It began when he felt a small wrong tingling feeling at the back of his neck. Arne had lived off his instinct for years and trusted his feelings implicitly.
He surreptitiously looked around the crowded marketplace and slowly made his way into the shade under the roofed parts of the busy market. Everywhere around him in the crowded space vendors loudly proclaimed the virtues of their wares from the colourful stalls of leather goods, luxurious fabric in strong colours and patterns, perfumes and sweets. The market building here was narrow, and he stood for a while, looking at some market stalls while stealthily keeping an eye on either entrance and letting himself fully feel his surroundings.
Everything in him urged him to keep moving, to run and melt into the shadows of Arabesk’s narrow winding alleyways where he felt safe and at home. But he calmly browsed his way over to a stall selling trinkets and found a small, polished mirror. As he looked it over, he tilted it a bit to catch the ceiling, suppressing a sigh of relief to find it unadorned by anything other than mosaic tiles in bright colours.
He still felt the presence hovering on the edge of his awareness, however, though he couldn’t pinpoint it. Cursing his situation in his mind, Arne made his way slowly towards the tavern by the gate where they were going to meet. There was just a ridiculous number of variables to this, when working with people who weren’t used to precision. He needed to warn the others, but he didn’t even know they would actually have made their way to the River Bird tavern, be on time and not do something absurd that called attention to him or put him in danger in some way. Like throwing a burning potted plant at a tentacled eye-creature and leaving him to distract it…
As he walked through the crowds towards Lichgate, he could do nothing but hope. Absurd and counterintuitive reactions aside, Dia and Toog were both capable if they wanted to be and he needed either backup or human – and half-elven – shields.
When he entered the busy tavern, he was surprised to see both Toog and Dia there. Toog with …her? bag of gruesomely mundane torture implements and strange samples. Before they noticed him, he bought a flask of water and then looked at them while he waited the few moments for his water flask to be filled. He caught Dia’s gaze for a moment, hoping against hope that she could see something was wrong, and then looked away as if they were strangers before he left the tavern again. He expected to hear Dia’s running footsteps behind him but was surprised when that didn’t happen. Of course, that could be because she just didn’t care but he slowly made his way back through the crowded streets to the marketplace.
The sense of something having eyes on him from somewhere was still there, powerful as ever, and he wanted the thing to at least have to plough through a heap of random passers-by to get to him if it really wanted to.
And then he heard Dia and Toog talking behind him. Hopefully, they were aware something was wrong.
He slowly browsed through the market, buying a few trinkets as he tried to manoeuvre himself behind the others. They seemed to make their way around him, and soon they would meet in the middle.
He had a feeling the presence was still following him from a distance and felt like it was coming from one of the side streets where the market spilled down from the bazaar plaza itself.
When finally they were near each other, the look Dia sent him when he exclaimed, “Sister!” was downright murderous. And when he hugged her and whispered, “I’m being followed by something not human,” before stepping back and giving Toog a hug too, she was looking like she’d bit into a lemon with her entire face.
“I’ll move towards it. Need backup,” he whispered to Toog.
“So good to see you…” Dia said too loudly. Her voice was stilted, and she kept looking around at the people shopping and running the stalls around them, a beacon of awkwardness and deep exasperation.
“Well, I will be off again, I've just been buying some objects I needed, I still need to pick some things up in the old quarter,” he nodded in the direction where he felt whatever it was were.
“Great. Hope to catch you at the next orgy!” Toog stated loudly and waved as Arne turned and made his way towards the threat. He could flee. They were going on a journey to Rasheed anyway, they could just do that. But leaving with something trailing them into the unpopulated desert reaches between small fishing villages along the coast way? No. Better to face it here where he had resources to draw on, and human shields surrounding him.
Arne slowly made his way into the old quarter of the bazaar. He stopped at a stall and quickly haggled for a small bag of sweets. He used to steal these, as a child. Small, honeyed rolls of flavourful, ground-up nuts rolled in powdered pollentree bark. As a potential last meal, it wasn’t bad. He chewed one of the sweets carefully, enjoying the taste while he walked, all senses on alert.
The market stalls lined the old, narrow street off the main bazaar plaza. The houses here were old and leaned towards each other, blocking the sun’s harsh rays. It was still busy here but considerably quieter than the plaza since there were room for fewer people in the street that was made even narrower by the stalls. Everywhere he looked, normal and calm Arabesk life happened around him. People haggled, chatted, argued, went back and forth on their errands. None seemed to notice anything amiss, although to him it shone through like a knife cutting reality asunder so he could almost but, not quite, glimpse things on the other side.
Arne stopped calmly at a stall and stood examining a dagger from the lineup of goods while feeling the world around him.
And then it happened.
A strange skittering, as though reality had been strangely displaced, behind a stall further down the street in the direction he had just come from. Instinctually, he turned his head slightly. A shimmering sat enveloping the façade of a house, stretching up to the third floor, long feelers blossoming off around windows and the shadowy doorway. It seemed to him like a staggeringly sized version of a small octopus, camouflaging itself in the sandy bed of Arabesk’s harbour.
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The enormous thing sat there, enveloping a house, long tentacles slowly pulsing, reaching, and the main bulk of the being resting like a malformed, disgusting tumour up along the house’s face, weaving obscenely in between the narrow openings of the windows.
Arne’s heartbeat picked up. The creature was enormous. Even bigger than the thing he had narrowly fled at the Family’s house. And in such close quarters, he did not stand a chance. He was vaguely aware that the stallholder was looking at him funny and that any pretence of not actually being aware of the creature had bled away with the horror of fully seeing it, or rather… he had been seeing it. All the time. He had seen it move across houses, high up in view of everyone. It had been there on the façade of the bazaar’s main, domed building, it had followed him, sending shockwaves of unease through him while he looked right at it, feeling it, dismissing the feeling, and not seeing it at the same time. Somehow it occupied some sort of blind angle in his mind, in reality, robbing him of actually being able to grasp its presence.
