---

Was this girl even aware of the implications she was making? Jack was dumbfounded. He slipped down off Guinea, top lip curled in contempt of the words proceeding from Cheryl's mouth:

“Before I was around.”

“She came back as the most feared witch around.”

“The old Hag’s connected to that witch.”

You mean my daughter? He was thinking, She was here before you were even born? She is now a witch that everyone is scared of? She’s tied in with that Hag I just met at the blacksmiths? My own now very old daughter is a witch? So I’m several decades too fucking late – is that what you are standing there telling me, you stupid apathetic fff….

Jack had to turn away, if only for a moment to maintain his composure. While Cheryl continued ranting, apparently about the shack now, he glared across the road at the massive trees of the adjacent forest. Just glaring in anguish over the possibilities surrounding his daughter. But his glare turned into a suspicious squint when he thought he caught sight of movement between two tree trunks near the edge of the road. In that moment - a very short moment - he thought he also saw two small beady white eyes flash back at him.

His body shuttered. Goosebumps dabbed his arms. He turned his head to look down the road in the direction they had come, in a fleeting instant considering that maybe the feral girl he had seen back there was actually in need of help. He discarded the though with a small shake of his head before turning back to Cheryl, who was now conversing with some old guy who had apparently appeared from inside the shack. Jack listened to their conversation carefully. Considered the situation. At last, when Cheryl turned and made some ridiculous comment about sharing (presumably with her) or sleeping outside, he wondered which one it actually was: That this girl was out of her mind - cuckoo - or just the dumbest bitch he’d ever met.

‘You can’t be fucking serious?’ He finally spoke. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? Moons twisted your brain or something, lady?’ He looked at the shack, looked back at Cheryl. Shook his head with disbelief. ‘I’ve seen some naïve twats in my time, but are you seriously believing a word this old fart has to say?’ He threw his arms out to the side in an exasperated why-would-I-even-bother fashion, and then had to point out the obvious just in case she missed it. “Take a look around, Sherlock. Is there anything, ANYTHING at all in this place - in this very moment and time - that you even feel at all comfortable with? We pass some crazy possibly-escaped-lunatic on the road a few minutes back, we are now pulled up in front of a creepy-ass forest where two creepy-ass white eyes just looked back at me, we have three – and I repeat THREE,” He held up three fingers for effect; ‘moons hovering in the sky. And you have the bright-spark capacity to trust this old geezer at his word? Do you really, honestly believe that he is in fact just some old guy willing to invite two young strangers into this abandoned shelter to share the night with his aging wife? Your crazy mind sees nothing at all amiss with this situation? Really? Do you even live in this world at all?

Move out of my fuck’n way!’

Jack had his sword out, and it would have been then that Cheryl saw its brilliant steel shimmering in the light of the falling moons, and she would have recognised it - the wavy reflections of its unique colouring - to be that of arist steel, as Jack then moved right past her with a purposeful stride towards the shack.

He soon arrived. Pushed aside the boar skin and stepped past the threshold inside.

Sword at the ready.

Him at the ready.

Ready for anything.

---

Bauble had gone without dignifying Erised’s remarks with a response.

Boris was dumb, and his goofy smile was continuing proof of that. His big, ironically brutish baby face had the look of an infant watching a stage show as Erised did her thing.

Hannah, now interested in Erised to the point of forsaking her own despair, watched on intently as well. By time Erised returned with a reforming hand – an aspect that couldn’t really be hidden by a glove – she had her head tilted and cocked, eyes narrowed with the concentration required to absorb Erised’s every move. When Erised offered her the horse, Hannah didn’t know what to say, since she had never been on a horse before. But when Erised finally showed - at least to Hannah - some vulnerability by stammering over her final question, she smiled. She smiled in the way that a girl who possessed the prospect of making a friend her own age in an otherwise scary place would smile.

‘I don’t know what that is,’ She said with a nervous yet hopeful kind of discarding laugh, ‘but I do speak English, if that’s what you mean?’

She took a step forward, glancing again to Erised gloved hand for reference. ‘How did you do that?’

Meanwhile, the townsfolk were becoming uneasy in the visual absence of Bauble, murmuring among themselves, some of them returning their attention to the smouldering ruins of their town. Others sharpening their stare on Erised, Boris and Hannah in an all too familiar where-are-our-pitchforks kind of way.

Boris, on the other hand, now becoming distracted by a thought, retrieved his drawing pad from his backpack. He flipped past a few parchments until arriving at a clean page, and then started scribbling something down with his charcoal pencil, tongue sticking out and writhing with childlike concentration.

