Al’Serica’s feet were numb. Despite smartly choosing to wear layers of dense furs and a woollen jumper to protect against the mountain’s freezing winds, he had thought it unnecessary to wear anything more than a few straps of leather on his carapaced feet. After all, he had been told by his guide that the weather on the mountain would be relatively mild and that the gossamer weaves of purple maleficium he had spun would be enough to hold off the worst of a sunless day’s chill. Yet still his feet were numb and Al’Serica barely felt the slush crunch beneath his feet and every breath stung at his lungs. But he could still feel the revolver by his side even as the metal became cold enough to be almost painful. His eyes could still see clearly the great, monstrous tracks of the Devil he had been chasing for a week. Even alone with his posse at a camp at the base of the forest Al’Serica knew he would be able to kill a wounded fiend. “I’ll only be out for the day,” he had argued, and only at the behest of his deputy did he consider bringing along a sleeping bag and a piece of flint. He would only be out in the forest for a little while longer, he was so close to finally putting down the hellish beast, yet Al’Serica felt the numbness slowly crawl up his legs.
Al’Serica wasn’t stupid of course, he knew at least to blaze the trail he took, hacking a crude mark every dozen or so trees with a flick of his wrist and a spray of more purple energy. Having a deep pool of maleficium, of curses that could both protect and harm, was one of the reasons Al’Serica had proposed he be the one to follow the Devil up and into the lonely mountain forest. The numbness had reached his knees. But any doubts about his decision to brave the chill alone and barely prepared were quickly dispelled when Al’Serica heard the sound. A low, rumbling, hissing sound that was almost volcanic in nature: the Devil’s laboured breathing. Even a near-immortal fiend powered solely by hatred and curses could not hope to endure a week of constant running and fighting. For every wound its claws and flaying energy tore open in Al’Serica’s posse, they would return in equal measure with gunfire and the snapping jaws of their hunting steeds. The tracks were becoming fresher, the snow more slush-like as it hadn’t had time to fully re-freeze, indigo blood yet to dissipate stained nearby trees. Al’Serica unholstered his gun and smiled a cruel smile, his revenge at hand.
Then silence. The sort of silence that happens between rumbling thunder and the lightning strike. The sort of silence where the world seems to halt in reverence of the sky’s wrathful motions. Silence that accompanies a disaster.
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Al’Serica had woken up to the sound of the clanging of bells, shrieking, and a world cut into darkest blacks and bloody reds and oranges. The midnight cacophony was soon joined by a roaring blaze and the sound of collapsing buildings. Al’Serica scrambled to get on at least his duster and his thoughts raced through the possibilities of what was happening. If it was just a fire, his responsibility as the officer of the town’s minutemen was the same as every other citizen’s. If it was an attack… Al’Serica could only think of one possibility. The town was too far out of the Delta for an undead raid and too close to Terminus for bandits. After grabbing a rifle Al’Serica kicked open his door and looked down the main street.
Fire snaked through the town and standing in the centre of the street was Al’Serica’s nightmare: a Devil. The Devil was a beast of hulking, rippling muscle loosely wrapped in ruddy chitin, a creature whose every breath tainted the air with sulphur and whose every step brought misery. Its arms which once numbered four in life had become so thick with muscle that they had fused together into two writhing trunks. Al’Serica even saw some fingers left out of the arm merger poking out of cords of arm muscle. Its eyes were the same pitch-black orbs as a mortal man’s, but they were crossed through with indigo veins and the pupil had collapsed inward into a void darker than black. Silhouetted against the fire Al’Serica couldn’t tell who was being gripped by the Devil’s eight-fingered hand but he saw clearly the flexing of the fiend’s arm muscles and the spray of gore that signalled their end. The Devil chuckled and let the body drop to join the rest of the corpses at its feet. Al’Serica growled and fired a shot at the thing, but the bullet never reached its target. A flash of purple partitioned the bullet into neat slices that quickly lost all velocity and clattered to the ground.
Yet Al’Serica’s shot was enough to inspire the other minutemen to begin firing their own volleys at the monster. For as powerful as the Devil was, not even it could defend itself against 10 guns firing as fast as they could from all sides. Bullets began to clink off its shell and sink into its flesh with squirts of volcanic blood. So it ran. Al’Serica could only watch the Devil leap onto the roof of one of the few buildings that hadn’t caught fire and rapidly bound across the rooftops out of town. Al’Serica dropped his gun and sprinted over to the mound of corpses the Devil had created. A dozen men and women were torn up into various states of intactness, some individuals so badly mauled by maleficium that they were only later identified because they weren’t found
anywhere else.
