All Hail the Shifter King
Title: Sacrifices
Word Count: 1942
Crossposted here at runaway_tales
Note: Wow, okay, so I intended this to be a 500-ish word entry and it just kept growing and growing!
“We’ll stop here,” Ryder told them, ducking under a half-collapsed stone archway. “Make the most of it. We can’t stay long.”
Katrina followed him on legs that barely felt able to support her, her knees wobbling with exhaustion as she gasped for breath. The weight of the humid air made her lungs strain and quiver in her chest, her lips tingling as her body struggled to keep up with her exertion, and she collapsed on a low stone bench after only a few paces into the tiny courtyard that lay beyond the vine-covered entrance. Gavin sagged onto the stones next to her, panting too hard to speak, and his thin hand found hers and clenched it with painful strength.
The forest was pitch black around them, but the small, oddly-shaped clearing they found themselves in offered a direct path for the moonlight to the carefully-laid stones of the courtyard - it was so bright that Katrina could clearly see Eli and Rebekah as they paced around the edge of the stones, speaking in hushed tones. Distantly, she could hear the chirrups and buzzes of the nocturnal creatures of the forest, but not here - their immediate area was bathed in a heavy quiet, the hush of tiny creatures sheltering themselves from the gaze of predators. Humans, she guessed, were not a common occurrence in this space. Not anymore, at least.
When the fire in her lungs eased and her muscles were no longer twitching in fits from her panicked sprint, she extracted her hand from Gavin’s grip and pushed herself off the bench so that she could walk around the ruins, admiring their construction. He followed her after a moment’s hesitation, either eager to remain at her side or genuinely curious at their surroundings - she assumed the latter as she watched him scurry from pillar to pillar, running his hands across the smooth stones and murmuring to himself at the pictographs carved into the rough surface. From the corner of her eye she saw Ryder light a cigarette and watch Gavin with an amused smirk, and it occurred to her that it was the first time she’d ever seen a show of emotion out of the man that wasn’t a blatant scowl.
The space was a slightly misshapen rectangle, twenty-odd feet in one direction and perhaps ten in the other, covered with carefully fit stones lined with mineral veins that sparkled in the moonlight. Rough-hewn pillars created a wall of sorts on which the vines knotted themselves, with archways at either end to allow entrance to the space. Aside from the benches, which were really just boulders that had been hammered into a vaguely rectangular shape and smoothed by years of exposure to the elements, the only fixture in the ruins was a wide well. It rose to Katrina’s hips in the center of the space, the open mouth at least seven feet across and the interior filled with dark, still water that reflected the star-speckled sky above.
“Kitkat, look at these,” Gavin breathed, darting over to take her hand and pull her to the nearest pillar. He gestured to one of the carvings, which looked almost like claw marks left from an animal, angular and ragged. “You see this?” he said, tapping his finger on the stone. “This, this isn’t Fel’danai. I mean, it is, but it isn’t, you see, because these, these are the letters…” He crouched, running his fingers down the pillar. “These are the letters but they’re marked differently, understand?”
“Not really,” she admitted, shaking her head.
“It’s like…” He fretted a moment, trying to find the words. “It’s like someone who wasn’t a native speaker carved it. Someone who could speak Fel’danai but wasn’t Fel’danai themselves.”
“I thought you said they were the only tribe here, though.”
“Yes, yes, that’s why this is so important!” He clapped his hands excitedly and fished his phone out of his pocket so that he could take photos - the flash from the camera dazzled Katrina’s eyes and she turned away, wincing. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Eli!” Across the courtyard, Eli paused in his conversation with Rebekah and glanced curiously at him. “Do you know anything about this site?” he asked.
“I know enough,” came the reply. Katrina stretched her aching arms above her head and walked to the well as she tuned out Gavin’s excited rambling, sitting on the edge so that she could lean over and peer into the water. The closer she looked, the more it seemed like a bath than a well - there was a sunken ledge inside the space with scalloped edges that looked like seats. She frowned, puzzling over it. A ceremonial bath, perhaps? Or maybe some sort of sacred spring? She leaned further over the lip and reached out to touch the water, curious at its temperature, but before her fingers could break the surface a pair of hands fell on her shoulders and yanked her roughly backward. Screeching in surprise, she tumbled to the ground in a heap, bashing her elbows and the back of her head on the stones.
“The hell was that for?” she yelped, massaging her throbbing skull and glaring daggers up at Ryder, who was leaning over the edge of the well, peering into the depths. Gavin scurried to her side, asking if she was alright, and she waved him off as she shoved herself to her feet. “You know, a simple ‘don’t touch that’ would have -“
“Can you be quiet, please,” Ryder said in a low voice, still staring down at the water.
