The man opened the door to his home. It was a squat, stone structure, just inside the wall of one of Nephalia's small villages. He pushed before him a wheelbarrow, and curled inside was a dark form with a cloth carefully draped over it. To any looking on in the dark night of Innistrad, he was simply a man in red leathers bringing a wheelbarrow into his house. Once both he and his cargo were safely inside, he closed and bolted the heavy wooden door, allowing all who walk by it to see the Symbol of Avacyn etched into it. Like a good human of Innistrad.
He parked the 'barrow just inside his home, and removed the cloth. Inside was a man, about thirty years of age, with salt-and-pepper colored hair. He was lying, gagged and unconscious curled painfully in the bottom. He was a muscular man, as he should be. According to what the vampire that sold him said, he was a sailor.
The man in red leathers roughly hoisted his victim over his shoulders, and began walking down to his cellar. He inhaled deeply the mana that wafted from his fireplace, however little there was. As he reached the bottom of the steps, he surveyed the room. It appeared to be as any other cellar in Innistrad, walled with stone bricks, floor covered in wooden boards. There were various crates, shelves, and cupboards around. It was a perfectly nice little cellar.
He walked to the wall opposite the stairs, and dropped his package. He unsheathed a dagger from his thigh, and made a long, shallow cut upon his palm. The pain exhilarated him, not only for what it was, but for what it meant he would soon do. He pressed his hand flat against the stone wall, and the blood filled unseen grooves, eventually forming into a symbol reminiscent of the Avacynian one, but upside down, and the two rectangles on the edges of the incomplete circle were instead as harsh spikes.
As the last of the blood completed the unholy symbol, the bricks in the wall began to rumble and shake, each independent of the other. He smiled as they began to turn themselves away, forming an opening in the wall. He picked up his burden and walked through. The downside to the enchantment on the wall was that it had to stay open while he was in his chamber.
He moved down darkened steps that wound down, deep into the earth. He eventually reached the bottom, where the narrow downward passage opened into a dimly lit room larger than his actual house entire. He moved towards a pre-prepared area, one of the many small compartments separated by cloth partitions hanging from tracks on the ceiling, like a church's surgery room, stepping carefully over a pool of red liquid on the floor. With some difficulty, he managed to shackle the man to the wall, securing his arms and legs.
Then, he moved to a nearby table, and picked up a syringe filled with a clear liquid. He approached his latest victim, a gleeful smile plastered across his face, but stopped, when he heard a weak voice from another partitioned chamber.
"Water," it pleaded. It was the voice of a broken being, one who had long since resided itself to a short life of pain.
The man set down his syringe, and moved into the other area. Shackled to the wall was a human. It was nearly impossible to tell what gender, so heavily was it scarred and disfigured. Had he not himself seen the person before, the man would not have known it had once been the most beautiful woman in the small village. She began to sob softly, though no tears flowed. He had long since ripped them from her face. Her hair was sparse, for he had wrenched most of it from her skull only a few days before. She had scars and dark red lines across her body as well. Tibalt intended to do more with her, but she had passed out, and she couldn't express her pain unconscious.
Despite everything else, he hadn't crippled her. Not physically, anyway. She still had all of her limbs, her (tearless) eyes, her ears. She was scarred, yet mostly whole. She was covered in small brown rags torn from burlap potato sacks. He picked up an empty syringe, smiled evilly at her, and left. He returned presently, the syringe filled with a different clear liquid. He affixed this one with a long, sharp needle. He approached her.
"Thirsty?" he asked, flashing his brilliantly white teeth again. She nodded, fearfully eyeing the needle.
"Open your mouth." He cooed softly. She blinked hard and shook her head. He slapped her across the face, leaving a stinging red mark across her cheek. She looked at him, pleading with her eyes.
"Please," she said, but before she could say anymore, Tibalt stuck the needle into her mouth careful not to poke anything, simply putting it inside. He slowly pushed down on the plunger, allowing the refreshing water to trickle down her throat. She smiled, relieved he didn't do something horrible to her.
Abruptly, he pulled it out of her mouth, grinning viciously. He tore the burlap shirt from her body, enjoying her small yelp of fear. He pressed the tip of the needle against various parts of her precious body, the thing she had treasured most when she was free. Finally, he settled on a spot, and withdrew the needle.
"Want more water?" He asked sincerely. He honestly wanted to know.
Fearing the worst, she nodded.