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Al’Serica felt the cold more fiercely. The weave of maleficium that kept him warm was fading and the chill spread into his hands. He took a moment to twist open the metal flask at his hip and forced down a mouthful of brackish swamp water. The weave renewed itself and Al’Serica blazed another tree.
“Help, get it away from me! Someone blind that baleful eye!” Al’Serica heard a terrified, gurgling cry that came from further in the woods. He held up his revolver. Devils could talk, of course they could, of course the cry was almost certainly a trap… yet Al’Serica also knew what true terror sounded like. He earned his officer rank from being present at the Willem Institute Massacre. As Al’Serica stalked closer to where the shout had come from, he heard a loud thump as if something had been dropped from a great height onto the snow. He began running towards the origin of the sound.
As he approached the origin Al’Serica saw that the Devil’s tracks had become so fresh that he could still feel the heat of its passing. Yet, as the trees began to thin out the tracks also began to be spaced further and further apart, as if the Devil had started to take bounding leaps instead of walking or running. Then the tracks stopped entirely just as the trees fully parted into a large clearing. Al’Serica looked up from the tracks into the clearing and stared in slack-jawed amazement.
Between where the tracks had stopped and the centre of the clearing was a distance no less than thirty metres, yet crumpled over in a mound of snow was the Devil. Al’Serica knew it was impossible for a Devil to leap that far, and even if it could, why would it do so? Other details began to stand out too; the snow surrounding the Devil was fresh while the snow Al’Serica was standing on was coated in hoarfrost. The snow itself had a curious fiery orange tint to it beyond what would be produced by the now-setting sun and Al’Serica had to cover his nose to avoid the disgustingly pungent acrid smell that hung in the air. Finally Al’Serica’s eyes fell upon his prey. The fiend was almost unrecognisable in that clearing. It reminded Al’Serica of the monarch eels that were found on the surface of the deepest lakes of the Delta. In the deep they were majestic apex predators, but the ones on lake surfaces were the sick, the dying, the elderly, their mien of power faded. So too did the Devil in the clearing have almost no resemblance to the living engine of wrath Al’Serica had been following for the past week, not just physically but in the character of its soul. Whatever had attacked left the Devil with a single arm that was stretched like taffy and its chitinous body looked like it had been suddenly released from a great pressure and all coherence thus lost.
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Far from just appearing flimsy, Al’Serica didn’t even need to pull out his knife to begin carving up the Devil and extract its throbbing core. Instead, its flesh parted under gentle tugs and Al’Serica only needed to tear at fat-encrusted arteries and organs whose purpose was unknown (if indeed they had a purpose). Eventually, the Devil’s heart that would have taken the sharpest sword or finely whetted harpoon to reach was pulled out in a single motion. The whole process was accompanied by the pained wheezing of the Devil and Al’Serica had to consciously keep his gaze from meeting the twitching yet unblinking pupil-less eyes of the Devil. As soon as Al’Serica yanked the beating heart from its body the Devil shuddered to a halt, its engine finally quieted.
Only once the thrum of the Devil’s maleficium stopped did Al’Serica realise another bout of silence had fallen on the mountain. Not a silence of reverence like before, but one of fear. Nothing moved, not even the wind, because everything knew for that one instant that to break the silence would mean an assured death. Al’Serica’s setae quivered as he felt a thousand eyes bore into his skin. The sunset coated the snow in a blood-red light, the metallic pungent smell from earlier came back even stronger. The combined putrid light and smell made the heart in Al’Serica’s hand feel like it had turned rancid, the flesh seemed to putrefy the longer it was held out under the bleeding sun. Al’Serica wanted to throw it as far away as possible despite being proof that he had succeeded in his hunt. Al’Serica wanted to throw up.
He ran, Al’Serica bolted from the clearing as fast as possible, desperately shoving the Devil’s core into his mostly-empty rucksack. His eyes frantically scanned for blazed trees and he only stopped running when the wind picked up again and the feeling of staring eyes dissipated. By then the sun had fully set and Al’Serica still couldn’t identify where he was in relation to the camp. The blazes were still there, he knew he had followed them, yet he seemed no closer to the campsite. Indeed, looking back Al’Serica could faintly see where the trees started thinning into the clearing. Despite the small distance travelled however the sun had almost completely set and in that moment Al’Serica was thankful at least that he had been convinced to take a sleeping bag, flint, and tinder.
Later that night Al’Serica noted under the then-dying fire that his hip-flask had become cold, much colder than he would have expected after an hour or two sitting next to a fire. As he began to fall asleep in that treacherous mountain forest, Al’Serica noted the bright full moon, unshrouded by the sudden appearance of heavy clouds. The chill sunk deeper into his bones as he slept.
