Last Chance, Declan

The receptionist had built a wooden railing around the front door of the Pathfinder Society Headquarters. The railing hugged the eastern side of the building and wrapped around the corner, where it ended abruptly due to the fact that another building was in the way. It instead pointed north, to a narrow cobbled staircase: up, across, and then over the buildings on the far end of the street. The railing then picked up again on even ground, and terminated without ceremony at the end of the block; about 500 yards away from the HQ itself.

He’d built the railing on account of the fact that the Pathfinder Society had a queue now. Ever since the explosion of pink magic that had emanated from the Tower, citizens of Mithalleana had been crowding around the Headquarters like kobolds around a drake. They needed somewhere to wait, and without a railing they’d all just crowded around the front doors, mob-like. Everyone was in a panic about the strange sights they kept seeing around town: pink monsters with misshapen bodies, spells transforming into other spells mid-cast, doors that talked, flags that waved against the wind… the list of oddities was endless. And everyone wanted the Pathfinder Society to fix it.

Unfortunately, the receptionist’s clever structural perambulation of the congested streets had, in many ways, made things worse -- the sight of hundreds of Mithalleanans standing in line on a railing above the rooftops was eye-catching, to say the least. And it drew a daily crowd.

Declan felt like she was being made into a spectacle. It was beginning to get incredibly uncomfortable. But there wasn’t much she could do without contacting Nomas, first.

“Zeric, is the mail in?” she said as she walked into the HQ lobby. The droning, cicada-like susurrus of the crowd outside continued despite her dogged determination to ignore it.

The receptionist held a handful of parchments over the lip of the desk. Declan plucked them, flicking through.

“One from Pharaoh Elid, four from the magistrate at the Castle, and one that I’m pretty sure is a love letter,” Zeric said.

Declan looked up hopefully. “Not from--?”

“No. Nothing from any of those weirdos.”

“Ah.” She continued her perusing, landing on the last envelope.

“Oh, and that one,” Zeric said, peering over the desk. “Unmarked. Couldn’t find a magic aura or anything. It should be safe.”

She frowned at the thick papyrus. The seal was blood red, a big blooming rose pressured into the wax. Turning it over, she saw three words on the back, in curving spiderfont:

Last Chance, Declan.

“Should I open the doors yet?” Zeric asked.

Declan looked up to the street. A few people were pressing their faces to the windows, cupping their hands to their foreheads to combat the early-morning sunlight. One of them spotted Declan and let out a roar that was strangled into muffle by the glass. The other Mithalleanans picked up the cry. Someone started banging on the door.

“Ora’s sake,” she muttered. “You ready to deal with that?”

“Nope.”

“Nor me. I don’t envy you.”

His gaze snapped over in alarm. “You’re not staying?”

She folded the mail into a pocket along the side of her jacket, and picked her estoc up from the rack behind the desk. “Can’t, I’m afraid,” she said tersely. “I have a meeting at the Castle. I just dropped by to pick up the mail.”

“But you’ve been here all night.”

“Well… once you start working…” She gestured with her free hand.

“They really ought to give us bedrooms.”

“Given that I am the ‘they’ in this situation -- you have a point there.”

Zeric smiled at her. There was something funny about her demeanor, but he wasn’t yet sure if it was the “I feel a little embarrassed about spending the night in my office” sort of funny, or the “something is very wrong and I’m not sure if I should tell you about it” sort of funny.

Zeric decided to brush the concern away. He took very little stock in his instincts. This was a shame, because he had actually been born with the dominant chromosome of a rare Elven attribute that kept him constantly tuned in to disturbances in the leylines. Unfortunately, that chromosome had replaced the one that usually gave elves their magical immunities. This left Zeric sadly unaware of his talents, and keenly aware of his deficits.

Declan was headed for the door.

“Just do what you can to sympathize with them,” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Stay safe,” Zeric said, because it seemed ironically appropriate.

He had no idea how right he was.

Declan was focused on clipping her sheath as she headed through the door. So she didn’t immediately notice that she was not, in fact, standing on the crowded threshold outside of the HQ. The clamor of people had dropped away to an eerie, immensely loud quiet. The flat black ground rippled beneath Declan’s footsteps, like a sheet of water. She got a few steps before she thought to look up.

She stopped walking and spun around. Behind her, in front of her, and indeed all around her, was a seemingly infinite flat black floor. No sky (or roof?) could be seen. The door to the HQ was gone.

Carefully, with the instinct of someone who has experienced more than one attempt on their life, Declan drew her estoc.

“What are you, then? Assassin? Faerie? Unhappy citizen?” she asked the abyss. There was no response.

“My name is Inquisitor Declan Ceresina,” she said, tone so dark and forthright that it would have made a dragon pause. “You will reveal yourself, or--YEEUUUGH!”

Her speech was cut off with an undignified scream. Taking a step forward to menace the invisible, her foot had fallen straight through the rippling black floor, and the rest of her followed suit.

