London.

1973. February.

The British & Empire Museum was a place for quiet contemplation, away from the noise and the bustle and the fumes of the city. Inside its colonnaded entrance were broad, tall corridors displaying the cultural heritage of countless civilisations across the triverse, each room a clean, freshly painted white with marble plinths and polished display cases.

Henry enjoyed bringing the family. He and his wife, Sarah, had always enjoyed touring museums and galleries; it was how they had met, after all, suddenly noticing each other standing before the same painting. The children were trickier, of course, always rushing through at top speed and resistant to the idea of taking one’s time and reading the curated descriptions. That said, they were older now, at seven and nine, and displayed more patience than they had even the previous year. Paul, the elder, had started to take a real interest in history, though Ellie still had a way to go. Henry had to remind himself that he had never been into this sort of thing when he was a child.

Still, lay the foundations and all that.

It was a busy day at the museum, visitors all shielding themselves from the cold February air by taking a walk through the exhibits. Henry had taken the kids from the Ancient Greece exhibit into the Palinor wing of the building, while Sarah stayed behind to continue savouring the remarkable sculptures from Athens. The Palionr wing was an astonishing collection of artefacts from many of Palinor’s city states, mountain tribes and aen’fa nomads, most gather during the early days of the Joining, before Palinor started restricting what could be taken through the portals. There had been something of a gold rush in those early decades after the portals opened, with some families becoming very rich indeed. The museum was also home to a range of Palinese fauna, mega and not-so-mega. It always struck Henry as odd that the place had some of the same animals - dogs, cats, horses - while also having the sort of beasts that would otherwise be confined to fiction.

There was a distant sound of items falling, or crashing together. Perhaps shelves tipping and depositing their items onto the floor. It was muffled, seemingly from elsewhere in the museum.

“Did you hear that, dad?” asked Paul.

“Sounds like someone is going to be in a lot of trouble,” he said, ruffling the boy’s hair and smiling. “Make sure you don’t knock anything over.”

“Maybe they can glue it back together,” said Ellie, taking his hand.

The double doors at the end of the gallery, painted to look like they were part of the wall, didn’t so much open as shatter. The doors themselves flew off their hinges, crumpling like paper, while the solid frame cracked and bent, plaster crumbling to the floor. The debris flew into the room, toppling exhibits, smashing glass displays and shredding paintings. Hundreds of years of Palinese history disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Henry froze, feet entirely rooted for a second, brain unable to process what had happened. Paul and Ellie shrieked and clutched at him, which jump-started his mind. He checked them for injuries, though the explosion had been at the far end of the room from where they stood. It was only then that he recognised bodies lying on the floor, some moving, some not. He spun the kids around to look at him, rather than the chaos. “We need to go and find mummy,” he said. “Hold my hands, both of you.”

There was another thundering crack and more of the wall collapsed. Through the haze of dust and disintegrated plaster he saw a shape: huge, solid, unfamiliar. Bigger and broader and taller than a horse.

“OK, let’s go,” he said, his voice emerging higher pitched than he’d anticipated. There was a deep, primal fear welling up inside that he would have to try to hide from the children. Making his grip firmer, he pulled them away and towards the doors at their end of the gallery. Behind there were snarls, and screams, and crunching.

“What’s happening, daddy?” asked Ellie.

“Don’t worry, just keep moving,” he said, “keep looking ahead, watch where you’re going.”

There were other people now, on their feet, all heading towards the same doorway. It became a race of who could get there first, the door not being wide enough to accommodate all of them at the same time. Those without small children got their first, pushing through, and by the time Henry and the kids made it there was already a bottleneck: an oversized human cork trying to squeeze through too small a gap. Others piled into the back of them, everyone straining to get past the doorway.

He glanced over his shoulder. The thing, the creature, was stalking through the room towards them, pausing occasionally to bend its enormous head and pick up a body. “Oh fuck,” he said, renewing his efforts to get them through the door.

“Daddy!” protested Paul. He didn’t like his parents using bad language.

