I felt lightheaded. My mind felt like a thick pudding. Thoughts were slow, and I felt like I was dreaming. I'd felt this before, more than once in my life. I'd passed out. It's not a common occurrence, but it's not something I wouldn't expect to happen, eventually.

Letting out a quiet groan, reality felt like it was filling in. My brain surged with activity, blood pounding through my skull as the simple act of vocalizing my pain made my muscles start waking up. I took in a deep breath and felt what I was sitting on. Soft. I was somewhere comfortable. I was safe.

Had it been a fever dream? It had to be, right? I'd been thinking so much about my grandmother and her crazy occultist beliefs lately that it was invading my dreams. I couldn't think past the dream to think of what could possibly have knocked me out like this, though. Maybe I went to that ritual site and I bled too much when I pricked my finger. That was so stupid; why had I agreed to something that idiotic in the first place? My blood was too precious to waste just dropping on the ground for a stupid game, even just a drop of it. Yes, that made sense. That's what must have happened. I filed away the whole experience as a bad dream. I got light-headed and passed out, and Thomas and Scarlet brought me somewhere safe. That was it.

I groaned again and slowly lifted my head, setting it back down when my muscles failed to give me my strength and opting to squint my eyes open instead. Looking down at my chest, though, I forced my eyes wide. Sitting at the center of my torso, on top of my shirt, there was a small black void the size of a toy dog, curled up in a twisted tube shape. It felt like my heart stopped. It wasn't a dream, was it?

As if to answer, the block blob unfurled, the end of its tube shape unpeeling into a single bright yellow eye and staring directly at me.

Adrenaline shot through me, and I pushed my palms against the couch. I was barely able to acknowledge that I was in my house while I scrambled back and flopped onto the ground, sending the black thing barreling off of me as I frantically pushed at the ground, trying to crawl backwards away from it. I screamed as loud as I could, panic overwhelming me as I flailed my legs in an effort to push myself away from it.

"Whoa! Whoa, Cora! It's okay! It's alright!" Thomas stepped into view above me, and I felt my breath slow slightly, seeing a friendly face. My eyes darted to the black shape on the floor. It had been unleashing adorable squeaking noises to match my screams, and now it was silent again, staring at me like a snake with a single distended eye stalk at one end. I looked back and forth between it and Thomas, then gestured dramatically toward it with the obvious silent question hanging in the air between us while I panted for breath. "It's... a long story." He mumbled, "But it's not dangerous. I think. Scarlet says it's not dangerous. Look, deep breaths, don't pass out on us again."

I nodded frantically, forcing myself to suck down air. It wasn't a dream. It was real. Something horrible and supernatural happened because I did something I didn't know with magic. MAGIC. Magic was actually real! Magic was real and I was a witch, and my grandmother was right all along, and I just unleashed something terrible onto the world. Breathing was somehow getting harder despite my efforts. "Thomas... the fuck did we do? The fuck is that? What happened? That thing knocked me out!"

Thomas shook his head. "Actually, that was a second one that knocked you out. This one saved your life. Probably all our lives. It's why it's so small now. The one that attacked you beat the shit out of it."

"There's two of them?!" I shouted back at him, again gesturing to the thing in my house.

It turned its eyestalk like a head cocking to the side, then grew four spindly, insect-like legs and scuttled back a few steps from me, hiding behind the leg of a coffee table. I gawked at it in disbelief. Was it scared of me? Just what the hell did I miss?

Scarlet hustled back into the room at that moment, carrying a glass of water, and knelt down to my side, holding it out for me. "Here." She said curtly.

I took the water in shaky hands and drew a long swig from it, being careful not to take my eyes off the skittish alien creature in my sitting room. Once I had my fill, I lowered the glass and took a few more breaths, finally able to calm my breathing enough to assure myself I wouldn't pass out again. "Okay... Okay, so I clearly missed a lot. Does someone wanna catch me up on what the FUCK happened after I passed out!?" I kept panting, my little heart refusing to stop hammering as fast as it could. I could only calm myself down so much. This whole situation was ridiculous. "You're telling me that thing saved my life? Bullshit!"

"I figured that would be her reaction." Scarlet said flatly to Thomas. The monster skittered away from the table and instead pressed itself against Scarlet's crouched leg. She turned to it and gave an amused huff. "Oh, you figured out legs."

