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Moar Snowwww

The snow has gone from a winter storm to something truly impressive. Ground-level doors are nearly buried in it; windows reveal walls of solid white pressing against the glass. Chimneys have iced over, and cars are buried in deep drifts.

The trams stopped running two days ago, with polite notes reading Temporarily Out of Service - We Apologize for Any Inconvenience affixed to the frozen doors.

Taxon is very quiet.

The Extras huddle indoors, and the streets are long white swathes of virgin snow. No car horns, no hum of traffic. The river is iced as well, and the edges of the shore boast chunks of white ice floating in the black water.

Near the Sanctuary, a water main has burst in the night, and the day's slight increase in temperature thawed it enough to erupt and flood a street. The buildings of that street are hung with sheets of icicles, gleaming like someone's idea of a Christmas decoration taken beyond all reason.

The wind blows from the north, and skirls the snow into further drifts and piles. If you listen-- if you listen very carefully-- you can hear the sound of voices on the wind, and howls that cut as keenly as the Arctic wind.

If you must go outside, Taxonians, breathe slowly and carefully-- for an incautious breath can freeze the very lining of your throat.

And at night...? Well, tonight the howls become more than distantly-imagined sounds: tonight, white shapes stalk Taxon's white streets-- wolves the size of ponies, whose eyes flicker with blue fire and who are hungry for warm meat.

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Out in the snow, there is indeed movement. Eyes may not be able to detect it, for the creatures hide well; but to one with a sense for bones...

Wolves pad through the snow, white and silent, spreading out under the half-buried trees to circle the two strange travelers that come near their mistress's mountain.

Jason cannot see them, but all the same, he settles a gloved hand on his sword's hilt.

Edited 2013-03-28 07:13 (UTC)

The world, to Metody, has only two colors: bone and not-bone. He holds still a moment, thinking.

If he were alone, he might flee. He can't do that with Jason riding on his back; Jason is rather more vulnerable than he is, and there is too high a chance of the wolves attacking while he runs - and goodness help them if he trips. He might try bullying his way through the wolves, too, but again - Jason. Metody can survive being shattered. Jason probably can't.

And that leaves fighting.

He can't groan, but he wishes he could.

Things move under Jason, grinding against the inside of the skull he sits upon. Metody's legs shift, sweeping back and to the sides so that Metody can open his mouth and release the smaller creatures he'd been keeping inside his head. They sprawl over the snow, octopus-like collections of delicate spines radiating from a complicated little pelvis, and then go writhing towards the wolves.

"There is something out there," Jason begins to say, but by the time his mouth has finished the words there are already bone things scuttling out from his steed's mouth.

Jason watches in something like morbid fascination. It's a handy, skin-crawling sort of trick.

"--if we can get to barer ground," he says after a few seconds of watching the white spider-like things skitter off into the snow, "I can stand on my own feet; it's merely this snow which makes it to deep for me to effectively fight. There are rock outcroppings ahead."

The wolves, meanwhile, are snapping and snarling at the first bone things to come within reach.

Oh gosh, oh gosh, oh gosh oh gosh oh gosh ohgoshoh-

The forward bits of Metody leap directly at the wolves, aiming straight for those snapping mouths. Those that land go for the teeth and eyesockets, grabbing for them with no regard to what flesh may be intervening, and wrenching out the bone beneath.

As for steed Metody, he is going to delicately skirt around the wolves, heading for the outcropping. And he is also going to try not to vomit, and never mind the lack of a stomach or any other related organs.

Flesh. Flesh, oh, my gosh, there is flesh on all kinds of bits of him, and it is disgusting and wet and - oh, why doesn't he have the right bits to throw up? He'd feel so much better.

The wolves howl-- or some of them do; others find their ability to howl abruptly cut off. Paws attempt to smash and claw the nearest bits of bone; jaws attempt to bite them.

Jason leans to the side even if the balance of riding this thing is nothing exactly like a horse. When near enough, he slings himself off, landing more-or-less on his feet on the rock, in only a few inches of snow rather than five deep feet of it.

He turns around probing with his feet for where it is and isn't safe to step, and to get the hill as it keeps rising at his back. The sword comes out and he stares at the extremely odd combat playing out before him with the wolves and the bone-things.

