41

Could this be right? What were the odds of this gutted and decaying body belonging to the very man they’d come all this way to find? What were the odds of it not belonging to him? Hunter’s head swam. He glanced at Fawkes. Had she noticed? It was impossible to tell. Her face was a mask, her eyes stuck to the woman on the dais, her hands discreetly hovering near the handles of her weapons. He’d seen her like this before; she was ready to pounce, ready to draw her gun and put a bullet between the woman’s emerald-shining eyes, ready to draw her blade and slash at her long and pale neck.

Mother, on the other hand, paid Fawkes and Hunter absolutely no attention. She was focused on her daughter, who was still on the floor and very much in a state of shock. Sister Peregrine was cradling the head of a human-again-and-hopefully-not-dead Brother Aurochs. She was in a bad way, that much was obvious even with her falcon headdress still covering most of her face. She was shaking uncontrollably, sobbing, and muttering at him in some language Hunter couldn’t understand.

“Dry your eyes, daughter. Rejoice, for your eyes are at last about to see true light. Cast off the chains of the Cor and join me. Leave the past behind. There is splendor ahead of us, if only you join me and let me show you the world as it truly is.”

As far as villain lines went, it took more than the handful of vague clichés Mother was spewing to impress Hunter. If this was a movie he was watching or a book he was reading or a game–a normal game–he was playing, he would be scoffing and looking at his phone and thinking about what he would eat for dinner later in the evening. Being there however, even in the degree he actually was, gave a whole different twist to the experience. The acrid smell of burned flesh assaulted his nostrils, the ever-present heartbeat of the Halls filled his ears, the muted chants and whispers of the grotesque faithful of the Inner Sanctum permeated his very being. Bad writing or no bad writing, simply being there was enough to make his heart race like mad and his fight or flight response go nuts.

“Daughter”, said Mother again, and there was a hint of impatience in her voice. “Enough of this.”

“…”

“Rejoice, I said.”

“…”

“DAUGHTER!” she wailed, and her shrill voice boomed and echoed throughout the cavernous space with supernatural intensity. Hunter instinctively raised his hands to his ears, Fawkes tightened like a drawn bowstring, Fyodor hid behind Hunter, and the ravens took flight, startled.

Sister Peregrine stopped her sobs, too.

“Shut your mouth” she told the other woman, unexpectedly calm. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what you’ve done with her, but if you don’t shut your mouth I swear I’ll sew it shut myself.”

Mother’s eyes grew wide with disbelief, and she looked like she’d just been slapped in the face. It didn’t take her long to regain her composure, however. She flashed her daughter a sinister half-smile.

“Insolence. I see.” For the first time since they’d entered the Sanctum, she turned her gaze to Hunter and Fawkes. “Is that your doing, outlanders? Your influence?”

Hunter squirmed. Fawkes stood as still as a statue. Neither answered.

“No answer? It is just as well. It’s not like your heathen tongues would have to offer anything of value, after all.” She turned back to Sister Peregrine. “It pains me to no end, daughter, how you’ve let the ways of strangers cloud your sight on top of the lies and deceptions of the Cor. It pains me, but I see no alternative. If you share the heathens’ ways, then you’ll share their fate, too.”

Mother raised her hand in the air, twisting her long and slender fingers in a gesture that had something definitely ominous and eldritch to it.

“One way or the other, you will see the truth.”

Strands of golden light seeped from her fingertips and started to weave themselves together, forming some kind of sigil, and Hunter’s mind was suddenly assaulted with a crushing kind of pressure he’d never even thought possible. It was a blend of awe and dread and agitation turned up to eleven, as if he had suddenly drawn the attention of… something. Something ungodly. It was far greater than the primal fear he’d felt when he’d first seen the shapeshifted form of Brother Aurochs – or even Arjen the bear, who was the aspect of a forest god. Only once had he felt dread and terror of rivaling intensity again; back at that standing stone when he’d first come to Elderpyre, moments before he was slaughtered by the clawed hands of ghostly killers.

Radiating power, Mother raised her other hand in the air and drew another sigil. A blinding light blasted everything in sight, golden and brighter than the midday sun.

You have failed a contest of will against [?? ???? ????????].

Kannewik Corpse Hair Charm has been consumed to protect you from the effects of Auric Authority.

