Midnight
Bane stood over the ledge of the quarry, staring through the darkness into the rippling surface tension of the waters below.
He held up Tannin's severed head by the deadlocked mane of its scaly head. A long time, days now, he considered skinning the creature's head, and keeping its skull as a trophy... but trophies were not his way. More so, the weight of his bone mask, the faceplate of his former self, was a reminder of what he really was, or at least what he used to be.
He lobbed the monster's head overhand, and watched it soar through the air a moment before its plummet into the quarry. There was no satisfactory splash, the torrent of the night's storm masking any sound that may have been. He finished the job, having Tannin's bloated body by its tail with both hands, up and over the edge of the ledge.
He saw the splash, and watched the monster's headless body sink into the waters.
It's dead.
Bane nodded in agreement with the faint memory of Jonathan Walker's memories, the invasive surviving portion of the dead hunter that sometimes haunted him whether he needed it, or not.
...but it should be floating. Something's wrong.
"Something is wrong." Bane said aloud, mirroring the memory in agreement.
Bane stood still a moment, his hair heavy and matted to his head, and shoulders. Lightning crackled through the blanket clouded midnight sky, and thunder rumbled in a low, echoing growl.
It was time to return to the ruins.
...it was time, so why was he following the impulse, step after heavy step down the quarry trail?
Bane grumbled a complaint to himself, as he continued into the quarry.
✟ ☧ ✟
Bane was not a fan of water, but especially a body where he could not see the bottom.
He could swim, of course.
Jonathan's memories of swimming, all of the pools, and ponds, as fresh in his head to recall as the day they happened.
Jonathan was a strong boy, and a good swimmer, and Bane was stronger than that, but Bane was as dense as he was muscular. His buoyancy was negligible, and so he avoided deep water when, and where he could, lest he should sink as would any heavy thing.
But he could hear that place. Ther terrible lying songs that vibrated out from inside it. It was a piece of the other place, the place where he was born to slavery, in bondage to the Dead God. He never knew such a place could exist, neither while he lurked along her twisted branches, nor when he first opened his eyes to the world of man.
What was something like this doing in his world?
Bane knelt and touched the waters. They were cool, but they were not as cold as they should be. The rain itself was cold; the night air and most of the days in Driftwood were cold now... but these waters were cool. They were comfortable.
Too comfortable.
Bane stepped into the water, wading in until he was in up to his chest.
Bane felt something brush - something rush - past his leg. It was large, heavy, and very much alive. (Run.)
Bane ignored the memory of fear. Fear was not his, it was the dead boy's. Fear did not belong to the creature he was, and though he no longer knew where he dead boy ended, and he began, he remembered his own once existence, the fearless charge against the outlaw. Even if it cost him his life once, here he was. Alive.
Bane continued through the cool waters, hesitating only a moment as the waters touched his throat just below his mask. His guns would prove useless right now, and in the water there was no way to move with speed enough to defend himself, or destroy anything that attacked him - were anything to attack him - and though he could fight through the fear easily enough, there was no -
Bane rose out of the water with enough force to knock the wind from him, its scaled hide muscular beneath his body. As he slid down the length of its black scales, he unsheathed his blades and buried them to the hilt in the beast, and stopped his fall.
(Serpent.)
He ignored the memory, dangling from its back, and getting his left leg up and over its back. Bane struggled to recover his breathing, climbing up the length of its broad scale hide.
The serpent stiffened, plummeting back toward the water. Bane braced for the splashdown when it shifted without warning and Bane found himself rushing toward the water with the beast atop him.
✟ ☧ ✟
Darkness, air escaping around him in white water he could not see, in bubbles of precious breath he could not breathe, weight he could not lift crashing down on him.
His blades were still in his tight grip.
He may die, but not with his mouth open. Not screaming, not drowning, and not trying to escape. He was beneath it, and it rolled, and for a precious moment he was above water. Above water, racing away from where he wanted to be, away from the entrance, away from the mouth of that place.
Bane pulled a blade free, dangling a moment in the rushing water, and pulled himself forward, thrusting his blade up, and into its flesh. He repeated in slow succession, climbing through the rush of water up its thick armor of black scales.
He needed air. He needed it to surface again.
...or. He needed it to stop.
Bane felt his blade suddenly stop against something hard, something dense, but not as hard as rock, or steel.
Bane sheathed his dagger, and drew his pistol. He pressed the muzzle against its head.
Bane pulled the trigger.
