Katalepsis: 2.7

Heather's hand got got. Possibly by a mutant Maisie, possibly by some other human-ish-shaped-and-sized entity affiliated with the Eye. What happens next?

The mitten saved me. Raine helped.

The dark hand gripped my wrist, but simple screaming terror wrapped around my heart. No need for paralysing supernatural force to immobilise me. Here was an unspoken fear from the darkest nights of my ruined childhood: Wonderland was reaching out to snatch me away.

Bone-freezing cold soaked through the mitten and into my flesh.

The dark hand pulled.

I wonder. If Heather got pulled through the portal, would everyone on Earth immediately forget she ever existed? How DID that global mind-warping (and possibly reality-warping, given the amount of physical record there must have been of Maisie's existence) work, exactly, and how much effort did it take for the Eye or whatever entity was responsible for it to actually do it?

In other details, the recurring emphasis on coldness is suggesting odd things about magic. Is this creature's arm being extra especially cold something related to its magical nature, or is that just a side effect of the spell creating the portal?

Or...maybe Earth is just an unusually hot environment, by multiversal standards? Perhaps most other realms that magicians make contact with are just much colder than Earth, the interdimensional activity that spellcasting causes allows heat to move along that gradient, and those worlds' native life is adapted to those conditions. Is Earth a sweltering hell for most aliens?

But Raine already had me, her arms hooked under my shoulders from behind.

She'd reacted first, faster even than the hand. Beating my reaction times isn't exactly a challenge, but I'd thought we were all slow and sluggish after the soul-battering from the Eye. Raine held on, planted her feet and tried to haul me back as the dark hand tightened its grip.

Aw, I was hoping she'd hit the alien hand with her nightstick, just for the meme value. Still, it's probably best that she didn't, since this might be Maisie or another potentially-befriendable-in-the-longterm entity. She already blew our first contact with the great and prosperous Fleaman Republic, after all.

It was much, much stronger than Raine. For one heart-stopping moment I became the rope in a tug of war, shoulder wrenched near out of the socket. I snapped out of paralysis, kicking and screaming, trying to scramble away.

Then my hand slipped out of the borrowed purple mitten. I yanked my arm back and left the dark hand clutching nothing but empty glove.

Well, it's been implied to be pretty chilly on Planet Eyeball, so the creature probably needs that more than Heather does.

Raine and I won the tug of war and crashed into an armchair. I accidentally elbowed her in the stomach and our heads cracked together. She let out a winded grunt, but didn't stop, she quickly disentangled our legs and jumped to her feet. I stayed half-collapsed in the chair, too shaken to get up.

The dark hand snapped open and dropped the mitten.

Or not, I guess.

"What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that?" Twil shouted from behind us. Evelyn backed away in panic, shaking her head.

A dark arm followed the dark hand, reaching across the table until it found a grip on the edge. A shoulder emerged, made of glistening black night.

The owner of the dark hand began to climb through into our reality.

Hmmm. At this point, I think I'm going to call it a 40% chance of being a mutated Maisie, and 60% chance of being an actual alien.

In the latter case, it will then be 50/50 on whether it joins the harem.

So, 40% Maisie, 30% combat encounter, 30% waifu. Let's see where the dice land!

Raine slid something slender and sharp out of her jacket pocket. I wasn't paying much attention to her, or the yelp from Twil. I only figured out much later that Raine had palmed a silver letter opener. Didn't matter much at the time.

"Evee." Raine raised her voice. "Hope I don't need to say this, but you should probably close that gate."

"I can't!" Evelyn said. "There's no gate, there's nothing to close! I don't … I don't understand."
Our uninvited guest slid out of the aqua vitae in the silver plate, inch by slow inch of dark oil-slick flesh, contorting itself to fit through the eighteen-inch opening, like a rodent cramming itself through a crack in the wall.

It was a nightmare parody straight from the imagination of any medieval diabolist.

No face, no sense organs, no skin. Just one flowing surface of pure darkness, without blemish or break. No claws, no hairs or rough patches, no knobbly joints or bunched muscle. Humanoid, but gangly and so tall it assumed a crouch atop the table as it emerged. Limbs as long as my entire body. Head a blank, tapering ovoid big as an anvil, topped with a pair of curved horns. Huge wings stretched from its back, and a long sinuous tail lashed behind it, thick as a mooring cable.

Sounds like a night-gaunt, from Lovecraft's "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," at least as they're usually depicted in fanart and such.

Well, if this is an homage to the night-gaunts in nature rather than just in aesthetics: nightgaunts are powerful synthetic hunters created by some powerful eldritch entity to capture and retrieve live targets. Which means that this one is likely being sent to do just that; bring one or all of the human scryers (or just Heather, due to the Eye already being interested in her) back to its master on the other side of the gate.

If that IS what's going on here, then...I'd say 70% odds of combat encounter, 30% odds of waifu option.

This was nothing like the bone-thing Raine had killed in Evelyn's house. That had originated Outside, belonged to some alien taxonomy, but it had been material. It had possessed bones and skin and a mouth. It had bled and it had died.

The dark visitor wasn't even remotely biological.

Even without eyes, I knew it was staring at me.

"Nuh-uh," Raine said to it. "She's not for you."

So, yeah. Construct. Sent on abduction missions. This is absolutely a night-gaunt expie.

