If Loki himself was outside Ashera’s bone house, she would not have given a single fuck. She just wanted to sleep. Never in her life had she felt this tired. Her insides felt like they had been pulverized with a fifteen pound sledgehammer then split open with a rusty spork. Muscles ached, protesting no matter how she lay on the bed, as if she had just fought a hundred thralls in a no ‘hold’s barred’ wrestling match covered in coconut oil. Every fiber and tendon within her had been worked to the straining point. Her crotch felt like a nest of fire ants had moved in and were doing their best imitation of rabbits in heat.
Then the pounding started.
A rosy dusk settled over their nameless town, silencing Ellin Forest like a guillotine. But not the pounding. Someone was just outside her house clanging solid metal bars against each other. Sounds like golems trying to procreate. What a racket! Hey, just cause I’m pregnant doesn’t mean that you can steal a march and overthrow the Lady of Mischief!
Ashera tried to stand, pain shot through her legs, gut, and back before her feet ever touched the ground. A million needles ran up her toes like a thousand angry honey badgers, overloading her senses as the weight of her legs dragged her onto the floor. Unfortunately she lacked the strength to rise, resigning herself to sleep on the dirt floor.
Her eyes fluttered shut, closing despite her orders to stay open.
BANG BANG BANG
I’m going to murder whoever is banging out there. Ashera thought, fading into a blood loss induced stupor.
Rowan found her on the floor, his voice sounded distant and fuzzy, like looking at the sun through ten feet of water. There was no mistaking that the sun was in fact there, but it was blurry, dim, shifting with the ebb and flow of the waves. People materialized around them, her family.
“Where is Aleyander?”
Muddled voices answered her. Vesper’s sweet voice among them. Something ephemeral bordered her tone making her sound unusual, like it did not fit a conversation about an infant. Vesper pressed something warm to Ashera’s lips, going by the scent of bare feet and grass it was one of her home remedies. Fortune smiled as Ashera sipped, finding the liquid to be predominantly flavorless except for a slight twinge of sulfur.
Her world sharpened, all five senses cranking into overdrive. Every scratch, scrape, and bruise caught fire. Whatever was in the potion kicked the nether-region-honey-badgers that she had almost been able to forget. Now they were on the warpath, kicking and clawing–
Matching Ashera’s screams with howls of their own.
“Damnit man! Silence the witch!”
A dozen pairs of hands touched Ashera, making her scream as coarse hands covered her face. Then her nose. She kicked out, trying to make them work, but a broken pelvis sent her kicks in odd directions, landing on people she did not know and could not see. Something hooked her tongue, piercing through it’s center. Caught fast they pulled the muscle out of her mouth.
“Uck oo! Mm mott a wwfsssshh”
The hook slipped, cutting into her tongue. Stimulant heightened pain burned Ashera’s mouth, redoubling as the hook bit through her again, and again.
ENOUGH.
Ashera yanked her head backwards, ripping the hook out in one painful spasm. Blood filled her mouth, muffling her cry. Enemies –most likely thralls– had infiltrated their home, she needed to get out of their reach. Throughout her life Ashera had been injured far worse, healing magic would fix her tongue, she just needed to get Aleyander and get out of the forest.
A man loomed in front of her vision, hands cranked her neck, leveraging her hair to painfully knot her so she had to look up at the man. It might have been Nerus, stimulants or not, her eyes refused to focus on anything except the thin gleam of steel. It grew larger as it approached her right eye. Growing ever larger. Ashera jerked as it touched her eyelid.
She tried to scream ‘STOP IT’ but her newly forked tongue only managed to drool blood. Scarlet spit oozed down her front. A vile deterrent that did nothing to slow the metal spoon as it squelched between her eye and eyelid. Ashera screamed, a primal howl of agony as someone rotated the spoon around her eyeball. Brute force tore through the eyelid and muscles that moved the eye. She wailed louder than a banshee–
–in vain.
She felt and saw the eyeball detach, her vision abruptly halved as the optical nerve was severed and she caught a glimpse of something spherical through her remaining eye. The spoon man flipped his tool, depositing the eyeball in a bowl before–
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
–Ashera blinked, not believing her eye— Did he just… Lick the spoon?
What the fuck is going on!?!
A fist connected with spoon-man’s face, the fist was attached to a giant, someone so large it could only be Rowan. Ashera’s mind raced, was the village under attack? She needed to run, no- find Aleyander then run.
Steel glinted again, this time it flashed in a single smooth stroke, one Ashera had seen tens of thousands of times. Tristan’s blade slashed through Rowan’s neck with a ssshhh-tttcccchhhiinnggg sound. Pink mist stung Ashera’s eye.
Thud.
His head rolled across the grass. Shouts of surprise erupted, the hands holding Ashera dwindled as her captors scattered. Finally! Tristan was here to save her. Had a demon borrowed Rowan’s face? That must be what happened. A demon had infiltrated the town—
A shriek of unbridled lament rose from the earth, stretching into the heavens to beg for intervention.
Ashera felt the shriek in her lungs. It was the sound she wished she could bring into the world. Someone was suffering just like her, one of her family needed her. Tapping into her soul she found her mana drained, utterly expended.
I’ll fight without mana then. Ashera twisted in her captor’s arms grasping towards any belt buckle her eye would focus on.
Her fingers found the rod she was looking for, tightening on the pommel of a dagger. Magic had always been Ashera’s first weapon. And her second weapon. And usually her third weapon. But mana ran dry, depleting as it was used. A powerful ability that required one to use it sparingly. Enhancing a blade was more efficient than a fireball or an illusory specter. So Ashera at least knew which end of a blade went in the bad guy.
