Apefmhet: A Feast For Scarabs

[Tagi]

Giacomo, as it turned out, was a weeper.

In the grand scheme of things, most scholars didn't have to deal with the rapid deaths of everyone around them. Certainly, most mercs on escort duty didn't need to deal with that either, but at least for them they'd likely experienced it at some point or another, and knew better than to grow too attached (or, at the least, grew attached with the foresight that gruesome deaths may very well lay ahead). But, at the least they had each other; Giacomo was the last civilian left conscious -- Omar was nigh delirious and Fariq was either brain damaged or playing unconscious. Maybe he'd fainted. Whatever the case, Giacomo was presently stifling his sobs with a fist to his mouth.

Ramon, weary and practical, sighed. So Tagi said it. "Really? This is really happening? This is ridiculous. We needed him!"

"Shut up and scout," Ramon said.

"You want me to be dying?"

"Look, as long as I don't have to see it, you've got the best chance."

Tagi thought about it. It was true. And with the civilians cut down, and the darkness, there would be little complaining or vomiting when she adjusted her form. Plus, it would take significant damage to kill her.

"Fine," she said, "but I am wanting there to be much singing of my usefulness when the ugly one wakes up. And," she said, as she crept forward past Hassan's body, lengthening her front legs and adding weight so she could feel for more pressure plates, "you should dump the cripple."

She grew a tail, waved it about in the air to check for . . .well, anything else that could harm someone at chest height or higher.

Giacomo's muted sobbing intensified.

[Sertor Potens]

While the question of a new scout was being handled by Ramon and Tagi, Sertor debated giving Giacomo a comforting pat on the shoulder. The loss of one's comrades was a thing to be grieved, though admittedly there was a time and a place for such things. However, he did have his arms full, and he was once again covered in bug-bits, so he settled for some inspiring words to get morale back up. "Comradef, we have come far at much coft, but we muft preff on! The glory of fucfeff awaitf our effortf, af the feptre if not far from uf now. Take heart that our goal if fo clofe and achievable! We shall have time to mourn the fallen when our work if done."

It was a pretty speech, he felt, in line with those ancient speeches recorded in the legion's histories at Castrum Kerostriarum. From the moment of silence which greeted the end of his speech, he assumed it had achieved the desired effect. Mostly, though, the survivors were still trying to figure out if he was at all fucking serious, and was he actually bloody mad?

That silence would, however, provide Tagi ample opportunity to search for more deadly traps with less background kerfuffle to distract her. Oh hey, how did that really thin, razor-sharp wire stay intact for so long? Magic, probably. And it was set at around neck-height too. Someone involved in the temple's design evidently had a fetish for decapitation. But sharp wires were only the start of Tagi's happy-fun-scouting-time. What other fun quirks of deadly architecture would the ghul djinn find?

[Tagi]

"Fuckfest? Did he say fuckfest?" Tagi, as usual, broke the silence. She'd turned to face them, though they couldn't see her, confused. "That is not an appropriate joke, Ser -- ow!"

Her raised tail had found the wire. Though the pain, for Tagi, was likely not as harsh as that of normal living beings, it still filled her with her own form of resentment. She wasn't completely new to the concept of tomb-traps. After all, she regularly went spelunking in tombs to eat her fill -- but she wasn't typically trailing bloodbags that popped at the slightest nudge.

"What? Just don't talk anymore, Tagi. I'll buy you a fucking shriveled head when we're out of here, just shut up."

She found a rock and took out the wire, grumbling to herself about how she would not eat Ramon centuries after his death, not even if he asked her to, not even if he promised her caves full of corpses.

The wire came down, and she reassembled her tail.

Okay, maybe for the caves full of corpses.

She discovered a pit by virtue of almost falling into it. Meanwhle, Giacomo was sticking to Sertor's side, unable to talk much without squeaking or sniveling, so after his muted thanks (he'd learned to just ignore Tagi's outbursts, by virtue of not wanting anything to do with her anymore, not that he ever had) he just kept close to the big rhino-man. Come to think of it, Sertor was the only decent one in the lot, anyways, despite his . . . oddness and speech impediment. Yes, Giacomo decided, Sertor would do for the illusion of friendship while they were stuck in the darkness.

"The humans can crawl over me to get across this pit," Tagi said, interrupting Giacomo's fuzzy thoughts, "but the big guy will have to find another way."

[Sertor Potens]

Sertor was pleased. It seemed his speech had achieved the desired effect, and Giacomo had regained something of his dignity. Given their situation, it was much better to face likely death with dignity.

He'd been quite content bringing up the rearguard. Tagi seemed quite handy with the traps side of things, which was nice. The spiked pit, however, was an issue. "Oh, fiddleftickf. Hmm. I will catch up." Somehow. There had to be a way. He just had to think it over carefully. If he was lucky, he'd get attacked again and just fill the pit with the bodies of his foes.

