Fawn's Veil

The Veil

Close enough now to see the details of the child, the Hunter sheathed his sword and made for her petite frame.

Without any idea of what to do, Fawn simply began to repeat.

“No, no, no, no ... go away.”

Through tears of desperation, a feeling of hopelessness started to take over. With nowhere to run, and no way to defend herself, she screamed and thrashed as the Hunter got closer.

Behind her scream, Fawn heard a noise: the sound that had woken her more than once.

This time it was much louder, much closer ... an unmistakable resonance like two boulders sliding past each other, mixed strangely with a clicking report—akin to metal striking metal under water.

She tightened her body to its utmost, digging her fingers into her palms hard enough to draw blood, her shoulder pressed against the rock so hard it began to visibly bruise.

The oh-so specific sound rumbled through the empty space.

CLUNK ... CLUNK ... CLUNK.

The shadow she had tried so hard to define against the ceiling earlier, became distinct in its movement.

Her blood froze, she had no more screams left to utter: she just stared at the huge, moving shade, eyes stretched to their utmost.

As the sound rolled around the cave, the two roughly clad men stopped moving.

“What?”

The Hunter, mouth dropping wide, turns on just one foot. Scraping all possible air into his lungs, he frantically launches himself back toward the opening he only just came through.

“A VEIL!”

He screams as though his manhood were being torn from the inside. The ear-splitting refraction of his bellowing rattles about the cavern as his every movement is committed to the exit path.

Before the men or Fawn can possibly come to terms with what is happening, there comes a silken movement from the ceiling.

In one swift pass, an enormous claw rends the Hunter’s arm from his body almost entirely, a few threads of flesh and sinew holding hopelessly to the limb. The claw cleaves armor, cloth, flesh and bone all at once, as though they present no resistance.

The Hunter screams and falls to the floor, face down.

His sound is borne more of terror than pain. As he continues his frenetic scrambling for the broken wall, a great foot descends and pierces one of its claws into the panicking man’s calf, passing on through his shin bone. Then, as the creature adds force, the claw continues right into the very stone floor itself, as if it were no more solid than wet dirt.

The two harrowed men that followed now watch, with no idea how to contend with what they see. They have always seen the Hunter as a powerful force to be feared, and yet now he is little more than fodder for a creature they have only heard of in stories.

“Help me! I can’t move!”

In a flash the other two traverse the cave floor in one hurried movement. One of them makes a poorly conceived, half effort to help the prone man, as he bleeds profusely from his wounds. His attempt to grasp at the Hunter’s intact hand is met with immediate failure as the creature moves its quarry from reach. The other man frantically leaps for the exit point.

As he does so, the creature makes a slight adjustment in the shadow and throws something from the rear of its body. The large, barbed, bone-shard looking tip of its tail comes tearing through the dark, and shreds the running man’s knee. He’s hit with such precision as to separate the kneecap from its bedded cartilage.

Retracting its tail, the creature turns its attention to the one who tried to reach the Hunter pinned under its foot. Another massive hand emerges from the darkness to snatch the petrified man into its grasp—its clawed fingers long enough to take position at either side of his chest.

The villager begins to screech hopelessly as the claws slowly make their way into his sides with methodical persistence. His wounds happen so gradually, yet with such inevitability, his strained, defensive movements change nothing.

Once his convulsing body begins to cough blood, the creature dismissively drops him like rotting fruit.

As the light from the expanded break in the wall passes over it, more of the creature’s form becomes visible.

Removing its second foot from its inverted position on the cave ceiling, and placing it lightly on the floor, the creature moves toward the man lying on the floor beside the shreds of his knee, now surrounded by a sickening mass of blood and vomit. There is a bubbling and curdling of the blood in his wound, a result of the strike from the creature’s tail barb delivering a large quantity of a highly acidic natural element.

As the crippled Dust Cloth tries to crawl away, his hands shaking and teeth clenching, he sees the face of what the Hunter called a ‘Veil’. Its skin is a blackened gray, with a deep and regular texture to it, like softened scales. Its eyes are silver ovals, with no evidence of pupil or iris, just vast and shadowed—like looking into a moving, darkened mirror.

