Blooding

Limbo's End

The white pyre was rupturing. Its tall flame jittered and snapped like a whip. It struggled against the onslaught of blackness, the crushing palms of darkness that pressed against the white pyre's globe of light. The air howled and swept, yet the pyre acted independently. Around it, bodies were littered. Some twitched, others were still.

They were to die. Lusik was closest.

Within the globe the ice ground looked like a red carpet. The blood sprouted blooms of ice crystals like pockets of algae and it had stopped sloshing or trickling, it was paralysed in time. Liquid purgatory. What's the word? Trapped spirit place? The bodies were like islands in a crimson sea.

When Canary stumbled out of the glacial rift, her wrists slit open and her robe wetted with her own blood, she had only one desire. To recall that word. The word that meant trapped spirit place. It was odd how the body, when empty of blood, made the mind drunk and swimmy. Canary had never been drunk. But she staggered and splashed all the same.

She slipped and slid down into the drakes' blood. Little crystals shattered and the warmth heated her belly. It was sticky and thick, like soup left out in the sun, its taste was rotten and metallic. Her beak was a crimson smile. Canary tried to stand. Her talons and paws sounded like dead fish being slapped when she rose. Long strings of cherry stuck to her like strands of a spiderweb.

She stepped forward twice then swayed and toppled over. Splashing the blood on her face and causing a subtle wave. It had the same meaning as purgatory but was shorter, almost more elegant. Her mind was unfocused. A broken lens looking through a curtained window. Canary couldn't stand anymore. Her forelegs were gone. Not severed. But unresponsive. She thought that wasn't good, but not the end of the world.

Her griffon blood pooled into the sea of drakes' blood. There was no difference. Water into water. Canary might have scoffed at it.

Not purgatory. Her hindlegs pushed and she lugged forward. A zombie that slid on the ice. To where? She forgot, but not really. He was still there, a blaring thought charging her forward like a battering ram. A broken, bloodied, drunk battering ram.

The Griffon slid next to the drake. He had regained consciousness once, writhed, moaned, then fell asleep. His talons still clutched his stomach.

She fumbled like a blind toddler. The wind squealed. Piercing like glass grating on glass. She propped herself up next to him, sticky and blooded. Lusik would know. I should ask him. He's so clever with words.

His face was pale and solemn. No purple splotches of cold or frostbite between the scales, just perfect blinding white. Alabaster marble.

'Wusak.' She slurred.

Then Canary slumped against him. Her forelegs hung limply, the blood flow sated. Then the Red Griffon took a deep breath, very deep, as if she was about to plunge underwater. Then she exhaled, the air whistled out like it was escaping from a tunnel.

The darkness blasted away. Light shone from the ice in rays that reached up to the heavens like towering fingers. It came from rifts, like the one she had crawled out from, except now the looking-glass land was pot-marked with them. They were wounds. Grievous and fatal. The land shrieked, a sound that carried up into sky and reached into the atmosphere as a distant scream. Massive webs of cracks snapped into existence, shafts of light bled out of them. The glacier rumbled – its shelves skidded against each other and boomed. Apocalyptic. The ground glowed in sickly yellow and the land was lit to the horizon, the bodies of the drakes stopped their twitching and the bloody flower they laid on ceased.

It popped out of existence. Like a blinking light that finally busted. Beneath it was the livered ground, lacerated and lit – the drakes all awoke, they snapped back into consciousness, some shouted and scrambled but their calls were lost under the cacophony of screams. They clutched their frills, trying to halt the blared shrieking. The brother propped up by an invisible spear fell and landed upright. His tattered robes were whole again. His face was cringed and stern.