XXX
Post Mortem
Edith watched the clouds of warm breath that escaped her lips.
It was strange that she wasn’t shivering from the terrible cold that must have drifted in the air around her. But it didn’t bother her in the slightest.
Her lab coat was casually unbuttoned, leaving her summer blouse exposed to the room’s refrigerated air. Her hands were stuck in the coat’s pockets, but only because she had nowhere else to put them. She felt at home.
The spotlights blinded her briefly, forcing her to avert her eyes from the dissecting table and let her gaze drift of the rows of dark, wooden stands that mounted up around the rotunda of the anatomical theatre in an elegant semicircle. As empty as they were, there was the occasional shadow among them that hinted that she and the other aspirants were under quiet observation.
She had always remembered this place bothering her more.
For one thing, the temperatures could get quite unbearable during three-hour exams.
And, by virtue of her name starting with a ‘Ш’, that meant that she had to wait through all of it.
Her hands were already said by her professors to be the steadiest in the course - but that was only the case at room temperature.
But… that was it, really.
“Alright then!” a loud voice bellowed from the vicinity of the dissection table. “Will the Banja Luka Delegation gather around, please? Come on, boys and girls, squeeze in.”
Instinctively, Edith’s peers, each and every one wearing, just like her, a lab coat and a white medical cap, grabbed their pens and notepads and stepped towards the cold light of the deck lamp, which sent light falling down a porcelain slab, which was carried a body that was in turn completely obscured by a blanket, as well as a middle-aged, but muscularly-built lecturer in a white coat of his own, a garish tie and round academicians’ glasses, who stood on the other side of the table and curiously peeked under the blanket, as though to make sure he wasn’t looking at the outlines of the wrong ‘patient’.
Edith moved up as well, but she was sad to realise that she could find neither pad nor pen in the rush.
“Alright then,” the lecturer repeated, rubbing his gloved hands together as he glanced around the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the summer circus. Lovely to see you returned from the winter sleep all relaxed and rejuvenated. Just in time for me to drag you back into the hell of reality.”
He chuckled.
Edith vividly remembered old Doctor Levenshtein’s questionable sense of humour.
Of course. Now it all came back to her.
This was Moscow. The People’s Friendship University, RUDN.
Six months of residence in the Institute for Medicine. Probably the most productive - and, alas, happiest - spring and summer she had in the past few years.
“Now,” he muttered, “let us take a look at our first patient. This is a special one, and I hope you’re going to appreciate her as much as I when we’re done.”
He reached under the blanket and dragged out a pale foot. “First, let’s take a look at the old meat ticket, shall we?”
Twisting the toe, he pulled out an orange tag. “Gender: Female. Age: Thirty-six. Place of birth: Prijedor, SFR Yugoslavia. A countryman of yours, I see! My thanks to the Medical University Hospital’s kind donation.” He glanced up, “Ethnicity: Serb… No surprise there.” He shrugged and read on. “Name: Redacted, unfortunately, for the purposes of this session.”
Unfazed, Levenshtein smacked his lips.
“Place of death: City of Canterlot, Principality of Equestria, Equestria. The new world, boys and girls! And lastly… cause of death:...”
He smiled at his aspirants. “That, I’m going to let you figure out for yourself.”
With a fluid pull, he uncovered the body on the table as though she were something epoch-making.
A collective groan of shock went through the aspirant pathologists as they inspected the cadaver.
Some turned away, others began to cough.
What sight could possibly be bad enough for hardened GPs and anatomical forensicists, all with three-plus years of residency under their belts, to avert their eyes?
Curious, Edith stumbled forward to see for herself.
And herself she saw.
At least, her corpse. Pale and stripped naked.
But it was fine, it looked completely untouched. It was nothing that Edith herself could have considered stomach-churning in the slightest.She looked like she was in the middle of a long, peaceful slumber.
“I know, I know,” Levenshtein sang, “not a pretty sight. Not pretty at all. But you’re going to have to deal with plenty of gore in your coming careers. So consider this an immunisation exercise.” He grabbed a tray with the standard medical instruments and sniffed. “Another silver lining is that you’ll be getting to learn something about life as much as about death from this patient. Doctor Kovač!”
A young blonde girl glanced at her lecturer and cleared her throat nervously.
