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halfbakedspuds · 6 months

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ECHOES OF SHADOW

Chapter 1

The city slept rather peacefully under the blind gaze of the newborn moon. The sun’s light had not yet dared to glance upon it’s face from behind the world, fearful of agitating the child as though it were some kind of monster that might snap it’s jaws and gulp up any prospect of the light showing itself in the future ever again.

If one were to be passing by the docks at that late and waning hour, with naught but the streetlamps to guide their way along the Hawestraat, they’d find only a peaceful late night stroll awaiting them, albeit it a nervewracking one as thoughts of the less savoury types who frequented the warf began to slowly coalesce in one’s mind, sending shivers down their spine and forcing them to pull their coats tight and quicken their steps. Later they’d remark to their loved one’s on the silliness of their reaction, and they’d laugh and drink off the evening before passing out in a drunken stupor. In the morning they’d awake, having completely forgotten the experience.

But if one fought off the animalistic urge to run and walked on to the corner of Hawestraat and the Zelverweg, by old Rachelje and her wife’s book store, and they turned their heads to look out into the bay, they’d be greeted with an absolute wall of darkness and the soft roar of waves just beyond, perhaps even the roaring horn of a passing ship and the noticeable flicker of the lighthouse out in the water.

And if that observer somehow had unnaturally good nightvision, or they were a Lumoworker who just happened to have the urge to light up the docks for a moment, they’d see the quay and the row of warehouses where thousands of crates bound to and from Zuurveldt, Angeheim and Genesh were stored.

And if that same observer had the eyes of a hawk, they’d see a lone figure in a beige trench coat and a grey flatcap standing around smoking a cigar near the railing. A silver cross- the Zuurveldt medal of bravery- was displayed proudly on rightmost lapel, keeping it in place while the other flagged pitifully. The sight of this may have even tempted our eagle-eyed observer to call to the figure and thank them for their service. Even though the man clearly didn’t fight in the Ost-Rietland army, a hero of their sister state was a hero of theirs.

But just before they could utter a single sound, another chill would run down their spine, and a more pious observer might’ve offered a prayer to a god or the spirits or whomever they worshipped on the spot, but they would soon fall in step with their atheist counterparts: Going anywhere as long as it was away from the man on the docks.

The man perked up at the sound of approaching footsteps. With a sigh he turned to toss his still lit cigar into the the water, and quickly wiped the red dust from his hands, leaving a barely glimmer as the powder clung to bony fingers and stained the fabric of his cost. His movements permitted the mettalic rattling of steel in holsters, identifying him as a man who carried guns at all times, as the Rietlanders tended to do. He reached a hand into his coat as if searching for another cigar to light, and made sure to rest his hand on one of his pistols just in case it was needed.

“Goed aand, Johan,” Greeted the voice from the dark.

Rostovsk, female. Young, mid-twenties at most. Her voice carries a slight annoyance, probably at struggling with a language she had to pick up as an immigrant, though her accent itself doesn’t sound Rostovan. Colonial Rostovan, maybe? Chemyarin or Ulyenski, most likely, fleeing the constant wars in Petrova probably drove her south-west to the Rietland.

He relaxed his grip on the gun.

“Spirits, Anastasia, you trying to give a veteran a heart attack?” He asked light heartedly. Inwardly he was glad he hadn’t shot before reasoning out who she was first. If the war had taught him anything, it was that people like him didn’t miss, and he would’ve hated shooting his second so early in her career. Hated shooting the closest- and only- thing he had to a friend.

She slipped out of the darkness and walked up to him. She was dressed in simple black pants with suspenders arcing over a white shirt. A grey bowler hat adorned her head: a decent enough attempt to fit in with the Ost-Rietlanders, if only her accent didn’t stand out like a sore thumb. She had her sleeves rolled up in an attempt to fight off the early spring heat of Ost-Rietland. Johan had to pity her. The year was still going to get a lot warmer before it returned to what Rostovans considered peak temperatures.

