Armor and flesh ripped apart by talons and teeth, body engulfed in ropy tendril of vine. Equal parts blood and brackish water erupt from his body out of every opened hole and gash and tear -- but the power of the Saa was...

...defeated. Garen Corlagon thrashed one more time, screaming, "NOOO!!" before it pitted out into a dull gurgle. A death rattle. Seconds later, his body erupted in a geyser of blood and flesh and foul water and tissue as the vines tugged and tightened, ripping him apart limb from limb, showering Alysia, DeAuster, Ravenlock, and Icer in the putresecent mix.

And he fell.

Garen Corlagon was falling in darkness. The deep wounds in his body were still there, though it did not seem to hurt any longer. He felt splattered blood on his face, and his stomach was gaping open beneath greens and light blues pulsed and fluxed before him, almost as if quivering in anticipation. In the shadows, just on the cusp of the lighted circle he stood in, he heard chittering noises. Clicking noises. The creatures looked like large lizards, only their heads were covered in eyes, and they had six legs with which to scamper about on.

He knew of them. Nephwracks were twisted and bent, the hollowed remains of spectres and other servants of the Malfeans punished for some slight or another. Shock troopers and, at the best of times nearly uncontrollable, they were expendable and cannibalistic. But these were not Nephwracks. These were the personal servants of the Nihil, the dark lords of Malfeas. They lived in holes burrowed into the Malfeans' leathery, fleshy hulks and they served them in all things.

Kel'thoids.

"Garen Corlagon."

The voice was familiar, and he didn't even have to wait for the next lighted circle to illuminate the figure to know exactly who had said it. His voice was flat, uninteresting, and entirely devoid of expression or emotion. Black plates of armor, Thrakan like his own tattered mess, wrapped the man's body like snake scales. His eyes were black, and uninspiring in any way. He looked dead, even as he spoke; his will entirely crushed by the Malfeans. A slender, ropy green tentacle had enwrapped his throat, and it flexed once as he finished speaking.

The Voice of the Nihil. The dead-eyed man was the voice, though, not the Nihil themselves. Those belonged to the large, glowing x-shaped eyes somewhere in the pitchy, inky, infinite blackness behind him. Garen Corlagon had been called before the Nihil.

"My lords--"

"--Silence. You have failed us, Garen Corlagon."

To the Malfeans, failure was nearly inexcusable. And always unforgivable.

"He had a weapon. I wasn't aware of it, he.. he tricked me! My lords, surely you saw--"

"--We saw you fall in defeat, Garen Corlagon. Again."

Corlagon's mind raced for something, anything, to say. Some way to pass the blame from his shoulders.

"I was attacked by too many. I had lost my weapon, and was weakened terribly. Great masters, I--"

"--Enough. Your role has been decided upon, Garen Corlagon. The Nihil will not waste enough ounce of effort upon you. You are unable even to stop Jodiah Ayreg, an old man. How, then, were you to take the destruction of Malfeas to the world above?"

Strangely, Corlagon fell to his knees in an almost automatic response to beg for mercy. His hands extended out, lifting in supplication to the insectoid creatures around him, to the dead-eyed man, to the shadows, to the x-shaped eyes.

"My great lords, my masters..." he started, feeling no shame in groveling. When one was facing absolute destruction, one did what they must to survive. "...I have only ever served you as best I could. It is not my doing! I am not the one at fault! Dark lords, you must give me another--"

"--You forget your place, death knight. We must do nothing."

Abruptly, the dead-eyed man stopped speaking and looked on impassively. The x-shaped eyes of the Malfeans, somewhere in the inky black darkness, turned one to another and spoke amongst themselves. A raucous cacaphony of glutteral noises, grunts, wheezings, chitterings, and deep, resonating barks.

After a time, the tentacle wrapped around the dead-eyed man's throat flexed and twitched, and he abruptly began to speak again.

"Very well, Garen Corlagon. The Nihil has decided. While the Faceless wanted simply to cast you into Oblivion, and the Plaguebringer had desired to turn you into a Nephwrack for the forthcoming attack against Stygia... it was your own master, the Prince of Hate, that has decided your fate."

Corlagon wanted to gulp.

"You will serve again, Garen Corlagon."

That made the once-again-defeated death knight want to dance and sing. Mercy was being shown, he would be given another, very likely final chance to serve!

"What must I do, great masters?"

If he had ever seen the dead-eyed man smile, he wasn't aware of it. Maybe that's why it came to such a shock to him now when he was almost certain he saw the Voice of the Nihil's lips twitch into a nearly-flat curve, and once again the tentacle about his throat flexed.

"Absolutly nothing."

In an instant, those unholy insects swarmed toward him, biting mandibles and slashing talons taking pieces of flesh away from him as they climbed across his body. He flailed at them as best he could, but in his weakened state he could only fall to the ground. As the insects began to drag him away toward the darkness past the dead-eyed man, Corlagon howled in agony, thrashing and jerking and trying in vain to free himself of the Kel'thoids

The pain was in very sharp relief now, compared to earlier.

This was the destruction of betrayers, cowards, fools, prisoners of raids on the Shadowlands, and failures.

He was left in shambles, there in the dark. He could see the dead-eyed man, the Voice of the Nihil, somewhere in the depths of the blackness illuminated by the lighted circle from above. Another one, the one he had been standing in, was empty now. He was closer to the dead-eyed man.

He was in the darkness where the Malfeans themselves existed. There was movement heard, slithering of moist husk upon soppy, organic ground, and he looked up into the huge, glowing, x-shaped eyes of one of the Nihil. Instinctively, he knew it to be the Prince of Hate.

Zyras, the All-Consuming.

He could see, sort of, being this close. The light from those enormous x-shaped eyes reflected off the grotesque skin of the Malfean, and he could see the creature now in all of its terrible glory. Like a gigantic, colossal worm looming over him in the night. The Kel'thoids were there, as well, somewhere around him. Everywhere around him. Behind him, to his left, to his right, crawling and skittering over the skin of the Prince of Hate itself.

In the dark, the creature known as the Prince of Hate, this Malfean, this Neverborn, old when the world was young, this metaphysical embodiment of pure, raw, abject negative emotion quivered. It roared, and Corlagon grasped his ears and howled in pain renewed.

Riddled with tentacles and insectoids burrowed into its slimy husk, the Prince of Hate was a being unlike any other. Eyestalks were turned solely upon the death knight, this... creature ...of singular thought, and mind, children of the Grand Maw from which all evil spewed in the first days. It slithered toward the interloper, and.. changed. The front spiraled open, a gaping mouth, lined with circular rows of teeth into the inky black void of its gullet from which more tentacles sprang forth to grab, to manipulate, and to pull asunder; over the grind of rows and rows of vicious incisors.

And that is when Garen Corlagon's true screaming began, as he was made into food for the Malfeans. His body was rended over those circular rows of teeth, catching and biting and tearing and ripping, back and forth, again and again, the tentacles flexing and twisting, thrashing.

At last, little better than an amorphous pile of sentient sludge, he was swallowed and the thousand-year-long digestion process began.

Garen Corlagon... was no more.