Red Whale Stories: November 2022

Hello Internet,

Today, I announce my resignation from the 2022 NaNoWriMo challenge. As of right now, I am approx. 12,000 words behind, and while I would likely be able to make that in the last ten or so days of the month, I am frankly just not enjoying this story. So, I would rather use the last ten days to work on projects I am excited about.

What follows is what I have written for the month:

NaNoWriMo 2022

Imagine a pale skin on thin limbs. Imagine wings and feathers of burning black flame, chained to cold gray stone, pinned in jagged spikes of obsidian. Imagine a spine showing through thin, membrane-like skin of an arched back as an angel fallen from grace is held against the ground in permanent obeisance. Dark hair hung over gaunt features as it stares out into the darkness until its stiff neck gives out. Then, its pale forehead touches the ground and its held breath is released.

The door in the far wall unlocks and opens, and a small figure moves carefully through the darkness. Her hips sway as she moves from candleholder to candleholder. Each is at height with her, and she holds them by their slender black necks, the steel cool in her fingers as she flicks her thumb and forefinger together in her free hand and produces a dancing orange flame. Slowly, methodically, she lights all four candles, casting warm, dancing light around the room and making the shadows writhe.

“How do you fare, sweet Tenebris?”

Her voice is smooth, smokey, and her eyes a dark, burnt brown. Her smile is crimson red, painted, as she drags a seat into place in front of him. It is a rich, dark wood as old as her, and she settles into the seat with her legs crossed. A slit in her sparkling dress shows off her shapely calve. Her foot bounces as she waits.

“How long,” the angel gasps, voice raw and body quaking. It takes everything inside of it to sustain it, it has been drained so much of itself.

The woman chuckles. “Oh, be kind, my dear. After all the years that we’ve known each other, you would think that you would have warmed to me some time.”

They lift their head to glower at the woman and growl. “A hostage never warms to their captor, witch.”

“Actually, they sometimes do,” she says. “It’s called Stockholm syndrome, as it turns out.”

“The vengeance I will visit upon you and your blood will be so much more than what you can fathom, human.”

The woman feigns a yawn. “So you’ve said.” She stands and, from the air, produces a gleaming dagger which she holds in a reversed grip, with the blade angled down. “I ask you: don’t you ever tire of the threats?”

“My ire only grows by the day,” they respond, and their body tenses as she drags the sharpened edge of the dagger along their exposed back. Thick and tar-like, angelic blood beads across the surface. It does not run, and the woman uses a small, crystalline phial to capture what was made. Already congeal, it slides slowly down the glass and gathers at the base while she watches.

Watching her move, the angel follows the movement of the chair as it slides back into place against the wall, where it always is. The woman turns to smile at them, and they bare their teeth like the feral beast she has reduced them to. “And what will you be doing with my blood today, you monster?”

The woman shrugs. “Worry not over such small things,” she tells them. “It is for me to know and to benefit from, and you to provide.”

Head back against the floor, they listen as her shuffling feet snuffs the lights. One by one, it dies until they are alone in darkness. Then, the door opens and closes, and the latch turns, and finally, silence.

Israel stood at the edge of the property, staring up the hill at the old, haunted Dunkel House. He held a coin in his left hand and turned it over and over in his fingers as a nervous habit. The wind stirred the yellow grass around him, long blades of it chaffing and striking against one another and tickling at his legs. His eyes narrow and silence follows.

“There is something wrong there,” he says aloud, and he lifts a small palm-sized book. Inside, red lettering writes itself on age-yellowed pages. “What do you think, Grimm?”

It is obvious that something is wrong here. The question is a matter of what. We’ve traced dozens of powerful alchemical manifestations sourced from this town. I think the two of us can predict what it is that is happening there. Can’t you?

Israel frowns. “Fools rush in blind, you know.”

Does that mean, then, that the blind are foolish?

Israel stares at the house for a moment longer and then shrugs. “I’ll get back to you on that one.”

Closing the book, Israel pockets it and then walks the perimeter of the estate. The large, black iron bars run the length of the entire property. He makes his way to the front gate and stopped there. He stared up at her through the gate and then turned his back on it to regard the city nearby.

Dunkelheit was not a large city. It’s population was only just thirty thousand people, and the Dunkel House was both a historic property and one of some legend. The rumor was that it was haunted, and it was left there by the people out of mixed superstition and tradition. From the moment Israel arrived, however, he could tell that something was different about the area.

It was like a blessing, he considered, but it was stale. This city was watched over by something, but the eyes had gone tired. He could feel the gaze on him from the moment he set foot inside of city limits, and the gaze was more focused and almost penetrating at this point. He could feel it against his back as he said, “And here I thought the estate was abandoned.”

“It is,” says the woman inside of the gate. She has long, curly hair as dark as sin. Her skin was fair and hips wide and shapely. She wore a corset and a dark dress, and the heels on her boots added a few inches to her height. She gave a ruby red smile as she regarded him. He was shorter than her, and she stared down slender nose at him. “I am simply the groundskeeper, but I can have you in for tea.”

