Riposte.

I was on Harina Oltven in a heartbeat.

I bashed away the elegant sword he held, and as it swung wide I dove atop him, hoping to barrel him over so I could bite at his face and slash his throat with my... No. That was the demon slavering for blood just behind my eyes. The pressure in my throat was enormous. I pulled myself away and rolled to my feet, staggering under the combined weight of bloodlust and arrows.

Oltven stood warily. He snarled in disgust and spit out a tooth I'd bashed free with my pommel.

"Not sporting," he sneered, his hand coming away bloody from his nose, though it was already beginning to heal. "For someone who prides himself on fair play, I'm surprised."

"That's rich, from a backbiter like you," I retorted, letting the monster play freely with my words while I mentally locked down access to my other faculties. I prepared a fortress in my mind, safe from the demonic element infecting my body and erected a silver wall between them. Within the fortress, I was in control. I loosened my arms and legs, readying myself for the cold logic of swordplay. I gave my hatred and rage to the beast, evicting them from my fortress so they withered and died without access to my heart. "Shooting me in the back with arrows is less sporting than an open handed punch from a foe."

"Is that what you think we are?" Oltven laughed. "You have been given the gifts of a god! You are stronger and faster than you have ever been. Once the transformation is complete, you will transcend your historically pointless existence and serve the greater good of the Brotherhood. I do not see you as a foe, brother." He smiled before continuing, and I could see he meant it. He was evil, it was true, but he was also utterly convinced he was right. "I see you as an inevitable comrade."

He lowered his blade, as if to delay rather than press the fight. Time was on his side, but why the delay? Was he afraid? My brows furrowed in confusion, until I caught a whiff of someone behind me.

I moved in the serene emptiness of battle perception, sword floating with long familiarity like fingers finding a bedroom doorknob in the dark. I spun and turned aside both spears set to strike, each parry followed by a blinding riposte to drop its man, the first with a deep gash to the temple, the other run through below the left shoulder. My silvered blade bit and was withdrawn in less time than it took the man to realize he was dead. His footwork had been especially poor.

"Call off your dogs," I demanded while staring down a handful of fools who huddled toward me to cover their fallen allies' retreat.

One of the guarding thugs took an imprudent swing and found himself on the ground behind his retreating fellows, life's blood rising around the cobblestones beneath him like an incoming tide. My counter attack was delivered without thought or emotion. In my heartless stronghold, I was beyond the lizard's reach, but it would not last long. These were peasants held under Oltven's poisonous sway, not veterans or even hired killers. Against martial instincts honed through centuries of use and a flawless, unanswerable delivery that had literally become my namesake, serfs with crudely forged weapons were hopelessly outmatched.

"You mistake our situation," Oltven gloated, "assuming this is a contest of blades."

"What else could it be?" I smirked. "You have a sword, I have a sword... one of us will be dead in a moment." I willed the silver wall surrounding my fortress into plates of impenetrable silver mail around my heart. Let him try to lead me back to the mortal world of rage and consequence. I wanted none of it. Not until I put him down.

"This," he said, indicating the two of us, "is merely a race to see who will embrace the Gift of Sethos first. Unless you fall on this enchanted blade to escape me, there is no circumstance in which you will win."

"You may be right," I admitted. Perhaps it was in his best interest to force my change, but if it happened I was a dead man. He held the ornate blade I'd gifted Pertuli before him like a detestable thing. Something he would rather not use. A mistake. To win, a warrior had to commit to using his weapon. Dead or not, I have already won. "But your rebellion will fail before your curse claims me."

I lunged to the attack. Aided by Oltven's cursed speed and his blade's defensive enchantment, Pertuli's weapon leaped into my silver sword's path, turning it aside. The edge passed less than a hand span from his face before we were locked in a fierce struggle, our off-hands tangled in our opponent's guard, each attempting to overpower the other. Gifted with super-human strength, neither could find an advantage over the other.

"Grraaaa!" I growled in frustration. Maintain control. Must maintain control.

"I'm told..." Oltven grunted, still smiling his incomprehensible leer, "that she begged for death at the end."

I frowned, not following. "What.. Are... you... babbling about?" I stammered, groaning with the effort of dislodging Oltven's fleshy mitt. His skin burned whenever my blade pressed against it, but he fought me savagely nevertheless, ignoring the pain as he continued.

"Your woman, the noble tilwen wench," he snarled, choking off a chortle that was immediately caught in another fierce gurgle of effort.

I flinched, and he threw me bodily onto the pavement nearby.

I looked up with wild eyes. "You're lying. She left the city long before you were born."

It was as if a demonic ram was assaulting my emotionless tower, silver scales spraying from my defenses with every blow. The tower was imaginary, after all, and the creature inside me so very real.

"Oh yes, long ago," the merchant-turned-revolutionary croaked maliciously. He raised his sword to a guard position, expecting an incoming attack, so I obliged him. We exchanged a furious series of thrusts and parries before pushing apart once more. A parting swipe nicked the outside of my right arm and the blade's magic seared me to the bone as if acid had been poured into the wound. I gasped and clutched at my arm as blood oozed between my fingers. "But the Brotherhood was installed in Dragoskala two hundred and fifty years ago. Who do you think convinced her to leave in the first place?"

"Lies!" I screamed. My skin was on fire. Control. I needed control. My stomach threatened to empty itself, and not just because of the demon in my belly clambered for release.