“This action will not repeat,” Anastasia managed to force out in heavily accented Vosch, though she had turned a little paler than usual

“Are you alright?” Asked Johan in Riets, hoping that a language halfway between Rostovsk and Vosch would be easier for her to communicate in. It wasn’t a difficult switch, it just felt like speaking less formal Vosch, the kind he might’ve spoken with school friends back in Zuurveldt.

She shook her head, and continued in Vosch, “I scout warehouse. Blood stains by four and eight.” She swallowed, “I check eight and find murder scene…” She didn’t seem eager to continue, and Johan had seen enough atrocities himself that he wasn’t keen to press her, either.

“Gawe geesten,” He muttered, “Did you leave a tip-off to the Stadwag?”

“What is ‘Stadwag’?” She asked.

“ ‘Politziya’ in Rostovsk. The police”

“Then yes, I leave tip off” She said, then shook her head, “Four stink of death and… Zhutky”

Zhutky. Johan didn’t have a proper name for what they were dealing with yet, he only knew that it was incredibly dangerous and that almost noone believed they existed. When his second had started using the word to describe them for lack of knowing a good Vosch equivellant, it had stuck.

“Then Odendaal was right. There is something out here” said Johan. He paused, then tried using the very basic Rostovsk he’d picked up over the years, “Do not worry of the man-made dead. We are here to end something worse”

“You speak Rostovsk?” She asked in surprise.

“Very little and only when I need to” He said, replying in Riets, and began his walk toward the fourth warehouse, “If I’m not at the bookstore by First-bell and four chimes, you have my permission to tell Mister Odendaal that I died a horrible and painfully slow death and he’ll need to find someone else to deal with his problem” He stopped and turned back to see her cringe at the thought, “Oh, and Anastasia?”

“Da, sir?” She replied, forcing a more relaxed mask as if he hadn’t seen her discomfort.

“If I do die, there’s a safe under my desk with all my money in it. You can find the code in my journal.” He said, and without another word, kept walking.

His words to Anastasia had been a kind of test. He had practically picked her up off the ship from Rostov when she’d tried to steal his wallet and it had promptly been taught why he only carried coins in it.

It had been a cool day by the standards of the Rietveld, though proximity to the ocean made the daily varience in temperature far less drastic than it was inland, making Ost-Rietland Johan’s favourite summertime location in the Republics, even if he sometimes missed the overbearing heat of his homeland.

He’d been tracking a target down by the east-end. Little Rostov.

The case was a simple one: A man had come to him with suspicions that his partner was being unfaithful, and that they had been returning home at odd hours with a strange perfume wafting off their coat. A regular old infidelity case. Not his favourite kind but something had to pay the bills his real job couldn’t.

After spending more time than he’d like to admit trying to decypher street signs and fnd his way to his lead, he’d taken a break inside a shop selling some sweet Rostovan drink that he couldn’t quite remember the name of, and had asked a newspaper boy who was calling out headlines in both Rostovsk and passable Vosch for directions when suddenly a short blonde girl in a purple kaftan had bumped into him, taken his wallet right out of his coat pocket and started booking it before he could so much as react.

“Tough luck, mister” The newspaper boy had said to him, “Five Kreuger and I try catch thief for you?”

He’d laughed, “You’ve learnt our ways quick, eh?’

Then he’d begun to concentrate on the girl, “Don’t worry, she won’t get far.”

She had run for an entire chime, stopping only after she cornered herself in a dead-end alleyway and proceeded to say some doubtless unsavoury things in Rostovsk. He’d followed his money at a calm pace the entire time, and rounded the corner just as she seemed to consider backtracking.

“Not from around here, nê?” He asked her calmly. A click rang out as she flicked open a switchblade.

“Razgulyats’am,” take a walk. He knew the word well, “I take, is mine!”

He held his hands up in mock surrender, “Oh I don’t doubt that, but did you even bother to check if I even had coins in that? For all you know you might’ve stolen my bottlecap wallet”

“What nonsense. You stall?” She asked, inching towards the wall.

