Saina paced across the street, holding her daughter’s hand. The ground trembled beneath them as meteors impacted the earth nearby, crushing buildings and concrete as they did. She glanced left, right, and back as they stepped onto the sidewalk and walked into an alleyway.

She took cover against the wall, guiding Saphi to her side, then glanced down the street they’d just crossed.

A meteor had fallen to the ground quite far away but in view.

“Saphi?” Saina said as her daughter, seemingly the same age as Saina, moved in front of her to see what she was looking at. “Do you have your water on you?”

Saphi nodded, her sapphire necklace shifting on her neck as she did. “I have a water bottle, that’s all, Mom.”

Saina, who I admittedly already described quite a while back, wore black, very serious clothes. Her hair was black as well, which would have given her a very ‘mature’ look, but given that she was, biologically, ten, it was...difficult to tell if the attempt to appear mature worked as intended or was ‘cute’. Either way, she obviously took herself very seriously, even as she struggled to run with a heavy radio hooped to her belt.

She sighed. “Any water nearby?”

“There’s some in the sewers,” Saphi said, glancing at a nearby manhole cover. “Should I beat those men up with it?”

“Men?” Saina glanced back at the meteor only to see that its two sides had popped open like a nut, and from inside, six soldiers suited in strange gear climbed out. “So it’s more than just those superpowered people and the elementals...the city’s in more danger than I thought...”

“M-mom, w-what’s that?”

Saina saw where Saphi pointed -the manhole.

The lid had popped open, revealing some strange black goo that began to climb out, bubbling ominously with life.

Saina didn’t hesitate to put an arm around her daughter and dash further into the alleyway. Problem was, the only way out of it was up a scaffold stairway that led into the back of some apartments. Even worse, the building it led up had been sliced in two by the elemental some time earlier and looked ready to collapse any second after the other nearby buildings had battered it upon their fall.

She glanced back at the goop as she ran toward the scaffold. As it fully exited the sewer, it became clear just how large it was. It had about twice the mass of the average person and was rather identifiable as nothing more than sentient goop, black as the darkest night.

It didn’t hesitate to move toward the two once it was out, moving barely faster than the children could run.

Saina climbed over the debris covering the scaffold’s entrance and grabbed her daughter’s arm to help her climb.

“Keep running up, Saphi,” she said as she pushed her up the stairs. “I’ll do what I can to hold it back.”

“Okay, Mom,” the kid said with uncertainty as she climbed upward.

Saina narrowed her eyes and held out her right hand as it approached, her left on the radio at her belt as it did.

Just as it leaped to envelop her, she turned a dial on the radio.

As though a television had been turned to the wrong channel at 1000% volume, a blast of noise -static- sounded from her hand and impacted the goop, sending it writhing in the debris as the force of the shockwave rattled the deaf creature.

Saina’s magic, staticmancy(not to be confused with Sirla’s often abbreviated form of ‘electro’staticmancy), was quite strange. Saina could control the idea of static; synonyms and all. Though, while she could turn it into a powerful weapon at point blank, it was nothing more than an annoyance at any other point because the sound quickly dispersed across the air even a foot away from its focal point, and her effective range was low.

Saina didn’t hesitate to dash onto the platform and climb behind her daughter, a level below her.

As Saphi climbed upward, the metal dully clinking against the large boots(which her mother had thought looked cute), she uncapped a water bottle clipped to her jeans like a gunman would their gun and subconsciously brought the full extent of its contents out, causing it to swirl about her in a halo, orbiting her as rocks might a planet.

Saphi, borne of Saina and a man from a tribe of so-called ‘elementalists’ who drew upon the power of The Great Water Elemental, was said to be a child of prophecy. They thought her capable of controlling The Great Water Elemental, and some even thought she was its reincarnation. Unfortunately for those who took her from her mother and stole her away for nearly a decade, she was, in fact, not that child. They mistook a child with simple Aquakinesis for a messiah capable of drawing upon the elemental’s power without so much as a word...

...that messiah will probably be relevant soon, but I digress.

Anyhow, she was simply a coincidence, a false messiah who happened to have inherited her mother’s magically attuned soul structure.