The pale, terrified man screams as it gets closer, madly struggling to move himself out into the light. It’s hopeless: the Veil’s powerful hand skewers the foot of his torn, fast-corroding leg. Paying no attention to the noise the man makes, the Veil moves its head closer and peels back its charcoal lips.

Folding a large portion of skin away from its face, two distinct mandibles move separately from its jaw, come both down and outwards at once. It reveals deep, crimson gums and tightly packed, barbed teeth: row upon row, a visual replica of the coarse gathering of Razor Rocks outside the cave.

It makes the sound again, the sound that had woken Fawn.

Grinding, sliding, clacking.

Now shrieking horribly, grasping for anything he can on the floor of the cave, the brutally injured man feels his hopes of rescue fade to nothing as the great creature takes up his kneecap and passes it to its mouth.

The mass of teeth fall together and begin to press. A force so great and constant, that the crippled man must watch as his crucial piece of bone crumples into fragments. As the creature’s jaw makes a sudden cross-movement, the fragments foam against its acidic mouth and are consumed.

Watching a piece of his leg disappear into dust and dissolve against the gums of the Veil, takes his sanity. He covers his eyes and begins to howl like a child, scraping his hands at his face.

With all three of its victims downed and disabled, the Veil turns its attention back to the Hunter, bleeding and scrambling on the floor. It makes the cracked rumble of its herald and reaches for the Hunter’s nearly severed arm.

“NO ... No ... NO!”

He yells at the wall, trying to get away from the creature’s clutches.

It collects the Hunter’s arm, tearing what remains of the flesh and sinew that makes it part of his body. While holding him in place with its foot like a bird of prey, it slices and peels the meat from his arm, dropping it beside him.

The Hunter, hopelessly secured face down, cannot see what the Veil has done with what was once his trusted right arm. He sees the flesh that once clad it slumped on the ground next to his head.

Suddenly, a new sound begins. Through his searing and catastrophic suffering, the sound becomes clear. Cracking and grinding, sprinkled with the drips of caustic dissolution. A splinter of his radius bone falls beside his face, marrow spread across its surface.

Desperately clawing at the ground and finding no purchase on the smooth surface, his memories of Veil savagery force him forward at all costs. Lucidity sliding away, he begins howling uncontrollably.

The creature gradually turns its head to the second screaming man missing his knee. The corrosive effect in his blood now makes its way up his leg, peeling and bubbling his skin. Covering its apparent ear, the creature reaches its huge, clawed hand towards him.

Turning him face up, it presses the claw of its thumb through the side of his temple, piercing his skull and forcing his eyes out of their sockets. His gargled screams of desperation finally stop.

Having crushed the eyes from its perishing prey, the Veil gathers both of them off the cheeks of his gaunt face. It carefully eats them, as if a delicacy outside its daily fare.

The cave rings only with the sound of the Hunter’s mortal cries and—distant to their cacophony—the tiny sobs of Fawn.

The Veil’s attention passes to the shivering child in the alcove, as it makes a determined motion toward her.

Taking the momentary distraction as an opportunity, the Hunter refocuses his efforts to escape. Finding some traction from a rough edge on the rock, he begins to crawl.

His movement brings the creature back to him in a snap.

Seemingly disinterested in the activities of the child, it simply ignores her and makes its presence known to the man on the floor—stripping the flesh from his leg and consuming the bones—its actions steadily accompanied by the fading screams of the tortured man. The creature seems persistently intent on creating immeasurable suffering for the Hunter. It continues to slice flesh from bone, working from his foot upwards to his hip.

Its claws are micron fine in their edge, and flesh slides off the leg effortlessly. The Hunter’s morose wailing eventually subsides, as his brutalized body fails. Finally, the savaged man’s blood runs its last out across the cold cave floor.

The creature pulls the bones from their place at the hip and passes them to the chemical grinder of its maw. Leaving nothing behind but torn tendons and sliced flesh, lying in collapsed shreds from the waist, where once there was a functioning body.