I pursed my lips, just about ready to shout again, but managed to take a breath instead. Stay calm. Just stay calm for now. "What. Happened?" I muttered through clenched teeth. "Play by play. Tell me."

—

We told each other what we each experienced that day, from our own points of view, to put together a cohesive account of what happened. I told them about the strange ethereal pull I felt at the climax of the ritual finishing, and how the monster snuck up on me and knocked me out after Thomas left. They told me of how Scarlet somehow tamed the creature that had now been diminished to the size of a small pet while defending us, of how they had to rescue me from the hostile creature and carry me back here through the dark corners of the old side of town, of how Thomas was suffering what may be some sort of supernatural injury, and of how they left the creature in contact with me in an effort to foster a healing effect in it.

By the end of the recap, I was holding my head, trying not to freak out. What had we done? What did we get ourselves into? How do we fix this? It felt like a massive weight had been placed onto my shoulders, and it still didn't feel like it could possibly be real. I wanted to cry. Instead, I took in a long, unsteady breath and exhaled to calm myself. "Okay. So what do we know? We need to figure out the rules."

Scarlet nodded at the suggestion and put on a serious face. She seemed a lot less relaxed than she had been the last week, but that was understandable. After what we'd been through already, it was hard to imagine any of us trying to act casual. "There's a few inconsistencies I've been wondering about." She started, petting the creature who had scrambled into her lap and curled up into a black mound again after she'd sat on the floor with it. "First, where did the second creature come from?"

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"The summoning room." I said confidently. "Where else would it come from? You said the room was starting to fall apart and open up even though the portal was closed, right? It slipped through the cracks you saw."

Scarlet shook her head. "Think about it for a second. While they have an alien physiology we can't even begin to understand yet, these creatures are still bound by physical laws. One of the first things I observed from our monster here was that it didn't have an inherent understanding of the basics of physical principles like acceleration, gravity, and momentum, but it was still bound by them." She leaned back on one arm, still offering the monster her attention with the other. "If the monster who attacked you came from the summoning room, it would have a very small window between when we first exited the room until when I came back through it to appear there, run out ahead of me, go all the way around Thomas, and sneak up on you."

Thomas nodded slowly. "And that monster wasn't very fast and didn't seem to care about stealth. It's hard to imagine it flying around the industrial park, dodging around me. So what, you think these things could just appear anywhere now?"

Scarlet gave a thoughtful hum. "No, I doubt that. We haven't been attacked here, after all. If they can just show up wherever, then we'd have already lost. They have some kind of rule set they have to follow, like Coraline said, but I don't think it's the summoning room."

"If only we could interrogate that thing." I gestured to the black mound in Scarlet's lap, and it opened its singular eye, staring up at me. It formed a small jagged maw and snapped in my direction. "Eugh. Wait... did it understand me?"

"Maybe. No biting." Scarlet scolded, planting her hand firmly on top of the blob. It obediently dissolved its mouth back into the solid black form and skittered around in her lap for a moment before settling in again. True to what she'd said, it was obedient to her, in some fashion. "We could go that route. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm pretty sure it develops from human contact. If we could get it to tag more humans..."

Thomas cleared his throat. "Not only does that sound grossly irresponsible, since we don't know if it's actually safe in the long term to touch it at all, but it would be impossible without showing it off to a bunch of people."

"I have a few ideas about that. But later, let's continue." Scarlet said, bringing us back to her original set of points. "Second, why didn't it kill Coraline?"

Thomas gave a thoughtful nod. "That's right. It took us a while to get back to it after you were caught. If it was trying to kill you, it would have just done it there."

Scarlet nodded in agreement. "Which leaves two possibilities. It either didn't want to or it couldn't. If it couldn't, that's another rule we need to think about. It didn't even hesitate to hurt the monster, but it might be unable to attack humans."

"That's not right, though." Thomas shook his head. "That would explain why it didn't attack me, but remember, it did attack you, Scarlet."

"Right." Scarlet nodded slowly, clearly unhappy to be reminded of the sweep it made at her. "Or at least it tried to. Which means its rules are very specific, or it kept Coraline, specifically, alive for a reason.

Realization struck me as she said that. "For my blood. For my witch blood! To open the portal with!"

