A battered pair speckled with wounds and bandaging sat in cold resolve on the muddy earth beside seven burned wagons. The sky was dimming to night and cast a terrible shadow over the scene around them. A scene of blood and anguish that portrayed a fight without any winners. Thirty travelers lay mauled on the slick muddy floor of the woodland. The dead trees which were unnaturally turning to stone in this twisted part of the spreding stood as though a crowd of mocking onlookers around the brutally disfigured forms. The bloody bodies of what used to be people were strewn on the ground like fallen leaves, pieces, and crimson-covered parts laid here and there all around.
"Lacy, what were those things?" The man whose face was dark and hopeless asked his compatriot, not even looking her way. Instead, he sat beside her leaning his tired back on a blackened wagon wheel and stared blankly at a tree with no leaves, the bottom of which was completely stone and the top gray and dead, with sharp spear-like branches and dry cracked bark. Lacy moaned, to even breathe hurt her chest something awful, she also stared ahead with dead eyes avoiding looking at the gruesome death around them. "I don't know what they were." She rasped her voice breaking in pain. Though she tried not to move her broken rib while speaking it was impossible. "But Fin you need to run. You need to..." The man laughed to interrupt her. His pointed and mad-sounding laugh was so crisp sounding in this barren forest. He looked at her with a glare in his eyes and almost whispered his reply. "Do you think running would save me? The spreading has won, there is no rock to hide under or hole to crawl into that will spare either of us even an extra minute of life." Fin's hand pointed wildly at the smoldering wagons around them. "The smoke from those fires will bring our death soon enough, let us not fill these last moments with silly dreams... or rather, nightmares of me abandoning you."
Lacy showed him a sad smile, and though she could hardly stomach the pain she felt the need to speak. "Remember when you said.. ugh" she moaned. "You said "we can not let the spreading take our hope" that even if things get bad we can't.." *cough that single cough hurt like a thousand knives stabbed into Lacy's chest. "Even if things get bad we shouldn't give up until our very last breath. You can't give up just because of me. Run and find a way to survive, like you always do." Fin felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He loved this beautiful woman. He couldn't help but picture them both together on another world, in another place or time where they didn't have to run from the spreading, and where they didn't have to suffer so much injustice but could live together in a small home on a small green hill where the season was always spring. Alone and separate from war and death and... monsters. "Maybe I said that, And maybe I was a fool. No one can hope forever. It's time the running stopped, let's just let the spreading take us. Who knows, Maybe it will take us someplace better than here. To a world that wants us."
Lacy saw the end in her lover's eyes as his hand reached out to hold her own, bandaged and stinging hand. She didn't say anything more, because nothing needed to be said. A world that wants us... she thought just as more of... them... arrived.
A twisted face resembling a man but with a mouth too wide, a nose too long, and hollow darkness where eyes should be. His mouth a den of knives and his hands a single fingerless bone claw, like a white dagger attached to his arm in a twisted and infected-looking way. His naked body was thin and frail and wrinkled like an old man. He hovered like a ghost above the ground and stood among a crowd of twenty doppelgangers. They all drifted swiftly between the trees as though two dozen spirits haunting the wood. They made no sound nor seemed to notice anything around them, yet like skilled hunters they approached Fin and Lacy without diverting course. The couple said nothing. They simply watched the indelible image of their convoy's demise repeat itself a second time.
There was no fighting will in them but Lacy and Fin stood anyway as the phantom beings reached the burnt ashes of the wagon farthest from where they sat. The monsters simply flew right through it, their bodies negating the physical world completely, these evil spirits were immaterial and untiring. Fin threw a rock with all his might into the approaching crowd, the stone passed through the forms of seven beings and left no sign or mark behind. This close the monster's faces were even more horrid and hard to look directly at. But the whole herd was staring with their hollow eye sockets and seemed to have a hate-filled expression as they sped up toward the duo.
"I know you probably don't have any more in you, but we could use some fire right about now." the panic in Fin's voice surprised even him. only moments ago he spoke of welcoming the end, but looking now into the chill-raising expression of death he wavered. Lacy raised her hand and with a great heave of her body fire appeared before her. A wave of heat and flame rushed out and struck the ethereal creatures in the front of the pack. Then the screams began. Louder than a horn and shriller than any natural beast, the calls from the ghost's throat were ear-piercing and their skin burned and withered off of their very bones in the furnace of bright flame that swept over them. They scratched and scraped at their own flesh with the claws at the end of their arms but continued even in their bitter pain and yelping to charge.
