ALL TOGETHER—as a village, as a family—THEY ATTACKED.
The straw-bound crumbs cohered into gristly [Thorns].
Sling darted downward as a splintered [Stake], her bandages swimming around her body in loose spirals of koi fish fluidity.
And Swishy, a novice dark lord, attempted to be anything but that. After his curse-filled commands, he sought balance by feeding energy into his luminous rake.
Light, light, the boy wanted nothing more than to temper his body and soul and weapons with light.
He was almost ready, a bookend to the straw-bound barrage to come.
Come, the E-squad said, four taunting auras polluting the air pressure. Each rough patch of air against Swishy's body felt like a condescending laugh, a sneer, a you’re-not-good-enough judgment.
Sling and the straw-bound defied that notion with their armament bodies.
It was a shame they had to attack the symbol formerly known as the [Straw Guardian]. Through the soul radar, Swishy sensed the wincing and eye-closing feelings of their souls upon the moment of impact.
[Stake] and [Thorns] crashed into the giant scarecrow, drilling through the neck and collarbone and torso as if the structure were a traditional voodoo doll, a destined receptacle of spite. The chuffing violence was tremendous. The structure’s arms, once perfect rigid lines of scarecrow-ing glory, now lowered until they hung limply at the sides, the [Possessed Guardian] acting as if it were a person in the throes of being killed. It lost power, rigor and vigor, and most of all, a will to live.
The occasional glints in its otherwise deadened eyes ceased those signs of life. The abyss was calm and flat, just orbital holes in its colossal head.
As the drilling continued, the Sling [Stake] and the villager [Thorns] twisted within the wounds, digging and digging. Another straw rain commenced, a spray of dead wheat without curse, soul, or efficacy. The lifeless straw fell in black strands, with no aura of magic contained within.
Wow, the E-squad echoed as they receded within the guardian, their souls dodging the attacks through the weaves. This is how you treat your friend? You’re really digging in. Even Ruby would clutch her pearls at this ruthlessness.
But the village dug and drilled and fought. No hesitation. No doubt.
Swishy also fed energy into their swish-straw charms—which were now reduced to embedded emblems woven into the side of their current, thorny forms.
As the boy spoke, the scarecrow-themed etchings glowed. “Keep going. Nothing can stop you. You’re finally fighting. Do you see how strong you are? How do you feel about the strength you have? Ask yourself…”
Swishy borrowed from the Trey script, sensing that this was how one tapped into magic.
And his hunch was on target: the village darts emitted a blue glow of legible, cloud-font words.
PRIDE, HONOR, and WILL.
Are you all seeing this? The E-squad said amongst themselves, a family meeting of sorts. They didn’t have all that gumption before. Maybe we can use them in our new world…Ruby would have a place for this talent.
Swishy was sick of them and their self-assured unseriousness.
There was a final step to exorcise the E-squad’s possession of the colossus: the straw god himself.
Swishy overflowed with bright aura and was flawlessly in tune with the image of his coming attack. He tempered himself with light as he followed the other attacks, a leader determined to finish the job.
He recognized the feeling inside him, the soul-drive, and he saw himself as a bottomless well of power.
The blackness inside his head now poured with gold, and the weapon in his hand transformed as well.
Effortlessly drawing upon his magic, his rake prongs merged with the adjacent ones, weaving and weaving until there were only three left.
His rake became a trident again, his weapon of choice when downing his very first wrathraven.
He welcomed his signature move like an old friend.
Swishy poised his trident aggressively, driving downward with savage gravity.
“[Golden Scarecrow Returns to Hell]!”
He impaled the guardian, ripping through with the rake first—and aura second. The rake expanded to the ground, penetrating deep within the Cearth. Next came the light, which spread in tendrils within the [Possessed Guardian], chasing after the E-squad. The four shadows traversed the scarecrow, searching for crevices and corners with which to hide. They giggled all along the way, enjoying the game of hide and seek.
The tower of trident light slowly spread throughout the area, from the width of one tree to two, and from two tree-widths to three-and-a-half. Soon the golden beam expanded to the entire structure, then spread outward.
As Swishy parted the darkness with light, he mourned his guardian every moment of its shaky dissolution. The intense glow pushed the shadows away, tearing the guardian from the inside out.
“I’m sorry, my friend…”
The [Possessed Guardian] remained dead and unresponsive as could be, gradually reducing to powder.
