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Revulsion and fear sent a shudder down her spine. It was too strong, she couldn't break it or kill it, and it was just putting itself back together as though nothing were wrong. So many bugs. Everywhere.

"Me?" She asked, out of habit and a need to hear her own voice. Small comforts. "The other?" Jake? Did it mean Jake? And others? ... Right. Caelius had said the place from before... so this thing was... one of those horsemen?

Sherry closed her eyes in a futile attempt to let her mind clear a little. Only bones. Hunter bones. Horsemen bones. Bones.

"I'm not dead!" Sherry flailed, backing away from that hand as she tried to push it away. "I don't want to die." Instinct had her summoning her weapon again, even as she continued to back away, bugs and darkness be damned. "You should die, and let me honour you."

The horseman, if they could even still be called that, was beyond any cusp of sanity. The second Sherry summoned her weapon again he descended, a mass of bones, sharp, brittle bones that shattered and reformed.

Crack.

The strange noise came from everywhere and nowhere at once and then Sherry was staring at the figure holding a single perfect arced bone. A sharp pain blossomed against her side and it began to bleed and it began to hurt uncontrollably. There was a hole in her left ribcage. Ther was a hole where a rib bone should have been-

- And the boneskeeper held his new prize proudly.

She'd been expecting an attack, but she'd been expecting to be hit. An attack came, quick and strong but something about it had been wrong. The sound that accompanied it was wrong. It hurt. The sensation... Armagnac clattered to the floor as Sherry's mind made sense of of things. The noise, the pain that she was registering, what the skeleton held in it's disgusting hand.

The screaming started in her mind. It wasn't her own voice, though she knew the voice well enough it could have been. It wasn't a scream of pain or confusion, rather one of territorial rage. For half an instant Sherry didn't understand.

Her own hand moved out of reflex to cover the hole. Oh, God, there was a hole. How? Sherry screamed from the pain, or tried to, but that only made things hurt worse. She probably screamed though. She couldn't be sure. Armagnac was still screaming in her brain. Sherry's hand, already bloody, was warm now, warm and wet.

The jerk-wad of a bonecollecter had taken her rib.

Only one hand was pressed to her side, and the other reached out, reaching for the bone that was hers. One step forward, and she thought she might pass out from the pain of it all.

Armagnac was telling her to run. Run while she still have strength to do so. 'It wasn't like she could put the rib back' the weapon seemed to be saying. But even Armagnac sounded far away. Shock and pain dulled Sherry's thoughts in that moment. Bones weren't supposed to leave the body.

Breathing hurt, moving hurt, but that a*****e had just ripped her rib out. The room seemed to spin. "Give it back," she said, teeth clenched. "Give it..." It hurt, but she reached out to grab it anyway.

"But why do you want it back?" The horsemen, if it was still one, seemed genuinely confused. It dropped the broken rib in front of Sherry anyway. "What could you possibly do with so many bones. You don't need them all, Hunters are special that way. You aren't fully hmm... Human, and your weapon slowly changes you over. I can feel it and taste it. There is nothing human left in you, you are becoming one of us, all the precious little Hunters." As they talked, Sherry's weapon was losing power fast, the Fear shield waning and all but disappearing in effort to sustain its owner.

The laugh was low and brittle and then they flipped Sherry over, her face flat against the ground. A long finger trailed down her back. "Which bone should I take next little Hunter?"

"Be-be- It's mine," Sherry whispered. Some part of her knew it was silly, or maybe that was her recalling what Armagnac had said, but she was upset that the bone had been taken from her. She knew you couldn't just put stuff like that back, but it was the principle of the matter.

Such thoughts were pushed out of her head as her rib fell. More confusion. Why would this monster just drop it? And what was it talking about? She needed her bones. All of them, thank you very much- she moved to reach down (standing was getting difficult anyway) and picked her missing piece, her own broken bone, wrong as it seemed to be able to do that.

The skeleton continued talking, and Sherry still didn't quite understand. She might not have been as human as she once was (that Sherry would have died from shock or blood loss by now) but she was nothing like the thing before her. Her bones broke too easily.

She hated thoughts like that.

Her next thought was that the ground was cold. Cold and wet. And the pain was worse. Armagnac was quiet, but Sherry could feel her. There and weakening, weakening but trying. The pain was growing. She might have shivered at the touch on her back, but she was too weak and scared. But she wasn't dead yet, Armagnac was seeing to that, for now.

"None." Speaking was difficult. So was moving. "None." But she tried to move. She tried to roll, tried reaching up and back with one hand. She jabbed at the creature, stabbed at it, with her own brittle rib, the only weapon in hand.

Her movements were weaker and slower than she would have liked, but panic was setting in again. Crying and whimpering, she fought as best she could- Damn it all if she wasn't going to struggle.

Sherry's own rib wedged into the horsemen, straight and true. The bone, her bone, stuck, and the creature she attacked rattled and laughed at her efforts, pushing her closer towards it. Closer, their form became almost fog-like, closer, she could see something within the horseman's chest beating through a maelstorm of murky black chaos.

"Do you see it, little Hunter?" Its bones clacked and the chaos, the noise, the sound of destruction grew stronger, "I am immortal. I am destruction. You cannot destroy what destroys."

A second later she went sprawling again, but this time she could see it clearer in the ugly hole she had carved with her own bones on the horseman. An opening, a small red fragment sleeping inside. The horsemen's heart.

She didn't want to be closer to the thing. It was all bone and bugs and gross. It would have been worse if her brain was up for processing what she'd stabbed it with, but that hadn't sunk in yet. Sherry was too busy trying to figure out why the thing was made out of fog, too. Clearly it was just something out of a nightmare, a painful nightmare.

"I see," she whispered. There was something there, something that stood out against whatever the rest of thing was. She didn't get the chance to say more before being flung around again. More pain, blinding in the face of her falling shield. Armagnac wasn't able to do much to dull it anymore, not while she kept her from bleeding to death. The weapon wouldn't be able to do either for much longer. Sherry accepted that, had accepted it moments ago. But she wasn't done struggling. Hope was fading with her shield, but spite and frustration could fill that hole left by hope.

Just like her hand could fill the hole in the horsemen's chest. She'd made that hole, if she'd been more aware in that moment she might have wondered if it let her. But she didn't think about that. She fought, she reached for the thing's chest, intending to reach inside it and reach it's heart. She wanted to hurt the thing, like it had hurt her. If she could cause it one tiny ounce of pain, if she could stop that laughter for an instant, she'd die happy.