Brother Aurochs raised his monstrous hand and let his palm rest on the surface of the great doors, setting the patina aflame with ghostly light. Filling each shape after the next, that light spread across the thousands of runes that were carved on the doors, and then continued spreading to the etchings that covered the walls and floor, too.
It was like the Halls Of The Cor Ancestors themselves came alive around them, a living, breathing being that rearranged and transformed its geometry and, in a way, its very essence. Hunter felt it, too; a ripple in the fabric of things, a wave that went straight through him. It made his head swim and it filled his senses with the oddly familiar scent of something like ozone and camphor.
Then the moment passed, and everything came back to normal. Brother Aurochs let a deep, resounding sigh and pushed the great double doors open. They swung on their hinges as if they weighed nothing; sickly light poured out from beyond them along with the powerful stench of low-dwellers, stinging both Hunter’s eyes and nostrils.
More importantly, all of his body, mind, and soul were suddenly filled by a voiceless whisper–or was it a chant? Dozens of voices were mumbling as one, coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, filling the air with unintelligible words in bone-chilling languages.
Acting on pure survival instinct, Hunter tried to plug his ears–and so did Fawkes and Sister Peregrine, too. It didn’t matter. If sound was a mechanical wave that used air as a medium to travel through, as he’d been taught back in high school, this dreadful whispering was definitely more. It was a disturbance that rippled through reality, propagating itself unimpeded through matter, aether, and who knows what other kind of cosmic medium.
Point was, there was no stopping it. Once the heavily enchanted door of the Inner Sanctum was opened, the whispering permeated everything.
“Is this the whispering Arjen and the medicine woman mentioned?” he asked Fawkes, still squinting and plugging his ears with his fingers.
Fawkes, who’d already plugged her ears with something she’d pulled out of her sleeve, just nodded.
“Well, up close it feels more like shouting than whispering, doesn’t it?”
“Take this. Plug your ears with it. It won’t stop all of it, but it will help.”
She handed Hunter and the Brethren small lumps of what looked like wax. She was right. It didn’t stop the whispering, but it made it a bit more bearable. Hunter plugged Fyodor’s ears, too. The poor thing had been whimpering like crazy. Biggs and Wedge did not seem to be bothered as much, though they’d fallen awfully silent.
The chamber that lay beyond the doors reminded Hunter of a chapel. Braziers lined the walls, shedding otherworldly illumination and creating an atmosphere of reverence that somehow bordered on the profane. There were tapestries on the walls and lush carpets on the floor, and rows and rows of stone benches in front of which hunched and broken forms were kneeling in prayer. All of them were facing towards a great dais near the far end of the long, rectangular hall.
The dais itself was covered in a canopy and layers upon layers of heavy and ornate curtains, obscuring whoever or whatever stood there in thick gloom. Just in front of it there was a great cauldron made of some dark lustrous material, easily big enough for a fully grown man to sit inside.
Around it, much like an honor guard, there were a handful of low-ogres, each one as big and horrifying as the one Hunter, Fawkes, and the Brethren had faced earlier. They were wielding enormous spears, Hunter noticed with a pang of dread, and from each spear hung a malformed human corpse.
“Welcome, children” said a woman’s voice that echoed throughout the chamber. It was friendly and melodic, but Hunter still caught himself shuddering. “We have been expecting you. Come closer, so I may better see your faces.”
Hunter and Fawkes exchanged worried glances and turned to Sister Peregrine, who stood there silent and still, as if stunned. It was Brother Aurochs who moved first, letting out another deep sigh rumble through his hulking chest and taking a ponderous step towards the canopy-covered dais. The others followed, weapons clutched in hand in case the praying faithful all around them got any cute ideas.
Not that it would make much of a difference. There were dozens of them, more than enough to put a swift and definite end to any kind of resistance Hunter and his companions could put up in case a fight broke out. Some of them looked like ragged, desiccated humans; others had a definitely low-dwellerish look to them.
