“What is that?” Amelia asked, still looking at the parasite.
“Part of Lurida Lumo,” I said. I wondered if he could control people or Reapers with them as well. I wished I’d worn a helmet. “We need to get out of here before—”
“Hello, Aella and Amelia,” the unmistakable, polite, whispery voice said.
I sighed. “Lurida Lumo shows up. Everything in this cave has great timing, you know that?”
He sat on his throne, blue and glowing, smug as ever. I tried to watch both him and the crawling parasite while staying protectively in front of Amelia.
“You have frightened my pet,” Lurida Lumo said. “He’s so lonely now with no one to talk to.”
“He’ll get over it,” I said.
“You are also attempting to take my sacrifice for a second time.”
“It was much harder this time if that’s any comfort.”
“Aella, you amaze me. Your courage is so wonderful.”
“You should see me dance.”
“I will. As soon as one of my pets brings you under my control—”
I jumped and grabbed at my neck, but there was nothing there.
Lurida Lumo tilted back his head and laughed his dry-wind laugh. “Oh, silly little Reaper, these pets only work on the Demons. I created them for that.”
I didn’t want to get drawn into a conversation, but I couldn’t let this go. “Oh, yeah? Why?”
“The Demons betrayed me. During their war. They promised me sacrifices that never appeared. So I took two of their own. You Reapers had them so frightened, they could not be bothered to attempt a rescue.” He sighed and shook his head. “Those two were mere bait. I’d intended to convert an army.”
“Sorry for your loss,” I said. “I think we’ll be going now.”
“No,” he said, “you won’t. I have done without my sacrifice for as long as I intend to. You, human, will feed my needs. And you, Reaper, will replace the Demons you slew.”
I changed my grip on the sword. “I’ll kill us both before I let that happen.”
I glanced at Amelia, who nodded.
“You may not have time,” Lurida Lumo said smugly.
Strong arms suddenly wrapped around me, and I was lifted off my feet. I heard the clank of metal and realized someone was trying to lock me in the Demon shackles again. There was no way that was going to happen, and I kicked, bit, and thrashed until I fell free of whoever grabbed me. I hit the floor and scrambled away, finally turning to confront Damato, standing there with the shackles at the ready.
I froze. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think.
“Every God needs a prophet,” Lurida Lumo said. “Mine is a poor one and not very good at his job, but he’s all I’ve got.”
“Damato,” I said at last.
He said nothing. He dropped the shackles at his feet and lowered his head as if ashamed.
Then Amelia shrieked. I followed her gaze to see a dozen giant spiders clustered around the only exit from the cave. There would be no escaping that way.
But I couldn’t believe I’d been so wrong about Damato. “How…could you?” I choked out.
He shrugged. That was all. He said nothing.
My vision grew wet and blurry—and started to turn that dangerous shade of red. If there’s anything I strongly dislike, it’s betrayal. And this was the last time.
“Aella,” Amelia said, her voice shaking. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know!” I screamed. My voice echoed around the cavern, mocking me with my own pathetic words. My vision came in and out as I fought for control. Full-on Reaper-mode might get me out alive, but not Amelia. That I knew for sure.
Amelia strode over and spun Damato to face her. “You son of a bitch. We all trusted you. How could you do this to her? To us?” And like a champion, she slapped him across the face. “That was from both of us!”
He still said nothing. But through his long hair, I now saw the blue glow of one of Lurida Lumo’s parasites affixed to the back of his skull.
The horror of what this meant turned me cold inside. He had come to rescue her, but Lurida Lumo had caught him first. And now…
I whirled toward Lurida Lumo. “You said you could only do this to Demons!”
“No, I said I had to create a special kind for Demons. Humans are infinitely simpler and easier. And as for you Reapers…”
I was alert, but he was still faster than I ever imagined. Lurida Lumo raised his hand and snapped it as if cracking a whip. Instantly, the material of his being stretched out impossibly thin, arcing across the space between us and snapping around my neck. I dropped my sword and grabbed the strand, which felt like a ribbon covered in catfish slime. The tip on the back of my neck swelled, and I knew that it was becoming one of the parasites. Tiny, needle-like sensations dug into my skin and wriggled deeper as the tendrils sought access to my brain.
