Something With a Prince

Chapter Fifty-Eight: Mud

Tallethea

When the screams started, I turned to the skies and watched something drop down. Shadows erupted from the mud. My stomach lurched as hundreds of them started to claw their way out from under our boots. Men and women alike scrambled for their minds, for their senses, but this was happening. This is happening. She had come for her revenge anyway. A hand burst through the soil and clutched my ankle, using it to pull itself up. A face of death, rolling out of the earth as if it were born of the mud itself, a clay figure of carnage. My instinct was to scream, to cut off its head, but one look at me with its dead eyes and it fell still.

Heart thundering, it peered at me with those caverns of eyes...a clicking noise came from its throat and wiry limbs of grey sinew. Nearly invisible in the mist, just like Dominic's soldiers, the creature, along with the thousands of its kind, laughed. Laughed. Then they had teeth.

With its scuffling limbs, the creature lurched onto the nearest Rughwen soldier and crawled up his body. All my eyes allowed was the sight of teeth ripping and shredding as blood sprayed. Those of us who were human snapped back to reality and began to fight again, silence fleeing at the demand of self-preservation. Everything in me told me to wait, to look, to pay attention, but my limbs would have none of it. My sword was up, and a deep-seeded anger took hold. Anger I thought I had lost until I looked at that creature standing before me. It licked its lips, dropping the dead soldier from its teeth and purring.

You. All I could think was, You.

Slowly it turned to look at me, grinning.

It started in my fingertips and like a draught of poison, flooded its way up my arms like a chill. I felt as if I had a fever. My head grew hot, flushing up my neck and over my ears. Muscles under my chest flexed like giant hands. Like I was being electrocuted. It took a step toward me, rolling its head and neck as if stretching. An expression flicked over its dead flesh, then it was gone. As briefly as it looked at me, there was a presence of insurmountable grief attached to its expression. I was off limits.

Before I got the chance to look again, or even raise my weapon, it was gone and devouring the next available soldier. They hardly discriminate, taking and tearing at those which pleased them. The preference was slim, but Rughwen was the target, blue and silver bodies dropping. The sounds of terror were thickest at the center of battle, where the most bloodshed was...that's where she and that thing had dropped. Where Arlyn had no doubt gone to meet Dominic.

My fingers tightened around the hilt of my sword, and I raced as well as I could to the center of the fight. Blood rushed everywhere around me, and with each death I witnessed, each death I caused, my heart seemed to snap and scream and plead. Soaked by the spray of rain and blood, my hair was plastered to my face.

"Arlyn!" I screamed, looking around the vast field as I fought off one soldier after another. But none of the creatures touched me. All of them pausing long enough to give an irritated or grievous expression then leave.

"Arlyn!" Again, my voice was lost to the cacophonous sounds of war.

That's when I reached the pit. When I saw her.

Her body was aflame, exhaling a deep crimson as she cried joyfully to the skies. The divine lines of her face and body were overblown, making those nearest to her unsure if they should be afraid. If they should kneel. She had no protection, no battalion of creatures about her feet. Yellow roses crowned her head, so delicate looking against the fangs protruding from her mouth, it was off putting. Saorla was the puppeteer, every human her marionette, as those long fingers reached out and crushed chests, throats, heads...Her body more indeterminable than the bottom of a well.