Notably, everyone can see this thing, not just Heather. It's not pneuma-somatic like the "servitors" created by human magicians. Maybe that puts it closer to the same category as Twil's werewolf suit, or maybe it's in a totally different category from any of the above.

She put herself between me and the nightmare and dropped into a knife-fighter's stance. Until that moment, I couldn't have told you what a knife-fighting pose was meant to look like, but Raine made it seem second nature. She raised the silver knife in one hand and thrust her other palm forward.

A grin played across her lips. Tension in every muscle. I couldn't believe she wanted to fight this thing; it was simply too large, too other, too intimidating. Her knife looked so small.

In that moment, I loved her for it.

The demon—I couldn't think of it as anything but a classical demon—finished climbing through into our reality and planted both slab-like feet on the table, squatting in a gargoyle's crouch. The wood creaked under its weight. It leaned forward and craned its head to look around Raine, to look at me.

"Back off," Raine said, loud and clear.

An echo of alien thought brushed against my mind.

I swallowed a gasp, but the thought slipped off, like an oil-soaked hand trying to grip my consciousness.

Huh. Was it trying to communicate, just now? Granted, the message might have been "I command you to throw yourself into my night-gaunt's grasp, will save to resist," but it also might not have been.

Raine shifted her balance onto her back foot; I scrambled out of the armchair and cringed away from the impending violence.

"No, no, don't touch it, don't touch it!" Evelyn cried. "I think I know what it is. Do not touch it."

Raine froze. She didn't take her eyes off the demon. It bobbed its head to stare at me over Raine's other shoulder.

"It's—" Evelyn swallowed hard. "Therapon nyktos, uh … Noctis Latro. I've seen one before. Once. I think."

"Don't care what it is," Raine almost growled. "It needs to leave."

"Yes, yes, I think it will! It's a messenger, that's what they do, they deliver messages. Look, it's not attacking us. Don't touch it."

Ehhh...seemed like it was trying to do an abduction a second ago.

Also...the Latin name she just gave for it is literally "night thief," which, uh, kinda suggests that it's meant for taking rather than delivering.

Then again, the Greek version apparently means "night therapist" or "night comforter" or "therapeutic night," so who knows. I'm guessing either the author gave it this name as a shoutout to the nightgaunt's amazingly whimsical trait of keeping its captive subdued en route by tickling them, or Google Translate is missing something.

Anyway, the fact that Evelyn does know what these are, but DOESN'T know what the Eye is, suggests that these notgaunts are used by a number of different entities, any of which could have been their original inventor. Which...is actually *also* true to the source material, heh. Carter's ghoul friends in "Dream-Quest" had hacked a bunch of units that their creator left laying around near ghoul territory.

Another phantom thought skimmed the surface of my brain, wordless impulse and sense impression: crushing cold; bone-shattering, blood-freezing cold; entrapment and imprisonment; such a tiny, tiny space with no way out, no way out; the human mind turned inside out and put back together piece by piece. Loneliness, abandonment, darkness.

"I-it's in my head," I stammered. "It's trying to get into my head."

Is that a threat? An offer that it doesn't realize a human would find unreasonable? A plea for assistance? Or just one part of a bigger message that got garbled?

"A message," Evelyn said. "It's trying to deliver a message. Maybe we let it, maybe it—"

"Bugger that," said Raine. "Take your message and shove it up your arse. Get out of my girl's head."
Evelyn swore under her breath. "A message from what? From The Eye? There was no gate! I don't understand!"

"Fuck this," Twil said. "Just fucking kill it already."

The messenger made its move.

With one huge hand wrapped around the edge of the table, it leaned forward and reached out toward me. I squealed and stumbled backward from the grasping fingers.

Yeah, Evelyn has been batting really, really poorly when it comes to predicting and/or correctly diagnosing stuff. It's at the point where I'm starting to wonder if the fractal she drew on Heather is making things worse instead of better in the longrun.

Twil...has her heart in the right place, at least in these circumstances, but I'm not sure that this is something you can just beat to death with a blunt intrument. If anything, I'd expect Twil herself with her werewolf powers would have better odds than Raine...oh wait, right, there's a silver dish right under the nightgaunt. Never mind.

Guess it's all on Raine. And maybe Heather if she figures something out that can help. Evelyn is probably too brain-blasted to cast anything else for a bit.

Raine lashed out so fast I don't think even the demon knew what happened.

She rammed the knife into the messenger's night-black arm and twisted the blade on the way back out. Three times in quick succession. She made it look effortless, a quick repeated motion, practised a thousand times, executed with perfect precision. On a human being she'd have opened arteries and veins, torn flesh and cracked bone.

She may as well have stabbed a bucket of sand.

The night-flesh didn't even need to suck back together, it closed seamlessly in the blade's wake. No wounds, no response, no sound greater than a gentle hiss.

The demon stopped reaching for me and paused, as if trying to work out what had just happened. Raine yanked the knife out a final time, grinning in full flow. She rocked back in a sort of predictive feint, then went for the demon's throat.

It took the knife from her. Plucked it right out of her fingers and made it vanish. Raine was so surprised that she almost baffed at it with her empty hand.

Yeah. That's about what I expected.

