by T. Wyse
He skidded to a halt on the earth, swiveling to face the monsters reared tail. Feet catching the line, he launched upwards again with a helping hoist, just in time to avoid the barbed whips striking at him. They tasted his naked arm lightly, and he marked the base of the tail where they jutted forth, silvered sand pouring out of the gash.
Two of the three stalks went after him once more, and the sound of the whipping ends cut through the air in synchronicity.
He leapt out of the way, clambering onto the creature’s back. Two of the longer tendrils reaching for his form were caught by the tail, severing them into silver dust. The thing screamed in rage, trembling in place.
The plates along Cruelty’s back betrayed no weakness and muted the sense of the earth below. He struggled to slip back into the rhythm of his footfalls against the shriek of the rocky plates as they gyrated and squirmed. It sent the whips again, and he met them all in glancing chastisement with the blade. The fangs struck once more, in careful rotation with the tail, and he chased them away with his sting.
He tumbled from its back, slipping under another volley of attacks, and made a fleeting attack at one of the sprouting stalks towards its front before returning to its side.
A mistake, but he focused on his juggling feet; on the earth below. For each wound stabbed into the stalk source, another pair of limbs sprouted. The renewed limbs bore toughened scales wrapping around them, and the blooming tendrils sported hooked and longer daggers.
The trembling, squirming thing paused a moment and let out shrill giggle, whipping its new limbs in the air and spinning them like some bulbous peacock on parade. Kechua struck at the incoming whips but misread their intention. Instead of aiming at him, they joyously severed its own eyes and fanged stalks. More limbs bubbled and sprang forward in the gushing, silver-sanded hail.
Ten sets of the renewed dagger maws descended on Kechua, his whipping tail joining in the careless rain. No weakness at the front or back. He leapt onto the shifting plates once more and tapped anew, dodging the ever-increasing volleys of blades and teeth.
He tapped back and forth, feeling the jingling of the net but focusing on the muscular movement below the shrieking plates. He danced between the blades darkening the sky, blocking out the swift glances of those he tried to protect.
Fine, he resolved, and began a new dance.
Leaping within the rhythm of the plates and winding, thrashing limbs, he landed, slipping prone and digging the knife between the gyrating plates. He felt the world inside the thing—soft, malleable; churning with life and movement.
The plates shifted again, and the knife shot out of the arena, clattering somewhere against stone. No time to mourn its loss, he leapt again, so enveloped by the song of the beast that he ran on the tips of the sticky whips, only to dodge out of the clasping jaws.
He landed again on its back, a wall of mouths surrounding him, blocking all vision of the world outside. The whipping blades peered over the back, and in that moment, the creature billowed with laughter.
It flung jaws, one by one, then two by two. When those missed, it sent the bladed whips, its laughter inflating it more and more.
Kechua laughed and a new dance became infected by the desperation of the moment. He stomped hard at the shell beneath, and the shifting muscle echoed within, the very electricity of its thoughts. He moved with every anticipation of its malevolence, though his energy flickered like a dying candle.
He stomped hard, with practiced timing, and the plates shook with harmony. They bit at the soft and bloated flesh underneath, and in a singular moment of clarity in the growing dark, he broke the rhythm and guided two of the whipping blades between the plates, the pouring silver blood a lubricant and guide. The whips stuck there, and the creature lashed out. He continued the dance, twirling insanely and catching each of the whips, adding the teeth into the burgeoning wedge.
With no time left, Kechua stopped his dance, his heart in utter chaos. Sweat burned his eyes. He fought the stinging salt and saw himself in the reflection of the wounded ruby eye, pausing to regard the beast he had become. With a tooth-bearing snarl, he tore back on the tendrils, leveraging against the plate. The rock shifted like a fingernail turning upwards, tearing the connecting skin and attached nerves. The creature screamed, the energy of its rhythm staggered, and the humming resonance paused in a gasp. The snapping mouths writhed towards the sky, and the tails slapped at the ground.
