The flesh in the furnace

size. He has fierce teeth and great claws. But I cripple him and dismember him in center stage."
        The prince sneered. "Dismember him? With the help of how many visual deceptions?"
        "Mirrors?" Scratch stepped closer. His bare arms appeared to swell. Or was it just that the thickly corded muscles had always been there, hidden beneath a deceptive layer of fat, visible only when they were needed? The prince wished he had paid closer attention to Scratch in the days past.
        The devil made his muscles writhe and ripple as if they were alive and sentient beneath his ebony skin. "Give me your sword," he said, holding out a hand.
        Before the prince could refuse, Scratch grasped the wicked blade in his hand, twisted it and tore it free of the hand that held it. He threw his dark head back and laughed. The laughter echoed up and down the pipe with the force of a dozen throats.
        The prince grabbed for the handle of his weapon. Scratch swung the length of steel by the blade, snapped the shaft into the prince's jaw. There was a sickening crunch. The prince fell to his knees, spitting teeth and blood.
        "Was that a visual deception?" Scratch asked. He chuckled heartily, though he no longer laughed out loud. There was a savage tone beneath the humor, a taste for blood and agony.
        
        "Why?" the prince asked.
        "Why what?"
        "Why does… she want me… dead?"
        "You really don't know?"
        "No."
        "It's obvious to everyone else," the devil said. "But I can see where it might not be to you."
        "Tell me," the prince said.
        When Scratch began to tell him, he dove for the devil's ankles, hoping to topple the dark puppet and go for its throat. Scratch kicked him square in the center of the forehead, propelled him backwards where he crashed the back of his skull against the floor.
        "She wants you dead," Scratch said, "because you lack the necessary qualities to be allowed to survive. You have the cruelty and the love of death that she thinks we'll all need in the future to fulfill her plans. But there is a difference in the way you love pain. Your sadism is tempered by your egotism. When you kill or wound, it is to make yourself look better. You play the role of the hero offstage as well as on, always questing after the spotlight."
        "I don't understand," the prince said. He did not have the energy, yet, to rise up.
        "The rest of us enjoy death and pain for the intrinsic value in suffering. We have no ulterior motives. We kill to kill and not to gain status. It is a cleaner lust than yours. It will lead to fewer failures in the future than your own egotism would." He tossed the sword away, behind him, brushed his hands together. "Your egotism and need to accomplish taint everything you do. When you have sex, for instance, you sometimes spend as much energy giving your partner pleasure as the energy you spend to satisfy your own needs."
        "Isn't that the proper thing?" the prince asked.
        "Not for us. Not if we're going to survive. Everything we do we must do for ourselves, for our own pleasure. If the group gains from our actions, it is merely a side product of our own gain. Pleasure. We seek pleasure anywhere it is given. And Bitty Belina has shown us that our kind can find no greater joy than delivering pain. She says that we have been made less than men, but that we are consequently more deadly and more capable than men. Except you, that is."
        "Me?"
        "You"
        "Please.
        "Please?" the devil mocked. "Please?" He leaped upon the prince, his terrible fingers pressing the bones of the warrior's body from their sockets.
        His eyes were pure crimson.
        
        There is a point where the mind renounces its own emotions, blanks them out and utterly refuses to operate again until the causal stimulus ceases to exist. The husband grieving for his dying wife might grow hysterical on notice of her death. But the hysteria cannot build forever, forcing him closer and closer to madness. There is a moment when it will become either catatonia or acceptance. The same applies to terror. Terror is, perhaps, the most difficult emotion the mind must deal with, for it affects the body more directly than either hate or love. It summons up adren alin, sets the heart to beating faster, sensitizes the ears and the eyes. If the mind were not able to short circuit to avoid the more