Title: Sweet Thing
Author: Aviry Nolane, slvrluna47@aol.com
Rating: Rather PG
Summary: Recipe For One Sweet Thing: One part feisty main character, riddled with emotional holes, add one part authoress tired of emotional crapwittage fluff, mix well, adding chunks of bad humor and hollywood glam. Mix. Destroy.
Keywords: One Evil Sarah
Notes: Thousands upon thousands of thanks to Redaura
Thanks awfully to: Rumm, Sway, and Solea.
Sweet Thing
Chapter 3 - Slime and Snails and Puppydog Tails
The halls were thick with rancid sounds.
They ranged from the obtuse shrieks of the peasants outside to the positively disgusting keening of the deformed mongrel soldiers that populated the marble room. Together they raised in a fearsome crescendo that would have sent most full grown males running to their mothers.
The monstrous groans cried out together, their combined rancor exemplifing the death and decay of their surroundings.
For the wails alone were disturbing, but if there was anything that added to the mood of complete catastrophe, it was the stench.
The combined garbage and waste of the shrieking animals was scattered in sparse piles throughout the chamber, most of the mess being concentrated at the outer ridge of the room where the rain could wash the refuse from the ledge and down the side of the outcropping.
Not that this occurred very often.
The small brown and green figures crept in sloth-like trails around the room, all semblance of joy and triviality gone from their existences.
They lived for one thing now, survival.
One could scarcely believe that at one time they could have been the personification of life, of innocence, of creation. In a single moment they had been transformed into witless idiots, thoughtless seekers of pleasure and excitement, caring nothing for growth or preservation. Their existences had been bleak, perhaps. But it was only now that they had grown completely useless and demented.
They had shrunken, shriveled into tiny coarse bits of rumpled flesh and peeling skin. The clothes on their backs had been ravaged, leaving them with the look of deformed vagrant wanderers. Despite it all, the looks in their eyes were still the worst of it.
The beady yellow eyes of the monsters shone with hunger. The hunger for food and drink may well have been alleviated, but still they eyes hungered for more. They had the look about them of being thirsty for bloodlust, a deep craving for revenge and masochism bridled within their sniveling forms.
They slunk along, brooding in the lighter parts of the dungeon-like hell.
Amidst the rank mess of the polluted chamber there grew one great shadow from it all. It encompassed the whole of the center, the stretches of its languid fingers seemingly omnipotent in the chaotic room.
For all the hunger and pain dwelling within the eyes of the creatures, not a single one
would venture into that darkness.
They crept on, oblivious to its dwelling presence in their midst.
Through the deep folds of the shadow, over the pathways of shattered crystal and
crumbled rock, the dusty outcropping of stone permeated the shadow.
For in the shattered outcropping sat one lone figure, unmoving in the shadows.
The dust rose up in frozen spikes around him, the dazzling ice like projections frozen in a
cloudy circular mist that framed the fragile bauble it held within.
For in the seat, beyond the raingear shifts, the solitary silhouette remained.
The gossamer strands of his hair had long since been tainted by the disarray of the
surroundings, faded to a musty gray clump that fell in disheveled heaps around his face.
And the face.
It was frozen, unmoving, fastened in time by the breaking of will and sovereignty.
The eyes had sunken in, the glow lost to the brassy overtones of dirt and soil. The bones of the face had started to become prominent, the hollows of the figure receding into the charred depths of the ivory structure. His mouth was open in a half gasp, the misty ring of dust emanating from it depicting a stilled death.
The expression was one of frozen horror, of betrayal, of loss, and of confusion.
Slowly, a brief movement began to come from it, a small stirring of the mouth.
The shadows drew back, the folding of shadow to light producing a curtain of darkness. In the small opening of other worldly light, the small object began to pull itself from its prison.
A small gold spider crawled deftly from its home inside the cracking skull of the once
beautiful reagent.
And beyond the shadow, the beasts roared on in misery.
Their king was dead.
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* avi