That said, Saina hoped that she would at least be able to defend against the army of powerful elementals summoned at the shore, if nothing else, as they had experience with the creatures.

As they neared the top of the half-broken stairs, she looked back at the goop below. It had enveloped the bottom of it for some reason. “What is it doing...?” Saina muttered. It was then that she noticed the staircase shudder. She glanced at where it should have been screwed into the wall, and as she did, her eyes widened, and her heart skipped a beat. The staircase itself had somehow become unhinged after the damage done to the building, its screws ripped out of the concrete.

And as she took another step forward, her negligible weight caused one last screw to fall backward, and thus the whole staircase suddenly collapsed a foot downward.

Saphi barely caught herself against the railing while her mother tripped onto the stair in front of her.

“M-mom, what was that?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said through gritted teeth as she glanced down again. The goop was beginning to consume the scaffold, and they were quickly falling as it absorbed it from the bottom up.

There wasn’t any time for fancy maneuvers, they needed out of the alley, and this thing was clearly smarter than it appeared. They continued upward, but their progress toward the top of the building was crawling at best.

Saina glanced to and fro in thought as her daughter waited for her to catch up at the top of the scaffold. Her daughter wasn’t capable of molding water into physical barriers like a more advanced elementalist may have been able to, or at least wasn’t good enough to create platforms for them to climb atop without possibly dropping one of them to their death, so that wasn’t an option...

“Saphi, cut us a staircase out!” Saina yelled.

“A-a staricase?” Her daughter blinked with confusion, not understanding.

“In the wall!”

Her daughter slowly nodded, then narrowed her eyes and swept her hand out. Her ring suddenly shot at the thick concrete of the building and cut through like it was cold butter. The child’s expression grew hard as she concentrated, and it was only a few seconds before she’d carved a hole big enough for the two of them to leap inside. unfortunately, the platform had fallen so low that they couldn’t simply jump in from the scaffold’s floor.

As she made it to the topmost platform, Saina planned on stepping onto the platform’s railing to heft her daughter up, but much to her dread, most of the railing was cut off, with nothing more than a point remaining.

As usual, her maternal instincts kicked in, so she didn’t hesitate in the slightest to leap atop the pointed metal. She nearly tumbled forward after her boot planted onto the metal, but a globule of water suddenly pushed her upward enough to balance her again, giving her time to grip on to the cut out part of the wall.

As the scaffolding continued to fall, she lowered her other hand. “Grab on!”

Saphi gripped her wrist and climbed onto her shoulders, eventually stepping into the carved hole. She smiled victoriously and turned around as she did, only to see her mother lose her grip as the scaffold suddenly fell an extra inch, eliminating her foothold.

In the blink of an eye, however, Saphi had begun to squat, her mother’s arm gripped in her hands.

Saina blinked, her body shutting down for just a moment as she tried to understand what had happened.

“M-Mom, grab the- the-”

She panickedly swept her other hand to the ledge, only to find that Saphi’s water had carved a handhold into the smoothly cut concrete without her noticing, then she planted her feet into the wall and climbed into the hole in the concrete beside her daughter.

Her eyes were wide with adrenaline as she looked back, watching the scaffold melt ever faster into the goop. It was only another ten seconds before it had all been eaten, leaving the hallway coated in goop.

When she had recovered from her shock, she saw a gobule of water crash into the concrete above them, causing a staircase-shaped carving of concrete to satisfyingly fall to the ground, as Saphi had cut it out while she was doing nothing.

“Okay, mom, I made a staircase!”

“Good job, Saphi,” she said before slowly stepping up.

Then, below, she saw the goop begin to move away, out of the alleyway. It seemed like only part of it was moving, though. She didn’t question it as she continued to climb, but then...

The building lurched.

She grabbed onto the concrete of the nearest stair as her daughter hung to her for support. Her eyes widened as she looked down and realized what was happening.

The goop had first consumed the scaffold, but it had grown large enough to consume the building.

“Shi- Upupupupup!” she yelled, clambering up the stairs with panic as it, too, fell into the belly of the beast.

Not that it was that she was afraid of. The Very foundations of the building had quickly begun to deteriorate after it lurched, and soon it would suddenly collapse into nothing more than a pile of rubble, its broken and cracked walls falling one after another like a tower of dominos.