---

Haila’s effort to make contact with Bauble’s mind would have - at least for the immediate few second to follow - failed, as though some dark wall had been raised to prevent her access.

As she continued to watch on at the three humans of interest, nothing nearby that could have distracted her from events taking place in the town, not even the slightest crack of a twig or shift of a shadow – she would have suddenly felt a warm breath on the side of her face, accompanied shortly thereafter by a deep, whispered voice travelling through her head:

‘What are you planning?’

‘Why is a fish judging a crab?’

Bauble’s whispered telepathy resonated through Haila’s head again almost instantly after her second question was complete. Then the following statement became distorted and broken as the telepathic words began to be replaced by an audible voice: ‘None of us should be so quick to point a talon. These humans may not be so very terrible as you think.’ While the message was being delivered, Haila would have seen the air beside her move, first like a mirage coming into view, the moist waves of which then filled with colour and solidified into a person… but not a dragon. The end of the statement was only audible, spoken in the tone of a young human male. Just a teenage boy. He was sitting on a branch of the neighbouring tree.

He was maybe in his late teens to be generous, legs dangling, feet swinging back and forth. His feet were bare, but he wore knee-length tattered green shorts, a dull and collarless buttoned shirt, and a typically mischievous teenage grin. It was incredible, really, the detail of this round-faced lad, right down to the youthful twinkle in his sky-blue eye, the two small pimples on his chin, a few fading freckles on his cheek, and his short, unkempt auburn hair.

He clicked with his tongue and gave Haila a wink, then in one swift movement he was up on his feet. Now standing on the limb he faltered for a moment and swayed, his arms flailed, expression of exaggerated fear; a believable impression of a reckless teen showing off to his crush. Done with his act, he corrected his balance with a second, playful wink and proceeded to walk the length of the limb - heel to toe as if daring a tightrope – and then leaned in on the trunk of the tree, head angling around to peer with sarcastic suspicion at the people gathered in town.

‘And you would know better, all of you would, if you spent more time with them. Like I have…’ Said the teenage human Bauble, turning a shifty, narrow stare to Haila, “…I’m the orphan stable hand.”

Before Haila could reply, Bauble lifted his hands, palms up, and sighed despairingly like a boy who had broken a toy, and then squatting low on the branch he popped his eyes as though he just very well had to tell her a secret he’d been holding onto for years.

He whispered low, ‘Let me show you something….’

Though Bauble did not move or reach out, the following event would have felt invasive to Haila, like a physical hand reaching into her head to place a tangible item in her mind. The item was a memory - a memory suddenly coming back to her, but a memory not her own. In the memory she would have seen a war-torn area of land. The land was mostly ash, houses were burning in the distance, the nearby forest afire. In the middle of this land was a group of powerful human mages. These mages had in the grip of their power three arist dragons, two adults and one infant, pinned to the charred ground by some type of red forcefield. All around and looking on were humans and various breeds of dragon, all of them battered, dirty and bloodied as though they had all been through a battle, and all of them now looking on at what the mages were doing.

It would have soon become clear to Haila that these wicked, powerful mages were torturing the three arist dragons, taking turns as they laughed and enjoyed every second of it. The arist's wailed in agony, calling for help, struggling to break free from the magic field that not only held them there, but prevented them from using magic of their own to defend themselves. Yet, no dragon came forward to try and help. No, not one. Neither did any human step forward - well, there was one. Just one. A human female. Just a hatchling, no older than twelve. The girl's clothes were tattered and stained as she pulled free from her mother’s hand. The dirt on her face – a face that very much resembled that of the human hatchling Haila had been referring to now in town - was cracked with tears. Her sweet, broken voice pleaded and begged for mercy on behalf of the arist's. But the mages did not yield and the child came running and screaming, her tiny fists beating at the arm of the nearest mage who turned to her with a mocking smile. He placed one hand on her head, muttered a curse, and the child fell dead where she stood. Her mother screamed and came running, only to be stopped by a bolt of lightning from the heavens.

Now was when Haila’s implanted memory faded to black. Bauble was still a teen boy, seated on the branch once again, feet no longer swinging. Sorrow was his portrait. He asked her in a solemn, cracking voice:

“Did you see any dragons trying to help me? Did they try and help my mother? My Father? No. They did not….’ A tear welled in Bauble's human eye. ‘Despite the danger. The threat. Only a human girl came. A hatchling.’ He turned his head towards the town. ‘Just like that one.’

