On a dark night, in a light polluted city, on the top floor of a high-rise building, in a darkly lit corner office, behind a large, wooden "I'm obviously the boss" desk, was a man. Medium build. Medium height. Medium hair color— that brown that’s not blonde but not dark. If you were asked to describe this man, you’d use the word ‘average’ a lot. Also, you’d have a hard time picking out any one thing that made him not generic.
This man was not happy.
His tie was loose, and other than his jacket that was hung up on a hanger and stored on the back of the door that went into his vacant secretary's office, his expensive three-piece suit was impeccable. He was laid back in his office chair, and his legs were under the desk but spread in a way that said he was in charge of the whole room. His eyes raked over a paper spreadsheet and one finger rested lightly on the final row at the bottom of the page, while the person sitting in the visitor's chair sweat and stammered.
"The foot soldiers of the Whites haven't said anything about shit. And you know those guys. They can't keep their mouths shut. If they had heard of anything, they would have blabbed about it already. The Montblancs are still tied to us by treaty so it would be suicidal for them to tank our stock now. The Freskans and Cuppells are all silent. The Ellsons were all wiped out during the last challenge. It's nothing coming from outside. I'm tellin' ya, boss. It's too clean. It had to be an inside job."
The sweating man was trying to save his own skin by stating the obvious so early and adamantly. His knuckles were white and clenched. He was doing his best to look as honest as possible. Open arms, open legs, relaxed posture. But those fists told the story of the stress this little man was feeling.
It was expected of the lower-status henchmen to do their best to make sure the wind did not blow in their direction; if it did, it was expected for the wind to be redirected to upper management, lower management, middle management -- anyone but the henching cog sitting in front of this desk.
The Boss said nothing, but directed the henchman to leave by jerking his generic chin to the door. Of course, cog-boy didn't do what was being investigated--- that peon had barely enough smarts to do basic math.
This was expert.
It was clean, it was efficient, it was a thing of beauty. The theft itself was a blunt and brutal thing, but the laundering-- it bounced through fifteen accounts that could be tracked, crossed borders that usually did not monitor such things, divided and recombined several times, changed countries and converted currencies a dozen times, and then seemingly disappeared.
Vanished.
An entire quarter's worth of revenue, gone.
Boss knew that he did not have anyone on payroll currently that could have pulled this off. Maybe the Ellson heir could have, that smarmy little bastard, if handed total access, unlimited resources, and a few years to plan, but Boss had slit that snot-nosed brat's throat with his own knife six months ago; it was the starting shot that had culminated into a months-long bloody turf war, one that had Boss and his men coming out on top and absorbing the Ellson's lives and assets.
The theft was ballsy. It was meticulously done. It would have been a rallying cry to all allies to forge a bloody war, but no one had claimed responsibility. It would have been a coup de grace that would have smashed the company, had they not been on a war footing since the last challenge. As it was, the Boss would have to do palm greasing and make some promises and woo some purses just so they could pay to maintain the image that nothing was amiss.
It was a strategic masterstroke.
And if he ever found the culprit, he'd either hire them immediately, or he'd torture and behead their entire family, down to the women and children, servants and slaves, in front of them. Maybe he'd do one and then the other.
Until then, he'd do his best to keep a facade of calm. It was only one-quarter of revenue. A few million credits. He had major plans to implement a few changes soon, but if he redirected the credits he had dedicated to that project and used them to cover this theft's losses, he might be able to take action on those new things next year.
He looked at the final readout.
Year after next. Maybe in two years.
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Aldred could remember when the world was young.
He could remember, although it was eons and ages and millennia ago, a brief time when the gods spoke to everyone.
He could still remember not having a name. He could feel the yoke of the master around his neck if he ruminated on it long enough, and hear the commands he could not deny. The unhinged impulses to feed and to fuck and breed and flay. If he thought too long about it, he could remember the smell of his nestmates, hear their gasps and moans cries of ecstasy and pain as they lay in their piles of skin and tears and new or drying or old blood, waiting on the master to issue orders.