For the moment, all they did was face the dais with nothing short of the purest form of divine-inspired prostration. It was them the eerie whispering came from, always in perfect sync with the Halls’ deep, powerful heartbeat.
Walking towards that dais felt like treading water. The rich carpet at their feet felt more and more like quicksand, ready to swallow them whole. The form under the canopy waited patiently for them to approach, all but radiating discord. Still, none of the Sanctum’s occupants moved a muscle. The scores of the faithful simply ignored them, and so did the low-ogres of that brutish honor guard.
Brother Aurochs led the way. Sister Peregrine followed in his shadow. Fawkes and Hunter brought back the rear with Fyodor at their side. Biggs and Wedge had landed, too, and they were following on foot with dignity and gravitas that befitted a formal procession. Hunter would normally find that hilarious. Now he found it disconcerting.
“Come, come, have no fear,” the voice said, sweet and welcoming. “Do not worry about dispatching the guardians outside. More will be made, more will be unmade, and still more will be made again. Such is the purpose of the Misbegotten. Come, come, there is much to be discussed.”
To say that Hunter wasn’t too keen on the idea would be the understatement of the century. He’d read, played, and watched more than enough works of fantasy and fiction to know this was going nowhere pleasant. The darkness under the canopy quivered for a second, reminding him how the air above a highway’s tarmac shimmers on particularly hot days. Then the woman sitting on the dais finally revealed herself, illuminated by soft golden light that seemed to radiate from nowhere and everywhere around her.
Judging from her looks, she probably shared blood and ancestry with the folken. She had the same almond-shaped face, the same high cheekbones, the same rich, dark, straight hair–but that’s where the similarities ended. Unlike the folken and their humble hide and linen and wool clothing, she wore a lavish dress of dark silk, accented with ornate clasps and gilded pins. Jewelry gleamed all over her body, beautiful armlets wrapped her arms in elaborate gold filigrees, and elegant chains and shining gemstones hung around her slender neck, some of them long enough to get lost in the rich curvature of her bosom. Her head was covered by a headdress, as much a queen’s crown as a ceremonial toque. Two large crescent-shaped horns rose from it above her flowing dark hair, covered with intricate gold leaf designs and accented with charms and gemstones that hung from delicate chains. By far her most striking feature, however, was her gaze; ever-vigilant, ever-watching, ever-shining, like emerald-speckled fire.
Hunter found himself unable to take his eyes off the woman. She cut quite the regal form. Regal enough for someone–not himself, of course, but definitely someone–to throw themselves at her queenly feet with awe and adoration.
Still, despite all of her magnificence, Hunter couldn’t shake off the feeling that there was something off about her.
Way, way off.
She was sitting on a small mountain of embroidered pillows and her body from the waist down was covered in luxurious shawls and beautiful wraps. Hunter’s Low Light Vision painted him a very different picture, however.
For starters, it shouldn’t be working at all; there was more than enough illumination for him to see the woman clearly with his normal vision, and yet he could still see the lines and edges of her outline superimposed on her form.
Second, those lines and edges wove a jumbled, alien shape that didn’t match the majestic-looking beauty that was sitting on that dais beckoning at him and his companions. In fact, they didn’t match anything Hunter could wrap his mind around, a glitch in how lines and shapes and spaces worked.
Brother Aurochs stopped a few feet away from the dais, his humongous werebeast form somehow humbled before the aura of sheer splendor the woman radiated. Hunter, Fawkes, and the small raven-and-direwolf menagerie stopped too. Only Sister Peregrine took a few steps further, either much more or much less captivated.
“Sister Finch," she addressed the woman on the dais, her usually clarion-clear voice uncharacteristically muffled.
“Lera,” she responded with a magnanimous smile. “All is right. You do not have to address me by that pretentious name any longer. Speak the word I know your heart has long ached to speak.”
Sister Peregrine said nothing. In fact, not a single hair on her moved.