A wave of eldritch power washed over Hunter, threatening to swallow him whole, but he was somehow spared t the last moment. Fawkes and Fyodor and Sister Peregrine were not as fortunate. The split second it took for the flash of golden light to blast them was enough for Fawkes to draw her saber and pistol, but instead of rushing at the woman on the dais, she now simply stood there still and slack-jawed. Sister Peregrine was more or less the same, still cradling Brother Aurochs’s head and staring at her mother with eyes that looked glassy and glazed over. The direwolf had simply collapsed on the floor, and the ravens were nowhere to be seen.

More of that golden-hued eldritch power was beginning to manifest around Mother, taking the form of a nimbus around her form and a bright-burning corona around the horns of her headdress. The first sigil she’d began to cast was nearing completion. Millions of tiny strands of gold were flowing from her hand, forming what looked like an ophidian symbol surrounding an orb of pure light. Simply looking at the thing flooded Hunter’s mind with alien notions that were testing his sanity, shapes and colors that should not–could not!–exist, memories of strange lands and deep waters and twin suns burning in the middle of an empty sky, black and cold and void.

Even with the protection of his corpse hair charm, he was overtaken. He wanted to give up right then and there, in give in to the pressure, stop thinking, stop feeling, stop suffering under that impossible pressure. He wanted to fall down on his knees and worship and join the scores of low-dwellers in their whispered hymn and praise the source of that golden light. For a moment, he almost did.

Almost.

Then he blinked, and Fawkes’s gun came into focus.

Hunter acted on pure, kill-or-be-killed survival instinct. He didn’t plan. He didn’t think. He had neither the time nor the luxury. He simply closed his eyes to shield them from the radiance, burst into motion, and dove for the pistol. He felt his fingers close around its handle, he felt its heft in his hand as he raised its barrel and aimed at Mother. He didn’t even have to open his eyes. The light that surrounded her burned straight through his shut eyelids. He gathered all the willpower he could muster, squeezed the trigger, and shot.

It was more than a bullet that hit Mother; it was an act of pure defiance in the face of impossible odds, a desperate, wordless “fuck you” spat in her immaculate face. Maybe it was that spite that cut Mother’s spell short, or maybe it simply was the lead the hit her squarely in the chest, staining her exquisite dress with blood. It didn’t matter which; all that mattered is that she suddenly lost her oomph. Her light flickered and dimmed as she wailed in pain, and her image swam again like hot air over asphalt on a hot day. For just a moment, the illusion broke and Hunter saw her true form through squinted eyes.

He immediately wished he hadn’t.

She was the same woman alright, but barely recognizable. Gone were the luxurious silks and the gilded ornaments; she was a broken and tormented thing with bony limbs and ashen, saggy skin. Her lower body simply wasn’t there. She was fused at the waist to the humongous body of… something, jutting out of a broad torso at a skewed angle. That something reminded Hunter of a coiled gargantuan centipede, only each of its segments were the torso of what looked like a low-ogre, and each of its legs was a giant humanoid arm. Worst of all, its head was an elongated, spongy thing, faceless and eyeless and asymmetrical and and full of protrusions and orifices in places that made no sense. That was the source of all the whispering, Hunter realized. That was what pulled the strings. Mother was just a façade, like the bright, luminous lure a deep-sea anglerfish would use to trick its hapless prey. It didn’t last long, that slip of the mask; before he knew it, Mother was back to her aristocratic-looking self, and the nightmarish being was nowhere to be seen. For Hunter, though, the illusion was broken for good; what he’d seen, he simply couldn’t unsee.

With the ophidian sigil now broken and rapidly dissolving into thin air, Mother’s mental chokehold on Fawkes and Sister Peregrine loosened too. They came back to their senses, blinking and visibly disoriented. On the flipside, so did the rest of the Inner Sanctum’s inhabitants. Mother let out another wail, and the malformed bodies of the praying misbegotten began to stir behind the rows of stone benches, and the low-ogres clutched and brandished their huge spears threateningly. Hunter saw all of that, and instantly knew it; there was no way they’d make it out of there alive.

No way, perhaps, but one.

“Run!” he shouted at Fawkes and threw her pistol back at her. She caught it in midair purely on muscle memory; here grey eyes were still glassy, her expression confused. “Don’t fight, just run! I’ll keep them busy, but you gotta get out now!”

Too pressed for time to even see whether she’d understood, he grabbed his glaive from the floor and ran straight for the dais. If he was going down, this time he’d make sure as hell he’d do so fighting tooth and nail.