Karta Stryker

Chapter 7: The Godspawn

Walking over the corpses of all of the Kites wasn't exactly delightful, and for Arcadia it was even worse. But we had no other means of getting out of the darn place. 

"It's better if you don't look." I said.

"I want to look, I don't need a parent," Arcadia interjected, "so please, at least let me take this in." Arcadia shrugged.

"Cool, now that we're on the same page."

Arcadia squinted her eyes. I could almost hear her mutter 'asshole' under her breath. 

"My life was a lie, whoop-dee-doo. Shit happens."

Arcadia's sadness could still be heard in her voice, despite her tough attitude. She wasn't letting any of her walls down. We eventually reached to the mansion's doors, making our way out to the forest. Arcadia looked around the forest, inspecting it before we left. She took a deep breath in the forest's atmosphere.

"I'm going to miss this place. The forest was always so beautiful." Arcadia's voice shook under her tears.

You could tell Arcadia wanted that to so desperately be true, but she knew she was lying to herself.

"Question is, how do we get out of here?" I looked around, not remembering how the incantation allows one to exit.

Maybe the Kites had made the incantation in a way that only they could control, prohibiting anyone from leaving without their permission.

"Do you know how to get out of this spell?" I asked Arcadia.

"What spell?" Arcadia said as she looked up at me.

She has no idea.

The thought puzzled me, but I wasn't surprised when Arcadia said she didn't know about the incantation.

"There's a road, not too far east from here. They often take convoys through there apparently, but I haven't been 20 feet outside of the mansion." Arcadia grinned.

"Better than aimlessly wondering around. Let's go there." I shrugged.

I followed Arcadia as she hopped and weaved her way between the hanging tree branches cheerfully. I simply walked through at a steady pace, inspecting the forest. Despite demons inhabiting the mansion, the forest was fully natural and pure, birds chirping and water falling off of the precipice. The road was now in viewing distance, and it was occupied.

"Get down!" I hastily whispered to Arcadia.

We ducked behind the tree log, looking at what was going on. It appeared to be a smuggling, two equal parties meeting up to do business. There was a singular Therro with one of the groups, which was being led by an anorexic, shirtless man only wearing a gown to cover his bottom half. His head was mostly shaved off, but he had a long streak of smokey grey hair, tied up into dreadlocks behind his head, which with the accumulated height of his body only stood about 5 feet and 8 inches. He had a tattoo of three wolf heads on his chest, and his voice sounded like a demonic droning of three people at once, who were all Russian.

Good ol' boy Cerberus.

A tall man walks up to Cerberus, seemingly omnipotent in his presence. He had a black trench coat similar to mine, but four pins shaped liked scout symbols joined up the torso part of his coat, and had a dark crimson red fabric on the inside of the coat, highlighting the black button up shirt he wore underneath. He had medium length, wavy black hair, which was shaved on the sides, allowing a small fringe to fall over the left side of his face. He was extremely tall, at least 6 foot and 8 inches in height. He had a scythe sheathed on his back, which was an obsidian-colored alloy, with purple murals on the inner part of the sickle, resembling an ancient Celtic symbol. The weapon appeared to have multiple mechanic layouts in it, which suggested the sickle had multiple "modes" for lack of a better term. He wore black dress pants, which complimented his shin-height pointed dress boots.