“Speak it, child.”
“…”
“Speak it. At last, all is right now.”
“…mother.”
“Daughter," the woman smiled, the word rolling off her tongue. “More now than ever, you are a sight for sore eyes. I’ve been expecting you…” She paused to give each of the others the once-over, her emerald gaze scrutinizing them from head to toe. “…though a mother would hope her daughter would keep better company.”
“You are hardly one to talk," Sister Peregrine said, but her voice was weak, uncertain. “What is the meaning of all this… mother?”
The woman’s expression became puzzled, as if she was caught off guard by the question.
“Why, enlightenment, of course! Our eyes have been shut for ages, daughter, but finally I see beyond the lies and deceptions that were the teaching of the Brethren.”
“I don’t understand. How could you have done all of this? You of all people?”
Sister Finch–or rather, the woman that once was Sister Finch–scowled for just a moment. For Hunter, it was a moment too long. He felt chills run down his spine. Fyodor took a step behind, too, and let out a soft whimper. Then her features softened again, and when she spoke, her voice was sweet and soothing.
“Your confusion is warranted, but worry not, daughter. You now have your mother to properly guide you, as she should have done years ago. We have all the time in the world, you and me.”
The woman swept the room with her gaze, her eyes staying on each and every one of them for a moment.
“Long have we let misguided notions of duty rob us of our birthright,” she said, her voice rich, cold, crystal clear. “Long have we strived to survive, all but forgetting to live. Long have he let peasants and simpletons roam the land, thinking it theirs. It’s time to take it all back, assert ourselves at the top where we belong, rule with fury and splendor. There’s no better day to let that reign begin, now that you have come to take your rightful place by my side.”
That final sentence must have shaken Sister Peregrine free of her initial bewilderment. She raised her head to study her mother’s face, her knuckles turning white as her grip on her spear tightened. When she spoke, her voice had almost gained its usual impassive, commanding tone back. Almost.
“I am here to do nothing of the sort, Sister Finch. I am here to do my duty and put an end to your madness.”
That didn’t shake the woman on the dais.
“I told you to call me mother, child. I see now that the lies of the Cor have a stronger hold over you than I had anticipated. We shall dispel it together as mother and daughter, and it will only strengthen the bond we share. And you lot,” she said, turning to Brother Aurochs, Fawkes, and Hunter. “This is no place for strangers. What is your business here?”
Fawkes remained silent. She had opted to follow her own ‘see everything, hear everything, say nothing’ rule, Hunter thought, and this time around he actually agreed. Neither of them said anything, letting Sister Peregrine navigate the situation instead.
Brother Aurochs, on the other hand, let out a low rumbling groan and took a couple of heavy steps closer to the dais. For a second there, Hunter was worried he’d simply lift his huge axe and cleave the woman in two. Or maybe he hoped he would. Instead, the were-buffalo only stared at the woman and panted, each labored breath coming out as a sigh.
“Is that you, Rhaast?” the woman asked, examining Brother Aurochs with an expression halfway between pity and distaste. “My, my, what pain you’ve put yourself in. And for what? Some silly sense of duty?”
If he had any sort of an answer to that, the hulking bison-man never expressed it. It wasn’t even clear whether he understood what the woman said. What anyone said.
“Such a good young man,” she went on, reaching out with her hand as if to caress his chest. “Such a loyal young man. It would be a shame if that very loyalty became your undoing, wouldn’t it? Lera? Shall I free him from his pain?”
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“No, mother, wait–”
The woman paid no heed to her daughter’s cries. She gestured with a long, painted fingernail, and some unseen hand picked up the were-buffalo as easily as she could have picked a rag doll. The great werebeast thrashed and fought and bellowed, but it was all in vain; whatever was holding him in midair didn’t seem to be affected by his struggling at all. Sister Peregrine screamed. Hunter clutched his glaive and prepared to rush to Brother Aurochs’s side, unsure of what he could do, if anything, but also unable to simply sit there and stare. Fawkes, ever faster, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back.