“One at a time, come on,” Henry said, momentarily letting go of Paul and Ellie’s hands in order to yank some of the panicking people back from the doorway, thus allowing some movement from those at the front. The pressure lessened, they all started moving forward. There was a spike of abject fear when for a moment he couldn’t find Ellie’s hand, then he had both of them again and they were shuffling closer, and then they were the through—

The beast crashed into the crowd behind them and the wall and floor shuddered. Henry and the children fell to the floor, feet taken from under them by the vibrations. Henry scrabbled backward, got to his knees, grabbed the kids again and wrenched them up. All three of them stared at the thing in the doorway, the claws of its front legs gripping the frame, its jaw soaked with a mixture of blood and something gelatinous. It had the snout of a komodo dragon, albeit much larger, but the gait of a mammal.

Paul whimpered, a long, high pitched whine of terror. Henry picked up Ellie and swung her onto his back. “Hold on tight, little girl,” he said, then held tight to Paul’s hand and ran. The boy was fast, his legs having grown enough to move almost as fast as an adult. Henry had to be careful with Ellie on his back, but it was faster than having her try to keep up.

Still, it wasn’t fast enough. He could hear the creature behind them, the heavy thumping-clack of clawed feet on stone. Something bashed into him and he sprawled flat onto the hard floor of the museum. Paul went sliding further, and Ellie thumped down next to him. He flipped himself over just in time to see the creature’s jaws close around his ankle.

He screamed as the teeth sunk in. “Run!” he shouted at the kids. The beast walked backwards, dragging him by the foot, each movement feeling like the scraping of a thousands injections into his leg.

It released him and he scrabbled at the smooth floor, trying to get himself away, but knowing that it was hopeless. He couldn’t see the kids, and hoped they were gone, that they’d find their mother, that maybe one day they’d forget this, or at least be able to move beyond it.

The creature raised a clawed foreleg above his head, the claws sharp.

“Nope,” came a voice from the side. It was a short, simple, incongruous utterance. Then a massive blade swung into Henry’s view, its edge coming down on the creature’s leg, cutting into its flesh. It recoiled, tearing itself free, black blood seeping from the wound, and skittered away from its attacker.

Henry turned painfully and found himself staring at a huge man, the wielder of the sword, clad in some sort of armour. “Erik, get him out of here,” the man growled. “Ngarkh?”

“My pleasure,” came a deep, reverberating voice.

Henry felt a hand on his shoulder and he jumped, expecting something awful. “Come with me if you want to not be eaten or die from a slow venom,” came a voice. It was a man, older, perhaps in his late sixties. He held out his hand and helped Henry stand.

“I can’t walk,” Henry said, grimacing through the pain that arced up his leg.

“I can fix that,” the man said, “but first we need to get out of here.”

The creature had clearly got past the shock of the sudden bladed attack and was stalking its way back towards them, evidently more enraged than ever. Its tail lashed out and splintered a wooden totem.

That was when Henry saw the owner of the deep, booming voice. It was a koth, enormous, its skin black and shiny like a beetle’s, but scaled like a reptile. It stomped its way past, the impact of its feet shaking the floor, building momentum and intercepting the creature before it got any closer. It was like a train crash, two immovable objects hammering into each other.

“My name’s Erik,” the older man said, putting Henry’s arm around his shoulders.

“My children,” Henry said, the panicked fog clearing from his mind, “a boy and a girl, are they—”

“They’re safe, they’re already outside.”

Henry half-hobbled, half-hopped away from the conflagration in the gallery, the sounds of immense destruction becoming no quieter even after they were out of the gallery.

“Who are you? What is that thing?” Henry found himself babbling questions, not caring especially for the answers, but talking somehow kept him focused, stopped his frayed nerves from breaking entirely.

A young woman ran towards them, towards the creature. “We’ve taken everyone to the courtyard,” she shouted, pulling an arrow from a quiver on her back as she darted past. “Regroup there.”

“That’s where your children will be,” Erik said.

“Where’s she going?”

“To fight.”

Through the open doors to the gallery Henry saw the girl, who he only latterly realised had pointed ears, attach a rope of some sort to the arrow and fire it into the room. She pulled another instantly as she advanced, disappearing from view.

Outside, the courtyard in the centre of the museum was full of shocked and whimpering people, some sat on the ground or on the few benches, others wandering about aimlessly. There was no destruction here, Henry feeling for a moment like he was in a fever dream, that none of it was real - at least until his next step brought weight down on his mangled ankle.

