Tag: matryoshka

“We can taste your loathing and lust mixing together, Matryoshka… The flavor pleases us…”

A hybrid of three entities, Matryoshka’s layers each have a separate consciousness, but share sensations and a pool of memories. The outermost layer, the demon skin, is loud and boisterous: a talkative and tactless suit of living armor. It can speak through any of its orifices, and it takes great joy in sharing her innermost thoughts with those she least wants to hear them. Its flesh is rubbery, flexible, and completely impenetrable to conventional weaponry. Its mouths can devour almost anything, but it remains a mystery where those things go once they’ve been eaten.

The middle layer, what remains of her mortal body, still has limited autonomy. Stoic by nature, Matryoshka is a woman of few words, though her skin frequently betrays her thoughts. A massive warrior in life, her strength has increased a hundredfold in undeath, making her Grizelda’s primary choice in personal defense. Her grip can crush a helmet-clad skull like an overripe fruit, and a wound from her wicked blade, Everthirst, inflicts a bleeding curse that can only be staunched with the aid of healing magic. Though she occasionally still yearns for freedom, she has resigned herself to her fate as Grizelda’s plaything.

Her innermost layer, her heart, is no longer completely within our plane of existence. Transmuted into a cancerous bridge between worlds, it has access to knowledge and power outside of the realm of mortal understanding. It also prefers to be left alone, refusing to participate in the petty affairs of the tangible unless they happen to affect it directly.

“So, you’ve come to destroy us… We can already tell you won’t be the one. You’ll be punished for rousing us.”

Her creation began as her torture. A former witch hunter turned undead bodyguard, Matryoshka tried and failed to slay Grizelda in the days when such a thing was still conceivable. After her capture, Grizelda decided her body would be of greater use in her laboratory, rather than mounted outside on a pike as a warning.

A second-generation experiment, Matryoshka is a fusion of Necrow’s poisoned flesh and Grizelda’s eldritch summoning. Demonic flesh usually requires regular blood sacrifice to survive, but when summoned into a regenerating host, the flesh can become self-sufficient. Locking her in a cell with the growing abomination, Grizelda planned to document the slow, painful consumption of her prisoner; instead, the flesh bound itself to her, integrating its foul organs with her own. Without the need for blood, demon flesh eventually solidifies into a static shape. In Matryoshka’s case, the visible part of it became her skin, while the rest made her innards host to the unspeakable horrors of the demon world.

Although she hates Grizelda from the deepest reaches of her being, Matryoshka is magic-bound to eternally serve and satisfy her mistress in whatever ways she demands. Each time a new trespasser enters the halls of Mundus Mortis, Matryoshka prays they’ll finally be the one to release her. So far, they’ve only been grist for Grizelda’s grim mill.