“Good meat on ‘em,” the small man muttered, limping toward Frank. He stood four feet tall and was draped in a loose wrap of oddly stitched reptile skins, the skins green and red and purple, like a chameleon that couldn’t make up its mind. The wrap billowed as he moved and settled unevenly over his frame, hinting at the twisted form beneath. “Good meat for Nanesh.”

  “You alive, Thune?” Frank’s body had seized up when the psychic pulse tore through him. He’d dropped Thune’s head and his sword, and now he felt around on the hard earth, searching for either, both. “Thune, can you hear me?”

  “They’re men.” The small man didn’t open his mouth as he spoke this time, his greasy lips locked in a sneer. “Manesh won’t eat man flesh.”

  The small man continued to advance, his back leg dragging as he moved. The shape of him, hidden under that hand-stitched poncho, somehow became more confusing as Frank got a closer look. His right shoulder seemed twice as large as his left. An indistinct bulge warped his midsection. His spine was bent like a hunchback’s.

  “Thune!” Frank called again, louder this time.

  “I live,” Thune said weakly. His voice had never been particularly powerful, sounding like a gasping deathbed confession even in the best of times. But now it was thready and weak, edged with pain.

  Groaning, Frank sat up and grabbed his bronze saber. He spared Thune a quick glance and saw that he was still alive (or as close to alive as Thune could be) despite the stone dagger buried in his eye. Rising on trembling legs, he turned to face the misshapen man, his blade held before him as a warning.

  “Come any closer,” he said, the sword trembling like a dowsing rod in his weakened grip, “and you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  “Brave fella, eh?” The misshapen man’s right eye sat higher than his left. He had dun-colored skin and a sparse, curly coif that looked closer to ass hair than head hair. “Does the big one want to dance with me?”

  “I’m all yours, handsome.”

  “Don’t hurt ‘em,” the misshapen man said through an unpleasant smile, his mouth never moving. “He didn’t mean to trespass.”

  Every nerve in Frank’s body screamed for him to act, each heartbeat a call to action.

  Lunge. Lub-dub. Stab. Lub-dub. KILL!

  But wanting to move and moving were different things entirely. His brain said act, but the body – his body, why did he keep thinking of it as the body – couldn’t find the strength. All he could manage was a few clumsy swipes with his saber, his arm burning from the effort.

  The misshapen man dodged each stroke easily. As he moved in close, he crabbed sideways, sidling to get at Frank’s back. He was an ungraceful little shit (it was a miracle he could even keep that odd frame of his upright) but capable of surprising bursts of speed. He rushed in on Frank twice, landing two quick pokes before retreating. The first strike glanced harmlessly off Frank’s bracer of spiked bone and the second bit into the tough leather of the war belt, but neither managed to find skin.

  These attacks, futile as they were, had served a purpose. They were like a boxer’s jab, helping to gauge distance and timing. But the next stab was a killing blow, one aimed directly at Frank’s heart.

  He twisted out of the way and the misshapen man tripped on his approach (or was that hesitation Frank noticed, just before that final lunge?), stumbling into a defensive slash that missed his body but sliced open his wrap.

  “Now he’s done it,” the misshapen man snarled, foam flecks spraying from his mouth. “He’s ruined the skins. Ruined the beautiful skins. Now Nanesh will just have to take his skin.”

  Nanesh shrugged off his wrap and the form beneath, to Frank’s surprise, was not one misshapen man but two. They had a single wide torso, twisted and hunched, with four arms and four legs. Two of these arms were vestigial nubs hanging limply from their greasy chest, and all four legs were of different sizes. They had a true left leg, true in shape and location, as well as a second left leg that grew from their belly. Both of their right legs erupted from the same hip joint, jostling each other for space like overcrowded teeth, so that one stuck out perpendicular to the trunk and one grew out of the ass.

  Frank’s first impression was that they looked like the remnants of a tandem skydive gone bad.

  “No!” the second head shouted. It was set into the right shoulder, more a face than a full head, with two bleak eyes set atop flesh-colored stalks. Lacking a neck, it couldn’t move, only staring upward and outward. “We don’t hunt men.”

  “I find all the food,” Nanesh said. “I does all the killing. And what does Manesh do? Eats and complains all day. Well enough is enough. I’m hungry.”

  “Nanesh will anger the gods,” the second head said, eye stalks bristling.

  “We take what the gods give. The gods gave us men. So we make meals of them.”