“Why? Who the hell is going to hear us? We’re out in the middle of nowhere, there’s nobody around to…” She trailed off as a curious sound rose in the clearing, a quiet murmuring of high-pitched whispers that echoed around her, like a collective of children giggling and murmuring outside her field of vision. The hairs rose on the back of her neck as she twisted in circles trying to find the source of the sound, only to find her eyes landing on the well and the now-swirling liquid inside. As she watched, the surface of the water flexed upward, as if it wasn’t water at all but a film of plastic, and the pressure beneath took the form of a small hand, tiny fingers splayed against the bizarre surface tension holding it inside, and the voices rose from gentle giggles to choking, gasping sobs and cries for attention.
A mewl of horror escaped her as she covered her mouth with her hands and backed away, trying desperately to avert her eyes from the straining hands that shoved and hammered against the weight that kept them confined. It wasn’t just surreal, it was horrific - the sight of the tiny fingers grasping at the air, the overlapping discord of their wailing voices, the horrible knot she felt in her stomach that made her want to race forward and grab their little wrists, pull them from their dark prison. Like a twisted siren song, their foreign pleas triggered a sort of matronly panic inside of her, a desperate desire to protect them, to rescue them, to save them, even though she couldn’t begin to understand what it was she was seeing.
“They can hear you,” Ryder told her. He was wrapping something around his wrist, a long leather strap with some sort of battered metal disc hanging from the end, and when he slowly reached out and pressed his palm to the highest of the reaching limbs - the tiny hand, fingers spread wide, was still dwarfed by his own - the disc sparked loudly like a bursting lightbulb, sending a rain of glowing embers floating down onto the water’s surface. “Shh,” he soothed, as the voices eased from cries to whimpers, like children calming from a nightmare. Gradually the arms began to recede, though a few grasped at his fingers, clung to his hand, and he lowered his arm toward the water as they slowly sank away. “Back to sleep,” he said quietly. “All of you.”
Katrina didn’t dare move until the last sobbing voice fell silent, and released the breath she wasn’t aware she’d been holding as she dropped her hands, wrapped her arms around herself. Her senses cleared almost immediately, the hum in her ears and the near-physical longing to reach into the well, and she shuddered at the near spell-like quality of the effect the voices had on her.
“What…” Gavin breathed from somewhere behind her. “What… were those things? Demons?” The question made Ryder chuckle.
“So typical,” he said. “No. They’re not demons.”
“Ghosts?”
“More like spirits,” Eli told him. “This place was used for sacrifices up until about two hundred years ago.”
"I'm going to get some kachen blooms, something to calm them," Rebekah said, ducking outside the archway. "I'll be back in a moment." Katrina watched her go, the pale grey of her skirt vanishing into the shadows, and then she hesitantly turned back to Eli.
“Children?” she asked, cringing as she did. Eli nodded at her, and she chewed on her lip a moment before adding, “Why do they scream like that?”
“They’re hungry,” Ryder said.
“They’re primitive things,” Eli added, shooting Ryder a glare when he caught Katrina’s stricken expression. “They only understand basic emotions, desires.”
"Like eating," Ryder pointed out, netting himself another stern look from Eli.
"Eating... people?" she asked.
"Other sacrifices, yes," Eli said before Ryder could open his mouth.
"This is... I don't even know what this is," Gavin said, knotting his hands in his hair. "It's... I mean... Is this normal?" he asked, to nobody in particular.
“Not entirely," Eli commented. "I haven’t heard them act up like that in years." He crossed the courtyard to peer out into the forest in the direction Rebekah had gone, running his hand along the thick vines that wrapped the pillars. Ryder hummed at this, skimming his palm across the water’s surface, the piece of metal - some sort of coin, Katrina realized - trailing a gold-white glow that vaguely illuminated the dark liquid.
“They've been alone a long time,” he said, and craned his neck to look up at the sky before lifting his hand from the water and wiping it on his shirt. "We need to get moving," he added, unwrapping the necklace from his wrist. Katrina watched him as he did it, how careful he was with the sparkling coin, the near-delicacy with which he treated it, and found herself mulling over the sparks and the way it glowed. She'd heard stories of the modern Fel'danai carrying talismans but it hadn't occurred to her that they would actually do something.
It was only because she was looking in that direction that she noticed the water bulge and lift behind him, the way the surface changed shape until a small skull and the bony curve of shoulders rose up from beneath it, and her heart skittered its way up into her throat.
"Ryder!" she shrieked, as the water-thing behind him reared back like a snake, its mouth opening into a cavernous hole far too wide for its small face. She lunged forward, grabbing for him. "Look -"
Her fingers managed to just barely brush his wrist before the creature coiled its bone-thin, too-long limbs around him, and with a single violent motion twisted him sideways and dragged him into the well.
The air in the courtyard rippled with a soft, contented sigh, and the water stilled into a perfect, glass-like surface.
