CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: BELIEVE ME

Then she struck, lashing out and into her twin.

Pinching her fingers together, Briddy sleepily peeled a book page off her cheek. Her mouth felt like it was full of sand. Rubbing at the irritated skin where the paper had stuck during her brief nap, she spared a glance at its contents– a detailed anatomical figure of a six-legged, double-kneed giant– and slapped it close with a thud. A chorus of hiss and moans rose from outside the curtains drawn around her, scolding the disturbance as her roommates tried to settle in for the evening. Bridget rolled her eyes at them, as though it were her fault they had only just gotten to bed. She took the book and chucked it onto an increasingly mountainous pile at the foot of her own; it had been as useless as the rest.

No matter how much she cross-referenced against her notes and texts, or pestered the unsettling librarian twins for obscure and esoteric tomes on encounters with monsters– Bridget was coming up repeatedly empty-handed in her search. No folktale or researcher’s paper matched her recollections. Her attempts at drawing a recreation of what she had seen lurking vigilant over the ravine had fared worse, evoking the image of a clumsy set of children’s building blocks set at odd angles, and (as Asher had pointed out when she showed him) it wasn’t very threatening to look at whatsoever.

So when Bridget had stormed back into Honor house that night after her encounter in the cantina, she had blustered through the empty Common Area and into the sleeping quarters, where she was presented with the opportunity to immerse herself into something that didn’t involve having to think about Niles, Gemma, or any feelings she might have had about who they were talking to.

Within seconds, she flung her uniform onto her trunk and her focus on research, tearing into a book called Errors in the Natural Order; making it most of the way through before her eyes got heavy. Now that Briddy had awoken later, she wasn’t entirely sure how much time had passed. Peering out through her curtains, she could hear a few of the deep, sighing breaths that signalled her neighbors dreamed nearby, but creaking mattresses told her others still tossed and turned. Their heads lifted, briefly glancing her way as the parting fabric let loose a flicker of the light she had been using to read.

Briddy silently mouthed ‘sorry’, as though any of them could see her lips move in that distance, and in the darkness. She still felt the need to apologize. Trying to talk, even silently, rubbed the parched walls of her throat together, and Bridget swallowed dryly. Extinguishing her light spell, she slipped out of bed, feeling the cool stone under her bare feet. Her hair tumbled forward, carrying the hairclip with it, partially attached to a lock and completely tangled after she had slept with it in. The silver feather tip smacked point-first into her cheek as she took a step forward.

“Ow.” She hissed, trying to pull it out so she could throw it on top of her trunk, with her Shroud, for tomorrow. The hooks caught on a snarl, stubbornly refusing to release, so Briddy padded her way out into the Common Area where she could find some better light. This late at night, pale slivers of light stretched long down the hall, breaking through the large window at the end. It spilled across the floor before Bridget’s feet like a river of silver-white, broken only by the lines of the panes like rocks under the current.

Peering across the hall, Briddy squinted into the shadows of huddled, slanting shapes that suggested the mismatched furniture of the Common Area. So much for better light. She sighed and padded across the patch of moonlight and into the bathroom. A quick light spell and a few moments later, Bridget had claimed a few mouthfuls of water and was close to conquering her clip. Freeing the last few hairs still tangled in its little hooks, she brushed a thumb over the metal and went to put it in her pocket, before realizing that the simple shorts and camisole she wore lacked any.

Sliding it back into her hair for the moment, she grabbed a few more mouthfuls of water from the faucet before turning to go, avoiding eye contact with any mirror. They didn’t hold anything she wanted to look at right now. Walking back out of the bathroom, Briddy mulled over her advantages of going to bed early that night: at least she had missed Niles and Gemma returning to the house, smug with victory.

A disturbance outside prickled her senses, and Bridget paused in front of the door to the girl’s Sleeping Area. All the beds had looked full when she ducked out. Caution stiffened her spine, freezing the little hairs on her forearms. She heard it again, a scuffling thump, and then a soft yelp of pain.

