The massive beast snarled, ropes of drool slapping the ground as it lowered its horned head menacingly. Eleanor's guards shrank back, their weapons trembling in their white-knuckled grips.
"Steady yourselves, men!" Eleanor heard her own voice ring out with more confidence than she felt. She stepped forward boldly, Valyrian steel leaving its sheath with a rasping hiss. "We are the queen's personal guard - show no fear!"
Her bravado didn't seem to bolster her soldiers much. The creature took another thunderous step closer, each footfall shaking the ground. It opened its fanged maw impossibly wide, a guttural roar ripping from its throat.
Too late, Eleanor realized her mistake in confronting such an otherworldly titan directly. She should have fled with the others while they still could. As the thought crossed her mind, the beast struck.
Faster than should have been possible for something so massive, it lunged forward, claws extended in a blurring arc. Eleanor just had time to raise her sword defensively before the blow slammed into her like a battering ram.
White hot agony lanced through her body as she felt ribs crack and shatter. Her feet left the ground, lifted and flung backwards like a ragdoll. She cartwheeled gracelessly, the wind knocked from her lungs.
Distantly, she heard Shane bellow her name over the screams of her disintegrating guards. Eleanor slammed into the unforgiving ground, consciousness flickering. Every gasping breath was liquid fire in her ruined chest.
Through a dimming haze, she saw the monstrous beast turn its attention to her fallen protectors. They fired arrows and threw spears desperately, but the projectiles only seemed to enrage it further. Its bulky tail lashed out, a single sweeping motion that sent bodies crumpling in a spray of blood and shattered bone.
Eleanor tried to cry out, to force her body to move, but she could only lie there helplessly. Black spots crept in at the edges of her vision as Shane rushed to her side, face twisted with panic.
"Your Majesty! Can you hear me?" His voice sounded tinny and distant, drowned out by the wet snaps and bestial snarls as the beast methodically slaughtered the last of the guards.
With a herculean effort, Eleanor managed the barest croak. "Run...Shane...get help..."
But even as the words left her lips, the monster wheeled toward them with predatory swiftness. Shane threw himself over Eleanor as it charged, shielding her broken body with his own.
In that moment, Eleanor saw the same primal fear in Shane's wild eyes as the doomed guards before him. They were face to face with something far beyond their understanding. Something not of this world.
Eleanor felt a strange sense of resignation sweep over her then, even as the rancid reek of the creature rolled over them. For all her desperate strategizing, all her maneuvering to stave off the unraveling of reality itself...perhaps this was how it was always destined to end.
A plaything crushed between cosmic forces too immense to comprehend. Just another forgotten casualty to powers as callous and indifferent as they were vast. She felt Shane's body tense above her as the beast reared up, maw agape to deal the final killing strike.
No witty one-liner slipped from his lips this time. They simply held each other's gaze for a final, crystalline second. Then the scything talons descended, obliterating everything in a weltering, sanguine spray--
SHHHHHRRRRRRRAAAAACKKKKK!
The piercing resonance reverberated through every cell in Eleanor's body. A deafening peal that pulsed in her very bones with the force of a thunderclap.
Suddenly, Shane's weight vanished from atop her, though she didn't recall him moving. Eleanor blinked, the blazing sun now directly in her eyes as she stared straight up at the cloudless sky, momentarily blinded.
Wheezing, she rolled to her side. Finding she could somehow draw breath again without screaming agony. Hazy shapes moved at the corners of her vision, resolving into...soldiers?
Eleanor squinted against the harsh sunlight, her head swimming as she tried to make sense of the scene unfolding around her. Dozens of armored figures now surrounded the courtyard, swords and pikes leveled at...nothing?
She blinked in confusion. The hulking, fanged beast that had attacked them so violently was simply gone. Vanished into thin air, as if it had never existed at all. The only evidence it had been there at all were the broken bodies of her guards strewn about.
"Your Majesty!" A familiar voice cut through her dazed state. Sir Roderick, captain of her household guard, rushed to her side. His face was creased with concern as he took in her battered state.
"Can you speak, my queen? Are you injured gravely?" His calloused hands carefully felt along her sides, probing for breaks.
