The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

On a very special Headless Over Heels, Anna, Annalise's no-nonsense and no-manners seraph-hunting head, has brought Seth on, well, a seraph hunt.

Anna nudged the spear’s leaf blade tip into the brush; it shifted a patch of dry grass and punched through. She pulled back and crouched to the hole she’d opened in the earth.

“Hidden entrance.” She pulled aside the plant matter and tossed the largest branches away. The narrow crease grew to a crack in the ground large enough to swallow a horse, limned with damp limestone and sloping precariously downward. The spear darted into the cave and tapped rock. “Right,” Anna said, and stood. “In you go.”

Seth’s stomach turned over. “Me?”

“Get in there, find where she’s sleeping and what she’s doing, come back to me,” Anna said. “All you have to do.”

Seth eyed the uncovered cave, the underbrush around it like a peeled-back scab on a wound to the world. “How do we know she’s sleeping?”

“There were at least four people on that wagon,” Anna said. “She’s eaten her fill. She’ll be sleeping it off while she digests. You do what I hired you to do and you won’t wake her up.”

“Do seraphs sleep as soundly as humans do?”

Anna scoffed. “Don’t be a bitch, il Gutierre. Go.”

“Okay, okay. Saints and Seraphs.” Seth dug into his satchel and found his flashlight. “You got a mite?”

“Won’t work,” Anna said, like he was a thumb-sucking child. She retrieved an antique-looking tallow lamp from a saddlebag and held it out.

Seth eyed the pre-hexcraft relic with unease. “How do I—”

Anna made an annoyed noise in her throat, struck a match, lit the lantern’s wick, and shut its glass case. She shoved it into his hands as its light expanded. “You break this, it’s your ass,” she said.

Seth sighed and took the lantern. He found his footing on the limestone lip of the cave and eased himself into the dark, carefully seeking holds that would let him descend with one hand occupied. A short downward climb of ten-odd feet and he slid the rest of the way into a natural cave whose walls and cones bulged and dripped like petrified candle wax.

Lots of blood. Blood in extraordinary quantities.

That was the first thing he noticed—the walls. What he took for water stains the lantern quickly disabused him of. That was blood. A lot of blood. The smell struck him almost simultaneously. An eye-watering curtain of decay. When he’d worked the kitchens at the Sidewinder they’d sent him now and then to retrieve the cuts for the day from Prossimo’s slaughterhouse. So many months of blood spilt that cleansers couldn’t scrub it all away, mixed with a fresher acrid tang, over a ripe sickbed scent of decomposition. Here that smell was again, concentrated further into a reeking weapon driven into his sinuses.

Bones on the floor. Bones and clothes and blackened, dried-up organic… stuff. It was all just stuff. Not people anymore. His hot streak of not puking teetered on itself; he gagged, heaved, and then with sainted strength managed to keep it all inside. Look at that, Seth. You’re a natural.

He slunk through the stinking dark, hating every little scraping sound the lantern made as he bore it aloft. A kicked bone or stone skittered and froze him momentarily; reluctantly he angled the lantern downward and put a pittance of focus into navigating the bonescape at his feet. He stepped carefully over more of that cattailed fabric, and spent too long looking at it, long enough to realize it was part of a small dress. Too small. The lantern caught the gleam of something bright red and horribly new in the crease of that fabric and Seth looked away again before his legs locked up completely.

Find where it sleeps and get the fuck out. That’s all you have to do.

He strained to listen in the dark beyond his lantern-light for some proof of its presence. A snore or a breath. There was a breeze creeping the cavern as he did, yawning its way around the stalactites, but nothing more.

He hunched around a corner and the light from his lantern fell across more fabric. Canvas, grass, cloth, hide. Arranged in a great oval on the cavern floor, its lip nudging up against a scratched-out wall. Something had expanded the cave here. Expanded it and built a nest.

An empty nest.

