“That actually makes some sort of sense,” Darius said in surprise.
“Flabberjacks! Of course it makes sense you overgrown crouton!” she clapped him around the ear. “Now come, we have to move yonder.”
“I’m really unsure of the meaning you’re putting on the word yonder,” Darius muttered.
“Yonder, as in ‘let us delve into the cracks of the great yonder’， you frallycake. I don’t know how I can be any more clear,” she scoffed, heading from the room and we shared a glance before taking off after her.
We hurried along the cavernous halls of the palace and a creeping feeling ran up my spine, my heightened hearing picking up a scuttling sound somewhere behind us once more.
I whipped around, drawing the Phoenix sword from my hip and Darius reacted in the same moment, lifting the axe from his back. I gazed into the shadows beyond a cracked open door, trying to see through the dark, but it was so thick I couldn’t make out anything at all.
“Why do I feel like we’re being watched?” I whispered and Darius nodded, taking a step towards that door, but I caught his arm and drew him back.
“We should stay on track,” I said, tightening our silencing bubble around our group. “But keep your wits about you.”
He nodded and we turned to follow Geraldine, finding her prancing off down a huge staircase that was covered in a deep blue carpet.
We treaded quietly after her and I kept glancing back over my shoulder, keeping my ears trained on anything behind us in case I heard that strange scuttling again.
Geraldine turned down a corridor at the bottom of the stairs and we kept close at her back as she picked up her pace.
“His quarters are down here,” Darius encouraged.
“Yes, yes, you bothersome bandicoot. I will get us to our destination. Simply lay your fate in my hands and I shall not lead you astray.” Geraldine turned right down a corridor as Darius hissed at her that she was going the wrong way, but after several random turns, we arrived back in the same corridor and she walked up to a door, pausing with her hand pressed to the door as she worked to disable the magical locks and alarms on it before pushing it open.
“Ah yes,” she purred. “The greasy-haired codswallop rests his scar-shamed face upon a lagaluffin.”
“What the hell’s a lagaluffin?” I whispered, moving forward to peer over her head into the dark room.
“I think she means a pillow,” Darius said as he knocked the door wider so he could see too.
Vard was asleep on a fourposter bed, facing towards us with his eyes shut and his brow furrowed like he was plagued with nightmares in his sleep.
The bloodlust rose in me as the urge to kill this scum filled me and I followed the others into his room, the three of us approaching him like wraiths come to steal away his soul to hell.
I drew the sun steel sword from my hip and passed it to Darius. “Make him pay,” I growled and he nodded to me as he slinked closer to him.
But before he could make it there, Geraldine dove onto the bed, straddling Vard and slapping him forcefully around the face.
“Ah!” he cried, his hands raising to blast her off of him, but she tethered them to his chest with vines and cast a dick-shaped eggplant in her hand before shoving it deep into his mouth to silence his screams.
In the next second, she’d taken a silver item from her pocket which resembled an ice cream scoop and she rammed it into his eye socket with a precision which suggested she’d done this before.
Vard screamed against the eggplant, thrashing like mad as Geraldine pressed a lever on the scoop and a snap sounded as the thing closed around his shadow eye.
I stared on with my mouth agape as she ripped the whole thing from his face in a stream of blood and held it up victoriously while he screamed around the vegetable gag in his mouth.
“Bleed for the pleasure of the Grus line, devil man!” she wailed. “I declare this eye a possession of the true queens!”
Vard flailed and sobbed against the eggplant as Geraldine dismounted him, taking a plastic bag from her pocket and shoving the eye into it before ziplocking it tight. The grotesque red eye was surrounded by shadow, coils of it hanging from it like tiny feet as it wriggled angrily inside the bag.
“Ergh.” I recoiled as she pocketed it then the sound of Vard screaming even louder came to me and I realised Darius was on the bed, shearing one of his fingers off.
“Holy fuck,” I gasped, shooting forward as Darius tore open Vard’s shirt and started carving a crisscross of deep cuts into his chest, making a savage grin fill my lips as his blood spilled and he roared in agony beneath him.