Word Count: 1942
Crossposted here at runaway_tales
Note: Wow, okay, so I intended this to be a 500-ish word entry and it just kept growing and growing!
“We’ll stop here,” Ryder told them, ducking under a half-collapsed stone archway. “Make the most of it. We can’t stay long.”
Katrina followed him on legs that barely felt able to support her, her knees wobbling with exhaustion as she gasped for breath. The weight of the humid air made her lungs strain and quiver in her chest, her lips tingling as her body struggled to keep up with her exertion, and she collapsed on a low stone bench after only a few paces into the tiny courtyard that lay beyond the vine-covered entrance. Gavin sagged onto the stones next to her, panting too hard to speak, and his thin hand found hers and clenched it with painful strength.
The forest was pitch black around them, but the small, oddly-shaped clearing they found themselves in offered a direct path for the moonlight to the carefully-laid stones of the courtyard - it was so bright that Katrina could clearly see Eli and Rebekah as they paced around the edge of the stones, speaking in hushed tones. Distantly, she could hear the chirrups and buzzes of the nocturnal creatures of the forest, but not here - their immediate area was bathed in a heavy quiet, the hush of tiny creatures sheltering themselves from the gaze of predators. Humans, she guessed, were not a common occurrence in this space. Not anymore, at least.
When the fire in her lungs eased and her muscles were no longer twitching in fits from her panicked sprint, she extracted her hand from Gavin’s grip and pushed herself off the bench so that she could walk around the ruins, admiring their construction. He followed her after a moment’s hesitation, either eager to remain at her side or genuinely curious at their surroundings - she assumed the latter as she watched him scurry from pillar to pillar, running his hands across the smooth stones and murmuring to himself at the pictographs carved into the rough surface. From the corner of her eye she saw Ryder light a cigarette and watch Gavin with an amused smirk, and it occurred to her that it was the first time she’d ever seen a show of emotion out of the man that wasn’t a blatant scowl.
The space was a slightly misshapen rectangle, twenty-odd feet in one direction and perhaps ten in the other, covered with carefully fit stones lined with mineral veins that sparkled in the moonlight. Rough-hewn pillars created a wall of sorts on which the vines knotted themselves, with archways at either end to allow entrance to the space. Aside from the benches, which were really just boulders that had been hammered into a vaguely rectangular shape and smoothed by years of exposure to the elements, the only fixture in the ruins was a wide well. It rose to Katrina’s hips in the center of the space, the open mouth at least seven feet across and the interior filled with dark, still water that reflected the star-speckled sky above.
“Kitkat, look at these,” Gavin breathed, darting over to take her hand and pull her to the nearest pillar. He gestured to one of the carvings, which looked almost like claw marks left from an animal, angular and ragged. “You see this?” he said, tapping his finger on the stone. “This, this isn’t Fel’danai. I mean, it is, but it isn’t, you see, because these, these are the letters…” He crouched, running his fingers down the pillar. “These are the letters but they’re marked differently, understand?”
“Not really,” she admitted, shaking her head.
“It’s like…” He fretted a moment, trying to find the words. “It’s like someone who wasn’t a native speaker carved it. Someone who could speak Fel’danai but wasn’t Fel’danai themselves.”
“I thought you said they were the only tribe here, though.”
“Yes, yes, that’s why this is so important!” He clapped his hands excitedly and fished his phone out of his pocket so that he could take photos - the flash from the camera dazzled Katrina’s eyes and she turned away, wincing. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Eli!” Across the courtyard, Eli paused in his conversation with Rebekah and glanced curiously at him. “Do you know anything about this site?” he asked.
“I know enough,” came the reply. Katrina stretched her aching arms above her head and walked to the well as she tuned out Gavin’s excited rambling, sitting on the edge so that she could lean over and peer into the water. The closer she looked, the more it seemed like a bath than a well - there was a sunken ledge inside the space with scalloped edges that looked like seats. She frowned, puzzling over it. A ceremonial bath, perhaps? Or maybe some sort of sacred spring? She leaned further over the lip and reached out to touch the water, curious at its temperature, but before her fingers could break the surface a pair of hands fell on her shoulders and yanked her roughly backward. Screeching in surprise, she tumbled to the ground in a heap, bashing her elbows and the back of her head on the stones.
“The hell was that for?” she yelped, massaging her throbbing skull and glaring daggers up at Ryder, who was leaning over the edge of the well, peering into the depths. Gavin scurried to her side, asking if she was alright, and she waved him off as she shoved herself to her feet. “You know, a simple ‘don’t touch that’ would have -“
“Can you be quiet, please,” Ryder said in a low voice, still staring down at the water.
