There was something weird about the graveyard. It wasn’t just that a good portion of it had gone into the river thanks to a landslide, though that was part of it, no, there was something else at work. Some of me was convinced that it was magical, to the point that I had to constantly taste the air and my eyes started to glow a little from the amount of focus I put on my magical sight, but there was nothing I could see. And yet, that weird sensation in my stomach never left, it remained there like a rock, weighing me down and making me queasy.

“Lia, Luna can you feel this?” I asked my daughters, noticing that Lia’s head was on a swivel, constantly checking everything around us, making me think that she was just as nervous as me.

“There’s something here, something that tells me I’m not welcome here,” Lia admitted, her constant search for an unseen threat stopping for a moment, only to resume the next.

“Mhm, I’m not sure, but there’s something,” Luna agreed, her eyes starting to glow as well and her hands were gesticulating around as if following some unseen pattern. Instead of trying to get her to say more, I left her alone and focused on my own instincts. If it wasn’t magic that I was feeling, it might be something else, though I wasn’t sure what.

Slowly looking around, I tried to ascertain where the sensation came from and noticed that there was some pattern to it. Patterns, I could work with, even if I only had the vaguest idea of what I was sensing or how to quantify the sensation. A part of me was tempted to close my eyes so that I could concentrate on the odd sensation in my gut but closing my eyes in a possibly hostile situation wasn’t the smartest play I could make.

“There’s something over there,” Luna called out, pointing towards what might have been the centre of the graveyard. Following her outstretched arm, I noticed a few small buildings, clustered around that area and mostly hidden behind shrubs and a few trees. It took me a second to realise that these weren’t buildings but crypts, likely for some of the older families or something along those lines.

“Let’s check it out,” I decided, starting to move towards the shrubs. It was fairly interesting, for once I couldn’t simply use my magical senses to detect what was going on. Instead, I had to rely on my instincts, as all my senses were unable to help. At least that was the case until I got close enough and heard a strange noise within one of the crypts, one that I couldn’t immediately place. But I could make an educated guess that it was some sort of Undead, given that we were in a creepy graveyard.

Gesturing to the others, I let Lia and Silva take the lead, while Luna and I stayed behind a little, Alex sitting on Luna’s shoulder once again. For once, I remained behind Luna, just in case we were attacked from behind. Not only did I have better senses than her, allowing me to detect potential attacks earlier, I also had a much better chance to defeat attackers, if they ever got to us.

Up front, Lia raised a hand in warning, while Silva moved to the side a little, ready to flank any attacker that engaged Lia. Luna stopped, while I did the same, quickly looking around again, only to notice movement out of the corner of my eye.

Not sure what I had seen, I called out a warning anyway, just in case, while sending my frozen Shuttles. While I was busy in the back, Lia was also attacked and to my surprise, her attacker wasn’t an Undead, at least not of any sort I had seen before. The thing was some sort of shadow creature, nothing I had ever seen before, and took the shape of a canine, either wolf or dog, it wasn’t easy to tell with it being entirely made out of shadow.

For a moment, I paused, feeling fascination as I looked at the creature, but I instantly tightened my focus again, I could be fascinated after we dealt with them. And it was ‘them’, what I had seen and attacked with my shuttles was a similar creature, one that seemed to easily avoid my attack, or rather ignore the attack. I was nearly certain that I had seen one of my blades pierce through the darkness it was composed of, without slowing or showing any indication of being hit, making me worry a little. If these things were immune to physical attacks, we might be in a pickle, especially if the only thing working against shadows was Light. We certainly couldn’t use any of that, none of us could.

Given that it looked like using Ice was impossible, i instead decided to fight fire with fire, or rather, to fight shadows with shadows. Taking control of the Darkness around me, I formed it into tendrils, letting them lash out against the creature. At the same time, I used Observe and felt quite relieved when I realised that it was called a Gravehound and only level twenty-five.

The tendrils latched onto the creature in a way it wouldn’t work on anything corporeal and for a moment, I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. I now had shadows wrapped around darkness, keeping hold of the beast with nothing but force of will. For a moment, I considered trying to tame the beastie, or maybe bind it in some way, but I couldn’t really figure out how, so I decided to go with the old maxime of KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.

And simply pulled the shadows I was using to bind it into two directions, one latched around the front of the hound, the other wrapped around its hips.

The effect was… fascinating. I could feel the shadows strain against my will and see the creature stretch in a way only shadows could until something gave. There was a discharge of something, I could feel the sensation but it wasn’t Astral Power, and for a moment, I could see the two parts of the hound writhe, as if in agony, before they faded into the darkness of the night.

My enemy dealt with, I looked over to Lia and saw that she had managed to wound the thing, mostly by fighting defensively by the looks of it. Striking so that her attack connected just as the thing attacked her, forcing it to either become corporeal enough to hurt her, and get hurt in turn, or remain incorporeal and have nothing happen to either party.

Similarly, Silva was blocking another two Gravehounds, her paws glowing with soft, silver light and the hounds were completely on the defensive, despite their numbers advantage. Focusing again, I sent out more tendrils, catching one of the hounds as it was just dodging Silva’s attack and tearing that one apart, too. It gave Silva the opportunity to attack her remaining foe with abandon, no longer forced to keep them from going after Luna, who sadly lacked the ability to easily deal with them.

By the time Silva was done with her hound, Lia had managed to whittle down her foe, giving it death by a thousand cuts, and reducing it to nothingness that way. Again, I could feel a bit of something in the air, something that wasn’t Astral Power as I knew it but something remarkably similar.

On a whim, I decided to step into the shadows and when I did, I felt my eyes open in shock. The hounds, destroyed in the real world, were lying in the shadows, obviously dead. Here, they looked far more like real creatures, not just the strange shades they had been in the real world, making me wonder how they could remain in both worlds at the same time. And how they could shift so seamlessly that they could dodge attacks and only be corporeal when they wanted to.

It was certainly a trick I would like to pick up, simply because it was incredibly useful, but for now, I was more interested in the creatures themselves. Moving over to the one in the best shape, the one Silva had killed, I picked it up and stepped out of the shadows again, dragging it with me.

Just before I left the shadows, something new occurred. I heard noise in the shadows before the place had always been utterly, eerily quiet. But now, there was a loud howl, not quite like the howling of a wolf, not like that of a dog. But something else, something that sent a shiver down my spine.

“We should leave, children,” I said, the moment I was out of the shadows. I had no desire to find out what had been howling in the darkness, even if their levels were low, these creatures were dangerous.

Without any discussion, we started to move quickly, Luna on Silva’s back, while Alex was once again on Lia’s. And then we ran as if the hounds of Hell were nipping at our heels. It wasn’t that far from the truth.