Left with no tools, the boy tore into the muscle of the thing with ripping fingers and gnawing teeth. The rules of the world melted away as he submerged inside the warm flesh. He found himself swimming through it like sun-warmed quicksand, the movements of his arms and kicking of his legs smearing a shrieking red against the canvas of black. He recognized the feeling of the dark and dreaming forest, but he moved through this version with a lucid familiarity and ease.
He moved through the very song of the thing, a confused and frantic humming beating out in sonorous pulses of red. Each of the pulses declared a different attempt to paint some scene. Humanoid shapes huddled around it, standing in a building in one moment, only to be washed over and replaced with scattered humans wandering in a sleeping forest.
He swam inwards, the defining red doing nothing to slow his feral pursuit. The pulses painted swaths of flat nothingness, the humanoid forms staring blankly; the tone of the song jittering into confusion.
He felt the prize at the centre of the searching red, the paint splattering all over his reaching arms. He tore at it with his jaw, ripped it loose with his fraying hands. With a single kicking motion, he launched himself away from the centre of the thing’s forest, clutching the heart with his teeth and fingers.
He erupted back into reality in a geyser of fraying silver, chill, and blinding light. Propelled by the flow, he tore into the pulsing red rock in his hand and teeth, ripping it open. A tiny diamond slipped into the air and melted the moment the air grazed its naked form.
The whips caught him in the air, slicing his shoulders and cutting into his lungs. The jaws gripped his arms and legs like jagged, shining jewelry. Yet before they could clamp down on their prize, the silvered sand of the shattered soul trickled from between his fingers. The creature’s body shuddered with the realization of its own mortality, and it froze in place.
The droplets fell to the earth, falling like chilled sap. The multitude of heads cast off their colours, ending in silver and crumbling into ashen sand. The first of the droplets graced the earth, and he felt a word erupt from his lungs like a gasping cough.
“Go,” he whispered, and the earth shook with a single sonorous quake, a single note too low to be heard but too overwhelming to be denied. The pulsing shockwave distorted the air, filling the angular space of the net. The vibration numbed his bones, his ears popping even though the world around lay silent. The thing’s shell rattled, the plates slipping from one another.
More of the heart’s blood dripped onto the ground, and the rumbling doubled and tripled as it forced him down against the earth. He gasped for breath but couldn’t be sure if anything came in or out
Dizziness and confusion set in, his vision blurring. He leapt to the side with the last of his energy, the trickling silver mostly in his palm. He landed at the edge of the net, slamming his palm against the edge of it and tearing backwards as his other palm fell limply to the ground.
A sequence of pulses smashed him flat into the earth, the sand in his nose and lungs and a sudden rush of blindness his only hopeful sign. The final bit of the creature’s essence drank into the soil, and he felt the blackness of the forest embracing him as a mountain’s worth of pressure crushed against his back, cracking his chest even through the buffering sand.
He fought the black forest, nudging his face slowly from the sand, the silt falling like calming snow. His back burned with the touch of light yet again, but he fought. There had been something in the pulsing red he had been blinded to.
“You did it, just like you said,” Tyran’s voice
came. Kechua opened a single eye to see the man’s silhouette against the burning and low sun.
“Nnh.” Kechua gasped. “Others.” He sputtered. Those shapes, the humans painted in red in the darkness, had remained even when the creature’s heart had been ripped away.
“They’re all fine. You’re . . . I’m not sure about you,” Tyran began. “I’ve seen some bad hits, but you’re—“
“Help me.” Kechua’s arm trembled to rise.
“We shouldn’t move.” Tyran cut.
“Help me!” Kechua coughed up red and wet clay. “We need them all, now.” He rose on the man’s shoulder. He felt the heartbeat in the silence, the heart coming to rest from the adrenaline, and yet a trembling new song of despair in the man.
“Not dying, don’t worry.” He gave a glancing smile. “Need . . . need to pull.” He shifted over limply to the creature’s fangs and pulled uselessly. “Need . . . to open it.”
