Without further delay, she turned to the door of the treehouse, opened it, and ducked inside.
3 - Elder
The interior smelled like cinnamon and sugar and wildflowers all mixed together.
The room was tidy and cozy with a low ceiling and a green rug on the floor. Two very small wooden couches with heavily stuffed blood-red cushions were arranged in an L pattern around the rug with a small table positioned at the corner where they met, and a wooden rocking chair that looked exactly like the one she’d seen in the gazebo, sitting in the other corner.
A little old lady reclined in the chair.
She was very small, no larger than your average 10 year old child. She had snow-white hair and full lips that seemed too large for her face. She wore a long-sleeved button-up shirt, blue with white stripes, and her spindly legs emerged from bright red shorts that stopped a little above her knees.
Her face was full of surprise as she stared up at Camilla. She had the look of someone who had just been roused from a deep slumber.
“Who in the devil are you?” the woman said, speaking very good Anglikt.
Camilla started to answer, and then hesitated. What could she say? She certainly couldn’t admit to being a Countess.
I’ll just change the subject, she thought. Might as well get to the point of this anyway.
“I was sent here,” she said. “By the Great Serpent, Apep.”
The little woman blinked. Then her face split into a wide grin, and she laughed long and hard, her eyes shining with absolute delight.
Finally, when she ran out of breath, she spoke: “Apep you say? I’ve been dreaming that old devil might send someone soon. It looks like he took the trouble to bloody you up first… Did he do it to make you scrumptious for me?”
Camilla felt her face heat up. Scrumptious? Was the old crone making sport?
Camilla fought off a sudden spasm of temper and said, “I’m bleeding because I was attacked. By a flock of birds.”
“Oh dear… Unfortunate but not surprising. I’ve found that birds are sometimes a touch unfriendly when it comes to strangers, haven’t you?”
Camilla didn’t say anything.
The little woman stood. “You should take a seat, let me have a look at those wounds. Would you like some of my special tea? It’ll help with the pain.”
Camilla hesitated. “Actually, as I stated, I’m here on business.”
“Business can wait. Sit down, sit down, you darling little pineapple.” The woman pulled the rocking chair out into the middle of the floor and gestured towards it. “Rest a moment here with me, and I’ll make you all better.”
Pineapple?
Camilla was more than a little bit offended by the woman’s informal manner, but it seemed like sitting wouldn’t be such a bad idea, what with all the aches and pains and everything else.
“Okay,” she said, walking over to the chair. “I suppose I can take a moment or two.”
The seat was comfortable enough, though the wound on her buttock pained her, forcing her to lean to one side.
She had no idea why the birds had attacked her. Maybe another chaos storm? Out here in Atzgythe, the whole landscape was essentially a chaos storm waiting to happen, and she’d been battling nerves and fear before it happened—a state of mind that was known to trigger all sorts of bad luck in places like this.
The little woman walked over and handed her a small porcelain cup. It didn’t seem to be warm. Camilla sniffed it, and picked up on a mild flowery aroma that she couldn’t quite place.
“Take a sip, girl,” said the old lady. “It’ll make you feel much better. I promise.”
Camilla eyed the woman, who was smiling sweetly.
She brought the cup to her lips and sipped. The liquid was sweet and refreshing, and very different than any tea she’d tried before.
She glanced up at the old lady, and said, “Thank you very much.”
“It’s my pleasure,” replied the woman as she rolled up Camilla’s sleeve and looked at the wound on her arm. “So you say the birds did this?”
“Yes. A whole bunch of them attacked me. I thought they were going to knock me off the bridge.”
“Vicious little peckers is what they are.”
“What?”
“Little devils, the birds. They’ll happily peck a young girl’s eyes out, given half a chance.”
“I think they were actually trying to kill me. It was as if they’d been sent after me by someone.”
“Yes, well, the sky belongs to the things of the sky, and the land belongs to the things of the land. That’s what old Grampy Meepus always taught me when I was a little one.”
“Grampy who?”
The little woman didn’t respond, and she didn’t do anything to help Camilla’s arm wound either, just studied it with an odd and mildly unsavory look of smiling fascination on her face. Then she walked around behind Camilla and started fiddling with her hair. “You’re bleeding back here too. So much blood.”
“They hit me from every direction,” said Camilla.
“Yes, looks that way. It was a hell of a fuck job.”
“A what?”
“A fuck job,” said the little woman, laughing. “It’s kind of a naughty word. You’ve probably never heard it before.”
“I’ve heard it.”
“Well good then. But have you ever done it?”
Camilla felt her cheeks heating up. “That’s none of your business.”
The little woman cackled, and continued fiddling around with Camilla’s hair.
They passed a few moments in silence.
Camilla began to wonder why was she still sitting here? Why hadn’t she stormed out? This woman was rude, and perhaps even crazy.
I’m here on business, she thought. I should be forcing this woman to show me… something…
Yes, naturally. But what? What is she supposed to show?
What am I here to take?
