40 #2
More and more of Raegan’s guards sprinted towards us, but it was on that brief glance that I noticed what I had missed with the ceadan that worked alongside Killian – their eyes were all the same.
All the same lifeless, lacking depth of black that seemed to stretch down into their souls, giving the viewer a clear glimpse into what lived within them, as if there was more to them than just their skin and bones.
Tadgh made yet another gargled sound as he hit the ground, grunting as his body resisted the height he had fallen.
But the Prince of Uisge moved quickly, wobbling his way across the floor until he was near his mother.
With a powerful roar, he pulled his arms to either side and tore the bindings of brambles from his wrists, spraying blood across the hallways as they slid through his skin and severed veins.
“Release her, vermin!” Tadgh bellowed as he reached up. He did not reach for the daggers on the hips all around him, but for that mask around his mothers mouth.
“No!” Raegan shouted as he tried to move around me, but I blocked his body from their path and Tadgh was successful in ripping the cage that had formed over Queen Tonn’s mouth.
The guards drew nearer.
Those eyes of a true abyss started to glow.
It was obvious why Queen Tonn had been given the necklace, why it had taken to her face and kept her mouth still, as she opened her lips and began a low, sorrowful melody that caused me to sway.
Except it was not that allure that threatened all around her, but the water that she began to summon from everyone’s bodies.
Droplet by droplet I could feel the moisture sucking from my being, reaching deep into my bloodstream and yanking anything that resembled fluid to the surface.
The guards reached us and I knew I wasn’t looking at pixies.
Not the pixies I knew and loved, not their eyes of glistening wander and their smiles of unbreakable joy.
No, these were husks, mere bags of flesh that resembled some of the ceadan that I had seen up and down the hallways, but now were lacking all humanity as they stared absently at the task at hand.
The ceadan guard who had been at Killian’s side moved towards the Queen, his hand outstretched towards her throat, the veins along his arm turning black.
Queen Tonn shot him one look and pulled the remnants of liquid from him, leaving a dried up corpse to crumble at her side, nothing but ashen bones to remember him by.
And I snapped.
“Enough!” I screamed at them all, throwing myself from Raegan and placing myself equally between all sides. I threw both hands up, one in the direction of Queen Tonn and Tadgh who were about to finish us off, the other towards the remaining ceadan that approached.
“Stay out of it–” Killian started, only to be interrupted by one of the nearing guards.
He squealed, his black eyes shooting wide as both hands reached out and in front of him to block his sight of me. “Daughter of Gealach!”
The one at his side matched his expression, soon shrieking the same three words, “Daughter of Gealach!”
The third, the same.
All of them horrified, all of them shaking, all of them shedding their skin–
Wait, what?
The horrific position that I had put myself in, the very plausible approaching doom that I had lured to myself, became a secondary issue as I watched the three ceadan before me.
The three ceadan who seconds ago had been pixies of flesh, bone, and skin, but now had allowed all three things to drop from them.
In their stead, three horses.
Not horses like I knew horses. Not horses like the pegasus’ in the fields. These were horses of the darkest marshes, horses of decaying seaweed and rotting death, horses who opened their mouths and revealed rows upon rows of sharp, glistening teeth.
Their bodies were shaped like the animals I had grown up with, but there was little definition.
Everything was fluid and moving, long strands of green-black that flowed and danced as if a breeze constantly graced the castle.
Those eyes of solid black now took form in their equine skulls, except they glowed a strange hue of red beneath the black, causing me to look away from them at once.
As one they spoke, their mouths remaining closed. “The sea has long since belonged to us, False Queen of the Waters.”
That noise – their voice – was decrepit and vile, turning my skin near green and tempting me to curl over and hurl.
Raegan, unbothered by the fact that his guards seemed to turn into Kelpies, started to move towards the largest of the three, only to receive a roar that was better suited to a gorilla than a sea-dwelling-horse.
While Raegan was distracted trying to reason with the things, I crept my way back towards Queen Tonn and Tadgh, who had gone deathly still in the face of their oceanic enemies.
“Come on, while they’re busy–”
Queen Tonn and Tadgh refused to move, their eyes wide and pointed at the scene unfolding over my shoulder. I was stupid in that I, too, glanced in that direction only to see one of the Kelpies peel its maw wide open, a glow of acidic bile summoned to the back of its throat.
“First to die shall be the child of Gealach,” it said right before that humming ball flew from its mouth.
Towards…
Me.
They were referring to me. The weaponized saliva that was already generating its own terrible form of heat was on its way through the air and it was not soaring for Queen Tonn nor Tadgh, but for me.
Raegan bellowed my name and then his head was in my side, his arms braced around me, and the two of us were hurling through the air across the hallway of the castle.
And it was easy to feel relieved at that, at the fact that I came away unscathed other than a patch on my shoulder that was burning and aching, until we stopped flying through the palace and came to a harsh stop.
Because then, I looked in the direction I had been tackled from.
Queen Tonn of Uisge was dead.