Inside the Confessors bedroom the bitter citrus and metallic copper smell of burning magicks filled the room, its occupants occupying impossible states of unlife, undeath. Organs functioned devoid of blood supply and heads gouged of eyeballs saw without the need for them. The song of the Altar Boy powered the collapsing bubble of unreality, though the exertion of doing so had taken its toll on his small form, his power was ebbing as he died.
Hips and shoulders popped out of joint under the Confessors indelicate ministrations. The tantalizing touch of the flensing blade peeled back abdominal flesh and glistening gossamer membranes. Trails of purple viscera, trailing loops and coils of intestine decorated the walls like bunting flags. The Confessor put down his needle and thread, and with infinite care took a gently pulsating agglutination of organs from the profane alter, its components cut from his congregation. He looked down upon them; of the four girls, three lay in sensuous poses, their tautght teenage bodies glistening with sweat and stranger things, their abdomens bloated and distended as if heavily pregnant. Rough, hewn stitches ran across their bellies and, bulging gaps between the stitches exposed unthinkable, inhuman shapes.
The fourth and final girl lay bound by her ropes, her abdomen spread wide and pinned back with callipers. She twisted against her bonds, her eyes screwed tightly shut against the horror of her own flesh. The confessor squatted down between the girl and the remains of the Alter Boy, cradling the thing of stolen flesh in his arms, gently cooing to it.
It moved.
It twitched, and gently mewed.
The Altar Boy smiled as he the thing was presented. He leant forward with difficulty and kissed it reverently on its crown. The alter boy's flesh had formed much of the bulk of four such creations now, his chest and abdomen were empty, black and clotted blood pooled in the empty cavities and over the carpeted floor.
The Confessor dipped a hand into one of the congealing puddles, and daubed an eight pointed star upon the things crown. With the care of a midwife, deranged and reversed, he eased the thing into the final girl through the wound in her spread abdomen. She screamed with the terrible knowledge of it.
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She struggled to live. The Altar Boy's song had finished and the magick's had finished. The Confessor's metal frame was once again bound to his bones, the vital life support systems without which he could not live were once again bound to his organs without no sign of symptom that they had ever been removed.. She struggled to breathe.
The Confessor and the other three girls stared down at her, their expression contemptuous. Their females forms were perfect. Stitches no longer ruined the skin of their bellies. , no longer did stitches or wounds ruin their bellies. Their beautiful bodies were clothed in grotesque parodies of novice robes; the tunics could barely contain their flesh, heavy swells of oversized breasts pressed down upon their midriff buckles and from bellowbelow the straining buckle bare and swollen abdomens protruded. Half liddedHalf-lidded eyes looked at one another and pouting lips pursed in post orgasmic rapture, they held each other's hands demurely like shy apprentices. The occasional ripple of flesh, a claw like hand print pushing out from their abdomens hinted at the sinister nature of their pregnancies.
She lay on the floor, ragged little breathes causing her chest to heave uncomfortabty. Her stitches were half dissolved, incompletely transformed. The thing that had been put in her was didn't move.
The girls huddled closely to the Confessor. One leaned in close, pressing her chest sordidly against his exo-frame and to whispered in his ear. He nodded sadly. He took the metal loop of keys from the corpse of the Altar Boy, .
""... We'll be with you soon my boy. I miss your voice so much already... yes. Time to give a speech, eh? Time to rouse God's army, eh? Oh, I hope Sabastius will find the true god... Oh he will, I'll use the gifts you gave me..." His voice was changed, ever so slightly... slightly too smooth, a touch too silky. He bent down with difficulty and kissed the corpse on its forehead. He turned to her "If the child survives... join us at the proving grounds... if not... well your just pointless aren't you?" .
The girl was left alone in the shadowy bedchamber. The tapestries no longer impossibly billowed in the still air, the candles flickering flames were a mundane yellow. She tried to prop herself up, agonisingly slowly she managed to pull herself onto her side. Her name was Cadet Arice Sumeria. Dragging herself up she pulled herself into a sitting position, her body felt strange to her, numb and bloated, her abdominal skin stretched so tight she was terrified it would burst. Casting about Arice pulled at a tablecloth covering a small stand; candleholders, coins and a collection plate tumbled down. She wrapped the tablecloth around her shoulders; it did little to hide her nakedness.
