She has three, he has one and...and it's not really any contest is it? A twitch of your tail sends you knifing through the water; hydra-heads swaying in the induced current, fluttering and furling behind you like so many scaled ribbons. You draw up alongside her, here almost a dozen meters down and God, if you thought she was big from a distance you really weren't doing her justice. Because big doesn't really cover it, big doesn't really describe it. Call her "
really fucking big" and maybe you're making a start but
still. You're like a tug-boat drifting up to a container ship.
You're tall, she's nearly three feet taller. You have fangs, hers shine like a drawer of polished steaknives. You think you're strong? Sure you have that lean, honed brawn; that aesthetically pleasing athleticism. But she could palm your skull one-handed and crush it with just the strength in her wrist. Brawn flexes and works beneath her purple-black skin, tendons and sinews like steel cables; the human body within has been bloated, swollen, twisted out of shape until the finer details were nearly unidentifiable, then draped in scales and scutes and a row of thick overlapping chitin. Ink dark pincers hang from her back; sinking into the flesh of her back like limpets, like mollusks, like some parasite that's attached itself to her spine. Her head is long, a saurian snout framed in ridged bone, bonded to more of that glossy black carapace. Fleshy tendrils of sea-weed grow in a mane around her head. Her eyes shine within like yellowed lanterns. Her pupils flick up, they flick down, they focus on you. You feel yourself start to slip, start to be pushed back and you shiver, kicking with your feet, kicking until you're just holding position beside her. Steadying yourself with your arms, your snakes fanning out around you.
She seems skeptical.
Stretch your mouth and feel the bone crunch out. Show your fangs, it's meant to be frightening and aggressive but it just comes out as sullen and spiteful. Like a kitten that tries to chomp your shin for waking him up. Whatever, you just want to crawl up on the shore, vomit up your lungs, and sleep for a week. A month. A year.
She seems satisfied.
With a single lazy, swinging motion she slings you one of the emaciated bodies under her arm. He sails out into the dark water and you have dip down and come up beneath him, getting him on your back. He's lighter than you thought; the second set of legs is long and lanky and they catch and drag but the guy himself barely weighs anything at all. Turn your head back and you could count each rib in his chest. You could see the mismatched anatomy, the emaciated tissue as tics and shivers. His jointed mandibles fidget and flex. A set of fucked up black teeth on articulated arms. You take the lead of the little group of three (and company), you're turning back to face the front when you see it.
Motion in that fluttering black mass. Something moving, something pushing, through the tattered vegetation that ripples, undulating like a thousand squirming cilia. You can see the seaweed deforming. See it…clinging to whatever's underneath. Blink, properly blink, with your actual lids and not the see through set and the feeling vanishes. Like a Magic Eye picture that got jarred out of focus and now you lost your place.
...C'mon there's-there's nothing there. There's nothing coming through. There's nothing you need to be afraid of. There's just brown beer bottles, cradled in a bed of slimy sea-grass. There's just crumpled aluminum, flashing and glimmering in the moonlight. There's just bits of plastic, filthy and half-swallowed by the matt. In the depths, for a second, just a second, you see a yellow-orange flicker. A little firefly glow, like some invisible hand flicked a lighter and just as quickly snuffed it out.
Stare ahead, set yourself against the tide and kick. Don't look back: it was nothing, nothing at all.
The rain's really coming down when you finally stagger out of the surf; gagging, water surging from your mouth to splatter on the muddy sand as you stumble and nearly fall on all fours. The storm hammers the shore: striking exposed skin like a frozen mallet, chewing the water to a grey froth. The skyscrapers are blurred blotches of light now, fading in and out of sight between bands of the deluge. Wind moans, sending skirts and skeins of sand and grit up the dunes. Swaying back to a wide stance, bracing your burden; groaning through gritted teeth, snakes hissing in pain as fresh cuts are torn and widened. A few more drunken steps. Just a few more and-there. You lower the guy to the dun-colored ground, feet comfortably above the tide-line.
"(Thank you)" he murmurs, his voice humming, buzzing; his antenna twitching. Both sets of limbs splayed out as he stares up the roiling sky. You awkwardly pat his arm and say nothing, chest rising and falling in short sharp pants as you step away, turn away, and scan this new, insane tableau.The once pristine beach has been churned to pieces by more than a dozen pairs of passing feet. Dark, nearly indistinct shapes sit up and down your stretch of the beach. Huddling together and hunching up. Over the din of the deluge and the crash of the waves, you hear the sounds of small miseries: gasping and groaning, weeping and sobbing. A hulking shadow presses their palms to their skull, rocking back and forth as water runs from their seaweed mane. A haloed silhouette trudges past, dark blood dripping down their wrist to mingle with the rain. Higher up claws flash as thin figures hunch over prone bodies. Sliding your second lids filters out the incidental spray and some of the mist, helping but not by much; it's still enough to give you a decent count.
