Saffron slept in a ball at the middle of the bed, curled up atop the blankets with her large, fluffy white tail wrapped around her. Hank Emerson still had Cuyler's daughter Emarie for the next two nights, and Cuyler herself had taken a job with a few of he orcish contacts; it seemed one of the sorts of things where the fewer questions asked, the better. Nevertheless, it left the bestial little redhead on her lonesome in the house, save for the konked-out pot-bellied pigs and the Eekers the cat, who currently surveyed his living-room kingdom from atop the television.
The smallest of the two pigs, young Sputnik, bucked in his sleep until flinging himself awake with a wild scream, and immediately began to run in a panic from their spot by the gem-warmed hearth. His tiny hooves carved lashes into the floor as he zig-zagged, all the while squealing like feedback from a mic smacked into a speaker. Eekers' pupils dilated as his ears pinned back, and the force of his jump to hide under the Mystery Couch in the front corner. It landed with a loud bang as the screen caved in and popped, only adding to the chaos and awakening the large porcine matriarch, Mothership. She roused slowly, pushing up with her front hooves as the back ones situated beneath, and shook her crumpled face with a wild flop of her ears. However, once she got her bearings, she immediately ran her rotund self at top speed towards the door to Saffron's room and leapt upon it, taking it off the hinges and down in a thud.
"HWREEEAAAK! HWEEREEEH! REEEYOORRNNNK!!"
Saffron's ears twitched as a sine wave rolled along her tail, seeming to initiate her move towards awakening. Above her, a dense, black shape lurched. A hint of light, deep within the abyss, glowed dully, giving the merest implication of a 'head.' Both pigs' wild keening sputtered to a halt, though their breathing still held panic, Sputnik joining his mother in the bedroom as they stared at the Cauchemar, as much as they could focus their attention on a dark blotch in a lightless room, raising their scrunched-in faces and sniffing as Mothership's bristly hide began to glow, faintly. She started grunting and rumbling low as she started to circle around the bed; Sputnik turned his ears and adjusted his trotter to catch her communications, tuned in far lower than human registry. He flexed his jaw and scraped his burgeoning tusks together, spreading his legs to steady his stance.
The room itself stretched and distorted as Mothership began to close in upon it, warping into a paradox of being 'just out of reach' of the pig. Mothership waited for the twitch in Saffron's ears to bring one toward her, and with a mighty expansion of her lungs, she let out a powerful bellow, cracking the glass on the window. The Cauchemar sank down around the sleeping Canadian, although his contrast with the room became brighter as the ghostly spheres that often followed Saffron blinked in, and blinked out in a slow strobe. The entire house seemed to growl, from every nook and eave, from each taxidermied head that lined the basement walls in their respective shrieks and roars.
If Sputnik was scared into flattening himself down and pushing himself back toward the closet, then Eekers was out of his mind in terror. He started to yowl back and forth, between a kitten's squeak for its mother and the wahwah pedal acid-rock guitar-solo of a grown tomcat holding his space from intruders. Sputnik's ears perked up at Eekers' yowls, and with a hearty "HWONK!", he ran across the fallen door and out of the bedroom... just narrowly missing the thick, oozing wave of shadow that smashed down where he once cowered.
The living room had grown enormous since Sputnik had first awoken. Cobwebs the size of towing cables sprawled under skyscraper-chairs. Hints of wriggling, jagged shapes brushed around each corner, over each obstacle that the pig could neither see, smell, nor hear around. What lights shone in the place appeared as hot-yellow, predatory eyeshine, always in even numbers, flickering only to reinforce that their source was staring. Sputnik's ears stayed back as he scraped his tusks once again, and with a nervous shake, he headed into the wilds of the living room to find the terrified cat.
Events in the living room fared no better. Mothership ran back and forth around the bed, still defiantly squealing towards the Night Terror that perched over Saffron. Blood seeped from beneath the bed, paired with the tiny, dark faces of her children, long since given homes amongst the less-than-warm elves from whence she had been raised. The smell that emerged was delicious, like roasting nuts, warm fruit and ripe pumpkin. The sow shook her head wildly as her front legs splayed, a low, slow wail drifting from her maw. The dark shape that had narrowly missed Sputnik pulled itself forward, producing a column of black, gelatinous hate, topped in a cold light. It drifted forward as the anguish dug into Mothership, slow and even. She dropped three of her legs and snorted, her lungs pumping as her heart rate rocketed, though she still wobbled on that last, front trotter. She was too worn down to stand, too distraught to fight back; she was not too rattled to surrender. Once again, she raised her chin, took in a deep breath, and bellowed to Saffron, her whole, rotund body expanding and tensing in her cry.
"BWOOOOOOOONK!"
