A Child

Ears twitched. Once. Twice; flicking away at phantom irritations. A shake of the head; a twitching limb. Ivory claws extended lazily to their apex and retracted, leaving shallow grooves in a wooden floor that had seen a lot of small footsteps. Bronze-freckled, its burgundy fur caught the slivers of moonlight in dazzling phantom fireflies. Hackles undulated like a broad road from the thick of its mane and narrowed to the base of its tail, vanishing to start over from the top. A new scent. Flews twitched in agitation. Eyes snapped open whilst far-off thunder burgeoned from its chest. The Fura’s purple irises contracted to thin four-pointed stars, pinpointing That-Which-Did-Not-Belong. Canines gleamed like polished flintin the dissipating moonlight.

Torpid air currents stirred subtly as things dropped from various heights. Wings unfurled in the billowing of myriad cloaks. Their inaudible chirps and hunting pulses disturbed those that lived beneath them. Spiny-haired legs rose from the rotten crevasses to probe the land around them. Clicks flowed through the silence like lost souls until the fog swallowed them up.

Silence.

Answering clicks faintly echoed back as ancients ascended on thick cobwebs from abyssal fissures.

The Fura named Saya rose to her feet, claws splintering the wooden floor beneath. The room had grown into a landscape of boiling mist and creeping shadows. Veiled objects stood like petrified ghosts in the flowing haze that blanketed foul and unwholesome soil. The landscape was littered with ancient snapped limbs and blackened trunks. The bark was burnt skin petrified in blistering and scarred tissue; the branches like burnt victims reaching for help.

A forest of autumn leaves rustled as a presence approached.Pale grass swayed back and forth, entranced by the caress of slithering limbs. The remaining light of the abdicated sun dwindled, giving way to the ascending darkness. With the first tremor of fear, the air, heavy with anticipation, ruptured and bled out in rivers of violence and torment. It flowed with purpose and malign intent towards the small wooden bed.

The child in it rolled around restlessly. Her sheets lay strewn half off the bed. Eyes rolled under twitching eyelids as she gazed upon a figure hidden behind a cloak of serpentine limbs. Some of the limbs flailed as if tortured, others rippled like a calm open ocean. Her face contorted in fear.

The child’s breathing became difficult as the presence drew closer.Saya put one paw forward, pushing against the asphyxiating atmosphere around them. Its own presence swelled outwards like an erupting flare, howls signaling the hunt. The presence ceased all movement, and in that idleness one could feel the gentle probing of the land by spiny-haired legs and the tasting of the air by various forms of antennae. Abyssal eyes opened like curtains on some macabre stage, where the dramatis persona — a little girl — would be the entertainment.

The concussion of crumbling mountains shook the bed, cracking floorboards and scattering furniture. Chitin cracked and shattered as things were torn apart by ivory claws and flint teeth. Bones snapped and flesh ripped in dull wet sounds. Maddening ululations and unyielding howls reverberated in a cacophonous fugue.

The land shuddered as a deep sigh buckled the earth into a sagging depression. Claws raked slabs of coarse stone, releasing showers of sparks. Drool flew between the ferocious snapping of teeth. Rage-filled howls sank into the earth as rock ground on rock, gradually muffling the ferocious din until there was nothing but the feint rustling of things in the dark.

The presence pulled its splintered bones and rent flesh together in a mauled cloak of agitated limbs and billowing wings. Four green eyes appeared like ship lanterns in a dense fog. They swirled and churned in anticipation of the child’s awakening. The girl rubbed her eyes in confusion and alarm — her mouth opened in a silent scream as she stared at the Eldritch. It reveled in her recognition of him and the consequences of that recognition.

It whispered her name.

Its voice hissed like immeasurable slithering things combined with the clicking of eager pinchers. It lingered with the chirping of far-off winged beasts locating their quarry. Her red hair hung in wet tangles, a few strands trembled before her eyes like dead vines. Her slouched shoulders carried the weight of her leaden arms; her legs anchored her to the bed.

It whispered her name again.

The bed gave a shudder and tilted to one side — her body did not change position. The linen on the floor writhed and rippled as things crawled beneath it, up the wooden legs and onto the bed. Behind her things churned under her pillow. The Eldritch told her that she was alone. It laughed in screams of abhorrent mares; unseen teeth elongating with maddening hunger.

“She is not alone,” a voice said absentmindedly. The new voice startled the creeping of spiny-haired legs and the slithering of undulating bodies. Wings exploded in a gust of surprise and took off into the sky above.

“She has me.”

*

Half of the deadened landscape was swallowed up by the snapping and crackling of encroaching ice. A glacier stood like a titan, its warped façade reflecting nothing but the color of deep ocean. The Eldritch shifted its attention to a cavernous shadow near the base. It could sense him there, sitting on a small ledge of cold blue and thermal veins — his features concealed in shades deeper than its own.

Emotions of intrigue, rage and megalomania reverberated through the space between them. The seated figure waved it away in a manner of absentmindedness and stared at  the place where Saya had disappeared.

“I remember you..” The figure surveyed the room he knew so well until he focused on the enormous caped figure standing between him and the child’s bed.

“You always liked things that crawled and slithered. The wings are new,” he said in an amused voice.

Confusion. Hissing. Thought. Old memories. Boy. Not alone. Wolf. Resemblance. Dog. Fura. Perplexed.

Recognition.

The Eldritch struck — the detonation flung shards of leviathan-blue ice in every direction. Spires of ice fell towards the child chained to the bed in fear. The glacier wall gave way to the absence of matter and the existence of pure oblivion.

Ancient ice cracked. Fissures ran along its frigid veins right to the heart of the descending spires. They bulged outwards like overstretched sails and burst into a shower of harmless hail.

The Eldritch did not turn its head, since it didn’t have one. Eyes lit up on every side of its body and surveyed the whole region simultaneously. It found the figure standing at the foot of the bed; his blue-green eyes shone like the destroyed glacier. Old nightmares galloped at him in the violence of primordial waters. It rose like a giant serpent, frothing and hissing before it would swallow you into the depths of its embrace. It battered and tore at him, but was as harmful as a light drizzle on a hot day. The Eldritch writhed in agitation at its repeating failure.

Another enormous Fura stepped into the landscape. Its volcanic grey fur rippled in anticipation and its yellow eyes narrowed to slits. Thunder filled the room as it rolled out in uninterrupted arcs from its low growl as it could not locate Saya.

“Finis,” the figure said as it drew two short, slightly curved hilts from beneath the folds at his sides. The one was white as ancient compressed ice; the other was of volcanic rock. Mocking and deceit snaked out in chains, winding round and round until it covered the figure in an iron maiden. The encapsulated figure showed no movement or anxiety; it stared at the Eldritch in judgment of its uncountable crimes against children perpetuated over centuries. The ancient ice hilt grew into an elongated shard, the jagged edge curving forward longing to caress its claim. A molten scimitar grew from the other, pulsing with currents of the first hearth. There was only enough time for comprehension. Eternal fire brings justice and primordial ice brings death. There is nothing else beyond these two opposing forces.

Now, the child sleeps deep and peacefully. Her exhaustion left her dreamless and unmoving. He traces the lock of hair that dangles from her brow along her cheek.

“You look so much like your mother,” he said, covering her with a blanket.  He turned and walked to the titanic glacier, the bigger Fura followed suit. Saya took her place next to the bed and settled into a slumber as the room retook its normal dimensions.