Levenshtein clasped Dead Edith’s left leg and lifted it up gently by the thigh.
“Ignoring everything else: What can you see here, Doctor Kovač?”
“Oh! I can see...” She pointed a finger at a number of bulging scars that dotted and criss-crossed her leg muscles seemingly at random, “Some scattered scars.”
“Any guesses who or what inflicted them on her?”
“If I had to guess… maybe an explosion? I wouldn’t know of anything else that’d lodge so many tiny foreign bodies inside a person’s thigh.”
“Bravo, Kovač.” he smiled, and dug out a folder from under the desk. “What we have here indeed are shrapnel injuries, sustained in… an incident involving a PROM-1 antipersonnel mine in June of 2011.” He shrugged. “Poor girl was returning from the excavation of a military graveyard in Mostar, Herzegovina. An uplifting and fulfilling job that I’m sure anyone of us is aspiring to take. Right?”
Silence.
Unfazed, he grabbed Dead Edith by her head and bent it to the left, revealing the side of her jaw to the others. “Look at this. Doctor Nikolić. What can you see here?
A guy with youthful ginger stubble leaned over her lifeless face.
Her jawline still looked blue and swollen, almost plum-like.
“Uh... a blunt force trauma. The healing process had already started though.”
“Thank you. What you see here are the results of being struck by rockfall, possibly sustained during another field excursion in Southern Equestria. Which reminds us to never venture into the mountains without a helmet on your noggin. Got it, everyone? Good. Lesson learned. Moving on.”
Bending her head back even further, directed the aspirants’ attention at at area between her neck and left shoulder.
Even Edith could not help but lean in with childlike fascination. She never had the chance to see herself from this angle before. From the side, she looked so very different.
“Doctor Kazun,” the lecturer called. “If you please.”
A woman with braided brunette hair shuffled forward.
Dead Edith’s neck was practically white with mended wounds from stitches that had once dug into her pasty skin.
“Uh… I see… a single scar. There are… traces of a suture, so, uh… uhm...”
She trailed off.
Grinning, Levenshtein shook his head and directed a finger along the left side of Dead Edith’s neck.
“Lacking, Doctor Kazun, lacking. Records say we are looking at a...ballistic trauma that severely fractured the clavicle. .30 Russian Short, close range, though probably a ricochet. Hence the need of an intramedullary fixation.”
He adjusted his glasses and pouted.
“Injury was sustained at the tender age of fifteen.”
Silence once again spread through the room.
“Like I said… this young Madame has led a fascinating life. One can safely assume we’re looking at yet another victim of your war.”
He positioned her head at a more natural angle.
“But was this wound life-threatening? What say you, Doctor Kazun?”
“Uh… only if the subclavian artery were injured.”
“Quite right. The artery was barely touched. She was lucky to walk that one off.”
He stretched himself before continuing.
“But… not lucky forever, by the looks of it. Alright, ladies and gentlemen. We come to our grand finale.”
He grabbed Dead Edith’s right arm and and held it aloft, laying bare the entire right side of her torso.
“Doctor Branković, will you do us the honour? We need a cause of death!”
A boy with a thin moustache folded his arms uncomfortably.
“Ahem… Well… we are looking at... several causes of death, really. Massive blunt force trauma… massive fractures, ruptures and blood loss abound. The crushing of the body would be consistent with… a fall. A fall from… I would say, fifty metres?“
“Excellent.” Levenshtein nodded. “You know what they say. ‘The higher you climb…’ Well, you can guess the rest.”
He held up the coroner’s report and adjusted his glasses. “Massive blunt force trauma, causing fractures of both tibias, fibulas, patellas, femurs, the pelvic girdle, vertebral column, and ribs, as well as ruptures of the large intestine, small intestine, left kidney, right kidney, liver, stomach, and left lung. And massive blood loss.”
Next, he directed his gaze directly at Edith, who still stood in the crowd, saying nothing, her hands still hidden in her coat’s deep pockets.
“Ah, Doctor Šarić. There you are. Hidden in plain sight, as usual. Do step up.”
Edith obeyed, and stepped up to the table she lay on.
“As a little bonus round, I would like to ask you about the following.”
He clasped Dead Edith’s arm and held her fingers practically under Edith’s nose.