“Don’t," she let out a harsh whisper, and it was all she had to say.
Unaffected by all the screaming and thrashing and bellowing, the woman followed Brother Aurochs with her emerald-colored eyes as the unseen thing that had taken hold of him shoved him inside the great cauldron that sat before the dais. The air itself rippled all around her like a mirage. With a flick of her wrist, its obsidian-looking surface started to rapidly heat until it glowed golden. Hunter could feel it burn impossibly hot even from two dozen feet away, like a small indoor sun. The bellows of the werebeast gave their place to loud sizzling and gurgling noises, and the already pungent air was filled with smoke, vapors, and the stench of molten flesh.
Sister Peregrine, still screaming and pleading, dropped her spear and bow and ran towards the burning cauldron, only to be snatched and lifted in the air by another invisible hand.
“Oh, do not be like that” the woman said with a sigh. “He’ll be fine. If anything, you should thank me for finally ridding him of that curse he brought upon himself, the poor fool.”
With another indolent wave of her hand, the woman made the cauldron cool down as rapidly as she’d made it burn. An invisible hand pulled Brother Aurochs out and dumped him on the floor before her feet, stark naked, unconscious, and covered in some kind of slimy proto-matter, but alive and back to his human form.
The woman waved at the other invisible hand too, the one holding Sister Peregrine suspended in midair, and had it gently put her daughter down next to the unconscious man.
“See? Made whole again, better and stronger than he’d ever been. A token of my goodwill, if you may. Others that dared to stand against me," she gestured towards the broken bodies that hung from her low-ogre servants’ spears, “were not as fortunate.”
One look at the corpses was enough to make Hunter’s stomach lurch. These people had not simply been murdered, but also desecrated and stripped of their humanity. They were displayed as trophies and reminders of… what?
This woman’s cruelty?
Her power?
Was she really the poor, twisted and broken Sister Finch the Brethren had told them about–the poor soul they were here to mercy-kill?
Was she really Sister Peregrine’s mother?
Who was she?
What was she, even?
And then Hunter saw it.
He’d just begun to take his eyes off the woman’s monstrous honor guard and the grisly standards they held in the air, when one of the broken bodies grabbed his attention. To his utter horror, despite the damage and decay, he realized he recognized it.
It once belonged to a man in his thirties, hair like straw, yay tall, clad in leathers full of pockets and straps and buckles, and from its belt hung the empty scabbards of twin blades.
Could this be right?
Could it be him?
Could it not be him?
Hunter’s head swam. He glanced at Fawkes. Had she noticed? It was impossible to tell. Her face was a mask, her eyes stuck to the woman on the dais, her hands discreetly hovering near the handles of her weapons. He’d seen her like this before; she was ready to pounce, ready to draw her gun and put a bullet between the woman’s emerald-shining eyes, ready to draw her blade and slash at her long and pale neck.
Mother, on the other hand, paid Fawkes and Hunter absolutely no attention. She was focused on her daughter, who was still on the floor and very much in a state of shock.
Sister Peregrine was cradling the head of Brother Aurochs, who was back to his human form and hopefully not dead. She was not well, not well at all. That much was obvious even with her falcon headdress still covering most of her face. She was shaking uncontrollably, sobbing, and muttering at him in some language Hunter couldn’t understand.
“Dry your eyes, daughter,” said the woman, her patience visibly evaporating. “Cast off the chains of the Cor and join me. Leave the past behind. There is splendor ahead of us, if only you join me and let me show you the world as it truly is.”
The air grew thicker. The acrid smell of burned flesh assaulted Hunter’s nostrils, the ever-present heartbeat of the Halls filled his ears, the muted chants and whispers of the grotesque faithful of the Inner Sanctum permeated his very being. Something was changing, something enough to make his heart race and his fight or flight response go nuts.
