The Manticore and the Moon Sprites – Chapter 33

*Scene 01* – 00:00 (Monsters in The Lake)

Despite the serenity of the scene, we noticed something moving along the edge of the large pool, just below the surface.  A whitish form, roughly oblong in shape, created a pale, cloudy, luminescence below the green surface.  Its sinuous undulating motions created a rippling wake, though no part of it appeared to break the crest of the water.  Other than that, its form was elusive.  More fish-like in motion than that of an animal.   Yet in the Mid-Worlds, no possibility could be completely ruled out.  If we were to learn any more, we would have to get closer.  And the way ahead must certainly require we pass within a neared proximity, whether we wished to or not.

Additional movement caught our eye, as something large and moving fast came into sight at the far left end of the pool, moving fast down the tree-shrouded slope, noisily crashing through the underbrush, huffing and rumbling as it slid and skidded downward towards the water’s edge.  Finally, it crashed through the skirting brush and skidding to a stop on the mossy, grassy bank.  Gray smoke feathered steamy tendrils from its tawny back, and its powerful front claws dug into the mud and grass, tearing out great gouts of the embankment, scaring the shoulder as it bounded towards the water.  It was one of the manticores, that had laid siege to Azragoth.  It mewled and growled angrily, its hide blackened and burnt, its great mane singed and matted with melted fur and fiery welts where the oil and tar continued to smolder and lick its body with fading blue flames.  The hide of its back was red and raw, the fire had peeled it and cauterized the wounds so that they merely wept rather than bled out.  Its face was contorted, disturbing in its partial human and bestial mix, its feral eyes roving for something to take its fury out on, its slack and fanged jaws champing at the misty air from the pounding falls.  It gathered itself, muscular hind legs bunched, front legs and chest lowered nearly to the ground, segmented and scorched tail lashing back and forth in angry whip-like motions, before it sprang into the large green pool with a mighty SPLOSH, water exploding up onto the shore as the weight of the savage creature plunged downward.  The aura of flames, finally doused, the creature surfaced, its wet matted mane plastered against its neck as it paddled to and from allowing the cooling water to soothe its suppurating wounds.  One might have even felt sorry for the creature, had we not known of its capacity for violence and the threat it posed to our friends and us as we traveled further into the interior.  If the beast survived its wounds, it would surely stalk us through the forest and eventually bring us down.  Manticores killed in a very insidious way.  Being part lion, part human and having what appeared to be the insectile tail of a scorpion, they are formidable killing machines, with a singular thirst that drove them to obsession.  The taste and need for blood.  With the mouth of a human, except for the slightly larger mandible, they could not extend their jaw to the extent that an average lion could in the Surface World.  As such, they could not rip and tear such great hunks of meat off a carcass to slake their hunger in the way our great cats could.  But they could drink up the blood of their kills by the gallons.  You might even say they preferred a juice diet.  And that furry, segmented tail, scorpion-like in appearance, actually have two barbed spins at the end of their telson.  One with a hard carapace vesicle with a gland that injects a stunning mix of venom and anti-coagulant, and another sting bard that is a hollow proboscis that jabs into a body and serves as a sucking pipe.  With their mauled victim pinned, the manticore engorges on the blood flowing from the stab wound, with bellows-like spiracles that strengthen the pumping action as their victims are rapidly drained of their life essence.  A manticore may or may not linger to taste the meat of their kill, but these are usually cursory bites in the soft tissue areas, and rarely result in a large-scale stripping of flesh.  If they drag their victims, it is with some difficulty since they do not bear the large jaws of a true giant cat.  To say the least, these are savage creatures, and with full knowledge of what they are capable of and how they go about their kills, makes sympathy for such a rather ridiculous waste of misplaced emotion.  Manticores were a scourge.  A violent and unnatural threat to civilized and domestic creatures, that could barely be contained.  Only The Pan held sway with them, for reasons not fully known to me.

We dismounted and crouched down edging our way to the overlooking ledge, to observe the waterfall and basin below, careful not to be seen or noticed.