A slim hand sank in, knuckle-deep, into the "face" of the Cauchemar that approached Mothership from behind. Wooden trinkets, long-lost bangles and lockets all wrapped around the wiry, pale wrist, etched with densely-packed lines of an inscrutable maze. As the fingers raked down, the dark shape condensed, breaking down and off in chunks, clattering on the floor by bare, anklet-topped feet left dirty with black soot. The curtain of black hair split from around the bridge of the fae-thing's nose, over tattered rags of clothing and the weight of lost trinkets around her neck. She dragged her hand back to her side and cleaved the nightmare-thing in half. It vanished as it landed, and the room snapped back to its original proportions.
Mothership rolled into her side and panted, her dark little eyes staring at the spectral figure gliding in awkward, halting zig-zags toward the bed. The ink-haired, ragged woman stopped just a bit past the pig. A single, head-sized peach rolled across the floor, stopping in muzzle's reach of Mothership. "P-pppttthkkbbt!"
The Ragged Woman reached to her wrist, taking hold of a bracelet with the face of a fox placed at the center of it and pulled it off with a snap, hissing through her teeth at the thing above Saffron. The hovering will-o-the-wisps flared to life, swarming in the air and flashing in a blinding strobe around the nightmare-being. "You-Made-A-Ba-d.CHoiCe..."
Both Sputnik and Eekers collapsed by the doorway, safe, yet exhausted, in front of a living room that had, save for a busted TV and torn carpeting, returned to normal. The pig glowed, and a small criss-cross group of cuts along his flank glittered, a fresh mark of his Rite of Passage. One of Saffron's legs kicked down in a sudden jerk as her eyes shot open, sinuses rumbling in a hard inhale.
The shadowy mass atop her shrank back, congealing into arms, legs, a beak-like nose and wavy hair, which seemed lighter at the bottom than at the top. The dim light of its face rose to its eyes, which stared beadily down as it wrapped its fingers around Saffron's neck. As she looked up, neck tightened hard enough to keep the hands from cutting into her windpipe, her lips pulled back in a hard, animal snarl. The orbs took a formation around the bed, sealing the Nightmare into its shape, no matter how much it strained at its confines. "You F***ing clich?!"
Her tail swung under the nightmare-in-Father-drag's arms, winding around its neck, and pushing it back as she peeled off one of its hands. She bucked her hip in a hard check to its undercarriage, knocking him upwards and sweeping her legs in to pull out from beneath it, tail whipping it to the side while still holding fast to its neck, a fur collar from Hell. She twisted its wrist and put her heel at its shoulder, giving her leverage to shove it upwards in a tendon-popping torque. Saffron's square-palmed, childlike hand set on the Cauchemar's chin while the other flattened at the top of its head, pulling it a hard angle... but still keeping its spine intact. It was enough for her to look into its eyes, her gaze calm, warm, unfazed. "If someone's scared of being alone..." She twisted hard, popping the dadNightmare's head around far enough to look at the nape of his neck. "... then becoming what left them is a dumb, dumb f***ing idea."
The dark shape spilled onto the floor in a ragged heap, soon followed by the firefly-lights of Saffron's spheres all closing in around it like crows on carrion. She placed her hands on her knees at he kneel atop the bed and breathed, her tail twitching and her ears flexing back and forth. Both pigs joined in the spirit-feast, burying their snouts into the shadowy flesh and snorting happily, while Eekers sat in the closet and groomed himself amid the safe spires of boots and shoes. Saffron raised her eyes to the maze-tattooed, rag-dressed woman, her brows pulled down in concern.
The Ragged Woman shuffled on her heels and raised he finger, pointing to the cell phone on the night stand. "Ph0ne-foR-YoU..." As the phone vibrated and lit up, the Ragged Woman vanished.
Saffron scooped up her phone on the second ring and checked the number. Her ears were still high and open, as she brought it up to her cheek. "Hey, Mom?"
"...Uh... Saffron..." The chipper, pixie-like voice of Saffron's mom had become grave, as if weights dragged behind it. She swallowed before continuing. "The uh... the Montreal police need you to um..." The color drained from Saffron's face as she sat back on her heels, one arm crossing over her tummy as her ears tipped backwards.
"... what do they need me to do, Mom?" She swallowed as she tensed, from the base of her spine to the top of her head, blood slamming through her temples.
"... They need you to identf--mh... f***. They need you to identify your dad's body. They found him on--" Carla Jensen's sniff bore substance, and her exhale started to shudder near the end. "... oh ghad, they found him in an alley all...He froze to death, honey. Oh may ghad, he--"
Saffron dropped the phone as she doubled over, catching herself just fast enough to put her head down and scoot her legs forward to keep from passing out. She fumbled for the phone and returned it to her cheek, her voice weak, soft. "I'll uh... I'm gonna check... with a few people... and I'll call you the minute i know what's goin' on here, okay?" She looked out of the corner of her eye to the pile of shadow eaten up by pig and pixie-light. "... I love you, Mom."
