Shadows raced and slithered through the starlit night. Beth could make out the cloaks of the coven now, and her heart dropped when she realized that some of those shapes in the darkness were headed straight for them.
“Whip!” Ashley shouted.
The willow tree beside the coven moved. There was no windup, no subtle indication of what was coming. The branches of the willow tree simply shot out, and Whip eviscerated the front line of shadows.
Blood and gore exploded into the air with the force of the strike. And something that looked far too much like a human leg fell to the earth nearby. Another shadow surged into a brighter patch of moonlight and Beth recoiled at the vision.
Those same humanlike legs, paired in the dozens, churned across the earth. The creature didn’t stand any higher than her knee, but Beth had little doubt the damage it could do if the pinchers protruding from its jaws caught hold of flesh.
The coven backed away, glimpses of blades shining from beneath their cloaks. Beth unsheathed Cornelius’s dagger and plunged it into the center of the protection rune on her right arm. A crackling blue shield flashed up in front of the nearest coven members, and one of the grotesque creatures crashed into it, its face splitting apart in a shower of blue sparks.
Beth pulled the blade away and made to stab her left arm, but a wave of exhaustion flowed over her. She’d lost too much blood recently, and that was something the fairies’ healing magic couldn’t replace entirely. Her vision swam and her knees locked in place as she tried not to fall over.
Ashley’s cloak flew out to the side, exposing the weapons strapped to her thigh and the nine tails at her waist. The latter came into her hand as she flipped a tile at the shadows.
The whip cracked out, cutting the rune on the back of the tile, and sending a torrent of flame to tear through the shadows. It was easy to tell which trees were only trees, and which were green men as they scattered away from the flames.
The light of the attack revealed the horrors waiting in the darkness. The legs had a human shape, but were scaly like those of an Utukku. The core of its snakelike body, segmented like an insect, weaved back and forth in a nauseating rhythm. But the face, the face was like that of a human skull laid bare.
The eyes of that expressionless thing were what froze Beth’s heart. Those oily shimmering rainbows locked onto her and surged forward, eyes like the flesh of the Eldritch thing in the Shadowed Lands. Beth didn’t have to ask what the thing was. She knew it was some Eldritch spawn, and she had little doubt it was there for her.
Whip struck out again, and the thing flew to pieces, bluish-red blood exploding across the field like some long-infected flesh.
“They’re here for me!” Beth shouted, gritting her teeth through her exhaustion. “Stay away from me!” It was a warning for the coven, for the green men, and most especially for Ashley.
“Like fucking hell.” Ashley spun three tiles into the air, and the nine tails cracked with a fury. Three funnels of blue lightning, cascading around storm clouds black as night, sailed into the Eldritch things, devouring them as surely as an ant in a flood.
A green man stepped in front of them, and vines exploded from his hands, lashing out to wrap up one of the Eldritch crawlers. But he wasn’t fast enough, the mandibles siphoning from side to side, severing vines before they landed on the green man himself. Beth watched in horror as the green man’s leg came off in two brutal crunches, and a second Eldritch thing leapt from the earth, crushing the green man’s head before he could so much as scream.
“They’re behind us!” Stump bellowed, drawing Ashley’s attention.
She didn’t see the Eldritch thing that leapt from the shadows. Didn’t see the mandibles stretched out to strike her down. But the Eldritch thing couldn’t have known what the triangle cut with a horizontal line in blood would do.
The giant came from the Shadowed Lands with a clap of thunder. A familiar form, a titan named Sleeper, was born into that realm with a fury few creatures could match. His fist closed around the airborne Eldritch thing, pulping its head with a nauseating pop.
Beth shouted for him to help Stump, unsure if a giant from the Shadowed Lands could even hear her orders, but it was the last thing she could think of. And to her relief, the giant turned and flowed into action, joining the green man as another wave of the Eldritch came in from the east.
“They’re back here too!” Vicky shouted.
Beth glanced up to see the girl on the roof, and a moment later she saw the wings of the dragon spread out behind her and dive off the side of the house. The night exploded into blue and white fire as Jasper burned down everything that wasn’t an ally.
The back door of Rivercene opened, the hinges squealing like a dying rabbit as the long-dead wood turned green and writhed around it. But the woman who walked out of those doors was the deathbringer in that place. The innkeeper’s eyes flared gold as the boards beneath her bare feet groaned.
“You dare. In my home.”
She raised her right arm as golden motes of dust drifted away from her fingertips. The innkeeper snapped her hand closed into a fist, and a tidal wave of shimmering vines exploded out from her being, erupting from the very wood of Rivercene. They snaked around green men and witches as if they had a consciousness all their own. They pierced the fires of the dragon and came out the other side unsinged.
And as the world fell into the chaos of slithering shadows and brilliant light, those vines fell upon the Eldritch things with a fury. Twisting pillars of vines and light snatched up form after form, curling into inescapable vises.
As quickly as it had begun, the light faded from those tendrils. Golden motes of power drifted back to the innkeeper, passing through walls and trees and allies alike until the glow of her eyes subsided, the wood of Rivercene waited dormant once more, and the corpses of the Eldritch things lay as ash upon the earth.
The innkeeper looked down at Ashley. “It is not only you who has had to take up arms, child. Your blessing is my blessing, and your coven is one with me.”
With that, the innkeeper returned to the mansion, leaving silence in her wake.