Battle at the Top of the Castle

And so we proceeded, a strange and miserable procession. The Lamia led, her serpentine form a pale exhalation of chalk dust in the despair. I followed, my hand never straying far from my pistol, every shadow a potential assassin. And Xiao Ru, she remained attached to my back, a trembling, warm weight, her fear a living thing I could feel in the desperate grip of her hands.

Our guide led us to the threshold of a cavern so vast it seemed a deliberate mockery of a cathedral's nave. Below us, where pews should have been, lay a great, subterranean lake. It was not water, but some viscous, purple fluid that seethed and bubbled with a sickening, biological light, its surface roiling as if with the troubled dreams of a dying god. From the depths of this foul lake, great pillars of black, basalt-like rock rose like the ribs of some colossal, long-dead leviathan, their tops forming a series of precarious platforms that created a winding path upward, toward a high chamber carved into the cavern's far wall.

Here, our guide stopped. "They are… up there," she whispered, her voice a thread of sound. "This is as far as my part in this affair goes."

She turned and slithered away into the darkness, but just before she vanished, she glanced back. I met her gaze, and in the eyes of that monster, I saw a flicker of something that looked disturbingly like pity.

Xiao Ru finally let out a long, shuddering breath. I felt the tension leave her body, her claws retracting from the flesh of my back. Her tail, which had been tucked away in terror, slowly reappeared and gave a weak, tentative flick. I offered her a small, reassuring smile and patted her on the head.

We began our ascent, leaping from one slick teetering pillar to the next. With every head we gained in height, the stench rising from the lake below grew more potent. It was a terrible, putrid perfume, the scent of a garden of lilies left to rot and fester for a century.

We reached the upper chamber, a wide, circular room open to the vast cavern below. The floor was dominated by an incredibly intricate symbol, a mad geometry of interlocking circles and jagged lines, painted in blood that was still dark and wet. Upon this profane altar, three small forms were sprawled, unmoving—the lost kitsune cubs. Even as we took in the horrific sight, two creatures made of living, semi-solid shadow were dragging two more children from a great, crystalline vault that rested atop a central column of stone, their small bodies limp and unresisting.

The sight of the fox children, limp and helpless in the grasp of those shadowy things, broke something within Xiao Ru. A scream, a sound of pure, unbridled rage and terror, was torn from her throat. Her luminous bow was in her hand, and a storm of her spectral, fiery arrows began to rain down upon the creatures.

They came, figures draped in a cloth the color of a fresh bruise, their forms vaguely human but their faces were voids, their faces were surfaces of a darkness so complete it had its own temperature, a sorrowful cold that seemed to leach the warmth from my own gaze as I looked upon them—and where Xiao Ru's arrows of light found the smaller ones, their forms un-knitted themselves into a brief efflorescence of black dust, yet the larger ones dragging the children merely staggered, the sacred flames curdling on their skin and dripping away in sluggish, impotent tears of luminescence, each volley from Xiao Ru another spent breath, another beautiful, wasted prayer against the unhearing dark.

I watched her beautiful, failing archery and felt the truth as a dissonant taste at the back of my throat, a flavor of burnt sugar and despair that grew with each wasted arrow, my own nerves beginning to fray into a low, audible static before their slow, quiet erosion of the space between us, the need to flee becoming a pressure behind my eyes.

"Ashley!" I shouted, my voice a distinct crack in the cavern. "Cover!"

A great, two-dimensional claw of darkness swept from Ashley's feet, momentarily forcing the closest of the shadow creatures back. I used the opening. I ran and threw my entire body into Xiao Ru, tackling her to the warm, blood-stained stone.

She struggled, her strength a physical fact my mind was determined to forget between encounters, each blow a startling refutation of my own private physics—sharp, declarative syllables of dissent I felt rattle deep within my very bones, her voice fracturing the air, the words 'Let me go' and 'Stop' pushing against me with a tangible, desperate force.

I held her pinned beneath me, my own heart beating incessantly, ready to jump out and run astray. Tears, hot and real, stained her lovely face. And then, her struggles ceased. She looked up, and her gaze met mine. She saw in my eyes, perhaps, a hint of my own tears threatening to form.

Xiao Ru gulped.

And in that moment, with the sounds of Ashley's desperate battle and the hissing of shadows as a backdrop, we simply gazed at one another. It was a look of startling, inappropriate intimacy, a small, fragile island of shared fear in a sea of miserable, morose, morbid, every "m word" I could fathom to think, monsters. The world, for an instant, seemed to narrow to the space between our faces.

The fragile intimacy of our shared gaze shattered as a pained cry from Ashley tore through the air. I pulled myself together. I rose to my feet and helped Xiao Ru up, the two of us breathless from the strange and perilous country we had just visited in each other's eyes.

She clung to my arm, her knuckles white. "Mei-Ling," she whispered, her voice a thin, desperate thread. "What is your plan? What can we do?"

