A Garden of Flowers and Bones [Lloyd Garmadon x Reader]

Chapter 4: Visitors (Prt 2)

The blood in her veins was running with ice, and her shoulders were so tense that they were unable to even shake from the paralysing fear rending her like a lethal venom. All her muscles locked up at once, freezing her still on the ground. Even her lungs refused to take air like she was drowning.

Laying prone on the ground, out in the open beneath a bright blue sky, she felt as if she may as well have been a fire in a dark field. So obvious, so vulnerable that any prying eyes could see her. Anything could find her- hurt her. 

But it was the strangest thing. Nothing did.

As if the forest had gone muted at the sound of a single reprimand- as if the world had gone limp at a single wave of the hand. As if an incredible power had descended and blown the sound out of the wildlife like a candle.

Slowly, Y/N pulled her head up from where it had been resting behind her forearms, protected from the unforgiving pathway that would have surely cracked her skull open. And when she looked up, the world remained unchanged.

Except it was entirely different.

Not physically, no. It looked the same. But it had transformed in some invisible way that she could only sense inside her chest. The way it tightened and expanded all at once.

The sky was still bright with daylight. The darkness of night couldn't devour her here. And yet. There was still a threat somewhere, somehow. It was here. She was so exposed out in the open, splayed out like a buffet.

Dwyn was still waiting at home, and she was looking directly into the forest. Nothing looked back. As if there was nothing there at all. As if all local wildlife retreated in fear and were collectively holding their breaths.

She lifted her head further, tucking tufts of hair from her vision and wiping at her face. Wet. Glancing down, she was met with thick, red blood, enough to smear down the length of the back of her thumb. When she pressed her lips together, she found pain blossoming there and an irony flavour invading her tastebuds.

Ah... that's right. She had many small, nervous habits that often escaped her conscious attention. Biting the insides of her cheeks, shuffling from one foot to another... and, with chapped lips like hers, peeling the skin off. She must've had her lip between her teeth at the time. Somehow, feeling and tasting the thick rivulets that trickled from her mouth, and seeing it messily strewn across her skin was sobering.

She had been so disoriented- even then, her head was spinning. But the gravity of the situation began to set in. Something was here. Before she could scramble to her feet and run away (as her instincts were clawing at her to do), the forest contorted somewhere deep within. And as she shifted her gaze over her shoulder to the origin of the anomaly, she heard it.

A slow crunch likes bones being ground to dust in a mortar and pestle. Then, the loudest impact she'd ever heard before- a deafening THUD, followed by more snapping, as if trees were being torn out from their roots. The soil shuddered, and all the grass with it, as if the earth, itself, was in agony.

"ACK!!" The voice was strident, twinged with pain, and blaring in her ears- she could feel it thrumming under her skin.

It was a man's voice. Piercing and raucous as a lightning strike. And it didn't end there. No more thunderous yelling, thankfully, but cursing that occasionally rose enough to ring through her skull like carillon bells. A person, not a monster. And his words sounded nothing like the dull drone of the Angler Fish's manipulation, nor repetitive like it's emotional lure.

A less attuned person may have been unable to tell the difference, but Y/N knew the forest- knew what was within it. It wasn't her home, but they were intimately familiar with each other as it crowded around her house on all sides and lined the path, encroaching on the borders of the village in some places and rescinding like the tide in others.