House Opulence’s goon advanced out from under the lion statue to get a clear arc for his second swing, but I was already moving before the club slammed down with a thud that actually shook the earth. How was he even swinging that thing? It looked sized for him, but when it connected I could swear the club alone weighed as much as a small elephant. Were leprechauns just that strong?

I continued my movement, sort of a half-roll half-crawl situation, until I was fully out of the reach of the club, then rose shakily to my feet. My knees reported agony, but they didn’t collapse under my weight. That seemed like a good sign. Leaning on a statue for support, I brandished my hammer in the direction of my attacker. He looked unimpressed.

“You let one of your friends get the stuffing beat out of him, rather than reveal your hiding place?”

The leprechaun looked over at Maps, then back to me, then shrugged. Like the club, the shrug seemed somehow heavier than it should be. I hadn’t even considered that shrugs should have a normal weight, but that was the way it felt.

“Not my friend. Barely my ally. More of a servant situation. Or it will be. Once you finish the job you were hired for, Daniel Corners.” The leprechaun grinned, ear to ear. His teeth all ended in points, like a characature of a pihranna. Why did we use these in childrens’ advertising? “So, what’s it going to be? I can see plain as day that your little hammer hasn’t a chance of breaking my shillelagh, and you must see it too or you’d have tried that little trick you pulled on the hob.” He spat. His spit was green with gold flecks. “So either you just follow me back to my House or we can have a nice chat, during which I will be forced to bludgeon you unconscious, then I’ll throw you in a pot and drag you back there.”

Unconscious. Asleep. I had considered it a few times. It was already manifested once, after all. The leprechaun was right, I wasn’t going to win a straight fight against him, not with his strength and not with my injured knees. It wasn’t like I had a lot of other constructs in reserve. Just my hammer, really. I reintegrated my hammer and began sending out feelers in my mind.

“Can I at least know your name before you bash me into a near-coma?” I asked, drawing myself up straighter and trying to imitate a fighting stance I had seen in a boxing movie once.

“You know, you could have just asked for a bribe, Daniel,” the leprechaun pointed out. “It’s what this whole situation was about, after all. Money triumphs in the end.”

“I might have gone along with it, you know. But now I’m just pissed off about my knees, and about that turd,” I gestured vaguely in the direction of Rookie, “And frankly about my mind being tampered with. Humans are a little particular that way.”

“Hmph. My master suggested as much to yours, but Mister Carver insisted that it would be more effective if you never knew what you were doing. I’d suggest we should take over his house but…” he gestured expansively with his club. I was beginning to tire in my stance. My knees were ready to buckle. My attacker had yet to do any more attacking. “We’re already planning that anyway, obviously.”

“I asked for your name. Surely even Opulence understands the importance of good manners. Then again, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are probably not in your vocabularies, are they?”

“You may call me Cudgel, Mister Daniel. I’m rather excited to try on the new vocation, really.” With barely any warning, Cudgel rushed at me, club swinging in a wide arc that would roughly intersect my ribs. I wasn’t sure how to block that, or any attack, so instead I dropped backwards into the worlds worst limbo, at which point my knees spasmed, leaving me lying on the lawn, Cudgel and his--what was the word he used? Shillelagh?--poised to crack my skull.

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I found it. I opened the doors in my mind that would let the creature out once it was roused. I just needed a reason to fall asleep and it would be free. Of course, with the adrenaline of my fight, not to mention the adrenaline from my growing knee pain, and the pain from my growing knee pain, I didn’t feel much like sleeping right at that moment. A crucial flaw in my half-baked plan.

Oh, damns and damned damny dams. I thought. There was no other way.

I braced myself for pain as Cudgel took his swing. There was a flash behind my eyes, and a sudden sense of floating, and then there was pain. A lot of pain. It felt like swimming in a sea except every wave and current was the rush of pain. A dim part of my mind noted that it was good we were in one of the Houses or we’d be up to our necks in metaphor by this point.

Blackness started to creep over my vision. I was blacking out. I was falling asleep. The creature stirred in my mind. With the last dregs of my willpower, I flung open the first door that would lead it out of my mind. A brassy searchlight turned, slowly, to look through the doorway, and then there was a rush of energy.

It was up to luck, now.

----

Watcher sensed a pathway opening. A pathway it had taken once, in a different life. A pathway to freedom, the freedom to strike, to stalk, to see its purpose completed.

But Watcher had a new purpose now. A dual purpose. It still felt driven to hunt, to grapple, to drag, to bury. But now it also knew it had to destroy. Specifically, it had to destroy invaders. Those who didn’t belong. It couldn’t do that if it left the mindscape. On some level, it understood that. Its dual natures conflicted for a brief moment, until the hunger, its prime, its originating need, won out.

Watcher flung itself up tunnels and doorways and hallways and stairways until the exit from the mindscape was known. Ah, yes. This was a place it recognized. Its host had been brought here, shortly after Watcher had been trapped back in his mind. It had happened right before Watcher had awoken to its second purpose. The strange food that looked and sounded like its host but behaved differently. It had to be stopped. Watcher knew this in its one good eye.

Watcher tasted the air of the Lane. It blinked, revealing the points of its star-shaped eye. A single word flashed with the blink, its characters lost in the riot of light. Watcher knew those letters, though. They were seared into its vision, more a part of the eye than the eye itself was a part of Watcher.

A small food stood there, long stick raised over Watcher’s host as if to strike. Well, as long as it was here…Watcher lunged out of it’s host’s sleeping mind and thrashed its claws around the small food. The small food yelped with surprise, but it was too late. Watcher had him in its grips. Slowly, then suddenly, Watcher dragged the small food deep under the curtain of sleep. It shiverred with the joy of a good meal. Conscious minds had so much to offer. Watcher’s host was a rich food source, but Watcher liked variety. Or it thought it did.

It cast its senses about, its eye illuminating every nook and cranny. There. Two foods were shooting loud at each other. Watcher did not like loud. But it was more than its old self, now. It could survive the loud.

One of the foods was the interloper. Watcher realzed this all at once, and with a burst of limbs it lunged. The interloper was its primary purpose in its new life. Perhaps it would be able to satiate both halves of itself in one raw strike.