33 years ago

A subtle weight blanketed her shoulders and someone stepped into the corner of her vision. A black mantle and two gloved hands leaned on the broken merlon to her left.

Allison kept her eyes on the moon-drenched landscape. The shadows of the clouds danced over the trees beyond the track field. The cold wind whipped at her hair, and the moonlight painted the rolling fields in shades of silver and blue.

“I’m told you’ve become something of a [Night Owl],” Tor said.

“There is something out there.” Allison eyed that distant line where the hills met the sky. “It stares at the school, some nights.”

The man hummed. “Wouldn’t you assume,” he told her,” that with over fifty dedicated teachers and instructors here, many of whom are veterans in their field, and the many guest speakers like myself who come through all the time, not to mention the seven hundred students training to become guards and diviners, the best of which live in … that building right over there”—he pointed a finger with narrowed eyes and a hint of a smile—”someone would have noticed if something was watching the school at night?”

She scowled. “Professor Dornan told me the same thing.”

Tor sighed. It was a vaguely disappointed note, as if he had made a joke that had flown over her head. “And?”

“She’s wrong.”

“And do you think that by sitting on the battlements all night, you will be able to prove her wrong? Or that you will defend the school all on your own?”

“Hypothetically speaking?”

He inclined his head.

“Hypothetically speaking, if there were something out there, I would want to identify what it is or, failing that, investigate its origins, its intent, and patterns … and if necessary, hunt it down and kill it, sir.”

“By yourself? You can barely keep your eyes open.”

She continued to stare. The trees and hunting blinds looked like dashes on a canvas from afar. “I have Skills.”

“Yes. [Night Owl]. [Moonlit Sight].” His jovial tone left him, and Allison knew this was the real reason he’d sought her out before he had to leave again. “Allison, do you remember, we had a conversation—”

“I remember. I’m not— It’s just two Skills, Kostel. Any scout could get them. I won’t become a [Moon Ranger] or anything like that. I’m not that stupid.”

“No. No …” He shook his head and was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, he sounded … uncertain? Or was that guilt in his tone? “That’s not why I’m here. I came to ask, do you think you could become a [Moon Ranger] if you tried?”

For the first time since he had joined her on the roof of the school, Allison tore her eyes away from the hills to frown at the man.

Konstantin Tor would not have been the man she would have pictured when she thought ‘demon hunter’ as a child. His mane of dark brown hair curled around his ears. He pranced around the countryside in an endless parade of designer suits.

The mantle he wore tonight alone could have paid another man’s rent for half a year.

He looked like the spoiled son of a businessman or politician—same thing in Anevos—or maybe the son of a guard commissioner. That was as close to the truth as it got.

Or at least, he had looked that way, six years ago, when he had pulled her from the wreckage of what had once been her home.

At twenty-six, he was no longer the spoiled son but the father. He still acted like a mix between the two. Aloof, overworked, overbearing. There was a strain around his eyes that hadn’t been there two years ago, but his smile was full of pride.

He was a Tor. Duty was the first and last line of his Path. But after watching him cradle his baby son not so long ago, his question had managed to surprise her.

“A [Tide Hydromancer] went missing in Esdoc two months ago,” he answered the question in her eyes, “and a [Starmap Navigator] vanished off his ship bound for Lighthouse at the Sea. It’s back.”

A year of school life vanished in the blink of an eye. The cold seeped into her skin, and Allison blinked as if waking from a dream. “You need bait.”

His jaw worked as if to deny her statement, but she had cut to the truth of the matter. This was why he was here. What would be the point of denying it? “Yes.”

“What’s my timeline?”

Honestly, this was a good thing. School was a waste of her time. She had some exams coming up. She could ace most of those with ease, because she had put in the work, but others …

There was a reason she had noticed a threat to their school in the first place. Allison would rather meditate in the cold than study in some stuffy library. If she could get out of her exams or drop out entirely—

“Years,” Kostel interrupted her frantic thoughts.

“Huh?”

“It strikes quickly, takes as many people as it can, and goes into hiding for a year at minimum. The average time between attacks is somewhere around seven years.

“You need to understand, Allison, that this isn’t just a single assignment. We don’t even know if it’ll take the bait, but you can’t just get one level in [Moon Ranger] and be done with it. It’s never taken someone below level twenty-three. This will be your life; a shot in the dark. So I have to know, would you even want a Class like that? If not, tell me. I can find something else for you to do after graduation.”

So he still wanted her to graduate? Allison let out a cold sigh of relief and considered.