I fell to my knees, gasping and struggling. The strand in my hand grew thinner until it was no bigger than a hair, far too small to grab or break. I couldn’t breathe, and I heard a voice in my head—in my mind—saying, submit, obey, accept.
Amelia screamed my name, but it was distant and thin even though she stood right next to me.
She grabbed at the bulbous thing on my neck and tried to pull it free. The tentacles bit in as if they had barbs, and it felt as though she’d end up tearing my skull out the back of my head. Submit, obey, accept, the voice continued, soothing and warm in contrast with the physical agony.
Yes, I thought. Oh, yes.
Then a jolt of pain greater than anything I’d ever felt in my life tore through my head, scorching me from ear to ear and boiling the backs of my eyeballs. I know I must’ve screamed—I couldn’t imagine enduring that in silence—but all I could hear was the other scream, the one from the voice that had previously been so soothing and calm.
The tentacles pulled free of my head and neck, not clawing to stay anchored as they’d done on the Demon but limp and floppy. It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever felt, and I knew disgusting. I collapsed face down on the rock and bone-strewn floor, and as my senses returned, I realized I was sobbing. I stopped myself at once, pushed up to my hands and knees, and looked around.
Amelia stood holding my sword. The parasite was in her other hand, but it was already turning gray and drying out. She looked as disgusted as I felt and said breathlessly, “I cut the thread. My sword wouldn’t do it, so I tried yours.”
“Good move,” I said, my voice ragged and choked. Blood ran down the back of my neck. I wiped it, stared at the red smear, then pushed myself upright and grabbed Damato. He was totally compliant as I turned him and exposed the parasite beneath his hair, its own thread trailing down his back.
I raised his chin and looked into his eyes. “Are you dead?” I asked, dreading the answer.
He nodded. In his glassy eyes, I thought I saw the tiniest flicker of regret and despair.
I turned to Lurida Lumo. “Let him go. Let him die.”
“But dead humans are so useful. At least until they start to decompose.”
Amelia, still holding my sword, cried out in rage and swung it hard at Damato. The blade severed the parasite’s thread and buried itself in Damato’s back, across his shoulder blades. He fell limp and unmoving.
Amelia sobbed and turned away. I wrenched my sword free and turned toward Lurida Lumo again. My eyes burned. My chest would barely expand, and the smell of my own blood set me on edge. “That was the last thing you’re going to do, Blue Balls.” I started across the bone-strewn floor.
He stood, but it was a slow movement, as if his squishy form couldn’t move any faster. He’d barely stepped around the edge of the throne before I got to him and swung with all my strength at his midsection. My blade cut through him and clanged hard against the stone chair, the impact knocking me back a step. I held onto my sword. Barely.
Lurida Lumo’s upper body slid off his hips and hit the floor with a wet splat. It lay there and immediately be
gan crumbling as it dried. His legs and hips stayed where they were, and the flat cross-section began to pulse and bubble until a large, knobbish protrusion rose from it. He was regrowing himself like a worm sliced in half.
I stared as it resolved into a torso from which additional bulges began to form a head and two arms. The legs shifted position for balance, and in that instant, I saw something I’d totally missed before. Just like the parasites, Lurida Lumo had a thin, hair-like blue cord stretching from one heel into the darkness of the cavern behind the throne.
I didn’t think to ponder the implications of this and instead charged forward and cut the cord with one blow.
The half-regrown Lurida Lumo collapsed atop the remains of his earlier body, and the cavern rang with a loud, deep roar of pain, a roar that could not possibly have come from the human-sized mouth of the soggy being dying before me.
And the sound didn’t only scare us. The spiders fled for the shadows, leaving the way clear to escape.
