26. Melas Oneiros
Chapter 26
Melas Oneiros
Ella
T he moment I saw what the demon above me had done, I cried out as if I felt a thousand losses all at the same time. As for the villainous being still standing above me, he looked to be wearing the carcass of a feathered pelt of a bird, like someone had stripped the skin straight from a giant eagle. The large, shining black beak overhung his demonic skeletal face of what looked like some walking corpse. Hanging flesh and charred skin covered its bones more like clothing than anything that once could have belonged to the body of this demon.
Hallowed sockets on its face held twin burning orange dots for eyes, as well as it having a strange beaked nose that looked to be rotting. Added to this monstrous face was a mouth void of lips, with only pointed teeth left to snap at me.
However, my cry of anguish was enough to alert Lerna as she had crept up behind the bird man and was just about to strike as it threatened,
“Now my master will easily rid you from this world once and for all and I will have finally fulfilled my… EEEEKARKKK!” It screeched when Lerna hit it with a branch, making it suddenly transform into the bird it wore on its back. This before it took off to where we could not follow.
“What the hell was that thing!?” I yelled as she dropped the convenient weapon.
“I don’t know, what happened? What did it do?” she asked, kneeling next to me and placing a comforting hand on my shoulder.
“It made me dream of Jared, made me believe that everything that had happened, this place, my being here, even you… that it had all been nothing but a dream.”
“Was that it?” she asked as if suspecting there was more.
“No, it made me believe…”
“What?” she pressed, after I paused.
“It made me believe that I was eating pomegranates, and I woke up to find that I had actually swallowed them,” I told her, quickly making her gasp.
“Oh no!”
“What does that mean?” I asked, now panicking at the horrified look on her face before she turned away and told me in a hurried tone,
“We have to leave.” Then she rose to standing and started to make back for the path we had been on. I quickly scrambled to my feet before catching up to her. Then when I was within reach, I grabbed her arm to stop her, forcing her to now look at me.
“Lerna, what does it mean?” I asked again, more forcefully this time. Only understanding the depth of the mistake I had made when she told me,
“It means that you are now tied to this realm.”
“What?!” I gasped in utter shock.
“It means you can’t leave,” she said again, repeating my new nightmare.
“No… that can’t be right… there must be a way to reverse it… And what about my powers?” I rambled in panic.
In sight of my building meltdown, she acted, quickly pulling me in for a hug and telling me,
“We will find a way… okay, Ella, we will find a way but right now, we have to go.”
“Why?” I asked, pulling back and looking around as if I half expected us to find ourselves surrounded.
“Because that was Epiales, a master of the Melas Oneiros.”
“A what now?” My face said it all.
“Melas Oneiros means dark dreams. They enter your mind and take pieces of your memories, then they use them to manipulate you, to make you believe through these dreams whatever they want in order to get their way. Epiales knew as soon as you ate that seed that your powers would be bound to the one who rules this realm,” she told me, giving me cause to ask,
“You mean Hades, right…? You mean our father?”
“Yes. And without him, not only are your powers lost but it also means you are bound to this realm.”
I swallowed hard, as if the last five minutes had forced me to choke down led weights.
“So, what you’re saying is…”
“There is no way home,” she finished… even more words to this nightmare ending.
“Fuck!” I swore, making her shoulders slump because any hopes of getting back to the one place I was safe from Garmr ever capturing me had now gone. Evaporated in an instant. But this was when my mind started to kick back into gear.
“But what about Hades? Can’t we just find him and…”
“It is not that simple. We can’t just walk up to the palace and announce who we are,” she said, tossing up her hands as if even thinking this was foolish. Yet despite this, I continued to ask,
“Why not?”
“Because like I told you, there are those in this realm that would kill us, even now it is not safe.”
“Alright, so trying to find our father is off the cards. But what about here? Can Garmr still reach me in this realm? Because the gate was closed and…” Once more she was cutting me off with even more bad news.
“He has found a way in before, so I do not doubt that he will again.”
“So, we really are fucked, aren’t we?” I said, slumping down on a rock, wondering what was next.
“There might still be a way,” she admitted after long minutes of silence. And well, let’s just say that my self-pity was at an all-time high, which was why I didn’t exactly sound hopeful when I asked,
“How?”