Wait, now there was an idea. "I have a plan. Try not to get too far ahead." He returned to the language of the Kabakuru which he and Tagi shared, and Ramon sighed audibly as the clicking sounds recommenced "This pit will delay me perhaps half an hour to an hour. I should be able to follow your scent. Be careful, as I suspect worse to come."

[Tagi]

"Try not to die," was Ramon's weary return, the implicit humor in the words mellowed by the grim way he said it.

Tagi didn't like the odds of two warriors and a walking dead man bumbling about in the tunnels. Well, her odds were just fine, but there was the little matter of getting paid, and the board of coolness ranking, which she'd planned on making her mark upon after this gig. She was totally cooler than Sertor, at the very least. That should be obvious to everyone by now.

Giacomo and Ramon finished climbing over her (with much ado from Giacomo, who kept muttering under his breath things about her not being normal, which she believed was the height of rudeness amongst humans). Ramon lapsed into silence, except for the occasional question about traps she encountered or what she sensed. He was not comfortable being so senseless, unable to see, unable to hear much beyond their movements. She could sense the strain in him, the coiled agony of being ready to fight but not knowing where the fight was. He was a straightforward mercenary: you put an enemy in front of him, and he would defeat it or die. This was not what he signed up for.

Tagi understood, and marveled in her understanding. She didn't care, true, but it was interesting how little human warriors changed over time, and how humans reacted to things so predictably.

She was bored. Those thoughts kept her busy as they moved forward at a crawl. The traps were not terribly close together, but their spacing was seemingly at random, and every inch had to be thoroughly checked so as to not lose another human to a little poke here or there. Then, Giacomo whined about needing to check his bearings every so often, which meant lighting the lamp and waiting while he mumbled and groped around. He'd gone pale the first time they'd lit the lamp, staring at Tagi as if she was some ghastly tomb wight waiting to eat all of them; she would have acted offended for his sake, but she was too irritated by the process to bother putting up a facsimile of human emotion. She'd stared at him instead, expressionless in her warped hyena face, which at the very least seemed to make him stumble around faster while he shot her nervous glances.

Ramon was like stone. Tagi worried he would become too tired to fight. He was sweating, and though his bleeding had slowed she could still smell fresh blood. Chances were, other things would too.

They came upon a chamber, medium-sized, with several small doorways branching off into other directions. They were not a great distance from where they'd left Sertor behind at the pit, but Tagi was not comfortable leaving Ramon and Giacomo to go and scout.

"We're very close," Giacomo said. He sounded ready to faint.

"We wait for Sertor," Tagi replied.

Ramon didn't say a word. Tagi could smell his sweat, sickly sweet.

She so wasn't getting a bonus.

[Sertor Potens]

Ramon was a good brother in arms, Sertor decided. He had the right attitude for a soldier. "Of courfe not. The Keroftriarii were the moft refillient of the legionf. I will rejoin your rankf foon."

And while the others fiddled about with the tedium of traps, Sertor approached his own little dilemma with the straight-forward problem solving he'd applied to much of his career thus far. So his way was blocked by a hole? The simple solution was to fill it. And as it happened there was a lot of raw materials spread around a room they'd recently exited.

Admittedly, there was a flaw in his initial plan. It was going to be far too difficult to use his scutum as a tray for the dead Nehkhepera. Navigating the hallways with it held horizontally was just not going to work. But he could use his shield as an improvised broom, and sweep them along in a gory viscous mess of bodies.

It was probably lucky none of the others were with him, and that Omar remained comatose. The dull squish-scrape-scrape squish-scrape scrape of Sertor's dogged attention to his task echoed along the empty passages. Unfortunately, Sertor was accompanied by someone whose state of unconsciousness was a little more easily shaken off. Mid routine Sertor was interrupted, by Fariq, Squish-scrape-screech-scrape. His employer had been jolted from Ramon's gift of unconsciousness with a splitting headache and what he thought was the continuation of his nightmare.

Fariq pulled himself together remarkably swiftly given the circumstances. Not many men could go from 'slung like a sack over Sertor's shoulder and screeching' to 'slung like a sack over Sertor's shoulder and sneering out demands.' But Fariq was not many men. Fariq was endowed with the knowledge that all over men were inferior to him and his majestic sneer. "Put me down, you imbecile, now."

Sertor heard the order, but there wasn't much he could do about it. He had a task to do, and the longer he took the greater the risk of calamity. Fariq's only reply was another round of Squish-scrape-scrape. The goateed antiques dealer began to realise that it wasn't just dark. It stank to high heavens. "Changers protect my delicate nostrils, what is that hideous stench!" Squish-scrape-scrape.

This time the large mercenary did take a moment to reply "It if the fent of our fallen foef, foon to be ufed for the purpofe of our immediate falvation." Fariq had no idea what the oversized hired muscle had just said, but it didn't resemble anything close to 'Yes sir, letting you down straight away'. And that just wouldn't do. It was time for drastic action. Fariq tried to look around, then realised it was pitch black. "Turn the lantern on you fool, how can you expect to see?!"