“What will you be able to tell me about these irritations between the patient’s fingers?”
“Those are papule scars,” she answered automatically, “She contracted contagious pustular dermatitis after she was licked by a sheep on her father’s farm. The disease acutely progressed due to the poor sanitary conditions of her environment, and a resultant immunodeficiency.”
“I w…” Levenshtein had to stop and take a look at his medical file. “Well done, Doctor. Well done indeed. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you snuck a peek at her file.”
Edith gazed at herself briefly before shaking her head.
Digging through the assortment of medical cutlery on his tray, Levenshtein picked out a medium-sized scalpel and twisted it around in his hand and offered it to her, grip-first.
“Well then, Nurse Nightingale... I wonder what you can then tell me about her guts.”
Edith nodded and accepted the sharp instrument from her lecturer.
Like so many times before, standing over a body - with this one seeming as familiar as it seemed foreign - her mind cleared and invited in her cool and professional self as she prepared for the assignment at hand.
Oh yes. This was a thing she had missed sorely, and she didn’t even realise it. The buzz of excitement of a task waiting to be processed by her steady, precise fingers. This was her world. Here, she thrived.
And she did not even have to remind herself that there was nothing wrong with it. Digging through a once living being's cadaver had never bothered her too much. After all, what was done was done. This person - or rather, this person’s remains - could no longer be helped. So no need to lose sleep over it.
Dead flesh was easily cut.
“Fair Edith!” a voice echoed.
Momentarily distracted, Edith glanced up, inspecting the gallery of seats all around her.
The other aspirants, as well as Levenshtein, did the same, their faces marked by shock.
“Don’t!” the voice shouted again, pleading.
From one moment to the next, her fingers felt like they had been paralysed. The scalpel slipped from her numb fingers and clattered on the tiled floor.
The voice seemed uncannily familiar. She reminded Edith of someone.
The disturbance triggered something in her. For the first time in what seemed like ages, her body was rocked by a flight of intense panic.
A black shadow swept in under the darkened ceiling, with such velocity that Edith had trouble following it with her eyes.
Her peers scattered out of the light a little with increasing worry, voices dropping to hurried whispers.
The shadow slipped over the rows of empty seats and seeped into the centre of the round auditorium.
The hapless medical aspirants dove away from the shape as it snaked its way towards Edith and the slab.
Before she could so something to avoid the ghostly apparition, the shadow shot out of the floor like a great black weed and swelled into a life-sized, remotely animalistic shape.
Helplessly, Edith watched the apparition transform into a black solid blob.
“Edith!” the mass screamed.
A head seemed to grow out of the top of it. Before long, this ‘head’ shook itself and rid itself of the dark matter, which slipped off her much like a cowl.
This cowl revealed the head of a dazzling equine creature, her coat darkest blue, and her mane coldly burning like a star-filled night sky, with burning, earnest eyes that pierced Edith with their grave stare.
“Oh child...” the equine breathed, not taking her eyes off Edith as she tried to command her unformed body to wade closer. “At last. At last! Thou must listen, for We may have little time to spare. This foul magic, it seeks to pry Us from thy dreams-”
The mare tried to continue, but was momentarily visibly harrowed by a glance towards Edith’s cold, deceased body resting on the slab next to her.
Her breaths intensified.
“Thou...” the mare continued, recovering from the sight as best as she could, “thou art in great peril. Thou must hold on to thy wits. Try to surmise thy whereabouts. Remember where thou art, whence thou hast come and whither thou wilt be dragged! And… lose thyself not. Always remember who-”
Edith’s world suddenly tilted. Her thoughts became jumbled and flittered far away as vertigo overtook her. Her head began ringing as her balance was taken from her.
She was going overboard.
The Moscovian medical theatre dissolved before her eyes into the black void.
Edith’s fall seemed endless. The momentum, even as it picked up, seemed to push her downward for half an eternity.
A cool wet sensation suddenly blew over her fingers and travelled up her hands and arms.
The faster she fell, the more she realised that she had her eyes closed, and that she had to open them.
But they wouldn’t. It was as though they had been glued shut.
Something long and thick roughly broke her plunge.
She could feel herself flailing around like a freshly caught fish, before whatever she had slipped onto carried her off.