“Not at all, my dear Rostovan! I merely mean to point out the cultural rudeness of stealing a bag of used bottlecaps. They’re an offer to the spirits, you see.” Pretending to hide a sheepish-smile as he did, “Unfortunately, I’m a bit behind on my seventh day tributes”

She froze. Bingo, she cares about something. That’s an advantage.

“You…offer garbage to your god?” She asked tentatively.

“We offer them to the spirits to pray for a clean mind and house” He lowered his hands, “We pay them for the clean execution of a scam”

She paused at that and looked into the wallet, then frowned in obvious confusion.

“Where…” She rummaged through the wallet, “It was full only minute back…”

He cleared his throat and held up his hand to show a pile of coins.

“How did you…?”

“We all have our tricks to survive, little Rostovan, and tricks lose their value when revealed, I think you’ll agree” Johan answerred.

“You new to Novya Koroleva?” He asked, switching to Riets to make it easier on the Rostovan. He already knew his answer. No native thief would get that lost in little Rostov. He never even went to the East-end and even he found the layout easy enough to follow.

“Just kill me already. It is what you intend, no? Frontier justice?” She asked casting a nervous glance at the coins. Good, he had made her think he was a witch of some kind.

Not too far off from the truth, actually.

“Actually, I want to offer you a job”

He could see the hesitation: the hook had taken. Desperation was a common yet invauable tool.

“What kind?” She asked, “What pay?”

“Good enough to live off of plus a dry room that doesn’t leak. In exchange, you help me steal secrets and… items of interest pertaining to my job.” He pause, “What say you?”

She thought about it, clearly deliberating instinct and a desperation for a stable income in a strange new land.

After a long moment, she closed the blade. “I am ‘in’, as you say”

“Good. Ah, where are my manners” He walked forward and extended a hand, “Johan Suiderkloof, private investigator at your service, miss…?”

“Retvenko. Anastasia Retvenko” She said, and shook it, and in that single moment he learnt a thousand details from how she stood, how she spoke and how she held his hand.

He’d recognised the use a good thief would be to investigations where an ex-soldier with too many half healed injuries to count wouldn’t be able to take the stealthy option, and she’d proven instrumental to that very investigation.

About a month earlier, she’d walked in on him passed out over papers and documents, researching for his actual investigation, and through a strange turn of events she'd begun to help him with that too. He could trust her with this strange hidden world of his, and deep down he was sure that counted for something.

But at the same time, he didn’t know how much he could trust the little thief. Not yet at least.

So he’d staged a little test of loyalty and honesty. There were genuine stacks of Zuurveldt and Ost-Rietland Kreuger in that safe, enough to buy a nice house in the Pêreldistrik, Maybe enough for her to get a Vosch tutor and get a nice job to pay for a comfortable lifestyle. Perhaps investigative journalism or writing. Something told him she was likely quite expressive in Rostovsk, even if she lacked the words in Vosch.

And he was telling the truth. It’s contents were hers if anything happened to him. After all, what need has a ghost of money?

But if he survived and got back to the office only to find his notebook misplaced and the safe empty, he knew he’d unfortunately have to let her go. In Novya Koroleva, one had to secure their money before their friendships if they hoped to survive.

Of course, if she did end up earning his trust- an fear that would doubtless take years- He’d put her in his will, and the day after his death she’d find that a mysterious benefactor had suddenly paid a small fortune to her for no apparent reason. His small fortune.

Johan calmly walked up to the door of warehouse four. A heavy thing. Reinforced steel: iron, manganese and a random sprinkling of copper mixed in with null spots that he couldn’t feel out but assumed to be remnants of carbon. The door was made in Tuitis judging by the composition of the steel and how it had been made.

That was one of the many useful traits he had that held quite literally no advantages for him in his job.

He reached his hand to the heavy padlock and and felt for the mechanism within. With a few probing thoughts, he’d completely felt out the inner layout of the mechanism and quickly pushed the pins into place. The round padlock fell off and he barely grabbed it before it could hit the flagstones, carefully placing it beside the door, somewhere that he cold quickly find it to clean up after himself later.