“Daughter," said Mother again. “Enough of this.”
“…”
“Rejoice, I said.”
“…”
“DAUGHTER!” she wailed, and her shrill voice boomed and echoed throughout the cavernous space with supernatural intensity.
Hunter instinctively raised his hands to his ears, Fawkes tightened like a drawn bowstring, Fyodor hid behind Hunter, and the ravens took flight, startled.
Sister Peregrine stopped her sobs, too.
“Shut your mouth” she told the other woman, unexpectedly calm. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what you’ve done with her, but if you don’t shut your mouth, I swear I’ll sew it shut myself.”
Mother’s eyes grew wide with disbelief, and she looked like she’d just been slapped in the face. It didn’t take her long to regain her composure, however. She flashed her daughter a sinister half-smile.
“Insolence. I see.” For the first time since they’d entered the Sanctum, she turned her gaze to Hunter and Fawkes. “Is that your doing, outlanders? Your influence?”
Hunter squirmed. Fawkes stood as still as a statue. Neither answered.
“No answer? It is just as well. It’s not like your heathen tongues would have to offer anything of value, after all.” She turned back to Sister Peregrine. “It pains me to no end, daughter, how you’ve let the ways of strangers cloud your sight on top of the lies and deceptions of the Cor. It pains me, but I see no alternative. If you share the heathens’ ways, then you’ll share their fate, too.”
Mother raised her hand in the air, twisting her long and slender fingers in a gesture that had something definitely ominous and eldritch to it.
“One way or the other, you will see the truth.”
Strands of golden light seeped from her fingertips and started to weave themselves together, forming some kind of sigil, and Hunter’s mind was suddenly assaulted with a crushing kind of pressure he’d never even thought possible. It was a blend of awe and dread and agitation turned up to eleven, as if he had suddenly drawn the attention of… something.
Something ungodly.
It was far greater than the primal fear he’d felt when he’d first seen the shapeshifted form of Brother Aurochs–or even Arjen the bear, who was the aspect of a forest god. Only once had he felt dread and terror of rivaling intensity again; back at that standing stone when he’d first come to Elderpyre, moments before he was slaughtered by the clawed hands of ghostly killers.
Radiating power, Mother raised her other hand in the air and drew another sigil. A blinding light blasted everything in sight, golden and brighter than the midday sun.
A wave of eldritch power washed over Hunter, threatening to swallow him whole, but he was somehow spared at the last moment.
Fawkes and Fyodor and Sister Peregrine were not as fortunate. The split second it took for the flash of golden light to blast them was enough for Fawkes to draw her saber and pistol, but instead of rushing at the woman on the dais, she now simply stood there still and slack-jawed.
Sister Peregrine was more or less the same, still cradling Brother Aurochs’s head and staring at her mother with eyes that looked glassy and glazed over.
The direwolf had simply collapsed on the floor, and the ravens were nowhere to be seen.
More of that golden-hued eldritch power was beginning to manifest around Mother, taking the form of a nimbus around her form and a bright-burning corona around the horns of her headdress.
The first sigil she’d begun to cast was nearing completion. Millions of tiny strands of gold were flowing from her hand, forming what looked like an ophidian symbol surrounding an orb of pure light. Simply looking at the thing flooded Hunter’s mind with alien notions that were testing his sanity, shapes and colors that should not–could not!–exist. Images flashed in his mind, memories of strange lands and deep waters and twin suns burning in the middle of an empty sky, black and cold and void.
Even with the protection of his corpse hair charm, he was overtaken. He wanted to give up right then and there, to give in to the pressure, stop thinking, stop feeling, stop suffering under that impossible pressure. He wanted to fall down on his knees and worship and join the scores of low-dwellers in their whispered hymn and praise the source of that golden light. For a moment, he almost did.
Almost.
Then he blinked, and Fawkes’s gun came into focus.