For a moment, she harkened back to the strong, unyielding arms of her father that had carried her around when she was little. It was the same aching, uncomfortable position…
She was placed down on her back, onto something that was surprisingly soft and heated. Immediately, something swept across her face, leaving behind a sticky moist sensation that made her grimace in disgust.
Again, something - somewhat soft and of harsh fur - swept across her eyes, rubbing them and the rest of her face clean from something slick.
Freed, her eyes fluttered open, to a distorted sea of dark green.
That’s when her gag reflex kicked in. Almost automatically, her body rolled to the side and her head cocked her mouth sideways. And then she began to splutter something - something that had been inside her all along. She didn’t feel sick. Her stomach was almost ominously calm. Yet there was something in her esophagus. And there was something blocking her airways, all the way down her trachea. Her retching flushed it out.
Then it was gone.
Something clutched her by her cheeks and moved her head back over.
Behind all the bleary green, she could make out a vague figure, a head looking down at her.
Through waterlogged ears, she could hear it speak to her, its words short, repetitive, desperate, and almost bark-like.
“Ma’am! Ma’am! Ma’am!”
As the moisture trickled out of her ears and the gunk flowed out of her eyes, the world once again began to return to Edith.
What she may have noticed first was the smell. The intense, overbearing, omnipresent smell that was not unlike unspent petroleum - sweet and entrancing.
Second thing, she realised how incredibly tired she was. What a strong calming buzz emanated from her head and sent waves of tranquility flowing through her limp body, and it just motivated to lie even more still, mind the creature hanging above her even less…
A sharp slap ended that serenity promptly.
In a painful instant, her senses sharpened. She promptly shot her hands up at the attacker, but his hooves warded her off.
“Stop it! Stop!” he hissed.
She recognised the grey unicorn stallion with the dented golden armour.
“You need to get up! He’s gone. Now’s our chance to get out of here!”
Edith needed a moment to process it. She wasn’t usually this slow. But it caught her off guard all the same.
“The next one could stop by any minute! If we want to make it out alive, we have to make a run for it...”
Edith’s attention drifted to the ceiling above her. Tinged in a dim green fluorescent light, she saw white limestone, and long stalactites pointing down at her face, casting long shadows that stretched into seemingly all directions.
Another sharp slap broke her attention.
“Don’t make me do this, I beg you! Get on your feet! I cannot carry you.”
She tried it out and lifted her knees. The ground beneath her feet was soft and wet, as though she were standing in warm clay.
The unicorn pulled her upright, and like a one-year-old that had just found her balance, she staggered forward.
Before she had an idea where her feet could take her, she was already pulled forward by a immaterial glowing force that seemed to stream out of his horn.
“Follow me. Do as I do.”
They crossed the small cavern they were in. Edith quickly noticed that all the walls were lined with shimmering green treacle that looked as moist as the ground felt to her. A brief look down confirmed it. She was standing knee-deep in something.
Wondering how she could feel it so freely, she realised that she had no shoes.
She felt her stomach. She noticed that she was down to her shirt and long winter underwear. Her winter jacket and scarf had disappeared off her like everything else.
Frantically, the unicorn paced by the coated walls and sniffed searchingly before stopping in front of a section that seemed to bulge slightly.
He gave her a meaningful glance. “I’ll go first. Just hold your breath.”
Then he dove right into the wall. To her surprise, the material accepted him openly, and he melted right inside without so much as leaving a hole.
Edith’s mind told her to steer clear of the swallowing gunk, but an invisible will compelled her to stay on his heels.
Her fingers going first, she advanced towards the wall and testingly leaned her hands against it.
The substance proved to be extremely viscous and surprisingly hot to the touch. She wasn’t accepted nearly as easily as the unicorn in front of her.
Inch by inch, she pushed in, closing her eyes as the upright green mass touched and enveloped her forehead.
Before she knew it, she was once more enveloped.
Before she knew it, she was once again in complete darkness.
“Oh dear...” the unicorn muttered as he dragged her alongside again, “I suppose this stuff just… has this effect on you.”
He wiped her face clean again. But this time, Edith mustered the strength to help with her own soiled hands.
She hadn’t considered it before, but she suddenly thought about what terrible shape her hair had to be in after that… bath.
