Armed to the Teeth [Private, PM for Invite]

[Reverance]

​

Selvaris

Near Nutrient Rich Bogs

Early Morning

The sun rose over the hazy day, as groggy as an old haggard man after a bender the night prior. The cut of the shimmers of the sun dispersed against fog particles, refracting and reflecting to give the sensation of an overtly brightness while also remaining relatively abstained from attenuation. Gabriel walked ahead of some Shapers, currently intent on extending an expanse of the nutrient bogs to meet the needs for more Vonduun Skerr Kyrric. He wore no shirt atop his chest, fresh gashes healing with scars with intended plans to have his tattoos refinished at a future date. [member="Matsu Xiangu"] had a certain taste for the flesh, the drip drop of blood, and it had given him a myriad of new memories and stitches and staples for the reminder. Sometimes, one just had to hope the wounds healed and let life takes it's intended path. But he was a glutton for her sort of medicine, the type that fed the soul. At least, his soul.

"There..." Gabriel pointed with one arm, leaning on an auger. He glanced back to the shapers and nodded. His words were deep in the accents and tongue of the Vong, his taking to the species nearly complete. "That's a saddle. We'll funnel the wetland into that location." He walked over the feature, a higher point on the fringe of the bog. The low lying sphagnum and moss shifted into upland grasses and shrub species, the bowl ending on a ringed hillside. He lifted his hand and scoped about, the entire feature seemingly one enormous bowl with a ditch cut through it, draining an area that would otherwise develop into a bog. He plunged his auger into the ground and spun the tool, pulling a column of soil out to inspect a mostly clay based horizon. "Perfect..." he muttered as he smacked the metal object against his boot and approached the Shapers. They were standing methodically, prepared to oversee the upcoming engineering. "On the other side of that hill is a relatively permanent water body. Dig out the hill, put in a culvert, put in a control structure, and excavate this area so that the current bog is on same elevation plane." He squinted his eye, knowing full well that the Shapers would utilized the chazrach slaves and slaves of Selvaris, humans taken for the poke and prod of experiment. More corpses than anything else, he felt nothing for them. After all, he had endorsed the CRC, and they were fully entrenched in the slave trade. He had once been a slave and look how he had prospered. As the Shapers set forth, he turned and focused on a nearby Gla.

He had received word from Matsu that her apprentice, [member="Sage Bane"], had lost an arm and would need a replacement. He recalled the strike of pain on Ashera, wanting to roll about in it, but found distraction in the spilling of blood of his own. Setting the shapers to work, with the arrival of his company, they would see fruits of labor put to good use.

[member="Sage Bane"] | [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Reverance]

The sounds of the chazrach slaves squirming through the field made for an unpleasant sound. They began their processes by first taking to the vegetation with their coufe before moving on the soil. Soon enough, the larger beasts of burden would be brought in to pull yorik plows across the field, grating the soil. While others dug through the hill to remove the hydrologic obstruction. But that was merely in the foreground as Gabriel stood outside the Gla, the hexegonal structure with a mica outcropping across the top, like scales of a lizard. Placing the auger against an outside wall, he entered the facility and clapped his hand, cleaning it of the dried dirt. A Shaper approached and smiled.

"Warmaster Reverance, thank you for coming to see us..."
"No, thank you for taking on the task. Please give me an update..." Cordial as always, the shapers were a caste to be respected. Especially the masters such as this one. With that, she waved him over to a display. Her mannerism was slightly enchanting, as if even her robe was moving through water. He crossed his arms over his bare chest, the samples of scarrification were ever present, putting notches through the tattoos that adorned him.

"As you know, the amphistaff grows in threes from a polyp called the groundmouth..." Gabriel responded with a nod and stiffening of his body. "The reasoning for the amphistaff to depart from the initial polyp is that the groundmouth is no longer capable of withstanding the weight of the three amphistaffs..." Gabriel walked forward, inspecting the display. The groundmouth had been shaped like the extension from deltoid to bicep. The Vong King picked his teeth as he starred into the chamber. "You shaped it in less of oval state and more linear, like a muscle...does that help in the integrity?"

She nodded and approach, pointing towards the object. "The balance is shifted to allow for a more flexible system. When it would normally break, it instead will bend." The Sith Lord nodded as if understanding, though being unable to relate. "And this can be grafted to a sentient?" She nodded multiple times and smiled, steepling her hands. "The nerve clusters and connections have been cauterized, to prevent healing, and continually damaged as we await arrival of this...Sage?" The Sith Lord nodded. "Yes, Sage Bane." She smiled. "Yes, once he arrives, we can move towards the process of getting him fitted and testing...and proceed to the masquer mounting on the arm after grafting."