The ability to pick locks with his mind, though, had turned out very much be a skill he made use of, and disconcertingly often at that.

He heaved with the effort and the heavy steel door slid open. His senses were immediately assaulted by the pungeant stench of rot and death and- strange as it may seem- corruption. Anastasia hadn’t been kidding, something was very wrong in warehouse four.

“Spirits, when last did anyone open this thing?” He said, waving away the the smell. At that moment he wished he was a windworker so that he could simply do away with the stench, but alas he steeled himself and continued inside.

He waved his hand again and the door slid closed behind him. He reached into the folds of his coat and unholstered his pistols, bracing for the familiar rush of chemical information that came from touching them: Iron and cobalt alloy with a hint of a formerly biological compound. What did this tell him? The metal had been sourced from the Ysterkraans mountains in either western Ost-Rietland or eastern Zuurveldt where the cobalt and iron veins bled together almost inseperably. The compound itself was one of the few biological ones he could sense: Goudstoft, the powder used in cigars.

He twirled them on impulse and began his long ritual of stalking through the darknees and shadows, with his weapons raised.

The warehouse itself was large, easily atbleast three hundred and twenty feet long and ninety wide. Crates filled with various metals were piled onto high shelves reaching almost to the ceiling, each marked in Tuitisch and occasionally the strange flowy dune-like script of Genesh. Johan spotted one or two from Zuurveldt that claimed to be moving Goudstoft or cobalt.

A Gantry had been mounted to the ceiling and ran out over the massive doors in the direction of the docks to assist workers in moving large batches of cargo on and off of ships. A set of rusty stairs made their way up to a catwalk and a small corrugated steel shack. He could see through the mesh that acted as a window for the shack that it was the control room of sorts, likely for the gantry and it's attached crane.

Johan moved slowly, focussing on keeping his breathing slow and silent, staying as close to the wall as he could to both maximise his distance from his blindspots and to increase his reaction window if anything jumped out at him from the aisles.

Something bumped into a shelf up ahead, startling him and making him quickly bring his guns to bear on the source of the noise. He watched it for a moment to see if something came running out, then steadied his breathing.

'Pull yourself together, you spirits-forsaken coward', He thought, 'You survived the southern front, you can survive whatever just went bump in the night,'

It was all well and good to say that, except he knew of all the unpleasent things that could go bump in the night. He took comfort in the fact that he’d even killed a few of them.

He took a few light steps toward the aisle and swung around the corner, fingers already tightening on triggers in case he had to shoot something.

He paused, sweeping every inch of the darkness.

A sound to the left: Skittering claws on concrete.

He spun to identify the source of new noise.

Claws. Moves ridiculously fast. Clumsy enough to bump into crates while it relocates. Apparantly somewhat skittish.

'Shoggoth?' He reasoned. It was a viable possibility, but it would also be the only one he’d ever seen inside of a city.

He filed away that partiular information and made his way down the aisle.

The boxes rose up around him like the walls of a trench. He thanked the spirits every day that that was one particular nightmare he avoided. Enough Petrovans and even a few of his own people had died in those muddy mires of disease and rats during the merchant’s war. Spirits knew what horrors plagued their waking nightmares if his own were anything to go by.

He continued onward and started as his boot stepped in something slick.

He took a step back and look down. A corpse, a dockworker still in overalls, or rather what was left of them. They had been savaged so badly that he had a hard time even discerning them as human.

The body had been battered and broken, all jutting bones and spilling entrails. The shattered ribs were bared for all to see like some kind of savage gore-stained maw if yellowing fangs. The head was nowhere to be seen.

A circle had been drawn around the corpse and what looked like the start of some runes in the victims bloof. This kill wasn’t made to sate hunger, it was trying to summon another.

Johan frowned and pulled a satchel out of his trenchcoat. Shoggoths weren’t smart enough to pull off rituals. They were demons of gluttony, nothing even resembling conscious thought in their minds.

Which concerned him, because no Zhutky matching the evidence he’d found could do rituals. It meant he’d either forgotten something important and should really have been considering sleep as soon as he could, or they were dealing with new ground. Both were equally terrifying possibilities at that moment in time.