Tibalt reared his needle back, then injected it quickly and painfully, going straight through her flesh and into her quivering stomach. He pushed hard on the plunger, skipping the middle man of her mouth and throat. She gasped in extreme pain, second only to when he removed her ability not to cry, but to produce tears.
Tibalt smiled and pulled the plunger out, filling the syringe with her stomach fluids. He chuckled and walked away, leaving the torturous thing sticking out of her body.
He returned to the compartment of his latest victim, the sweet song of the woman's cries wafting through the curtains. He picked up his abandoned injector, and stalked toward the man. He put the significantly shorter needle into the man's arm and filled his veins with the clear liquid.
The liquid caused him to awake, his arms burning, as it made its way through his system. He gasped.
"Where, where am I?" he groaned, sure his arms would fall off.
Tibalt wiped the grin from his face and put on his most reassuring and innocent face, speaking with a matched voice. "You were injured, out on the rocks. We don't know how you got there, but you were found and brought to me for healing."
"My arms," the man said, on the verge of tears.
"Don't worry. The pain will subside. You had some form of toxin in you. We had to inject you with a chemical that will stop the poison, but it will hurt like hell for a while. You'll be fine." He lied, barely keeping his voice calm.
"Can you ease the pain? Why am I shackled?" he asked.
"Well, no, I can't. You're shackled to keep you standing. Because of the curious nature of the antivenom, you have to stay upright so it can work its way through your system."
The man looked mildly reassured, and Tibalt left, retreating into the room he was in earlier. He picked up the burlap rag that previously served as the woman's shirt and used it as a gag. Then, satisfied, he returned upstairs. At the top, he wiped his palm across the space where the wall once was, and the stones began to rumble and return to a wall form. He undressed and redressed into nighttime clothes, and, thinking of what he could do tomorrow, quickly fell into a peaceful slumber.
He awoke the next morning to find some small red thing in the corner of his bedroom. It was hunched over, and boasted an almost equine head with thick black hair coursing down its back in a narrow line, ending where its back did. It had long thin claws on each small hand of each thin arm. Its legs were reversed-jointed, and ended in large, clawed, four-toed feet. Its back was lined with sharp white spikes, all the way down to the tip of its rat-like tail.
Tibalt sat, staring at it, and saw himself reflected in its solid black eyes. Neither made a sound, until Tibalt eventually decided to stand and get dressed. He did so silently, and grabbed two loaves of bread from his kitchen before heading back downstairs to continue his gleeful work. The creature didn't seem to move, yet still appeared everywhere he went.
Tibalt broke one of the loaves in half, and fed it half to the woman, bit by bit. When she was done, he poured a glass of water down her throat for her. He could tell from the marks on her wrists that she had strained against her bonds trying to remove the needle and syringe, but was obviously unable to do so. The chains weren't even long enough for her to touch her own head.
He bent down and, with a brush, scrubbed her filthy feet. He didn't want her dying of some disease before he had his fill of her, and standing in this dirty room on this dirty floor certainly wouldn't make her healthier.
Then he moved into the room of the man, and repeated this process.
"How are your arms?" he asked.
"They're better now. Thanks doc." The man said, relieved and almost happy.
"I'm no doctor." Tibalt said, staring his victim dead in the eye. The man shifted uncomfortably.
"Who, ah, who else is here?" The man said. Tibalt regarded him curiously. "I've heard a muffled voice. Who is that?"
"Oh, her." Tibalt said, feigning surprise. "She's… mentally unstable. I have to keep her gagged or else, well…" he trailed off, hoping the man would let his imagination fill in the gaps. Nope.
"Well what?" he asked, earning an agitated look from Tibalt.
"She'll cast her spells. You see, she's a mage." Then he stopped, changed his expression, and said "You know what? No. She's not. If you like, I can go untie her." Before the man could answer, Tibalt was gone, and removed the gag from the woman's mouth.
"Tell me, what's your name?" Tibalt called through the curtain.
"Aaron." The man responded, voice shaking slightly.
"Well, Aaron," Tibalt said, throwing the curtain to the side, revealing the scarred, mostly bald, scared, topless woman. "Meet your future."
The man gasped. Before he could utter a word, though, Tibalt was in front of him, dagger in hand. He quickly cut Aaron's clothes in a dozen different places, then pulled the pieces off.
He knelt near the man's genitalia, and raised his sharp blade up to them.