Eleanor winced but shook her head slowly. "I...I don't know. That...thing..." She trailed off, utterly at a loss for words to describe the savage beast.
Sir Roderick's expression hardened at her bewilderment. "We heard the sounds of battle from the palace and made haste. But it seems we arrived too late to prevent this slaughter." He waved a hand at the carnage surrounding them, mouth setting in a grim line.
Shane appeared at Eleanor's other side suddenly, having seemingly materialized from nowhere as well. He looked completely unharmed, though his face was pale and drawn.
"That was no natural creature," he muttered, hands trembling ever so slightly. "Where in the hellish void did that abomination come from?"
Sir Roderick opened his mouth, perhaps to demand answers, when a strangled cry split the air. One of the Queen's Guards, grievously wounded but still clinging to life, dragged himself across the bloodstained dirt in their direction.
"Y-Your Majesty..." The man's words were thick with the rattle of punctured lungs. Eleanor scrambled to his side despite Sir Roderick's restraining hand.
"Soldier, do not try to speak," she murmured, cradling his head gently in her lap. The man's eyes were wild, unfocused, locked on some distant point over her shoulder.
"It...it came from...the Rift..." He coughed wetly, a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. With a final supreme effort, he raised a shaking hand to point.
Eleanor turned to follow his gesture. There, a hundred yards away across the rubble-strewn slum...a shimmering, semi-translucent oval rippled in the air. Tendrils of energy crackled along its edges, wisps of ethereal smoke drifting from its distorted center.
It didn't resemble any type of portal or gateway Eleanor had ever witnessed. More like a tear in the very fabric of reality itself, hanging suspended in space. As she watched, the unstable Rift seemed to pulse and convulse, growing marginally wider with each sickening flex.
"What in the name of the gods...?" Shane's strangled whisper was heavy with primal fear.
Sir Roderick bristled, straightening as he turned to bellow orders at his assembled troops. "Form a perimeter, you maggots! Nock arrows and prepare to attack whatever unholy things come slithering out of that abyss next!"
The men hurried to comply, Eleanor's eyes never leaving the nightmarish Rift as it continued dilating like a grotesque, gasping maw. She felt a creeping sense of inevitability claw its way into her gut.
This...this was what her advisors had warned of as Vincent's transgressions against reality worsened. Outer realms were bleeding through into her own world, their eldritch denizens spilling across like a ruptured blister.
Eleanor clutched the dying soldier tighter as another thunderous bellow rent the air, this one unmistakably emerged from the pulsing rift. More were coming. Darker. Deadlier.
Shane gripped her shoulder urgently. "Your Majesty, I beg you to withdraw to the palace! To face such horrors head-on is suicide!"
For once, Eleanor could detect no bravado or sarcasm in his voice. Only the quavering tones of naked terror. From Shane, of all people.
She wanted to agree with him, to turn and flee while they still could. But some core of iron will solidified in Eleanor's chest as she stared into the ongoing collapse, the very seams of existence fraying before her eyes.
If a ruler could not protect her people from even this...what else was she good for?
Drawing a fortifying breath, Eleanor gently lay the fallen soldier's head on the ground. She fixed Shane with a determined look as she climbed to her feet, hand finding the hilt of her sword once more.
"No. We make our stand here and now. If these...interdimensional invaders wish to claim my kingdom..." She swallowed hard, but her voice was a clarion strength.
"...they'll have to take it from my cold, dead hands."
Shane opened his mouth as if to protest further, but something in Eleanor's expression seemed to stay him. He simply gave a solemn nod, drawing his own blade beside her with a steely rasp.
Side-by-side, the pair turned to face the Rift and whatever fresh cosmic terrors it would birth next. Eleanor could feel her guard's eyes upon her, saw them straightening their spines and raising their weapons as the ominous rumbling intensified.
Yes, she would meet this existential onslaught head on, for the sake of her people. Her kingdom. Perhaps even the whole of reality, though she could scarcely conceive of such a responsibility.
As another bone-shaking roar tore across the slums, Eleanor tightened her grip on her sword until her knuckles turned white. Lifting her chin proudly, she faced down the end of everything with fierce determination burning in her eyes.
Let it come, she thought grimly. Let the cosmos itself strain to tear her world asunder.
They would have no choice but to go through her first.