  Frank recoiled at the sight of the thing. He backed away, waving his saber to keep them (it?) at bay. He stumbled over a few of the large rocks strewn about the clearing but managed to keep a safe distance. When he felt the shield on his back scrape up against stone though, he knew he’d reached the cliff wall that edged the clearing. End of the line.

  A hot breeze swept down from the clifftops, bending wildflowers and blowing dust into his eyes. Something skittered across the rock face above him, wind-tossed gravel probably. When his vision cleared, the twins were nearly upon him. There was no place for him to run now. And even if there had been, his legs couldn’t carry him very fast. He was trapped, all alone under the glare of that malignant sun.

  Except … he wasn’t alone, was he?

  The Allflesh was with him. Dimly, just on the edge of perception, at the furthest tips of his nerves, he could feel it lurking warm and black, like snow fire at midnight, like the start of a fever.

  Why aren’t you stomping this turd and walking it dry, marine? The voice inside his head was Sarge’s, but it was sounding closer and closer to his own.

  “I’m too weak.”

  Too weak? Sarge barked in a perfect drill instructor cadence. What’s the matter? Forget your Wheaties this morning?

  “Fuck you.”

  That’s a start. Now why don’t you use some of that moxie to break your foot off in whatever that thing calls an ass?

  “I don’t have the strength.”

  Strength’s got nothing to do with it. Plenty of ways to whup a man. If you can’t break his back, then break his spirit, break his mind.

  The skull in his belt squirmed, the sensation like dragging a wet feather across the inside of his belly. The Allflesh was calling, and he knew what was waiting for him if he answered.

  Power … raw power.

  All he had to do was accept it. And so he did, partially out of desperation, but only partially. In truth, he was grateful for the power, hungry for it even.

  The eyes of the horned skull flashed with black flame, and a dull ache pulsed behind Frank’s belly button. He caught Nanesh’s gaze and immediately the world stopped, frozen in time like a single frame of film. Suddenly Frank felt himself floating out of his own head, drifting across the clearing to dive soundlessly into the black pool of Nanesh’s left pupil, which rippled and splashed and fell still again.

  Under the surface of Nanesh’s eye, the world was as lightless as the sea floor and Frank was a deep-sea diver, hunting for treasure in the dark. He brushed up against an amorphous shape, dense and heavy, and although he didn’t know what it was, he seized it with both hands and hauled it wriggling toward the sky.

  As he breached the surface of the pupil, the world started up again and he snapped back into his own head with a disorienting jolt of whiplash. The twins were advancing on him, and the woman in the sand was squirming to life.

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  Vision of Horror

  Form: Vigilante

  Ability Type: Action

  Psychoplasm Cost: 5

  Craft a horrific illusion modeled on the deepest fears of your foes. Choose one target enemy within 50 feet whose eyes (or eye) you can see. Create an illusion of the target’s greatest fear at a point within range. The illusion must be a construct no larger than a 20-foot cube. It can incorporate sights and sounds, but no other sensory effects. The target is Terrified as long as this illusion is present. This effect lasts for a number of minutes equal to 2 x your Will.

  The construct is intangible and physical interaction with it reveals it to be an illusion, ending its effects early.

  Psionic Reserve: 90/100

  Frank was trapped and although Nanesh was in striking distance, he didn’t move in for the kill. Instead, the cretin stood shaking his head in disbelief.

  “How can it be?” he said.

  “What is it?” Manesh said.

  “She’s here,” Nanesh whispered. “She’s come back.”

  “Who’s here? Let me see.”

  The figure that unfurled on the dry earth looked like a middle-aged woman. She had black hair streaked with gray and skin the deep red of a mellowed sunburn. She wore a plain dress, green and blue, which was so long it dragged the ground. You couldn’t see her legs under the dress but something there was moving.

  “What are you two doing?” the woman shouted. She approached the twins, gliding across the hard-packed earth more than walking, a brief flash of tentacle visible past the hem of her skirt. “And just what are you wearing? Rags fit for a beggar, it looks like. Didn’t I tell you to cover up? No one wants to see your body. You’re a monster.”

  “No, mum.” The hate had drained from Nanesh’s voice. He scared and puny now, like a little boy caught doing something he knew he wasn’t supposed to do, teasing a dog maybe or shoplifting a toy. “Don’t say that.”

  “Don’t you tell me what to say.”

  “Please, mum.”

  “But that’s what you are,” the woman said. “You’re a mangy little monster. You belong in a circus, not out in full view of the world. Dressed in those filthy rags. Crawling around in the dirt. Don’t you have any shame?”