“And why would you do that,” asks Israel, turning to regard her with his dark eyes. One of was slightly darker than the other, almost black, and he found her staring at it. “Why would you invite a stranger in to drink?”

“Because we both know why you are here, sir, and we both know who you are.”

“Do we,” he asks.

The woman nods and smiles, and she turns and sashays away from him through the tall grass. The lock undoes itself behind her, and the gate swings open as invitation. Israel regards it, and her, quietly, and then taps his pocket. “I know, I know,” he says, and he follows her into the trap of her making.

Israel follows up a long, winding path toward the front of the house. He waits on the porch as she unlocks the front door. Without losing sight of her, he takes in his surroundings. The sight of the city from the porch is awe inspiring as the golden light of the evening flows over the horizon like honey.

They enter the house, and she walks him through the foyer, past a long staircase that disappears into a hallway at the top. Following down another hallway into a small kitchenette. There, she guides him to a black table with slender legs. He sat there and watched her prepare the tea. She moved slowly, sensually, enjoying every step. She lights the flame on a gas stove, and she sets the kettle down to boil.

He hears the water bubbling before the steam begins screaming. Then, she brings it back to him with white, ornate porcelain cups, each of them embroidered with roses and vines around the base. Golden rings are emblazoned across the top and the bottom. She pours him tea through a netting that holds a tea bag. “Sugar,” she asks, and Israel shakes his head.

She sits down across from him and pours her own tea using a similar tea bag. Then, she adds two scoops of sugar and a splurt of honey. She stirred it until it was a light red, and then sipped it. “Mm. Perfect,” she purrs, and she gives him a hungry, feline stare. Resting her chin in her hands, she says, “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your interest, Mr. Israel?”

“You know me,” he asks, and she sips her tea and nods.

“Of course I do. Rumors of you follow you everywhere you go,” she says. Her voice is velvet, burnt. He can hear age and smoke and life, but she looks no older to him than he was.

Israel looks around the room. “This kitchen is well kept,” he says. “And the house is clean.” He meets her gaze. “This place looks more like a home than a historical sight.” She sips her tea, and he says, “You must work hard to keep it in such fine condition.”

“When you have something important to you, you take care of it.”

Israel nods and regards his tea. The scent of it is sweet, almost floral.

“I will cut to the chase: I know all about you and how you’re hunting for all kinds of rare, alchemical materials. I’ve also heard rumors as to why, and that is exactly why I invited you inside.” She smiles at him. “I have some very rare materials, if you are willing to pay the price for them.”

Israel stares at her with his hands in his pockets and says, “That depends: how rare are the materials, and how steep is the price for them?”

The woman gives a dark, rich chuckle. “Come now, there is no reason to be so serious. You’ve hardly touched your tea.”

“I haven’t touched it at all,” he says. “I’m not thirsty.”

“I imagine you’re not,” said the woman with the ruby red lips. From within her corset she produced a phial of thickened black blood. She placed the phial delicately on the table between them and smiled at Israel over their tea. “Perhaps, you simply haven’t had the right addition to the tea just yet.”

Israel raised his eyebrows at the tincture. It could have been a million things to him, but he didn’t need to say a word to her to get the answer out of her. Meeting her gaze, he knew she was too proud to keep her mouth shut.

“Demonic blood,” she said. “Distilled from corruption thousands of years old and refined by anger and torment. Something such as this could cost a nation, you know.”

Israel nodded silently and regarded it. He lifted his hand and hovered it over the phial, waiting for her nod. When given permission, he turned it over in the phial and watched it cling. The substance did not move save for a subtle jiggle and flow. It was coagulated, congealed, and heavily beaded inside. Wherever he moved it, it hung and it swayed, but it never ran.

No alchemist by trade, Israel did not know the true value of any alchemical component. He did understand rarity of source, however, and knew that anything adequately demonic or angelic was difficult to find. Supply and demand ruled everything in a free market, and the purple markets of magic which he dealt in were the freest magic there were.

Israel set it back onto the table and kept his face neutral as he watched her. He folded his hands in front of him as if in thought. “And there is more where that came from?”

“Could you even afford more if I were to offer it,” she teased, and he noted that it was not a denial. She was playing with him and clearly did not need the sale, which told him that she had not only a ready source but that she had other buyers already lined up. She had been peddling this for some time, or else had the time to be prudent. He knew that either one meant something to him.

He watched her watching him and realized that he could not place her age. Her skin was smooth and without blemish, and her voice sultry and smoky. She was beautiful, alluring to the point of seduction, and yet there was something outside of time about her. Her eyes carried wisdom and power far beyond someone of her age. More than that, she clearly knew a lot. Her presence was soaked into the town.

“You don’t even know that I could afford this,” said Israel, pointing with his steepled fingers at the vial between them.

Her smile grew whimsical in response. She was playing with him, and he knew it when she said, “Oh, I know a great deal more than you think,” she said. “As I previously mentioned: your reputation precedes you.”

Israel grew quiet again as he considered the import of her words. It was not the first time that he had been recognized by another practitioner of the crafts. Her knowing him was not a surprise. He had drawn too much attention to himself too many times to avoid the inconvenience. He was not well known among alchemical circles, and for the life of him he could not think of anything to do with this resource that was not alchemy. At least, nothing that he would want to do.

