I peer at the obsessive creatures as we pass them, mulling over our new companion’s words—and the things Viscera said to me before her essence burst apart. The warped shadowkind all seem to think there’s something waiting for them here that they can’t get at. And now the rift is spitting out beings who didn’t even want to come.
It’s got to add up to a bigger picture, but right now that picture is looking more like a Dali than a Da Vinci.
We hurry on to the edge of the city through the streets we’ve already cleared. After a few more blocks, Falkor half-scrambles, half-winds around my torso and leaps to the ground to slither-bound along beside me. I guess he wanted to stretch his paws… and stomach? It’s hard to tell which is doing most of the work propelling him along.
As the haze up ahead brightens where the flood of shadows must end, a few more regular higher shadowkind slip out to join us. They all sound as puzzled as our twiggy friend, as if they fell asleep on the bus and ended up way past their expected stop. Except none of them were actually asleep.
“The shadows crashed all around me, and I fell right through them,” one woman says with a smack of her hands together. “What in the realms is going on?”
Mirage hums. “Dropped from the sky; let’s not cry.”
When she shoots him an even more bewildered look, Jonah steps in. “We’re trying to figure that out. None of us expected something like this to happen.”
Over the past week, the rift had been getting bigger and spewing out small floods. But this escalation was jumping from a pond to an ocean in one go.
What if the portal does suck all its shadows back in like it did the last couple of times it vomited? Will it siphon up everything in them too—including us?
Then again, we’ve been marinating in its sludgy porridge for hours without it backtracking. Looks like it’s all spew, no suck this time.
We pass a few familiar factories, picking up our pace at the increased brightening ahead. A few thicker puffs of essence drift off my exposed skin, and I shove my hands in my pockets.
Maybe if I collect the smoky stuff close, it’ll stick back onto me when we’re out of this mess.
We step out of the murky haze into early morning sunlight. For a moment, I gape at the rising sun. I didn’t even realize we’d been working through the whole night.
The fresh air fills my lungs like the sweetest honey. I drink it in, reveling in the faint tingling that spreads over my skin as my physical body knits back together in the places where the strange shadows gnawed at it.
Tents ranging from campsite to circus size poke up from the ground for miles in front of us, with a sprinkling of trailers and camper vans in between. Hundreds of figures walk or, mostly, sit slumped in my view, most of them humans who’ve been ushered out of the rift zone.
“Peri! Good to see you back.” Sorsha jogs over to join us, her bright red ponytail swinging behind her. The phoenix shifter stops a few paces away. “Rollick’s been wondering how you were getting on. We’ve heard a lot of stories from the incoming humans about the ‘shiny short woman’ who sent them here.”
Falkor takes one look at our friend, darts around my feet three times, and scurry-winds back up to my shoulder. Sorshadoes a double-take and then laughs. “It looks like you’ve been adopted. It’s not so bad being a steed—you get used to it.”
That’s right—she has a shadowkind creature like a little dragon who stays with her. Maybe Pickle can show my puppy-snake the ropes.
Jonah has already moved on to more serious matters. “We wanted to evacuate as many people as possible, but we started noticing some ill effects after staying in the rift area for so long. I’m not sure if it affected me, but my shadowkind teammates were losing essence.”
Mirage nods and flutters his fingers up from his arm. “It was just breezing away.”
Sorsha’s good humor dims. “We definitely don’t want any of you disintegrating. You’d better get a little rest before you head back in, and we’ll alert the other teams on duty to keep an eye on themselves.”
Her gaze slides past us to the dark, hazy barrier less than ten feet away down the road. “Wonderful. Here come some more of the warped ones.”
A couple of particularly disjointed creatures have just emerged from the thicker shadows. It’s hard to call what they’re doing “walking.” One hobbles along on four legs, two of which are short and stubby as an aardvark’s and the other two slim and long as a greyhound’s. The other has possibly hundreds of legs and possibly none—I can’t tell whether the blobs rippling along its jelly-ish sides are individual limbs or just bulges of its torso.
The blobby creature has a face that’s all mouth, which it holds open wide as if vacuuming up all the air around it and then suctioning at the ground. The aard-hound notices someone’s evacuated Goldendoodle trotting past and surges forward with anurf!that might be a threat or a welcome.
It could use a little work on its delivery.
Raze steps into the latter creature’s path to block it. It halts and then bumps its round, scaly head against his leg. Either it wants scritches or it’s really bad at playing battering ram.
The basilisk shifter backs up a step. “What are we doing with the ones that aren’t aggressive so far? It doesn’t seem right to kill them.”
Sorsha sighs. “The ones that come out of the rift area, we’ve been sending back in. They seem to prefer being at one with the strangeness. Rollick has beings patrolling the outskirts. I don’t know what to make of these lesser shadowkind. We found one that suffocated a human by squeezing him too tight and seemed pretty distressed about it, and another that kept digging through every wall it encountered. I have no idea what it was looking for.”
Like the ones we’ve seen—trying to get as close as they can to different parts of the mortal world. As if they feel like there’s supposed to be a place for them here—the way Viscera did.
She got so angry when she couldn’t figure out how to fit in…
