Ashes of Love and War - TodoMomo

||Chapter 8 ~ Part 1||

28 days post the fall of Troy

Momo ran down the empty street. The houses on either side of her were burning; bright red flames licked off of their roofs. The heat bore down on her, hot and suffocating, but she didn't stop.

She skidded and nearly fell as she rounded a corner. In front of her was the temple's courtyard. Her throat constricted. Everything was as she remembered it on the night Troy fell. Apollo's statue had been toppled; marble stones lay scattered across the space interspersed with dead soldiers, their faces slack and eyes empty.

Momo tore her gaze away and looked up. In the middle of the square, the temple was a writhing inferno of flames. The air was thick with black smoke.

In front of the building, four darkened figures stood watching the flames consume the temple.

Her eyes widened, and something within her twisted as the blackened shapes morphed. They were everyone she had ever considered family. She couldn't see their faces, but she knew them: her mother and father's tall, delicate frames, Tokoyami's raven head, and Kyouka Jirou's cropped hair.

Momo called to them, but her voice was drowned out by the roaring flames.

Suddenly, her mother took a step forward towards the burning building. The blood in Momo's veins ran cold as she watched the others follow.

She bolted across the yard. She was screaming for them to stop. She reached out, and her fingers almost grazed the back of Tokoyami's chiton when something wrapped around her ankle.

Momo tripped and hit the ground. She looked down at what had grabbed her and froze.

Pale, dead fingers of one of the temple's priestesses had wrapped around her ankle. The dead priestess looked up. Her eyes were hollow, but they seemed to be staring right at Momo. Then the woman's lips curled, and she smiled up at her with vicious glee.

"Where are you going, kiss ass?"

Momo's throat constricted, and she tried to kick the hand off but couldn't.

"Only time she shuts up," another disjointed voice echoed.

Momo turned her head sharply. Her eyes widened, and she stared in horror as one of the dead soldier's bodies twitched and then transformed into another of the temple's priestesses. She stared back at her with the same blank gaze.

"She thinks she's blessed by the gods," the woman said, sneering. "But no one likes her. That's why they all leave."

Then, all around her, the other bodies of the soldiers began to twitch and mutate into the priestesses she had once known.

Momo screamed, but no sound came out. She looked up, trying to find Tokoyami, her parents, Jirou. Anyone. But they were gone. They had left her.

A hand grasped her wrist. Momo tried to jerk away, but the fingers tightened like chains. "Bitch, where are you looking?" There was a singsong quality to the woman's voice. "You know bitches like you don't have any friends," she said, releasing her.

Suddenly, a chorus of women's voices started up, laughing and giggling. "Bitch has no friends. Bitch has no friends. Bitch has no friends."

The voices grew louder.

Momo sobbed and curled into a ball, clamping her hands over her ears to keep out the sound, but she couldn't. The laughter kept going on and on. Cruel, taunting, hysterical peals of laughter.