I'm surprised it even paid her that much mind, given how ineffectual her knife was. Which...means it might not have actually been as ineffectual as it looked, come to think of it. Still not very effective, obviously, but at least annoying.

"Raine!" I yelled.

She snapped back before touching the demon and quickly hopped away from the creature, one arm out to shield me. She took a great shuddering breath, still grinning but now shaking her head in disbelief. Evelyn was reciting words in Latin, shouting commands, instructions, insults. For all I knew, she was inviting it to afternoon tea.

I guess Evelyn isn't down after all. Maybe she'll manage to cast something that doesn't make the situation worse. Very small chance of that, but still.

Or she actually is rolling to seduce it away from the Eye, and we might still get nightgaunt waifu.

"Okay, back up, keep away from it—" Raine got out, before Twil bounded past us.

Twil didn't look very human, but I didn't exactly have the presence of mind to catalogue her wolf form. All I saw was a blur of fur and teeth, mid-leap.

The demon messenger travelled without moving, two feet to the left. The trick made my eyes hurt, drew a pained gasp from Evelyn and a wince from Raine. Twil flew right through the spot it had occupied a moment before. She crashed head first into the old bookcases on the other side with a horrible clatter-crack of snapped bones.

How the hell hard did she pounce? Does the nearby silver plate turn her bones into porcelain or something?

Maybe the bookcase or something sitting on top of it was made of bone, and that's what broke. Even so though...

"Exi. R-redi, unde v-ventum es." Evelyn's voice shook and stumbled.

The demon reached for me again. Raine, in one of the bravest and stupidest gestures I ever witnessed from her, put her fists up.

It moved her aside.

The motion was impossible to comprehend, at least with human senses. One moment Raine was between the demon and I, then the messenger reached out with a dark hand and adjusted her position. Suddenly she was fifteen feet away, on the other side of the room.

Neat trick. And, true to the inspiration, meticulously nonlethal while also being crazy powerful.

Raine reacted instantly, not even disoriented. She ran for me.

That dark hand reached for my face.

The backs of my legs hit the chair and I very almost fell over in blind panic. Nowhere left to go, nobody left to stand behind, only a split second to think. I'd never had to defend myself before. I was weak and slow and unarmed. Best I could manage was to bat ineffectually at the demon's hand, probably invite the awful freezing grip around my arm once more.

Oh.

My arm.

The mitten hadn't saved me; Raine hadn't broken the creature's grip in a tug of war; my solitary resistance to the Eye had not come from prior experience or presence of mind.

Ah. Hadn't realized it was the same arm. That makes sense.

Although...if that glyph is Evelyn's go-to defense against supernatural intrusions, it seems like she should have it inscribed elsewhere around this room too, no? Also, did she really not think to put it on *herself* before casting this spell?

Hmm. Well, to be fair, the nightgaunt only seems to have trouble when it physically touches the glyph, not just when it's near it. So, it could be that there are plenty more instances of it around the room, but unless they start throwing the objects inscribed with it at the gaunt it's not going to effect it.

The Noctis Latro's hand closed around my face, inches from my skin. Alien thoughts found purchase on my mind, freezing sense-impressions screaming the loneliness of the void into my heart.

I tugged my sleeve down with shaking fingers and held up my forearm.

Showed it the Fractal.

The demon stopped, statue-still.

"Go away," I hissed in a rush of panic and fear, more an animal sound than real words, but it did the trick.

The demon, the messenger, Noctis Latro, whatever it was and whatever it intended, retracted its hand and rocked back on its heels, as if considering my polite request. The probing thoughts withdrew. Evelyn's stream of Latin and Greek and worse stuttered to a halt, and Twil hauled herself up against a bookcase, shaking herself like a dog.

"Greek and Latin and worse."

What could possibly be worse than Greek and Latin? 🤔

Raine almost slammed into me, skidding to a halt and brandishing a heavy book she'd pulled off the shelves in lieu of a real weapon. She gaped at the Fractal on my arm, then broke into a huge grin at the creature.

"Yeah, that's right, go on, off with you!" she shouted.

Raine put her free hand on my elbow, her other arm around my waist, and propped me up. I'd never felt so glad for the support.

She gently eased me forward.

"Raine, no!" I hissed.

The Noctis Latro flexed like a cat rising from a nap, unlimbering gangly limbs and unfolding itself from the table, too tall to stretch to full height indoors. Its other hand uncurled and flicked a crumpled ball of fabric onto the floor at my feet.

Oh? What's this now?

We all watched in razor-sharp silence as the demon stepped down from the table and backed away from me—away from the Fractal.

"It's okay, it's shit-scared of you, see?" Raine muttered. I managed a terrified nod. I didn't think it was scared at all.

Hmm. If it's not scared, then what is it? I can think of two possibilities.

1) It (or its remote controller, if that's how it works) has determined that it can't physically grab Heather because of the sign, but not out of fear so much as just an understanding that it needs a different method of penetrating this specific defense.

2) It (or its controller) actually is trying to be diplomatic here. With how forcefully it delivered its "message" a second ago (the message seemingly being "I want you to come to my world," and the delivery method being trying to grab her and drag her through the portal), maybe some (mild, by its own reckoning) application of force is how it communicates. In its mind, it offered Heather an invitation, and understood her active use of the glyph as a polite refusal.

