

  I twisted and pulled, and the whole damn handle came away with the scent of wood rot and the squeak of rusted iron hinges.

  Great.

  I sighed, and pulled what was left open and started into the dark beyond.

  Stale air met the damp scent of clean flowin' water. I shivered, first from the cold and wet, and then because of what I saw as my eyes adjusted.

  "Fuck me, there's more..."

  The room was wide and round, nearly pitch dark save for a single dyin' crystal mounted in a sconce in the rooms center. The pale yellow light made the dark iron bars of each of the thirteen cells around the room glint and almost glitter. Behind those rested a new vision of hell and damnation. Not the lurkin' shambling death I had seen in the town above, not even the ritual horror that dwelt just a few floors above-

  No.

  I'd have preferred any of that to the carnival of desecration, cruelty, neglect and twisted malice I now found myself lookin' at.

  The men, women, and children inside the cells, they didn't moan, didn't cry out. Instead they stared toward the center with listless, glassy eyes. Some were chained up by skinny limbs, the weight of their emaciated bodies causing the manacles and shackles to cut deep into their skin. Others sat, and a few lay, on the filthy floor, their flesh gray, their skin a tapestry of lesions and welts, scars and sores.

  I knew these types of injuries. I'd seen them before.

  In that damn ship I had come to this New World on. In the dark where so many people like me quietly succumbed to the blind 'justice' of the Imperial Crown.

  We'd been told back then, that our destination was the mines and work camps built to suck every drop of life out of the untamed land and put a tidy profit in the coffers of the Crown. Honest indenture for our wicked crimes, mercy compared to the rope we'd all earned.

  I'd almost believed it, back then. Now though, I wondered, was this the fate I had been spared? Was this where all them bandits, whores, heretic and drunkards, thieves, and the rest that didn't fit int he jails of old Karinwoad, was this where we were supposed to go?

  All thoughts of a peaceful life, of regret for the violence I so often embraced, all of the fled as I stumbled toward the first cell. The stench of rot was thick, and I barely held back a gag.

  "You still alive, son?" I asked the boy, no more than fourteen. I held his glassy gaze for a while as the question went unanswered, then, like a corpse come to life, his head shifted and those blank eyes focused on me.

  "You're... not..." His voice was a bare whisper, and a shiver ran down my spine as he spoke, "you can't be real..." tears flowed from his eyes and all around us other began to stir.

  My arms moved on their own, Skullduggery workin' to spring the lock with nothin' but a folding knife and preternatural instinct.

  As the cell door swung open and I stumbled into the filth and muck that was the floor the boy began to whimper.

  "No, no, no, no, no!"

  I knelt beside him, and the others in his cell, and they cowered.

  Stop cryin'," I said as cold as any bastard I had ever met, "and listen close. This is a jailbreak. If you want out, you can come, but you're gonna have to pack all that shit that's been done to you down," I growled as I released the first of the chains that held the kid to the moss slick stone wall, "you're gonna have to shove that fear down so deep the Void's gonna have a taste. You're gonna have to fight, and run, and kill and do a hundred other things."

  He looked at me, blinking past whatever nightmare lingered in his broken mind, and the tears stopped. He looked at the others, then to me, then he stared at that wide open door.

  "... okay."