Empty Names

21 – Old Flame

For all the pocket dimensions Eris has passed in and out of, somehow these past few days have been her first time leaving the country while, strictly speaking, remaining on Earth.  Their last mission - somehow the word feels less silly when Road is around - involved helping a young man sort through the collection of cursed and haunted artifacts filling the house he’d just inherited from some mysterious distant uncle.  The unlucky heir had found the experience harrowing enough that he took the amnestic Road offered him afterward, but that still left a couple dozen dangerously enchanted items in need of proper disposal.  Eris had been able to call up Preacher from her monster hunter contacts for a good old fashioned Catholic exorcism on a few, others were handled by Road and Ashan performing some more esoteric rituals, and three were set aside for storage in some basement of the Bridgewood Manor for Sullivan to take care of.  That all left seven objects that Road insisted would be best handled by returning them to their rightful resting places.

Hence the current international road trip with Road while Lacuna and Ashan stayed behind to watch the office.  When Road had said they could just about get anywhere on the planet in three hours or less, Eris had taken it for a boast.  After seventy-two hours of making more jumps through bridges and pocket dimensions than she’d previously made in the seven years since she first found Crossherd, she’s reminded that Road doesn’t make boasts.  France, Peru, Kenya, Romania, India, Korea… and who knows how many other countries they technically passed through for a few minutes between bridges in between those stops.

“So, what’s the fastest way from Seoul to Vancouver?” Eris asks Road as she climbs into the driver’s seat of her van.

The third-to-last artifact on their dropoff list - a spirit of a blacksmith haunting the last sword it ever made - has been picky about who it will allow itself to be passed down to.  It’s been insistent about being in the hands of “a true craftsman of its bloodline,” and so far none of its descendents in its home country that she and Road have talked to have made the cut.  Hopefully a cousin in Canada with a 3D modeling job and a resin printer for making tabletop wargame miniatures will satisfy the spirit more than a restaurant owner who’s long since given up doing his own cooking.

“If we were walking, there’s a noodle place I know a few blocks away that’s in six different cities and once.  Depending on what we order and how fast we eat, we could probably get there in twenty or thirty minutes.  Driving through, probably best we go back through the bridge we came here from, then a series of brief transits from Mumbai, to Dubai, to Cambrai, to Quebec, to Vancouver.  Should be about an hour if traffic is good.”

“Rhyming our way to France, and then making the French connection to Canada?”

“It might be silly, but it works,” Road says with a chuckle.   “Bridges and pocket dimension links have sprouted up from stranger things.”

“Are you sure we’re actually on an achor world?  This has been a whole lot of holes and folds in space we’ve been going through.  It’s all starting to make the firm bedrock of reality that everything’s tied down to feel more like a sponge.”

“Now you know why the powers that be in Crossherd and similar hub dimensions are so insistent on the Masquerade.  Not even most people in the know Backstage have any idea just how… loose… everything really is.”

Eris stays silent for a bit to let that sink in.  And to concentrate on driving in a city with street signs in a language she’s had scant opportunity to practice since her parents kicked her out nearly a decade ago.  She knew better than to expect anything familiar here, in the birthplace of a grandmother she’d never met that looked nothing like how it would have back before that grandmother met her grandfather and moved with him back overseas.  A grandmother she herself probably looks nothing like.  Allegedly her father had taken more after his father and passed that on to her.  Still, both the arrival and the leaving of this city brought an irrational twinge of hope that she might glimpse something of one of the heritages her parents had been so weirdly insistent about cutting out of their lives in favor of a futile attempt to blend in and assimilate.  She’d gotten the same feeling when stopping in India on this trip too, and nothing had come of it there either.  It’d probably be the same if she ever went to Mexico, although that unmet grandparent had supposedly been a second generation immigrant.

But hey, on the bright side she’s driving again, even if it is in city traffic at the moment.  Between Crossherd’s walkability, the trees at the Bridgewood Estate, and the unexpected lack of monster corpses in need of disposal since joining up with Road, she’s barely been behind the wheel in the past two months.  Fortunately, the heavily refurbished van turned out to be just about perfect for transporting a pile of cursed artifacts that were too volatile to shove into bigger-on-the-inside containers.  Maybe one of these days when they all have some downtime she’ll talk the others into a more recreational road trip somewhere.  It’d get Lacuna out of her basement lab and would probably be a brand new experience for Ashan.

“By the way,” Road says at a red light, snapping Eris out of her traffic-induced musings, “I’ve noticed these past couple days that you’ve been changing up how you refer to me mid-conversation.”

“Just going with what felt right.  My bad for not running it by you first though.”

“No, no, I’m just surprised is all…  How could you tell?”

“There’s this thing you do with your voice.  Your body language and posture too, but mostly your voice.  You’ve got three or four different modes of presentation, I guess you could call it, that you’ll settle into as a default for most of the day and shapeshift your jacket to match, but then throughout the day in shorter bursts you’ll shift in and out of those other modes while your appearance stays the same.”  Eris raises an eyebrow at him before turning her gaze back to the traffic that’s begun moving with the greenlight.  “Am I wrong?”

Road lets out a laugh that peters out into a bemused sigh.  “You’re the first person I’ve met other than Sullivan to pick up on that,” she says to Eris.  “It feels nice to be seen like that.  I knew you were the right one to bring along on this trip.”

“I’ve been wondering about that actually.  Why did you pick me for this?  Sure, I’ve got the van, but we’ve got one in the office’s garage that we’ve still never taken out for a spin and I know you know how to drive.”

“Partly I figured you would be the best at resisting any influence our backseat passengers start acting up.”

“I’d think the wizard would be the ideal choice for that.”

“Sure, he has his defenses, the same as any other properly trained mage, but even before putting this team together, I’ve always felt you were strong-willed enough not to need such techniques.”

A rapidly shifting sky seen through bloody water.  A sense of peace and warmth despite the icy depths.  A steady fame from the tip of a white wand.  Active thought flowing out to feed the fire.  Smooth skin where a scar should be.  A flood of lost memories.  A sun held between her -

Eris pushes the memories of helplessness back down.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” she replies.

“And I wouldn’t be so sure of selling yourself short,” Road says.  “Nevertheless, the bigger reason I asked you to come with me for this is that you know how to talk to people.”

“Eh, my Spanish is fluent and my German is passable, but we just saw that my Korean is rusty as Hell and my Hindi is even worse.  I never did get around to learning French beyond a handful of tourist phrases, and I don’t know a lick of Romanian.  Again, Ashan seems like the better fit with the translation charm.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“You’re right.”

“Then why play dumb?”

The van reaches another intersection just in time for the light to turn red.  

Eris turns answers over in her mind.

Why?

Reflex?  Humility?  Habit?

Why would that be a reflex?  When did that happen?  How did she let it?

It’s been a long time.

Was it when she started hanging out at a bar full of adrenaline junkies with a deathwish?

Was it when she chose the bloody rush of killing monsters with her bare hands over college despite her scholarship qualifications?

Was it when she got accused of secretly being a boy and on drugs for being too good at sports in junior high?

It’s been a long time.

The light turns green.

“I guess I’m not used to anyone wanting me around for much other than to be the big strong one who’s good at hitting and breaking stuff,” Eris answers.

“Again, you’re selling yourself short.  Do you think that’s what Lacuna wants you around for?  Or how Ashan sees you when the two of you linger in the kitchen after the rest of us leave?”

“Those are personal relationships, it’s not the same thing.  Besides, Sully’s made it abundantly clear what he thinks of me and what I got hired to do for you two.”

“He has, hasn’t he?  I’m sorry about that, I really am.  Sullivan, for better or worse, has some consistent blindspots with his biases and isn’t half as good at reading people as he thinks he is.  Especially anyone that’s even remotely similar to him.”

“Okay, now that’s a low blow.  He and I are not alike”

“I mean it as a compliment, really.  I’ve never met anyone so loyal or so fiercely protective of the people he cares about.  I see that in you too, except you still have it in you to have some compassion for anyone outside those close to you.  And, of course, you’re both incredibly skilled at doing violence and enjoy it, even if the reasons are different.  But you’re both more than that too.  Even with this mission he’s the one who’s been doing the genealogical digging and messaging me with suggestions of where to go and who to take these artifacts to, despite that taking time away from his ongoing investigation.”

“Speaking of that,” Eris says, “what have you had Sully working on that’s so secret?  Not that I’m complaining, but I don’t think I’ve seen the guy since the office opened up.”

“You don’t know?”

“Obviously not.  And every other time I’ve asked something’s conveniently come up for you to change the subject.”

“Strange.  I could have sworn I told you.  It must have just slipped… my… mind…  again…”

A handful of times, on particularly bad nights, Eris has sat with Lacuna when she just sort of shut down.  Those instances were always rough, but seeing Road of all people do it out of the blue like this is chilling.  Like the sun going out and revealing that it’s just been a big light bulb hanging from a poorly-painted ceiling this whole time.  

Lacuna never snapped back to normal abruptly enough to make Eris question if she'd just imagined it though.

“Anyway,” Road resumes, “remember our first mission as a team?”

“It’s barely been two months.”

“So it has.  Regardless, he’s been investigating what caused a dragon and a Culescun bone ship not outfitted for inter-world travel to get drawn into a crossover point and try to occupy the same space at the same time.  More specifically, he’s been tracking down whomever it was that blew up the nearby lighthouse shortly after we left and trying to figure out if they’re connected to a different case of an unknown party picking off and stealing the contraband from inter-world smugglers.”

“He’s what now?”  Eris asks, keeping her tone carefully level.  How is this her first time hearing any of this?  “Is that why we’re playing cursed delivery service right now?  So we can be bait?”

“In all honesty, that thought hadn’t occurred to me.  But now that you mention it, there are worse plans.”

Another red light.  The last intersection before the turn into a series of side alleys for the bridge.

“We can come back to that after you explain everything you thought you already told me,” Eris says, “but for now, what was that about the lighthouse bl-”

A custom ringtone that Eris hasn’t heard in years plays over the van’s speakers and cuts off her question.  She doesn’t need to look at the caller ID displayed on the dashboard console to know who it is.  A part of her is surprised the caller still has her number, but then again, Eris still has hers.  And the two of them do still speak from time to time.