Hunter acted on pure, kill-or-be-killed survival instinct. He didn’t plan. He didn’t think. He had neither the time nor the luxury. He simply closed his eyes to shield them from the radiance, burst into motion, and dove for the pistol. He felt his fingers close around its handle, he felt its heft in his hand as he raised its barrel and aimed at Mother. He didn’t even have to open his eyes. The light that surrounded her burned straight through his shut eyelids.
He gathered all the willpower he could muster, squeezed the trigger, and shot.
It was more than a bullet that hit Mother; it was an act of pure defiance in the face of impossible odds, desperate, wordless spite spat straight in her immaculate face. Maybe it was that spite that cut Mother’s spell short, or maybe it simply was the lead that hit her squarely in the chest, staining her exquisite dress with blood. Maybe both. It didn’t matter which; all that mattered is that she suddenly lost her oomph.
Her light flickered and dimmed as she wailed in pain, and her image swam again like hot air over asphalt on a hot day. For just a moment, the illusion broke and Hunter saw her true form through squinted eyes.
He immediately wished he hadn’t.
She was the same woman alright, but barely recognizable. Gone were the luxurious silks and the gilded ornaments; she was a broken and tormented thing with bony limbs and ashen, saggy skin. Her lower body simply wasn’t there. She was fused at the waist to the humongous body of… something, jutting out of a broad torso at a skewed angle. That something reminded Hunter of a coiled gargantuan centipede, only each of its segments were the torso of what looked like a low-ogre, and each of its legs was a giant humanoid arm. Its whole body was contorted in an indescribable mass of gruesome flesh and too many limbs.
Worst of all, its head was an elongated, spongy thing, faceless and eyeless and asymmetrical and full of protrusions and orifices in places that made no sense. That was the source of all the whispering. That was what pulled the strings. Mother was just a façade, like the bright, luminous lure a deep-sea anglerfish would use to trick its hapless prey.
It didn’t last long, that slip of the mask; before he knew it, Mother was back to her aristocratic-looking self, and the nightmarish being was nowhere to be seen. For Hunter, though, the illusion was broken for good; what he’d seen, he simply couldn’t unsee.
With the ophidian sigil now broken and rapidly dissolving into thin air, Mother’s mental chokehold on Fawkes and Sister Peregrine loosened too. They came back to their senses, blinking and visibly disoriented. Mother let out another wail, a wordless command to her ghastly subjects.
The malformed bodies of the praying misbegotten began to stir behind the rows of stone benches. The low-ogres clutched and brandished their huge spears threateningly, eager to adorn them with new horrid trophies. Hunter saw all of that, and instantly knew it; there was no way they’d make it out of there alive.
No way, perhaps, but one.
“Run!” he shouted at Fawkes and tossed her pistol back at her. She caught it in midair acting purely on muscle memory; her gray eyes were still glassy, her expression confused. “Don’t fight, just run! I’ll keep them busy, but you gotta get out now!”
Too pressed for time to even see whether she’d understood, he grabbed his glaive from the floor and ran straight for the dais. If he was going down, he’d make sure as hell he’d do so fighting tooth and nail.
As he rushed towards the dais, it became as clear as day; all of Mother’s previous veneer of civility and magnanimity proved to have been just that all along, just a veneer. What stood before Hunter now was more akin to a wraith, a maenad that screeched and wailed and stared at him with an emerald-burning gaze so intense he swore he could feel it on his skin. And even that, he now knew, was just another illusion, a shadow puppet masterfully manipulated by some unseen, alien puppeteer.
She wasn’t the only threat Hunter had to keep an eye on, though. Not by a long shot. Everywhere around him, the faithful of the Inner Sanctum were stirring from their prayer-like trance. They didn’t sound too happy about it, either; instead of stopping or at least dying down, their ceaseless whispered chants were now escalating into a furious crescendo that permeated and resounded through everything. They were still looking a bit out of sorts and all around the place, but Hunter would bet his last dollar it wouldn’t be long before they would be frothing at the teeth and rushing to tear him to pieces.
