//------------------------------// // Chapter 20 — Foreleg // Story: Jericho // by Crushric //------------------------------// Chapter 20: Foreleg “Now, first, you must lift your foreleg up to your forehead, like so.” “Sing!” Have you ever sat there and watched a cat sing its catsong in the middle of the night? You know, the kind that attracts vultures and undesirable ethnic minorities alike to try to dine upon it? Well, the mare dancing upon the bar counter, her hips vacillating mesmerizingly as she sang and commanded ponies to sing in her off-tune yet endearing voice, reminded me of that as I stepped through the batwing-like bar doors. I had come in here after being chased around the town by an escaped seeing-eye dog named “Kimbles”, according to his collar. He had been happily assaulting a mare pushing a stroller with her foal in it, but upon seeing me, my black poncho, my steel helmet, and my black leather boots, Kimbles decided to harass me. While Kimbles didn’t bite ponies, his idea of playing with them was decidedly violent, hence the word “assault”. “Bad dog,” I hissed as Kimbles the golden retriever stared at me from outside the batwing doors. Thankfully for me, Kimbles had an irrational phobia of two things: squirrels covered in honey, and the great indoors. My steel helmet felt right. It covered the upper part of my face and part of my nose, leaving most of my face bare, like those of my Wikinger ancestors. Though it didn’t have any horns attached; the Wikinger never actually had horned helmets. Common misconceptions. Adjusting my poncho, I let my sword show, and went into the tavern proper. It was always taverns with me, wasn’t it? But that was where all the quest-giving characters were. Evidently, the sight of me turned a lot of heads. Mayhap they simply never got enough travelers. Or perhaps ponies dressed partly as ancient pagan raiders never frequented these parts. A shame. I was a great cosplayer. The dancing earther mare didn’t notice me as she led the bar in song and dance. “Whoooa, and if you fight hard for foal and wife, Try to get something good in this life, You’re a sinner and bad buck, And ya gon’ be by the Fiddler dead struck!” She hopped off the bar as I sat down at it, the piano player in the room’s corner keeping his stride. As I fiddled with my poncho and sword, a mare in a plague mask sat down next to me. She put a card on the countertop and slid it over to me. The Fool. A preemptive move if ever I saw. It reminded me of that one nation-based board game I’d played once where I’d provoked my friend into declaring war on me, a war I would have won, by sending several pretty mares out to our heavy contest border. These mares were told to loudly proclaim how they’d all seen my friend naked and hadn’t stopped laughing since. Sadly for me, though I recognized the trap, I couldn’t help but lash out at those laughing mares. I spoke. “And so what is this supposed to mean?” The Blue-Eyed Mare leaned towards me, lifting part of her mask as she whispered, “Give not up.” “Lady, just who are—” I gasped, a surge of cold water running over me. Reality broke away from me, replaced by confusion, vertigo, disorientation, and the urge to start a dairy farm that serviced weasels only. I had no idea if weasel milk was any good, but dammit, I wanted to be he who tried. “Is he awake?” a mare asked. I coughed and sputtered, cold water soaking me. Ponies crowded above me, Felicitat was one of them, Biche was another. “Verpisst euch,” I growled, rolling over and forcing myself to my feet. My head jerked in the direction of the Blue-Eyed Mare, where she had been before the fever overtook me. There was nopony there. Looking back over to where the ponies really existed, I blinked. Standing by the front door was a mare in a familiar mask, her black jacket belted at the waist. While I knew that flanking maneuvers weren’t dirty tricks, unlike some mares I could name, this seemed like cheating. No being everyone at once! That was just a rule. A sudden, irrational desire reamed my skull sideways. It was a lust, a lust I felt as I stared at the masked mare: the irrepressible, untamable, overbearing urge to just touch the Blue-Eyed Mare. Not in a sexual way, no. It was like that feeling you got when you looked over the edge of really tall cliff: the urge to just jump, to see what happens, to fall a great height and die. “Hey, you,” I said weakly, holding out a hoof. “Who are you?” With all the casualness of a pussycat in a cathouse, she strolled through the doors and into the midday outside. “N-no, please! Don’t-don’t… I just want to talk, I swear upon the face of my father!” Ignoring the protests of Felicitat and Biche, I broke out into a sprint and slammed the door open. Out in the street, my instincts told me to run to the left, to the north. So I galloped northwards, the Blue-Eyed Lady nowhere to be seen. I thought I heard