He looked more at the Sessile-triostaff and smiled. "Good..."

[member="Sage Bane"] | [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Sage Bane]

Nightmares were nothing new to Sage Bane, Sith Knight and pupil of sorceress, Matsu Xiangu. The dreams of the black water had always been there, but lately the water had been changing, undulating, and coagulating. As he floated down into its depths, it engulfed him, leavening into a gelatinous substance that entered him, snaking down his throat, choking him. At that point, he would wake in a cold sweat, only to have the nightmare on relentless repeat during the nights that followed.

Sage had come to this fetid bog on the the backwater planet of Selvaris to join his Master, Matsu Xiangu. She had a designs on an addition to his body, a limb he lost during the One Sith’s siege on the fortresses of light-sided cultists. Much like the water in his dreams, Sage would come to Selvaris to undergo an extreme metamorphosis. Knowing the Beast, the experience would be an agonizing trial, but his emergence from it would make him a more powerful agent of chaos.

His boots tramped through the swamp, leaving muddy ditches in their wake. Sage wore a black cloak over his clothing, a cloak hung strangely over one side of his body, dropping straight down instead of draping over the curves of his left arm, a part of him that was no more present than a mournful phantom.

As he approached the figures standing outside a hexegonal structure , his eyes blinked repeatedly at the sight of the tanned and scarred skin and the fleshy spiral over one of his eyes. The Wrath of the Dark Lord stood tall near what was presumably one of the Vong shaper caste. Sage was aware that Matsu travelled in the circles of the upper echelons of the One Sith, but had no idea the heights were so dizzying. He dropped to one knee before the Vong King, lowering his head in deference. It was not a complete genuflection, as he knew that Matsu would not wish to see her pupil scraping the ground, but far be it to show even a hint of arrogance before a man who held such stratospheric power.

[member="Reverance"] [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Reverance]

Matsu was the butcher, this boy was the meat. Evidently a prime enough cut for the Atrisian to trim the fat, to take notice of that marbling and see fit to shave it loose. As Gabriel turned, his blood hued eye fixated about the gesture of respect at bending knee. In his right hand, a half horn of bone, likely from a failed vonduun carcass and the intricacies of it's legs, chitinous substance changed into a cup of his fashioning. Within the curvature of it's crystalline lattice structure, semi-transparent, spark bee mead sat in frothy culminations. It smelled thickly of yeast and had this vonduun not been long ago calcified, the skin would have itched for the onset of an allergic reaction.

Perching out his bottom lip, he drank of the substance for the time of waiting for the student and the master. With the flick of his finger, he gripped the man with telekinesis, a mere semblance of the power that resided within though unnoticably used to the shapers around him. To anyone else, it may have just been Sage rising at the warranted time. "You don't need to to do that..." He spoke with a squint as he strode forward, the sun catching the scar riddled body with certain implication to the complexity of his past and present situation. Tattoos interrupted by the rosy lifting of flesh, in response to trauma, he was a man of certain proclivities. And well guarded against the mentalism of the force, a subject that seemed to further entice Matsu and would likely make the half-chiss question his capabilities - a line thrown into a pond, never to catch a bite. Instantly, he recognized the resemblance to the half brother criminal, met in the Dragon Casino and once more in the Cream and the Crop Casino. He wasn't sure he had ever met a half-chiss, the result was a curious one.

Without any sense of personal space, he pawed at the left nub that rested just off the edge of the shoulder. Feeling through the cloak, he finished off his mead and tossed the cup away, pressing against it with both hands. A blind man searching for the traces of the scars beneath the black fabric, as he closed his eye. "The cut is jagged...sloppy. You used a...vibro weapon?" He wasn't there to take part in the viewing of the trauma, but he had enough medical training and double doctorates from Arkania - enough to know what was what just through prodding. "The grafting is a painful process and you'll never forget the alien nature of the arm, it will constantly remind you...are you prepared for that?"

How do you ask someone to anticipate a stimulation they had never experienced? Like asking a person, born blind, to describe colors. He was just giving fair warning, the certainty of pain would be apparent long after the surgery was completed. He opened his eye, searching brown pupils of the young man for a reaction. "Take heed of the Shaper caste and any wondering eyes. They resent our kind until proven otherwise." They weren't wearing tizowyrms, a request long ago made by Gabriel that upon Selvaris, that they maintain the delineation between the vong culture and everything else.

