Kaia the Argent Wing

We managed to set out for the library in relatively short order, which was good because we had no idea what would happen. The only intel we had on the library was that the interior was uncharacteristically dark, almost murky even. It wasn’t the same as the Primary School had been, however, but since then the Captain had issued a very prudent edict that nobody was to go into sketchy looking buildings without a proper team behind them.

Hence why I had such a team, and why we were all carrying rucksacks with various survival supplies inside. The food would be a little… monotonous, unfortunately. We’d finally run out of looted pre-storm food, and now we were subsisting off whatever edible plants could be grown from Chloe’s small garden, and monster meat. In our backpacks we had several days’ worth of the stuff. Specifically, we had smoked scorpion meat and for variety, a little squi— no, they weren’t really squirrels anymore—especially since I wasn’t the only person who’d seen actual squirrels running around, now. The little chameleon critters were growing bolder as the unnatural winter forced them to search farther afield for food.

Maybe I should yoink a page from April’s book and give the monster squirrels a new portmanteau name. Hmmm… what about… Squerals. Because they were squirrels, but feral. No, Ferulles? Furrels? I’d run the idea past April later.

Either way, the smoked meat was the only ration we had, because it was basically the only ration that Edgewood had. Thank the goddess for late-middle aged men and their hobbies, because we had one of them to thank for the smoking knowhow too.

“It blows my mind,” Scott said as he trudged through the snow beside me.

Blinking away my wandering thoughts, I tilted my head in question.

“How much bigger the suburb feels since the Storm,” he explained, gesturing to the Christmas-themed hellscape that was our life now. “Now that we have to walk everywhere, and do it all cautiously-like.”

I snorted and nodded agreement. “Dude, I know it. That first day… it took me all day just to clear like, six blocks.”

“Oh yeah?” He said, giving me an impressed glance. “Where'd you start?”

“Home,” I said instantly, only to catch myself and continue, “It… Uh, it's a ways from here, almost out of, you know… Edgewood.”

One singular eyebrow rose, creasing his forehead, and he nodded thoughtfully. “Damn, if I didn't know you were a literal angel, I'd reckon you were being mad sus. That was not very convincing.”

“She's always sus,” Chloe complained, suddenly reminding me that she was on my other side. “Can't string a sentence together to save her life if she's trying to keep a secret. It's all, um, and, ah, and whatever.”

I bit my tongue. I bit my damn tongue with all of my willpower.

“Oh, our guardian angel is keeping secrets, huh?” Scott asked with a laugh.

Chloe kicked at a drift of snow, only to scowl and regret it as snow went into her boot. “Oh yeah, for real.”

“I'm right here, you know,” I pouted, folding my arms sternly. Evidently, neither Scott nor Chloe were buying my scowl, because the former just laughed, while the latter rolled her eyes.

“You just reminded me so much of one of my friends,” Scott chuckled.

“Kaia?” Chloe asked, and fuck but I almost answered to the name.

Thankfully, Scott spoke just before I could give the game away. Goddess, I was really riding the knife’s edge right now. If I was going to keep this secret, I needed to get way better at it.

“Yeah, actually,” Scott nodded. “They have similar—” he trailed off and just… stared at me. “—Vibes.”

Oh god. Oh shit. Oh no! Mayday, mayday! All hands to panic stations, this is not a drill!

In that moment, I fully scoped out all my exits, trying to figure out if I could leap a fence to the right, or maybe I could just book it—

Scott’s hand punched lightly at my shoulder and he laughed. “Man, now I want to see you and Kaia meet.”

I was stunned. Did… did I just dodge a bullet without even realising it? The look he'd given me… I was sure he'd figured it out, but apparently not.

Chloe, who was oblivious to the whole unspoken subtext of the interaction—thank fuck—nodded emphatically. “Yes! I think they would get along really well. Plus, Kaia is really into her tinkering, and Silver needs all sorts of gear. As an added bonus, we wouldn't have to be quite so worried whenever she rushes off into the snow alone.”

I must’ve had an outraged expression on my face, because she scowled at me. “What? It’s fucking true, Silver.”

I looked to Scott for backup, but he just held his hands in the air. “Hey, I don’t know you well enough to have an opinion on that.”

