Gilded Serpents

Chapter Thirty-Six: The Creature

The raven-haired girl's face rose from atop the hill.

"Blood," she said, sweet voice booming over the field's expanse, "Blood."

Doris froze from underneath me, and Aixel tried in vain to urge her forward, but the great void beast would not move.

I watched as the girl then began to rise from the red, then further still, as the rest of her body was revealed. Beneath her chest, what was left of her own body stopped and continued into a strange crude mass of red and metal. She rose, higher and higher, until her giant form shadowed almost the entirety of the field. The red of her body came not from blood, but flowers, millions of red flowers, cascading down her body like a dress, held together by the strange metal underneath. She raised her thin pale arms, and thousands of metal arms, hidden beneath the flowers of her dress raised in unison.

I strained my eyes trying to understand what I was seeing, and even the knights behind us halted in their chase. The metal arms were armored limbs, gold, silver, copper, making tiny clanking noises in the harrowing silence.

Aixel was at full panic now, pulling Doris's paralyzed arm as she stared at the strange giant seer-faced creature.

"Please, please," he begged.

But Doris remained frozen, staring back into the raven haired girl's small face as she grew, taller and taller, up away from the red field.

I held my breath. I knew I could not run in this state, and the last place I wanted to go was back underneath the grass. So I remained, clutching tight to the void beast beneath me, awestruck and terrified.

Suddenly, the worm-like creature stopped, at a height almost at the clouds, and there was another groan beneath the ground met with the same horrid rumble. This new noise seemed to finally break Doris from her temporary spell as she once again began to move, slowly at first, away from the creature.

I then watched in horror as the towering creature then began to fall forward, swiftly like a chopped evergreen, straight towards us.

"Doris - Go!" screamed Aixel.

My stomach dropped as the creature then began crawling, aided by thousands of arms, over the hills like a frantic snake, sending a cloud of red flowers, dust, and grass in its wake and barrelling towards us like a frenzied millipede. I watched in horror as a plume of flowers exploded around one of the running knights, dragging them downward into the red grass. Doris' slow start was enough to let one of the knights grasp her long tail, as they frantically tried to escape, holding tight as she whipped it left and right in agitation. The knight's additional weight was too much and she slowed to a stop.

I turned, trying to push him off with the heel of my boot, and to my surprise, he reached his other arm around and grasped around my ankle. As Doris flicked her tail a final time, the knight flew into the air, and I with him.

Smash.

I was once more beneath the grass, gasping for air, with eyes now fogged in pain with vision beginning to darken. In the distance, I heard the rumbling of a thousand metal arms making their way to me.

I turned my head and through the grass, I was met with the crawling golden knight, desperately making his way through the dark towards me. I dug my heels in the black soil, pushing myself away as fast as I could bare, each tiny move rattling pain through my body. But the knight was faster than me, and stretched forward, grasping my outstretched leg and pulling me towards him. I lifted my other boot, pushing my heel into his helmeted forehead, trying to escape his grasp.

As my heel caught on the ridge of his visor, the entire helmet came off, falling backwards with a sharp clang against the back of his armor, revealing a sweated, matted mass beneath. The woman's eyes were wild, shining wet with fear unlike any I had ever seen. She pulled me closer, then suddenly took my blackened hand. Shaking, she placed it to her forehead.