“I have a… friend,” she said like she didn’t know what to call them, which I had to say, also didn’t exactly sound reassuring
“If I get word to them, they may be able to help us,” she added, helping me up and making me realize that she was at least putting more weight on her foot now that time had passed. Hurray for silver lining and all that.
“Okay great, and how do we do that?” I asked, praying for a plan.
“The Gate of Hermes,” she told me, ushering me back once again on the path that I hoped led us to somewhere safer than here.
“The gate of who?”
She gave me a sideways glance and complained, “You really need to freshen up on your Greek Mythology.”
“Freshen up, have you not gathered by now that I know nothing? Hell, even your average nine-year-old who likes to read Percy Jackson knows more than me,” I admitted begrudgingly.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Well, I don’t know who this Hermes guy is.”
She released a sigh and told me,
“He is Olympian deity known as the messenger of the Gods. And as he plays an important role of the psychopomp…”
“The what now?” I asked, giggling because well, it was a funny ass word.
“It means soul guide, as he is the conductor of souls, aiding them in getting to the Afterlife and to the place of judgement.”
I couldn’t help my wincing expression.
“Great, so the guy’s a grim reaper then.”
“He is an ambassador for the Gods, the bridge between mortal and the divine,” she argued before releasing a sigh.
“Well for our purpose, he is a messenger, and that is the main thing to focus on.”
“So, this gate of his?” I asked, rolling my hand around, gesturing for her to explain further.
“It is not actually a gate. You cannot travel through it, only he can, but it can be used to get messages to others, as long as you know where to find them or expect them to be.”
“So not exactly like email or telephone,” I pointed out, wishing more than anything that I had my cell phone in hand to call Jared. The cruel dream still lingered and made me miss him even more.
“I don’t know what either of those things are,” she admitted, making me laugh.
“Okay, how about I make you a deal? We manage to pull a miracle and get out of this, you teach me all the mythology you want and in return, I will teach you all about the mortal world.”
“Deal, now let’s try and hurry, for if Epiales knows where we are, it won’t take him long to start alerting others.”
Well, that was certainly enough to get me moving, because the very last thing I wanted was to come into contact with that horrifying thing ever again. Even if it made me dream of the only thing I ever wanted…
My HellBeast.
A little time later, the landscape fully changed as we were forced to go into a forest. In truth, it didn’t look that dissimilar to what you would have found on Earth, the only difference being that most of the trees were a dark grey color. They were also minus their leaves, giving them a sinister appearance of some long-forgotten dead place. But then, I kept having to remind myself that we were in Hell, so really, what else did I expect? I was just glad that I hadn’t come across the stereotypical depiction of Hell that was supposed to be all fire and brimstone.
But as time went on, the questions burning in my mind led me to finally say,
“Lerna, I have to ask…”
“Ask me what?” she said as she ducked under a hanging branch before lifting it up for me.
The ground was at least green, if not a bit of a sickly color, as if it was covered in some kind of squishy moss. A surface I had managed to slip on a few times. As for my appearance, the moment my powers were stolen from me, I returned back to how I had looked before summoning my book.
At the very least, I wasn’t wearing near-white like Lerna was, and that stuff was stained with dirt, dust, and now green spears of moss.
“It’s about Jared,” I said, making her sigh.
“Oh.”
“I need to know why, Lerna,” I told her in my defense.
“I know, it’s just hard to admit what I did.”
“But why did you do it?” I asked, and we both knew what I was referring to.
“Because it was the only way to… wait… Ssshh, did you hear that?” she whispered, making me freeze my steps.
“I don’t hear anything,” I admitted quietly, giving me reason to think that it was just another way for her to get out of talking about it. But then she told me,
“I think we are being followed.”
Naturally, my eyes grew wide as I looked around, trying to spot anything that could be hiding behind the trees.
“Over there! Run!” Lerna shouted the second they spotted us and started running our way.
And why oh why had I had the foolish thought in thinking this place so far hadn’t looked much like the Hell I would have expected? I had clearly gone and jinxed myself, because Hell’s own soldiers were now chasing us. As in, very demony looking demons, with horns and red cracked skin and everything! Including terrifying gnashing teeth, long black swords that seemed to be dripping with a kind of thick black oil, and demonic spiked armor that looked made for war. These were the ones scouring the woods looking for us, and my response to this threat was to run for my fucking life!
To start running as fast as we could, being careful to step on the rocks whenever we were able so as not to slip on any of the moss. Because when first entering this place, it had taken us all of about ten minutes to catch on pretty quickly for where to step. Lerna’s pale tunic now stained green was testament to that.