She considers letting it go to voicemail.  Or even hitting the button to hang up altogether.  She has more important things to focus on right now than a phone call from an ex who might have been trying to flirt with her a week ago.

An ex who wouldn’t call unless it was an emergency.  An ex who, if she really wanted to get back together, would more likely rope mutual friends into arranging a “chance meeting” where they would “just so happen” to have the opportunity and reason to do something romantic together like walk through a botanical garden, fix an engine together, or fight each other until they can barely stand.  An ex who would drop everything if Eris were the one to call.

Godammit.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Eris says to Road before tapping the green call icon on the dashboard screen.  “Yo, Gretchen, I’m driving right now with Road, so I’ve got you on speakerphone.  What’s up?”

With any luck, knowing Road’s on the line should keep Gretchen from trying to dredge up old relationship history that Eris is even less in the mood to deal with right now than normal.  And if it really is an emergency, it will be good to keep Road in the loop.

“Great,” Gretchen’s voice says through the van’s speakers, “that saves me the trouble of making a second call.  Do either of you know anything about non-euclidean, shifting, tesseract-esque architecture of the sort Lovecraftian horrorterrors like to make nests in?”

“I know that eldritch-warped spaces should never be entered without the proper training and precautions,” Road offers, “and even then they’re incredibly dangerous to go into alone and nigh-impossible to find your way out of without an anchor back to realspace.”

“Right.  Pretty much what I already guessed then.”

“Gretchen,” Eris says in exasperation that hasn’t yet turned into concern, “for the love of God, please tell me that’s not where you’re calling from.”

“Not yet it isn’t, but I am camped out inside the theater department of a Midwest liberal arts college staring at the door to a dressing room that was bigger on the inside when I opened it to chase the tentacle monster I’ve been hunting.”

“In that case,” Road says, “I would strongly advise closing the door, waiting an hour, and then checking to see if it’s gone back to normal by then.  The eldritch aren’t mere beasts to hunt.”

“Not happening.  I’ve already tagged this one so it can’t fully escape the world into voidspace.  It’s my quarry to claim, and while I really would love the assistance if you want to come jump into the proverbial eye of terror with me, I’m going after it either way.  And before you start lecturing me about acceptable targets, I’ve already verified that this one’s not sapient; it’s just a passing scavenger that stopped by to feed on the psychic torment of undergrads going through finals week.”

The traffic light turns green.

“Give us an address and we’ll be there as soon as we can,” Eris says.  “Don’t you dare go in there alone before we arrive.”  She just had to turn this into an ultimatum, didn’t she?

“Thanks E, I’ll text it to you.  Be seeing you.”

The call ends, and the ensuing text message arrives immediately enough that it was almost certainly typed up in advance.  Eris taps to display it on the screen and glances at Road.

“Do I still want to make this turn up ahead?”

“Do you really think she’ll really go in on her own if we take too long?”

“I hate to say it, but yes.  I’d know if she were bluffing and she’s not.  She’s leaving something out, but she’s serious about that.”

“In that case go three more blocks and then take twelve right turns in a row.  There’s a witch I know who owes me a favor.”

“Got it.  And thanks for helping with this.  I know it’s a detour from the current mission cleanup.”

“It’s practically on the way, and besides, there’s not a rush with the deliveries.  It’s not like they’re going anywhere if we leave them unattended for a short time.  Wrong kind of hauntings for that.”

“All the same, I appreciate it.  Things between me and Gretchen are weird, but I’d still rather not see her lose her mind trapped in some impossible labyrinth.”

“I wouldn’t want to see that happen to anyone.  Do you want to loop in Ashan and Lacuna?”

“Nah, someone’s got to watch the office in case something comes up.  Besides, it’s like two a.m. there right now.  Let them sleep.  Between you, me, and Gretchen, we should be fine.”

“Right you are,” Road says with a smile that shows more teeth than his usual.  “It’s been awhile since I’ve dealt with one of the eldritch.  This should be fun.”

Fun…  Yes, Eris supposes it will be once the hunt gets going.  No more effective way to forget her worries for a little while.  But first…

“Now about that exploding lighthouse…” Eris leaves the implied question hanging.

“I can give you and the others the full explanation when we get back.”

“You can give me the abridged version while I drive.”

“Fair enough.”

Eris could almost swear she hears them whisper something under their breath about it being refreshing to be called out.

 

*******

 

It has long been observed that artists, writers, performers, and other such creative types tend to have a statistically significant increased rate of contact with the extra-dimensional entities collectively known as “the eldritch.”  While the theory that creatives are somehow possessed of some special spiritual elevation or metaphysical sensitivity has been largely discredited, the actual cause of this phenomenon remains hotly debated.  The most popular theories are variations on the proposition that the act of creating art gives of psychic resonances that the eldritch can sustain themselves on similar to how deiform entities (more commonly known as “gods”) are sustained by - and by some indications potentially created by - sapient faith.  Others propose that the act of creation is a reshaping of our otherwise relatively stable baseline reality that either draws the eldritch in via a sense of familiarity to their own ever-shifting domain of existence or fascinates them with its alienness.

The most radical theories of why the eldritch seem to be drawn to art and artists is that they are not truly so different from us, and just find it neat.

Such is the potentially relevant trivia that runs through Eris’s mind as she picks her way down a dark hallway strewn with a web of tripwires and enchanted chalk drawings, trying not to catch any of the higher-strung wires on the spear strapped to her back.  Less helpful but equally persistent thoughts include stories of victims going mad from merely looking at the eldritch and irritation at Gretchen for setting all this up when she knew Eris and Road were coming to help.  And, Eris will begrudgingly admit, thoughts admiring the skill it takes to turn thirty feet of straight hallway into a virtual labyrinth to navigate.

“Okay, stop,” Gretchen instructs her.  Golden hair and golden eyes catch the glow coming from the one open door in the hallway while black leather and kevlar blend the rest of the monster huntress into the shadows.  Her spear, with its exaggerated bladed crossguard below the main blade, lies resting against the doorframe.  “Take two steps to the left, two steps back, another to the left, four forward, two to the right, and then you should be clear.”

“Was this all really necessary?” Eris asks as she catches up with Road and Gretchen in front of a door to a theater dressing room whose contents keep multiplying and folding in on themselves. 

“Maybe not, but I had the time waiting for you to get here,” Gretchen answers, “so I figured I may as well account for the possibility of this thing fleeing back outside once we find it in there.  These Lovecraftian tentacle monsters are slippery like that, this way we either catch it in there or we chase it back out here where it slithers headlong into a magic net.”  She flashes Eris a wickedly playful grin painted poison apple red.  “Besides, if you were to accidentally set one of these off it’d be fun to see how long it takes you to break out.”

“Lovecraftian is a slur,” Road points out without looking away from the threshold of the warped space, saving Eris from having to reply to that last part.

“Huh?”

“Old Howard Phillips was a racist xenophobe even by the standards of his time who thought air conditioning was unnatural and scary,” Eris clarifies.  “A guy like that was obviously going to interpret any contact with a genuinely alien consciousness in the worst possible faith, and whether it was coincidence or a failed attempt at breaking the Masquerade, he wound up having an outsized influence on the collective consciousness and how the eldritch have even been able to interact with this world over the past century.”

“I never did understand how the other hunters couldn’t see you were a giant nerd at heart,” Gretchen says.

“Not in a flirting mood right now, Gretchen.”

“Spoilsport.”  The word comes out as a joke rather than an accusation.

“Anyway,” Road says as they drop their duffel bag on the floor and begin rifling through it, “I think I’ve seen enough to get a handle on the situation.”  

“Do tell,” Gretchen says.

“At a glance this appears to be a fairly standard eldritch spatial warping, anchored enough to this world to be merely confusing instead of completely incomprehensible.  That said…” he pulls a scrimshaw carving of a deep-sea fish from the duffle bag and sticks his arm through the doorway, holds it there past the threshold for a few seconds until the bone starts glowing, and puts it back in the bag.  “Like I suspected, the space is psychically reactive, so we’ll need to be careful about mental feedback loops in there.  Luckily I have some countermeasures for that.  Just give me a few minutes to stabilize this portal so it doesn’t close behind us and we should be good to go.”

“Cool, while you do that…” Eris says to Road and then turns to Gretchen, “Gretchen, I need a word with you in private.”

“Not a lot of privacy in here, E, unless you want to go walk through the web again.”

Eris stalks over to where the person who coined that nickname for her and all it entails stands lurking just past the edge of the light spilling from the warped space beyond the door.  She comes to a stop close enough that the shorter woman has to crane her neck up to look her in the eye.  When she does, Eris can see that her pupils are dilated beyond even what this darkness should elicit.  Black circles that nearly reach the edge of their sockets with just the faintest rim of yellow iris and hardly any room for the white of sclera.

“We can whisper,” Eris hisses.  “And I am not in the mood for you to make a joke out of that.”

“What’s got you all worked up?” Gretchen whispers.  “A hunt with rare prey and working with Road?  I’d think you’d be enjoying this as much as I am.  Or has working with the celebrity hero gotten boring for you?”

“What are you leaving out?”  Eris prays that she’s wrong about already knowing the answer to her own question.  

“Perceptive as ever.  It always was one of your best qualities.”

“Stop dancing around the answer.”

“Tell me how you figured it out.”

“Do I look like I want to play this game?”  She used to love playing this game.

“You already know the answer.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

“You want to hear me say literally anything else.  I want to hear you say it.”

A request with two meanings if there ever was one.

“Fine,” Eris growls.  “You called me.”

“Just that?”

“That was enough to suspect.”

“But there was more.  What are you leaving out?”  

That same wonderfully wicked smile that always accompanied every inside joke between them.

“If this was just about a hunt gone weird you would have called Road directly.  We all have their number, it’s literally posted on the wall at 121813.  And you certainly wouldn’t have turned it into a threat to go in alone.  You’re smarter than that.  You wanted me here, and Road’s an excuse at best and distraction at worst.”

“Go on.”

