This is the third part of an ongoing story that I started 3 weeks ago. Every Sunday, I write a smoke-long story, or flash fiction, on the winner of a photo poll that I have every Tuesday that you’re able to vote on.

If you’d like to catch up on what has happened with our characters to date, here is the link to the first installment. At the end of the post, you’ll be able to link to part two, which I wrote last week.

Of course, as it’s flash fiction (1000 words or less), you’re also welcome to just start from here and let your imagination fill in the blanks for you but I have to warn you… my imagination is pretty out there, so you may just want to take a peek as to how everyone got to this point or you could end up a little more confused than usual, which could be the beginning of a downward spiral into hard-core glue sniffing abuse and purchasing a lot of kittens to make up for the emptiness you feel due to the lack of understanding you have chosen to take on.

I mean, it’s totally up to you though.

This week’s winner of the Picture Poll is:

 

“Impossible,” Emily had started, “Shay…I mean what the fu*k? Ok, I get that Poor Bastard is back from the dead. We’ve seen enough crazy sh*t over the years for me to not be surprised by that, but…I mean… you’re with him? And how did you even…”

I could see Emily’s confusion taking over. Whenever she got like this, I knew an impending asthma attack was coming, and this would absolutely work to our advantage.

“It’s not what you think, Em! He took me!” I turned so she could see my profile on the ground from the flood lights. It had stopped snowing now.

I can’t believe that Poor Bastard had figured it out, although to be fair, this wasn’t some poor bastard, after all. Emily and I had been blinded when we let our guard down on the trip. You can’t blame us. After nearly 10 years of fighting Jez, we had finally destroyed him. Through all that he had thrown at us, we had defeated the last remaining heir to the Shadow throne.

I had never told Emily that the one and only way I could be caught was while Jez was inside of an unconscious host, during the last moments of sunlight before a snowstorm.

Yeah, super random, I know, but there we had it. It had been nearly a year since we thought we had killed Jez and entrapped his essence in the book. Emily and I fought an army of over 1000 shadows to get to Jez. Shadows are easy to defeat when they are not attached to a human form, so it actually wasn’t as hard as “fighting an army of shadows” may sound. You could basically knock them out by decapitation with a sword made of pure iron.

When we had reached Jez, Emily and I stood back to back and each swung our swords to decapitate the shadow monster as he sat on the toilet.

Yeah, yeah, that was a cheap shot, but this monster needed to be stopped.

We binded him to the book using the spell we had bought from a defiant shadow demon who had been helping us at the time.

Man, were we idiots to think this would work.

But it had, for over a year. Emily and I stayed on guard for nearly 11 months. Sleeping under candle light in shifts. As we had approached the one year since the binding, we had decided it was safe and that we needed a break.

And here we were.

I’ll have to remind her next year that I get to pick the location, and it will be somewhere that’s sunny 24 hours a day.

You see, once caught, the only way I can be held is through false light. Something not of the four elements or nature. Only man-made light could keep me from returning to Emily.

The poor bastard who Jez was now attached to, had somehow, been 10 steps ahead of us the whole time and set up this floodlight trap.

“Did you really think this was so random, ladies?” Jez asked as he used the poor bastard’s corpse as a sort of puppet. He had reached into the skull and started using his hand to operate the mouth.

Hmmm….

This was new…

“Jez? You sick bastard! How…? I mean….,” Emily was losing it, “Ok seriously, WHAT THE FU*K??!”

I noticed Jez using the corpse as a sort of crutch.

He was injured.

Or at the very least, not at full strength.

“Don’t you see where you morons are?” Jez asked as he continued to use the poor bastard as a way of speaking.

I looked around.

Sh*t.

I looked over at Emily who was struggling to breath and patting down all of her pockets to look for her inhaler.

“Emily, look!” I said, as I pointed to the stone near the maple tree.

“Look ladies, it’s simple. You trapped me in the book. The book WANTS me to take the shadow realm to the surface and destroy the pathetic solid human forms that bind each of us to you. The book, brought us here. Together. It allowed me to jump into the body of this poor bastard just long enough to piss Shay off so she’d kill me. Really Shay, you need to get that temper under control. I do thank you for your continued predictability though.

“The book is what drew you here.”

Emily was in the midst of a full-blown asthma attack. I called to her so she could see me but she wasn’t responding.

“Now, Emily my love, if you would be so kind as to take the book and follow Shay and I over to the stone, we can complete this ritual so I can finally eat you and swallow Shay whole. I even brought my own hot sauce,” Jez stuck his arm into the body of the poor bastard and reached in his pocket to reveal the Into the Fire hot sauce, from the all girl, Swedish metal band Crucified Barbara. I had to agree, that was probably the right choice in hot sauces.

Emily was in no shape to fight in this state and as long as I was bound to Jez and the corpse, I was useless. Emily knew this as well as I did. But I knew something she didn’t.

“Come on Emily..it’s over,” I yelled out to her, “Grab the bag, and let’s get this over with.”

Emily finally looked up, surprised in my defeat despite the situation. As she did, I turned so she could see me wink.

We all walked over to the sacred stone with the spell carved all around. The spell that would release all shadows from their bodies to be consumed by Jez. I feel like I don’t need to stress that this would be a very bad thing.

Emily fell to the ground as she reached in the bag for the book, wheezing and coughing as she struggled to breathe.

“Emily, your inhaler is in the front pocket of the bag. Go ahead and get it, sweetie,” I said. We had coined this term as our “Oi! Pay attention!” word after a full marathon viewing of the entire Absolutely Fabulous series.

She had to know…she just had to.

“What’s the point. I’ll be eating her within minutes,” Jez said as he shook the hot sauce bottle in my face.

“Christ, do you EVER shut up? Geez!” I scoffed.

Emily opened the front of the bag to look for her inhaler. What she found, was even better.

 

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***Thoughts? Feedback? Confusion? If confusion was your answer, you really should go back and read the other stories.

As usual, I will now reveal the origin of the photo.

This was taken in Öland, Sweden last summer. A small island full of windmills, fortresses, castles, runes and viking graveyards. This is the Karlevi Rune Stone, said to be dated to the late 10th Century. Click on the link for “learning”, or just continue to think of it as a magical stone with a spell to unbind shadows from their human hosts 😀

I’m actually happy this was the winning photo as it helped paint a picture for me as to where to take the story. It would have been a different direction if one of the other photos had won. This worked out well though as the Eketorp Fortress, where the original photo in the story was taken from, is also on Öland.

With that said, I hope you’re happy with the result 🙂