Twenty. Counting the ones black-bagged and waiting to be loaded into the truckbed. Twenty, all that's left out of the-
warhorns sounding in the deep, the song of the host
Pain flares; a freezing needle lancing through the back of your brain, the tip piercing your pupil. You dig black nails into your scalp until it passes. Until the steady drum of the deluge wipes it all away. Until the raw, half-choked breaths taper off into shallow gasps. You sink to your knees. You kind of just...fall over, belly to the wet crust. Breaking it and baring the white sand beneath; the rain stains that too. Your arm itches. You lift an arm to scratch it before giving up.
The man comes walking out of the water next and damn him he somehow looks immaculate. Halo curving around behind his sinuous neck. Curved, beak-like jaws pressed together in a thin line. His armor is a faded, sickly yellow somewhere between a lightning flash and aged fat; the scales beneath the rich, regal blue of broken bloodvessels. He kneels beside you and lets the colossus on his back slide off. Land with the wet smack of flesh and a groggy exhale. The eelheaded guy stays in his crouch, half-folded over his knee and staring at nothing. You...don't think he actually can get up. Behind you the sea bubbles and churns and then she comes
crashing through wading through the water. Waves breaking against her back, her hips.. She sets her passengers down more gingerly than either of you managed, gazing up inland, and then she cocks her head and looks at you, her attention settling on you like a lead blanket. Force yourself to roll over, one leg crooked and hands clawing furrows into the sand. You belatedly realize you're still naked heh. That long, statuesque body and not a stitch to hide it, nothing to cover your shame. Stripped among strangers, isn't that supposed to be some sort of nightmare? You even can't find it in yourself to pretend to care. You can't find it in yourself to flush and stammer and slither away. Everything hurts too much.
"...There's a dead body up on the dunes." Her voice is a wet, low, rumble. It resonates in your chest.
Silently nod, black hair plastered down around the base of your horns. You feel your snakes unspool, feel them stretch, heads tilted back and mouths half-cracked, their hiss they...chirp? Baring soft pink mouths and ivory fangs.
"Was that you?"
Nod again. You feel so depleted, so defeated, like every last stock of energy you had was ripped out of you. Does she see it? See the burned out filament inside you: the way your nerves ache and buzz, the way your tendons
throb. You want to vomit. You want to eat. You want you want you want- shhhh sh no. No hey, keep that mask on. Force that smile on. Can't lose that swagger now, not with Suzy's blood still clotting on your tongue. Push your limp, lank hair out of your eyes and work your mouth into a defiant expression. Try and remember how that's even supposed to look.
"They were going to send us back, why do you care?" You say.
"Mm," she clicks her pincers and shrugs in a giant sized "fair enough". "Guess we'll call that good work then. Got a name snakeboy?"
"Do
you?"
There's a long, long, pause. Her jaw creaks open and you see her tongue, testing, squirming, against the thick fence of teeth. And oh what teeth they are. Each one the length of your finger, serrated and wickedly sharp, staggered in jagged rows. Her eyes gleam in the gloom. "Gallow," she says at last. "My name's Gallow."
"...Levi. My name's Levi."
"Boring, mine's better. Yo, angelcake?"
"Mneuh?" The poor haloed man looks over your way, his eyes bloodshot, his fins limp against his body. His tail curling behind him like a dead thing half-beached on the shore. The tip lifted up and floated down by the receding waves.
"What's your name?"
He considers. "Glass."
"Cute. Either of you know where the hell we are?"
Glass shakes his head, the motion far more dramatic than it has any right to be. Neck swaying back and forth. Gallow huffs, rubbing the back of her broad neck with one meaty palm as she glances at you. You make to shake your head too but-
driving in the rain, windshield wipers sluicing water from the view of the road ahead, the empty highway rolling on:
a long asphalt ribbon curling through the grey mountains and green wood.
A sign comes up on the shoulder: Welcome to-
"Ggghahah Sparker's Bay! We're-" you nearly slice off the forked tips of your tongue as your teeth snap together. Tears welling up, mercifully lost in the downpour. Hurts, hurts, hurts, fuck fuck how does it hurt so much it's not even real. It feels like your brain's swollen, like the pink-grey is stretched shiny and straining to hold back foreign body lodged within. "-i-in Sparker's Bay. It's in Washington, think it's South of Seattle. W-wouldn't really know heh, not from around here."
You look to Glass, he frowns and drops his gaze to the sand. Gallow doesn't have any recognition on that boney mask of a face, she's just got arms the size of ham-hocks folded across her chest. Looking thoughtfully up at the miserable dregs clinging to this little spit of wind-lashed land. Backlit by a gentle golden glow as the dawn finally, finally comes, shining rays peeking over the Western….
horizon.
