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

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels cuts back to the Verdugo as she and the good kindred of Shaheill face Enna-Belum.

Anna’s drawing had captured Enna-Belum’s silhouette acceptably enough, by her estimation. There was the head bedecked with horns, there the heavy knuckle-walking front legs and the digitigrade predator’s haunches. There were the spines along his shoulders and studding his back. There was the size, just as she’d promised, a train car’s worth of flesh and an army’s worth of hatred packed into a bovine’s worth of brains.

But the sounds of dismay from her warriors taught her that she had come nowhere near a proper depiction. Who could? What sane hand could reproduce the face that hung beneath those horns? Or faces perhaps, it was hard to tell. A confusion of loose, flabby features, as though a card table’s worth of leather-skinned old veterans had been flensed and sewn together with only the vaguest idea of a human face’s proper contours. This nightmare conglomeration hung like fleshy curtains from the thing’s skull, curling and flexing as it approached like the puckering of lips, the eight filmy eyes a concentric spiral around its leech-sucker mouth.

“Saints sanctify us.” A blond-bearded man tapped the guy next to him. “Arvind. You could’ve warned us your mother’s visiting.”

“Tighten up,” Anna said, over the stricken laughter that drew out of the spearline, but it was on instinct. Better they be laughing than wailing.

The Sorrow of the Northmarch.

Enna-Belum loped toward Shaheill’s forward palisade, his vertical maw splitting his gormless face open like an orchid, his ring of eyes fixed.

Anna glared back. Hello again, you big blackfeathered asshole. Come again to die at the hands of the Legion? We’ll oblige you.

The initial attack in the battle for Shaheill came from its kindred, and it issued forth from the trees all around the wide, dug-through clearing. Arrows whistled from hiding places high in the boughs. Unseen rifles cracked. Enna-Belum let out an ursine bark of confusion as they pockmarked him, some finding his face, others falling below, none landing more than shallow pits or thin lacerations.

Two loose skirmisher columns spilled from the trees, sprinting into place and dropping to staggered double-deep firing lines. Closer to the monster, more accurate, and positioned—Saints be kind—to draw him into one of the dozen or more pit traps they’d spent the night preparing for him.

Ofelia was in the left column; Anna could see her. Right, she thought, meanly: go right. Enna-Belum could not have heard her, surely; there were seraphs that could, even if you’d never spoken aloud, but not blackfeathers. He went right regardless, breaking from his loping jog into full gallop.

And now it began.

The first terrified skirmishers broke away, sprinting for the trees, and even a tyrant like Anna couldn’t fault them, could only commend them for their haste, because here he came, his earthquake run gaining velocity. There was a pit trap waiting for him, but his strides were so colossal that they must have cleared its boards, and now he was on its other side, among them, bellowing and bristling.

He caught a woman in his zipper jaws, hefted her into the air, slammed her back to the ground and knocked her limbs into ragdoll uselessness, slammed her again and cut off her howling terror as her ribcage collapsed and pulped her heart. His foreclaw seized another fighter who took a puncturing talon through the chest and had the misfortune not to die immediately. The monster launched the impaled man with trebuchet force into the palisade, headfirst, and his skull cracked like a hen’s egg on contact, wild eye hanging out on its glistening stalk. His lips moved for a terrible second as if he was still there, still seeking for a last word, and then he was dead.

From the raging beast’s blindside, another volley belched fire and billowed smoke. Quarrels stuck from the rubbery skin of Enna-Belum’s neck. He reeled around from the squad’s fleeing remnants and caught a sling-pot to the face; it burst open in a caustic cloud of quicklime. It burned into his mouth and his blanked eyes and the weeping wounds on his face and he let out an unnervingly human scream, high and stripped, and charged at his new attackers.

The rolling rifle smoke drifted and curled at the edge of Ofelia’s sable cloak where she stood amid the line, cranking another quarrel into her crossbow, all calm concentration, as though she’d fired at a doe rather than a demon.

The urge to break ranks and go sprinting toward her daughter nearly sent Anna stumbling, but it was too late, Enna-Belum would reach the skirmishers before she would, and Ofelia would be another broken doll, jaw slackened by death or torn from its housing—

The ground broke open with a timbershaking crack. Enna-Belum’s knuckled forelimb punched through the boards and the mat of topsoil, and crashed through into the dug-out trench below and its thicket of sharpened stakes. He yowled, scrambling and raking and upturning a fountain of blackened earth, and tugged free a mangled, perforated claw.

But he wasn’t dying.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...enna-belum
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2571401/