Bealz, Prince Of The SouthSide

16 Pickle-Me-Jack held on as best he could but he was being drawn further and further into the swirling storm of flames. He tried to pull himself back, but the threads he'd woven held him fast. He was no longer in control of Monie's story. His prey had transformed within the cacooning of his weaving. She now wielded a mystically honed dagger and sliced easily through his bindings. With a deft maneuver, she twisted herself round and dropped lithely to the floor. In the same rapid, fluid motion, she sheathed her blade, retrieved the stout bow from around her shoulder, nocked a bolt of lightning and pinned Pickle-Me-Jack to the wall. “I told you to leave us the fuck alone!” she roars. This was a different woman. Different even than the one who'd stood not long before at the the top of a small hill, having just ripped open a dimensional portal. That woman had acted out of a desperate maternal instinct. Lashing out, unfocused, reflexively....

15 The sky above the flowered valley began to darken. Monie could no longer hear the sound of Bealz's laughter. She'd stopped casting about, no longer attempting to orient herself with anything familiar, no longer attempting to believe in something that she knew wasn't really there. Monie, standing in the middle of an endless field of flowers, feels trapped. Feels an unwanted intrusion. She scanned the horizon, searching for her captor. She grew warm, could feel the air heating up around her. She drew comfort from the heat, stoked the flames higher. The flowers and the silky golden grasses at her feet begin to blacken, the soil pulls back and splits as the moisture within it is driven out by the spreading heat. Combusting into flame, the field begins to burn. Monique Felani Kokua-Binti, whose name means Daughter of Earth, The Undying Warrior, standing at the heart of the conflagration, the shambling and shuffling, confused persona burn...

14 Pickle-Me-Jack worked furiously. He wove and wove, layer upon layer, forcing his threads deeper and deeper into Monie's mind. He searched frantically for a story, a memory that he could use to ensnare her, but she fought hard against his attempts. He had never encountered anything or anyone with the ability to withstand his weavings so. It distressed him and caused him to experience something foreign to his kind. He began to grow afraid.

13 Pickle-Me-Jack left no track nor trail in his passage through the forest. Bealz and Monie, meanwhile, cut a wide swath as they made their way, crashing about in oblivious delight. Their trail vanished, though, just as the forest takes a turn, darkening, changing over suddenly from light to dark. The darkness wasn't just caused because of the density of the woods. This was something else. Jo-Mel had tracked them at a distance, following them into the heart of the forest, and now silently contemplates the sudden disappearance of Bealz and Monie's trail. It was as though they'd simply vanished into thin air. Highly possible, but unlikely, given that Monie wielded her power with no subtlety, like a hammer. She would have simply torn a hole right through the barriers. Jo-Mel would have sensed it happening, would still feel its residual energies. There was no scent, however. No displaced leaf, no stirred nor scuffed soil along the path, no broken twi...

12 Monie had grown quiet. She looked about and saw an endless field of flowers. Bealz's laughter rang all around her but she couldn't see him. Something seemed to flit across her face. Like a spider's web drifting along the breeze. She brushed at it annoyingly. She didn't see the trees. She came here often. Loved to stroll through the flowers at the bottom of the hill that she always stepped out onto. She loved the scent of them, the flowers. A beautifully aromatic explosion that filled her senses, drove out the garbage stench of the city streets. But she only ever wanted to stroll through the flowers on her way to the sanctity of the trees. She cherished the close, intimate feeling of the woods. It seemed to reach out to her, as if it sensed her longing, and wrapped itself around her in a soothing, oak and pine and willowy comforter. Now she couldn't see the trees. They should be well within sight. The little valley at th...

11 The forest was dying. It was being slowly sapped of its essential energies. The magic that animated its consciousness was being leeched away, drained like a tapped tree. All over the Incata it was the same. The living avatars of this world's most essential natural elements were under attack, some had even succumb, dying off and forever severing the sub-dimensional connections that they maintained with the Earth. Roots that had grown deep down into and through the thin barriers between worlds, serving as transoms and anchors since before recorded time, had been lost forever. Deep in the heart of many of the Incata's elementals, growing like cancers, the Anansia Shitani, Spider Demons known to swap out and share human forms, slowly spin, killing and replacing these nodal points from the inside with a massive weaving, a binding spell that they hoped would tie the two planes of existence permanently in place. If these demons were successful, the natural ...

10 Askauri's body was in the prison infirmary. Looking down on it, he felt a pang of pity for what he had become. Prison changed a man. Forced him to devolve into something completely unrecognizable to his younger, more optimistic self. Here lay the culmination of all of his dreams and aspirations. A sad sight, indeed. His time in incarceration had been a morose and lonely affair. There were no next of kin noted on Askauri's intake paperwork and no one in more than eleven years ever listed on his visitor's list, though he did surreptitiously receive the occasional envoy. His only pleasures had been in meditating, reading, working out and sleeping. Especially sleeping. The barriers were thinner during one's deep sleep, so he had been able to slip below the veil of his concealment spell and enter into Bealz's personal dream domain. This had been his one chance at experiencing anything even close to freedom. The one chance to talk to, to inte...