And it wasn’t just your fear you had to worry about. Monsters lurked in the liminal spaces of the world. Bas had often seen them and avoided confrontation as much as possible. They had been rare in the past, but when the fae kings had restored magic the year before, all sorts of bizarre shit began waking up and roaming the worlds again.
The astral plane, which had always been a weird place, had become infinitely more dangerous.
Bas had tried to find the library in the woods again to warn the woman about what was lurking out there but hadn’t been able to.
Maybe she had moved it to a different part of the plane? She believed they were in her mind palace, but Bas knew otherwise. Mind palaces were contained and anchored to the creator. Sure, he could have walked into her mind palace, but only if he had touched her or, at the very least, been in the same room.
The library he had stumbled on was out in the open, and he had walked right in. Much to his professional annoyance, he hadn’t been able do it again.
So now Bas was flying through the astral plane, letting his inner dragon free to hunt her down once and for all. The woman he had met had shifted into a hawk before flying away. Hawks were also flying predators, and Bas’s dragon side wanted to find the creature and show it who was boss.
She is hiding there, the dragon prompted him, and Bas looked down. Through misty clouds, he could make out a crumbling stone tower. He couldn’t see the woman walking about, but he trusted the dragon’s instincts.
Bas dived through the mist and landed on top of the tower. The mist had been acting as a roof, and as it cleared, he saw the raven-haired woman standing with her hands on her hips, glaring up at him. Bas tried to say hello, forgot he was a dragon, and spat fire instead.
“Have you lost your mind? There are books down here, you fucking jerk!” the woman yelled.
Cursing, Bas shifted back into his human form. “Sorry!” he called down. “Wait right there! Don’t run. Or fly!”
He climbed down the crumbling stone wall and found a winding staircase. Like the rest of the ruins, it felt like thewoman had pulled them out of a fairytale book. Bas filed that fact away for future examination.
The woman was standing by a set of bookshelves and didn’t look even a little bit happy to see him. Now he was closer, he could see her eyes were a mahogany brown color like dark rum.Beautiful.
Bas tried hard not to stare, but he couldn’t help it. She was all black hair and golden-brown skin. Like a hawk, with a glare that was twice as sharp. She had a scar cutting through one dark eyebrow that made her expression even more disapproving.
“Not another step, nerd boy. I know Krav Maga, and I will not hesitate to kick you in the nuts so hard, your physical body feels it,” she warned him.
Bas stopped walking. He didn’t know if she could really do it but wasn’t about to take the chance. “Firstly, ow. Secondly, I’m Basset. Bas. Not nerd boy. What’s your name?”
The woman crossed her arms. “Like I’d be dumb enough to tell some stranger my real name in a place like this,Basset. A named thing is a tamed thing, after all.”
Shit. She’s right. Dumbass. Stop staring at her like a creeper.
“That’s wise of you,” Bas blundered on. He really did know better. Cosimo would murder him if he found out. His mouth, however, seemed determined to plunge on without him. If she could give him nicknames, he would play that game too. “I’m so glad I finally found you, Hawk Girl.”
The scarred eyebrow rose. “And why is that?”
“Because there’re lots of weird shit roaming the astral plane right now, and you have zero wards on this place. You’re lucky it’s only me that has found you.”
“Am I now? Look, Basset, I don’t know how you keep turning up here, but as I told you before, this is my mind palace,” shesaid, and walked slowly around him. “You look familiar, but I don’t think my mind would have created you.”
“It’s not a mind palace, sweetheart,” he said, trying to be patient. “It’s a pocket dimension in the astral. Mind palaces are confined within your mind. This isn’t one, or I wouldn’t have been able to come in at all unless I was touching your physical body in some way.”
The woman stopped walking and crossed her arms. “And you’re the big expert, are you?”
“As a matter of fact…yes, I am,” Bas replied.
Damn, he never thought the few academic articles on consciousness he had written would ever come in handy. He opened his mouth to tell her his last name and credentials when he remembered that he shouldn’t be giving some random woman in the astral those details.
“Sure you are. Look, I don’t mean to be rude?—”
Bas grinned. “Yes, you do.”
“Okay, fine. Politely bugger off. It’s weird having you turn up and ruin my happy place like this,” she said and pointed at a stone archway that led back out into the forest.
“Well, I don’t mean to come across as an ass, but you really do need to set up some…” Bas let the sentence drop.
A shadow had rolled over the mist, covering them in darkness. He saw the image of a man-shaped creature with claws standing on the stone walls, and cold swept through him. He could feel its voracious hunger and the gnawing terror it wanted to inflict on them.
