Page 47 of Up from the Earth

As I blinked my eyes open, I only wished that the sight that followed would have been half as bad as the smell.

Bodies littered the ground, the tear behind a massive throne of corpses pulsing with vile energy that seeped through with each second. Limbs and shredded torsos decorated the area around the priest’s feet, a tribute paid to a creature that desired only torment and viscera.

My stomach lurched, threatening to send yellow bile scattering across the vacant faces that watched me from beneath my boots. Stringy protrusions shot up from the dry earth, their slick angles cropping up through the cracks like weeds. A burning effigy wove itself from their lengths, creating a symbol I could recognize easily—ifneverseen in this context.

“He has defiled his own sigil. Why would he do such a thing?”

The Queen stood beside me, taking my hand as we roamed our stare over the hellish landscape before us. It had been so altered from its original state, the infection of that realm beyond the tear growing stronger.

“He is a defamation, a blasphemy. Paine can only be what animates him, and that I believe is a literal interpretation of his name.”

Pain.

It was undeniable—the reversed cross, bisected with split bones and decorated with tongues nailed to the surface—a visceral piece of evidence. Trepidation snaked beneath my skin, a voice that begged me to flee, to turn back and never look upon this place again.

But as the heat licked at my skin, I drew the long blade I had been gifted from its sheath at my hip and squared my shoulders.

“And I thought you might never come…” Appearing from a bridge that reached from within the depths of that tormented plane to where we stood on this one was Father Paine, his wretched form only worse for the time we’d not seen him. “...Witch.”

The crescendoing cry of thousands of souls filtered out as he hovered closer to the hill where I held the line with The Beast King. Screams of merciless suffering and malignant delight echoed through the still air on this side, bringing with them a hot knife-like wind that slashed through my cheeks.

Souls that did not belong to the punished realm begged for release, innocence swept into the priest’s hell so that he might feast on their miserable agony.

“But where are my manners? Allow me to truly welcome you to my kingdom.” Paine raised his hands, the ground shaking as it erupted with gargantuan chains where the spindles of vine-like growth had been. “A kingdom, you’ll see, of retribution and punishment of my decree.”

Smoke choked the air, making me cough as The Queen stepped in front of me, holding their cloak of shadow over my form to block the poisonous gas. The natural world felt eons away, replaced by these clouds of smelting iron and pilfered minerals. Industrial and sweltering, noxious and set only in shades of molten red and charred black, the work of the priest had corrupted any tie the World of Below had to the forest here.

“Stop this! You are mad!” I cried out, my throat raw and burning. “This is not for you. You must go back!”

As fast as a blink, Father Paine whooshed through the air, hovering before me in a fog of black smoke. “I will go nowhere! Your kind thinks they can take from me what is mine? What I demand?! Bah!”

His hand snaked forward, gripping the upper edge of my breast plate, his skin corroding the metal where it touched it.

“It is you—you and yourking—who will flee into the abyss with your fucking tails between your legs.” That hideous tongue licked over his teeth, a slow trail that pulled a crimson thread of saliva along with it. “Unless you’re more interested in doing what your kind does best?”

Pulling myself back as I took hold of his wrist and pushed against his hold, I set my jaw, glaring. “Which is?”

“Why, taking your punishment on your back—or in any number of other positions I might demand. After all, you are all just whores. Women, witches, the corrupted plague of mortals who think they know better than God, thanme. Fucked to death with a hellish poker stabbed through your holes would serve you all right. The slop of your intestine on the ground would be a fucking glorious sound.”

Quickly, as quickly as I could muster, I plunged the blade up through the bottom of the priest’s jaw, the point coming through his tongue where it stuck, the fleshy meat writhing in his mouth like a skewered worm.

Paine’s hollers melted into the air in a sloping screech, a sound that was initially too high-pitched for my ears to comprehend but then blisteringly loud. I shrank back, and warmth immediately dripped down divots near my jaw.

Ringing was everywhere, and at once, I was flung backward, launched through the arm by a wild strike delivered to my chest. I landed in a heap, my ribs aching as the world around me blurred. Thankfully, the armor took a heavy bit of the damage, if the blow had left the center dented and pressing into my sternum. I shook my head, searching the field in front of me for The Queen.

Shit.

At the edge of the hill, The Queen held her ground against the priest, but her attacks did nothing. The dark wave of energy emitted from her only served to hold him back, allowing me the moment to collect myself. It was a small boon, but one that I would take. I needed to refocus. I needed to find another point of attack on the deformed monstrosity’s body.

Groping across the blistered earth, I padded for my sword, that damned unfamiliar weapon that felt clunky and enormous in my hands. It wasn’t there.

Snapping my attention back to the fight, I could see it lodged in the monster’s jaw, a toothpick stuck in his mandible and seeming to cause him no issues.Dammit. I hauled myself off the ground, wheezing as the dent in my armor restricted my breathing. I couldn’t keep it on, and my time of cover was quickly flying away. Even The Beast King couldn’t last forever against whatever Father Paine had become.

“I’m coming,” I whispered, reaching over my shoulder for the buckle that secured the breastplate on my left. “I’m coming.”

Unfastening it, I went to the one on the right, and then my protection dropped to the ground with a thud. The dirt beneath it cracked farther, heat wafting up from some distant place past the black. I could breathe, and did so—sucking in a lungful that burned as much as it replenished—but I was vulnerable now.

“Mistress.”

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