Dreaming Damnations, Chapter Twenty-Two, Part Two

    Anger trembling from the potency of its own venom boiled inside her, poisoning her initial shock into a still deeper shade of rage. Blood fell from the clean cut of their necks and painted the dead leaves below like something from a horror movie. She always used to watch those on occasion with a couple of friends during high school on weekend nights. She had no interest in dating in that mad world, after all. Now she couldn’t imagine how she ever sat through something so sadistic. This was inhumane beyond comprehension. Pandora’s cruelty had a purpose revolving around her instincts to survive. She was a feral Cat applying cold-blooded tactics to get ahead. Her morals went by a different standard than a human’s. Where was the purpose in this? The rationality? There was no call for it. This was the result of malice. Of evil. Proof that monsters existed and why Hell was created to cage them. Amaranth created the hands that did this to her own creations. And why? How much crueler was the Dream if the culprit behind this damnatory act was capable of this level of audacity?

    “That bitch!” Narcissa hissed tremblingly under her breath.

    “She’s counting on your anger, Narciss,” Pandora warned, turning her head around so she could read her feline lips. “My Alyss’s recklessness will give her the edge she’s seeking. Don’t be her puppet.”

    “Will you look at what she did?” Narcissa mouthed at the Cat.

    The Black Knight lifted his helmet enough for her to read his lips.

    “Listen to your flygja,” he said sternly. His hand rested on Jedda’s trembling shoulder as the girl struggled to compose herself. “The Red Duchess is no fool. She is revered as the queen of her flygja class for more than her bloodlust. She can’t be beaten by someone ruled by their own emotions.”

    Narcissa’s sharp exhale of breath came out nearly as a hiss. Tearing her gaze from the tree’s grotesque ornaments, she placed all her weapons in her bag and handed them to Pandora.

    “Make them disappear.”

    The nature of Pandora’s movement carried the severity of a cat readying to quarrel with a rival as she turned to hook a paw round the strap and banish the bag from sight. Her tensely coiled tail did the same to Jedda’s sparth. When Pandora got serious before a fight, someone was assuredly about to die. There’d be no toying with the woman this time around. Only a felid out for blood. As creepy as her grin could be, she was frightening when she frowned. Her head snapped up, ears pinned back after flicking in the direction of some sort of sound. Narcissa looked in the direction of her Cheshire Cat’s feral eyes and saw something moving beneath the fallen leaves and through the foliage. Her hand flew to Jedda’s other shoulder to draw her notice to it. Startled, she jumped back against her flygja. Frozen from lack of comprehension at first, Narcissa studied the long, fluid movement of the obscured creature before the realization finally struck at her.

    Snake! she thought with a start.

    The slithering thing attempted to circumvent the feline and rose its frightfully unexpected head up from the leaves. The scare she was given from being caught off guard by that bizarre, six-eyed, orchid-shaped head came close to giving her a heart attack. In an instant Pandora’s paw snatched up the large serpent and sent it flying hard enough it was either stunned or dead upon landing. She never saw so much as a twitch of movement from it afterwards.

    Narcissa looked warily back at the place where the heads hung from the tree and saw  a headless corpse untangling itself from the heap at the old tree’s base. Gray-blue-skinned with greenish, furry arms, the rotund cadaver was covered in wounds. One by one its fellow victims rose from the ground. Sickened, she forced the vomit back down her throat as she watched the macabre procession, each armed with a good-sized knife. A bird-woman, an anthromorphic, six-armed salamander, and a humanoid entity with the spine from its hunched over form protruding from the flesh as spikes with up-raised spirals of silver.

    They’re dead, Narcissa said to herself in horror. They’re dead. They’re walking and headless and fucking dead.

    The Black Knight slammed his fist into a nearby tree, snapping its trunk and sending it crashing down. Jedda backed away from him, grabbing Narcissa’s arm and taking her with her. There was shock in her eyes as well as she watched her flygja’s form distort and take the form of a titanic black horse. Reluctant to watch how he planned to disable the corpses, she looked away.

    “The woman’s coming out next,” Pandora’s mute lips warned them. “She and her Alyss won’t be alone. I smell the stench of an awful beast with them.”

    “What sort?” Narcissa mouthed.

    “A demonic kind. The albajax will seem puppyish in comparison. The Red Duchess has found a tree witch. I know that smell of rotted wood and fungus anywhere.”

    As if waiting for a cue, the stench intensified, hitting Narcissa like a brick wall. A flash of red moved from behind the dense vegetation across the glade. Spying it and the wink of the scythe in a sunbeam, Narcissa fought down the rage that again tried consuming her to the point black closed in around her vision for a quick instant. As the woman strode out from her hiding place alongside her Alyss with a cool grin, the large, twisting tree stirred its leaves, heedless of the current absence of wind. Without sound in her world, the tree’s ghostly stirring was eerie in the most eldritch of ways. Voluntarily deaf for the time being, the Black Knight stomping the convulsing bodies into the ground paid it no notice. Tensed, Jedda sprinted towards him before Narcissa could stop her. She ceased pursuit after a few paces and met the Red Duchess’s eyes venomously. She gesticulated a beckoning gesture to the duo from beside the materializing red eyes beside her. A skinny arm appeared next, swinging into Narcissa and sending her almost dancing backward in attempt not to fall on her butt. Confused and panicked that perhaps Pandora had lied about a Cheshire Cat’s immunity to the Duchess’s ability, she snatched hold of a trunk the instant her back pressed to it. From there she blinked dumbfoundedly at the vanishing felid, half standing, half falling where the tree interrupted her meeting with the ground.

    A bestial humanoid of a hunched figure mostly concealed by a long black cloak covered with moss appeared from the tree beside where she previously stood, the seven-foot-tall grotesquery defying the boundaries of dimension in dong so. The long, unseen forehead of the slit-eyed, large-nosed trollish hag appeared to slope down to the nose like the physiognomy of a beast so that one could balance a book safely on it. Her four spindly arms, their length perhaps equal to her body’s, sprawled own in a position Narcissa couldn’t help but compare to a spider’s. The haggish thing produced a creaky sort of groan as if in contemplation. Then, raising one of her bony hands, she pulled back her hood to reveal the second mouth in her long forehead, its teeth like needles.