Camilla didn’t know. That knowledge, for whatever reason, hadn’t been planted in her mind.
The woman leaned in closer, started breathing onto the back of her head. Then something warm and soft began to press—fleeting, tender touches—on her wounded flesh. It felt quite nice.
“What’s that?” asked Camilla.
The lady didn’t respond, but the wet, warm dabs continued, and a tingling sensation began to spread over her scalp; and over her ears; and, eventually, to her cheeks.
She opened her mouth to speak, but her lips wouldn’t work right, and her vocal cords only managed to produce a dry rattling hiss. So she tried again, with even more feeble results.
The tingling sensation was spreading fast, down her neck, to her chest and her stomach. She stood and tried to lunge away, but her legs were like rubber and she fell, face-first.
Her nose crunched with the impact, and her lips slammed into her teeth, but there was no pain.
She tried to scream but her mouth wouldn’t even open. Her cheeks just inflated with useless air from her lungs and she choked a little.
Behind her, the old lady cackled again.
Camilla attempted to drag herself away, but her arms wouldn’t respond to the commands from her mind.
Her legs still worked. A little. But she only managed to push herself a few feet before the tingling spread down past her hips, rendering her totally immobile.
She lay there helpless, struggling to breathe through a nose filled with blood.
Almost all the sensation in her skin was gone, but there was still enough left so that she felt it when the old lady seized her by the calves and flipped her over.
The woman’s face was different now; she had become some sort of monster—a bug-eyed thing with a long fluted beak.
She forced Camilla’s mouth open, and a long slender tongue, covered in black spines, dangled from the beak. Beads of pale liquid, thick like mucus, formed in several places on the tongue and ran down the length of it, eventually joining up with each other at the end, and dri
pping down into Camilla’s mouth.
She felt a warmth and there was a vague sense of slimy texture as the stuff slid down her throat, but the sensations were rather dim, and there was no taste at all, which she supposed was a blessing—the taste, she assumed, would’ve almost certainly made her vomit, and if she were to vomit under the current circumstances, she would most likely choke to death.
She tried to spit it out but her tongue wouldn’t work. She tried to scream again, but couldn’t even manage a hiss this time.
The only things that still seemed to work were her eyelids, and she used them to blink away the tears that had welled up, blurring her vision.
The gruesome tongue went back into the beak, and the old lady let out another long peal of laughter, a mostly human sound which seemed entirely out of place coming from the monstrous visage.
4 - Hive
The old lady left her for a bit, and then came back with several others just like her, all old, all small like children. Some had bug faces, some didn’t, but Camilla felt sure they were all of the same kind, and were probably capable of manifesting either sort of face if they wanted.
Together, they lifted her and carried her away to one of the other houses, which was full of spider webs and old furniture; clearly unoccupied.
They placed her atop a long wooden table. Then they left her for a time, to lay helpless and immobile in the dark little hovel, unable to do anything but think doomed thoughts.
During those lonely minutes she realized that the psychic buzzing of the serpent in her mind had vanished completely. She couldn't sense it at all.
I haven't felt it once since I first laid eyes on the old lady, she realized. Which had to be significant. The moment she walked into the treehouse, the Serpent's voice had left her entirely.
He's abandoned me here, she thought. And even though she had desperately wanted to be free of Apep's control, the feeling of being abandoned under these circumstances was much worse.
The whole time, as she walked into Atzgythe, she'd been full of a certainty that at least there was some purpose to what she was doing. It had always been totally clear in her mind that she was sent here to get something—she was meant to fetch some prize and bring it back, which, she now realized, was a more comforting frame of mind, because it suggested strongly that she was intended to survive her time in this place.
It had always been clear to her that she might die eventually from the effects of the venom, but if The Great Father wanted her to come back, then that gave her a little bit of breathing room—at the very least she should be able to count on a few more days of life. But now it seemed that maybe this wasn't true. Maybe the whole idea that she'd been sent to fetch something had been some lie planted in her mind by Apep to make her more compliant, or maybe the Serpent's plan had somehow gone horribly wrong.
- - -
The first visit was late that evening just before dark.
Two of them came the first time. One, a man, stood over her, still in human form, caressing her hair, smiling down at her.
He had horrible buck teeth that hung out over the top of his mouth, like a rodent.
The other, a woman, had shifted into her buglike countenance—her pitch black eyes bulged grotesquely and the flutelike proboscis had fully replaced her mouth. She had disrobed, revealing a set of sagging wrinkled breasts and a withered, hairless pubic mound, which was the only reason Camilla was able to determine the sex. The bug-woman was standing beside Camilla, holding a singled-edged knife with a short, narrow blade. She made a quick, shallow cut on Camilla's arm, and then sent out the horrible black tongue to taste at the blood that welled up.
Camilla watched in helpless horror for the next few minutes, as the woman exhausted the blood supply from the initial cut, and made a few more. Then she offered the knife to the man. He took it, and bent down to feed while the woman stepped back a few paces and began to caress herself in a lewd fashion, swaying slightly from side to side as she did so, apparently intoxicated.
