Excerpts 7: More from Series 2

More quotes from my stories. This time, the focus is on series 2.

“You are a monster Usor’an, a monster!” Magakanajaij spat as the flames around her body were sucked into her mouth, nose, and eyes. She began to convulse.
“Say what you want woman,” Usor’an cackled. “But I’m the one roasting your soul.”

“I’m making a pelt out of you,” Jacob told the hellhound as he fired his pistol at it. As soon as he pulled the trigger, the hellhound’s body turned into a goat-shaped cloud of brown fog. A small distortion of mist near the hellhound’s throat was all that happened as a result of the shot. The mist coalesced back into the hellhound. “That’s not fair!” Jacob shouted. The beast leapt forward.

“Usor’an has a new lieutenant, one who leads the angels against the Erayics in a mad genocide. His crimes are piled high”. Each word he said sounded forced, as if he had to squeeze the words up his throat and out of his mouth. "Some call him the Magistrate,” Anar choked out then went quiet and his eyes fluttered across Fenera’s face. “He’s also my son.”

The closest person in the slave pit lay four meters away from her. Fenera’s nose burned with the smell of the waste that lay down there. Her ears bled with the sounds of screams and hundreds of begging voices that reached them. Her eyes took in nothing but the collected misery of thousands of people, who had nothing to look forward to except enslavement, or more mercifully, extermination.

The machine people, the angels, swarmed over to them. A storm of snow was thrown up around them as the angels took their places in a circle around them. Fenera cringed but Mhaldin was calm. As they came to a stop, the snow settled and she could see each individual angelic face. The torchlight glinted off their eyes and illuminated their black carapace, which was like the chitin of an insect. Fenera looked back to Mhaldin. He stood with a straight back, totally calculated. Five angels surrounded him, one rearing over his head, three on his flanks, and two crouching like cats by his feet. She couldn’t even see Mhaldin’s legs through the angel’s bodies. She noticed he had stripped off his left gauntlet and his bare hand was delicately stroking the head of an angel to his left. His caress seemed almost loving.
“See? There Fenera is,” Mhaldin said reassuringly, talking to the angels. He sounded like he had been talking to a scared girl whose closet he had just opened to disprove her imagined monster. “She is my genuine sister. Look at her and memorize her. If you see her, no matter what, you are not to attack her or let her be threatened. Alright?” Fenera shuddered as the angels all squeezed in towards her. They all pushed their soulless faces up around her until she was completely enveloped by a cocoon of metal. Wherever she looked she only saw faces. She felt an angel brush against her shoulder. She flinched and pulled away from it, only to bump into a wall of faces. Fenera huddled to the snow.

Fenera was so detached from reality that she almost fell over a water-filled basin that sat in the middle of the floor. She didn’t take a second look at Lynx, who was naked and washing his clothes in the basin. She heard him say something like “I thought you’d be gone longer.”