She plummeted at an alarming speed, determinable only by the immense wind whipping past her person. It would be kind of us to say that she was not afraid, and did not flail, but she was very afraid, and flailed readily.

Suddenly, but gradually, the pace of her descent slackened until it felt as though she were falling through water. So intense was the effect that she held her breath a moment on instinct, releasing it only after several seconds had passed. Blackness was all around her. She had no idea how she could even see.

She floated for a moment, getting her breath back. Her sword cut slowly through the space, feeling resistance, like a current. When she saw the tip of it glint, she realized a light was slowly growing around her.

As the light became more acute, it seemed to rush at her from above, as if she were ascending. She braced her sword out in front of her at an angle, anticipating impact: when the impact came, it was the hydraulic punch of water being parted. Her legs kicked at empty air and sunlight, but when her feet hit the sand it was with a surprising amount of grace.

Leaning on the tip of the estoc, she turned slowly to look around her. She was on the bank of a modestly-sized lake, the other shore visible less than a mile out. The clear water looked more gray than blue. It, and the dense green foliage around it, appeared utterly untouched. The sun was bright and pleasantly warm. There was no birdsong; no song at all but for the wind. She supposed she must have been pushed out of the water, likely by some magic force. But she was completely dry. Sheathing the sword, she ran her hands along her sides in befuddlement.

She had half a mind to investigate the water further, but her attention was caught by a shape on a hillock to her right. It was tall and mounted, like a scarecrow, but the shape was stretched out horizontally in an unnatural way. Declan stalked up the hill.

Her eyes adjusted to see that it was an effigy. The body of some large cat, mounted on a wooden stake. The stake went through its middle, at the base of the ribs, and its hind- and forelegs were stretched out, as if running. Or reaching, perhaps, its glassy eyes focused forward in a way that was uncomfortably direct and human. Lacerations covered its legs, from haunch to toe.

Tilting her head to the side, Declan’s eyes widened in that rare mixture of disgust and amazement. Looking at it closer, she could see that the legs were not lacerated, but segmented. Little disks of flesh hung unmoving in the empty air, arranged in the shape of arms but supported by nothing. Like someone had ran the cat through with wire, and then immediately frozen it in time.

Declan’s eyes flickered as she cast detect magic -- her own innate Elven ability. Her fingers hovered over the effigy, eyes narrowed in focus, but the spell produced nothing of interest. One hand fell slowly to her side. The other reached up to touch one of the cat’s paws.

When her finger was but centimeters from one outstretched claw, the cat’s mouth opened and a sinuous shape stretched out of it with a sickening pop.

“Can I help you?” the shape said in a haughty tone.

Declan reared in disgust. The thing was snake-like, but far too fleshy to be a snake. Its too-wide, circular eyes had a hypnotic quality, and it blinked them one at a time as it looked at Declan.

This was probably something fey. It had to be. She would have to choose her words carefully. “What…” She couldn’t get any farther before a terrible, screeching roar sounded through the empty holt. The sound was basal and harsh, causing the leaves on the nearby trees to rattle like alarm bells.

The creature’s head snapped immediately in the direction of the roar. “Oh my. You’re being hunted, aren’t you? Sorry, but I can’t talk with Huntees. It’s not good for the game, if you know what I’m saying.”

It slithered back into the cat’s mouth without hesitation. “Wait,” Declan said, even though it was already gone. She huffed in disbelief. “Hunted? What’s hunting me?” No response. “At least tell me where I am.”

The roar sounded again: closer and lower. The leaves didn’t bother rattling this time. It really did seem like the first roar was some sort of warning call. This one sounded less like a warning and more like a sneering I told you so.

Declan spun around. She couldn’t see anything nearby. She was up on a hillock -- surely if a threat was approaching, she would be able to see it at a distance. Unless it was very far away (in which case, that was quite the roar). Or unless it was very small (in which case, that was quite the roar).

Or -- unless it was invisible. But there were no magical auras nearby. She kept searching, but there was no magic here. Just an empty greenwood and its impossible effigy. And -- oh! to the east, a church, half-hidden behind some trees. It was far better than nothing, so she set off in its direction, drawing her sword again in earnest.

Another low roar reported as she started marching. This one was almost close enough to suggest a distance, and definitely predatory in nature. She checked behind her but still she could see nothing. Almost without even thinking about it, she started running.

No less than a few seconds later, there was a ssschhhh of the undergrowth sliding behind her; then the deathly soft thump--thump of enormous paws. Declan lurched forward in her haste, so close to the church that she didn’t bother turning around. The tall stone door was right there. The paws, pound--pound. Door ahead, paws pound, earth below, church ahead, paws pound, cloud of dust kicked up against her ankles, pound--pound. She let out a fearful roar of her own as she slammed into the door and pushed it out of the way with her full body.

It was an oversized metal door, and it fought her on the close. Adrenaline made Declan very persuasive. Despite the screaming of steel on steel, the door closed in a hurry. It hit the threshold with a tomb-like clang. The only moment of uncertainty came in the form of a sudden, writhing pressure against the other side of the door, trying to push it free. Declan had just enough momentum to resist, but even so the overwhelming weight of whatever she was fighting back twisted her arms in their sockets.

