The White Cat had already forgotten its latest victim. People and cars had returned to their usual routes as if nothing in the world would ever be meaningful enough to stop them.

Myra looked far and wide through the moving crowds but failed to spot anything remotely familiar until her eyes caught a glimpse of something grim leaning against a fence just above her head. It signalled her to go up.

“Do you have something?” she asked, and peeked over the edge, realizing they were higher up than it appeared. She quickly regretted her decision and turned back to face the roof.

“Have you always been afraid of heights?” Ori said in an almost condescending tone, returning to pick and choose which part of the ice cream he was going to eat next, even if all of it was mint.

“Have you always been so boring?” she hissed back, wondering if she was wasting time having such conversations.

He smirked and turned the cup around. “What did they say at the firm?”

“How’d you know I was there just now?”

“I saw you leave the building,” he returned pointing to the blue banner in the distance. Much closer to them stood another with the advertisement for the clinic Alfeen broke into. The buildings were clear, the signs even more so, but to see a face so far away was not something a person could do.

“How? You can’t even see a car clearly from here?”

“You’re probably right,” he said without as much as a doubt to his own words. “Did she have any problems?”

“No, nothing of the sort I expected.”

“So it was a dead end?”

“Not if you consider the gold bars in her bedroom.”

“Interesting,” he said biting a spoonful of the ice cream.

“She had a suitcase at the ready as well, like she was afraid she would have to leave quickly and without a trace. The gold, I don’t get. She may not have wanted to bring it with her, but it was certainly not a thing you just stumble upon, or earn doing a company job.”

“What does that tell us?”

“She was afraid of something. She had a possession that may not have been obtained legally, which I’m certain is the key to all this.” She looked into the distance, where the rooftops blended in with the sky and a million people went about their lives never having to know there were such things as flesh eating curses.

“So what will you do?”

“First things first. Why did you call me up here?”

“What we’re looking for is not easy to find. I called you here to tell me what you see.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“See? What?”

“Look down and look hard.”

She hesitated at first, naturally suspicious of Ori’s intentions, only peeking over the railing, with either one of her eyes. It wasn’t that she feared the high places or what she’d find beneath them, but that awful feeling she’d get in her feet when the ledge was near. If she could not trust her own legs, how could she trust herself to do what is right if such a moment ever came?

“There’s people,” she finally said forcing both her eyes to stay on the ground. “There’s cars, there’s dogs and their masters, there’s delivery vehicles and restaurants. There’s a whole group of tourists and a line of taxis. That’s all I see.”

“What about now,” Ori said placing his hand on her forehead. It was cold and that cold seeped all the way to the back of her head until her vision became so clear she felt like she could read someone’s newspaper. Even though it lasted mere seconds, it felt like a whole hour of peering into some other world.

“Now really look,” she heard him say, but this time the voice was stretched out like time itself had slowed down.

That’s when she really began to see. At first, she though it was an illusion, her mind looking for patterns in things that weren’t real, but the face the crowd formed remained equally pronounced no matter how many people or cars it was made from.

The moment Ori removed his hand was the moment she faltered back, desperately looking at the sky to find some peace for her eyes.

“What did you see?” Ori asked as he helped her back up.

“I don’t - don’t ever do that to me again without warning,” she yelled, pointing a finger back at him.

“If I warned you, it would have been different,” Ori returned and got back to finishing the cup.

Even when she closed her eyes the image remained as an impression upon her eyelids. It moved and shifted with the movements of those who made it, and it only stopped when she looked straight at the sun with her eyes closed.

“It was terrible,” she finally said.

“Describe it to me.”

“A pale, misshaped face, like it was so many people at the same time. And it had these eyes, empty, yet staring straight at me.”

“That is what we’re after,” Ori said in the prophetic tone he kept for the best of moments.

“Pardon?”

“This place is like a magnet for things that feed on human misery. From the moment you step on it, it’s hard to tell just what kind of misfortune you would pick up because this here is a playground, and that thing you saw is its master. ”

“Wait, how long have you known about this... thing?”

“There used to be a village here. I can’t remember its name but it was not doing well. At some point, they decided to abuse magic to revive the crops, but ended up summoning this entity from another realm. Since then, it’s been a daunting challenge for every magic wielder to put it back into its prison, and many foolish people thought it was a good idea to release it back into the world. If you need a name for your culprit you can call it Lakuto.”

“So this Lakuto is the one that ate Alfeen’s organs? Is that a delicacy where it came from or…?”

“As always, you are making fun of me,” Ori sighed. “This thing survived for so long because people are feeble. It was bought and sold more times than you can imagine, and only because it’s a perfect tool for vengeance. It feeds on people’s darkest thoughts, follows them around without them ever knowing and then, at night, when they are fast asleep and safe in their homes, it comes out from the shadows. It can be days or months, but at some point, those people start feeling this impossible burning sensation inside them, like someone lit a fire in their chest. No matter what they do, they cannot stop it, so they choose to kill themselves. And the worst part is, even if they don’t, even if by some miracle they are sedated, they will still die because they are nothing but empty shells, held together by a deviant curse.”

“Wow,” Myra smiled, more surprised by the influx of Ori’s words than what he was actually talking about. “So the genie needs to go back to the bottle is what you’re saying.”

“Yes. Because someone woke it up for a reason.”

“And it has people to kill,” she snapped her fingers and looked back down. It was no longer as terrible as it was. “We need to find out why Alfeen was one of them.”

“You need to do that. I have other plans,” Ori said as he turned away from the fence and headed back down.