I looked at her, at the tear tracks on her face and the weariness that now seemed to cling to her like a shroud the creatures wore. I could not take more of her blood; to do so now would be to drain the very life from her, leaving a husk. I glanced at my pistol on the floor. The faint, cerulean aura that had wreathed it in power was now gone, leaving only mundane steel. Our one great volley was spent.

A desolate certainty settled in my chest. There was no plan. There was no clever stratagem left in my detective's mind. We had reached the end of our resources, a final, desperate checkmate. It seemed hopeless.

Across the chamber, Ashley faltered. Her living shadow, which had been a whirlwind of dark fury, now seemed thin and frayed. It recoiled for a moment, and in that opening, the robed creatures surged forward. They loomed over us, their featureless, dark voids where faces should have been tilted down, a jury of executioners ready to deliver their verdict.

A look of pure, bewildered offense crossed Ashley's face. "What manner of creature are you?" she hissed, more to herself than to them.

But the question was a futile one. Her strength gave out, a candle finally consumed. She fell to one knee, her body trembling with a deep and telling exhaustion. Her shaking hands fumbled with her lacquered box, searching for another crimson pill, but her coordination failed her. The small box slipped, and the precious beads of solidified blood scattered across the blood-stained stone like fallen rubies in a strawberry patch.

It was over. I saw it with a grim certainty. But I would not be taken kneeling. I pushed Xiao Ru behind me and prepared to move forward, to meet the end with what little fight I had left.

From the darkness behind us, a spinning sai carved its path through air that seemed to weep in its wake, and I felt its malevolent approach as one might taste copper pennies on the tongue before lightning strikes. The torchlight began to hemorrhage toward this whirling executioner like blood drawn to a wound, whilst the sound it produced was that of the world's spine being slowly twisted from its socket.

The creature, which had appeared as naught but a citadel wrought from living shadow, did release a sound as of drowning gods gasping their last breath. A fracture, resembling the first crack in a frozen pond beneath winter's dying grip, spread across its umbral form like poison through veins, and in that same instant a serpent of ivory silk shot forth to embrace the wounded demon, dragging it backward—away from Ashley—as a spider might claim its paralyzed prey.

We all turned, our expressions a mixture of confusion and disbelief.

There, at the threshold of that accursed chamber, stood our unlikely deliverers—the serpent whose trembling whispers had been replaced by the steel of battlefield resolve, her remaining sai gleaming like molten mercury caught in moonlight, and beside her the arachnid maiden whose earlier blushes now burned with warrior's fire, her fingers weaving death from silk as pale as the belly of a sleeping ghost.

I stared at our saviors, a sense of dreamlike unreality washing over me. Disbelief, yes, but it was a muted thing, for in this mad world, why should a monster not show mercy? The Lamia moved with a dancer's vicious grace, her sais a blur of steel that deflected the shadows' attacks, while the Widow cast great, sticky nets of her silk, ensnaring the robed things and slowing their inexorable advance.

But their intervention, I saw with a sickening lurch in my gut, was a mere bandage on a mortal wound. Behind the fray, upon the blood-painted symbol, the small bodies of the fox children were being drained, their life's essence flowing into the stone. A dozen, at least, were already still and pale, their part in this terrible ritual concluded.

I turned to Xiao Ru, who was leaning heavily against me, all her furious energy now gone. My eyes were drawn to her leg. The wound from the widow's fangs was no longer a simple bite; the skin around it had turned a sickly, yellowish-green, the color of bruised fruit. It seemed she had been envenomed.

I called to Ashley, who stumbled over, her own face slick with sweat. "The venom…" I said, my voice low.

Ashley's eyes, dark with fatigue, focused on the wound. "You must draw it out," she rasped. "Suck it from the wound."

The suggestion was a madness. "How?" I countered. "The poison is far beyond the bite itself by now."

"A vampire's draw is not a simple thing," she insisted, her breaths shallow. "It… it- Do it!"

I did swallow hard, my gaze transfixed upon that yellowed flesh which spoke of poison's cruel artistry. I knelt beside her prone form, my breath a ghost above her fevered skin whilst doubt gnawed at my resolve like hungry rats, then, summoning what courage remained to me, I sank my fangs into the tender flesh that bordered her wound. From Xiao Ru's throat escaped a cry sharp as breaking crystal, and my mouth was flooded with bitterness that tasted of burnt violin strings soaked in the tears of dying moths—a flavor that mocked the honeyed nectar I had come to cherish from her veins.

And as I worked to draw the venom from my friend's veins, a new figure appeared at the chamber's edge, stepping from the shadows with a disconcerting suddenness. She was a small, almost doll-like figure with blonde hair peeking from beneath a tall, pointed magenta hat that held a bow at its band. Her cape and dress were of the same garish hue, and she looked upon the battle with an air of cold, childish petulance.

“A feyborne witch.” Ashley said decidedly.