Option 2 might sound a little contrived, but consider. If the Eye is used to interacting with other beings like itself, whose minds contain enormous masses of simultaneous thought processes and whose manipulator appendages are nightgaunt-type-things, then nothing it's done so far is all that aggressive. Beaming thoughts unsolicited into another entity's head isn't so impolite when you expect that entity to have more than enough brainspace to entertain your prattle without interrupting its own musings. Having your indestructible remote drones get a little rough with their indestructible remote drones is a form of secondary communication that can bypass any language barrier (violence is the universal language, after all).

Recently, Heather finally started following the spell instructions the Eye had been sending her. Now, just shortly after that, she's opened up a portal to the Eye's realm. I can absolutely see how it might interpret that as her finally getting around to accepting its friend request.

Now, with all of that said? Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if the Eye's intentions are malicious or not. At this point, it's clear that any contact with the Eye will cause grave harm to humans. It's got to be repelled, whether it knows what it's doing to her or not. If it's holding Maisie captive, and there's enough of her left by this point for rescue to be possible, then she needs to be rescued, by whatever means necessary.

...also, come to think of it, it's failure to take the hint when Heather first started wearing the glyph is evidence against this being a tragic misunderstanding and for the Eye being actually hostile. Not conclusive evidence on its own, but an important data point.

Raine and I backed it all the way to the windows. The creature's tail probed behind it, tapping at the floor and the heavy blankets, but found no egress. It paused and flexed its wings.

Twil growled through a mouth not all human. "Don't corner it, for fuck's sake."

"It's not an animal, you idiot," said Evelyn.

"Twil," Raine said softly. "Pull the curtains down."

"What?"

"Just do it. Rip them if you have to."

Twil grunted as she understood what Raine was getting at.

I don't understand what Raine is getting at. I guess she heard the word "night" showing up in both translations of its name, and figured it might be vulnerable to sunlight?

She crept down the edge of the room at the boundary of my peripheral vision, a hunched figure with far too many teeth in her muzzle. She reached out slowly with a fist made of claws, took a good handful of the blankets over the windows, then jerked them sideways with one swift tug. Thumbtacks and pins popped out of the thin plasterboard wall as the whole mass of makeshift curtain tore away.

The last dying rays of the day's sunlight bathed the room in deep orange glow. The messenger turned to look outside, across the concrete shadows of the campus and the city beyond. Its tail tapped and slid across the surface of the glass. Could it even sense light? A tiny, ever-curious part of me filed that question away for later.

Most of me, however, just wanted it gone.

"Twil, get the window latch," Raine said.

"Are you mental?"

"Stop whining. You're the most robust here."

"Look," I said.

The demon fumbled with the window, as if it didn't know how glass worked. Which, to be fair, it probably didn't. Huge hands roved across the edges of the window, looking for a catch or mechanism. When it found the latch it paused, touched, then paused again, those horrible long fingers cupping and pinching and probing the metal.

It can't just teleport the window away with a touch like it did to Raine. Interesting. Wonder what the limits of that are?

Anyway, sun doesn't seem to be hurting it. Now it's just...examining the environment? Trying to find a way out of the room so it can try a different plan of attack? It seems like it's strong enough to just break the window (or even the wall) if it wanted to.

Or...hmm. Maybe Heather actually gave the night-gaunt a command back there, when she told it to leave? But rather than interpreting that to mean "go back home," it's just trying to move further away from her on the same 3D plane?

"It's going to break the window," Evelyn huffed, as if this was any concern at all.

"It can break the wall for all I care," I said. "As long as it goes away."

Finally, it figured out the latch, clacked it down, and spent another moment sliding the window open. Cold evening air flooded the room, blew past the messenger, and touched my face. The demon mounted the windowsill with one huge toeless foot, but paused again and turned its head to look at me one last time.

"Shoo," Raine shouted, and threw the book at it.

The demon leapt into the air and fell like a brick. The book sailed out the window. A moment later a crack of leather sounded below—unfurling wings catching the air—and the demon messenger soared off between the spires of Sharrowford University, toward the heart of the city, an ungainly, heavy smudge of darker colour against the dimming sky.

Alright. Either it's gone to get something to break the glyph's defences with, or it obeyed Heather.

The fact that it bothered to be delicate with the window instead of just breaking it suggests the latter.

So, Heather somehow rested control of it away from the Eye, or else the Eye really is trying to be friendly and show that it understands a little bit.

lol at Raine acting like it's a stray cat that got in.

I let out one long, shaky breath, my whole body a lightning rod of tension and disbelief.

"Heather, hey, it's gone, it's gone," Raine said.

"I know. I can see that."

Raine eased my elbow back down. My arm ached terribly, despite her support. I'd clenched my fist so hard my nails had drawn blood from my palm.

"You okay?" Raine asked.

I was about to say no, obviously I'm not okay, we just faced down a true monster, some unthinkable thing from Outside, sent by the Eye to kidnap me or wipe my brain or do god alone knows what else. I was shaking and exhausted and far beyond fear. Twil slammed the window shut and Evelyn sagged as she examined the broken magic circle on the table.

Raine had thrown a book at it. For me.

She already killed a chryssalid for you once, didn't she?

...actually, no, she would have had to fight that anyway when she went to check out Evelyn's house. Okay, yeah, this is the first time she's fought a monster specifically and exclusively for Heather.

