Cracks and crevices are clogged like arteries with drying, thickening blood in the cold of Winter. Holes are stuffed with spider webs yet sing a hauntingly hollow song in tune with the wind which shudders the walls to shiver like the humans they encased.
Humans, Shen would consider them, but only in the lightest and most forgiving of moments.
The shrouded figures adorn the same mask in a cloned repeat which curves in a perfect, near mathematically precise half circle. In the center, a worn seat positioned like a throne seats a man no more differently dressed than the rest: Zed, the Master of Shadows. In his arms, a rotting corpse decomposes in the moonlight. Shen identifies it as his father.
Short, dark hair has been reduced to dry, thinning threads. The void of the body's empty eye sockets are filled with crawling, well-fed maggots who writhe in the very being they consume. Zed's face is close–much too close–to the head of the body which barely holds on by the fibers of its skin to the base of its neck. Shen can hear every breath Zed takes, and with the drawn out inhalation he understands that Zed was relishing in the sick bliss building in his lungs.
The sight makes Shen swallow a lump in his throat. The Eye of Twilight is clearly uncomfortable by the macabre show put before him. The sound of his unease and the tremble in his hands makes the Master of Shadows react like a well-tuned predator. Zed turns slowly, as if knowing that the anticipation and delay lay seed to anxiety.
The look of a dissatisfied sadist could be read in Zed's eyes alone. It is this demeaning gaze that makes Shen realize that he is on his knees, unable to stand before his enemy. Like offering scraps to a beggar, Zed tosses the body and allows it to roll into disfigurement until it reaches Shen's place on the floor.
A deep laugh echoes within his helmet. Shen looks down and, upon closer inspection, realizes that the body is not of his father.
It is of him.