The amount of my life I've spend lookin' my mistakes in the face is, frankly, depressin'. Even when I win, I can't help but recall the many times I have lost. Bitterness in every sweet, sorrow in every joy, and a whole hell of lot of pain in every happy memory. That's why I really drink, not just for the taste like I say. Not just to play the man my daddy had been.

  I do it 'cause it numbs all the feelin'. Quiets that voice that reminds me, for all I hate the wicked and the strong, I am no better. And I hate myself still more than all of them.

  As I fell, stunned like a pig ready for the axe, the moment stretched on and on. The psychical pain, the hole in my fuckin' face, was nothing compared to the bitter truth that I was now a dead man. Because once again, I just wasn't smart enough, wise enough, man enough to recognize how rotten this world really is.

  I hit the stone and felt bones crack, as hot, mana rich blood bubbled from the crater in my crimson mask, I knew the fight was already lost. The swarm, a hundred strong or more, was already on top of me, my scattergun lost somewhere in the mist and dark.

  It was futile.

  Gore Arsenal, and the inherited effects of Ice-Cold Blood would've been fine to restore me. In a few hours that I did not have. As it stood, the fact I couldn't bleed out just mean I'd get to truly savor the experience of being eaten alive.

  I was doomed.

  But damn me if I'd ever die easy, ever on my back.

  And damn poor Mister Tequi if the many dead failed just the same...

  I rose slow to the thundering beats of bare, cloth-shod, and leather booted feet rushed across the grimy cobbles of Murkwater's. The staccato hammerin' of my heart joined in, measured by my frosty breath and conducted by the mania of a Rush turned feral in the face of death and the glory of the Wyld.

  As I stared down my end, the world beyond the world once again resolved, and with it, the true music of my soul rose in deafening measure. Here chaos sounded like distant piano and a tortured violin, a funeral dirge and a battle hymn. A eulogy to the fallen, a march for the broken, the lost.

  And a requiem for the damned.

  My tentacles exploded from my gloves, rending the enchanted leather with ease as they blood like the wings of mana twisted Strix. The broken bones in my legs and back protested in agony as half my mutated tendrils wrapped around the ruined tissue, my own body made marionette by alien flesh. The clutched, cold and wet, makin' a brace of strange flesh to salvage what was left of everything inside.

  Fuck it hurt.

  As the first wave of the hungry dead fell upon me, the rest of those extra arms, three on each, began to tremble and writhed with rage-

  Then they struck.

  The first of my arms whipped back and then surged in an arc, so fast it cracked the air and I felt the pressure of a small sonic boom ripple out. I heard the wet thump of a skull crushed to paste, a tax of lifeforce expended as my Deep's Embrace enhanced the strike well beyond human limits.

  The second lanced forward, as gore spattered the stone walls all around. It stabbed forward, punchin' through the knees of a large revenant, a matronly woman in the remains of a baker's apron who likely loved her work a little too well in life. As she tripped, her bulk bowled over a half-dozen other horrors as they alley flood in rotten flesh.

  Two of my arms remained on offense as the other the four, those that weren't holding me together, searched for purchase on the moss slick bricks of the walls that formed the alley. I needed to get up. The streets were hell but on the roofs I could-

  "Look, this one's trapped. I told you it would work daddy," said a small, cruel voice from above, "see? This is why everybody should listen to me." Proclaimed the small from a child in a floral dress from where she sat on the broad shoulders of her revenant father.

  The moment she spoke yet more monsters moved to loom above me, even as the rest filled the alley from both sides.

  Ah.

  I wasn't doomed before. I was just in a bad situation, easy mistake to make.

  Now though?

  Now I was proper fucked.

  A small part of me, not the Wyld tainted part of my thinkin' mind, or the one singing mindlessly along to the twin songs of the mana all around, the part that was sort of human-

  He screamed.

  And it came out as a roar from my blood soaked lips. My eyes burned, my heart ached, and the hole, that ever starvin' hole in my guts, yawned wide.

  No more did any part of me consider escape. Instead, as the tidal wave rose and crashed against my battered body, I fought.

  I fought, and each and every moment I lost.

  As one tentacle struck out to swat away a fallin' revenant another was seized by the countless arms of the swarms. The pain was distant as a dozen mouths dug into the slippery flesh, severin' it like I was servin' good devilfish to a table full of hungry dock hands.

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  Another, simply torn from its place at my back as a revenant managed to cross the distance and put his rotten claws to agonizing use.

  I howled as a third, this one from my left side, was chewed apart. Before I could even begin to enjoy that agony though, I felt something cold dark surge into my broken leg. A rotten upper half of a woman, her bare breasts soaked in mud and gore, guts trailing behind her like line nets in the lurch. Her teeth cracked as she bit the meat of my calf, biting straight down to the bone.

  A quick stomp ended her, but the damage was done.

  The sheer weight of sensation, of despair, dragged my thinkin' mind under as I fought desperately on.

  One of my tentacles shot for my coat, stealin' away the lone elixir I had taken for myself, the rest given to Temjun just before our departure. It uncorked the bottle and simply passed the whole glass through the gapin' bullet wound in my fast. I bit down, the pain of chewin' glass offset by the rush of lifeforce as wounds knit and tentacles reformed from stumps to full flesh.

  And it didn't matter a whit.