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The ones who the flames didn't touch also picked up their pace and ignored their comrades who were now smoldering just like the wagons all around. This was all the same as before. The Caravan had tried fist and iron, weapon and arrow but everything physical went through the monsters like hammers through the air. Only the two magicians were able to strike the monsters with their fire and lightning. the battle had been horrible, Babies had been ripped from wagons and mothers skewered on the long claws of the ghosts which became physical at the will of the beasts. Even lighting everything on fire gave no escape from the phantoms who howled in pain and withered but floated through the burning fire anyway just to attack the living with teeth and claw.
Smoke had obscured much of the pandemonium but both Fin and Lacy had witnessed enough to be shaken on their feet. Lacy had used up all of her strength burning the phantoms but even when nothing but the bones was left of the monsters, their face, flesh, and organs melted off into the mud they continued to shriek and consume as nothing more than burning skeletons hovering in the fiery light. Killing anyone and everyone around them. Piercing and clawing off limbs, biting off flesh and muscle from victims who added their screams to the air with terror. Eventually, their bones would cinder and crack and slowly they would die, but the end was sealed from the beginning. Creatures like this were why all but the foolish ran from the spreading. It was only a shame that their convoy had weakened from starvation and fallen behind.
"I'm done." Lacy craked out as her hand fell. Only a handful of the loud phantoms were smoldering with burns, they approached with finality and claws outstretched to kill and eat. Fin wanted to say something, but his throat dried up. Lacy turned her eyes away as the monsters finally reached them and a claw was swung at her head.
*Woosh the air parted in front of both Lacy and Fin as a man dressed in grey monster hide stepped between them and the crowd of ghosts. Two powerful hands reached up and caught the falling claws before they could even touch the couple one from a phantom to the left, in front of Lacy, and another striking at Fin to the right with lust for his death on its morphed face. Fin cocked his dizzy head to the side, but the image in front of him made no sense. Had a dead friend risen from the grave to protect them? "You two shouldn't stay out in the open with wounds like that." A simple voice of someone younger but obviously braver than Fin spoke.
The Claws in the man's hands which had been stopped dead in the air slipped through his grasp like trying to hold sand, and before he could react a dozen more of the creatures swarmed around them with claws and teeth bared. The man whose back was sturdy and who moved so fast Fin couldn't even see what he was doing, seemed dismayed by the phantom's ability to phase through his hands. He pulled out a bone dagger from his side that was latched to him with a leather strap and struck at the monster but went right through as though the phantom were only an image in the air. It was at this moment Fin realized a foolish stranger had appeared to save them but would soon only become another victim.
The man now surrounded by the phantoms was slashed through the thigh by a claw that only missed his chest by a hairsbreadth. He struck out again at another phantom but his weapon only touched air. If he wasn't so quick he would have died from the many phantoms striking at him but instead, he ducked and weaved through blow and stab alike and always kept himself between the couple and the phantoms. Fin could hardly believe a single man could survive what would have surely been the death of a dozen men if they were all strong warriors and accosted by so many phantom creatures.
It was only a few seconds of time but it felt like it all happened so slowly, perhaps the nearness of death plays tricks on the mind. Fin had only been able to step back a few paces from the new fight while holding a weak and stumbling Lacy's hand when the stranger spoke for a second time. His voice was filled with frustration and rage, and he seemed to target no one with his words. "ARGHGH!!! NO more of this!!" with some form of irrevocability Fin did not understand, the hands of the man which had slipped through the monsters like they were only mist before... Now reached out dropping the bone blade on the ground and grabbed two fistfuls of pale skin. The man pulled down two shoulders of a phantom and brought his knee up with such swiftness that when the torso met his leg it burst. It simply burst. Bone, blood, muscle, and flesh splattered all around and the corpse that was left in the man's hands was dropped like a sack of bleeding apples. The monster and all its guts then sank through the natural world and into the very ground itself. all remnant of it disappearing.
Fin couldn't hardly register what had just taken place when the man reached out and grabbed another phantom... this time pulling off its head and tossing it aside. He stepped quick and dogged blow after blow, and swiftly struck another Phantom with a fist that whistled in the air, the pieces of it that blew apart were gruesome and gory, but they too vanished into the mud. And soon the Man was striking faster than the phantoms could track. One after another his might touched them with powerful consequences. "Is this man a human?" Lacy strained out. But Fin didn't know. He just stood in silence as the monsters died and his heart lightened to watch the massacre which in some minuscule way felt as though it brought justice to the massacre of human life he had seen only an hour before.