Medusa: Fate's Game Ch. 13

She collapsed, hand against the mountainside. Behind her and further down the road, she could see Otrera was still unconscious where Medusa had left her. Gods, she hoped she was ok. She couldn't lose more, not after Chimera.

The thought gripped her, and she collapsed onto one of her hands, while the claws of the other scraped down against the cliff rock. She wanted to cry. It was the first time in her transformed state she'd ever let herself collapse, expose herself so, feel vulnerable, and she wanted to cry. Tears would not come, no matter how much she felt like they should. Perhaps snakes could not cry — and she was more snake than human, in this form. She shrieked once again, and her voice echoed in the new silence.

Not silence. The sound of metal hitting metal followed her cries, and echoed down the mountain road. Darian! She forced herself up, and took breaths. Many deep breaths. Attempts to slither ripped the energy from her, and she fell forward onto her claws. Her snake hair, strong and huge in her transformed state, pushed their chins against the ground to help lift her.

She forced herself to look at the sea creature standing in the bay. Its hand was in her way, resting along the mountainside road, and big enough climbing over it would be trouble. Its body was stone, through and through, and stood as a second mountain in the bay next to the acropolis sea cliff. Big enough to defy definition.

Coughing, dizzy, struggling to not fall over, she slithered toward the massive hand, and sighed relief when she saw a gap underneath its palm, six feet high. She gulped and went underneath, belly to the rock, snake hair grazing along the giant palm above her. It could come alive any minute, crush her like it did Chimera, grind her into paste.

She came out the other side and looked to the bay once more. The sea creature looked very odd, with a set of teeth against its whole body, rather than a head. A squid, but not, with arms and tentacles both. She shivered and moved on. Dead. It was dead.

She started to tremble again, and shook her head all the more. The others! Her gaze had covered the sky! She looked down from the mountain road to the destroyed bridge, and almost collapsed once more as relief filled her. The people were not stone, no one else was. Only the sea creature.

Relief vanished quickly as she looked over the city people, and saw no Chimera. Don't think about it, don't think about them, don't think about him, think about Darian. Get to Darian.

Getting to him was getting harder. The echo and crack of swords against shields was further than she realized, and she started to lean against the cliff as she slithered up the road. Still transformed though. Chimera had taught her to embrace her monstrous form, to be comfortable in it, for it to fuel her instead of fight against her. And she could feel it drive her, her thicker muscles and stronger snake body gripping and pushing against the road. Slowly but surely, the dizziness parted, the weight of her body lessened, and her breathing calmed. Not fully, not enough she could unleash her fury like she wanted to, but she could make herself move. And that was good enough.

Voices. She got low and tight to the cliff edge, and crept along at a slow slither, until she could hear the shuffling of feet ahead.

"—stone!"

"Medusa's pretty amazing, isn't she?"

"You think this a joke, Bellerophontes? Years of her work, undone! We will have to start again, rebuild, find a new city!"

The crash of shields made Medusa wince. She got lower until her scale-covered chest slid along the rock of the road, slithering forward, chin only inches above the ground.

"Cry me a river."

"How dare you! Do you not see what we are trying to accomplish? Change fate! We are trying to free ourselves of their bonds. Surely you must know what that means."

She poked her head around a small outcropping of stone along the cliff wall, just enough to see beyond the curve, and to the two fighting men.

Darian was down, on a knee, with his shield up and his sword arm dangling, bleeding. Medusa fought the urge to hiss, and kept her eyes on the circling madman. Perseus still had his shield, the one that blocked her petrifying gaze, but he too was exhausted and bleeding, like Darian. Not enough to fall to a knee though. And the pool of blood around Darian's feet was growing larger.

"I hate the Fates as much as anyone, Perseus, but you're a sick fuck for thinking it's ok to sacrifice a city to—"

"Think of the larger picture, Bellerophontes! As you once did. You thought to defy the gods, because you knew they controlled our lives, turned us into mindless sheep, like them!" Perseus pointed his sword down over the ledge. Medusa only now realized she'd slithered the road long enough to circle around the mountain once, and below her, the mob could be seen again. Their torches were high, and many stared up at the second, new mountain beside them, while others were tending the wounded and pulling people away from the destroyed bridge.