Well, there's one more for the nightmares, at least.

Not a whole lot of time for anything fancy. On the other hand, unless the wolves do come to him, there is little he can do to attack them without expending far more energy thane he thinks the situation merits.

Jaws are only effective as long as you have gnashing teeth and strong bones to root the biting muscles in. And when those teeth and bones suddenly belong to something else, and they turn against the flesh around them, and crawl backwards through the body to gather more boney self?

It goes unpleasantly for the wolves.

Some of the wolves, at least. Two escape, and circle towards Jason and his steed, which has gone still as death; right now, Metody is busy a short distance away.

"There are two coming our way," Jason calls whilst readying the blade; then registers the bone-steed's total stilness. Well, dammit.

"Cha! Over here, yes, I smell of warm meat, come here you overgrown dogs," Jason calls with a shrill whistle between his teeth. The canine ears perk; the wolves pad across the snow like gray blurs (behind them on the snow a carnage of very strange combat indeed, between the rest of this bit of the pack, and their very bones).

Jason really wishes he had a spear, or even a longsword rather than this ridiculous jewel-studded thing, but needs must...

He side-steps the first lunge of cruel teeth and jaws, and jams the sword up into the gray heaving ribs. It sinks in, dotting the rock and snow beneath with crimson blood.

He's fought wolves before; normal wolves may be cowed, but these creatures with their eyes crackling with blue ice and frost ghosting from their muzzles are another thing entirely. He's fought demonic hounds too, but usually... well, usually, he lets Etrigan handle that.

The momentum of the wolf's lunge drags the sword free of his grip even as the wolf stumbles past him with the blade buried deep in its side. Weaponless, he has the second wolf to deal with, and Jason Blood, for all his experience, is still only a man.

The shaggy beast bears him down to the rock and the snow with bruising impact. He's fought wolves before, yes, in forests on three continents-- he shoves his forearm up and into the massive jaws before they can rip his throat out like so much tissue paper.

Even through the layers and layers of cloth he feels the long teeth pierce his flesh. The wolf is far stronger. Jason grits his teeth and takes the pain, which is hot as nothing else is currently hot, and focuses, summoning energy to his will, heat to his will. Heat and life, like that currently soaking into the inner layers of his sleeve and further goading the wolf's hunger.

Life is in the blood, and blood is a catalyst for so much of his magic-- winds it red way through his castings, binds and summons, calls and wards---

His free hand fumbles on the snow, for the patch of snow marked crimson by the first wolf's blood. His gloved fingers grab up a desperate handful of it and jam it into the wolf's azure eyes.

"τυφλός! κουφός! ἐκφεύγω!" he shouts, words cracking like whips in the frozen air, even as the wolf's claws start rending holes in his layers of warm, life-sustaining clothing.

The beast snarls as its five senses are abruptly stripped from it, releasing his arm to stumble backwards in the snow.

"If you are done over there," Jason calls to his odd, odd ally, "some assistance here would not be rejected--"

Unsure of whether the bone-things can even hear him or not right now, he scrambles painfully to his feet, preparing for a next attack if he must, hissing words beneath his breath.

Flesh, wet, disgusting flesh, slimed and pulped by his movements, smeared all over her, oozing revolting fluids all over her from goodness knows what kind of torn cappillaries and tubes and glands-

(And somewhere far away, beside the bridge, limbs shatter and drop off of the left behind tower of Metody, and shatter again when they hit the snow. That part of her stirs, briefly poking through the shards, then settles again, waiting for wolves.)

- she stretches and arches, ripping herself free of the wolves, and then buzzes, shaking rapidly to shed the clinging flecks of flesh and blood. She trots towards Jason, and if he is very lucky, he will glance away at the approaching sword wounded wolf in the moment when she cracks open the brain cases and ejects the scrambled contents.

Well. So she can throw when she really needs to. She doesn't feel any better, though, especially since the bleeding wolf is circling around her steed-bulk to get at Jason, and - and - and that makes her really mad, really mad, honestly mad and not scared or sick or close to crying, really truly mad, really -

All of Metody leaps at once, the new claimed wolves and the steed self too, exploding into teeth and converging on the wolf. Screw the bones, she'll just blend this one instead.

