"Apollyon (4)" by Carrie E Ott

 An indescribable, explosive pain blasted through Apollyon’s body from the gash in his stomach. He could feel Saraph’s handless arm probing through his wound, bumping against his already bruised intestines. Apollyon threw back his head, shrieking until his throat began to bleed. His tail flicked back and forth, but his strength was flowing out of him like water from a broken clay pot.

                “I will not be ruled!” he screamed, his horns grinding through the sand. “I will not be made to dance like some puppet of yours, Saraph!”

                With that, he coiled the muscles in his chest and jerked his head up to snap at the incessant enemy whose arm was buried in his stomach. In a whirling flash of scenery, he came up nose to nose with Saraph.

Saraph, whose luminescent silver eyes were staring unabashedly into the golden eyes of a basilisk.

                The enchantment from the basilisk’s eyes was cast immediately. A patina of stone inched over Saraph’s smirking face, spreading across his shoulders and paralyzing the downy feathers on all six wings with weighty mineral. In moments, his entire body was a monument of petrified marble.

Apollyon paused to make sure Saraph had stopped moving, his neck aching with the depressing weight of his horned head. Finally, he took a few shallow, trembling breaths before exhaling deeply and allowing his head to fall back to the ground.

                The sputtering and popping of stone formation resonated quietly through the cavern, a quiet symphony of crackling applause to celebrate Saraph’s defeat. Apollyon rested for a moment before trying to flip over and get to his feet. It took the tiny jolt to his spine to realize that his muscles did not respond. Arching his long neck over his body, he saw a grey glaze of stone slowly creeping up to his chest.

                His ears flattened against his neck and his eyes betrayed the sudden fear that struck him. Saraph’s blood, gushing from his missing hand and mixing inseparably with Apollyon’s own in his belly, continued to spread the petrification and fuel the curse. Apollyon flipped as much as his muscles would allow, but he could not shake the stone from his craggy scales. He could only drag the stone carving of himself across the earth in little sandy ditches.

Panic gripped at his stomach, oozing out in irregular snorts from his long snout. Suddenly he lunged, bucking his back and shaking free of the statue of Saraph, which crashed to the ground and smashed into glossy shards. The coiled anger and hatred in Apollyon’s stomach ignited once again; he whirled toward Rachel’s corpse, clawing his way toward her as the stone half of his body weighed him down more and more.

Apollyon snarled, baring his silvery fangs as the immense weight of his body sunk deeper into the ground. “It’s all because of you!” he howled. “You chose the train that crashed! You died that day! You called for Saraph, but you came to me!” He tossed his head in frustration, biceps flexing and trembling, clawing the sand to drag himself closer to her body. “You brought this plague upon my house! You –”

                The creeping stone cut his words short, his ragged claws still outstretched toward Rachel’s fallen form, his fanged maw still gaping in his forgotten shouts. The cavern in Sheol which had been full of so much noise and energy retreated into silence once more, host only to a garden of broken bodies and a stone dragon posed in an inane twist like a marionette tangled in its own strings.

No, Rachel’s first trip to England didn’t go as Apollyon had planned.