He opened the satchel and poured some of the white powder within onto the corpse with the utmost care that none of it touched him. He watched as the powder drew into the corpse's skin and drained it of all fluids, hooveringing up the blood around it as well. The end result was the corpse’s skin visibly pulling taught and becoming leathery, like a stereotypical Geneshi mummy's.

It pained him to no end to desecrate a corpse, but he couldn’t risk fighting two of them at once. Maybe back in Robbepoort where there’d been a network of people who organised and perpetuated nightly hunts. But in Novya Koroleva? The only other person in his network could barely stab something right, what help would she be in a hunt?

He caught a glint of something high above him in the darkness and quickly brought his right-most pistol to bear. Now he was well and truly convinced he was dealing with something completely new. What entity allowed the light to glint as though off a blade?

He kept his eyes trained upwards as he continued down the the aisle and clutched his hand to the pendant at his neck, tucked neatly beneath his shirt and pullover.

Because of this, he didn’t see the thing until he’d all but backed up into it. He paused, feeling the hair on his arms stand on end as it breathed down his neck.

He silently pulled back the hammers on his guns. He felt a rush of air as something heavy silently swung toward his head and ducked down, feeling one of it’s claws catch on the fabric of his flatcap and rip it clean off his head. Messy locks of red hair spilled out and dangled freely over his eyes.

Wasting no time, he whirled around and brought both guns up, firing off three blasts from each right into the thing’s chest, catching glimpses of it through flashes of gunfire and the spraying of brackish, oily blood.

Rows of teeth, eyes like the blackened souls of stars. Too many appendages in all the wrong places…

'Stop it,' he chastised himself, 'First rule: You never think about how they look, '

It roared once, a hollow sound that felt like something scraping off the outer layers of his bones, and then it was gone in a skittering of legs.

“Asshole…” He swore under his breath as he came to his feet and pushed aside the hair from his field of vision, “Do I look like I have the money to buy another hat?”

A little voice in the back of his reminded him that he did, in fact, have that kind of money.

He decided against acknowledging it.

Johan flicked open the cylinders to dump his spent ammo, then quickly loaded in fresh bullets off his belt, hands guided in the dark by his strange awareness of metal.

A stray thought crossed his mind that perhaps he had been using his traits for more than he’d previously thought.

He pushed it aside. A distracted soldier was a dead soldier.

He heard the sound of something small landing high above him. It was a soft landing, but in the empty warehouse it echoed. The thing may as well have sent up a flare.

What worried him was the disparities between what he was hearing and seeing. There was no way something that big could move around a packed warehouse that fast, let alone up and down several meters of metal shelves as silently as it did, only to randomly permit a noise by bumping into something.

“So what, there’s two of you now?” He asked the darkness.

Silence.

Johan gathered his wits and continued down the aisle. He turned the corner into a railing. Beyond: a square area that sunk several meters into the ground. A loading bay.

He heard a crash across the way. Someone had knocked over a small rack. He heard panicked yelling, Rostovan by the sound of it. The thing suddenly roared in pain and he caught sight of a figure running away with the mass close behind them.

Someone else had wandered into the hunting grounds. It was no longer a slow and methodical stalk. It was a rescue mission, and time was bleeding away the other person’s luck.

“Gracious spirits!” He swore, bringing up one of his guns and firing off a few shots.

The first missed, breaking open a goudstoft crate and spilling the reflective red-gold powder onto the floor in a stream of dust. The second pinged off of shelf’s supports, knocking out a pane of glass in te warehouse’s skylight.

The thing was gaining on it’s victim, roaring in both hunger and fury, perhaps even pain if it were capable of feeling as much. Johan forced himself to concentrate. He wasn’t his sister when it came to shooting, he didn’t have his parents aim.

But he’d grown up in Zuurveldt, and his people valued one thing above all else, to such an extent that they even had a saying that much of the population lived by: Een boer maken een plann

A farmer makes a plan.