Anyway Heather, if you were just waiting for a proper excuse to jam your face into her crotch, it's not gonna get better than this.

I sketched a very shaky smile, the best I could manage under the circumstances. "Actually, yes. Yes. We won, yes?"

"That we did." Raine grinned. "Sure you're okay? You should sit down."

"Well, no, but … " I glanced around the room, unable to phrase it while so emotionally drained. Turned out facing down your darkest fears was a lot easier with a little help from your friends. Even if Twil wasn't quite a friend. Yet.

"Where the hell is it going?" Twil asked. She peered out of the window after the dwindling dot. "I can't believe you did this, Saye. Let something like that loose in the city. What were you thinking?"

"It wasn't me." Evelyn sounded as exhausted as I felt. She gestured at the silver plate, the aqua vitae, now inert. "There was no gate. The window was already closed. Somebody or something else opened that, sent it through."

Evelyn, that's pedantic bullshit and you know it. Even if the Eye opened its own portal from its own side to send the thing through without hijacking any of your own spell effects, it did that IN RESPONSE to you poking it.

"Yeah, right." Twil squinted at her in disbelief. "You lost control. Face it, you're not the hot shit you think you are."

Evelyn sighed and shook her head.

"What are you gonna do about it, huh?" Twil asked. "This is your fault. You can't leave that thing out there, it—"

"It will leave reality by itself," Evelyn raised her voice. "That's what they do. Noctis Latro. Messenger of Darkness. Unbekannte Orte has a dozen such names for them. More powerful beings use them as messengers, errand runners. I've seen one once before, I told you."

Raine put a hand on my back, steadying, warm, here. "What if it doesn't leave?" she asked. "What if it comes back for Heather again?"

"It won't." Evelyn almost spat. "It's a messenger, not an assassin. It's been refused. Quite comprehensively."

Evelyn, if that was true it would have gone HOME, not out the window.

Stop pretending you know things, seriously.

Twil raised her voice again. Raine told her to shut up. Evelyn started on about ritual process and gates and magic, but I wasn't following. Past the shaking exhaustion and the aftershocks of fear, I realised that Evelyn was right. If that demon—the Noctis Latro—had really wanted to hurt me or kidnap me, it probably could have, Fractal on my arm or no. If it needed skin contact, it could have snuck that tail up from behind and wrapped it around my throat.

I remembered, all of a sudden, that the demon messenger had delivered something after all: it had dropped a piece of fabric.

Ehhh...I wouldn't go so far as to say Evelyn is RIGHT. Or at least, if she is right, then that doesn't mean she isn't also wrong. The nightgaunt tried to do other things both before and after dropping the piece of fabric.

Amid the argument and the blame and the yelling, I looked down and found it. I stepped away from Raine and bent to pick it up.

Intellectually, I recognised the item of clothing before I touched it.

Uh oh.

It's something she or Maisie was wearing that night, isn't it?

My mind fled from the implication.

I lifted the child-sized t-shirt off the floor and stared at the faded strawberry design.

Yup.

Maisie and I had this game we played as children. We had a lot of games. All children who grow up close have private, secret games, but the games twins play with each other are built on a special understanding, that unique bond between two people whom the world confuses with each other. Sometimes even Mum and Dad couldn't tell us apart. Mum tried all sorts of techniques: different haircuts, dressing us differently, even clothes with our initials on the front or back. Nothing worked, because we swapped everything, shared everything, became each other.

One day—I think when we were six or seven years old, I didn't remember exactly, because I'd spent so many years convinced those memories weren't real—we decided to finger-paint our names on our t-shirts. Mum was furious, so we produced crocodile tears and giggled about it later. We kept the ruined t-shirts, though, and used them to have silent conversations across the room, writing more and more words in every blank space. We swapped them back and forth, so my words became Maisie's and Maisie's words became mine and in the end we couldn't remember whose thoughts had belonged to who.

A child's pajama top. Thin and faded. Collar and cuffs gone ragged.

A single word was written on the front, letters daubed with a fingertip dipped in a dark and tarry substance, still sticky-fresh.

help

Oh.

That, um.

That's even worse.

"Heather?"

Her t-shirt. The one she wore that night. Some details, you never forget. I brought it to my face and sniffed, but there was nothing of her—of me— left there, only the black ash and ruin-stench of Wonderland.

"Heather?"

I blinked back slow tears, numb to my core.

"Heather? Hey, Heather?"

I jerked my head up, shaking all over. Raine stared at me with naked concern. Evelyn and Twil were still yelling at each other. How did the world continue to turn, how did we not all simply fly apart into atoms, if this thing in my hands was real? The most horrible promise, the worst kind of proof.

"Look." I held the t-shirt up, to her, to the room, to reality. My hands shook, my voice did worse. "Look. Look at this. What is this? How— how—"

Raine looked down at the thing in my hands, this obscene, beautiful proof in my grasp. I imagined ugly thoughts in her head. I'd spent so long, so many years denying Maisie even existed that now I projected that outward, confused and lashing and incoherent.

It wasn't real, it was a trick, you can't be certain, Heather. You can't be certain of anything, can you? You little damsel in distress, you let Raine deal with it for you. Keep your head down and stay safe. Forget what you saw. Coward. Coward. Coward. You left her behind, you left her behind and she's not dead.
Raine met my eyes. She reached out and folded her fingers around my hand, held on hard. Nodded once.

