The Prophecy of Water | ✔️ 🎖 [2018 Wattys Shortlister]

CHAPTER 46-Farts and Goat Droppings

Every spiteful comment of hers makes me die inside a little. 

But then I swat it away like an irksome fly, get up and rise even stronger from the ashes.

LoG, 347

The Dark Terrors were indeed the naked, grotesque, wrinkly old women with saggy teats from Damona's story. However, they had no poisonous knee-long tongues. 

An enormous, gaping hole stood where their stomach was supposed to be. It showed rotten, foul-smelling jaws filled with big, sharp teeth. The misshapen miserable forms of life had stomachs and belly buttons on their heads, while their eyeless faces with predominant mandibles were on their stomachs.

"Damn it!" Drian swore. "I knew we shouldn't have let the fire burn for so long." He pulled out his trustworthy bone knife, which, to be honest, he had lately been using simply for making sandwiches and swung it towards the nearest hag.

The hag lunged at him impossibly fast, opening her jaws and trapping his arm within them. Drian was forced to release the knife if he wanted to keep his hand, so he let her swallow it. The hag did so, with a loud uncomfortable burp.

Well, there goes that. If I ever see Liton again, I don't know how I am going to explain to him where the knife is now.

Damona kicked the second hag with her hind hooves.  Then she impaled the third one with her horns, bathing her in its own impure, smelly water. Moments later, the antelope shifted into the cheetah and attacked the fourth hag. She ripped the old, soft flesh which gave under her rapier-like canines.

A screech descended from above. Malik came out of nowhere as the fifth hag, along with the first one, brought Drian to the ground.  He wrestled with them as much as he could. His hair got entangled into jaws of one of them as he was trying to keep the other one as far away as he could from his neck.

I knew I should have cut my hair, was a silly thought that ran through Drian's brain before the possibility of his own death suppressed it.

Malik positioned himself on one of the hag's shoulders and started pecking her ears, hair and the corners of her eyes. She was livid with fury when she grabbed him and almost snapped the poor bird's neck, but the diversion was successful. The hag's entire attention was now on the flying critter.

Drian was left alone with one of The Abominations as Damona was busy pursuing the last one. Days of sitting behind the canvas and kneeling in The House of Credo were showing. He couldn't overpower her.

I am useless. Damona killed two ... 

A distant cry was heard in the background.

No, three hags. Malik is blinding and pestering this one. And what about me? Even the old wrinkly Terror is physically stronger than me, Drian thought, terribly disappointed with himself.

Precisely at that moment, when the fetid jaws were breathing down his spine, readying themselves to snap it, a type of the battle cry was heard that pierced Drian's ears.

"Lily liveeeeer!"

Both Drian and the hag looked left, surprised at the newcomer. Their upper and lower jaws simultaneously opened in wonder as the battle came to a halt.

Sooo ... To fight five wrinkly hostile old hags ... Heeeere comes another wrinkly old hag. Hopefully not hostile. Since when did I become snarky? All those influences—Liton's, Malik's, Damona's—are finally rubbing off on me.