With a blink the welled tear vanished. He composed himself. His feet began to swing again.

‘All three dragons, the last of my kind, were said to have died that day. But no…. I survived. So please if you will, Haila, be careful whom your judgements fall upon. I have been living as one of them for quite some time – and I tell you now, dragon, they are not so bad as most would say. They, just like us, fear what they don’t understand.’

---

Hannah didn’t know what to think. She didn’t know how to feel. She was so very traumatised – not just by the events over the last day, but also by her own behaviour – that her emotions were taking a rollercoaster ride. For the moment she was on a low, and she did not want to holler or scream as this very strange girl had implied she might. In fact, by the way she was currently feeling, she didn’t even know where those previous outbursts had come from, as she also had no idea about the power she’d apparently been wielding.

For now, and perhaps it was a convenient distraction from the real issues at hand, Hannah was intrigued by this new possible friend of hers - Eri, as the dragon had called her. She leaned with curiosity, hanging on Eri’s every word. She watched carefully as the spikes of some sort of magic appeared in the air between them and the crowd, and then while Eri shifted her attention to Boris she considered - with what appeared to be great concentration - the request that Eri had made. After a moment of careful deliberation, and proceeding a moment wherein her face screwed up like she had bitten into something sour, Hannah called out to the crowd somewhat less aggressively than Eri had probably hoped:

‘You should all go home now.’

She then gave Eri an apologetic look, shrugged one shoulder, and referred to the hovering magical spikes with an apprehensive glance. ‘What are those things?’

Meanwhile, Boris had paid no mind to the look Eri had given him. He was too involved with his drawing to care about anything else, his tongue still protruding and writhing with concentration as he vigorously scribbled away.

There was barely enough time for Eri to respond to Hannah’s enquiry when one of the townsfolk felt daring enough to speak up. It was a man, perhaps 30, dressed like a common farmer, and probably a stall holder to one of the food stands that had just been destroyed in the market. ‘What is it you want with us?’ He called out, pretending not be intimidated by the looming spikes of magic before him. ‘We are just a simple folk! We only want that you leave us alone – you and your… your…’ he glanced at Boris, Hannah again, then glared at the girl he had formerly seen flying around. ‘…you and your brutes and your ungodly wings and your magic! We just want to be left alone. And if you happen upon that flaming king, well you go ahead and tell him I said so too! Just leave us alone! You might think you're tough with… with y-y-y-your - those WINGS and fancy magics – but this wouldn’t be the first time we had to fight off a WITCH like you!’

In response to a brave little spat, many other of the townsfolk were encouraged to step forward, yet while many of them called out in support of the farmer in various ways, the terror in their voices couldn’t be ignored. Some other townsfolk broke off into groups, conspiring in heating whispers, while a few souls took off in search of weapons. It was simple, though; their town had recently been ravaged by the king's dragons, it was likely that many of them had lost a good chunk of their livelihood, and they couldn’t in good conscience just stand by mute while any further threat literally hung in the air.

Boris lifted his head, giving the farmer a sideways glance, then noticing the hovering blades of magic as if to question their existence for a fleeting moment, but still, again, returning to his drawing.

Hannah sighed a certain sigh as she observed the townsfolk's reaction, the sound she sometimes made when realising she’d been mistaken. She pushed some hair back behind her ears and looked around at the encroaching crowd. ‘Stop!’ Her voice was loud again, even louder with the following words, ‘Don’t be stupid, you will die!’ It was like the words themselves were pulling to the surface another burst of heightened emotion, dredging with it an energy that once again frightened her as much as it made her feel like her body was about to explode.

It was hard to ignore the arrays of dark colours fluctuating down the length of Hannah’s arms and into her hands, resulting in sparks and smoke from her finger tips like she was some sort of malfunctioning cyborg. A glow of emerald light shone from her eyes. She levitated several feet above the ground. A dark shadow enveloped her person. The ground started to convulse and shift like the planets seismic plates were suddenly undergoing maintenance.

Boris looked up from his notepad. He finally put it away. He spread his feet to keep balance against the rising tremor. The dragonbone on his back began to glow a deep turquoise hue. Yet he did nothing, for the moment at least - more delighted than anything else, as though he were watching a butterfly break free of its cocoon.

This was more than the townsfolk could bear. What courage they had was swiftly removed. They started scattering like a group of ants suddenly alarmed by a drop of water.