No blast. No explosive recoil. No force. He squeezed the trigger again, and again. Useless fucking weapon. At least the blades never jammed, at least the -
✟ ☧ ✟
The world rang around him in a high pitched squeal.
Water, as Bane discovered, amidst its numerous unpleasant traits, had qualities he disliked. For all the good it was for, for thirst, and life, it was infinitely more destructive than he.
Sound, for instance. The sound of his pistol - and how he was sorry he fired it - above water was loud. It fired large metal slugs, and made a thunderous sound.
Below the water, it was a lot louder.
It worked, though.
The serpent stopped moving. Bane burst through the surface of the water, struggling to keep his booted feet on the corpsed flesh of now dead serpent.
Air.
Bane spat out a mouthful olf water, and inhaled deeply, fixing his mask back over his
Victory, at any cost.
Bane felt something brush against his calf.
Shit.
✟ ☧ ✟
(...Nadjia. you said a bad word. <TK>)
Bane felt burning fire crawling from his ankle, up his calf, and into his knee. There was no time to grunt, no time to scream- not that he was going to scream for this thing - no time to for anything.
Well, there was time for one thing.
Since it insisted on clamping its venomous maw over his leg, he obliged it a long blade in each its eyes. Easy enough a battle, except for the teeth lodged in his calf.
It was smaller than the last. Smaller being relative to the difference between a Juniper and a Douglas fir.
Bane sat on the carcass of the larger dead serpent, and pulled his blades from its eyes. He marveled a moment as its blood, black in the near pitch darkness around him, flowed from its sockets into the water.
He sheathed his blades, and clamped his hands on its upper, and lower mouth, prying them apart. Bane winced as he pulled its dagger fangs free from his calf.
If only he had light. Or fire. Or anything by which he could see.
He held the smaller serpent up as the burning crawled up from his knee to his thigh.
It was half as large as the first, but heavy, its diamond shaped head bleeding over his gloved hands as its muscles slowly pulsed. It was a snake. A common snake - not common in its size, but common enough. He closed his eyes, and sifted through anything he could find in Jonathan's memory of snakes. Garter snakes, King snakes, rattlesnakes - not unheard of in Driftwood, but rare - and something called a trouser snake.
Bane narrowed his eyes. What prepubescent stupidity was this "trouser snake"?
These were water moccasins. Venomous.
(...trouser snake.)
Bane heard the memories of laughter in a place Jonathan called advanced education.
Snakes were no laughing matter.
In his previous incarnation as Yan'shuf, he knew a snake, a serpent as much as any, if not for her arms, and legs, the same as all the Emim.
"Nakhash." Bane tossed the serpent into the water, and wondered what more perils waited beneath its surface.
He smelled her before he heard her. Bane hobbled to his feet. Its massive head - her large head - rose from the water, her yellow unblibking eyes staring at him, into the eyelets of his mask.
"Ashasathaan ukul naazal undul af abalasz, Yanshuf."
She smelled of mold, and mildew, the scent permeating his nostrils even beneath his mask. "Had you ever the favor for Yan'ahuf, it is a long dead thing."
"S'shazth, Yan'shuf?" her tongue flicked out past her scaled maw of teeth as she titled her head in the way all Emim - and he - when strategizing a kill.
"Yan'shuf is dead."
"...unztsa'szhil." Her shoulders surfaced as she lowered her large head on that long neck. He could see the knuckles of her clawed hands just above the surface.
Bane drew his blades free again, fighting the weakness in his limbs now, in his hands, so that he would not drop the daggers into the water. "As will you be, a dead thing."
Nakhash stared with her unblinking yellow eyes, her tongue flicking the air faster, and faster.
The venom was in him and he knew it. Anyone else would be dead already.
Not him.
He would suffer for days, even weeks, maybe... but if he attempted to fight her here in the water, with the fire in his veins, there was no certainty he could win.
He knew it.
He was certain she knew it, too.
Nakhash was out of the water, springing into the air above it, her mouth a wide open, her jaws unhinged.
Bane fell back into the water as Nakhash sailed overhead, arcing her long neck around.
Her jaws snapped shut, missing him.
Nakhash writhed in the air, twisting her abominable serpentine body, her long arms, and legs, talons, twisting on one-hundred-eighty degrees as she righted herself around, talons drawn out.
Bane surfaced above the still waters, dizzied and unable to tread the surface too much longer.
She was nowhere in sight.
Shit.
Such useless words for men, but such meaning, and oh, how they applied. The strange wonders of such primitive people, whose weak tongue, whose weak flesh could not survive the spoken word of his birth kind... but they had words.