He felt the bullet in his gun, and he felt the six rounds already lodged in the Zhutky’s chest. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, felt the distractions of the world fall away: The panicked screams, the roars, the skittering of claws on concrete, even the waves and the distant sound of ships in the bay.

All that existed was him, his gun, and his target.

He fired.

When he opened his eyes, he saw a huge pile of crates had collapsed on top of the monster. Nothing made by the grace of the spirits or of their beautiful world should have survived that, yet he knew with sickening certainty that it would take much more to kill it than that.

He scanned across the way and saw the silhouette standing there, hunched over the railing. He thought he could hear retching.

“Hey, pal!” He called, “It’s not safe here! You need to leave!”

“Excuse?” came the response in an accent thick as butter.

“Razgulyats’am!” He called out. The word didn’t exactly fit the context but he hoped it would get the job done.

The figure looked like they were about to argue when the pile began to undulate. A muffled groan escaped the beast as a set of appendages pushed their way out of the gaps in the pile and began heaving in an attempt to escape.

“Meet at steel box!” The figure called back, and ran away into the darkness.

“The control room?”

“Da!”

He was about to protest that they should get out imediately when a crate toppled from the pile. That was their cue to start running.

He caught a glint of a knife under the moonlight as he ran into an aisle.

You cheeky little shit, He thought to himself, No wonder the clues seemed off, half of them were you.

He caught more writing in Genesh as he ran, and were it not for several open crates with rifles poking out the top he would’ve had no idea what they contained.

It didn’t matter to him. He had a fairly good idea of what they were dealing with: Karalan. Solitary ambush predators, also one of the few Zhutky with enough of a mind to try bring more of it’s abominable kind into the world through sorcery.

He rounded a corner a little to fast, lost his footing and slammed his shoulder into a crate marked: “Rottedam mijnwerk- en vervoerskommissie”. Some kind of mining and shipping company from northern Ost-Rietland. He absentmindedly rubbed his shoulder, certain he’d have to get a Bioworker to fade the bruise later but confident he hadn’t dislocated anything.

Ahead of him lay the stairs and control room.

He shook off the pain and kept going, taking the stairs two at a time and ignoring the rush of sensory information whenever he took a step.

At the top he heard a growl and whirled around in time to see the thing clinging to a wall, watching him from the shadows. Ready to pounce when ready.

He raised one of his guns and shot it right in one of it’s too-many eyes, to the effect of simply making it angry. With that sudden realisation, he threw open the door to the control booth, slipped inside and slammed the door shut behind him.

The light was already on, and the sudden contrast to environments stung his eyes, making them well up with tears which he quickly blinked away. Once he’d adjusted he took in the sight of a short, blonde lady in overalls reading over the controls.

“Anna?” he asked.

“Da, boss” said Anastasia, “Zhutky follow you?”

“You shouldn’t be here, it’s too dangerous!”

“It follow?”

“Yes, I just shot it in the eye” He admitted

“Good” She said, working a few of the switches and levers on the console, “Tell me, why you not want me here? Is it because am not burly like soldier?”

“The hell does that have to do with the price of eggs? I just don’t want more of us in harm’s way than necessary,” He said coming to stand beside her, “You know how to use one of these”

Her hands deftly worked the controls, moving the crane in the distance.

“You people hire many Rostovans, machinery labelled in Rostovsk. See?” She pointed out a label in blocky lettering which he couldn’t read. Beneath it was the translation in Vosch: Emergency release.

Although that may have been true, she still operated it as though she knew where everything was, and had definitely operated a crane before.

Johan decided against prising.

“Your plan?” He asked, loading another bullet into his gun.

“I bring hook over. We catch like fish. You send back to hells”

“Sound plan,”

She nodded and concentrated on what she was doing.

Johan was about to ask how she’d gotten in when he heard something take a heavy footstep right outside. Then another.

He crouched down and took aim at the door.

“Get down, it’s here” He ordered.

Anastasia looked like she wanted to protest when the sound of something grinding against metal began to fill the cabin. She put a hand over her mouth and slowly slid down to a crouch as well.