Standing up hurriedly from the door, she worked to get her breath back. It wasn’t until her heart stopped gunning in her chest that she realized the church door had been made of stone. Not metal. Her head snapped up.

A long catwalk extended before her. The steel -- or whatever it was -- was dyed a vague purple. The walls and floor were made of the same material. Glass balls of everlasting blue fire hung from the ceiling at regular intervals. Eerie shadows rolled over the chamber in time with their swaying. At the far end of the catwalk, she could see two paths branching in either direction, and some sort of plinth in the center.

Declan didn’t bother checking the door. She was quite certain that whatever she found on the other side would not be the church she’d entered from. More importantly, she could hear a skittering sound on the other side -- like something tapping its claws. Best not to get involved.

It wasn’t that whatever was chasing her scared her, exactly. As a general rule, Declan didn’t like picking a fight until she could form a decent strategy. And with her environment unreliable (and unfamiliar) as it was, it was impossible to develop the grounds (pun intended) for a solid rebuttal. Furthermore, she presumed that this creature was responsible for her situation in the first place. Charging it outright seemed like a good way to get sent plummeting through the floor again.

Instead, she proceeded down the catwalk.

She watched the swaying shadows of the lights as she walked. The shadow of the orbs was opaque in the center, reflecting the merry blue light rolling across the room. The shadow of the fire was a bit more substantial, and flew behind the orb like a pair of wings each time it swung back and forth. Although… that’s not right…

Declan stopped walking. She looked at the nearest orb, and then at its shadow.

The orb swung right…

The shadow swung left…

Declan started walking faster. Maybe she was scared after all.

The orbs and their shadows continued to swing out of time. Was it just her, or were they getting faster? Well, so was she.

The orb, left…

The shadow, right…

The orb, right…

The shadow -- stopped. All of them stopped dead, immobile on the wall, despite the fact that the orbs themselves kept moving. Unable to stop the reflex response, Declan also froze.

“Hey!” a voice said. Declan couldn’t tell if it was coming from a shadow, an orb, both, or neither. “Hey, hey, what are you doing? Huh? Are you allowed to be here? Not just anybody can be here, you know. Did you know that? Huh?”

“I’m not looking for trouble,” she said, hating how cornered she sounded. “Can you tell me where I am?”

“This is the Palace! You know, the Palace? This is the Palace! Did you bring something bad to the Palace? The door is awful unhappy. Very unhappy.”

She glanced warily door-wards. “I was told I’m being… hunted.”

“Oh! Hunted! It’s a Hunt! There’s a Hunt on, did you know? Wow! A Hunt, right here in the Palace! Does the Hunter have to scratch the door?”

Declan found herself flabbergasted, a state which she had become increasingly familiar with over the past few months. The shadows had started bobbing in a circular pattern around the walls of the room. They stayed in perfect formation; it looked uncannily like a bunch of fat imps dancing on the walls. She shook her head to clear the disorientation. “Look, I think there’s been a mistake. I’m from Musea. Are you familiar?”

“Musea! Yes. Musea! Musea! Boring. I love Musea! It’s so boring! I bet the door would fancy Musea.”

“Yes -- well, I didn’t intend to be here. I must have stepped through a portal or something.” She grimaced. “It was absolutely a trap. But I just want to go back to Musea. I’m not interested in any hunt.”

“That’s not how it works! Nuh-uh. You must have been invited. Where’s your invitation? Weren’t you invited? Every Hunt has an invitation! Show it! Show it! Prove it!”

“I wasn’t invited,” she snarled, losing her patience. “I was taken here against my will, with no warning, in the middle of the day, in broad fucking daylight, and now I’m being chased around by a damn abomination in the -- wait.” Grabbing hastily at her coat, she pulled the day’s mail out of it. “I suppose you mean this.” She held up the unmarked envelope with the rose-shaped seal.

“Oh! Oh! Yes, that’s it! What’s inside? Open it! You haven’t opened it yet? Open it, open it!”

“Hang on,” Declan said sharply, lowering the envelope and definitely not opening it. “This envelope isn’t magical, and neither is the letter inside. My secretary checked. Nor was the front door of the Headquarters, or that horrible effigy I saw. This isn’t possible. I couldn’t have been teleported to a place like this without magic. I couldn’t be hallucinating it without magic, either.”

“Magic? It thinks we’re using magic? Haha! Magic! HAHAHAHA!”

The voice kept cackling, louder and louder. The shadows on the walls bobbed up and down. The actual fires seemed to be bobbing too, spreading wild light across the chamber. At the same time -- natch -- the metal door screamed open. A huge black shape was briefly visible, long tubes falling around its head like tentacles -- and then it winked out of existence.

Declan scrambled, nearly threw her mail over the catwalk, and then bolted with all of it clutched to her chest.