"We will," Raine said.

Well. I guess I was sort of right to begin with after all. It's not Maisie in person, but it's a mailman she sent. Why it tried to GRAB Heather like that, I'm not sure. Either Maisie's control over it is tenuous, or Maisie was trying to like...hug her sister...through the nightgaunt, and it got misinterpreted.

The way she chose to send the message though...means she still has the mind of a child. And she's been alone in the cold being immersed in whatever madness the Eye and Co have had her in for all these years. The fact that there's enough of a person left to still ask for help at this point is almost more horrific than if she'd just gone fully catatonic or been turned into an alien or something.

Now, granted, the fact that she's able to send nightgaunt-messages indicates that she isn't *powerless* where she is. It's bad, and she's desperate for rescue, but she has SOME kind of status or ability or allies. I'm definitely curious about what her exact situation is.

Also, if Maisie sent the nightgaunt, is she still controlling it? Or...did she leave it on Earth so that Heather and Co can try and jailbreak it themselves? Oh man, that would be great. No nightgaunt waifu, but yes nightgaunt pet. Definitely an acceptable alternative.

Also, looks like nightgaunts aren't retrieval specialists in Katalepsis' take after all (though they seem like they'd still be very good at it). Evelyn was more right than it initially seemed.

Her meaning failed to penetrate my survivor's guilt. I blinked at her and shook my head. "I-I don't—"

"Help."

I let out a huge, choking breath and scrubbed my tears on one arm. I hadn't realised how badly I'd needed Raine to believe, in that moment. And she gave me so much more than bare belief.

"How— how— how can we possibly—"

"Don't think about that part yet. We'll figure it out." Raine cracked a smile, a notch down from her usual rakish grin. "I doubt it's something we can do in a single afternoon."

Evelyn and Twil had fallen quiet, my distress cut through their argument.

"Look." I held the t-shirt out to them as well, my hands shaking.

" … ah," Evelyn murmured.

"What?" Twil frowned. "What am I looking at? What the hell's wrong with her now?"

"Long story. Shut up," said Raine.

The full meaning of the demon messenger's visit began to weigh on me as I realised what had just happened.

"How do they deliver their messages?" I asked Evelyn.

She shook her head. "I don't know. There's only speculation."

"How? Just tell me, I don't care if it's speculation. How?"

"I don't know," Evelyn said, frowning at the proof in my hands. "Some kind of mind-to-mind contact, I assume. Communication means different things to different orders of being. It could—"

"It was trying to touch me," I muttered. "It needed to touch, because of the Fractal, blocking. It had a message from her and we chased it away."

Oh man, this is really evoking that episode of The Twilight Zone, with the old lady who only found out the creepy phone calls were coming from her dead husband after she'd managed to make them stop.

Well, the nightgaunt is still on Earth. Seems like tracking it down and trying to extract the rest of the message (assuming there's anything it wasn't able to get across yet) would be a good starting point. Even moreso if they can keep the 'gaunt afterward. That thing is their best starting point for figuring out how to mount a rescue.

That crushing cold, that endless isolation, that darkness. Were those Maisie's feelings?

That *was* one of the several possibilities I briefly considered at the time. Looks like it was the correct option.

"Heather?" Raine wrapped an arm around my shoulders and squeezed, to keep me here, keep me grounded. It didn't work.

I pulled away from her and hurried over to the window, clutching the soiled old t-shirt to my chest. Raine joined me, but I had no attention left for her, too busy peering out after the messenger—Maisie's messenger. It had vanished into the light pollution and shadows of a Sharrowford evening. I scanned the sky with mounting frustration greater than I'd ever felt, gritting my teeth, the thread slipping through my fingers.

"Heather, hey, look at me for a second."

"I can't. I-I have to find it."

"There are easier ways to track than with the naked eye."

I turned to her and got a full-face blast of Raine at her most focused. No grin, no patronising I-know-better, no humouring the hysterical, poorly adjusted crazy girl. Not even a please calm down. She was here to solve problems. It was beautiful. I could have thrown my arms around her and kissed her, if I weren't so messed up.

She nodded sideways at Twil.

"Oh, tracker dog," I said.

"Hey!" said Twil.

"Stuff your pride," Raine said to her. "You're so worried about Heather, well then, it's time to help. You can track that thing by scent, right?"

"What?" Twil was still way behind. "I guess so. Shit, I don't want to, it reeked like a chemical factory."

Twil having thaaaaat many traits in common with an actual canine is a bit annoying, if the "werewolf" thing is just supposed to be a superficially doglike alien form. But, like I said, they might actually have used their pet dead alien thing to staple a local Earth entity to Twil's brain or something. Stuffed the ghost of a literal wolf into her cerebellum and used the thing's phlegm to glue it in place etc.

Also, man is Twil regretting that stupid posturing she did earlier when she was using Heather as casus belli against Evelyn. Raine may or may not have actually dated her for a time, but either way she knows her well enough to very effectively use her own bullshit against her.

"Yes or no," Raine barked. "Can you do it?"

"Why are we after it now? We only just got rid of the thing."

