Chapter 11: What's wrong this time.
In his distorted sight, they looked like red devils, their green skin darkened by a hazy shadow and his own blood, their eyes glowing with malevolent joy.
They grabbed the collar of his fur clothes with their strong, clawed hands and began to drag him through the snow.
The rough ground scraped against his ruined chin, then face, and with his arms gone, he couldn't lift his head.
It wasn't long before he began to suffocate, his mouth and nose filling with snow until his world began to dim at the edges, but just before he blacked out, they stopped, and he gasped in a ragged, painful breath of air.
They had arrived at a small, damp cave. A fire burned in the center, the smoke stinging his eyes. By now, the side of his face that had been dragged along the ground was partially frozen and covered in cuts and scrapes.
His eyes, heavy with pain and blood loss, began to flutter closed, welcoming the darkness, but they flew wide open when he saw what was in the corner of the cave.
A young man, completely naked, was tied up with woven ropes made from dried tree bark. His body was covered in several dark bruises and deep claw marks, and he stared into the fire with hollow, unseeing eyes, shivering uncontrollably.
When he noticed movement within the cave, his eyes glanced at Adrian, realizing that it was another fellow human being, his dazed eyes were slowly suffused with terror and began to tremble in fear.
"... please, not again."
" Not again..."
" I don't want to see it..."
" I'm tired of seeing it..." The young man muttered in broken sentences, the terror in his eyes turning into pain and exhaustion.
A wave of horror washed over Adrian at the sight of this broken person.
" ARGGHHH!!!"
That horror was instantly replaced by a new, unimaginable wave of agony as he felt a brutal, hacking pain in his leg.
He twisted his head, his neck screaming in protest, to see one of the female goblins standing over him with a wicked, triumphant look on her face, holding his severed leg in her hands.
She brought it to her mouth and took a messy, brutal bite out of the flesh. Adrian tried to hold back the tears, to be strong, but he couldn't.
A broken, pathetic sob escaped him as the other two joined in, and they began to systematically dismember him alive.
His anguished, helpless screams filled the cave, echoing off the stone walls, like a demonic anchor praising his suffering.
Throughout the entire, gruesome ordeal, the tied-up young man in the corner never made a sound, but simply turned his head further away, his body shaking with silent, terrified muffled sobs as if he were reliving a nightmare he already knew by heart.
The female goblins were completely merciless.
HAHAHAHAHA
They cackled with relish watching Adrian suffer beneath them, each bite of his flesh felt so much sweeter to them as they ate it while listening to his horrendous cries.
A while later, Adrian's screams had completely vanished, the only sounds left in the cave were the crackle of the fire and the wet, tearing noises of the diminishing feast.
The cave floor below the 3 female goblins, was now completely drenched in a dark pool of Adrian's blood, reflecting the firelight in ugly patches.
Although it was a lot less fun without his pain filled cries, The three female goblins continued to devour the remainder of his dismembered corpse.
It was bloody winter and non of them dared to waste a single bite. They continued shredding the last bits of flesh from his bones with their sharp teeth and using their long, rough tongues to lick the bones clean until they shone white.
Each time they were finished with a piece of him, whether a leg bone, an arm bone, or a rib bone, they would toss it carelessly over their shoulders, where it would land with a clatter in a growing pile of his own skeleton.
Adrian's bones didn't need to feel lonely for some of them would land next to bones belonging to other deceased creatures, some animal bones, while a few belonged to humans...
Moments soon went by and their green bellies were now bulging outward, if one didn't know any better, they would think that the tree of them were suddenly pregnant.
Having enjoyed their meal, they slumped down onto the bloody floor around the fire, patting their stomachs with satisfied, contented sounds.
" What's going on?"
Unbeknownst to them, Adrian emerged within the cave and saw the end of the gruesome spectacle, his eyes blinking as he tried to process what was happening.
He looked down at himself and saw that he was no longer solid. His current form was an intangible outline, a human-shaped mass made of shifting, swirling patterns of black and white, like static on an old television.
"...."
He glanced over at the remains of his physical body in surprise, and a wave of horror made his ghostly form flicker when he saw the three goblins so close.
" Huh? What's going on. Can't they see me?" Adrian was about to run for his life but he quickly calmed down, realizing they were completely unaware of him, their eyes glazed over with food-drunk satisfaction.
He even walked right up to the tied-up young man, waving a hand in front of his hollow, traumatized eyes, and discovered that even he couldn't see him.
" I guess he's just like the rest of them."
" Does this mean I'm now truly dead this time?" He unconsciously scratched the back of his head. As for how that was possible in his strange new state, one could only wonder.
GONG!
A feeling of amazement washed over him at this strange new state, but it was cut short by a sudden, piercing pain in his head.
It wasn't a physical pain, but a sound, a loud, clear, ringing bell that seemed to echo from deep inside his mind.