Squish-scrape-scrape-clang. Sertor kicked aside the rubble that had banged against his scutum's edge. "Ramon haf the lantern." Fariq sneered some more in the darkness "And where is Ramon? Tell him to turn on the lantern, you oaf!" Squish-scrape-scrape "Ramon if on the other fide of the fpiked pit." Fariq was about to mimic again when the last two words clicked "What did you say? Spiked pit? What do you mean on the other side? Why am I not on the side with the lantern?!" Sertor couldn't think of a polite way to say 'Nobody wanted to carry you.' and sometimes silence is golden when talking to the man who signs the pay disbursements.

Sertor lost himself in the dull routine of Squish-scrape-scrape while Fariq railed at the heavens, the hells, the sun, the moon, Sertor, Sertor's parents, Sertor's people, Mercenaries of every incompetent variety, and so the list went on. And on. And on and on and on to the accompaniment of Squish-scrape-scrape.

Until eventually it turned to Squish-scrape-shhhhklumpf, a sound similar to that of a hundred kebabs getting skewered. Sertor sighed. "Now for the hard part." Having pushed a large consignment of corpsemeat, Pinar and Hassan included, into the spiked pit, that gave enough solid material for him to rest his scutum on the result flat. Carefully Sertor sat down, so as to be able to prop his weight like an enormous child about to dip his toe in the waters of a particularly cold pool.

Except in this case his worry was not about cold water but that his shield, for all its mighty construction and the buffering presence of flesh beneath it, would not support his weight for the three seconds it needed to. Fariq was still finding new ways to curse things even tenuously linked to Sertor in what had to be a record diatribe. Sertor placed one foot on his scutum, then another, then heaved towards the opposite side of the pit.

A shriek of pain filled the corridors. Fariq had landed on his sneer. Then Omar had landed on Fariq.

Sertor made it across in one piece, recovered his scutum, and picked up Omar again. The large mercenary addressed Fariq "You are on the fafe fide of the pit now. Follow me to the reft."

It was not a pleased Fariq who arrived with Sertor to rejoin the main group

[Tagi]

There was a joyous reunion with the three latecomers, the celebration of which largely consisted of Tagi's unenthused "oh," at seeing Fariq, and Giacomo's quiet sniveling. Ramon remained silent. Tagi had taken the time to switch to human form to look at his wound and dress it as best she could; it was not immediately fatal, but it was near his elbow joint, and every necessary movement broke open the necessary crust of dried blood. He smelled like a walking blood factory, and he was getting tired. Not that he'd admit to it, but his descent into dour, grim wordlessness was unlike him.

That or he was just seriously tired of Tagi's shit. But we'll leave that one to your imagination.

Tagi was back in her hyena form, adjusted to allow for speech. She'd done some preliminary scouting along the walls, and had disarmed two dart traps. She was presently wondering what scabies might taste like after a few hundred years dead. She was rather hungry.

"Giacomo said something about there being a hidden passageway in this room that will lead to the whatever-it-is, so, anyway, I'll clear things up and you just don't die," she said.

There were corpses beneath them. Delicious, yummy, ancient corpses.

One way or another, Tagi was going to find them.

[Sertor Potens]

Sertor was glad to see nobody else had died in his absence. It was a pleasing turn of events. Must have been his inspirational speeches.
But then it was back to the task at hand: finding the Sceptre of Asari.

Now, the storytellers would have you think that crawling through temples, fighting its guardians, and avoiding its traps are all very exciting things. They are liars. Liars of the worst sort. As any member of the Abdju expedition could tell you. Lots of tedious 'Waiting for Tagi to check for traps, then walking a few more metres, then waiting for Tagi again.' And all the while Fariq complained, Ramon seeped semi-vital fluids in stoic silence, Sertor waxed lyrical on the topic of morale, Giacomo insisted on stopping to read hieroglyphs every other minute, and Omar remained pleasantly unconscious. See what I mean? The stuff legends are made of, according to the noisy bastards in taverns.

It took them a while, is what I'm getting at. Nerves were frayed and the notion of quietly running Fariq through crossed the minds of more than one present. However, after going through what they were going through and having no saleable loot for their efforts thus far, Fariq was their only chance to make some kind of profit from this. So they didn't kill him. Just thought about it really hard. Imagined it in graphic detail, in many different variations. They had plenty of time on their hands after all. Right up until they didn't.

Tagi smelled it first "Oh, I found Evren" but then she got distracted by the scent of something amiss with one of the stone blocks in front of her. While Tagi worked out where the extent of the pressure plate lay, Sertor picked up the scent as well. "He if bleeding, it feemf, fomewhere below not far from here."

Giacomo took the opportunity to read the hieroglyphs enscribed on the room they were passing through "We are almost at the inner sanctum, where the Rites of Asari were carried out by his priesthood. Oh, to think I'll be the first academic to set my eyes on that ancient place of worship! To hold in my hands the Sceptre itself! I shall be the toast of every learned man in Eyropa! The treatises I shall be able to write!" Fariq interrupted him with a sneering "...the poor fools you will be able to bore to death if you don't learn to be brief." Which was uncalled for, really, but what could you do? Ramon wasn't really in any condition to waste energy on knocking him unconscious again.

