The beast crashed through the trees after Oriana. Garren trailed behind them, dodging and slashing as the serpent on its tail lunged and snapped at him. His eyes searched the beast. It was too strong, with mighty creatures at both its head and tail. One of them needed to be severed to make the beast easier to defeat.
Garren picked up speed until he was directly beneath the body of the beast. The serpent followed. Garren glanced over his shoulder, watching as the snake prepared to strike. Just as it did, he rolled out from underneath the beast until he was behind its hind leg. The serpent followed just as he had expected and clamped down on its own leg. Garren spun in an instant, slicing through the neck of the snake with one downward slash. The lion head roared in agony, tail thrashing as rancid green blood sprayed from its severed appendage.
The beast stopped its pursuit of Oriana and turned on him, but Garren was ready. He poised for an attack, but it never came.
The creature slowly rose into the air before him. “What…” he breathed, watching in bewilderment. It was the trees. The forest around them came alive. Branches wrapped around the body of the beast, around each of its limbs and its neck, lifting the creature higher into the air.
The monster squirmed, wrestling in the grip of the branches. It breathed fire on the trunks of the trees and, to Garren’s astonishment, nothing happened. The fire disappeared from the trees as if it never was.
The branches pulled, splaying the great creature overhead, stretching it further and further. It was then that Garren looked to Oriana. She stared up at the display, pure death in her eyes, fists clenched so tightly her knuckles were white.
The beast squealed high above. It was her. She was doing this, but how?
Before Garren could think of it further, a torturous screech came from the creature, followed by the most horrid, sickening sound Garren had ever heard
The beast’s bones splintered as each limb snapped in half. Its flesh ripped until each of its limbs was torn from its body, and with one final wail, the creature’s head fell to the forest floor with a solid thud. The trees retracted their branches and gore rained down from the sky, falling in a circle around them.
Oriana sank to the ground, hugging her knees to her chest, head buried against them. He went to her, sitting beside her as she attempted to calm her breathing. So many questions flitted to the front of his mind, but he offered the one that wouldn’t be an outright accusation against her.
“Wh-what just happened? What sort of demon was that?” he inquired. His mind was reeling with what he had just witnessed. The forest had been alive; it had literally ripped the creature into pieces before his very eyes.
“That wasn’t a demon.” Oriana wheezed, head finally moving from its hiding place within her knees. She looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. “None of the beasts you have been fighting are demons.”
He furrowed his eyebrows. “What do you mean? What are they then?”
“They are beings from other worlds,” she said. “You know demons to be creatures of death and darkness from the underworld. You have been taught that since you were a child, but there is no underworld, no hell as your people like to call it. There are only realms within the cosmos. Worlds created by the Gods. Well…by one god. The god of creation and chaos.”
“How would you know these things? They cannot be true. There are only the six Gods of the High City. They rule over us and the levels of our existence, the Ether, the mortal world and the underworld. That is all there is.” Garren’s mind swayed. He felt as if he had been knocked in the head by a rock.
“Have you noticed that each demon you face is different? No two are alike. How each one you face is more vicious than the last?” Her tone was gentle.
“I…well, yes.” he turned confused eyes on her. How did she know this? What was she saying?
“It took me some time to realize it, but tonight proved my theory. The creatures you have spent your life fighting, protecting Svakland from, shouldn’t even be here. They don’t exist in this world.” She paused, a single tear rolling down her cheek. “It’s Orrick. It’s all my fault. He saw what I could do the first night he came to visit me all those years ago.” She shook her head in disbelief. “When did the first demons begin to plague this world?”
“They…it was when…” He blinked, brows wrinkling as he tried and failed to answer her. His mind was far too confused. Too much had just happened. She wasn’t making any sense. Nothing from this day made sense! How was she the Woman in White and Oriana? Where had her brother come from, and how was he responsible for the creatures he had fought his entire life? The questions were near bursting forth from his mind.
“What the hell is going on!?” He exclaimed. “How are you two people in one? How are you in the texts from hundreds of years ago? I don’t understand any of this!”
Oriana opened her mouth to speak, but she gasped, her head snapping up to the sky peeking through the treetops, where the edge of a milky moon glowed. Night had snuck up on them. She scrambled away from him, rising from the ground and grasping her head, ripping at her scalp as if in great pain.
“Oriana?” He reached out a shaking hand toward her. What was happening? Was she in pain? He felt as if he had been thrust into a sick dream, full of secrets and lies.
She stopped suddenly and turned her head eerily slow until he could see her face, but what he saw was not Oriana. It wasn’t even the Woman in White. It was a deformity of her features, twisted and pulled into something that he could only described as pure evil.
“Run,” she hissed, in a voice that was so unlike hers, it sent chills down his spine.
“The White Demon,” he murmured into the fog. Everything began to come into focus. All of his scattered thoughts became one. Oriana was the woman from the forest that night. She hadn’t found him on its edge but within. He vaguely remembered her saying that she couldn’t take him into town, that he had to go on his own, because…it had been the full moon. Oriana was the Woman in White was the White Demon. She was three people in one, but how and if this was all true, it meant she had been living in this forest for hundreds of years.
Garren could only watch in horror as Oriana’s delicate features bubbled before his eyes, as if a million spiders were crawling beneath her skin. He winced as her face morphed into an unrecognizable distortion. Into a monster, like the very demons he had faced his entire life.
Grotesque pustules sprouted on her forehead and down the sides of her neck. Ridges molded down her nose, making her look more feline than human, her face permanently etched into a snarl. She smiled, revealing a row of horrifying teeth that could only be for shredding, along with the black, menacing claws that grew like thorns from her fingers.
Garren brought his gaze up to see a set of sickly yellow eyes staring back at him, filled with bloodlust.
“You should have run when I gave you the chance, boy,” she sneered.
“I will not run.” He held his ground, forcing himself to stare at her deformed, monstrous appearance, waiting for her to attack. He wouldn’t kill her–couldn’t–but he would fight her until the morning light. If the legends were true, the White Demon disappeared with the moon.