Amelia ran over to me. “Whatever that was, I think it’s angry. We should go.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, and we turned to pick our way across the bone-strewn floor, past the dead spiders and the still weakly flopping remains of the male Demon. I didn’t look at Damato; whatever goodbyes I wanted to say would be meaningless now.
We had reached the exit when something crashed into the rock behind and above us.
If we hadn’t turned, a lot might’ve been different. But we did, both of us, and what we saw froze us in our tracks.
Something big and dark pushed its way up from the depths behind the throne. It had dozens of glowing blue tendrils protruding from its head like the whiskers on a catfish. But it was gray and covered in gleaming smooth flesh, and a clawed foot with toes bigger than I was slammed down and dug into the rock for purchase.
Amelia said shakily, “Is that—?”
“Lurida Lumo,” I said. “The real one.” Whatever we’d seen, whatever had spoken to us and mocked us, was just a lure, a false front for this giant, enormous being that was now emerging from the depths into the cavern.
A voice louder than any I’d ever heard before boomed forth one word.
“AELLA!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The massive head pushed the heavy throne aside like it was a toy. A mouth fifteen feet wide and filled with irregular teeth opened to emit my name. I’d never seen anything like this, never even heard about anything like it, and certainly had no clue what to do when faced with it.
“Get out of here,” I said to Amelia. “Seriously.”
She clutched her sword with both hands and with shaky yet admirable courage said, “I’m not just running away and leaving you.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going to get back to the village, get everyone together, and tell them to bring anything with a sharp point.”
“What about you?” Concern and fear in her voice. What a creature she was!
“I’m going to try to stall it.”
She looked at me.
“I can be really charming,” I added.
There was nothing else to say, so she turned and ran from the cavern. I turned to face the great being that now seemed to have dragged half his monumental form into the open, the blue glow now coming from a ring of tentacles around its barn-sized mouth. Spines along its back shattered stalactites into razor-sharp debris that rolled down its sides like beads of water.
I wasn’t exactly scared, just mainly awed. I’d never seen anything alive that was this big let alone apparently intelligent. And verbal. I couldn’t meet both of its widely-spaced, black eyes at once, so I chose the left and glared at it.
“It took me years to master the skill of creating a human form with that tentacle,” the big voice said slowly and with great deliberation. “Years. I started during the war between Reapers and Demons.”
“Maybe you should’ve picked a different hobby,” I said. Never had a sword seemed less useful than it did right then. I wondered if any of my mother’s magic would…
He pushed forward, another great lunge that brought more rock down around me. I ducked under my shield, and heavy stones clanged off the metal. When they stopped, I peeked out again. Lurida Lumo loomed directly over me, so close that when he spoke, I felt his breath.
“Once, I roamed this land, but the Demons drove me underground,” he boomed. “I had only the spiders for company. We got along famously; they caught food and ate their fill, and I subsisted quite nicely on what they left. We have…” he chuckled, and I felt the ripples in my chest, “different but complimentary tastes. I prefer the bone marrow and skin. They prefer the internal organs.”
“That’s gross,” I said.
“It is life. We all consume something.”
“You’re done consuming village sacrifices.” I found it surprisingly easy to be brave when faced with such a ludicrously overwhelming foe. Maybe that was my magical power: stupid optimism.
“And you…tiny Aella…will stop me?”
“Yeah, that reminds me. How do you know my name?”
“As I said, I was not always an enemy of the Demons. Once, we were allies. Ganesh betrayed me.”
“He’s good at that sort of thing. He betrayed me too. That should make us allies.”
“There are more than two sides to these things, Aella. You and I are forever doomed to oppose each other…at least until only one of us is left.”
“You sure? What about, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ and all that?”
The enormous mouth spread wide in a smile that could engulf two dozen Reapers, their horses, and possibly all their bad habits.
“Never mind.”
My tactical training did me no good in this situation. How do I outmaneuver something as big as one of the castle towers? How could I possibly overpower it? There was no way. That left outsmarting it, but that seemed impossible as well.