Tyran waivered, shooting a look back to the assembled watching figures. “He says pull!” he screamed at them. “Need all of you, help pull it open!” Tyran moved to Kechua’s side and pulled with every inch of power he had. He leaned into it, and the shell rattled and cracked.
“Other side!” Tyran roared. “Everything you’ve got!”
Kechua grinned and slumped over the fang with a gasp, but bodies shifted into place beside him, and he willed his body to pull with them.
“One, two, three!” Tyran screamed, and the sound of crackling thunder rumbled in their ears. Silvered sand gushed forth.
“One, two, three!” Tyran screamed again, and a piercing crack shook Kechua’s bones.
“More,” Kechua whispered. “More.”
“One more, everything, come on! One, two, three!” Tyran said, but the chorus of those helping echoed from all around, lingering on three. The words became a gnashing scream of battle and triumph. The sand gushed forth, yawning like an exploding well releasing pressure.
He slumped onto the ground again, the exclamations of those who helped flurrying over his ears, his own slowing heart deafening him to most of it.
“It’s her! She’s still alive!” a woman’s voice rang above his slowing rhythm.
“Him too!” Tyran’s bass rumbled in Kechua’s trembling bones.
“Good catch, I suppose.” Wolf chuckled, though his tone flickered between his lingering anger and a softer, almost gentle one. “Not bad, and not quite done,” Wolf murmured with an alien softness into his ear, the breath a tickling lapping at his cheek.
“What . . . ” Kechua noticed strange red buds forming in the silvered sand. He rose to his watery legs but slumped down again. Trying to warn the excited parade of people bringing their lost back to the fortress of the danger.
“Rest, young one.” The soft growl washed over him with warmth. “The battle is won. Now is the time for rest and reward.”
He watched the budding pustules rise into life from the silvered sand. Yet when he flickered to the black forest, they bubbled forth there too, but in stark and glowing blue with growing needles of white.
In the waking world, they appeared as cacti, though fuzzy and red. They grew as bubbling tumors in the sunlight; as noble spheres glowing like tiny lamps within the spirit world.
“Okay, we’re getting you inside. Everyone’s safe.” Tyran’s arms locked with Kechua.
“Let me lie out here. Please,” Kechua whispered, bloody clay clotting his throat. He tried to give a dismissive wave, but his arm merely trembled in place. “Make sure they’re all good. Let me be here, alone.”
“I . . . ” the man said, but he let the boy be, his shadow retreating.
The cactus bloomed, and the last flickers of Tyran faded away, his pace staggering to steal glances back. The final thing Kechua remembered, before slipping into the darkness fully, was the man returning to plant the staff under his arm.
The glowing blue cactus grew spiked leaves, becoming a radiant thistle of sorts, with rounded shoots of aloe. It took clarity and shape before him, blooming glowing white flowers with flickering interiors. A cluster of such flowers flowed from three stalks of the writhing heads, suspended in the immobile reach of the thing. The plant fell through time, the flowers wilted, and it bore a red fruit upon a single blooming stalk.
Kechua knelt, his limbs free in the dreaming forest, and he watched this spectacle unfurl with a rumbling set of pulsing chuckles. The plant let off a tingling, sighing song, reminding him of the battle with Cruelty of Earth, and somehow it felt appropriate; somehow it felt expected.
There was a lapping at his face, an unfocused vision of the living world again. “Do not simply let the magic flow. Claim it, little one.” In his delirium, the words seemed softer still, with only the faintest trace of a growl. In the dreaming world, the fuzzy ripples flowed over him from his right rather than the jagged-jawed words.
The white creature, less a wolf and more a glowing splotch, leaned its head back. The sky trembled, darkening until the moon hung stark against a canopy of midnight above.
The creature howled, singing into the dream world, and the trees hummed in harmony. Two other voices joined her song, and moments later, one other joined their chorus.
The illusion of darkness passed again, and the hint of blue peaked through his blurred eyes. Two white blobs rested their heads on his legs, the warm and pointed faces of pups leaning into the numbness remaining in his limbs.