When they finally made it to the source of Evren's blood, Giacomo had wrested control of the lantern from Ramon and its illumination revealed the pale form of Evren himself. The mercenary was propped against an ornate altar, blood dripping from an injury to his left arm. He blinked in the light, and rasped out hoarsely "Giacomo, everyone, you are here? Is this the place?"

They were all so used to Giacomo's academic fervour that there was no reason to stop the man from rushing over to the altar, which matched the descriptions in the old papyrus manuscript. It was again Tagi, and then Sertor, who caught the burgeoning scent of the Nehkhepera approaching from some of the other entrances. "Scabies" Tagi hissed, and "Prepare yourfelf for battle" Sertor rumbled. Ramon wearily drew his sword, and Fariq took up position behind Sertor who was as large a meatshield as any pragmatist could hope for.

Giacomo looked at Tagi and Sertor fearfully as they made their pronouncement, and thus was not paying attention when Evren suddenly grabbed him and threw him over his hip to land him painfully on the altar. Giacomo's last words were 'The Sceptre of Asari!' followed by 'Wait, what are you doing?' then 'Oh, I didn't know it could do that, how fascinataaaaarrgh' as Evren stabbed him through the heart with the Sceptre's hidden blade. As the scent of the Nehkhepera grew stronger for Tagi and Sertor Evren chanted the final parts of the ritual (it was one he'd prepared earlier, just for the main show)

The altar began to glow as the hieroglyphics inscribed all over it took on a sickly rust-coloured glow. Evren let his own blood drip into the wound he'd opened in Giacomo's heart and shouted the final words: Nuk per Asari! Ami-ab per-ab ami-kshat. Anksh-a em t'ett'a-a!!!

The language was an ancient one, and perhaps only the Ghul Djinn Tagi would understand its meaning: "I coming forth am Asari! Pure of heart within a pure body. I live through my words!" A moment later, Giacomo's body took on the same unnatural glow as the altar he lay on, and the sound of scuttling grew louder from the passageways into the chamber. Evren began to laugh, a mania of relief and disbelief combined in one mad cascade of mirth.

He'd done it. Of all his family it had been he, the pariah mercenary, who had completed the destiny of the Cult of Asari, who had held the Sceptre in his hands and chanted the ancient rituals. And succeeded where so many had failed. Fuck his father, fuck his grandfather, and fuck every mercenary outfit he'd ever worked with. He, Evren, had awakened the spirit of a demigod and given it a shell to inhabit.

But there's an old adage about gloating: it's something best done in private. And here Evren was most definitely not alone - a fact he had momentarily forgotten in his manic jubilation.

[Tagi]

He never shut up. Tagi was bemused as she watched-smelled-heard Giacomo die, but it was only at the corner of her attention. Well, no one was really paying much attention to Giacomo, because by the time any of them could register what was going on, it was them or him, and everyone who might have really cared about him was already face down in the dirt. I mean, a mercer had to have his priorities, right? And Tagi would rather crunch into a nice scaby carapace than get sliced up from behind while doing something so impractical as rush to help Giacomo.

But still, no one even bothered to fling out a hand and dramatically cry out, "no!" as he died.

He just died, and no one really cared.

That was just how life went, sometimes.

At least Tagi wasn't flashing anyone. Nope, she was still hyena, and she went for the scabies. Most of them had, in fact, turned for the scabies, until one by one they realized that Evren might actually pose a bigger threat. Fucking magi. Ramon, weakened, his wound soon to reopen, was the one who decided to charge Evren. After all, he would have a harder time dealing with scabies over Tagi or Sertor, and the two would (probably) have his back as he rushed Evren.

The room filled with the sound of legs, and the sound of metal. Tagi's teeth, in particular, made some really horrendous screeching sounds when they scraped off the scabies' carapaces the wrong way.

And then Giacomo came back to life, the wrong way, the worst way possible. Evren's death was postponed as Ramon's strike was deflected by Giacomo, who was shedding light in a disturbing, if useful, fashion. The place was really dark, otherwise, and the lantern wasn't terribly useful for the size of the room, and Ramon did need to see.

He growled out a string of curses, but they took up too much breath, so he just thought them really hard until the training took over and then he wasn't thinking at all, really, except a few spurts of thoughts that occasionally didn't have much to do with anything, except that it was his brain's way of coping with everything. He engaged with the undead Giacomo, but found that the demigod was too powerful. Was that ironic? So much actual power now filling the body of an academic who'd had almost none? If it was, no one cared.

Tagi wrenched half the face of a scaby off, ears turning to face Ramon, to determine what was going on. Something smelled really weird, and she looked --briefly -- to see Giacomo's shining body, and had to do a double take. A scaby rent her foreleg while her attention was divided, and she moved just in time to avoid another pincer through the shoulder. Aggressive little fuckers.

There were too many. She wanted to try some arrows -- for all they weren't meant for close quarters -- but there was no way she could disengage from the scabies without them tearing her to bits.

