Chapter 62 #2
Hundreds of leeches fell from the lion’s sides. They squirmed and flowed in a river toward Derek, their white bodies shimmering like marble. The horror of it made him pause, unable to believe that such a mass flowing at him could be leeches, that they could be real, and then he turned to flee.
He made it only two steps before something struck his back. He stumbled, then felt heavy weights across his legs. Every step became a burden as pain flared throughout his body. He stumbled, and despite knowing nothing good would come of it, he glanced behind him.
The leeches. They could leap, and they did, flying onto him by the dozens.
Their teeth sank into his armor and bit at his clothes, not all of them finding flesh, not yet, but their weight piled onto him, heavier and heavier.
He rolled across the stone, trying to smash them underneath his armor. Many died, but not enough. Not enough.
They were on his neck. His face. He pulled at them, screaming, but they were on his hands now, sinking into his fingers, draining them of color, of life, until he couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
Could only lie there as even more piled atop him, biting his face, his lips, and squirming through the creases of his armor to find the flesh underneath.
Above, the now skinny lion watched while licking its lips.
“Lost, and now found,” it said, and bared teeth of gold.
Rowan trailed a half mile behind the army, in a group of surgeons preparing to set up tents in the heart of the city to treat the wounded.
She had been tending to a man who had limped along, ignoring an arrow wound until the blood loss had him collapse, when the otherworldly fire approached.
She dove atop the soldier as it passed, offering him what meager protection she could.
It isn’t fire , she thought as her skin tingled and her mind went white. But goddess help me, it burns.
When it passed, the chilling silence lasted but a moment before the screams began. Rowan sat up, expecting to see burns, but instead men and women writhed, clutching themselves and flushing red as if suddenly afflicted with fevers. It was strange, for Rowan herself felt so cold, and so numb.
“Miss?” the wounded man said beneath her. She looked down and screamed despite herself.
He was not one man now, but three, each sprouting from the same waist. Their faces were different, as were their voices, as they twisted and flailed like newborn babes unable to control their limbs.
“Sara?” one of the faces, bearded and scarred, asked her.
“Merri?” one of the faces, young and handsome with long red hair, asked her.
Nothing, asked the third, the original face, for his eyes were wide, and he was screaming mindlessly.
Rowan fled. Her vows did not matter. Her duty did not matter.
To her left was a woman with a scorpion tail sprouting from her back.
To her right was a man whose hands had become claws and whose face resembled that of a white-feathered vulture.
Deeper in the city, she saw the remainder of Isabelle’s army retreating toward her, but she couldn’t bring herself to wait.
Run. Run. Chase the fire.
It burned in a wave ahead of her, rolling without stopping.
Buildings trembled at its passage. The colors swirled, shifted, never the same and yet always a perfect mix of seemingly every shade to have ever existed.
The road vibrated beneath her feet, and suddenly it rose, a hill forming from nowhere, and it sent her tumbling to the bottom.
She hit her head against a wall, and the pain was hard enough that she felt an urge to vomit.
Hold it together , she told herself. On your feet, now!
Her vision was like a boat on rocky waters, yet she pushed to a stand and moved.
She didn’t know where; she only saw a street and hurried down it.
If she continued west, eventually she would find the outer wall, and then the gate, or perhaps one of the gaps broken by the catapults. Keep moving. Keep fighting.
“Please,” a woman shouted, her upper half suddenly lunging out an open window. Her hand grabbed Rowan’s wrist. Her eyes were wide. When she spoke, her tongue was forked. “Please, help me, I don’t know what happened to my husband!”
Rowan saw a shape moving behind the woman, skin like ivory, face like a lion.
“Let me go!” Rowan shouted, and ripped her hand free.
“Wait!” the woman cried. Rowan ran, her hands held to her ears to block the sounds that followed. Screams, first of horror, then of pain. The rattle of a door. Then silence.
The street shifted, stone become pebble, pebble become dirt.
Buildings turned to bronze. Somehow, she saw water running through them, and up ahead, an impossible stream.
Little blue fish startled and fled as she splashed across.
