NOVEL NEXT Chapter 8: Shadow Widow Parking Lot Wrestling Federation
"Look," I said, following him into the pub's car park, "my plate's pretty full right now. I've got my own little revenge Quest thing on the boil. And even if I hadn't, I've got to figure out how to get back to Bayteran. I'm working on the assumption time isn't passing, so it's not urgent urgent, but still. Obligations. Deadlines. Villages to help. Friends who might be dying. Also, and I mean this with all love, I reckon I'm a little past the stage in my life where I accept quests from strange men in pubs."
The old man gave no sign whatsoever that he'd heard me.
"I'm serious, mate," I called after him. "I've got trauma pencilled in till at least Thursday. My dance card is full, and every partner's got claws."
Which was when my minimap screamed, which was new, and a jagged red slash ripped across it like someone'd keyed my skull. And then something in my shadow moved, crashing out of my shape on the tarmac, all spindly limbs, and slick with something that glistened, and too many joints that were bending the wrong way.
And it leapt straight at me.
There was no time for any cool reactions. No witty one-liners. Just a meaty thud in the centre of my chest like God had drop-kicked me, and then the sky was spinning sideways. My spine met concrete, and whatever it was started biting me. Fangs drove into my chest like I was the only thing on the menu. They went through my hastily reequipped armour—through it!— and then a chemical burn lit me up from the inside out. Appalling heat. And plenty of agony.
[WARNING: SHADOW-ALIGNED TOXIN DETECTED]
[TRIGGERING: SHADOW MARKED – Lvl 3 | Venom nullified | Effect suppressed]
That certainly did the job, in that my veins stopped melting. Sort of. The creature chowing down on me hissed in surprise, which wasn't a sound, exactly. More like a subtraction of silence.
I tried to swipe it off me, and it bit my arm. More venom. More pain. Then my palm caught one of its limbs, and [Closed Circle] came alive, instinct and muscle memory took over, and I twisted and heaved, dragging the thing into a clinch as if that was a remotely sane idea. It thrashed with more limbs than anything above sea level should have, but I got my knees up and drove them into what I hoped might be its abdomen.
Its skin… or carapace… or shadowy murder-exosuit was wet and cold, like it had just emerged from a butcher's freezer. Its fangs darted out at me again, but I turned with the bite.
[SIDESTEP – SUCCESSFUL]
[DEFLECTIVE INSTINCT – Glancing Blow | Minimal Damage Received]
My HUD flickered red. Then purple. Then back to red. It appeared the System was pretty confused about what was happening. It wasn't the only one.
"Get. Off!" I roared, driving my fist up into the thing's underside over and over again. My gauntlet battered into something which gave a satisfying crunch, and Aggro Magnetism triggered.
[RAGE DEBUFF – APPLIED]
[+5% THREAT GENERATED | -28% ENDURANCE, -15% STAMINA REGEN TO TARGET]
Which made my attacker go absolutely mental. Sure, there were benefits to the debuff, but right now, as it savaged me even more, I wasn't sure I could remember them. It was time to change it up. I activated [Crash Tackle] from my prone position, gritting my teeth against the pain of the repeated bites. Just because the poison wasn't working didn't mean it wasn't tearing chunks out of me.
[CRASH TACKLE – TRIGGERED]
[Damage Dealt: 74 | Stun Duration: 5s | Momentum Break: Toppled]
Whatever this thing was was finally jettisoned off me, and went sprawling across the car park gravel in a squeal of chitin. I struggled to my feet before it could come back at me, swinging the Morningstar from my hip with everything I had.
[WEIGHTED ARGUMENT – ACTIVE]
The immense impact folded the thing in half. If it had lungs, I was pretty sure they popped. It scrabbled, legs and feelers jerking in every direction. I wound up and released another strike.
[ANVIL ECHO – TRIGGERED | Minor Stagger Applied to All Melee Attackers in 3m]
The old man was shouting something behind me. But it didn't matter. I had a bug to stomp.
I slammed the weapon down again, and again, until the thing dissolved, leaking smoke and static as it unstitched itself from reality.
My chest heaved. The shadow smoked, and my armour scraped and steamed where a bunch of bites had landed. Considering how quick the interaction had been, I was surprised to see that my Health was sitting at just below 40%. It was climbing now, thanks to [Stubborn Constitution], however, my nerves were busy hosting a rave for every moment of damage I'd ever collected.
The old man stared at the smear the thing had left behind. "Well," he said. "Suppose that answers whether or not you're going to be worth the trouble."
I wiped a string of black ooze off my vambrace. "You were expecting that to happen?"
"Let's say, I wasn't surprised."
"You could've warned me."
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"I could've. Didn't."
"You really need to work on your recruitment pitches."
"Welcome to the Hunt, Warden."
***
So. The Hunt.
The old man, whose name it turned out was Roderick, had quite a lot to say about it. His voice had a tone to it that made me want to believe him. Not because it was warm or wise or particularly authoritative, but because it sounded like it had been sharpened by disappointment and soaked in whisky for thirty years, then asked politely to be reasonable. Truth be told, he reminded me more than a little of Griff.
We sat outside the pub on a picnic bench ringed with old cigarette burns and enough carved-in graffiti to suggest several generations had already solved the mysteries of life, the universe, and 1980s genital anatomy.
He poured me a cup of tea from a flask shaped like a WW2 shell casing and offered me some. I said no. He told me not to be a wet-wipe and to get some down me. So I did.