Felicitat and Biche calling after me, but I didn’t know for sure. I kept kept galloping and sprinting and running and dashing and barreling. Town turned into river valley. Stone into grass and dirt. Grass into weeds and weeds into trees. I could feel bile-like blood circulating through my body. Each pump brought about a wailing agony in my skull, for the brain itself literally could not feel pain. I think I vomited somewhere along the way; I couldn’t say. All I could say was that I had to go north, towards the Blue-Eyed Mare. My duster practically flapped as I vaulted boulders, little hills, bits of streams, and at least one very startled doe. A quick thought reminded me that biche meant doe, but that was all I afforded the ponies behind me. And as I ran, I began to see more and more of the Blue-Eyed Lady. She was behind every tree, every rock, every incline, every hill, always vanishing just before I got there. She reminded me of my first girlfriend in that way, teasing whenever it fit her. I recalled her amber eyes, her sharp features. In the memory she was dressing herself after our first time. Her look was two-parts vague amusement, one-part almost real sympathy as she said, “Wow. You really get girly after doing it, huh?” Biting my tongue, I forced the memories away. The Reich, the Fatherland, was behind me. She was probably dead, just like everyone else I’d ever had any care about in the Reich, which was why Dad was alive and well, I knew. For all I could truly care about, the Blue-Eyed Lady was my whole world… and I was okay with that… Acids festered within my leg, perfectly normal but perfectly painful. I gulped in fresh air, my throat drying so hard that I choked on it. Each step was agony. I must have banged my hoof somewhere, because my ruined hoof was now leaving little specks of blood as I sprinted. Faint… what was I… where as I… why… blue eyes… Find her! And my arms and legs gave out under me. I collapsed, rolling and rolling until I smashed my head on a rock so hard that it drew blood… blood… blood… I saw her face, a filly’s face full of terror and fear as she looked directly up at me. The corpse of her mother had a bloody mouth, a steak knife impaled through her eye. I peeked in through the hole in the stone wall, the ruins of Esztergom behind me. “Hey there, kleines Mädchen. Are you okay?” She whimpered, stepping back from me. “It’s okay,” I said with a smile, not that she could see it through my Atemschutzmaske. The mask only let her see my eyes, if lucky. I reached out for her. “You look hungry. Would you like something to…” The lips died on my tongue as I saw why she was crying. She wasn’t scared of me or because of the dead mother and father by her side, no. That would be too easy. She was crying in silent agony from the bite wound that shredded her blouse. Equine teeth. Dead mother… She was infected. There was nothing more to it. It was only a matter of time before the necromantic fungus got into her too deep and she turned into one of them. The Code looked down upon me, and it refused to comment as I raised my sword and… and so much blood… and the first time I contemplated suicide, even if my brothers-in-arm solemnly commended me on having the guts to do what none of them could do. If I could laugh in the face of horror, I could keep away the monsters from my lack of dreams. So long as I didn’t dream, I could sleep soundly. So many bad things, so many smiles from me. “You can’t give in,” she said, snapping me cold out of my stupor. She was sitting in there in front of me. Slowly, I rose a hoof to touch her, but she stood up and took herself from me. “Please,” I begged in a weak tone. “Give not up,” she insisted. “Only a little further now, Fool.” “I feel as though our relationship has become verbally abusive,” I commented, and she slowly walked off into the brush and vanished. Nothing within me could work up the strength to go after her. I let the sun high above burn my eye and dry my blood into a crust that would not have gone very well on a pie. Trust me, I’ve tried. It never goes like you’d think it would. A sudden fit of laughter overtook me as I remembered the last time I’d seen my father. I laughed like it was the funniest thing ever, so funny that I coughed until my throat felt about ready to bleed. One of his eyes, the one mirroring the one I lost, had something new: a battle wound. Where once the pupil had existed now only a sea of color surrounded by the image of an Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. When last I saw him, he’d been holding out his Iron Cross out to me, the one I still wore today. Gritting my teeth, I grasped the Iron Cross. What was I anymore? What was I doing? Gone was Jericho Amadeus Faust, replaced by some diseased brat whose every other word, every other thought, was some genital thought. I… why? Get your ass up, maggot! my father’s voice screamed in my