That would normally be a bad thing, but then Hunter would normally be trying to save his proverbial bacon, not use it as bait to draw all of the nasties’ attention on himself.
Mother zeroed in on him too. She raised her perfectly manicured hand and pointed at him, screaming like a banshee. As if jump-started, the spear-wielding low-ogres all suddenly centered in on Hunter, corpses dangling from their huge weapons like grim piñatas.
Hunter threw a glance towards the back of the Sanctum and caught a glimpse of Fawkes and Sister Peregrine dragging an unconscious Brother Aurochs towards the hall’s entrance. They were almost there. He just had to buy them a few more seconds, half a minute tops. He could do that.
The low-ogres that served as Mother’s honor guard weren’t charging at Hunter. Not yet, at least.
Unlike the feral low-ogre he’d been uncomfortably acquainted with back in the Halls, these ones acted intelligent. Their moves were ponderous, calculated. Their priority was to get between their mistress and whatever was threatening her. That struck Hunter as peculiar. Were they mind-controlled by the same alien human-centipede-thing that acted as Mother’s puppeteer? Probably yes, as were the whispering low-dwellers that worshiped it.
If that was the case, then the best way to keep everyone’s–and everything’s–attention on him was to ignore the bodyguards and drones and attack Mother directly. It was only logical. Then again, he could make a run for it himself, see if he could catch up with the others. Or maybe he could do some kind of feint, pretend like he’s about to attack, then do the old bait-and-switch. Or…
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, man” he scolded himself out loud. “Just fucking do it.”
By that point, what was another horribly traumatizing near-death experience? He’d had all the time in the world to worry about that later, so he did just that; he went on and fucking did it.
He tightened his grip on his glaive, screamed as hard as he could, and charged straight at Mother’s sneering face.
A low-ogre lowered his great spear and tried to turn him into a Hunter-flavored souvlaki, but he wasn’t very fast. Hunter just swerved to the side. Another tried to flank him and do the same, and came very, very close. He managed to dodge the incoming tip of the spear at the last moment, but crashed into the corpse that hung from it. It was Reiner’s corpse, he realized to his horror, tall and slender and blond and still dressed in leather armor.
Fuck.
Not having the luxury to waste a single breath, he simply shoved it away and dive-rolled to the side, just in time to dodge another attack. Or at least he tried to; dive-rolling while holding an eight-and-a-half foot polearm was a messy affair, as it turned out. He had to either leave it behind, or risk tripping himself and becoming an easy target for the next giant spear that came his way. He chose the former, let go of the glaive, and kept running.
What would he even do without a weapon, even if he reached Mother? Give her indian burns and titty twisters? Nothing, he realized, but it didn’t matter. It never had. All that mattered was to keep her occupied, and he had done that; by now, Fawkes and the Brethren probably had made it out. Now it was time to pay the piper, like he’d known he’d have to from the very beginning.
Hunter slowed down to a walk and kept his eyes on Mother’s furious visage. To his surprise, he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t even worried about the world of pain and anguish that he knew was coming any moment now. He was past that. Hell, he was smiling.
Could Mother see him, really see him?
Could she understand she’d been had?
He hoped she could.
He’d expected his last thoughts here to be of fear, or of his companions, or of duty and sacrifice, or even of some kind of Pyrrhic victory. None of these was true. The only thing he felt was a kind of smug, impish glee. He looked past Mother, under the canopy, straight at the darkness where he knew the alien thing’s head was, and flashed it his most infuriating shit-eating grin.
When the tip of a giant spear finally found his back, he didn’t even scream. When the low-ogre heaved his now-dying body in the air, another grisly trophy for the honor guard to carry around, he didn’t even gasp. Every last drop of his willpower went to proudly, defiantly keeping that grin plastered to his face.
And, to his credit, he did keep it up to the very end, right until darkness came and took him.