"I may as well tell you, Clasicant, that you have long been considered a threat." He continued, his voice alive with the glee at disclosing a long held secret. One he was sure would cause untold pain. "Long ago, our seers predicted you would be the deciding factor against us on the day all our plans came to fruition. There were assassination attempts, of course, but somehow or another you or that dog of yours foiled them all. They forced your woman out of town in the hopes that you would follow and never return. When you chose to remain, the great and wise Mysteriat gave you the Gift instead. Now your every move benefits our order."

"Impossible!" I shouted again, less sure this time. I attacked, but was distracted. Oltven knocked my blade away time and again, aided by his unnatural speed and his sword's magic. I took a cut on my left shoulder and a stab in my right calf. They wouldn't heal. The wall around my stoic fortress was crumbling; a burst dam that would take time I didn't have to mend. My mind reeled. "She never would have—"

Let me be freeee, a voice said suddenly in the back of my mind, so loud I spun about, to make sure no one had snuck within my guard. I felt my gorge rising. It is inevitable, it said, as if in mockery of my confusion.

"When my masters determined she was of no use, they found her and made sure she would be unable to return to you," Oltven hissed, a slow pull of a long curved blade across the throat of my spirit. He continued as if confiding a a secret, a cruel grin widening around his near-whispered words. "Clasicant, you know I speak truth when I say my brothers are expert in the implements of torture, but the way it is told in our secret annals, your woman's agony was... legendary."

"No!" I cried, and the blackness came flooding in. I was inside Oltven's guard before he could react. I began bashing his face with the silver of my sword's pommel and didn't stop until it shattered the paving stones under him. The bent and twisted metal slipped past the bandage on my hand and seared into my palm over and over until the pain seeped into the waters of my wrath.

I threw the broken weapon from me. A weak implement. With my newfound strength I had no use for such tools.

I continued pummeling the corpse for long drips, until the pulp under me was no longer recognizable as human remains. Black, roiling smoke surrounded me where the head had turned to ash, and I became aware that arrows were striking me.

Turning, I flattened a spearman as the shaft he held jumped from his weak fingers. I yanked the spear from my flank and broke him with it, then hurled it at an archer, not far away. The man flew ten paces before he was pinned to a temple wall. The small army threatening me fled, dispersing in the darkness.

I was about to pursue the largest group when I noticed a lone man who had been hidden among their number facing me alone. He carried no weapon, but strode forward without fear. I snarled and picked up Pertuli's sword like an ungainly javelin.

"Stop!" the man's voice boomed and my hand froze behind me in mid throw. "Don't look so surprised, Lord Clasicant. You have received the Gift of Sethos, and are now beholden to his Scarlet Sorcerers." With a crook of his index finger and an unintelligible phrase, tentacles of shadow rose from the air around me. "Do you think that all the turned, even fueled by rage and steeped in evil would be so pliable without certain ingrained levers of the soul which could be pushed and pulled by the puppet masters of our order?"

As one, the tentacles began beating at me with very real, very painful force.

"You have proven surprisingly difficult to turn," he continued, emerging from the greasy black fog rising from Oltven's pulpy remnants like a tongue of flame. Instead of the scarlet cape of the brotherhood, this man was dressed head to foot in crimson robes. "But your stubbornness will avail you no longer. Join us, Lord Clasicant, as we seize this world in Sethos' great, scaly fist."

I grunted under the first few blows as more tentacles rose around me. They snaked around my arms and legs, elastic and impossible to tear with even my great strength while their neighboring fronds beat my face and pounded arrow shafts deeper into my body like hammers. I cried out in pain, and then began to scream.

The gorge rose in my throat, pinching and then strangling my cries, and I gave in to despair as the beast seized me from within. My body heaved. The pain was unimaginable; Parts of my body tore in ways impossible to recover without the corruption's ability to mend, only now the beast had no inclination to heal what was left of me.

My time had come. The world went dark around me as all senses fled but the constant, unutterable pain. The blackness rushed over the shattered silver wall of my defenses, and surged like a flood into the tower at the center of my being. My mind raced to the top of that last tower where, in the most secret place of my heart was a box. I opened it just as the oily black floodwaters began to lap at its sides. Within were two memories. Memories that I had chosen as the core of who I was. Failsafes against the demon, for when the last light of hope had been extinguished. Tyella ... and Balina.

Tyella was the sole reason I had the strength to live in this dark world. Memory and hope for her had sustained me through a century of apathy, weariness and uselessness. I hadn't been the best person during that time, but I hadn't faded. Hadn't died. I had really thought that one day she and I would be reunited, but I had been wrong. I was a fool. A fool in love. I shed silent, strangled tears for her as I turned from my lost hope and forced myself to remember Balina.

She had known a secret about the curse. A terrible secret, but one of which the Brotherhood might not be aware.

Look at me, a strategist to the end.

"The secret to taming the beast, you see," she had said, as her face split and the hideous transformation began with an unnaturally wide, mocking grin, "is to let it out, sometimes."

Right before I killed her.

There was evil in everyone. It didn't take some demon possession to bring it out in most people. I didn't even have a soul to turn my back on. I didn't let the beast have me... I became the beast.

There was the beating of wings and a strike of lightning nearby. Has my decision offended you? I railed at whatever gods were listening to my thoughts, too bad you missed! It could all have been over.

If Father Bessik's One God was real, he said nothing. My thoughts found voice once again and my screams died away as I looked out on my city with new, reptilian eyes.