Moving faster than she had thought possible, Bridget sprinted toward the front door of the house, throwing it wide.

The Houseminder looked up at her with a look of shock that quickly faded. “Oh. Good evening Bridget.”

She deflated like a balloon had been popped. “Oh.”

The older student looked down at the wriggling boy he gripped by the collar. “I’m just returning Argus here to his assigned accommodations.” He had a very put-upon air.

“You gotta believe me, man!” Little Argus squeaked, trying to wrest free. “She was making these eyes that said–”

The Houseminder stooped down, grabbing him up like a sack of potatoes. “Yeah? And mine are saying Get.In.Your.Dorm.” With each word, he lugged him further into the house. Argus flopped dramatically over his arm like a wilted flower, making the older student fight for each step. “Get the door, would you Bridget? And then to bed. It’s far past curfew for both of you.”

Silently, she complied. The Houseminder continued his toils across the Common Area, smacking into furniture on his way to shuffle up the stairs. She felt silly, getting so riled up over Argus.

“You could walk, you know.” She heard the older student hiss as he toiled up the steps.

“Ah.” Argus made a noise between a squawk and a yelp.

Bridget shook her head, wondering what would ever possess someone in their right mind to volunteer for the Houseminder position, and crossed the hall herself.

“Eh,” Argus muttered. She could hear him tussling with the Housminder on the stairs.

As soon as she grabbed the handle of the door, all of the little hairs on Briddy’s body suddenly stood on end again.

Bridget.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh…” There was a series of thuds, and Argus's protest was no longer the low grunt of obstinance, but the high keen of a whine. Briddy knew she whipped her head around to look, but it felt like her body was moving through nearly frozen ice for how slowly the next moments passed.

The smell hit first, a tang that tickled at her nostrils before her eyes could track the long, dark slip that coursed down the stairs and ended in a trembling, blood-soaked Argus. Then, their gazes met. His eyes were completely round in his big-eared face. The whites stood out against skin that was covered in dark red liquid, rolling about as they took in the state of his body, and then turned, slowly, back toward the staircase.

Bridget followed suit. Up the grey stone steps, streaked as though painted by wide, brutal brush, an unmoving mass splayed in the shadows near the second floor. She could just see the tip of the Houseminder’s ill-healed nose jutting down at them, his head laying at an angle that was so very wrong.

It couldn’t be real. Bridget took a step away from the door. As if triggered by her movement, the older student’s head jerked and disappeared upwards.

“Briddy,” Argus whimpered.

“Hush.” She hissed.

“Help.” He looked over at her, and then up at the shadows at the top of the stairs.

Bridget opened her mouth, lips trembling. “Come here.” She whispered, finally, gesturing toward the door to the dormitory.

Argus didn’t move, his big ears casting shadows in the moonlight.

“We need to move.” She breathed, the words shaking as hard as the hand she held out to him. “Come on.”

He just stared at her, his eyes so big and wide.

Atop the stairs, something stirred.

Bridget had begun to dash forward but froze in her tracks. Dully lit by grey cast-off illumination from the moonlight, a dark figure rose, six arms unfolding in triangular, faceted sections that split to become twelve separate appendages, delicately pointed and intricately joined. They pierced the stone like hot butter, affixing the creature to the top of the staircase and the ceiling with as little effort as an enormous black Gaspider hanging on its web.

Argus shook his head pleadingly, raising his hands to show they were empty.

The creature considered him, the flatter side of its featureless, diamond-shaped head pointing directly at where he sat at the foot of the stairs. Beneath, a long, convulsing sac of a body attached the geometric cranium to its many limbs, pulsing and folding in never-halting motion. Softly, the monstrosity let out a single note, like a breeze tickling through windchimes before a hurricane.

Bridget couldn’t will her body to move, everything inside ground to a halt, trying to find the force of will to understand what was going on. This couldn’t be happening. Everything she had seen said these things didn’t exist, didn’t have a name. All two hundred and twenty species of monstrosity were chronicled and well-known. This couldn’t be happening. So why was it?

