"Oh my God! what in the name of Jesus Christ are you doing here?!"
"Hehe... You sure... are going to need more soap for that!" Vanilla spawned in the personal bathroom of the Weiler's, a couple of morbidly obese farm landlords. She looked around and spotted an open window. She rushed.
"Wait! Come here!" The obese woman splashed water as she got out of the tube. Vanilla jumped out without hesitating to the tree outside.
"What's happening? Are you okay?" Rowie confusedly asked, standing in the yard down.
"Run Rowie, Run!" She descended the tree like a squirrel and ran away. Rowie followed behind.
"Come back you dumb, meddling kid!" The woman raised her fist and showed her teeth in anger. The girl became a small spot in the distance.
"Heavens, Felicia. Come here, your soap is going to dry up." Mr. Weiler said.
"O-of course honey," She closed the door and returned.
That damn man and his pranks... No one impeded Vanilla's way home this time. Being the middle of the night, all the lights of the residence were off, and she was forced to sneak in. She climbed the cobblestone fences, bypassing the watchmen, and forced the locks on the windows, moving like a stealthy cat all up to her room.
Once there, she laid in the dark, cuddling on her nest of pillows and blankets. Her thoughts bounced. It was not even a week and she had already experienced numerous things than any person would ever see in their lifetime. Could she affirm she was even sane at that point?
'Silence the one who serves the human desire'... Those words sounded through her thoughts. Aha! Didn't Carol utilize such fancy lingo to talk about Lugus? Yeah! that could only mean one thing. She got up, put on her adventuring attire, and picked Avrevm Bacvlvm. What she was searching for was a creature that was vigorous at night.
"Vanilla?" Where are you going?" Rowie's babyish voice chimed amidst the darkness.
"Rowie! The one who serves the human desire, I got it! Come with me!" Rowie left a tiny bark, wagged his tail, and hopped out of her bed. "Wait," As ever, she returned to her trifle box. A plushie had to be selected.
Which one? The creatures that roamed Merry Oaths' streets when it was full moon were something that she wished to never cross paths with. No-see... Yeah, he would be perfect. The place that was her objective was adults-only, and the creature she was looking for was an ace of sneak and disguise.
She picked up the green chameleon of primary color patches stitched on his back. It was time to get into action. She escaped the residence in the same way she entered it and jumped to the sidewalk after almost getting caught.
The street was forlorn and wrapped by unwelcoming gloom. St. Bernard of Clairvaux street only counted with a single night light where the Cul-De-Sac started. Flashes twinkled from some of the third floors of the gothic buildings. Owls hooted and the occasional bat squeaked.
"Where are we going?" Rowie whispered.
"To St. Peter Street... And to think I'd go there so soon. I don't think I'm ready to revive some memories ..."
"What happened?"
"I don't know if I can tell you Rowie..."
"I heard the police telling you that those bad people that hurt you died. Didn't you by any chance..."
"I didn't... I didn't know until the officers informed us about their deaths."
"But they won't harm you again right?"
"No Rowie. They won't harm anyone ever again."
He almost caught her. She breathed in relief and strolled for five blocks until she reached St. Cecilia street, which adjoined perpendicularly with St. Bernard of Clairvaux street. It was where the latter came upon its end. Most of its unfinished houses were forsaken. The trees' roots massacred the sidewalks.
A long-haired woman in a white dress roamed on the isolated St. Cecilia street as Vanilla entered through the right. Her sobbings hummed from the other flank of the road. "Vanilla, this doesn't give me good vibes..." Rowie whispered, halting her for a moment.
The woman turned around and waddled in their direction. A veil of obscurity enclosed her complexion. "She's coming..." Vanilla mumbled. Could that be a real human, or maybe was she seeing something else?
"Vanilla... I sniff no good... let's go..." Rowie quivered. He hid his head inside the backpack. The woman approached unhurriedly but steadily. Her wails evolved sharper as she got closer.
Vanilla's spine twitched, and her heart joined an anxious race. Her-fight or-flight instincts fought each other in an overthinking parade. She put her hand inside her bag and gripped Avrevm Bacvlvm. She felt as if she could not allow herself to flee away anymore from danger.
Twenty meters. The woman's groans magnified. Vanilla remembered. She had heard about the old legend of some weeping mother that lost her children roaming in the dark, only to destroy and devour her clumsy preys.
"Vanilla, please!" Rowie cried.
Ten meters. The woman of long, smooth hair revealed herself. A horsehead of barren eyes possessed the place that a human one was supposed to. The whimpers and wails halted. A macabre, frosting laughter of raspy tone and equine, defunct neighs took their sonic place. Her snout and tongue rattled and erratically spread, rolled, and knocked over.
Devouring anxiety made Vanilla turn around towards the devouring road and try to flee away. "Wh—" Her body hamstrung and petrified in a running stance. Rowie's was not any luckier.
