As the enforcers trooped off towards the Ascendo, the Inquisitor's attention turned fully to the crew. Slowly, he raised his hand to his face, and grasped the mask around its temples, squeezing gently, and pulling it away from his face to reveal deathly pale, ashen smooth skin, with his mouth and jaw still covered by a thin veil of dark, opaque silk, and eyes that were so black that to look into them would be to visit an abyss.

He dropped the mask to the side with a tiny gasp of what would have sounded like pain, if it were audible. The world around him grew brighter in a way that only his changed eyes could perceive, and the crew's heartbeats became visible, tiny pulses of light varying only slightly in colour against a background that was coming into focus only slowly.

"You cannot hide from me." His voice came louder than before, reaching into your core and shaking it. "The Eyes can already see all that you are, children, and all that you could ever be."

He took a step forward, clutching the artefact more tightly in his fist, and tearing it from the thin cord that kept it around his neck.

"I can taste the guilt of your pilot, who abandoned his family to the treachery of the Iron Dominion, where gold and blood rule; I can hear the whispers of your scholar's fears of his own loneliness, sharp and biting; I can feel the pinpricks of your Dragonkin's weakness, like a sapling in the wind, or a greyhound on the run, only useful until it can move no longer; and most of all, I can smell the [i]revulsion[/i] that your Dryad cannot ignore when she sees my face, my eyes, and knows that I am not a person as she knows it. I know all that you are, and you cannot hope to prevail in your pathetic mission."

"Just... give up." He half growled, half purred, in between a sharp inward breath, taken as if existence itself was just another pain to ignore.