"Ramon!" She cried out, frustrated, expecting him to switch with her.

He may have been wounded and facing a demi-god, but he threw her a look like she was crazy. He wasn't in any shape to go facing off against multiple enemies.

"Sertor?" Tagi sounded pouty.

Of course she would.

They were only probably going to die.

[Sertor Potens]

If it was any consolation, Sertor hadn't exactly been ignoring the Nehkhepera himself. He'd set up in front of a doorway and in a short time build up a nice little barricade of chopped scarab bodies in front of him so that he only needed to focus on defending from the hips up. Which was also a sign of just how many of the fucking things there were. Quantity, not quality, that's what he was facing, and he was feeling a little bit jilted out of the glorious finale he'd often dreamed of. Even for an eternal optimist like Sertor, pragmatism held a strong place in the heart of every veteran mercenary. That deep-seated understanding of 'how many enemies is TOO MANY enemies'. And this definitely felt like too many.

This was when the universe decided to provide those assembled a brief lesson in irony. Irony was being saved from death by something much more dangerous than the thing about to kill you. Bitter irony was knowing the latter is probably going to kill you anyway. Which is a roundabout way of saying that Giacomo wasn't Giacomo any more. Or an aggressive Giacomo-shaped super-lantern, for that matter.

Once shining-Giacomo had backhanded Ramon away from Evren, preserving his priest for the rites to come, he returned to the central altar. Inhuman sounds came from Giacomo's tortured throat in the same ancient language used by Evren "Complete the next stage of the ritual, priest. Evren hurried over to the altar, and started reciting words of an ancient rite as shining-Giacomo laid himself back down on the altar, grasping the sceptre of Asari. Suddenly, Tagi and Sertor were only facing the warrior caste of the Nehkhepera. All the smaller worker scarabs made a bee-line for the altar as ancient and eldritch energies gathered around the form of what had once been the group's pet scholar. With Ramon slumped against a wall, Tagi and Sertor engaging with the warrior scarabs, and Fariq hiding under Omar next to a pile of scarab corpses, there was nobody to contest Evren's proclamation: "At last! The master and servants are united under the light of Asari!"

The light, however, had suddenly become a lot more patchy. As to what that meant, well, a quick turn of the head would reveal the Nehkhepera workers swarming over the altar and ex-Giacomo. Shortly afterwards, there was a sudden and more distinctive lull in the combat - the warrior class suddenly retreated from the chamber as the presence of that which they served brought out old, overriding behavioural programming. From underneath the writhing mass of scarabs on the altar, sickening sounds could be heard, the sound of flesh rending and bones breaking.

With the sudden retreat of most of the scarabs, Sertor turned his attention to the altar. Then he saw Ramon. Once Evren was done with the foul magics, Sertor reasoned, Ramon would likely be his next target. The Kerostriarii stomped swiftly to take up position between the altar, Evren and Ramon, and waited to see what Evren would do before making his next move to attack or defend. Ramon slowly hauled himself back onto his feet, using his sword as a temporary prop - the creature inhabiting Giacomo's frail form had backhanded him with the force of a mule's kick, and it had fucking hurt. The sudden break from the fighting was a chance for everyone to catch their breath.

At that point, the sounds from the altar changed, and the mass of scarabs were not moving quite the way they had been. Evren's focus was entirely on the altar, waiting to see if there were more tasks to be given to him. The scarabs stopped moving, and something that looked like a long leg uncurled itself from the scarab mass and swung itself off one side of the altar, followed by another. A moment later a cascade of beetle bits fell to the ground as that which Giacomo had become arose from the altar. The only way they could tell it had been Giacomo, in fact, was because it was still clutching the Sceptre of Asari. But now that which stood before them was a chimerical scarabesque abomination, taller than Sertor, and resembling a much more bipedal version of the Nehkhepera which had been attacking them. A fell light glowed in its eyes, and the words it growled were familiar from Evren's earlier chanting: "Nuk per Asari!"

Well, that about did it for the wait-and-see approach, really. At least in Sertor's opinion. The Kerostriarii bellowed "He'f mine!" and charged, leading with his shield as he wound up for a powerful cut. Ramon slid along the wall to be out of the line of fire from whatever might be coming Sertor's way - Ramon was no fool. Which saved his life a moment later when Asari's sceptre glowed, the creature distended its jaw, and a wash of green-hued flame burst forth towards Sertor. Unlike Sertor, the human merc was not roasted. This was what had made Ramon a veteran. But right now, Ramon was seriously considering retirement. If he got the chance.

Magic-scorched rhino-hide was a smell that probably hadn't been experienced by a human since the times of the Changers Wars when Sertor's people had been brought into existance. Or possibly the Punic wars. History was a bit weak on that point. It hadn't been a pleasant smell then, and it still wasn't now. Sertor's charge was blunted by the flames, his shield heating to unbearable levels as his flesh started to crackle in an agonising fashion, but the Kerostriarii had enough time and determination to cleave into the abomination's wrist and send the sceptre flying. A moment later, as the sceptre rattled to the ground near Ramon, Asari swept the smoking Sertor aside with a powerful swipe of its undamaged arm and sent the 800kg mercenary crashing against the altar. The abomination staggered slightly before snarling to Evren in its ancient language "Retrieve my sceptre before all is undone! Hurry, priest!"