The dagger yanked upwards clearing the captor’s scabbard before Ashera plunged it downward with all her post-birth strength. The man yelped as the dagger sank a half inch into his flesh, a superficial wound he quickly avenged himself of. One hand caught Ashera’s wrist, squeezing it until her bones cracked sending electric rods through her arm. The dagger fell free, and the man pressed it into Ashera’s fingers.
“Listen here cunt, I’ll teach you to stab me!” He growled into her ear.
Speaking in time with the blade sawing through her fingers. Ashera screamed with every molecule of sanity she still clung to, managing a very respectable gurgle. One that was cut off when a blue haired head rolled across the grass and knocked against her own skull.
Blindsided by the head it took Ashera a moment to recover, a moment that saw her fingers leave one hand. When she did, her vision clouded with tears, Vesper’s head lay near Rowan’s neck, a macabre display that twisted her heart into knots. Salt stung her eye socket.
Ashera broke.
She slumped forward, planting her forehead into the dirt. Dominate eye missing, pelvis and legs broken, fingers on her primary hand severed, magic depleted, and pinned. Ashera wept.
And wept.
And wept.
Til there were no more tears to weep. At least she had just given birth, she would be unusable for the things demons often began their tortures with. Like they did with Jude. If only I had been there a day earlier. If only Lorelai had broken me out of prison a single day sooner. That is my only regret. Ashera looked up, trying to focus on what was going around her.
Ashera Thorne’s remaining eye widened at the sight of Tristan and Jude crossing a wooden beam with the statue of her. She had asked Nerus to carve the statue for Loki, anointing the town as his chosen refuge, but somewhere in the offing he had changed muses, carving it in her image. Lorelai had convinced her it was fine, one statue amongst the nine hundred and ninety nine statues or tokens that Nerus had carved for Loki would be acceptable. After all, this village was Ashera’s village and she was Loki’s champion. Honouring Ashera, honoured Loki.
Jude lifted the crossbeam into position while Tristan drove an iron spike through it, piercing the beam and statue right where Ashera’s heart would be.
BANG BANG BANG
The statue that bore her likeness was about to become a cross. Lorelai -The woman Ashera’s once called her dearest friend- appeared beside them, carrying a dozen more iron spikes. Each of the rusty spikes were as long as Ashera’s forearm, too large for any rational work. Although, there was no forge in the village, nor charcoal to power it.
They must have been purposely forged for this sole task, rusty with age... How long ago had those been forged, no, how long had they been planning for this day? Ashera could not believe what her single eye told her, she had been loyal, faithful. Why was her family turning on her? Ashera shivered, gagging and heaving a wad of bloody spit onto the dirt. They were going to kill her, execute her in the style of the Legendary Reavers. Damnit all, why couldn’t they just behead her like the fucking Inquisition would. How did it come to this? Her life flashed before her eyes, memories inundating her mind as she sought the answer…
Ashera could not feel the hands that lifted her onto the cross, but she would never forget the sensation of having iron spiked driven through her palms and wrists. She couldn’t feel her legs, an infinitesimal mercy.
Throughout the nailing, Ashera repeated one question.
“Where is Aleyander?”
If anyone understood her slurred speech they did nothing to respond, leaving her broken body to hang on the cross.
Where she remained for the next two days.
An hour after she was first crucified, night fell, leaving her thoughts to haunt her. Imagined shapes swam through the darkness, forever ephemeral yet always terrifying. Shadows took the form of dozens of prowling wolves. Their fangs glistening with saliva at the prospect of a tender woman left out in the sun to dry for them.
Ashera couldn’t be bothered with fear. Sorrow seeped into her core, fermenting into hate.
The ‘Why’ of her crucifiction warped into a voracious ‘Where’. Hatred abhorred distractions, cleansing them from her mind. All she needed to know was where they had taken Aleyander. That question became her pole star, the goal of what little life remained within her, so she held on. Throughout the night Ashera found the will to lift herself, remaining upright so she could breath. Crucifixion was once known as the most painful way to die, a rumor brought on by onlookers who watched people die of thirst on a cross after the first day.
Those were the lucky ones. Crucifixion’s modus operandi was to contort the body so the executed would have to use their legs to stand, pushing their bare bones against iron nails for every breath of air. Try to sleep on the cross? Your lungs would pinch and your body would naturally wake you, saving you from a quiet exit and safeguarding a slow death by suffocation. Brought about when your muscles finally cramped and failed from exhaustion or dehydration.
The dawn sun rose behind Ashera illuminating the village and the carnage of the previous day. Vesper and Rowan had been moved, their bodies rolled into rages and dragged away before lunch, a fact that Ashera hardly noticed. For the rising sun had shown her the mauled gibbets of a baby. They had done what heaven required of them, dismembering the cambion and beheading it. They should have burned the corpse, but that was life in Ellin Forest.
Black hornes
Red skin
Cloven feet
It wasn’t possible. Ashera had been loyal, Tristan was the only man she had ever been with, how. No, it had to be someone else’s. Haven had been pregnant! The cambion must be hers. Thought Ashera, not believing her own lie. Haven had lost her child weeks ago, Vesper had buried it while Ashera comforted the woman.
Loki, save him. Forget about me, any life I have left, take it! Give me the truth about Aleyander. That, that THING can’t be him!
No answer came.