But it was also right then that an old man was present. Whether he had strolled up, or somehow just appeared, could not have been clear to anyone, since nobody knew he was there, yet. But there he was, standing on the road between the misfits and the bridge out of town. The man had a mule. The mule, as traveling merchant mules often were, was laden with all manner of luggage. The old man himself, however, was hunched with what appeared to be pain induced by the burden of too long a life, and leaned most of his meager weight on a cane that wobbled under the strain. The cane had the look of something hewn from the twisted and knotted branch of perhaps the first tree to ever exist. His clothing appeared almost as old; a faded brown cloak that touched the ground, tied about the waist by a fraying rope that was obviously defying the laws of physics by being able to secure anything any longer. His face was sunken, cheek bones almost perforating his dusty, wrinkled skin, while his jaw was jutting forward, chin raised, thick bottom lip pulled up over the top of his mouth and nearly touching the hairy curls extending from the flared nostrils of his long and lumpy nose. His eyes, however, were without doubt the creepiest aspect of the old man. One of them were nearly shut, not on account of squinting, more like it was just being lazy, deciding that it didn’t really care what there was left to see in the world, and wanting no part whatsoever in the shenanigans of his second eye that was rather popped and wily, darting about in a crazed sort of fashion to assess the situation.

Somehow though, the old man was unaffected by the earthquake, his mule too, as he also found the strength to lean back a little, raise his cane, then drive its tip down hard against the crusty surface of the road – a small act of itself that nobody would have noticed, but caused everything to change. And it would have only been then, after the earth stopped shaking, after every townsfolk had vanished, after Hannah dropped to the ground in an unconscious heap, after the glow from Boris’s bone turned off, after the spikes of desire exploded into quickly fading particles of dust, and after the day was snatched away by night and two large moons hung low together in the heavens, that Boris or Erised may have noticed the old man there. If not (which would likely be due to everything else that had just taken place), he cleared his throat to make sure.

Boris didn’t hear the old man clear his throat, neither did he seem to care that the town was quiet, or even that it was night time all of a sudden. He had rushed to Hannah when she fell to the ground. It was only once he had swooped her up, Hannah looking like a tiny doll cradled in his arms, that his pouty expression happened upon the old man.

Due to the land being lit by Azul and Terrariell (the two largest moons of Nihilo hanging close together and symbolising the night after Beckon Season), and the immediate area lit up more so by two street lamps - one beside the stable entrance, the other across the road closer to Boris and Erised - there would have been no problem seeing the old man shuffle very slowly in Erised’s direction, sparing a moment on his tiresome journey to shake his head wearily at Boris, almost as if he were embarrassed by the massive brute. An uncomfortable amount of time later, with the mule keeping pace close behind, the old man came to a halt a few feet from where he had previously been standing, his good eye jittering hard in an effort to keep a glaring focus on Erised as he spat out the words –

‘What are you daft, you hyped up little self-indulgent abomination? After all this time you’ve spent existing and bitching about everything and achieving absolutely nothing, you let the universe get in the way of seeing the stars? Sure, yeah, I wouldn’t expect dumb-dumb over here to figure it out,’ He said with a glance to Boris, ‘but it’s pretty damn obvious that Hannah is going through a quickening.’ He mumbles something in some other language, and added, ‘You haven’t even figured it out, have ya, Erised? After all this time… it still hasn’t registered in that Dodo brain of yours that you are where you are because that’s where you’re meant to be. That’s life, stupid!’ He said the last part in a somewhat aggravated tone, but quickly relaxed while his good eyes spun in circles a few times and his mule made some stressful forlorn groans.

The sound of a cow was also heard close by, mooing loud and startling the night. But there was no cow to be seen. Boris looked around utterly confused. He also regarded Erised, and then Hannah passed out in his arms, suspicious that it may have been one of them that mooed.

‘The girl needs your help.’ Concluded the old man, and spared one more glance to include Boris in that statement. ‘She’s in your care. For now.’

---

There were no monsters. No transforming beasts. No six headed dragon. Just a couple of old farts suddenly pleading for mercy. Jack’s specific line of work made him well tuned to many things about human nature, and fear was one of those things. He’d been around, he’d witnessed it, he’d been the cause of it, he'd seen it so many, many times to know that the fear of this old couple was real. He lowered the sword to his side, tip of the blade rested on the mouldy floorboard as he stared into the eyes of the old woman while she pleaded with him.

Remorse took hold of Jack. He regretted his actions. Not for what he was doing right at that moment, but for something he had done over a decade ago. It was a memory, among a surprising few, that would forever haunt him.