Her breaths started to come quick and fast, her limbs slowly remembering what it meant to move. Not quick enough. As she tried to breathe, Argus made a break for it. With a squeak, he scampered for the front door, his feet slipping and sliding on the thick liquid beneath them. Before Bridget could lift a hand to stop the ill-advised attempt, a jet-black limb shot out from above the stairs. She could barely blink before the angled tip protruded from the other side of his leg, glittering dark where it wasn’t covered with blood. With a gasp, Argues sank to one knee, then the other.

He had only made it a few steps. A scream began to fill his mouth, but another limb, the triangular facets mutating and twisting themselves like a drill, punctured his throat before the sound could leave. Covering her mouth, Briddy staggered back, her eyes darting around, barely taking anything in. She had to get away. Front door was too far. The window was down the hall–

Thud. thud.thudthudthudthud.

She didn’t want to look back at Argus, much less the creature that loomed over them, six of its legs buried in his back. He let out a wet, coughing gasp as they hit, blood bubbling from his mouth.

Bulging and rolling, his eyes met hers. They were shot through with blood, wide with terror, and filled with final tears as he gurgled at her something accusatorily, before going limp. His body fell against the limbs dug into it, which suspended his weight like a puppeteer’s strings.

Bridget’s heart pounded in her ears. Thoughts came and went in her mind like matches lit in a monsoon. Run? Fight? Reason? Was she going to die? Sculptor, was she about to die?

Thwick. Snick. Splat.

Briddy was suddenly intensely thankful for the hand that covered her mouth. With quick, intentional precision, the chitinous, trigonous limbs of the creature had straightened like a surgeon cracking their knuckles, and begun slicing into Argus. Within seconds, it had sectioned out and skewered his liver on the tip of one arm, plucked an eyeball clean to perfectly balance on another, sectioning out pieces as though cuts at the butchers. It held the pieces of this boy in front of its overlarge expressionless head, which rotated the tip to the side as if cocking in question.

The water she had drunk earlier raced up Bridget’s throat, and she silently heaved against her stomach to keep it down. Cold contempt curdled the disgust and horror in her gut. It wasn’t consuming, or fighting to live, this thing was just…looking. Like Argus was a piece of produce at the market. Thinking of the door behind her, Bridget made her mind up. She was no prey, and neither were those within, still unaware.

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

Vex.

There was no reply, except for a steady warmth from her left hand. Looking down, she realized her sword was already there and had been for some time. She wasn’t sure for how long.

Go now. The relic urged.

Glancing between the door and the monstrosity, which had begun carefully digging into Argus’ skull, Bridget took the advice. She had just turned when she heard the chime again but didn’t stop, although her stomach sank when it sounded once more.

Whatever that meant, she was sure it probably wasn’t great. Good thing was, Briddy didn’t plan to stick around and find out. Swinging Vex behind her in a backward block, Bridget grabbed the door. She cursed as her hand sweatily slipped over the doorknob when she tried to yank it open.

A force struck her back a hundred times worse than when Niles had thrown the fireball. Bridget was crushed into the wall, the wind gone from her lungs before she hit. Lights danced in front of her eyes, and she lost Vex’s summoning from the impact instantly. She was barely aware of the jet-black limb that deflected off it, digging into the wall about four inches from her shoulder.

Gasping a breath in hard, Bridget yanked open the door and barely slammed it shut before it shuddered, the wood splintering.

“What is wrong with you?” Someone muttered nearby.

“Go to bed!” Another voice called from the other end of the dormitory.

Bridget, still sucking and gasping for air, tried to right herself. The door shuddered again.

“Get out!” She wheezed. “They’re in the dorms.” She desperately sucked at the air, trying to fill her lungs and scream, to tell them, to get them out.

“Who’s doing that?”

“Is it Warrin again?”

“My money’s on Warrin.”

