Occulturation #14 After Death
Date: Pixie-Incorporeal-Restcha (3rd day, 4th week, 3rd month)
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Millie thought that death would be peaceful and still. But it isn’t. The sounds of screaming and panic hurt her ears. Even with her face against the ground, she can tell there is a great deal of movement as she feels the vibrations in the dirt around her from all of the running and stomping. At least she doesn’t feel any pain except for screams hurting her ears. That’s one good thing about death. It doesn’t hurt. She expected it to hurt. The sun has fallen below the horizon. Millie knows it’s only a matter of time until midnight. Who knows what will happen to the remaining survivors then. It doesn’t matter too much to Millie. She isn’t one of the survivors. She had her chance and she blew it. She didn’t even get to see the face of the creature that killed her. Another thing that Millie finds strange about death is that is still conscious. She thought that death would have been like sleep. How long has it been since she has slept? Why can she still hear their screams? She can’t sleep. She can’t rest. Her mind is still anxious. There is something that she still must do. There is some unfinished business that she must complete. She cannot rest until it is done. But she can’t move. Her body is numb. She can’t feel anything. Her senses begin to dull. The screams muffle and her ears don’t hurt anymore. But she can sense the horrible presence of the creature that killed her. The creature is slowly walking to the hysterical mob of people. Millie can’t see it, but she knows that it is holding a cup of Clementinenade in its hands. Milllie wishes she could move, that she were still alive. But the dead don’t rise and so neither can she. In the back of her mind, this all seems so familiar. Millie puts it out of her mind. How can death feel familiar? Death isn’t something you can experience more than once. Millie can tell that her bones are broken, crumpled beneath her. It was a really tall oak tree. Amongst the tallest in the forest. Probably around 100 feet tall. Maybe if she hadn’t landed on her head, she might have had a chance. Millie hates this. Her spine must have snapped, that’s why she can’t move. Paralysis. If only she were asleep. If only she could rest. As her corpse lies broken on the ground, Millie feels restless. Even though she can’t move, she feels like there is something she needs to do. She can’t give up until she accomplishes her task. Millie asks herself What is it I think I need to do? But there is more than one task she must complete. She has obligations that cannot be abandoned, not even in death. A contract bound by the souls of children. Not even her death sets her free. But there is something beyond the contract. Something bigger, ancient. A purpose that she has felt simmering in her heart for nearly an eternity. Since before she ever met Garesh, she has been harboring a desire that she now finally has the chance to realize. It terrifies her. Millie brings her attention back to her contract. She must save Garesh.
She must help him defeat his enemies. Millie doesn’t really remember making the contract, or at least, she doesn’t want to. It reminds her that something isn’t right with her. It reminds her that she has died before. But Millie cannot ignore the contract. The terms throw themselves against her mind every time she would try to break the contract, such as if she were to break the contract by dying before fulfilling the terms. It’s too bad that Millie can’t move. Death didn’t stop you before. Why should it stop you now? Millie tries to ignore the voices in her head. =They sound like little children. 5-year old girls begging her to act. Millie finally hears something other than screams in her ears. “No, no, no! Stay away from me. I don’t want to drink that!” It’s the young woman. The real one. The Screamer had been disguised as her using illusions. But Millie isn’t under the effects of the illusions anymore. She knows that this is the real young woman that she is hearing. And it sounds like the Screamer is offering her some Clementinenade. Strangely, Millie didn’t hear the Screamer say anything. Millie tries to think of what she could possibly do, given that she is dead. She knows a few dead people. Svartr, Willheim, Jack. They’re all dead. They can still do things. But Millie can’t leave her body. She is stuck to it. However, if the Incorporeals can move, then she should be able to as well. Millie focuses on her right hand. She tries to move her muscles, but they don’t work. There are no signals sent from her brain. Her spine has snapped, after all. She is dead. But, something in her must still be alive. Maybe not part of her body, but her spirit. She is still aware. She can still see and hear, even if all she can see is the dirt in front of her face and all she can hear are the screams of a hysterical mob and the whimpers of the young woman trying to refuse the Clementinenade. Millie reaches out with… well not with her hands, but with some part of her Psyche, her essence. She grabs hold of her own right hand and pulls. Her hand flops forward. That’s not going to work. Millie thinks to herself. So she grabs her waist and rolls it. Then she has to grab and twist her shoulders. Her whole body fumbles toward the sound of the whimpering young woman. Millie slowly rolls like a log. She imagines this is how Willheim would puppet his own corpse if he still had a body.