[member="Sage Bane"] | [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Sage Bane]

Sage's exposure to the Yuuzhan Vong was somewhat limited thus far. Ghastly stories of the Vong, told by his brother who had been tortured by their soldiers and their Yammosks as well as undergone the painful insertion of a Yorik-Kul in his brain, were his main exposure to the sentients. At the time of the telling, he had wondered if his sibling were exaggerating, but once the elder Bane pointed out him the places where both of his organic legs ended and his cybernetic ones started, Sage knew that his brother was not given to his usual hyperbole. With more than an edge of apprehension, Sage warily eyed the nearby Vong shaper.

He was pulled from his reverie, literally, as the Vong King pulled him up off his feet and reeled him towards his vice-like grip, as if a net had been cast. He momentarily blanched at the Wrath's touch, his pale jaw tightening as he hissed out a breath. With his muscular hands, the other man prodded the lumpy tangle of healing skin over a raw jangle of nerves, some still sore, some completely numb. Sage noticed a familiar, pleased reaction, a flush just underneath the skin, at the evidence of another's pain. The same look crossed Matsu's dark eyes and bloomed under her porcelain skin whenever Sage suffered.

With an audible swallow, Sage nodded in affirmation at Reverance's question about his weapon of choice. He hadn't had the time to be choosy about which tool was used for the severance. At the time, his arm was burning, shriveling into blackened kindle wood, flames licking up his body. It had to come off. Convinced there was no other way to stop the inferno that engulfed his limb, a testament to Matsu's illusionary power, he'd grabbed the first weapon his hand had clenched around. The cut may have been unclean, but it did the job.

"I am ready, My Lord," he said in a unconvincing voice sounded eerily like his brother's. He might have not looked ready, but Sage wanted this arm. He had visions of it in his nightmares. Deep down in the dark water, the arm lurked, its black tendrils reaching for him. Sage had come to respect his dreams and nightmares in the way only an illusionist could. The ancient magic he wielded demanded his body give in to the yearnings of the dreamspace. Sage was convinced, that no matter the pain, that this was his fate.

[member="Reverance"] [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Reverance]

"Good...and Reverance is fine." He spoke through clenched teeth as he back-stepped with a crooked gaze, lingering on the hidden wound beneath cloak. It had the mark of the woman, the residual pain and the lingering taste of it, the person he would claim closest to his heart. To the clamor and cacophony of the world, that his mind stood in awe and repose in her presence, he tingled at the notion that her powers could bring such carnage and wound and trauma. Self-inflicted, he sometimes envied those capable of being impacted in such ways. To defer control, lend the wheel, and lean back and allow decisions made in the presence of diffidence. He did envy it, rope tied taught and body strung up for the sport of it's mutilation, to see how far bones could be broken and skin could be torn so that what stood before her no longer resembled the dough with which she began. Something cooked and kneaded with her passions and curiosity, made whole - he lingered on the idea of it and this rite of passage. A silent form of approval as he turned and waved the knight forward.

The doors to the gla were not really doors so much as fleshy curtains that seemed rigid in semblance. As he neared it, he approached the shaper and extended a hand out to greet the woman with a small smile. He spoke, the words would be foreign to those who didn't know the Vong tongue, specifically the shai dialect. His words, while untranslated, would point towards the preparation of the table and the surgery. No anesthesia, no sympathy - just pain. Always pain. As they entered, Gabriel would draw Sage over to a location with a longing sort of impatient gaze. With the arrival, he would speak in the tongue the half-chiss would understand.

"The groundmouth..." He spoke from the side of his mouth, pointing towards the creature that seemed docile for the moment. Gabriel lifted his hand and twisted his fingers, curving the wrist down and over, and an amphistaff took note. Drawing upward, the amphistaff lingered and turned rigid and sharp before laying flat against the surface beneath it. The man was well versed in the instinctual commands of the amphistaff, and this was no different, though such things would no longer have power once grafted to Sage. "...has been re-shaped to fit the dimensions of your former arm, right at the deltoid..." He pointed to the stub of the half chiss, the other hand hovering away but in the direction of the polyp. "The shapers will bind the groundmouth to your arm, re-opening the wound to allow attachment of nerves and synpases. The acid will be diverted through the venom sacs, diluted, in response to injury to cauterize the attachment and finalize it. Once that happens, the groundmouth will shift up you arm and mold with your flesh...marrying your skin with it's own." He paused and looked for understanding. "After, we will work the masquer ring on and finalize your transformation...which will bind with the groundmouth." He pulled a wooden dowel rod from his back packet, short and wrapped in twine. He presented it to Sage with an almost stoic expression, if not for the slightest tinge of excitement for the events to come. "Lay down on the table, after you remove your cloak and shirt...and bite down on this..." He tilted his head. "Try to not scream...it will only irritate them." Them being the shapers for who saw such practice as honoring of the Gods - screams only sullied such notions.

