It was night now, and Susannah was slumped over the counter, upper body resting beside the register. She had massively underestimated how many people would be showing up for Karulk’s flowers. It wasn’t a few groups off and on, it was practically a whole festival worth of people. From what snippets of conversation she heard between rushing from the counter and the kitchen, it seemed like Karulk had invited the entire street to participate in the sale.

Susannah had been impressed at the level of organization it must have taken when the people first started to show up. By an hour in she was utterly slammed, and cursing Karulk’s name, regardless of the fact that she no longer needed advertising.

She had no idea when it stopped, just that it did. One moment, she was making twelve cups of coffee at once, the next it was six, and then her café was empty.

Susannah had yet to muster the energy to begin to close up. She barely had the brain power to complain about how tired she was, or how badly she needed an employee.

The bell on the door rang.

“We’re closed,” she mumbled into the counter without opening her eyes or looking up. Then, louder, “we’re closed.”

Footsteps approached. They sounded like the footsteps of a normal human in boots, if a bit loud. She sighed and looked up. She wished she hadn’t.

There was a thing standing in her café. A terrible thing.

It was tall. Menacing things were often tall, for it gave them a unique looming quality short people just couldn’t quite… reach.

It stood straight backed, and Susannah got the impression it could brush the ceiling if it wanted to.

It was wearing a black fedora. There was a ribbon around it, also black, almost indistinguishable from the hat.

The head wearing the fedora had a face, and hair. It was average. Unremarkably average. Unfeelingly, unseeingly average. So average that every word and no words at all could have possibly described it at all.

It was wearing a black shirt without sleeves, leather pants, and multiple thin belts. The type that were for fashion more than function, took several minutes to put on each day, and were frustrating to fiddle with when one needed to go to the bathroom in a public stall.

It also had a coat. A duster, to be precise. Like the rest of its apparel, the coat could be called the color black, as black was the absence of all wavelengths of colored light that the human eye could perceive. In this particular case, (not that Susannah could possibly know this,) the duster interacted with no light at all. Absolutely none of the electromagnetic spectrum passed by, bounced on, or otherwise touched the slick surface of the coat. The duster was made of antimatter and made visible as the color black by magic.

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Susannah saw all of this for only a second, as her being, her entire body, mind, and soul, were overwritten by hunger.

The incoherent, gibbering wreck her mind became in that moment thought that the hunger came from the tall thing in front of her. But no, as the sensations passed, trickling down her spine in shivers and curling out of her skin as cooled air, Susannah realized the hunger was coming from the coat.

She gulped.

It was standing in front of her now. The counter and the display case underneath it were the only things separating Susannah Blitzar from what could only be a god.

It lifted an arm, just a whisper of a motion, fluid as any creature who needed to wear a flesh suit to participate in life in any manner, and pointed.

Susannah slowly followed where it was pointing with her eyes, and then her head.

There was a single slice of double super rich cho-co chocolate cake sitting in the display case. It was the only thing left in the case. It sat innocent to the ways of the world, born by hasting stirs and baked in the oven only hours ago, frosted by a deft, practiced hand running out of time. It sat, so preciously ignorant of the ravenous creature afore it and the horrific designs it had upon the small slice of cake.

Susannah felt no pity, no horror, no grief. Better the cake eaten than her.

She took the cake out of the case, put it on a plate, set a dainty fork beside it, and in an action practiced all over the planet, by people and cultures of all types, by the schoolboy to the bully, by the colonies to the colonizers, by the pious to the divine, she offered her bounty to something greater than herself in exchange for her life.

It was accepted.

The hand swept the plate from the counter. And then it walked to a table in the far right of the café. And then it sat down, presumably to eat.

Susannah quivered.

Her knees were weak, but out of what her instinct wrongly deemed the immediate threat range, they slackened entirely.

She collapsed against the counter.

She let herself lay brokenly on cold wood for only a moment, before lifting her head. She pillowed her arms under it, and watched the thing. The god. It. Whatever, whoever it was.

It wasn’t eating. It was staring at the cake. It didn’t react to her scrutiny in any way she could perceive.

Susannah closed her eyes. She was exhausted. She had probably worn blisters into the callouses on her feet from how fast she had moved herself today.

She did not feel comfortable leaving the thing alone in her café. She did not want to let it out of eyesight, for what little good that would do. Even so, her eyes were getting heavy. She could not keep vigil.

Susannah whimpered.

This was not a good day, not at all.