[open quest] trick or treat? round 2

[wilt]

WILT

In a sudden whirl of smoke all around him, he is transported. He coughs and his eyes water enough that he doesn’t quite notice whenever the black haze clears. All Wilt knows is that the sudden quiet is eerie. His ears perk and turn this way and that as he studies his surroundings: unsaturated, muted, and suffocating in their wrongness. The creature flexes his magic to raise roots to guard him, but he finds nothing to answer his call. The things here are all dead and they refuse to return to life once more. Is this the afterlife, then?

He takes a step back and tilts his head. Something laughs from all around him, its voice echoing over itself like a horrible choir. Wilt bristles and gnashes his pointed teeth. He cannot manipulate the plants around him, but the flytraps and pitcher plants that are one with him all stir and snap alongside him.

The laughter cuts itself off abruptly. Something is coming near, from behind him? He spins to meet them and prepares to lunge, but there is nothing there now. Wilt hurries forward as he decides he will not wait to become prey to some vile thing that plays games. He will find them first and rend the meat from their carcass. He tells himself this, and then he feels angry claws tear into his hindleg. He yelps in pain while the flytraps all reach and bite for their assailant, yet they close on nothing.

She’s too quick.

Limping now, he turns and bares his teeth at the aggressor. There, beneath the pale moonlight, is the first woman he killed - or so he thought. Sochi smiles with the smear of his blood across her teeth and rage engulfs him. Wilt surges toward her despite the burning agony in his leg and he takes her by the throat, tossing his head so her body flails like a ragdoll. He doesn’t stop until she gives up the fight and goes limp, just like before.

Then he drops her. And she gets right back up.

He snaps his teeth across her face and destroys whatever beauty she had before. Wilt mangles the fine curve of her jaw, the sharp angle of her brow. He takes those gorgeous silver eyes and he devours them. Then, at last, he drops her to the ground again.

And she gets right back up.

She takes a step toward him. Her blood oozes black from the pits where her eyes used to be. Her broken jaw is a fountain of midnight colored pus. He takes a step back and she follows with two of her own, then a third, again and again until she is leaping at him with her claws outstretched. Wilt shrieks and cries out as she tackles him to the dry dirt. Sochi says nothing, does nothing then. She just lets all that bile pour over his face until it’s all he can see or smell or taste. It forces its way down his throat as he chokes and gasps, his consciousness dwindling.

And then, quite suddenly, he is sputtering on the ground in front of the shadow creature. He is as he was, though certainly less sure of himself.

[Sintra]

"It was just a dream, Sintra, go to sleep now."

They're standing at the edge of the dark forest, with the wide, wild river rushing by, swollen with storm water and filling the dark girl's small ears like noisome cotton, deafening her with it's tumbling roar. She thinks it like a lion, though she's never met one before to know, a grey and white cat tearing the silence of the night, reaching its silvery-wet paws out to claw at the sand and the rock of its own banks, threatening to overrun them because who can tame a lion?

She does not hear her mother's soft lullaby at first, nor spare a glance at the dusky forest behind her where coyotes cackle at cold stars sleeping in the branches. She does not hold the image of the spectral guardian long in her mind, but lets it drift away easy as the wind. Perhaps she should pay more attention to what has happened, to the strange, wan, light that illuminates almost as much as it conceals, to the dim feeling in her chest, or the too-cool touch of her mother's skin against her own.

Perhaps she should, but it is easier and more familiar to curl up at Simplicity's feet and drowse beneath the repeated verses of her lullabies.

Do not lie down near the edge,
Or the little grey wolfie will come,
And grab you by your tum,
He'll grab you by your tiny side,
And drag you to the forest.
Drag you to the forest,
Down under a willow bough.

The mare's teeth knead Sintra's skin and the child feel's her eyelids grow heavier. She will certainly, and without knowledge or regret, lose herself to this land of the dead, arching her neck as the roaned shape of her mother grooms itchy withers and all those places that even her young tendons don't allow her to reach.

Do not lie down near the edge,
Or the little grey wolfie will come,
And grab you by your tum,
He'll grab you by your tiny side,
And drag you to the forest.
Drag you to the forest,
Down under a raspberry bush.

The teeth scrape harder at her skin and bright violet eyes flutter open, confused.

Do not lie down near the edge,

The world seems askew, as if the forest and the river are both falling in towards her.

Or the little grey wolfie will come,
And grab you by your tum,
And grab you by your tum,
He'll grab you by your tiny side,
And drag you to the forest.

"Mama?"

Bone-white teeth flash in that sickly light. The roan mare looms large over Sintra, impossibly large, her eyes too dark, her teeth too white. They close like traps on Sintra's flank and the child cries and tries to scramble away, but her mother doesn't release her, and her dark skin tears like paper, leaving tattered streamers between the roans wicked, flat teeth. That's when the screaming starts. She doesn't know where it comes from, Sintra hears it, but it seems to shudder out of the bark of the trees, out of the grey moss.  It rips its way from her throat as easily as her dam peels away another swath of ebony skin until all that remains is what remains tight against her legs and her face, and all else is bleeding muscle and the alabaster-white of her bones, and the tears that fall thick from her once-bright eyes burn like fire when they fall against her chest.

Simplicity smiles with bloody lips and her daughter, in agony, lurches to her clumsy feet and stumbles into a careening run into the beckoning trees where her wails are answered by her mother's iniquitous laughter.

...the little grey wolfie will come,
And grab you by your tum,
And drag you to the forest.
Down under an aspen tree.
Don't come round, wolfie, don't wake up our Sintra.

The thorns and thin branches slash away at the girl until the pain is so great that it becomes no more than noise and fades into a dull, burning, buzz that drowns out everything but the lilting lullaby that repeats in her ears again and again, over and over, though Simplicity herself remains at the river's bank. And Sintra runs, and trips, spattering mud across the gore of her tiny frame until at last she finds, through some unknown magic, that Guardian she had forgotten so willingly, and falls sobbing at his feet, muscles twitching visibly in the gloom of Death's endless dusk.

"I'm sorry. I don't want to be here anymore," and she reaches out for the ephemeral whisps of its cloaking shadows as if in supplication, dripping blood and mud into the grey sand.

"Please."