"Don't" was all the man could manage to say before he became half a man. Tibalt quickly lit a fire in his left hand, and used the spell to cauterize the place that had once been the man's pride and joy. Yells and hollers and cries and pleas sounded, and tears rolled down Aaron's face as he squirmed away from the inescapable pain and the fire. He collected the 'spare parts' and sealed them in a jar of preservative liquid, which he placed on the table nearby so the man would always see them. He heard soft sobbing from behind him as well, and turned so suddenly as to elicit another yelp from the girl.
Squatting as it always had in front of her was the small creature from before. For some reason that he associated with the creature, he moved towards her and removed the needle from her form.
"Open." He said. She shook her head, and Tibalt shook his in disappointment. He thought she would have learned her lesson. He wrapped his left arm around her and caressed her back, knowing it would disgust her, and in truth, she shuddered and shied away. He pressed against the middle of her back, and ignited his palm. She opened her mouth in pain, and he placed the needle into her mouth, letting the fire die.
Her eyes pleading with him and the thought of the man's pain behind him, he released the stomach acid into her mouth, forcing her to painfully swallow her own digestive juices.
Tibalt awoke the next day to find a second demon in his room. It was different than the first, more reptilian. He repeated the ritual from the day before, but this time brought with him an iron spear. Fueled by ideas he attributed to the demons, he impaled the man, moving from the stomach upwards and backwards, piercing his spine. The man's legs instantly hung limp.
"Why can't I feel anything?" The man asked, terrified. In truth, he could feel, but considering he was run through, it didn't hurt much.
"I severed your spinal column. You can't feel or move below your chest." When the man tried to move his legs, he found that Tibalt hadn't lied.
Tibalt removed the spear, allowing blood cascade out onto the floor, but quickly replaced the weapon with a similarly sized iron rod, which he used his spells to heat to an intense temperature, cauterizing the man's gaping hole.
Then, Tibalt picked up a serrated knife, and began carefully carving the man's abdominal skin and muscles out. It was hard work to not cut the internal organs and to seal the wounds with fire as he went, but he eventually managed to remove the hunk of flesh.
Tibalt used his knife to sever the small intestine where it connected to large, and slowly began unstringing them. He could see the man's sheer revulsion, and saw how it affected him to witness his own torture and not feel it.
Tibalt very carefully and methodically secured the organs to hang from the wall and ceiling. Then, in a fit of genius, placed the man's preserved parts in the body cavity left by the intestines. Feeling the approval of the demons, Tibalt left, both the chamber, his house, and the village, heading for the largest city in Nephalia, Seagraf.
There, he managed to procure another victim, another woman named Catherine, through a combination of coin, persuasion, and fire.
He returned the next day to see the man dead as he expected, and the woman hungry and thirsty. He chained Catherine to another wall, making sure there was no partition, so she could see her fate. He let her awake on her own this time. He sat patiently back facing the two women, surrounded by five demons. He cast his mind out to the small hills near Seagraf he had become familiar with through the years. He meditated, gathering mana he didn't really need.
After an hour, Catherine awoke. Eyes still closed, Tibalt smiled at the sound of her startled gasp, followed by a small shriek.
"No one can hear you," the other woman said.
"Where am I?" Catherine asked. "What's going on?"
"You're in the basement of some madman! He's crazy, he's keeping us here. But I think he's asleep now." She looked at him, fearful, but couldn't tell if he was awake.
They sat quietly for a while, each with mounting fear. Tibalt allowed them both to do so, and particularly enjoyed the thought of Catherine's inevitable terror at the sight of a sexless man with his innards hung everywhere.
He eventually stood, and turned to Catherine.
"Welcome," he said, bowing deeply with a slight flourish, "to my humble abode." Still bowed, he turned his head to the woman that had been in his chamber for days. "And I was awake the whole time."
He straightened, and moved towards Catherine. She glared at him all the while. He removed her clothing piece by piece, almost gently. Once she was fully nude, he gently ran the back of his hand across her supple body. He moved his face to be within two inches of her.
"Your screams must sound lovely."
She reared her head back and head-butted him, but recoiled in pain with a burn mark on her forehead.
"Nice try." Tibalt said, then took a step back and clapped his hands joyously. "Now, how shall we begin?" He received an idea from one of his demonic onlookers, and turned towards it. "Excellent idea!" he crowed. However, the two women couldn't see any of the evil audience, so it looked to him as if he was talking to the air.
