Blooding

Demons Beneath

Spectres reached up from the reflection. Their arms flowed with a misty darkness. They swarmed around the Red Griffon's frozen body. They recoiled back at each of her gasps. They leaned over her blood. The smaller ones tracing strange runes and lines in it. They were reflections that moved without an origin. No one stood upon the glass ice-shelf but the frozen Red Griffon and the approaching drake. With a large pack bundled on his back and a lamp swaying on a pole hitched to his side.

The reflections' talons reached forth from their black bodies. Each of their claws gnarled and long with patches of ice pot-marked over them. They halted at her long breath, then clasped her reflection. They gripped mounds of cloth and feathers, pulling and ripping her robes open. They plucked her feathers and dabbed them in the blood. Her body was untouched, but the eyes of her reflection in the icy plane snapped open.

Her reflection moved whilst she laid still.

The Mirror-image seemed to squeal and flail as the claws turned violent. The black wraiths started digging into her. Tearing chunks of meaty mounds out. Her frost-bitten tail twitched as a tide of blood pooled from her wounds. The Mirror-image struggled and thrashed before its strength was drained away with its blood. Her reflection slumped as the blood spread outward, covering the ice. The head of the Red Griffon's reflection slammed against the ground in a perfect pose of its origin. Its eye was red with bulbous veins popping out. The eye stared at the Red Griffon's flickering eyelids and icy eyelashes before the blood crept along and concealed it all.

The drake began to jog, his heavy claw covers thumping against the ice. The lamp jiggled on his pole. The blood receded when he arrived. Slowly crept back into a normal mirror image of the Red Griffon's form. He regarded her for a moment, a shaky exhale escaping his cowl that drifted up in a small cloud. The drake knelt and felt her neck. The feathers there were stiff, and her skin was crusty with dried blood. He glanced around, not knowing fully why. It wasn't exactly conscious. The looking-glass plain stretched forever with the sky. It looked more like two, colossal mirrors slanted against each other than an iceshelf and a dreary, heavy sky. Anything that wasn't ice was visible for all eternity out here.

Yet still he glanced furtively with darting eyes. A tiny, niggling feeling deep in his bowels that warned him. There isn't anything too kind out here.

Dusk began to dip over the horizon. The clouds of grey blackened into dark soot and the lightning strikes became stark booms of light against the sky's membrane. A glimmer of light flickered at the mirror's meeting at the horizon as the sun sunk beneath the clouds. Like a sea mine dropped into the ocean. The temperature chilled and plummeted further into an icy depth.

He scrambled and unclipped his pack, it thudded on the ice and he feared a cobweb of cracks would jump into existence. But the iceshelf was thick. He unwound the pack and reached in, retrieving a slew of stocky and crumpled blankets. Splaying them out like a picnic he heaved the Red Griffon onto them. They were warm, as inside his pack he kept an ember of the white pyre in a copper jar. It burned eternal.

For a moment he panicked. She was grievously scarred, deep lacerations travelled over her right foreleg and back like she'd been whipped. To remove her robes and cauterise it would kill her with the freezing cold. He could start with her leg. Reaching into his pack he retrieved the copper jar and a large burner. It was wrought iron and heavy, but the drake was abnormally large and quite strong. He clamped the jar into place and slowly turned the lid loose. The ember of the white pyre crackled from within and already a hot vent of heat sizzled from the tip of burner. He inhaled before squeaking the nob on the slide slowly. It screeched with rust before the fuse inhaled air into the jar. The ember swallowed the oxygen and suddenly vented flame into a small jet on the top.