From our vantage point, we watched as the manticore swam in the pool, its head skimming and frothing the surface as its submerged legs and torso churned the water below.  Its face was larger than a human man, streaked with soot and scorch marks.  Feral and fierce, its eyes luminous with a yellow scintillation.  If we were able to do so without getting ourselves killed in the attempt, this stray manticore also needed to be put down.  I also wondered, if whatever we had seen moving under the water before had also seen and taken an interest in this creature.  When the manticore entered the water we had been distracted for a moment, but the other unidentified creature that had been swimming near the surface had submerged as if it had never been there.  Some of us wondered aloud if it were possible that the Manticore might have frightened it away.  After a while longer, it appeared that that had been the case.  At least until young Will spotted new and sudden movement in the water.  From several sides at once, the water appears to bunch up and churn with rolling waves.  Evening darkled on the distant horizon, as grey shadows grew to slushy, roadside snowbanks in the sky.  A pale-yellow twilight pulled the rays of the sun across a fading pastel spectrum ending in a mountain-rimmed edge of pink and rose.  As the greying darkness approached, the agitation in the basin waters grew, causing the Manticore to cease its leisurely swim.  Noticing, at last, the rings of concentric waves approach him in advance of an undercurrent of pushed water.  From approximately five sides, the underwater disturbances began to converge on the beast, the presences below causing this still unclear and undefined.

The Manticore, though formidable on land, was out of its element in the water.  It seemed to realize this and began swimming more rapidly back towards the shoreline.  A rising cross wave indicated a shift below the surface, as the submerged creatures moved to cut off its access and drive it back out into deeper water.  The movements suddenly became more pronounced, causing the resulting wave crests to cut across the water’s surface.

Like circling arrows in a decaying gyre, edging ever closer to the swimming manticore, the unidentified creatures were clearly and strategically working in coordination.

The occluded green water began to glow as the evening drew an eyelid of darkness across the basin lake.  White ghostly tendrils, like long pale nimbuses of hair, striated the surface with a milky greenish sort of writhing phosphorescence just below the surface of the water.  From each of the five swimming crests, tracers of light glowed through the water, the light growing more pronounced with the ebbing rays of the fading sun.  From the forest, sparkles of light began to flash from among the darkening leaves and zip about in the air swooping in and out from the edge of the dark wood to the water’s edge and then back into the darkness, as if hesitant to fly across the water of the basin.

The manticore trod water, fearfully watching the movements of the waves.  Its ugly, bobbing, head turning this way and that, in an attempt to gage from which direction the attack might come.  The tiny erratic flying lights from the forest line, distracting it a little as if these flashes were in league with the water beings below the water.  The gyre began to close on the manticore, their white green hair sweeping behind the crests of the waves as white fin ridges broke the surface of the water in a ghostly paleness.

Maeven had been watching the developments closely, curious to see what kind of beings would dare threaten a manticore and when she saw the fins and the bleached paleness of their skin she thought she knew at last what these could be.

*Scene 02* – 00:00 (Scene Title)

*Scene 03* – 00:00 (The Pearl)

The water rippled as the tendrils, with a bulbous pod shape at each end rose and skated over the surface of the water.  The forms of the beings rose up like submerged manatees, their hides sparkling in wet radiance with an opalescence lunar light.  As evening mastered the day into submission, the rising moon’s light began to glimmer across the basin lake surface.  Somehow its light seemed to embolden the creatures as their torsos broke through the water, revealing these beings to be stranger in appearance than anyone could have imagined.  A white pale head with aquatic, unblinking eyes and no apparent mouth scanned the lake surface, its head a tentacular mass of wet dreadlocks that seemed to each have a volitional movement of their own.  At the end of these tentacles were the pods, each with a tiny mouth with a pale hooked beak.  These then were the mouths that had bitten the carcasses that had been retrieved from the lake.  These were the means upon which the creatures relied to feed their bodies.  Pondering this, I felt my gorge rise as I heard Maeven whisper her conclusion on what these creatures were.

