As hideously deformed as the beasts they had seen attack the flesh camp, these monsters were a similar horror of insane anatomies. Limbs turned inside out, pulsing organs grown and mutated through warped external skeletons, heads and chests fused with metastasised bone sinews, Siamese twins wrapped together with fleshy streamers and some with grossly swollen bellies that resembled the daemonic mothers that had brought them into being.
'From one death sentence to another,' observed Ardaric Vaanes sourly, unsheathing his lightning claws.
'Shut up, Vaanes!' snapped Uriel as he drew his sword and the blade leapt to fiery life. The members of the warrior band who had retained hold of their weapons drew them and readied themselves for battle. It would be an uneven fight, but it was a fight they would make nonetheless. Leonid left the wounded Ellard and picked up a jagged rock.
The Unfleshed closed the noose about them, grotesquely muscled and swollen limbs propelling them rapidly across the rocky floor of the basin, hungry for the taste of warm, bloody meat in their mouths. The nearest beast splashed into the foetid water of the pool, the noise of the waterfall from the outflow not enough to cover its bestial grunts of monstrous appetite. Its muscled forelimbs formed powerful fists as it prepared to attack. Uriel and the others formed a circle as the creatures loped forwards, ready to die on their feet, facing their deaths like warriors.
'You meat…' hissed the Unfleshed as it waded through the water towards them.
Uriel started in surprise, amazed the creature could speak. Vaanes had told him that these beasts were the by-blows of the Iron Warriors and until now he had believed them to be nothing more than failed experiments carried out by the Savage Morticians, similar to the creature, Sabatier.
But seeing them up close and having been fed to the wombs of the daemonculaba himself, he now knew better. He pictured the children being sutured into the daemon wombs alongside him and knew that such an imperfect method of hot-housing Chaos Space Marines must result in more failures than successes…
'Emperor's blood,' whispered Uriel as the realisation of his shared kinship with the Unfleshed sank in. He glanced up at the outflow pipe high on the rockface above them, understanding how these beasts came to be in the mountains.
He returned his attention to the Unfleshed as the beast reared up to its full height and bellowed its challenge. Uriel felt a burst of adrenaline dump into his system at the size of the thing. Its barrel chest was crisscrossed with imperfectly grafted folds of skin, pinned to its muscular frame by shards of bone and its head was a vast, hydrocephalic nightmare with multiple, yellowed eyes and a distended jaw filled with blunt fangs. Perfect for grinding his bones to digestible mush.
'Blood,' said the monster, nodding its elephantine head and licking its lips.
The remaining creatures held back as the lead beast approached, and Uriel sensed a tribal, pack mentality at work.
Uriel stepped towards the beast and held his sword, two-handed, before him.
'What are you doing?' said Pasanius.
'I think this is the alpha male of the group,' said Uriel. 'Perhaps if I can kill it, the others won't attack.'
'Or they'll tear us to pieces all the quicker,' said Leonid.
'True,' allowed Uriel, 'but I don't think we have much choice.'
'Give it your best shot,' said Vaanes, sheathing his claws.
The beast watched Uriel approach, flexing the huge muscles of its upper body. He tried to read its expression, but its blunted features gave him no clue as to its thoughts.
'Come on then. Come and get me if you want to eat me!' he roared.
The monster sprang forward and Uriel barely avoided a swinging blow that would have taken his head off had it connected. He ducked beneath the punch and dodged around the side of the Unfleshed, swinging his sword for its back. The blade sliced barely a centimetre into its flesh and Uriel felt the shock of the blow up his arms, horrified that the lethal energies of his weapon had failed to cut the monster in two. Before he recovered from his surprise, the beast was upon him, its meaty fists clubbing him down. Uriel collapsed into the water, rolling from a thunderous stamp that sent up a geyser of brackish water.
'Uriel!' shouted Pasanius, stepping forward to help.
'No!' shouted Uriel, scrambling away from the monster on his backside and into the downpour of rushing water driving down from the Halls of the Savage Morticians. 'If you help me, they will all attack!'
Uriel pushed himself clear of the foaming torrent and lunged forward, stabbing for the monster's groin: The tip of the blade barely penetrated the Unfleshed's hide before sliding clear without further injury. It roared and picked him up in one fist, snapping its jaws shut on his side. Uriel shouted in pain and twisted in its grip, saving himself from being disembowelled and stabbed his sword for the monster's head.
The blade scraped across its eyeballs, drawing a howl of pain from the monster. Its claws spasmed and Uriel fell from its hand. He landed before the Unfleshed and thrust his sword straight forward with a roar of anger, putting his entire strength behind the blow.
He yelled in triumph as the point of the blade punched through a weaker section of the monster's flesh and he drove the blade clean through its body. A heavy fist smashed into his shoulder and Uriel was driven to his knees in the water. He felt his collarbone crack and released his grip on the sword hilt. He looked up into the Unfleshed's weeping-blood eyes and knew that he could not defeat it. Despite a crackling blade impaling its belly, the monster gave no indication that it even felt the wound.
Uriel had stood before the might of a star god, had destroyed the heart of a tyranid hive ship, had faced the unimaginable power of a rogue psyker and now he was to die at the hands of this monster that was kin to him at a genetic level. Its clawed hands reached for him, but before they closed on his head and crushed his skull to splinters, a bellowing roar echoed from the sides of the basin and, as one, the Unfleshed that surrounded them drew back in fearful respect.
A stillness fell, a sudden peace, and Uriel watched as a terrible beast, larger than the others, descended slowly into the water-filled depression. The Unfleshed Uriel had just fought was a gargantuan, swollen monstrosity, but this beast was an order of magnitude greater than that. Its physique was colossal and rippled with abnormal growths of fierce muscle, a powerhouse of primal, destructive energy. Red and raw, its body was a glistening mass of wet, exposed musculature, sinews bulging and contracting as it moved. If there was an alpha male of the Unfleshed, then surely this must be it. Uriel recognised the thing as the creature that had led the attack against the huddled slaves at the flesh camp.
Its head was lodged low between its shoulders, a red skull face with burning yellowed eyes set within a prosaic arrangement of gory features. Without the guise of flesh, its features were dead and expressionless, its mouth lipless, its nose a torn gash in the centre of its face. Unlike many of its brethren, it retained a measure of its humanity in its form, though massively built beyond even what the ancient legends told of the primarchs.
But worst of all, Uriel could see a gleam of intelligence lurking within its calculating gaze. Where the others of its kind might be spared the awful knowledge of their fate and the horror of their existence, Uriel knew that this terrible creature knew full well how the fates had damned it.
It descended into the valley with a guttural series of grunts and roars, the Unfleshed that surrounded them backing away from what must surely be their lord… the Lord of the Unfleshed. Uriel shivered as he conjured the phrase, grimacing at its appropriateness.