Every good play has to have a magnanimous closure. Now that all masks have fallen, now that the jokes have ended, now that the well of hope has gone dry, this is it. Welcome, Ladies and gentlemen, to this humble Pawn’s life. Welcome to Lady Scarlet’s palace of horrors. You won’t enjoy the tour, but you won’t ever go away.

I had managed to climb a good portion of the web, grabbing from stiff legs and arms that kicked and scratched me, not to pull me down, but just out of the cruelty of those who prongs an animal with a stick. That’s when the sphincter exploded in a electric blue flash. I saw the amber eyes even through the smoke, electrical sparks coursing through them.

“So you are here, little scoundrel!” His attention was shifted to the dead fledgling that had barked and me and cushioned my fall. “That’s eight, little, soon to be dead, scoundrel.”

Then Gadorprims spat a bolt of lightning against one of the walls, leaving a patch of molten stone on the point of impact.

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” cheered the dragonlings.

“Everyone that can understand me, get out. Daddy needs to have a slightly heated up discussion with our dear butler!” He commanded, and a little, dragon approached with his head down, like a dog that knows he has done bad.

“But daddy, brothers and sisters will eat us if we go out the nanny chamber. Mommy told us so.”

“Not if you eat them first, champ,” he said, and licked the forehead of the little one. The dragonling immediately perked up and trotted away.

Soon after, a tide of his siblings following, flowing out the opening like water, stepping over each other, screeching, howling.

“Too many remain yet…” Gadorprims commented, and shook his head.

“Come down, let me kill you in a way that’s safe, and I may have the mercy of eating your remains so Scarreladai’s cannot use them.”

I stretched one of my arms towards him, revealing the sigils of the lower part of my forearm.

“You offer is tempting and fair, Sir Gadorprims. Unfortunately, if I die, we all go boom boom kaboom. I am loaded charge. So let me give my girlfriend the death I owe her, and then I will defuse the glyphs.”

“With Jillsenbane? You know how much that thing hurts undead? You are stupider than I took you for! Get down or I will carry you away and drop you over a populated city, let’s see who else goes ‘boom, boom kaboom’ then!” he ordered, taking a few steps towards my position. I struggled to climb higher, and barely managed it. I had to unsheathe Jillsebane, and I had to climb higher, but I couldn’t do both. Damned instant of indecision.

“If you take me out the room, I am triggering the glyphs anyway. With just a thought. This place will crumble and kill most, if not all, of your little young darlings. “

Lightning coursed around his body, gathering around his snout, flickering around his teeth, jumping from fang to fang. “I can still torture you until you deactivate them.”

“Or until I decided I had enough and pull the trigger. Come on, Gadorprims, you are more intelligent than that.”

“No, no. He isn’t,” finally interjected Abeline, “who, do you think, had the ‘breast badly grafted to eye socket’ idea?”

“It’s avant garde, ignorant woman!” growled Gadorpims, sending sparks.

“Figures, it’s too goofy of a modification for Scarreladai,” I sighed.

“I once tried to see how head-banging feels, and the answer is: like a head-butting contest with a beluga,” she began ranting and a bolt of lightning reached Jillsenbane, ripping her off my hand and leaving my whole arm feeling like a toddler discovering why electrical outlets and forks are a bad match.

“Will you come down and settle this like the man you are?”

“I would, but your wife kind of nailed me to the wall with bone for better support,” sassed Abeline.

“This is why we stashed you away in the most isolated corner of the cave and we barely visit, Abeline!”

“Gadorprims, do you expect me to hate you and Scarreladai less than I hate this scum that is clinging to me like a parasite? Because that is not going to happen anytime soon.” She looked down at me, as I breathed heavily and opened and closed my fingers in front of my face to make sure they all still worked correctly. “Cheer up, they may have nailed me against the wall, but, for the record, it was against my will.”

I grimaced, her jokes were getting disgusting.

“Will you were not into, by the way. Hey, Gadorprims, have you contacted my lawyer yet?”

I jumped off the web and went back to recover Jillsenbane.

“I will enjoy cutting your head off, Abel-abi,” I admitted, and my heart sunk, because I never thought those would be words I’d be uttering.

“Ohhh, cute boy, you are going to make me cosplay as Marie Antoinette! Is it because that’s the only way you would ever be able to reach my throat?”

Gadorprims shoot another bolt, this time against Abeline, hitting her in the neck, making her choke, cough, spasm.

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“Shut. Up. Grownups are talking.”

With my guard up, I began walking towards Gadorprims the Peerless with firm step. I would not be able to release Abeline as long as he was there. He would not allow me to destroy his nest, or incubator, or however it would please you to call this… function, of Abeline’s corpse. So, if I wanted to conclude my mission, to fulfill my duty, I had to defeat Gadorprims first.

I rushed towards him and he turned violently, sweeping me off my feet with the aid of his long tail. I had to avoid getting pinner by his claws, so I rolled towards the outer side of the flesh net, where an unopened egg capsule stood.

He remained in place, staring at me, gathering electricy around his snoot and then releasing it, letting it disperse in the air around him, illuminating the dark corners of the room.

“It seems this battle can be nothing but a stalemate. You cannot win, I cannot completely lose,” I said.

“There is a thing that keeps you from blowing up, though.” Abeline turned her head to follow the gaze of Gadorprims. It seems the facebreast gave her a rather severe blind spot.

Gadorprims was staring at the diary. This diary.

