Vacation in Damnation

Letting Go

Marcus’s heart pounded in his chest as he squeezed the trigger again and again, but the gun only clicked uselessly in his hand. He was out of bullets. His breath caught in his throat, horror flooding his veins as he watched the harpies descend on Sarah. Their twisted, gleeful faces contorted with savage hunger as they tore into her body, their claws raking through flesh with sickening ease.

“No… no, no, no,” Marcus whispered, his voice breaking as he tried to force himself to move, to do something—anything—but his body refused to obey. The pain in his leg was excruciating, his strength drained, leaving him helpless as the harpies began their gruesome feast.

He couldn’t look away. He couldn’t stop watching as they devoured the woman he loved, tearing her apart piece by piece, their shrieks of delight filling the air. Rage and despair churned inside him, a seething mix of emotions that threatened to consume him whole. He wanted to scream, to cry, to tear the harpies limb from limb—but all he could do was watch.

As the horror unfolded before his eyes, a voice began to whisper in the back of his mind. It was faint at first, just a murmur that barely registered above the cacophony of screeches and tearing flesh. But as the seconds dragged on, the voice grew louder, more insistent, its tone deepening into something inhuman, something dark.

“Let go.”

Marcus flinched, his eyes widening as the words echoed in his skull, reverberating through his mind like the toll of a funeral bell. He tried to block it out, to focus on anything else, but the voice only grew stronger, pounding in his head like a war drum.

“Let go.”

It was a command now, impossible to ignore, filling every corner of his consciousness. The anger bubbling inside him began to boil over, his vision blurring with tears and rage as he watched those monsters continue to desecrate Sarah’s body. The sight was unbearable, the anguish tearing at his soul.

“LET GO.”

The voice roared in his mind, a thunderous sound that drowned out everything else. His body trembled as something foreign began to take hold of him, a dark, oppressive weight that pressed down on his chest, making it harder and harder to breathe. It felt as though he were sinking, as though something was pulling him under, dragging him down into the depths of despair.

He gasped for air, struggling to fight against the feeling, but it was relentless, crushing him from the inside out. A language he had never heard before began to whisper in his mind, ancient and sinister, the words twisting and writhing in his brain like a serpent coiling around its prey.

He tried to resist, tried to cling to what little sanity he had left, but the words wouldn’t stop. They pounded in his head, urging him to speak, to give in, to let go of everything he knew and surrender to the darkness.

Finally, he could resist no longer. The words spilled from his lips, a guttural incantation in a tongue that tasted of ash and death.

The ground beneath the harpies began to tremble, the earth cracking open as if answering his call. Bone-like hands clawed their way out of the dirt, skeletal fingers reaching up to grasp one of the harpies by the leg. The creature let out a bloodcurdling scream, its wings flapping frantically as it tried to escape, but the skeletal grip was unyielding.

Marcus watched in a daze as the skeleton dragged the harpy to the ground, pinning it down with inhuman strength. The other harpies screeched in terror, momentarily forgetting their feast as they backed away, wings beating furiously in the air.

The skeleton rose from the earth, its hollow eye sockets burning with an unnatural light as it stared down at the harpy struggling beneath it. Without hesitation, it launched into a brutal attack, its bony hands tearing into the creature’s stomach, ripping out organs with a savage ferocity. The harpy’s screams of pain echoed through the night, mingling with the wet, tearing sounds of flesh being rent apart.