“Yeah, no”—no matter how she spun it— “I don’t care.”

She saw his reaction and rushed to clarify. He wouldn’t accept it this time if she just shrugged his concerns off.

“[Moon Ranger], [Midnight Scout], [Shadow Hunter]—it’s all just interpolation. A line we drew in the sand of this ‘golden blessing’ of ours. You said it yourself, Kostel. It is what is, uh, ‘under the hood’ that matters the most. Our spirits.”

He furrowed his brows. “I hope that wasn’t all you took away from our lessons. The differences between Classes are not unimportant.”

“They are to me. I’ve been meditating like you taught me. The nomenclature might help others find meaning in the madness, but I prefer this.”

She stared up in the silence of the night and saw no constellations. Only stars.

“You will be bait, Allison. All your life.”

She saw a young man gritting his teeth as a nurse dressed his wounds. Scars littered his bare torso.

How long have you— Does your family force you to do this?

“‘Better me than them,’” she quoted the man and Kostel shut up. What kind of Tor would deny another their duty?

He gave a rueful smile and shook his head. “You haven’t changed. I’d hoped Silversun might do you some good, but I should have known you’d fit right in with the rest of the brats here.”

She scoffed. “As if. I can’t stand most of the people here. Especially the teachers. ‘Best school in the league,’ my ass.”

“Oh, I’m sure. That’s how it starts.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that you and Professor Dornan have more in common than you might think.” He tapped her arm and pointed. “Look.”

Allison followed the gesture to— A shadow stood on the hill. Tall enough that she could see its form from two kilometers away. It shambled toward the horse pen. “Is it— does it want to eat the horses?”

“I can’t tell you,” Kostel said cheekily. “That would be cheating.”

“Cheating? What do you— Wait, is this a test!?” There was no way. There was no way Silversun would release a monster into the countryside just to test its students … right?

Kostel made an iunno sound, hands in the pockets of his mantle.

The thing stopped and turned its long neck to stare right at them across the distance. Its eyes bore into hers with a feral hunger and madness. It exuded a pressure much like an aura. One that pierced through Kostel’s aura of dominion.

And then it fled. Whatever it was, it turned and loped over the hill like a spooked rabbit, crossing a hundred meters in seconds. Its long limbs dragged through the grass until it disappeared behind the hill.

Tor patted her shoulder and began to walk away. “Happy hunting.”

She grabbed the sleeve of his expensive mantle and yanked him to a stop. “No! Spill. I like some of those horses!”

3 years ago

Silver lines traced the outline of the obsidian arrow that Allison nocked. The full moon illuminated the dark, but for her, the full moon always illuminated the dark. With [Moonlit Eyes], she searched the edge of the woods far below.

The canopy and darkness obscured her vision, but she had scouted the terrain. She glimpsed her query through the leaves and tracked its size, its pace, its trajectory. Her mind matched the data to her memories and filled in the blanks.

[Terrain Tracker]. [Predictive Imaging]. [Perception Filter].

Once, as a child, she had sat in classroom and looked at two dots on a sheet of paper. If you stared at one dot for too long, the other disappeared. This, her teacher had explained to them, is your blind spot.

To her, the canopy faded like dots on a page of paper and she saw the grass below.

The gangly imp stumbled along, eyes fixed on the south as surely as Allison could find her home. It dragged a stitched sack of monster pelts behind itself. Its contents jangled, clanked, and made sucking noises as it hit every bump, root, and pitfall in its path.

It bulged at the seams. The imp’s skin bulged where it stretched over its bones. Something like an umbilical cord connected the two, and yellow fumes escaped between the tears and stretches.

Chill night air filled her lungs. A cage of metal limbs rearranged itself around her body. A vambrace and a single greave supported her chest as Allison leaned forward and down. A lock of hair slipped over her ear, and she loosed.

She sat back. The metal limbs moved again to support her spine. A second went by.

The front half of an unworn breastplate levitated toward her, proffering up an enchanted tea set, a small satchel, and a bundle of arrows. Another second went by.

A solitary metal gauntlet slid a wooden box open, revealing a selection of teabags in tidy rows. It picked one out and dropped it in a cup.

Four seconds and four kilometers away, the Greed Imp dropped. It tumbled down a hill, eyes wide and panicked. When it stopped rolling, it convulsed as it tried to suck in deep breaths past the arrow lodged in its throat. Yellow blood oozed from its neck and stained its lips and tongue.

It turned and crawled back up the hill, long fingers clawing desperately for its sack, before its arm dropped into the dirt. Limp.