While she ran, she could hear the thumping of paws behind her, rapidly gaining. While she ran, she thought about her ways out. The narrow, secluded nature of the catwalk made it difficult to get a good vantage point on the paths beyond; they looked uniformly the same. Left or right could prove equally advantageous, or deadly. The plinth in front of her seemed like a no-go; she was running so fast that she couldn’t even get a straight look at it. Maybe now was the time to stop and fight? Maybe now she could--

This thought process was cut short as, by a hair’s breadth, one of the invisible creature’s talons caught the back of her coat. She stumbled, completely thrown off-balance. The effect was startling: only the barest edge of the talon was close enough to actually touch her, and in effect, was nothing more than a poke. But the size of the instrument, and the force with which it reached her, was so magnified that it nearly sent her sprawling.

Declan rolled forward to avoid whatever follow-up the Hunter had in mind. As she stood and regained her footing, she shoved the mail back into her coat. But then she paused hastily and pulled out the unmarked envelope once more. Maybe the laughing shadows were onto something. At least, she was out of ideas well enough to try.

Still running, she struggled to break the seal. She took the right hallway on a whim, jogging as slow as she dared to get her nails under the wax.

When she tore it free, she ripped the letter out and held it up in front of her face. What she read made her slow to halt, even as she passed through the door at the end of the hall.

She stared at the page blankly, chest heaving from exertion. Her grip tightened around the paper. “That’s not possible,” she snapped at it, as if the paper itself was responsible. “How could you…”

She spun around to accuse the monster. There wasn’t any monster there. Declan seemed to be in a new place again. The door behind her was an unpleasant gray-white and made of a pockmarked, shiny material that Declan didn’t recognize. An unceremonious metal latch on the side was the only indication of a doorknob. It vibrated slightly in its frame, probably from the force with which Declan had flown through it.

She was vaguely aware of the tuned-down murmuring of people all around her. Her head snapped from side to side. They were all humans. A bunch of humans, all wearing ill-fitting, impractical, thin garments, and pulling small, multicolored cases on wheels behind them.

The floor, or what was visible of it, was made of a glossy and unidentifiable material. The rest of the floor was covered with the most hideous rugs Declan had ever seen. They were thin and wiry, the hair curled into cords like it had been soaked in glue. It must have been made of terribly low-quality pelts. Worst and most disturbing of all was the fact that each and every rug was exactly the same diseased brown color -- as if they had all been pulled from the hide of the same monstrous beast.

The chamber was enormous. The humans walked in file on the floor and sat in rows of chairs on the rugs. The other end of the room must have been at least two or three hundred yards away from Declan; featureless white columns made of the same shiny material as the door supported the structure. It was bigger than the Castle in Mithalleana. In the distance, she could see counters like overlong desks. Humans in colorful parade garments stood behind them, serving food. Declan stared, motionless. A voice snapped her out of reverie.

“Um… are you on Flight 2316? Did you forget something?”

She turned around. To the left of the door, there was a large blue desk with a winged emblem set into the wall behind it. Words in a strangled version of Common were written beneath the symbol: ELYSIUM AIRLINES. Standing at the desk was a human woman wearing an ugly blue dress.

Without a second thought, Declan strode forward and held up the letter in the woman’s face.

“What is the meaning of this?”

The letter said:

You are now the subject of a Hunt. Don’t let your Hunter catch you. If you lose, the contents of your bottom left desk drawer are forfeit.

Declan leaned forward over the counter, gritting her teeth. “I am the only person who knows what’s in that drawer. I’ve never told anyone. Do you people think this is a joke?”

The woman took a moment to study her. She studied Declan’s slender, pointed ears; she studied the unnatural glitter in the unnaturally bright blue eyes behind Declan’s glasses; she studied the yellowing parchment Declan was holding up, with its perfect spindly cursive spelling out utter gibberish; she studied what was frankly an obnoxiously large sword clipped to Declan’s belt. She took in the fact that this stranger was dressed, more or less, exactly like Bayonetta, which was her husband’s favorite video game. The only thing Declan was missing was a pair of gun-spiked heels.

The woman took all this in, and then nodded to herself. “If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling airport security.”

Declan may have been more responsive to this perceived threat, if not for the fact that she was also perceiving a terrible roaring noise. It was coming from the other side of the door that had brought her here.

“Look,” she told the woman in earnest. “I know you’re all in on it. The effigy was in on it, the shadow-orbs were in on it -- hell, even the lake was in on it. All you humans are in on it too, yeah?” She held up the letter in a way that she hoped was polite and reasonable. “Let’s abandon the theatrics. I’m not interested in the Hunt. I just want to go home.”

The woman lidded her eyes. She jerked her head at Declan’s sword. “You know you could go to jail for sneaking that in here, right?”

“Sneaking--?” Declan stared at her in bewilderment. “Human, there is a monster roaring on the other side of that door. It is invisible and its claws are at least the size of my estoc. Do you understand how serious this is?”

“Is that a threat?”

“What?”

The woman moved her hand under the desk, pressing some sort of switch. “Dispatch, I need backup at Gate C17. There’s a woman with a sword.”