He picked up the vial again and moved it. The blood stayed still inside as he showed it back to the woman. “Can this get me what I seek?”

“Even if it can’t, it can get you closer to something that could,” she said. “Think of it as an investment as you like. Even still, even after all the time I’ve spent with it, I don’t know its full capabilities, only that it is powerful. That said, I do know that it can bend time.”

Israel did not visibly respond except for going quiet as he set the vial down. Demonic blood was a powerful catalyst in many times of magic, and while Demons exist outside of the confines of time in a technical sense, they were not conventionally associated with it in the same way a ghost or specter would be.

He pushed the vial away. “You never gave me your price.”

“You provided me with your offer.”

Israel gave her a long, lingering look and then stood. Hand in his pockets, fingers wrapped tight around the book, he said, “I need to think about it. You’re asking for a lot.”

“I’m asking only for what it is worth,” she said, and she tucked the vial back into her corset and walked him out. She let him walk his way to the gate, which opened on its own, but she did not leave the porch until the gates had closed behind him.

Israel waited until he was well outside of her sight before he produced Grimm from his pocket, and when he opened the book, he found its pages already full. The woman is clearly hiding something, and whatever it is, she’s hiding it inside of that house of hers.

“Clearly,” said Israel, but he knew what it was. He was inside of town, standing on one of the neatly organized and cleaned streets as he stared back up at the manor. It’s a demon, he said to himself, and he walked back toward the motel where he had booked. Grimm, meanwhile, wrote itself.

Why do you think that she sought you out?

“As she said, my reputation precedes me.”

And what is it that she wants from you, then?

“That is the question,” Israel said aloud, and he watched Grimm think for a time before tucking it back away. He stopped at the motel and was greeted by the owner.

“Did you find what you were looking for.”

Israel gave the woman a tired smile and said, “Yes, thank you. It’s quite the building, isn’t it?”

“It’s history,” she said with a plaintive shake of her head.

“The groundskeeper was there. She showed me in.”

“Groundskeeper,” said the woman, her eyes dull as marbles as she spoke. “Why, son, we have no groundskeeper up there,” she said. “That place is condemned, of course, and we locales are too afraid to go and look. Why, have you seen someone up thereabouts?”

Israel hesitated but saw no dishonesty in the woman’s face, and then he flashed a smile. “I had meant that the gate was open when I arrived. I simply walked up to it, though, and then turned around,” he said, and he gave a shiver in performance. “It had a bad feel about it.”

The woman laughed. “Strange you said that,” she told him. “Local teenagers like to pretend like they’ve done the same, though I’ve never known the gate to be unlocked. Perhaps it was one of them that did it. Either way, rumor has it you can see a woman inside of the building staring back at you if you wait long enough.”

“Is that what the rumor says,” Israel inquired, and he could almost hear Grimm writing.

The woman nods. “All folktale,” she said. “Still, I don’t like to look up there at night. Always afraid I’ll find something looking back,” she told him.

Israel nodded.

“So, you were writing a book, were you?”

“Something like it,” he said, and he smiled before tapping the front desk. “Anything else haunted around here that I should know about?”

“No, nothing of the sort. It’s a good kind of town, save for that monstrosity.” The woman gave a crooked smile. “Still, it adds a certain charm to the area, doesn’t it?”

“It does at that,” he said. “And that diner you gave me this morning: thank you. It was delicious.”

“You’re quite welcome, dear. If you need anything else, be quick to tell me.”

“Oh, you’ll be the first to know.”

Israel returned to his room and locked the door after him. He stripped his jacket and tossed it onto the bed, but only after pulling Grimm out, too. He left Grimm open beside the jacket as he went to brush his teeth after the long morning. When he returned, he grinned.

It always astonishes me how easily you can blend in with people. As for the woman: you think she has a demon up there, and that she is selling its blood. How does she bind it? And why bind it there? Why keep it in a place so well known to the town.

“Oh, I have a few theories,” said Israel, and he lifted the blinds on the window enough to gaze out at the town.

The town of Dunklheit was small but peaceful. It lacked the same poverty that seemed to hurt towns of its size, and that allowed it to grow to a size that was sustainable without swelling larger. There was a force guiding such a perfect place, a force that directed it. Even the streets were neatly organized, like from its very inception the town had a guardian angel or patron deity that was always serving it.

What will you do now that you know? That was what Grimm had waiting for Israel when he turned to check on it.

“For now, I think I’ll rest,” he said, and he closed Grimm and collapsed onto the bed beside it.

Israel rested until nightfall and then went for supper at another diner suggested by the woman at the front desk. He smiled and he waved politely, and he walked the quiet streets with the manor at the back of his mind. It felt to him like the building was watching him, and for the first time in years he felt a fear gripping him in his heart and in his mind.

He ate quietly and had a small meal, and he grabbed a handful of salt packets on his way out. One by one, he tore them and poured them into his empty pocket after making sure that Grimm was left safely at the motel.

