10-10-2021, 08:09 PM
She avoids the other partygoers out of habit, keeping far enough away that they are only lumbering shadows, far enough away that she does not have to see their faces when they become monsters and men, and they do not have to see her.
The first inkling that something is very wrong is the taste of pomegranate thick on her tongue. Without thinking, she raises a filthy hand to her mouth and it comes away dark with blood. Her gums are bleeding?
Hands.
Sintra stares at that bloodied hand for longer than he should, his breath quickening. Panic is creeping over him with burning electric fingers, tingling at his scalp and crawling down his temples. What magic is this? The shape is familiar, if only because it is the shape of the men on the battlefield, the shape of Hera, scowling from above with her thunderhead eyes and voice like lightning. Is he one of them, now, to fight in the gods' battles, to die, again?
There's an unpleasant tickle at his chest that the now-pirate thinks is sweat but when he looks down, he sees it is more blood, seeping from the spear-shaft wound in his chest that has broken open. It does nothing to soothe, not even knowing – how? - that it is the scurvy unhealing these wounds. How bad will they become? Will he die of them again? There’s laughter in the air, hideous laughter and the sound of wind moaning something too much like real words. The parrot squawks, still on his shoulder and badly agitated, and flaps its green wings hard against the man's head.
"AVAST! SCURVY DOG! DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES!"
Sintra jerks away from the bird's shrill voice in his ear and as he does so, trips over a large jar of dirt placed neatly beside his feet, narrowly avoiding being decapitated by a Reaper flying just at eye level, its scythe gleaming cruelly. It turns its faceless head, but does not stop to finish off the man on the ground. It has another victim in mind, perhaps, one less… unwashed.
“Any more bright ideas?” he grumbles with reluctant gratitude to the bright bird settling back on his shoulder with a pleased ruffle of its feathers.
*microwave beep*
Guess not. Sintra climbs clumsily to his strange legs, taking the parrot and the jar along (unsure to which he actually owes his thanks,) and ducks off the wide path into the forest, after the distant sound of water. The flat-bladed sword hacks ineptly at hawthorn branches, angering the trees enough that they redirect him to an ocean of low-lying fog, white and obscure in the moonlight.
“BLIMEY,” the parrot says, and, *fart noise.*
“It’s just fog,” Sintra says, knowing full well that it is not, but he wades into it just the same, clutching the jar with a white-knuckled grip. Halfway across, the bubbling begins and leafy tentacles wrap around his ankles, flinging Sintra back to shore where he lands with a yelp and the sound of breaking glass. Impossibly, from the shallows, an enormous kraken rises, its tentacles made of whipping green vines and its body a carved pumpkin with light pouring from its eyes and its crooked, horrible, grin. The beast roars into the night making the stars quake and the trees pull back from its fog-sea bed, and Sintra, on the bank, looks desperately for a way out but those wicked trunks pull too tightly together and there’s nowhere to go but across. He looks at the broken jar and wonders why he even brought it. The parrot lands above it on the rock that cracked the thick glass in two and pecks at the dirt.
“HEAVE-HO! IN YOUR GOB-AWK!”
The man stares at the bird and wonders if he is really going to take its advice. It had saved him once, maybe, and he has no other ideas. He has to get across the misty pool and he is either going to die cursing this bag of feathers, or he is going to live because of it, so he crawls to the pile of soft, ashy dirt and with cupped and filthy hands, does indeed “heave-ho" it into his "gob.”
Is he more startled that it does not taste like pomegranate, or that he wishes – desperately – that it did? But he swallows as much as he can before his stomach revolts and boils and a strange rushing feeling rises up against the back of his throat that he forces back down with a strangled sound, and then he stands up again and steps back into the mist.
The parrot, disturbingly, flies off to perch on a nearby branch.
Vine tentacles wrap around him again, around his waist and chest and arms, around his neck, and they pull him under the surface where everything is white and damp and cool, then abruptly he surfaces with just enough time to know that he is being pressed into a bright, fiery mouth. He can feel the moment his heart stops beating. The teeth are sharper than he expected but their edges mean nothing to deadened skin. The fire cannot burn his too-cool flesh. Instead, the livid furnace within darkens where he touches it and the krak-o-lantern makes a guttural whine. Like a grain of sand in an oyster, he's encased in something wet and mucus-y and then spit unceremoniously back to shore where he lands with a wet SPLAT.
The creature screeches again and disappears, leaving him on the other bank at the mouth of a cave, covered in pumpkin guts and seeds. Shamelessly, the parrot drops from the sky. It lands heavily on his chest and plucks a seed off his face which it eats with relish, pausing only long enough to cock its his to one side and focus a dark eye on the slimey, orange, pirate.
*meow.*
978 words