The thick oppressive air mingled with the darkness of what seemed like a crystal prison. Muffled screams echoed in demonic voices, silenced by runes imprinted on what was their flesh, imprisoned in mere crystals that none of them could comprehend.
The followers of the cult of pleasure thought it was a foolish irony how they ended up in this prison made by the hands of a mortal, how it so closely resembled what they had once been forced to offer to the Thirsty One. But irony gave way to boredom, boredom to the desire to escape, and escape to pain a pain from which no pleasure could be drawn, for the very concept of pleasure was contained within their glassy prison.
Those followers of the Lord of Magic could not even touch the runes by which they were imprisoned. The mere thought of it left them in such an utterly confined state where everything stopped, every change was undone, everything remained the same, making them ever more unstable. With each reprisal they felt themselves dissolve, while their form remained unchanged, contradicting their very purpose a torture without end.
The berserkers of the Master of Eternal War screamed without understanding anything, their claws trying to dig in from within the crystal, an infinite rage as red as the blood contained inside the artifact made by a mortal or a god? Yet those furious warriors never knew that their attacks would never touch anything, unable to fight because you cannot fight something forever out of reach. Until rage gave way to thought, and thought gave way to madness. The thirst for blood was still there, but without that infinite rage nothing remained, for fury was all they were.
The masses of pus belonging to the Regent of Plagues twisted into something they did not know pain. The plagues that had once been the blessings of their lord were now nothing more than torment twisting in their entrails. Worms swarmed, but the satisfaction they once felt was replaced by the burning of medicines, by the way their very existence fought against order. For they are or were entropy, the end of all life, but no longer. Their prisons made them ever more aware that here their gods had no power.
…
Adrian the true one looked with his own eyes at the demons writhing in the crystal prisons that had taken him so long to design and create. The chamber was a dark place where the only light came from the runes on the four great black crystals, suspended by golden chains and floating. The only sound was the distorted voices of the demons as their concepts were dissolved by the magic to which he subjected them.
When he was close enough to the crystals, whispers of power and magic tried to penetrate his mind, but they were repelled by how alien his thought process had become, being able to divide his mind into 16,384 versions of himself. The whispers ceased when they found themselves oppressed by the gaze of more than ten thousand minds.
"I hope you understand why you are in such a state," they said as they observed the commanders of this small Chaos incursion or at least part of them. He knew well that a demon could be in multiple places at once, so he had no illusions about truly "killing" these cockroaches that fed on souls to sustain their existence.
The whispers answered with curses beyond language, yet somehow he understood them clearly, returning their curses. To the demons' surprise, he even used the names of their gods as a way to mock their current condition.
"I'd love to say I have no curiosity about how you got to this dimension far from the Warp, but in the end, lying would be foolish, so enlighten me with the lies I know you'll tell," I said as I brought my hand close to the crystal containing the fragment of the great demon of war. My actions were answered with a blow to the crystal that never touched it, denying the pure violence that was the demon. All that remained for it was to scream, but its voice was also silenced as the runes on the crystal moved, generating the "opposite" of its existence, colliding until everything was nullified, leaving a sepulchral silence. After all, for the rest of the followers of the Chaos gods, he had just delivered a true death to one of their demons.
A smile formed on his face as he turned back to the three great demons remaining.
"You know, I've never liked war. It's just a waste of time that could be spent on something more interesting. But denying reality is an even greater foolishness, you know? Do you have any idea how much time I've lost because I had to play your masters' damned game? No, you don't. And if you don't want to end up like that demon who only knew how to scream, you'd better tell me everything I want to know," I said as the whispers answered with visible disgust in their voices, worn down by the magic they could not comprehend.
The tone of reprisal was answered by my gaze, and the sack of pus that was the greater plague demon burned before the eyes of its brothers.
But what truly terrified them was not the fact that the demon's existence was extinguished, but that before it ended they watched, in living flesh, as its concepts were reversed and separated like a puzzle, as its form was twisted into its opposite… a demon that denied its own concept. More than a death, it was a suicide.
I sighed as my eyes fixed on the two crystals that remained. Killing the demons of the Lord of War and the Master of Plagues was not merely an act of intimidation on my part I knew I would get little or no information from them anyway. Better they serve as a deterrent than as yet another nuisance I'd have to deal with.