The monster’s moment of pleasure was fleeting. In an instant, the master himself billowed through the mist, an eddy of gray so dark it was almost ebon.
Silence, beast! Do not challenge me.
Again, red streaks came into the mist. But these were like blazing bolts of lightning, overwhelming the monster’s own fury as easily as a flooding river flushes aside a child’s pond. For just a fleeting instant, the monster thought to catch sight of Chernobog behind the shadows and the mist. The master was terrifying—huge, and tusked, and horned, and taloned. Scaled like a dragon, bestriding a broken earth like a behemoth.
One of the scarlet flashes curled through the mist like a snake, and struck the monster’s flank. Agony speared through it. The monster whimpered. Broken words pleading forgiveness tried to issue from lips that had once, long ago, had the semblance of human ones.
But that semblance was too ancient, now, too far gone. The words would not come any longer. Not over lips that were no more than a gash; not shaped by an ox-thick tongue writhing in a mouth that was more like an eel’s gullet than a man’s palate and throat.
Again, the spearing agony. The monster wailed. Wailing, it could manage—as could any beast.
Some part of the monster retained enough intelligence to think, if not speak, a protest. I was a god once!
“Only the shadow of one,” came the sneering voice of Chernobog’s servant—as if she were anything but a shadow herself. “And he isn’t much of a god anyway, which is why he crouches at Great Chernobog’s side. Wearing his master’s leash.”
The servant drifted forward, now fearless. For a moment, the monster sensed a vaguely female form coalescing, stooping. It felt another flash of rage—but a quickly suppressed one. She dared to inspect its feed!
“Not much left,” she purred, jeering. “But then, I imagine the old monk’s soul was mostly gristle anyway.”
The form straightened and moved back into the mist. The gray of the shadow servant merged at the edges into the gray mist that surrounded the monster everywhere. Only a vague fluttering was left to indicate her shape.
The monster recognized the pattern. Chernobog would now speak himself, using the servant’s voice.
“You have done well, beast.”
The monster’s momentary relief was immediately shredded by another scarlet lash coming through the mist, ripping into its flank like an axe. Gray-black blood spurted from a wound that was insubstantial—healing almost in the instant it was formed—but agonizing for all that. The monster wailed again, and again, crouching in terror.
“Which is why I punish you so lightly for your insolence.”
The servant’s vague form was replaced by another of those horrifying forward surges in the surrounding mist. The ebony billow that was Chernobog himself, threatening to take full and visible shape.
Do not forget your place, beast. I allow you to be powerful, at my convenience. I could as easily make you a worm, for my dining pleasure.
For a moment, the monster caught another glimpse of Chernobog on that broken landscape. Hunching, this time, over a mound of squirming souls. Much like worms, they looked; especially as they disappeared into the maw that devoured them, a few spilling out of the gigantic jaws onto the charred-black soil.
Another image flashed through the monster’s mind. Itself—himself, then—held down by Chernobog’s enormous limbs while the master tore out his manhood with that same maw and left the monster a bleeding, neutered ruin. Less than a eunuch, who had once been a god.
The monster was now completely cowed. Its heavy brow was lowered, the muzzle that had once been like a man’s pressed into its chest. Oddly enough, perhaps, the chest itself was still hairless—quite unlike the shaggy limbs and the heavy spine that protruded like a ridge, covered with a long and stringy mane of hair.
At another time, the memory of what that hairless chest had once signified might have brought anguish. Now, the monster had no thoughts beyond submission.
“Good.” The monster felt relief at hearing the servant’s voice instead of Chernobog’s own. As much as the monster hated and resented taking orders from one who was even less than it was . . .