He walked towards the topless woman, drawing a dagger as he did so. He gently and carefully cut her between her breasts, leaving a long red line. He wiped the blood off on her cheek. Then, calling upon an old spell, he reached out and touched let his hand lay flat on her stomach.
Then, wherever blood laid on the outside of her skin was, she felt a sharp and intense pain. She doubled over, as well as she could in chains, and let out a yell of pain. Tibalt laughed aloud, breathing in the pain.
After several minutes of this, Tibalt eventually stopped. The spell drained his energy very quickly, and he couldn't keep it up for long.
Tired, he sunk to his knees, chuckling. He looked up at this woman, and saw that she wore nothing beneath her strip of burlap over her hips. He smiled and stored that knowledge away.
That night, he was out prowling the village. He eventually decided on one of the guards. He followed the man until he was the only one around. Then, he pulled out a hand crossbow. He placed a careful enchantment on the quarrel, one that would cause enough pain to knock one unconscious. Seeing as an individual human's tolerance for pain varied, Tibalt saw fit to cause enough pain to render a werewolf packleader into a whining pup. The quarrel hit the guard in the back, and he instantly fell to the ground, unconscious before he even could utter a cry of pain.
Tibalt was quickly at the prone form, and slowly and stealthily made his way back to his house. While the man was still unconscious, he ripped out the quarrel and used a potion he had acquired to treat the wound. He scowled in disgust as the injury healed, flesh stitching back into flesh, muscle fibers knitting themselves together, skin stretching across the gap to close the wound. Then, he placed an opaque hood over the man, stripped him down, and placed him near the topless woman. Then, he closed the partition between them and everything.
When the man awoke, he groaned in pain, reaching for his back, before realizing he was sitting bound, naked, in an unfamiliar room He instantly stood and shouted in his most guardsmanly voice "Hey! Where am I?"
In a much-practiced voice, Tibalt responded "Congratulations, guardsman! For your work, we've given you a reward! As long as you can break free from your rope ties, you can have your way with this woman. She has completely consented, and we dressed her up as a victim. Anything she says is an act. Just imagine: You bust into a maniac's house and get to 'save' his latest victim!"
Tibalt silently congratulated himself. He almost convinced even himself that he was the guard captain.
The man almost instantly broke the bonds, though Tibalt always meant him to. He chose a weak rope and tied it weakly.
Tibalt heard grunts and groans as the man got to business. He let him at it for a moment before sticking his head through the curtains. At a point when the man's body was almost entirely touching hers, Tibalt activated the rune he had previously etched into the ground there.
The two's flesh almost instantly melded together, skin growing into skin wherever they touched.. They were, of course, still tow separate people, just with conjoined skin. If he really wanted to, or could even have thought about it over his own frantic shouts and screams, the guardsmen could have ripped himself away, despite the amount of pain it would cause.
Tibalt fully entered the room and leaned quietly against the wall, so he'd be in the guardsman's field of vision. The guard began to move his hand, possibly to strike Tibalt, but found that his hand was indeed stuck to the woman's hip. He strained, but the idea of ripping the skin off of the inside of his hand caused him to cease his struggles.
Tibalt whipped out his thigh-mounted dagger, and carefully cut the woman's side. He laughed as the man winced, sharing the pain of his partner.
"Who are you?" the guard hollered. "What is this? Let me go! I'll kill you!"
Tibalt walked away, laughing. As he walked, he idly threw his dagger at Catherine. It struck the wall right next to her head. It left a mark in the stone, and fell to the ground at her feet. Of course, Tibalt had no intention to hit her, and as he locked eyes with her as he left, he was sure that she knew too.
Tibalt's dreams that night were wracked with madness, and he slept fitfully. Over the next several days, he tortured the conjoined two in various ways, leaving Catherine untouched, though every day he threw his dagger at her. Near the end of the week, the victims woke to find that Aaron's body was gone, a small pile of ash where it once hung. There was also a new set of chains on the floor, and the day after that, there was a man there, completely nude, as Tibalt began to prefer his victims, chained spread-eagled facing upwards.
The week after that man appeared, they hardly saw Tibalt besides the daily cleaning and feeding. As the week went by, there were two more people, one a man and one a woman in the room. Now there was the two newcomers each in a corner on the left side of the room, Catherine, still untouched, in the front-right corner, a man in the center, and the conjoined two in the remaining corner.