Not a mob, a resistance, cut into steel at a moment's notice by Otrera's words. Medusa caught her breath; oh poor Otrera. What was she going to say, do, when she discovered Chimera was gone? What was going to happen to her, with what little she had in the world taken from her a second time? By Darian's quest, no less?

Her glare grew hard once more as she stared at Perseus. It was darker, now that the sea creature was near, as its body blocked the sunrise. And again Medusa caught her breath. Rhea! She wanted to save Rhea. How many had died, so she'd have a chance to save Rhea? And sunrise was coming, delayed by the new mountain she'd created, but coming nonetheless.

Darian laughed, and forced himself to stand. Blood coated his fingers, and a long gash ran down from his forearm to the side of his wrist. His eyes continued to glow white, just as Perseus's.

"Those mindless sheep have souls. They have their own voices and desires. Trust me, I hate the mindless sheep as much as you, but I would never, ever presume I had the right to sacrifice them, to slaughter them like sheep. You are one seriously twisted, disturbed psychopath to think it's ok to do this to—"

Perseus came at him, calm face broken into a mess of rage and roars. Huge shield first, the taller Fate's Child drove his shield into Darian's body, and sent the small man back and onto his ass. Darian managed to block it, but his sword arm dangled and waved uselessly in the air. Despite the mess of blood and groans, he still held onto the sword.

Until Perseus kicked him in the face. Medusa winced as sandal met chin, and Darian flipped backward and onto his stomach. Shield and sword fell to the side, well out of reach of the downed man. Darian tried to get up, put his hands to the ground and push himself to standing, but Perseus came over to him and put a foot on his shoulder.

Medusa froze. She needed the moment, the perfect moment. And if she waited too long, Darian was going to die.

"You disgust me, Bellerophontes. So few of us have freed our minds of the gods, the Fates, and yet here you are, a slave to them once more."

Darian reached up and grabbed Perseus's ankle. "You're just a... rabid dog... biting its master's hand."

"Enough of your delusions, fool. I hope Hades treats you well." Perseus raised his sword.

And Medusa was upon him.

She looked down at the man in her arms. Behind him, her right hand around his right wrist, and her left hand gripping his left bicep underneath the shield. So fast! She hadn't even tried to move, tried to notice when to go, tried to reach out and save Darian. She just did when the moment presented itself. A striking snake.

"You!" Perseus stared up at her, eyes wide. He pulled against her, struggled, but he could not move. Not when she was like this.

She squeezed his wrist, hard, and hissed at the man as she stared at him. He cried out as his bones cracked, as flesh tore and ripped as she squeezed tighter, and tighter still, until his wrist was a flimsy slab of meat in her hand. His sword dropped onto the ground, and Darian looked from it, to her as she pulled Perseus back a few feet from him.

"You... Andromeda... you killed Chimera! Ssso many people dead!"

Perseus was caught somewhere between gargled screams and enraged roars. His wrist wasn't a wrist anymore, and when he pulled on it, it only pulled more cries from him. Tears were on his cheeks, but so too were the mad eyes of the psychopath she met in the volcano. He tried to kick her with his heels, but all his feet found were the hard belly scales of her transformed, monstrous snake body.

Darian stared at her, his eyes just as wide.

"Ssso many people!" Her snake hair snapped out, each of the huge pythons sinking their fangs into a different part of Perseus's body as she raised him higher, and higher. Soon he was above her head, and held horizontal as her snake hair bit into his calves, hamstrings, arms, neck. Every part of him left exposed by his armor, her hair bit into.

And his cries erupted all the more when one of her pythons bit the shield, and yanked it off his arm, backward. The crack of his elbow bending much too far in the wrong direction made her stomach turn, but only for a moment, only until she remembered Chimera's face, and the sea monster that'd crushed him. Only until she remembered all the others, the first people to ever trust her, get crushed along with him.

She tore Perseus in half.

Holding the body above her, but also a foot in front of her, the mess of blood and entrails spilled over the ground as the man ripped apart at the center. She threw his legs to one side and his torso to the other, hard enough the gore of it all decorated the street in crimson, and left the dying man's insides strewn about.

And he was still alive. She glared at his upper half, flat on his chest against the cliff wall, even as he turned to face her. Mouth open, foaming, Perseus stared at her as the life drained out of him.

