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"What are we doing here? This place is dead," Cura asked the cloaked creature that walked in front of them.

"Patience, dear vampire queen! Soon all will become clear I promise," Grimlock said with a laugh. The large group walked through the dark corridors of the old Behaku palace, Grimlock leading the way with a burning torch as his guide. On his shoulder sat his black-feathered companion, its red eyes darting from wall to wall. Teya walked behind the two children, all of them bound and surrounded on all sides by Grimlock's creatures. The children were silent ever since Grimlock had spoken to them about their father...

"Children, where did you say you dwelled?" Grimlock turned around to ask the children, his crow cawing loudly. They said nothing and continued to stare at the ground. One of the creatures nudged them and growled. Kerrigan raised her arm and pointed down a long corridor.

"Much obliged," Grimlock said with a salute and started walking down the corridor; the creatures pushed the children and Teya along after him. They reached the end of the corridor and Grimlock looked at the small dwelling where the children had spent their entire lives. The whole house was quiet, dark, and abandoned. Grimlock smiled.

"Perfect...now your father's throneroom, where is it?" he demanded. Teya scoffed.

"They have no idea, you fool! You already confused them enough, let them be for god's sake," she muttered and looked down. Grimlock cocked his head slightly and looked at his bird, which looked back malevolently. When he looked back he had a look of disbelief at her remark, like he was trying to comprehend what she had just said to him. Nonchalantly he held up his right hand, revealing a small hole in the center of his palm.

Teya's eyes widened immediately, as though she had just been shot, and she doubled over choking and coughing until she finally fell to the ground. She was trying to scream, but the pain was too great for her to even breathe...

She looked up at Grimlock from the cold stone floor, her slitted pupils so tightly clenched that they were barely visible as the other parts of her eyes became bloodshot. Her mouth opened and closed as her nails dug into the scales of her abdomen. The children watched in horror, both of them beginning to tremble at the sight they were witnessing. On top of that, they were both haunted by a bizarre droning buzz that ranged from low-pitched to high-pitched in patterned intervals which started when Grimlock raised his claw to Teya...

"Now then, shall we say we're sorry for that little remark and keep moving?" Grimlock kneeled down to face her, his creatures moving out of his way to grant him passage to his victim. Teya coughed and tried desperately to inhale, to speak, to do anything...

"Y-y...e...," she tried and finally slumped to the ground, eyes still wide and horridly bloodshot with pain. Grimlock smiled and curled his hand into a fist.

"Good girl," he said and rose to his feet once again. The red pockets on his chest armor were glowing brilliantly in the half-lit corridor. He stepped back to the front of the group and turned to the creatures nearest Teya. "She's far too weak to move, bind her tail to her arms and let's continue shall we?"

They grunted and did as they were told, hogtying Teya and hoisting her onto one of their shoulders. The children looked at her, completely terrified when Grimlock turned to them.

"Now then, little ones, where did you say that throneroom was?" he asked politely.

"We...we actually don't know..." Kerrigan whispered, afraid of the consequences. Grimlock took a step towards her. Dexter immediately spoke up.

"Wait! I think I know where it is," he said, trying to dissuade the demon from torturing his sister as well. Grimlock smiled and kneeled down to him.

"Lead the way then, little hero," he said, handing him the torch. Dexter took the torch with a solid hand and began walking in the head of the group, Grimlock being close behind him. Mileena rested herself on Grimlock's shoulders.

"Why didn't you kill her, Lord? It would've been so exhilarating to see her die in so much pain!" she moaned. Grimlock chuckled.

"If I had, then her blood would have spoiled before you could partake of it," the lizard said with a flick of his forked, barbed tongue. Mileena and her sister giggled.

"It's just up there," Dexter looked back and said to the demonic reptile. They reached a large room, one with long pillars that reached the ceiling and shredded drapes hanging from loose stonework walls. And in the center, yes indeed there was a tall ornate throne, decorated in imposing spikes and other carvings of equal morbidity. Grimlock smiled.

"Yes, this is it!" he said with a laugh. As he walked past Dexter, he gave him an appreciative pat on the head. The crow cawed at him, sounding like as much of a dick as it usually was...

Grimlock stood in the center, twirling around as though he were a prince at a royal ball. His smile was miles long, revealing his cruelly pointed teeth.

"So now what, master?" Cura asked, interrupting him from his demented dance. He looked over at her, annoyed.

