Piamuen snarled, disliking but seeing the necessity of her next task. Her hair began to catch aflame, and turn to black ash. The shadowy flame crawled up her mane and lit her scalp, charring her flesh into the same ebony flakes. It licked across her skin and burned her away, piece by piece until it consumed her flesh down to the muscle, at which point she let out a guttural scream. The sheer noise in itself didn't sound human, but then, she wasn't. It was then that the remains of her burning corpse exploded into a flurry of black flakes, and ash, like a morbid confetti canon.
The fires winked out, and no more in Limadan's hand was the lithe woman. She seemed gone, burnt away. The ash in the air blew without wind however, and reformed in many different shapes, none of them her own. They were tall and small, fat and thin, all manner of differences were between them, but none of them beautiful. All of them monstrous. They seemed a mismatched mangle of limbs and orifices, most of them, but some were blobbish and obese, others no more than skeletal, skintight wraiths clad in shadow. Together they walked toward Limadan, but did not charge him. Slither, yes, grovel, yes, even crawl before him, yes, but eventually they met at his feet, a tangle of limbs and thick black oil secreting from among their throng. There had to be at least twenty of them, if not more, the smallest only a foot high and the tallest peaking at fifteen feet. So the little ones wrapped his legs, and the big ones draped themselves over him, the fat ones lay around him, breaking the little ones' bones and eliciting screams and cries, all the while bending the legs of the tall ones. The last to join the heap was a behemoth, flabby and towering, and he leapt upon Limadan, but as soon as he struck, the black oil that was leaking from the group exploded from his swollen gut, and he, along with all the rest began to melt. The oil coalesced around Limadan's feet, just in front of him, somehow shrinking into a very small, feminine form.
She blinked, scowling, and tilted her head up to Limadan. Her eyes were bored and insolent, and in a tone ripe with resentment, she murmured, "I am kin, and yet I serve. Is that so hard to grasp, Marionette? The souls I collect all travel down the same path as those thou... liberates." At this she stood, and chin held high, said, "Speak to the Lady all ye'd wish. But know that thee, Limadan, were once a man. Thine power, however great, is tainted thus. Thine prison lies in thine flesh," She poked his armour around where his chest would be, "and until ye hast removed it, I will be more kin than thee shall ever hope to be."
