The fortress never left our line of sight, even as we trekked through the trees. It was as if the foliage shifted so the tallest spires were always looming, barely cresting the tops of the trees.

“How long have we been walking?” Katrine asked.

“No clue.” Jodie said.

“A few hours, I think.” I’d tried every method of keeping time; counting, using my watch, tracking heartbeats. I always lost track, my watch ran backwards, and my heart didn’t beat unless I forced it to.

“We weren’t twenty minutes from the park.” Jodie sai.

“Distances work differently in here,” I said, “It’s all based on human-”

“Perception.” she interrupted, “You’ve said that seven times.”

“You’ve asked seven times.”

“It’s not just human.” Katrine ducked under a branch, “look at the trees.” They were looming, curling inwards to make a tunnel. “I’ve seen these trees before, in the real world I mean. They’re shit, tiny things.”

I looked again, they still loomed, but not in a way that made them feel big. I just felt small. Small like a cat?

“They say you’re never more than four feet away from a rat,” said Katrine

“So the entirety of Shitty Mirror London is rat-sized?” Jodie said, “fucking ew.”

“Well probably not all of it, but this part seems to be.” Katrine said, “Maybe there’s a nest in the real world somewhere.”

We kept walking, always keeping one eye on the fortress. Fgures kept flitting around the outside on balconies and pathways that I could barely perceive.

Jodie raised a fist and stopped. I froze, Katrine followed a moment later. Jodie crouched, soundlessly inching her backpack off her shoulder. She tapped two fingers against her ear, and then her forearm. The hand sign for an enemy. I rallied next to Katrine and pulled out my pistol, glancing at the tree line. Jodie turned to us, tapped two fingers to her brow, ‘keep watch’, and disappeared up a tree.

I pulled Katrine in so that I was practically kissing her ear and whispered, quiet as I could, “Back to back, listen and keep an eye on the treeline.”

She followed, and we started scouting.

Night and day didn’t seem to be distinct time periods in the fae realm so much as they were concepts. It wasn’t any darker now than it had been when we’d arrived, but shadows started protruding in odd directions and the hairs on my neck stuck up. I felt like I was being watched. The trees were impenetrable, but when I focused they almost shifted to reveal gaps, just wide enough to fit through, It was a porous wall of shifting leaves and bark. Jodie had disappeared through one of the gaps, up into one of the trees like a climber, but I couldn’t tell which. What had she heard? Why hadn’t I heard it? I had to trust her, but I didn’t like her leaving us behind like this. Something darted by one of the gaps, something round and dark, the size of a small dog, moving too fast. I raised my gun to make my way over to it, but Katrine tapped me on my leg, not saying anything.

I turned around to look, and immediately realised why she hadn’t said anything. The creature looking back was the size of a bear and every black, greasy bristle of hair was tipped with old gristle and meat. It had too many eyes, every one of them red and panicked, and it was sniffing the ground in front of it indifferently. A long, thick tail protruded from its back, stretching to a whip-thin point that was too long. It stood on six legs. With the barest form of resemblance, I realised that Katrine had been right. It wasn’t just human perception that affected this world, because no human could imagine a rat like this.

It darted forwards too quickly, long, broken teeth moving for Katrine’s torso, and I put three bullets in its eyes. Each burst like overripe fruit, and when it blinked the fluid out there were a bunch more, like grapes, like pomegranates. It squealed and reared backwards onto two legs, clawing at itself, wiping fluid away. Its claws came away an indistinct dark; not red, not green, not even brown. It landed back down on six legs and turned. I readied myself for it to charge again, but didn’t register the tail coming towards me until it connected with my side. I hit the ground and heard a gasp of pain from Katrine behind me. It felt like getting hit by a car. I heard a crack from the trees, something cleaved in half by the narrow end of the tail, and made a note to stay close, but not too close. I tried to push myself up onto two feet, but the rat bounded towards me on four legs, the other two ready to claw at me. I rolled, and shot again, in the fur. One of the bristles cracked in half, the tip falling to the floor, but hitting the body didn’t do anything, It kept coming, and coming. And then, not a full two feet from me, it stopped.

It tried to turn its head sideways, but the spear protruding from its neck stopped it. Jodie was on the other end of it, silent with effort. The rat looked back at me, gnashing and spitting at me in terror. I scrabbled back and called out behind me to Katrine, “Knives!”

