Castor’s job was easy, most of the time.

It didn’t make him wealthy, it wasn’t a route to easy money, it didn’t earn him any particular prestige with his mother and her knitting circle, and it didn’t offer much power within the government of his tiny colony town.

He was, at most, a glorified message board. It was easy though.

He sat in his comfortable rocking chair, kept a side-eye on the incoming messages, and mostly did his crosswords. Or, redid old ones. There weren’t any puzzle masters on Herotid to make new ones, and Castor couldn’t right well solve a puzzle he had made himself, could he? He only had a couple hundred, smuggled in one way or another on a colony ship, and Castor spent his days workman-like cycling his way through copies before turning back to start again at the top of a new pile of new copies of the same old crosswords. He had gotten quite good at pretending he didn’t know the answer, after a decade or two of practice.

What Castor’s job lacked in daily rigor, it made up for in stress and anxiety, when the incoming Alert boards started lighting up and blinking and strobing all red and angry with warnings. There was a reason that Castor, a mediocre and unambitious man, had so easily beat out the competition for the Liaison position. There was a reason that the Liaison’s had the highest death rate of any job in a fairly well established township…

It was on days like this where he paid for the long and easy months of light work… When he sat, huddled in his dark, quiet office, eyes straining to watch the blinking screen, almost an hour after Third-week’s third night of sleep should have started. Just waiting.

Slayers of Beasts could be vicious and aggressive, snapping and lashing out at the littlest thing; especially to the mortal liasons responsible for giving them orders.

They could just as easily be happy, cheerful, or easygoing, but most of the few Castor had had to meet were of the first kind. It never paid well to gamble with one’s life, but even the most vicious Slayer could be handled, if treated properly. The truly unstable ones were never offered the job.

Castor hadn’t gotten a good read on this newest one, but the silent, harsh mien and angry aura had spelled out how bad of an idea annoying him might be.

So, Castor didn't risked it, staying huddling in the darkened hut, fingers tapping and dancing a nervous rhythm against his chair’s arm. He would be here, ready to log and mark off the Slayer’s job as done when the duster coated man returned.

Better a few hours of sitting around anxious than a quick death for inconvenience.

The alert had gone off Third-week’s first morning, after the township’s wellspring had sprung a leak. He had felt the Alert board’s warning from almost a hundred yards away, walking up the cobblestone path that led to the small hut of his office. Malevolent spirits from beyond the Pale. Ancient things, far more powerful than any of the colonists.

There was little he could do at that point but call for a Slayer and call the rest of the town in to bunker up inside the town’s walls.

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

The Mayor had sealed the wellspring’s crack rather quickly after all the hubbub, so there hadn't been much risk of the beasts finding their way even to the town wall. Whatever beasts had noticed the leak and crept across the wards from the wildlands beyond the Pale wall had lost the scent and begun wandering through the farmlands, trying to find the source of the power they had felt. But the scent was lost and the town’s walls were tall and strong. They were trapped within their own home now, but at no immediate threat from the wildland beasts.

But the only way to open the farmlands back up for those who worked them was to call for a Slayer. That was when Castor got to shine. Oh what glory, to be allowed to serve as a Liaison. The rest of the town wasn't in much risk from the beasts, but Slayers were a threat all their own, for all that they were supposedly human.

He could only hope that this Slayer hadn’t been too inconvenienced by whatever beasts he had to fight.

Castor had felt it, early this morning, when the last of the invading beasts had died. The Alert board had lit up in quiet relief as the last foreign presence had been eradicated. But it had been almost five hours now, and the dark looking man who had responded to the Slayer’s call had yet to return. He mightily hoped that one of the mythical warriors hadn’t died, or, worse, gone missing under his watch. If the man had died, there was a chance the Impyriati might come investigating.

He shivered lightly at the thought and leaned back in his chair, trying to breath deeply, trying to calm his mind. He had only seen an Impyriati once, at the ceremony for the crowning of the local governor, and was not excited about the though of interacting personally.

When that hadn’t worked after a good twenty minutes, he jerked into motion, reaching out to grab for a half-done, half-remembered crossword.

It took his eyes a moment to adjust; sat there in the dark, staring down at the hand grasping his crossword.

He couldn’t see the paper.

With a quiet giggle to himself, a little of his tension easing away at the absurdity of his mistake, he bounced to his feet, spinning around to reach out for the lightswitch over by the entrance.

And froze.

The door was half-way swung open, moving with a silent grace that it had never before possessed.

A shadowed figure, outside, stared back at him.

Castor gulped, desperately trying to deny the bile trying to surge back up his throat, and forced himself into motion, stumbling over himself to turn on the lights and pull out a chair and invite the man in and pull up all the after action reports and the half-completed forms and inquire politely towards the martial implement embedded through his chest…

And all the while…

His attention kept drifting to the Alert board’s sensory arrays.

It couldn’t sense his guest. It hadn’t when the man had come at first, but Castor had been too caught up in anxiety and fear and duty. Afterwards, sitting for the last two full sun-cycles, waiting for the man’s return, with nothing else to think of… the thought had kept worming its way into his attention.

The Alert board, which could sense the strongest of beasts from beyond the Pale, could pinpoint the soul and spirit of every Slayer he had met; had even been able to read-out the exact strength of the Impyrial Magistrate that audited the town once a decade… Simply failed to sense this darkness cloaked figure dressed in a beaten, old duster.

An imperfect shroud, for a blank void of emptiness could be felt where the man sat, if the Alert board was well tuned to the exact position, but terrifying enough in its own right.

He shivered a little, trying to hide it, as he rushed to get out the required paperwork.