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The next morning the forest was covered in a dense mist and despite his best efforts to keep warm Al’Serica could no longer feel his legs. With numb hands he opened his flask to replenish his spent maleficium. Only a trickle came out as most of the water had frozen into small blocks of ice, blocking the neck of the flask. Great handprints surrounded his campsite, Al’Serica’s sleeping bag in particular having several outlines of a terrible three-fingered grip created by frost. Al’Serica knew he had to make it back to the campsite as soon as possible and he swiftly packed up the sleeping bag with shaky hands.
Despite the fog Al’Serica could still faintly make out the deep gashes in the trees he had blazed, so he started towards where his compatriots should have been camped. Under a bleak sky minutes of walking turned into hours, early morning to midday and midday into afternoon. Despite the cold no snow fell and Al’Serica needed to contend with the difficult footing caused by half-melted frost as well as the maddening, glacial pace he needed to walk to ensure that he saw every blaze and didn’t get turned around in the fog. It was at noon Al’Serica realised his slow pace wasn’t the reason why the journey seemed to be taking so long: the distance between the marked trees had grown.
“One… two… three…” Al’Serica counted the trees between one mark and the next, placing his hand on each one to ensure the mist wasn’t tricking his vision. Indeed, the distance that had once been perhaps a dozen or so pine trees had extended to more than thirty. The extent of the incongruity was variable too, some blazes were separated by only a single tree more than Al’Serica expected, others up to forty. It reminded Al’Serica of the stories he had heard from their guide as they climbed the mountain, of the vast Witikos that stalked the forests forever-hungry and with skin cracked and bony from constant starvation and had the horrid idea that each additional tree was the leg of one such creature… yet the guide had told Al’Serica and his posse that the Witikos had migrated north and their allegedly tell-tale wind-like voice was absent. All Al’Serica could hear was the occasional gust of frigid mountainous air and the rustling of pines.
Once again night fell and Al’Serica had no way of telling how far he had travelled towards his goal. And once again he lit a fire under a night sky darkened by thick clouds and an even more terrible chill. Despite the roiling clouds the moon was clearly visible, full, and brilliantly radiant. He hadn’t expected a blue moon that month but the mysteries of the sky were far beyond his expertise. He placed his flask next to the fire as it burned away, hoping that by the next day it would be thawed enough to drink from.
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Al’Serica awoke to the horrid sensation of his veins freezing over. One arm, it had seemed, had slipped out of his sleeping bag. The chitin covering his arm became chipped and cracked under an unbearable chill. Al’Serica grabbed his flask from next to the burnt out campfire and abandoned his sleeping bag to begin running. Unlike the two days prior, distance seemed to have returned to normalcy and under a darkened sky devoid of even the bleary light of the previous day Al’Serica came closer and closer to his destination. Halfway through his desperate sprint to safety Al’Serica stopped to renew his protective maleficium weave only to find the flask of swamp water completely frozen. Numbness now covered every part of his body beneath the neck and he struggled to even drop the now-useless flask. A feeling of gazing eyes raised Al’Serica’s fear to a fever pitch.
Finally, in the early afternoon Al’Serica arrived to find the camp deserted. The tents were still present indicating a hurried exodus yet the central fire pit was ashen cold and filled with soot. Despite the haste with which his group had left, Al’Serica knew he had only missed them by perhaps a few hours. Indeed looking closely Al’Serica could see somewhat fresh footprints in the snow leading down the now fog-shrouded mountain. He began to follow the footprints but suddenly collapsed from an extreme bout of dizziness. Al’Serica continued crawling towards the direction of the footprints yet with each laboured motion he felt as though he was looking down from progressively higher heights and the accompanying vertigo grew worse and worse. It only relieved itself when he began crawling back to the central fire pit.
Al’Serica would have cried when he returned to the fire pit if it wasn’t so cold that the tears froze on his carapace. He looked up to see either that his spell of vertigo had lasted long enough for night to fall or the clouds had gotten so thick that they hid all of the sun’s rays. Once again a full moon gazed down upon him and as Al’Serica stared back at the sky he saw many more moons appear. A thousand moons stretched out to and beyond the horizon in all directions, each one shrouded by their own writhing mass of clouds and illuminating their own patch of sky. Al’Serica’s moon grew larger under his gaze, or rather moved towards him closer and closer. Its smooth surface became striated and marked with cataract-like cysts. Three-fingered tendrils of stormy vapour reached down and Al’Serica saw the nimbus clouds part around the moon to create a sadistic grin. He felt himself get tugged towards the sky as the fingers wrapped around his body.