Totem Ch7: The Deformed (Patreon)

Since my father bought land to farm on, we lived a little further out from the village than most. This was both good and bad.

Good because the Deformed usually went for the highest population centers first, but bad because we still got some stragglers. With fewer people around, there were that many less hands to help fight off the monsters.

My dad did employ a couple of strong backs and workers who looked like they could hold their own in a fight, but it wasn't reasonable to hire full-time guards. Especially when mom had her legion of sister alligators.

Speaking of which, as soon as I had gotten out of the house, I heard the distinctive hiss of an angry alligator. You never forget that sound: Like a cross between a lion's roar and a rattlesnake's rattle.

It came from the direction of the canals. When I peered through the evening light, I saw reeds shaking and rattling. Some Deformed was having a bad day, and an alligator was having a nice dinner.

Then a girl's scream split the air.

I whipped around toward the direction of the cornfield. A lane wide enough to allow ostrich-pulled wagons bordered it. That was the road most people took when they were coming up to our house from the direction of the village.

I say that because I recognized the scream. This was a small town, and I had grown up with these people, after all. It was Annika… probably inviting herself over for dinner again.

I swore under my breath and broke into a run.

She wasn't hard to find. She stood in the middle of the road, swinging a walking stick at two hunched figures.

The Deformed babbled and chirped nonsense to one another, and one tried to dart in to make a grab for her. With unusual grace, Annika danced out of the way. Her walking stick slammed into the Deformed’s ribs.

It doubled over, but the second Deformed, who I think might have been a woman judging by the body parts I could see between the rags, rushed in and bowled Annika over.

I saw it all happen as if in slow motion. Even though I was running as fast as I could, I was still too slow.

The creature started clawing at her, and Annika's next scream was one of pain.

“Hey!” I yelled, trying to get its attention, but it didn't work. The Deformed was too busy enjoying its meal.

The second Defomed — the one that Annika had bashed her walking stick into — straightened slightly from its hunched position and ran at me, gibbering complete madness.

I don't know what animal its totem had originally been. Some sort of dog, judging from its pushed-out face and claws that hung down off its form. It looked like a werewolf.

Fuck. I didn’t have time for this. The other one was still clawing and biting at the downed Annika.

I focused inward and allowed myself one moment of regret for not squeezing my core dry like a wet sponge to wring it for all the power it was worth, because I could tell that the trickle which flowed into me had not fully recovered from my last magical blast.

I had one more half-decent blast in me, and I needed to make it count. So, I shifted to the side so that both monsters — the oncoming and the one over Annika – would be in my blast range.

Annika would be, too, but there was nothing I could do about that. I concentrated on the inner gosling and focused. Again, fire exploded from my hand – in the shape of a diving goose with the ghostly outlines of wings.

The blast caught the oncoming Deformed head on. Its fur caught on fire, but the fire goose kept going and, to my shock, dove down on the monster trying to eat Annika alive.

It caught the thing's rags on fire and it rolled away, screaming like a cat that had just gotten its tail shut in the door.

Meanwhile, the werewolf had only been singed. It collected itself and, with a snarl, focused on me.

And I was all out of juice. "Fuck," I said, brightly, then reached down and picked up a rock as big as my fist. "Come on," I said. "You want to dance? Let's dance."

After all, I had never seen a goose back down from a fight. A small part of me wanted to hiss menacingly.

The werewolf advanced, but was immediately taken down at the knees by an onrushing alligator.

Yeah, that surprised the hell out of me too.

The Deformed clawed at the alligator as it fell, but its claws were not enough to pierce the thick outer scales that armored the alligator’s back. Within seconds, one leg was in the alligator’s jaws. Then the beast did what was called a death roll and the werewolf’s leg separated from the rest of the body.

Gross but also oddly satisfying.

"What are you doing here?" I heard my mother's voice, distorted with a hissing growl between elongated teeth.

I didn't have time to answer her. Instead, I turned back to where I had last seen Annika.

A second and one-third alligator had come up and were busy pulling apart her attacker. However, the Deformed was not going down easily.

Annika was a still, small figure on the ground.

Dead?

Ignoring my mother, who was trying to check me over for wounds, I pushed past her and ran to the girl. She was so covered with blood I didn't know what to do. I knelt, my hands out but afraid to touch.

"Is she still alive?" my mother bent to check on her. She wasn't squeamish of blood at all and placed her hand on the ruin of Annika's neck. Then she hissed under her breath, shaking her head. "She lives, barely. We need to get her indoors. Some of these Deformed can smell blood. You both need to get inside. This is no place to be for children without totems."

"I do have a totem," I rasped.

She whipped around to stare at me. Her eyes had turned gray-green over the last couple of years.

"My son..." Her voice was full of pride, but then she shook her head, and I could practically see her reminding herself that this was not the time or the place. "Then you are an adult now and it’s your role to protect her. Take her to the house. I will deal with the Deformed in the fields."

I opened my mouth, on the verge of telling my mother that I was out of power. That the little amount of power that the gosling inside had filtered back to me was gone. Mom was a fighter. She would know what to do.

... except that the power wasn’t all gone.

Diffuse light was circling around my core, filtering in from an outside source. After a startled moment, I realized that it was from the Deformed corpses.

There was something wrong with that light. Instead of a yellow gold, it was darker with a greenish tinge as if it were poisonous.

I worried for a moment that it would infect the gosling in my core... but the little guy seemed to be handling it just fine.

The tiny trickle that I got in return was golden and so pure that I felt like I could do anything with it.

"Go," my mother said, misunderstanding my realization as hesitation. "She is losing a lot of blood. I will protect our farm."

That last bit sounded like a vow.

I had always found Annika to be an annoying girl, but I couldn't stand it if she died out here like this. Reaching down, I picked her up in a princess carry.

I wished that this moment was like an action movie back in the day, but it wasn't. Annika was heavy for being such a small girl, and I staggered a few steps. She was dead weight, sticky, and smelly with blood.

There were no official doctors in our little village. No advanced medicine, and no healing magic. I didn't know what I could do for her, if anything.

I tried not to think about the fact that none of this would have happened to her if I had just been a little faster. Would I have been quicker if I had taken all of the gosling's power instead of a fraction of it? I couldn't help but think that the answer was yes.

I didn't want to second-guess myself, but it was hard not to do when a girl was possibly dying in my arms.

I staggered up the hill straight for the large house. Meanwhile, Mom and her sister alligators slinked back to the fields to rid it of the Deformed.

Deep inside, my little gosling changed the corrupted magic into something pure and bright... and kept most of it for itself, that greedy little bastard.

If circumstances were different, I would have loved to sit down and meditate to see exactly what was going on. But I had to keep my mind on the present.

It was a good thing I did, because from the flickering shadows backed by torchlight... the Deformed had made it to the house.

< Previous  Next >