Lazaren bit his lower lip as he inserted the needle into his arm and injected the stinging medication, but didn't wince. He was used to this by now, and the pain was insignificant compared to the alternative.

The gremlin mender withdrew the needle and removed the tourniquet from his upper arm, stretching to ease the tingling sensation more quickly. He was gaunt from long illness, his eyes dull and sunken, his fur brittle. Everything about him suggested frailty.

"You! Hurry up!" Gristorio barked from outside the small tent. He was the leader of the current tiny band of misfits and broken souls, and was unsympathetic to anything which did not directly benefit his plans.

"You can wait," Lazaren growled at the other gremlin with what had become his usual bad temper of late. Truth be told, he often regretted the decision to have his mate and daughter told he had perished out in the Clockworks. He had sought to save them the suffering of watching him wither and slowly die of the thing that was consuming him, but he missed them every day. That particular gnawing pain was often worse than the physical one, and sometimes he wondered why he even bothered with the medication anymore. Other times, he wondered why he didn't just inject a dose of Dark Matter suspension and end it all instead.

Having finished putting away the medicines and instruments that were part of his routine, the mender emerged from the dingy tent and shot Gristorio a baleful look, which was returned in kind. The only other two members of the group, at the moment, were already present.

Abad looked bored. This was his usual affect; the Dark Trojan was terminally uncreative, and only seemed particularly interested in his surroundings when there was something in them he could kill. Miurr, in contrast, was a Devil-IT who never really came down from his frenzied overtimer state. As a result, he was nervous, jumpy, and manic. At the moment, he was pacing in some sort of zigzag pattern around Abad and Gristorio, the latter of whom seemed to be about to lash out at his fiendish underling.

"Nice of you to join us," he said tersely as Lazaren took a seat on a stone block. "Now we can get down to business."

The current business was the usual business: try to destroy the Grand Arsenal and everything associated with it. It was an unrealistic goal, but Lazaren seemed to be the only one who saw it that way; he had lost count of the teammates who had been killed in a variety of gruesome and unlikely ways during previous attempts, many of which Gristorio took credit for having helped develop. The actual purpose of these missions was never mentioned, and the mender assumed that the root of it was tied to whatever the reason that Gristorio was no longer there performing unspeakable horrors on his own kind.

And horrors they had been. Gristorio always became highly animated when he described the medical experiments he had overseen at the behest of the Warmaster, and seemed to relish going over them in lavish detail with the mender. Lazaren always felt sick to his stomach having to listen to him, and tried to tune the ex-researcher out, but was rarely as successful as he would like. Some of the mental images Gristorio's stories imparted would just not leave his head, and gave him nightmares on many of those rare occasions he managed to get more than an few decicycles of consecutive sleep.

* * * * *

The world had been washed in a sea of blood ... or so it seemed to Lazaren.

Hanging back, the mender tried to block out the screaming, at least. With each gurgling cry cut short, he resisted the urge to run into the fray and save what lives he could. By all rights, these were his enemies dying, but friend or foe, all gremlins bled the same.

The worst part was the Knockers.

Most of them seemed to be the same age as Lazaren's own gremlinite, and hearing the death cries that were little more than the wails of frightened children, he couldn't help openly weeping.

None of the others seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn't much care. Abad, his eyes bright and his lip curled in what passed for a perverse grin, hacked through youths and adults alike so that it was impossible to tell who the limbs that littered the floor had belonged to. The stench of offal hung heavy in the air.

Miurr, in his usual frenetic way, flung things indiscriminately. He had long run out of whatever he had brought with him as ammunition, and was throwing the discarded armor, weapons, and even parts of the dead that the Trojan knocked into his path.

It was the shields and thwackhammers that did the physical damage, but the Devil-IT's real weapon was not made of metal; Lazaren could see the looks of horror that broke over the faces of those who had just been hit by the head or some other recognizable part of someone they knew. Many of them froze with the gruesome realization and were immediately cut down by Abad's enormous sword, their twisted faces offering Miurr even more of his gristly ammunition.

Away from the others, Gristorio fought with a sort of grim joy. Lazaren had never seen him use a traditional gremlin weapon; he had adopted one of the shadow blades the Knights tended to favor when venturing into Colony territory, and carried a stolen Sentenza at his belt. It was one more indication of just how much the gremlin hated his fellows.

Lazaren followed the three through passages strewn with fresh corpses, his tongue coated with bile as his gorge rose time and again. Part of him asked why he didn't just turn and run as best as he could ... the same part of him that asked why he bothered to keep himself alive from one day to the next. The rest of him knew exactly what Gristorio would do if he did run.

The opposition thinned and finally came to a stop sometime before they reached the Grand Arsenal, givinng the invaders pause as they crept warily through deserted hallways. It has been but a token guard, it seemed, which was unusual. The place was eerily quiet, and after the din of the fight to reach here, Lazaren's ears were filled with the irregular pounding of his own heart.

