Shane Porteous - The Battle of Ebulon - A Shared Anthology

Jolia, still silent, rose. She bobbed her head once — an aggressive maneuver, lacking any sign of respect that might have been implied, making her look like an angry chicken — and practically bolted out the door.

Once she was gone, Irana stepped closer to Andrew, moving sinuously, adding more sway to her hips than was necessary; he found himself thinking of the woman who had brained him, and how much this one resembled her. Again, the change started to come over him, and he clenched his fists in an attempt to resist it.

“Why do you fight it?” Irana drawled. “You are what you are… that is why you are here.”

She came closer still, draping one arm around him and tangling her fingers in the hair at the base of his neck. “Show me. Show me the killer of fomori, show me the son of the Morrigan. Show me our savior… and I am yours. The price of your service, if you will.”

Her eyes were half-lidded, her tone full of promises of ecstasy. Andrew marveled at the idea that someone would offer such to him, knowing what he was. Knowing what he did . He stopped fighting the change, allowing his hands to lengthen and grow lean, the nails stretching out into steel claws. His teeth shifted, becoming more akin to a bear trap as they melted into jagged fangs. Irana lost her grip on the back of his neck as he grew nearly two feet, and the mop of black hair became a smattering of raven feathers. His face grew even more pale, turning pallid and corpse-like as his eyes became glittering amethysts.

“Oh…” she gasped. Despite her apparent foreknowledge, seeing him in his true form had still rendered Irana speechless.

His voice had become the buzzing of insects, varying in pitch and tone to approximate human speech. “Yes, oh. Now you see. And soon you will feel…”

He snapped his fingers, and a bit of carved wood appeared in the palm of his left hand; with a flick of a wrist, a dully gleaming silver blade had popped out. He placed the straight razor to Irana’s cheek, drawing it down slowly and lightly, letting the flesh bring beads of blood to the fore like poppies at bloom. He shot out his tongue — a freakish thing, far too long and covered with tiny barbs — and lapped at the red water flowing from her cheek. She gasped again, but made no attempt to pull away.

“Mmmmm. Delicious.”

Andrew came away from the memory, not wanting to think about what had happened afterward; he remembered a scream from the hall, the stomping of boots, a frenzy of additional shouts. Then… something, he hadn’t had time to tell what, had burst into the room, forcing him to drop his treat. Irana had hit the floor, crying out in pain and surprise. As Andrew had begun to turn, he’d felt something hit him in the chest, felt the iron within the crossbow bolt working on him, forcing him back into the shape of his fleshself and negating any defense or assault he might have otherwise prepared. Then something had crashed into his skull, leaving only darkness until he’d woken up here.

Andrew froze, his unnaturally sharp hearing having detected a scuffling sound. Movement, down the hallway. Smiling broadly, he willed his dreamself to the front, the thinning of his hand and fluid nature of his flesh allowing him to slip one arm from the shackles. Snapping his fingers, the straight razor appeared in his free hand as he allowed himself to return to his more normal seeming.

He waited, straining to hear. The shuffling was growing louder, definitely coming this way; likely a guardsman coming to check on his prisoner. He could smell the thing’s thoughts, and found them to his liking: All hate and violence, this one. Something definitely inhuman. Ah, taken prisoner and prevented from playing with Irana… only to be handed a fomori playmate. Perfect.

The shuffling stopped just beside the door to his cell, and Andrew forced his smile back. He slumped his head and tried to appear sleeping — not certain how well the creature could see in the absolute darkness down here but not wanting to make any assumptions — as he heard the jingle of keys. The barred door swung open. A moment later he heard a grotesque, ratcheting cough and saw a wad of phlegm shoot through the opening. Then one of his captors stepped into the room, carrying a tray laden with rancid meat and a cup that stank of vinegar.

Superficially, it resembled the figure in the statue of the Rose Quarter Square; porcine features, human shape. This one possessed only a single eye, however, set in the middle of the forehead like some blasphemous tumor that could somehow see. The hands were strangely twisted, with a hoof-like extrusion emerging from the palm where the last three fingers should have been and spiny pincers in place of the thumb and first finger. Underneath the simple loincloth it wore, the legs were thick and heavily muscled, tapering into hairy cloven hoofs that it drug across the floor.

Andrew rattled one of the chains that held him to the wall, tuning his voice to the pitch of helplessness and fear that so many of his previous playmates had used on him. “Let me out! I promise, whatever you want, I’ll do it!”

The guard appeared unmoved by Andrew’s pleas as it shuffled forward and tossed the tray on the ground at Andrew’s feet. It stood before him for a long moment, staring at him with that single bulbous eye; then the grotesque mouth twitched upwards in a horrid parody of a smile.

“It shakes the chains all it wants, but can’t get out. Galluk’ur decides, Galluk’ur makes it food. Galluk’ur wants it. Not dead. Tender.”

Before Andrew could begin to put voice to the questions the thing’s statement provoked, it reared back with one of those misshapen hands and slapped him across the jaw. Andrew felt something crack — despite the emaciated appearance, it was strong and the hoof-like material of its lower hand was nearly as dense as steel — and his head whipped to the side. Blood dribbled over his lower lip, and Andrew’s probing tongue could tell that at least two of his teeth had been cracked off.

When he refocused his eyes on his attacker, however… Andrew was smiling widely. “Mistake, my friend.” In order to slap him, the creature had gotten close enough for Andrew to reach; now he lashed out with his free hand, the straight razor gleaming even in the darkness as it sheared through the creature’s stomach.

As Andrew had expected, the beast doubled up over the wound, clasping one of those strange hands against it as black and red sludge seeped through the wound. He used that moment to rise and pull his already-changing flesh free of the other shackle. Assuming his true form, the shattered teeth replaced with their steel counterparts and his handsome human face replaced with a hellish harlequin mask, Andrew leaned forward, panting his rancid blood-and-oysters stench into the guard’s face.

“And people who make mistakes around me don’t live to repent them, pal.”

He jerked the straight razor up and drove it forward, popping the creature’s eye with a wet sound that was nearly buried beneath the creature’s shrieks. Yellow fluid began to dribble from the edges, but Andrew dug deeper, using the height advantage and increased strength from his dreamself to bury the blade into the skull and the soft meat that lay behind it. After another moment, the thing began to twitch and shudder uncontrollably and its voice dwindled to nothing but gasps. A moment after that, it slid from his blade and hit the floor still twitching as it sank into the fecal mire.

Andrew leaned his head back and took a deep breath, relishing the scent of terror and death that had been released by the creature in its final moments; the miasma of the dying rejuvenated him slightly — not as much as dealing with it in his preferred manner might have, but enough to tend to the wounds on his body and grant him the psychic strength to lay hands on the fomori’s spirit as it sought to flee.