Part 18 - Terror of the Trdlo - Wreathed in Blue Fire

A blindingly bright blue light shone around the outline of the hermitage’s front door, and through the gnawed gap underneath.  The door bowed inward, straining against the stout oak plank barring it, then creaked, whined, and exploded.  

Wreathed in blue fire, a pale, petite woman with black hair and a fixed stare strode inside the cabin.   

Her hands were tensed into the shape of claws.  She moved her arms in wide arcs, ruffling the long, draping sleeves of her robe, sending a ripple through wide writhing swaths of trdlo-shapes.  As her gesture swept over them, they groaned, quivered, and shriveled down by the hundreds into heaps of brittle, mummified cylinders.

“Sieglinde!” cried Silvernose, overjoyed, smashing a trdlo between his boot and the side of the oven below his perch.

An odd smile broke over Sieglinde’s face, although her staring eyes and claw-handed gestures continued their trdlo-murdering work without interruption. 

Sister Ludmilla’s much-lined face peered upside-down through the opening in the rafters.  Her long white hair drooped down and her eyes were wide.  She swung around and dropped onto the crowded bed-platform.  She urged Silvernose and the others to precede her down the hand- and foot-holds built into the oven.  She continued to push them through the space Sieglinde had cleared on the floor inside the front door.  Their feet crunched on the desiccated corpses of blackened trdla. 

Ludmilla stooped to pick up her basket of icons, cursed when she followed the handle down with her eyes to where it disappeared into a heap of trdlo corpses.  She shook off the dried husks of a hundred trdla, hoisted the basket, quickly extricated her iron skillet from another pile of bodies, and bade Sieglinde follow her out of the hermitage.

“I got a fire going up there pretty good,” she explained to Silvernose outside, grinning like a madwoman.  “If I’d known your friend was coming, I wouldn’t have done it!”

There was a wide path paved by shrunken trdlo carcasses leading across the ravine.  Even the trdla not directly in the path Sieglinde had made were lethargic and groaning instead of jumping, shrieking and howling.

Sieglinde made a pointing gesture above her head, and an orb of blue light floated, hovering above her as she walked.   She entwined her hand gently in Silvernose’s and led the group along the path, the odd smile still on her face. 

“We must hurry,” she said without turning around.  “The forest spirits tell me that these beings never swarm in these numbers, and this aggressively, but for a particularly rare conjunction of the Rutting Moon with the baleful influence of certain stars positioned just right.

“I have strength now, but I cannot defend you against another swarm of this size.  We must speed to a landscape with different soils, different flora, which will be inhospitable to them,” she continued.

Sister Ludmilla asked if the town of Horalka lay in an inhospitable environment for the trdlo, and Sieglinde said it would be safe. The hermitess reaffirmed everyone’s approval for her plan of being dropped off there.  Flames were licking out of the roof of the hermitage behind them.

They passed the grisly sight of their dead horses, still in harness, unable to flee when their legs were viciously attacked while they were attached to the wagon. The burning hermitage on the other side of the ravine imparted a lurid glow to the bloodied corpses.

They devoted a few heartbeats to trying to salvage what they could from the wagon.  At least one trdlo had somehow climbed into it, ripped apart their bags and firkins of food, and dispersed the contents as a hopeless mess.  But Beata was able to retrieve her second custom-built repeater crossbow, and the others were able to take out their leather bags of extra weapons and clothing which were largely intact and not befouled with a musky, oil spoor. 

“Do you have your own horse and wagon on the main road?” Ludmilla asked Sieglinde.  Sieglinde shook her head. 

“We must walk.”

They walked in silence up the rutted forest path with overstretching treetops that led away from the ravine and the hermitage, which was now burning to the ground with thousands of trdlo corpses in it.

They walked along the main road, but not in the direction of abandoned Skalica.  Instead they walked toward the Hill Country urban triangle of Horalka, Tatranka, and Jesenka, which Sieglinde had assured them would be trdlo-free.  A glorious profusion of autumnal yellow and red leaves became increasingly visible in the landscape with the improving light.

“I missed you,” Sieglinde said to Silvernose as dawn faded the stars and reddened the sky.  “I asked for you at St. Vlasta’s as soon as my lonely errand was complete. They told me where you went. I thought you and our friends could benefit from my help.”   

The orb of light above her head winked out.

+++

More to come on the 1st of May

"It was late in the evening - the 1st of May/
 Twilit May - the time of love..."

- K.H. Macha, Máj (1836)

If you're in lockdown with loved ones, smooch 'em under a flowering tree, preferably a cherry tree, on May 1st for maximum Czech thinly-veiled-pagan traditional resonance - and also so the womenfolk don't "dry out" (Sigmund Freud should have said something about this custom - he was born in Příbor, Moravia, after all).

Anyway-
The story so far...
The Terror of the Trdlo, Serialized:

Part I - The Adventure Begins (But Not Really the Terror, Yet)
Part II - Zdenka vs. The Green-Eyed Monster (Jealousy - That Is)
Part III - Nun: The Wiser
Part IV - The Hermitess
Part V - Silvernose Arrives Minus His Weird Girlfriend
Part VI - She's Gone Feral
Part VII - A Little Traveling Music
Part VIII - Horror at the Hermitage
Part IX - The Rutting Moon
Part X - Herbal Interlude
Part XI - "It's Blood"
Part XII - Empty, Disturbed, Dead
Part 13 - Hut Stinking of Musk
Part 14 - The Howling, Squealing Horde
Part 15 - Something Wicked This Way Comes...UP
Part 16 - A Heaving Sea of Beasts
Part 17 - Hymns Above the Battle's Din