She and her daughter made it to the top of the cut-up building, and she stepped on her foot as she tried to halt herself from stepping off the side of it into a collapsed building not far away.

“Mom, where do we go now?” Saphi asked.

She looked around. The only places they could leap to from where they were were taller, cut-down buildings and the aforementioned pile of rubble in front of them. There was one building just low enough to the ground that they may have been able to leap onto it, but it was on the opposite side of the building. Even at a sprint, it would take her and her daughter perhaps ten seconds to make it there, and that was a dangerous maneuver since the wall was barely thicker than four shoes stuffed between each other.

“Left,” Saina said. She wanted to pick her child up and rush across with her in her arms, but her current form made that impossible. “We have to be fast, though,” she said as she powerwalked across the thin wall, breathing heavily and trying not to glance back at her daughter, else she made a mistake.

As the city echoed with rampant fighting, the mother and daughter stepped across the concrete, their boots tapping on it quietly, overpowering the other sounds as their vision blurred in focus, their cautious but hasty footsteps forward ticking one after another.

Tic, Tic.

Tic, Tic.

Tic, Tic.

Tic, Tic.

Suddenly, the building lurched again.

Her eyes moved back at her daughter, widening for only a moment as she saw her foot had slipped, but she was kicking against a blob of water like a biker trying to put down their kickstand. She managed to push herself forward, back onto both feet only a second later.

They continued walking forward.

Saina glanced downward, only to regret her decision as she saw goop running up the building, clawing for them.

She ignored it as best she could, focusing on the edge.

Tic, Tic.

Their feet continued clicking against the concrete. It felt like a full minute had passed once her feet reached the edge. She looked back only to see the goop reach out for her daughter, having just barely reached the peak of the building.

Without a word, she pulled her daughter forward to the ledge, and she leaped off the building and onto the next, five feet below.

Then, she twisted the knob on her radio once more and blasted the clawing murk with noise, sending it tumbling back off the building. She had only slowed it a little, though, and more continued climbing after her

She kicked backward off the edge and fell back first onto the other building.

As she knew would happen, her fall was softened by water, and her daughter caught her.

“Thank you so much, Saphi,” she said, hugging her daughter. “We’re almost at the shore,” she said as she stepped back, her eyes wandering to the goop as it crawled after it, but a moment later, the building suddenly collapsed, leaving it to fall to the floor, buried at least for the moment under a pile of concrete. “We’ll call the rest of our Friends once we get to somewhere safe.”

“Okay.” Her daughter nodded as they ran across the building, leaving the goop behind as it struggled to continue a chase across the rooftops, giving up after not too long.

Maysray watched from the cliffside as her hometown turned into a warzone, slowly being reduced to nothing more than a field of rubble. It wasn’t a pretty sight, really, but she wasn’t...too distraught about it.

Though, she did not feel good about betraying her former Friends...k-kinda. It wasn’t really a betrayal, but it sure felt a like one, considering they lived in that city.

Her brown curly hair fluttered in the chilly lake winds, her clothes growing colder and colder as time went on, permeating to her skin.

She looked to the side. A young boy with aqua blue hair and a set of robes similar in color stood beside her, impassive as he watched The Great Water Elemental fight a losing fight against Uffield.

Maysray wouldn’t have accepted the job she’d been given had she thought that the eldritch girl or her brother was in danger because of her, but as part of the terms of her joining Therin’s ‘Age of Magic’, Uffield would be captured instead of outright killed. Although, she knew that it had never been part of Therin’s plan to kill her.

The truth was, she had seen a future where Uffield died.

Maysray, after all, was a Prophet.

Feeling cold, she sat down, watching the beautifully destructive scene with contemplation.

That was part of why she had agreed to join Therin, to make sure the innocent girl didn’t die, but the other reason was much more simple; she knew Therin would not win.

It was why she had been hired to his cause. Therin thought that a prophet would be able to aid him in his war, and perhaps she could, but even though she warned him that the odds weren’t in his favor, Therin refused to resign.

That was good, however, because it meant that she could work for him and not feel bad about it. Although, she couldn’t pretend that his rhetoric about creating a new ‘Age of Magic’ wasn’t enthralling.