"Love you too, Saffy.... I'll... talk to ya soon..." They hung up simultaneously, leaving Saffron hugging her knees and trembling. Sleep, at this point, was impossible.
The smallest of the two pigs, young Sputnik, bucked in his sleep until flinging himself awake with a wild scream, and immediately began to run in a panic from their spot by the gem-warmed hearth. His tiny hooves carved lashes into the floor as he zig-zagged, all the while squealing like feedback from a mic smacked into a speaker. Eekers' pupils dilated as his ears pinned back, and the force of his jump to hide under the Mystery Couch in the front corner. It landed with a loud bang as the screen caved in and popped, only adding to the chaos and awakening the large porcine matriarch, Mothership. She roused slowly, pushing up with her front hooves as the back ones situated beneath, and shook her crumpled face with a wild flop of her ears. However, once she got her bearings, she immediately ran her rotund self at top speed towards the door to Saffron's room and leapt upon it, taking it off the hinges and down in a thud.
"HWREEEAAAK! HWEEREEEH! REEEYOORRNNNK!!"
Saffron's ears twitched as a sine wave rolled along her tail, seeming to initiate her move towards awakening. Above her, a dense, black shape lurched. A hint of light, deep within the abyss, glowed dully, giving the merest implication of a 'head.' Both pigs' wild keening sputtered to a halt, though their breathing still held panic, Sputnik joining his mother in the bedroom as they stared at the Cauchemar, as much as they could focus their attention on a dark blotch in a lightless room, raising their scrunched-in faces and sniffing as Mothership's bristly hide began to glow, faintly. She started grunting and rumbling low as she started to circle around the bed; Sputnik turned his ears and adjusted his trotter to catch her communications, tuned in far lower than human registry. He flexed his jaw and scraped his burgeoning tusks together, spreading his legs to steady his stance.
The room itself stretched and distorted as Mothership began to close in upon it, warping into a paradox of being 'just out of reach' of the pig. Mothership waited for the twitch in Saffron's ears to bring one toward her, and with a mighty expansion of her lungs, she let out a powerful bellow, cracking the glass on the window. The Cauchemar sank down around the sleeping Canadian, although his contrast with the room became brighter as the ghostly spheres that often followed Saffron blinked in, and blinked out in a slow strobe. The entire house seemed to growl, from every nook and eave, from each taxidermied head that lined the basement walls in their respective shrieks and roars.
If Sputnik was scared into flattening himself down and pushing himself back toward the closet, then Eekers was out of his mind in terror. He started to yowl back and forth, between a kitten's squeak for its mother and the wahwah pedal acid-rock guitar-solo of a grown tomcat holding his space from intruders. Sputnik's ears perked up at Eekers' yowls, and with a hearty "HWONK!", he ran across the fallen door and out of the bedroom... just narrowly missing the thick, oozing wave of shadow that smashed down where he once cowered.
The living room had grown enormous since Sputnik had first awoken. Cobwebs the size of towing cables sprawled under skyscraper-chairs. Hints of wriggling, jagged shapes brushed around each corner, over each obstacle that the pig could neither see, smell, nor hear around. What lights shone in the place appeared as hot-yellow, predatory eyeshine, always in even numbers, flickering only to reinforce that their source was staring. Sputnik's ears stayed back as he scraped his tusks once again, and with a nervous shake, he headed into the wilds of the living room to find the terrified cat.
Events in the living room fared no better. Mothership ran back and forth around the bed, still defiantly squealing towards the Night Terror that perched over Saffron. Blood seeped from beneath the bed, paired with the tiny, dark faces of her children, long since given homes amongst the less-than-warm elves from whence she had been raised. The smell that emerged was delicious, like roasting nuts, warm fruit and ripe pumpkin. The sow shook her head wildly as her front legs splayed, a low, slow wail drifting from her maw. The dark shape that had narrowly missed Sputnik pulled itself forward, producing a column of black, gelatinous hate, topped in a cold light. It drifted forward as the anguish dug into Mothership, slow and even. She dropped three of her legs and snorted, her lungs pumping as her heart rate rocketed, though she still wobbled on that last, front trotter. She was too worn down to stand, too distraught to fight back; she was not too rattled to surrender. Once again, she raised her chin, took in a deep breath, and bellowed to Saffron, her whole, rotund body expanding and tensing in her cry.
"BWOOOOOOOONK!"
A slim hand sank in, knuckle-deep, into the "face" of the Cauchemar that approached Mothership from behind. Wooden trinkets, long-lost bangles and lockets all wrapped around the wiry, pale wrist, etched with densely-packed lines of an inscrutable maze. As the fingers raked down, the dark shape condensed, breaking down and off in chunks, clattering on the floor by bare, anklet-topped feet left dirty with black soot. The curtain of black hair split from around the bridge of the fae-thing's nose, over tattered rags of clothing and the weight of lost trinkets around her neck. She dragged her hand back to her side and cleaved the nightmare-thing in half. It vanished as it landed, and the room snapped back to its original proportions.
