Night of the Cauldron: Part VIII, The Tree of Death

Continued from Night of the Cauldron: Part VII, The Scythe of the Reaper

Night of the Cauldron

Part VIII

The Tree of Death

The pumpkin faced reaper leveled its baleful gaze upon Traci.  It moved to her and lifted her face in it's skeletal hand, examining her with the same detachment it had viewed her uncle's body.  She tried to pull away, but it held her fast.  The creature stunk of earth.

"Tt tt,"  The reaper released her face and walked about as if it were smelling the air or listening to some silent melody.  As it turned its back to her, Traci reached over and wrapped her hand around the length of the shovel. 

"Remember this night,"  The reaper gestured to the green air, "Though surely it is not likely that you can forget it."  It chuckled and touched the tip of the scythe blade into the green column of flame.  It stood silently for a long moment, watching the flames dance around the scythe's tip, much like a child burning ants with a magnifying glass.  Small sparks flew upward, dancing into the green fog.  Through it, a firetruck's siren clearly blared.

From the Archives: Flower of Sorrow

More recent sketchwork from painting in Adobe Photoshop.  This is my digital painting of a friend's psychic SOS I received at 4am one morning.  At the time I couldn't figure out where this was coming from.  When I started asking around the next day, I found out about my friends problem.  Things are much better now but at the time they were intense and sorrowful.

{Created in Adobe Photoshop}

Featured Creature: Worm

"It moved through water like a bullet.  That horrible maw opened up like a balloon and I knew that the man who had fallen overboard was lost.  I couldn't see that it even had a mouth until it ate him.  I watched the thing swallow him in two even gulps.

In the moonlight, we could see the black waters were becoming full of the things.  Their white shapes darted about just beneath the surface.  If I didn't know better I'd say they were glowing.  There were so many of the things moving about underneath, the boat started to rock.  When they started hitting the underside of the boat we didn't waste any time.  We cut our nets loose and turned the boat toward land.  The Captain ran the engines as hard as he could without burning them out.

Night of the Cauldron: Part VII, Scythe of the Reaper

Continued from Night of the Cauldron: Part VI, The Scarecrow's Lantern

Night of the Cauldron

Part VII

Scythe of the Reaper

Traci watched with horror as the mechanical grim reaper peeled itself off the fence and climbed down toward her and her father.  The reaper's fake teeth chattered as it crawled.  It cackled endlessly now, no longer waiting for Traci to come near.  It was coming to her.  As it moved, it's scythe knocked the Jack O Lantern off the edge of the railing.  The large pumpkin rolled across the deck and finally came to rest near the cauldron.

Suddenly, she was moving backward, away from the reaper and green glow of the cauldron.  Her father had opened the sliding glass door and pulled her inside the house.  The door slid closed with a soft hiss just as the reaper's skeletal fingers danced across the glass.  Traci's father quickly pushed the lock button and dropped the security bar down into the door's track.

The reaper flattened its plastic face against the glass door.  Much like a bird, it seemed unable to see the glass.  It pushed forward, perplexed by the unseen obstruction, biting at the air.  Traci noticed that its movements had become less mechanical.  It seemed almost to slither now as it sought passage.

Night of the Cauldron Extension

 

The last chapter of the Night of the Cauldron event has taken much longer to write than I originally thought.  As I was writing the final sequences, the scene tripled in size.  As a consequence, I'm adding one more chapter to accommodate the length of the finale.

Psyche Delectus: Bird Shaman

He knows the silence of air,
the mystery of wind.