Lilliad 30

Her voice carried and echoed around the open mountain air. For a long moment, no one moved or spoke.

Then there was a clatter. Lilli turned to the sound and gritted her teeth against the horror that wanted to spill out.

“Who are you?” Igni asked loudly. “You are extraordinarily ugly.”

The skeleton, held together with black tendrils and spite, did not answer. It was coming directly at her. In an eerily spindly, fragile-looking hand, it had a rusted and dented sword. The other arm was missing.

One of the men made a loud sound of disgust. She didn’t turn to see who, because the skeleton was nearly upon her.

“How do I kill this?” Lilli shrieked. “It doesn’t have any organs!”

“The tendons!” Ser Alcuin bellowed. The clatter of metal behind her was probably the knight hauling themself and their heavy armor up the drop.

Lilli looked at the thing again and bit her own lip on accident. She tasted blood when she rolled out of the way of an oncoming blow. “What is a tendon?” She howled in answer. She took a swipe at the back of the skeleton's ankle on reflex. What would have been a disabling blow on a human merely glanced off with an unpleasantly dry scrape.

There was a heroic-sounding yell behind her. Immediately after it was followed by a horrible clang as Ser Alcuin bashed the skeleton with their gleaming shield.

Lilli rolled up to a ready crouch, shuddering. She watched with round eyes as the knight hit the skeleton again, cleaving the head off entirely.

The body didn’t stop moving. It listed sideways, unbalanced, but the one remaining arm still brought up that scrap metal sword.

Lilli shot forward, intending to cut out the black tendrils on the back of the elbow. Ser Alcuin reacted first, parrying and then cutting off that arm at the shoulder joint. It fell to the stone with a clatter.

The skeleton, limbless and beheaded, seemed to be looking at them somehow. She forced down a shudder.

A black voice echoed.

Lilli shot up straight, looking around wildly. Whoever was speaking- they must have been enormous, the voice was everywhere around them. The sound made her bones ache. She swayed on her feet.   It sounded cruel and amused, but it wasn’t speaking any language that she knew.

The voice said what must have been two or three sentences in that hateful, heavy voice. It ended as abruptly as it had begun.

The skeleton crumpled to the ground, limp and abandoned.

A chill walked up her spine.

“... whoever that was, they were inside the skeleton?” Lilli said. It was a question, but no one answered.