528 days after a wizard cursed the REALM…
Current Version:
The Apocalypse Beast focuses on the Enduring Portal. She focuses on the overcast sky. She focuses on the dismal landscape. All of this is possible, now that she’s shifted into a form with 97 eyes.
She scans every direction all at once. If some unknown danger really is destined to end her life today, it won’t be because she let it sneak up on her.
Red lighting snakes down from the thunderclouds, as it often does in the presence of her kind. The charged air carries a confirmation of her power. There are few beings in any of the worlds that would dare to challenge an Apocalypse Beast in the prime of her strength.
“Hey! Hey you! Down here!”
All 97 eyes roll upward in exasperation. The Beast looks down at a ghost whose aethereal essence is swirling around in front of her. “Yes?” asks the Beast, impatiently.
“You have some unfinished business,” says the ghost.
“No, you have some unfinished business,” says the Beast. “That’s the whole deal with ghosts, isn’t it?”
The ghost drifts left and right in thought. “In a metaphysical sense, yes, but your unfinished business is of the more tangible variety. My friend challenged you to a fight a while back, and so far you’ve chickened out on him.”
The Beast blinks 96 of her glowing red eyes, keeping the remaining eye on full alert against possible trickery. “I remember no such challenge.”
“Oh, dear.” The ghost shakes his translucent head. “When I tell him that, he’ll claim you blocked it out of your mind because of the terror you hold for him. It’ll make him insufferable.”
The Beast sighs. “Then let’s make this quick. Where can I find this foolish warrior?”
“He’s waiting for you in the stone circle.”
Downhill, across the plain, the ruins of an ancient stone circle beckon. The megalithic sarsen stones are twenty-four feet high, about even with the Beast’s chin as she squeezes into the circle on all fours. Her shoulder brushes one of the stones, tumbling its lintel to the ground.
For the hundredth time, the Beast considers the toad’s prophecy. Is this how it happens? After three millennia, am I destined to be slain in an arena of combat?
There are worse ways to go, she decides, and lopes after the ghost toward the circle. “Nobody is here,” says the Beast, surveying the empty space.
“Who are you calling a nobody?” asks a teeny-tiny mouse-sized horse. “Bring your toenail back down here for a rematch!”
“Oh,” says the Beast, “it’s you.”
“I can taste your fear, Beast.” The mouse-sized horse prances, light on its tiny hooves. “It tastes like bananas and mashed potatoes. Your fear tastes soft, just like the rest of you.”
“Listen,” says the Beast, “I’m a bit on edge today. I’m expecting a genuine threat to show up at any moment. So whatever this is meant to be, can we get on with it?”
“That’s funny. ‘Can we get on with it?’ Those were the very words that preceded my battle with a half-elephant, half-gerbil, with the skin of a snake. Here, let me tell you about it.” The horse launches into a long, boring, and utterly nonsensical story that makes the Beast’s eyes glaze over, one by one, until 96 of them see nothing but a haze.
But out of the corner of her 97th eye, the Beast catches a hint of movement at the Enduring Portal.
“What trickery is this?” The Beast turns her head and refocuses her attention in time to see a Simian carrying an Elf and a wind-up squirrel into the shimmery field within the ring of stone.
“…and the dreaded Elepherbil was never seen again,” the tiny horse concludes.
“You were a distraction!” the Beast roars.
“I was,” the horse declares. “And that reminds me of another story, about my battle with a giraffe-headed underwater lemur. I was worried about that one, because I can’t swim, but luckily I was able to lure the lemuraffe onto the shore and—”
The outraged Beast leaps forward and snatches up the tiny horse in its jaws, along with five cubic yards of dirt around where the tiny creature had been standing. It takes her two swallows to push the rough mouthful down into her gullet. “Enjoy your hundred years of torment,” she says, with a punch to her stomach for good measure.
“I guess that settles your unfinished business,” says the ghost, “now let’s talk about mine.”
The Beast lopes back toward the portal. She’d catch hell for letting those two beings through, no matter that one was small and the other was shaggy, but she wasn’t about to allow anyone else to get past her.
“My name was Melvin, and probably still is,” says the ghost. “My friends call me Formerly Melvin.”
“How nice for you,” the Beast snorts.
“I’ve always been a bit of an optimist. I believe I’m still floating around because my body is still alive, somewhere in the bowels of the Apocalypse Beast that swallowed me whole during NIGHTfall. Look inside yourself, Beast, and tell me. Am I in there?”
“So you are the soul who escaped,” the Beast confirms. “Consigned to a hundred years of torment in the belly of the beast, you discovered a loophole by disassociating from your physical body.”
“It wasn’t a loophole I escaped through, it was a—”
“Before this gets too personal,” the Beast interrupts, “let me assure you that I feel no shame, and I am fully capable of restoring your former condition within my gullet.”
The Beast opens her maw and inhales sharply, creating a spirit-wind that tugs the ghost toward her.
“Any time now, any time now, any time now,” Formerly Melvin mutters, as he struggles against the forces drawing him ever closer to the mouth of the Apocalypse Beast.
Suddenly, the Beast stops. “What is this pain?”
“Something you ate is disagreeing with you,” the ghost states.
The Beast groans and doubles over. “I don’t understand. Was it the sacred soil of the sarsen circle?”
“Let me tell you a story about my Pooka friend,” says Formerly Melvin. “A true story, this time. You see, his kind are immensely powerful, but remain bonded until the final Elf perishes from the world.”
The Beast writhes in agony. “Yes? So?”
“Gloriander was left behind when the rest of her kind went home. She was the final Elf in this world. And now she’s gone.”
All 97 of the Beast’s eyes widen with horror as her stomach distends like the neck of a bullfrog, and then explodes.
Dozens of human bodies scatter across the grass, every being the Apocalypse Beast has swallowed in the past hundred years. They groan and shift, reorienting themselves, all still very much alive.
A gigantic purple stallion erupts from the grizzled innards of the Beast. The Pooka tosses its luxuriant mane and checks that his massive wings have returned. He traces a victory glyph in the air with the tip of a long horn that juts like a saber from its forehead. “I am free! Thank you, Formerly Melvin!”
“Formerly Formerly Melvin,” says one of the bodies on the ground, newly reunited with its lost soul. He stands on unsteady feet and wipes the beastly goop from his half-digested clothing. “Or I guess you could just call me Melvin.”
“Onward to join our friends?” The Pooka stoops to allow the human to climb onto his back.
“Onward,” Melvin agrees. “To rescue that Steampunk Faery.”
With Melvin on his back, the Pooka spreads its wings and takes to the air. He makes a loop around the stone circle, basks in the applause of the other resurrected humans, and dives through the Enduring Portal into the next unknown adventure.
Web3 Draft:
- Listed on OpenSea
- Listed on Rarible
Revision Notes:
To be added.
