Tenebrae Manor by P. Clinen Page B

wisps of indigo smoke drifting from their mouths continued to play at their ventriloquism.
    As though of need of vent, Bordeaux opened the floodgates of his angst on Deadsol and words began to cascade from his mouth. “Personally, I will be glad when this farce is over.”
    “The birthday?”
    Bordeaux nodded slowly, his face curled with vagabond smoke.
    “Were that ghastly banshee not so short of temper and abundant of magic, I would give her a piece of my mind,” said Deadsol.
    “If we pay her no other compliment, we must say that she does keep the sky dark for us.”
    “Yes, the spell. Bah! If only the old bat would divulge the secrets of her witchcraft.”
    “Old bat? She’s the vigour of a lass in her mid-twenties!” said Bordeaux.
    “Ah yes, of two or three lasses I might say and I speak not of her mental structure,” chuckled Deadsol.
    “Another jab at the physical decline of our fair mistress.”
    “I’d call it a physical increase.”
    “Enough.”
    Deadsol was visibly amused with his antics but held his tongue from further insults. The demons sat in silence, gaze hypnotized by the nighttime scene surrounding.
    Somewhere in the gloom, Comets was scavenging for his coin.
    ****
    Comets tore through the conifer maze with adroit agility, paying no notice to the whips and lashings of pine needle striking his person, his eyes bore into the darkness, searching, hunting. It was a trivial game to be sure but to a being of Comet's juvenile disposition, chasing down a silver coin in a forest was the highest calibre of fun. The imp was an enigma, a humanoid of disproportioned features, grotesque  in their peculiarity. Did his mind bulge with knowledge and press against the very inside edges of his scalp? Or, encompassed as it were in his melon like skull, was his mind more akin to a rattling bead in an egg-shaker, chiming like the bells of his motley cap and echoing off the cavernous walls of unused head? The eloquence of the monologues poured from the angular slit of a mouth in beautiful and nonsensical phonics; were they of purposeful poetic prose or merely the ramblings of an ignorant fool? Despite an attention span of extremities so opposing that one could deem it as suspicious trickery of a changeling, Comets found his focus enraptured upon his little game for hours at a time. While other exploits came across to him an ignoble nuisance, his shiny coin held him in hypnagogic state. Wont of his character, he was drawn to such relics as a moth is to flame and no matter how long it took, he always managed to uncover the treasure he sought.
      The moon made navigation less challenging at present, for it hung in the sky as a perfect disc, a flawless swirl of vibrant paint, a blinding white at its centre. And that white faded out in a circle through brushstrokes all shades of grey and into the impregnable black canvas of night. It was as though it was a pebble, dropped into a still pond where the colourless hue was ever changing like ripples across the water's surface. The moonlight gave the forest a cloak of navy blue, electrifying in its intensity, giving new animation to the trees, sharper edges to all objects.
    Comets came to a halt and stood statue-still on the matted floor of dust and needles. There it was. The moon had betrayed its reflective friend and shone a noticeable beam from the coin's surface. Betwixt weed and  gnarled root, the coin was exposed in all its foreign, metallic glory.
    The jester hopped forward  on one foot until his shadow blocked out the shining silver. Triumphant he stood, yet as he reached forth to scoop up his prize, his wrist was grasped by a hand of knuckled root and wood.
    Comets, true to form, was not in the least startled by this movement of usually inanimate tree branch, a mild nuisance, nothing more. The hand was rough and splintery on its petiolar arm and Comets’ gaze sought the source of the thing that had grabbed him. On a stump stood an awkward,