There was a pause, then a loud crackle of something alien that made Declan jump. A garbled voice came out of the desk and said, “Anna, what--?”

The woman snatched a slender black device from the desk and brought it up to her face, appearing to silence the voice in the process. There was a pause. “I’m pretty sure it’s real,” she said into the device, “but she’s in cosplay too. I don’t know. She’s talking about something roaring inside the tunnel. No, of course there’s no roaring.”

The roaring had continued, with little interruption, during the entirety of this exchange. Delcan looked between the door and the woman in concern.

“No, she’s just kind of staring at me.” Anna made a face at the device. “What about 9/11? Alec, seriously.” She shot Declan a glance, and then carefully turned away from her. In a voice that was barely lowered: “I think she might be crazy or something.”

Declan finally realized that she wasn’t going to get any help here. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Sorry for the cuss, but… Jesus Christ.”

“That’s not a cuss,” said Anna in affront.

Declan actually gasped.

It was time to leave. There was clearly no escaping this thing that was chasing her. If anyone was capable of resolving the stipulations of this “Hunt,” surely it was the Hunter itself. Consequences be damned, she would face the thing and get this over with, or die trying. Drawing her sword, she strode for the door without hesitation.

Anna started shouting a lot of things, and with a remarkably stern tone at that. Declan ignored her and ripped the door open. She felt the lock pop in half underneath her fingers.

Immediately, alarms started going off. A red light flooded the enormous chamber. The volume of it all was rattling, but somehow the low growl of the creature was far louder in Declan’s ears.

It wasn’t on the other side of the door. On the other side of the door was a long, squarish tunnel, made of the same disgusting pockmarked material that most of the stuff here seemed to be made of. The lighting was low. There were narrow windows at irregular intervals along the tunnel; through it, Declan could see that it was night.

“She ripped the fucking door off its hinges, Alec!” Anna was yelling. That was the last Declan heard from her.

As she stepped into the tunnel, the sound of the roaring followed her. It seemed to be getting louder. The tunnel curved to the left; each time she rounded a corner, she fully anticipated the creature to be in wait on the other side. Each time, it wasn’t. Instead, that growling, predatory roar just got louder and louder.

By the time Declan had advanced to the end of the tunnel, her face was screwed up in pain from the volume. Through glaring eyes, she saw two men in garish yellow vests in the process of closing a large, curved metal door. The door seemed to be affixed to some sort of giant tube, so enormous that it extended well outside the bounds of the tunnel on either side.

A warning swing from her estoc sent one of them staggering, flabbergasted, into the corner. The other was too stunned to stop her as she grabbed the door at its edge and pulled it open. It was heavier and thicker than she was expecting. The roaring was so loud, she was certain the creature was right at her neck.

“Hey!” about seven voices inside the tube said at once, mixed in with a spattering of “What the hell?”s.

“Out of the way!” Declan boomed. “This vessel has a monster on board.”

It appeared to be a vessel. It was full of seats in regular, ordered rows, and all of those seats were full of passengers. It reminded her of the belly of a Majority trader ship: full of rows upon rows of tired Maenads sitting on narrow wooden benches, all psionically linked as they power the ship for hours on end. The comparison made her a little sick. The vessel did not remind her of the dragon trains, which had warm, spacious compartments and looked more like a hotel than a transport vehicle.

A man in a suit nearly as ugly as Anna’s attempted to grab Declan’s arm. She shrugged him off and forced her way down the aisle between the two rows of seats. The people in the chairs were murmuring and looking around, some of them beginning to stand. The roar continued, but no one other than Declan appeared to be aware of it.

The vessel, tube-like, continued for some time further before terminating in a shadowy alcove behind a curtain. Declan couldn’t see the monster. But it was so loud, it might as well have been sitting on her shoulders. It was absolutely inside of this… thing.

“Ma’am, you need to exit the plane immediately.” Someone was following her down the aisle.

She turned and stared at him with an expression that was at once cold and enraged; business-like and scathing. It was the same look she had given to Sef Elid during his eighth birthday party, when he threw a tantrum because his parents wanted to give away the leftover cake. The moment Declan turned this gaze on him, Sif fell completely silent, and did not cry again for the rest of the evening.

“Great,” she said darkly. “So long as you’re sending me back to the Material one.”

The man, if phased, did a remarkable job of hiding it. Declan didn’t wait for his response, though: she continued towards the curtain, where the rows of seats ended. “Where is--” she started, but then stopped as she saw the shadow on the wall in front of her. The creature was right behind her, raising a set of comically large talons.

The roar cut out with a guttural purr. “LOOKS LIKE THE GAME ENDS HERE.”

The voice that spoke to her was loud and close and basal. Declan couldn’t help but jolt at the spikes in volume. Fear overwhelmed her remaining rationality. With a primal roar, and a natural physical fluidity that can only be achieved by a skilled combatant, she spun on her heel and swung the estoc like a thresher over her shoulder, one-handed, free hand bared in the air to catch the kick-back from the blade.

