Most of the room was bathed in a deep and sedated dark wisping with thin hovering fogs of smoke distilled from numerous oxygen recycling vines creeping eerily like fleshy tendons along the walls and ceiling. Excluding some mildly glowing cautionary lights that shown with a dull hue of green upon the boxy sides of a few humming generators there was little sense of industry amongst the masonry walls of intertwined creeping flesh. The machines, primitive in Terran origin, possessed industrial masses which reached deep into the stone basin were the remnants from an age long passed served as a reminder to a civilization now pushed into a steady scientific and cultural decline. Contrasting these ancient wonders were the rotting corpses of numerous races stacked up in giant mounds of naked flesh like some form of demented fire kindling with beetles scurrying away from their feasting at the sounds of approaching feet against the dungeon floor.
As if despite… the almost all consuming darkness, there was also a single bright column of white light amongst the mounds of discarded rotting corpses whose pink and grayish fleshes were slowly being eked away by flies and worms. This light, it glared down from an overhead surgical lamp illuminating two gore covered surgical tables encased with gold plated bones for decorative ornamentation.
Off to the sides were several glass bio-containers with fragmented body parts suspended in a bluish preservation liqueur. Some of the suspended decapitated heads, with razor thin hairs left dangling from undo rot phasing before their pale eyes even blinked in bewilderment to their long and torturous existences. These body parts, the ones harvested and left as trophies upon the surrounding shelving, were from numerous races and were attached to medical wires that kept the flesh from slowly decomposing into something less… useful.
Somebody, a tall human male with a weathered skin stretched tight like a tanned death's-head mask across his face and with a mechanical pack with numerous surgical arms, stepped forward while whistling in amusement as he pulled away a blood stained clothe covering numerous unwashed surgical tools. He inspected the instruments of his craft, the congealed blood of numerous dead creatures forming along their rusted edges, with a jovial grin. Within the crisp lighting of the overhead surgical lamps the lines of his face seemed to crease and fold into a deep smile which temporarily went from ear to ear as his short white dreadlocks wrinkled against his paper-thin scalp.
"The body if you would…" he nodded towards the shadows as the faint green illumination showed his corpse like facial features with horrific detail. Two female Eldar Wyches, with long black hair and each with albino skin, wearing nothing but loin clothes and leather vests stepped forward with their bare feet tapping upon the blood-soaked floor leaving crimson footprints in their wake. They were graceful, elegant in their movements, but also… imperfect. The human male fathered disdain within his haunted eyes as he looked at the bone structures of their shoulders. Flawed, ugly, close but imperfect. Such details sickened him immensely.
Together these two shameless xenos women carried the headless, lifeless, metallic remains of a Necron warrior forward into the light and placed the shattered android corpse upon the surgical table. Their human master towered above the Eldar siblings and nodded in approval before pushing them briskly aside. Had they been purebred from Commorragh the two creatures would have turned upon their human master with daggers and knives for such rude treatment. But, they weren't purebreds. They were gene-clones, cheap and easily replaceable copies of the original Eldar matron. To their human master… they were nothing more than 'things,' and not worth his respect.
The two alien clones appeared apprehensive and frightened as this human, a renowned dark sorcerer, started to remove the exterior armor plating to the Necron limbs and chest cavity. Together they stepped back, their feet tapping wetly upon the floor, worms and bugs climbing over their naked toes, as bits and pieces of ancient technology were thrown away and discarded until at last the Necron warrior was stripped away to his metallic skeletal core.
"Now the body…" he said while looking over his shoulder and commanding these two she devils with gleeful eyes as they stood distant in leather rags handed down from prior failed experiments. They both flinched, aghast, and then resigned themselves to his orders. They did this for he feed them well with his scientific horrors unless they forget their place in which case they became those horrors in short order. It was fear, the fear of their perfect alabaster bodies, lean and fit, being rendered into something horrid by their dark master which motivated their actions. So, they left for the shadows and hefted something bulky from a mound of decomposing bodies.
Together they once more emerged from the surrounding darkness carrying a bloody corpse covered in a white drape. As one, they hefted the body upon the other surgical table with a cloth flapping smack of canvas against metal. A white alabaster arm fell limply and lifelessly over the tables frame from under the white drapery dripping blood upon the floor from its finger tips.
This human sculptor of flesh stepped to his new charge and pulled back the sheet to reveal the corpse of a naked female Elder with a bloody stump for a head. Strings of white hair from what remained of an ornate braid hung to the skin of what remained of her scalp. He licked his lips and traced his hands around her highs, buttocks, waist, breasts, and arms; studying her bone structure and muscles with great patience and practice. The dead and rotting creature was beautiful. Her arteries and nervous system were honed like a true warrior and the human could feel her muscle tendons beneath his fingertips. She wasn't perfect… but by the time he was done… she would be.
"A flawless specimen," said the human sorcerer as he traced his fingers down her sternum admiring her muscular stomach as he did so, "She will do perfectly…"
One of the two Eldar Wyches standing behind him interrupted, "The Archon thought that you could do something with Helspereth's remains. Her death was… unfortunate." The clone which had spoken bowed her head nervously while frightfully wringing her fingers. Had he been a more wrathful master… the creature would have been shortly skinned and rendered for such insolence, but he wasn't a cruel master. He was a kind master, and so he nodded his approval. The clone smiled happily and stepped back with arms crossed over her exposed stomach as if intoxicated by love.
"Ah yes, that duel against the one-armed Salamander Chaplain. Tis a pity, for someone so talented such as Helspereth to meet such a demise. It was shameful if not unfortunate. I will make sure to put her body to good use."
