Frizhope Demon
Posted by Meg
Here is an entry from Ben.
Dear Peter, Dear Meg,
I’ve been one of many French fans of The Warded Man cycle for a long time, and since I received a signed plate from you, I’ve never been able to find a way to tell you how grateful I was.
I’m grateful for your writing, to Meg for your blog …
Carry on writing as you do; it gives us emotions, dreams, hopes and we need it all!
Here my entry for the contest.
Unfortunately, my ten month toddler can do better than me with pencils so I’ll have to do the whole job with words …
There, is in a first part, the demon description, and in a second part, a made up story putting up one of those on stage.
Hope you’ll like it!
Yours,
Ben.
Frizhope Demon:
It’s a specific sort of demon as they are very few in the Core.
They come out at night at specific location and time of the year, usually answering a Mind demon’s call on punctual massive destruction attacks.
Frizhope is kind of a demon’s Big Mama for heavy duty, as much as ultimate weapon.
Description:
As big a common barn; it’s shaped as a hornet.
The insect like head with massive mandibles atop a ridiculously small body attached on a gigantic, disproportionate abdomen.
Larges hardened chitinuous organic plates cover the upper side whereas the underside is kind of raw pulsating and moving flesh.
The abdomen finishes with a protuberant spear long sting, folded under the abdomen.
That sting is a as much a razor sharp spade as a syringe, always ready to expulse corrosive and toxic fluids secreted in abundance from over fertile abdomen’s glands.
Stories tell that an added needle on the sting allows him to inseminate major demons so as to bring them enhanced strength, healing, morphing even, thanks to demonic sap injunction.
The abdomen is the sap and venom factory, but in addition, it protects and carries multiple embryonic demons enclosed as a “core” part, ready for expulsion in the heat of an assault if need be.
Devoid of legs or wings, it seemed to levitate for the (few) observers still alive (even fewer).
What they couldn’t see is that the Frizhope is sustained at an average of two meters above ground thanks to thousands ever moving organics tendrils whose role is to insure mobility.
Rummaging the ground they’re on contact with, those tendrils have to draw nourishment for inside siblings, and are the direct link between Core and demons outside getting sonic wave instructions emitted through Frizhope’s synapses.
The Frizhope is surrounded by a demon swarm whose jellyfish likeness recalls the abdomen’s underside on which they are umbilical linked.
No one alive have been able to testify of a dawn where a Frizhope would have been defeated.
Only ultimate destruction, desolation and sterilization are symptoms of a Frizhope passing.
Nota : The French translation for hornet in french is frelon: Thus Frizhope for frelon zero hope
Victor clenched his jaw for the second time this morning.
Fully awake since dusk yesterday, the whole perimeter of protective wards around his farm had been strangely quiet through the night.
Something was wrong with the demons.
Tougher and stronger, the new wards the living legend Arlen had taught them a few months past could be paying off.
Standing facing Bert, his chief, mentor, and friend in the messenger office of Plöermail, Victor was uneasy and almost tempted to decline this mission of a new kind.
But what Bert asked was of course duty, and Victor had lived his whole life for it.
The coming of thaodan’s night in less than two days made him think twice.
-“You know I can’t send Martin to the beach. He hasn’t recovered yet.”
Indeed, Martin was still shaking with fever after an epic fight with a Shrimps vase demon that had brought him below sea level.
Only the intensive coast messengers training in breathing and swimming allowed him to survive two days and night in a long forgotten sub sea creek.
-“I’ll go; you know I will, Bert.”
-“We are the sixteenth of May, Victor, and the stellar conjunction is reaching its peak at thaodan’s night the eighteenth. If there is one chance, we have to take it.”
-“Let me back home this morning. I have yet to fix a few wardposts and I’ll be on the road at noon.”
-“I won’t say no, but hurry, we need to know how Martin survived. Feeding on those algaes should have killed him if not the tremendous periwinkle demons.”
