Dreaming Damnations -Chapter Twenty, Part Two

    The Crow pulled off an almost dance-like series of maneuvers, making sure her own body remained between the pursuing arrow and Rook. Jedda jumped back from the swing of Meber’s twin blades after picking herself up, returned her sparth to the bottomless tin can on the makeshift sling behind her, and formed a series of gestures aimed in no particular direction, but rather meant for all directions at once. Narcissa had spent enough time with Jedda and her armored translator to pick up on quite a bit of sign language. Her arms vanished first, securing a hold on her ally from beneath her arms. The remainder of her evanesced with her separated limbs and their passenger. Rook started to protest when he saw them take shape from the materializing black wisps, but was cut off as the Crow became ensnared by the canopy of trees and fell beneath the verdant roof with loud cracks, snaps, and rustling from the leaves.

    Jedda formed her arms into a cross to block the arrow barreling after them at breakneck speed. It ripped open her jacket’s sleeve and snapped in two upon meeting her adamantine flesh. The girl below studied Narcissa curiously. Her mouth moved, no doubt barking an order judging by the authoritative stance she adopted, but her words were drowned out by the cold morning wind as she and Jedda plummeted. The vertigo followed Narcissa’s teleportation back to the tree’s fork for an instant. The sudden shift in location seemed to have disoriented Jedda more than herself after the previous free fall. Her hands clung tightly to the trunk as she tried tossing her disheveled red hair from her face to see. She could feel her ally’s legs shaking as they tried disentangling from one another quietly as possible and squeeze comfortably together in the space provided by the tree’s fork. Narcissa soon gave up and banished all but her floating head to the mysterious void between her shifts in location. Jedda poked her cheek once her equilibrium returned to get her attention and pointed towards where Pandora grinningly prowled towards the Duchess, immune to her commands and the swings of her scythe alike. Her head never stayed off for more than a few moments no matter how may times the Red Duchess decapitated her. The Cheshire Cat appeared pleased to demonstrate this ability, even relishing the woman’s displeasure. The way the two interacted gave the impression they knew each other long before today.

    “I’ve bonded my soul to a demon,” Narcissa said with a tiny smile.

    Disregarding the Cheshire Cat and Red Duchess, she focused on the girl whose familiar brown auburn hair was tied back in a high ponytail adorned with some sort of shimmering accessory. She pointed to the woods with her scythe as she spoke to the Twins and held her other hand on her hip. Her hand surfaced from the void first and closed its fingers around the dagger that soon followed its lead. Even from a distance she saw a twinkle of light crawl up its blade like a shiver of anticipation. From the corner of her vision she saw Jedda lean forward eagerly to watch the dagger embed its blade into the girl’s back from point blank range. The boy dressed in a sleeveless black and white striped jacket with the yin and yang symbol on the back nearly took off her hand with one of his blades, causing the girl to whirl around and instinctively recede back. The Black Knight’s blade came within an ace of taking off his head before he managed to duck, buying Narcissa enough time to dematerialize her hand and wrist. The flygja’s next swing fluidly proceeded the first as a single, unbroken action and nearly cut the girl in half. The boy wavered between aiding her and distancing himself from the intimidating figure. Narcissa’s floating head turned to fix Jedda with an inquiring look, lips loosening to speak, when the girl started gesturing a series of hand signs.

    “We blocked our ears with wax plugs the March Hare kept in his pocket,” Jedda explained through sign language.

    “You can lip read?”

    Smiling briefly, she nodded. The worry in her eyes never diminished. Jedda glanced back at the Black Knight. The male Alyss below had split into two entities, one standing by as the other aided the girl. His sword having gone rogue, he resorted to hand to hand combat with speed his size never could’ve suggested. The female Alyss snapped her fingers and gave an order to the Unicorn before she could join her wielder in searching out the missing members of the team with Tweedledee and Tweedledum. In a matter of moments the Black Knight appeared to have gone mad, swinging at invisible objects and pulling something only he could see behind his back. Jedda poked Narcissa in her cheek harder than she had the first time when an upward swing of his own sword knocked his helmet off –more of a jab than a poke. She was fairly certain his skin was no easier to penetrate than his shiny black armor, but the sword’s close proximity to her flygja worried her just the same.

    “Help him out!” Jedda gestured frantically.

    Narcissa nodded and smiled reassuringly. Adopting Jedda’s idea to cancel out her hearing, she closed her eyes in concentration until she managed to make her ears and everything in them vanish.

    “She’ll only turn your weapons against you if she sees them,” her ally said through sign language. “Just use your krav maga.” In reply to her quizzical look, she added, “My uncle knew it. I recognize the style.”

    “Still waters run deep,” Narcissa muttered, inciting what Pandora had said of the girl when they first met.

    Her hand appeared below her head, handing over her shoulder bag, pouch of knives, and her dagger before dematerializing. The two golden spirals making up the high heel on of one of the Red Duchess’s tall, open toed boots touched the back of her own high-topped shoe for a moment once her form took shape behind her wielder. Having receded back from the Cat her scythe barely managed to keep at bay, the Red Duchess whirled around almost in sync with her. Narcissa mentally cringed when her extravagant, blood speckled red and black striped bustle brushed against her.