She opened her eyes to a passageway - the same rock and lime, with the same stream of green gunk flowing at her feet and seemingly trickling up the walls.
The Royal Guard unicorn glanced up at her.
“Look up once in a while. They could easily sneak up on us from anywhere.”
“Who?” she mumbled. Her voice almost wasn’t there. She resisted the urge to cough up more green.
“They can climb walls. And they do. And don’t get me started on their flying. It’s totally silent.” he mumbled back, looking up and down the passageway fearfully. “Let’s go that way. But keep it down.”
They trudged on, down a corridor that had only barely enough of a gleam of light to look down.
Exasperated, Edith tried to retrace her mental steps.
Last she knew, she was lying in the snow, her power punched out of her by the fall from the window of the castle in the Everfree.
Now she was here, in this cavern. And so was Sergeant Golden Dirk. The changeling.
She knew she should have been harrowed. But all she could muster was bemusement.
“You… you’ve been out for, like, three days now.” Golden Dirk whispered, his voice trembling nervously. “Or two. I don’t really know. There’s no sunlight in this place.”
Edith’s mind clicked.
“This… is a hive, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“I didn’t know where they came from. I ran straight into them. And I still had my… you know… Guard veneer and everything on.”
They stopped at yet another nondescript vertical pool of green treacle, and rubbed a probing hoof over it.
“What about you? Do you remember anything?”
Edith thought for a moment. Not really. She remembered some humans, in uniforms and turbans of all things, but that couldn’t have been right.
“I don’t think they got to anypony else but us,” he continued and sneered impulsively. “The nerve. The absolute nerve! There were Guards swarming all over the place, they were almost on top of them! What the hay were the changelings doing right in the middle of it?!”
Digging at the wall, his hooves seemed to find something. “Ah. Got it. I’ll open up. That’ll make it easier for you.”
He put his hooves together and pushed them in. As they sank in, he spread them out - and pulled the green film with him. It created a ever-widening gap that revealed a hidden branch-off that led deeper into the cavern.
“Oh mama...” he whimpered, “I can still do it. I’ve still got it!”
Under his movement, the hole grew to the size of a suitcase. Before Edith knew it, Dirk was already slipping through.
She made herself as small as possible and ducked into the dark hole after him.
A new tunnel. But unlike the others, this one wasn’t bare.
For a moment, it looked like they had crept into some sort of crypt.
In the ominous twilight of the green gunk’s glow, she saw metal and gemstones sparkling in equally impressive abundance.
She stepped over heaps of random objects in various states of decay and filth that filled every corner and niche of the room.
Ripped rugs, a muddy mattress, bent beakers, shards of dishes, dampened books, crumpled parchment, chairs, table legs, rusty plough equipment, a couple of wicker baskets, a straw hat, a bushy clotted fur cap, broken gas lamps, a derelict gramophone, a blistered guitar, a concertina, a popped military snare drum, rusty shields, upturned golden helmets, components of a longbow and some arrows.
But more of that later, Edith thought.
Most of the stuff she didn’t really care for. But the arrows drew her in. They had metallic heads and seemed as sharp as ever.
Instinctively, she reached and pulled them tip-first out of the slime, snapping the feathery ends off.
She clutched the remaining few inches in her fist and felt the cold bronze tips. Would they do the job? They were pretty sharp; they might.
She felt marginally safer.
“The thieves...” Dirk spat as he waded on, trying to reach the walls to tap them. “Look at all that stuff.” There was a crunch. He glanced down nervously, only to find that he was standing on some kind of album. “Books. What on earth would they want with books?”
As she caught up with the snooping soldier, she couldn’t help but notice that there was even more unseen equipment piled on in the shadows.
Were those life preservers? Whoever was responsible for this, they had certainly been journeying.
Then she noticed a bright orange plastic helmet. An electric megaphone. Several ski poles and an empty can of corned beef.
The more familiar the junk became, the more it worried her.
“What is ghoingh on here?” she inquired, her voice raspy.
“Keep it down!” he hissed. “I’m trying to find a way out of here. We’re in some cave, alright, but I have no idea where I’m going. This place is a maze. But... we must have come in somehow!”
She felt an eerie sense of déjà vu.
