I don’t sit. I prefer to stand when delivering a report. It feels less like a confession.
“Nyssa,” Cormac begins, his voice as dry as old parchment. “Your report is late.”
“Rough night,” I mutter.
“Oh?” Taye asks, her ghostly pale hair, twining up into knots above her head before they fall again around her shoulders.
“Demon, vampire and…” I trail off, suddenly not sure I want to say the next part.
“And?” Finnian asks.
“And that’s it,” I state flatly.
Cormac’s eyes bore into my skull. “How does that constitute a rough night? Did something else happen?”
Tell them!My conscience screams at me that this lie I’ve told, this great big lie, the first of none, is going to have severe consequences. My stomach knots, but something deep in my brain is fighting against telling them anything about the madman or the summoning or the gods or the fissure or my blade.
“Nope.” The lie goes against everything I believe in. “Just got wet and banged my elbow on a gravestone. Couldn’t sleep after that.”
“Your patrol logs are usually meticulous,” Finnian adds, his tone softer than Cormac’s but no less pointed. “This is… vague.”
“There’s nothing more to report,” I say, forcing a finality into my tone I don’t feel. “It was a slow night business-wise.”
Cormac leans back, steepling his fingers. The look he gives me is one of profound disappointment. “Very well. If that is all, you’re dismissed.”
“The old docks!” Taye suddenly says, her hand clutching her head. “Go!”
I don’t hesitate. Taye’s visions are few and far between, but when she gets one, I move. They are never wrong. I’m lucky she didn’t have one of last night’s shitshow. Not to say she never will, but I assume that if she had prior to the fissure opening, she would’ve said. Her visions are of the future, not the past, so I’m safe in that respect. No pesky video replay in her second sight of me stabbing a goddess in the face and then lying about it. The command gives me a perfect out. I spin on my heel and take the steps two at a time, not looking back. The weight of their gazes follows me, heavy with suspicion, but Taye’s word is law when it comes to her visions. The lie sits like a stone in my gut. I’ve never withheld information before. Not once. But Dastian got in my head.
Damn him.
I burst out of the bookshop, the bell jangling frantically behind me. The rain is relentless, a grey sheet that turns the world into a watercolour blur. I pull up my hood and run, my trainers slapping against the wet pavement. The docks are on the far side of town, a place of decay and forgotten industry even on a good day. Today, it will be a special kind of miserable.
As I get closer, the air changes. The familiar scent of brine and rotting wood is there, but it’s overlaid with something else. A cold, static nothingness. It’s the opposite of a demonic presence. Where a demon feels like a spike of malevolent energy, this feels like a hole. A vacuum that sucks the very life out of the air.
I slow my pace, pulling my blade from its sheath. The runes stay dark. No shadowy gods about then. My breath mists in front of my face as I step onto the first rotting planks of the main pier. The only sounds are the creak of wood, the drumming rain, and the slap of choppy water against the pilings. There are no gulls crying, no distant foghorns. Just silence. A dead, hollow silence that is more terrifying than any monster’s roar. Whatever Taye saw, it’s here. It’s waiting.
But where? What is it?
I creep forward, each step deliberate, testing the warped boards beneath my feet. The pier groans like it’s in pain. My knuckles are white around the hilt of my blade, and I force myself to loosen my grip just enough to maintain flexibility. Tense muscles make for slow reactions, and slow reactions get you killed.
A shape moves in my peripheral vision. I spin, blade up, but it’s just a tattered tarp flapping in the wind, caught on the skeletal remains of an old crane. My heart hammers against my ribs. Get it together, Nyssa. This is what you do. You find the monster, you kill the monster, you go home.
A ripple disturbs the grey water below, too large to be a fish, too deliberate to be the current. I freeze, my blade held ready.
The water bulges upward, a dome of oily black liquid that defies gravity. Then it collapses, and something rises from the depths.
It’s not a creature. Not in any sense I understand. It’s a shape, a writhing mass of darkness that seems to absorb the rain before it can touch its surface. No eyes, no mouth, no discernible features. Just a hungry, gnawing void in the shape of something that might once have been alive.
“Okay,” I mutter, backing up a step. “You are a bit ugly, aren’t you?”
The thing doesn’t respond to my quip, which is fair enough. It probably doesn’t have ears. Or a sense of humour. It just undulates there, hovering above the water like oil floating on the surface of a puddle. The cold intensifies, biting through my sodden coat and making my teeth chatter. My breath comes out in thick clouds now, and frost starts to creep across the wooden planks beneath my trainers.
It’s the kind of monster that doesn’t play by normal rules.
I take another step back, assessing. My blade is good against physical threats. The demons, vampires, and the occasional pissed-off werewolf and a goddess, I got the jump on. But this? This is something else entirely. It’s not solid. It’s not even really there, in a way I can define. It’s an absence. A hole in reality that happens to be hungry.
The mass shifts, elongating towards me like a tendril of smoke. I dart to the side, and the tendril follows, slow but inexorable. Where it passes over the pier, the wood blackens and crumbles to ash. The sound it makes is like a sigh, a long exhalation of nothing.
