The Aftermath of an ***

Zakyra screamed as Kirby's head rolled off the stone. I shielded her eyes into my chest, supporting most of her weight as she sobbed weakly against me. I had to look away myself when Kirby stopped rolling and his dead eyes appeared to be looking straight at me.

One of the guards—the black bear—picked up Kirby's headless body and swung it over his shoulder. He brought the body to Beku, who coiled tightly around it. Bones snapped grotesquely one by one. It was pretty freaky to watch a snake kill an animal by constriction, but to see a partially-human creature constricting around a human corpse was just fucking disturbing.

The Alute were still cheering and chanting wildly in their obnoxious animal cries, including Leboni and Rave, who we had trusted. I thought I had noticed some tension between Leboni and her leader when we arrived, but there was no trace of it now. Mob mentality, I guessed, was what had all these creatures so thrilled about such acts of merciless cruelty.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the hawk-winged guard pick up Kirby's head. He held it out to the rhinoceros-armored man, who grunted as he impaled it with a long iron spear. Three women—two with bushy squirrel tails and the third with a partial scorpion's exoskeleton—were tending to a fire, feeding it scraps of wood, when the rhino approached. The women hurried out of his way. He stood next to the fire with Kirby's head on a stick, turning it slowly over the flames. He looked over at the scorpion girl, who came timidly to take his place roasting my friend's head. The air filled with the scent of burning flesh.

Zakyra tried to turn her head and get a load of the festivities, but I stopped her. "No," I said, hardly expecting obedience, but Zakyra only lifted her wide brown eyes to mine.

"What's happening?" she asked, her tone of voice so pitiful that I wanted to weep. This wasn't my Zakyra. My Zakyra was a fighter, a warrior, not a teary-eyed little girl. Seeing Zakyra overtaken by terror and misery was extremely emotional for me. I learned a fundamental lesson of life in those few, brief seconds: that every hero, even the greatest of them, has a moment of weakness in which he or she has to be cared for by an ordinary person. "I'm scared," she admitted, and her words cut me.

I leaned down without thinking and kissed her neck. I felt her tremble with something aside from fear, and I whispered into her ear, "I'll protect you."

I watched Beku on his ornate throne, in his arms the mangled lump of flesh that was once Kirby. He opened his jaws widely and set to work swallowing the body whole. Despite the lack of solid bones that hadn't been reduced to powder, the carcass was still relatively large, leaving me mystified as to how it was passing down another man's throat.

It occurred to me out of nowhere that I was on shrooms and should be tripping balls. I felt odd, but it wasn't the tripping-balls kind of odd. I thought that somehow it must have been the high concentration of magic in the air giving me this bizarre high. I got a strange idea that I could tap into the energy and escape somehow, but I couldn't have known where to begin.

The scorpion girl lifted the slightly blackened head out of the fire and held it before the rhino. He took the iron rod like a bat and swung it full force. Kirby's head sailed off and straight toward a girl with the body of a horse. She caught the head and immediately threw it back up in the air for someone else to catch. The whole crowd joined in, letting the head's burning flesh scald their hands before passing it on. At the center of this disorderly game, smiling slightly, sat Beku on his throne, a huge bulge in his stomach where Kirby was being digested.

When the head got back to the rhino, he leaned in and, almost too quickly to catch, viciously ripped off Kirby's ear with his teeth. He then tossed the head up indifferently, chewing the cartilage like it was a piece of jerky. The Alute hooted and hollered, and Kirby's face slowly became everyone's dinner. His nose was bit off, his lips were chewed away, someone tore out his tongue. One of his eyes was stabbed repeatedly with an eagle's talon and then slurped out of the socket. The eagle person chucked Kirby's head directly at Chrysis.

Chrysis stared in awe as the mutilated head of his friend flew through the air toward him. At the last second, Chrysis ducked, just enough to avoid being hit. He felt some juice splatter on his cheek and wiped it off. The Alute colony went dead silent. Kirby's faceless head lie still in the grass, attracting curious insects. Their game was over.

And Chrysis had lost.