Paul and Ellie ran to him, grabbing at him, speaking relieved nonsense, and then he saw Sarah, who must have already been reunited with the kids. She touched his face, then crouched beside him and examined his wound. “What happened?”

Erik knelt and rummaged in he bag that was slung around his shoulder. “He was bitten,” he said, as if it were normal. “I need to extract the poison and administer a counter agent.” He pulled a syringe from his bag. “Hold him,” he said to Sarah. Confused, she braced the leg. Erik pushed the syringe into the wound, without warning.

For a second Henry lost consciousness, his vision blurring, then he snapped back and screamed. Ellie and Paul clutched at his arms, trying to comfort him and themselves. “Stop hurting daddy!” shouted Ellie.

“Calm yourself, little one,” Erik said, “I am saving his life.” Satisfied, he withdrew the syringe, which contained a viscous, yellow liquid that Henry was fairly sure shouldn’t have been inside his body. Erik pulled a bottle and cloth from his bag, poured a few drops from the bottle onto the cloth and pressed it to the wound. “Hold this in place for at least half an hour,” he said to Sarah. “With luck he’ll be completely fine, other than a limp. At worst, he’ll lose the leg below the knee. But he’ll live.”

“Who are you?” Henry gasped, still reeling from the pain, although already feeling a numbing in the leg.

“Erik Vineroot,” the main said, straightening. “One of the Six Blades. Well done, you were brave. Now I have a job to do.”

He started back towards the gallery but before he could make it the wide window at the eastern side of the courtyard shattered and the koth and the creature tumbled out onto the cobbles. The koth fought ragefully, clawing and tearing at the creature, but for all their might the creature was still nearly twice its size. Arrow were embedded in the creature’s hide, ropes dangling uselessly. From the hole in the window the archer leapt out, landing nimbly, followed shortly afterwards by the large man with his giant sword and another woman - also toweringly tall - that Henry hadn’t noticed before. They tried to surround the creature, which lashed and thrashed and refused to be kept in one place.

Everyone in the courtyard scattered, trying to get to the far side and as far away as possible from the fight. The big woman with the two pikes managed to get one near the creature’s neck and it screeched, snapping at the pole with its teeth. It succeeded in removing the weapon, then, apparently deciding that it was outnumbered, turned and ran to the wall of the courtyard, scampering up the vertical as if it were a cat jumping over a fence.

The koth didn’t miss a beat, its bat-like wings unfolding from its back and launching into the air in pursuit. It reached the roof of the museum just ahead of the creature and re-engaged, both of them tumbling along the tiles.

Henry turned his attention back to his family. “Are you all OK?”

“We’re fine,” Sarah said, trying for a smile, “I was so worried about you all.”

“Those warriors are amazing,” Henry said. “I’d be dead without them.”

There was a cracking sound from the roof and he looked back to see the koth falling, crunching down into the courtyard. The creature, clearly deciding that it had a chance to finish off its prey, leaped back down, drawing screams again from the crowd. The big man and woman, who looked oddly similar - maybe they were related? - leapt to the immobile koth’s defence.

Angry, the creature turned and looked for an easier target. Seeing the smaller aen’fa with the bow, it charged. The aen’fa didn’t moved, instead pulling arrow after arrow and firing them: first into one of the creature’s eyes, then directly into its open maw. It didn’t slow down, too confused and angry to stop.

Just before the beast reached the girl - who was tiny in comparison - another figure ran from the side, knocking the aen’fa to the ground and out of the creature’s path. A human woman, with what looked like a police badge hanging on a lanyard around her neck.

Shots rang out, and for the first time he noticed there were police officers in the courtyard, London officers, armed. The bullets seemed to be irritating the creature rather than injuring it, but they made it think twice about its attack. It turned and again climbed back onto the roof, where it hissed at its attackers. It convulsed and writhed, and then appeared to tear out of its own skin, like a calf being born, and emerged somehow larger, and its middle legs - for it had six legs, Henry realised with a start - were now connected to its back with leathery wings. It ran awkwardly along the rooftop, wings flapping, like a child trying its first walk, and then it launched itself off the far side of the building and glided away, shortly disappearing from view.

The big man shouted at one of the plain clothes officers. “Now do you believe me when I say you should call in the army?”