I thrust the t-shirt toward Twil, holding up Maisie's message. "My sister isn't dead! Maisie isn't dead!"

Without a doubt, those were the most beautiful and terrible words I'd ever spoken. I wasn't sure if I should laugh or cry. I made a compromise and hiccuped.

"Okay, yeah," Twil said. "Sure, that explains everything."

Evelyn spoke up. Two words.

"It's bait."

Possible, but I doubt it. As Heather pointed out earlier, if whoever sent the gaunt wanted to capture Heather, they could have had it do that while avoiding the glyph.

Hmm. Then again.

If the Eye is deliberately trying to teach Heather plane-hopping magic and wants her to use it, and its reason for wanting this ISN'T to capture her, this would be a good way of motivating her to keep practicing.

So yes, the odds of it being bait are higher than I first thought. I still think it's less likely than the alternative though.

My mind edited them out, unwilling to hear. I was too busy glancing out of the window again, along the route the messenger had taken toward the heart of Sharrowford.

The exact route.

I broke for the door without a second thought, pulled at the latch and stumbled out into the top-floor corridor of Willow House before the others realised what I was doing. I wasn't trying to leave them behind; the only thing I cared about was getting out there before the aftershocks passed, before the trail went cold. Raine called my name, right on my heels.

Lucky for us—and for my dignity—that Willow house was almost empty this late in the day. Classroom doors yawned open into darkness. The stairwell lights flickered on as I plunged down the steps two or three at a time.

Heh. If there's still enough sunlight for them to have seen the thing fly away for that long, and it's visible to the naked human eye, then there's got to be plenty of bystanders who saw it regardless of how empty the building itself is. Wonder if there will be any fallout from this?

"Heather, slow down, you'll trip."

I didn't stop until I hit the ground floor and pushed my way through the brown glass double doors. Cold evening air ran whispering fingers through my hair as I craned up at the sky. I must have made quite a sight there in the middle of campus, wearing one purple mitten and a half-unravelled scarf, flushed in the face and out of breath, eyes red from crying. Raine and Twil bundled out of the building behind me.

"Want me to grab her?" Twil asked.

Raine didn't answer that. "Heather, speak to me. Tell me what you're doing. If you have a plan, I need in."

"There. Right there." I pointed across campus.

The messenger's wake had driven the spirit world into a frenzy. Where it had passed, pneuma-somatic life writhed and twitched like bugs in wet earth under a lifted stone.

A blue and red lizard the size of a house lay curled around itself in a protective dome, huge swivel-eyes dilated in fear. Bone-faced figures hunched along the campus walkways, clutching their heads and wailing, tripping over each other and sprawling across the ground. One of the insectoid leviathans on the library roof kicked and jerked limbs in the air, as if fighting ghosts. In the sky, a roc of fire and stone flapped and hissed and spat, hurling sparks and trailing loose feathers of flame.

Then I remembered nobody else could see them.

A lifelong fear, finally realised in the flesh: I was the crazy girl gesturing at invisible monsters in public, imbuing them with private meaning, following their secret ways.

I realised I didn't care anymore. Maisie was more important.

"The spirits, they're reacting to it. It went that way."

Twil looked at me, then at Raine, as if we were both mad.

"Just trust her," Raine said. "She knows what she's doing."

Oh man the big rock-fire-bird overhead, that thing must be beautiful.

The PSF are all scared of nightgaunts, apparently. Could be because gaunts or things similar to them prey on PSF sometimes. Could be that they just sense the aura of whatever powerful, dangerous entity created the gaunt. Or it could just be as simple as "animals reacting to a loud machine." Twil mentioned it having a really overwhelming industrial smell to it, which suggests that it might read as the equivalent of a loud, smoky diesel engine to spirit fauna.

Well. Then again. ARE the PNF actually just the ethereal equivalent of animals who do animal things for animal reasons? Most evidence suggests that they are, but there's also some to suggest that they're not. In the latter case, the reason they interact with nightgaunts this way could be much more esoteric.

They couldn't have held me back. I'd have hissed and spat and clawed just to be allowed to follow that spirit trail across the sky. A near-fugue state gripped my mind and heart, and we followed a track that would have seemed schizophrenic delusion a month prior.

* * *

We left campus quickly, heading west into Sharrowford proper.

Bluebell Road roiled with spirit life, howling at the sky and clawing at each other in overstimulated distress. A thousand scuttling shapes gathered and flowed in the shadows and the dusk between pools of orange streetlight.

I led us down into the student quarter, across suburban streets littered with spine-covered mollusc shells, their inhabitants retracted inside to shelter from the messenger's passing. On Downtruff Road, a giant form shifted uneasily against the sky overhead, adjusting pillar-legs and plates of chitin to carry it away from the Noctis Latro's destination.

We climbed cobblestone streets up Mercy Hill, where I spotted a nightmare of eyes and tentacles clutching the distant spires of Sharrowford Cathedral, against the backdrop of lights from the city centre.

Dang, even the Impossibly Tall Creature is spooked when nightgaunts move passed.

My knowledge of the city ran dry beyond the student quarter, but Raine knew Sharrowford inside out. Our leadership began to switch back and forth. I'd point, she'd forge the way, then I'd change direction and she'd know a shortcut, a better route. When the tortured spirit life gave out and the trail ran cold, Twil sniffed the air and bounded down the streets until she caught the scent again on the night wind.
Raine did her best to hold my hand but I wasn't the most affectionate partner right then, always pulling free to point in the next direction, my other hand too busy clutching Maisie's soiled t-shirt to my chest.