“You’ve always been good at setting up snares, but not even you could have rigged all this up in the time between the phone call and now.  You had these traps ready before you ever picked up the phone.  You prepared this for us as much as for your prey, but you made a point of helping us get on this side of them.”

“And why would I ever do a thing like that?”

“We show up and you’re lurking in the shadows like you’re setting up a dramatic reveal.  You love being dramatic, but that’s not your flavor.  You burst into rooms with flashy entrances and get all eyes on you.  You’re two thirds my size and take up twice as much space.  You’ve got a miniature bluetooth speaker hidden in your gear so you can play goddam theme music in a fight.  You don’t lurk for drama.  You only lurk when you’re hunting.  When you’re closing in on prey and waiting for it to get in position.  When you want to build up your own thrill of anticipation before you come down like lightning with all the flash and thunder that goes with it for your perfect moment.”

“But we’re on a hunt, aren’t we?  Why shouldn’t I be lurking outside the hole I’ve run my prey down into?”

“But the eldritch in there isn’t what you really want to catch.”

“My my, my.  E, are you calling yourself my prey?  I know you’re delicious, but -”

Eris reaches out and grips the flashlight clipped to Gretchen’s shoulder, twists it towards Gretchen’s face and turns it on.  There’s an unmistakable flash of eyeshine in the moment before those unnaturally dilated pupils contract into sharp vertical slits, leaving Gretchen more golden-eyed than ever.  A predator’s eyes.  A hunter’s eyes.

“Now who’s the dramatic one?” Gretchen purrs.

“You were practically showing them off when we got here.”

“They’re lovely aren’t they.  It’s amazing what autogenesis can do.  But what does it all mean?”

It’s the reason they broke up.

“I almost hit my tipping point on my last hunt,” Gretchen speaks up when Eris doesn’t.

The fifth fate of hunters.

“I changed, and it felt wonderful.”

To get so lost in the hunt, in the thrill of violence, that one becomes no different from the monsters they hunt.

“But then the rush faded, and it was horrifying.”

A recognition of identity that triggers a self-reinforcing feedback loop of autogenesis.

“That’s why I want you here tonight.”

Those who fight monsters and live are doomed to become monsters themselves.

“So you can help pull me back from the brink when I start to go over again.”

“Bullshit,” Eris says flatly.

“Excuse me?”

“You picked out a difficult and dramatic target for your last hunt that you knew had a reputation for making people lose their minds in the hopes that it would be a sure thing to seal you into the fifth fate, and then you called me up so I could witness you change and then tragically have to put you down the way you always romanticized and fantasized about.  Bonus points if I die too right after from injuries you inflicted.  Your perfect fucked up fairy tale ending.”

“E, that’s not the only way it has to go.”

“Oh, and me turning into a monster too so we can go on a mindless rampage together is so much more -”

“I’m done!” Road calls from the door.

Eris turns around to see them holding an intricately embossed knife in one hand and a smoking censer dangling from a chain in the other.  Behind them the doorframe is now surrounded by geometric sigils drawn in glowing chalk.

“Good.  So are we,” Eris says.

Road nods in misunderstood affirmation.  “Now then, then incense should ward off any eldritch influence to keep our minds stable and bodies intact, so we’ll need to stick together while we’re in there.”

“About that,” Eris says.  “Change of plans.  Gretchen is staying out here.”

“I absolutely am not!  This is my hunt!”  Gretchen shouts.  The sudden change in demeanor would be jarring if Eris hadn’t expected it.

“I’ve read up enough on these things and talked to enough wizards to know that getting out of weird space like that works best if you have someone on the outside as a lifeline or beacon to follow back.  Gretchen’s the one who set up all the traps out here, so best if she takes on that duty so she can manage them if the eldritch comes back out before we do.  Better to drive it back out and into her traps to finish it off here than to kill it in an extradimensional space that might well collapse with its death.”

“Oh, now who’s talking bullshit?”  Gretchen snarls.  Her teeth are sharper than they were three minutes ago.  “If anyone should stay behind it should be Road since they’re the one who knows how to keep the door open.  Just give us the incense to take with us and we’ll be fine.”  She shakes her head.  “But no.  You’re just trying to poach my prey.  Well, I’m the one who found out it was haunting this place!  I’m the one who tracked it down to begin with!  I’m the one who lured it into realspace!  I’m the one who tagged it so it can’t escape!  I’m the one who backed it into a corner!  I’m the one who kills it!  It’s mine!  My prey!  My hunt!  And you can’t take it!”

Eris rounds on her.  “Good God!  Would you listen to yourself right now?  You’re raving.  This isn’t you.  Not the Gretchen I know.  You’re on the brink and that’s the feedback loop talking.”

“And you know me so well, don’t you?  In spite of being too afraid of letting go of yourself to see what I see.”  

“I know that there’s more to you than just joy of the hunt, and if you go in there you’re going to fall over the edge and lose all of that.  And I am not going to help you commit an elaborate ego suicide.”

“It’s not-” Gretchen starts to say before getting interrupted by Road stepping between the two monster hunters.

“Eris, you’ve got a point about someone staying behind as a lifeline beacon,” Road says before taking Eris’s hand in hers to give her a crystal amulet on a silver chain, “but if it’s the hunter’s fifth fate you’re worried about then maybe you should both stay out here while I go in.”

“Me?”  Eris balks.  “I’m fine.”

“Look me in the eye and tell me that you are one hundred percent sure of that.  Tell me that if you go in you won’t wind up being the one falling over the edge when eldritch exposure starts eating away at your capacity for rational thought.”

Heat.  Rage.  Ecstasy.  The smell of smoke and steam.  A cloak of flames.  Hair alight like clouds at sunset.  A heavy, wet, crunching sound repeating over and over.

The contextless memory leaves Eris gasping.  She pushes it back down lest context arrive.

Road nods.  It’s the first time Eris has ever seen them look sad.  It’s unsettling.

“Gretchen’s liable to run in right after us anyway if we leave her out here unsupervised,”  Eris says.

“I would not!”  Gretchen protests.  “Not that you’re going to leave me out here.”

“Gretchen,” Road says, turning to her, “Eris is right.  You’re not well right now.  I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before firsthand, so I would know.”  He raises a hand to forestall another objection.  “I also know that, on some level, you know that too, or else you would have come up with a way to just get Eris here and not me.  You know how the arrangement I have with the 121813 crew goes; if I’m called in it’s not a hunt anymore and it’s out of the hands of whomever it was that made the call.  It’s out of your hands.”  Road steps back and gives one of  those warm, reassuring smiles of theirs.  “And maybe you even meant it earlier about wanting Eris to be here to pull you back from the brink.  Yeah, you two weren’t exactly being quiet by the end there.  But maybe you don’t have to be all the way to the brink for someone you care about to pull you back and help you.”

Maybe it’s the incense bringing her back down to her senses, or maybe it’s just Road being Road, but something in Gretchen relaxes.  Deflates.

“Maybe…” she whispers, eyes downcast.

“Now then!” Road says in a sudden shift from serious to chipper.  “You two obviously have a lot of baggage to unpack, so why don’t you take the opportunity to sort that out while I go sort out getting our squiggly visitor back to its home in the Void?  Alright?  Good.  I’m trusting you, and I’ll see you on the other side.”

And with that, Road turns on their heel and heads toward the door with a jaunty wave.  By the time they cross the threshold their jacket has finished folding and flowing outward to completely cover them in plated purple armor with green trim.  The incense smoke billows around them and trails behind, creating a pocket of stability in the chaotic space that was once a theater dressing room.  And then the bubble gets too far away from the door, the room inverts itself, and Road is gone save for a subtle tugging sensation coming from the amulet they left in Eris’s hand.

“So…” Gretchen grasps at the words to say next.  Her eyes remain downcast.

“So…” Eris prompts.  Her eyes remain trained on Gretchen.

“Is Road always…”

“Like that?  Pretty much.”

“And here I thought they were just doing a bit the couple of times I worked with them.”

“Nah, they’ve got that vibe going pretty much twentyfour-seven.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“For me or for them?”

“Both.”

“Eh, it’s endearing, and I’m not convinced they actually sleep.”

The silence of thoughts not yet formed into words descends.  Gretchen steps away from Eris to go lean on a section of wall that hasn’t been tripwired or graffitied.  Eris shifts her own position to keep herself between Gretchen and the door and pockets the lifeline amulet.  

Seconds pass.

Minutes.

Gretchen finally looks back up at Eris.

“I’m sorry,” Gretchen says.  “Like you said, I wasn’t really myself when I was going on like that.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“It’s just… You know what it’s like.  The rush, the thrill, the anticipation.  The drumbeat in the back of your head that seems too loud to be simply your own heart.  The electric tingle down your spine that spreads through your whole body.  The way smell and taste start blurring together and your other senses all start feeding each other so that the whole world seems more.  The craving.  The memory of blood’s viscosity and the way a drop’s trail down the back of your hand catches on all the little hairs and gathers in the pores and creases.  The constant knowledge of how good the climax of the hunt feels.  Has felt.  Will feel next time.”

“I do.  All the more reason for you not to go in there.”

“It’s like that all the time now.  Even basking in that moment right after a kill, it only ebbs away to a murmur.  It’s enough to make you think it might not be so bad if you never felt anything else.”

“Only ever feeling one thing?  Sounds like death to me, and I’d rather die as myself.”

Gretchen’s laugh is soft and bitter.  “You always say that.  Have you ever stopped to think that it might be becoming more yourself, not less?”

“I have, but I’ve seen what someone becoming more herself looks like, and this?  What you’re talking about?  This ain’t it.”

“How do you figure?”

“Becoming more yourself is about letting yourself grow, and while you might shed some masks that were never really part of who you were in the first place, everything that makes you you is still there in some form, for better or worse.  What you’re talking about isn’t taking off a mask, it’s hacking off your nose, ripping out your tongue, and mangling your ears.  It’s becoming a caricature of yourself.  Maybe if this was a not wanting to be human anymore thing I could understand, but that’s never been what you wanted.  It was always that single perfect moment stretched out to infinity that you’d always wax poetic about.”

“How do you do it then?”

