Harras

The harras are Izgard of Garizon's crack troops, hand-picked for their weapon skills and loyalty. Cool and deadly as blades packed in ice, they stop at nothing to make a kill. Still Izgard is not satisfied. He wants more. He wants them to fight until their legs are hacked from under them and their veins run empty of blood. He wants them to breathe-in the night and become the night, and think and act as one.With the help of the Barbed Coil, Izgard will get his wish...

In the salt marshes to the southeast of Castle Bess, where the ground was fed by a thousand narrow channels that ran from the sea at high tide, where sandpipers came each spring to feed on tiger-moths and ghost crabs, and where nothing but salt grass and sandwort grew, forty men rode their horses at full gallop.

It was dark, but the terrain was flat and featureless so they feared no damage to the horses. The horses themselves might have been skittish for other, more instinctive reasons, but snuffle caps dowsed in pine oil had been fitted around their nosebands, and the changing smell of their riders bothered them less than their shifting weight.

The riders gained mass as they rode. They gathered the night to them like blotting paper soaking up ink. Muscles swelled, skin stretched, bone thickened and compacted into plates. Teeth grew large in their mouths, tongues plumped and jawbones reset themselves with a series of dull clicks. Blood ran from one man's nose. Clear liquid wept from another man's ear. All bodies shifted; fluid as shadows lengthening at sunset one moment, jarring as dogs tearing themselves from sacks the next.

Eyes dimmed. Colors drained from irises like wine from a glass. Blinking patterns changed. The glaze wetting the riders' corneas stung as it thickened and saltened. The saliva between their teeth smacked as they worked their jaws. Swallowing often, they tried to rid themselves of the excess.

The riders cumulated and densened. They became.

Thoughts and desires left them as soundlessly and unobtrusively as sweat evaporating from an upper lip. Their names fell away like shedding skin. If they were aware of anything it was the golden warmth pulsing up from their bellies. If they retained memories, they were all of the womb.

Slowly, as their horses bore them west and northward, shape and meaning formed from the shifting pulp of thoughts, flesh and bone. Gristle hardened. Purpose sparked. Eyes devoid of color, borrowed a cast of purest gold.

The Barbed Coil sung to them. It shaped and created; fixing motive and mindset and might. As the riders followed the tide channels to the gates of Castle Bess, they stopped being men and became other instead. They were creatures of the Coil now. And even as their smell and bulk finally spooked the horses forcing them to abandon the creatures and proceed on foot, the Barbed Coil took them further and deeper. Its barbs shredded what was left of them and created something new.

The horses screamed and reared and galloped back the way they came. Ghost crabs scuttled back to their pools and tiger moths settled flat against rocks. The moon disappeared behind a bank of cloud, yet it made no difference to the creatures of the Coil. Through their eyes the darkness looked like the clear light of day.