I only realised much later that Raine was trying to minimise our bizarre spectacle, to make sure my behaviour didn't draw the attention of curtain twitchers or a passing police car. A crazy girl staring and gesticulating at the air, leading the way as two other college girls hustled after her, hanging on her every move.

It was a miracle nobody stopped us.

Yeah, that definitely would look like someone having a bad drug trip and her friends trying to stop her from getting them all in trouble.

On the edge of the city centre the demon messenger had turned north, skirted the shopping district and the ring of roundabouts, and brushed up against the fringe of industrial development walled off with red brick and razor wire. For a long moment I stood on the edge of a pedestrian crossing next to one of the larger roundabouts, cars passing and lights changing from red to green, because I couldn't work out where the messenger had gone.

Raine laid a hand on my shoulder. "Heather? Take a moment, you're out of breath. We're gonna catch it, one way or the other, I swear."

She was right. I was out of breath. The ache in my chest, the soul-gap below my diaphragm, was on fire. I rubbed at my sternum, but the pain didn't matter. I'd never felt so driven in my entire life.

"We look like a bunch of fucking nutters," Twil said. "Bet this'll do wonders for my rep."

"Let Heather do her thing," Raine warned.

We were about to look much worse.

It's not flying in a straight path? Huh, wonder where it's going.

A spirit squatted on the concrete island of the roundabout. A gorilla crossed with slime mould, leaning on fists the size of wrecking balls. A mouth of slab teeth hung open, drooling black mist onto the ground. Long thin fleshy tendrils sprouted from its back and waved in the air. A few tendrils had gripped the roundabout's signage, rooted there to spread a kind of throbbing meat-moss across the metal.

It was disgusting, the exact sort of thing I'd spent ten years going out of my way to avoid. If it had been staring at the sky, I could simply have followed the direction of its gaze, but its bull-shoulders were hunched tight at the messenger's passing, head down.

Well, this critter is receiving a lot more attention from the text than all the others. I imagine we're about to find out why, and the reason will probably be related to what's about to mess their group up even more at least to outside appearances.

Any other day, any other cause, and my courage would have failed me.

I hurried over the road onto the roundabout; hardly Green Cross Code compliant. Raine dashed along after me. Twil was a second too slow and got stuck waiting for traffic to pass.

"Heather, holy shit, slow down!" Raine called.

"It's fine, I looked both ways."

I walked right up to the hunched gorilla-spirit.

Raine caught up, put one hand on my waist and looked around, waiting for the inevitable shout from a confused motorist. Two college girls standing in the middle of a roundabout, obviously drunk or playing some immature prank. Or insane. She didn't hurry me.

I opened my mouth, closed it again, hiccuped twice.

Let the world think what it wanted. I pushed away a decade's worth of taboo. My sister was alive.

I spoke to the spirit.

"Where did it go? What direction?"

Odds of this working? Very, very, very low.

If it does actually work, though? Holy shit would that be a game changer. Practically a genre-changer. It would turn out that Heather was never actually Eldritch Steve Erwin at all, she was Eldritch Dr. Doolittle.

A shudder passed through the gorilla-plant-thing, a reluctant quiver of muscle and tendon. Those giant, shiny black eyes swivelled to look at me. It was a huge, hulking beast of intimidating power, ugly as sin, ridged and gnarled. An instinctive animal part of me screamed about running away and climbing trees. I shook very badly. Raine spoke my name and squeezed my shoulder.

It didn't matter. It was immaterial, literally. I had flesh. It didn't.

I stared back.

The me of a month ago would have been mortified beyond thought. That other, younger Heather, she still clung to the safety blanket of insanity. She was the little voice which still denied that all this was real. I think that moment finally ended her vigil. Here I was, standing in the middle of a traffic island under the streetlights, demanding answers from a monster that nobody else could see, clutching to my chest a message from my kidnapped twin.

Yes, sceptic Heather gave up, right there on that concrete island. I told her it was all going to be okay. She could rest now.

I tried to sound commanding, to summon up a little of Evelyn's tone of unquestionable contempt. My voice emerged in a squeak. "I demand you tell me where it went. Point."

The spirit lifted one wrecking-ball paw, toward the north.

Holy.

Shit.

So, um. Either the PSF are closer to "people" than "animals," or Heather has a "talk to (ethereal) animals" power packaged in with the ability to see them.

The latter may have to be true regardless, actually. Even if these creatures are smart enough to answer questions when asked them, I very much doubt they'd be fluent in English.

I guess they might vary in intelligence and communication ability, but in that case Heather just got really, really lucky in picking this one to talk to.

Hope she doubles back and finds this creature again once they've caught up to the messenger. Does it have a name? Do its kind have a society? Perhaps even a civilization? Is it a waifu option?

And...wow.

What a crazy fucking note to end the chapter on.


Alright, "Atoms or Providence" has finally picked up. The first half of it was disappointingly generic urban fantasy stuff, albeit better written than average, but now things are back in swing and the focus and tone are much closer to where they were in "Mind, Correlating."