The Fiend's body was plated in dense dark-red armor that looked half-forged metal and half living gore, every overlapping plate giving a faint obscene throb as though something enormous had been skinned alive and taught to wear itself as armor. Thin seams between the plates opened and closed with each pulse, leaking black fluid that refused to fall normally:
It crawled upward, drifted sideways and stretched through the air in long corrosive filaments, smoking wherever it brushed the frozen ground.
The helm buried Phei completely beneath a faceless visage, its eye-slits burning with a dim blood-red glow while horned ridges swept backward like a crown grown from the skull of some abyssal war-fiend.
Beneath them, the chest rose broad and grotesquely powerful, carrying the dreadful majesty of something that had crawled out of an old slaughter and never learned how to stop killing.