"I said patience!" he growled angrily. He looked at his crow. "You have the knowledge, my friend. Not I..."

The crow screeched loudly and flapped its wings, zipping off of his shoulder to land on a nearby torch-holder mounted to the wall. From its perch it looked around for a moment, its bright red eyes darting all over the room furiously until its gaze fixed onto one corridor. It cawed again and flew like a black jet down the hallway.

"After it!" Grimlock called and started racing after his bird. The bird cawed and zipped down an adjacent hallway, with Grimlock and his group only a few feet behind. Finally the bird turned one last corner and reached a dead end, closely followed by Grimlock and his panting group mates. Grimlock himself was unfazed.

"This is it?" he asked the bird, which hopped along on the ground. It cawed and chirped a few times. Grimlock nodded.

He bent down and the crow hopped onto his arm, flapping up to his shoulder once again.

"Well done," he said happily. Then he began feeling the wall, running his fingers over every inch of the cold stones. The crow chipped and chirped, with Grimlock's hands moving every time it did. It was guiding him...

Finally, he felt it and his eyes shot open! He grabbed the stone his hand was resting on and pressed. The stone glowed for a moment, and then vanished as the wall was cut into hundreds of pieces by white lines. The wall became still, slashed along with the dividing white lines. Grimlock reached out to touch it, but found that his hand moved straight through it! He smiled and stepped through, completely unharmed. The others soon followed suite and stepped through the intangible wall. Once they were through they found themselves in a long hallway with unlit torches lining the walls. As they walked down the hall, the torches lit up one by one until the hallway was completely lit. Finally they reached a door at the end of the hall, a single wooden door. Grimlock approached it and reached out to the handle, gripping it tightly with shaking fingers.

As though opening the door to the greatest treasure in the universe, Grimlock turned the handle, his whole body shaking in anticipation and excitement.

The door sprung open and the room beyond was extremely dark, like it had not been even looked upon in years. But yet Grimlock took one of the torches from the wall and continued on through the darkness. He walked out into the middle of the room, looking around the black walls to try and make out the general layout. He could see nothing...

Then there was a grinding noise, a deep mechanical whirring, and then a screech as machinery sprung to life after many long years of dormancy.

The room was suddenly illuminated in white light which shone from floodlights mounted in the upper layers of the area. The room was no longer a room...it was a warehouse-sized laboratory.

"This...this is it," Grimlock said with a smile. His eyes looked glassy with the bright white lights dancing off of them. He took a look around, suddenly broken from his trance. "Where is it?"

"Where's what?" Cura asked.

"Where's the reason we came here? Where's the centerpiece? You can't have Christmas dinner without the centerpiece!" Grimlock shouted, now becoming angry. The others were seriously concerned for his sanity as his rambling clearly made no sense. He spun around wildly. "Could he have moved it? Could it be hidden? Where is it?!"

With that he stamped his foot against the stone floor, unleashing a sparking shockwave of red light from the impact! The group was shaken to the core. Then, from under the ground, there was a low rumbling sound. There were quiet clangs and sounds that were reminiscent of locks opening and tumblers slamming against eachother. Grimlock smiled a wide, evil smile and started walking quickly towards the group.

"Might want to take a step back everybody, I'm sure these things aren't at the top of their maintenance," he said with a grin. He turned around once he was with them and looked at the center of the laboratory. There was a circular section of stones that was outlined in white, like a bright light underneath the floor. Then the stones fell away and the bright light poured from the large hole in the ground. The light gave way to shadows, shadows which signaled the arrival of a much more material thing rising from the floor...

First there came three large pillars, each of them with a small box at its base. Then there came a set of two rings, intertwined with eachother around a man-sized table with manacles hanging from the sides. Then finally the stones that had fallen now rose to form a staircase. Then the room became silent once again.

Grimlock smiled wickedly...

Eveser awoke from his sleep again, this time unbothered by strange dreams but still hounded by that one word...that name...Bahamut...

He walked into the room where the rest of the group was chatting amongst themselves. He walked up to Dameon and sat next to him.

"Dameon?" he asked. Dameon turned to him, his eyes for once looking actually unclouded by rage and anger.

"Yes?" he asked.

"I want to know about the Carnians," the dragon said, his eyes set in seriousness. The room grew quiet immediately. Dameon looked stunned for a moment, then blinked a few times and looked around before responding.

"What would you like to know?" he asked. Eve smiled.

