The|MULTIVERSE

EPISODE 23: Big Chill Bump Off

The gaunt-faced man stuffed his meaty hands into his thick patchy jacket as if to keep his fingers warm and cozy while the whispering air of Cruxhaven whisked far from nippy. Not many were outside from where his chambers resided, having one of the smaller stone-made domiciles, its numerous chambers turned into individual living quarters, connected to Cruxhaven's exterior courts overlooking the eternal sea of stars its lovely spectrums. He appreciated the scenery; adored it. Being one of the few to himself in a great mass of Gaiea immigrants, he never once believed this, other worlds, to subsist outside his own blue globe. He realized the bizarre detail of it. The mass clutter of stars and its perpetual brilliance delivered onto him a safe feeling of celebrated solace. It was of course, why he lingered passed curfew to view the skies congregation of glittery clouds wafting into another. It wouldn't feel right if his routine stargazing interrupted, all because of some grisly death in Cruxhaven's alleys.

A silky series of giggles stalked his ears. The beguiling music of womanly innocence tore him from the stellar abyss and had him exploring along the island's edge.

The sultry tune drew him closer, beckoning near. A thick bundle of heavily shadowed trees awaited him; the starving voice implored him closer, towing him into the thickets. He abandoned his stargazing and vanished into the wood, and the once comely voice touched his ears far more than just a teasing tickle.

His head thrummed, eyes hazed. His inner skull rambled and droned, and a swelling tingle invaded his mind thick like brain bees; tiny, little, lusty pink brain bees promising honey and all things nice.

How was that for weird imagery?

As he waded through the bush, the whole grove grew dark, fading to a heavy, dismal black.

The syrupy song of honey-kissed wonders hit again, turning ugly. A miserable chill churned his spine, literally. His spine became cold with biting dread, twisting; snapping apart, and his bloody throat cawed in an anguished shriek...now snuffed by the darkness.

|★|

Noboo shrieked like a high child banshee in a Bloody Mary choir. Fright paid a soul-shaking visit to the girl of feather-dressed hair and bird-beaked crown, its company a cruel sight.

The company was the mess, the butchery, a wicked display of raw meat chopped to precision. The horrid scenery scarred her ultra swelled childish eyes, beyond saucers—or, was it perhaps the head of a four-horned bull centered among the slaughter-soon-to-be-feast of many in Cruxhaven hosted by Klarissa, the head butcher of a carnage-induced outfit.

If Noboo believed that food arrived by a fat stork, or some other mystical fantastical means, then all she once knew in this very moment shattered like a fairytale lie. Childhood ruined...as one might say.

Now, her innocence discovered the horrors that be, a mutilated animal deader than coffin wood as it laid grotesquely on its one flopped ear. Its eyes to the brain, tongue drooped out. Noboo lost her iddy bitty kiddy marbles and if her soul endured the seizure-induced shock, then she was one hell of a kid indeed.

There was no seizure-induced shock to surface about her.

It drove the large pantry of meat-cleaving people to a startling halt, though. For sure.

Klarissa was just around the way, inside a cold storage enchanted in ice glyphs for maximum meat preserve. Upon hearing the trope-girl shrill of soul-ravaged death, the elf whipped out of the storage room, lightning-quick in her fancy shoulderless flower-strewn dress and messy leather apron. She rushed across the meat room as if a crisis unfolded, her fine elvish face no longer cute and prissy, ready for a fight, and her feet but an inch from the floor as she smoothly glided across the butchery floor as if a phantom on the stride.