Amani:

  “What in God's name is that?” the Marquis says. The City Lord echos his sentiments before getting up. Slowly, like a cautious prey, he inches up to the window, and grabbing the curtains away from his brother in law's hand, he parts it open completely, allowing the vivid colours to seep in through.

  It was not the dancing colours that drew me in closer to that window like a mothin bug drawn to an ember lamp, but rather it were the guttural screams that emanated from it later that did. Unwittingly winding up more than I already was, I crawl to the window, hearing the rest behind me following suit. “May God protect us,” I say reflexively as I get close.

  “What the actual fuck is that?” Omar cries from my side. I hear multiple gasps follow his proclamation, as if his saying it out loud somehow solidified its existence.

  Spinning with an arching, sizzling purple light, and occupying the middle of the view through the window, was a massive hole, as if someone had carved out that space in the sky to fill it with something else, something otherwordly, something ominous. Around this sizzling, spinning hole, the light of the sky had switched off, replaced by a purple hued tinge. Slowly, this purplish sky began to change shades into hues of red. A gushing rumbling sound is what I hear first–in my ear, or in my head–I hear this sound, like the gush of water from a water fountain. The tempo of this noise increases and increases until a rod of red shoots out from the hole.

  “What in God's name is that?” Uncle Mal asks, his voice hollowed out in bewilderment.

  “I-I think those are tiny d-demons,” I hear little Ahayan say, his voice finally the tone of a little child, a scared little child.

  “You've done it, Miss,” says the City Lord, staring dumbfoundedly at the sky, “you've called down Hell on us.”

  . . .

  “M'Lord!” explodes in a soldier, one of the heavily armored gate soldiers I saw on my way in here. He wheezes, anchoring his falling helm with a hand. “I-Its hell outside. We must escort you to a safer location, M'Lord.” The City Lord nods.

  We step outside to a more horrific scene than before.

  Chaos, massacre, tragedy. These words are not enough to describe what I see before me. In the distance, over the souk markets, in the backdrop of a bleeding sky, hundred if not thousands of people slowly get raised high. Twisted pointed tails stuffed up their open mouths, snuffing out their silent screams from the world around.

  A carriage, adorned in gold and tipped with midnight diamonds, skids to a halt before us. The heavily armored men rush the City Lord and the Marquis into the carriage with a squad of heavily cloaked soldiers. From the inside, the City Lord beckons us in, but we stay frozen in place. Just as the Marquis stands back up and begins to come towards us, however, one of the heavily armored guards bangs the door shut in his face. Getting up on to the coach box, he and his fellow heavily armed buddy gallop the royal armoured carriage out of the estate.

  A shrieking maid gets picked up from the open court of the estate. The others, as if finally broken out of the trance, begin to flee into the protective arms of the rigid looming manor. A yelling Omar scolds the reluctant little Ahayan into following suit to take cover with the others. Now its just us in the open court. Another burst of a sharp screech pulls us back up, to the squirming maid in the sky. Her screeches tear through the sky a moment longer before it too is snuffed out by the rounded tail of the red demon. It flies up into its line where they all fly in a single file, a sight sickly similar to a Pirpiri ant colony line. My brain flaps through a hundred leagues a second, thinking up everything and anything on how to resolve the situation before me, but bodily I remain frozen, my flesh unwilling to listen. Slowly, even my flying brain begins to dim down a little, mesmerized by the ethereal scene before me. I remain like this until. . .

  "KREEEEE"

  The air cries with a hollowing despair; a song of death. An unnatural cry accompanies this cacophony, and how unnaturally beautiful the resulting sound is, how harrowingly mesmerising. A tear escapes my eyes, but I am unable to even wipe that off my face. I only watch in horror as the sonata of screams merge into a single inexplicable sound, a sound my ears cannot even perceive yet it pierces through my soul.

  SNAP.

  One, two, three, four, five, six . . .

  Heads snap off like twigs. A single line of pouring red. Blood. My vision clouds with red. Anger, a simmering anger, now a thundering ANGER. A guttural cry escapes from me.