“NO!’ Briddy found her voice. “ Argus is dead, you need to believe me, we have to-”

With a shuddering, screeching cacophony of splinters, the door burst inward.

A chorus of screams met it, chaos erupting as bodies flew out of beds, smacking into each other in the darkness. Magic began sparking through the air, illuminating the shape drawing itself through the doorway with long, articulated limbs.

The screams grew louder.

“Get out!” Bridget yelled. “The other door!”

She started trying to shove some of the girls toward the other end of the room, and the second door that all the Sleeping Areas had so that foot traffic didn’t get too congested. By the time she managed to get there and get it open, the fresh tang of blood graced the air once more.

Huddled shapes streamed past her, screaming and yelping as they streaked for the front door, leaping over the river of milky moonlight that was now mixed red with blood and the chunks of Argus’ viscera. Panic still sounded behind her.

“Come on!” Someone grabbed her sleeve, dragging her with them. “We have to–a teacher will know what to do.”

Briddy pulled free. “The boys! The other houses!” She shook her head. “Someone has to tell them before it’s too late.”

Her stomach sank as the thought settled in, and she sprinted up the blood-painted stairs. At the top, she skidded past the fallen Houseminder, his skin, and clothing peeled back from exposed muscle and bone like a piece of partially drawn silk over a frame of art. Bridget’s feet faltered momentarily, but she forced her head up, toward the two doors and the long windowed hall in front of her.

Without hesitation, she tried to open the door and found the wood steadfastly blocked against her. Bridget slammed it with her fist, calling out. She could hear voices within, arguing. After a moment, there was a scrape before the door opened a bit, and Niles’ face appeared in the crack.

“What’s going on?” He said, eyes glinting behind the frames. “We heard–”

“Something’s in the dorms. It attacked–”

The door shut.

“Go get a teacher.” She heard his voice on the other side.

“Niles!” Briddy kicked the door so hard it moved slightly. “It broke into ours, it’ll get into yours too!”

Voices erupted in a low rumble of chaos in response, but Bridget stopped paying attention. Far below, she had heard an echo, bouncing off the staircase and up to her ears. The chime sounding again, somewhere between a pure metallic tone, and a rush of wind. Briddy shook her head. She didn’t have time for this.

She slapped the wood. “If you want to live, you need to believe me and we need to go. People are dead!”

The door was yanked open, and the boys flooded out, Niles’ frown among them.

“It’s down there.” Bridget hissed.

“Then we fight it.” Someone muttered.

“You don’t–”

The flash of metal caught some of the moonlight off the giant window at the end of the hall, as heirs began summoning their relics.

“If Bridget fought off this thing, we’ll be fine,” Niles said dismissively.

“You’re not listening!” Bridget grabbed his spear. “What part of ‘people are dead’ is hard to understand?”

“You’re here.” He said flatly.

There were mutters of assent, and the first-years began moving for the stairs.

“No! You don’t understand!” Bridget hissed. “I didn’t fight it, I was just third in line–”

But by then, the screaming began again, and her voice was drowned out. A ripple of fear surged through the group, and Bridget found herself carried forward in a crush of bodies, battered from side to side as she tried to keep her footing and not fall. She could barely make out the forms around her and the pointy things they were holding, let alone what else was going on. The clang of weapons reverberating against a foreign tone from where they struck the creature’s appendages was undercut by the din of thumping of feet, and before Bridget could catch her bearings, everything had spilled down the stairs and out of the house.

She backed away from Honor house, gulping the free air now that the crowd had scattered. A crescent moon grinned down at them, taking in the pandemonium that unfolded on the campus below. Students limped or crawled by in the night, retreating from the chiming, partially-emerged figure whose limbs punctured, sliced, and drilled at the current target of its torments. In the lamplight, it was easier to catch the way the smaller triangular facets of its body folded and unfolded at amazing speed, changing the size and shape of appendages at a rate to match.

“We aren’t scratching it!” Claris, the fox-faced girl from Bridget’s Weapon Proficiency class slammed her shoulder back into its socket.

