14
Marguerite awokenaked and covered in blood.
Smoke stung her eyes the moment she blinked them open. She rolled onto her side and coughed, trying to clear the taste of soot from her mouth.
And found herself staring into the gaping, empty, bloody eye sockets of Tomaz. They were nothing but gory pits where his eyes should have been. When she screamed, she choked on the smoke in the air and instead could only scramble back away from him, heart pounding in her ears in terror.
Her hand fell into something thick, ropey, and viscous as she frantically tried to escape what was before her. Looking down to see what she had touched, she found her fingers pressed deep into…intestines.
Oskar lay beside her, or what remained of him. His stomach was torn open, nothing remaining of the skin that should have held his organs in place. His face was caught in a silent scream. Unlike Tomaz, he had known he was dying. His eyes were locked wide in terror, staring sightlessly at the starry sky overhead.
For a moment, it seemed Fritz was missing. But then she saw a hand lying by her foot. A hand it did not seem the other men were missing. The stump of a leg sat in the grass a few feet away. It was as though a giant cat had caught and dismembered a mouse.
She could only sit there, frozen in shock. She was covered in blood. Their blood.
Turning, she retched into the straw, unable to stop herself. Only water exited her, thankfully, as she had nothing in her stomach to surrender. When she was finished, she found herself unable to do anything but simply stare at the bodies around her.
It was after several moments of her mind simply failing to grasp what was happening before she realized she could see clearly. The straw pile she had been placed upon was no longer obscured in the darkness of the night. But neither was it daytime.
Another coughing fit caused by smoke catching in her lungs jarred her out of her frozen state. Everything around her was illuminated in a flickering, orange glow. As she turned her head, she realized why.
The village was on fire.
All of it.
Climbing out of the gore, she desperately tried to find her dress, or at least her underthings. But her hopes fell as she saw they were soaked through with the viscera left behind by the three mercenaries who she had been about to…
She shook her head, forcing the thought from her mind. They were dead. Very dead. And there was nothing she could do to save them. Something had attacked them, and she was lucky to be alive. She needed to escape, naked or not! Perhaps she could find something in the charred remains of the village when it burned itself out, if she could just find somewhere to hide long enough to wait it out, and—
A sound set her teeth on edge and tore every thought from her mind without warning. But it was not a true sound. Or it was not one she heard with her ears, perhaps. It felt like it ripped through her. When it finished, nausea washed over her again, but that time she managed to keep it down.
What had done that? What could produce such a—a sensation?
Turning, she quickly discovered her answer.
And she was not glad she had.
There, outlined against the blaze of the burning buildings, the pyres of orange stretching high up into the night sky like perverse summer bonfires, was darkness. Cut out like the night sky had come down to reclaim some of its rightful kingdom, a silhouette of nothingness was stamped against the brightness of the fire.
It was tall—easily twelve feet or more. A hood seemed to be draped over its head, long black flowing robes of purest nothing that tapered off into swirling tendrils of smoke that raised from it along the edges. Its arms were long and thin, far longer than they should be to truly resemble a human. Around its wrists hovered silver circles, like bracelets, but that seemed to defy all sense of the natural world.
In its hand—it was more of a claw, long, viciously pointed things that had no business being real—it held the head of a man who dangled several feet from the ground, kicking and screaming.
She did not know the man. She had never seen him before. Nor would she ever have the chance.
The creature squeezed, crushing the man’s skull in his grasp like an egg. She could hear the sickening crunch from where she stood. The man went instantly limp.
And the creature tossed him away as if he were nothing more than chaff.
It was when the man landed on the ground like a child’s doll that she realized he was not alone. Scattered about the center of the town was…death. Bodies, lying where they were killed or discarded. Easily two dozen that she could see. She knew there were more.
This thing has been sent by Gideon to find me. Will it kill me for its master? No. It left me alive. It has come to retrieve me. I must run!
Turning to try to do just that, she made it only a few feet before her body, unable to cope with what she had witnessed, gave out on her. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed to the ground before retching once again. Nothing exited her that time, but it did not stop her stomach from making the valiant attempt.
A shadow fell over her, a ghastly silhouette of the monster. She turned to face it, sitting in the dewy grass, and lifted an arm to protect herself, for what good it would do.
The creature loomed over her like the product of a nightmare, the shadowy and shifting robes it wore curling in some unseen breeze. It stared at her.