Once everyone had donned their protection, a peculiar mix of modern luxury and ancient, tradition-ladden obscurities, Morgana voiced a few, unheared words, her face beaming with enthusiasm. She grasped unto the stem of something that on the first look would have been mistaken for an overgrown dandelion, its leaves shaped like a crual, barbaric blade, the ridges heralding the bloodshed this flower from hell was born from - and that it may bring. From the grove she laid bared whatever blasphemous abnormality may slumber restlessly in the poisoned earth.
The pain, intense as it may be, was instant. Birds and squirrels rained from the surrounding trees, struck down where they stood, soiling themselves as they did. Those unaccustomed to it were forced to their knees by an invisible hand, bowing their heads to a king of vegetation that called life and death its domain. The creature was just as hideous as it was poisonous. It's rust-red flesh was malformed, resembling not the familiar watery sponge of bulbous roots, but skinless flesh and muscle fiber, covered in thin, vein-like tentacle-roots, slowly draining all that that is good and nurturing from the tortured ground, leaving behind unaging, oily dust. It's serpent-like legs struggled against Morganas grasp, its flimsey, malnourished arms tiny and useless in comparison. Though it resembled a miscarried infant in size, there was no scar on its bloated, bulbous stomach, born from nothing but blood, magic and soil. Its eyes were lidless, adorned with tiny, hook-like thorns, miniscule, blind beads, not a window to the soul, but the abyss whence it came from. However the attention of the viewer could not be drawn from the mouth....ohhh, horribleness. An open wound in the plantfiber yawning from ear to ear, revealing the monstrosities yellow-tinged spine, standing like a tree in a forest of sword-like teeth, covering gums, tounge, palate and throat in a chaos that knew neither anatomy nor sanity. A shriek that went unheared was released from this chasm, and though silenced, it left not a doubt about its potency. Resonating in their bones and flesh alike, it shook them to the core of their being - or was that the fear rising inside them?
A line had been crossed, and a truth had invaded their minds, armed with pointed daggers and curved blades, throwing down the false idols of their mind, and planting itself as their new god. This...this...thing! It was real! Not an illusion, crafted with misintend on the machines of artists, in glorious high definition 3D, not a puppet of rubber and wax - but a being of flesh and fiber. Was it...narural? How could it be? What else was real? Everything? No, it can't be! This was a game. A hobby! A story for children! Science disproves it. Or does it? It has to.....please...it has to. Their entire life, their entire existance brought low and thrown into the mud, a paralysis kept them from standing up again. They could not look.. nor could they look away... Elise could not help herself but purge the acidic bile rising in her throat, coughing and tearing.
Meanwhile, hidden in the bushes and forgotten laid Oliver, abandoned. Melting to a red-hot sludge the lead poured down her chest like styx itself, leaving nothing but distruction and the stink of burning meat. Her eardrums shattered and her mind violated by the forces of death, blood forced itself from her eyes, nose, mouth, ears and fingernails. For a moment she stood paralysed, there was no pain, but just the single, unavoidable manifestation of a thought inside her head. There was no heartbeat. Shouldn't there be a heartbeat?
Offering what little protection it could, the amulette turncoat that was once a protector had now become her tormentor, denying her merciful oblivion by taking away an instantatous death, replacing it by a strangehold instead, the searing hotness preventing breath to be drawn. Was it competing with the mandrake for the right of first blood?
A death by inches..