The two Wyches watched with benign horror as the human apothecary used a scalpel to open Helspereth's remains with a cut from her sternum down to her pelvis exposing organs and blood capillaries with ease. Additional cuts were opened up on her arms and legs revealing the muscles and bones beneath her alabaster skin.
He continued to whistle as he worked, blood squirting upon his human skinned apron, each cut masterfully removing skin from muscles and muscles from bone. The two Eldar clones stood back, clearly disturbed by his display of defilement… and talent in the sculptor's arts. They were his servants, 'nurses,' as he mockingly called them, and their sole duty was to aid him in his scientific endeavors to perfect the flawed creatures inhabiting the universe. He had to make them beautiful. Most didn't understand this compulsion to sculp flesh into perfect curves over perfect bones. He found that slightly depressing.
"Lord Fabius Bile, do you require any further assistance?" asked one of them, her eyes twisted in horror as a violent squirt of blood splashed upon her master's face showering white teeth grinningly wickedly in glee with red stains.
The human stopped his defilement for a brief second as another squirt of blood splashed onto his flesh apron, and then turned to eye both clone servants with a wide smile as he used a white cloth to wipe away the vita from his deep facial recesses. They were loyal in the best of times when it mattered. Secretly, Lord Bile hoped that the would never have to corrupt them into an expendable experimental horror. Yet, those lips and those shoulders, perhaps… a minor cut here or there. NO… they served him well… and he was also thirsty, "Ah yes, could you fetch me some wine and perhaps start preparing the new specimens for there…" he briefly laughed, "usage."
The two Wyches nodded and skirted away into the shadows with a quickened eager gait as if in fear of their master's sudden urge to cleave and craft. Meanwhile, Fabius put his scalpel back upon the bloody butchery tray with the rest of his surgical tools, and stalked over to a nearby ornately engraved wooden table. He needed more than the flesh between his fingers. He had to feel the craft in his soul as he rendered skin, bone, and muscles into masterful work. Here, upon the table, an ancient primitive record player gently looped in idle. He sat the delicate playing arm upon the vinyl disk and returned to the partially butchered Eldar corpse as Purcell: Trumpet Tune in D Major started to hum in the background. His two Eldar assistants secretly watched from the shadows, admiring his dementia, as his humming matched the trumpet blares from the vinyl record.
Each cut of his scalpel was masterful with the gore splashing from Helspereth's corpse in great swaths as skin was rendered from meat and meat from bone. After the better part of an hour the two Wyches returned from their actual duties. One carried a heavily engraved tray of silver, where a golden goblet filled with red wine sat for his consumption. The other cradled an Orkish arm against her chest with a look of satiated torture lust upon her face. Yes, they were both good servants. He would not rend them anytime soon.
"Well done…" said Fabius Bile as he gulped down his beverage and wiped away the remains of liquor from his aged face with a blood smeared sleeve, "Come," he beckoned, "I have much to show."
The two servant Wyches followed their master's orders and came forward towards the two operating tables. The living metal bones of the Necron warrior had long since been infused and wrapped in a thick muscle culture from the slain Eldar gladiator. Helspereth's body, actually just her skin, lay to the side de-boned and left open like an empty fleshy sack.
"What I do today is an experiment of the highest sort. The first step has already been accomplished. Prepare a suspension chamber while I finish here. The two Eldar clones nodded and walked off to perform their charges. Meanwhile, Fabius Bile looked down upon the abomination body, the machine and flesh fused skinless creature before him, the 'New Man.' He nodded in approval and walked over to a nearby display tank where he took out a bio-sample of several small organs crammed into a small suspension chamber. Each one of these nineteen organs was implanted into the beheaded corpse at strategic points just as if it was any normal Space Marine Neophyte.
By the time that he had finished this delicate chore the two scantly clothed Eldar Wyches had returned with a surgical gurney, and were placing the corpse upon the metal bed. They then started to wheel it away towards a large open rockcrete amphitheater with a single large suspension chamber at its center. Numerous failed experiments lined the halls and rooms of this trek as the two Eldar aides and Fabius Bile himself walked towards the amphitheater. Most of these foul creatures were slumped over dead and decaying like the long forgotten and abandoned monstrosities they were with rodents have since infested their rotting corpses for food. Other survivors of apothecaries madness were in locked cages. They reached beyond their bars for the young Eldar Wyches as they passed with the gurney. Fabius payed these wretched creatures no mind... for they were all failures.
Instead, after he and his aides had entered the amphitheater he watched the two clones place the headless corpse into the suspension chamber before smiling fondly as he hit an activation rune to lift the glass barrier. The chamber then filled with a blue liquid causing the corpse to lift up off the floor. This liquid was meant to preserve the flesh, or accelerate the aging process for some of his more ambitious projects.
"Everything that was Helspereth," he said while walking forward with a bulky swagger, "Her muscles, her organs, her adrenal system, all of it… now fused to a bio-metal skeleton…"
He looked at the two Dark Eldar servants with a fond smile, "And, improved with space marine gene-seed implants. The body and head we can mend, but everything else… requires… talent."
The two Wyches watched Fabius Bile pull a small vile out from under his human skin robe. He held it before their faces with a deep resonating gleam upon his face that shuttered them to their cores with his wickedness, "Rafen my dear boy… I only needed a small amount… You may have reclaimed most of your trophy… but what sort of fool would carry every bit of something so valuable on them at all times…"
"What is it?" asked one of the Eldar.
Fabius Bile gave a brief chuckle and handed them the vile, "The main ingredient… inject it…"
The clone, beaming with pride for the task assigned to her, took the small vile and inserted it into the tanks liquid control node. Within seconds whatever was inside the vile was now cycling through the suspension tank as a thin red mist.
"I hope the tanks are big enough for the wings…" said Fabius Bile in a moment of rare self-reflection.