minions below call out to her in some high-pitched cry. She circled the bailey, with her green toned wings glinting off the few fires that were dotted around the space in cast iron grills. The large Harpy, then circled back towards the biggest arch and after her wings batted her back enough to stop mid-air, she lifted her skirt and reached out with her bird feet to grab the edge. The other two made room for her instantly, each moving to their sides so she could perch in the middle.
Then she started to speak, and I recognised instantly that same malevolent voice that had taken me. She also wore the same headpiece made of shadowy fingers that hissed like snakes and reached out like dead souls trying to grasp back at life. Her eyes were also different, slanted snake eyes of crimson pools of hatred. However, her face and body weren’t like the other Harpies.
No, amazingly, she was in a scary way, beautiful. I couldn’t understand how she was, for what I knew of Harpies, being beautiful was far from how one would be described. Yet here was this radiant, if not bat shit crazy, beauty that had dirty white wings with tips of emerald green.
She was even dressed in a regal medieval dress that was most definitely what you would call form fitting. Her dress was made of dark green satin that looked almost as black as her coiled dark hair. It was a style she wore twisted and curled up around the headdress she wore, pinned in such a way it became hard to distinguish between what was hair or not. It reminded me of a traditional Japanese headdress cross between a helmet of a samurai warrior. The front of which came down low and covered her forehead in a V shape, with the point touching the bridge of her nose. Her eyes, which had once been slanted and that of a crimson snake, were now as a human’s was. Well, if that human had dark green eyes and looked menacing to the point of murderous that was.
She had slim features that admittedly gave her a regal edge, with a thin nose, high cheekbones and distinct jawline that lent its way to a graceful neck. Her body was also all that of a woman and not at all like the painful flash bag of bones like the rest of her hideous race. Her tight bodice was embroidered with swirls of roses and thorns that framed the lines of her body, mirroring the V shape of her headdress as it finished at a harsh point at her navel.
Long bell-shaped sleeves were tight around her slender shoulders and tops of her arms before flaring out at the elbow, making her hands appear swallowed up by swathes of material. The skirt was the same, being a full skirt making her look like some dark medieval Queen out for killing all that threatened to take her crown. Basically, she was your typical looking fairy tale baddie, other than the fact she had wings and feathered bird’s feet hidden underneath her skirt, legs that you only saw when she lifted the material enough to aid in her landing.
In short, she didn’t look like a Harpy at all, which made me question…was this their Queen?
Whether she was or she wasn’t, it didn’t matter. She was the one that brought me here and she was the one that needed to pay! A flash of that same image assaulted me, with my fingertips reaching out to Nero only to blur again before haunting me with those dead eyes. In the end, this was all it took for that rage to ignite something in me and I could feel it happening again, only this time more slowly.
I looked down at my hands to find them twitching uncontrollably, as if I was casting spells or commanding something invisible just beyond my fingertips. That’s when I saw it seeping up through the cracks and gaps in the stone. Small lines of blood appeared like red grout between the blocks before it overflowed and turned into pools of crimson. Each one started to join up until suddenly I found myself lying surrounded by a small moat of blood, as if protecting me in some way.
I had no idea how I was summoning this blood or how I knew that I could summon a lot more than that. I didn’t even know where it had come from, I only knew that