"Everything," he responded. Dameon looked unsure where to begin.

"I told you the history," Dameon reminded him.

"Tell it again. With more detail!" Eve prodded. Dameon sighed.

"Very well...how about we start at the beginning?" he said, straightening himself...

"As I said before, the Carnians weren't on either side before the war. They were their own race, their own faction. They had their own homeland, Carnivex, and a monarch, Morbossus Gride. When the war began, the Behaku came to Carnivex and asked for the support of the Carnians against the Omaki. The Carnians, looking for any reason to destroy something without consequences, quickly accepted...and like I said, they were nightmares on the battlefield. Eventually the Behaku Lord of that time period, Lord Dexxus, realized the error in allying with a race of creatures that burned children alive for nothing more than the sake of doing so. He called together his generals and ordered that every Carnian Legion was to be immediately destroyed with extreme prejudice. The Carnian race had to be vanquished. But Dexxus didn't expect the Carnians to go quietly, nor did they. Even with huge amounts of deception and trickery the Carnians still managed to fight their way half through the traps set for them before overwhelming manpower and cunning finally brought them down. Then there's my sob story, then there was the instance in which I killed Dexxus in a duel and took the crown for myself, fashioning my new name and my new title," Dameon finished finally. "But I told you all of that before..."

"Is that all of the history? What about the monarch?" Cyllea asked, suddenly interested.

"Morbossus is a long story..." Dameon warned. Holi poked him playfully.

"We have time," she said with a smile.

"Alright," Dameon said with a stretch of his back. "Morbossus wasn't really born so to speak, formed is a better word. He is the embodiment of a god known to the Egyptians as Apep, to the Greeks as Tartarus, and to the Christians as Lucifer..."

"So you were led by the devil?" Cyllea asked with one eyebrow raised. Dameon growled.

"I'm not a Carnian anymore," he said through gritted teeth. Cyllea held up her hands in surrender.

"My fault, sorry," she said with a slight smile. "Please continue."

"Yes he is technically the devil," Dameon went on. "But he's the devil of every religious system since they were invented. He isn't any of those beings...he's the idea that inspires them. That idea managed to find a way into our world by bringing together a hundred different bodies and making them one. He was a Frankenstein's monster of corpses brought to him by his original faithful. Then he began to grow. He expanded his infection to the surrounding colonies of creatures and they became monsters, he touched flowers and they became hungry for flesh, he literally exhaled viruses...or so they say. But Morbossus was his adopted name when he became Emperor of Carnivex, or Serga Carnivex. He was nigh unstoppable. It was him that the Behaku Lord feared most, and for good reason, but in the end he was defeated when they managed to remove his soul from the body he inhabited and contain him within some artifact."

"So they couldn't kill him?" Cyllea asked.

"Kill him?! Please, they could barely capture him. The Behaku couldn't even do it by themselves! They summoned a higher power to provide backup before Gride annihilated them all," Dameon said with a chuckle.

"Who was it?" Kane asked. "Some other evil god?"

"Quite the opposite actually," Dameon said, straightening up again. "They requested help from the dragon-god Bahamut."

Eveser's eyes snapped open.

"Say that name again!" he said excitedly. Dameon looked worried.

"Bahamut?" he said hesitantly.

"Tell me about him!" Eve practically yelled at the skeleton.

"I don't know anything about him!" Dameon shook himself free of Eve's stare. "I'm ex-evil, not ex-historian. I only know he was a draconic god of justice and other good stuff. That's all, he helped to seal Morbossus and that's all that I know."

"Ok, sorry, please continue," Eve said, relaxing a bit but still more excited than ever before.

"Well, that's it..." Dameon said with a shrug. "What else do ya wanna know?"

"Their magic," Darrow said from the corner. "I wanna know why I got hit with a windstorm three feet away from that lizard-guy."

"Oh Carnian magic is a blast! Ok, so Carnians have a weird anatomy. In their palms they have a small hole which ends a large, pipe-like structure from an organ much like a very complex lung," Dameon said and held up his own hand to demonstrate, pointing to his palm and then tracing his finger down his arm to his ribcage. "Actually they have two of the glands, one for each palm. The glands are smack-dab in the middle of the body, nestled right inside the intestinal coils. So these organs suck in air and spit it out again, like a lung, but with one major difference. When they expel air from the holes in the palms it makes a sound, a frequency. This frequency is picked up by the brain as a signal that it made; it thinks the signal is its own. Whatever the signal tells your brain to do, it does."