You find your spare reserves then, you find your second wind as you push yourself up to your feet, sharp cries rising up from the scattered Fae upon the sloping dunes. Glass cranes his neck around. Gallow turns, more curious than confused.
It burns beneath the coal black waves: a great golden disk, a sickly second sun, the edges hazed in smoky shadow. Y-you can see it pulsing. See it swelling. See it growing as it devours the space around it; stretching wider, yawning
wider. The infected amber light strengthening, solidifying, out in the harbor you see an entire section of sea just...drop. Crashing down a dozen yards, cratering, as currents swirl into a froth. Shadows stir in the heart of the celestial canker. You back away. Long, thick tendrils of ink move within the cosmic sore. You back away. They unspool, lazily gliding through the storm-tossed sea,
reaching out. You grab the black masked man and start dragging him the
fuck away. The crowd reacts as one. Surging, scrambling, clawing back; trying to get more room between themselves and the water. Trying to get to the top of the endless goddamn dunes, the green grass so far away it might as well be on the moon. They don't get far on lacerated limbers. They don't get far on aching, bruised, sinews. Glass is paralyzed, you shout something at him and he jerks out of his stupor and dives for the thinner giant. Gallow is already moving, shouldering her charges again. Shove the mandibled man behind you, press yourself shoulder to shoulder with the crowd of strangers. A tight knot, a close clot, of bloodied flesh and bruised bodies.
Reach out your hand, fingers curling around an invisible haft. The crowd hushes, your heartbeats almost audible over the driving rain.
In the shallows the waters churn. The tendrils go still, then indistinct. You see swirling hair, the shape of a skull, brine-water cascading down grey shoulders as she walks up the sunken slope.
...She's like a clumsy child's drawing. Like someone's first attempt at making a woman. She has too many joints in her long, long arms and they crunch and click as she tries to work the zig-zags straight. Her interlaced teeth are too large for her mouth, forcing jaws apart, lips thin to the point of nonexistence. Her skin is coral, all calcified curls and ossified waves. As you watch it cracks and slippery, limp, tendrils spill out. Black limbs twitching bonelessly as she walks. As they bloat. Now they're the length of your forearm. Now they're the length of your leg. Now they're as thick as your thigh and thrashing.
He's close on her heels.
If she's a drawing then he's a mashed clay sculpture. Like God gave up halfway through detailing and dashed the design to pieces. He sags, half-made, half-stitched, the gaps in nacre flesh filled in with spurs of jagged grey stone. His face a blank, ticcing expanse of translucent mantle, a jellyfish dome. His belly bloated, splitting like an overripe fruit as long black coils spill out. Rope after rope unspooling. Tugging the barnacle clad figure along like a fishing line threaded through his navel. His chest flexes, the bones working themselves free of the grey-green muscle. His ribs are teeth. The tendrils are tongues.
There's more. And more. And more. More heads breaking the rain-pocked waves. More twisted, fever-dream forms. Its head is a thicket of lampreys, its shoulders mantled in black pearl and curving horns. Her arms end in enormous, cancerous claws, razor-edged tumors curving into pincers. His body is bent nearly double by the weight of the shell he carries, human head hanging against his chest, borne on a slug's body.
Grip your spear so hard your hand shakes. You fucked up the first time but you can get one good through, one good through is all you need. You can kill one. Maybe two. You can buy everyone time to turn and scramble up onto dry land.
The water rushes back, splashing against her ankles as the first one stops at the very edge of the tide. The rain covering her in a steely shroud. Amber eyes glowing through long, matted hair. She takes a step. Her first step onto muddy land. You reach, you start to twist-
A light flashes. There's a crack, something between a bough shattering and stone breaking. And...and she just crumples. Head caved into a ruin. Anemone matter undulating wildly within the shattered shell of her skull. The rest stop.
You hear the sound of car engines. You hear doors slamming. Headlights switch to highbeams, casting harsh arcs of light down the beach. Dare to turn your head, dare to look over your shoulder and see the
pack of people racing down to meet you.
H-heh you're...you're being rescued.
You feel...
[ ] Simply, nauseously, relieved. You didn't have to draw your spear. Nobody else had to see it. Nobody had to
know.
[ ] Half-cheated. More than half maybe. They're yours, why would they need anyone else when they have
you.
[ ] Shamefully angry. You...you were ready to die. Ready to give it all. Ready to fight. And now you're being
rescued?
[ ] Hollowed out and aching. You can feel the drip-drip-drip of the acid wearing everything away. Did you even
care?
. So, hrm.