Now that he had more to work with, Tibalt had fun. He whipped, burned, stung, marked, branded, pierced, cut, and lashed the two newcomers and the conjoined two. Yet he still was intent on leaving Catherine alone, though he had no idea why.
One day he came down the steps with a long metal item in his hands. It was long and thin, and seemed absolutely covered in blades and spikes. He walked over towards the conjoined couple, and set the contraption against the man's back. He sent a pulse of magic through the metal, and smiled as it began to work.
It started by throwing its spikes into his flesh on either side of his spine. The spikes dug deep, then turned, curling around his spine. The man screamed the entire way, spasming in pain. The woman did the same, but hers was less, as she received the pain second-hand. Then, in a swift, violent motion, the device ripped the vertebrae and spinal column of the man right out of his back. The poor man managed to stay alive for a few agonizing minutes, completely limp and useless, feeling a pain so intense that even had he the ability to send messages to his throat to scream, it would have been a silent one.
Tibalt spent the next hour or so cutting the guard away from the woman, silent the whole time. He did the best he could with the area they had been connected before his spell, but it was still a little messy. When he was done, he hauled the body and its bits to the center of the back of the room, and left. He had remained silent the whole day.
And over the course of these past weeks, the amount of demons and devils increased substantially. None of them ever said anything audible, yet he was certain they were giving him ideas.
As before, he burned away the corpse before the others woke up. When she awoke, and she woke first, as she usually did, Tibalt went over to his longest victim.
"Why haven't you hurt that girl?" she asked, motioning with her chin towards Catherine.
"I don't know." Tibalt responded.
"You should." She said.
"Maybe," Tibalt said.
He moved away from her, towards the man in the middle. In one vicious moment, he unsheathed his dagger and plunged it into the man's core. The man screamed, and Tibalt sliced the dagger to the side, and it tore out of the man's side. The man shrieked. By now, the others were awake.
Tibalt laid his left hand upon the man's wound, and cauterized it. The man was spasming, but he might live, had Tibalt stopped. Instead, however, Tibalt pressed his red-hot hand down further and further, and everything his hand touched either evaporated or slowly turned to ash. He pressed further and further, and the veritable army of demons and devils around him were laughing or shrieking with joy.
After several minutes, Tibalt had pressed his hand straight through the man, and touched the floor. The man was left quivering with a giant searing hole in his body. Then, Tibalt laid both hands on the man's hair, and set it alight, and laughed with glee as it rapidly spread to his eyebrows and beard, then to his chest hair, following down to ignite every piece of hair on his body. Soon the man was an inferno in the center of the room, and Tibalt feared that the shackles might melt or warp. Nonetheless, he let him burn.
Then the hair on the back of Tibalt's neck raised as he heard a sickening sound. He shouldn't have heard it, not above the man's screams or the roar of the fire, but he did: someone had forced his door open. Tibalt sprinted for the stairs, and began climbing up and up and up the damnable stairs. He reached the top at the same time the cathars that invaded his house entered his cellar from above.
The two groups stared at each other for a full minute, neither speaking, the cathars halfway down the steps, Tibalt hanging from the doorway. Tibalt then put his hand out, awkwardly wiping the area that closed the wall from the opposite side. The stones began to shift, and Tibalt disappeared down the stairs, and the Cathars began to rush. By the time they got there, however, the hole was too small for even the smallest of the two to squeeze through.
Tibalt ran down the steps, cursing his luck. In the chamber, he closed off the curtain around Catherine, blocking off the others' view of her. They didn't see what happened, but her shrieks and yells of agony would haunt the rest of their short lives. Blood spattered against the curtain, and there was the occasional sound of hacking flesh. At one point, they all heard a series of sickening snaps and cracks, as well as many wet ripping sounds. The entire time was filled with screams and cries of true anguish. Until a few minutes before the end.
When he pulled back the curtain, they could see that most of her skin and muscle was gon, as well as all of her intestinal track, her liver, and a lung. Her ribcage was forced opened, and her entire throat was pulled out. Her hair wasn't just pulled out, but her entire scalp was, and a part of her skull had been opened revealing her brain. One eye dangled limply by the optic nerve.