Swishy grieved in earnest before a disruptive thought skipped through his mind: I’ll make another. He shook his head from the shame, and though he acknowledged the truth in his statement, he judged the timing of his thought as intrusive and violating.
The logic that everyone applied to his heart, he now applied to his favorite scarecrow. He couldn’t explain his bond to the guardian. It was just…big. It was impressive—the most impressive thing he’d ever done. Downing a scarecrow—its arms, its carefree aura—was one of his saddest experiences on the planet Cearth.
The guardian flaked before his eyes, becoming the black rain it’d once released. And the rain wouldn’t stop. Not for a while. There was that much straw, darkness, and sorrow to go around.
“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…”
But we’re still here, E-squad said, their voices in the sky, all-encompassing.
“Don’t remind me…”
You don’t need reminders. You can feel us. And we can feel you too.
Swishy jumped from his massive trident and flapped his wing, slowing his descent. His soul gulped. His body simply stiffened.
Your fear, we feel that too. Gulp again. Freeze again. Show us everything that you are.
Swishy landed next to his glowing trident, the weapon sticking into the ground like a lighthouse. He palmed the handle and absorbed everything he could of the item, reducing its height and width, draining the resources back into his body. Soon, he pulled the trident from the ground and the three prongs unwound and spread back into its twelve original tines.
A flicker of shadow occurred between the trees several paces ahead. And then another flicker a few meters to the left. And then two more in the surrounding area.
Emi, Emilio, Eren, and Emily were concealed by the woods. Their silhouettes regrouped within the trees—Swishy viewed the smoke trails curling and twisting together. But the reconstruction was blessedly slow. While Swishy’s attack didn’t take them out, they struggled to maneuver amid the technique’s mythic glow.
But they confidently reformed one part of themselves: their mouths. They smiled and Swishy could see their teeth, pure fangs, gleaming like professionally maintained sets of assassination blades.
They clicked their teeth together and kiss-kissed at Swishy.
Rake in hand, Swishy lowered himself into battle position.
(…)
But Swishy wasn’t quite ready for the fight yet. Minor regrouping was ahead on his end, too.
Stolen story; please report.
He turned to the black stake in the ground, tree height with a wood-chipped texture. A pile of bandages lay at its base. Sling hadn’t transformed into her old body. Perhaps she couldn’t. Swishy knew he had to sort that out.
Several souls were above them as well, a freefall of curses and allies. The remnant curses of the [Possessed Guardian]’s rain poured downward. So, too, did the [Thorn] forms of the villagers.
Trey, also falling, was building aura to handle the hapless luggage that descended with him. He was now a sudden babysitter to Sling’s cast-off belt of mummified kid-crows. The wrathraven babies also flapped desperately and ineffectually in the same area. And the Bristles’ backpack also fell like a rock—an evil, somehow still-snoring rock.
The Clayborne spread his limbs outward, a free-falling position, a rapidly descending starfish of a boy. He spread his energy through the tips of his fingers and toes, creating a bubble around him of both shadow and gold. As the bubble grew and grew, touching everyone within its magical radius, they were all drawn into a [Zlide].
One second, they were falling. And the next they’d vanished.
Swishy heard their rearrange in the treetop directly above him. Their bodies rustled in the foliage, knocking leaves and twigs to the ground. All their bodies and vessels were concealed in the canopies, but Swishy accounted for all their clustered-together souls.
The kid-crows whined.
The wrath babies chirped in protests.
Bristles laughed—laughs that were cut off by sudden snoring.
Thank goodness! Swishy was relieved by the volatile man’s ability to sleep. They didn’t need another problem, his immediate worry that Bristles would wake up and eat the crumb village.
A funny but not-so-funny thought crossed the boy’s mind: Well, that’s Trey’s problem now!
One that Trey readily addressed. Multiple spells lit up within the tree’s foliage: ZOOTHE, ZTEADY, ZIP. These spells were activated multiple times, presumably into the crumb village and kid-crows. Swishy sensed the effects immediately, the quality of their souls flowed with serenity, steadiness, and speed.
Trey, wisely, decided not to buff the wrath babies. He gathered them into his hands and deposited them in his parka hood—as the dark chicks chirped away with insolence and ire.
Swishy and Trey exchanged looks, then thumbs-up gestures, before Trey tossed the mummified kid-crows out of the tree.
Thud!
“What are you doing?” Swishy yelled.
“Oh, whatever, they can’t feel it. These bales are done.”