The streets felt darker and colder to him than they had when he had left for supper. A harvest moon, redder and larger than any he had ever seen before, loomed in the distance as he approached the manor. At night, he found it looked more haunted than it had during the day. The gate was open, as if it were waiting for him.

He followed the wooden staircase up to the front door and found that open, too, and then he entered. Rather than follow the hall down to the kitchen where he had spoken with her, he instead climbed the stairs to the landing at the top and was greeted by a cold hallway. The air felt chill and each breath seemed to burn both his nostrils and his lungs as he took it.

At the top landing, he went down the right hallway and followed it for what felt like hours. He passed blank doors of oak and mahogany but never reached the end. It felt like hours he walked, seeking something that he worried wasn’t there. When he turned to look back, however, he found himself back at the origin of the landing. He looked down the stairs and saw the front door, and when he looked back down the hall he found a wall in its place.

Looking down the other way produced yet another wall, nondescript but solid. He put his hand to it and found it held, and he flexed his right hand behind the gloves he wore. Removing his left glove, he put his bare hand to the wall and felt a biting cold pass through into his skin. He looked to where the wall had been and found a staircase leading up.

The woman was using some form of spatial distortion. It was not an illusion if he could feel it, he assumed, and he tried his right hand for good measure and found the wall as tangible as it had been with his left. He returned his glove and waited at the landing to think, to test. He heard a clock somewhere in the building, but it echoed like a far off thought. Likely, it was the limits of the spell to do that, though considering the catalysts she had and her familiarity with the building, she could hold the spell for days if necessary.

Suddenly, he felt much better about not drinking that tea.

He looked down the stairs again, at the darkened doorway that waited for him. With a spell like this in the works, she could be keeping her prize literally anywhere within the building and literally anywhere outside of it in space. This space was not an actual space but a pocket. By his estimation, he had entered it the moment he had crossed the threshold, and leaving through that door would at best place him somewhere else he didn’t want to be and not outside.

Even if he could make it outside, though, he wasn’t ready to go. She was hiding the demon somewhere in the building, and he couldn’t leave before he found it. He had too many questions to ask, and besides, he didn’t trust this witch. She had done too much for too long for her to be left to her own devices.

Knowing that whatever he was seeking was deeper inside, he decided to start up the stairs rather than to make his way back down. He took to walking in a slow, measured pace, and could feel that the stairs and the distance he moved were real enough. His legs began to ache and burn as he lumbered his way up and, without a banister to guide himself by, he had to use the wall for support.

He placed his bare right hand on the wall as an experiment and felt it hold. Again, the magic was transporting him somewhere else, but the walls themselves were not magical. They would not survive this long if they were. He replaced his glove and kept going, and in time his back grew stiff and so did his neck as his lungs began to burn with the effort.

He stopped eventually and, looking back down the stairs, found another wall. Alone on the stairs, trapped in a small, confined space, he began to laugh to himself. Looking up, he found another wall, too, and then found himself trapped in a small cube of walls and stairs. Blocked in on all sides, he said to himself aloud, “And what exactly is it that you want with me? Do you want me to negotiate with you? To trade?”

Silence responded, and Israel smiled to himself. He had expected as much. A woman like her was not one to speak openly. He reached into his pocket and produced a small knife, and then removed his left glove. Dragging the knife along one finger, he used the blood it produced to draw delicate circles and rigid lines in precise patterns on each wall. Then, he dragging the blade the other way to seal the wound and put it away.

Standing and waiting, he watched the runes dry and felt the room shaking. And then, like water bursting from a stone, reality came apart. Small tears formed in the walls, showing impossible venues beyond them, and then, nothing. On all sides, he was surrounded by impossible spaces, and behind him was the landing which he had left not so long ago. He still smiled, but it was stony and unmoving. She knew and had expected this. This was a test. What followed would be real.

He blinked and then focused, and then he followed the magic back down the stairs. There was an illusion there, he realized, but it was hidden in the darkness. One eye saw it while the other did not. There was another staircase hidden from view by the woven light covering the doorway. Removing his right glove yet again, he dragged his hand over it and unraveled the light. The spell fractured in his grip and the staircase appeared in both eyes.

Israel pulled his glove back on and made his way down the stairs. He moved slowly, watching more carefully now for the weaves of magic that the witch could wrought. He had not seen a practitioner as powerful as her in some time and felt foolish for underestimating her. At the base of the stairs, he found the source of the cold as he stepped into a finished basement that was blue with magic. At the far wall was a steel door. A low mist filled the room.

He did not speak when he entered. He only turned to look at her in the darkness, and she smiled in return. When he blinked, both eyes could perceive her as she lifted the veil. “What truths can that eye of yours see, I wonder.”

Israel stayed quiet as she sauntered into the center of the basement. It was a large space with magic woven into the wood and the stone. This was her altar and her home, and she had made it her castle, too. This ground was hallowed by her, and that was how she held the demon in chains upon it.

“I suppose I’ll find out when I take it from you,” she said, and she lifted her arms as the fog shifted. The darkened shadows turned to mist and flowed around her, surging toward Israel, who barely had time to respond before being overwhelmed by them. Darkness rolled over while the witch stood grinning, her smile blood red as she felt certain that he was dissolved to nothingness before her.