Rowan stumbled near the edge, the cool water flowing across her hands as she caught herself.
“Wait,” she heard a guttural voice say, and looked to her left, farther upstream in this body of water that could not possibly flow through the accursed city.
A man crawled toward her, naked but for a torn shred of cloth around his waist. His body was muscular, his skin somehow shifted to an unnatural shade akin to obsidian.
Water glistened off him, and she realized his skin was not skin at all, but deep black scales.
His face was not a face. It was a gaping, open-mouthed creature of the sea, eyes wide and sightless. Little whiskers wiggled from the sides of his face as he forced out his speech.
“Please. Wait.”
Rowan ran and ran, until the ground turned to grass, and the buildings groaned and stretched upward with their sides deep brown bark.
“This… this can’t be real,” she said, slowing to a walk.
Ahead was a small clearing, and in the center, what appeared to have once been a well.
A towering tree grew from its center, fifty feet high at least, its sprawling branches spreading out in all directions to cover the clearing with violet leaves.
Figures gathered underneath, men, women, and children. At least, they were, once.
Their bodies were vine and bark, root and stem. They stood in place, locked in whatever poses they had been in when the strange fire washed over them. Rowan approached one, a woman, her mind too overwhelmed to feel fear. It was too strange. Too much.
“Are you… there?” she asked the woman. Her lower half was entirely bark, and her feet were sunken into the earth.
Her skin was the light brown shade of exposed sapwood.
Flowers had replaced her clothing. Green vines wrapped about her head for her hair.
Through those vines, eyes like frozen amber stared back at her. They moved, ever so slightly.
Lips parted. Rowan saw teeth like thorns.
“Do you hear it?” the woman asked. Her voice was as soft as petals. “The song?”
Rowan retreated a step, a cloud lifting from her mind. Somehow, this was real. It was real, and horrible, and she was trapped.
“Do you hear it?” a man behind her asked.
She spun. His hand stretched out, dripping with vines.
She tried to flee, but her ankles would not move.
Her legs felt numb. She looked down, saw vines wrapping about her shins and knees.
Crimson thorns sank into her flesh deep enough to draw blood, and yet she felt them not at all.
“The song is light,” two small children said in unison to her right.
Vines rolled from their legs to crawl across the ground, joining the growing mass from all directions.
They wrapped higher, higher, curling into her waist. Rowan twisted and flailed, but she could not move.
All sensations were leaving her. The vines crawled, to her chest now, and then her arms.
The skin on her hands parted. Flowers sprouted from her fingertips. She opened her mouth to cry out, to plead for help, but then the vines slithered down her throat, choking her. Numbness took her lungs. Her eyes refused to close as more vines wrapped along her forehead.
“Do you hear it?” the people of wood and vine asked her.
Blood dribbled down her chin as the thorns tore deeper into her. More twisted up her nostrils and into her ears.
“Do you hear the song?”
The bones in her legs snapped. Her clothes, shredded by vines, fell away, and in her nakedness, she saw thick bark replace her flesh. The numbness began to fade, replaced by pain.
“Do you hear? Do you hear?”
It hurt. It hurt so much.
The vines ripped her jaw from her face. What should have been a rupture of blood was instead a wave of blue poppies falling like a blanket from her neck to cover her chest and waist.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
With Mitra remaining inside the Tower Majestic, Madeleine had taken it upon herself to encourage Racliffe’s defenders, and so she was in the heart of their formation defending Bridgetop when the otherworldly fire was birthed from the opened sky.
“Do not fear!” she shouted to them as they cowered at its approach.
She held her arms to her sides and her head high.
This fire… this had to be the cleansing Mitra had always spoken of.
This was the hope for all of Kaus, and she would meet it with her heart open and her soul brave.
Eyes closed, she offered herself to Father.
Forgive my sins, so your will may be done.
Silence encompassed the world as the fire touched her. She gasped, and her eyes flitted open against her will. All traces of her prayer were banished as pain tore across her entire body. Her mouth opened to scream, but she could not manage even that. Her lungs would not draw breath.