The horsehead hybrid slowly but securely closed, carving more malign neighs.
"H-h-h!" Hopeless anguish, a spine-freezing jiggling, and the worst squeezing anxiety took possession of Vanilla.
A slaughtering paranoia embraced her body and locked her away, pushing against her trunk and exterminating respiration. Rowie whimpered, wailed, and chirred. He was in a trap of doom. Even if they were deaf, they could feel that horrendous aberration getting closer, in an agonizing moment that felt like an eternity.
Impervious mist encircled the cobblestone street of threadbare houses and whistling trees. It condensed and proceeded to reduce the breathing area where Vanilla and Rowie were petrified.
The stuttering neighs approached. The ground on Vanilla's feet melted into a suctioning black hole.
By the time Vanilla and Rowie were in control once again of their bodies, they were plummeting into a frosting, soundless cacophony of black and nothing.
Did she fall from ten feet or ten miles? Broken, sawed ribs and decalcified bones covered the frozen, raspy, and spiked floor. Each step crunched and echoed the soundless nada. The eternal gloom protected everything from the morbid, judging human eyes and their ignorance.
A woman with a horse head. That sounded like a hybrid, but the way she manipulated the fog and dragged them into whatever this dimension pointed more to a higher apparition, but she was nothing like the common ones she had learned and fought before.
Vanilla wished she had Mr. Fluffyball with her. "Rowie, are you here?" She panted. Her back was loosely light. She desperately tried to catch him on her feet.
"Vanilla... I'm scared," His doggy voice gifted her with relief.
"Wait. I'll try something." She clasped Avrevm Bacvlvm from her inner jacket.
She pressed the stones on the bottom of the graved pole, unable to discern which one was each. Ice chilled, the fire burned, and finally, a mini star levitated on the top of the golden pole. It scared away the darkness with purifying light. Was it the Citrine?
"Vanilla, your eye..."
"My eye?"
She put her palm in front of her face. A tenuous, blue circle with a golden pentacle illuminated it. She turned Avrevm Bacvlvm off and put off her patch.
"I can see your eye floating in the dark, Vanilla."
"Guess it's not worth covering it anymore. Let's advance and see what we can find." She put Rowie on her backpack again and strode on that cold and soundless place, with the twinkle of Avrevm Bacvlvm leading the way.
"Help!"
"I swear I won't-"
"Please no!"
"Aaaargh!"
Voices of different pitches, gender, and strength rumbled everywhere, with the commonality being their desperate and begging cry. Vanilla accelerated. Her spine was hypersensitive and her legs chilled.
Lost in her instincts, she tripped over. Her heart skyrocketed and her legs jiggled. She raised her gaze from the ground, feeling her hands perforated with the splinter bones.
Avrevm Bacvlvm laid down. In the distance, the back of a human figure, laying on her knees and weeping stood. It was the same tone that the horse head hybrid produced on the street before revealing herself. Being sucked into such a lifeless void, the wails and moans tinkering with the crippled wind, and now this. Whatever in the world dragged her to this place was not an ordinary specter.
"Vanilla... it's the same smell..." Rowie murmured.
The woman kept whimpering. She held a tiny, human figure. The begging cries intensified at Vanilla's back, to the point they were damaging her ears. Rowie howled. She got forced to advance.
Did the cries of the hybrid turn on to be more... aggressive? That was enough. She put her hands on her leather pockets and pulled out the chameleon plush.
"No-see, Custos Talpa: allow me to become one with the dark, the light, and any surrounding, equalizing energy. Make myself intimate to any other living and nonliving essence, and support my hunt with your patient grace."
The special words were pronounced. Vanilla felt her skin being carved with rusty, sawed, redden knives; her eyelids being chopped off and her joints being sliced. The murdering agony that she could not wish to her worst enemy then halted after her screaming. Numbness ruled and killed grief.
She raised Avrevm Bacvlvm and saw it levitating in the dark. She was invisible and blended with the shadows.
"...Where are you? ...Do you think you can come and make fun of me?!" An equine voice rumbled from the kneeled woman. Darkness stopped. The scenario of death and torture made her intestines turn on and puke.
The foggy sky blended in blood and litmus coral. Vanilla found herself on a stony platform of half a football court. The woman kneeled on a puddle of blood and guts at its end. She held a moveless child. The piercing stink of decaying putrefaction dominated any fresh air that could exist in such a morbid place.
The floor behind Vanilla rumbled. Custos Talpa passed by her side. The reptilian of blue aura and iridescent colors stood as tall as her, and probably weighted twenty times more.
Thousands of triangular teeth crammed numerous rows in his raspy snout. His eyes independently rotated one from another and watched over everything around.