Johan signalled a thumbs up to her and shrugged. She nodded. After a moment, she quietly reached down and pulled a knife from a strap in her boot.

Another step. He could hear its ragged breaths, could practically smell the dockworker it had had for lunch through the gaps in the plating. He tried to quietly pull back the hammers on his guns.

A click rang out.

The thing stopped moving and huffed, then sniffed the air.

They both froze, too scared to move. Johan risked a glance at the crane through the mesh and felt his heart drop.

'Too far. Too bloody far.'

It stood there for one terrifying moment, and Johan felt his breath catch as a single scarred and milky white eye stopped by a crack in the steel and stared directly at him, and he had to resist the urge to shoot it.

After a moment that felt like a lifetime, it moved away. He could still feel the bullets he’d planted in it earlier undulating with each heavy step.

Anastasia slowly came to her feet. She pointed in the Zhutky’s general direction, signed something walking away with two fingers on her palm and shrugged. He paused, listening and feeling it leave, then nodded.

She took a step forward and went back to the controls.

Suddenly, he felt the thing stop and and turn back to them.

“Shit! Down!” He ordered in a rushed whisper.

Anastasia reacted at just the wrong time. The thing loomed into view before the window as she turned and began to drop to her haunches. A long, spindly appendage with an almost scythelike boney portrusion shot through the wall, and where it would’ve otherwise just pierced her stomach…

It had managed to go through her heart.

The thing wrenched it’s blade back, tearing off the entire front half of the cabin in a shower of steel shavings and sparks from damaged wiring. Anna slid off it’s blade and landed on the grate-like flooring of the catwalk clutching her chest and coughing up a rather alarming amount of blood while the monster screeched and clawed at the clingy bits of wall that refused to come off it’s appendage.

Johan wasn’t thinking straight as he ran toward her, dumping bullet after bullet into the thing: ten overall, until only two remained in his left handed pistol, the exact moment the thing crumpled in on itself.

Johan dropped to his knees, craddling Anna’s dying form. Blood ran from the hole in her chest, dripping through the catwalk to the warehouse floor beneath them.

“Gracious spirits…” He began, not sure how to help her even though every cell in his body was screaming at him to do something. He could feel some of her blood soaking into his cloathes and caking his hands, and quite honestly he did not care.

“Stay with me!” He said, then paused. He had been about to do what the Zuurveldt medics had in the war and loudly proclaim that he hadn’t given her permission to die nor had he given the spirits permission to take her.

Instead, he said, “Come on, my friend. I know I haven’t said this nearly enough but I need you, okay? I need your dry, Rostovan humour and your caring nature. I need someone to keep me sane and…” He shook his head, “Spirits, I sound selfish.”

He knew her heart had been torn to shreds, that her ribcage must’ve been shattered like a cheap Angeheim teaset in two separate places and she was likely far too catatonic from pain to even register his voice if she hadn’t already blacked out from blood loss.

In desperation, he tore the pendant from his throat and dangled it before him. It consisted of an iridescant purple gem inlaid in some golden material with runes carved around it.

“Listen here, you little shit,” He addressed the pendant, “You’re going to keep her alive or I’m gonna toss you in the bay, consequences be damned. Verstaan je mij?”

A voice in the back of his head, a rather terrified sounding voice said that it did understand him perfectly, and with that he placed the pendant around her neck. Her breathing returned to normal, and with a sense of dawning horror, he realised that the blood was freely flowing to and from the various arteries and veins in her body, mimicking the path they would’ve taken had her heart still been intact.

She’d still need urgent medical attention, but it would help.

Ahead of him, the mass began to stir. Johan carefully put his friend down and came to his feet, holstering his empty pistol and swapping the other to his dominant hand.

"Tell me, do you bleed?" Johan asked in a voice like the Rostov heartlands, a voice that spoke to the fury of humanity, and strangely- although most would’ve dismissed it as pure fantastical thinking- the fury of another.

He lifted up his gun and fired once at the things neck. A glancing non-lethal blow, but enough to spray brackish, oily blood across the walls.

