Page 115 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

Macha whispered, so low beneath her breath it sounded more of an exhale than speech, and pointed the tip of the rod towards the monopteros.

Silas’s ears popped first. A vibration hummed through the air, subtler than the more violent screeches of the ailing Sanctuary. The cobalt veins brightened. Silas shaded his eyes. The sorceress’s wild laughter echoed off the chamber walls as she and Onoskolis slipped back through their portal and vanished.

The moment they vanished, the roar of the lost souls went from faint to raucous.

The unseen barrier that had separated them from Silas fell away, the soul trap gone.

What swept from it was a horror.

Silas was dumped in a seething pool of misery. The angst of dozens of hopeless dead. The roar was deafening to begin with, a disarray of sound that held the lead weight of grief and unspeakable loss. He wished nothing more than for it to end, until the first brittle notes began to appear.

The clattered, uneven melody of Macha’s teratisms. Clunky, jarring notes that sought to clamber over the top of one another.

‘Christ.’ Silas staggered, as much as from the tunes’ morose weight as from understanding what the sorceress had done.

She had wielded the Blight like the curse it was…twisting each and every soul that had called to him…had rescued him from her illusion… and forced a transformation upon them.

She had made them teratisms in one astonishing instant.

His throat was thick with the horror of it. The realisation a dagger, its tip sharp and cruel against his heart. These souls had begged for his protection. And he had failed them.

The wave of anguish hit him head on. The mournful arias rose, abrupt, untuned, and wayward, as though the new teratisms were confused by their sudden existence.

Samyaza’s statue rocked on its plinth, and Silas braced.

He could run, push through to another place and seek to stay one step ahead of the maddened crowd that was coming for him. But an inner pull held him rooted to the spot, an ingrained compulsion to remain and see that right was done.

He was ankou. He was made to end their torment.

The statue toppled, shattering in huge portions. One chunk skidded towards Silas, and he sidestepped to avoid being struck in the shin by one of Samyaza’s wings.

The teratisms spewed forth from their pit, a torrent of umber and sickly greens rising like a burst water main from the monopteros’s floor. So many wretches he could not make much sense of any of them until they were upon him. Saturating him with ire, vexation, and enmity, they were as thick as marzipan on a rotten cake.

He reached his hands into the fray and found the neck of a creature whose mouth was fixed open, crawling with writhing worms that spilled over him as Silas crushed its gangly neck. He tore the head free, found himself spattered with something horrid and sticky, and set off using the grotesque battering ram to fend off the multitudes reaching for him. He spun about, seeking to create some space for himself in the vile pile that sought to smother him.

They came for him in a mob. Spindly and graceless, thick and grotesque. All very vaguely human. Enough so for it to send sharp pangs of horror through Silas with each blow. He caught a glimpse of watery eyes, a thin film of white dulling their colour. Fear was so apparent in the gaze that he hesitated and suffered a deep gash to his bruised shoulder when another teratism took its chance. He threw the head with all the might he could summon, sending more than one of Macha’s creations tumbling.

A skeletal creature with a misshapen skull ran at him. Silas met it head-on, dispatching it quickly with a moist snap of an elongated neck, the head coming free with a sickening moist sound. Silas grabbed the body before it fell and made it a shield. He charged at the gathering of wailing, tortured souls, seeking to push his way free of this miserable prison.

Bloody hell, there were so many of them. So much death to be wrought. But this was not the pleasant dispatch of a ready soul. Here he must be monstrous, breaking and tearing his way through the group.

And he did not want this. Silas was not a creature of chaos.

He was covered in gore, puce and pea green, drenched in a vileness that did not bear thinking of.

Silas bellowed into the calamity.

He stood at the centre of a hellish circle. Far worse than anything he had faced at the greensward, for he knew that it was not a daemon who could save him here, only carnage itself. A carnage not wrought by a rampaging prince but by an ankou.

Another neck was broken, another decapitation complete, this one setting off sprays of rich crimson that bathed his face with warmth. The tinge of copper clung to his lips, and he may have darted his tongue to taste it.

One of the grief-ridden souls caught at him, latched twisted, rheumatic fingers about his arm, and sought to tug him closer to where sharp teeth and gouged eyes waited.

Silas’s cry was unearthly. It tore at his throat as he landed his fist in the middle of the teratism’s grey and sagging face. Anger drove Silas’s fist deep through sinew and bone still fragile and tender after such a hurried birthing.

He could have freed all of them. Sent each soul to where the goddess waited. Finished their lives as they should have been ended.

But the sorceress had made that impossible.