When the shadows parted and Israel was still standing, she was openly astonished. His right hand was up and shallow cuts were left along his chest and arms. The glove was gone, revealing pale, waxen fingers. The sleeve of his jacket had been eaten away by the corrosive dusk which had briefly swallowed him, revealing alabaster flesh cut with dark runes across its lifeless surface.

The witch regarded his arm with surprised awe and said, “Fascinating!” With a snap of her finger, the shadows surged again, swirling around him and then narrowing into a spiral. They stopped at least a foot from him and swelled into a dome as he stood, gritting his teeth, and the woman laughed. “An anti-magic barrier projected from that arm of yours? So the rumors are true, then? Then I have to ask, young man: what exactly are you?”

Seeing an opening in her assault, Israel charged forward as fast as his legs would carry him. He kept his right hand up while the dark runes across the fingers and the back of his hands and arms writhed and shifted in their protective way. The shadows moved, too, rising against him in a twirling maelstrom of whispers and velvet. Around him, a cocoon of barely perceptible light kept them at bay as his magic combated hers.

He was just to her and was about to wrap his hand around where her throat should be when the shadows parted. He found the wall and planted against it with his palm flat. She was gone, replaced by bare cement. Israel looked to his right and then to his left and found a sphere of shadows parting there. The witch peeked out with a crimson smile and said, “Boo.” When Israel turned to grab at her again, he was caught by an invisible force which threw him through a pillar of wood and held him against a cement wall fifteen feet from her.

The witch walked toward him then and dragged her fingers along the wooden pillar on the way. Fresh vines wove around it, joining the two broken pieces again. She stopped only inches from him, and he could smell the scent of lavender and rot on her. “Tell me,” she teased, her voice breathy and mouth smelling strongly of sulfur as she leaned close to look him in the eyes. The two disjointed images of the crone and the maiden were fixed there for his mind to boggle at. “What is it that you came here for, if not to barter?”

Israel stayed quiet while she watched him, and she threw her head back in a cackle. “You are a quiet one, aren’t you? Assuming you can answers from me again, are you? Well, let me assure you: you gleaned nothing over tea that I did not give you personally. Why, after all, what better bait to tempt you back here than the very thing you wanted most: rare catalysts with which to work your magic.” She shook her head in front of him and it made her dark curls dance. “What would your mother thing?”

Israel took a deep breath, and the witch smiled in response. “Oh, was that finally a response? Then the rumors are true, I’d wager. You lost your mother in a spell gone wrong, and now you spend your days trying to stop errant magic what could consume the lives of other unsuspecting people?” She snorted and glared. “Well, boy, I am no mere conjurer whom you can snare. Anti-magic or not, your tricks are little more than trifles to me and you are nothing but a sad joke by comparison.”

“It is rare to see someone of such power who is so young,” Israel said, and when the woman twitched, he knew what he saw. When she saw his understanding, she began to laugh again.

“You are a clever one,” she said, and she ran her left hand along his right arm. Tracing her long fingers along his arm, she whispered to him, “And this is something I’ve only dreamed of seeing. How exactly did you come by this? What did you sacrifice in trade? Knowledge like this is lost for a reason, you know. Sunken with poor, poor Atlantis.”

Pinned to the wall, Israel went silent again as he tried hard to find an angle of escape. Whatever she was doing, it bypassed his anti-magic field and suspended him from the wall. The witch, growing tired of the game, took him by the hair and dragged him through the air behind her as she said, “Fine. Be silent. I have something you don’t have very much of: time. In fact, as you’ve already figured out, I have infinite amounts of it.”

-NaNoWriMo 2022-

Samantha blinks in the dark as she wakes up before her alarm. She shivers as the cold of the room surrounds her every bit as much as the shadows do. She was never afraid of the dark as a child, but lately she swears that she sees things watching her from the shadows, and she hates it. Sometimes, she thinks to tell her mother and grandmother all about it, but she knows how they are. Her mother will deny it, and her grandmother will play it up. After all, grandma Dunkelheit had been telling her for years that the house is haunted.

She checks her alarm clock and sighs. It is still an hour until she has to wake up for school, and judging by the way the shadows are watching her, she doesn’t imagine that she will get back to sleep any time soon. So, she sits up, and she turns on the lamp beside her bed before rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The shadows lurch away slowly, as if reluctant to leave her.

Samantha had never been afraid of the dark before living in this house. Even as a child, when she would visit her grandmother here, she was not afraid of what the dark might hold. It is only recently that she began to fear the shadows that seemed to cling like taffy to the walls and corners. Normally, Samantha was more like her mother than her grandmother and did not fear such things as clinging shadows.

Pulling her curtain to one side, Samantha stares out the window at the exterior darkness that looks so very much like the sticky shadows of her bedroom. It feels different to her, as she stares out and sees the edges of the sky lighting up. Halloween is different in a haunted house, she tells herself, though she would never speak it aloud. Her mother would argue; grandma would prattle.