Then I had an idea.
It was not my best idea certainly. And if it failed, there’d be no evidence that I even tried, which meant I wouldn’t go down in the great Reaper book of lost causes, which chronicled the brave but futile exploits of Reapers throughout history. But at the moment, it was all I had, and I sensed I didn’t have time to come up with something else.
I took a step toward Lurida Lumo. Thankfully, my voice didn’t shake when I said, “So there’s no point in me resisting you, is there?”
“None at all,” the creature rumbled. The smell of its breath was like damp mold.
I moved closer. “Okay, then. You win.”
The great head tilted, puzzled. The whisker that had grown his human avatar hung limp, and the severed end dripped bluish fluid onto the rocks.
I was walking now, keeping my face turned toward him, hoping I didn’t trip over a bone. I’d need speed for the last few steps, but I didn’t want to tip my hand too early. “I give up. There’s no point in fighting to lose.”
“That doesn’t sound like a Reaper.”
“If you know anything about me, you know I’m not typical.” I began to trot.
“But Reapers fight to the end.”
“Only if there’s a chance of victory.” I was running now.
Lurida Lumo looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, which I possibly had. I tossed my shield aside, sprinted over the last bit, and then jumped. I curled as much as I could to get maximum distance, closed my eyes tight, and sailed up past those enormous teeth and into his gigantic mouth. I took a deep breath and straightened out as my momentum carried me head-first down his throat.
For such an enormous creature, its gullet was barely big enough to admit me. I wonder if it expanded during actual feeding. It was also scalding hot, slick with slime and juices, and smelled worse than my training underwear on wash day. I tried not to throw up, which would have been almost too ironic for words.
I knew from my endless biology classes that Reapers, humans, and most large animals had a kind of valve that let food into the stomach and kept the caustic d
igestive juices from getting out. When I felt it ahead of me, all spongy and wrinkled, I spread my feet and stopped my descent. Then I turned and crawled back up the thing’s throat, bracing my back against one side of the tube and using my legs to propel me.
What did this feel like to Lurida Lumo? I wondered. Was he even aware of me? If something as proportionally smaller jumped down my own throat, what would I do?
The sensation of touching all this soft, warm, damp inner flesh was as disgusting as it sounds. Everything around me moved and pulsed as the creature tried to expel me. Even with my Reaper boots, I slipped and slid. I heard and felt a massive cough followed by what could only be a gag. Now I knew what it felt like to be a chicken bone. I clung desperately as an enormous spasm rocked his body. Another spasm jerked us both, so I switched my grip from fingers to claws and spread my feet wide to keep from going further down. Then it came: a third spasm immediately followed by a wash of fluid so vile I could smell it before it engulfed my feet, my legs, my torso. I lost my grip entirely this time, spiraling back down his throat in a river of…yuck. I was tumbling head over heels toward doom faster than I thought. Eyes closed, breath held, I had to trust my Reaper instincts as I tossed the sword I’d been given in what I hoped was the direction of down. If I’d gauged it right the sword would stick horizontally and give me a place to land.
And victory! A small one but a victory nonetheless. I took a deep breath as the last of the nastiest fluid in the creator’s realm cleared my head, and my toes nested in the groove of Felicia’s well-made sword. I wrenched my sword free and began to climb again.
At last, I reached the place where the windpipe and esophagus diverged. Feeling my way, I crawled into the opening of the airway. Luckily for my plan, it was no bigger than the esophagus. I jabbed my sword into it for purchase then again wedged my back and feet against opposite sides. I didn’t quite block the flow of air, but I got most of it.
I didn’t think it would take long, and I was right.
I’ve choked on things before—the Demons used to make me eat things they knew would choke me and then laugh at my distress—so I had no trouble envisioning what was happening. The great beast was thrashing around in a wild effort to dislodge me. But with the sword buried in his flesh and my hands and knees holding it and me in place, there was nothing he could do.
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