ear. Move like you have a purpose! Purpose. Hmm… Now, there’s a foreign word. As distant from my life as my mental image of Princess Celestia was from being anywhere near intimidating. Cardsie-wardsie-hatie-watie! I took a deep breath in through my nose. With nothing but willpower, I rolled onto my stomach and stayed there until I lost track of the time. I could feel Father’s hoof in my mouth mixed with blood. Worthless boy. You have forgotten my face. So I gritted my teeth, swallowed the bile in my throat, ignored the headache, and stood up. Before me stood trees by the banks of the river that had spent eons carving this little valley. I ambled forwards into the brush wherein the Blue-Eyed Mare had vanished. I could not run, only slowly drag myself through brush and bramble. The drag led me to a little clearing choked with dry bits of bramble and leaves and dead wood. As I stumbled out into the clearing proper, still a distance from its center, I looked down at my right arm. The veins were black. Black as the darkest night with a dash of peppermint. Red meant infected. Black meant necrotic. The limb had been dragging not because I lacked will, but because it was dead. Not metaphorically. Literally dead. So I thought long and hard, and eventually I dragged myself over to the center of the clearing. All of my efforts were focused on gathering up all the dry leaves and everything here, putting it into a huge pile at the center, and setting it alight via the magic of friction. I kept growing the flame until it was a bonfire, until the heat of the fire made me wince, my very bones filling with warmth. My good forehoof found its way to my empty eye. What had I done when it had died? What I had done was… solve the problem. So I reached over, grabbed my sword in my teeth, stuck my arm into the fire, and went to work amputating the dead limb. Hack, slash, slash, slop, hack, saw, cauterize. Cauterize. Cauterize! The rotten, diseased flesh came off easy enough; death made limbs so weak, flesh so maimable. I laughed like a banshee as the severed portion of the limb fell off. The nerves turned to a charred crisp, the veins, capillaries, and artery burned into a sickly-sweet smelling substance that made my tummy rumble, my mouth salivate. When I pulled it out, half of my face felt burned in the first degree. Part of my flesh had melted over my arm, like a freaked scab that reminded me of the way a clown glares at a little filly. Still smiling, still laughing, I collapsed onto the ground. So much blood gone, but so many clear thoughts! I don’t know how long I lay there, cackling like a hen who’s just eaten the fox. It was long enough for rain to come and for night to fall. At first I was soaked, but the bonfires dried me so well as it cast its dancing shadows all over the clearing like pagan witches who’ve just discovered what sugar was, but didn’t yet know with what orifice you consumed sugar. Only, not all of them were shadows. Figures stared at me from the edge of the clearing, their eyes flickering in the pyrelight. None of them dared approached me, even as my voicebox went raw and I could no longer even moan. “You live,” a sweet voice said, and I suddenly found myself myself staring into beautiful blue eyes. Problem was, I was no longer dying beside a bonfire. Above me was the ancient vaulted ceiling of a castle or cathedral. I reached out a hoof to caress the face that held the eyes, but she pulled out. “Thank all the holies for that.” “Where…?” I croaked. Literally croaked. My sudden desire to be a frog came out like a croak. “Ribbit,” I added. A part of me now wanted to find and severely annoy a witch. When I asked myself why, I drew a blank “Don’t speak,” she said in a soft, motherly voice. Now that I looked, she was again wearing that masque from my earlier hallucination. Catching my look, she feigned a smile. “You know, not many a girl would forgive a guy for blowing her brains out through her skulls, that’s for sure. Lucky for us—” There’s an ‘us’? “—I’m a forgiving, understanding lady.” She winked at me. My internal organs couldn’t decide if I liked that look or if that look made me want to strangle her by her ovaries while carving the alphabet into her back with a spoon. ABC—Die, bitch! “Wait, no, I think I said that already…” The mare shook her head. “You’ve come so far, Fool, so far,” she whispered, moving her lips closer and closer to my ear. “There’s just one thing left to do.” I could feel the heat of her body against my ear now. But words never came. The night sky flashed before me once more. A tall figure was standing above me. There wasn’t much I could tell about the figure save that it was impossibly tall and its smile was three times too big for its face. And then I was back in that cathedral-like room. She wasn’t standing over me, I realized with a wave of panic. I flailed until I was on my stomach, and I grunted