Originally written for a contest: mixing horror, fantasy & erotica (limited to 1800 words)
Iranne's Caller
As the air around her cleared, the mage's breath came in small puffs of white vapors. The creature loomed in front of her shadowed in the light, covered in her companion's frozen blood but otherwise completely unaffected by her most powerful spell. It took a deep breath. Blood shattered all around it in a frozen shower that sounded like crystal falling from it.
She screamed until everything went black.
* **
Iranne awoke. She must've been out for hours, when she had followed her traitorous companion to the other building it was dawn. Now it was mid-day by the sun's light on the floor. As she pushed herself up she felt cloth beneath her touch. At first she brushed it off as her mage's robe, then realized that unlikelihood and looked down.
"Where are my clothes?" she asked. She saw that what she sat on was a ragged blanket laid out on the floor. Looking around she saw nothing of her belongings.
Had it not been for witnessing the very bloody death of her companion, she would have thought that double-crossing human boyfriend of hers would have set such a situation up as a surprise for her.
Still, "Kern?" she called tentatively.
Grabbing the blanket, Iranne wrapped it around herself and went to look out the window.
"Kern, I don't know what you're doing, but it isn't funny. That monster was really scary and I don't know how you managed to talk the other mages into creating him, but it wasn't nice." She desperately wanted to believe a different reality.
Looking outside, Iranne saw the ruins sprawled for miles and she was three stories high. She couldn't see the building where her companion was killed and she had no idea where she was.
"Great," she groaned. "Kern, you better know how to get back to camp!"
She turned to look for Kern, her belongings, and a way down. She froze.
Tck… tck… tck…
"Kern, tell me that's you tapping on the wall." Iranne clutched the blanket to her closed eyes. But she heard deep breathing that made her heart thunder with fear and smelled a heady musk that wasn't Kern.
She peeked one eye open and saw a shape that filled the room's doorframe. "No," she squeaked.
The monster at first stood as though it had just landed, then hunched, bringing its hands to the floor and slipped inside the room.
"I'll be good! I promise!" Iranne backed up into the wall behind her. Visions of her no good partner shredded by this demon before her rampant in her mind.
The demon stood seven feet tall, but walked hunched in an ape-like manner with huge wings folded behind it. Its flesh dark. Sable fur covered parts of its arms, legs and membranous wings. Its arms/wings were a fused appendage, like a bat, but the clawed hands more functional. Those hands effortlessly tore through leather armor and turned her partner into mush.
The tail appeared to be a part of the wings rudder-like where it blended into his back, but it was long and solid on its own, prehensile, made for fighting. The demon's face was a fusion of chiropteran and humanoid. Either side of its head sported huge fluted, tapered ears, each easily a third the size of the head. Iranne remembered its eyes glowing brilliant yellow preternaturally at her.
Iranne knew this thing was not a trick of her miserable boyfriend. As it drew closer, she saw the shoulders, legs, chest and torso were well-carved and glistened with a satin hue. It wore nothing and was heavily packaged.
Iranne knew this thing was here to collect her for getting mixed up with Kern's scheme of stealing the group's gold and killing them. It was wrong and this demon was here to make her pay.
"He made me do it. I was trying to talk him out of it and he sicced his friend on me – that guy y-you killed. I wasn't gonna. Really, I wasn't. I don't like killing. I'm a mage. I'm not an assassin like those guys. P-please don't hurt me."
The demon regarded her with burning eyes. It stepped closer.
Iranne slid against the wall, finding she couldn't step back.
"I'm sorry about the ice thing."
The demon reached forward grasping the blanket. Iranne looked at the clawed hand, then at the dark face. She was vulnerable, but it was all she had. Biting her lower lip, scrunching her eyes closed, she released it. The blanket fell away and those eyes were upon her. Instinctively, she curled in on herself hiding from the images in her mind.
No flurry of claws? No bloody mess of Iranne all over the place?