By right and ritual, and by all laws. That tired old despairing thought, oh gods show mercy for what I've done, was too well-rehearsed to shake him as it should have. He curled gauntleted fingers in towards his armoured palm. Wide awake to the terror, but unafraid.

He had done his petitioning; this was the mercy he had been shown. He was coldly grateful for it.

A shade-thing, momentarily beetle-bodied before it diffused and stretched into something greater and stranger, scuttled past and over him, and with a sudden, armour-silenced hiss of defiance he opened his palm, reached into the darkness and pulled, and all the shadows—the real true shadows, cast by the weird, blood-thick light from above—opened their mouths. And sought (with great, rolling black tongues, the darkness suddenly the consistency of sucking tar) to swallow down the shades which crowded nearest them, opening a path for the Brucolac.