The master always had orders until the day it didn't anymore. Until the day that the unkillable, powerful, unparalleled master screamed and bled all over a meadow in the sunshine, it's guts and viscera laid bare to the air, and all of Aldred's nestmates threw themselves away-- they died trying to save it.
Aldred liked what the world had become in it's old age. He felt like the world had grown old with him; he and the world were old friends who had matured together. They had both grown from violent, ravaged monsters, into civilized bastions, accepting of all different peoples and ideas. Embracing the new. Making space for the soft. Allowing the weak to survive.
Rarely did large-scale violence happen. Small-scale acts of violence happened every day... in alleyways and bedrooms, in boardrooms and drug dens. But large scale? No. That was a thing of the past.
So, why was he thinking about the day when the world of a spawn ended and the day when his new existence began?
The ants.
One night a few weeks ago, he woke up from a deep sleep to the feeling of ants crawling on his skin. Fire-filled embers burned up and down his arms and spine. The overwhelming unease he felt had only ever happened one other time to him in his long and ancient existence-- in the presence of the creature that killed his master. The creature that killed his nestmates. The creature that turned him from a spawn into what he is now. The creature that set him free with a baptism of blood.
Aldred needed to know if the creature was back. He had to warn his progeny-- he had to warn everyone. The world. He'd have to approach the Conclave in person to convey the gravitas of his plea. The past decade had been one of silence and issuing his votes through proxies, but he'd break his abstaining and silence from politics to save everyone. This was a creature too brutal for the brutal past, too deadly for the world as it was now to handle. Even in all his vast accumulated power, he was certain that he could not fight it alone, not as he was. He wasn't sure that if he somehow rallied every ancient and new Power, screamed a call to arms to every being on the planet, if they all, united, could defend against such overwhelming brutality.
But as soon as he decided to issue a worldwide warning, the feeling went away.
Curious.
And then he was notified by the bank that one of his smaller accounts got cleaned out.
“What?”
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A hushed footfall in an intentionally forgotten forest. Deep breaths through a perfect nose, like a hound trying to catch the scent of the quarry. No smells of death or blood.
A harsh gaze. A defiant eye.
His people were few in number, but they would die before being captured again. They weren’t going back. They would die free. He had shattered the portal himself three centuries ago, when the last wounded refugee, the last of his broken people, came through.
How were the alarm wards broken? Nothing can come through. I broke the gate. He made sure of it.
A wiry woman dressed in black tactical gear-- his last soldier-- rushed up to him, lowered her chin quickly in acknowledgment, and gave her report.
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“There is one set of tracks leaving Gods’ Fall Cavern. Humanoid. Small. Small size and light indentations indicate female or adolescent. Tracks lead to that network tower, where there appears to be an effigy of logs. We don’t know what it means. The tracks go to the road, and it looks like she was picked up by an ally or accomplice. Cora started to scry for anything that might have come through the gate the moment the ward was broken. She says nothing came through, even though we all felt the wards fall.”
She took a breath, braced to give the hard-eyed leader more bad news. “Also, she told me the shadows are gone. They left shortly after the ward breach. We think they left to find whatever this was that came through.”
The leader's eyes narrowed. Became flinty. They both followed the small footprints at the foot of the mountain up to the tower.
The entire climb, he could smell a forgotten lightness in the air.
He answered her obvious worry halfway up. “The shadows have been silent and compliant for the centuries we've been here. Why would they disappear now?" He asked off-handedly and rhetorically. He wasn't expecting an answer.
"Do you think they know who this could have been? Who it is? Did the shadowy bastards finally decide to betray us?" The soldier had seen war between light and dark, and he could tell she had never truly trusted the covenant of a united people. She had had brothers and sisters fall to schemes and tricks in wars long past. To daggers in the dark. To a poisoned word. She had done her best to forgive since the end of the world, but could never forget. The leader took her suspicions with a nod and dismissed them quickly.
