“D-demeter, d-dear?” William stuttered.
But she was gone.
Well, not gone, but not answering, likely watching them fidget and sweat as they frantically tried to sort out what to do.
Emma, though, was not playing Demeter’s game. She was going to get out of here, and now! And if she had to cross a field of monsters to return home, then so be it.
“No use in lounging about, right, Mister William? Early bird catches the worm. Follow me!” Emma said as she bounded over the hillside and walked into the field of monsters.
Glancing back, Emma noticed William was still shaking in place. She hurriedly waved him over, but he was paralyzed with fear. So she went back and dragged him into the field.
“Goodness me, mister William. And you call yourself a man!” Emma spoke, but she regretted it immediately. She might not have liked William’s womanizing side, but that was no reason to degrade a person because they are weary about venturing into a horde of flesh eating beasts. That would get anyone’s goat.
William did sputter out something like a rebuttal, but Emma did not hear it. She mumbled an apology herself, and that seemed enough to placate William, or at least encourage him to follow behind her.
As the two made their way into the field of grazing manticores, the cloaks provided by Demeter functioned as intended; having shielded them from the sight of the patrolling monsters, the soft terror in their hearts faded some, as they learned to trust the garment of the gods.
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However, Emma was upset. Though they had been traveling through the field for a while now, they appeared to never get closer to the large building in the center of the island. Which was absurd, because whenever she looked back, their point of departure — that strange wooded area — drifted further away from their backsides. How was it that we are not getting any closer, while, at the same time, we are inching further away from the woods? It makes no damn sense! Emma cursed.
William, for his part, appeared calm. Or was casually bringing up conversational bits. Emma supposed that once he had spent enough time among the manticores, the fear of death faded. Either the cloaks would work and continue their illusory function, or they would not work, and they would be killed and eaten.
“Speaking of which,” William said after finishing a thought on the nature of the manticores, “why are they grazing? I do not see them eating grass. Yet, their faces are smoothed to the ground. Curious, no?”
Emma had wondered that herself, but it wasn’t really a concern to her; not in this place where the ground was solid water and the physics of the world given a middle finger. Emma figured there was a logic to their grazing which their minds simply hadn’t yet grasped. And when she came upon a mermaid skeleton not too far from a giant hole in the ground which led straight to the liquid ocean, Emma had found that missing logic.
“Oh, no…” William said as he barfed into the hole after seeing the skeleton. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Emma ventured a guess, “that the manticores are, essentially, ice-fishing. But without the ice?”
“So, like, they—” but William did not finish as a skin-tingling cacophony behind them roared.
Looking, Emma and William saw a terrible sight; one of the manticores had slammed its head into the ground. When it re-emerged, a mermaid had been violently locked in its jaws, its neck already crushed by the force of its maw. With the creature already dead — a mercy, thought Emma — the manticores wasted no time in tearing the mermaid apart piece-by-piece. Both Emma and William averted their eyes and ran full speed toward the building at the center of the island.