It was short, sharp scream at first, cresting into a high, warbling keen. As though it had broken through a dam, a flood of noise followed. The voices of people rose in alarm, shouting things unintelligible in the ensuing cacophony. They overlapped one another. It was difficult to tell where one scream ended and another began. Beneath it, like distant thunder, wood groaned, splintered, and cracked.

Bette could guess what was happening—whatever defenses the town center had set up, they were buckling.

Every part of her wanted to turn away from that horrible noise. If she covered her ears, the symphony of human terror would be nothing more than howling wind. She could leave. She could run, and keep running. She wasn’t even supposed to be here! She was outclassed in every way by even the smallest of monsters. It was sheer folly to imagine that her soft, human hands could do something about iron claws and teeth-tipped tentacles.

But she knew that if she were to turn away now, in the eleventh hour, she wouldn’t be able to face herself. She couldn’t hold her head high under the weight of her crown in the future if she ignored the pleas of her people today.

She took a step.

Windale hissed in alarm somewhere behind her.

“What are ye doing? Let’s leave, quickly!”

“You found your family, Windale,” she said, looking down the way toward the danger. “I pray you escape safely. Regretfully, I have something I must do, so I cannot help you.”

“What…? Yer naught but a mite! You can’t do anything to help! What you should do is run away!”

They weren’t wrong. But…

I have to try, she thought.

Without a backward glance, Bette ran.

As she ran, she tried to find her place in the flow again, reaching out to brush against the mana around her. Her insides tingled and itched, warning her against trying to manipulate anything. It felt like raw skin against open air. Any more mana pulled or pushed through her channels was going to do some damage, she expected. She didn’t have a painless choice, though. If she was going to be any help to these people, she had to do whatever she could.

Bette rounded a corner and found herself at the far edge of the central courtyard. It was a utilitarian affair, with rows of dirt beds ready to be planted and gravel paths crisscrossing between them. The only plants already sprouted were the abundant, delicate snow lilies which lined the beds, however.

Torchlight flickered from posts every two meters or so, illuminating the scene in front of the headman’s home. Bette sidestepped into the wall, hiding behind the lip of the log building. It was a purely instinctual move, since it wouldn’t help her evade the hellhounds, but it brought her some animal comfort.

From her vantage point, she could see two enormous beasts prowling in a tight circle toward the end of the yard, in front of what must be the headman’s abode. They weren’t attempting to breach the building—there was some kind of trapdoor, like the one Bette had crawled from, but larger and sturdier. It looked like it had been buried under snow and dirt, but two hellhounds were steadily digging through to the wooden planks. The screaming had started when their claws hit wood, it seemed.

If that was where the rest of the townspeople were hiding, it must have been a cellar door of some kind.

As she watched, the digging hellhounds began to probe the door with their tentacles, using the sensitive tips to search for weak-points or holes they could leverage to gain access. One found its way within, and then the hellhound let out a horrific screech and pulled away. The tip of its tentacle came away bloody.

While Bette couldn’t fault the defenders for it, it only seemed to enrage the hellhounds. The injured hellhound rose on its hindquarters, flexing the bunched muscles of its back, curling its tentacles against the ground to grant it greater leverage, and then slammed back down on the door with the upper half of its body.

The wood splintered with a sound like a falling tree. The groan of metal told her that the bar blocking the doors had bent out of shape. The screaming intensified. She could see through the gaps in the wood that some people were trying to hold the door in place, using staves or raw wood to push up against it. That wouldn’t keep them at bay for much longer.

The other hellhounds pounced on this opening, wiggling their own tentacles into the gaps that opened. Some looped around for purchase while others pulled and tore at weak spots to open them wider. It wouldn’t be long before the claws made it through, and then they would pluck the people out like anteaters devouring termites from a mound. They would have no trouble dragging the kicking, screaming humans into the air and tearing them apart.

Hellhounds feast on mana most of all, she thought. While they can devour flesh, their greatest source of energy is the energy of other mana-rich creatures.

Though they were tenacious hunters, surely they wouldn’t continue to chase a difficult quarry when a plump hen was offered to them.

Bette took a deep, ragged breath.

She found the place where her spirit met her flesh-self, and she pushed.

At first, it felt like throwing open the doors and letting in a cool breeze on a sweltering day. Mana rushed out into her physical self, churning through her channels in a deluge. It stole her breath and numbed the mind—there was such a clear difference between her inner mana and the mana twisted about by the Horizon that she was momentarily caught between the two sensations.

Then the mana surged through her channels and out through her skin with such force that it blew the atmospheric mana out of the way, and all Bette could feel were the rapids of her own soul pouring out. Where it hit the air, it burned and froze at once. Frost crept along her arms and down her back, bloomed over her face and chest and each point where mana gathered.

Energy built around her. Power continued to flow.

Her insides felt itchy. Mana pushed and jostled against itself and her body, fighting to escape as space within quickly vanished. With nowhere to go and too much pressure building beyond her, it exploded backwards into the meatspace that was her blood, bones, and veins.

I need to direct it or its going to rip me apart!

