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.The Horned Beast has a broad, bare chest, narrow hips, and a studded, thorned phallus hanging between a pair of furry thighs.All around the Antlered God are the beasts of the forest—but mutated, like creatures born of a disturbed child’s mind.Wolves with tusks.Pigs with snake-tails.Owls with human faces roost in the antlers, while long-legged razor-mouthed rats stalk the ground.The ground itself is a twisting knot—like they’re all standing on a maze carved out of the very earth, a twisting double-back labyrinth that spirals in on itself.“I dreamed of this,” he says in a voice barely above a whisper.Psyche says nothing.He turns to ask her if she knows the figure in the carving—But she’s not there.And the walls of the hallway are gone.Stretched out before him is a forest.Like from his dream.No walls, no more missile silo.No boundaries at all.Twisted black trees grow together above his head like intertwined witch-fingers.The ground is lumpy, mossy, littered with twigs and leaves.No sky can be seen, but moonlight shines through branches.Some of the signs of the missile silo remain.He sees the corkboard, the water fountain, the nuclear sign.But they hang from trees, or sit on the ground.No walls.No structure at all.And no Psyche.Then—somewhere—he hears leaves rustling.Twigs snapping.Something moves—a lean, rangy shadow—between two distant trees.Behind him, something chuffs, snorts.Cason turns and sees nothing there.For a few moments, all is quiet.Then: shapes emerge from all sides, blasting out of the brush, shouldering between tall trees and bent saplings—dark shadows with yellow eyes and white teeth, coming for him, hissing and howling and spitting.Cason turns to run, but a tree branch snarls around his foot, and the forest tilts as he tumbles, the flashlight spinning away, the light dim, then dark.The ground shakes.The creatures pounce.CHAPTER THIRTY-FOURChildren Of The Antlered GodJAWS SNAP CLOSED in front of his face—wolf jaws that hang not on a wolf at all, but thrust from the face of a boar, spit-slathered tusks gleaming.Cason grabs those tusks, twists, throws the beast off him—the creature rolls away as two more dash forward from the shadow.One a skinny fox with a spiral of goat horns and paws like a human child’s hands, the other a chimera of indistinct origins: rat’s head on a long, leathery neck, the body a hairless pock-marked tube of sagging skin, its six limbs more like spider’s legs than anything else.Other beasts dance in the margins—yellow eyes, white teeth, growling, hissing, circling, circling.Cason tries to stand, but the rat-chimera pounces, knocks him flat to the ground.The horned fox pounces at his front, little needle teeth coming right for his face—eyes, nose, all the soft bits.He grabs its head, holds it as the teeth tick and tack in front of him.The rat-thing bites the back of his neck.Pain shoots up into his head, across his shoulders and into his arms.He tries to stay calm, tries to think, Okay, I’m a tougher guy than I ever figured, I’m not even a guy so much as I am—Well, he doesn’t know what he is.But he can’t worry about that now.Point is, he can survive this.Bloodied and beaten, but alive.Cason rolls, crushing the rat-thing beneath his back while hoisting the horned fox into the air—it writhes and yowls, bushy fox tail whipping the air.He hurls it hard against a tree, hears its back break.It lays, twitching.Up, up, up, go! Cason lurches, but it feels like his legs want to go out of him, like they’re made of rubber bands dangling from his hip sockets—he feels suddenly sluggish, slushy like a winter puddle, and it’s then the thought strikes him:The bite was venomous.Down, down on his hands and knees.He reaches for his bag, but it seems miles away, now.The world slides into deeper darkness.All around him, shadows encroach.A black blob with a crocodile’s maw.A falcon’s beak with human eyes set above it.A mangy dog with feathers instead of fur.The beasts creep forward.A new wretched thought strikes him—Nergal.These are Nergal’s pets.Like his seven warriors, his guardians, they are—But his thoughts die incomplete.They’re suddenly a jumble as the venom seizes, wracking his body with spasms.He collapses.Hears the ginger tread of the approaching monsters.His fingers sink into the forest floor.Deep through moss and leaf layer, down through dark earth and into the domain of the earthworms.And suddenly: a terrifying bloom of awareness.A feeling like falling.The forest is alive.He can see it.He can see the roots and shoots, the runners and briars, can feel every stone, every mote of dirt.He can feel the beasts, too—he doesn’t see them so much as discern their shape in the deep of his mind, and there he sees the crocodile maw drawing open on its leathery hinge, opening wide around his skull, ready to snap closed and take his head clean off its shoulders.Panic causes his mind to lash out.He seizes the beast’s jaws, not with his hands but with his mind
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