as I lifted myself up with only three limbs to support myself. For some reason, I imagined myself with a pegleg ending with a hook. That mental image ended with me getting caught in a closet making out with a suit of armor, and me screaming, “This is who I am now—a machine with machine desires!” I needed to get a hobby, I figured as I hobbled through the large room. It was like a throne room, years after the king was overthrown and the republic declared. In fact, there was an area that looked like it had once held a great throne. Tattered banners hang from the walls and ceiling, mayhap symbols of noble houses. Whatever this was, I stumbled wobbly through the place until I got to where I thought a throne might have been. Then the faint but distinct scent of incense tackled my nose, screaming something about the square root of lemons. Behind the throne there was a little doorway once hidden by a bannister of crossed swords behind a snarling wolf. Walking the little passage led me into a larger corridor. I stopped to catch my breath. Apparently, losing your arm made you more prone to getting winded than a fat chick in an “ice cream and hot guys who will never love you” emporium. Hah. Obesity. The lethargic killer. Still less scary than a brain aneurysm. Those things just haunted my nightmares. You never knew when they could happen, and they just instantly killed you. How ponies went around not in constant fear was beyond me. Licking my parched lips with a tongue so dry that a cat would call it scratchy, I went back to walking, following the smell. The hall vanished into a large semi-circular balcony for no adequately explored reason. Beyond the balcony was an ocean, its waters red in the setting sun. I could see that this was indeed a ruined castle. Tall spires connected by narrow bridged rose out of the bay beneath the castle, as if some giant had lazily been trying to build up a goal post, gave up halfway, then decided he was going to become a painter who painted only small rodents. He was probably dying of poverty. But more importantly, there was a half-dressed mare sitting on the balcony, a half-circle of burning candles before her. She was half-dressed because her jacket was around her waist where it was belted, a plagued mask tossed to the side. When she slowly turned her head to look at me, she sighed. Her face was striking; not because of radiant beauty or anything, but because it was the face of a mare whose childhood had visibly been slapped out of her face. I couldn’t tell her age, but I estimated her to be somewhere in her early-to-mid thirties. I liked her mane. A strange part of me wanted to shave her bald, stitch her mane into a wig, and then staple it to Cards’ forehead—just because it’d totally be cute. You need help, Jericho. You need so much help. “Long days and pleasant nights to you, Fool,” she said in a voice that was cool, but not hostile. “I liked it better when I was the Hanged Stallion,” I replied. “Sounds less daft.” She shrugged, still not facing me fully. “We cannot choose who we are.” “I like to think it was my choice to do this and not become a ballerina like my father wanted me to be.” “Did he really want you to…?” I shook my head. “No; I just say things. Doesn’t change the fact at hand, though.” She grunted. “You have interesting eyes… interesting eye, that is,” the half-nude mare commented, turning back to her candles. “You have the eye of a corpse. One who is far too alive and mayhap stupid to know that it has been dead for a very long time.” “Are you hitting on me?” I asked, narrowing my eye. “Because if you are, appealing to my mutilations only makes you seem like one of those ponies with weird fetishes. You’re one of those mares who’s into cripples and tentacles, aren’t you?” I accused. Her manner remained just as composed. “No.” I deflated. It felt as if I needed to be blo—no, no, there was absolutely no way to phrase that without sounding like a sex joke. “So, you’re saying you judge for me the blood and flesh I lost defending the good and virtuous?!” “No.” “Oh, you are just an utter bitch,” I groused. “You can’t just be so calm when I say unusual things.” “I try my best, Fool,” she said in a casual tone. “Why do you keep calling me that?” The Blue-Eyed Mare turned to look at me, the distant sound of waves crashing ringing across the barren cliffs below the castle. “It is your card.” I nodded, leaning to the side and up against the little doorway to the balcony. How I had ended up here was a bit foggy, but hopefully I wasn’t carried here by exactly four and a half dwarves or a sleigh team of gerbils. It happened to me once and I could never again look at sunsets the same way again afterwards. “Oh, I get it,” I said, nodding my head. “This whole thing isn’t real!” Smiling at the mare only made her grimace. I went on. “So you’re not real! This castle is but a bad thought. You call me Fool