“Sleep now, warrior. Sleep and know you will be safe,” the she-wolf purred, curling her body around him. A myriad more of the little white blobs shifted onto him, warming his cooling legs and soothing him into rest.
***
Kechua sat again with his back to the baking light, his field of cacti flowing through their flowering, fruiting, and withering like a field of beating hearts.
“Concess, concess, the game is done.” The voice of his tormentor drifted away into the light behind him. “No rage, no malice. The game is done.”
“Can you forgive it, this wretched little one?” Anah’s figure, cast into a shadow by the orb, reached out, a tiny figure of the ugly creature in her hand. “It is going now. This will be your last chance.” She smiled, hoisting a little blob within her cupped hands, a shriveling and proxy of Cruelty of Earth, melting swiftly in Kechua’s dream sense.
“Some are born knowing nothing else. It has done no lingering harm in the end. It cut only your skin; drank only your blood. Any malice was simple ignorance.” Her warm chuckle radiated over him, and yearning sadness gnawed at his gut.
She was not here; could not be touched.
“I forgive you, wretched one. Now pass into whatever peace awaits you.” His words flowed with reflex and yet they came driven with truth.
“Thank you,” the little blob hissed, and with a nudge of Anah’s cupped hands, the last lingering form of the creature burst into pips of light, flowing into the burning wall behind him.
“Now, there’s a little more.” Anah laughed softly, offering her hand. He reached for it but felt nothing, not even the memory of grazing her fingertips. He sat again in the circle of darkened trees, in his field of glowing blue cacti.
Yet her touch lingered on his hand, infecting it with light, infusing and spreading it beyond his shoulder until it saddled his back and ignited his hands both. They moved without prompting on his part, burning hot and tearing into the clay beneath the circle. Baptized in this clay, they reached towards the blackened sky, to the west and east. At the subliminal beckoning of his hands, a great mountain rose from below, yawning like a volcano’s atoll beneath and around him.
His hands moved furiously, in a blur he couldn’t strain to make out. Beasts, plants, water; his will became streaks of light pouring all such things forth into his construct.
***
The boy woke alone, save for the staff nuzzling happily under his neck and the knives replaced in their sheaths. The furry blobs no longer clung to him, and the chill in the air bit at his arms, thrusting deep into his lungs as he gas
ped and coughed for new breath.
He rose slowly, with enough energy to stop him from toppling. The school’s ruin remained, and so too did Cruelty of Earth’s cracked black shell. His eyes focused slowly, and the reality of the changes struck him.
Greenery knocked against the ruined school’s doorstep, growing with a shagged curiosity leaning into the concrete step. Upon standing, he saw a lake stretching out a little beyond the blackened shell, radiant blue water lapping upon the shore with a lazy burbling metronome.
Trees of azure and green, and yet standing with the widened and proud trunks that dwarfed even the silenced trees he had crossed paths with, swayed with an equally lazy movement in the soft wind. Beyond the lake and the hovering ocean of leaves, an encircling grey mountain wall rose, holding a single cleft on the side furthest from the school. A thin stand of trees sat between the new mountain wall and the school, enough to see through them from where he sat.
Clinging ivy again coated the walls, peeling away from the windows and rising all the way to the roof, yet stopping just before intruding. A carpet of tiny blue-fruited thistles met the ivy and spread outwards amongst the soft grass, mindful of a single path spelled out in stone, which led from the school to the lake.
The plants were all soaked in dew, a cool morning mist rising from the fresh universe below.
Even the lake breathed out chill fog in the new morning, parting the forest far down Kechua’s sight and suggesting a river’s flow that exited the mountain. Three narrow waterfalls poured from the mountains above, each holding respect for the present ruin, and all of them feeding into the lake.
His limbs ached to move, and he rose without help from the staff, though it nudged out insistently to catch his unsure footing as he headed to the lapping water. He tasted it, immediately numbing his tongue and needling at his teeth with its chill. It was soft and sweet, with no traces of tainting chemicals. He walked with the staff across the banks, the muddy earth pushing forth pale weeds, tangled in an unsure static of white and green.