Camilla was so overwhelmed by the horror of what she was experiencing that she would've gladly welcomed death at that moment. Anything to escape this terrible room. And the lack of physical pain didn't alleviate the horror in the slightest. Rather, if anything, it made the experience worse because it served as the starkest possible reminder of how completely helpless she was.
Every time the knife came down, she would watch her skin split open, watch as the wound produced blood, watch as the monsters gleefully lapped it up. And all the while she couldn't move her arm, couldn't flinch with pain, couldn't open her mouth to cry out.
She was a spectator rather than a participant. It was as if she had died, and her soul had gotten stuck in the process of leaving her body.
When the man finished feeding, he rose up from Camilla's arm, and she saw that his face had transformed as well. He had an especially long proboscis and a set of gray colored antennae with tufts at the end emerged from the top of his head.
He studied Camilla for a moment, black tongue shooting out occasionally, nearly a foot long at its full extension. Then he went over to the woman, embraced her roughly, and pushed her against the wall. She reached down, unfastened his belt, and unbuttoned his trousers.
A moment later, something burst out of the man's open fly. Something that was not a normal human penis. It was long and black and slimy, with joints in it like a finger, and a wicked backward-facing hook at the tip. The thing thrashed wildly in the woman's hands, pressing eagerly against her bare stomach, and then it started sliding lower down, as if independently intelligent, working its way inexorably towards the opening between the woman's legs.
Camilla would've turned her head if it were possible. Instead, she did the only thing she could do, and closed her eyes, waiting for it to be over.
She heard strange calls as the two creatures, drunk on her blood, made love—hissing sounds and long strings of clicks with the occasional vaguely human moan mixed in. And at the end, the room was filled with an acrid perfume, like cucumber juice mixed with ammonia.
Camilla didn't open her eyes again until she heard the door close behind them as they departed.
5 - Affliction
The same act was repeated again and again with different couples all through the night. Most of the time Camilla tried not to watch. Sometimes—because there was no actual sensation at all—she even managed to sleep and escape the horror of her reality.
At some point, after many hours, they were finally done, and they left her under the supervision of a single old man.
He sometimes sat in the corner, and at other times he would come over and feed on her, getting drunker and drunker with each drop of her blood that he consumed.
“You're our saving grace," he slurred at one point. "Didya know that? We’re all so old… Truth is, we can’t even make our parts work most of the time.” He grabbed at his crotch. “I’m talking about our grown up parts, if you get my drift… But your blood makes all the difference in the world in that department. Do ya understand me, you little cutie? Your blood has saved a whole race of people.”
She stared back at him helplessly, unable to even make a facial expression in response.
He laughed a little bit, then made another cut on her thigh and lapped at the drops that welled up. “Makes me feel real nice to drink your blood,” he said. “Makes me feel alive again.”
By this point her arms and legs were a mess. There were so many cuts it was hard to see her bare skin in places. She knew she must've lost a good amount of blood, but with cuts so small it couldn't be a dangerous amount.
They could keep me alive like this for years, she thought.
Maybe that was actually the plan. If this whole thing was some sort of mating ritual, and if her blood worked as an aphrodisiac for these things, then it would make sense for them to keep her around.
Earlier, one of them had told her that she was the promised one; the one they'd been awaiting for centuries.
It seemed to
Camilla that The Great Father had made some sort of deal with these creatures, maybe a long time ago, and had sent her as payment on the promise.
- - -
The lone guard kept feeding and intoxicating himself until he finally got to the point where she couldn't understand what he was saying, which was no great loss since most of what he said was either nonsense or terrifying.
After that he spent a good portion of the night weaving and staggering around the room, mumbling things to himself. And for Camilla the sound of his voice sort of faded into the background. She still heard it, but in the same way that she heard crickets chirping outside.
Then, at some point well after midnight, he suddenly made an awful, pained sound—a long, slow, pitiful groan. She glanced his way and saw that his eyes were bloodshot, his face green. And he was shivering all over, like someone suffering with a terrible fever.
He met her eyes, and she saw panic in his expression. Then he said something she couldn't decipher, and tried to stand up, but he lost his balance and collapsed against the wall, slamming his head with a loud bang.
After that he just lay there. His eyes had rolled back up into his head and his mouth was hanging open, tongue protruding slightly. It looked as if he was having trouble breathing.
He had the first seizure about five minutes later. It was violent and horrible. His feet beat against the ground like someone playing the drums and his head slammed again and again into the wall behind him. A short time after it ended, he vomited red—her blood she supposed. It covered his face, and his neck, and wetted the whole front of his shirt.
After that he didn't do much else. He just lay there, twitching occasionally, his breathing so shallow it might as well have been nonexistent.
She tried to understand what she'd just seen. Had he drank too much from her and accidentally poisoned himself in the same way someone drinking alcohol might?
Or was his difficulty a result of the fall? He had hit his head very hard. Maybe that caused brain damage, and that led to the seizures.
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