Nightlord: Orb Read Free

keep count.
    Finally, when I settled down again, I evaluated at the carnage.  Black powder was everywhere, slowly sinking into the floor and vanishing.  I wondered what it meant.
    Then a harpy dive-bombed one of the eye openings and sent in a shit-missile.  It splattered everywhere and I could hear the raucous laughter outside.
    Wrath— Ira —is one of the sins.  I remember that.  At that moment, though, I didn’t much care.
    I wriggled out through an ear and stood there, eyeballing the circling flock of foul-smelling things.  The distorted faces of women I have cared about sneered and screeched at me.  The one with Tort’s face dove at me, talons out.
    That’s not Tort , I realized.  That’s some monster that’s using her face—that dares to use her face.
    Instead of ducking, I dealt that face a two-handed blow with my length of pipe.  The harpy came to an abrupt halt in mid-swoop and fell to the ground, stunned.  I hit it again, cracking the skull, before I stepped on its throat and put my makeshift knife into its left eye.
    It shuddered and quit, crumbling to a fine, black powder.
    Everything else scattered.  The flaming figure went out; the handsome man faded back into the shadows, and the other harpies screamed and shrieked as they flapped away, shedding greasy feathers. I watched them go, wondering.
    Is that all it takes?  To make the choice?  To stand instead of flee?  To be brave instead of cowardly?  Or is it a case where finally getting angry was the right thing to do?
    Yoda would be so disappointed in me.  Malcolm X might not.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.
    I crawled back into my head to rest and think.
     
    I’m living in an extended phantasmagoria of psychological metaphors.  I know that, because I can follow along my personal timeline, point by point, for how I got here.  I grabbed a demonic spirit with my tendrils and gave it a free ride into my being.
    Important note:  never try to eat a demon’s soul.  They aren’t food; they’re competition.  Trying to pull a demon’s essence in through one’s soul-devouring tendrils works entirely too well.  They treat it like an open door and come right in.  This is not considered an optimal outcome by anyone except the demon, who will then fight you for the driver’s seat at the very least.
    Within the structure of my mental creations, there’s one real way out of this basement: stairs up to a trapdoor in the floor of my mental study.  My mental study, of course, is a conscious construct for where my personal concept of self is supposed to be.  It’s kind of like the bridge on a ship.  Everything is controlled from there.  Or, if not controlled, at least that’s where the central coordination happens.
    If I’m going to get out of here, I need to find the stairs, force the door, and somehow manage to defeat a double or triple dose of my own darker nature.  My Evil Twin is already much stronger than any of my own inner demons should be—or, perhaps, it’s a more cohesive and organized bundle of them.  It can also call up all of my own inner darkness through a process of affinity or correspondence.  That’s what got me dragged down here in the first place.
    I don’t know if killing off his potential allies is, in the long term, a good thing for my sanity or not.  But if I’m going to stand a chance of breaking out and beating him, I have to cut down on his reinforcements.
    I’ve been hunted long enough.

In My Head
     
    If I were trying to run from things, I would abandon this position and keep moving.  As it is, I’ve decided to stay.  The unpleasant things come to me and I kill them.  They crumble and blow away, or the dusty remains diffuse into the ground.  I don’t think I’ve seen any of those again.  I know I haven’t seen the Tort-harpy again; the rest of them seem more cautious about approaching.  The handsome fellow is hanging around, but he doesn’t crawl in after me.  The fiery figure