"They would die, too, if they betrayed us to the ender beasts. There are only three shadows left. They value their blood enough to not throw away their lives. They suffered just as much as we did when the shattering happened, and know their dark blood is a favorite flavor of the Maw." He stared at the tower as soon as they approached it. Walked up to it. Ran a hand down a leg of it. He used his fingernail to lift a piece of chipped paint away, and found a long brown hair that was caught underneath, stuck in the ridged and rusted metal. "This doesn't look like the fur of a hunter beast. It looks like it came from a person." He sniffed it. "Get this to Cora and see what she can tell us of who it came off of."
"Yes sir." She gingerly and delicately clasped the fine, thin hair, between two fingers, put it in an envelope pulled from a chest pocket of her tactical gear, and ran as fast as she could to the nearest vehicle.
When he first got to Gods' Fall, he was expecting an army of ravager beasts, of hideous monsters that did not care of balance and traveled in a screaming pack of viciousness. He expected brays for blood and death. He was expecting to throw his life, and the life of his last and most dedicated soldier, away as a distraction so the last of his broken people could flee. The Shining Ones would take them into their pocket realms, even the sleepers, and possibly treat them well. They would be considered pets-- not slaves and not meat-- but pets, but alive was alive.
Now, with the shadows gone and a found hair that smelled of life and hope and balance, he wondered what was about to happen. What did this portend? Had the soul of his original world lived? Had it belatedly sent him an avatar to guide his people on this new world? Had he finally, after all these years, through enduring the death rattle of his people and gods and civilization, received help?
He would never tell his people -- less than a dozen broken souls left to embody the dichotomy of light and dark that was currently very unbalanced and askew-- that it was too late. He had to encourage them all to have hope, because a life without hope that things could get better, was a life without light. His blood, his being, the heart of who he was could not let the darkness of despair win.
But he knew he was lying to them, and he knew they were lying right back when they agreed with him. They all knew they were the last. The end of their civilization. The last remaining children of a dead world.
He held a leaf that smelled of the same life and shadow and balance that he had smelled on the hair.
He tried not to hope.
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A dingy, aged single-wide in a run-down neighborhood of a tiny town in the heartland of nowhere.
"Yeah, baby. Yeah. Right there." The single bed was creaking and cracking and squeaking. "Right there. Like that. I'm coming baby. Yes! Yes! Yes!" Sheila screamed.
A few more thrusts and Merrick exploded into her.
He leaned down, the last of the heavy breathing washing through him, and licked her pretty pink nipple. She giggled and swatted him away playfully, and pulled her pants and underwear back on before his seed leaked down her thigh. He laid on his bare back with his spent member slowly deflating, shrinking, leaning over the V of his lower abdomen. He put the crook of his elbow over his eyes and tried to bask in the afterglow.
Sheila stood up, tucked her tits back into her top, buttoned her pants, and absently said, "Clark asked me to marry him. I said yes. Me and you can't do this anymore." She gathered her mussed hair and tied it back in a low bun, and squared her shoulders--readied herself for an argument.
Damn, she could have at least waited til my dick was dry. "Okay. Yeah, I guess that's to be expected." He sighed. It hurt, but it was just one more hurt on the feast of hurt that this month was serving.
"I know that we were a good thing, but since your parents... since your expulsion from the pack, I just can't run the risk of getting disavowed too. I shouldn't even be here right now. You know my dad. He'd kill me." She nervously straightened her necklace, the necklace he bought her last summer, of a golden butterfly on a white opal daisy flower. It was supposed to be his promise to her. It was nothing, now, he guessed. A sparkly gift.
She sat down on the side of the shitty little bed and put her hand on his bare chest, over his heart. "What are you gonna do, Merrick? You can't take care of Thomas and Emma as you are. No one in the pack will hire you. The rest of your family's things that haven't been taken are about to get confiscated. Your trailer will get taken. You're too young to run your own pack. Your beast is too threatening to beta elsewhere. What are your plans?"
She hurried to add: "Don't tell me anything you don't want my dad to know. You know he'll force me to tell him if you leave. Especially if you take Thomas. Just tell me you have a plan for you three to be safe."
He sighed. "Yeah, I got something. It's a bad plan, but it'll be away from here. That's the only way to save Em and Thom, so that's what we'll do." He somberly uttered the words, and mentally closed the door on the people who, two weeks ago, he'd have called family.