[member="Sage Bane"] | [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Sage Bane]

"Very well, Reverance, then." he said, ducking his head as the other man led him through the Gla's sarcous entrance. For a few moments, the Wrath exchanged foreign words with the Vong shaper who would perform Sage's procedure. His eyes followed the older man's gaze to a bare operation table, a sight that tested Sage's composure. He knew the Sith enough to know that there would be nothing to numb whatever pain or discomfort he was about to feel, and as a former spice addict, his pain receptors were gradually resetting themselves in the circuitry of his brain. His pain tolerance was slowly being relearned, and had not yet caught up with his new-found sobriety.

The leathery creature inside its polyp, the "groundmouth," as Reverance called it, followed the twist of the Wrathful hand, responding, obeying. An involuntary shudder escaped the young Knight's chest as he realized the anthropomorphic form would soon become an intimate part of him, man and monster fused together in defiance of humanity. The idea provoked a simultaneous brew of ecstasy and horror deep within his body. The arm would be an instrument of power and subjugation as he continued to serve the One Sith in their crusades, its repulsion sure to provoke panic in his enemies.

The explanation of the procedure did nothing to help Sage understand what was about to happen, but he listened and respectfully nodded along. What was crystal clear, however, was the amount of anguish he would experience, as evidenced by the dowel he was given to bite down on. Through Reverance's steely mask, his one red eye glimmered with the anticipation of the trial about to come. Like Matsu, the other man seemed eager to drink the pleasure out of his suffering.

Sage removed his cloak and shirt and curled his fingers around the dowel. Like a man walking to the gallows, he took his place on the table and, with eyes cast up to the ceiling of the Gla, placed the dowel between his upper and lower teeth, clamping down on it.

[member="Reverance"] [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

Matsu hadn’t needed to learn to love the act of hurting another creature – that she was born with, a sickness with no physical manifestation in her body. It was as incorporeal as the illusions she so loved, as conceptual as the universe she contemplated while watching the stars out of the windows of her ships or the Coruscant skyline. But she was not blind to what she created either. She’d known pain in all forms, seen metamorphosis in the blinding in-between. She’d hurt Sage so that he might experience a rebirth of his own, true. But pain was communion. Pain was the middleman between oneself and the ultimate – death, art. If he understood what it was to hurt, he understood what it was he provoked in his enemies. New and dangerous.

And he’d survived.

That he’d deserved a replacement was unquestionable. Matsu had seen many students come and go, most dying or escaping in to the night when she dismissed them for the day. It was for the best – the weak polluted their organization. But she’d seen a few rise to the top, none as consistently successful as Sage. He was the best she’d ever taught. He would have a replacement equally as terrifying as he had the potential to be. She was late to the party but it could have been for any number of reasons – she did, after all, have a thing for stopping and admiring things. Or maybe she was trying to further understand the Vong. Or maybe she was staring at Gabriel from afar. A little creepy, but probably the most likely. But she wasn’t going to miss the closing of this chapter, the final sealing of Sage renewed.

Whether the female Shaper outside the Gla’s ‘doors’ had been told to expect her or knew her association with Gabriel wasn’t clear but she gave the Atrisian no trouble. It seemed she was just in time, Sage settling himself on the operating table as the hush of preparation fell over the shapers preparing for the binding. It would be an exquisitely painful operation but she always found getting used to the arm to be the hardest part. Ten minutes of mind-numbing agony and then it was over. But months of dull ache, of the knowledge something was gone forever, replaced by something that didn’t belong to you. Eventually it became a part of the body, a fill-in one gave no thought to. But that dull ache was worse.

She moved behind Gabriel, brushing a hand over his arm and across his back as she passed by before settling at his side. To Sage, she reached out to the telepathic link usually so easy to find. “When it starts to hurt, think of something nice.”

Something so hideous and morbid it might fill her dreams at night.

