He barely had his pants pulled back up when he heard the noise of a trumpet and the sound of a thousand cavalrymen charging across an open plain.
He knew no fear as this was the bargain he had made. The lives of his friends and brothers for the chance at glory eternal. Given willingly to his God, his only true future. As the horsemen thundered across the plain, to call them "men" was to use the loosest of language, for these apparitions merely bore the likeness of men. The frame was bone and sinew, the shape generally that of a man, but the fire behind the eyes was pure anathema to that what called itself MAN. The power that drove those frame of meat knew nothing of the limits placed upon mortal men.
Each bore the blessings of his god upon his bulk. With pride even! Waxen flesh, filmy eyes, guts and skin flapping like banners behind each rider. With cruel blades of bone formed to or fashioned from the living hand, never to be released and filmed with uncounted poisons.
As these horsemen closed upon the camp, He knew fear. As he had known to be in this place at this exact time. To do what he had not know but he knew now what must be done.
Edward threw open the lid to the chute, and giggled.
He launched himself into the depths of that hold of foulness, with each moment of his flight down the hole he whispered things unheard in this world for centuries.
Edward landed with a slosh and a tittering of a school child, and begun his transformation.
He flailed about in that unspeakable horror of the camp's latrines, and drank deep its contents. With each act the man that was Edward quailed and shrieked, and the creature he was to become grew more powerful.
His last acts as a man , a human man. Were to grasp his dirk with maddened fingers, to draw it high to end the horror. Alas! But he watched as his sickness swollen fingers engulfed the blade of his salvation. As he gazed in rapt wonder he became aware of a new sound beyond his ripping skin and shifting skelton.
"Help me oh God! Save me from this madness!"
Edward the creature salivated into his pool of foulness as he recognized the sound, the learned one from the capital. The one who scoffed at his warning of the power of the "Old gods".
Well he screamed and babbled and begged his Creator for deliverance but only the thing that was Edward heard, and he was moved by something to comfort the man.
"You are not alone here." Edward rasped.
"Who is there! You must protect me for I am your master!"
"I shall save you from your terror. Is this your wish?"
"My wish? It is God's command! Now be quick about it, you know some way from this abyss?"
Edward the man babbled and shrieked a warning to the man, but from the darkest corner of what has been his mind.
The creature reached to the man and mouthed a warning to be silent. Then grasped the man with His over long, over strong limbs and thrust him under the filth.
"GOD HAS GRANTED YOU HIS BLESSING IF YOU HAVE THE WILL TO TAKE IT INTO YOU!" Grated the thing wearing Edwards skin.
"Breath deep his blessing!"
The learned man struggled feebly against the insane power of his diseased limbs as they pressing him further into the muck. He struggled to keep his mouth shut, to close out the waste. But everyman that was born of woman needs breath and all too soon he too took a great lung full of the liquid filth, shuddering into death. At that exact moment Edward the man stopped, and from the hole heaved the