(As a side note - for those worried that the world might have somehow lost its principle exponent of the most refined sneers - Fariq was still using the comatose Omar as a meatshield, and was doing very well at not being noticed, thank you very much.)

With Ramon already badly wounded, Sertor an altar-served Asari-fried-kerostriarii, and Fariq putting his own safety first, the only person left to save the day was not the hero it deserved or needed (or even desired, for that matter). But fuck the world, because it was time for Tagi to go up a few places on that stupid scoreboard she hated so much at the merc hq in Tamazgha.

[Tagi]

There was one nice thing about the chips being down and desperation settling in: Tagi didn't have to cater to the delicate sensibilities of her companions any longer. Their enemies were summoning monsters, so she became one. Well, she already was one. She just made the outsides look like the insides. Or more like reality; Tagi had always personally thought that her insides were much less gross than human insides. Not that humans could appreciate that, and if anyone of note had actually seen her dashing towards the sceptre in the queer half-light of that tomb, she likely would have gone down several places on the board. And then off it. And then a mass of villagers would have gathered with pitchforks and torches to cleanse her with iron and fire.

There was no justice in the world.

But still, move she did. Shadow and light played off her twisted form, a ghoulish mix of hyena, ghul, and human; too many joints, nearly reminiscent of a scuttling cockroach or spider, but with a faceful of teeth too much like a hyena jaw pushing against a human face to be anything but disquieting.

A lesser man would have retched at Tagi's approach, but Ramon only paled and pressed backwards slightly. His hand had tightened on his weapon in a way that proclaimed his sudden uncertainty of whether or not Tagi was an ally any longer -- who could blame him after Giacomo's transformation? Tagi, for her part, spared him a glance from her beady little eyes to ensure he was not in immediate danger (you're welcome she was thinking, sarcastic, having noticed how he looked at her the same way some human women looked at particularly ugly spiders -- how cruel the world!) before swooping in on the sceptre.

She picked it up, hands too stubby and misshapen to really be called hands, but still functioning as such (her shape, shall we say, was not entirely static). Evren arrived moments too late, teeth bared in determination, and could only watch as Tagi took the thing in her other hand and broke it like a twig.

Except it didn't break. It bent. Which, given the surge of desperation in Evren's face, didn't really do anything to it besides make it look ugly and kind of pitiful. Tagi looked down at it, confused, and was then more confused when Evren's sword entered her mid-body, around the area where guts should have been (probably), and his other hand reached out to try to yank it from her grasp. That fucking hurt, all right, and pissed her off more than anything. Could a ghul get any glory, for once?

So she did what any proper ghul djinn would have done: she distended her jaw, yanked upwards, and crunched down on half the scepter, Evren's hand, and part of his wrist. The other piece came off in her hand as the rest disappeared into her maw. Crunch, crunch, and then a bulging swallow.

Evren stared, mouth agape. Into that silence, Tagi retched and told him, "you taste disgusting" in her gravelly, distorted voice.

The magical, suddenly unstabilized energies of the sceptre, however, were about to give her indigestion quite unlike anything she'd ever had before: to put it succinctly, she made a noise like a cat about to discharge a hairball, and then puked rainbow all over Evren.

Well, something like rainbow. It was mostly magic that appeared like light, broken into unstable prisms that were generally not good for the human condition.

Evren screamed.

The other half of the sceptre started smoking in Tagi's hand.

Tagi screamed.

Hers was much less pleasant than Evren's...but what else could you expect coming from that monstrous throat?

[Sertor Potens]

There was, it had to be said, a lot of screaming when the Sceptre of Asari was destroyed in a fashion not quite in keeping with the dignity such an artifact might have felt it deserved - if it had any opinion on the subject. Not that anyone had bothered to ask it and find out. Nobody would ever know if the Sceptre had any last words other than 'Snap', 'crunch', and 'clank'. And even if it had, well, it probably could not be heard above all the screaming, hissing, and gnashing of Nehkhepera mandibles anyway.

Everything fell into chaos as magical energy fluctuated wildly and muddled everything up. Ramon would later describe it as 'reality getting kicked in the balls, and everyone feeling the pain'. Somehow - several hours later - Sertor, Ramon, Tagi, and Fariq found themselves seated around a makeshift campfire waiting for their memories to make sense. There was a big question mark, thanks to the potent psychedelic effects caused by shattering the Sceptre of Asari, regarding just how they had escaped the temple.

There was however a smell of cooked meat, which was nice. Unfortunately, the scent of cooked meat was emanating from Sertor, which was not so pleasant. Certainly the thin soup being cooked by Ramon in his helmet lacked any meat, and frankly Ramon resented Sertor for smelling like anything approaching a proper dinner. But it didn't seem politic to ask him to move downwind. In fact speaking of any kind hadn't been on anyone's mind even after some semblance of lucidity had returned to them.

