Part Four

In which a man faces the Demon.

The pain was agonizing, and my red blood trickled down upon the horse. I hung; it felt like in mid-air, when it happened, until finally I felt the ground’s familiar tug and the feeling of pain slipped away into cold numbness. I heard her gasp, and the dull thud of the pike hitting the ground.

I wanted to fall, but I did not. I simply hung there, hand caught and crushed between the hammer and the death-engine. Red blood dripped down along my arm, falling into my face. I couldn’t feel my arm, much less my destroyed hand. The forces pulling me downward wanted to tear my arm off me, and I frankly didn’t mind at this point if it did.

The demon was still firing at the archers, but its attention seemed to be more fixated on me. The archers took this opportunity to flee, and while the horseman fired and slew a number of them it was clearly more interested in me, the bug, that had managed to interrupt its killing spree. Soon there were only the three of us. Meanwhile it hadn’t moved its arm, leaving me just to dangle there like a broken doll.

The fiend holstered its other weapon, and only then finally raised its arm. I winced and groaned as the numbness suddenly gave way to circuits of pain all along that side of my body. The arrow stumps still protruding from the steed and its master deeply jabbed into me, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one or two had actually impaled me and I just didn’t feel it yet. As it raised the death engine up though, it raised me as well. It held me up closer, as if for inspection. Here, mere inches away from what was supposed to be its face, did I get a closer look at its head.

Its helm was a black-iron cauldron betraying nothing of face or even eyes, its only feature being a wide and tapering grille along the mouth in the shape of a giant grin. A huge, wicked grin, nearly encompassing the entirety of the helm’s lower half. Nothing, no breath, emanated from within. If there was any flesh inside, I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to behold what it might be. From atop the helm spouted segmented tendrils, like the legs of insects, in some sort of mockery of hair. Each one ended in a cruel-looking spike.

But this close to the demon, looking at it as I’m sure it looked right back into me, it cocked its head slightly, and I heard the light jingle of bells. Faintly, as if from a distance and the sound were carried only by the wind alone. It was then I saw, as my eyes focused, that the spikes at the end of each tendril weren’t spikes. They were hollow cages, and within each of them, a jingling jangling, bell. They spun and flung themselves at their cage bars, ringing incessantly, dancing in a wind that wasn’t blowing.

I thought back to the man who laughed before he died, on how he faced his demise with a chuckle and not with whimper. Or was his fear in his laughter?

The demon raised its thumb and pulled back on the hammer, and I fell sharply to the ground. She rushed up to my battered form, trying to hoist me over her shoulders. I wanted to tell her to run, to get away, but the better part of me knew it’d be a waste to try. If she wanted to, she’d have a long time ago. Knowing that made the pain just a little bit more tolerable.

To my, and even her shock, the fiend casually dismounted. Finally off its accursed steed, it was only slightly bigger than a stout and swarthy man. I noticed it still had one weapon out, though it was currently pointed at the ground. It just stared. At the moment, all either of us could do was stare back.

In the corner of my eyes I noticed her shifting. I thought she was just shifting her weight. Then I felt the prod of something against my back, and felt it cold like metal. It had to be a dirk. I wanted to protest, to somehow convince her not to, but anything at this point would just betray the fact that she had it. So I withheld all the emotion from my face, keeping my body deathly still. It wasn’t hard.

As smooth and graceful as the quicksilver running in her veins she slid away from me and flung the blade. It flew straight and true, flatly towards the gaping divides in the helm’s mouth grille, inwards to whatever lay within. Though no wind blew, I thought heard the faint murmur of bells.

Something happened. The next thing I knew I was once more aloft, this time with my head caught within one of the demon’s hands. Its other arm had one of the death engines rammed down her throat, forcing her down onto her knees. How had it moved so fast? It was like it hadn’t moved at all, and we were always in this position the entire time.

The gauntleted fingers clutching my skull tightened, and I yelled as pain unlike anything I’d ever felt before literally tried to cave in my head. I flailed and writhed with renewed vigor, my body somehow finding some secret cache of adrenaline and unleashing it all at once in a last, desperate bid for survival. I kicked and banged with my good arm, but I might as well have been striking the side of a mountain. The pressure only steadily increased. My blows were rapidly becoming fainter, not because of any waning effort but because my hearing was diminishing by the second until there was nothing but the tidal coursing of blood as it swelled in my cranium.

I spared one last glimpse towards her. She saw my imminent death, and pale tears were rolling down her face, leaving clean trails across a surface of grime. There was blood in her mouth, and she might have been choking. She was moving one of her hands frantically, but not against the fiend. She was trying to reach towards me.

The pressure on my head was becoming too much. I could feel the bones in me bending and on the verge of breaking. Everything was growing dimmer. The last thing I could make out before my vision finally darkened was one crimson finger pulling the hammer back on the death engine in her mouth.

I could not hear, and I could not see. But I could still taste, taste the blood in my mouth. I could still feel, the rough and gritted texture of the hand crushing my skull. I could still smell, the very stench of fear from both our bodies.

I had faced death more times than I wished to count, and been ready to confront the end at each of those times. But now, now I knew. I was going to die, and this time there was no luck, or chance, or hope.

My dangling, ruined hand brushed against the smooth but distinctive feel of wood. Ironwood. I could also feel the cold touch of metal.

I am going to die today, right now. But she is not.

The adrenaline had faded and nothing could stave off the shrieking banshees of my nerves as I tried to move my ruined arm. The pain electrified me like I had been struck with a hurricane’s worth of lightning. My whole body convulsed with it, but in the twitching I forced it to move only harder. My arm was ruined, dead, and every fiber of my being railed against me. Death and oblivion swirled, and even that fleeting sense of touch was already starting to go numb. I was seeing, seeing lights. Every minute thing in my limited, immediate, and personal universe was ending right then and there. But I would not stop. I did not stop. I wanted that arm to move. I needed it to. I focused every thought, every desire, whim, emotion and dream into moving it. Without hearing I thought I heard a creaking, perhaps even the first slimmer of cracking. I willed it to move. And it did.

The sudden return of pain illuminated all of me like the ignition of a star, and in that agonizing light I brought that arm up and shoved the barrel of the gun deep into helm of the Rainbow Demon, right into its mocking and cruel grin. I pulled that trigger back and with all of me, I fired.

I knew darkness, and in it I knew blackness. I knew the colors, all the colors, all the ones based in white and all the ones based in black. I saw gray. I beheld the whole spectrum, both visible and invisible, across all ranges of light. And then I awoke.

Author's Note

I usually proofread my works, however as always I'm sure there are typos and syntax errors. I appreciate any and all notices of that, and will work to correct those. If I haven't do know that I did acknowledge your notice and try implementing it, but found that it detracted from the effect I wanted and so omitted it.