"Well, you should do it before they get the idea to take your truck. I saw that piss ant Paul eyeing Emma like he wanted something, and you know he'd break her and breed her, even if she's underage and unwilling. The sharks are circling. You need to take them and go." She grabbed her keys and phone and walked toward the back door.
”Stay alive, Rick. I’ll never see you again, but stay alive. Get those kids out of here. This town is sick and it’ll kill us all one day. Until then, they're gonna do their best to kill you and steal those kids. Keep them safe.”
****
It was a long drive. It was made even longer by the three of them being crammed into a beat-up pickup, no A/C, and with what was left of the lives their parents had built for them (that didn't fit in the bed of the truck), shoved in the passenger floor. Emma, a dainty little thirteen-year-old, and her little brother Thomas, a scrawny and delicate twelve-year-old, made the best of what they were given and tried to keep Merrick awake during the endless drive.
”Everyone in that fucking town…” Thomas started but was interrupted by both Merrick and Emma.
”Fucking language.”
”Language, Budger. You don’t cuss like that, either, Emmafly.”
“They can all line up and eat my dick. So what if I’m gonna be a raven and not a wolf? So what if Emma hasn’t found her animal? Why are they such fucking lumpy dicks?!”
Merrick did his best to keep a straight face. Hearing kids go on a heated rant-- kids who had the vocabulary to make hardened brothel workers blush-- was hilarious. And wrong. So, so wrong. His ma would've whooped his ass if she heard him laughing at it. She’d probably find a way to do it beyond the grave. She was spooky like that.
”They killed Ma and Pa to get to us. Even if they kept saying we were safe, they’d have just made something up about Merri to take us away. Probably kill him too. So I agree. They can suck my dick, too.” Emma said with a nod to Thomas, then turned her hard gaze out the windshield.
”You don’t have a dick, Em.” Merrick really was trying his best. His best was just lackluster. At least the tiredness of a day-and-a-half drive wasn’t about to put him to sleep. He thought the increased potty-mouthing was their attempt to help him stay awake.
He said, ”Ma told me before the meeting that night that we could probably find some friends in the city. We’re gonna find a place to lay low for a bit while I look for work. Maybe get you two into school. I’m not gonna say it’ll all work out. I don’t know if it will. But you guys are safe for right now, and I still have my throat where it belongs. We are all together. I have a couple of hundred credits we can live on until we find a place. We are gonna try to start over. All I can ask of y’all is your best efforts. I’ll give mine, too.” Merrick turned on the wipers of his truck because small amounts of drizzle were peppering down. Like even the sky had to spit on him.
The rain made the hot highway smell like a hot highway and petrichor. It wasn’t a bad smell.
”I..” Emma started, hesitantly. Both of the boys gave her a minute to decide if she was going to talk. She wrung her hands together and bit her bottom lip. She did this sometimes. It was always when she was going to talk about something they knew would mark her as different than the rest of the pack. Sometimes she kept talking, sometimes she didn’t.
Ma and Pa did their best to let her know her gifts were okay, that they weren’t bad, but also always did their best to hide them from the town. Merrick and Thomas did their best to let Em know she was safe to talk to them about it. She still always hesitated. Especially after Ma and Pa died.
Em physically locked up and clenched her eyes. She then spoke quickly, as if trying to get what she needed to say out, or it would be strangled in her throat. ”I had a dream. About a lady. She will help us, but I don’t know how to find her yet. I’ll need to sleep again. But she will be safe. She'll hate us at first, something about a flag? It wasn’t clear. But we are going to find her and she will protect us.”
Thank fucking gods, Merrick thought. If anyone needed rescue, and if anyone was worthy of rescue, it was his siblings. If he had to call a Shining One with his blood and soul and body to cut a deal for their safety, he would have. He would have made a deal with all the devils in all the hells if he had to. One lady who hated him didn't sound too bad.
He had had no plan. He was lying to everyone this whole time. Ma didn’t say shit about the city. This was his best guess at what to do. Fuck. If Em dreamed of a way out, of safety, he was all in.
He sped up a little while driving. Now, they had hope.