Something was wrong with the nights.
Patting his horse’s mane, riding out of the little town, he could feel the fear spreading its venomous tendrils around both his heart and reason.
He’ll have to go fast along the road with little rest if he wanted to be back home for Thaodan’s night.
Something was wrong with the Core.
His mother had given him the gift that allowed him to sense the core pulsating: like a living organ in the night, and a purring cat on daylight.
Thirty years of feelings from your night enemy’s very place had given him the patterns.
He could feel the demons squirting from the buzzing underneath at night, and the silent rumble in the morning.
For the past few months, the frame he was used to was changing.
There was no more rest after the night, as if despite the great effort of the night, demons were still pulsating, their venomous blood boiling.
The thought of Arlen coming through the village gave him some comfort.
He had been lucky enough to spend some time with him that day. Arlen had listened carefully speaking little but giving much.
Launching his horse into gallop, he would ride straight to the shores, discover that creek Martin survived into and report back whatever it is that precise spot had of specifics.
* * *
“Alive, I’m alive,” thought Victor, as consciousness took a bit lower the buzzing in his head.
Quickly checking if fingers and toes were moving, he became slowly aware that a soft light was glowing at the back of the cave.
Riding in the stormy night along the high cliffs atop the maddened sea, rock and sand demons had unleashed an apocalypse of violence he had never before witnessed.
Thinking of his beloved ones falling from the cliffs, he fainted while drowning between rocks and foam.
Thumping in his head Victor reckoned the pattern attuned with the reddish glow. Ramping further he could feel stronger as he was nearing the now visible source.
A power Nodus, he had found it somehow; it was there: one of the scarce holy locations in the world where nature in its beauty formed a ward of its own.
A vertical crack, with on the right side, a single dot below a horizontal slash crossing the middle axe in its centre was shining in its powerful elemental glory.
Lying on his back, he watched the ceiling of this narrow pit registering this unique and powerful sign where Mother Earth repelled the scum coursing through her.
Instinctively he used his knife whose tip shimmered as he copied the holy ward on his forearm flesh.
* * *
Three stones in a circle were all Victor could distinguish as he emerged in the diminished daylight.
The whole surroundings shimmered as the first star in the sky marked the end of the day.
This place, Victor understood with an enhanced consciousness, was where the core massed its malevolent power in order to corrupt the holy place in the eve of Thaodan’s night:
Before, the stellar link with earth was to be the strongest and demons the weakest.
Still vibrating from the Nodus closeness, his right arm bled anew with a mix of liquid light shining brighter as night grew its fangs.
“That is what you were up to, then,” thought Victor, assessing the dark and darker cursed place.
In the way of a wounded snake, demons were retreating from the land to throw their whole might against this place at that time of the year.
His temples drummed as thick fog arose from the plain.
His fingers were chilled as wind blew stronger.
His legs were giving away as dark forms took shapes.
“Come to me,” thought Victor.
“I reject you no more …”
“Express yourself, you my ever present companion.”
“You, my first opponent since I decided to be your vassal no more,” whispered the messenger.
Shouting to the spiralling darkness amid the stone circle:
“Explode in me at last in all your rage so I may see your true face, you who laid sleeping in me all those years.”
“Show me your shape, you … my fear.”
Earth and wind demons roam the land they take shape on.
He doesn’t see them yet but he perceives the first hiss and roar of hate from the teeming shapes.
Fear infuses in him as a single drop of blood would in clear water.
Grim crackling sounds of demons tearing at each other are everywhere in their absolute violence.
Amid the three standing stones, a barn sized demon materializes.
Hornet shaped with swords like mandibles crackling in the now cold air, the gigantic ignominy soars in its buzzing and roaring glory.
Dwarfing the head, a disproportionate abdomen is pulsating with a thousand lives of its own.
Protected with chitinuous plates on the top, pink spongy raw flesh oozes gory slime in tendrils rummaging the soil it is erupting from.
