"Part of me is convinced that I will never be able to forget the way his voice sounds when the coercion sets in, or the way his hair curls around his face. He's got the face of an angel, with the will of the devil. But perhaps only God can help him now.
And perhaps it is the same for me."
Just a little mood-board for a book I've been working on since last year. I hope to publish soon, but I just wanted to see if this post would get any traction or not :) I own none of these pics, they're all from Pinterest!
Inspo sparked by literally one random sentence in this fic
TF141 is in a tough situation. The team needs help, and they can't quite explain the things they've seen or the enemy they face. They're used to hell, both fresh and decaying, but the problem they're up against seems to be entirely unnatural. Maybe they need to find an unnatural solution.
They'd gone for recon first, of course. Two parties on either side of the ragged canyon. They watched the firelight down below, in the cracks of the earth, flicker against stone and dance with shadows. If they hadn't already been familiar with the landscape, they might have assumed the red glow of the canyon's walls was entirely because of the three large pyres buring throughought the wide pass. It was simply coincidence that the minerals of the earth provided here such an uncanny similarity to Hades. Only difference was it was cold as a witches tit in these northern mountains.
The screeching sounds the men heard when they settled into place, the hoarse laughter and chanting of nonsense (no, not the language of the local people - just unadulterated, arbitrary noise); this was all perfectly manageable, under the assumption that the cult was just that, ruled by the machinations of the human trafficking ring they sought to destroy. They wore bones and stolen gold and celebrated as if they were lighter than air. The sway of their pale limbs was wild and unorchestrated, and yet the writing energy of the large group as a whole seemed to flow right towards the center, at the widest split of the canyon.
What the team had not expected was the devil himself. Or something like the devil, ram horned and corded like a red dragon, smelling of iron and black earth even to the men so high above, as it shook its shaggy mane and something dripped from the sharp end on its horns. Ghost thought it was some stupid costume, to match the ones the revelers rolled about in with streaks of blood red and ink black. He vocalized this thought lowly before they watched four prisoners be marched to the shallow pit where the thing crouched, under the frenzy of drums and shakers. There they were brought to their knees, and untied.
"Offerings?" Price squinted from his post beside Soap, opposite his captain and liutenant. He watched the prisoners each receive a small weapon, the metal glinting in the firelight. "Challengers?" The eight men escorting the prisoners all bowed and walked backwards, their eyes on their feet as they went. The captives themselves stood and took on a posture announcing reluctant defiance against the beast before them. Looking not so much confused as they were resigned to not knowing what to do with themselves, as if they had expected this would be their fate but had yet to decide on a plan of action.
The devil sat still before them, surveying each man. They were all of them grown and built up with hard labor.
"They look tough enough," Gaz said calmly and pulled out his binoculars for a better look. "Looks like the same uniform the men wore at the quarry. Guess we found some of the missing civs."
"Think the Brits are down there too?" Ghost muttered.
"Welshmen." Soap made the correction. "All'a ye truly gonna ignore the bloody demon in the center, aye? Jesus. Fuck." Soap had already aimed his own lenses at the beast and did not like the idea of taking his eyes off it.
Ghost snorted at the pure, fearful faith in the Scott's voice, coming across clearly even over coms, but then he shuffled to the side and Price soon heard the telltale clicks of his sniper kit as he set it up.
"Hold on mate," Price said. "Think we oughtta see what this mangy fursuit is capable of."
All in all, it was a surprisingly short affair. After a display of bravery from one prisoner ended in his knife-holding limb being severed by sheer force and thrown halfway up the canyon wall (a foot that was somehow both hooved and clawed providing the pressure to keep the rest of his body on the ground), the other three were dispatched with not much more than a thwak thwak and several wet crunches.
Even the captain felt his stomach rise to his throat at the efficiency of the thing, the wrongness of it. A roar went up, echoing past the soldiers and into the starry sky, first made of twisted, delighted ovation and followed by a sound unlike any the team had ever heard. If his top and bottom lip were anywhere close enough together to form language, Gaz might have said it sounded like ten different terrifying video game bosses thrown into a blender. He only closed his jaw with a gasp when he realized it was preventing him from breathing properly. The makeshift sparring ring was littered with parts, stringy and wet and melting into the ground, the beast now snorting with pride and picking through the desecrated bodies the way a monkey picks flees off his mate.
[At that final - carnal - sound, one of our soldiers had loosed his bladder - I shan't say which one - and none of them were at all surprised or in any mood to haze him about it on the ride back to the safehouse.]
Price put his hand on Ghost's rifle when the masked man tensed, seeing the beast slow and readying to fire. "Hold." The slight tap and movement of his scope necessitated Ghost to pull away from the shot, and he looked at Price incredilously.
"What the fuck d'ya mean hold?" he hissed.
Price shook his head, then started to elbow his way back off the bluff and into the twiggy bushes lining the cliffsides. The other man rolled with his gun onto his back and slid dutifully after, half relieved at getting away from the whole scene, half terrified to lose track of the events playing out down below.
At Price's orders the men on the other side moved hesitantly away from the edge and crept back a half mile to a smaller canyon, carved out of red rock and looking much less sinister, even dark as it was. Not one of them managed to resist flinching at every sound on the way there.
Once in the truck, silence was inevitable for a time. No one wanted to breach the topic. In order to come up with a plan, one had to accept the reality of the contex. And that was... difficult.
After twenty minutes Gaz coughed wearily and cleared his throat, and that seemed the impetus of the discussion that would last through the rest of the night and well into morning.
By the time the sun crept up over the safehouse, everyone had on a fresh pair of trousers and the decision was made to investigate the local town to see if a cultural clue might be found.
Their search began at a food stall and ended at a church, grand in comparison to the other buildings but still quite shabby and lackluster. Between the food stall and the church the men had asked many awkward questions about local religions and strange animals. They got mostly furrowed brows and head shakes, until they were pointed towards the domed building at the edge of town, where establishments and cabins became fields, and cobbled paths drove out into the dust of marble quaries, and finally to endless walls of that red, red earth.
"Looking to kill a demon? Find a priest. Sounds about right." Price smoothed his hand over his mustache, then again over his lips. It put Simon at ill ease seeing his captain self-soothe.
To be continued... cause I want to post this idea but I have to go to sleep!! Also im cursing myself for writing this in past tense I hate when I do that
"That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on."