It was, regrettably, Fariq who broke the silence. "You realise, of course, that you are not getting paid." The inevitable sneer was somewhat bedraggled by the events of the day, but even so it was present. It was like a reminder that at the end of every sunny day comes a cold, dark, wretched night; and Fariq was the kind of person who inevitably states the obvious fact that yes, it is a cold wretched night, and wouldn't it be wonderful if it was less cold and wet and damp, and did anyone else notice the miserable state of affairs? The looks Fariq received were, unsurprisingly, not particularly well intentioned.

Ramon had finally had enough. The mercenary spoke quietly, with the kind of calm that comes before a cut throat - or maybe that was just the influence of the knife the mercenary was caressing "You realise, of course, that you will not be returning with us. Alive at least. Your only value is as a paymaster. I'm sure, if we can't get our money out of you, we will get some kind of reward for bravely returning your corpse to your family. I'm sure Tagi can make it look like authentic insect injuries." Tagi experimented with shifting her head into something grotesquely akin to that of a beetle, and clacked the mandibles experimentally. Fariq's sneer lost most of its edge. It was, after that stomach-churning display, a vestigial sneer at best. 'Resting Sneer Face', some experts might call it.

As Fariq desperately tried to think of some way in which being a condescending and arrogant bastard could get him out of the developing situation alive, Sertor rasped "There if an alternative." The scorched Kerostriarii coughed. "Perhapf an ad hoc change of the contractf, de contractus ferenda, might be fuggefted by Fariq. He muft of courfe make it fo that there if no rifk of it later being interpreted contra proferentem to our difadvantage." The thing about learning so many languages, it must be noted, is that contracts have a form of language all to themselves. Sertor hadn't ignored that fact after the first (and last) time he was stiffed out of a commission by a cunning paymaster.

Ramon had to concede Sertor had a point. But now he resented Sertor for both smelling like a roast and depriving him of the excuse to help Tagi kill the supercilious arsehole Fariq. The latter seemed to sense some hint of Ramon's emotional state, and was quick to say "Ah, yes, that could work." Tagi's second attempt at a decent beetle head might have helped matters along too.

The wounded merc grumbled "You'd better make the amendments good, or we'll go back to the first plan." Tagi clacked her mandibles. This time they sounded a lot more forceful. Definite improvement in the tendon and ligament strength. Focused practice really does help in any endeavour. Fariq, in an unexpected display of self-awareness and tact, replied "Yes, of course. Ah, what did happen after the Sceptre was destr... uhm, caught up in an inexplicable event of wild magic and rendered unrecoverable by the expedition."

It was a good question. Ramon looked at Tagi. For one, Sertor's lisp was far worse now that he was par-cooked, and secondly, she seemed the most magical of the lot of them, maybe she could fill in some of the gaps. Thirdly, he was curious if she'd try to speak with a beetle head.

Ramon, for his own part, was still trying to sort through the confused cacophony of sensory input his mind had been bombarded with. He'd tried eating Changer's Caps once, a highly hallucinogenic mushroom, and that experience paled in comparison to what he had just gone through.

[Tagi]

Tagi belched, the sound distorted through the mandibles of the deformed beetle head she wore. She clacked her mandibles, and seemed, for a moment, to be at a loss.

_________

The rainbow light of the vomited magic dribbled from Evren, suffusing him with a multi-hued glow. It lit up the room, bouncing from the walls and glittering from the shells of the scarabs. It broke apart, each color twisting away from its brethren to scatter and blend into a light show the likes of which Tagi had never seen before. It blanketed them, muffling all sound; for Tagi it was as if she was watching from behind someone else's eyes. She stumbled back from Evren, whose mouth was yet opened, and watched as the light slid into him.

She could not drop the other half of the scepter, though she tried. She could feel it assessing, could feel its automatic and animal intent; it was not so dissimilar to how she'd once been, a thing of instinct rather than thought. It began to discharge a smoky darkness made up of indistinguishable shades felt rather than seen. If the rainbow light was bouncing and forming sharp angles, the darkness drifted in amorphous clouds that did not disperse.

Tagi fell as she watched, captivated by the contradictions and the pictures forming behind the outermost edges of the magic. She began to feel that she was upside down, or backwards, and twisted this way and that. Certainty flooded her that if she could look at it the right way, she would see behind the protective veil the magic cast about itself to the heart of the matter. To the truth of it. The truth of the universe, connecting them all, ghul-djinn to human, to beast, to bug.

The scabies had quietened but for a few mournful clacks, fallen to feet, bumping and swaying: such docility as though they'd never harmed anything. As Tagi stared, it was as if she could see them come apart, to see the very fabric of their being. Maybe she was one of them for a moment, they all were one, separated by circumstance. An urge rose up in her all of a sudden, a hunger to be connected, to take them all into her and pick through their lives second by second.

She was floating.