Had circumstances been at all different, she may very well have taken off the heads of a few innocent humans. It is fortunate, then, that the circumstances taking place here were being very carefully monitored.

As Declan spun, the lights on the roof of the vessel guttered and flickered like a candle going out. In between flickers, she was privy to the sight of the passengers flickering, too; winking out of the plane (in both senses of the word). Her estoc cut through the plush headrests at the top of the seats with little resistance; they bobbed through the empty vessel with a gusto. There was no monster behind her. The lights went out entirely as Declan completed her swing, hitting nothing.

A moment of utter stillness.

There were only two sounds in the dark, empty vessel. The first was the off-pitch humming of the lights. They attempted to click on again with a psychoacoustic pop that produced an uncertain, off-color glow. Other than Declan, there was no one inside the vessel anymore. The second sound was Declan’s harsh, rapid breathing, her chest rising and falling like an engine in resistance of hyperventilation.

When she noticed the dull, agonizing pressure in her ears, she was almost too overwhelmed to react. Almost. The pain seemed to grow sharper and sharper, like the inside of her head was being pumped full of air. It was going to kill her. Blood was going to come pouring out of her ears. She gripped at her head, face screwed up in an unending wince.

Such was the agony of this added stimulus that Declan didn’t even react when the creature’s talon appeared on her shoulder. It was enormously heavy. Both the creature’s scales and keratin were solid black; the talon gleamed like a knife blade. Its head was lizard-like, teeth hovering centimeters from Declan’s face. Hanging all around it, like hair, were long, tube-like appendages that seemed to wave about the creature in an invisible wind.

She just kept breathing hard, staring at it. If this were to be her death, then she would face it head-on. She would not panic or gibber or beg.

Its mouth curved up in an uncomfortable approximation of a smile. “TAG. GOT YOU. I WIN.”

She tensed instinctively for the blow. It did not come. The creature’s talon slumped off her shoulder and it turned away, suddenly disinterested, perambulating carefully in the narrow corridor.

“ALL DONE, BOSS,” it called down to the front end. Pushing itself along the cramped corridor by dragging its talons along the wall, it pulled itself into the alcove at the front of the vessel with an unexpected ease.

“For the last time, Gabriel, I’m not your boss,” said a muffled voice from behind the pilot’s door. It opened, and with absolutely no fanfare, Nomas Kavoran stepped out.

“WHATEVER YOU SAY, BOSS,” said Gabriel. Despite being at the other end of the corridor, it still sounded like he was speaking directly into Declan’s ear.

Nomas politely sighed. He delicately worked each wrist in the opposite hand. He calmly looked in Declan’s direction. He reasonably smiled. Everything he did was polite, or delicate, or calm, or reasonable, or some combination therein. He was wearing a lightly embroidered robe that was also delicate and reasonable -- not too gaudy or out-of-place. When he walked forward, the movement was so open and unassuming that it provoked no protest.

“I admit, I’m a little disappointed,” he said. “I was betting in your favor.”

Declan’s breathing was beginning to settle. Her ears still hurt. Her eye twitched.

He came to a stop in front of her. He gestured in the direction of the vessel’s portholes, and the gesture was so reasonable that three of them immediately snapped open. Outside, an infinite black maw could be seen. There were little glowing lights visible; they illuminated no sky, and no stars. But Declan could perceive the force of the wind rushing by the vessel. They were moving at an incredible speed.

“I’m sorry to be so underhanded,” Nomas said. “Really, I am. But, honestly, you gave me no choice.” He leaned forward. “Declan Ceresina, you are a difficult woman to get a hold of.”

Yes, her breathing was back to normal now. Though the pressure in her ears was still unbelievable. “Where are we?” she breathed.

“The Void, more or less.” He stared at the portholes. “One of its less-pleasant back alleys, currently. But the plane is flying for better skies. That’s what this machine is, by the way. Very confusing name, I know.”

“IT DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A PLANE IS?” Gabriel said, making Declan jump. “SORRY, SHE. FUCK.”

“You’re no masterclass yourself, Gabriel,” said Nomas in a tone that, despite his sarcasm, was also very polite.

“AT LEAST I’M WELL-TRAVELLED.”

Nomas half-turned to face him. “Where all did you go, then?”

“ONE OF THOSE ANIMAL DIMENSIONS. YIÆZYUA’S TURF. EFFIGY AND EVERYTHING. FUNNY THAT YOUR MORTAL FRIEND DIDN’T CHANGE, THOUGH. MUST HAVE BEEN AN OFFSHOOT OF THE ORIGINAL. AFTER THAT, THE PALACE--”

“The Palace?” Nomas interrupted. “What a treat.”

“HAHA. EVERLY WAS THERE, TRIED TALKING TO IT-- TO HER. WE PRETTY MUCH WENT STRAIGHT TO THE AIRPLANE AFTER THAT.”

Nomas nodded calmly at Declan. “You put in a good run, at least.”