[member="Reverance"] | [member="Sage Bane"]​

 

[Reverance]

"Matsu..." He spoke, his eye fixated upon the new subject of the Shapers focus. His hand extended, dragging his nails slowly down the lining of her back. To either trudge against concealing fabric or revealing skin, it didn't matter. He was looking for a reminder, as he turned to his face towards her. "I'm glad you could make it..."He crossed behind her, dragging his other hand across the small of her back in the sort of enticing appeal, before heading over to the defacto laying spot of the triostaff. Despite the exquisite knowledge of the shapers caste, they hadn't entangled with the grip of the amphistaff in the ways of the warrior group. The shapers looked towards their Warmaster as he smirked. He spoke in their tongue, foreign to the uninitiated. "Begin removing the scarred tissue, I will bring the beast."

With a hiss of his own towards the beast, his hand punched outward with the curve of his wrist, before flattening out. The three caught wind of the change in his posture and turned sessile, even more so then they had already been. He reached in a grabbed the three together, the groundmouth hanging low towards the ground as he held them at their center, their bodies naturally coiling about his arm and wrist. It was really quite impressive as with this size, the groundmouth would have long ago cracked free and died. But the reinforcements of the shaping process had created a structurally different substance, allowing the item to bend when normally it would break. And through reinforcements, it became as much a point of strength as any other part of the body.

As he prepared the beast, the shapers began using their shaping hands and bone shaped cutting objects to cut against the stump, pulling away the scarred tissues with deft procedure. The cauterized wound, through lightsaber cut by Matsu, was now long gone and blood would begin to pool out against the table from the new wound. As it did, Gabriel placed the docile beast against the table and the shapers took hold, wounding the monster with a clean shave of it's end, like a slab of deli meat shaved free. Despite the wound, the trio remained still as the wound began to seep acid. They pushed the monster upon the stump, the flesh of the groundmouth worming up the stump as the diluted acid would cauterize nerve endings and the connection between vong and non vong flesh alike. It was fortunate for Sage that so many willing humanoid species existed on Selvaris. Gabriel couldn't count the number of people killed in the experiments to perfect this process.

The smell of burning flesh lifted in the hexagonal wound as the skin of the groundmouth began to merge onto the stump, suddenly taking on the color and appearance of the flesh it was attached. An artifact of it's feeding process, something that would marry and bind it to Sage. Nevertheless, neither they nor Gabriel would pay attention to the likely squirming and agony of the Sith Knight, as the Sith Lord turned and picked up what appeared as a nearly translucent sash of flesh. As the binding was completed, he wrapped the item around the new biot and the touching of it's ends bound it together to both itself and the groundmouth, though it's DNA was tied directly to Sage. It coiled into a ring, waiting for an electrical response from it's master, to extend down the triostaff and create the illusion of an arm. It rested patiently upon the groundmouth, near where the stump used to be, as the Sith Lord backed away and crossed his arms.

It would take time to master such things. Hopefully, Sage was a fast learner.

[member="Sage Bane"] | [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Sage Bane]

Dowel held tightly in his jaws, Sage turned his head to the side to look at the two Sith Lords. Whatever it was between them, tension, dark-sided power, a shared thirst for pain, it was palatable and hair-raising. Chill bumps appeared on his exposed white skin, the tiny mounds of debossed flesh rose even further with the sound of Matsu's voice in his head. He let her roam freely in there most of the time. Her whispers were a caress when welcome, a clawing when not. It wasn't as if he had a choice in the matter. Matsu told him to think of something nice. If he weren't holding a piece of wood between his teeth, he might have given her an amused smirk. She would receive a return whisper through the air of the Gla.

Nice things. What are those? Let me know when you see one.

The leathery tentacle-like creatures writhed in Reverance's grip. With a steely determination, Sage forced himself to watch. The better he got to know the creatures, the better his control over them would be. Or that was his line of thinking anyway. Then the shapers began their work. Like artists with clay they began to dig and grate and sculpt. The wound that comprised his raw stump blooming afresh. The smell of blood and acid filled the Gla. Sage clamped down on the dowl, eyes squeezed shut, hands clenched into fists. His body went as rigid as a forgotten corpse.

Holding back the screaming was the hardest part. In response to the agony, Sage's back arched into a bridge. His torso jerked forward, the ridges of his ribs on display as his stomach caved in. Sage had been enslaved, whipped, forced into all kinds of degrading situations, and vomited on by a Hutt. How much more torture could a man take? Apparently more. There was always room for more pain.

Once the groundmouth was merged to the stump, Sage felt the psychic connection right away. A delirious rage soared through his bloodstream as he felt the creature's wrestling for power over their new master. He craned his neck and glanced down at his arm. The black, squirming appendage filled him with a cold, aching dread. A few ragged breaths came and went as Sage began to try and will the masquer to reshape his limb into something resembling humanity. He let out a long keening groan, the wooden stick still clamped between his teeth. It was a horrendously difficult task, but in a few minutes, he felt it responding.

