1468

Noise. Squish?
The Black Valley was mostly quiet, each remnant that spawned dying almost immediately to the churning bone spikes, or drowning in the swamp before they could make much noise. And the ones that didn’t die instantly, their noises blended into the background; getting used to Hell’s endless sounds of torture was fucked up, but it was happening, even if Mia didn’t want it to. The small bursts of blue flames were almost silent, too.
But there was noise. Squish. Squish. Something walked in the black swamp, something slow, something heavy. It came closer, and the three of them stared into the fog, looking for any signs of movement. Nothing.
Something. A shift in the black gore of the swamp, the tainted entrails spreading around impact. A footprint?
Another footprint, and another, each getting closer. But, nothing was making them. Literally, nothing. Mia, Kas, and Adron all stared, but no one made a sound as yet another footprint sunk into the muck. Massive footprints, bigger than Kas’s, Romakus’s, or even Vin’s. Much bigger than Vin’s.
Kas turned and sprinted for the tetrad and ragarin, and Mia squeaked, one hand clutching her egg, the other grabbing one of his back spikes. Adron followed without a sound, save for the churning guts under his talons. They weren’t as fast as they should have been, each step sinking them deep into the gore like horrible mud, and the thing following them wasn’t slowed by the swamp at all.
Something was following them. Something was following them, and each step it took shook the ground. The black gore underneath its feet rippled ahead of it, each thundering step of the invisible creature growing heavier and heavier until the ground rumbled. An earthquake? The gore bubbled with each impact, until it almost boiled.
“What’s going on!?” Julisa yelled.
“I don’t know! Vin!?”
“I don’t know,” the biggest, oldest, strongest demon alive said.
The footsteps followed, and the demons ran, straight back toward Death’s Grip.
“Back to the trench!” Adron yelled. “Go!”
On a dime, the group turned and ran to the trench. If they fell in, a five-foot drop awaited them into a ten-foot-wide trench flooded with guts. Literally flooded, guts constantly flowing into it. There was probably a one, two, maybe three foot deep layer of black gore at the bottom of the trench. Maybe more. Mia didn’t want to find out.
But it was their only guide in the Black Valley, and if they didn’t follow it, they’d be lost.
“What do we do!?” Mia screamed. “What–”
“I don’t know!” Adron yelled back. “Something hidden is chasing us!”
“Hidden!? It’s invisible!” Mia and Julisa said, at the same time. A moment worthy of notice, if not for the sheer panic in their voices.
“There is no invisible… anything, in Hell,” Vin said, leading the pack. “Run!”
Run. The child of Belial said run. Ice ran down Mia’s spine, and she looked behind her as she clutched Kas’s back spikes. Or at least, she had been clutching his spikes. With a seamless scooping motion, Vin grabbed her and set her on his back. She didn’t protest, and neither did Kas. She grabbed his spikes and stood on them, her chest to his back and head peeking over his shoulder. The egg? Thank god, still in the sling.
She looked back, and her heart sank into her stomach. It was chasing them, each step shaking the ground more and more. Without consistent light, it was hard to see the shape of the footsteps, but every so often a blue flame illuminated everything nearby, and the footprints came into view. The shapes were never the same. One looked like a T-Rex, with three long toes and claws. The next had two toes. The next had four. They ran in darkness for a while longer, and the next burst of light showed a footprint with no toes at all.
Something shimmered, a flicker of shape in the fog. An invisible body pushing the fog aside, like a gust of wind in mist. But the longer she stared, the more a shape came into view. On the edge of the blackness, she could see it.
It had skin. It had limbs. A blurry mess of shapes coalesced into something gargantuan, but that was all her brain could wrap around. The color was dark, but shifted from navy to gray to dark green, and the colors ran slowly around the limbs like dripping wet paint that defied gravity. Maybe it was a chameleon, changing its color to blend in?
No. Chameleons didn’t grow and lose limbs, but whatever this thing was, it was doing exactly that. Enormous arms, each the size of Vinicius, erupted from something that must have been a torso, before they fell off, breaking away and dispersing into the black fog, never hitting the ground. Pieces of it appeared before disappearing again, legs broke away and reformed, shaped differently every time.
It had to be forty feet tall, and proportional, like some sort of mini Godzilla chasing them. At some points it even looked kinda like Godzilla, tail included, but then the tail broke away, and the creature stood more upright.
The next footprint looked way too human, and so did the next one, and the next one. Mia’s eyes drifted higher up the creature’s shape, more and more of it coming into view as it chased them, and she screamed. It looked human. Almost. It didn’t run at them so much as lean forward and jog after them, as if its upper half was too heavy, but it was proportionally human. Thick arms, thick legs, thick torso, a blocky body with arms hanging underneath its leaning-forward chest, but human.
It had eyes. Two eyes stared down at her from the black fog above, right where two human eyes would have been, but they shined with the universe, endless obsidian sparkling with stars hidden in their depths. She stared up at them and tried to scream again, but her throat refused to work. Thoughts melted away, replaced with only cold nothingness. Her grip on Vin’s spikes loosened, and only some vestigial wisp of instinct allowed her to keep holding on.
There was no song in those eyes. No music. No vibration. No life. No existence.
It was the same thing she’d seen at the bottom of that canyon that’d ripped open under the Death’s Grip spire. Endless black. A swirling, infinite whirlpool of endless black, moving, alive but not alive. And it was looking directly at her. Not Julisa, or Vinicius, or Kasimiro or Adron. It was looking directly at her.
It had tentacles hanging from where a jaw and mouth should have been.
Adron looked back, and sucked in another breath between his pants.
“What is that!?” His voice and panic shot through Mia’s brain, and awareness snapped through her limbs hard enough she almost fell.
“You can see it, too?”
“Yes, I can see it! What the fuck happened? What is that and why does it look like that!?”
“I don’t fucking know!”
Pieces of the monster continued to fade in and out of existence, and the shape still wasn’t completely solid, but new mutations grew less and less extreme. It grew claws, and its human-like feet grew claws, too, but the basic shape remained. The long tentacles of its mouth reached halfway down its torso, and they wriggled, like an octopus. Features on the skin, like spikes, were all a blur and ever shifting. But the eyes remained completely consistent, as if the monster had found the perfect match for whatever it was trying… to become.
It matched their speed, but each swing of its massive legs was slow, and thunderous. The swamp vibrated with each step, and the black gore around Vin’s feet splashed up to his knees as the strange monster shook the land.
It reached down from high above, and Mia ducked her head close to Vin’s shoulder as the thing’s fingers came for her.
Adron jumped high, and mid-air brought out his sword and swung it down. It went through the monster’s huge fingers, straight through, and the alien creature yanked its hand back. It stared at its fingers, and three of them fell from its hand. Except they didn’t. The three fingers remained, but also fell. They hit the swamp with a splash, but disappeared a moment later, leaving empty impact holes in the black gore. The fingers were still on the creature’s hand, but they flickered in and out of existence.