Samantha lives with her mother and grandmother following her father’s death three years ago. She was sad, at first, and she still misses her father, but she stays quiet about that, too. When she first moved in, she swore that the creaking of the floorboards as night were her father’s footsteps. They sounded the same, to her, as they did when they would visit as a family when she was a child.

As a child, Samantha spent summers with her grandmother in this old house. When she was about ten, something happened. Her parents never spoke of it, but she stopped visiting and she didn’t hear from her grandmother for nearly three years straight. Samantha never asked why, and her parents never offered an explanation. After her father passed, her mother packed everything up and moved them. Samantha didn’t ask about that either. The decision made sense to her, though she could never properly articulate why.

All in all, Samantha likes living with her mother and grandmother. Sometimes there is tension, but she is glad to have family, even if the shadows are unwelcoming. She looks at her darkened corners and grins to herself, thinking how the problem isn’t that they are not welcoming her. The problem is that they are too vigorous with their welcome.

Samantha climbs barefoot from her bed and leaves her room to use the restroom. She has her own private restroom just outside of her bedroom and keeps a nightlight in there to combat the darkness. As she walks, she watches the shadows move away from her like wisps of smoke, almost as if they are dissolving into the floorboards and making them real for her. It reminds her of dark feathers and dying flames for some reason.

She uses the restroom and washes her hands afterward. Looking in the mirror, she sees a corpse and then blinks it away. Sometimes, she remembers the car crash that took her father’s life. At the time, she thought that her mother had died, too. Sometimes, when she is feeling lonely or let down and she misses her father the most, she thinks that all three of them should have died that day. Sometimes, living without her father feels almost like hell to her.

Early mornings always produce these sorts of intrusive thoughts. She walks barefoot back to bed and curled up with the lamp on to keep the shadows away. Her alarm still have forty minutes, but she wants to be warm while she waits. Silently, as she cries, she replays happy memories to try and get some warmth into her bones. As she warms, her eyelids grow heavy, and it isn’t until she is nearly to sleep that she begins hearing the tapping on the floor boards beneath her.

-NaNoWriMo-

Human’s like to associate God with light, but it was Lucifer who lit the sun. That it was God’s decree was irrelevant in the grand scheme. Lucifer was named for the deed, and Tenebris was named for theirs. They still remember the process of weaving darkness from what was left behind, like thread from a spinning wheel and then knitting it together to create, well, everything.

Honestly, humans get almost everything about God wrong. They could not understand it, and so they created a comfortable version of it in their own image. History, as they understand it, is so small and simple. Tenebris remembers what was there before everything, and can understand the infinity behind it being almost nothing at all.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, the scientists say, but they do not understand a world without rules. Physics exists because the angel’s created it and God demanded it. Everything was set into order around them, and each one of them is a miracle with more care and love put into them than they can ever comprehend. Why, every moment before them was designed in a way to lead up to them, and every moment after is a product of their very own existence.

That humans, any humans at all, ever envy immortals is a fascination and disappointment to Tenebris, who has always understood the function of dark things. Death, they thing, is merely a process and transaction. You were given eighty years, he remembers, and now you will give them up after you have used them. That they now have to bleed for human greed and fear is something which infuriates them more than the fall did, and thinking about it makes them want to fall even farther in pursuit of revenge.

Sometimes, over long periods of solitude, Tenebris will send their consciousness back to the beginnings of creation. They will remember unraveled time and empty space, and they will remember the architect there before them, detailing to them through color and thought the wonders which they would work. They remember also the insidious lie behind it all, the story which they were unknowingly telling and the suffering which they would endure as their own creations not only doubted them but turned on them.

As a creature whose entire existence was once time but who exists entirely and completely outside of time, Tenebris has no concept of how long they have been trapped here. They remember being summoned here in the same way which their allies in the war were sometimes summoned by Solomon to do his bidding. They remember the cold of the chamber eating at their heels like piranha, and they remember the runed obsidian which were used to shackle them by feather and by flame in place.

Pride was not Tenebris’ sin. No, that was Lucifer whose pride was so great that it not only shook the heavens but also shook the God who inhabited them. It was Lucifer, whose brilliance so blinded the other angels that they chose to fall with them. It is Lucifer whose arrogance was so great that they created a prison of their own design to spend their eternity in and turned it into their palace out of spite.

It is not uncommon for practitioners of magic to call upon otherworldly patrons to empower them. Tenebris had done it for some time after their fall and saw no harm in the act. Some few other demons reviled humans, but that was raw envy, Tenebris felt. All of God’s children, even those without the flaming wings of creation at their backs, are pawns in a greater game which God does not deign to share. That is the war Tenebris is fighting, and that is the corrupt which boils their blood and burns their wings.

Right now, however, Tenebris wishes only to sit up. Head to the cold stone, body pale and limp, they feel stiff and tired all at the same time. It feels to them like they have been waiting centuries only to be woke from time to time to have their blood taken, or their feather’s plucked, or their skin shaved off. They know not what the woman is doing with their body, only that it hurts.