  SCHWING

  The air whistles, a red demon falls. Falling, it cries in pain, what a beautiful sound. Amidst falling, its grasp laxens on the limp body it holds, and slowly the body falls with it. Both the bodies free fall for a moment before thwacking on the earth below, like a ball of spit, spat back onto the earth.

  It is only when I hear another whistle that my head snaps behind me, to the source, Arsha. Standing tall with a blazing arrow held taut between her hands, she shoots, her normally sweet face stony with concentration.

  One, two, three, four, five, six . . . ten. That's how many of them she shoots out of the air before we get noticed.

  “Kree!”

  A single red from the back of the line turns back as the one behind it bumps into it as it falls. It turns with a snarl as if about to rip open the one behind it for daring to bump into it. But its face falls once it sees its companion fall from the sky. Turning fully, it now notices Arsha, standing tall. Arsha loosens her bow and it too falls, but with a cry this time, alerting the ones before it. Now, the whole of the line turns in unison, all snarling and growling. But they're not the only ones brought to alertness.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  One fist sized rock flies at a demon, bouncing ineffectively off of its flesh. The targeted demon turns, baring its fangs in a wild hiss, but as it begins to attempt a descent, a bigger rock flies at it, and this time it bashes the demon’s face in. And suddenly, as if a chain reaction had been unleashed, a volley of rocks begin assaulting the airborne demons; some hitting, some missing. But this volley of small rocks ignites a bigger chain, and soon enough the air fills with the thundering roars of elemental spells. Boulders the size of cattle hurl through the air, clipping down large clumps of demons, the dead dangling humans beneath them free falling with them. A sad sight, but in this way, at least they'd get their loved ones back, albeit dead.

  The sky roars, the air shimmers, the red demons cry with pain, and the crowds hurl out their spells. Finally, a large crack of lightning tears through the whole of the sky, clipping down the red demons like flies, and it is this action that stops the demons in their tracts; the line finally halting, however much of the line that remained.

  I only pause my own retaliation when I spot the spinning ring of spawn getting bigger, resulting in a wider pipeline of the red little fuckers flying in. But I get a vague sense of foreboding, as if those little red fuckers were better than what's to come.

  Two hands, the size of half the spinning portal juts out of it, grabbing the corners of the spinning sizzling portal. With great effort it begins pushing against the outline of the portal. The rigid portal only budges at first, but under the unrelenting force it gives way, begins stretching, stretching, stretching, and stretching. . .

  “Oh God!” Cries somebody from behind me. Another cries, “God, forgive me for all my sins.”

  The grey gigantic hands slip back inside while the portal's size stays the same.

  A large rod shoots out of the portal and I follow it to what seems to be a leg. This supposed leg shoots out of the purple portal, and almost immediately, a grey white portal of the same size spins into existence before it, mirroring it. The new portal spins with a greyish white ash dusting off of its edges. The massive leg then enters this grey portal, the rest of its body following suit. Dumbfounded, I stare at this horrifying scene unfold.

  The Leg is followed by a pelvis, then a torso, shoulders, neck, and finally. . .a head, hosting a face, an otherworldly, terrifying face. Eyes void dark, dotted with tiny lights like a night sky filled with stars stare right at us, the gaze piercing right through me. My life, my struggles, happiness, joys, sadness; they all are minute, miniscule, and insignificant in front of the existence I hold before me. Who am I before an existence such as this?

  . . .

  A little boy, sitting in a corner, playing with a toy. The little boy looks at me, smiling. Heaving with effort, the child gets up, holds his toy up to me, as if wanting me to see it. Giggling, he begins to run to me, adorable. But a voice whispers next to me, tone full of spite. “Lesson two, my princess; trust no one. He may appear to be an innocent child running to his big sister with his toy in his hands, but soon enough he'll be running to you with a dagger in his tiny little hands, just like his mother. He's your rival, dear princess, a rival to the throne."

  Snap

  GASP

  What? Who? Me? Who am I, what am I . . . where am I?

  “Amani,” calls someone from behind me, and my body begins to respond to it, but before it can a figure comes up to me, stands beside me. “Are you okay?” It asks. I turn to it, but do not recognise the caller. Who are you? “AMANI! Get a hold of yourself.”

  . . .