Her mind was spinning, she forced herself not to think about the nightmare of what had just happened, she didn't understand exactly what had happened and had to struggle not to try to want to understand. So she screamed. It was primal, a cathartic release, she screamed until she was horse and only a whimper escaped her throat. A sob escaped her throat, and she hated herself for it.
Cadet Arice Sumeria was a guardsman. A Cadet, freshly signed up and ready to be decamped to basic training. Ready to fight. Ready to kill. Ready to be engaged in specialist training in flamers and heavy flamers, she had been looking forward to that so much. She banged her head on the wall behind her, an action that caused the head of the corpse of the Altar boy to roll towards her, its jaw hung loose. She banged her head again, she realised that she had assumed that her dreams were shattered, she had given in.
"Fuck that" She whispered. It felt good to resist, in a way that she hadn't been able to when she had been bound and ganged. "FUCK THAT!" She screamed.
The Confessor and the other girls, she assumed that they had been cadets too, had given in to the evil magick's of the Altar Boy. The Confessor was a holy man, a strong and powerful, wilful man, how had he gone from that to the simpering psychopath that had carved a monstrous thing from her flesh? Her memory grew hazy when she thought about how she had come to be bound and gagged. She had been talking to a regimental commissar... and then nothing. What made her so special? Had his spell just stopped before her soul could be consumed by whatever evil had consumed theirs? Would she yet be consumed by it? The Confessor didn't to seem to see her as a threat.
"Fuck That." No longer a cry of distress, it was a statement of intent.
She was a threat to them, she was Cadet Arice Sumeria of the Imperial guard, an oath bound soldier of the emperor himself, an warrior bound to slaughter the unholy and they were... they were no longer human, evil, other... the arch-enemy. The things whispered about in chapel, the unnamed heretics of religious texts... they were going to spread their evil, to the other cadets.
"Fuck that" the whisper was a mantra, a prayer, an oath. She needed take action.
She needed to get up, get out and let an officer know what was happening, a commissar would be good, she needed a weapon and clothes. She struggled to pull herself up on the table stand, knocking the corpse of the Altar Boy over, one of his mutilated hands brushed against her leg, making her cry out and stomp at it.
Holding herself tall she struggled to regain her equilibrium, her great distended abdomen and swollen chest pulled her forward. In the corner of the room a small pile of sacks, ropes and cadet uniforms laid discarded. She stepped unsteadily towards them.
Something caught her leg. It was the dismembered arm of the Altar Boy.
Her breath caught in her throat, her eyes darted to his face. His eyes stared, unseeing. She pulled her leg free of dead things accidental grip, but she never turned her back on the corpse while she pulled on the clothes.
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Outside the incense clouds and smoky coils of the Confessors Bed Chamber the air felt crisply cold. The cadet uniform had fitted so well that morning, been slightly loose across the shoulders and back, slightly too tight at the waist where the supply officer told her she would put on hard packs of muscle and strip of her 'puppy fat' as he had called it. Now it was perverse, she struggled to keep two thirds of her flesh covered, either her pregnant belly spilled out like some fat old adept whose damaged and enlarged liver stuck out in front of him, or she revealed so much bust that she was sure people would think her a... harlot, as the mistress of her old convent had called them, a lady of the evening her precious remembrancers books would have said.
She blushed angrily as she stormed up the stairwell and along the backstage area of the chapel, with less confidence than she had fancied herself having; she walked up to one of the servitors made in the form of Saint Cain and took from its scabbard his chainsword. It was a prop, ancient and non-functional, little more than a heavy iron club, its cutting teeth blunt and unmoving, but it was a weapon, and it might even have been blessed at some point. It felt very reassuring in her grip
Leaving the chapel by its big main entrance, she found herself looking up at the great sweep of the domed roof. It was cracked and holes wept a steady cascade of rubble. A clatter of what she knew must be gunfire in the distance. Dead bodies littered the floor. Something had gone dreadfully wrong in the giant arenas of the gladatorium.