DISEMBODIED, HER VIEW SCUTTLED like a beetle along the base of a jagged obsidian cliff. It ducked beneath rust-red boulders, scurried beneath a dead branch bleached white with age and dryness, and paused to sample the quality of the unfamiliar, coal-black dust lying on top of everything. Dust? Or ash? The jerky, stop-start motion reminded her of a busy ant. Unfamiliar, pungent scents kindled her senses. Her jungle home was never dry. Not like this. Devoid of its usual humidity, the air’s quality struck her as strangely thin and weightless.
The overall sensation was insectoid enough to cause her brain to split off from the vision.
Another unbidden memory. How could this be hers? Yet it was.
She was present. There, somehow.
Present and conscious and … skittering across an unknown landscape like a bug. Not a Fae. Not even close. She was also fully mindful that this was a dream and therefore she should be able to wake herself up, but she could not.
Her bug-brain worked at the speed of a giant branch snail, which was to say, a creature which laid an inch-an-hour slime trail. Slow and sticky. Meantime, her new host propelled her body headlong into a gully choked with a great pile of broken branches and canary-yellow stones, flicking this way and that as it meandered along, and then turned for the sky as it scaled the other wall. Her skyward view was all overcast, the heavy overcast of storm, yet she sensed no cold. Only cloying warmth. Unnatural warmth, she sensed, conveyed on a breeze that stank like an abandoned Grey Warbler’s nest she had once fallen into, which had been full of rotten eggs. How her pupae-siblings had teased her for coming back to the cocoon dripping in green slime and stinking to high Centresky.
The scene frayed.
A voice whispered dryly in her ear, “O visions of the night, arise!”
Suggids! It’s back …
The world rocked and stabilised. She scooted up a rocky ledge, tipped and froze as a shadow swept over. The only thought in that bug-brain was the possibility of being scooped up by a hard beak and crushed. Gone. A trembling in the stone beneath her carapace caused another stop-freeze, jerk-stop-freeze of motion before she moved again. Almost capsizing onto her nose, a stick-like appendage darted out to keep her upright.
Allory gazed out over an entirely alien world. Was this even Spheris?
Before her stretched a sea of obsidian sand dotted with mustard-yellow boulders like this one she stood upon. The sand was smooth, perhaps scoured by the same wind that brought a host of new scents to her nostrils – acrid oil, rancid man-sweat, powdery dust and heat and pungent leather. Her range of sight was not a pinch on her Fae vision. Just a few hundred feet away, everything merged into a white-hot glare that shimmered up from the ground. She gaped at the unfamiliar phenomenon in fascination. It did not help that the stone leaped against her belly again. And again.
A regular cadence. A … drumbeat, like those used for Fae dances?
Doom. Doom. Doom! The stone danced; the sand quivered nearby as if an unseen animal disturbed it from beneath.
Doom. Doom. Doom! The beat reverberated across the barren, desiccated land.
Unseen legs darted her back and forth across the boulder, seeking the source of the disturbance. Increasingly frantic.
Doom. Doom. DOOM!
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
So suddenly that she screamed even in the not-dream state, a shadow fell over her and a host of booted feet began to tramp by. Every massive tread was a thousand feet in perfect step – apart from one, a shiny brown leather boot that stumbled over her rock and kicked her flying. A world of dust-stomping, massively heavy boots thundered around and over her. She darted this way and that in a blind panic, dodging, slipping, screaming and leaping and sprinting for her life.
The boots kicked up clouds of dust with every step. Bedlam. Doom. Doom. Doom! It drove her crazy with terror. Armour and weapons jingled, leather creaked and a massive, squat lizard-thing stomped by, dragging a heavy cart set upon six ironbound wheels. She dived beneath another boulder – merely a stone or a pebble to these great creatures – but the relentless pounding drove her out into the open again.
It seemed forever before the dust clouds settled and her bug-eyes saw the world afresh. A mighty column of grey-skinned Men marched down into that vast desert space. They wore silver armour that shimmered like insect chitin in the bright daylight, and ugly, twisted crowns of what appeared to be thin metal sticks protruded above each helm. Twenty deep, their column issued steadily from an almighty cleft carved in a deep, mottled grey stone face – a statue with a tortured face cleft in twain, she realised, as if the army marched up through its throat and emerged upon its lolling, dead tongue. Periodically, a shaggy creature clad in animal skins shambled alongside the column, bearing a drum far bigger than her entire family cocoon. They hammered the taut surfaces with heavy green sticks, keeping the rhythm of the march – and upon the far side, she saw a line of slower-moving carts paralleling the grey Men.
Her awed gaze rose.
Right atop that opening which spat forth untold numbers of soldiers, on the bridge of the ghastly statue’s scarred and broken nose, a familiar apparition surveyed the scene with a manner of grim satisfaction that reached even the onlooker. It spoke to a Man standing beside it, a Man whose armour was a shiny black colour with gold emblazons upon the shoulders, and although they must have been far away, their voices carried as if they spoke inside her mind.
The ebon apparition hissed, “This is but the beginning, Commander Garakon.”
“We are twelve thousand strong, Master,” he replied in a heavy accent. “With these, we shall crush the rebellious Kingdom of Dormate-kar-Gebaroon as a man crushes a scuttling cockroach beneath his heel.”
“You shall spare none.”
“Neither man, woman nor child,” growled the Man, beating his chest with the haft of a mighty war hammer he held loosely in his left hand.
“Good. Their insignificant souls shall be your acceptable offering.”
“O Wraith –”
“Do not call me by that name. I am none any shall remember, and memory of my face or name shall not linger in the realms of you pitiful mortals.” Its voice lashed the Commander so violently that he stumbled to one knee. Allory recoiled in expectation of pain but none came. “Like all of your kind, you are weak, nothing but a mewling infant. Allow me to raise you up. You shall ride Dastaradon Sky-Cleaver the Crimson Raptor, and the spawn of his loins shall be your personal guard. One day I shall command the skyfires to ravage all the lands, but until then, let the fires of beasts be unleashed!”
“Master!”
After a brief pause, the man leaped out into the air above his trudging troops. An enormous pair of paws snatched him out of the blue. So swift and cunning was the beast, Allory never saw where it had sprung from – but immediately, others began to issue out of the hole, whipping forth from the darkness as if expelled by a force akin to disgust.
The faceless Wraith seemed to smile as it surveyed its army that blotted out the land and sky.
After a moment, the sable appendage lifted. “Indeed, you shall act as beasts. Behave as beasts. You shall devour the flesh of my enemies! Go! Let none stand before you – GO!”
With a bestial roar that shook earth and sky, the great column of men broke into a dead run. The drumming of their boots broke like thunder across the wasteland; their rapacious, mindless rage broke over her like a falling bough striking a hapless Faerie. Above, the Crimson Raptors raised a dreadful chorus of snarling and roaring.
Somewhere, a pathetic runt screamed and raved and writhed.
The creature did not turn, but Allory sensed the full brunt of its regard fall upon her. How, she knew not. As before, a face smeared out of the region of its chest – a familiar, well-loved face, yet it was in the Wraith’s voice that her Momfae sneered:
“Now do you remember, twiggy?”
She stared in numb horror at the foul pretender, the usurper, the possessor of her Momfae’s very soul. How could it know that cruel nickname if it did not know her?
One formless limb gestured contemptuously.
A boot swung out of nowhere and crushed her into a never-ending death.