Bette fought the pain. She drew a line through the air, like she’d done with the mana at the castle, but this time she pictured her own mana moving. She pictured it gathering into clumps like bits of wool and spinning down into taught, iron thread. She pushed the sharp and frigid mana into her stomach, then up through her throat.

When she screamed, it was with an otherworldly force. Her voice came out warped and unnatural and very, very loud.

“OVER HERE!”

The mana-imbued noise forced the wave of building mana around her to move. She saw it hit the hellhounds like a gust of wind, making them stumble and duck down. Their heads moved, searching for the source of the mana. One wedge-shaped head swung in her direction and, eerily, the others turned at once the same way.

She could still feel her mana leaking into the world. It felt like it was pouring from her eyes and mouth and nose, oozing from every pore in her skin, and it still wasn’t enough. It felt endless. Her eyes were buzzing in her skull; whenever she closed her eyelids she saw stars winking in and out of existence in her skin. She could only imagine what she might look like to the hellhounds.

For a moment, the hellhounds seemed confused about what to do. They stood still, tentacles writhing as they communicated in their own way with one another. Much as she wanted to, she couldn’t break and run until she was sure they would follow her. If she only distracted them for a moment, that wouldn’t be enough.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The smallest hellhound, one that had been initially digging at the door, finally seemed to make a decision. It broke away from the pack, advancing on her cautiously. Its head moved side to side like a snake’s as it honed it on her position, following its sense of smell and hearing as well as its mana sense, which must have been overwhelmed at this point.

When it came halfway between them, Bette’s nerve failed. She backed away, as quietly as she could. It followed her motion with its head. Bette broke into a run, darting back into the cover between the buildings. At the rising staccato of her steps, the hellhound took off after her, powerful limbs making quick work of the ground between them.

Some primal sense of danger alerted her and Bette dove for the ground just as one of the jagged tentacles whipped through where she had been a moment prior. It curled around empty air above her, and she could see the way the end of the tentacle opened up like a lily—if lilies had teeth lining their petals. The flap opened and closed much as a nostril would.

From the ground, Bette could see now that what she thought had been one building was in fact two. The gap between them was tiny, but Bette herself was rather small.

She scrambled more than she ran, on hands and feet, squeezing herself into the gap. She shimmied sideways between the wooden walls. Two or three tendrils attempted to follow her through the corridor, but the slender flowers were attached to huge, muscular tentacles. The hellhound put its head through the gap, trying to force the buildings apart by shouldering into them, but it was no use.

The wedge of its head opened down the center and she was greeted by rows and rows of sharp, tearing teeth and a forked tongue that lashed out towards her. She yelped and threw herself out of its way.

She hadn’t known they had prehensile tongues. That was… well, that wasn’t good. She’d either forgotten something about them or she’d never known it in the first place. Either option implied things she did not like.

Bette emerged from the gap on the other side of the row of buildings. While the little one tried to figure out how to follow her through the gap, she needed to put some distance between her and it. She also needed to ascertain where the rest of the hellhounds were; she needed to know if they followed her or if they were still laying siege to the sanctuary the humans of the town had sought.

Her head whipped around, searching for other hellhounds in the dark and other places to run and hide from them. She caught a glimpse of a door with a hole cut through and a flap over, the kind one would use to let a cat or a small dog come and go as they pleased. She was sure she could fit through it.

Suddenly, Bette was no longer standing on the ground. The wind whipped her hair around her head and her stomach lodged somewhere in her chest before pain exploded through her on one side. She hit something, hard, and the air was knocked from her lungs. She struggled, flopping like a fish, trying to breathe and panicking the longer she was unsuccessful.

Her entire right side felt like she’d ran it through a cheese grater. There was blood soaking through her dress on that side, where the fabric had not simply been torn to reveal the scrapes and shallow gashes now decorating her torso.

The ground shook. Something heavy dropped down before her, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off it. It was big and dark and it smelled like metal. It smelled like blood.

The metal smell was her own blood, she understood.

Bette realized then that she had forgotten to look up. Then hellhound on the roofs must have noticed her and given chase like its brother. It had batted her down with one of its tentacles, and raked her side over with the teeth.

She still couldn’t breathe.

Had it crushed her ribs with that blow?

The monster opened its mouth and tasted the air, following the scent of her blood to see where she had landed. Bette struggled to right herself. She was closer to the door with the hole in it, now. She could make it if she tried.

But she wouldn’t make it before the hellhound was upon her.

She didn’t want to die, she thought. She thought it wouldn’t be as scary, wouldn’t hurt so much, since she had already died before. But no, Bette had never died. Whatever Liz was to her, her past incarnation or a wayward glitch in the fabric of the multiverse, she had died. Bette had already realized that Liz was not her, not wholly.

Why, then, was it such a shock to realize that she was still afraid of death?

Tears blinded her as she scrabbled at the ground, dragging herself forward every painstaking inch she could. It was still behind her, but she couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t think about how much she hurt. She had to do something.

She tried to pull a line through the air as she’d done before. Even if she couldn’t manage to fly again, the wind wall would be some measure of protection against the hellhound’s claws and teeth. At least, she hoped it would be. It fell apart at once, incoherent in the rush of her own mana and the strange pull of the Horizon.