"The Hunt," Roderick said again, slower this time. "It ain't something anyone on Earth invented. It's older than us, most think it's older than the System itself. Far as we can figure it, every realm's got a version of one. Anywhere that the Veil's worn thin, or there's more stress fracture in the weave, or soul-rot in the stone, or too many folk wishing for the wrong thing at the same time… Well, that's where it seems that these things find a way through. Those of us in the Hunt have to squash them before they bed in."
"Your job's to combat Shadow bleed?" I asked, thinking back to my encounter with a massive Ogrin back on Bayteran.
He nodded. "You can call it what you want. Bleed. Breakage. Echo-spill. The names shift depending on where you're standing and how many friends you've lost. But it all amounts to the same thing. Every now and then, something comes through to our world that never should've. Something that doesn't belong. Something hungry. "And when it does," he went on, "someone's got to put it down. Quick. Quiet. And before it leaves a door open behind it. That's where we come in."
He tapped his temple, knuckles knocking bone. "Because once the Shadow establish a nest? Once they catch the scent of a world, learn the shape of its dreams and boundaries? Well, once they recognise it—really recognise it - they don't stop coming. Not ever. Not until there's nothing left."
"You're telling me monsters on Earth are real?" I asked. "That Shadow creatures have been popping out around here for centuries and no one really noticed?"
"Oh, people noticed," he said. "They just didn't have the vocabulary to properly describe it. So they gave it poetry instead. The Barghest. The Red Cap. Jenny Greenteeth. Black Shuck with his flaming eyes. The Mare that sits on your chest while you dream and makes you feel like you're drowning in syrup. The Hand of Glory that opens any lock. The crooked thing that lives under the bridge and asks riddles it already knows the answer to. We didn't ignore the Shadow, lad. We storied it. We whispered it to our kids, carved warnings into stone and the church door. We wrapped it in salt and iron, and rosemary. Said a prayer, turned our coats inside out and hung a horseshoe over the lintel. That wasn't superstition. That was triage. That was folk medicine for a bleeding world. Patchwork. Stopgaps. Just enough to hold until someone like Margaret showed up."
"Aunt Margaret?"
"Way I hear it, she was the best Guardian the Threshold ever had," he said without hesitation. "She didn't just keep the worst of the Shadows from Earth, she understood the Veil like she could feel the pressure in the air before something pushed through. She taught most of us what little we know. But when she died… well. Imagine a dam cracking. At first, it's just a trickle. But it got worse. And faster."
I thought of the thing that had pulled itself out of my shadow, all needle-limbs and chewed angles. The … the Glitch Widow. "So, it's open season now?"
"Not quite," Roderick said. "But it's getting close. We've noticed that the cracks are spreading and pressure seems to be building. We've been doing our best but... well, none of us are Margaret."
"How bad is it?"
"Bad. First, it was the little ones. Minor Shadows. Wisps. Stuff you can swat with a good pair of boots and a half-remembered nursery rhyme. But in the last few weeks, we've started losing them."
"Them?"
"Anchors, I mean. Old places. The quiet places. Graveyards no one visits anymore. Stone circles wrapped in weeds. Crossroads where three parishes meet, but no one remembers which belongs to whom. They hadn't been properly warded in years, but they still should have had enough power not to fall to the Shadow."
"And, what, now they're gone?"
He nodded. "As far as we can tell, they've become Unmoored. Like their names got erased from the map. First, the place forgets itself. Then the world forgets the place. Then the Shadows move in."
I thought about what Aunt M had said about me needing to return to Earth to make sure my memory stayed intact. It sounded like the same sort of thing happened to realms, too.
"And then, yesterday," Roderick's gaze slid sideways. "We lost a whole tether point in Wales. Which was when I was told to get my backside to Halfway Hold and see if Aunt M's nephew had the chops to step up."
There was a lot to unpack there.
"How do you mean, you lost a tether point?"
"One moment it was there. The next, it was gone. Just… gone. Like the land had a stroke. One minute, there were people living there, walking dogs, fixing boilers, having arguments about bins. Next minute, the System glitched and the Hunt dispatch got a red flare. By the time anyone arrived, there was nothing left but a name in a parish record and a lot of static. A Shadow breach took root. Which means something fed long enough to leave an afterimage that blotted out reality. Which means unless a Warden steps up, we're going to be struggling."
"Meaning me, specifically?"
"From how Margaret explained it to us before she… fell, you're her backup plan. And from the way you handled that Shadow, she might not be wrong. Sure, you're no Guardian yet, but as a Warden, you're basically radioactive. Every Shadow-entity, every echo-thing, every mad whisper leaking in from the other side, they'll be feeling you. Like a ripple in the ink. And none of them will like what they feel."
"Great. So, what, the Hunt wants to use me as bait?"
"Bait. Keystone. Firewall. Depends on how you want to look at it," Roderick said. "But the point is, the Shadow bleed on Earth is worsening."
I stared at a hedgerow, thinking about the line Aunt M had left me with. About forgetting things. About how fragile the mind might be if the Threshold frayed too far. "She said I needed to pace myself. That if I didn't, I'd start losing things. Names. Faces. Scent of rain."
"She was right," he said. "Shadow exposure's a bit like radiation. Slow at first. Harmless, maybe. But keep soaking in it, and something changes. Not always something you notice."
"And the Hunt?"
"We track flare points. We triangulate exposure. We've got Watchers, Agents, a few Outriders like me. We move quiet. Burn what can't be saved. Patch what can. And we try to stop the realm from noticing."
"So what now?"
"Now we figure out if you're what she thought you were."
"Brilliant. And what if I'm not?"
He stood up, stretched his back, and dusted off his jacket. "Then we're all very, very screwed."