Arc 5: Chapter 8: Cackling Death
Several things happened at once.
The sudden, abrupt empty space where Catrin had been took me off guard, even though I’d expected it. She seemed to sink into the sheets, as though a hole had opened in the bed, and then just… wasn’t there.
The door exploded. A shower of splintered wood fragments and dust tore across the bedroom. Something came through the window on the room’s opposite side, blurring fast and eerily silent.
I leapt, going for my axe even as I hurled the sheet as an impromptu shield between me and the erupting door. Something got tangled in it, barreling into the bed I’d left empty in a ripping, flailing mess. But the second one who’d used the window wasn’t tangled. I heard a soft thunk as they landed on the bedpost, along with a series of softer clicks.
I ducked. Something, a blade, slashed through the cloud of dust where my neck had been an eye blink before. I lunged for the wall, grabbed my axe, and swept it up and around my head. The second blade, which would have skewered through my spine, instead broke off Faen Orgis’s keen edge, spinning through the air to embed itself in a rafter.
I did all of this without really seeing who was in the room with me. I didn’t think, didn’t bother strategizing or making demands. Just acted, my world a chaos of sound, motion, twitching reflex, and clenched muscle.
Survival.
The attacker I’d almost died to went stumbling back, off balance from the force of my parry. I heard an odd noise, a rhythmic clicking, wood and metal shifting with stiff, jerking motions. The bedsheet I’d thrown fell away as whatever had been tangled in it shredded free.
The dust from the destroyed door cleared, and I got a look at my would-be killers. There were two of them, and neither were human. They were human sized but on the smaller side, both barely more than five feet tall, with cylindrical torsos and arms segmented by brassy spheres at each joint. They were mostly wood otherwise, their heads perfectly round and carved with deep slits for eyes and mouth, permanently fixed in expressions of squinting confusion.
Their hands ended in weapons. A short blade of steel on the left, and a two-faced hammer on the right with a sharp spike on one end and a hexagonal bludgeon on the other.
Marions. Dolls animated by sorcery, and crafted for murder.