“It’s right that nobody can win here today, not how they want, son of Saho. But, believe me, Scarreladai won’t care about anything but keeping you alive and close to Jillsenbane. It won’t keep her awake at night if she has to make an amputee without hands to hold a sword or legs to run and kick. The few tennets of healing magic she learned from Abeline will make sure that that can happen. And there you won’t be able to draw sigils anymore, with no fingers nor toes nor tongue. Maybe she would even insert Jillsebane in your mouth, so you would be kept staring straight up all the time, constantly trying to vomit, and unable to do so , while the sword’s metal irritates your esophagus for the rest of time. So, Pawn—”

I shrugged. “I’d blow up before that happens. I need no hands to detonate the magic.”

“She will make you crazy enough without you noticing, and you will fall into a deeper madness than ever, only to wake up from it when she is done with the amputations.”

“I’d consider my wife doing that to someone as a red flag.”

“Shut up, Abeline, stuck up bitch!” I shook my fist at her in anger.

“It amazes me how she manages to torture us more than Scarreladai,” added Gadorprims. “Pawn, I offer you a good death. And as soon as all my sons and daughters are born, I will release Abeline myself. Burn her body to ashes. All I ask is you to not kill my litters by any means. Even more, as a direct descendant of Jillsen, I give you my word”, he pointed with a claw at his heart and applied a slight pressure on his chest, drawing a drop of blood. “That I will deliver your diary to some human population, so people can read your story, your… myth.”

Lightning surged from his body and gathered above his head, forming a giant image of a paper contract, a quill and ink.

“Why would I trust you?”

“He can convince people to graft…” Abeline opened her eye wide and started bawling like a scared child. “She comes with everything. Everything. The dogs, the sentinel, the ghosts, the chestipede, Luricia…”

“Who, or what is Luricia?” I asked, confused, concerned.

“A small detail, just… the nearest town we conquered,” Gadorprims said and ran towards the nearest group of several helpless whelps. He extended a wing down, and the little dragons started to climb it immediately. “Get on daddy’s back, come on, that is…”

The thing about tides, reader, is that they always come back.

The ground started to tremble with violence. I felt like an earthquake, but it wasn’t. it could not be.

Earthquakes don’t slowly open the crack on the ceiling as if they were a pair of eyelids. They make rubble and stalactites fall, but they don’t reveal flesh underneath the calcareous stone. The room had to be originally out in the open, before it got sealed with a giant, pulsating, calcite secreting sphincter.

I hid under one of the egg capsules and kept looking at the ceiling, to avoid a rock hitting me in the head just in the right angle to make us all blow up. I acted more out of fear than out of reason, as it is in that moment that I should have secured my death.

A tsunami of little dragons came from the mouth of the halls, fluttering, running, pushing, or struggling to take flight and go out the new opening, the new eye of the night that had a waxing moon for a pupil.

“Mommy comes!” yelled one of the dragons.

“Mother no, mother no!”

“Fly for your lives, mother comes!”

“I wanted to be a necromancer like her when I grow up. I want to grow up!”

Another one, slightly fat —to understate things a little—, lay on his side in the middle of the room. “Finally, the sweet embrace of death and servitude. Mother comes, Hurray!”

Distant chants flooded the place from above. I couldn’t recognize the language they were in, but the choir called her name every few words.

“What’s going on? Why do her sons fear Scarreladai?”

Gadorprims turned, ignoring the last three out of nine infants he was hurrying to climb onto him, and scowled at me.

“She is the eldest daughter of the goddess of death and Jillsen. Interpret that in the most non-figurative way you can imagine. And I don’t intend on meeting my mother-in-law, as you call it, anytime soon. See you when she calms down in a thousand years or so.”

He grabbed the last child with his mouth, and despite the squirming of the small dragon, began to flap his emerald wings. He soon took off from the floor and started flying in circles around the room, beating his wings once a lap and slowly ascending into the night.

But there was someone here hell-bent on stopping him, someone with a breast grafted to her face. Extending the meaty web so some of the hands could reach Gadorprims’ tail, she grasped it firmly. Gadorprims started flapping wildly as he got pulled lower and lower, as more and more hands and legs wrapped around him.

“You are not going anywhere but hell, Gadorprims.”

“Screw the eggs that have not hatched yet!” He began gathering electricity in his mouth and breathing it upon the arms and legs, reducing them to ashes. Abeline grabbed me with more of her extremities and I took Jillsenbane out of her scabbard, then she swung me, and I Jillsenbane, striking Gadorprims on the wrist of his right wing, severing its tip. He lost balance, hit the pulsating ceiling with a bolt, making blood rain upon us, and plummeted to the ground, crushing the two little dragons that were not fast enough to jump from his back and trusted his father so much they grasped him firmly, even in the last moments.

“No, no, no,” he repeated as he nuzzled the small ones blleding over the stone. “Ten, ten, ten! This makes ten!” he claimed and turned only to see me jumping upon him, aiming for his chest.

He managed to block Jillsenbane with his right foreleg, and the sword went straight through his ulna and radius. This didn’t stop him from charging another attack to fulminate me.

“If you attack, we explode,” I reminded him while trying to pull Jillsenbane away from his extremity to deliver another blow.

“We are dead anyway. This is mercy.”

A blood curling shrill irrupted in the room, making both me and Gadorprims stop what we were doing to cover our ears and close our eyes.

Then the world went silent, and when I opened my eyes again, the whole room was made of flesh, squirming and slimy, consuming the web around Abeline as she remained paralyzed, only able to giggle as, through the main entrance, through the burned sphincter, Scarreladai made her entrance.

“Kill the pawn or my bargaining chip, Gadorprims, and I will put you and each one of your children, mine or not, under the care of my mother,” the house lady’s voice boomed with the tone of broken glass and chanting whales.