Who: Mania and Echo (and later Artemis) Where: Central Park When: Late afternoon Warnings: Violence, animal cruelty
Blood and ichor, flesh and entrails. With animal snarls the goatherds had converged on the girl, heedless of her screams as they snapped and clawed and ripped at her porcelain skin. Bone cracked, blood flowed, and at length the nymph struggled no longer -- but even then, even as the life drained from her body and the death-mist dulled her eyes -- even then her shrieks filled the men's ears.
They ripped out her throat, that her voice would sound no more, but still she wept. They cut the head clean off, wrenched out her tongue, they pounded the skull till the skin oozed and the bone shattered. But the more they raged, roaring their fury, the more insistent the cries became. And when the body lay in shreds and the nymph's voice continued to wail around them, they took the dead flesh and they flung it away from them. High into the mountains and the far distant caverns, down into the valleys and deep wells, across both wilderness and the great cities of man; in all these places the fragments of the nymph landed -- bereft of words, her broken voice forever to lament her fate through sorrowful repetition.
And horned Pan looked down on what he had wrought, and he said:
"You don't think you overdid it a little with the whole dismemberment bit?"
And through the maddened eyes of a dozen goatherds, Mania grinned twelve crazed, bloody smiles.
*
That was then. Now... now things had become interesting. Whether by all the king's horses or all the king's men, Echo had become whole once again and Mania was... intrigued. How had she done it? Was this the work of the parasite that swelled her belly so? Were the cracks still there? Give her a push, would she shatter again? And more importantly, would she make so glorious a mess as she had the first time around?
She would have her answers soon enough. For the nymph was coming to her, whether she knew it or not -- whether she wanted to or not -- she was coming. And, reclining among the branches of a great oak, near-invisible to the mortals below, Mania was waiting to receive her.