Millie’s rolling corpse bumps into someone’s leg. It’s the Screamer. Millie’s body is lying on the ground. But Millie must know the face that killed her So she grabs her own face and twists. She feels resistance as her head spins too far until finally, her head has turned 180° to face the Screamer. Millie immediately regrets this. The Screamer’s skin is made of the material of an orange peel. And its head is a giant orange. Its face is merely holes carved through the peel. Circles with pulp hanging out are its eyes. And its mouth oozes reddish-orange fluid and pulp sits in its always-open maw. Millie can’t tell its reaction as it watches her lying on the ground, since the carved face of the Screamer is unable to change. Millie hears the young woman whimpering as drinks the Clementinenade. “Help.” Gulp. “Help… Help.” Gulp. The young woman’s eyes become unfocused and she no longer looks at the Screamer, but through it. The Screamer looks up from Millie and turns one way and then another, as though looking for something or someone. It raises its dark purple gnarled root-like hands coated in dark red liquid and pulp. It scratches its head as it looks back down to Millie’s corpse. The Screamer looks back up and shakes its head slightly. It grabs the young woman by the shoulder and leads her to a tree. Millie holds up her own shoulders to try and get her a better view. Her legs kneeling on the ground beneath her, Millie’s awkward posture makes it hard for her to see straight as her head sits sideways on her shoulders. She swings her torso back and forth like a pendulum to try and get a view of Garesh or the Incorporeals. Even as the noose comes down around the young woman’s neck, Millie sways back and forth until she sees him. Noose around his neck, he sits high in a tree. The rope is slack, but if he were to fall off his branch, he would surely die. Millie thinks she now knows what feast will be happening at midnight. The corpses hanging from the trees must be from the last feast. She wonders how long ago the Screamer last had a feast if the corpses are so rotten that they are falling apart.
Millie can reach the tree, but she wonders how she will climb the tree without precise control of her body. She rolls towards the tree that holds Garesh and can see the young woman out of the corner of her eye, being hoisted up a tree slowly by the noose around her neck. As she rolls, Millie can feel something snapping under her weight. She hopes those are just twigs and not her bones. Millie hits the trunk of the tree and stops rolling. Millie realizes how she will climb up the tree and would smile at her brilliance if she had control of her face. This is going to be easier than when I was alive, she thinks to herself. She holds herself by her center of gravity just above her waist and pulls her hands upward to stretch out her broken arms. She slams her weight against the tree and continues to push. She pushes her two hands together against a branch above her. She can’t pull with her hands since she can’t use her muscles, but she can push her body up against the tree and slowly slide up it. Her hands smushed together against a branch to act as an anchor. Once she is high enough, she contorts her body by holding the branch pinned between her legs and raises her hands back up again in search of another branch. She is terribly damaging her body and her skin rakes away as she pushes her body up against the tree, and slides slowly upwards. But she can’t feel pain and without use of her muscles, she finds no other way to scale the tree.
Millie hears something thumping against the bark beneath her. She adjusts her head, which realizes is still backwards to see the Screamer is crawling up the tree after her. She can now hear faint whispers hissing forth from its unmoving, permanently agape carved smile. “You are such a troublesome child.” Millie frantically slams her body against the tree and doesn’t even bother with anchoring her hands and legs against branches. She just slams her weight into the tree again and again. Splinters scrape against her flesh and wounds rake through her sides as blood starts to trickle down. But she doesn’t care. I have to get away from that thing! How funny. She would have thought that she wouldn’t fear anything once she was dead, but even in death, she is still scared. The Screamer twists its arms as though it has no joints to climb up the tree like a spider. It’s skittering limbs are like twisted branches that are double the length of a man’s arm. Its clothes are merely patchworks of leaves covering its torso from its neck down to its knees. But by the way its legs bend, those knees might only be for show.