  “I made those skins,” he said, pointing toward his discarded wrap as if presenting a piece of evidence in a courtroom. “Lizard skins and snake skins. Shiny and colorful. No rats. No dogs. Nothing unclean. Just every beautiful skin I could find to … to hide myself.”

  “Well, fine job you did,” the woman said. “That thing is disgusting. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with it. And it stinks so bad even a maggot wouldn’t touch it.”

  Another scrabbling sound moved across the rockface above Frank, but there was no breeze this time. He looked up and saw raw stone and olive-hued sky and … there, just on his periphery. It was a flash of movement, a tail maybe or the edge of a cloak, but gone before he could identify it.

  “Is it you mum?” Manesh’s eye stalks twitched, trying to crane around to glimpse this new figure. “Manesh has missed you so. Sometimes, I still hear you sing to me in his dreams.”

  “And you,” she turned her attention to the lesser twin, “I figured you’d be dead by now. Thought you’d have sloughed off your brother like an old wart off a whore’s ass. Which is exactly what you are.”

  Manesh’s eye stalks quivered, milky pools of fluid filling his empty sockets.

  “You’re my greatest shame, do you know that? You’re nothing but a stupid little runt. Everyone told me to drown you two in the river. But what I should have done was taken a knife and hacked you off, given your brother half a chance to be normal.”

  “No,” Manesh wailed.

  What was he witnessing here? Sarge’s fear constructs were his most recognizable power, but he had never seen them used like this before. He had expected to conjure up a simple phobia, bugs or bears or whatever passed for a boogie-man in a place like this. Instead, he’d unleashed some deep, Freudian nightmare on these poor bastards. A face only a mother could love was a cliché, but he could imagine it was also the overarching theme of their childhood. And here he had taken that one kind figure, that one beacon of joy in an otherwise cruel world, and turned it against them.

  Sure, they had it coming. They had set an ambush, wounded Thune, tried to knife Frank to death. These were bad guys, or at least the one called Nanesh was. The lesser brother seemed unwilling to go along with all this but physically unable to stop his brother.

  It didn’t sit right with Frank. None of it.

  They’re distracted now. Make your move.

  He staggered forward haltingly, his legs moving of their own volition. After a few steps, he seemed to regain control again, but it was a struggle. The divide between his mind and this body – and the disorientation that came with it – had never been greater.

  He circled wide, keeping out of sight of the twins, and trying to decide what to do next. He could always try Fear Eater again. The twins were spooked, to say the least, and their dread was ripe for harvesting. But there were only two of them (or did they count as one?) and that wouldn’t offer much of a boost. Fear Eater always worked better on crowds.

  Mr. Argyle, his drama teacher at Julliard, once said the same thing about him.

  Promise me you’ll never leave the theater, Frank. You have such a gift for live performance. You’re at your best in front of a crowd.

  Besides, Fear Eater would leave him exhausted again in a little while, helpless and weak, right back where he couldn’t afford to be.

  “Waaahhhh,” the woman shouted, mocking the cries of Manesh. “Waaaahhhh.”

  Nanesh was screaming, too. He had dropped his knife and was holding his hands over his ears, rocking his head back and forth as he tried to block out the taunting sound. But his lesser brother had no such reprieve. He hung there trembling with terror and pain, milky discharge falling from his face to wet the dry earth.

  By then, Frank had managed to circle around behind this chaotic scene. Taking a two-handed grip to steady his saber, he raised the blade high and moved in for the kill. But something about the meekness of the twins, their abject despair, filled him not with righteous anger but with pity.

  What would Sarge do?

  Kill them. No two ways about it. The Sarge didn’t suffer fools, and he had a body count second only to the state of Texas itself. The choice was so easy, it was no choice at all.

  But … that wasn’t exactly true. Sure, Sarge killed bad guys when they had it coming. He wasn’t Batman, who locked up his villains month after month, only to see them escape and terrorize the innocent again. Yet even without a no-kill rule, Sarge was still a hero. And stabbing a guy in the back didn’t feel very heroic.

  The Allflesh knew it, too. Frank could feel it pushing against these thoughts, trying to bury them. It wanted him to kill, although he couldn’t tell if its motive was self-preservation or some darker impulse.

  What are you waiting for, marine?

  “Forgive us, mum,” Manesh called. “We love you.”

  Do it!

