Work Text:
The figure arches backwards, swinging his oil-slick ropes of hair like a momentary crest, and the familiarity in the face revealed beneath is almost more unnerving than what is missing. Most of Balor’s features are gone, ripped apart by the huge chasm that opens now where a nose might once have started; skin, muscle and bone vanished entirely, replaced by a blackened maw that has taken his face, his jaw, extending the split throat down to well below his sternum. Yet there is none of the visceral mess that you might expect to be revealed, as if he has torn open into somewhere else entirely. Exchanged; not eliminated.
Bone-white fangs, each as long as fingers, strike out viciously from the tar-sheen flesh which lines the pit of him now; regular as railings and flexing slightly, although if keeping time to breath or pulse is impossible to tell. The surrounding skin is black-bloody, stained midnight and struck through with straining veins that shine like trails of liquid ruby, glowing against the tangled shadows that bleed through the surface of him. Still twisting, even as you watch, the seething scarlet pours down his outstretched arms, down to his splayed hands, where claws like hooked obsidian rise seamlessly from his fingertips, flexing in the same deep rhythm as the teeth above.
Nothing about him is still, from the bent-back angles of his legs, folded and moving strangely beneath the shredded fabric of his training pants; to the thick coil of arterial crimson that writhes within the too-deep cavern of his erupted chest; an elongate tongue that worms obscenely between the pulsing fangs, moving to the beat of a heart he cannot still hold. Yet, even with all that, it is the eyes that draw down so hard against your own attention – twin points of pale blue, set alien and icy into the darkened strip of his remaining face, worn like a mask above the distended maw that has split him into something very far from human.
But the eyes are bright, and sharp, and a little crinkled at the edges.
And you realise that, somehow – he is smiling.
‘I’m bringin’ something that you’ve never seen before.’