As the fumes carried him deeper into the tormented depths of his altered mind, he saw towering buildings of white stone, glorious windows of many colours and a host of statues depicting a golden warrior, his head haloed in stars and surrounded by angels of light.
Of all the fevered visions the Lord of the Unfleshed saw, this one had the most power and, more than that, it had an identity.
This was the Emperor and the Emperor loved him.
This love would never last and these golden memories would shatter, replaced by loathsome visions of horror and blood so terrifying that he would crush rocks with his fists in his dreaming frenzy.
He saw fire. He saw explosions and stuttering flickers of bullets.
In the bursts of light, he saw warriors in iron-grey armour fringed with chevrons of yellow and black.
Heavy, textured gauntlets reached for him, tearing him from the bloody corpse of the beautiful woman, his screams, falling on deaf ears as his world resolved into snapshots of horror: darkness and terror, the taste of blood never far from his mouth; slavering saw-carrying monsters and the giant, drooling faces of monstrous mothers.
Then only pain and emptiness as he felt himself enfolded by moist folds of flesh and dragged down into darkness.
Then, gloriously, light.
But the light was a lie and served only to reveal his hideousness.
A monster he was and a monster he became, flushed away with the rest of the rotten meat into the unforgiving wilderness beyond the Iron Men's citadel.
His revulsion at his own horrible existence would always break the grip of the toxic fumes and he would rise from the mountainside to make his way back down to his wretched band, the unwanted, the rejected and the unloved.
Many of the wailing masses of twisted meat and bone shat from above were howling things without form or mind.
These the tribe would eat, but those with enough semblance of form and strength would become part of the Lord of the Unfleshed's growing tribe.
This was the Lord of the Unfleshed's life and he had known of no other way to live, until the warrior had come.
The Lord of the Unfleshed had watched the latest outpourings from the Iron Men's citadel fall into the pool, imagining the taste of their meat as they struggled to the edge of the black water. Anticipation turned to puzzlement, for they were none of them monsters. His only thought had been to feast on them, but he had smelled the mother meat on the warrior who led the new arrivals.
The Lord of the Unfleshed had taken the new arrivals to the great cavern beneath the earth that was home and presented them to the mighty statue of the Emperor that they had built from the detritus flushed from above. The Emperor had judged the warrior, who called himself Uriel, worthy and so they had become part of the tribe and struck back at the Iron Men who lived in the fortress on top of the impossible mountain.
Much blood had been shed, many Iron Men killed and their fortress brought crashing down. Many of the Unfleshed had died also, but it was a good memory, one the Lord of the Unfleshed held fast to as they escaped the world of their monstrous birth in the bowels of the iron daemon's machine.
The Lord of the Unfleshed did not like to think of the time spent within the daemonic machine's reeking, blood-soaked depths, for it had taken all his power and strength to prevent the tribe from turning on one another in a frenzy of gnashing jaws and taloned fists.
The journey had ended though and they had set foot on this world. The air was clean and the ground soft, but there was something wrong with it. He did not know what it was or how to articulate that wrongness, but a presence of great anger saturated the air of this place.
He could feel it as surely as he felt the blood running down his fleshless face.
The meat from the carcasses was almost gone. One of the tribe, a creature with glistening organs oozing at the edges of its bones and a hideously elongated mouth filled with serrated fangs, snapped bones and sucked the marrow from them. Another scraped the inside of the gutted beast's stomach for the last morsels.
'No,' growled the Lord of the Unfleshed, 'we not need to live like this.'
The tribe looked up at him, confusion twisting their mangled features.
'This a better world for us,' he said. 'Uriel promise us this. We not be feared and Emperor loves us.'
He could see the hope in their eyes, the first rays of sunshine diffusing through the treetops with a soft golden glow. The Lord of the Unfleshed felt it on his skin as a pleasant tingle and looked down as the warmth spread across the raw redness of his arm.
He rose to his feet and made his way from the shadows of the forest, ducking under branches as the sun rose higher over the mountains and spilled its golden light over the landscape. The tribe followed him, captivated by the glow building in the sky.
Walking like recently awakened sleepwalkers, the Unfleshed made their way from beneath the trees to stand in the open. Their faces were alive with wonderment, the sight of this bright orb in the sky incredible and new, yet strangely familiar.
Memories of happier times fought to reach the surface of the Lord of the Unfleshed's mind and he felt the beginnings of hope stir in his breast. Perhaps this could be a better place, a new beginning on a world where they were not hated and hunted.
The sensation of the sunlight on his body grew stronger, the tingling turning to something else, something painful. The tribe began to moan, rubbing their arms and bodies as though scratching at a persistent itch.
The Lord of the Unfleshed felt the musculature of his body begin to burn, the sensation like the angry heat that covered his body whenever he had ventured into the filthy waters of the Iron Men's world.
He growled as the burning sensation grew stronger, the meat of his body unused to the strange sun's rays. Black patches began to form on his skin, spreading like droplets of oil on water. Pain grew as the black, blistering marks grew and the Lord of the Unfleshed roared as he scratched one and a viscous pus oozed from the wound.
On the Iron Men's world, the sun radiated despair and hopelessness, but this one… this one radiated pain.
The Unfleshed began to howl, clawing at the meat of their limbs and bodies as they struggled to understand what was happening to them. Their cries were piteous as the sunlight burned their bodies and the Lord of the Unfleshed roared in anger and hurt betrayal.
This world was no good. He had known it, but had allowed himself to forget that everything hated them.
Even the sun wanted to destroy them.
'Tribe!' he roared. 'Back! Back into shadow!'
He turned from the burning sun and ran back to the shelter of the trees, but even there the sunlight found them, slicing through the trees in deadly beams that seared the unprotected flesh of their bodies. The Unfleshed looked to him for guidance, but he had none to give.
There was no better life, not for the likes of them.
The Unfleshed bellowed and beat their chests in agony and the Lord of the Unfleshed cried his frustration to the heavens. Through the foliage he saw the rocky escarpment rearing above them, a vertical slab of glistening black rock with numerous waterfalls cascading from high above.
Against the blackness of the rock, the Lord of the Unfleshed saw a patch of deeper darkness, a cleft in the sheer surface: a cave.
'Tribe must run!' he cried. 'Find shelter in rocks! Follow!'
Without looking to see if any came with him, the Lord of the Unfleshed broke from the scant cover of the forest and ran uphill towards the cliffs. His powerful muscles easily carried him across the landscape, leaping over huge boulders and shutting out the burning pain that threatened to overwhelm him.