Path of the Extra

The voice breathed the words directly into her right ear, low and giddy and almost tender. And with it came the smell, that foul and rotten stench belonging solely to the creature, wrapping itself around her just as its arms had, and her body reacted before she could do anything to stop it. She vomited again.

What offered no comfort whatsoever was that the creature had begun to speak with far greater fluency than before, its sentences flowing smoothly where they had once come in broken and lurching fragments. None of it soothed the petrified Princess of the Frost Clan in any way that mattered.

”Oh, Cele! Why are you crying? Why are you vomiting? Shh... do not be upset. The bad people are all gone now. No one will separate us ever again.”

”A-ah... n-no...”

Celestina’s entire small body shook without ceasing.

The smoke thinned and continued to clear as she sat there, wholly unable to look back at the creature whose arms encircled her. And so her eyes moved forward instead, out across the rubble-strewn ground, and there, half-buried beneath shattered stone and splintered debris, she saw it.

Her grandfather’s spear.

It was broken clean in half, both red and black blood staining what remained of it. Yet even shattered and sullied as it was, she recognized it instantly. That spear had once been so beautiful, its white surface luminous and proud, and it stood apart so clearly from everything surrounding it that she would have known it in a far worse state than this.

”What... did you... what did you do?”

She asked it half-dazed, her voice trembling with fear.

”I put the bad humans trying to separate us to sleep forever...” the creature replied softly, in the warm and familiar voice of her grandmother, as one of its bloodied fingers traced along Celestina’s chin and wiped the fluid there.

”Y-you... you are not Granny.”

Something shattered inside her the moment those words left her lips, and everything she had been holding back came flooding out all at once.

”You are not Granny! Where is Granny! Where is Gramps! No! No! Let me go! Let me go! Someone! Help me! Please, someone help me! Gramps! Granny! Please, save me!”

She sobbed and screamed, her voice ringing out with enough force that anyone within range should have heard. The servants, the knights permitted within the estate, her grandparents. All of them should have come running the moment their princess cried out.

...But no one came.

They were all dead.

”Why are you still upset? Do not treat me as though I am the bad one here, Cele.”

”No! Do not call me that!”

Celestina was shrieking and weeping in hysterics, clawing and prying at the arms around her, but the creature’s grip was immovable, impervious to every last ounce of effort she could summon.

”Are you... are you a bad person as well, Cele?”

It delivered those words in a voice gone utterly cold, and that single shift in temperature was enough to freeze the blood in her veins entirely. Celestina stilled, her screaming dying on her tongue as the fear climbed higher inside her once more.

”Your stomach is empty, Cele... sweetheart... you should eat. Here, eat this and feel better, alright?”

One arm uncoiled from around her, and that slight loosening gave Celestina a faint, trembling glimmer of hope. The creature leaned away from her just a fraction, yet even with only one arm holding her, she still could not pull herself free.

Then something was hurled through the air above her and landed on the ground directly before her.

”Eat.”

A single word, plainly said.

Celestina’s eyes went wide. Kristine lay before her, limp and discarded, tossed forward as though she were worth even less than refuse. The carelessness of it, the absolute absence of reverence for a human life, made something inside Celestina’s chest break open quietly.

”N-no...” she breathed, shaking.

”Eat,” the creature said again, and its voice had gone colder.

Involuntarily, she shook her head. The creature leaned forward and cradled her trembling form against itself, then without any particular care or hesitation dug its fingers into the crown of Kristine’s skull. Blood seeped slowly from the wound as it dragged the body closer by the head, hauling the rest of it along like a ragdoll, drawing it right up before Celestina’s face. Celestina pressed her lips together as tightly as she could bear and turned her gaze away.

”Eat.”

She did not dare move her lips.

”Eat.”

It repeated the same word, coldly, without variation.

”Eat.”

Celestina had to do something.

”Eat.”

She did not want to eat a human.

”Eat.”

There was no one left to come for her.

”Eat.”

She had to do something herself.

”Eat.”

Why was the creature so fixated on her?

”Eat.”

From what little she knew, given how precisely it mimicked her grandmother, it was almost certainly a skinwalker, or something closely akin to one.

”Eat.”

But why did it attempt to care for her at all? Was this nothing more than a game it played until boredom claimed it, at which point it would discard her the way it had discarded everyone else?

”Eat.”

At the far edges of her vision, she could make out the shapes of fallen knights and maids strewn across the grounds, more and more of them the further her gaze traveled.

”Eat.”

A hollow and hopeless feeling was swallowing her whole.

”Eat.”

But Celestina did not want to die.

”Eat.”

She was terrified down to her very bones, and yet she did not want to die, and that meant there was still one thing she could do.

”Eat.”

Celestina wanted to live.

”Eat.”

”...Okay.”

The word came out in a trembling whisper. The creature’s body gave a single involuntary twitch, and then it fell silent, the repetition ceasing all at once.

Celestina looked at the body of her maid and slowly parted her lips.

Then her canine teeth began to change. A faint and subtle white glow bled through them for just a moment before vanishing, and in its wake they had become the sharp, tapered fangs of a fox. Unlike before, only her teeth had transformed.

”Good girl... Eat, Cele. Eat.”

Celestina forced herself to ignore the stench of the creature, the smell of the body laid out before her, the blood soaking into the earth beneath her knees. She pried her jaw open wider, and then, in one swift and decisive motion, she bit down.

Not into Kristine.

Into the arm of the creature holding her.