Suddenly, a cat leaped onto her lap. Then another, and another. And soon, she found herself quite buried in cats, huddled around her. Maysray looked back with confusion.

Behind her was not just a few cats but an army of cats. So many, in fact, that she could hardly see the ground beneath them. As she stared in disbelief, they marched to the edge of the cliff and overlooked the destruction.

“What?” she said hoarsely.

The first cat she’d seen, who was white with black stripes, suddenly spoke. “Hello, Prophet.”

“H-hi?” she said, patting the cat as it shifted into a comfortable position. What the heeeck? “Why...”

“We are reinforcements,” the cat said, “Just in case things get hairy.”

Her eyes glossed-over almost like she were bored. “Really now.”

“Though I doubt it will be necessary. My legion’s primary goal is to lure in and capture Uffield.”

“H-how do you plan on doing that?” Maysray squeaked out.

“Apparently, she has a weakness to cats.”

“What?” she squeaked out again.

“Therin instructed my legion to, I quote, ‘just stand there’, so that’s what we’re doing until further notice.”

“Cool...”

She looked up at the elementalist, too confused to focus on the cats huddled around her. He was shifting around with a confused expression as if he weren’t sure if he should avoid the cats crowding the space beside his feet.

“Have you not seen cats before?” Maysray asked.

“N-not in person,” the sheltered kid said, looking back at her only to make a strange expression at the carpet of cats atop her.

“No need to be scared, they aren’t going to scratch you...probably.”

He grumbled, unsure, before kneeling down and timidly raising a hand to a cat’s head. It nuzzled his hand, and he recoiled in confusion before moving back down to pat it more.

A minute later, the kid was rolling around in the dirt and laughing, unable to stand as he was turned into a playground by the army.

Maysray turned her attention back to the elemental in the distance. She felt awe as Uffield continued fighting, the black spot harassing the deity with seeming ease, slowly but surely defeating it. Nobody dared stand in the way of their fight, as Uffield herself was easily faster than any fighter jet.

Speaking of which, she could see that one such jet had turned into some giant, jet-powered mech and was attacking...something. It was difficult to tell from nearly three miles away, but it was probably some person.

Her eyes suddenly widened.

I’m not going with you, mom!” Vertai yelled, frustration obvious on her face. She stood in the street, looking up.

Hilda narrowed her eyes, standing on her floating platform above Vertai. “Stop being ridiculous, Veri. You do not belong to these people. Come with me now, or I’ll have to make-”

“I belong to them a lot more than I do you!”

Hilda groaned in frustration. “Do you hear yourself? I’m your mother, those people are simply there to use you and then sell your talent. We have a future with The Org- Therin, Veri. When the world knows what magic is, we will be the ones on top. Teleportation isn’t some mid-rank magical ability, you know. You and I are valuable...more valuable than...” She looked around herself, where quite a few members of The Friends stood, uncertain expressions on their faces. “Them.”

“Oh, stop it with the superiority complex, Mom! As far as I’m concerned, you destroyed a city and are threatening my friends just to ‘capture’ your damn daughter! You’re just being petty now.”

She shrugged. “Yes, it’s a little petty, but I’ll remind you that most of none of this was personal. You know this is my job, right?”

...

Vertai squinted. “Wait, what?”

“You...you know that I’m Therin’s secretary, right?”

“Who the fuck is a Therin?”

Maysray blinked rapidly, taken aback a bit.

“Why did your eyes just glow?” the boy asked curiously, looking up at her from the ground, covered in cats.

“I was just seeing the future,” she responded, rubbing her head.

“The....future? You can see the future?”

“Yeah.”

He pushed himself up a bit, causing a few cats to hop off his chest, while a stalwart one seemed completely unfazed as it rolled down onto another. “That’s so cool! Can you see mine?”

“No, I can’t control it, unfortunately...”

“Oh.”

...

“But you can control elementals and water. Isn’t that cool?” she asked.

“I guess,” he said boredly as he leaned back down.

Maysray glanced back at the fight in the distance. As she did, her phone suddenly rang.

“What’s up?” she said as she accepted the call.

