Son of Sek (Gaunt’s Ghosts) by John French

Author:John French [French, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2018-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

V

There is a majesty in desecration, a truth in horror. As I kneel here, I am clad in the stuff of nightmares. My head is bare, the skin the gloss pink of scar tissue. My mouth is masked, and the hand that covers it came from an unwilling sacrifice. The skin of the hand has withered, but the nails still grow; their hooked tips claw at the skin of my cheeks. I cut my own ears from my head. They hang around my neck, knocking softly on my breastplate. My armour is plasteel, bronzed, and the dried crust of blood blessings cling to its carving. Ink, scars and brands mark my arms, and tell the gods that I am theirs, and that my master raised me to them. Bones gather at my waist. Fingers, fragments of skull, and teeth, looped on wire or held on chains beside the knives of sacrifice, flaying and mortification. I know each bone, and made the sharpness of each blade edge. They are bound to me, though I do not own them. They have their own souls, their own silence.

I can see the terror in the eyes of those who look on me. That is as it should be. They are weak, and lost in the din of their delusion. They look on the marks of the Dark Beyond, hear the clatter of bones on sharp iron, and they think these devotions are for them. They think that their fear is why I took the finger bones of the priest who ended in a pyre on Noor, why I burnt the eightfold star on my hands, and why the first blood of battle wets my eyelids. I do not do these things to be feared, and the unshriven do not fear me because of them.

They fear me because I am everything that they fail to be.

I wear the truth of the universe as my skin.

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