Torture

Timestamp: Bootleggers Pier

Sir Zane held his vambraces over in his hands. His fingertips stroked along the dents and scratches etched into the dark metal by countless battles. The plate was painted red with an artisan's care, in stylised mimicry of a bears' skull. He told himself that this wasn't symbolic, that his gear's damage didn't reflect the damage done to him during his life time.

Building up to war had a proven and profane habit of stoking the fires of melancholy, in him in the later years of his life. The warrior took a deep breath, seeing the inhuman spectacle upon the hill ahead. He had been dreaming of Bloodstone lately, had been for months now. A part of him knew that he would never return home again. That Arcadia had not only been his punishment but was supposed to be his grave as well. He stopped short of cursing the Emperor aloud.

"Sir Zane..." someone called. His sergeant called. The warrior replaced his vambraces. They felt heavy. Heavier that he had ever realised. He looked up at the golden view of the setting sun for a few moments before turning away from it.
"What?" the old warrior asked. "The Native is breaking." came the reply.

The warrior nodded as he drew his dagger sheathed at his side. Fading sunlight flashed off the blade's edge.

----

Crucifixion was a nasty business. But it was a delicious conceit, for Otho Margrave and served well as means to an end. The warrior hung slack from his bonds, bathed in pain but surrendering no sound from his cut lips. The Purger smiled. Everyone he had tortured in his life had imagined they would remain stoic to the last moment. But all broke. All you had to do was to find the straw that broke the horses back. Everyone breaks in the end. Some in less than an hour, others in days. He remembered the young witch from the Sisters of Azure, he had tortured for months. How she had remain defiant through the beatings, hunger and physical abuse, refusing to repent and accept the Pillars into her heart and renouncing the the ways of the Maleficium.
How he had enjoyed his daily visits to her cell. In the end it had been a dark hole and the black rats that had broken her. How she had raved, begged and cried as the filthy creatures bloated bodies rubbed against her and gnawed at her flesh.
How disappointed he had been when that day come.

With no iron spikes to hand, getting him up the cross required a degree of improvisation. He had signalled to his men to bind the native to the wood by impaling the prisoner's limbs with their short swords. Blood still flowed to the dirt in liquid drips , but had long since stopped to run like rainwater. A human body, even those of savages only held so much blood.

Under the crucified captive, an helm rested like a cup. The Purger dismissed another unwelcome tide of reflection at the sight of a helm that remined him of yet another of his many victims and victories. With no real venom, he kicked it way with his boot.

The warrior native looked down, baring features destroyed by mutilating knives. His chest skin had been peeled away expertly by blades showing the sinews and raw muscle of his torso, his arms pitted and cracked around the impaling short swords. His face, once so grim and proud, was a skinless display of bare veins and bloody, layered nerves. Even his eyelids had been cut away.
"Hail, savage." The Purger greeted the captive. "Do you know who I am?"

With the native broken, a confession took no time at all. To speak the words, he shouted up, his voice cracking like thunderclap in the evening air.

"Who is Erewhon?’

As his silent Flock gathered around him, Sir Zane looked on in muted raged at the sight before him.

The Inquisition had truly arrived in Arcadia...