Vanilla looked behind. Hovering, rusty cages surrounded the road she came from. Their insides had murky, scrawny, and denuded people that swung on them. They stretched their arms out in useless attempts to escape.
The whimpering apparition turned around. A sunken, grim face of spread mouth and blank eyes replaced her horse head. She screamed, hovered, and dropped the body of the rotten child. His head broke like an egg on the floor. Rusty, handleless knives crammed his torso and stomach.
Childish voices and wails rumbled everywhere. Grayish, decaying hands rose from the edges of the platform and crawled upside.
"What the hell are those?" Vanilla whispered. It was a battalion of at least twenty totterings, putrid children of gargling black blood that waddled and crawled towards them, wielding rusty butcher knives.
Rotkids. Vanilla raised Avrevm Bacvlvm. The mini-monsters wailed and screeched.
"Attack, No-see!" She ordered.
Custos Talpa shot his tongue. With a sticky whip, he dragged one of the aberrations to him and munched it with a clapping bite. Black blood and a green fluid splashed from his mouth.
Vanilla shot the ruby. Two of the undead monsters fell, screamed, and rolled on the floor. More approached and she shot the sapphire. They became ice statues. Their limbs fell like frozen meat. The rest of the Rotkids kept crawling, tottering, and screaming. They approached the chameleon just like fire ants would attack a scorpion.
He whipped his tail at incoming ones and sent them flying away to the unknown void off the platform. The horsehead spread her arms and raised her head, launching a war screech. Vanilla ran against her and shot the ruby. An invisible barrier repelled the burst.
She looked at Vanilla with her eyes darkened, and glided downwards in response, hitting Vanilla with a sweeping blow. She flew away and splashed dust as she hit the barren surface of the rocky platform. She looked down the edge. Impenetrable fog covered everything until the end of the horizon.
Damn, she even had some kind of magical barrier. That was nothing common of the most known apparitions.
The decaying woman then hovered to her position. Vanilla crawled to get Avrevm Bacvlvm. Her body was now translucent, but not invisible. Damn. That hit revealed her. Rowie got out of her backpack and ran away. A gang of rotten children chased him away.
The putrid woman strangled her mid-air with telekinesis. Vanilla grabbed her neck, but she felt as if she was getting crushed by a giant boa, unable of freeing herself from that trap of doom.
Custos Talpa shot his tongue at the lanky apparition. She got stunned and lost balance. Vanilla hit the ground and picked up Avrevm Bacvlvm. She pressed the Sapphire, but it was useless. The ice got deflected.
More sour children crawled from the borders and tottered towards her and Custos Talpa. The chameleon hopped, shaking the ground on his bit, and halved one of them.
He hammered another one with his tail and sent flying another two with a headbutt, but more arrived and launched themselves at him. Three of them stabbed his raspy and spiky back, More tried to gore his eyes. Rowie was nowhere to be seen.
The spectral woman launched an attack of dazzling energy at Vanilla, but the raven's reflexes were sharper. The attack passed above her head and hit one of the cages at her back.
The cage unlocked. The person inside let out a war cry and glided towards the apparition. She screamed in grief as a grey aura of smoke enveloped her away from moving. So that was it! it was not a check situation! Vanilla got up and ran back to the stone corridor flooded with bones.
The white-dressed woman chased her. Rowie ran around the platform, with a rotkid stabbing the floor behind. He reached Vanilla. She turned around while running and sent his chaser away with the lightning of Avrevm Bacvlvm.
"Don't stop Rowie!" She yelled.
Both ran as fast as they could. The woman launched more burning, blinding energy. She destroyed the floor behind them, which was the part between the platform and that road.
They got disconnected from the security of Custos Talpa.
"Vanilla, do it!" Rowie said.
Vanilla pointed and shot electricity at every cage on her way, with the woman attacks hitting the ground behind their run. Thirsty voices rumbled with an ovation of freedom. The flying army of grey spirits rushed towards that queen of death.
She hunched and shrieked as if she was being attacked by a swarm of killer bees. The black, smoky aura covering her pushed her against the stone ground at the middle of the main platform and sucked her inside another void of doom.
She scratched the ground and screamed, but the spirits dragged her into the undivulged abyss. She let out one last, agonizing scream. The overwhelming army of green, putrid rotkids on Custos Talpa shrieked and plummeted.
"She's gone..." Rowie said.
"The portal... it's s still open..." Vanilla panted for air.
"Vanilla... You aren't thinking about..."
"Rowie, if she was truly gone we'd be out of this world. We need to... make sure." She approached the edge of the rock. "Hey! No-see! over here! lend me a hand! or a tongue!"
She picked up Rowie, and the prehistoric chameleon approached the border. He shot his tongue at her, enveloping and dragging her to the other side.
"P-puagh!" Rowie tried to shake his body. Sticky, viscous saliva enveloped the girl and pup.
