5. THE ADHERENTS OF THE BLIGHTED GOD
They'd been hiking through the dense forest for about an hour, Greg reckoned, and he was starting to get pretty sweaty and sore. His only comfort came from watching Dalile. After she'd bathed herself there wasn't much left of her scale girdle and her silken wrap; for quite some time now Greg had been watching her bare ass sway in front of him as she followed the guidance of her ancestral instinct.
The forest itself was quiet - horribly quiet, Greg thought. No birdsong. No panthers creeping through the underbrush. No fish in the streams. No signs of life apart from the foliage, which was unnaturally dense and lush.
"Why do they call this the Blighted Forest again?" Greg asked. "It seems basically fine, except for the total lack of living creatures."
"I don't know." Dalile sniffed the air. "It's very unusual."
"It makes me nervous," said Greg.
"You are wise to be cautious," said Dalile. At that moment a snare closed around her foot and shot up into the air. She shrieked and dangled, upside-down, from the branch of a nearby tree.
At the exact same time, a swarm of bizarre creatures leaped from the trees. They looked sort of like people, only bizarrely deformed, their skin a deathly-grey and covered in what looked like tiny tentacles and suckers. Their faces were nightmarish death-masks, their eyes empty, their mouths agape and filled with needlelike teeth. They were waving crude stone spears and charging at Greg.
"For Kitra!" he yelled, ready to be carried along in the familiar battle-dance. The sword began doing its work, cleaving through horror after horror. Instead of spraying gore as Greg had become accustomed too, the deformed creatures simply fell apart and dissolved like dust.
"Be careful, Greg!" Dalile yelled, struggling. "There's some evil enchantment at work here!"
"Obvs!" Greg yelled, as the sword dragged him through the ornate motions of an expert warrior. In moments the swarm of creatures were dead - piles of grey dust on the forest floor.
"Phew," Greg said, wiping his forehead. "It's getting hot here." He was starting to think that maybe he should turn his jeans into cutoffs.
"Your assistance would be appreciated," said Dalile.
"Right," said Greg. He took a step towards where she was dangling, and then halted as a loud BOOOOOOM resonated through the forest, as though someone had just banged an exceptionally loud gong.
"The fuck was that?" said Greg.
"Hurry!" said Dalile.
A faint whisper filled the air as the slain warriors rose from the earth, particles of dust combining to reassemble their grisly forms. They looked even more twisted and misshapen than before.
"Goddammit," said Greg, "this is going to get tedious."
BOOOOOOOM, came another resonance. Greg's sword hung heavy in his hand. "For Kitra!" he yelled - and the sword dropped to the ground.
"Oh shit," he said. He scrambled to pick it up. It wasn't feeling any lighter.
BOOOOOOOOOOOM.
The deformed horde rushed towards him, spears upraised. "SPIRIT OF KITRA, AID ME!" Greg yelled, and dragged the sword up, smashing the foremost attacker in the face. He could feel the obsidian blade pulsing in his hand, struggling to move against some unseen force. It thudded back into the earth. The point of a stone spear embedded itself in his chest. He spat up blood, fell on his back, and died.
*
"Arise, Spirits of the Unseen Deeps," intoned the shaman.
"Mmmrrg!" said Dalile.
After slaughtering Greg, the grey-skinned monsters had bound her tightly, and dragged her and the corpse through the forest. Their journey had ended in a sprawling tribal village, built into a clearing in the forest. The inhabitants of the village were less frightening than Dalile had expected - in fact, they looked fairly normal: dark-skinned, with red tattoos, clothed in animal skins. But there was a hint of grey in their complexions.
In the centre of the camp was a huge fire-pit, and beside it an extremely tall man covered in charms and clothed in strips of coloured cloth. His eyes were milky white with blindness, and his skin had changed almost entirely to the sickly grey of the monsters, although there was no sign of the more extreme deformations yet. He shook his head at Dalile.
"I beg forgiveness for what you will soon undergo," he said, raising his hand. "It is the will of the Blighted God."
"It would seem you made your choice of gods poorly," said Dalile.
The shaman sighed. "The Blighted God chose us," he said. "We are all its slaves. Bind the dead one to the Pillar."
Beside the fire was a thick wooden stake. The grey monsters bound Greg's corpse to these. Dalile was dragged to the other side of the fire. There two stakes were driven into the ground, two arm-lengths apart, and connected by a thickly-knotted rope.
"I will explain," said the shaman. "The Blighted God requires two things of us. One is a vessel to inhabit: the corpse of a dead hero. The other is a fair maiden. In the years of our slavery under the Blighted God, all of our great warriors have perished, and our fair maidens have turned grey with sickness. We must hunt outside of our tribe now."
"Insanity!" yelled Dalile. "Revoke your god of evil! Better to die in flames than to serve and die under his awful yoke!"
"Alas," said the shaman. "To revoke the Blighted God is not to die, but to suffer eternally in the halls of his blighted palace in Hell. But those who die in his service may be reborn as spirits of the free forest, and spend eternity in bliss."
"Lies!" said Dalile, but then one of the monsters stuffed a gag in her mouth, and it was too late. Another tore off what remained of her clothes. They dragged her, naked, to the knotted rope, and laid her legs over it, so that she straddled the rope at one end, her toes barely reaching the ground, her groin driven cruelly into the rough ropes.