“Do what?”

“I’ve seen you in action E, I know you love it just as much as I do.  Maybe even more.”

“I’m not the one trying to accelerate losing my mind here.”

“That’s my point!  I’ve seen you covered head to toe in blood with a look on your face I only wish I could have ever gotten you to make in bed, and it’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.  That’s not even flirting, it’s objective fact.  So how are you not the one rushing headlong into trying to feel that way all the time?  Where do you find that strength to resist?”

Eris shrugs.  “It’s not that complicated really.  I wouldn’t even call it ‘strength’ per say. I have other things I care about and I know that there’s more to me than being the strong one who rips out hearts and crushes skulls with my bare hands.  I love the hunt - and the kill - sure, but I don’t let my life revolve around it.”

“I could make an argument to the contrary, but…”  Gretchen takes a deep breath, throws back her head, and lets out a long exhale in time with sliding her lean against the wall down into a seated position.  “Maybe you’re right.  Maybe I should try to take a break for a while.  Find myself a new hobby.”

Eris crouches down to get closer to eye level with her and grins.  “I’d suggest gardening, but you and I both know your track record there.”

Gretchen’s laugh is sharp and sweet.  “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

“You almost let a cactus die of dehydration before I stepped in.”

“In my defense, we were living in a humid area at the time.  I figured that would be enough for it.”

“Not in that case.”

The silence of familiarity lost and found changed descends.  Gretchen fiddles with the area on her arm where sleeve meets glove.  Eris cracks her neck.

Seconds pass.

Minutes.

Gretchen’s eyes drink in Eris’s presence, only flickering their focus to the open doorway behind her for a moment.

“So, finally got yourself a new pair of boots,” Gretchen observes.

Eris glances down, catches herself, and snaps back to watching Gretchen.  “You should have seen the rest of the armor they came with.  It was an offworld import, a real sci-fi space marine type look just a step shy of full on power armor.”

“What, did you order it in the wrong size and just keep the boots?”

Eris shakes her head.  “You know the trope of jumping on a grenade to save your teammate?”

“Yeah?”

“Replace the grenade with a miniature exploding sun conjured by a wizard.  It was hovering though, so instead of throwing myself on top of it I just sort of grabbed it with both hands and squeezed.”  Eris mimics the motion.  “The boots were the only part of the armor that were still salvageable after.”

“That’s my E, walking off a supernova to the face.”

Light piercing through skin down to the marrow.  Heat beyond pain’s ability to register.  Flame inseparable from flesh.  A heavy, wet, crunching sound repeating over and over.  A soft bed.  The fog of painkillers.  A request for a mirror denied.

“Eh, that’s overselling it.  Remember the salamander den the Lor twins asked us to help clear out that one time?  Now that was some fire.”

“Yeah, in Yellowstone.  God, I can still smell the sulfur just thinking about it.  Was it you or Lornegna who had the dumbass idea to smash a hole in the wall to flood the cave?”

“That one was on Loreghaste for once, if you can believe it.  Not that they’ll ever admit to it.”

“Oh really?  I always took them for the reasonable twin.”

“You’d think that, but half the wild shit Lornegna pulls is something that Loreghaste said in passing earlier, knowing full well that they’ll take it and run with it.”

“Even plugging a geyser with that oversized hammer of theirs to turn themself into a human cannonball?”

“Okay, that one was one hundred percent Lornegna.”  Eris’s laugh is rough and mellow.  “Regular pair of menaces, those two.”

“Like you’re one to talk.”

Eris gasps in mock indignation.  “Me?  A menace?”

“You got an amusement park shut down.”

“Miraclezone Fun Park had already closed its doors for four whole days by the time we got there, thank you very much.  You know, on account of all the mysterious deaths that got our attention in the first place.”

“Maybe, but derailing a roller coaster so that it crashes into the middle of an amphitheater certainly didn’t help their odds of reopening once the weird ape spider things that were eating the night shift employees were dealt with.”

“Says the woman who decided to draw the beasts out by plugging her phone into the sound system, turning on all the stage lights, and doing a solo dance number without realizing how many there were infesting the park.  You’re lucky my aim was good enough to take out half of them when I landed.”

“More like you’re lucky I was fast enough to dodge that mess.  I’ll hand it to you though, you made one helluva first impression climbing out of the wreckage, ripping off one of the coaster’s safety bars one-handed and using it as a club to lay into the rest of the… what even were those things anyway?”

“Some alchemist’s escaped mad science experiments.  It was in the Crossherd papers a few days later when the guy got bagged for a gross violation of the Masquerade after the cops showed up and found a bunch of dead eight-legged monkeys.”  Eris shakes her head in exasperation.  “I still can’t believe we didn’t get caught for that.”

“Fitzy’s always been good at covering for his bar’s patrons.  It’s half the point of 121813.”  Gretchen pauses, searching her memory.  “That night was your first time there, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.  You offered to buy me a drink and I was too busy trying to hide the fact that my arm was broken to turn you down.”

“Your arm was broken?”

“And a few ribs.  Did something to my ankle too, but by that point I already had a good grasp on how fast I heal and I was trying to look cool for the chick who was killing rabid chimeras with a spear in time with the bassline on metal music blasting from stadium speakers.”

“Speaking of impressive spearwork…”  Gretchen pauses just long enough for both of them to think of innuendos that are funnier left unspoken.  “Is that the new ice spear you mentioned the last time you were at the bar?”

Eris reaches back and traces two-fingers along the sigil-engraved haft sticking up over her shoulder.  “Sure is.  Intent-activated ice conjuration on contact capable of full encasement without long term damage after thawing out.  It is a bit finicky about which part of the spear causes the freezing, but that’s got its advantages once you get used to it.  Come to think of it, this thing would have been real handy back on the Miami job.”

“You mean the time some rich kid showed up at the bar begging for someone to do a live capture on his lost pet?  Oh yeah, that would have saved us so much time with that slippery little bastard.”

“Oh, be nice, it was adorable.”

“It was a blob of ooze capable of squeezing itself through a showerhead that had us running in circles around that resort all day like a slapstick routine.”

“But it made itself dog-shaped and licked the kid’s face when we got it back.”

“You are such a bleeding heart.”

“I wonder if I still have a video of that.  I bet Lacuna would love it.”

“Right, Lacuna…”  Gretchen trails off.  “How long have you two been together now?”

“We’re not a couple,” Eris says.  The sentence is practically a reflex by now with how often the mistake’s been made.

“Really?  Well crap, I owe Old Vic twenty dollars.”

“You made a bet with Old Vic?  That Lacuna and I were a couple?”

“Me and half the regulars.  Separate pool for how long until you bring her in to show off.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish right now.”

“I don’t even bring her up that much.”

“I was going by quality over quantity.  Seriously, have you heard yourself talk about her?  Adorably fragile little mess of a genius hacker witch that you protectively fret over who lets you indulge your inner nerd and play the experienced worldly butch while you teach her how to be a woman.”

“First off, I have never once in my life called Lacuna ‘adorable.’  Second, the witch thing didn’t work out for her and she hates being called a hacker.  And third, that whole description is infantilizing.  She is pretty smart though.”  In certain areas anyway, Eris bites her tongue from adding.  “She’s got a whole server farm set up and programmed to enchant stuff for her.  She’s the one who made the spear.”

Gretchen’s self-satisfied ‘You just proved my point’ look is as insufferably smug as ever.

“Look,” Eris says, “Lacuna’s like a sister to me.  Maybe in another life, if we’d met under different circumstances, then maybe, but I wouldn’t trade what we have, given the choice.”

The silence of sore subjects and inarticulate hope descends.  Gretchen pushes herself off the wall to sit a little closer to Eris and leaves one hand resting in the space between as a clear invitation.  Eris shifts her own position to meet Gretchen’s without touching.

Seconds pass.

Minutes.

“Old Vic says it’ll be behemoth season soon on his homeworld,” Gretchen says without meeting Eris’s gaze.  Looking more past her than at her.  “He invited me and some of the other regulars to come join him there when it does.”

“Sounds like a party,” Eris says, keeping her eyes locked on Gretchen’s hands.

“It really is, to hear him tell it.  A solid week of festivals before and after the culling hunts.  Dancing, feasting, games, rituals, all that good stuff.  Not many offworlders get invited, but we wouldn’t be the only ones, so it’s not like we’d be intruding either.”  

“I hope you get to enjoy it.”

Gretchen raises her hand until her fingers brush Eris’s.  Her fingers curl slightly.  Eris’s curl into them.

“Obviously, you’re invited too, E.  It’ll be the first words out of Old Vic’s mouth the next time you show up.  I know you’re busy these days with your new crew, but you really should think about joining us.  It’s a once in a lifetime hunt for anyone without a triple-digit lifespan.”

“Whatever happened to taking a break from it all?”

The curled fingers become clasped hands.

“That’s the best part.  Imagine, one final hunt grander than anything we’ve seen before or ever will see again where we’ll bring down walking mountains and flying rivers of scales.  One last hurrah to get everything out of our system, and afterwards once everyone else goes home the two of us could stay for a while and take a real vacation for a hard reset.  Spend a month or two in some tranquil hidden elf village, get in touch with nature, calm down from the hunt.”

“Make a fresh start.”

One of them rises to her feet.  The other follows.  It is unclear who does which.

“Reconnect.”  The word is said in unison.

Gretchen places her free hand on Eris’s shoulder and rests her head on Eris’s chest.  Eris places her free hand on Gretchen’s wrist and rests her head on Gretchen’s.  A foot wraps around an ankle.

“If I could give it up,”  Gretchen whispers, “do you think things could work out between us again?”

The silence of past actions considered.

“Think about it, E.  Has anyone else ever been as good with you?  No one else has for me.  And it was just that one thing between us.”

The silence of chance weighed against choice.

“What if, for each other, we really could get out, E?  Have one last hunt and mean it.  And if it does call us back again, then if we’re both trying to avoid letting it consume us and watching out for each other, who knows how long we might last?  Maybe we could even keep each other alive long enough to get tired and settle down.”

The silence of exceptional circumstances accounted for.

“E… What if neither of us had to die young?  What if we got to grow old together?”

