Mother Night: The Cult of the Scarecrow – Part 3

by Mr. K. 

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I was an offering. I was a sacrifice. I had been down this road before: I wasn’t too flabbergasted when I found myself set out as a treat for some otherworldly being.

Hanging there in the dark, I remembered when Mother Frost, Mother Fire, Shade, Hexx, and I battled the women of Spinnerette. Another cult. They were gorgeous, every last one of them, in their tight jeans and leather jackets. They rode powerful cycles and covered themselves in elaborate tattoos of spiders and their webs. They always went to church. It was always a church.

It always started off the same with them. As I hung there in the darkness of the abandoned church in which these people held me captive, I remembered how the The Spinnerette would ride into town on a Sunday morning, find a church full of people, and quietly walk in the middle of a sermon. They looked like gorgeous runway models in riding leathers and jeans, each with a spider emblem on her back. Within a few hours, the church would be empty, save for an impenetrable forest of thick, thick cobwebs. They looked like a motorcycle gang coming to raid a town, but much more was happening, obviously.

Mother Fire, Mother Frost, Hexx, and I swept down on them as they roared down the road into their next town. There was a hoard of them, and we really didn’t know what to expect from their powers. We unleashed ours though. Mother Fire created a barrier stopping them in their tracks. She was able to blow out their tires with heat beams and create air bursts of fire that sucked up the oxygen and rained down heat enough to drive them back. She didn’t want to simply burn them up; we wanted to turn them over to the law.

Mother Frost hit them directly, freezing some in place. She created ice slicks that made them skid out and fall in to null zones created by my daughter. They ended up floating in a liminal space. I did the same, bringing The Darkness, and trapping them like bugs in amber.

Hanging on my cross now, waiting the scarecrows, I remember how the other magical women laughed at how I was still very “hands-on” in my mature years. I always think, if you have super strength, why not use it? Once they were disorganized, and falling to our powers, I grabbed one of the women off of her motorcycle. I took hold of her leather vest pulled her up and flung her. She sailed into three others. Bikes and gorgeous women flew everywhere.

Hanging on my cross in the empty church, I remembered seeing several of them pull up their bikes and stop. They reached into pockets and up sleeves. They began whipping their hands around in the air. Their eyes were fixed on us. For a moment, I wondered what they were doing when they snapped their hands in the air, waving their hand at us as thought cracking a whip. My questions were answered quite quickly.

There was the vipvipvip sound of wire zipping through the air. Still flying, still grabbing another bitch off of her bike, I felt my arms yanked down and away from my target. There was sudden pressure. There was biting pain. I looked down to see thin, powerful wires making wide loops around me. They flew in coils around my arms and upper body. They flew in coils around my legs, my thighs. I tried to fend them off with The Darkness, but only found my powers redirected at me. The magic charged wires snapped shut across my face, my body. I screamed in searing agony, by body locked in their embrace. I fell from the sky.

Hanging on my cross, I remembered how I heard my daughter gasp and shudder, scream and fall. I heard the painful exaltations of Mother Fire and Mother Frost. Each of us was entangled and falling from the sky. It ended up with us laid out on the asphalt, bound in wire that channeled agony though our bodies. The cycle women recovered themselves, standing up and brushing off. What should have been debilitating attacks had done nothing to them physically.

I used Sight, the one power of mine that wasn’t neutralized by the wires, and saw the true state of things. I saw them lifting Mother Fire from the concrete, and starting to unwrap her still form. Like me, she as slowly blacking out. She was in the grips of … creatures. Not gorgeous fantasy women in leather and denim. She was in the grip of monsters that had created illusions. They were something altogether different.

I felt them unwrapping my wire as they took hold of my body, my hair.

Hanging on my cross in this abandoned church, I remembered how I awoke in another abandoned church back then. I was … we were … surrounded by candles. Hexx, Mother Frost, Mother Fire and I were offerings. I passed out again. I remembered how it all came together when I finally awoke: All of us were covered in spiders, and webs were being sewn up around us. These creatures, disguised as beauty human women, were the minions of these intelligent spiders. They had brought yet more food to their interdimensional masters and mistresses. We were being devoured.

I was hanging on a cross prepared to be devoured again.