Millie looks down again and realizes that she has passed Garesh’s branch in her mad dash to escape the Screamer. She doesn’t want to go anywhere near the Screamer, but she knows that she must protect Garesh. The Screamer is his enemy. She hates how her understanding of Vengeance in the contract dictates that she must fight this creature. It’s not so much willpower as much as the inability to take actions counterintuitive to saving Garesh that gives her the courage to push her weight directly downwards, back towards the Screamer. The Screamer nimbly dodges away, jumping to some branches to the left. Millie pushes her weight towards the Screamer, following it like a homing missile. A hiss screams from the head of the monster and Millie pulls her hands and feet outwards to catch the branches as slams her weight into the monster.
The orange-headed Screamer falls from the tree but bounces when it lands, it’s arms and legs acting almost as springs to catch its fall. It does bounce high, just enough to prevent it from being harmed by the fall. Millie, however, has her arms and legs lacerated by the branches they tore through to prevent her from falling off the tree. Leaves and branches are entwined with her limbs. And it makes it difficult for her to push her body back towards Garesh. However, she scrapes her body against the bark and rests her body limp over the branch that Garesh is sitting on. Millie knows that the Screamer is climbing back up the tree towards her, so she has to act fast. She knows she has the key in her pocket. She can’t speak the command words, but it is a bit sharp, so perhaps she could… Millie slams her palm against the pocket of her skirt where she is holding the key. Garesh never got me clean clothes! Millie takes a moment to realize just how silly it is for her to be worried about Garesh’s poor care for her, leaving her in the same blood-stained clothes that she originally came in given how trivial that is in her current situation. Those poor children. Now her blood stains mark her clothes just like theirs do.
Millie squeezes her hand, unable to articulate her fingers. She simply crushes the hand closed on itself over the pocket. The key is locked in her cold, dead grip. She pulls her closed hand away, tearing cloth as the pocket rips open and the key comes out in her hand with cloth all around it. Her hand is bleeding from being crushed against a sharp key, but she doesn’t care. She pushes her hand up against the rope, and crushes it between the key and the branch. Then she begins to saw. The rope begins to fray. Soon, Garesh’s noose won’t be tied to the branch anymore. Millie can hear the hissing getting closer and closer. The branch is shaking as the monster skitters up the trunk of the tree. It is so close that she can feel its weight on the branch.
SNAP!
Millie’s key hits the branch, having cut all the way through the rope. But Millie doesn’t trust Garesh’s balance as he sits on the tree in a stupor on the shaking branch. Millie doesn’t have a pocket anymore and doesn’t have time to find a place to store her key. So she stabs it into her right side and feels it scrape against her ribs. She pushes her arms and legs around Garesh’s chest and pushes them towards her center of gravity and she throws her entire weight into the tree. Garesh is dragging her down, but she just needs to slow their fall with the friction of Millie’s body scraping against the bark of the trunk of the tree. She pushes and pushes her body against the tree with all of her bodiless might as gravity pulls her downwards. She feels like she is being dragged down a cheesegrater, but she can’t feel pain. The Screamer is chasing after them, jumping from branch to branch, but it can’t beat her accelerating fall. She is only about ten feet from the ground now. Millile pushes her body into the nearby branches, crashing through the branches, but it works. She slows their fall and they land on a few of the people that are hysterically bumping into each other as they run around. Garesh doesn’t appear to have broken anything, and all of this movement is waking him back to his senses. He is stirring a bit.