“Quite a bit, really,” Hilda said on the other side. “Therin is currently busy with that god or whatever...or...well, he also mentioned a second one as well...so it’s come to me to lead the charge for the moment. Could I speak with Saphire?”

“Sure.” Maysray handed her phone to the kid, putting it on speaker.

He looked at the phone sideways. “Huh?”

“Saphire, please begin to lead the elemental toward...the cats have arrived, right?”

The cat who had spoken before yawned out, “Yesss, madam...”

“Good. Lure her to the cats, and hopefully, once she has finished off the elemental’s main form, they will neutralize her.”

Saphire looked over the lake with uncertainty. “What will cats do to that thing?”

“I don’t know. If you really want to know, just ask them.”

“But-”

She hung up.

The white and black cat growled with annoyance. “Now nobody knows what the plan is. Just purrfect.”

The nearby cats began to hiss at their leader.

Maysray sighed. “This is why we don’t want talking cats...”

“Slow day?”

Sirla stood beside the counter, a hand propping up her cheek as she boredly watched Wurn clean the empty diner.

“Yeah,” she replied as he looked back at her with a smirk. “Slow month, really. Only interesting thing that’s happened is Mr.Freeloader.”

“Still calling him that?”

Her frown deepened. “Nah, he’s fine. But...something about his name...”

“‘Drade’ seems normal to me.”

Sirla shook her head. “Probably. It’s one letter off Drake, after all...Anyway...” She trailed off as her hair reached for a control panel hidden under the counter, clicking a button to turn on a TV hung under the second floor of the diner’s railing.

“-ngeton is apparently experiencing a tidal wave of nearly three-hundred feet, according to the on-site meteorologists observing the situation. Off-site experts say that it could be one of the most deadly natural disasters of all time. Residents have evacuated in quick order, however, so we can only pray for their safety.”

“Huh. That ‘luck’ of his...” she blinked as she tried to register what had just been laid before her. She hadn’t really planned on listening to the news, but the channel was just kinda...on it. Her eyes quickly widened. “Oh shit, I hope he’s okay.”

Wurn glanced at the TV. “Yeah,” he said without much passion.

Knock knock.

She glanced toward the door. “Come in!” she yelled before looking back to the television.

He sent her a strange look.

...

“Uhh...Wurn?”

He looked to her again.

“People aren’t...able to knock on that door, are they?”

“Nah. Why?”

She looked at him with confusion. “You...heard that, right?”

“Heard wha-”

Suddenly, a hole was blasted through the door, revealing a void of nothingness behind it. Sirla’s hair shot outward as she stumbled backward, her expression mortified.

Wurn blinked. “Is something wrong?”

“The fuck do you mean, ‘is something wrong’? Do you not see that?!”

He slowly looked to the door, then her, and lowered his eyebrow skeptically. “See what?”

Sirla leaped out from the counter with her hair and landed between what had crawled from behind the door and Wurn, ready for a fight.

The thing that had invaded their place, seemingly invisible to her partner, looked similar to the void outside. While it appeared quite sinister, Sirla felt its neutrality as it approached, its tentacles writhing and body dissolving and reforming at the same time.

It suddenly lunged at her. Three tentacles shot left, right, and up, curving toward her with decisive malice.

She sent out one of her own tendrils of hair, slapping the upward one aside while she lunged forward, her fist balled.

Then, where the other two were moving, they instead seemed to stretch and speed up, space bending around them. The leftmost one hit her head, disorienting her as the other stabbed directly toward her back. It missed because of her sudden lunge but, in a flick of the limb, it curved around her waist, holding her in place, then raised her up and smashed her against the boards near Wurn. She coughed, wide-eyed at being beaten for the first time she could remember. She should have been able to overpower it, but she’d been too hasty.

Wurn blinked with confusion, his eyes focused on yet past the creature.

Sirla burst back up despite her pain, prepared to protect the confounded Wurn with her life, and spread her hair out, ready to parry any more blows, this time with more knowledge.

Just as the tentacles sliced toward him, and she readied to block-

“Wait just a fucking moment!” Sirla yelled.

It paused on cue.

Her eyes widened as she realized that the creature actually understood her, but continued speaking, “I-Is this...about the taxes?”