The creature roared in fury and made ready to pounce.

"You see, blood has iron in it" He slowly rose and maintained eye contact as eight feet of wiry sinew launched itself it him. He thrust out his free hand and it stopped in mid air, gurgling in some approximation of confusion or fear. With a single gesture he flung it back and onto the hook of the crane, stringing it up like meat at a butchers shop.

"I'm on very good terms with iron, just as I was… am with this poor woman you've just tried to kill" He clenched his hand and the thing began to cry out in pain. He heard the popping and snapping of bones, the visceral rending of muscle and sinew as this monster was broken and disfigured by the very substance that gave it life.

With a sickening crack, the thing compressed into a ball of ruin parts. Johan yanked his fist downward, tearing the thing off of the hook. He released his his grip and felt the maddening rush of power recede somewhat as the entity fell to the ground.

He calmly walked toward it, aimed at it’s head and fired, causing it to flower in an epic shower of viscera and blood.

So much for metalworkers being the harmless caste of mage.

He knew the thing would vanish as soon as the sun came up, as they always did.

“You boost me for that?” Johan asked the darkness

'No, my friend. That was all you,' said the voice in the back of his head, 'Fear is such a powerful motivator for humans, isn’t it? '

“New directive then” Johan said, bending down to scoop up his friend, thanking the spirits that she was light.

“Keep her alive until we get to a hospital”

The sun was already coming up by the time he had made it out of the warehouse. He commanded the door to open and stepped into the early morning air. He forced himself to take everything slow: Just one more step, one more emulated heartbeat, one more aspect of this nervewracking night processed.

When he made it out onto the quay and turned to take the stairs up to the Hawestraat, he heard the sirens.

“Bloody Stadwag never respond on time until you don't want then to show up” he mumbled under his breath.

He took another step forward. They would have no reason to suspect him of hurting her. Why would he be carrying her out in the open if he had?

He had just began to formulate a plan when one of the officers in their dark grey uniforms spotted him and called out.

“Halt! This is a restricted area! Identify your name and business” The officer called

“Johannes Antonius Suiderkloof, I’m a PI.” He said, not in the least bit fazed that they had rifles pointed at him “Please, this Tante is bleeding out, she needs to get to a hosptal right now”

Completely ignoring his pleas, the officer called again, “Why were you in there?”

“Heard gunfire and decided to investigate. Thought it might be gang violence, something pertaining to my case. Now let me through!”

“And how’d you get in?” The officer continued prying.

“I’m a Metalworker and that’s the exact fucking skillset I’m gonna use to make you get out of my way if you don’t let me through now you daft, deaf son of a-”

“Kaptein?” A voice called over the commotion. The officers parted as an older woman with an eyepatch and some bad burn scars all over her face. Her uniform had three golden stripes on the one sleeve, denoting her as a captain herself.

Once she saw Johan she ordered them to let him through.

“Gesenverdomde bliksiemt” He swore as he passed the officer who’d held him up.

“Spirits, what happened to her?” She asked once he’d approached.

“Haven’t the foggiest, Steyn, she was like this when I found her.” It was an obvious lie, but how would he have explained that she’d almost died while fighting a demon? Even though Stein had been part of his unit in the war, she’d have him thrown under the Green Roof for a thought like that.

He winced at the bruise on his shoulder.

“You good?”

“Controlling the iron in her blood to stop her form bleeding out is…tiring.” He lied. He was overworked, system flooded with adrenaline and above all else worried, but this wasn’t his doing. He could realistically have done it, but he’d never be able to keep it up nearly as long as the pendant was.

“I can take you to Baaidorf’s district hospital if you think you can keep her alive for ten minutes” She offered.

“You’d do that?” He asked, then remembered how Novya Koroleva worked, “How much would I owe you?”

“None of our unit would’ve made it back if it weren’t for you, Kaptein, this is me settling my debts”

“Then I thank you” He said, and when she opened the door to the cruiser, he bundled himself and Anastasia in without much further thought.

#fantasy #writing #writeblr #story #fiction

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