“The… Hunt…” Declan said slowly. She paused and took a breath. “The Hunt is a game of tag.”

“SUPER POPULAR IN THE INNER DIMENSIONS,” Gabriel said into her ear. “IT’S NO SURPRISE MOST OF THE ENTITIES WE ENCOUNTERED KNEW WHAT WAS UP. SURE AS HELL MADE MY JOB EASIER, HAHA!”

“It’s called a Grid Hunt,” Nomas added. “Entities like Gabriel here are rather well-known for it. His species’ innate ability to become invisible and incorporeal makes him a natural.”

“MY RECORD IS 564 GAMES WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT.” He beamed disquietingly across the cabin.

Declan nodded. She was remarkably calm. She looked at the elf in question levelly. “So you… set this up, then. You planned all of this.”

Nomas nodded. His nod was also remarkably calm.

She enunciated carefully. “Fucking… why?”

“Why do you think, Declan?” Nomas frowned at her. It was a very delicate frown. “Are you ready to attend to your desk yet? Bottom left drawer?”

Declan went through a number of expressions. “You knew.”

“Well, not as such,” he said. He leaned back, giving Declan a reasonable amount of space. “Lavinia had to scry the specific location of the letters for me. But, it is true, that even before I went to this extreme measure…” His gaze flicked her way. “...I had my theories.”

Declan was quiet. “One of those theories,” Nomas said at length, “is that your inaction was motivated by fear.” He spread his hands at the machine from another dimension which encapsulated them. “Was I correct in this assumption?”

It is

here

that we ought to back up.

On Arielle the 22nd, TC 1175, The Tower was liberated from its perceptual coil. Chaos magic was let loose into Musea. And Declan, receiving this news from a group of five (or was it six?) travellers, was told that she really should get in contact with Nomas Kavoran.

To anyone, this would not seem like an unreasonable request. This was Declan’s primary objective in infiltrating the Tower in the first place: contact Nomas. But in the presence of this new and foreign power -- chaos magic -- Declan’s peerless confidence finally met its match. Nomas was different now, they had told her. Nomas had unique and otherworldly powers now, they said. Nomas had been very sick for a very long time prior, she learned. And Declan (although not totally aware of it until this exact moment, in an airplane flying through the Void) became afraid. She was afraid of Nomas Kavoran.

When he didn’t receive a letter, he sent her one.

It would be my honor to speak with the leader of the Pathfinder Society. I have heard much of your work and know that you have this world’s best interests in mind. I am eager to make amends for the right mess I’ve made of Mithalleana.

And then another.

I understand that my position in Musean politics is now shaky at best. The matter of the Mithalleanan throne is just the beginning. I’m sure you have a myriad of advisors in your ear, telling you what to say to me and when. I’m not interested in any of that, myself. Personally, I’d just like to talk.

Now determined, yet more. This time hand-delivered by messenger.

Declan, I’m very serious about this. I don’t want Musea to suffer from a poor relationship with chaos. You are the key to avoiding this fate. I insist that you respond.

Declan collected each letter. She took them upstairs to her office and opened them slowly. She read them all the way through, more than once. And then, frozen with indecision, her impeccably strategic mind eclipsed with fear of the unknown, she hid them in the bottom left drawer of her desk.

Finally, Nomas decided enough was enough, which, more or less, brings us back to Flight 2316.

Declan swallowed.

“Again, I’m very sorry,” Nomas said as reasonably as he could. “But I did need to prove a point. You were told some horror stories about chaos magic, weren’t you?”

“There were some… implications,” she said tightly.

“So.” He gestured at the plane again. “Here’s your worst nightmare, come true. All the horrors of chaos magic, directly in your face. You’ve been through hell. How do you feel now?”

“LOOK,” Gabriel cut in. “I DON’T DO THE PSYCHIATRIC STUFF. AND I’D LIKE TO POP OFF TO THEUES-X-9 FOR A SODA. THAT COOL WITH YOU, BOSS?”

“You are free to do whatever you like, Gabriel,” said Nomas warmly. “Thank you again for all your help.”

“COOL. HAVE A GOOD ONE, DECKMAN.” He turned around and immediately disappeared from existence.

“It’s Declan,” she said, pointlessly.

“Let’s head into the cockpit,” Nomas suggested. “We ought to get a few strings free of the plane. I do hate how it makes my ears pop.”

Pop? Declan was quick to follow.

The door to the cockpit gave way to an overlarge, circular chamber with a red carpeted floor and dark oak furniture. A large tea table sat in the middle of the room. On the far wall was a long glass viewing port, the Void visible outside it, with a myriad of panels and buttons above and below it. Declan had at best a rudimentary understanding of what an airplane was, but even so she could instinctively tell that this was not what a cockpit normally looked like.

Nomas sat and started pouring the tea -- which managed, by way of his sheer politeness, to be steaming hot.

Declan sat across from him. The pressure in her ears was beginning to go down; a hollow ache replaced it. She rubbed absently at the side of her head.

