Shoot Her

You meet her gaze, and for a moment she seems unsure, as if your defiance was not the reaction she expected. Her eyes stay locked on yours, and her brow is curved inquisitively.

She never sees it coming.

Swiftly, you withdraw the gun, point it right at the hole where her heart should be, and fire.

Pop!

The sound is almost comical, like the pop guns children play with. It wasn't nearly as loud as you expected, and had no recoil. For a moment, you're worried it did nothing, as the only sound that greets you is a soft grunt from the demoness' lips. But her once intense gaze quickly loses focus as she rises upright, and looks down at the now bleeding gash in her flesh. A hand dumbly goes to the growing stain of black blood on her dress, and her breath becomes more shallow.

A stifled cry leaves her lips, as a shimmering light bursts out of the hole. She gasps and falls to her knees as another ripple of light pierces out of her back. The rays of light begin to tear through her flesh, like razor blades fired out from insider her body.

You stagger backwards before hearing someone shout. "Get back!" and you find yourself tackled in a pillowy mass of fabric and blond hair. A moment later your vision flashes white. You hear the haunting cry of the demoness, and can't figure out if it was her short lived **** throes or simply the air being **** from her lungs. The light blinds you, and casts pain upon any exposed flesh, and then it's gone. But the chaos doesn't stop.

You prop yourself up, then stagger to your feet in time to see an ashy husk where once the demoness stood, and out of her body a torrent of shadows begins to erupt. A chorus of wails and moans begins to fill the air, along with a violent wind. The moans increase in number and volume until they are hellish, terrifying, and deafening. More and more black apparitions appear, desperately clawing away from the corpse. There's so many, it seems like a putrid black cloud is erupting from the corpse. Rather than fly away however, the ghosts seem to be drawn down deeper into the earth. You can see faint outlines of **** faces in the misshapen apparitions, but despite their frantic efforts to grab and claw at their surroundings, none can escape the unyielding gravity pulling them downwards.

None, except one.

This one is inky, sickly, and as wretched as all the others... Yet the faintest hint of red light still glows within its translucent chest. The red gash within its body throbs like an open wound rather than beating like a heart, but it is nonetheless alive. The ghost claws its way across the ground until it's begging at your feet. You stagger backwards, but it follows you, and for the briefest of moments you make out a hollow melancholy face at the place where its head is.

The face of Nealie.

You reach down, and find yourself filled with the vague sense that you could draw this specter within you... In fact you might even be able to draw all the ghosts into your body. They look like they would welcome an anchor preventing their terrible descent... Or maybe you could return the lone miserable specter to its own body.