“When was that?”
He turned to gaze at her.
“Do really remember nothing? Like I said, two or three days. They picked us up the moment we jumped out of the fire.“
Her eyes drew blank.
“You... remember the fire in the Chancery, right?”
She couldn’t say that she did. She vaguely remembered she was on the run, but little more.
“We… we already were in the Chancery?”
He looked slightly incredulous.
“You’re kidding right? You and me, we were all there, when they… started setting the books alight left and right.”
“Who?” she breathed.
He shrugged.
“And… why?”
“I guess they wanted to smoke us out. Pah. Worked well enough!”
He kicked at the pile and sent scrap flying in all directions. Then he felt the coated piece of cave wall.
“I would’ve gotten you out of your cocoon sooner, but… they always came to look. I first had to get a hold of their patterns, their shifts. You see, they didn’t know I could leave whenever I wanted. I... wasn’t too hot on them noticing that, though.”
“So… wait, we were imprisoned.” she made sure, slowly.
“As far as I’m concerned, we still are.”
“And… You freed yourself.”
“Well...” the ‘unicorn’ sighed and wiped some slime off his horn. “I can. But those savages can’t find out about that.”
Savages, Edith thought.
“What are we talkhing about here, Sergeant?”
He held his ear against the wall, before stretching out his front hooves. Again, he split the slime and peered into the next room through a hole barely broader than his muzzle.
But then his eyes shrunk.
“...What?” Edith asked.
Almost immediately, Golden Dirk began to hiss at her and flail his hoof in wild, erratic swings.
“Shhhhht! Shuuuushhhhh! Quiet.”
Edith looked inside. It was true. In the weak light, she could make out dozens upon dozens of grey creatures, all heaped on one another. There was a veritable layer of them stuffed into the corridor.
Edith would have sworn she was looking at a pile of corpses, were it not for the occasional flicking limp and clattering wing or shimmer of a rising stomach’s chitin.
“They’re... asleep.” she concluded.
“There’s a hundred of them.” Golden Dirk just whimpered. “Sweet Celestia, we’re never gonna leave this place! Where else can we go?!”
“Qhuiet.” Edith commanded coldly, and looked once again into the strange changeling dormitory, with the slightest flicker of fascination.
There they were.
This is what the whole world had been looking for all these months.
The enigmatic changeling race.
It may not have been the first time she had ever seen a changeling in her life - that honour would have gone to the ‘unicorn’ standing next to her - but this could have been called an awe-inspiring sight nevertheless.
She could see the heap was split in two, each section lying propped up against one side of the narrow passageway. In the middle, like a mountain valley, ran a thin canal of secrete, undisturbed by the changeling sleepers themselves.
She immediately decided that it was worth a shot.
“We chould try passingh through there, see what is on the other side of the room,” she explained to her fellow escapee.
“Are you nuts?” he snapped, his breaths quickening. “We’ll wake the lot of them.”
“Not if we don’t step on anyone.” she escaped. “I know how to stalkh. I used to hunt.”
“Oh?” Golden Dirk nervously wiped his nose with a hoof.
“I’m… I’m a pretty light sleeper. What… what if they’re all light sleepers too?”
She gazed up the changeling heap.
“Nobody chan sleep likhe that and be a light sleeper. Open it up further, will you?” she commanded him. “I want to take a look inside.”
“No!”
“What do we have to lose? We’re damned either way.”
He briefly looked up at the sky that wasn’t there. Then he obeyed.
Edith tried not to stumble as she stepped through.
Golden Dirk surely wasn’t exaggerating. There were far more than a mere hundred creatures crammed into the quarter. An entire village’s worth.
And she was barely a few feet away from the foot of the hill - or rather, the closest sleeping changeling drone.
Though there seemingly wasn’t a single creature that wasn’t asleep, the mass was nevertheless brimming with life.
Edith kept her cool, and a step towards the creatures.
The strangest mouth noises reverberated through the space. Some more like roars, others more like high-pitched whimpers.
Less than three feet.
And now she could veritably smell their snores too. More petroleum.
She wouldn’t have expected changelings to snore.
Not that she had expected anything from changelings, really. She didn’t really think about what she’d find once she did.
One foot.