He handed her the tea and proffered the sugar. At her gesture, he dropped two lumps in. He put nothing in his. They both sipped quietly.

“I suppose I was afraid,” Declan admitted at length.

“It’s not surprising,” he said, reasonably.

“No,” she agreed. She glanced very carefully and pointedly in the direction of the Void outside. “So this is your world.”

Nomas laughed. “That would be quite presumptuous of me. This is a world, at any rate. This is the world of chaos.”

“But your little experiment here didn’t really prove anything, did it? It was all staged.”

Nomas shook his head. “Gabriel never had any intention of hurting you. But everything else was very much real. You really did go to those places. Other dimensions. Any number of things could have seriously harmed you in them.” His expression, despite its incredible delicate calmness, was dead serious. “The point of what I did here today was not to belittle you or put you through a demeaning simulation. The point of what I did here today was to show you that you are right. Chaos is terrifying. You should never not be afraid of it.”

She blinked at him. “What did you do, exactly?”

“I destabilized a five-foot square of space from your personal perception of reality. We call it severing the grid. So, when you stepped on it, the ground did not register as real. You free-fell, straight through the strings and into other dimensional grids. You were constantly free-falling, that entire time you were running from Gabriel. I reconceptualized yourself and the airplane in the Void when it was clear that the Hunt was ending.”

“That’s why it didn’t register as magic,” she said. “Because it was chaos.”

“Precisely.” He raised his eyebrows. “You followed all of that?”

“Not all of it,” she admitted, “but enough to get the gist.” She sipped her tea, eyeing him. “You know, this shit was really manipulative. Sort of disturbingly manipulative. You gaslit me and everything.”

Nomas moved to respond, and then paused in a delicate moment of consideration. “I have been somewhat… disconnected… from, shall we say, normal socialization for some time now.” His gaze was a shadow of remorseful and a backlight of guilty. “I don’t expect you to understand, but… after what I’ve been through, it’s difficult to perceive the world from a mortal perspective. I admit I could use some tips on the finer points of ‘getting what you want’.”

“I could help you there,” Declan said, still eyeing him. “I am a diplomat, after all.”

“I was under the perception that diplomacy is nothing but manipulation.”

Her eyes drifted. “That’s enough of that subject. You said all that, er, dimension-hopping really happened. So did you… steal this vessel from that world?”

Nomas coughed politely. “Well, yes.”

“But there were humans in here.”

“And they probably have very sore backs now. But no one was seriously hurt, I assure you. We can check in, if you like?”

Declan nodded. She still wasn’t exactly sure how good or bad she was feeling about all this chaos business.

He pointed a finger very reasonably at the control panel, and some dials twisted of their own accord. A whining, hissing sound like the one Anna’s device made emanated from the panel. It writhed in pitch and consistency before abruptly resolving itself into words.

“...ow that Flight 2316 is Flight 2356…” a male voice drawled slowly through the garble, “we’re gonna do our dangedest to get you folks to New York as soon as possible. That little incident in taxi put us off schedule by a solid hour, so we’ve let LaGuardia know to expect a whole slew of rescheduled flights.” He paused. “What happened earlier was awful strange. Here’s a friendly reminder that our flight attendants can provide you with alcohol.” Declan heard a distant murmuring of laughter. The man chuckled, too. “I’m sure you all can find a way to forget about it before we land. It’s a funny world out there, folks. Personally, I don’t see how we can stop it from getting funnier. Anyway, thanks for flying Elysium.”

Nomas turned the panel off. He was smiling a little.

Declan, meanwhile, made up her mind. “You know,” she said, as if it was a completely original thought: “we ought to start working together.”

When the door to the Pathfinder Society Headquarters swung open at ten o’clock that night, Zeric shot awake at the front desk, scattering papers all over the floor.

Declan looked at him from the threshold, eyebrows lifted coolly above her glasses. “Fell asleep?”

He swallowed thickly, rubbing at his eyes. “Sorry. The crowd, did you see? They’re gone.”

She looked through the windows at the perfectly calm, perfectly empty, perfectly regular streets of Mithalleana. A distant cricket could be heard chirping away. The moon was half-visible behind the buildings on the other side of the street. She took another moment to revel in the familiarity of it all. “Yes, I noticed. When did they leave?”

“It was hours ago. I’ve no idea why. One elf was in the middle of shouting me to death, when this sort of… murmur seemed to go through the queue. People talking to each other about how they should go investigate for themselves. Eventually someone tapped the elf on the shoulder and that was that. They just left.”

Declan nodded, nonplussed. She headed for the stairs. “Zeric, from now on, please mark any mail we get from Nomas Kavoran as top priority.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, taken aback. He watched her walking away for a moment, at a loss. “But… do you know what happened? Why did everyone stop barraging us with complaints?”

Declan paused at the foot of the stairs to put her estoc back on the rack. She scrutinized it on its hook for a moment, and then took one step up the stairs. She looked back at Zeric with her hand on the rail. She smiled at him.

“If I had to guess, I’d say it was nothing more than a change of perspective.”