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The assault on Morgunov’s workshop had just led into one disaster after another. Looking back on it all now, he still couldn’t believe how bad things had gone. Each time he’d thought that the situation couldn’t get any worse, it somehow did.

Even after weeks of fighting. It still did.

And now, here he was. A barely-held-together pile of flesh.

But at least he wasn’t alone.

His oldest friend was right there behind him, shuffling along at a similarly terrible pace.

Damian Lofar.

Parson couldn’t believe that, either. He was actually alive. After forty years of thinking he and Feromas had died, the wily bastards really had managed to survive.

He’d suspected as much, of course, but he’d never been able to confirm it. And Germal had been no help at all in discerning the truth, of course.

Such a strange mixture of emotions. He was at once elated and mortified. Elated for the man Damian once was. Mortified for the one he’d turned into.

“Stop lookin’ at me like that, already.” Between how much Damian had allowed himself to age and how absolutely thrashed his body currently was, the man was virtually unrecognizable. “It’s pissing me off.”

If not for Feromas’ presence, Parson might not have believed it. “Eh, shut up, you old prick,” said Parson. His half-destroyed throat made his words sound like they’d been put through a grinder. “I’ll look wherever I want.”

“Pah! Finally grow a pair of balls, did ya?” Damian’s voice, by comparison, sounded almost normal. Most of his damaged seemed to be in his crushed leg, missing arm, and disemboweled stomach. “Only took a hundred and fifty years.” He was just as deathly pale, too.

“You seem to be forgetting about all the times I kicked your ass.”

“I’m sure I’d remember them if they’d ever happened.”

Hmph. Well, he was certainly behaving like the hard-edged, grumpy asshole that Parson had grown up with.

But how long was that going to last?

How long before the madness returned?

He dared not hope that his old friend might actually be cured. Down that road lay only heartache.

Parson was plenty old enough now. He’d seen this many times before, not just with Damian.

Good men turning into raving lunatics.

And it never got any easier to witness, either. Parson kept eyeing Feromas, too, wondering what the reaper must have been thinking about all this. Was he still harboring hopes of a recovery? After all this time?