  Another ten seconds and I was forced to resort to weaponizing the arms that had kept me upright, lashing out with a desperation I couldn't feel. Another elixir was shattered and swallowed, the liquid hot and bitter in my belly, and still, it wasn't enough to save me. No sooner was a wound healed then another one was opened, and all the while fat and muscle burned until I was skin and bone.

  As the fog closed in and my vision grew dark, a strange sense of calm settled over my mind.

  So this was it. My end. The death that had haunted my nightmares for years. The death I deserved, in truth.

  I was a murderer. I had killed that tax man, shot him in the back and took the gold he took from my people. I liked to think it was righteous, in a kind of way, but knew most of the Gods would say otherwise.

  My mama, my daddy, and Sarah, they all had. They told me I ruined the family, ruined what life I ought to have lived. Them and all the folks of my nameless little village in the mire of the Broken Coast.

  Still took the gold though. Still lied to the magistrate to ensure our humble burg made it through a tax-leaned winter.

  As I died, as I found myself fallin' down into the black hole inside of me, on the verge of payin' the Queen of the Deep's price a lot sooner than expected, I found a strange sense of comfort in that memory. It didn't matter that they all hated me. It didn't matter what I did was wrong.

  Good people lived and thrived for it. From wickedness came some good. There was a kind of mercy in that. Even if the gods and the devils, even if my own people, didn't recognize it, I could die knowin' I had done somthin' right.

  And that was enough.

  The echo of distant thunder rolled over the sounds of hunger, and even the songs of the Wyld and the Entropy. Rain was comin' rain to wash it, to wash me away. I saw the fog began to break, the faint rays of the sun bleedin' through.

  I let my eyes close, as my final arm was freed from its socket, as the teeth of a girl, no more than six, crunched through the shell like mask I'd made of my face.

  I found peace in that last image of a radiant sun and a distant blue sky.

  Then the roar came.

  My eyes, they twitched open.

  And oddly, as I stared into a hundred milky white eyes....

  I saw-

  Was that fear?

  Boom.

  The fog rushed out as a cloud of rotten red mist exploded from the far end of the alley. The revenants, dozens of the fuckers, were simply gone. Not even the rotten shreds and bones remained, as if the blast of scarlet power had erased them entirely.

  I wondered at the culprit, the last sparks of my consciousness now distracted from the contemplation of death by the barest spark of hope. Wondered until I saw it.

  The hammer. Flying so fast it warped the air. So fast that it made mist of men and women and all.

  The saint's mercy.

  A tool used to drive the four foot spike through the skull of a captured leviathan. An instrument of such pure death, that the Strix's mana clung heavy to the rusted iron head.

  The fury clad titan that wielded it roared again. Not some animal cry, but instead the first syllable of a wordless, timeless song. An Uruk warsong, the chant of battle, of defiance to death. A song that had made Imperial Battlemages piss their britches and Crown Crusaders abandon their posts on the Fence.

  That was the sound of hope for me.

  Temjun.

  Gods damn that big, beautiful dummy had come for me, impartin' a debt that run deeper than any rune, any magic or oath.

  "Roche!" Howled the wild-eyed half-Uruk, his body wreathed in the earliest stages of forming aura. It was a bright and vibrant thing, an endless expanse of deep, honest blue. A calm sea, so deep it seemed like it might go on forever. His hammer came again, and again. It tore the revenants asunder, leaving only dust in its wake. The big man howled as he came, a living storm of mana and steel, a beast of wrath and woe.

  The revenants fought, tried to fight. I watched several break limbs on his sheer, physical bulk. Others bit and claws, but barely drew ruddy lines along where they touched.

  I was a chaotic wind, wippin' through the world on sand and salt, lethal when free and fast, and doomed the moment I hit a wall. But Temjun? We was the wall, hell he was the whole fuckin' fort.

  Eventually the revenants began to falter-

  Nah, scratch that, they fuckin' broke.

  I saw undeath understand fear in a way that I never had.

  Gone were the taunts and talk of hunger and feast, instead came the wanton plea, drawn from whatever tatters of a human soul lay trapped in their putrid prisons.

  "No plea-" Came a short, stunted cry before a thrown brick, ripped right from the wall tore through the face of the thing that had clutched at ate from my bleedin' mask.

  "No!" Temjun said in simple, complete denial. As he did the many, many, many cuts on his greyish hide knit, as if he was refusing reality as much as the pleas of the damned and doomed.

  There would be no mercy, no hesitation, no end until he was finished with what needed done.

  I though about that, couldn't do much from where I lay and bled.

  For some reason, that big boy had decided I was good enough to fight for. Gods knew why, but I wasn't about to look this particular gift horse in his mouth.

  Well, actually. I wasn't seein' anything.

  I felt myself snatched from the stone, my bones creakin' as I was thrown bodily over a shoulder too broad, too hard with muscle to be real. Then, we ran.

  I think I died, right around then. Just for a little bit. Everything just shut down while my Ability worked to salvage the precious scraps of my life, and I was left to simply drift in the void I had traded nothing for.

  When I came to, it was to the taste of good alchemy, the blinding light of the sun streaming through a high windows, and a half dozen faces starin' down at me.

  Huh.

  I was alive.

  Wrong again, dispshit.

  And thank the Gods for that.

  Thank the Gods for little brothers and the lies we tell ourselves.