“S-Sirla? Umm...what...huh?” Wurn had obviously figured out that she was battling something, but the talk of taxes was what confounded him.

She continued. “Because we have the tax money set aside,” she said like she was trying to please an angry customer. “We just couldn’t, umm...find our...umm...nearest e-eldritch lawyer...or for that matter consultant so we could figure out how to pay it. R-right, Wurn?”

“Err...sure...”

“H-how much do we owe you? Ten-thousand or...a h-hundred, or...” Not that we have that much on hand...

The tentacles, which had remained unnervingly still, retracted back to the being, and it suddenly stopped dissolving, turning into what looked like a...black cube. Wurn then stepped back, trying to understand what he could now see.

A moment later, the cube had morphed into an ominous black chest, which fell open.

“What the fuck was that?” Sirla half-mouthed to herself before nervously stepping to see what was inside.

“I could say the same...” Wurn muttered.

Inside was a note.

She spoke as she read it. “Oh, just 20k. Not so...W-Wurn...” She stepped back and grabbed him to whisper with their backs toward the box. “D-Do we have that much in the bank right now?”

He grimaced. He hadn’t mentioned what had happened the last night yet, and he wasn’t so sure about when he should. “We do,” he replied.

“O-okay.” Sirla walked to the chest. “Umm...do you take credit?”

The chest suddenly morphed into a card reader.

“Tax collectors these days...” she muttered.

“Who, exactly, sent this thing to collect what taxes?”

“Umm...According to Mr.Freeloader, the IRS is run by an elder god or something, so...technically, the space between space or whatever is owned by America.”

Wurn blankly stared at her as he pulled a card out of his fanny pack of holding. “I don’t...I don’t even...”

Sirla grabbed it, then picked up the eldritch card reader and slid it in.

...

The Card reader suddenly dissolved, disappearing completely.

“And now I can explain properly why everyone is afraid of the IRS,” Sirla muttered. She glanced back at the door, only to see that the hole blasted in it had disappeared.

Before she could comment on it, though, the door opened, and two people walked in.

“H-hello- Who the fuck is it now?!” She had assumed that they were untimely customers at first, but it was, in fact, a boy and girl dressed in primitive linen fabrics embroidered with jewels and red and blue patterns. They held spears in their right and left hands, respectively.

The boy, whose hair was brown and unkempt despite being cut short, bowed, alongside his sister, whose pulled-up hair was almost completely smooth and straight, like it had been freshly washed.

“Hello,” the boy said with a thick, unrecognizable accent as he looked about the place.

“We were sent by Hinnqua, the girl said afterward with the same accent, stepping forward innocuously.

“Oh, yeah, I completely forgot she mentioned that...” Wurn muttered.

“Who mentioned what? Did you not tell me something important?” Sirla asked.

“Dude, it’s your fault we just got attacked by an eldritch tax collector!”

“Fair enough. So who are you two?”

“I am Sola, that is Luna. We are Hinnqua’s Kaes.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Her soulmates.”

“Soulm...ates?!” Sirla said, somewhat flustered.

“Yes,” she said boredly.

“So where is this passage to ‘Changeton’?” Her brother asked curiously. “We were told that the fourth Fatebringer may need our oversight as the current of Fate has rebounded North.”

Sirla rolled her eyes. “You deal with this. I’m done. I also think I need to use the healing bandages. That thing did a number on me...”

Therin's notes on the eldritch:

{Not all Eldritch are what I would consider 'sentient', but all of us have the capability for sentience. Those who aren't instead follow a directive related to their birth, although this directive can change over time. A breed of Eldritch I created artificially, the Devourerers, are nothing more than piles of goop whom follow my instructions loosely and consume objects and souls to gain power. Their hunger is endless, but while they could easily destroy the world in a few days in the right environment due to their invulnerability find infinite capacity for growth, their soul is their weak point. Anyone with a modicum of spiritual power could do so little as punching them to evaporate their soul. A more advanced form could be more dangerous, but a sprinkle of the right chemical can kill nearly any non-pureblood Eldritch, so I wouldn't worry about it. I hope you enjoy devouring this 'fictional' diatribe on eldritch beings just as much as they do concrete, because I'm sure we're both as dry.}