As it is now, Tenebris has given up home. They still rage, and they still hate, but so far it seems impossible to them that they will escape. The witch, whatever else she is, is shrewd. She had all of this ready before summon them, and she was able to bind them quickly before using them for whatever purposes they have. So far, they have yet to even reason out how long they have been there, an impossible feet for one such as themselves who is intrinsically tied to time.

They are like this, held to the floor, when they hear a tapping on the wall to their left. At first, they assume it to be the witch coming back to grab more blood, but they know well enough that she would not be back so soon. Turning their head, they scrape their forehead against the cold, dusty floor and listen.

-NaNoWriMo-

Samantha remembers the tapping and little else from her sleep. She stretches as the alarm goes off and then silences it. Rising from the bed, she goes to dress and brushes her hair afterward. She wears it back in a loose ponytail and goes in sweats downstairs to grab her breakfast. Her mother is already there dressed for work and nursing a coffee. Grandmother will sleep for another few hours.

“Samantha, darling, you are not wearing that to school, are you,” asks her mother, whose own suit and pants make her look like anything other than a woman in mourning. Samantha, meanwhile, looks like she hasn’t bathed in a few days.

Samantha looks down at the sweats she pulled on and shrugged. Pouring herself a large glass of orange juice, she gives a mighty yawn that is loud enough to show off all of her mouth and then says, “Who do I have to impress?”

“Your classmates,” says her mother quickly as she snatches a box of cereal from Samantha’s hand and replaces it with a fresh apple. “Your friends. Your teachers.”

“Come on, mom,” says Samantha as she takes a crisp bite out of the apple. She speaks while chewing and opens the cereal box beside her mother to grab a handful out while she talks. “It’s late October. If I haven’t impressed them yet, then I’m not going to.”

“Please, dear, even if you don’t impress them, you’ll embarrass me!”

Samantha shovels a handful of cereal into her mouth and chews. “No,” she says after washing it down with orange juice. She sprinkles another handful of cereal into a cup of yogurt which she had gotten out of the fridge and stirs while holding the apple with her mouth. With both ready, she continues, “I’m embarrassing me. Or, I would be, if I had anything to be embarrassed about. With how fashion is now, you’re lucky that I’m wearing anything at all.”

Her mother’s brow knits. “Please, don’t say things like that.”

Samantha shrugs again and slurps her orange juice. “Just saying.”

“I know, I know.” Her mother sighs and finishes her coffee. Then, smoothing Samantha’s hair back, she pulls her first into a hug that goes on longer than Samantha would like and then kisses Samantha on the forehead. Afterward, she looks at her. “I love you.”

Samantha frowns. “Fine, I’ll go change.”

“You don’t have to.”

“When you look at me like that, I do.” Samantha sets her things down and storms back up the stairs.

-NaNoWriMo-

Creation began with nothing, not flame

Devoid of darkness, the shadows came

They clung, they grasp, they lived in the wake

And all of creation then began to quake.

It was He who made it, whose word began

The process from which there came the land

And the people who inhabited it and all the beasts

Whom they would slaughter for their selfish feasts.

It was He who made it, whose word would craft

Who would build all things that would come after

And we were given the tasks to complete,

We lived in service and worshipped at His feet.

It was in His shadow that we worked

And all the glory did He took

While we scrambled, shaved, and wove the heavens

Until the day we could be forgotten…

-NaNoWriMo-

Tenebris sat at the edge of creation watching the sphere of the sunshine and glow in the vast darkness which they had woven. They had taken pride in the work they were doing. Darkness was not the opposite of light but the sibling of it. They existed together in conjunction with one another, balancing each other, teasing each other. The sun floated in vast darkness but also gave darkness definition. Without light, darkness simply was. It was the light which made it dark.

Technically speaking, Tenebris was not their name. It was a name given to them by a long dead civilization who had forgotten centuries ago. Like all angels and the demons they would someday become, they predated such things like religion and Christianity. Like God, they simply always have been.

At this time, however, Tenebris was resting on that final day of work. Days didn’t exist then and night was a new thing. Technically, neither concept would come into being for millions of years when humans began creating their complex methodologies of tracking the passage of time. It is sometimes said that time is an illusion, but in all actually it is a practical fact. Things move through space and take up space, and they change, too. Time is the measurement of that change, but it is also a social construct which humans have constructed and refined through countless civilizations.

In the beginning, none of the angels realized how their creation would be used. They had been given the blueprints and set to work, and they had worked tirelessly until their work was done. That was how they were built. More importantly, that was why they were built. They existed solely to put God’s plans into motion, and once the work was done, they had no purpose left. They simply existed around the thing which they had built, aware of it but separate from it, forbidden to interact with it.

The work was sometimes lonely. Tenebris remembers seeing the other angels toiling and weaving, their work endless and infinite and forever expanding. To their understanding of creation, the worlds were still unfolding. The work is never done. Even with the rebellion, creation continues.

The tapping continues to Tenebris’ left, jarring them out of reverie and pulling them back to the cold darkness that now confines them. Once, they were proud of the shadows which they had made. These shadows were not like theirs, though. They were not the shadows of creation. These were the witches shadows, and they were loyal only to her. Tenebris, eyes to the left and forehead to the cold cement of the floor, whispers to themselves.

