June heard the man’s strange words, but could make no sense of them. Manipulating the vast universe? What kind of esoteric magic could he possibly be using to keep them in stasis like this? As her mind raced, an image that miraculously put her at ease had suddenly cut through the haze of anxiety and loathing. It was the standing figure of her brother in front of her. A comforting vision that was just as quickly ripped away from her by the sudden intrusion of the demon-like eldritch priest’s terrifying visage. She could see the clear and appalling image of him in her mind: a representation of all the horrors she had witnessed in her visions until then. His monstrous grin stretched from ear to ear as it edged closer to her face. The princess tried to scream, but her body completely failed to respond. The utter lack of control made things all the more frightening. Her breath refused to shallow, her still heart unable to beat. A blind body now bereft of agency. She would soon be at the mercy of this vile creature and there was nothing she would be able to do about it. His horrid string of words were incoherent to her ears as he continued speaking to himself, until the sudden moment done in some twisted act of malice caused her mind to go blank. The visceral sensation of his jagged nail scraping across her throat caused the fear she had been drowning in to finally overwhelm her.
The priest grabbed Bart and shoved him aside, his frozen body stopping mid-way toward the ground. The man’s eerie smile flinched for a fleeting moment as he came face to face with June. Despite his gaze being hidden behind his turban, he seemed to easily observe the princess’s face with a cold, analytical expression. The rigid rictus on his face stretched downward into a frown as he rubbed his chin contemplatively while squeezing her cheeks in his hand. He picked off her sunglasses and tossed them aside. “Wait… I recognize that adorably squishable face hiding behind those shades. Princess June of Malachias, delivered directly to my doorstep? Now what rotten panoply of stars have aligned for such an unfortunate fate to have befallen her?” His smile returned. “How useful you could have been to us once upon a time, but alas, things change and we're about to make our grand and disastrous exit while leaving nothing but rubble in our wake. Although, I suppose killing you now might bring me a middling shred of joy…”
As the occultic man brought his fingertip up to June’s neck, the eyes of his captive suddenly widened in shock as milky pupils rolled into the back of her head. June’s mouth stretched open inhumanly wide and far past her neck, releasing a mind-shattering wail from inside of her.
“What—?!” The priest’s face contorted into a hateful grimace at June’s sudden transformation. Writhing arm-like appendages grew from her sides, the fingers of which folded together into a beak-like shape and pierced deeply into his emaciated body with deadly precision. Another hand grabbed his throat—the long, slender fingers coiling around his neck as it pulled him away to toss him across the room like a discarded doll. Blackish tar oozed from his wounds and stained his clothes as he picked himself up, trying to understand what had just happened. The woman, who was now free from the effects of the artifact, stood across from him. She had undergone some kind of strange alteration that transformed her body into a perverted monstrosity. The entity that was once a princess seemed to struggle with her newly transformed state, as her upper torso seemed to dangle around while she slowly hobbled toward him. She had grown two extra sets of arms below the ones she already had, and all six were now aggressively squirming around like the tentacles of a marine creature striking at its prey. The black tar was slowly bleeding from between his teeth. “The Scarlet Church really keeps some dark and terrible secrets, don’t they? You lot always manage to surprise me with your insidiousness. It almost rivals my own.”
A sharp suction of air sounded from the gruesome princess’s gaping mouth right before unleashing another powerful wail. Her screeching cry sounded almost like a siren—an ominous signal cutting through the darkness. Her silhouette, barely visible, twitched in the black stillness of the room. Her green dress had become torn and stretched beyond its limits to accommodate her vile form. Her brother and the others were still frozen by the madman’s relic, unable to perceive the monster she had become.
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“If you can’t even be constrained by the force of time, then I’ll just have to focus my attention elsewhere.” The man chanted something to himself in a strange tongue while raising a twitching hand to the air. As the chanting continued, the room around them began shaking and crumbling.
The eerie form of the princess continued lumbering forward, undaunted, despite the collapsing rock around her and still moving in unnatural strides.
The cult priest brought his arm down, simultaneously bringing a large chunk of debris crashing down onto the mutated creature that was once a young woman. The air was deathly quiet and the man’s stretched-out grin stretched even further in a victorious smirk. As he turned to pick up the fallen artifact that had flown earlier from his hand, a sound from behind him made him stop in his tracks. It started as a quiet moaning, followed by the turning of crumbling stone.
The girl had pushed off the giant slab of rock with her six arms like it was a simple obstruction standing in her way. It slammed back down against the ground with a shattering thud. There was another suction of air through her teeth before another piercing screech penetrated the darkness around her.
“Such a perfect, little abomination of nature you are. Unnaturally strong and unnaturally… creepy. It’s a shame, I would have loved to study you, but if I can’t kill you, I better make my escape now. No doubt your transformation must have set off some alarms to your masters and who knows what else.”
“Ma… cha…” A low, hoarse voice strained to escape from the princess’s maw.
“Yes, I suppose that monster is the one controlling you. That would explain this inexplicable urge to flee and this tingling I’m feeling inside of my head. I better get a move on then.” The smiling man picked up his scattered artifact while chanting another spell in an unknown tongue. He raised a twitching arm once again, and as he did, the room shook and the walls crumbled. “This is only a taste of what we have in store. Enjoy it while it lasts, because soon you’ll all return to the dust of stars.”
The princess creature charged forward on wobbly legs, only to be stopped by a falling boulder. She screeched at it before pushing it aside. She looked around for the evil priest, but was blinded by the dust of falling debris being swallowed into the darkness around it. She howled to the heavens somewhere past the hundreds of feet of rock and the hundreds of miles of air, clutching at her head with a pair of arms, mind filled with the endless madness of her goddess. Her cries were filled with agony, unable to fathom any longer what she was experiencing. Any trace of the former Princess June was gone, replaced with mind-shattering insanity as her new eldritch form took shape. The agonizing process was slow and still incomplete. Another slab of rock came crashing down on top of her, pinning her to the cold ground, as if attempting to bury the accursed secrets unleashed therein. She wailed again, not out of any physical pain, but from the mental torture of her reality coming undone. The eerie man had vanished somewhere deep into the planet, the only remaining target of her fervor, and she no longer understood what the purpose of her madness was for.
After the rain of rock and stone finally subsided, the princess once again connected the tips of her fingers and bored straight through the stone covering her, cracking it into pieces. The creature bleeding an eldritch aura stumbled to her feet and looked around through her blank, white sockets. The frozen bodies of the others were still standing behind her, miraculously untouched by the falling debris. Her brother stood diagonally from a fall that never came. She inched over to them with slow and jagged steps, slithering her arms around uncontrollably, and then sucked in air through her teeth as she came face to face with her stiff sibling. An aggressive, discordant wail escaped from the void in her neck.
But whatever the princess had planned to do next was cut abruptly short, as in the next moment, a foreign, resonant sound slowly filled the empty chamber. It was the sound of someone singing.
