He wiped obsessively at the blood encrusting his body, grunting and gagging at the strange rotting, caramel odour which the viscous slime emitted. He rose as he did so, wild eyes ravaging the room for any scrap of inspiration or aid, it was barren, and they were coming. He looked once more to that inky black expanse beyond the door and prepared his fatigue shackled legs for a mad dash, anything to put distance between him and the hollow, glassy marble gaze of the lacerated body sprawled at his feet.
Coward! Harangued the scathing tongues who bore witness to his suffering as they punished him with yet another flash of seemingly endless agony.
“Quiet!” He roared back in an avian squawk of a voice and pounded his skull with the heel of his palm as he advanced to the door.
Futile! Too weak! Stay! Spilled out the words once more, their voices joined together in manic harmony and sounding like a synthesis of beetle hisses and wolf howls. They played recollections jumbled with scenes of vicious torment and yet one theme permeated the miasma of pervasive anger and that was his earlier realisation that he couldn’t outrun his opponent.
He roared to the faceless, unfeeling ceiling and threw his hands around impotently, ever aware of the steady encroach of the war drum like thud of hobnailed boots which proceeded his imminent demise.
“And you would have me do what demon!” Said he to the ring now damp with a broadside of impassioned spittle.
Fight! Crush skulls! Rend bone! Shouted one in a shuddering earthquake of a voice, deep, baritone and haughty. Hide! Sneered a voice of venom and nettles, a weaselling little itch working its way maddeningly through his mind. Feed? Suggested one. Feed! Bayed the chorus and with exuberance they urged him back down with brain splitting agony into prostration before the mutilated form of the swine like man lying in a pool of his own tepid lifeblood.
Feed! They cried over and over again in voices like keening war cries and others like funerary laments. He felt as though his eardrums had erupted into a pink and painful fluid as the voices went intermittently painfully high and ruinously low as they chanted their heinous desire.
The man gave in and plunged a weak arm down onto the corpse as his vision devolved into a slurry of stars and shadows at the edges. He was then greeted with a true entropic spectacle as where the ring touched the corpse dissolved into a swirling cloud of ash and black mould spores which bloomed high into the air before dividing themselves between material realms, or so it seemed.
The ring glowed as it did so, a corrupted lavender colour more akin to a swelling bruise than any flower of great beauty. It fed ravenously on the corpse, invisible tongue and fangs gorging themselves on its flesh, slaking their cruel thirst and hunger like a man long consigned to starvation. Soon their spree of accelerated decomposition relegated the corpse to naught more than a wine stain leeched deep into the ground, the ring ceased to glow, and the voices fell dormant once more, sated. For now at least.
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Then the creature’s comrades arrived, all five of them with perturbed confusion written plain to see across their round, jowly and slobbering faces. Their swords were drawn, and their edges glinted fantastically in the shadowy but pronounced lamplight held aloft by the behind one. There eyes licked the room clean for any indication of the whereabouts of their before slain member, content momentarily to disregard the cringing and recoiling man sprawled on the mud before then.
Then the moment faded.
They began all at once in a disorganized jumble of barked grunts and squeals. One, the largest and foremost of their party, marched forward off the doorstep and into the mud, his fall splashing the man with yet another thin layer of muck.
The man, in an expression of childlike naivete thrust forward his ring bearing arm in a misplaced hope that his before pious fealty to the demonic court would result in their helping him out of this situation. Their aid failed to materialise however and his continued lack of response to the authoritative questioning tossed toward him in a garbled, hacking cough of a language resulted in the batting away of his arm and a swift kick to the ribs. He flew across the room and back into the scorched space from where he had first entered, air expunged, and sword gone from his weak grip.
His pleading look cast up from the ground was just quick enough to catch a glimpse of the boot sole which severed him from consciousness.
The man was adrift, an unwilling yet captive passenger on the ever shifting and prismatic winds of unconscious thought, their kaleidoscopic and ungraspable concepts assailing him at rapid speed and gone before he had time to commit them to memory.
He came back from time to time, enough to feel the coarse bite of rope around his wrists and ankles and to feel the gusting daggers illustrative that he had been stripped of his cloak. Then he was gone again, alone in the space between worlds.
He later regained a firm grip on reality in time to feel the cold embrace of a stone floor as he was unceremoniously tossed into a ramshackle wooden cage lashed together with hempen rope. His bounds were removed as, while still groggy, they closed and locked the door on him.
Them man licked his wounds for a short time, rubbing the red raw and scuffed skin where he had been tied, wincing especially when he touched the ankle he had been grabbed at, the vice like grip of before sprouting a tapestry of ugly purple and green welts over the thin joint.
His environment was different now, the rigid edges and man-made construction had given way to a far more primal and seamless cave. The far end of which and against the wall being where he was held. In between him and the far-off exit, sitting sedately and in the dull and melancholy of those who have lost a friend were his captors, eating a mystery gloop around a roaring fire, only the barest penumbra of which warmed his tired bones.
His eyes drooped half closed as he scooted back and collapsed onto the back of the cage, grunting when a knot of rope dug deep into his pummelled kidney.
Heal! No, grow! Heal! The voices returned in the uproarious, asymmetric and conflicting melody. He considered their words as they beamed images into his mind, one of the ring making whole once shattered ribs and mending bruised joints. Another of it granting some sort of unholy boon of his choice. He tried to put them out of mind so that the fog of sleep could take him once more, it couldn’t, no matter how hard he clamped hands over his ears. He looked back at the exit with a hunger pang gaze and then at his cage. It seemed he had several decisions to make.
Author Note:
Decision 1:
Type 1 to try an escape.
Type 2 to wait and see.
Decision 2:
Type 3 to heal
Type 4 to grow, also state which body part you would like strengthened
The option with the most votes wins.
Please vote on both decisions in the same comment it makes it easier to keep track.
More information on decision 2 below.
If no-one votes than I will make the decision myself.