The silence of a conclusion reached.

Eris pulls Gretchen further into their embrace.  They both lift their heads, faces nearly touching.  Brown eyes stare into gold.

“Oh Gretchen, you always knew how to say what I needed to hear.”

“E-”

The embrace becomes crushing.  Gretchen’s pained gasp at the vice grip on her hands and wrists is made shallow for want of air.

“Never were good at lying though,” Eris laments.  “You know that stun gun you still keep strapped to the underside of your wrist isn’t enough to take me down, right?  Or was it going to be the retractable blade in the toe of your boot going for my Achilles tendon?  Come to think of it, that lipstick’s the poison apple red I bought for your birthday that one year, isn’t it? ”

Gretchen’s laugh is hard and sour.  “Could’ve been all three at once.”

“Still wouldn’t have worked.”

“Can you blame me for trying?”

“No, and that’s the problem.”

“One more thing to say in my defense?”

“It won’t make a difference.  You’re not getting through that door.”

That same old deliciously wicked grin.  For the first time, Eris gets the feeling she’s not on the inside of the joke.

Gretchen intones a quick chant with no literal translation and looks up.

By reflex, Eris looks up into the uniform shadows of the ceiling.

The sole set of graffitied warding sigils that Gretchen neglected to point out earlier light up the ceiling’s shadows.

By reflex, Eris dodges to the side of the blade of light that comes piercing down.

Gretchen slips her hands free of her gloves and out of Eris’s grip.

By reflex, Eris lunges to grab her again.

Gretchen reaches over Eris’s shoulder and grasps the haft of the enchanted spear with intent.  Ice spreads from the points of contact where the spear is strapped to Eris’s back.  The sudden conjured weight causes Eris to stumble and then - when the ice encases her hips and shoulders - to fall.

It is only one third of a second that Eris is on the ground.  By two thirds of a second Eris has shattered the ice, rolled to her feet, and unslung her spear in a single motion.

It only takes Gretchen one half of a second to reach the open door to the eldritch-warped space and collect her own cross spear that she left leaning next to it.  She wastes a quarter of a second turning around to look back.

“I’m sorry E, but I’m not as strong as you are.”

Having finally turned around to see the door, Eris realizes that sometime while she’d been watching Gretchen the space on the other side had grown more chaotic until it gave up all pretense of resembling a room, now looking like nothing so much as the white noise of television static.  She almost reaches Gretchen in time to stop her from stepping through.  The tip of the spear brushes against the back of Gretchen’s knee mid-stride, freezing it and dropping her to what passes for the ground on the other side.  And then the feet of distance between the monster hunters becomes miles and Gretchen’s receding black and gold form is swallowed by the static.

Eri swears, pulls the lifeline amulet that Road gave her out of her pocket, and drops it on the floor.  She figures that as long as it stays out here in realspace, then Road can always get out and come back with Ashan and Lacuna to pull her and Gretchen out later.

She wastes no further time on hesitation before running into the static after Gretchen.

 

*******

 

Eris is hunting.

A chill wind howls across a moonlit prairie.  The rush, the thrill, the anticipation, are almost too much to bear as she chases down a pack of lupine shadows.  One falls to a spear.  Another is caught by its tail and dragged to the ground.  A third turns and raises itself on two legs to face its hunter.  Its claws meet with only open air.  Her claws meet with its heart.

There is a disappointing lack of blood.  They are naught but shadows afterall.

The pack’s lone survivor sprints for the treeline, wild with fear, only to find a chainlink fence between itself and safety.  She is still half human, and her eyes are fully so when she looks back at her hunter.

There’s a name Eris should remember and call out at this part.  She doesn’t, but what does it matter?  It’s just a beast.

What was she hunting again?  It doesn’t matter.  It’s all just prey in the end.

High above, tiny flames swirl and writhe.

Its watchful eyes are blinded.

The chainlink fence rattles and shrieks when she tears it down and stalks between the support struts of the rollercoaster.  The drumbeat in the back of her head seems too loud to simply be her own heart.  Perhaps it is the music pounding from that amphitheater over there.  Eight-legged shadows leap from support strut to support strut and skitter along the tracks above.  What an annoyance, that noise is luring her prey away from her.  

A freezing from the spear, a few good kicks, and a mighty heave are all it takes to knock out the nearest pylon and set the entire rollercoaster around her crashing down.  The music of the collapsing metal all around her is enough to drown out the metal of the music from the amphitheater, but the drumbeat in her skull is louder still.

She steps on one of the wretched chimerical shadows trying to free itself from the wreckage as she stalks toward the alleyway behind the amphitheater.

Oh, yes, that’s right.  She’s hunting Gretchen.  The snake, the spider, her lioness.

Amidst the wreckage, tendrils of flame coil around a thorn that will not burn. 

Its teeth cannot piece this.

The alleyway is awash with the scent of buzzard meat, skunk perfume, and pine scented car air freshener emanating from the dumpster at the far end.  An electric tingle runs down her spine and spreads through her whole body as she walks past the garbage truck that has taken her to so many trailheads with signs of new quarry within the dream-born city.  The shadow that erupts from the refuse is all horns, claws, spines, and teeth.  It is long enough to wrap itself around her, heavy enough to pull her down to the ground when it does, and vicious enough to keep wrestling with her even after she snaps off its saber fangs.

She recalls a dim memory that this thing once hurt her badly enough that she called for help to return to her home lair afterward.  The one who answered should never have had to see her like that.  She will make this shadow pay for that.

By the time she realizes the shadow is dead and gone, the pavement is shattered, the dumpster is rent in twain, and the engine of the garbage truck she was once responsible for is totalled.  There is no proper satiation to hunting shadows.  All chase and fight, but no release.  She retrieves her spear and vaults over the wall at the end of the alleyway.  Perhaps when she finds her true prey at the end of this she will bring satisfaction.

No, that’s not right, she’s supposed to be searching for Gretchen, not hunting her.

Behind her, the flame lashes out at a person-shaped hole.  

Its claws have fought against the other’s for so long now.

Moonlight reflects off the lake and into the whispering of the trees that brushes against her cheek to welcome her home with the scent of blood in her mouth.  Smell and taste blur together as her senses begin feeding into one another until the whole world seems more.  Was she really even alive before this?

Her oldest dance partner rises from the lake to greet her on the shore.  The one who tried to hunt her and in failing to do so taught her the joy of being the predator rather than prey.  Their dance begins again.  As it always has.  As it ever will.  Her dance partner is a gaunt and stretched out figure of tongues and teeth that still resembles a man.  Her dance partner is a beast of scale and shell with jaws that bite and claws that catch.  Her dance partner is a cacophonous evolution of forms between as the two of them drive one another to learn and adapt with each dance.

Her dance partner is a mere shadow, frozen in a block of ice and thrown into the back of her van to be stowed away and forgotten.  She has long since grown beyond it.  She slams the rear doors of the van shut.

And yet still the hunt always cycles anew.  She is always hunting.

Beneath the water, the ancient flame roils against a timeless knight. 

Its arms will crush the misbegotten parasite and then the thing beneath.

The air in the candlelit cavern smothers like a damp blanket.  A drop of blood trails down the back of her hand, catches on the tiny hairs, leaves bits of itself gathered in the pores and creases, and falls from her fingertip into the crystal clear pool the same as any other drop from the cavern’s stalactites.  It seems the shadow of her old dance partner left her with a final parting gift.

She approaches the cavern’s shrine and the wounded shadow praying at its moldy offering plate skitters away.  She weighs whether it is worth pursuing but is distracted by a shambling pile of bones.  The bones snap and crunch so pleasingly and the soft shadow beneath rips apart so delightfully.  But when the bones are ground to dust and the shadow they failed to protect are gone she is still hungry.

The wounded shadow taps a pattern on the ground.  Its eight eyes are not human at all but they hold fear all the same.

There’s a kindness Eris should offer at this part.  She doesn’t, but what does it matter?  It’s just a beast.

Still not satisfied, she turns her attention to the shrine and the small, forgotten god it venerates.  

Blood and hearts and bones and stone and ichor and mold.  What would a god taste like?

In the reflection on the surface  the upturned offering dish, a thousand tiny flames flare to a thousand stars.  

Its song echoes in triumph over the foolish nothing that thought to hurt it.

The air in the desert tries and fails to sap the moisture from her body.  Neither the heat of day nor the chill of night can touch her through the craving.

Feeling like the only person in the world, she lingers in a space only ever meant to be passed through until she hears the howl of an almost-human voice that almost sounds like a song.  Feeling the weight of her spear fall from her hand, she steps out beyond the edge of the parking lot pavement to the edge of the edge of the furthest lamplight, that twilight border between known and unknown.  Feeling no need to announce her presence, she locks eyes in the dark with a shadow and utters a growl that almost sounds like words as she circles her prey and blurs the line between beast and self.  

There are only claws and teeth for the thing whose face is almost human.  A stinger strikes through the air with a whipcord whistling but is a step too slow.  An inhuman growl from a once-human throat accompanies the tearing sound of a sting ripped free from its tail and plunged into its owner’s neck.  Deed done, she retrieves her spear and walks back to the truck whose cargo has been her excuse to travel the land’s liminal spaces for prey like this.

She opens the door to the sleeper cab and finds herself face to face with a squawking peacock.  

The avian incongruity leaves Eris shocked enough for the bird to shuffle out past her and take to the wing.  She blinks.  Waking up to find a peacock in her cab wasn’t even the same year as hunting the manticore.  That was in Vermont and this was in Arizona.  Why are those two memories mixed together?

Wait.  Memories?

Cautiously, she climbs into the cab.  Something about it feels too small, but otherwise all is as it should be.  Neatly made bed in the back, movie poster from her old bedroom on the ceiling, air plant hanging from the rearview mirror…  The mirror!  Her reflection!  Her eyes!  She turns and flees into the dark tunnel in the back of the cab until she can no longer feel that awful piece of glass staring at her.

No.  This isn’t right.  She’s not…

Somewhere in the long darkness, a core of flame is trapped and pinned.  

Its heart withers in fear and thrashes until the instinct to survive leaves nothing but…

Rage.  

