By this time, Dexter’s skin had become translucent, a thin shell covering the thing that had destroyed him. Under the yellowish, parchment-like covering, lumps and tendrils moved back and forth, thrashing impatiently and pushing out, here and there, causing cracks and tears in the drying skin. Only the mouth, impossibly large and tooth-filled, and the eyes, burning red surrounding pit-black irises, showed the horror of the thing waiting to shed Dexter’s skin and be born into our unready world.
“Time itself will come to an end, Paladin.” The voice of the beast that was wearing Dexter’s skin was surprisingly high-pitched, piping and unpleasant. As it spoke, tendrils lashed out of its mouth, probing at the desiccated skin of Dexter’s face, tearing strips loose and bearing them away, into the open maw. “Those From Outside will follow my path, and this little realm will become ours; it will be rent and torn and changed to suit our whim. All that you know will end in pain and hate and terror, without end.”
With a piercing, staccato sound that might have been a demented laugh, the mouth-tendrils shot out and finally tore the skin of Dexter’s face and head loose, pulling it back into the creature’s maw in great strips, filling the air with a series of horrible tearing and cracking sounds. As the skin was consumed, the mass of thrashing, whipping, sucker-ended tendril spread and unfolded. This sudden, final destruction of the visage of a man who had been a friend to each of us brought out shrieks, groans, and no small amount of flinching from our little group, as we each fought the urge to flee headlong away from the monstrosity. The tendrils seemed to focus on our sounds, or movements, and, as more and more of them, impossibly more, unfolded, swelling to three, then four, times the size of poor Dexter’s head. The eyes had separated, each to its own tendriled stalk, above the mouth that gaped from just below where the head-stalks joined.
More ripping and tearing as all of Dexter above the waist split and then vanished, some pulled into the thing’s mouth, but most consumed by the suckers on the end of each glistening, flagella-like stalk that burst forth, freed from their chrysalis of human skin. As with the head, the monster swelled and spread out more tendrils than could possibly have been held in the dimensions of a human chest, and gave the eye-watering impression of unfolding from…somewhere else.
The appendages that had been encased in Dexter’s arm split each into two multi-jointed extremities that spread out fore and aft, and lifted the central structure, Dexter’s legs still dangling from it’s underside, off the ground. One shoe and sock dropped off, and some sort of claw like thing could be seen struggling to break free as the rest of the thing had. The maw of the creature began spitting out painful sounds, and suddenly the world around me seemed to have an unreal sheen to it, like the cheap plastic of a child’s toy.
Enough of this, I thought. Reaching to my waist, the familiar weight of the Colt 1911 came into my hand, and I could feel the sigil embossed on the grip slip into line against it’s mirror, tattooed onto my palm. As I began to speak the Words, time slowed, making it a physically taxing effort to push the weapon and my arm into line for a good shot. A burning began in my palm, and, as the incantation continued, spread it’s fierce pain up my arm and into my chest, searing my heart.
After a period I can’t measure, my eye, arm, hand, and weapon came into line for the shot, just as the incantation ended. Time stopped. I could see the white hot lines burning bright on the metal of the weapon, extending over my hand and arm. Mostly, I saw that the shot was aimed at the abomination a few yards away from me, and would strike just where I wanted it to. I said the final word.
Time snapped back, and I had to squint away from the bright, painfully bright, spectacle of the burning power of the round pulling the lines of heat down my arm, into the weapon, and through the space that separated me from the thing that had killed my friend. The shot made a burning line out of the end of the barrel, with heat and licking fire coming from it. It hit the beast just under the jaw, where it’s form thickened from the joining of the two upper stalks.
For a moment, the thing seemed panicked, with both stalks of it’s upper section flying down and slapping at its midsection. Smoke rose from the point where the shot had struck, and the sun-brightness of it flickered and spun as the tendrils surrounding it lashed and withered under the heat.
But this only lasted a moment. The horror paused for a moment, seeming to consider, and, as it became obvious to us all that it wasn’t going to be killed by this, it’s keening ‘laughter’ filled the air again.
I was paying attention to neither it’s fear or it’s joy. While it had been preoccupied, I had taken my second weapon in had. Though this weapon was also a .45, it seemed to only weigh a slight fraction of it’s brother pistol. As I swung my right arm into line, the weapon seemed to pull my hand forward, so that I had to spit out the three words of the activating spell as fast as I could. I didn’t even bother to aim, as the pistol would make the rounds strike where it thought they should. I spoke the Firing Word and squeezed the trigger four times, feeling the stab of the freezing sigil on this one’s grip shoot pain up my arm, covering it with freezing lines that flared and vanished instantly, leaving only the seared image on my retina and steam rising from the arm of my jacket where the frozen sections that had been exposed to the lines of force met the sections that had been untouched.
The four rounds struck almost in the same instant, forming a diamond pattern around the point where the hot round had struck.
The thing stopped. It yelped, then shook itself like a wet dog, then began to shake madly and whine. The light cast by the five rounds began to spread. Fire sprang out of a few clumps of tendrils, then a few more. Ice and hoar-frost solidified on other patches. As the abomination’s painful gyrations grew in intensity, whole sections of itself became engulfed in primal cold and heat, flame giving way to ice, frost burning away under the onslaught of insistent conflagration. Huge, suppurating wounds formed at the borders of the different sections, only to be consumed and exacerbated as each element spread and fought for space on the thing’s hellish form. As it beat its four legs against the unyielding floor, cold and ice covered almost one entire appendage, which snapped under the manic terror that consumed the keening beast. One of the head stalks leaned down and tried to push the stump of the amputated limb, now attached by a thin strip of skin, against the point of the break, but screamed as the limb burst into flame and melted the eye attached to the stalk.
I tore my eyes away from the spectacle of the thrashing beast, and looked back at Saren’s horrified face.
“Saren!”, I called out, “Saren!” No response from her, my voice bouncing off of her disgusted fascination with the pain of the beast that had come out of Dexter.
“SAREN!” I screamed, to no avail. “God damn it, Saren, wake up! MYKE!”
At the sound of her given name, Saren’s eyes snapped to mine. “Now! Do it now! This won’t kill it either! It’s just gonna piss it off! Send it back, before the rest of it breaks through!”
Saren gaped at me for a moment, confusion written all over her expression. After a second, though, she snapped into focus. She glanced at the beast, which seemed to be trying to beat itself to death, then back at me. With a curt nod, she started singing.
Saren’s voice cut through the awful sounds the thing was making. As her song continued, the thing diminished, shrank, folded back in on itself. Still covered in fire and ice, it was being forced back into the aperture from which it had come, into Dexter’s skin.
Even the bits that had snapped off from the cold or melted from the heat were pulled back into the husks of Dexter’s legs. At last, all of it vanished, and, with a huge cracking sound, the scarred and battered flesh settled to the ground, empty and flaccid.
This was all that was left of Dexter.
I turned and looked at my shell-shocked friends, and realized I had no idea what to say to them.
