The Tempest

Vermipox sniggered through bloodstained teeth, looking up from the gore-splattered scrying bowl he had fashioned within the cracked ribcage of the humanoid creature that lay twitching and gurgling upon his slab. Fate, apparently, was delivering to him the souls of his hated enemies. Dethrone him, would they? Cast him out, had they? ‘Meeran!’ he called, and his greatest creation swiftly appeared. ‘We have visitors.’

Meeran beamed. ‘Shall we kill them and take their ship? No? Oh, but Vermipox, you promised. How long must we remain on this miserable rock, with that brute Kalik for company?’

‘Wretched girl! Have you forgotten what I rescued you from?’

‘No, master. I was a worthless slave, no better than this maggot on the slab desperately wishing you would allow it to die.’ She found something wet and squishy within the mangled alien and gave it a half-hearted twist, eliciting a bubbling scream. ‘You took me from the pits and made me into so much more. I’m always yours to command.’

‘Then serve me now. A ship comes near carrying my enemies, worthless Antox and archon Zelpan. By my arts I shall raise up a storm of such noise and fury that they will be forced to exit the webway and descend. Hunt them, chase them, torment them as you like, but do not kill those two. Their paths must lead them here, where I shall entrap them, and rip from them their souls. Now come, and watch the spectacle.’

Outside the storm was rising with a wrath that made the earth tremble and the heavens scream. Lightning cracked across the skies like the lashes of cruel gods, and the night came alive with dark and lurid colours. Bounding up the cliff came the brutish shape of Kalik the ork, enraged and terrified, impatient to crush anyone beneath its fists but wary of these two and willing to grovel before them.

The three fiendish silhouettes stood outlined against the flashing sky, and in the distance saw the Royal barge crash-landing. Meeran allowed herself a little smile. It was going to be an entertaining play.

Wow, this is a very good and gruesome story so far, will there be more?

Lord_Alino wrote:

Wow, this is a very good and gruesome story so far, will there be more?

Thank you, I'm glad someone liked it! Here are Acts II and III. I hope they please you.

They found their missing comrades, Tarquin and Phaeston, alive but spiked to an outcrop of rock through their wrists and knees, their skins peeled off in wet, curling ribbons, their flesh delicately sliced, and their nerves and sinews carefully plucked out and pulled taut over a latticework of wires like the strings of a bizarre harp.  Every sharp convulsion brought forth a sequence of screeching notes, making weird, discordant music in concert with their exhausted wails.

The dark eldar were held in awe by the sight.  They were horrified, of course – their race feels horror as much as any other, and perhaps even more keenly – but to them it was also a fountain of intense suffering and vitality, and more than that, a work of sublime artistry and beauty. Such an unexpected wonder filled them with something like an innocent delight. Meeran appeared from behind a rock and gracefully took a bow.

Zangloz broke the spell, risking the ire of his fellows, and fired a shot with his splinter pistol that Meeran easily side-stepped. She turned and ran, glancing back to see their malicious, agile, spidery figures leaping and bounding after her. Oh yes, she thought. Chase me, lovely boys.

The stragglers were thrown off their feet as a massive crash fell among them with brutal violence.  A hulking giant ran amok, cleaving flesh from bone, tearing limb from limb, crushing skulls and brains. The dark eldar quickly answered with a fusillade of splinter fire, but the poisoned shots only added to the brute’s rage. For far too long had Kalik the Ork been forced to rein in his natural brutality, enslaved as he was to the will of Vermipox, and now the dam had burst. Hadrian looked into a maw that opened like a tunnel, ringed with rows of rotten, jagged teeth and filled with an unspeakable rankness, and then Kalik bit off the top half of his head.

Elsewhere and later, archon Zelpan of the Bell of Woe turned to Antox, Ancient Haemonculus of the Fulsome Waters. ‘We are walking into a trap,’ he said.

‘We must retrace our steps,’ said Antox. But then they saw the robes.

The most beautiful robes they had ever seen, hanging from a petrified tree branch. One for each, perfectly tailored, smooth, pale, slightly glowing, made from the flayed faces of eldar maidens and sewn together with their screams. These robes were enchanted, of course, and in spite of themselves Antox and Zelpan were unable to resist putting them on. And thus they fell into the trap.

Antox and Zelpan found themselves naked and hanging from hooks stuck into the flesh of their armpits and groins, attached to monofilament wires suspending them upright above a filthy cast iron oubliette. First the skin and then the flesh of their thorax had been sliced open like a star and then pulled back with retractors like the petals of an enormous flower, exposing the ribcage and entrails within. Their entrails were held in place with loops of barbed wire, and their ribs were woven through with many-coloured cables that hung around them like decorations, carrying pulses of electric fire that caused them to twitch and writhe in fits of agony and ecstasy as blood and other viscous fluids ran down their legs.

Yet, in the midst of such extremity, Antox found his own voice. ‘What… do you hope… to accomplish?’ he managed to ask.

Vermipox appraised his work critically. ‘The problem with you, Antox, is that you’ve never appreciated art for its own sake.’

Antox sneered. ‘Kill us… and we will only be reborn… in my vats…’

Vermipox was angered. ‘Have you forgotten who I am? I am Vermipox! Shall I rip your soul to shreds to demonstrate? Shall I bind you to the backside of one of your own grotesques?’

Antox blanched, but Zelpan intervened. ‘You fool, Vermipox… aah! We serve the Black Heart now, do you understand? We have Vect on our side.  You may never return to Commorragh!’

As if Vect could ever be on anyone’s side but Vect’s, thought Vermipox. Still, the fop had a point. ‘I have no intention of returning to Commorragh,’ he said. ‘Not yet. I only wish to teach the two of you a lesson, my former friends. One that you will profit from, eventually, but that will provide me with considerable satisfaction right now.’

He gestured toward Meeran, who had entered the cell. ‘Have you met my daughter? Not  daughter of my loins, of course, but daughter of my knives, and vials, and torches, and so, my daughter.’ At first glance Meeran appeared like a young human woman, but her flesh had been altered to be more like one of the eldar, and then again like something more, something quick, and predatory, and disturbing. ‘I bought the flesh that she was from the pits as one might buy a dozen cheap slaves, merely a canvas for my art. And yet, as I worked upon my masterpiece, I learned a great many things, and as I wrought a wondrous transformation upon her flesh, I found myself transformed in turn.

‘It is the curse of our race, forever to seek further and more extreme horizons of experience, yet never to gain or learn wisdom from it. And so I leave you with this, though I doubt you have the wit to understand it: as we are masters of our cruelties, we are also slaves to them, and as we cut into flesh, tearing, slicing, stretching, burning, twisting it, we also cut into ourselves.’

A few hours later the repaired Royal barge lifted off, leaving behind a cursed, barren rock and an abandoned gallery of mortified flesh and tortured souls, and faraway screams lost amidst the howling wind.

Who was who?

Vermipox - Prospero
Meeran   - Miranda / Ariel
Kalik       - Caliban
Zelpan    - Alonso, King of Naples
Antox     - Antonio
Tarquin and Phaeston - Trinculo and Stephano
Zangloz   - Gonzalo
Hadrin and other Victims - Adrian, Francisco, etc.
There is no Ferdinand. Meeran ate Ferdinand.

Aha, Shakespeare!
I admit that I had not heard of this play of his before, but after studying it a bit I can see that you turned it very well into DEldar form. Nice read.