I slowly opened my eyes. They stung. My forehead stung. My shoulder stung.
Everything hurt. I was laying on stone steps I had become familiar with. I was in front of the hospital-church.
Why was I outside? Why was I unconscious on the ground? Why did I hurt all over?
Did I fall from the roof during my chat with Steph?
I looked up from my face-plant position. Inches from my face was another. Wrinkled green skin, bulging empty eyes, enormous nose, fanged teeth.
I bolted up, and scrambled away on my backside. A mound of bodies, trampled and pulled apart, circled around me.
My back slammed into something hard. My left eye immediately looked back to find the front door of the hospital-church wide open. That's what I had run into.
I shakily rose to my feet. The battle from last night rushed back to me.
"Steph! Kalamay! Aubrielle! Anyone?" I shouted, stumbling through the doorway.
My stomach churned at the sight before me. The wooden room was crimson. Bodies were all around the room, a gruesome portrait depicting the fate of more than twenty women and children. Faces that had smiled, people who had spoken to me just yesterday lay with faces twisted in long-gone screams.
It was too much. I vomited.
After coughing and spitting as much of my dinner as I could, I moved slowly to the stairs. They were cleaner than the room, though a woman, one of the girls who were vying for my attention, was sprawled at the top. Her nightgown had a hole in the middle of her back, where crimson liquid soaked it.
"I guess you never got what you wanted," I murmured respectfully, then I called out, "Steph? Kalamay? Aubrielle? Anyone?"
I heard a small voice answer. I followed it through the hospital portion, except I almost didn't recognize it. Beds were overturned. Mattresses were shredded. Medical instruments lay shattered, and there was a hole in the far wall. This was where most of the bodies were, as well as a few goblin bodies. There were still a few missing from my general count.
"Where you?" I called out.
"Oh, Argolex! Over here!"
I followed the voice to a closet on the other side of the room. The closet door was barricaded with debris from the hole and a bed leg.
"I seem to have locked myself in here. Would you mind getting me out?" She was the leader of the girls who had confronted me yesterday.
"It might take a few minutes," I replied before shoving the bed to the side. It didn't take much.
The debris took a bit longer because I didn't have a shovel to move a lot of it at once. A few minutes of work passed, and the door was free.
I pulled it open, and averted my gaze after a brief glimpse at her.
"Put shirt back on," I said, walking away.
"I was trying something new! You said that someone was doing something for you that the rest of us weren't. Don't blame me!" she said over the sound of her moving about.
"That clearly not it." I replied, fighting a primal instinct to turn around anyway.
"Where Aubrielle? Kalamay? Steph?"
"Someone commanded the goblins to take the magic users captive. He specifically said to take Stephasha. I could tell because he said something about silver hair."
"Did you hear anything else?"
"Lots of banging. Stephasha shouting that you'd come for them. Laughter. Evil laughter." I heard her shiver. Then, after a moment, she asked softly, "What did Stephasha do that the rest of us didn't?"
"She talk with me. She get to know me. She not hide self behind fake smile. She desperate, but not let desperate control."
"To think a man would want that… I can barely imagine it."
I turned around to find her fully dressed again. She gasped, clasping her hands over her mouth.
"Your eye!"
"Yes. Kalamay say it is 'Chaos Scar'. I not know what that mean, but she hide it."
"You're an otherworlder…" realizations seemed to be dawning on her.
"Yes. I walk from other world. I now here. I will go find Steph and others."
"Do you even know where they went?"
I pointed in the direction of the broken wall. "They leave ten hours and twenty-four minutes ago."
She looked at me awestruck. "How did you guess a time frame like that?"
"I good with time now I here. I not know why."
"But ten hours?" She repeated, "The trail is definitely cold now!"
I don't know why, but I instinctively let my mind drift back and recreate the scene as it might have been. Women holding their children as the horde of goblins swarmed the room. A man in a hooded black cloak formed, beyond my own control, standing two feet above the swarm. He seemed to give orders to the goblins.
I watched the memory, fascinated at the details that I was no longer supplying. I now saw a ghostly silhouette of the scene before me. Goblins rushed the mothers and children, cutting them apart with ghostly weapons. Kalamay, Aubrielle, and a number of others resisted, grabbing the weapons as they spoke silent words.
A whirlwind sprung up around Kalamay, tossing furniture and goblins alike. Fire erupted from others. Water shoved more.
The hooded figure gave commanding gestures. The magic all collapsed around him, dissolving to nothing. Then the physical wrestle continued, the women matching the small fiends they were holding off. But the goblin numbers were too many, and the women were overpowered.
Suddenly, a ghostly Steph burst out of the closet to the middle edge of the wall. She looked like she was screaming, and silvery whisps blew off of her. Her eyes were silver orbs. The silver wisps cut the goblins they passed by.
The cloaked man pointed a thin finger at Steph. A moment passed, the whole room seeming to freeze. Then Steph's eyes closed, the silver wisps disappeared, and she collapsed. Goblins pounced on her and they restrained and gagged the living women.
Then the cloaked figure gestured to the illusionary wall, and the illusion burst open, resulting in the current hole. Then, a small group at a time, the goblins leapt from the hole, each group carrying one of eleven captives.
I walked to the hole, my blackened eye tracing the shadows of the past.
"I can find them. I will rescue." I said.
"That's crazy."
I ignored her and jumped after the illusions, running north.
They would pay.