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Episode Thirteen: Flesh Wounds (Revised)



Morgaeous fires the cannon within his mouth.

There is no time to evade. No time to whisper up an enchantment to save your life.

A black cannonball tumbles through the air and rips through your chest.

Your corpse falls to the ground. Gore spills from the hole in your chest. You twitch for a moment, then fall still.

Morgaeous gulps down his cannon and coughs. “Got you,” He says, an oily satisfaction in his voice. “You had spunk, kid, but no one gets the best of Morgaeous the Drake…”

Your corpse dissolves into a cloud of pale smoke, seemingly solid flesh and clothing unraveling into phosphorus vapors and clumps of ash.

“…worm,” Morgaeous says, his voice now sizzling with anger. “So then: you had an extra trick up your sleeve.” He slithers around in the circle, looking back and forth around the burning ballroom. “C’mon then. Where are you, brat?”

Stray clumps of smoke and ash start drifting together into a single point, interweaving and taking on solid forms–a leg, an arm, a fancy buttoned-shirt, a porkpie hat.

In the span of a few second, you rematerialize in front of Morgaeous…or rather, a smoke-formed duplicate of yourself appears before him.

“Cute,” Morgaeous says, eyes narrowing.

Your smoke Doppelgänger tugs the brim of its hat and gives Morgaeous a smug, infuriating grin. “Sorry,” he says. “Things got a little out of hand.”

“Apologies won’t save you, human,” Morgaeous tells your duplicate, reaching up with his tail, plucking your sword free from his skull, and hurling it to the far side of the ballroom. “Nor will these pesky illusions of yours…”

“I think you have me at a disadvantage,” Your duplicate replies, holding his hand out and summoning a jianout of the surrounding smoke.

Morgaeous hisses softly and turns his back on the illusion. “Where are you hiding, sorcerer?” He snarls. “I’ll find you soon enough: don’t embarrass yourself by hiding like a rat…”

He looks in your direction.

You tense up. Oh Gods: you think. He can see you! He can see through the optical veil! You’ve got to move…!

A slender brown hand clamps itself over your shoulder. “Calm,” Sarah Mankiller says, whispering in your ear. “No sudden movements. Don’t break the smoke curtain.”

You look down at yourself: Your hands and legs––your entire body––are wreathed in in streams of pale, creamy smoke, distorting your form like a heat mirage…and bending light around your body.

It’s a kind of magic you’ve never seen before, a kind of magic you know nothing about.

Sarah, on the other hand, knows a lot about how her magic works.

For that reason, you follow her advice and stay still, as tempting as it is to make a break for it.

Your––ugh––trust pays off.

Morgaeous, unable to see through the spell of invisibility, looks away from the corner where you and Sarah are standing.

“It’s only a matter of time!" he blusters. "I’ve got quite the nose for man-flesh!"

“Phew…” you say, relaxing. “Thanks, by the way,” you add, turning towards Sarah. “You’re a lifesaver…”

“Not so loudly,” Sarah Mankiller whispers, raising a finger to her lips.

Dust and smoke swirl around her body and horns in a steady breeze, mingling with the pungent vapor pouring from the e-cigarette in her left hand. If you squint and focus, you can actually see the stone archway right behind her, layered over her torso like a perfect camouflage.

You feel a small surge of jealousy: how did Sarah make her illusions so precise? Every time you tried to make yourself invisible, you wound up going blind––

Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Morgaeous says in sing-song, tail thumping loudly against the ground. “Let’s think: if I was a smart-aleck spellcaster with an unexpected talent for illusions, I’d sneak up on my target…”

Morgaeous suddenly whips his head around. “…from behind!” He vomits a gold-plated battleaxe from his throat and cleaves through the air...

...hitting another Diesel illusion that splinters apart into threads of smoke.

“Or not,” Morgaeous said with disappointment, his voice muffled by the axe handle clutched between his teeth.

Sarah gestures with her e-cigarette. Another Diesel clone shimmers into existence behind Morgaeous. “Are we going to have a problem?” It asks the serpent.

“SHUT UP!” Morgaeous swings his cursed axe through the smoke clone, carving it into fragments of vapor

Sarah meets your eyes and glances meaningfully towards Morgaeous, as if to say So what now?

You shrug and raise your hand. Give me a moment to think, you try to say.

“Of course!” Morgaeous says out loud, slapping himself on the brow with his tail. “The answer’s staring me in the face! Ow,” he adds as the impact of his tail jostles the wound in his brow.

“...heh,” you whisper, feeling pleased as punch–– partly because Morgaeous had it coming, and partially because you agree with him.

The solution was staring you right in the face.

Morgaeous gargles and spits out a handful of golden coins and emeralds that spill across the charred stage. You lift your left foot as one of the cursed gold doubloons rolls past your shoe.