Going back to the basics of the messenger’s training, again and again, reaching even deeper inside him; he tries to move his body according to his breathing.
“Prepare your mind, awaken your senses, and dig inside yourself to reach the emotions you’ll need,” recites Victor.
The old messenger mantra soothes his senses, but frustration swarms as his body does not answer.
Cancelling any resolve he might have built-up, a roaring sound tears in his brain like a wasp snuggled in the ear, biting straight through it.
The numbness mask Victor was desperately building crashes in one of sheer terror.
Raping the earth it is standing on, each of the many tendrils is vibrating and stretching as the malevolent mass is arisen from the surface leaving only space for a spear long sting.
Rescuing his sanity, tearing the fear veil, his old friend’s voice comes to mind: “Ugly init’? Ain’t know if they got to reproduce, but mirrors should kill’em as much as sun!”
Victor sees the pattern anew.
The fear is there engulfing him whole but he can feel again.
Coursing through his arm, the Nodus-ward is pulsating power in rage, welcoming fear and using it to fuel his resolve.
The pattern becomes obvious.
Demons, as enslaved in the mightiness of this Core’s essence form, are dancing and evolving around the beast.
Feasting on weaker siblings, the strongest demons dare impale themselves on the venomous dart, convulsing in pain or bliss as their eyes shine with something they never showed before: sentience.
-“Breathe, keep your eyes shut and breathe,” he told himself. “And feel for yourself what earth has given you.”
Indeed, thinking he was bleeding in his immobility, the puddle formed by the falling drops at his feet shines, radiating reddish light brighter as darkness tries to take over.
Flowing now freely from the ward he sizzled on his arm, his blood pours freely through it as he feels fluids coming back from earth through every pore with an enhanced strength infused back to him.
The beating of his temples, he understands it now, never was from the core, but was an extension from the suffering voice of Mother Earth violated by demons.
Now, on Thaodan’s night, he knows it, the beating gives way to a drumming sound attuned with his heart, whose moves resonates with the celestial vault power.
Sky and earth get united thanks to a human being, able to hear and sing the elemental war anthem against demon’s corruption.
The first contact is disorienting. He hasn’t felt like moving yet, but an air demon in its hunger frenzy is melting, shrinking, turning into ashes as its sinks down, impaled on his raised arm.
He tries not to see the ugliness of this intelligence able to bring destruction; he wants to believe in the beauty of life and what hope might offer.
The insectoïd head turns to face him.
This demon understands.
It knows he is there for its destruction.
The sting disengages from an earth demon which size had doubled, and immediately throws its whole psychic might against Victor, launching spores and minions toward him.
Victor sets aside the pain searing through his head, as if countless needles sink into his brain and sets toward this demon’s breeder, face of what could be life without daylight.
He feels the pain of blows raining on him.
Even if no claws or fangs may reach him, impacts make him pivot and duck, always set in his objective’s direction.
A vicious killing blow from a sand demon breaks his ribs before exploding in a spray of mud cascading around him.
Victor tries to ignore the agony tearing his body and soul apart and his steps turn into a run.
Intoning the holy chant, he feels the multiple resonances of this one note he has heard his whole life.
His cries wrap him in the cleansing power of revenge.
Still birthing spores, the demon has no way to move fast enough to get rid of him and start to circle the shining bug dangerously coming its way.
Cutting venomous tendrils, Victor wants to reach the beginning of the abdomen, separate head from body.
In a last spring of energy, thrusting forward, he plunges his arm in the scorching gory mud of the abdomen, shouting at the top of his lungs as the dart unmercifully pierces his kidneys and tears his spine in shreds.
Spread on the grass, face turned sideways, he inhales for the first and last time the delicate fragrance of nature in the middle of the night as a Mind demon melts back to the Core between three standing stones.
Thanks to Ben for sending in his entry from France! What an intense and detailed story. I am terrified!