because my fever dream dreamed up that card.” I pointed to my right arm… and promptly fell to the ground. “And I didn’t really cut my arm off!” Her grimace deepened, and she scrunched her neck slightly in a way that reminded me of my first pet. My first pet had been a tortoise who, upon seeing me for the first time, became so scared that he hid in his shell until he starved to death. “No… that really did happen…” I blinked, my smile going from ecstatic to the kind of fake smile you gave your grandparents so that they wouldn’t commit suicide because they were old and nopony loved them. “Well then.” I laughed twice. “My life is so going to suck from now on.” And the frown came. “Oh sweet God, I’ve made a terrible mistake.” “It’s not all that bad, considering,” she replied hesitantly. “I once knew a pony who had to amputate all four limbs, then perform open heart surgery on themselves.” I laughed, but she didn’t. “Oh God, you’re serious. Huh. Here I was, thinking that you and I had the same sense of humor.” I frowned. “Why does nopony ever share in my sense of humor?” “Have you ever—” “Hey!” I exclaimed, pointing at her. “You don’t have a shadow.” “What?” I pointed at her, then at myself. “I have a shadow. You’re not casting a shadow. Stop it. That’s weird.” A seagull… or something—it had four slit-like eyes and talons but was otherwise identical to a seagull—landed on the stone walls of the little balcony and made a sound that was somewhere in-between a seagull’s cry and a very small filly screaming ‘mollify’. “See? This abomination has a shadow. Why don’t you?” She stood up, her jacket remaining on the ground. Raising a brow, I noted dully that she wasn’t wearing pants proper, just vague undergarments. Something about that seemed like a bad idea to me. What kind of lunatic sits outside with candles, watching the sunset in her underpants? They were white in that way wherein they were practically see-through, too. Because my fever dreams hated me, I doubted that she’d just so happened to be wearing something so provocative. Taking a sniff of the air, I noticed that the smell of the candles was gone as the wind picked up. “If this is the part of the dream where things get fun and I wake up feeling weird, I’d like to just wake up please.” The Blue-Eyed Mare rolled her eyes. “Can I ask you a question?” “I do enjoy syrup on my waffles, yes,” I replied. “And yes, I will gladly make us breakfast—provided that you have the waffle mix and syrup, of course, because I’m just nice like that. We can sit at the table and talk about… uh… taxes, because that’s what normal ponies talk about.” She looked longingly up at the castle and sighed. “I don’t pay taxes.” I went to clap my forehooves together in excitement, but instead fell back into the floor. “See? We’ll have something to discuss. I don’t really know for exactly how long I’ve not been in my home, but depending on some estimates, I may owe up to ten years’ worth of a back taxes to the Reich. Aww! When I get home, some government ponies wearing black coats are gonna drag me onto the street and publicly break my knees and face with baseball bats! And it will be great.” “Waltharius!” she blurted out, stamping a hoof. “Ja?” I goaded. “Everything you said about him was correct, right?” “Well, I don’t like to lie about history. I like it. Lying about others things, though, no problem.” The Blue-Eyed Mare bit the corner of her lip, looking down. “That is a name I recognize. When you first said it, I snapped somewhat.” I blinked. “You mean, that sudden burst of rage I felt when I mentioned his name to Felicitat?” She nodded, looking off to the weird mutant seagull. “Yes, that was me.” The mare paused to take a breath. I spun around a full revolution just to see what it was like without my right arm. “So. You defeated Waltharius?” “In absolutely every way, the Good Stallion was outmatched by King Viktor,” I said. “Waltharius made a move against the Reich, they say, when his agents burned down our capital of Zentrum in order to try to keep us from interfering. There’s few crazy conspiracy theorists who insist Viktor burned down his own capital to provoke the war, though. Ponies who buy into that are daft. Anyways, within a few years, the flag of the falcon and Iron Cross flew victoriously over two continents other than our own.” I narrowed at eye. “But you’re a figment of my imagination, not my history teacher. What gives?” “Because that’s not how it happened here,” she said. “Here?” She cast her eyes off to the castle. “On the other side of this castle there is… was a city… the greatest in this world.” If she expected me to question her further on this, I didn’t. While I was listening, I was trying to think up the next greatest dance craze that didn’t involve your right arm. “It was thriving, great, magnificent, rich, mighty, beautiful. And then the Good Stallion came. He was just like he was