  Yes, I'm Amani, Princess of Eyjavo, yes. . . YES! “ARSHA!” I yell. She nods, looks back at the sky, raises her bow to her head, pulls it till it's taut, and holds it against her cheek, taking aim.

  I follow her, look at the sky up above. The grey white circle has completely vanished, like it had never been there to begin with, but alas I couldn't say the same for the other one, the big purple spinning one. And that's not even the worst part, that would be the fact that the portal doesn't even seem to be shrinking, instead it slowly begins to inflate in size.

  I raise my weapon, we all do. I take aim at the inflating portal—the Mahavo party does not miss a second time.

  The beginning of a head appears and I see Arsha instinctively lose her arrow. The spinning fiery rod that seemed so mighty up close fizzles out in the face of its adversaries sheer size.

  The head of a dragon, or what seemed to be a shape that fits the descriptions of old, appears out of the spinning void. The existence, whatever it may be, disappears just as abruptly as it had appeared, not a speck of its form visible to the onlookers. After it began disappearing rapidly, all we could see all was an almost unending column of silver scales that shone brilliantly on the whole length of its form.

  The spinning vortex, now relieved of the enormous pressure, begins to shrink, and I finally get to sigh in relief. But halfway in it's shrinking it stops, still larger than its original size. The edges begin to quiver, as if being barely held apart.

  “KREE”

  A cry, shrill enough to blow most eardrums tears through the air. “Look out!” Calls from behind, and all I catch is a glimpse of Aunt Cass’s yellow slit eyes before I am shoved out of the way as she throws something at the incoming red demon. It is only when the demon falls that I see Arsha’s lava stick arrow jutting out of its back. The demon appears somehow larger than the ones before. But I am not allowed to inspect it any further.

  A crowd of demons charge at us. And we waste not a second longer as the whole party engages into combat. Uncle Mal cutting down demons left and right with his mist katana, me hooking them into my hail halberd like a kebab, Aunt Cass smashing both the close ones and the far off ones with her gauntlets of mass destruction, Arsha giving us cover while also knocking down most of the flying demons out of the sky with her expert marksmanship, and Omar reverting back to his gale curve-sword after his army issued sword broke with two solid gale hits.

  Circling around each other, with our backs pinned in like this I smile to myself—the party is finally back to form. Oh how I've missed this feeling.

  It is when I am completely zoned in that I hear a little voice screaming my name from behind me.

  “Watch out!”

  A lunging demon gets caught in Aunt Cass's Gauntlet choke in its lunge towards me.

  “No Ahayan, go back inside!” Yells Omar from my side and it is upon turning that I see little Ahayan standing in the open court, pointing his finger at the spinning portal above. I follow his direction to the sight of a form emerging from the portal. I can barely see it, it's that far, but I can sense the aura it exudes. While not will-shattering like the two before it, the forms still exude enough energy to quake me to my core.

  Four forms exit the weary portal, leaving it in its original size after them. The two in the front disappear into thin air, leaving back the two behind. One of them is a little red speck in the distance that I can barely see, the other I cannot see at all. Slowly, the red dot begins to stretch in place, an unfolding mess. Arsha gasps from beside me, seeing the horrors I cannot see. Following her gaze I look back at the red dot, it's growing larger by the minute. And before I wish it the form renders into a more discernible distance. I can vaguely see it now, a red demonic behemoth. A stick of red leaves the form, the object climbing in speed. The next few moments fly by in flashes.

  A screaming Omar erupts from behind me, running towards Ahayan. Little Ahayan sprinting back to the building. The stick of speeding red gaining visibility, aimed at him: the fleeing child. My fists wrapping around my halberd. Me taking my stance to hurl it. My hurling halberd being an inch lower than the tip of the descending stick, missing it. The stick of red plunging into Ahayan, jerking the child into place. The poor child dangling limply in the air like a rag doll.

  “NOO!”

  A guttural cry tears through the air, and it is only after I feel my throat grit in hoarseness that I realize it was me that unleashed the savage screech. Before I know it my limbs begin to move of their own accord, sprinting towards the dangling little boy, my arms extended in a desperate attempt to reach the flailing body. But before I can get anywhere close enough something crashes before me, a booming crash, the force of which blows me away.

  THUD!