Excerpt from Project Sleeping Beauty
This is an unpublished, unedited excerpt from Project Sleeping Beauty, a historical-inspired fantasy set in an alternate Ancient Greece, in which the main character, Cassia, is hunting down a monster before it finds its prey…
Rain had long since saturated Cassia’s tunic and trousers, and now each step made her feet squish in her boots. But her body was warm from running, and her mind was clear. Find the boy. Put him back in the cave and get the powder. Find the saprobe. Kill it. She operated best when working on a firm plan, and this one was straightforward enough, especially since the boy and the beast would likely be near each other.
The thought put extra energy into Cassia’s stride. This was her fault. Her fault Bel was outside alone with a teras lurking.
She sped back towards the cave, inhaling great nosefulls to try and catch a whiff of decay again. The cave certainly had gotten the saprobe’s attention—the forest surrounding the glowing cave stank like a barrel of moldy grain.
But where was Bel? Without a torch, she couldn’t make out footprints in the mud. Surely, he would have screamed if the saprobe had gotten a hold of him, even if he didn’t speak much. The fungus that covered all saprobe victims was slow-moving, and would not have engulfed him entirely yet—
The disgusting thought was cut off by the rustle of movement somewhere in Cassia’s vicinity. She jerked her head around to locate it, sword ready, but she saw nothing but the trees around her, heard nothing but the vague shush of rain. Enraged at her lack of ability to pinpoint it, she raised her sword and edged forward.
The cave’s entrance was in view when the hairs on her nape stood up, and a cloud of choking, reeking stench erupted around her. She made the mistake of inhaling sharply in surprise. Gasping for clean air, she turned to face whatever was lurking behind her, though she already knew what it was by the time she straightened up.
Saprobes thrived amidst decay. They found small pools of water that they corrupted, drawing in things they could decompose to add to the putrefaction. They were the only terata that lived in Hyetal. According to her studies, because of their magical nature, they were at once sustained by the water even as they were destroyed by it. Dumping a handful of xerosis powder on a saprobe was the easy way to be rid of them; they usually just shriveled up like a slug doused with salt. But the problem with saprobes, apart from the horrific smell, was that they were self-regenerating. They could rebuild anything that was stabbed or cut off very quickly. But, with a few quick slices, one could buy enough time to run away or prepare the powder. Cassia had therefore felt no concern over dealing with a saprobe.
This saprobe was different than any Cassia had ever studied. Rather than the amorphous blob of intelligent mold she was expected, when Cassia wheeled around to face the beast, she was met with a tall, human-like thing.
It was as tall as she, even hunched over as it was. White bone showed between blackish bundles, bulging obscenely from all over the body. Those squirming bunches were whatever it was that made a saprobe a saprobe, she supposed in the oddly stretching seconds where she and the teras just stared at each other. Or rather, Cassia stared into the gaping black eyes of the skeletal face, and the teras held the former man it was animating still.
The patches writhed on the dead man’s legs, and it took a shuddering step forward. Long, fuzzy hairs waved in her direction like they couldn’t wait to touch her and cling to her. Infect her.
She bared her teeth and lifted her sword. With a strike like lightning, she chopped at the neck.
She was surprised when her sword passed through the bones with little more than a horrendous crack, sending the empty-eyed skull hurtling backward.
Of course, it took another step forward. This time, the arms extended toward her. Each finger wriggled with fuzz.
She aimed for the arms next. She hacked at one, dodging its deceptively slow movements, but it took too many swings. The beast kept changing direction, trying to get at her.
With the forest at her back now, she backed away, wondering how hard it would be to simply get into the cave and—
Bel.
He was crouched next to a tree, exactly a third of the circular clearing away from the cave’s entrance. The saprobe was in the middle of the clearing, equidistant from her and Bel.
She exhaled slowly, raising her sword once again. She could distract it, keep hacking away until Bel got into the cave. With a grunt, she lashed out, her sword connecting with a rotting leg.
A few vicious hacks later, Bel hadn’t moved, merely watched her dance with the skeletal saprobe with huge eyes in his pale face.
She bit her tongue on an order for him to move, to run. She wracked her brain for more information about saprobes she might have picked up through her lessons or Antenor’s rambles about recent magical discoveries, something that might tell her about if they could hear or see. She was obviously missing key information if she’d never heard of a saprobe animating an entire wretched skeleton.
She would have to grab the boy and fight off the skeleton while they ran for the cave. Running wouldn’t be too much of a problem. The saprobe was relentless but slow.
To give herself a head start, she sent her blade hurtling through the spine visible through moldy bulges under the saprobe’s ribs. The top half of the torso teetered, then fell, a skeletal hand brushing over her chlamys as Cassia made a break for Bel.
She sprinted across the clearing, swept the boy onto her hip, and jogged for the cave’s entrance. He was heavy, surprisingly so, and clung to her shoulders.
The cave was steps away when he wailed, the sound so sharp and loud in her ear, it was a blade of sound stabbing directly into her brain.
Cassia stumbled on a patch of slick rock, and went down, hard, on one knee. She dropped her xiphos and barely kept a hold of the boy. Through the white-hot haze of pain, she pushed Bel, who’d let go of her, towards the cave.
Panting and shoving strands of sopping hair from her face, she forced herself to find the xiphos and stand. She did, hauling herself up despite the head-splitting ringing in her head, expecting to see the saprobe, ready to attack. Something had to have frightened Bel enough to make him scream like that. But the saprobe, broken in half, was a handful of feet away, crawling towards her as a swarming mass of mold attempted to strengthen the broken bones so it could get upright again.
Frowning, Cassia looked around, a creeping feeling crawling up her spine.
She squinted into the rain, sword ready. The base of her neck tingled.
Then something moved in her hair. A full-body shudder racked her body and she spun around, only to have something spin with her, attached to her hair.
She shrieked as a mass whipped around towards her face. In a split-second, she’d chopped at it and sent it to the ground with a thud.
The saprobe’s hand writhed in black strands of hair.
The earth shook beneath her feet and she wheeled around. Tethys stood, sword at the ready, at the mouth of the cave, gaping at her.
“Get the xerosis powder,” Cassia ground out. “We have a body to burn.”
