Page 140 of Psycho Beasts

I pressed my palms as hard as I could into my ears to block out the noise that was unbearably grating.

The water was dirty, muddy, and smothering.

Still, I fought against the pressure and focused on sinking deeper into the sludge.

The numb couldn’t trick me. Existence was pain, and I didn’t want to do it anymore. A proverb about accepting death gracefully, or some shit like that.

I was accepting it, and no screeching voice could change my mind.

YOU THINK EVERYONE WILL BE BETTER OFF? YOU IGNORANT AMOEBA!

Suddenly, the lake disappeared.

I was standing in a field.

The red sun of the shifter realm hung above, but everything was wrong.

The forests were gone, there was no ice, and everything was brown and dead. The charred ruins of a forest dotted the landscape, and fires blazed.

Across the valley, shifters screamed.

Thousands of figures stomped across the land. They held spears and swords, and massive catapults threw burning rocks hundreds of feet.

Shifter cries stopped as the army ran them through.

There was fire everywhere as more catapults launched. The ground shook under my feet.

Thousands of soldiers marched over the horizon.

As the armor-clad creatures neared, long spears pointed at me, I opened my mouth to scream, but the landscape changed.

At once, the world shifted, and two warm suns replaced the single red sun.

One was bright yellow, the other bright green.

It was the fae realm.

But it wasn’t.

The lush landscape and endless green lawn of the palace was black, and the air smelled of burning sulfur, just like the shifter realm.

Fires dotted the landscape as massive catapults flung burning rocks in every direction.

Like in the shifter realm, fae screamed as the endless army slaughtered them.

Air fae flew, but archers shot them down.

Water fae flung shards, but their ice clanged off the hard armor and didn’t penetrate.

The earth fae sent rocks flying but were killed by spears.

Fire fae set the world ablaze, but they killed as many fae as they did the armor-clad soldiers, and the army kept marching.

I stumbled over a dead fae, and my body turned toward the palace.

It was smaller than I remembered, only half the size.

Armor-clad soldiers streamed over the horizon, an unfathomable army that never ended.

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