“Moon Sprites,” she muttered, “Once called Gorgons, in the Surface World, in Ancient Greece.  The Medusa was thought to be one of these.  Fearful creatures.  It was believed they could turn a person to stone, but that is a mere myth.  They use a Mesmer technique, their pupils dilate and pulse and appear to swim in their sockets.  It’s hypnotic.  And these things are adept at it.  The glow is a sort of pulsing strobe.  Deep-sea fish have this ability.  I’ve seen it in certain jellyfish as well.  An electric shimmer.  They will subdue the manticore if they can and then move in to consume it.  I’ve never seen one of these up close.  And never five of them together.  Something must have drawn them here.  They are typically in saltwater seas.  I’ve never heard of them occupying a waterfall basin pool.”

“Why Moon Sprites,” I asked, “Aren’t sprites supposed to be like fairies or something?  I thought they were also small?”

“These are very old sprite clusters.  Don’t always believe the mythical accounts of them.  The Surface World tends to distort and exaggerate the accounts over time.  Some begin with a grain of truth, but people are prone to add in and embellish.  Especially tales that are old and the truths of the tales have been lost to antiquity.  With little or no corroborating body of witnesses, and even those being few, the probability of exaggeration becomes more likely.  Especially when some learn that there can be a profit to be had by the telling.”

“So, what are they?” Christie asked.

Maeven indicated the circling water and the white waving tendrils from each of the manatee shaped creatures, “The hair is their feedlings.  Their young.  They are like living umbilicals, only instead of the infants getting fed by their mother, they are the instruments through which their mother feeds.  When they are old enough to separate from the mother host and swim on their own to mature into their own cluster, the mother births another in its place.”

It was rather a fascinating and repulsing notion, alien to Surface World mammalian life, but perhaps in some way akin to some bizarre fish-like or amphibian species.  The very thought of those bleached white things slithering away gave me the creeps.

Begglar, Nell and Dominic had been watching with wary fascination, and Begglar spoke up, “So how’re we ta get by those beasties?”

Maeven nodded at me.

“Mr. O’Brian has something with him that might do the trick.”

I jerked my head around.

“What do you mean?  The Honor Sword?”

Maeven shook her head and then gestured to the sack hanging from my belt, lowering her voice, “If what I think is in that sack of yours, you are the one who can stop this right now, before these things kill that manticore.”

“That manticore attacked Azragoth,” I answered, “Why should we intervene here.  It would just as soon as kill us.  Perhaps we can move past the basin and falls, in the distraction when they do attack.”

“That is short-sighted.  That may buy us only a few minutes.  If the manticore makes it to shore, you can bet it will sniff us out and be hot on our trail.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Depends,” she answered enigmatically.

“On what?”

“On what you’ve got in that sack there.”

I had lain prone to be able to scan the area and witness the goings-on, and I rolled to my side so that I could undo the straps that held the sachet bag.  I separated the cinched gathers and opened the bag and peered inside, surprised at what I found there.

“What is it?” Begglar asked.

“I…it looks like…” I reached into the sack and felt its smooth cool surface, perfectly round, and it drew it slowly out, careful not to drop it.

“Ahhh…” some said in a collective expression of amazement.

“It looks like a giant pearl.”

Maeven bobbed her head smiling, “Perfect!  Just perfect!  Just what I thought it might be, but we’ll have to move fast if we are going to make our bargain.”

I withdrew it, “No, we can’t.  Mattox said we would need it in Skorlith.  We cannot part with it now.”

Maeven shook her head, “I am not asking you to part with it.  I need you to use it.”

“Use it how?” my brow furrowed, “What is this supposed to be, in your mind?”

“You truly do not know what this is that Mattox has given you, do you?”

“It appears to be a pearl,” I answered, “I’m not exactly sure what you think it’s supposed to be.  A very unusual pearl for its size, I’ll grant you, but it should fetch a fairly high price in Skorlith, for all the things we will need to get safely across Lake Cascale.”

Maeven nodded, “Aren’t you curious where Mattox might’ve gotten it?”

I was dumbstruck.  I only knew that Mattox had said this was a pearl that was from the spoils of my battle.  That the pearl had not come from the Mid-World.  I had never heard of an oyster producing something this great in our world, and I could not fathom any other natural method by which it could have been formed.

Maeven acknowledged my internal reasoning and came to my rescue.

“The Dust Dragon.  It came from the tongue of the Dust Dragon.”