  Frank sighed, lowering his blade. He waved his hand, an unconscious gesture he had never performed before but which was as familiar to him as a coin trick to a street magician. The screeching illusion disappeared.

  The clearing grew preternaturally quiet again, as it had been when he and Thune first approached.

  Nanesh dropped his hands from his ears. Manesh whimpered like a beat dog. Then noise seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his shallow face would allow, inside his brother’s shoulder joint maybe.

  “Where is mum?” Manesh asked his brother.

  “That wasn’t your mom,” Frank said. “It was an illusion.”

  The twins spun around, their single hunched form again moving with surprising agility.

  “An illusion?” Nanesh asked. “How did the big one know?

  “I conjured it.” Frank watched as anger spread over Nanesh’s face, his greasy lips peeling back in a sneer. “But only because you attacked me and my friend.”

  “The big one and his pet head are on my hunting ground. If he don’t want to get hunted, then he should stay away.”

  “I’m a stranger here. I had no idea this was your land. I’m headed to Uqmai. Let me pass and I’ll cause you no more trouble.”

  “Why should I let him pass?” One of Nanesh’s oddly angled legs began clawing at the ground, trying to drag the stone knife he had discarded closer.

  Frank raised his saber, leveling its point right between the cretin’s misaligned eyes.

  “I could have killed you a minute ago,” he said. “It would’ve been as easy as strangling a kitten. Instead I took pity on you. But if you reach for that knife, you’re going to find I’m all out of pity.”

  “Please,” Manesh said. “Mercy.”

  “Shut up,” Nanesh snapped. “Don’t show weakness.”

  “He’s not showing weakness, he’s showing brains. You should listen to him for once.”

  “He never listens to Manesh.”

  “Now you stabbed me and took my friend’s eye. And I put a fright into you that you’re going to remember until the day you die. That doesn’t exactly make us even, but it’s about as square as we’re ever going to get. So what do you say?”

  “I say, you’re not the only one who has friends around here.” Nanesh threw his head back and whistled, the sound echoing sharply off the rock walls. The grin on his face suggested he was expecting a friend to answer this call, but no one did and slowly the grin faded. He tried again.

  “She’s too far away,” Manesh said. “She can’t hear.”

  “What are you doing?” Frank asked.

  Something skittered across a nearby rock wall and then leaped down to the clearing, shaking the ground as it landed. It was a giant reptile, fifteen feet long and covered in rough green scales. It had clawed feet and two thin tails, like rat tails, that stretched half as long as its body. Its brow ridge was V-shaped and set with five eyes, each a different color.

  The creature was wounded, punctured by half a dozen spears, their long shafts sticking out of its hide like porcupine quills. In its mouth, it held the severed torso of a Copper Man.

  The beast dropped its meal when it saw Frank. It hissed low in its throat and began to crawl forward.

  “No,” Manesh yelled. His eye stalks twitched, the flesh there turning a shade of deep blue. The beast heeled like a well-trained dog.

  “Why do you call her off?” Nanesh said.

  “Don’t you see? Grizsix found a Copper Man. There must be more. They will kill us if they find us. Eat us even. We must flee.”

  “You know those guys?” Frank said, nodding toward the armored corpse on the ground but never taking his eyes off the beast.

  “They hunt us for sport,” Manesh said. “They wish to eat us.”

  “No fun being someone’s dinner plans is it?”

  “Piss on Copper Men,” Nanesh said. He had used the arrival of the beast as a distraction, slipping out of reach of Frank’s blade and angling again toward his own discarded knife. “Nanesh would finish his business with the big one first.”

  Nanesh made a clicking noise and the beast – Grizsix, by name – inched forward. But its steps were halting and slow, as if it was uncertain of Nanesh’s authority.

  “There’s a whole band of these Copper Men down in the valley,” Frank said. “They’re heading this way now. They may be here any minute.”

  No sooner had Frank warned about the imminent approach of the raiders than a spear struck the heavy shield on his back. He stumbled, nearly collapsing from the force of the blow, a blow he had barely felt earlier.

  “Look,” Manesh said.

  Above them, standing atop one of the cliffs that encircled the clearing, was a Copper Man raider. He stamped and shrieked, howling like a chimp on the hunt.

  “Bah,” Nanesh sneered. “One Copper Man is no threat. That’s a snack for Grizsix.”

  The Copper Man beat his chest with his fist and made a deep yodeling noise in his throat and then the rest of them crested the ridge.

  They came in waves, five raiders at first, then ten, then twenty. Frank lost count at twenty-five, and still more were coming.