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Bryony keeps her eyes squeezed shut, unable to hear anything over the roar of the Maw across the interdimensional breach as Marrowmont descends into chaos. Her lungs choke with the acrid tang of ash and cinder; burning rubber and charged ozone steal her breath as she clings to her wife’s back for dear life; trying to dial her focus down to the dry, earthy smell of Stheno’s scaly lower half; to something familiar amid the inferno. Bryony’s long hair flailing behind her as Stheno in her massive true gorgon’s form races them toward underground transit hubs and the evacuation portals the city’s inhabitants had hoped never to use.
Stheno veers hard, and Bryony holds her wife tighter as the gorgon skirts a tentacle slamming down – the echo of it loud enough to set Bryony’s eardrums ringing. The rush of air around it and the violence of its impact the only way she can track it. The Maw has no scent, only a faint hum emanating from those otherworldly limbs.
It can’t even have been an hour since it began spilling into their reality from what Stheno described for her as a crack in the world. Not even an hour since the city’s most potent inhabitants rushed to defend their home.
In the wake of that terrible mistake – none but the Maidens able to stand against it – Bryony’s sense of time has unmoored, only this moment feeling real. Everything else too massive, too impossible to comprehend. She would take comfort from Stheno – always the voice of reason, her wife sinuous and strong; a domineering, grounding force in a crisis. Save that Stheno, too, is terrified: fear sweat beading sickly sweet on her wife’s skin as Stheno does her best to grab others fleeing too slow and carry them in her massive arms.
Even as large as she is in her true form, she can carry so few… And then Stheno screams after them as she ducks low to avoid a scything tentacle. The few others she’d managed to save not so lucky – their cries cut short as the Maw takes them.
In the silence of their sudden absence, Bryony presses her face harder into Stheno’s back and shuts out the rest of the city’s cries as they pass – shuts outs the nightmare Marrowmont has become.
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