“I hope you took ballet lessons,” Morgaeous cackles, “cause you’re going to be tiptoeing all the way to your grave!”

You take Sarah’s hand, tugging her gently as you creep to the edge of the stage. Sarah frowns...but follows you without resistance as you drop down off the stage and run across the Ballroom floor…

...stopping right next to the fallen, unmoving Kayne.

Morgaeous gargles and spits more cursed treasure into the air, coating the floors of the burning ballroom quadrant by quadrant.

“Cloak him,” you whisper to Sarah.

“Hush,” Sarah tells you. She waves her e-cigarette around, causing a veil of fog to descend over Kayne, turning his form slightly translucent to your eyes.

You crouch by Kayne and lay a hand on his shoulder.

Kayne’s eyes snap open. He reaches for one of his knives.

“Easy,” you whisper, talking softly to keep Morgaeous from hearing you...and so that Kayne won’t stab you. “We got a plan.”

#

“Okay, okay!” You shout, flickering back into visibility behind Morgaeous and sinking to your knees. “No more! You win!” You tuck your hands behind your head. “Uncle!”

Morgaeous swivels about, gold doubloons spilling from his bloodied lips like drool.

He’s scattered his golden treasure across nearly the entire ballroom, particularly around the doors and exits. Everywhere you look, you see piles of coins and necklaces, goblets and scepters that’ll twist and mangle your flesh with curses the moment you touch them.

More to the point, they’ll make noise if you bump into them while invisible. You have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

“There you are,” Morgaeous hisses, slithering towards you, brushing past the piles of his treasure without a care. “Do you know how much your little adventure has cost me, you mook?” His yellow eyes flash red. “I’ll have you pay every inch of your debt to me. With numerous installments….”

“You love hearing yourself talk, don’t you?” You say, drawling in as bored a tone as you can manage. “Makes sense, I guess. Your bark’s worse than your bite, after all.”

Morgaeous goes very still.

You clench your teeth. You want to say more...but no. Either your words will evoke the right response, or you’ll die: no in-between.

“I’ll show you my bite, you little pissant!” Morgaeous howls, hinging his jaws open and rearing up on hindquarters of his tail. He lunges down, opening wide to swallow you whole. “I’ll bleach your skeleton with gold and add you to my collection––!”

There’s flicker of light.

The sickeningly wet sound of parting flesh.

The ozone scent of purification magic.

Morgaeous collapses at your feet, shrieking and flailing back and forth.

The air shimmers. Sarah and Kayne re-appear out of thin air. Sarah holds a knife hilt in her right hand, while Kayne clasps a knife blade tightly between his two hands.

The garrote wire pulled taut between them crackles with blue lighting, the power of your Amnita spell: drops of red blood cling to its length like dew.

Whoa," you say, eyes widening as you look down.

Morgaeous the Drake-Worm, Meat Baron of Cryptatown, has been sliced in half.

He’s also been burned and stabbed, but bisection tends to grab one’s attention.

His forked tail has been cut clean off. It wriggles back and forth on its own…like an earthworm, appropriately enough. The upper-half of Morgaeous wheezes and vomits out a mouthful of black blood.

"You..." he rasps. "You really think this’ll stop me...?"

You brace your shoe against the serpent’s skull and yank your sword free.

"Argh!" Morgaeous howls. "Urgh... fair enough," he groans. "I deserved that. I got too cocky. I dropped my guard. That’s okay. I can learn from my mistakes."

The Drake-Worm raises his head. Nothing could prepare you for the sheer naked hatred in his eyes, shimmering like a toxic cesspool.

“You three," he rasps, "won’t learn anything from this but pain."

Every piece of golden treasure starts to sliding along ballroom, dragged towards Morgaeous by some kind of invisible force.

Kayne grips Sarah by the shoulders and drags her to the side as cursed cups and jewelry and statuary swoop past them like tumbleweeds. You stay carefully still, letting your lucky shirt bend the path of the cursed objects out of your way.

Morgaeous is swallowed up by his own treasure, buried beneath a growing mound of expensive objects that swarm like an ant hive. As you watch, the golden objects melt and fuse together into a massive, lumpy sphere. The air shimmers before your eyes. The ball of gold contracts to a single, priceless singularity…

...a single oil lamp falls to the ground, clattering loudly against the charred ballroom floor. It looks like a classic Mediterranean style lamp, with a lid, teacup handle and gently curved nozzle...

Scratch that. It looks like a Jinn lamp, straight out of ’One Thousand and One Nights’.

You, Sarah and Mandrake Kayne search for words to describe your conclusive (if ambiguous) victory. You each eventually settle on words that perfectly encapsulate your limited monkey-brain intellects.

"Hmmph," Mandrake Kayne grunts.

“Whoah,” Sarah declares.

"Huh," you say.

Next Chapter: Episode Thirteen and a Half: Mortal Wounds (Revised)