Jason is never very lucky.

He gets to see it-- he wrinkles his nose for the pink-yellow-gray effluvia that gets hurled wetly out onto the snow, stinking in the cold air--

The wolf is still coming. Jason thinks of spells but the only words that come to mind are Gone, gone...

Does he have time to finish the chant? He calculates that in the frozen time of a crisis, parts his mouth to speak but--

--it proves unnecessary. Bones lunge and snap together like the Red Sea closing, a thousand bleached, sharp shards coming together and then doing an impressive imitation of a wood chipper.

Everything gets spattered. The snow is... sprayed... with bits too small to accurately describe as chunks. Jason at least snaps his eyes and mouth shut before the first particles of meat hit.

Plip-plip-plip is the sound of hundreds of wet, organic bits raining down on the snow.

He opens his eyes several seconds later.

"....thank you, I suppose."

Oh, gods, oh, gods, oh -

Metody just stands there a moment, clicking and scraping as she twitches. She doesn't have the right parts to cry but she wants t- does she have anything left to throw up? Oh. No. No, thats all gone.

She wants her mom.

Instead, she's got Jason. She tilts towards him, teeth folding in, and presses against his leg, boney and angular and trembling.

That was horrible. That was way more horrible than the deer - those were easy and fast, once the stalking stage was over, just a quick twist off the vertebrate. There weren't any....bits.

No spray, either. Oh, dear. Poor Jason.

....aaaand now the thing is pressed against his leg like an undead cat, except there is rather too much of it to be a 'cat'.

Right.

Jason wipes at the tiny bit of his face that is quasi-exposed before any of the steaming, stinking gunk on his face can start to freeze to his skin. Because it's the sort of thing he does, he mentally catalogs whether or not this has ever happened to him before.

Drenched in blood? Yes. Many times. Brain meat: only once that he can recall (the less said about what happens when a zombie vomits, the better). Having an entire lupine corpse explode over him, everything from liver to sinews? He thinks that's a new one, but then again, his memory is missing a few decades.

No. If he'd ever been splattered head to toe with the pureed bits of organs, hide, fur, and flesh, he is almost certain that it's a memory Etrigan would want him to keep. So, probably, this is simply a new experience.

The stench is intense; Jason feels distantly nauseous but the cold helps. Already some of the... mess... is congealing. His clothes are a lost cause and then some. Also, his arm hurts.

--and the little abattoir of bones-- the not-so-little abattoir of bones-- is trembling against his leg like a frightened animal.

"I don't believe I can say 'there, there' with a straight face," he informs the entity, after several blank seconds of trying to think of an appropriate response.

Jason, you are a poor mother substitute. Metody tilts to point her fore end at him, as if looking at him, then wrenches up and helpfully pincers a bit of muck off of his front.

Metody slowly looks down at the mess. She has lost a good bit of her substance to the cold and shattering. She reaches down and gathers up the shards of wolf bone, consolidating them into a replacement for one of her limbs.

"...yes. Thank you." Looked like a bit of a hamstring, there.

He watches the creature absorb bone back into itself. Even he might normally find that a bit disconcerting, but after the last five minutes it's just another thing to numbly observe happening.

Numb. Numb and cold. And he really should get somewhere inside. Yes.

i spy with my little eye
a suiting place for a bloody knave
your faithful steed
(if your lead it heeds)
can join you in yonder cave

Jason's head lifts to scan the nearby snow at Etrigan's words. Ah. Yes. There. Etrigan drags his eyes over to the nearly-invisible blackness of a crevice in the black rocks, hidden by a tree's snow-burdened branches.

"...come?" Jason says, not quite an order because he certainly isn't about to try giving commands to something that just Cuisinarted a wolf, but with a bit of nudge to the words since the creature seems rather at a loss, inasmuch as he can tell anything of what it feels.

He crouches to take his sword back from the snow it has toppled into, then starts a slow, stomping-trudge through the snow for the entrance into the rock, glancing to see if his strange ally is following.

It takes a long moment before she responds, but she lifts herself out of the snow and faithfully follows him, tapping along. When she closes the short gap between them, she even taps at the back of his knees, then crouches down so he can get on.