She had to shut off the mana. She had to get away.

I have to stay alive. My country needs me. My people need me!

She thought of the forlorn look on Tibitha’s face and the hard disappointment in her mother’s.

My family needs me…

“I have never met a bigger fool than ye!” A familiar voice needled her as a pair of wiry arms ceased her from behind and began to drag her away. When she looked up and saw the shade of sandy hair and the gold cat’s eyes, she found she could breathe again.

“Windale,” she murmured, “didn’t you leave?”

“Why, wouldn’t that be a smart move,” they grunted, halfway to themself. None too gently, Windale tugged her up onto their shoulder and into a fireman’s carry.

Behind them, the hellhound whipped its head back and forth as though it was trying to shake cobwebs from its snout. Its tentacles writhed in frustration, seemingly incapable of picking a direction to move in. It stumbled in one direction, then abruptly changed course. It was confused. But what had happened?

She remembered the way the garbage had shifted and was suddenly something else. The blind old man, Windale’s great-uncle, must have cast an illusion on the beast.

She’d never heard of anyone doing such a thing before. She hadn’t thought it was possible. Animals and monsters had different senses; the translation from creature to creature made the illusion unsteady and brittle. Had he found a technique to implant the illusion in a different way?

The shadows parted before her eyes, revealing that same man, now leaning heavily upon a staff. He looked more haggard, an unhealthy pallor painted over his face and hands.

“Uncle, I got ‘er.”

“It worked,” he said, relief mixing with exhaustion in his voice. “I wasn’t sure it would.”

“For now,” Windale agreed. “But no way to tell how far it got. The hounds in the center might not be in it.”

Had the old man managed an illusion that covered a whole area, rather than targeting an individual? Bette boggled at how such a powerful spell-crafter had been relegated to the position of village pariah on the outskirts of her nation when he should have been in the upper echelons of court mages.

“Let us not stay to find out,” the man said.

He reached out to take Bette from Windale, but the beastkin stubbornly batted his hand away.

“I’m much stronger than you, uncle,” they said flatly. “You’ll have a hard enough time keeping up with me without a handicap.”

His hand returned to his staff. “Of course, how silly of me.”

There was some joke there, something only they knew, because they both smiled at it with a terrible fondness that made Bette want to cry.

“I appreciate your saving me,” Bette said, trying to wiggle her way off of the beastkin’s shoulder. The motion brought tears to her eyes for an entirely different reason, but pain was something she could fight through. “But the people aren’t safe yet! I can’t leave!”

“Yer stubborn as a mule,” Windale accused, though they set her down. “Ye just got a couple of painful lessons and ye want to go back for thirds?”

It’s not a matter of want, she thought, it’s a matter of duty.

Something caught the corner of her eye, and she reacted without thinking, pushing Windale toward the old man before it reached them.

The smallest of the hellhounds, the one she’d stumped by slipping into a crack, reached for her with long, razored tendrils. She threw herself to the side and hit the ground hard. The tentacles were not deterred, curving to follow her down.

It wasn’t letting her get away this time.

The staff cracked against the appendages and sent them retreating back to the hellhound. The old man stood before her, a white-knuckled grip holding his staff like a club or a bat. Windale called out in alarm, seeing their uncle facing down the monster.

It happened too fast for either child to react. The hellhound lashed out, smooth skin giving way to teeth as it unfurled itself. It was no longer a thorn-edged whip but a wall of teeth and sinew. The old man tried to defend himself with the staff, but to no avail. The wall hit him like a hurricane, tearing ribbons from his flesh as it tossed him out of the way.

Windale’s cry of alarm and rage was the roar of an animal, and they were crouched over their uncle in an instant, baring their teeth and claws at the beast and howling a challenge.

It was a play to get the creature to follow, rather than trying to devour their uncle. It was what she’d done before.

Bette staggered to her feet, feeling like something crushed and poorly stuffed into the shape of a little girl. Her spirit dug into her physical self, barbs leaving tears through her as a fresh wave of mana hit her. The spirit was the gateway to the soul-self, she knew, and she could feel her soul, feel it raging within and above her.

Something made of fear and pain and anger reached out through the conduit of her mortal shell. It was like a thousand shards of glass melting into one, or maybe iron filings flying to a magnet. Her directionless mana found a purpose. It took shape, folding around her and through her. When she screamed this time, the force sent the hellhound flying.

The air was hot and roiling around her, but it was cold as the grave inside her skin. She was freezing from the inside out, leaking heat and mana without regard for what it left behind.

She threw her arm out and the mana reacted, following the arc of her swing. It fell like a hammer upon the hellhound, cracking the earth beneath it. The blow reverberated through her body. Her arm felt like it had been crushed under a ton of bricks.

She gasped out a sob. Her mana stuttered and shook, the shape falling apart around her.

Something sharp hit her from behind. She was pulled off the ground, kicking and screaming in agony from the collapsing mana and the tearing flesh both.

Her vision went red, then black, then red again and she was falling, falling, falling.

Someone called: “Lysander!”

Bette never felt herself hit the ground.

Everything went black, and stayed that way.