Her bare foot - where had her boots gone, anyway? - was only a few inches from bumping into one changeling’s muzzle, and only a few inches further away from getting entangled in another’s tail.
She looked to her right. There it was the same story. Only even closer.
Before she knew it, she was standing amidst them.
And she had to look where she stepped…
Razor wire flashed before her eyes.
A cold shower flushed down her spine.
Her knees almost gave in from the shock.
Had she just seen something gleaming right there? Down by her feet.
Not razor wire. Just a coil of hair.
She had to watch her step though...
For a select few moments, she forgot to breathe.
This inadvertently caught up with her with an impulsive, deafening gasp.
The silence that followed was horrifying, but nothing - and no one - seemed to stir.
“Ma’am!” she heard a voice hiss, “Come back! Now!”
She couldn’t turn back now. She could already see the looming darkness of the wall on the other end of the passage - entirely nondescript, but Golden Dirk could probably find a passage there too. Just a few more yards of edging past these things, and she would have made it through.
She moved on.
The ‘valley’ became slimmer and slimmer with every shuffle and every step. There was much less space than she had hoped.
Why was her head still spinning?
Was she really having a panic attack in the middle of the changeling horde?
A head behind her sneezed.
She skipped forward inadvertently.
Her landing toes disturbed the stream. There was a splash. Droplets shot through the room.
She forced herself to a standstill. The other end was so close.
Her legs began to shiver from the adrenaline.
She needed to calm her feet. So she hunkered down amidst the crowd, momentarily forgetting her surroundings.
She had to explain to herself that this was just a pool of something or other she was standing in. Nothing more. Nothing to worry about.
A jolt shook her as something grabbed hold of her shoulders from behind.
Her hand was wrapping around the arrowtips before her conscious mind even caught.
“What are you doing?!” the familiar voice hissed, almost inaudibly. “Move on. Slowly. Follow me!”
She massaged her legs and made ready to stand back up - but then she was pushed back down as the sergeant climbed over her back and head. She was sure his weight would have crushed her where she was, had he not helped himself with his hidden wings a little.
As soon as he was in front of her, he straggled through the jammed darkness and fell into the opposite wall as though it were a flat, gooey finish line.
As he started to peel away the at the right spot, Edith got the motivation she needed to get back on her legs.
But that was when she spotted the two bright-blue, pupil-less eyes beaming up at her.
Like a deer in the headlights, she was caught in the stare.
At first, she thought that she was seeing things. That her increasingly unnerved mind was playing tricks on her.
She knew it was. But not about that.
There really was now a changeling looking at her, lying mere inches beneath her knee, not blinking, suspended in complete silence.
She couldn’t make out its head as such, but those eyes were a little smaller than expected. She expected aubergines. What she got were apricots.
The body they belonged to dug itself forth from the living blanket under which it lay buried, all at a calm, leisurely pace.
This changeling really was tiny. Perhaps it was a young one.
And it was still watching her.
In that extended moment of slowly incoming fiasco, her breath fell. Her heart slowed.
An eerie calm whipped through body. Her instincts catapulted her mind back to a different time in her life.
With the grace of a dancer, she pulled out the bundle of arrowtips, and with an adept swing, she brought the deadly metal into a familiar forward grip. Just the kind of grip she had been taught so long ago.
Her eyes focusing on the changelings’ blue, she crouched forward and brought her improvised dagger into the position.
A few centimetres below the eyes’ shine, that’s where the neck had to be.
That’s where it had to land.
Of course, the other hand had to be ready clasp its mouth shut. Which had to be a few centimetres-
The blow from the side almost pummeled her into the dirt with the rest of the changelings.
Immediately, she brought the spear tips around to jab at her attacker, but one of its hooves punched the spears out of her fist and sent most of them scattering into the writhing mass of changelings.
Edith tried to keep her calm as she pressed back at the assailant, who was staying ominously silent itself.
It gave way - it sent her stumbling towards the end of the room, no doubt tripping across a dozen legs and faces as she flew.
She plunged into the secrete a foot short of the hole Golden Dirk had scraped into the wall. She rapidly picked herself up - just in time for her attacker to kick her and send her plummeting forward.
She barely had time to take a breath before she ploughed into warm, all-consuming changeling secrete.
All went dark.