For everything.
Except this.
Bane vomited into his mask, the bile running down his face and throat.
The venom.
Nakhash rose out of the water, her nose pressed to his mask. Her tongue rolled out in a languid, sloppy flick, and down Bane's bone mask from the eyelet to its base.
Bane felt her talons clench over his thighs, her powerful claws gripping his arms. She was larger than he was as Emim, but not near the size of Tannin.
Bane drew his head back away from her face and thrust it forward smashing his bone mask into her nose. Nakhash loosed her grip on him, and Bane tore his arms from her clawed hands, grasping her arms. He pulled her close again, and smashed his mask into her face again, and again.
Her skull was no less hard as his mask, and he would do little damage... but this was not about what hurt her.
Nakhash hissed, opening her jaws wide, her hypodermic fangs unfolding. Bane drew away, but she had the advantage, and she struck.
Bane reached into her maw and grasped one of her fangs in both hands, and pulled it to the side. He felt it crack. Bane pulled again, and the hollow tooth shattered in a spray of blood and venom. Nakhash released a shriek, twisting her over large head to the side. Bane felt her remaining fang slide along the surface of his mask, reverberating as it scored a deep line down its side.
Bane dropped her shattered fang, and caught her solitary fang as it slid toward his throat.
✟ ☧ ✟
David sat at his bedside thumbing through the pages of one of his father's journals.
His attention perked away from his reading, eyes now focused on the bedroom door. David rolled his eyes. "Come in, Karen."
The doorknob turned with a slow creak, and then door opened. Karen crept in tip-toing into the room.
"Karen." David sighed, running his fingers through his hair. "I can see you."
"No you can't."
David took a deep breathe, and exhaled. ""Yes, I can."
Karen narrowed her eyes. "You should run."
"Fine! I'll run."
Karen crouched. "You can't."
"We're not doing this right now." David picked up his father's journal.
"You can't. David."
David shut the journal, closing his eyes a moment. He opened his eyes to see Karen still crouched where she was. "Why, Karen? Why can't I run?"
"Because, David. You're being hunted."
David laughed, despite himself. "No, Karen. We're not doing Muldoon and the raptor right now."
Karen's shoulders slumped. "What's wrong David? You've been holed up in here for days now."
"I've been reading Clay's journals."
Karen's eyes took a new shine. "Anything interesting?"
"Yeah. A lot, actually." David opened the journal again, and pulled out a dusty photograph, and flipped it over to show Karen.
She stared at the photograph, a younger boy, and girl sharing a moment's kiss, an instance captured and frozen in time.
"That's Jonathan Walker."
"I've never seen him before." Karen's voice was a whisper, and she was there next to David, her head on his shoulder.
"Me, neither. At least not that I can remember." David absently touched a small scar over the left side of his face, just under his eyebrow. "Mom, and dad didn't even have photos of him up in the house."
"Why?"
"I don't know. Maybe painful?"
"What do the journals say?"
David shook his head. "They don't say anything. They're missing pages."
"Why would someone take pages out? These are supposed to be the answers. These are supposed to help us when we lose our way or need answers."
"I don't know, Karen. I have more questions than I do answers, now."
Karen tackled David from the side, knocking the journal onto the floor. David yelped in surprise, struggling under Karen's strong assault.
"Stop it!"
Karen increased her playful assault. "No! Tell me I'm a clever girl! Say, 'Clever girl!' to me!"
"Karen, no! No raptors!"
✟ ☧ ✟
Bane stood over her at the shore of the adit, her broken limbs, her broken back, her last remaining fang in his grip. Ragged pieces of flesh hung from its root, the unbroken syringe of a tooth smeared in her wretched blood. "You should have stayed with the dead god, and the mother tree."
"Nakhthash naan thaath. Yhafaan yhagh."
"The price of freedom here is death for you."
Bane drew the pistol from his right hip. It was empty. He holstered it, and drew the pistol from his left hip. "We let fate decide. My gun. Wet. If not one shot fires, you live whatever remaining life your crippled body allows. Otherwise, you die. I fire once. Nothing, and you live."
Bane knelt, and pressed the muzzle to her bleeding face, and squeezed the trigger. The rewarding spray of blood, brain, and bone sprayed against the black glass adit.
"Death, then."
Bane stood, and kicked the broken body of the earthbound Emim into the waters with the rest of her dead ilk, turned and entered the forboding halls of the angelic crypt.