After a moment, it moved itself with extraordinary fluidity across the floor of the cave toward the utterly petrified little girl, sitting curled, clutching tightly at her legs. Trying to be as invisible as possible, she kept herself still, only glancing up. Her face was hurting from clenching her eyes shut as tightly as she could manage.

As it crossed the floor, the Veil scored the stone with its feet. Fawn felt its massive presence draw closer and closer, bringing with it, the unbelievable foulness of fresh blood and corroded bone. A heinous stomach-retching assault on her senses she had never encountered before, even in this world.

As it came up to her, she felt it move its head down to her feet and draw air in through what must have been its nose.

She shook and grimaced, tears pouring down her cheeks as the great animal passed its head up her body, so close, she could feel it disrupt the air around her.

Tightening her grip on her knees and feeling the wetness pool underneath her, she now understood more clearly why the frightened villagers she had seen smelled the way they did.

Becoming so desperate she could no longer keep herself together, she let out a scream driven by horror, confusion and anguish in the utmost.

The Veil moved its head as her scream shattered the recent silence, motioning a hand to cover its exposed ear. It began a clicking sound: different this time—faster and lighter.

Fawn covered her face with both hands, abandoning her legs which straightened and cramped awfully.

Now thoroughly without control of bladder or bowel, she flailed frantically: the heinous screams and vivid horror of the last few moments ripping her mind apart. She imagined her own ghastly fate was soon to come.

Still holding its hand over its ear, the large creature moved away slightly. It reached its free hand towards what it viewed as a small, soft animal writhing around on the floor.

Slowly and with great accuracy, it scraped its claws across the floor, cutting swathes through the rock and passing under the child.

Collecting her off the ground, it carried her upward as it scaled the wall with ease and capability.

Fawn was not even able to react before she was already being moved across the ceiling like a trophy, or reserved food.

The creature turned and skewered the body of the Hunter with its tail before making for the back of the cave.

With ease, it pulled both her and the punctured torso, up and over an opening at the rearmost cave wall.

Fawn was caught in the strange sway of the Veil’s grip. It wasn’t hurting her or pressing on her: she seemed to be held much like a man might hold a butterfly.

As her emotions started to quiet, and her thoughts returned to her, there was little on her mind.

I don’t want to be food ...

The smell was starting to fade, as the creature had finished eating for the time being. There was a clarity to the odor coming from it, as though it had been washed with a solvent of some sort.

They were moving with significant pace across the ceilings—cave after cave—through long, natural corridors and large, open caverns. The network of underground space was vast and complex. There was much more to it than Fawn would ever have imagined.

After a period of time, the persistent bouncing and shuddering in the grasp of the Veil began to feel almost familiar, and utter exhaustion took her into sleep.

Waking slowly, Fawn started to see some vague outlines in the rock. She could hear a noise across the cavern from her.

The Veil was there, moving slowly around the space, making gestures of organization. It was almost like it was attending to housekeeping tasks.

Feeling grimy and uncomfortable, she lay still on the stone, trying to understand what her predicament was. Her mind went back to simple things for a moment.

I wish I could wash. I feel awful.

She sat up slowly and carefully, looking around to see if there was some way she could escape. She longed for the recent moment when she had some food, water, and felt like her little cave might be somewhat safe. Looking more closely at her body, there was no evidence of new injury or harm of any kind.

She had not taken any superficial wounds from the unusual form of transport that had got her here. Whatever the intentions of the creature, it had not yet caused her any harm. This feeling was a very strange space for her to be in, as it had done such horrific damage to all the men pursuing her. It had become very apparent that she would have been in real danger in the hands of the men. She was strangely better off now with this animal, at least so far.

Regardless though, the sight of what happened to them was written in her mind in indelible blood. She felt it would stay with her, for all her remaining cycles. The images were terrible when she reflected on them, but strangely comforting when she thought of what they had planned to do to her.

This ... thing saved me, but why?

She began to worry that her demise was only delayed, rather than entirely prevented.

–Garrick M Lynch–