Jay - Reacts to Charisma, fights through leg wound

The cemetery contained the corpses of twenty-seven former kings and queens of Whitecrosse, marked by statues in rough Romanesque style: stout cylindrical bodies and wide staring eyes. Arranged in two facing rows, each statue stood sentinel before a sharply gabled mausoleum, each mausoleum encrusted with depictions of its respective ruler's deeds. In bas-relief they rode again, atop staunchly striding stallions whose hooves crushed heaps of vanquished foes, vast armies or grim giants or dragons twined in awkward stillness. Twining too were the creeping strands of ivy that rose to blot these deific conquests under leafy bursts, entire walls swallowed, a subsummation of human history into an ever-insatiable maw.

***

From the body extended a trail of tiny bloody splotches that led to one of the middlemost statues, a tall queen imbued with holy blandness. Blood dribbled down the queen's side and from behind her shoulder a woman's face peeped, streaming slimy black tears.

***

Just as Jay expected. He gripped his baseball bat with both hands and when the cloud moved away Charisma was on him, clearing the entire span of the cemetery in moments, three limbs' worth of curved talons bared.

He swung, from shoulder height, only for the aluminum bat to clink between the spread claws on Charisma's monstrous arm. That kept her arm from striking, but she hopped up and scrabbled her legs like a chicken, an attack he backpedaled to avoid but could not keep from cutting deep into his thigh. An instant gush of warm blood flowed down his pant leg, while the pain itself stung in oddly localized intensity.

That pain snapped him out of boredom. Not just the boredom of the moment, which weighed heavy during the belabored wailing and swearing of the sisters, but a much longer boredom, one traveling seemingly uninterrupted as long as he remembered, even though he remembered times he was not bored—but because the memories themselves had become boring, the moments they signified retroactively turned boring in tandem.

Charisma screeched something in his face, a cackle half avian: "KCHH-HH-HH-HH!" And Jay whipped out his good leg between the swiping arcs of her talons and kicked her in the stomach hard enough to stagger her. His hurt leg transformed into agonizing stone and he knew if he attempted a kick like that again it'd give out and drop him. He had to remain rooted to the spot.

***

[2] The Same Place in a Worse World