The Screamer jumps the rest of the way to the ground and lands about 20 feet away. Millie can see a blue flickering flame hovering behind some bushes. Millie rolls out from underneath Garesh, and flails wildly to get Jack’s attention. The flame flies out from behind the bush. Then the bush parts as though by a strong breeze. After the bush closes back together, the shadow of a man crawls across the bush’s though it is only barely visible in the darkness due to the light provided by the blue candle-like flame. No one seems to notice the blue flame flying through the chaos, except for the orange-headed Screamer, which hisses angrily. Millie is dead, which means that her Screamer sigil scars should be showing now. Hot-branded into the back of her right shoulder is the sigil for Undead, on her right side where she stabbed the key is the burn scars for Shifter, in her left side is Fey, the back of her left shoulder is Incorporeal, and finally stretched across the entirety of her back is Angel. With her clothing having never been changed, the long dress that used to go down to her legs is barely even a knee-length skirt that squeezes into her waist and the long-sleeved, oversized dark purple cowl bearing the symbol of the ancient cult is a short sleeved hoodie that barely even covers her belly button, and shows far more skin than The Lady ever would have allowed.
Millie throws her body towards Jack, who is hesitant but unable to refuse to help her. She slams her two hands around the flame and pulls him to her left side. She can feel his numbing flames tickling her scars, she wills him to Incorporate, he cannot resist her command. Millie’s body is wreathed in blue flames. She only needs one more thing. She flails towards Garesh’s body, which is struggling to get up from the ground. There! In his pocket! She rolls towards him like a blue burning bowling ball. The Screamer has grabbed Garesh’s body and is lifting it up by the neck. However, That leaves his legs dangling barely above the ground. It’s all Millie needs to defeat the monster. She pulls down his pants. She’s sure he would be humiliated if he were fully conscious. But Millie doesn’t care about his emotional well-being, only his physical health. She rips through the brown cloth pants and pulls out the necklace of beads. This draws the Screamer’s attention. Its head turns to face Millie. Shaky hisses tremble from its carved face. It drops Garesh and stumbles backwards as Millie, burning with blue flame, holds the necklace of beads in her hands. Millie knows it’s addictive to Surge, but she has little other choice. With 119 beads, she could sustain the addiction for a while anyway. She drops the necklace as one more of the beads goes dark. The blue flames that cover Millie’s body become real. Real heat radiates from the blue bonfire. She rolls towards the monster, leaving a trail of blue fire behind. The fire behind her quickly becomes normal reddish-orange fire as it leaves contact with her body. The orange-headed monster skitters as fast as it can on those twisted spindly arms and legs. However, it’s not fast enough to outrun the reckless rolling of the burning corpse of a little girl. Millie feels her body weight crash into the monster. Her ball-like form crushes its legs beneath her weight. The monster struggles to get free but her surprisingly dense form pins it beneath her with crushing mass. And the monster lets forth hissing screams as it is consumed by the flames, like the sound of a spider when you light it on fire. As the Surge runs its course through Millie’s body, she feels her muscles knit together and her flesh stitch back to her body. The fires scorching her skin counteract the healing, so Millie releases Jack from her scarred wound in her left side. The blue flame roars out as a ball of fire that is the size and shape of a human head. Millie thinks she can barely make out facial features. It’s a young boy. She lies there, crumpled on the smoldering corpse of the orange-headed monster. Most people have climbed down from the trees by the time midnight rolls around. And those that haven’t yet escaped wait for the firefighters to arrive to save them as the forest burns.
When Millie is surrounded by the sounds of footsteps, she looks up to see the masked faces of firefighters in their heavy flame-retardant clothing and gas masks to keep out the smoke. They lift her up and carry her towards the ambulance. Millie notices that Jack has returned to a flickering candle-like flame. He is orange and blending in with the other embers. Millie sees a firefighter climbing down a ladder up against a tree while he is carrying down the young woman that the Screamer had disguised itself as. He asks, “Ma’am, can you see how many fingers I’m holding up? Nevermind, it’s hard with these gloves. Um, how about this. Lady, do you remember your name?”Millie feels chills as she sees the woman’s wounds. It looks like someone had been carving out her insides from a hole cut into her side. That’s why Millie knew what she would say before she even answered. “I’m Clementine.”