The other metal gauntlet held up one finger, then a second one.

“Two, thank you.”

Marionette dropped one teaspoon of sugar into her cup and, wagging a finger at her, tipped the kettle to fill it with steaming water.

Allison stuck her tongue out at it and picked up her frog—a small, decorative figurine that a homeowner might hide their spare key in outside of their house.

“Call Watchtower,” she said to activate its enchantment. “A4 reporting in. Greed Imp neutralized on my location. I repeat, A4 here. Greed Imp neutralized on my location. Requesting a salvage crew. I see some Northern items and body parts spilling from its sack. Over.”

“Roger that, A4,” a gurgling voice croaked to life. “Salvage crew en route. ETA forty minutes. Have a nice night.”

“Thanks,” she mumbled and dropped the frog back into her pouch.

She opened a novel to the page she’d dog-eared, read the beginning of the chapter twice, and tossed it back in her pouch with a sigh. Rummaging around, most of her snacks came up empty.

Allison leaned right—Marionette shifted a floating pauldron to support her waist—and gazed down the five hundred meter drop to the field where her tent, supply cart, and horses waited.

Buckets of arrows filled the cart to the brim, leaving little room for the supply crates. She could send Marion down there to get her more snacks … but she only had so many left. Allison had to pace herself.

Ugh.

She nibbled on a ration cookie like a cinder block instead, dunking it into her tea to soften it up.

One more month of this grunt work. She never should have agreed to it, no matter the shortage of volunteers.

Her eyes searched a forest filled with hundreds of thin black thorns, rotting corpses torn apart by carrion, and half-buried bones. A wave of nostalgia softened her heart.

Then again, this had been her station, once. In a way, this little patch of nowhere would always be her responsibility.

Another night at the ‘Fletched Border,’ as some of the kids called her old station near the Witch’s Forest. It felt like yesterday that she’d sat here, clutching an arrow as she chased every shadow with a racing heart.

Now, she lounged on the disassembled pieces of Marionette, her haunted armor, like a lawn chair in the middle of the night. Maybe if a dragon showed up, that’d make her sit up.

As it was … Allison sighed and picked the novel back up again.

The salvage crew came and went, waving at her with tired smiles as she watched over them.

Marionette floated her closer so she could respond to threats in time, but nothing happened. None of the articles in the imp’s sack were so much as blighted or cursed. They took them away for study.

The nights passed, one after another. Allison took naps during the day and did light exercises. She skimmed trash novels and scribbled pithy remarks in the margins. She groaned and leaned so far into her stretch that she flipped out of her seat and Marionette had to catch her.

When salvage crews or messengers were about to arrive, she made herself presentable and put on a stony, confident exterior.

Two weeks went by. Two weeks left to go.

Two strangers came to her in the middle of the night, rushing through the woods with a horde of monsters on their trail. And riders.

The riders rode carnival wolves, which would have been telling enough on its own—they were an old breed of Eonian canines whose size and strength could rival horses, with shaggy gray fur and an almost ape-like face. Like monstrous bearded collies.

They were high-maintenance and had few advantages over regular horses. The only reason some houses used them was to honor tradition, and those houses were more often than not rich or influential.

The second sign was the crest and insignia the riders wore—military badges and a blue emblem of a blood-red branch curving into a thin circle around itself.

The third was the appearance of one of the two people fleeing on foot: he was a young man with light brown skin and thick, short curls. He had freckles beneath his eyes and a red glow escaped his sleeve whenever he pumped his arm during his run.

Allison appraised her targets across the distance.

They ran past the warning signs and into the Fletched Border. His companion’s leg snagged on an arrow sticking out from a tree and he went down with a cry of alarm. The riders turned to hone in on the sound. Allison loosed an arrow.

The first man turned back to help his companion and, to her eyes, a massive red tattoo of interconnected lines dawned on his back. It stretched from the base of his skull beneath his arms to his rib cage, all the way down to his left hand, and to his buttocks.

A royal life mark.

An arrow thunked into the dirt right next to where his companion had fallen. The two men stared at it in alarm, then searched the canopy with wide eyes.

They would never spot her across the distance. She was nothing more than a spec in the daytime sky. During the night, her camouflage Skills made her blend in with the dark.

Four kilometers away, Allison picked up her frog. “Call Watchtower. A4 here. I have a stray Vitran prince fleeing toward my position with an honor guard and monster horde on his tail. Estimate about eighteen years old, one-eighty meters tall, with a beauty mark beneath his right eye. Seeking advice on how to proceed. Over.”