[member="Reverance"] [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Reverance]

"Each one has a mind, Sage..." Gabriel spoke in a whisper, a special sort of experience with the wielding of dual minds as a weapon. It was what afforded him such stalwart defenses against mental attacks, it was the notion that despite the split of his personalities, mental effort had lassoed them together to create a temporary binding. Concessions made some time ago turn to preferences as he recalled a point in his life where the sight of pain and blood didn't rouse such proclivities. But that time was long past, the hidden meaning of his purpose constantly lashing dust and debris in attempt to forget. Memories flash burned away to make room for the new, an old mind filled to the brim and constantly throwing away the unneeded. But for the moments of pain to which he cleverly reserved, a likeness appreciated by the defensive mind within, he was capable of storing this particular moment and the ones that preceded it of similar theme, to which there were many. A vault locked tight for future recollection.

The shapers work, though complex, was over with some brevity to boot. They would move to the outskirts of the room, impressed with the pain tolerance though the gesticulation and arch of back would have afforded a more unfortunate outcome to those of the warrior caste. Sage had obviously blocked out the pain, or attempted to, but those efforts were futile and shapers had disdain for anything useless. Wasted energy would lend a botched surgery. But they were of the Shai domain, it was to be expected. Gabriel, on the other hand, was pleased enough to approach, placing a hand across the coiling amphistaffs. The electrical impulse, a defensive and uncontrolled mechanism, drew scales to which drew blood in the form of a deep gash across the Sith Lords palm. Turning it over, he inspected it as if he had never seen his own bodily fluid before. It oozed and welled upwards from the cut, trickling on to the table to mix with the pole of Sage's.

His crimson eye cast down as he knelt, eyeing the masquer. "Including the groundmouth and the masquer, to which are bound now in thought, you have four additional minds rummaging through that head. Each will whisper to you, try and persuade action. Bargaining, fear of pain, fear of striking back, fear of starvation, anger, impulse, reckless maneuvers. They will be unwieldy...and you will need to temper their spirits with a strength you have yet to possess. But time will change that, I imagine..." He pressed a finger against the masquer and smiled. "But this species, it will be the easiest and most painful to influence. A dual edged blade, you must merely tell it that it's survival depends on cooperation. The desire to live claims it's mind, use that against it."

When the time would come, the triostaff would coil together to form the arm, with three digits. And the masquer would follow in turn, turning black beast into a pale form of an arm, until it was time to unleash the monsters once more. And from the brink of death, it would find repository in stationary ring, as it pulled nutrients from Sage to heal itself to utility once more.

[member="Sage Bane"] | [member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Sage Bane]

Reverance's explanations helped mentally prepare him for his task, but nothing could prepare him for the agony that continued to course through Sage's twitching body, as the new arm wrestled and struggled to be his black, leathery captain. He was barely aware of anything else, the shapers, Matsu, even the Gla itself, all material forms began to swim in his vision. Soon, he only heard Reverance's deep whisper and his own groaning through the dowel he held. There was another sound, a more primal jabbering like tiny voices that had no language, at least not one that could be formed by human lips. Four tiny egos with earnest, predatory needs tugged at the taut strings of his already frayed nerves.

The Wrath placed a hand on his arm and the feeling was indescribable as it lashed out and viciously struck its intruder, drawing blood. The attack filled Sage with a gory satisfaction that he knew wasn't really his own. Just as they sated their hunger, the amphistaffs had tasted blood and they wanted more. Rage and irritation filled him. If they would only karking shut off their insufferable keening, he could give them more. He attempted to reassure them with his thoughts. He would feed them, like a master would a cherished pet, but they needed to behave or they would be starved. Impossibly the amphistaffs' cries became weaker, nestling down into the back of his mind, coiling themselves around his brain like they coiled in the flesh. Lying in repose for a few grateful moments.

The pain was still furious, but Sage was slowly adapting to it. He spit out the dowel, and took a few sharp breaths, hissing through his teeth. He began to slowly force his will upon the creature that was permanently attached to him. Insisting that it obey. He was the Master. It was the servant. In a moment of mental weakness the creatures would take hold once again and the chattering would fill his mind.

As the cycle continued, Sage knew one thing. There would be many sleepless nights ahead.

[member="Reverance"] [member="Matsu Xiangu"]