"That's a terrifying thought." Scarlet mumbled. "It was less than a yard away from the center of the summoning room when Thomas stopped it. If all it needed was your blood in that spot, then we got there just in time."

I gulped. If they didn't save me right when they did, that monster would have probably torn me apart to spill my apparently magic-infused vital fluids, and I couldn't imagine it would be as gentle as a pinprick about it. I felt sick. A short time ago, I was a few feet away from almost certain death. If not for my allies, I would have been doomed. If it actually opened the portal again, the whole world might have been doomed. "This is too heavy." I muttered. "For fuck's sake, if there's a magic national guard or something, I'll take their help at this point. Damn the consequences. It's too much for us."

"Well, if there is, they're not here, and I wouldn't know how to call them." Scarlet sighed loudly. "If we went to the normal authorities, they'd just call us crazy, and they'd have their eyes on us after that. So for now, this is on us alone. Unless anyone has any other observations, I think we need to move onto the subject of what to do next."

I grumbled loudly. "We need to know more before we do anything!"

Thomas cleared his throat again and held up my backpack. "The book."

"The book!" I exclaimed urgently. "Thank god you kept it safe! There has to be more I can learn from it! I need to translate it way more carefully and take it seriously this time. What if it knows what those things are?" I reached for my bag and snatched it from Thomas's hand, unpacking the book from it in a hurry and placing it in front of us on a coffee table. "I wish I knew this language better." I mumbled to myself as I flipped through the pages in a rush, searching for the ritual again.

"What'd you tell me about old books being fragile?" Thomas taunted.

I clicked my tongue. "Shut it. We weren't fighting some kind of collective eldritch monstrosity when I said that," I said as I came back to that fateful page. A page of modern notebook paper, my translation notes, stuck out from the book. I turned to the next page, then the next, wondering if any of the diagrams might offer a hint now that I was taking it seriously. Four pages later, after several other magical circle diagrams, I came to a halt and froze.

Drawn on the page was a black shape, lines drawn haphazardly in a menacing, writhing mass. Was this it? Our enemy?

"That's..." Thomas started.

"Looks exactly like the monster that attacked you." Scarlet muttered. "It's a good thing your ancestors had the foresight to make sketches."

"No kidding." I said, looking down at the picture's caption and mulling the phrase over for a moment. "Mmm... no, I'll have to spend some time on this. Uhh... sin... vice...?"

"Vice." Scarlet sounded interested. "Is there some religious context?"

I shrugged. "It doesn't mean anything without the context of the surrounding words. My phone." I reached into my pocket and pulled my smartphone free, glad to see it unharmed by the manhandling I'd endured. I pulled open the dictionary app I'd been using to put together the text I had translated. Then a thought occurred to me. "Oh fuck no. Magic is real. Is religion real?" Scarlet and Thomas both shrugged. "This is stupid enough without some kind of fucking divinity being involved. If a fucking god shows up, I'm out. I'm just out. That's too crazy."

"I agree, that would be too far," Thomas sighed loudly. "Well, we can't just keep calling it 'the monster'. What about we just use that, then? Vice."

"Sure, why not?" I mumbled, resting my head in my hand as I glanced between the book and my phone, pulling my notepad over and reaching toward Thomas. I didn't really "Pen. Gimme a pen." I demanded, already beginning to scroll through the app, searching for anything I could actually use.

Thomas rolled his eyes and stood up from his place on the couch, muttering to himself, "Would a 'please' kill you?" I didn't really care. Now wasn't the time for pleasantries. I had to find out what this book said. What this book was. I was too scared not to act, politeness be damned. I didn't have time for that.

Scarlet stayed in place, though. Lost in thought. "Vice." She said again, her gaze going back down to her little alien pet in her lap. She put her hands down around it and it gave a small squeak and wiggled its four spindly insect-like legs for a moment as Scarlet brought it up to her face, looking it in the eye. "So then that makes you... a virtue." The creature squirmed for a few moments before it retracted its legs and settled in, silently gazing into Scarlet's eye. "You like that for a name? Hmm?"

It blinked a few times before it bobbed its eyestalk up and down a few times. I sat up and gave it my attention for just a moment. "Did it just... nod?"

Scarlet looked just as surprised as I did. "Maybe? I guess we're going with that, then. Virtue."