It came up around her ankles first like a slithering, pulsing mass. She never liked snakes, and she's never met a tentacle, and now it'll haunt her dreams. She turns back to the hole of light, a beacon in the shadow. The Girl watches thick darkness drip down from the top edges, dripping and dropping to splat at her feet. The dripping mess glues up the hole, starts to block out the light, like dollops of heavy syrup running thick from a spout. She tries to turn, to run, to escape, but that shapeless, monstrous thing has her legs, and it's not letting go. Especially not when its food was so polite as to walk right in. The entrance closes up, cutting off the Girl's cries and screams, equal parts fear, anguish and rage. She's come so far only to get devoured by the wet black that wraps its way up her legs, slimy and thumping like a heart. It lashes around her arms, bubbling and bursting like frothing soap, stinging and burning. And then she sees. In the darkness, the mountain spire falls away, space, time, everything around her falls away. She's found herself in the bed of a god, and the Girl's just stirred it awake. I've heard all manner of horror about what a Dreamer could be. The old folks said this spire was the rutting ground of the gods. Pavos, Charandria, Agintoth even—we just had the rotten luck to get caught in the way. The storm wall was to keep us out, not trap us in. Doesn't matter much, I suppose. We're less than ants to the gods. Truth is, I don't know. Girl wasn't inclined to tell me, and I wasn't inclined to ask, not with that look in her eyes. Some things snap a man's mind with just a glimpse. I'd guess whatever the Girl saw in that egg she'll take it to her nightmares and her grave. But whatever happened in that damned dark, the end of it was her turning up in the Desert Teeth, the sandy graveyard beneath Maya, final resting place of those ships that weren't lucky enough to crash on the beach.
YOU ARE READING
A Simple Story
Fantasía~ A Skies of Fortuna Tale ~ "It's a simple enough story to start, and it starts like so many do. It starts with a storm." So begins the account of a lost girl exploring a dangerous, secret mountain in the sky. Shipwrecked and abandoned, she begins t...