It was one of the first jobs he did for Johnny Big after being released from Juvenile detention, and an order that came directly from Johnny Big himself. A home invasion: “Go to their house. Kill the guy. Collect the goods. Clean before leaving.” But Johnny, somehow, had the address wrong. The numbers had been mixed up. Jack burst in through the door of the house next door instead, subsequently scaring the living daylights out of the old couple watch TV from the comfort of their sofa. Jack was armed with a semi-automatic pistol, the cold hollow point of its silencer aimed at the old man’s head while a look of confusion crippled Jack’s face. He’d been expecting someone younger. Mid-thirties. Not this old decrepit fool and his wife.

The old man lost control fast, arms outstretched as he wailed and turned in circles in the middle of the lounge room, as if he’d just realised that everything in his life - his family and all his possessions - had suddenly been stripped away. Jack watched on, speechless, set aback by this spectacle, entirely unsure of how to proceed until the old man stopped: He gripping his chest with his right arm. His left arm hooked in on itself like it was having a cramp. He turned towards Jack. He dropped to his knees. His face paled. Physical pain screamed from his eyes as what were to be his last words whispered almost inaudibly from his trembling lips –

‘You… fuck….’

It was obvious the old man was having a heart attack, and his wife - who had up until that point been pleading for mercy from Jack - ran to embrace her husband. He collapsed fully into her arms, reaching for a final breath but got none. His face paled further. Life was fleeing his widened stare. His wife bellowed in a way Jack had never heard before. It was like as if a cow and hyena were screaming together in some sort of twisted opera. And then all became silent as she turned her face to Jack, eyes no longer full of fear. No sorrow. No despair. She was no longer a victim. She was now the embodiment of accusing hatred glaring up at Jack.

Then, right there, was the remorse Jack felt. That woeful feeling of regret. Swelling. Sickening. Ripping him open inside. What had he done? It wasn’t his fault! Surely? An obvious mistake – He wasn’t to blame! No, this couldn’t be happening! This couldn’t be happening at all. He couldn’t be responsible for this – no! Not now! Not EVER! All at once it hit him – in one overwhelming moment he knew he couldn’t bear it; a prophecy of eternal nightmares flooded his heart. There was no way out, no escape, no relief from the future life of torment he was to endure on account of this one singular act. It couldn’t be true - surely - But he could already feel it haunting him the rest of his days – that accusing look in the old woman’s eyes! He needed to go. He needed to escape. He needed to turn back time! He needed to end this NOW!

He urgently squeezed the trigger multiple times.

A procession of muffled gunshots danced about the room. The old woman’s brains, blood and fragment of skull now covered the TV screen where a new contestant was currently being introduced on The Wheel of Fortune.

Jack was jolted from his memory of the event when Cheryl pushed by him into the shack. He looked at her, saw her mouth moving.

The old man and woman, though now eased back on their bedroll due to Cheryl, were still watching Jack with lingering apprehension.

While Cheryl then claimed a section of floor and said something stupid about his daughter, he drew a small breath, steadied himself, and then raised his free hand as if he were a priest bestowing a blessing of calm upon the old folks. They gave him a curious look. He added a nod of his head and it appeared, at least a little, to help comfort them. Jack returned his attention to Cheryl.

He didn’t have one - a bedroll, that is. Cheryl’s looked like something a homeless man had been dragging around the gutters for the last 20 years. Didn’t matter, though, he was too tired to care about the condition of her bed. But ‘Tactful’, as it turned out, was obviously not a word she was familiar with, not in the slightest. Her attempt at empathy, followed by yet another ill-timed note of self-preservation, found Jack irritated more than ever at her apparent lack of humanity.

Without thinking about the correct way to react, but remembering the callous elbow she jabbed him with on the ride there, he hooked his foot under her buttocks as she squatted with a thoughtful frown beside her bedroll, then shoved her out of his way with a firm thrust of his leg.

‘Move!’

The movement would have been strong enough to lift Cheryl and slam her firmly against the corner walls on top of her bedroll, while Jack simultaneously swung the same foot to the side and kicked the stool right out the door. It exited the premises quite dramatically and continued toppling into the night for what sounded like a good distance.

Before Cheryl could have recovered, he was on his back on the rotting floorboards, head without a pillow. He had one arm resting on the edge of her bedroll. His exposed sword lay by his other side. His feet occupied the spot where the stool had been. His hands, coupled, were rested on his stomach as he stared up into the night, focused partly on the broken timber of the roof and partly at the stars beyond.

‘Just give me an excuse….’ He muttered a warning at her, then clenched his jaws as he repeated the warning in his head.