    For one horrible moment, she met the Duchess’s beautiful, intimidating countenance close up. Star garnets ringed round the small crown atop her head, its six spindly, thorny spikes curling to form three disconnected hearts round a black and red striped cloth in the center and its decorative white rose dyed almost completely red with blood stains. The eyelids above her serpentine red eyes contrasted with one another, one red and the other black. In that seemingly endless moment, she saw the hearts ringing around the Red Duchess’s left pupil. Queen chess pieces dangled from her ears –the left black and the right one white –and a section of her hair tied together beneath her chin to give the appearance her face was framed by a heart. Her rose red lips opened an instant later, and Narcissa read her lips as, “You damn Cat!” before she realized who she was. For the duration of a heartbeat her frightening, long lashed eyes studied her heterochromatic eyes. The scythe stirred. She felt Pandora’s tail tip tap her neck twice in a signal to turn around before the rest of the Cat materialized beside her and forced the Red Duchess to place distance between them.

    Narcissa looked over her shoulder and ducked quickly, feeling the wind from the girl’s scythe, and swung out her leg. Red from the girl’s flamboyant attire flashed across her vision as the Alyss went down. She barely managed to break her fall with her scythe’s handle and gave her a look more curious than resentful with oddly familiar gray eyes. For some reason those eyes brought to mind a ballroom and a pearly white color. Rather than dwelling on it, she brought her leg up and stomped the flat of her foot against her gut to topple the fragile balance the Alyss managed to assume before meeting the ground. Propping herself up on her elbows, she smirked at her.

    Her shoulders shook in brief, mute laughter, and her silent lips formed the words, “I see you kept your card safe for me.”

    A vivid image of the pearly white masquerade mask the girl wore in Liddell Palace took shape in her memory with a sick sort of nostalgia. Picking herself up, she pointed to her and turned her head to bark an order to a new entity. A new shadow fell over her. Turning her head, she caught sight of the Rose’s thorns disentangling from the crisscross of Jerund’s battle axes. The Crow on Rook’s shoulder in place of his missing quiver’s strap flapped her wings frantically when the weapons came to life and jerked free of her wielder’s grasp. Narcissa vanished and reappeared behind the girl. Twisting her arm behind her back after kicking the Twins’ Alyss below his chin before he could intervene, she used the hold on the girl’s arm to force her into bending low enough to meet the knee she brought up between her ample breasts. Rook stole the scythe she dropped, leaped his head away from the Rose’s thorny extension, and cleaved the two Tweedledums that had followed him back into the glade and were making their way to him as they held the same dagger in half. Their top halves slid off their waists after their bottom halves tripped and fell lifelessly in a grotesque heap. Their Alyss’s clone remained intact, still connected to Tweedledee somewhere in the woods.

    Rook leaned back when the scythe went berserk and nearly succeeded in taking off his and the Crow’s head. Clutching her breast as she gasped for air, the girl caught the weapon bouncing back to her on its handle and forced Narcissa into evanescing. Jerund’s battle axes glided past her head upon reforming out of the scythe’s immediate reach. One arm separated from her and relocated the Black Knight out of his rebelling sword’s path. With the other she separated from herself she grabbed Meber’s clone by his head and bashed it hard against the back of his gray-eyed ally’s. Evading the axes, the Rose’s advances, and the three Alysses’ blows Narcissa fell easily into a rhythm of strike and disappear similar to the style she fought with under the Vindemiatrix Circus’s stygian tent. Before long the girl lost focus on the Rose, the sword, and the axes, leaving her to assume the Unicorn and likely Komako were under her flygja’s command. Her blows came more heavily with building confidence until she saw Rook behind the remaining boy’s bruised head freeze up. She could see that his eyes were lost in the past even from the other side of the glade. The Crow was nowhere to be seen and she didn’t have any inkling where the corvid was, but she doubted she would’ve let Deedledee get so close to her Alyss with that butcher knife if she were near enough to stop it. Rook’s shoulders shook from the effort it took to control his sally of despair, his wide, tormented gaze on the approaching little girl. His lips moved, speaking a single word she couldn’t lip read at such a distance. By the way he spoke it, she surmised it must have been a name. His twin sister’s name.

    Move, Narcissa silently willed him. Move, damn it!

    The knife slide underneath his shirt. Her other hand clasped his hand. Movement she recognized as Jedda stirred about ten yards off in the dusky umbrage of the woods, but the mute wouldn’t get there in time. Narcissa’s legs shook from fear, and her heart hurt her chest with its forceful hammering. Abandoning the enemy Alysses, she materialized behind the girl, temporarily severing her arm along the way to snatch up a two foot long stick. Though she couldn’t hear her own voice, she still heard the vehement words in her head as she shouted at the Twin, “Burn in hell!” The end of the stick jabbed into the girl’s yellow and green striped eye. Staggering back, her hands flew away from Rook and grasped the stick protruding from her right eye instead. By the way her lips moved, she was screaming bloody murder even after throwing away the stick. With her injured, watery eye squeezed shut, she glared at Narcissa with her remaining eye and raised the knife meaningfully. Jedda’s sparth poked from the underbrush in her peripheral vision as she wrapped her arms around Rook to teleport them both out the knife’s range.

    The Crow’s large shadow fell over the girl, blocking out a large portion of the early morning’s sleepy light. Jedda had hardly taken two steps into the glade before the bird’s large talons seized the girl by her head. The neck bent at an unnatural angle, causing the girl to go limp like a life-sized doll. Regulus and his Alyss leapt off the Crow, Leopold kicking aside Tweedledee’s head as it came rolling towards him hard enough it went flying past the glade. The girl stopped instantly when she saw Leopold, lowering her weapon and grinning. Narcissa felt Rook’s hand grasp hers but never looked down at it. Her gaze instead focused on the girl as she mouthed the word, “Little brother!”