Ike's night began surrounded by criminals and vagrants. In front of them the fog spun and twirled. Hidden under those misleading swirls of mist was death as far as the eye could see. Mud and monsters. 

Behind the group, Cadeloch slept. One of humanity's last remaining strongholds rose up on a steep black stone cliff with the sea on its back and the blight at its bottom. All of them relied on the muckrakers here to hold the frontline night after night. Hell, after all, did not sleep.

The muckrakers were seven strong. While the rest were conscripts from the dregs of society or voluntolds from other communities, Ike was something of a special case. He’d been working with the meager order for as long as he could remember. As a boy he’d sharpen the cheap spears given to expendable soldiers, and now he was old enough to stand here on watch, ready to die.

In the middle of their little camp, a tall black pylon maintained the mysterious border that saved Cadeloch from blight poison. The material swirled and twitched with runic symbols like a strange fleshy stone. Nobody liked to look at the thing, but it saved lives.

Out there, hidden in the mist and crawling around the veiny muck, demon’s lurked. They were horrible. Monsters of all shapes and sizes, covered in torn flesh and exposed muscles. Some were shaped like men, or dogs, or other animal’s Ike had no name for. They were walking nightmares but rarely intelligent. A proper smack upside the head from his shovel would generally do the trick for sending them back to the abyss where they belonged. 

Just as long as you avoid the teeth. And the claws.

"Awfully quiet tonight,” one of the others said.

Ike squeezed the shovel in his lap a little harder and kept his eyes focused on the mist.

“Quiet’s a lot better than hearing your dumb ass speak, so hush.”

Ike looked back at the two speakers. The first one, Rann, mumbled something quiet in response before going silent again. The other was Damir. One look at the size of the man and the hammer in his meaty hand’s put all arguments to rest with ease. If the man wanted silence then he would have it.

It was a valid point though. Ike found himself staring at a broken femur bone at the edge of the border. Most nights had some kind of incursion, and tonight had been far too easy.

Ike tightened the binding on his shovel’s head. Despite their jobs being critical to the rest of the settlement’s survival nobody spared a dime for muckrakers equipment. They were dressed in filthy rucksack clothing and ate slop for three meals a day. Bathing was a rare luxury. The only thing that kept anyone from deserting was the much better equipped shamans and constables in the city and the horrors in the mists outside. 

Ike was one of the lucky ones in that regard. He’d been using the same shovel for about five or six years. It had a long wooden handle wrapped in leather cut offs, a blade sharpened to necessary perfection, and a little symbol of the Carrion Cross carved just where metal were wood, something he put on there while he was bored and warm.

He rubbed the symbol with a little ounce of pride. Being bored and cold all the time afforded few things, but a little creativity helped pass the time. 

“I’m telling you, it’s too quiet out here. Something’s out there. Right out of sight…” Rann’s ominous declaration set Ike on edge again.

He was just a year younger than Ike, but at least twice the coward. Ike couldn’t blame him. If he’d been just a little smarter, he figured he’d be just as terrified. Ike would’ve said something to help, but years on the border taught him silence and impassioned caution were a lot more valuable than friendly speeches. 

Reyna didn’t. Sitting to Ike’s right, she spun and stared daggers at the boy sitting to his left. “Keep it shut, unless you want it to get real loud real quick,” she said. 

Ike dropped his head to hide a smirk. Reyna was one of the few muckrakers he’d taken a liking to, mostly because of the way she quipped at everyone else.

Rann glanced at her and then turned back to the fog. His body began to fidget. “There’s something out there, man…. It’s just… right there…” His voice broke, and all of a sudden Rann got up. He moved forward slowly, hunched over, skittishly looking all around and behind him again and again. 

Around that point Ike began to worry. Rann was a petty thief. He wasn’t going up to the fog out of bravado, which only meant one thing.

Reyna got up first. Ike was closer, but he was slower and more cautious. Before either of them could grab him or put this to an end the thief stumbled faster until he was all the way up to the fog’s edge. He moved like a puppet on a string. At the border, he stared up at the wall of white. It hovered right around where the power of the pylon stopped, and when he looked back at the other’s, there was terror in his eyes.

Something snapped out of the fog and grabbed Rann, yanking him into the fog so fast that Ike almost hadn’t seen it happen at all.

The rest of the muckrakers got out of their chairs when it happened. There was a general commotion as they got out of their seats and up into arms. He saw Reyna standing just a few feet from where Rann had disappeared, a long knife in her hand.

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Rann was right after all. It was too quiet, and something was very wrong with the fog.

Ike got up too but stayed closer to the pylon then the fog. He wasn’t keen on falling through or falling victim to twisted mental tricks. Commotion turned to quiet conversation around him.

“Shit, did you see that?”

“Idiot got close to the fog. Serves him right.”

“Blades up!”

As for Ike, his mouth got clammy enough to make his quaint silence almost a necessity. That had to be one of the worst parts about adrenaline- or fear, whatever the case. Talking already made him miserable. Shouting at someone to watch their back sounded heroic in his head and came out as a whimper that served to embarrass and confuse instead of do any good. 