"T-thanks..." Vanilla said, putting her hand on his face. The Chameleon nodded. Those kids would have needed something sharper if they wanted to penetrate his natural armor.
"Well, Rowie... It's now or never..." Vanilla approached the suctioning, twisting hole in the middle of the platform, and let her body plummet through it. Rowie hesitated, but finally jumped after her.
Her boots patted the ground. Everything stood black, besides what posed in front of her. In a fragile circle of light, the woman that she just fought laid on, surrounded by rusty beams with blood crusts.
She now had a delicate, normal human face. Her white dress was untouched. Black drops spilled from her face, after her tears and her eyeliner combined each other in a squirting makeup.
Not even Carol, who was considered by the men of Merry Oaths to be the most beautiful woman in the town, was as astonishing as her. Something awfully contrasting compared to the abomination Vanilla just fought, and the horsehead she had on the streets.
Rowie didn't attempt to hide behind Vanilla's legs.
"She can't see you nor hear you," One of the undead rotkids that fought Custos Talpa passed by her side. She raised Avrevm Bacvlvm, but the kid ignored her. His skin and black clothing were also untouched as if he was still alive, and not a piece of putrid flesh waddling around.
"Who are you?" Vanilla asked.
"You've done well. She's not gonna hurt anyone again, His void eyes stared at the sobbing woman on the ground.
"So the legend of the woman who killed her children was true... And now it's over..." Damn. All those years going out in Merry Oaths' nights doubting about the existence of this thing.
"It cost her one hundred years to amaze this power. A power to create her world and dimension of grief and sorrow. And it's finally all gone."
"You make it sound like it's a bad thing," Rowie said.
"She is only a broken mother that lost her children to really horrible people. She trapped them in those things you perceived as cages. And you freed them."
"Wait, didn't she kill them?"
The kid slowly shook his head, negating her question. "It's true that she lost control of herself, and eventually started to take innocent people, to alleviate her burning need of vengeance. But now the spirits of the same people that ruined her life, even after death have been set free. By you. They've enclosed her here. In an inescapable cage of pain and suffering."
"...You said she took innocents with her, on her vengeance path."
"Yes. And she ruined many lives by doing so. The number of innocent people she took fairly outweighs the lives of her enemies she took."
"I feel bad for her," Rowie said. "Can we do anything?"
"it's up to you. You defeated her In her world. And now you have the power to let her go, or leave her to this eternal destiny."
"She doesn't deserve this..." Rowie looked at Vanilla.
"She tried to kill us. And she's not innocent either..."
"You are right." The child said. "But you don't know if she was conscious about it. Perhaps she just descended into a spiral of madness. No one can know."
The woman kept sobbing, wiping her tears out.
"What if we set her free? will she kill more people?" Rowie asked.
"No. You defeated her madness and vengeance desires. This is just what's left of her. A broken woman, way beyond fixation. Some people never leave. Sometimes, their anger, frustration, despair, vengeance thirst, and hatred attach them to this world. But if you let her go now, she'll finally leave. And maybe, she'll find peace."
Vanilla meditated it. She preferred it when people paid it hard for their actions, but, who was she to judge after all? For less, she had already killed people by the same vengeance desire.
And this woman was a mother. Would not, her real mother... Sigh. What was that strange feeling?
"Who am I to judge after all?" She spoke, making her ultimate choice. "How do we free her?"
"Vanilla..." Rowie wagged his tail, with his voice stirred.
"Break the cage. That'll do. You'll return to your world."
"Thank you... whoever you are."
"You've chosen well... You've chosen well." The kid vanished with the dark.
Vanilla stepped back, pointed Avrevm Bacvlvm, and shot the rusty beams with the garnet. The electricity broke them like a grenade.
Everything started to fade white. The woman raised her sobbing eyes. Were they looking at her? And was that smile? Everything got consumed by light. Vanilla felt her body being raised.
She fell on her knees and crusty hands at St. Cecilia street. The mist was gone. Crickets dedicated to the night a melody of peace. The leafless trees didn't desire to whistle anymore.
"We did it Vanilla... we did it!" Rowie spun on himself, wagging his tail.
"And looks like the carrier effect of No-see is gone... Hey, look" There was something metallic resting on the ground.
"What's this..." It was a rusty medallion. Mostly worn-down, but in the bottom, it had inscribed the words "Ethel. Family Land."
"Hmmmmm... Could this mean that..." Vanilla checked it out some more. She simpered and put it inside her coat. Merry Oaths and the world were such small places...
"What now, Vanilla?" Rowie asked.
"C'mon. We have a mission to do. Remember?" She smiled at him, taking the first step.
"Woof!" The puppy hopped, and they began their stroll once again in the desolate, gloomy, and broken streets of Merry Oaths. The night was still young.