I’ve been off this week, and so slacking on the blogging cause I been gogging on the gaming. Or something like that. Maybe because I’m on vacation, my brain isn’t quite on the rip, either, and not coming up with good vents. I mean, really, its days I’m at work where I get the most aggravated! Still, herein is another VERY TINY peek at part of Undead Oz, where we see MY version of winged monkeys.
She blinked and blinked. Ahead of them, the skies were full of flying, flapping things. A fearful tickle entered her heart.
“What are they?” she whispered. At this distance, she couldn’t make them out, except that they had bat wings, and were much too big for birds, unless they were bat-winged condors.
“Chargoyles!” Thatcher shouted. “Get off the road! Get into the bushes, if you can! Don’t let them get a clear grab at you!”
“You hide. I’ll hold them off!” Monk countered.
“There are far too many of them!” Tinna protested as Dawthy hopped down from her back.
Chargoyles? Had she heard that right? He must have meant gargoyles. She looked around frantically for a bush or rock pile large enough to take cover in.
Monk stood in the center of the road, legs slightly apart, braced for impact, and his change began. His hair and beard grew long and thick in seconds, looking to the others like some sort of wild time-lapse photography. His muscles bulged, his fingers and toes thickened into paws, the nails grew, the animal skins he wore grew tighter and somehow melded into his own hide, and there he was, the mighty, not at all cowardly werelion Monk.
Thatcher grabbed Tinna by an arm, knowing that once she was off the road, her wheels would give her a terrible time in the loose dirt. He dragged her off to the left, where a beehive-shaped formation of iron and manganese promised some kind of cover. Dawthy had already scrambled to the right, but instead of relying on the rocks, she had caught herself up in a series of thorny, uncooperative shrubs.
There was a thump nearby, and she turned to find herself face to face with what had to be the ugliest chargoyle ever.
“It seems ’chargoyle’ is another term for dead flying monkey?” she mused out loud. It certainly looked like one, with tattered leathery wings, mangy fur, and only a skull for its head. The most amazing part was, perhaps, that it wore a green fez with a purple tassel.
Actually, the most amazing part was when they made eye-to-socket contact, it reached up and sort of doffed the fez, although a band of elastic kept it on the creatures head.
Then with a roar and a swirl of dust, Monk was there. He body-checked the chargoyle clear into the next zip code, then spun around to face the rest so quickly that Dawthy had to dodge his tail.
Some had landed on the other side of the road already, and now Dawthy could see that they were all different. Some did look like monkeys, but others looked like regular stone gargoyles, except that they could move, and they came in all kinds of colors. Some were furry, some had smooth, marble-looking flesh, some had scales, and while all had skulls for heads, there was a wild variety of types of skulls
And like the dead back in the city, many of them wore the odd bits of clothing. A tie here, a scarf wrapped as an armband; one chargoyle with the skull of a goat wore a tiny sweater done up with Christmas trees and glitter thread that looked as if it had been stolen off someone’s poodle.
It was very disorienting.
azbaelus 