The kids grumbled with their wraps, twisting, threatening.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…” Trey righted the children. Surprisingly, they balanced well on their bound feet. “Good kids. Ya’ll know the drill, try to keep up.”
The children stiffly jerked, their attempt at nodding.
The deluge continued. A constant pace, never stopping, and never draining the [Possessed Guardian] either. Swishy expected the proverbial rain cloud to deplete, to lighten up as it released its store of dark-dwellers. But it was full, so full, something Swishy claimed responsibility for.
He remembered his moment of [Voodoo]; he remembered allowing Myst to guide him into a suite of rare abilities; he remembered the massive impact of [Scarecrow of the Damned]. And the guardian never recovered from that. He’d thought it died; he thought it’d served its purpose and would be left alone.
But anything he touched turned into eternity. Straw is life, that was the maxim, that was his magic—and that was the greatest allure to his enemies.
“I’m dumb…of course, this would come back to eat me.”
“You had no way of knowing.” Trey was on hands and knees, checking for crumb villagers he might’ve missed. His hands were aglow with [Zoothe] and [Zteady].
“I know that but that’s not how this feels. It’s embarrassing.”
“You’re good, my guy. Let’s just handle this.”
Two words dueled within Swishy’s mind: PRESSURE and LOVE. They proliferated in bubbling flumes, all the anxieties and all the care. He imagined everyone’s little souls in his hand and had a frenzy welled in him. There was everything to fear. There were countless souls to lose. Swishy wanted to [Pile] and hide from it all. But to [Scarecrow] was to stand firm, to prove to himself that he deserved the faith placed in him.
He was Swishy the guardian. Swishy the sentinel.
But his chest chasm howled, insisting that he’d fail, but the [Heart Armor] prosthetic flashed and dispelled his doubts. He grinned, pleased to discover he could use Trey’s [Heart Strings] as a conduit for his latent gold, the magic core functioning like a traditional organ.
Strangely, the implant made him feel more human than he ever had. The weakness of personhood, of standard anatomy, settled him. The confidence flowed through him as he stared into the surging dark, his straw tightening throughout his limbs in powerful cords.
His renewed grip on his rake was firm.
“Need some of this?” Trey held [Zoothe] and [Zteady] toward him, just like he would a bag of chips.
“I’m okay, thank you.
“Cool, you got this.”
“I can do this, I can do this…”
“You can and you will.”
Swishy looked around for the E-squad. They were not immediately apparent, camouflaged in the night, but the boy sensed their four pairs of eyes, their four powerful and influential souls focused upon him. He held the rake close to his body, holding it with both hands, almost hugging it.
“That’s right, Swish,” Trey encouraged. “Steady is the hand that reaches for the future.”
“Did your family teach you that?”
“No, it just came from watching you fight for your life.”
“Thanks,” Swishy said, hunched and wary, prepared for the E-squad.
Trey hoisted the Bristles backpack on his back and nodded to the kid-crows. He then waved at the [Zip]-boosted crumbs, too, piece-mealed parents that clumped together into a tumbleweed.
“Okay, I’m going ahead. The woods are almost done. I see some straw plains. Meet me there. Okay, Swish?”
“Yeah, see you soon Trey.”
And then Trey was off, the kid-crows bouncing alongside him as the speediest rabbits ever. And the tumbleweed parents rolled behind them with haste and vigor.
(…)
Now it was Sling’s turn to reform. The woman was still in a hexed [Stake], plugged helplessly into the ground. But there wasn’t much time as the E-squad had made headway in gathering energy and forming an anatomy.
The shadows shifted like curtains, moving in strange patterns, their exact forms difficult to pin down.
One certainty that Swishy managed to glean from the situation was this: a wind, a gust, a tornado cage. A modest one, though, not at all an attack. The winds were so thin that Swishy felt he could walk through them without incident—except for the presence of Emi-Emilio-Eren-Emily.
Four cloak-like shadows produced a gust around their perimeter. They glided through the area, facing the enclosed pair. While they were shadow forms, Swishy easily detected their facial expressions and moods. They made no attempt to conceal their condescension, their assumed dominance over their targets.
And every several seconds, he could see stray body parts conjure from the dark smoke, a finger here, an eye and an ear there.
Their mouths were fully formed, the fangs presented in full. The four family members hissed through their open mouths.
But they made no move to attack them. They watched, evaluating the situation. Swishy didn’t know why they hadn’t yet attacked, but he could feel their shadow-sight home in on the tower of rake.
