Anthony Francis - Blood Rock

None of my standard tricks would work-so I had prepared new ones. I shimmied, drew an arm over my back, and plucked a newly-inked feather from the wings of the Dragon. Then I laid it down on a newly-inked mark on my forearm, clenched my fist, and brought both to life.

Zipperface’s mouth peeled open into two glittering arcs of teeth. His ropy tongue snaked out as he hissed at me, and he pointed his bat at me and called me out. Then he looked down at his chest. Dead center, an arrow now protruded-though it had started life as the feather, before being shot out from the crossbow I had inked upon my arm.

Bits of down fluttered away from the wound, the slightest of glows shined through the hole, and then the arrow sank in and his shirt rippled closed over it. Zipperface looked up at me, his white eyes gleamed beneath his floppy hat, and he smiled. Then he leaned in, the skateboard banked, and he screamed down upon me, baseball bat cocked back to take off my head.

That mano-a-mano stuff? Two masters face off in an arena and fight for fifteen minutes? It only works in the movies, or when opponents are evenly matched. I knew I wasn’t an even match before I stepped up to the plate. So, I’d taken precautions-using his own tricks.

Suddenly white light burst from every seam of Zipperface’s design. All the mana pouring in from the tags all around us had finally activated the self-replicating pattern Arcturus and I had woven into the feather. With a sudden pop, Zipperface exploded in a cloud of glowing down, the body of the Streetscribe jerked and flopped, and the spray can fell from his half-dead hand.

The skateboard kept sailing forward, bounced off the ground a few times, and slowly rolled to a stop at my feet. I slowly lowered my hand, letting the crossbow merge back into my skin; a moment or two later, the skateboard itself dissipated.

“Damn,” Tully said. “You don’t screws around.”

“I haven’t spent weeks studying these things for nothing,” I said.

“Fuck!” Cinnamon said, suddenly terrified. “Fuck, mom, something’s wrong… ”

I turned to follow her gaze. Some of the filaments embedded in the Streetscribe’s skull were blackening, disintegrating, floating away. But instead of dying out, the giant tag on the wall was growing stronger. With each line that detached, the tag was more and more free.

“I was wrong,” I said, as Cinnamon backed up into me. “Whatever discretion the Streetscribe had was the only thing that had been holding the tags back.”

Suddenly five thick cables jutting from his skull were simultaneously broken, and the giant whorl on the wall began glowing, spinning, picking up speed. I remembered what Doug had said about reflections of the local environment in the image of the tag, and began to be very scared that the only ‘reflections of the local environment’ I could see were rivers of stars.

Then the whole cavern shook. The perspective of the tags changed. The ring of vampiric matter began to glow, and the circuits of werewolf blood began to blaze. The massive, bus-sized tombstones surged and cracked like real stone. The huge hillside behind the whorl loomed closer, then moved through the whorl, shattering it, so the great knobbly dome with its waving strands of grass was seemingly barreling right down on us.

Then the tombstones lifted up and doubled over, fat squirming worms blindly reaching forward, stretching out of the canvas, striking the ground one by one, their white chalky backs tipped by cracked wooden shields. No, not wood… nails. The tombstones were fingers .

And then the huge hillock, waving with giant stalks of wheat, lifted itself up. The wheat was hair, the hill was a head, and the sodden misshapen thing surged forward out of the canvas and glared at us with the two blazing pinpricks of fire that were its eyes.

Just as Revenance had warned us not to, we had awakened ‘it’.

Then ‘it’ opened a mouth fifty feet wide and screamed graffiti fire down upon us.

I shrieked in pain as rainbow fire tore at my hastily erected shield. I seized Tully and Cinnamon and dragged them back towards the pool in the center of the chamber. Behind us we heard a deep rattling, like a dragon drawing its breath. Then all three of us dove into the water as a second wave of flame swept over us, boiling off the surface of the water with a metallic hiss.

Multicolored flames danced above us, lighting the bottom of the pond with a shifting dancefloor light. I floundered, but Cinnamon dragged me forward with werekin strength, cutting through the water to the gazebo’s counterpart, an island of broken masonry and rebar jutting out of the pool. In the sudden shallows we half-swam, half crawled, lungs aching, until we surfaced behind a jagged triangle of masonry that provided a shield against the fire.

Gasping, we planted ourselves against the wall. Another gut wrenching scream echoed through the cavern, and we all flinched back as a wave of heat bloomed from all around us, followed quick on the heels by another gout of multicolored graffiti flame.

“There!” Tully said, pointing. “Make for that exit, the air was freshest-”

“No!” I said, pulling him back. There was light in the tunnel he pointed at-and there hadn’t been before. “A trap tag is active, you can see it.”

“That’s how it got Revy!” Cinnamon said, flinching as the monster belched forth another horrifying scream. “Forced him out into the tunnels, into the traps… ”

“Of course,” I said, falling back as another wave of heat flooded over us. “He warned us about it-so he came here, awakened it somehow, and got caught when he fled.”

“We can’t stay here,” Tully said, as intricate flames swept past. Flickering tongues of color began wrapping around the edges of the wall, and I started splashing water on it.

“Wet the wall! Wet it before the pigment can take hold!” I shouted, and we all started splashing water up on it, desperately trying to prevent the tag from creeping around. Where the wildstyle flames had already crept, water boiled off with a screech; but where the water landed first, the tag’s outlines became limp and indistinct, a fizzling nothing. “Keep going!”

“This won’t work,” Cinnamon said, leaning around the wall. “Everyone down!”

There was a wave of heat, we hunched back against the wall, and another gout of graffiti flame tore around us in a kaleidoscope of brilliant color. The deadly curls and blazing twists of fire were artful, wonderful, even extraordinary, and inspiration struck me.

I leaned around the corner, glaring at the potato-shaped monstrosity with starry eyes. It caught my gaze and glared back, misshapen mouth spreading into a wide grin, opening into a vast fissure lined with the cracked, grimy cobblestones that were its teeth. My eyes traced those ham-fisted lines, then compared them to the graceful barbs erupting from the Streetscribe.

I leaned back as orange light built up inside the monster’s malformed maw. Moments later, flames tore past us, gracefully, painterly -and clearly, by the Streetscribe’s hand.

“That thing isn’t the tagger’s creation,” I said. “It’s something that he let in, something that possessed him-but it’s still using his mind to make the flames.”

“Something that possessed him?” Cinnamon said. “Like a demon?”

“Like a demon,” I said.

“I thought you didn’t believe in demons,” Tully said.

“I’m a scientist. I won’t deny evidence right before my eyes, even if it needs a little… interpretation.” Another hot flash, a gout of flame, followed by a terrible cracking noise. “Maybe it’s a projectia of an evil wizard, a Lovecraftian Great Old One or a genuine Christian demon. Who cares? It isn’t by the same hand as the flames, and we can use that to take it out.”