There was little left of the Arsenal itself but wreckage, melted and covered in scorch marks from the explosives that must have been its ultimate downfall. Gristorio quickened his pace through the burnt-out storerooms and research labs, where only a few charred remains and the occasional scrap of battle debris told the story of what had happened here. Running now, he led the others down one long hallway and into a richly-decorated chamber, untouched, where a throne-like chair sat empty upon its dais of enormous gears.

Lazaren's blood chilled at the howl of rage that tore from the other gremlin's throat, and he knew that the ruined Arsenal was only the beginning.

* * * * *

For the better part of the cycle, Lazaren had lain nearly motionless on the shabby, comfortless pallet he used as a bed, almost too sick to inject his medication and too tired to care. The rag he had been coughing into was soaked through with blackish blood; the mender was sure that his time was coming soon, but he couldn't even muster the energy to feel relieved.

Gristorio had yelled at him to come out several times already and had been ignored; only when Lazaren's tent had been invaded had he actually reacted by weakly chucking a vial of something foul-smelling at the other gremlin. That had been some time ago, or so it seemed to Lazaren, and Gristorio was starting in with his haranguing again.

"If you don't get your instruments and get out here right now, I will have Abad tear down that tent and drag you," the gremlin snarled after a few millicycles of ineffective barking. Lazaren lifted his head and scowled at the tent flap before painfully dragging himself to his feet and pushing it open, medical bag in hand.

Almost any other gremlin would have quailed and slunk away at the scowl the mender leveled at him, with his face little more than skin and fur stretched over bone, and blood smeared across his mouth. Gristorio just sneered, however, and jabbed his thumb in the direction of a slab of stone where a Knight, little more than a recruit, by the looks of her, lay bound and whimpering.

Lazaren stared at it for a moment. "What's that for?" he asked wearily.

"I want you to find out from her who it was that stole my revenge," Gristorio answered, grabbing the mender's gaunt arm and hauling him over to where the Knight was bound. She quieted as she turned her head to look at the two gremlins, her eyes wide with terror.

Disgusted, Lazaren tried to pull away from the other's grasp, to no avail. "Why didn't you already just ask her? She's scared. She would have told you if she knew."

"Because I want you to do it." Gristorio smiled nastily, his eyes resting meaningfully on the bag of surgical tools the mender held.

His stomach churning as he realized what the other was getting at, Lazaren tried to pull away again. "I'm a doctor; I'm not a torturer."

"But you will be." The young Knight gasped and struggled as Gristorio yanked Lazaren's arm, making him stumble into the slab. He found himself staring straight into the captive's face. "I'll stand right here and direct your every move if I have to," the ex-researcher added, sounding as though he was looking forward to it.

"No," the mender answered as strongly as he could, picking himself up and narrowing his eyes in suspicion at the expression of malicious glee that spread across Gristorio's face.

"I thought you would say that. Abad?"

Lazaren paled at the sound of familiar cries as Abad dragged a cramped and rusty cage from somewhere around a corner, Miurr darting around it to occasionally prod the figures inside. The mender's worst fears were confirmed when he saw his mate and daughter huddled together, trying to avoid the Devil-IT's harassment.

The mender stumbled as he ran to his mate and child, falling to his knees before the cage door. All of this had been put into motion with the best of intentions; he joined Gristorio for an opportunity to strike at the heart of the Colony with what little life remained him. Only later did the other gremlin's true colors show, and by then it was too late. He had already found out about Lazaren's family, and would threaten them on any occasion that Lazaren had said he was leaving the band. This time, he had preemptively made good on his threats.

Kelahrita and Meillinir stared at mate and father for a moment as though they had seen a ghost before Kelahrita leaned forward, clutching the bars. "They told us you were dead!" she whispered at the same time Meillinir cried "Papa!", thrusting her little hand through the bars to gingerly touch her father.

"I know," Lazaren replied hoarsely, clutching each of their hands in one of his and letting his forehead fall forward against the cold metal. "I'm sorry .... so sorry. I only wanted to spare you..."

"Spare us?" Kehlarita asked numbly. "You mean you knew? Do you have any idea what you put us through?!"

"Kehl-" Lazaren tried to answer, but was seized with a fit of coughing that made him double over, his body wracked with spasms as fresh blood stained the ground in front of him. Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he looked up just in time to see the horror on his mate and daughter's faces before he was dragged to his feet by the scruff of his neck.

"Please ... just let them go," he begged Gristorio, hanging limply from the Dark Trojan's hand.

Gristorio smiled nastily again. "If I let them go before you do what I've told you to, it will be so that Abad can chase them down."

Lazaren slowly turned his head to look at the terrified Knight struggling against her bonds on the stone slab, then returned his gaze to the other gremlin. "Fine," he said, defeated. "You win."