"So wait, then how did that make us-" Darrow began but was silenced by a metal claw.

"I'm getting to it," Dameon continued. "The frequencies are like a language, the Carnians can hear them and so can anyone else who has the higher auditory function. The end result is a command. A command to the brain. For example, if I still could, I could tell your brain to force all the necessary muscles to seize up completely, making it feel like..."

He waited for a response. Kane sat up like a rocket!

"Like we were walking into a hurricane!" his eyes were wide with revelations. Dameon nodded.

"The magic doesn't exist," he said. "Carnians aren't magical beings; Morbossus made them from the surrounding colonies in Carnivex. They don't have any inherent magic."

"So if we don't hear the frequency, we won't be affected?" Darrow asked hopefully.

"Precisely, gunslinger," Dameon laughed. "But the downside is its almost impossible not to. A Carnian warrior could transmit a signal long before you defend yourself from the attack. The signals can be activated at the Carnian's discretion; they just have to implant a key with the signal, like a certain movement to activate the command. For example, if I wanted to kill you Eve...and I don't...but if I did then I would make a frequency commanding your brain to shutdown the Vagus nerve, which would stop your heart, lungs, and a bunch of other systems. The command has to be extremely specific and for that the Carnians needed and still have a hugely extensive knowledge of anatomy and physiology. So anyway, the signal has been sent and I implanted a command to activate as soon as I raise my right hand. Then I toy with you for a few minutes, let you knock me about and get proud, and then when I get tired I raise my right hand and BAM! You're dead..."

"So how do we stop it?" Kane asked. "Didn't the Carnians have a way to stop other Carnians attacking them?"

"Well yea...but the downside is it was for Carnian use only..." Dameon said cryptically. "The frequencies are like a language to the Carnians, but not like a language that you can use to communicate. The frequencies are words almost; the command given is like a sentence. So the only way to stop it would be to erase the sentence. The organs that emit the signals also make a frequency when they "exhale" normally. It's like a null frequency; any other Carnian frequency that meets it is rendered flat and cancelled. So unless you guys have said organs there's not too much chance for avoiding a Carnian spell."

Bezimen sat up.

"Perhaps Bezimen could be of some assistance?" he asked.

"You're a man of many talents my insectoid companion," Eve said and nodded to him. "What did you have in mind?"

"Perhaps a machine that would create the null frequency? That shouldn't be too difficult if metal-man can remember the decibel coordinates?" Bezimen suggested helpfully.

"I remember the noises but I don't have any way to produce them for reference. But the decibel coordinates? No not at all...we never learned what they actually translated into scientifically but I can remember the sentence. The word, actually. The whole frequency was just one word: stop," Dameon explained. Bezimen thought for a moment, and then clicked his mandibles in excitement.

"Yes if you can discover what the sound is then I can make a device that could produce it!" he exclaimed.

"But how are we going to recreate the words if none of us can say them? We can't even hear them!" Kane said.

"But Grimlock can," Eve said, reasoning. "Hear me out! Grimlock can hear them and say them...what if we could just record him when he's making the null frequency? Dameon said it's made constantly, right?"

Dameon nodded.

"So then we wouldn't even have to fight him! As a matter of fact it would be counterproductive if we fought him because he would make other frequencies...we just need to get him when he's calm. How do we do it?"

There was absolute silence.

No one had any idea if Eve was serious but, given the situation and Eve's maturity level, the opposite was unlikely. Kane finally spoke up, looking around.

"He talked to me and Teya before I went to get you guys," he said. "He had the opportunity to kill us both when we were *ahem* distracted, but he didn't take it...maybe he doesn't like taking someone out when their back is turned?"

"The Carnians did have an honor code," Dameon said. "But it wasn't nearly so noble, if he's true Carnian then it wouldn't have made a difference whether your back was turned."

"And he talked to all of us before he attacked earlier! Mainly to you Dameon," Holi said, joining the conversation.

"True," Dameon acknowledged. "He was taunting us, he might just get his rocks off by doing that?"

"So then let's play on his ego," Darrow suggested. "This sucker's got a fuckload of pride, let's take advantage of it."

"I like this so far," Eveser nodded. "Now here's the difficult part...how do we get to him? How do contact someone like him?"

"I think I know a few old tricks to get in touch," Dameon said with a crack of his metallic knuckles.