There has ever been constant knowledge of how good the climax of the hunt feels.  Has felt.  Will feel next time.  And few things have had are having will have a death so sweet as the pile of garbage before her that calls itself a man.  It is not even fit to be prey, but the righteousness of ending it will more than make up for that.  It has captured, enslaved, and sold the innocent.  It has hurt one of her own.  It has arrogantly tried to summon the sun itself.

She swallows that sun.  Lets it burn away that which is not needed and bring light to what remains.  Its fire erupts from her scalp to become her hair and tumble down past her shoulders.  Its core melts down the flimsy scraps of armor and becomes her carapace.  Its hunger welds with hers and becomes yet more fuel for the hunt.

Her charred lips pull back nearly to her ears in what is both a snarl and a grin and in any case is all teeth.

The flash of her brilliant metamorphosis alone was nearly enough to dispose of the garbage, but not quite.  What is left of it continues to cough and twitch on the steaming ground.  She walks over to it and raises a foot in anticipation of a heavy, wet, crunching sound repeating over and over.

No!

This is not her!

This has never been her!

This can never be her!

Upon her shoulder, a gentle hand removes the thorn.  

The flames dwindle to embers and scatter.

Eris is not hunting.

Eris is searching.

Eris is herself.

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

Out of the corner of her eye, Eris catches sight of a tiny flickering flame amidst the endless static that surrounds her.  It darts out of view and she turns her head to follow it.  Rather than finding the flame in the middle of the white noise once more, she finds herself in the middle of a living room she hasn’t seen in nearly a decade.  It’s been even longer since she last saw the mottled green-brown shag carpet sticking up around her boots.

“But why do I have to only speak English at school?”

Eris turns around to find a family of shadows standing in the soft morning light that shines in through the bay windows.  Outside, a schoolbus waits on the suburban street for other small shadows to join the ones already piled inside and blurred together.  But these shadows in the room with her now are far more interesting.  A mother, a father, and a child with a backpack.  Even just as silhouettes she knows them.

Her mama.

Her papa.

Her.

“Because,” the shadow of her papa answers the shadow of her childhood, “that’s all any of the other kids speak and it’s important for you to fit in.”

“But I already don’t fit in!” Eris’s shadow whines.  A petulant response, but a true one.  She remembers this conversation - or at least the impression of it - from her second week of first grade.  Even by then she was acutely aware that none of her classmates looked like her.

“If you really wanted me to fit in, you would have given me a normal name,” she and her shadow grumble in unison.  Her shadow’s parents don’t seem to hear that part.

“All the more important for you to make an effort,” the shadow of her mama admonishes.  “Just because you’re perfect as you are, that doesn’t mean everyone else is ready for it.  So until that’s different, blending in is safer.  You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“But then why do you make me practice all those other languages that we speak at home?”

“They’ll be useful when you’re an adult and trying to get into college and find a job,” her shadow’s papa hastily answers.  “Now hurry before you miss the bus.”

Eris’s shadow ducks her mama’s kiss on the forehead and turns away from her papa’s hug.  Her shadow only pauses for a moment, just past the door’s threshold when she hears a pair of “I love you’s,” in two different languages.  She smiles for a moment at the tears that don’t quite form and didn’t manage to back then either.

Then she remembers where she is and what Road said about psychically reactive spaces.  Eris has never been good at keeping psychic entities out of her mind, but she’s consistently found herself to be very good at telling and resisting when they’re trying to change or insert anything.  Save for that one time with whatever Lacuna did, but she tells herself that’s because she was intentionally letting her most trusted friend poke around in there for the sake of healing.  As for the looking, she tells herself that she has nothing to hide or that she’s afraid of being thrown in her face and used against her.

She follows her shadow out the door.

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

Her shadow is taller now, taller even than the shadow of the boy she just knocked down.  She’s in the eighth grade and she’s just gotten in her first fight in the middle of the school cafeteria.  Not that it was much of one.  One punch and the boy was down on the floor rolling and clutching his nose.  

Eris made a point of forgetting the boy’s name a long time ago (it was Justin) but everything else is burned into her memory.  After a year of taking rumors and accusations in silence this last bit of harassment finally hit the tipping point.  And damn, had it felt good to finally let it out.  She can’t see the creeping wild grin on her shadow’s lack of a face, but she can feel the temptation to mirror it.  Now’s the part where her shadow’s nonexistent eyes should be flickering to the fleck of blood on her knuckles.  There’ll be an intrusive thought to lick it, just to see what it tastes like.  Not that she will, but it suddenly occurs to Eris to wonder if what she is now was always in her, even back then.  

Was she always a monster in waiting?  She dismisses that intrusive thought for what it is and turns around and walks for the door as the shocked silence permeating the cafeteria erupts into chaos.  She turns around before she has to see the horrified look on the shadow of her best friend at the time.  Dylan.  

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

Her shadow’s in third grade and Dylan’s shadow is teaching her how to talk with her hands.  It’s after school and they’re sitting at his parents’ kitchen table, homework already done.  When his family moved in down the street last summer their parents got together and started setting them up with playdates in hopes that the two misfits would at least have one friend apiece going into the new school year.  

Eris smiles and signs the alphabet along with them.  Her shadow mastered it months ago, much to everyone’s surprise, but at this point it’s a game for the two of them to see who can get through forwards and backwards the fastest before they move on to anything else.  Eris is only halfway through the reversal when the shadows finish their game.  She’s gotten rusty these days with only video calling Dylan two or three times a year to catch up and get the latest news on how her folks are doing.

Eris’s breath catches when she notices Dylan’s shadow addressing her - no, her shadow - with a simple thumb over palm with fingertips curled.  He’s got a more specific name sign for her these days and she’d forgotten that it used to just be an initialization.

When the shadow of Dylan’s mom walks in to get the cookies out of the oven, Eris remembers where she is, stands up, and heads for the nearest door.

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

“Eris.”

“That’s not my… Present.”

Her shadow is in second grade and she has just given up.  If the teacher can’t even pronounce the shortened nickname she came up with correctly, then what’s the point of fighting it anymore?  May as well just go along with whatever people decide to call her than constantly struggle over something that doesn’t really matter.  She knows who she is regardless.

Eris opens the door and leaves the classroom.  She may not have anything to hide, but that doesn’t mean she has to stick around and give whatever’s manifesting all this a guided tour of her childhood either.

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

“Is she really even a girl?”

Her shadow is in seventh grade and it’s unseasonably hot outside.  She’s sitting on a bleacher bench trying not to cry while the shadow mother of the girl who’s not accepting her apologies has it out with her mama’s shadow.  

It was an accident, really.  A car drove by and the glare got in her eyes, throwing off her aim.

“What girl can even throw a softball hard enough to knock out a tooth?”

It was an accident, so why isn’t saying sorry enough?

“Just look at her!  What girl her age is that tall or has shoulders like that?”

It was an accident, but the shadow is talking too fast for anyone else to get a word in.

“Or maybe she’s on steroids?  You should get your daughter tested!”

Eris tunes out the rest of the conversation while she slips on a pair of fingerless black gloves.  Just because she’s made her peace, that doesn’t mean she has any interest in sitting around watching this trainwreck all over again.  She traces the silver-stitched runes on the gloves with one finger.  Back of the hand then the palm.  Left hand then the right.  There’s no door to exit through on the softball practice field, so she’ll just have to make her own.  

Eris claps her hands together and twin jolts run through her palms and up her arms to meet at the base of her neck.  She throws her head back involuntarily at the shock and bares her teeth in a grimace that lacks any of the usual excited edge from using these.  The initial sensation fades as she crouches down low to the ground but her hands are tingling now and will be until she takes off the gloves.

One punch is all it takes for the ground beneath to crack and shatter into the white noise void for her to fall into.

Å̶̹̱̈́́Ȓ̷̦͚̳̱̗͐̒̍̈͠T̵̛͎͓̲̠͎̭̉̅͒̅͑?̶̜̰̮̺̖̕

Her shadow is in her bedroom with the door locked.  She’s in her sophomore year of high school and staying up far too late on a school night in front of a mirror with a makeup kit she bought at the drugstore.  She meant to do this earlier, but her AP Calc homework took longer than expected.

Eris lands in the room, takes a look at the decorations, and shudders at that phase of her life.  All that work to be someone else for the sake of burying a reputation that never actually went away, just hid in the whispers behind her back.  She can still remember how alien her own body felt, soft from making a point of never exercising anymore after being banned from school sports, yet still too big to be fashionable.  Who was she ever fooling besides herself?

Her shadow hisses in frustration as she tries to figure out how to bridge the gap between how her mama taught her to do makeup and the styles in the magazine one of her friends that weren’t her friends gave her.  None of the models in the magazine look anything like her.

The room has a door, but punching a hole in the wall to step through into the static is more in line with Eris’s mood.

Å̶̹̱̈́́Ȓ̷̦͚̳̱̗͐̒̍̈͠T̵̛͎͓̲̠͎̭̉̅͒̅͑?̶̜̰̮̺̖̕

Her shadow is in sixth grade and her teammates are all hugging her and cheering.  They just won their game.  For once she’s the star instead of the outcast.

Eris punches another hole in the illusion.

Å̶̹̱̈́́Ȓ̷̦͚̳̱̗͐̒̍̈͠T̵̛͎͓̲̠͎̭̉̅͒̅͑?̶̜̰̮̺̖̕

“From whence comes the starlight in the Dark Forest?”

Was that Road’s voice?  This time the static doesn’t resolve into another shadow of a memory.

“Yo, Road!”  Eris shouts into the void.  “Can you hear me?  Gretchen’s lost in here somewhere.  Have you seen her?”

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

“Not art.  Pigments.  Raw materials.  Kindling for the spark.”

“Road, who are you talking to?  I can hear you, but I can’t see you!”

“I’m glad to see you’ve calmed down now.  You gave me a scare when you ran off like that after I got that tag off of you.”

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

“I understand you need that, yes, and I’m sorry I had to be rough with you earlier, but you can’t go forcing what you need out of mortals like that.  It’s not good for them.”

