5-Beginning of Chapter 2

One hated her more than the cold.

He would rather lose his cock to the snow, let it turn blue with ice than lose it within her folds. It meant more than it should because for him his penis was his livelihood. His job, his work, his way of living, his method of sustenance, his life, his very being.

Helios was a prostitute, the best one in all the lands.

It was natural considering his status as fey—sexual beings that ate lust from their prey, drank emotions from quivering lips, consumed feelings that havocked the soul. Helios was a siren, a sea fairy with the ability to sing and entice.

A seducer that was legendary to all four corners of the world.

His skills were renowned, his beauty profound, and his soul was as beautiful as the white feathery wings on his back. He was an angel from the Heavens, a being only the biggest of bounties and the most lavish of gifts could buy.

A night with Helios was a night with the prince of the seas and the skies.

That was until Euodia crushed him like an ant under her boot.

*

The eschewal of overthinking, the ability to exercise self-control over her fear—they'd been the only reasons why Quinn had survived her very first night in the fictional world.

She'd pulled herself out of the mountain of bodies, leaned forward to look down at the beings that gnawed and chewed on the dead. Watched the tug of sinew stretch and pull apart from bone, until the skin broke and fat bubbled free—white in the light of the moon.

The numbness, the lack of emotion had meant a strong control over the sound of her breathing. And her steps had been quiet and soft as she moved over broken, sticky corpses that grew icier by the minute, nudged rubbery blue and red tubes that laid exposed and yet preserved in the snowbank stained red.

They were monsters.

They towered over the pile, hunched at the base of the stack. The beasts were nothing like she'd ever seen before: stained with ink and slathered with the remains of their feast. Putrid and oozing, they were animals gathered in the lonely dark, bathed in the moon and swathed in the generous lustre of blood.

Her conscious, so incredibly distraught it had quickly begun to fray, could only ferment and sink in the stress of danger that faded quite quickly into a need to just 'fuck it all'. Because good God it was just her and the monsters; her, death and the moon.

For brief moments, that solitude had been poetic, and she'd basked quite serenely, and quite mournfully at what their fangs to her throat could bring her. A second taste of death. A second chance at nothingness.

Freedom.

Or a second fictional world?

Quinn was just so tired, and the burn at her temples was a by-product of the whispers from another's recollections. Her head ached with information as if it had just been spooned to her by an unforgiving teacher. Princess Euodia's memories were like bad nightmares, awful dreams that she so desperately wanted to sleep off and forget.

There were things she knew about this world; information that did not come from the book but from Euodia.

For one, she knew that this was the wastelands. That the monsters were people experiencing the final stages of the Lonely—an unknown affliction that turned one crazy with animalistic lust and later a penchant for cannibalism. She also learnt that despite Euodia's stronger, mystical body she could not survive temperatures well below zero, naked.

The memories were random, jumbled up information that could only be recalled via visual and verbal reminder. They seemed to fight in the crevices of her tiny brain, appeared to leap and jump, pounding against one another, begging to be brought forth. But Quinn squashed it all down not wanting to think about their faces and their eyes.

Golden flecked and rife with hatred.

The seven men that murdered her, the seven men she'd wronged. The seven God-like heroes of this world. Her existence would be their only mistake, and they would gladly use her revival as an excuse to kill her again. It sent a chill straight through her, one that was far colder than that of the winds that lashed at her skin creating gooseflesh in its wake.

Perhaps her new reality was Hell, and the monsters were really just demons feasting on the sinners on Earth. Quinn had swallowed, throat spicy with the scent of rust as she stared down at the animals and the ways they particularly enjoyed the hearts of their meal, slurping the meat off the bone.

Just like how he had eaten Euodia's heart, fresh and bloody from her chest.

Perchance she was here for being unfilial to her parents, for being rude to the world. And maybe she was destined to die a second time.

But the monsters were not merciful killers. She noticed that they took their time with the corpses, noticed that they nibbled and licked first and then seemed to heave and shake as they sucked at the heart. The threat of pain spurred her to her feet—squelching quite horribly in the lurid waste of bodily fluids. She would be disgusted later, but not now when she was numb and sleepy from the cold.

Quinn would think about the reason for her existence again when her head wasn't cloudy from exhaustion, and monsters did not lay by her feet waiting to slurp out her lungs and gnaw on her bones. Bathed in the so much blood and waste that she couldn't quite make out their features, could only see the shimmer of eyes.

It had been cold enough for ice to form but not enough to stop the decay and putrefaction of old meat. The rotten bodies were the ones that the monsters didn't touch; they were in favour of freshly murdered options. She'd noticed that with a sidelong glance at the one-eyed corpse beside her, bloated with gas and hissing with maggots—a dead sorry man.

He taunted her with a gaping grin and a strangely hard cock, swelling with the worms and the fumes of decay. In her madness, she thought she heard him laugh and call her a pussy, a coward and then a bitch in the voice of the man she hated the most in the world.

'You're going to die,' it said, 'you're going to be eaten alive because you're too weak to run, too weak to fight.'

'They'll catch me the moment I step out of this hill,' was her pathetic answer.

'Excuses,' he spat, teeth shining in the light, 'you're waiting to die, you'd let them step over you, consume you just because you'd rather do that then confront and struggle. You've done it once and you'll do it again.' His grin grew personal. 'Always the coward, never the warrior. I'd fuck you now and you wouldn't even fight back.'

'But you're dead.'

'And you're already in your grave,' his smile had stretched, his eyes were empty sockets that leaked with the remains, 'we'd be together, you and I, side by side as we rot and decay. Mix and melt together as one. Forever.'

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