It also looked as if the soldiers had caught on to, because they were making good ground by doing the same as we were.
“We won’t out-run them!” Lerna said, making me grab her hand and tell her,
“Yes, we will, we just need to find somewhere to hide… come on, over there by that bank!” I told her, changing direction and taking advantage of the density of the thicker trees. Then once we had made it to the slope, we skidded down it and hid behind an overhanging tree that looked half rotten.
“This won’t hide us forever.”
“Ssshh, here they come,” I told her, ducking down. But then she grabbed my hand and told me,
“Head toward the next mountain pass, the third cave you see will hold the gate… seek out the one they call the Offensive One, tell them you need aid. He will know who to send.”
“The Offensive One… Why are you telling me this? We will go together,” I quickly argued.
“No, they cannot find you! I will lead them away,” she told me, making my heart drop in horror, before hissing,
“No, Lerna, you can’t do that… you can’t leave. You will get caught.”
“I must… but if I can outsmart them, then I will meet you at the gate… I love you, my sister,” she said, kissing my forehead quickly and then before I could stop her, her tunic slipped through my fingers, and she was off. The moment they got closer, she purposely made a noise, to lead them away from me, making them go shouting after her.
“There she is! Come on, she is getting away!”
I winced at this, the tears of frustration rising, and I wanted so badly to run to her, but I knew that if I did, then we would both get caught. Because they were still too close to me, and her sacrifice would have been in vain.
“Damn it!” I hissed, hitting down in my anger and in the process catching my hand on a dead branch, snapping it.
“Wait, did you hear that?”
I quickly covered my mouth to stifle my gasp the second I heard voices.
“It’s nothing, perhaps some young Catoblepas pup… let’s catch up with the others in the hunt, I want to be there when the females are caught,” a demonic voice said, a snarling slosh of words that sounded as if its speaker had too much salvia in its mouth.
“You go then, I will check this sound, as I may have found something for us to feast on. I could eat some roasted Catoblepas and then I will be praised, for anyone who brings the food gets first bite of the hunt.”
“Foolish, Yurkin Srk,” his comrade scowled.
“You won’t be saying that when I have found us a whole Catoblepas to eat,” he mumbled to himself as he was left alone.
Which unfortunately for me, meant that he was soon coming closer to where I was hiding. So, knowing that I was running out of time, I reached down and once again, found a stick in my hand, just like Germany. Although admittedly it hadn’t done me much good then, so I wasn’t holding out much hope now.
Especially not when suddenly I was crying out as its ugly demonic head popped out over me, scaring me shitless.
“Got you, human!” It snarled, its saliva dripping down between its teeth and landing on my shoulder. Up close, it looked like an orc had a love child with a goat, before trying to fuck a volcano! Little wonder then why I screamed the second it reached out and grabbed me.
However, I used all my strength in throwing up the stick, hitting it on the head and making it howl at the impact as dead wood burst around him. I also didn’t wait around to see what damage I had made, if any, and I ran further down the bank until I reached the bottom.
The speed of my descent meant I skidded until I fell, leaving me with no choice but to scramble back to my feet when I heard it yelling behind me. In fact, I had just made it back to running when suddenly I was yanked from behind, making me spin to face it once more. A black liquid I assumed was blood was trickling down its face, giving it cause to look even more pissed off than it already did. I managed to twist out of its hold, crying out when I felt its claws rake across my shoulder. Yet despite the pain that I didn’t have time for, I continued to run like my life depended on it… which right now, it really did.
However, this only got me so far because the second I saw the little valley come to an end, I knew I had no choice but to try and climb my way back up the bank. The demon used this as his next opportunity to grab my ankle, making me fall down until I grabbed a root, stopping my descent. Then I let my natural instincts take over and I kicked out at his face, making enough impact for him to let go.
This allowed me to make it all the way up. But in the end, it didn’t matter, because I was quickly taken off my feet as the demon tackled me from behind. The air left me in a whoosh, before I was forcefully rolled to my back, its claws once more tearing at my clothing and scratching my skin.
“AH!” I shouted in even more pain and with a heavy dose of fear. It straddled my waist, holding my wrists above me.
Then it told me,
“Now it’s time to pay for the blood you spilled, payment made in flesh… for you…”
“Smell good enough to eat.”