Here and there, her surface is pitted where gore froze to her, then chipped off. It's the very first time she's ever had a problem like that. Poor Jason must be half frozen.

Convenience trumps pride; he gets back on the creature's ... back, and from there it's a fairly short trip into the cave.

It's fractionally, fractionally warmer inside-- no more than a little drifted snow on the floor, and out of the wind, at least-- and Jason says another scrupulously polite 'thank you' to the entity as he dismounts. Much better to be safe rather than sorry when it comes to unknown creatures and their lethal capabilities.

He is quite cold, although not as frozen as he should be, as a strictly-human person would be. Etrigan rages like a furnace inside him, and that is not merely metaphor.

Jason digs inside the many pockets of his outermost parka until his fumbling, numb fingers find what they're looking for: the pack of chemical hand warmers he'd grabbed before trekking out into the snow.

It takes a few tries with his hands stiff and trembling in the gloves but at last he gets a pack open.

"I d-don't suppose one of these will do-- you any good."

What are they? She touches one, curious, then delicately pokes it a few times. The little spot of warmth is not enough to register with her, and the bright color of the packaging is invisible to her.

A little packet of sand? Why on earth would he be carrying something like that? Is it some kind of ceremonial item? Maybe like a crack and go blessing?

Weird. She shakes her head, confused. No, no good to her.

Look, Jason, they're inside. They did it! She taps his shoulder and gestures around them, then does a little dance that ends when one of her legs break off.

If he were conscious of Metody's thoughts on the matter, Jason would smile despite himself at the thought of a crack-and-go blessing.

He snaps a few more of the packets open and jams them down inside his parka and boots and gloves. Core first, extremities next, and... his arm is still injured, there is that small detail.

He watches the bones dance-- there is no other word for it-- vaguely bemused, then slings off his leather satchel for more rummaging.

(An extra scarf. Not exactly a sterile bandage, but infection isn't an issue for him anyway and it's better than nothing.)

"Yes, that's quite-- quite enthusiastic," he observes to Cheerful Dancing Bone Cuisinart. "You were most... helpful. Thank you."

Metody lifts her coiling spines to knot together another head, which she ducks a little in acknowledgement. She reaches out, and gently touches Jason's shoulder; thank you to him, too. Without eyes, who knows how long she would have wandered, searching for the cave?

...not at all, actually. She would have stayed at the bridge, waiting for wolves. But now she knows where the cave is, and now her path is strewn with splinters of bone that froze off, and while those parts of her aren't going to be getting up any time soon, they are an excellent trail of pebbles for other parts of her.

Which...she could really need. She can't sigh, but there's a sense of it as she settles down on the cave floor, tired.

It's extraordinarily hard to get a sense of intent off the bone-collection; Jason cannot truthfully say he understands the full gist of the bones touching his shoulder other than the gesture is not hostile, which is good enough for him under the circumstances.

Still, the bones do seem... tired, if that's not overly anthropomorphizing them; they certainly look battered, chipped and scrapped and pitted. He knows nothing of how the entity reconstructs itself other than what he has witnessed; presumably it needs time, right now, or else it would be fixing itself as they sit here.

He finishes binding his arm as best he can.

"If you can wait here to guard against further intrusions from the wolves," he says with a nod at the open mouth of the cave, "I can investigate the tunnel beyond, and get a sense of how far it extends."

Metody tilts her knotted head, then nods and lowers it. It spreads on the floor like puddled string, and already, little ice crystals are forming on her flanks.

Yeah. She'll just...wait here and guard. Exactly. She'll stand watch.

Yeah.

Jason nods wordlessly (he thinks he's talked about twice as much in this conversation as he normally does, and that was only because at least one of them had to do so) as he pushes himself back to his feet and retrieves a flashlight from his pack.

"If I am gone overly long, there is no need to concern yourself," he says as a more-or-less goodbye before heading down into the cave.

Much better to deal with whatever lurks beyond on his own, after all, even if the bones had been-- quite helpful, really.

Better, because alone never really is, for him, and if something comes up where he needs to release Etrigan, well.... he'd much rather nobody else was around at all.

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