Reyna appeared next to him and he jumped. Her hair was a greasy red, and he’d confused it for blood in his peripherals. She held that knife in her hand like squeezing it harder would bring Rann back.

“Are you getting any suggestions to take a walk?” she asked. Ike wasn’t even ready to answer.

“No. No, not at all. How-how many?”

“Hm?”

“How many are out there, you think? Like, a lot?”

She glared over at him and shrugged. “Probably. Don’t get chicken shit on me now mud baby.”

Ike could only roll his eyes and focus on the fog. ‘Mud baby’ was new. He’d heard worse nicknames before though. Very few people in this world looked at Ike as anything more than another body in the dirty shuffle to the border or shoveling crap off the streets. Mud baby was closer to a pet name than a slur, which was something.

They waited in that restless silence for a while longer. Some of the muckrakers paired up to patrol the border, careful not to get too close. Nobody went back to sit down or let their guards down. Ike counted off the weapons in his head. Shovel, knife, hammer, rake, pitchfork, incredibly smooth rod of iron. That last one looked odd, but they were a desperate bunch.

Then without a sound, two horned demons jumped out of the fog.

 They looked like a bastard experiment of mixing deer and men. One of them held a length of wood that matched the iron rod of the muckraker. The other bore only his bare fists and a mean look in its splintered eyes. 

Ike rushed in on the second and closer of the demons. Damir and Reyna were right ahead of him, and they both hit the beast from either side. Demons didn’t move like natural things. They shuffled and contorted, with more bones and muscles than they could use. One of the beasts’s clawed hands came down and knocked a chunk of flesh out of Demar’s side.

Ike got in next, dropping the edge of his shovel’s blade onto the demon’s bony face. It cracked and the beast reeled, and Ike jumped back out of the way of an evil swipe.

In between its strikes and attacks as it dueled with Reyna and the suffering Demar, the gap in its stomach flexed and opened. The perfect opportunity. Ike hesitated at the edge of the fight before seeing his chance and lunging, sinking the shovel head in deep and earning a wicked roar of pain.

Reyna and Demar fell on the demon with fury, hacking apart its dying body to add their own personal insults to its painful injury. Ike smiled like a complete idiot. The other group was having a little less success, but they were standing. The fight was close but they could call this an easy night.

If they were lucky.

Ike was never lucky.

Another demon came out of the fog to his right. He had just enough time to turn and see it coming. A long and leathery tentacle coming out of where its arms should’ve been reached out and sent Ike flying back.

His body made a ragged crater where it hit the dirt. Ike gasped for air and tried to blink the stars out of her eyes. Where was he? Why did everything hurt?

In a moment he recovered his memories and his breath. When he looked up, he saw the demon that knocked him back had its leathery tentacle inside of Damir’s stomach. It flung him to the side like he weighed nothing, and then turned to crouch and face the few muckrakers remaining upright now.

Ike tried to pick himself up. His body complained violently, and he fell right back down.

All Ike could do then was push himself up against the pylon and watch. Even that effort took his breath away and left him panting.

Every moment that passed, the fighting got worse. More demon’s crawled out of the fog to feast on fallen bodies or leap at the humans, and all of them were totally soundless. The only noises were the slop of metal striking flesh and the shout’s of the muckrakers begging for help or yelling out of anger. 

Ike needed to do something. He couldn’t just roll over and die like this. Straining the muscles that were screaming from the impact of his fall, he used the slimy side of the pylon to pull himself up from the ground and then grabbed his shovel for extra support.

Then once he lifted his eyes to the battlefield, he saw Reyna's lifeless corpse come crashing down with a crunch.

She was the last one. Ike coughed in pain and the demon turned its wicked empty eyes on him. 

“Oh,” he said.

The nearest beast moved on four legs, too quick for him to move in reaction, and knocked him into the pylon. 

In front of him, that beast flexed wings out of its back and howled, a sound that pierced the night sky and finally broke the silence that had been haunting them since the beginning. Ike froze and plastered himself to the pylon, frantically praying that its magic would do something to save his life now. In the back of his mind, he made desperate cries for help, but his throat was too dry to turn any of his psalms into words. 

Then something truly strange happened. The monster turned its eyes away from Ike, and a spire of black material just like that of the pylon shot down from the sky, spearing the monster through its black eyes and burning through the head.

Ike gasped. Then he watched as each of the monsters ran at a dark figure running out of the city. His head was spinning and threatened to tug him down to the ground, but he forced himself to stay upright so he could watch.

The fighting was a blur, but it was decisively destructive. Swirls of magic cut through the monsters and they screamed. In mere moments, only that mysterious figure was left standing. Ike tried stumbling away from the pylon to make contact, but after two steps he fell to the ground and the light began to leave his eyes.

“I’m sorry for this,” a voice said. “Just don’t die. Can you do that much?”

Ike thought he mumbled a yes, but he honestly couldn’t tell what came out of his mouth. He hiccuped, felt something snap inside, and promptly passed out.