Mothership rolled into her side and panted, her dark little eyes staring at the spectral figure gliding in awkward, halting zig-zags toward the bed. The ink-haired, ragged woman stopped just a bit past the pig. A single, head-sized peach rolled across the floor, stopping in muzzle's reach of Mothership. "P-pppttthkkbbt!"
The Ragged Woman reached to her wrist, taking hold of a bracelet with the face of a fox placed at the center of it and pulled it off with a snap, hissing through her teeth at the thing above Saffron. The hovering will-o-the-wisps flared to life, swarming in the air and flashing in a blinding strobe around the nightmare-being. "You-Made-A-Ba-d.CHoiCe..."
Both Sputnik and Eekers collapsed by the doorway, safe, yet exhausted, in front of a living room that had, save for a busted TV and torn carpeting, returned to normal. The pig glowed, and a small criss-cross group of cuts along his flank glittered, a fresh mark of his Rite of Passage. One of Saffron's legs kicked down in a sudden jerk as her eyes shot open, sinuses rumbling in a hard inhale.
The shadowy mass atop her shrank back, congealing into arms, legs, a beak-like nose and wavy hair, which seemed lighter at the bottom than at the top. The dim light of its face rose to its eyes, which stared beadily down as it wrapped its fingers around Saffron's neck. As she looked up, neck tightened hard enough to keep the hands from cutting into her windpipe, her lips pulled back in a hard, animal snarl. The orbs took a formation around the bed, sealing the Nightmare into its shape, no matter how much it strained at its confines. "You F***ing clich?!"
Her tail swung under the nightmare-in-Father-drag's arms, winding around its neck, and pushing it back as she peeled off one of its hands. She bucked her hip in a hard check to its undercarriage, knocking him upwards and sweeping her legs in to pull out from beneath it, tail whipping it to the side while still holding fast to its neck, a fur collar from Hell. She twisted its wrist and put her heel at its shoulder, giving her leverage to shove it upwards in a tendon-popping torque. Saffron's square-palmed, childlike hand set on the Cauchemar's chin while the other flattened at the top of its head, pulling it a hard angle... but still keeping its spine intact. It was enough for her to look into its eyes, her gaze calm, warm, unfazed. "If someone's scared of being alone..." She twisted hard, popping the dadNightmare's head around far enough to look at the nape of his neck. "... then becoming what left them is a dumb, dumb f***ing idea."
The dark shape spilled onto the floor in a ragged heap, soon followed by the firefly-lights of Saffron's spheres all closing in around it like crows on carrion. She placed her hands on her knees at he kneel atop the bed and breathed, her tail twitching and her ears flexing back and forth. Both pigs joined in the spirit-feast, burying their snouts into the shadowy flesh and snorting happily, while Eekers sat in the closet and groomed himself amid the safe spires of boots and shoes. Saffron raised her eyes to the maze-tattooed, rag-dressed woman, her brows pulled down in concern.
The Ragged Woman shuffled on her heels and raised he finger, pointing to the cell phone on the night stand. "Ph0ne-foR-YoU..." As the phone vibrated and lit up, the Ragged Woman vanished.
Saffron scooped up her phone on the second ring and checked the number. Her ears were still high and open, as she brought it up to her cheek. "Hey, Mom?"
"...Uh... Saffron..." The chipper, pixie-like voice of Saffron's mom had become grave, as if weights dragged behind it. She swallowed before continuing. "The uh... the Montreal police need you to um..." The color drained from Saffron's face as she sat back on her heels, one arm crossing over her tummy as her ears tipped backwards.
"... what do they need me to do, Mom?" She swallowed as she tensed, from the base of her spine to the top of her head, blood slamming through her temples.
"... They need you to identf--mh... f***. They need you to identify your dad's body. They found him on--" Carla Jensen's sniff bore substance, and her exhale started to shudder near the end. "... oh ghad, they found him in an alley all...He froze to death, honey. Oh may ghad, he--"
Saffron dropped the phone as she doubled over, catching herself just fast enough to put her head down and scoot her legs forward to keep from passing out. She fumbled for the phone and returned it to her cheek, her voice weak, soft. "I'll uh... I'm gonna check... with a few people... and I'll call you the minute i know what's goin' on here, okay?" She looked out of the corner of her eye to the pile of shadow eaten up by pig and pixie-light. "... I love you, Mom."
"Love you too, Saffy.... I'll... talk to ya soon..." They hung up simultaneously, leaving Saffron hugging her knees and trembling. Sleep, at this point, was impossible.