Arms are raised in a sharp bend. Curled palms with clutching fingers are not too far together from a pair of pursed lips. Light moans and crisp crunching are sung. The ongoing feat is quite slow, perhaps savoring every second. Who knows when this next pause for something delightful will be had? Days? months? Beyond a year?
Before the one with busy arms and lips and at a few yards away, widened eyes and other pairs of open lips are trembling. Backsides and hands of men and a woman veiled in leather, cotton and iron are inseparable from the grassy earth. Dirt and bruises are garnishing their faces, fewer with a streak or two of blood running down from above their heads to the jaw.
The feat is an earful for them who remain on the sea of soft green blades with white and yellow flowers every yard or so. It would be wisest to leave; leave and be somewhere far from this very spot as possible. Alas, the will to rise and move even their toes within boots is just out of reach. Most nerves in this gathering are dedicated towards one thing, perhaps haunted by a formless blight. Dread. Inconsolable dread.
She was a friend, an ally in battle. Past exploits of hers came with salvation for this once merry band of warriors and mages. The sword she once held and flaunted with enough power to make hefty chunks out of a spirited boar had been forsaken. She no longer needs it. Her current role provides a great burden for the petrified audience. With each moan and crunching, a part of her is gone, repurposed into ration.
They should all flee. This is just foolish at this point, wasting their time at the sight of something ghastly. But their arms, shoulders and toes would not budge. Something is in the air. Something they cannot see, smell and taste perverted their senses into submission. It did not happen when they first engaged with the creature. It was barely putting up a fight; its swings and stabs are easy to get away from with enough time. They even scored a few marks of swordplay and sinister spells on it, peppering it with wounds.
But then the battle endured and the creature had yet to be toppled. It later planted its long blade to the ground. After an ear-piercing shriek lasting five seconds, it revealed two pairs of large wings akin to tree branches with glowing milky red flower petals, their spans can each fully wrap around the tall thing they burst out from. A mighty cool wind had also blasted away from the transformed creature, flocking in all directions.
The air became different after that. In truth, the combatants felt a great sense of ease as the fight went on. It was terribly strange. But that embrace of peace came with a cruel caveat: their guards were lowered and what good sense for battle they have become harder to grasp, harder to flaunt. The worse then came. It became faster and more ferocious. Their attacks were at the mercy of its parries. Spells were swatted away. It was like fighting a strong gust with a long single-edged sword that moved like flowing water and they and their weapons were petty brittle leaves in the current.
As time passed and the conflict persisted, each succumbed to this silly scene: an audience in agony. The shock of the sudden sharp change in the tide of battle left them with only the will to watch when their bruises and wounds take better hold of their comfort. Stand and swing a weapon, speak and cast a spell, those feats became insurmountable hardships that only their earliest times as pure novices would know of. Not who they are and what they are capable of these days. It left them be as its foes, all imbued with sheer incompetence to engage in battle with it.
Now, they are forced to watch something mortifying. The price of their defeat is their undivided attention as their eyes and ears grasp upon the unsettling moment of their friend dangling helplessly before the creature. Her lightest moans are of a woman being ravaged. The crunching is the creature getting rid of more flesh and bone, nothing more than tasty tributes to its nourishment. It opens its horrid red-stained mouth widely like a serpent every now and then to partake a bigger bite at its leisure.
However, the worst has yet to come. It is so close. It will be nigh when their friend is nothing more than forsaken cloth and steel stained well by blood. When the creature shows even the slightest hint that is far from satisfied, doom shall cater to them with a toothy grin. No longer will they be mere audience to this godawful scene, no. They are next.
