torture, trauma, horror

The psyker is on the floor, twitching. She can tell he’s the psyker they’re looking for, because his skin is still visibly sparking off into the air. “Jan, cover me,” Ariadne instructs grimly, approaching. “Everyone else, forward. Time’s a-wasting.”

This bit is like shoving her hands into a wild animal’s cage, but there’s no time to lose. Pity she doesn’t have 068 and his soul-sight to hand to tell her if the guy’s freaking possessed or not. A more highly strung team might just shoot the psyker and call it better safe than sorry… but Evelyn would have her head for wasting Imperial resources like that. She’s here to either return this guy to his posting or claim him as an Inquisitorial asset. Hopefully he doesn’t need putting down. She nudges the prone man with a boot - just barely at first, then more sharply. The second one gets a bit of a whimper. “Anyone alive in there?”

Keep reading

(Essylt gets stabby beneath the cut, gore warning)

Iesin has been watching, and listening, in between the bouts of agony that Essylt calls experiments and he calls torture, and he has a plan.

He waits for a day when Essylt is attending to the other matters of her estate, and he’s been allowed as much time as he’s likely to get to recover before she returns to extract more knowledge from his flesh. Then, he waits for Talvos to bring the daily bowl of barley-and-meat hash that has comprised his diet since he arrived. It’s the only time he’s not muzzled and off of the tables simultaneously, and Talvos is watchful for that very reason, but Iesin has been careful to be quiet and unassuming during his feedings, both in fear - cowardly, disgusting fear - that even this small mercy of regularly given, never-quite enough portion of food might be taken from him, and in calculated knowledge that this, if any, will be his best opportunity to escape.

Keep reading