Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

fueled by his implacable will. Reality itself shivered where he walked, subject to his fleeting fancies. The world was whatever he believed it was, wherever he was.
    Screaming Silence was a huge, unhealthily obese woman, vast beyond bearing; a good eight feet tall and half as wide. Her shape was grotesquely distorted, all the normal human characteristics buried under huge rolls of fat. Her wide face was gaudy with colors, her mouth pushed out into an endless rosebud pout by the pressure of her huge cheeks. Her tightly stretched skin gleamed and glistened with sweat and urine and other fluids, and was flushed with a disturbing heat. Her gray hair flared out like a dandelion, and her eyes were big and round and always hungry. Her thick stubby fingers constantly opened and closed, ready to grasp onto anything that came in reach. She wore nothing but lengths of steel chain, wrapped around and around her, the steel links puncturing her flesh here and there to hold them in place. She stank of sweat and musk and flowers left too long in the hothouse.
    The Spider Harps were two withered homunculi with opened skulls, their fruiting brains exploded out into a giant gray and pink web of exposed brain tissues, that radiated away into nothingness. The two shriveled figures sat side by side on decaying chairs, their sunken faces dead and empty, apart from their eyes, still burning hotly with a vitality that would not diminish. Mummified in evil, preserved in hate. They held hands, the joined flesh fused together over many centuries. Two minds joined together for so long they had become one.
    And, finally, there was the Shatter Freak. His physical existence had been shattered and scattered across time and space, by some ancient psychic trauma. His patchwork body was composed of different parts from different times, from past, present, and future, somehow combined in one constantly changing construct. The details of his torso, limbs, and extremities were never still for a moment, appearing and disappearing, growing and shrinking, slipping and sliding over and around each other, always being replaced by another. The Shatter Freak’s face blurred and twisted as features dropped in and out, from child to ancient and everything in between, with only the eyes always the same: full of rage and pain, sorrow and horror.
    “I was right,” said Finn. “They haven’t changed at all. Seriously ugly.”
    “Not to worry, Finn,” said Douglas. “To me, you’ll always be the greatest monster.”
    “Why, thank you, Douglas.”
    The uber-espers turned their full attention on the two men, and their presence filled the court, horrid and overpowering. They were monstrosities, abominations, things that should never have existed. Their cold implacable will beat against Douglas’s and Finn’s minds, and both men cried out involuntarily. It felt like dead fingers pressing at the shutters of their minds, trying to force their way in. But they were protected.
    “I cannot reach them,” said the Gray Train, his voice like a never-ending sigh. “I am prevented.”
    “Then we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way,” said Screaming Silence, in a voice like a great grunting hog. “Tear them apart, and eat their brains.”
    “Yes,” said Blue Hellfire, in a voice like a cold wind in a narrow valley. “Or perhaps I shall take them in my arms, and love them, and watch them burn with my cold blue flames. Watch their blackened faces slough off their disobedient heads.”
    “Kill them,” said the Spider Harps, in one dusty voice. “Kill the King and the Emperor, and we shall rule here.”
    “No,” said the Shatter Freak, in a disturbingly normal voice. “Something is wrong. There’s something else here.”

    Outside the Imperial Palace, Stuart Lennox fought up and down the long entrance steps to keep the howling thralls at bay. He’d started out with twenty men to back him up, but he didn’t dare look to see how many he had left. The steps narrowed as they reached the top, and the entrance doors to the palace, which gave Stuart and his men the advantage of limiting how many thralls could come up at once; but the thralls just kept coming, clambering over the bodies of their own dead to get at the enemy. Stuart and his men held the steps through sheer ferocity and fighting skills, but already they were growing dangerously tired. Stuart’s sword seemed to get heavier with every blow and parry, and a slow insidious ache burned through