And then the creature moved.
As if it somehow knew he had seen it, a long shimmering and ever-camouflaging tentacle dislodged silently from the façade of the house and tore towards him in the narrow alley. The world stood still for a second, all Arne’s senses quickened; all the world holding its breath in the shower of splinters and spatter of red, human debris from the first stall with the merchant and customers it had swept through on its way towards him.
Time returned, though the world still registered as completely silent to his mind while splinters from thick wooden beams and debris from the façade opposite filled the air. Reacting on instinct, Arne let himself fall to the dusty street, making as small of a target of himself as he possibly could.
A split second later, a woosh of movement brushed past him leaving a trace of burning agony across his chest; hot, salty blood from the stallholder who had been too stunned by the sudden raw violence in the street to move, showered Arne, and he frantically got to his feet, knowing he would be running with a panicked crowd in a few seconds and that the tentacle that had filled the air with dust and screams and creaking of unsteady timber frames a second ago was swinging back and there were numerous more where it came from.
A blood-dotted thing moved behind him again, and Arne felt the struggle in his mind as his brain fought to not see the object, huge, debris-spattered and coming right at him, sweeping along the ground to make escape impossible.
And then someone ran into him. From the front. Running towards the monster.
Dia’s smile was a flash of deep, gleeful madness, and Arne felt more than heard how panicked voices around him were being silenced as the mage in front of him raised her arms with a sweet, insane giggle.
Arne had not prayed since he and his best friend had begun praying to the flayed monkey, they had found in a garbage heap as children, shortly after he had escaped his former home. It had never helped them, but it gave them a name to gather around. He considered asking a goddess or god for help in the madness of the split second before the tentacle would hit, as he threw his arms around Dia’s slim form in front of him, ducking his head and pressing in against her.
But there wasn’t time for prayer.
o-0-o
The world was silent and dark.
Arne knew his eyes were open but that made no difference. Breathing was impossible and suddenly his body’s frantic attempts to fix that problem propelled him into movement. It sparked a screaming tone in his ears and coughing and heaving for breath in his chest, the darkness of his vision was replaced with dancing green dots of light before he struggled to his knees and managed to get a sense of his body again as his vision and hearing slowly returned. There was still a screaming sound all around him, but it came from people milling around in the white dust in the air. White ghostly figures moved in staggering motion near him, and he saw they were streaked with blood.
He took a few shambling steps, fighting to get his body under control in the rubble. Buildings had collapsed. Buildings. He had been covered by a stall that had somehow tilted over him, the cloth of the backdrop heavy when he got up. The timber frame and sundried clay bricks of the surrounding houses had come crashing down like a hideous crater.
Arne spat and tasted blood in his mouth and as he moved, felt his body wake up in agony. He was walking, so probably nothing was broken, but he wasn’t sure.
He desperately wanted to flee. To just join the screaming people and flee from the destruction. But as blood dripped into his eyes and tickled his nose and lips, he knew he had to find Dia’s damned corpse! Dia’s. Damned. Corpse.
Because The Vampire!
The thought put a fire of anger into his pained joints and flesh.
Dia had been right there. This was not the creature’s fault. This was all Dia.
He pushed people emerging from the rubble aside, fighting his way over the dust covered destruction back to where he came from. A slim figure appeared next to him in the still settling dust clouds and screaming confusion. Several people jostled him trying to get away, running, staggering, or crawling. Toog looked fresh and unharmed next to him.
“Seems we should be going the other way?” Toog suggested.
“Dia. She did this. We need the corpse. And then…” he didn’t even know how to finish the sentence. Take her to the queen? Timing was not too good on this. If anyone had seen her and made it out alive…
He climbed over rubble and realised as the dust settled that it was in fact a crater around a point in the middle of the street. Dia was lying there under the same stall debris he had been lying under, looking curiously unharmed, if a bit dusty.
Both Arne and Toog stopped and looked at her. “Shit…” Arne whispered. “Brute force wasn’t an exaggeration.”
They looked at each other.
“I’ll haul her back. Get a box or crate we can stick her in, meet me at the edge of the market. We have to get out of here before anything is tied to us.”
Toog just nodded and quickly turned and ran, surefooted and nimble down the broken street.
“Gods fucking damn it…” Arne swore under his breath, wiped the warm blood from his eyes and patted Dia’s cheek to see if she would come around on her own. No such luck. He gritted his teeth and grabbed her by the arm to haul her over his shoulder. He made his way back to the marketplace and saw that several of the city guard and soldiers from other private scholar aristocrats’ forces had begun to show up and boss people around.
Impressive response time. Had this happened in the cheap end of the city, nobody would have batted an eyelid. A guardsman with an insignia Arne couldn’t be bothered deciphering stood nearby, looking at him.
“There might be more survivors!” Arne said loudly. “Hurry!” several of the guards hurried off and Arne quickened his pace as much as his battered body and the situation allowed.
He didn’t feel like anything was watching him, but he was also rather certain a half invisible thing that occupied the blind spot in his vision could be dancing around naked in front of him and wiggle its tentacles and eyeballs at him suggestively and he wouldn’t sense a thing. His vision still wasn’t really clear and there was still a faint ringing in his ears and woolly feeling in his brain.
If it was going to get him before he got Dia boxed and found a lift out of the city, it was Toog’s damned problem!