She looked away. She'd seen the death stare of many heroes, many soldiers. This one did not deserve that piece of her. Her tail flicked out, slid behind the man's torso, and knocked it into the sea.

"Medusa..."

"Darian! Darian..." Transformed, her voice was still a layered, raspy thing, distorted with inhuman hisses that covered the sound of her syllables, made them hard to understand even to herself.

But Darian smiled at her, and forced himself up onto a knee. "Medusa. You... you really killed him. I half expected you to not."

"I've killed many. I didn't want to! But... but he..." She shook her head, and reached down to scoop up her man in her hands. Poor Darian, the man was having trouble even moving, shaking and trembling. She hugged him to her breasts, but pulled him away when she looked down. Still transformed, her human skin was snake skin, and thicker, armored, hard. Not the bosom she wanted to cradle her love to.

Her poor little lover smirked up at her, reached up with his good arm to touch her monstrous jaw, and rested his head upon her chest's scales anyway.

"He was better than me."

"He was not! You had already been fighting for sssome time!" Oh gods, the little warrior didn't mind her transformed body. She squished him to her, and stroked his back with her claws as she hugged him. Her torso was larger now, arms thicker, stronger, and little Darian fit into the grooves of her hug like a child.

"Heh, maybe. Maybe he just wanted this more than me."

Again she shook her head, and set the man down against the cliff wall. "You're wrong. You're wrong and I'll... I'll..."

Blackness took her. One moment she was slithering up the road past Darian, the next she was falling. She only managed a few feet past him when the ground rushed up to meet her, and her whole body became a heavy mess of snakes and scales. Claws caught the ground before it cracked her in the face, and she started panting as her lungs fought to get air. She glanced at her tail body, and sighed; a lot of blood, a lot of gashes, a lot of cut open snake skin and muscle.

Her transformation left her. The extra weight of her larger muscles, her thicker snake scales, her python hair, everything faded away. Gasps came through, kept her from passing out, and she looked to Darian as her power bled away. He raised a brow as he watched her, but he too was panting, exhausted as she was.

"... well, you did that," he said, and he gestured to the second mountain she'd created. "I guess you're spent."

"I am..." She dug her claws into the ground — except they weren't her monstrous claws anymore, just tiny ones barely sharper than a human's fingernails. "But... but I have to sssave Rhea! Have to get to Pegasusss, have to—"

"I'm going to kill them."

Medusa stopped and stared at the ground. It wasn't her talking, and it wasn't Darian. She turned over her shoulder, and looked at Otrera.

The Amazon was covered in cuts and scraped skin. She was hunched over slightly, and she was missing her shield; her sword was in her scabbard at least. One of her eyes was closed, and blood dripped down her cheek. She wasn't like that when Medusa left her! Maybe... maybe more of the undead had attacked her, when Medusa left her? The gorgon tried to raise a hand to her lips, but even that proved too exhausting.

Otrera was wielding the large white bow again.

"Kill them... fucking... kill them..." The Amazon came to a stop beside Darian and Medusa, and she looked the two of them up and down as she did. Then she looked the trail of blood over, and the legs of Perseus that were still on the road. "...one down then. One to go."

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~~Otrera~~

The last thing she remembered was the sight of Chimera throwing Medusa off the bridge, and then the giant meeting the sea creature's hand. He was smiling, smiling at her, Otrera. Smiling as the colossal hand crushed him. The explosion of wood and water, bones and bodies, it'd forced Otrera to close her eyes. And when she managed to open them, the bridge was gone. Chimera was gone.

She'd drifted in and out of unconsciousness, and when she finally managed to stay awake, the undead around her were starting to get up.

Ten minutes later, a host of undead in pieces, and her body barely holding together, she started dragging herself up the hill. Chimera was dead? Did he survive that? No, he couldn't have survived that, just getting up the hill alone had required her to climb underneath a hand the size of several homes combined. A stone hand. At least Medusa had killed the sea creature.

But Andromeda and Perseus, they needed to die.

"I'm going... to kill them..." She chanted the words, said them in a slow drawl as her parched throat coughed them up. No stopping, no thinking, don't think about Chimera, don't think about him, just get to the top of the mountain, get up there.

Get up there and kill them.