The others shrieked in terror, squirming and struggling more than ever before. He stepped towards the other woman (not his longest victim), and squeezed her breasts. He squeezed uncomfortably hard, and then, with a grunt, somehow managed to rip them straight off her chest. She yelled, and Tibalt reached into her chest through the thin layer of tissue that remained and put his hand over her still-beating heart. The pain she felt was too much, and she died in a scream that never would have generated sound when he squeezed the organic pump.
Tibalt turned to the man. Using a simple spell, Tibalt gave his hands sharp claws, and, reaching downwards into the man's body from the top of his chest and within the ribcage, he ripped out the man's lungs. Before the man died, Tibalt also kneed his testicles so hard that the entire region of the man's body caved inward.
Tibalt spun, staring at his longest victim. He stalked towards her, and she was filled with a fear of him that was far more intense than the entire rest of her stay there. He unlocked her shackles, and threw her to the ground. He fell on top of her, and one hand reached down to her nether regions. However, he had kept his claw enchantment up, and raked them up the entirety of her torso.
She screeched, and Tibalt couldn't handle the sound, so with his other hand he simple stabbed her through the face, done with her.
He heard a crash upstairs as the cathars, likely in a larger group, broke through the wall. He heard the pounding of feet down the stairs, and drew the sword at his hip as he saw the first of the cathars enter the room. He threw a fireball at the soldier, but the man's shield easily blocked it. It wasn't long before four cathars and at least half a dozen town guards had filed into the room. They were all clearly horrendously revolted by what they saw around them. Tears formed in at least three of the guardsmen's eyes, and one of them even ran to a corner of the room and began heaving up his lunch.
The rest, however, began crowding around Tibalt, backing him into a corner. He only smiled, for he had already finished the chanting of a spell.
He released the magic, and all of the demons and devils around him suddenly vanished, no longer having the energy to stay in this realm. Their essenses and energies flowed into Tibalt, and his skin turned a deep red. He grew small twisted heads from the top of his forehead, and when he blinked, his eyes were yellow when they opened.
And the pain.
All of the pain he had ever inflicted. On the vermin, the rodents and rats, that he started his torturous career on. The deer and other wildlife. The people. He felt his tear ducts be ripped out. He felt whipped, he felt beaten, he felt his hair being removed roughly. He felt his genitals being violently cut off, and then a searing pain as he felt his crotch catch alight. He felt a horrible pain of being impaled, and, despite the fact that his victim never felt it, he felt his abdominals get cut out and his organs unwound. He briefly felt pleasure before a pin in his side, and then he was whipped, cut, beaten, abused again. His spine ripped from his body, and his ribs forced open, various body parts and organs being ripped out. He was skinned and de-meated, his throat ripped out. His chest fell off, and his heart was crushed. His lungs were ripped out, and he was kneed in his most tender area. He was raked up his torso, and his head was impaled.
He continued screaming, as the waves of pain washed over him. They wouldn't stop, and he relived everything a hundred times each second.
But at least his spell functioned as it was supposed to at least in part. He wasn't supposed to feel this hurt, but he was supposed to become immensely powerful. As he screamed and yelled and pleaded and cried, he radiated intense fire, incinerating all who intruded into his home, and all the dead bodies around him. And then suddenly, the pain stopped.
Suddenly, he was gone. He faced every direction at once, and he faced nowhere at once. He was surrounded by a physical nothing. Everything was every color at once at different times, and yet there were no colors to be seen. He drifted, or maybe the world he wasn't in drifted around him. He fell, and he flew.
Nearly every other being would already have been swept away, nonexistent and hyperexistant, but not Tibalt. No, his Spark had ignited, and it anchored him in the maddening chaos. He was a Planeswalker.
For hours, or maybe seconds, possibly thousands of years, Tibalt inhabited the Blind Eternities, and they would have driven any normal man insane, but Tibalt was already far past that line.
He brushed past what he knew to be worlds besides the Innistrad that he knew, dozens of them, millions of them, none of them. And then he was back. He was in his sub-basement, surrounded by charred ashes and melted metal and stone.
He sat there for hours, crying and sobbing like he never thought he could do. He never knew how much pain he truly inflicted. Or, he did, he just never imagined it would be inflicted upon him. But it wouldn't stop him from his grim work, no. If anything, this experience renewed it. He had felt the most pain any human on any world ever had, he was sure. But could he make someone feel more?
He immediately set about killing or capturing every member of the village. He had at least a dozen new subjects locked away in his workroom by morning.
The joyous work would continue.