“What?”

“These are embedded within the flesh of their tongues.  It is the only thing good about such creatures of deception.  The pearl is the grain of truth that they surround with lies, then cast mentally out to discourage and defeat their victims.”

“How do you know about Dust Dragons?”

She was quiet a moment, and then she said, barely above a whisper, “Because you are not the only person here to have one come after you.”

I could tell, from her demeanor that the memory was not one she cared to recount at this moment, so I did not probe further.

“Okay,” I conceded, “So what is this particular dragon pearl supposed to be able to do?”

“Follow me,” she said as she edged back away from the overlook.

We swung into our mounts and Begglar and family and the young men took their places in the wagon.

She led us down a brief winding trail with the wagon following some distance behind.

*Scene 04* – 00:00 (Scene Title)

*Scene 05* – 00:00 (Scene Title)

*Scene 06* – 00:00 (Scene Title)

*Scene 07* – 00:00 (Letting It Go)

After leaving Azragoth, we had refined our choices of weapons according to the lessons that Ezra had given us.  James, a rather tall man, with long arms and stout legs, found that he was much more adept at using pole weapons, such as a halberd, or pole-ax than wielding a small short sword.  His length and stature made short sword fighting very dangerous, even though his long arms allowed him an advantage in cutting reach.  For stability, his fighting stance required him to extend his legs wider than most, to give him a pivoting center of balance, but that meant that his legs were fair game in a conflict and an adept opponent would use that to deadly advantage against him.  With a pole weapon, the deadly bladed end required an enemy to maintain distance from the long deadly sweeps possible, by a tall man such as James was.  His feet were safe from short dive-and-retreat assaults because the cleaving blade would find them, slice them and propel any severed part of them into the air long before they ever could press an advantage.

James bore his halberd cross-wise, its hooked blade extended to the front left of his horse, its reins gathered in one hand and his backward right hand holding the back shaft at length and in balance, ready for a defensive swing and thrust should the need arise.  Maeven rode along-side him, impressed by James’ carriage of, what in other hands would be, an unwieldy weapon.  “You know how to use that?” she asked, playfully teasing him.

He smiled, “We’ll see.”

“We might soon need you to demonstrate that confidence.  Be ready.”

James nodded and with that she rode on ahead, bringing us to the level of the falls basin and within closer hearing of its hissing roar.  The manticore was still out in the pool about thirty yards from the shore.  The Moon sprites feinted in and circled it, their taunting flashes causing it to oscillate from side to side, trying its best to face its attackers on multiple fronts.  Behind it, the water swished and swirled in an eddying fashion, no doubt from the defensive posture of its stinging tail movement beneath the waves.  Its fearsome aspect and fire scorch face glaring angrily at the white-mouthless faces of the Moon Sprites as they swam around him.

We dismounted and quietly approach the water’s edge, the Moon sprites occupied with their manticore prey, the manticore with its back to us, facing the opposite and closest shore.  Moonlight danced upon the surface of the small lake.  Rolling waves rustled the bullrushes and cattail reeds as the basin water lapped at the shore below us.  I held the bag with the pearl in my clashed hand as Maeven approached me.

“What I am about to ask you to do, may sound foolish, but you will have to trust me.  You will not lose the pearl if you do as I tell you.”

I regarded her calmly and reached back into the bag, once again lifting the bright white and opalescent pearl out for her observation.

“Tell me what you need me to do.”

She scanned the shoreline and noticed a log half-submerged half-floating along the side of the shore.

“We’re gonna need that,” she indicated, “Guys can you pull that up further onto the bank, for a moment so that it fully clears the water?”

Will and the boys scrambled down from the wagon and Dominic joined them as they lifted the log and tugged it up onto the bank.

Then she turned to me.

“Mr. O’Brian, you’re not gonna like what I have to tell you.  But you need to put that pearl down and allow it to roll down the bank towards the water.”

“How do we keep it from going into the water.”

“It won’t.  You’ll soon see.  Trust me on this.”

I sighed and knelt down, tucking the bag back into my waistband, and I opened my palm to allow the grapefruit-sized pearl to follow gravity to the shore.  What happened next shocked us all.