Medusa's bow and quiver sat on the street, and she scooped them up. She'd need them to kill a sorceress, get her from a distance, take out a limb or two. See the sorceress cast anything while she bled out.

Medusa and Darian. She looked between the two of them, the warrior sitting against the cliff, Medusa on her hands in the middle of the road. Streaks of blood marked where Medusa had slithered up to the spot, and from the blood splatters, she recognized the slash of sword against flesh. Darian was leaking red even from where he sat, until the pool of it was growing around him. There were legs too, and she felt her teeth click as she stared at them. Perseus's legs.

A smile cracked, and vanished just as quickly. Darian and Perseus had been fighting then. Darian lost, and Medusa saved him. The gorgon was a force.

"One down then," Otrera said, and she started walking again. "One to go."

"Otrera!" Medusa tried to slither toward her, but managed only a few feet before she collapsed again. Probably exhausted from turning the sea creature to stone. And, from the mess of organs and blood that cut across the road from the cliff wall to its edge, she must have torn Perseus in half.

She'd have to thank the gorgon for killing the man in such a perfect way. Later. Breathing deep, she reached behind her back, grabbed an arrow, and started walking, arrow in one hand, bow in the other.

"Otrera wait!" Again the serpent tried to reach her, and Otrera forced herself to stop once she was between Medusa and Darian. "Chimera... he—"

"Shut up." She shook her head, and when the serpent reached for her ankle, she kicked her hand away. "Not now. We won't talk about it now. He... later." Her throat tightened on itself, and she choked down the need to sob. "She needs to die."

"Otrera." Darian this time. Bellerophontes. The man looked at her, and she glared back at him as she reached up to wipe the blood from her bleeding eye. She managed to open it, but the flesh of the eyebrow was cut deep enough to drip red from her chin; healing, but not fast enough.

"What?"

"You... you're going to deal with her... alone?"

"The fuck am I supposed to do?" She pointed her arrow down at Medusa, then back at Darian. "You're both fucked. And there!" She took a few steps to the edge of the mountainside road, and pointed the arrow down at the broken bridge, and the people who stood around it on the other side. "We're the only ones who made it over here. So, you are both going to shut the fuck up, and I am going to go kill her."

Kill her, slice off her fingers one at a time, cut her gut open and let her entrails decorate the floor of the acropolis center. What did the Egyptians call it? She smiled, and licked some of her teeth. Haruspex. Divination by entrails.

What would Ares have to say about that? She laughed again, and started walking. Fuck what Ares had to say. Fuck him, fuck his brothers, his sisters, parents, fuck the gods. What had Chimera called him? A vile, putrid mound of filth.

Chimera. One little touch of joy, one small drop of happiness, gone in the blink of an eye because of the very person who resurrected her. Death was far too good for Andromeda.

Before she moved around the turning bend of the road, she glanced back at Darian and Medusa. The two of them were wounded, badly. They'd heal of course, all of them would, as monsters had a habit of doing. But if she didn't do something about Andromeda, they wouldn't get the chance.

She gave them a nod — all she had to offer them — before she disappeared around the mountainside and continued along the road.

Her life took its merry time dancing through her head as she continued up the path. Just a young girl, born into a rough life, pulled into the Amazon world as a child when her parents died. Determined, driven, she became a squad leader quickly, and soon the queen of her tribe. Some friends, some lovers, nothing of substance, nothing of weight. But as she reigned as queen, helped her tribe grow and become stronger, she grew to love her sisters.

She coughed and spat a wad of blood on the rocky road. It wasn't so bad that they'd died, or how they'd died. Sparta would have been proud of them to die in combat against a demigod.

Course all of that got twisted, tainted, when Andromeda brought her back from the brink of death, and gave her a second chance. Suddenly everything was about revenge, about getting even with the man who took everything from her. Didn't get to die with her sisters, but became a tool of vengeance. She knew she hated herself as much as Andromeda, but she was a little more comfortable with the idea of killing Andromeda than herself.

She nocked her arrow and stepped toward the palace gates. Four more undead, this time the ones with shields and spears. They ran at her, as predictable as she knew they would be, and up high atop the mountain, the warming sunrise and bright moon lit them clear as day. She fired an arrow into each one of them, dead center of the chest, and each one exploded with the impact of the magical arrows.