Fishwhacked: Reign of the Walrus Witch

Chapter 25

The castle's courtyard was full of fighting. The peasants were timid about facing the heavily armored knights and cultists who actually knew how to use a sword, and the arrival of the Chum Knights and their flanking of the cultist warriors still didn't even the odds very much.

"What the hell was that?" Paistra shouted over the sounds of battle.

"Something over there!" Yawp yelled back. He crunched a knight's armor into scrap metal and threw the jagged mass of man and steel into a crowd of unfortunate cultists. He then pointed to a smoking crater right below an open castle window and at the bottom of a steep drop.

"It has to be Ebb. I feel it in my dough." Paistra gave herself dough tendrils as thick as tree trunks, using the ample amounts of bread donated to her cause by the peasants, and walked above the battle towards the crash site. Towering over the cultists and waving her banner helped the peasantry's morale just a bit. Paistra crushed a few cultists as she strode to the fading mist.

"You crazy idiot!" the Head Milliner shouted, standing up. He hugged Curio and wept.

"We lost a lot of good arcanerds perfecting the fall-sphere spell. To be honest, I didn't think it would work," Curio replied.

"Please don't say that," Ebb said. She managed to will her legs to stop wobbling enough to stand up, and surveyed the battlefield. It was a disaster with no clear winner. Knights were clashing against knights, cultists were preying on peasants, and the peasants were swarming like ants. When she saw Paistra on bread stilts followed by Yawp surfing down the muddy hill using two cultists as skis, she climbed out of the crater of impact and ran to them.

Paistra waved the dough away and was back on ground level. She caught Ebb with a hug. Yawp guffawed loudly and picked them both up, swinging them around and rolling down the hill into the crater.

"My lady! You're alive!" the Milliner said.

"You're damn right we are!" Yawp replied. He noticed Curio. "Hey, you made it here! Somehow!"

"Um. Good evening," Curio said.

"We have to stop the Walrus Witch. She killed King Whatsit and is using his power to-" Ebb started.

"Whatsit? What are you-" Paistra's interrogation was cut short by a humongous earthquake that came from nowhere. The sound of ice shattering was loud enough to reach the far ends of the city. Most of the combatants in the courtyard were too fueled by bloodlust to notice, but a handful of them stopped fighting to wonder what the hell was going on.

"What the hell is going on?" Yawp asked.

"The Walrus Witch," Omno said.

They climbed up the hill so they could see the Spawn Lake. A spiderweb of cracks had spread through it and a violent blue light was growing from its depths. In the center of the lake, there was an explosion of snow, followed by a deep growl that triggered the instinct of every human in the city to not be eaten by something bigger than them. There was another explosion, and a bolt of lightning shot out from the ice. It found the nearest attractor, which happened to be the Milliner's Tower, and erupted into flames.

A hefty crunch accompanied something poking through the ice. A massive shadow slithered up out of the lake and when it seemed like it couldn't possibly get any bigger, it kept going. Even over the stench of blood and fire and death, the odor of fish washed over the city like a tidal wave. When the shadow neared the Milliner's Tower, the flames lit it up enough to expose the thing's features.

It was a deep brown and green, with an elongated snout. Its eyes were a rich blue, twitching as they absorbed every detail. Long strands of mucous dripped from its mouth and its forked tongue could be seen inside, waving back and forth. Huge fins lined its body all the way down to the ice. Every breath it took changed the air pressure for everyone who could see it, causing popping ears and nosebleeds. It raised its head and blocked out the sun.