Ā̶̜̬̼̄̚̚r̵͉͓͗͒̉͝t̶̖̞́̍̆!̷̲̦̱̩̆̐͌͗

“I’d help you with that myself if I could, but I can’t.”

Ā̶̜̬̼̄̚̚r̵͉͓͗͒̉͝t̶̖̞́̍̆!̷̲̦̱̩̆̐͌͗

“I’ll see if I can get her permission.  These things work a lot better when the mortal agrees to it, you know.  They can even help and cooperate.”

Eris scans the white noise all around her, but still finds nothing, save for a tiny flame that quickly gets lost again.  Or was that just her brain trying to find an image in the noise where there is none?

“Road, what are you getting at here?  What do you need me to do?”

“Hey there Eris, sorry to put you on hold.  I’m with the eldritch right now and I can see you and Gretchen, but I can’t get to you.”

“Is Gretchen alright?”

“Physically, yes, but mentally she’s not handling this place nearly as well as you are.  Nothing irrecoverable yet, but it’s… not good.”

“Where is she?  If you can see us both, maybe you can help me reach her.”

“The concept of ‘where’ is subjective at best right now.  Our best bet is going to be helping the eldritch get what it wants - maybe needs, communication is tricky - in exchange for it leading all of us out of here.”

“And if we don’t cooperate?”

“You and I will probably be fine, but it’s not too happy with Gretchen right now.  There’s a good chance it’ll leave her in here when this space collapses upon its departure.”

“Of course it isn’t happy with her,” Eris mutters under her breath.  “Fine.  So what does it want?  It sounded like you were saying something about art earlier.  Is it going to conjure up a paintbrush and easel for me, or am I about to get sent on another trip down memory lane?”

“More likely the latter, unless you’re a painter or musician on top of everything else.”

 “Nah, I was always more of a STEM girl before I dropped out, I’m afraid.”

“That’s something.  Gardening can be an art.”

Gardening?  Oh, right.  “Not what I meant, but go on, let’s get the brain probing over with.”

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

“Yes, art.  But she’s going to choose what to show you, and you need to respect that she’s trusting you not to invade her privacy or touch anything.”

T̸̤͛r̶̭̲̥̠̫̼̒̐̌̀͆͂u̷̮̿̋̈́̆̈ś̷̡̬̝̠̮͙͊̿̓͘͘ẗ̷̘̙̲͋.̸̤͕̯̹̫̪̏̑̆͠

“Good.  Now, Eris, just focus on what art is to you.  What is the art in your life?  What have you created?  What have you experienced?  What have you shared?  Everyone has something.  Just let your mind find it and then let it flow.”

Eris nods.  Focus on art.  That shouldn’t be too hard.  She’s no artist, but she’s seen plenty.

She closes her eyes…

She is locked in a dance of death on the lakeshore with the hateful spirit of a thing that won’t stay dead.  She is using a tire iron to spraypaint the lifeblood of a rabid fae crossroads hound into a mural of autumn leaves on the side of a truckstop rest station.  She is standing on top of a moving rollercoaster and doing the on-the-fly math to calculate the optimal location and angle to hurl a broken flagpole in order to launch the ride, herself, and the dozen bloodthirsty ape spiders on the cars behind us into the amphitheater next door.  She is admiring her handiwork in the aftermath of a percussive demon exorcism that looks so very much like a tornado just tore through the gas station.  She is at the bar, arm wrestling two other monster hunters at once and winning.  She is at Doc’s clinic one of the few times she’s ever been hurt badly enough to need it and is thinking about how much the X-rays of her shattered arm look like a river delta.  She is holding the sun between her hands and feeling like God.

Ā̶̜̬̼̄̚̚r̵͉͓͗͒̉͝t̶̖̞́̍̆!̷̲̦̱̩̆̐͌͗

“Yes.  Destruction, too, is an art.”

She is destruction.  She a hunter.  She is a beast.

She is gasping and trying  to open her eyes.  She is finding them already wide and staring.  She is afraid to look down at her hands.

She is something other than that.  She is something more than that.  She is something greater than that.

She is protection.  She is an avenger.  She is a shield.

She is still just violence.  She is a danger.  She is a threat.

She is unwanted.  She is an outsider.  She is a disowned child.

She is scared.  She is hypocritical.  She is…

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

“E.”

She has never been only one thing.  She is what the world shaped her into.  She is what she chose for herself.

She is walking back home practicing the name sign Dylan came up with for her.  She is in the library reading a book on Greek gods and reclaiming a teacher’s laziness.  She is driving back and forth across the country, trying out a new name with the same initial at every stop.

She is in her parents’ kitchen, loving the rhythm of the name they gave her every time they ask her to pass the dishes or how her day went and the way that rhythm changes when the language shifts.  She is teaching that name to Lacuna.  She is sheepishly asking her best friend not to use that name afterall, but holding back tears over the fact that her friend took the time to master the pronunciation.

Ā̸̧̙̔r̷̭̤̤̊̀̽t̶̳͉̓?̵̼͙̻̋̾͜

She is planting seeds in the huge backyard garden with her papa.  She is hanging a tillandsia air plant in the sleeper cab of her truck.  She is watering the tiny balcony garden of her apartment.

She is working with her mama in her garage to repair the engine on the family car.  She is performing emergency roadside maintenance on her truck near a corn field.  She is renovating a barely-drivable van older than she is into something as new as the stage of life she just entered is.

She is watching a movie in the theater with her parents, eyes wide and hands full of popcorn.  She is crying in a motel a month after leaving home because that movie just came on the television when she was flipping channels.  She is lounging on the couch with Lacuna for movie night, excitedly explaining everything about that movie and the underappreciated nuances of the genre.

Ā̶̜̬̼̄̚̚r̵͉͓͗͒̉͝t̶̖̞́̍̆!̷̲̦̱̩̆̐͌͗

She is listening to her favorite song on the radio while driving down the highway.  She is singing her favorite song on karaoke night at 121813.  She is laughing as Gretchen unpacks a record player and puts on her favorite song for the two of them to unpack boxes to in their new apartment.

She is learning the four different languages her parents learned from their parents, still unaware that they aren’t all one.  She is learning ASL alongside Dylan, growing up together with something that feels all their own.  She is learning German from Gretchen, teaching her a few things in exchange and talking about how they’ll travel the world together someday.

She is learning to tie knots at summer camp and practicing over and over again with her eyes set on a merit badge.  She is tying a makeshift harness onto  a cool statue she found next to a dumpster to the side of her garbage truck so she can take it back home to her apartment.  She is in the bedroom with Gretchen, undressed and discussing the hypothetical logistics of trying to tie knots in industrial steel cable since she keeps accidentally breaking the ropes.

A̴̡͓͙̺͙͛̔ͅR̷̺̠̲̞͌͐̿̎̏͋T̷͇̣̹͖̐͛͘!̸̜͖̲̂͜

Eris is in a dark place that she does not recognize from any memory of her own.  The only light is a faint starshine spearing down through gaps in the canopy to create ghostly counterparts to the surrounding tree trunks.  Just at the edge of her hearing she can catch the sound of something lurking in the shadows.  For half a heartbeat, she spots a flash of gold.

Eris grins and shows what she knows is too many teeth for most people’s comfort.  Looks like that last set of memories got the desired reaction from the eldritch.

“Still hungry for more, huh?!” she shouts.  “Fine.  One last performance for the road!”

The nearest shaft of starlight becomes Eris’s spotlight as she takes the stage and steps into a ready stance with her spear.  She taps her foot in time with a remembered opening bassline from the track Gretchen always kicked off their exercises with.  She gets the rhythm down until she can almost hear it, and then starts the show.

Eris has heard of spears being called the oldest weapon.  She’s always felt it to be a dubious claim at best, when there are plenty of heavy and sharp rocks just lying around, but it’s true enough that the basic concept of “sharp pointy bit on the end of a long stick” is old indeed; old enough that just about everywhere you care to go has some variation on it.  She starts with the forms out of the illustrated Renaissance manuals that got Gretchen into the art to begin with.  She moves through the pike and lance devices, even though her own spear is too short for them.  She shifts to the staff swings, then the halberd techniques, then the peasant stick.  She works her way through the memorized Germanic style manual and moves on to the Italian.

In the dark, between the trees, a lurking presence closes in.  Eris keeps her view straight ahead.  The flashes of gold in her peripherals are enough to confirm she has her audience’s attention.

Eris skips across the globe to Filipino kali.  Stabbing their way around the world, Gretchen always liked to call the workout.  The point was never to master any given style.  Staves, pikes, lances, poleaxes, sibat, halberds, naginata, guandao, bō; it didn’t matter if the device, form, or kata was made with the types of spear the two of them happened to be practicing with in mind.  Martial arts were made for fighting people, and all that technique disappears when you’re fighting beasts.  It was about the novelty of finding new ways to move your body and learning all the ways the weapon can feel in your hands as an extension of yourself.  It was about acknowledging the human universality of finding interesting ways to swing a stick.  It was about compiling a wishlist of places to travel to one day.  

It was about an art the two of them shared.

“I know you recognize this,” Eris whispers. “Come join me.”

Eris traces her performance over Asia.  Through the Indian subcontinent and into Africa.  She crossed the ocean into the Americas.  She ventures into the Pacific, lands in Australia for a single stance, then returns to Europe where she started.  All along the way she feels the buildup of thrill for what comes after this opening act.  For what comes from having kept her eyes locked forward and back unprotected.

In the moment Eris stops moving, Gretchen comes down like lightning with all the flash and thunder that comes with it.  Eris steps forward and turns around, denying the lightning strike its perfect moment, its perfect kill.  

Gretchen is crouched low, modified boar spear impaling the ground instead of Eris.  She rips the weapon from the earth and sparks arc between the spear’s tip and bladed crossguard.  Her shadow cast by starlight and sparks is too large; it coils like a serpent and handles its weapon with too many arms.  Her face is furred, her neck is scaled, and her arms are chitinous.  She hisses and her jaw unhinges to expose her fangs.  She blinks, and she is simply Gretchen.  She blinks, and she is a beast.  She blinks, and she is something caught between.