“Why? Who the hell is going to hear us? We’re out in the middle of nowhere, there’s nobody around to…” She trailed off as a curious sound rose in the clearing, a quiet murmuring of high-pitched whispers that echoed around her, like a collective of children giggling and murmuring outside her field of vision. The hairs rose on the back of her neck as she twisted in circles trying to find the source of the sound, only to find her eyes landing on the well and the now-swirling liquid inside. As she watched, the surface of the water flexed upward, as if it wasn’t water at all but a film of plastic, and the pressure beneath took the form of a small hand, tiny fingers splayed against the bizarre surface tension holding it inside, and the voices rose from gentle giggles to choking, gasping sobs and cries for attention.
A mewl of horror escaped her as she covered her mouth with her hands and backed away, trying desperately to avert her eyes from the straining hands that shoved and hammered against the weight that kept them confined. It wasn’t just surreal, it was horrific - the sight of the tiny fingers grasping at the air, the overlapping discord of their wailing voices, the horrible knot she felt in her stomach that made her want to race forward and grab their little wrists, pull them from their dark prison. Like a twisted siren song, their foreign pleas triggered a sort of matronly panic inside of her, a desperate desire to protect them, to rescue them, to save them, even though she couldn’t begin to understand what it was she was seeing.
“They can hear you,” Ryder told her. He was wrapping something around his wrist, a long leather strap with some sort of battered metal disc hanging from the end, and when he slowly reached out and pressed his palm to the highest of the reaching limbs - the tiny hand, fingers spread wide, was still dwarfed by his own - the disc sparked loudly like a bursting lightbulb, sending a rain of glowing embers floating down onto the water’s surface. “Shh,” he soothed, as the voices eased from cries to whimpers, like children calming from a nightmare. Gradually the arms began to recede, though a few grasped at his fingers, clung to his hand, and he lowered his arm toward the water as they slowly sank away. “Back to sleep,” he said quietly. “All of you.”
Katrina didn’t dare move until the last sobbing voice fell silent, and released the breath she wasn’t aware she’d been holding as she dropped her hands, wrapped her arms around herself. Her senses cleared almost immediately, the hum in her ears and the near-physical longing to reach into the well, and she shuddered at the near spell-like quality of the effect the voices had on her.
“What…” Gavin breathed from somewhere behind her. “What… were those things? Demons?” The question made Ryder chuckle.
“So typical,” he said. “No. They’re not demons.”
“Ghosts?”
“More like spirits,” Eli told him. “This place was used for sacrifices up until about two hundred years ago.”
"I'm going to get some kachen blooms, something to calm them," Rebekah said, ducking outside the archway. "I'll be back in a moment." Katrina watched her go, the pale grey of her skirt vanishing into the shadows, and then she hesitantly turned back to Eli.
“Children?” she asked, cringing as she did. Eli nodded at her, and she chewed on her lip a moment before adding, “Why do they scream like that?”
“They’re hungry,” Ryder said.
“They’re primitive things,” Eli added, shooting Ryder a glare when he caught Katrina’s stricken expression. “They only understand basic emotions, desires.”
"Like eating," Ryder pointed out, netting himself another stern look from Eli.
"Eating... people?" she asked.
"Other sacrifices, yes," Eli said before Ryder could open his mouth.
"This is... I don't even know what this is," Gavin said, knotting his hands in his hair. "It's... I mean... Is this normal?" he asked, to nobody in particular.
“Not entirely," Eli commented. "I haven’t heard them act up like that in years." He crossed the courtyard to peer out into the forest in the direction Rebekah had gone, running his hand along the thick vines that wrapped the pillars. Ryder hummed at this, skimming his palm across the water’s surface, the piece of metal - some sort of coin, Katrina realized - trailing a gold-white glow that vaguely illuminated the dark liquid.
“They've been alone a long time,” he said, and craned his neck to look up at the sky before lifting his hand from the water and wiping it on his shirt. "We need to get moving," he added, unwrapping the necklace from his wrist. Katrina watched him as he did it, how careful he was with the sparkling coin, the near-delicacy with which he treated it, and found herself mulling over the sparks and the way it glowed. She'd heard stories of the modern Fel'danai carrying talismans but it hadn't occurred to her that they would actually do something.
It was only because she was looking in that direction that she noticed the water bulge and lift behind him, the way the surface changed shape until a small skull and the bony curve of shoulders rose up from beneath it, and her heart skittered its way up into her throat.
"Ryder!" she shrieked, as the water-thing behind him reared back like a snake, its mouth opening into a cavernous hole far too wide for its small face. She lunged forward, grabbing for him. "Look -"
Her fingers managed to just barely brush his wrist before the creature coiled its bone-thin, too-long limbs around him, and with a single violent motion twisted him sideways and dragged him into the well.
The air in the courtyard rippled with a soft, contented sigh, and the water stilled into a perfect, glass-like surface.