She watched Evren swim past her, the hollowness of his bones made clear by the first blast of contact; a happy accident there, that the magic had taken him whole before it could gentle itself. She could see it moving him, and knew it had claimed him. It didn't really want to, you know, but what was done was done.

Ramon was giggling against a wall, a cloud of darkness suffusing him with a deep ruby shadow. His bleeding had stopped, and he was clapping his hands in a rhythm. Tagi suspected he was experimenting with what it was like to be a scaby, though it might as well have been true that he was trying to recreate the sound falling rocks made when tumbling through reality into the astral plane. Distantly, she thought that she would like to feel that herself, though maybe as strands of human hair (she'd never really understood hair, now that she thought about it, they made as much sense as molten rock or strands of metal).

Sertor was dancing with such grace and elegance that Tagi was certain he had felt true inspiration tangled up in the skeins. There was such a peace about him that she knew he'd seen the answers in a manner that none of them could; behind him stood the line of his ancestors, back to the Changer who had formed his people. There was an understanding of magic and power that could have made her wept for knowing that she would never have that. Such formed her eternal hunger, but she was happy that Sertor tread the steps of the Changers and moved with them, had become of them -- through him she could touch it, and they all shared that peace.

She stood atop molten strands of magic, against a backdrop of sticky, humid pools of lifegiving blood, and felt someone grip the half of the sceptor she held. She looked up, and saw what Giacomo had become, and decided that he was the most filling, most deserving, most inspiring thing she'd ever seen. The light and dark bent and warped around them, connecting each of them through panes of glass, looking in on what each had thought and experienced, and with the knowledge that it was what all of them had ever wanted, she opened her jaw impossibly wide.

Together, they ate Giacomo and knew what it meant to be god.


_________

Having transformed her head back to its typical human-like state, Tagi said, "the magic nibbled us but didn't like us. It really liked Giacomo, though," and would say no more. She started counting her remaining arrows, instead, and when she noticed them staring at her she tipped her head to the side.

"Do you want me to try the beetle head again?"

[Sertor Potens]

Ramon did, in fact, want Tagi to try the beetle head again. He was perversely curious to see if Tagi could figure out how to talk with a beetle head, but decided not to say so aloud. It didn't seem politic. Instead he focused on the task of stirring the soup in diplomatic silence.

Sertor grumbled "It waf too confufing to put into wordf. Thingf went out of fape and affected our thinking. I affume it affected the fcarabf af badly af it affected uf. Morefo, given that we are ftill in one piece. All in all, a tafk well handled." Sertor's optimism blithely ignored the fact that they had lost most of their party, and had destroyed the artifact they had meant to recover. As far as Sertor was concerned, any mission you could walk away from was a good mission.

Fariq, for once, had the good sense not to say anything. Besides, his sneer said everything for him.

The trek home was arduous yet comfortingly dull. Those creatures which were attracted to the group by the delicious smell of cooked Sertor were soon shooed away by the sad reality that Sertor was faking being a cooked meal ready to eat.

By the time they returned to civilisation, Fariq was about ready to sign off anything to ensure he could put the entire sorry mess behind him. After all, with his brother's oh-so-sad-yet-very-fiscally-convenient passing, he'd inherited his brother's assets, which meant a lot more money, power, and paperwork. Fariq was petty enough to consider this appropriate compensation for the grief of losing his brother, and got over all of the associated trauma in a nauseatingly rapid fashion. Ramon, Tagi, and Sertor were all paid promptly, and everyone lived happily ever after.

The latter, of course, being a complete and utter lie. Fariq was never happy unless someone else was unhappy. Tagi was a whiny bitch in general, so describing her as happy would always be a bit of a stretch. Ramon proclaimed that he was done with the mercenary life and was retiring to die in the arms of someone else's plump wife and/or run a caravanserai. Sertor, however, was happy. He'd had some good fights, been paid, replaced and repaired his equipment, and even had a new monocle made.

Life was good for the Kerostriarius, and it even turned out that Tagi and he were headed in the same general direction, which was jolly. Nothing improved travel like a travelling companion. Which meant, if you really want to split hairs, that even Sertor's happy ending came with a Tagi-shaped caveat. But that's the mercenary life for you.

[Tagi]

Tagi and Sertor were heading in the same direction because Fariq had generally and deliberately let it be known that Tagi was cursed with an affliction that turned her into one of the Nehkhepera. Only the strength of opinion regarding her employer kept the villagers from running her out of town with torches and pitchforks, and given Sertor was leaving, he was assigned as her escort, aka babysitter.

Children gathered and squawked at her, brandishing sticks and bones in her direction. She bared her iron teeth at them, hissing. They scattered, but not for long.

They passed the scoreboard as they walked out of town; Ramon topped the list, followed by two yet-living mercs, and then Sertor. Several of the dead still held places, while Tagi's name was nowhere to be seen. She bit her lower lip. "Incomprehensible. I am too cool for them," was her final muttered comment on the matter.

Purses full, they left town with an entourage of jeering children at their backs. If they never returned, it would be too soon.