Eris could swear that the trees and starlight are humming a reprise of the music in her head.

Gretchen lunges forward and Eris sidesteps.  She skitters sideways, as close to being on all fours as she can get while still holding her spear.  She strikes again and Eris parries.

Strike, retreat, skitter, strike, repeat.  Thus go the steps of the dance’s first movement.

A strike is parried.  A hand grabs a neck.  A body is thrown.

“Is this the best a beast can do?”  Eris calls.  “You’ll have to do better than that if you want your kill!”

Gretchen grips her spear with both hands now.  Circles more thoughtfully.  Thrusts with the full length of her weapon to maintain the safety of arm’s reach while she stays outside the light.

Circle, thrust, parry.  The dance’s next movement is a slow one, defined by distance and separation.

A thrust is dodged.  A boot drives a haft to the ground.  An icy speartip peels a scale off a neck.

“I know that’s not all you’ve got!” Eris shouts.  “You taught me better than that!”

Gretchen adjusts her grip closer.  Stands more upright.  Steps inward and swings her spear, catching Eris’s between the cross blades to see her opponent’s muscles twitch and hair stand on end until their weapons freeze together and pull apart in a shatter of ice.

Step, swing, shock, shatter.  This movement’s tempo is lively and its notes are loud as the words unsaid.

A cheek is cut.  A hand is slashed.  A fleshy palm emerges from broken chitin.

“Now that’s more like it,”  Eris growls.  “You made me bleed, now come taste it!”

Gretchen shakes her hands free of the coverings that got between her grip and her spear.  Settles into a stance meant for close-quarters footwork.  Rushes in too close to swing or parry and stabs.

Stab, redirect, cut, grapple.  The dance’s final movement is an intimate one.

Hands grab wrists.  Spearpoints rest at necks.  Eyes lock.

“There you are,” Eris breathes.  “I knew you could do it.”

Ą̸̥̥̘̪͈̗̥̬̒̿͂̐̌́̔Ắ̶̪̼̞̳̼͉̰̘͙̹̍̀͛̈́̿͘͘Ą̵̝̳͚͈̺̟̬̻̗̟̓R̵͈͍̙̘̰̽̀̚Ř̵͉̝͉͉͇̇͊̃̃́͗͝R̷̛̗̫̙̎͌͐̇̅̈̇̚͝͝T̵̜̘̻̓̈̓̋T̵̙̆͂̎́̆Ţ̵̥̗̩̲̂̆̄͊́̍̿̂̄͘͘!̴̤͓͔̫̼͙̰͚͇̀͋̉͌̀̒͝!̵̧̞̟̜̝̳̳͑̇̂̀!̴̡̨̬͍͚͉̮̈́̊͊͊͂̈́͛̈́

The two of them maintain their embrace, breathing heavily.

Gretchen attempts to move in closer still, but is stopped by the blade still at her neck.

For a moment, Eris considers letting the blade shift out of the way.  She was able to bring her back from the brink, so could it work?  Without that one thing between them, could they?  Looking out for one another, could they grow old?

Eris’s grip on her spear loosens.  Gretchen’s does the same.  Blades shift away from necks.  Distance closes.  Smoke fills the air with the smell of incense.

Eris blinks and sees Gretchen’s face anew.

That expression on her one-time partner’s face says all the reasons it could never work.  Pulled back from the brink but not yet fully lucid.  There’s still hunger there, and while it’s less bloody now, it’s still enough to draw her into an intertwined spiral if she were to let it.  She can picture it now: Overconfidence in their ability to pull one another back morphing into enabling one another to ever greater risks until they both fall at once.

Eris takes a deep breath.  Lets it out.  Lets go.  Steps back.

Maybe if they could both give up the hunt, but neither of them are that strong yet.

“Good job,” a familiar voice says from behind her.

Eris turns around and finds herself gazing into a person-shaped hole.  A suggestion of identity without truth or core.  And then it’s just Road, a smoking censer dangling from one hand and the match to the lifeline amulet dangling from the other.  A rock of stability in the middle of the chaos while the rest of the scene dissolves back into the white noise.

“Something wrong?” Road asks.

“No, just taking a minute for the incense to kick in and clear my head.  Thanks for that.”

“Of course, although you were holding up remarkably well without it.  Not many people could.  Speaking of...”

Eris turns back around, following their gaze to where Gretchen has discarded her spear in favor of curling in on herself and shaking with silent sobs.  Her words are barely coherent as Road comforts her, but Eris can make out enough to piece together a picture.  With the incense slowly clearing Eris’s own fog over the memory of what she’s been through since entering this space, not having a similar reaction is a matter of well-practiced effort, and she wasn’t the one who went through a near ego death.

Eris slings her own spear back over her shoulder, picks up Gretchen’s, and then offers her other shoulder to lean on.  The two of them follow Road back to the door to realspace in silence.  On the real side of the threshold, Eris spares one last glance back to see a swirling mass of tentacles, eyes, and tiny ancient flames.

 

*******

 

Eris leans on the outside of her van, surrounded by cursed and haunted artifacts and answering a wall of text messages and pile of voice mails through the glare of the late afternoon sun and listening to the hum of the engine.  It turned out they were in the eldritch warped space for the better part of a day and only the grace of the campus having just started its break between summer and fall semesters has saved them from some uncomfortable Masquerade-endangering questions from students and faculty that might otherwise have walked into a booby-trapped hallway and a door to nowhere.

“How’s she doing?”  Road asks.

Eris looks up from her phone.  Has she ever heard them approach?

“She’s sleeping it off,” Eris answers with a thumb cocked over her shoulder towards the back of the van.  “I’ll wake her up and get these loaded back in when we’re ready to head home.  How’s the eldritch?”

“Doing as well as it’s possible to tell with one of them,” he says.  “Communication’s always a bit tricky, but seems like no permanent harm done and no grudges held.  I had a good long talk with it about more responsible feeding habits, consent, safety, and the wide range in mortal tolerances to eldritch contact.  And I was able to talk it into helping with the cleanup in the hallway before it left, so we’re good on that front.”  She gestures toward Eris’s phone.  “News from the office?”

“Yeah.  A client came in this morning, but Ashan and Lacuna handled it.  Sounds like it turned into this whole thing with some fairy lord getting involved, but it all worked out.  They’re on their way back now with a changeling and their human counterpart, so we’ll have some more followup to do there.  I figure I can get the rest of these delivered while you handle that.”

Road smiles warmly and shakes their head.  “You should get some rest too when we get back.  You deserve it after today.”

Eris tries and fails to meet Road’s eyes.  A question burns.  She struggles to voice it.

“What was all that about starlight in a dark forest?”

“Oh, caught that, did you?  I guess you could call it a code phrase of sorts between people that do a lot of travel between worlds.  It’s also a question that should only be asked by those who already know the answer.  But that’s not what you really want to ask about, is it?”

No.  It isn’t.

Eris closes her eyes.  Breathes.  Opens her eyes.  Does her best to meet Road’s eyes.

“How much did you see?”

Road nods in understanding.  “Bits and pieces.  Enough.  I did what I could to keep it from prying too deeply or to shift its focus when it looked like things were getting too private.”

“And before that?”

“I was busy trying to subdue a panicking eldritch within a warped space under its control at the time, so my focus was elsewhere.  But,” they admit, “I did feel some of it.  I felt Gretchen too.”

“Oh.  I see.  Could you… maybe not mention any of that to the others?  Some of the stuff from when I was a kid I haven’t even told Lacuna about.”

“Of course.  I’ll do my best to forget I saw any of it.”

“Thanks.”

“And if it helps, I’ve seen firsthand what it’s like when someone completely unravels and loses themself, and I don’t see that ever happening to you.  Especially not after today.”

“That… does help, actually.  Thank you.”

It helps more than it should.

“You’re welcome.  You want to wake Gretchen while I get these boxes?”

“Sure thing,” Eris says, moving towards the van’s sliding door.  “Oh, but one more thing?”

“Yes.”

“I know you meant well, calling out to me when I was on the edge back there, but E isn’t a name for you to call me.”

 

*******

 

Gently as she can, Eris closes the door to Gretchen’s room and heads back downstairs.  She steps lightly over the one board she knows creaks so as not to wake the changeling and their brother sleeping in the other two guest rooms of the bed and breakfast above the office.  The thought crosses her mind that the creaky board might have been a security feature left in on purpose with all of Sullivan’s renovations on the building, but she doesn’t follow it.  She’s too tired and it doesn’t matter.

Lacuna is waiting for her by the reception desk.

“Hey.”

“Yo.”

“So, uh, didn’t get the chance to talk, really.  Since we all got back.  What with the clients and all.”

“I guess not.”

“So…  Are you… Okay?”

Blood between her teeth.  Hunting.  Names forgotten.  Burning.  Hunger.  A heavy, wet, crunching sound repeating over and over.

“Been better.  You?”

“Tired.  But what else is new?”

Eris nods.  What else indeed?  “The others head out already?”

“Yeah.  Bridgewood Manor.  Road mentioned Sullivan might be back soon.”

“I should probably be there for that.”  Eris leans on the reception desk.  She’s so tired.

“I’m sure they’ll fill us in.”

“Probably.”

Lacuna Looks over at the living room.  “We’ve got a couch.”

“Huh?”  So tired.

“If we’ve got guests, we probably shouldn't leave the office unattended.  So reason to stay here.  But all the beds are taken.  So couch.”

Eris pushes off the reception desk, staggers over, and throws her arms around her best friend.  She feels Lacuna stagger under her limp weight.  She feels a shaking hand stroke across her back.  She feels a chin rest in the curve between her shoulder and neck.

“Sis?”

“Yeah, E?”

“Do you think,” Eris’s voice cracks, “we could do movie night early this week?”

 

*******

 

“This one?”

“This one.”

“You realize it’s your turn to choose the movie, right?”

“I know.  And.  I chose this one.”

“...”

“...”

“I’m surprised this one was even on the shelf here.”

“I figured it’d be good to get a copy to leave here.  Just in case.”

“...”

“...”

“Sis?”

“Yeah, E?”

“Just this once, do you think you could say my other name?”