She loosed two more arrows in quick succession, signaled Marionette to reposition them, and clucked her tongue. Why did nobody ever read the signs?

The horde and riders met each other like a confluence of rivers. A raving ape swung from a branch and tackled a man off his mount. Another carnival wolf chomped down on an ape loping along in front of it and snapped its neck.

A third shrieked as it gained on the two companions, drawn by the scent of his mark. They tried and failed to lose it in the underbrush. It caught up and—

[Hammer Shot]. Her arrow punched the ape into the ground with a thwump.

The companion nearly fell over himself as he scrambled back, but the prince dragged him along. Her shot had bought the pair a few moments of time.

Not that Allison had done it for their sake. Nor was she concerned for the prince’s safety—with a mark like his, he had a decent chance of surviving decapitation.

No, this was so she could claim the Tower League had offered every courtesy to an errant prince of Vitra.

Her second arrow slammed into the ground right in front of them, but the pair merely broke around it and kept running, ignoring the warning.

Finally, a voice gurgled to life from her frog. It sounded different than whomever she had been speaking to before. Most likely, the person on duty had handed the case up the chain to someone who could identify which prince this was—Vitra had hundreds of them—and they’d then passed it along to someone qualified to decide whether or not this prince deserved special attention.

Going by the tone of his voice, it seemed he did not.

The man on the other side of the frog sounded almost patronizing, as if he had to remind a child of a simple rule: “Standard procedure, A4. Not our problem.”

Allison loosed four more times in rapid succession. She had assumed as much, but she would rather be safe than get chewed out by some rookie captain later on—and she would have words with whoever this was once she was out of the local [Chain of Command].

Her arrows flew true, unhindered by the wind and guided by rivers of gravity. The first two caught another pair of apes in the throat and heart.

A hopeful look alighted in the pairs’ eyes when the forest of arrows began to thin around them. They were almost through the Fletched Border and beyond that was freedom.

Her third arrow caught the prince in the foot.

It nailed him to the forest bed. His momentum carried him forward and he hit the ground hard. His skull thumped into the dirt and his leg lurched at an odd angle.

The scream of his companion was muted to her, so far away. He slipped in the duff and scrambled back around on his hands and knees.

Her fourth arrow landed right between the two—her final warning. There were actual signs. And they had told Vitra after the last war: anyone who crossed their borders uninvited would be shot.

This invader was lucky he was a prince. She had aimed for his foot.

His companion tried to help him up. Their bodies flickered whenever their actions and her [Predictive Imaging] didn’t line up. She had Marionette reposition them so she could see them through the branches.

The prince tried to pull the arrow out of his foot but he was too exhausted and dazed from his fall.

His arm flickered when he … pushed weakly at the other man and told him to flee without him …?

Allison’s Vitran was rusty but she thought she’d read his lips right.

Huh. She had assumed he was some kind of servant or a hired smuggler, but maybe they were friends?

The companion refused. He tried to pull the arrow out but didn’t have the stomach for it when the prince jerked in pain.

They were wasting time. The riders had fended off the monster horde and were closing in.

Finally, the prince managed to convince his companion to go. He ran alone into the woods. Allison took aim, but he was too slow and he kept glancing back as if he were reluctant to leave his friend behind.

She lowered the arrow again. No sense in wasting it.

The riders circled around and caught him. They dragged him back and slit his throat in front of the prince.

Allison averted her eyes. Barbaric.

The captain of the guard dismounted to taunt the prince and blue light escaped his mouth whenever he spoke—a middling mental mark.

The prince stared at his fallen companion with balled fists. Until the captain stepped too close. Then tore the arrow out of his foot—the wound healed in an instant—and tackled the man to carve his throat out in a fit of rage. Tears streamed from his eyes.

Had they been good friends?

There was a scuffle as the other guards reacted. One of them punched the prince in the back of his head and hauled him off the captain, but the damage was done. The captain held his throat with a tight grip as he bled, and he wouldn't let go even when another guard tried to apply a healing salve. He died to his hubris.

The guards paced and cursed. They kicked the prince on the ground, threw him on the back of a wolf, collected their two fallen comrades, and left.

Allison picked up her frog. “Call Watchtower. A4 here. The prince was got picked up by his minders and is en route home …” She hesitated. “Their group left a body behind.”

The companion was still down there. He had rolled onto his back to stare at the canopy with glassy eyes. He breathed in wet, shallow breaths,

“A dual marked,” she reported. He had both a minor life and a minor stamina mark—a rare thing. “You might want to send a salvage crew around to come pick him up in case Rami or one of his colleagues wants to study him.”