The boy pressed his palm to the handle and reduced its size, bringing the weapon’s gold-straw inside him. As the golds re-entered his body, he felt the hearth of his curse-wracked self stoked through the magic. The wheat entered through his hand and streamed toward the [Heart Armor], encasing it, fortifying it. No one would get inside. Not his enemies. Not his curses. And not himself either.
He felt the long-absent urge to reach into her cavity but knew that wouldn’t be able to. There was no time to wallow, to worry over the type of heart he now had. He had to focus on others.
“Can you put yourself together, Slingy?”
The stake wavered in the ground, the bandages billowing upon like they were clothing, the ghost of Sling’s usual silhouette filling out the shed wraps.
A couple more waves that translated to Yes, please.
Sling reduced herself with [Pile], the mound of her blackwheat parts stacked as high as Swishy.
The woman was ash, decay.
Swishy gazed at her innumerable grains, the sum of countless agonies and slights.
[Scarecrow] formed in his mind but wouldn’t work on Sling’s blackwheat. The curses strained against the influence of a standard hay-bale enchantment, wanting more, demanding it.
“[Curse-straw],” Swishy said, a dark lord once more.
Reconstructing the giantess was sluggish work. The hand came first, its elegant fingers, its resistant curses that sharpened to claws, digging into the ground. Her curses refused to be put back into the strong-willed body and re-sealed under her pleasing and anestheticizing seals.
The hand flew from the straw ashes toward Swishy’s neck and squeezed. They dug in, scratching clawing, impaling through to the other side. But instinct led them astray for Swishy wasn’t an anatomically vulnerable vessel, just items and enchantment, straw and soul.
He created a second hand—this time with more of Sling in it—which launched to the other murderous hand and pulled it off of Swishy’s neck. He focused on restructuring by starting from the good arm, the well-behaved ally of a limb, creating the forearm, the elbow, and the shoulder. He kept going slowly, guiding Sling’s soul along the curse-mineable portions of the straw. A shoulder blade. A neck. Collarbone. Breasts. Ribs. And so on…
Past a certain point, her partially restored body crafted an aura that called out to her discarded bandages, wrapping her, clutching her, returning her to a semblance of her treasured elegance and modesty. SWEET CREAM, FRITTER, LEMON MERINGUE, CUSTARD.
Some wraps were outside in, others were inside out, revealing the sweet secrets of her gentle design. A girl who loved flavor. A girl, who, for every moment of her life, deserved delicious fortunes.
The village leader’s torso was completely constructed then—which alone was double Swishy’s height—and then she pressed her hands into the ground, infusing aura into the pile of remaining straw and bandages, and pushed herself up. As the woman’s body rose from the pile of herself, the wheat weaved into her missing limbs as she went higher and higher into the air, first the hips and thighs, her knees, calves, and ankles, and both of her exquisitely pointed but incredibly large feet.
And the wraps followed, floating along her current of aura, traveling around and around her legs in several airtight layers.
“Perfect,” Sling said as she poked a doting finger upon Swishy’s rind.
“Yes, Slingy,” Swishy smiled at her, pleased that she was together again, but worried by the imperfection of it all. She was craftable again—a perfect outcome in theory—but it took so long, and required more magic than he knew Sling had available within her. He guessed that she only had one, maybe two more restorations at most.
And the E-squad knew this as well. They waited as four arrogant siblings, self-assured, leering at Swishy and Sling. Wicked smiles spread across their mouths, their teeth gleaming like constellations. Both Swishy and E-squad acknowledged the elephant, or rather, the giantess in the room: that they could’ve attacked at any moment, that Sling was simply a vulnerable, vulnerable woman.
She won’t get that chance again, hehehe…We will pluck her soul straight from that mound.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Sling glared ahead at the amorphous shadows, a confident expression, though Swishy saw that her lips trembled—and the soul inside, lithe and relatively full, was also shaken.
Swishy stepped forward and brandished the rake, brightening it with energy.
We knew you’d been holding out…All that light, and you’ll share none of that with us? Shame.
“What about your shame? Make something for yourself. Make some cookies. Make a crumpet. I’m sure Slingy’s wraps have a recipe for that somewhere.”
“I do, actually,” Sling whispered, steadying her quivers.
One cup milk, three cups flour, two eggs…The E-squad shadows glided around Sling, holding an unraveled piece of her bandages, peeling it straight from her neck.
Sling trembled.
Swishy trembled.
And the E-squad kept reading, whispering about sugar to Swish-straw ratios.