No seraph. If it’s asleep then where’s the—

Drop, the Fox said.

Eldritch Flesh

He dropped to his stomach, and that’s why his ribcage stayed in one piece. The clubbing limb that would have otherwise powderized his chestbone looked as though it had begun its life as a wing before being hastily converted to an arm, and then a tentacle. The knob of gory gristle at its end would be better called a cannonball than a fist, and when it connected with the wall of the cave it stamped an orb-weaver web of cracks onto the stone with its gunshot impact.

The limb snapped backward bonelessly to join its five fellows on a hulking crimson body like a violent collision between a grizzly bear and a deep-sea squid, sliding glutinous and horrible down the cave wall. A thick neck rose from the ruin, hairless and cancerously caruncled with flaps of discolored flesh like a nightmare vulture’s wattle. Three faces crowned the beast; the left a skull, the right a rotting, dripping corpse, the center a woman’s, staring wild-eyed down at him, supernaturally beautiful, with high cheekbones, eyes in unlit black and skin either naturally red or coated in blood, Seth couldn’t say.

All three jaws unhinged. Her roar sounded like a lion and the women’s choir it was messily massacring had momentarily paused the carnage to share a primal scream.

Seth’s limbs hitched in place as if he was having a nightmare, but you can’t feel the hot, rancid breath of a nightmare on your face. He scrambled backward, palms biting into the stone as he tried to get back to his feet, and the seraph Sik-Ersetim pounced, its limbs wide, its rubbery body spreading above him in a terrible canopy and there were teeth, there was a mouth on its underbelly full of teeth, so many teeth, opening wider and wider—

A dark flicker whirred into the crimson beast and slammed into its distended chest, splitting the clavicle with a dry tinder-wood crack. Anna’s spear protruded from the seraph’s middle, buried so far into its hide that one of its spiked lugs had breached the seraph’s rubbery bulk.

The seraph wailed in a distressingly human tone and reared back; its horrible gristly limbs jerked and stuttered through the air like a demented marionette’s as it grasped the thick haft. Seth seized the chance to roll from beneath it and scramble to the edge of the cave, heedless, now, of the detritus and the soft organic horrors beneath his feet.

Anna’s illustrated skin gleamed in the lanternlight as she sprinted from the dark.

She ducked a desperate swipe that caromed off the cave wall in a shower of stone chips. She dropped to all fours and the beast’s malformed bludgeon-wing whistled over her head. Then her muscles fired into a peregrine leap, and she seized the impaling spear one-handed, mantled herself around and up onto the seraph’s barbed spine, and the seraph howled as her weight and violent motion wrenched the spear stuck in the vault of its ribs and tore a deepening rent in the eldritch flesh.

Anna was atop the monstrosity now, thighs cinched around the garden-hose cords of its neck. The executioner sword rose. Its dynamos sparked ghostly green, illuminated her pale and wrathful and leering with a mouth full of arrowhead teeth and threw her bent shadow across the melted karst-cave walls.

The seraph’s rubbery arm bent and raked in an attempt to dislodge the monochrome hellion on its back. Another piteous wail and a geyser of black blood and the limb was severed, pumping and twitching, and the black cavernous mouths on the seraph’s rotting faces and its deep-sea belly wailed in unison:

“YDRIS”

The Verdugo blade swung upward and the light danced and dazzled, and then down it whistled with a splintering crunch, and then another, and a third, wet and membranous. And the seraph went rigid.

Anna rode its dying thrash to the floor. She performed a sinuous dismount as its cleaved-open face connected with the stone. The bluntheaded bar of sorcerous steel departed her prey’s cranium with a sawing hiss of bisected bone and a lava-cake pooling of brain matter.

Three of the sword’s emerald dynamos lit up and slide across their abacus rows. She smirked and settled the blade on her shoulder, heedless of the ichor dripping thickly from its edge.

“Light work,” she said.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...itch-flesh
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2396421/