The Arpetist-Magnus
(Living shouldn't be a mechanical simplicity of fools)
I speak today as a witness, for I have seen with sharpening clarity and knowledge, what many do not imagine under Morpheus blessing sleep...
I knew the citadel for a million years, standing in true impudence high in a dangling cliff over a red sea of bodies... feeding of them, with raged celerity and defiance... some, still scratching the floor for compassion or mercy...
Through a thousand transformations and morphisms – giving it in peace times a normal look – it became, in the sixteenth-century, the perfect nevralgic center for a secret empire, controlled by decedents of the Sarmatian and Ostrogoth Knights... an obscure order bent on meta-human knowledge control...
For that objective, they created a secret class of hosting organisms that lodged inside the blood of monsters – living within the blood – and commanding them through the terror of losing simplistic territorial battles...
These unconscious beasts, were armed knights for grand irony... but contrary to their masters, they knew not of what passed inside the secret manor from which they received their orders...
It began as a depository for collective memory, and became a manipulative web for constant invasions and conquests through the ages of human existence...
...A permanent coat of arms (displaying a melting crown over a gray world) was shown as warning to any opposing force... but the ultimate objective was not conquest, but capture...
Specific prisoners were taken by force to the palace for interrogation, and torture...
No celerity was used after the gates were closed behind them, only patience and pain...
The screams mirrored a carnage inside the soul of any prisoner, indescribable in physical terms...
A great number of tortures were performed – using spikes, saws, racks, whips, rusty nails... – but none equaled the mastery of the Arpetist...
He developed a complex mechanism to obtain the ultimate torture effect, from which no one resisted beyond insanity...
The victims were restrained in mid-air and pulverized with liquid sulfur to immobilize the bones... then, a moving structure would firmly squeeze the fingernails until they pop, leaving a chump of nerve dangling in the air...
The palpitating nerves were then pulled from the flesh by the hands of the Arpetist, to a point of despair near the elbow and the knee... then they were boiled in a putrefactive mixture of vinegar, orpiment and blood...
The victim was then lowered to a steaming recipient of urine in which he stayed for a period of minutes before unconscious drowning...
...When the victim regained consciousness... the Arpetist would calmly leaned close to his ear, and gently ask: “What do I need to know...?”