Rather than deal with being ganged up on, and because I was feeling anxious, I stomped ahead a couple metres where I could be alone. We arrived at the library soon after, and stopped to take stock of the situation.

“That…” I said, gesturing to the unnaturally dark interior, “Is definitely a dungeon.”

The Edgewood library wasn't a large building in the grand scheme of things. If I had to guess, it was generously as large as a tennis court. The outside appeared to be the same as it’d been before the storm, with its wacky 1960’s style concrete facade and circular windows. As soon as you tried to look past its ageing automatic glass doors, however, there was nothing but darkness.

I turned to look at Quinton. “What do you think? Do we go in?”

He exhaled a long, weary breath before he shrugged. “Fucked if I know. Could be anything inside, but by the time we know enough to make a go no-go decision, we'll be locked in.”

“I think we can do it,” Mel said with determination. “Just gotta be slow and methodical. I reckon there'll be a sort of theme, too. The other dungeon was a play on the idea that old grimm-style fairies would steal and eat children, yeah? So, we just gotta keep our eyes out for a theme.”

“I'd like to make a suggestion,” Ben said, raising his staff. A light shone from it to impact the darkness of the library like a car hitting a block of concrete. He cleared his throat nervously and shone his staff this way and that. “How about we don't make noise when we first go in, yeah?”

“Why?” I asked, then snapped my fingers. “Because it's a library, and you're meant to be quiet in a library. There might be some sort of magic along those lines now.”

“Good idea,” our moustached leader agreed. “Okay, I'll give us another minute to prepare, then we head inside. Sound good?”

We came through all together, after having pried open the nonfunctional doors and I recognised the moment I crossed the threshold that this was, in fact, a dungeon. Something about the air and the vibe of it, it screamed otherness.

If that weren't enough… well, let's just say the interior of the library had expanded. The faded and garishly patterned carpet was familiar, as were the brutalist concrete walls, and the ragged old bookshelves. Now, though, they extended out and beyond sight in every direction with a seeming lack of reason. It was like someone had shoved the library into a generative AI with the prompt ‘make this bigger’.

We were silent as we took stock of our new surroundings. Nothing moved, not even a breeze, and all was sickeningly, deathly silent.

It felt like every movement we made sent the sounds of clothing rustling cascading out into the massive space, where it was devoured by the dark. The whole place was profoundly unsettling.

Then, a high screeching, scraping sound pierced the dusty stillness. It was quickly followed by a second, and then a third, until there was a chorus of awful noises that grated on the eardrums.

“...And there it is,” I sighed, breaking the silence. “The other shoe.”

“At least we have a lot of options for books?” Mel giggled nervously.

A shadow moved in the darkness, and I raised my shield, awkwardly blocking— nothing. No blow came. Curious and confused, I lowered it again and peered into the darkness. There was definitely something there.

Ben was the one to shine a light on the situation. Literally. His staff lit up like an LED lantern, and suddenly everything was bathed in a cool white light.

“Aw, fuck,” Chloe swore, and I had to say I agreed.

Dragging itself towards us with mindless purpose was an old, faded magazine. Normally, print media is fairly inert, but this one had grown three arms from its open pages. Each limb was constructed of dust and random library detritus. There was a membership card in there for sure, and I think I saw torn up late fees? It was hard to tell, except for a hint of a red ink stamp.

“There's more,” Scott said, sounding the most serious I'd ever heard him be.

He wasn't wrong. More and more of these things were crawling out from under and between the haphazard bookshelves. Not all of them were magazines either, or even books. Some were VHS tapes, with the magnetic tape torn out and trailing behind like forgotten guts on a zombie.

“Is that a damn microfilm reader?” Quinton asked incredulously, pointing with his axe.

I had no idea what a microfilm was, but it was definitely a machine of some kind. It had off-white metal panelling and black plastic trim, all of which had burst at the seams to emit a truly gut-churning number of dusty limbs.

Quinton’s axe wavered and his eyes bulged. “I think I had a nightmare like this back when I was in high school. I had a research paper to do and— it's not important. Silver, if you could hit them with your taunt?”

Oh. Perfect. Time to make all the hideous 80’s and 90’s dust monsters target me. This was going to be so much fun.