Two daggers skittered towards me from her direction, I grabbed them and started to hack at its face, meeting every bite with metal. It was disgusting, it was wet, it was greasy, it was wrong. Everything about this creature was wrong, so I kept cutting. Eyes burst as quickly as they grew until its head was a tumour of white, red and dark ooze. Then I went for the throat. Everywhere I stabbed, razored bristles softened into matted fur, rough but harmless. And as it died, the rat shrank. Jodie had started stabbing upwards into its trachea, but as I gutted it she was pushing it into the ground. I fell back on my knees, my heart pounding at my chest with effort and with anger. It was the size of a small dog, The rest of its eyes had fallen away, leaving only two, and its tail twitched as its face went slack.

I breathed heavily and looked at it, looked at myself. I was disgusting, I hated the way my skin felt. I blinked, and looked up, Jodie was using the spear as a crutch, looking down at me

“You good?” she asked. I nodded

“Check on Katrine.”

We limped the rest of the journey. Katrine had taken the thinner end of the tail, she’d cracked every rib I could feel on her, I wasn’t much better; blood was rushing to my head from the adrenaline high of the fight and I was sticky. Jodie was in the best form out of the three of us, The rat had hit her on the way to us, doing something to her leg and knocking her out of the tree. She’d landed next to a corpse, one of the people from the fortress, and picked up their spear. Katrine wanted to stop and triage our wounds, but I wanted to get to the fortress.

“What the fuck was that?” said Jodie, on one of our self-imposed breaks. We didn’t get tired, but Katrine figured that if we could get injured, we could get fatigued, exhausted.

“I don’t know, some kind of rat. Or like, what rats see rats as.” I said

“No, Chloe. What the fuck was that?” She looked over to Katrine, who had gone to draw a plant somewhere.

“I- fuck. I don’t know. It was just wasn’t what it was supposed to be. Rats are cuddly, you know? Kinda cute. Not like that thing.”

“Well if cute and cuddly is what gets you going, I won’t stop you. Why did it shrink down?”

“I don’t know, maybe they cursed a random rat and threw it at us to throw us off. Maybe Katrine knows better.”

I was still trying to wipe grease and muck off myself, drop by drop. When we got home, I would have the longest, hottest shower of my life.

“We should probably-”

Jodie clasped her hand over my mouth and pushed me against a tree, I knew better than to say anything in protest, so I went for my gun in preperation for the next fucked up rat monster.

“Are you of the lower court?” I heard Katrine, out of sight, talking calmly.

“I am Harbour, sixth daughter of the fourteenth Caste of the Lower Court of Londinium, Emissary to Deloran, first son of the seventh Caste of the Lower Court of Londinium.” said another figure, who I hadn’t seen. Jodie let me go, and signalled me to flank the two of them from the right. She peeled off to the left, limping on the spear. I hugged the treeline and crept around. I moved a lot quieter for some reason, something about my existence was just quieter in this world. I finally saw the figure Katrine was talking to. The fairy looked vaguely feminine, and spoke with a high voice, so I assumed ‘she’ would be accurate enough. She was maybe five feet tall, and pearlescent. She didn’t have hair as much as she did a cloud of some dark material that resembled hair. Her face was noseless and her ears tapered to points. It was hard to discern where her body stopped and her long, thinly flowing silver dress began, it was possible she was naked and this was all just her. She looked almost seal-like.

“How long have you been following us, Harbour?” said Katrine.

“As long as the shishishi was, you would count it twenty minutes after your transport.”

“That thing was hunting us the whole time?”

“Scavenging, the shishishi is not a predator.” When she named the rat monster she made a sound that a human mouth shouldn’t have been able to make. Then again, she was quite clearly not human.

“Is that what you call it? A shi-shi-shi?” said Katrine.

“It is what it calls itself.” said Harbour, “Where is your Pathbearer?”

“My what?”

“Your Pathbearer. Your guide?”

“Oh. Well, I think I’m the guide.”

“But you are no Pathbearer.”

I locked eyes with Jodie, across the clearing. She held up three fingers, and counted down.

Three.

Two.

One.

As she dropped the last, and we both bolted. I barked some command to get her attention, so Jodie could close the space, and in a second the spear was at her throat. She turned, bemused, and looked down the shaft of the spear to Jodie.

“You hold the spear of Seen, Three hundred and twenty first son of the Eleventh caste of the Lower Court of Londinium, Warrior to Zaava, Twenty fifth daughter of the Ninth caste of the Lower Court of Londinium.”

“Damn fucking right I do.”

“He has fallen then?”

“I’m asking the questions, who are you and why were you following us?”

Harbour looked at her a moment, then turned back to me.

“Welcome, visitors. I am Harbour, fifth daughter of the fourteenth Caste of the Lower Court of Londinium, Emissary to Deloran, first son of the seventh Caste of the Lower Court of Londinium. Come with me, We have been watching you.”