His stamina mark was already depleted. His life mark wasn’t far behind. Its glow rapidly faded as it tried to keep him alive.

His mouth moved to silently mumble his final words to himself, but Allison didn’t catch them. Like a dot on a page, he faded from her vision.

She took in a sharp breath and looked away, gathering her bearings.

Had she just used [Perception Filter] without meaning to …? She had to be getting soft in her old age.

With a sigh, she glanced around until her gaze settled on the little frog figurine she had spoken into.

Nobody had replied.

“Call Watchtower. A4 seeking confirmation you received my last message. Over.”

She waited and, after a few moments, frowned.

“Call Watchtower. A4, please respond. Over.”

Silence.

“Fucking what!?” Had they forgotten to patch her back down the chain of command? Had whoever was on duty thought they had enough time to take a piss break?

Allison ground her teeth. So irresponsible and disrespectful! Was this what the border guard had come to after four decades of peace?

“Lazy shits,” she muttered and shifted in her seat. “Marionette. Bring me—” She caught herself and took a deep breath. “Could you please bring me some more snacks from the cart?” No need to let her anger out on her friend.

A floating gauntlet gave her a thumbs-up and flew off.

“Something with chocolate!” she called, and a second gauntlet tapped her shoulder, then made a questioning sign with its flat hand.

Why are you yelling? I’m right here.

“Oh. Habit, sorry.”

She pulled her legs up, stretched, and looked up. This far from civilization, the stars shone unhindered by the city lights. A canyon of stardust flowed across the sky, the constellations were so easy to chart, and she even spotted a few distant planets—little more than somewhat brighter stars even to her eyes.

The waxing moon, in comparison, was much easier to spy on. She eyed its unfocused craters and wondered about the hints of ruined structures built into its surface.

She blinked. Waxing moon. She eyed its unfocused craters and the hints of ruined structures built into its surface.

Allison blinked again, straining her neck, but no matter how hard she tried, she eyed the waxing moon’s unfocused craters and the hints of ruined structures … and its shadow.

There was supposed to be a full moon out tonight. Allison knew that. Deep down, her spirits itself waxed and waned with its phases.

So why did the moon have a shadow tonight? And why couldn’t she turn her head or look away from it?

The way a mailman might finger open a letterbox to peer inside a home, two fingers extended out from the moon’s shadow and hooked themselves in the night sky like it was a flat surface. Two gray eyes, crinkled by a smile, peered at her from high above.

The moon swung open on its hinges like the porthole of a ship, revealing a void dusted with colorful stars and the head of a smiling stranger. He had gray skin and thin blue lips that barely hid razor-sharp teeth.

He reached through the hole in the sky with one arm and one leg, contorting his body to fit. A webbed foot touched down a hundred meters away as if there were a glass surface in the sky that she could not see. The stranger held onto the ‘edge’ of the moon to steady himself as he slipped a shoulder and then the rest of his body out.

He wore a tan suit. Hand-sewn and high-quality, but worn thin from overuse. His hands were webbed and his gray skin looked as rough as a shark’s.

In short, he looked like some kind of mutated offshoot of an ocean troll.

He closed the moon like a window and, suddenly, it was thousands of kilometers away again. Allison staggered as the forced perspective lifted itself. Her skull pounded and her neck ached like she’d pulled a muscle.

The stranger only smiled. “The moon is beautiful tonight, isn’t it?”

She loosed an arrow.

His tongue shot out, pale pink, a meter long, and prehensile. It wrapped around the arrow in mid-flight and snapped the shaft in haft. He tossed it aside and scowled. “That was not a polite thing to do.”

He speaks Lilian with the barest hint of an accent. His tongue alone can move faster than my arrows can fly, she noted. I may be in danger.

“Nor is murdering people,” Allison said in a calm tone as she nocked another arrow.

Below, Marionette’s gauntlet rapidly returned to her but she sent it a mental nudge to turn back to the cart and retrieve something else.

“That is why you are here, is it not? Because I am a level 37 [Moon Ranger]?”

Thirty years. Kostel’s voice echoed in her thoughts, It’s back. After all these years, it had finally taken the bait.

The stranger’s tongue lashed out and his lips curled back over his sharpened teeth as he snarled, “You parasite. The moon is mine.”

Allison loosed another arrow and kicked off Marion into a dive. Tonight, one way or another, her assignment would come to an end.