Someone tripped nearby, and Briddy and a dark-haired boy stooped to help them up.

“Try the-” The dark-haired heir’s voice was cut short with a wet suck. Warm mist hit her face as his head toppled one way, and his body, another. The student they had been helping took off screaming.

A series of fireballs blazed through the air, roaring vengeance down upon the intruder.

After their flames had cleared, the strange monstrosity didn’t seem affected by their attempts at resistance whatsoever. It left the house altogether, emitting a single chime as it skittered out. Lamps sparked and bent as it climbed over them, its bulbous sac of a body churning away. It reared back on two legs dug deep into furrowed ground, drawing to a full height that easily shamed that of their two-story dorm. With a second chime, it descended, and the limbs began to hack anew. Where they struck lucky, summonings wavered and vanished, and where not, gore followed in purposeful scarlet waves, conducted from the tips of ten lethal, constantly changing batons.

“Get to Courage!” There was a voice, already far off in the shadows. “They have the teachers tutoring there!”

Her mind flashed to Hennigan, scowling at her in the doorway of the Upper Dorms at Mistletide. At least Hennigan at a big axe.

Footsteps began pounding toward the trees, and Bridget was halfway there herself when the peaked shadow of Loyalty house pierced the corner of her perception, needling at the something she was forgetting in her haste. She skidded to a halt.

The lamps that lined that straight path connecting the two Lower Dorms were low, in accordance with the late hour, but their dull swells of illumination couldn’t hide the fact that the front door to the house hung at a diagonal, the top half completely separated from its hinges.

A different kind of fear took Bridget then, coursing through her veins like venom from a Mountaincore sting and sickening every breath. She changed direction without hesitation, sprinting for Gail and Tuck’s dormitory in a flash of feet.

If she was too late–No, she couldn’t be too late, she wouldn’t be. Not for them, not if she ran faster, not if–

With tremendous force, she collided with a solid mass. Immediately, they both began flailing, kicking, and scratching at the other in a desperate panic.

“Nonono!” Bridget drove her foot repeatedly into whatever soft part it came into contact with first.

“Get off, you beast!” The other figure slapped and pinched back before they both paused at the sound of the other’s voice.

“Briddy?”

“Niles?” For once, she was relieved to hear his nasal voice. They had trained together. His family was there. “Niles, we need to go–”

“To Courage. If you’d get off-”

This wastes time. Vex urged. Leave the boy.

“No! Look! The door-” Bridget offered him a hand, and he nearly pulled her over as he stood up.

“We’ll get a teacher.”

“Niles no one is coming out.” Briddy gestured with her chin at the empty house. “What if they don’t know? We need to get them out of there before it’s too late!”

He was quiet, for a moment. “That’s suicide.”

Bridget dropped his arm. “Niles, Tuck is in there. Gail.”

His glasses glinted as he turned his head toward the fight behind them. “We have to survive to bear our relics, Bridget. That means hard choices.”

Rage flooded her. “Hard choices like standing with your team! Like staying together when times are hard! You’ve told us so many times that you would never leave us in a real fight.” Bridget pushed his chest. “Come! Fight! Here and now!”

“We don’t know how many there are.” He muttered.

“And we don’t have time for-” The words died on Bridget’s lips.

From within the dark, gaping doorway of Loyalty House, she heard a sighing chime, and then a long, high scream.

“We need to go now.” She said firmly, reaching out to grab his shirt.

Her fingers shut around emptiness and shadows. Bridget looked up from them in momentary disbelief.

Niles was a silhouette in the night, rapidly growing smaller against those of the trees.

Blinking, her reaction caught between shock and a grim of course, Bridget took off in the opposite direction. She ran for the cockeyed door of Loyalty House, towards Gail and Tuck, and who knew what else within. With or without Niles, she would not leave them to this fight alone.

She could feel Vex, pushing against her mind with a voice that burned in a pain she hadn’t the time, or care, to spare thought to at that moment. When people show you who they are, Bridget, believe them the first time.