in your world, from raider to messiah, preaching the same message of equality and an end to class-based slavery. Though, he said nothing of magic like yours did.” Tscha-tscha-tscha, supertango! “So, without the Reich to save you, your homeland was destroyed?” She hesitated. “And now I am the last of those ponies. Then he went into your world, I suspect, and there was he slain.” “Come again?” The Blue-Eyed Mare sighed, turning around. She walked over to the edge of the balcony. She had nice flanks; they looked to me like ones exercised through a hard life, not vain exercising for its own sake. Were I a lesser stallion, I might have stared at it instead of wondering just how many jackrabbits I could hide in my now-armless sleeve. Imagine just what kind of shenanigans I could pull of with a sleeve full of jackrabbits! With a sudden leap, she hopped up onto the balcony’s railing, looking right at me. She held out a hoof and smiled, like a mother offering to help pick up her foal who had fallen into a cage of rabbit jackalopes. “Are you coming?” I had found once that sometimes unexpected things waltzed into my head if I let the door open for them. Useful things, often. Now, though, was different. Suddenly she had my rapt attention and interest. “Excuse me?” I said. “Come here,” she offered in a siren-like tone. Against the screaming in my head not to walk, I went up to her. She grabbed my left arm and helped me onto the balcony. It was at that moment that, with horror, I realized that going up stairs was going to suck. Great. So. In summation, I was a whacky cripple who most certainly would still gnaw your fetlocks off. Eh, I’ve probably had worse. No, no you have not. “Why are we up here?” I asked, already knowing the answer. She meant to kill me, and I had just stopped caring. Of course, that was exactly what I thought whenever I was standing on a ledge and another pony was near me, but whatever. “You are trapped in this dreamscape, this place between mind and reality. There is one way out.” “Does it involve you pushing me to my death?” I glanced down. “It’s a long way down. And contrary to popular belief, water does not soften a fall; in fact, it often worsens it; it’s about as hard as concrete when you fall into it from a great distance.” “Well, I only need you to do one thing,” she said softly. “And what is that?” She brought her lips to my ear and whispered one word: “Fly.” But I didn’t know how to fly any more than a dog knew how to carry all of these limes, so all I could do was fall. I was not wrong about what she wanted to do. All I could think of as I fell was a dull I wonder if they serve continental breakfast in Hell. I didn’t die when I hit the water. In fact, once again I was on my back, laying beside my bonfire. The rain was gone. It blinked out the daze of fever dream away, and my blood went cold. There were two balls of fire—no, not fire. They were reflections of the bonfire upon the eyes of a tall creature. It was like the way a cat’s eyes light up when flashed with light whilst in a dark place, only worse. Its… his mouth was locked in a smile too large for his face. “Jericho-tsaius,” he said in a dark voice. His body seemed almost ethereal as the firelight flickered across his body, the moon high above him in the sky. “C,” I stated, my eye feeling heavy in my skull. He crouched down, and the look of his smile sent pinpricks of worry oozing down my spine. His teeth looked whiter and stronger than mine; when he spoke, I could see his version of temporalis muscles flexing his jaws, and they looked strong. I noticed that he was no longer naked but instead wearing a pair of what looks like work jeans and, oddly, a black poncho. “You are hurt,” C said in a flat voice, his face knitting its smile into a more reasonably sized one. He raised an arm, lifting his poncho with it as he touched my stumpy arm. “I can help you, Tsaius.” “Why are you here?” I croaked. The question seemed to make him have to think. His eyes darted off to the side in the way that a pony trying to remember something will do. I had no idea if his body language corresponded at all to that of a pony. “Because ye are in trouble, Tsaius. Because I have been tracking you for some time now. And because a little lady asked me to look out for you.” I had to think about that for a second. “Lightning Dust?” “Nay,” he said, shaking his head. “’Twas Cards.” Her name hit me like a rampaging herd of elephants trying to learn how to wear stockings. “What?” “Yes,” he went on, “Cards. When I saved them, I noted that I doubted you’d die. And so she said—” C cut himself off with a jerk, pulling out two strong, serrated knives. I went to telekinect my sword, but that didn’t work, just giving me a sharp stabbing pain in my forehead. With his knives, he stabbed himself deep in the cheeks, dragging the blade up through bone and muscle. When the blades cleared, a shadowy, star-filled void leaked out of his face, followed by root-like extension of black char. They enveloped his face above and around the cuts. My skin crawled as his skin twisted and jerked, his eyes going with it. It didn’t take long for the process to stop. When it did, I was no longer staring into C’s eyes but the saddened yet fiery red eyes of Cards. In fact, his upper head was now hers: her face with his lower jaw, his upper jaw. Then he spoke in her exact voice, his… her… the face moving in the exact subtle ways that Cards’ face did. “H-he’s alive?” Cards’ voice said, like a perfectly clear recording. A sharp but quiet click sounded. Then it was C’s strong, horrible voice from his twisted face. “Yes, I doubt not that he is a cadaver. He has the smell of ingenuity about him. His flesh is weak as is yours, yet I trust in his broken mind to persevere and succeed this day.” Click. Her voice. “If that’s true, then… then…” Cards’ face scrunched up like a filly asking a colt to a dance. Only instead of a dance, it was spiders. Everything was spiders. It might have been cute if it hadn’t been literally the worst thing ever. Click. His voice. “Then what?” Click. Her voice. “Then…” She sighed, looking off to the side. “Make sure he doesn’t, like… get too hurt or anything, please. Like, look out for him, maybe. I just… I hate him but… I don’t know. I just don’t know. Click. His voice. “Of course, milady. I swear upon the Skahlzhinh that I will look out for him, if only for a short while.” One of C’s big, strong hands came up from behind the Cards-head, grabbed the top of the head, his fingers digging into the tops of her eyes. I was a first-class witness to Cards’ face being torn apart by C’s hands, blood and gore and all, her face an impartial blankness. Her eyes fell out of her sockets as C clawed off the rest of the face. Then it was just C’s face watching me with an amused little smirk. “Those were her words, Tsaius.” For the first time in as long as I could recall—which didn’t amount to very long at this moment—I was speechless. No witty remark, half-baked joke, or stupid thought. I just stared up at C. “So, I’ve been watching you for a time, Tsaius,” he went on, “and now I think I can help you.” He shrugged. “For what it’s worth.” “Why now?” I asked wearily. “Why not help me when I was dying in the swamp?” C frowned, looked around, then looked pleased with himself. He pointed to a little sapling that was all on its own, too narrow and thin to be of use to my bonfire. “Do you see this cocoon?” I squinted. “I… I think I do.” The skinwalker pulled out a knife and pointed it at the sapling. “This here is a moth cocoon. From what I know of cocoons, the little way its moving and that tiny little hole in it means that the larva is matured into a fully grown moth.” He brought the tip the knife very close to the cocoon. “Now, I could help this little fellow get out: I could just take the tip of my knife and help widen the hole, help the little guy out.” C pointed the knife at me. “But if I did that, the moth would be too weak to live. You see, it’s that struggle, that fight for survive, whence strength comes from. “Now, I could have helped you early, maybe even helped you keep your eye and horn.” He gave a single mirthless chortle. The word ‘chortle’ always made me think of an enormously fat pony trying to eat a hippopotamus. “But if I did that, you’d be too weak, Tsaius. I let you suffer because it made you better, made you stronger, made you able to survive worse.” “A-and now?” He sheathed the knife and stood up tall. “Now, if I don’t help you, you’ll be too weak to continue. Take the word of the last in the skinwalker’s line that there are those who would rather you alive.” Without warning, the skinwalker fell forwards onto all fours, holding himself up above me. He opened his mouth as wide as a snake eating a mopey mare bloated with ice cream because nopony loved her. Exactly eight black, spider-like legs curled out from the back of his throat. I could only stare with morbid, horrified fascination as the legs set themselves down around the edges of his face. I watched as each leg tapped once on his face. “Hmm,” he hummed, and the legs curled back into his mouth and down his throat. “I will help you, Tsaius.” The skinwalker’s flaming eyes darted to my stump of an arm as his hand grabbed for it. He positioned himself over my arm, a foot pinning my shoulder. “But first… this stump needs to go.” My world erupted into unimaginable pain as his thick, clawed fingers slashed and savaged the scabs and burns off the edge of the stump. I screamed, or tried to scream, but my sore throat only hacked out a bloody cough in place of agonized shriek, And he manually tore and clawed off what little of my arm there was. Everything went black. The last thing I saw, the thing burned into my retinas, was his smile literally tearing his face in half.