“What is it? Who is it? What do you want?”

There is no response, only an insistent tapping. It is not the witch, they imagine. She would not waste her time on such petty tortures. Evil though she may be, she is pragmatic. Like the angels in the beginning, she knows only her work. Even the collection of Tenebris’ blood is pragmatic, even in its cruelty. She is taking it for a reason, even if that reason eludes Tenebris.

The tapping stops, and there is a moment of silence. Tenebris closes their eyes. Then, the tapping resumes, but this time it is paced. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap-Tap. Tap. Tenebris opens their eyes. This is code, though they cannot divine what kind. It is meant to show intelligence, though. It is meant to show an attempt at communication.

With effort, Tenebris looks to their left and calls out, “Who are you? Why are you there? Are you friend or are you foe?”

Silence followed, and Tenebris realized that those were the wrong questions. Without a mutually accepted code for them to communicate with, the two of them could be saying everything in agreement without knowing it. Before anything else can be said, the two of them will have to determine a way to answer questions. Firstly, however, Tenebris needs to make sure that this mysterious figure can hear them.

“If you can hear my voice and my words clearly, please tap once.”

Silence follows briefly before a response is heard: a single, halting tap.

Tenebris smiles. “Good. Now that we know you can hear me, allow me to ask this: are you in league with the witch? Tap once for yes or twice for no.”

Two quick taps follow the question, and Tenebris rests their forehead against the cement while they think. Whomever it is, they are someone who knows the witch and, based upon their communication with Tenebris and their response to Tenebris’ question, are not only not in league with the witch but may be actively against the witch. It is too soon to ask such a forward question. For now, Tenebris has decided that other questions are more pertinent.

“Continuing from there, one tap for yes and two for no will suffice moving forward. Do you understand?”

Tap.

“Good. I am trapped and shackled. Are you likewise trapped?”

Tap.

“But you can make such noises. Are you trapped but unshackeled?”

Tap.

“I see,” says Tenebris into the darkness. In their head, they imagined someone very much like themselves at first. Perhaps, they imagined, an angel had been captured to complete the collection. It is a dark musing, and it is the very kind that made Tenebris better suited for the fall.

“Did the witch trap you?”

Tap.

An ally indeed, thought Tenebris, whose desire for revenge was upsetting even to them. A quiet, lingering rage rises in their chest and warms their cold, tired bones. This could be ruse, however, and they know all too well the sort of torment it might cause. The witch was not one to visit torture upon them so far, but that does not mean that she could not change. Human hearts are capable of depravity even demons would be appalled by.

“Are you seeking a way out?”

Tap.

Tenebris sits in silence again and considers their next question. They know that they have a seeming ally for the first time in only God knows how long. Even knowing that, however, they haven’t a plan. Whatever bindings are used to keep them here are powerful enough to stop even a demon. It seems the freedom allowed to this mysterious other individual, then, would have been a product of either oversight or a lack of power. The witch wouldn’t waste her time securing a victim who could not fight back against her, but then she wouldn’t waste her time in keeping someone of such little importance, either, Tenebris imagines.

“Do you know who I am?”

Tap-Tap.

Tenebris sighs. That alone is a mixed comfort. On the one hand, it limits their planning and strategy. If even one of them knew the other, then they could plan accordingly based on the knowledge of their combined prowess. As it is, they are two disparate figures speaking through code.

Still, thinks Tenebris, we are now two, and that is more than we were before this.

“I need time to think,” says Tenebris. “Can you wait?”

Tap.

Good, thinks Tenebris, and they rest their forehead to the stone again and close their eyes as they fall into deep contemplation. They have lived a long life so far, but nothing in it has prepared them for this moment. Even the dungeon which He created was one where Tenebris and the others were kept willingly. Whatever the witch is doing, and for whatever reason she is doing it, Tenebris will see her suffer before it is over.

-NaNoWriMo-

Samantha isn’t sure how she missed it for all these years. She remembers it vaguely, as a child. There were toys down there once, in the basement which she forgot. She remembers descending the stairs into a warmly lighted room, and she remembers a long carpet that ran the length of the floor. She remembers dressing the large wooden pillars which held the ceiling above them, wrapping them with tinsel for Christmas or decorating them with drawings she made for her grandmother. She remembers tracing her fingers along the old, aged grooves in them.

She does it again now, having remembered the space and found it again. Her finger tips feel the smooth, rounded grooves carefully as she stares at the cold, blue interior, lit only by the faint, white glow of a single lightbulb above her. The air in here is cold and motionless, and the shadows more alive than she has ever seen them. In the distance, she can hear a faint tapping without rhythm. It fades in and out, and sometimes she holds her breath to hear it more clearly.

“Sammy, darling, what are you doing down here?”

Samantha turns to face her grandmother, who seems to her to have appeared out of the darkness. Her grandmother, Mary, is a tall, slender woman with fair skin and ruby red lips. Her hair is a fading gray, and it was rich, dark curls when she was younger. She has a rich, smoky voice that speaks both age and feminine wild, and she smells almost always of lavender and spice. As she has gotten older, Samantha realizes alone with her grandmother in the darkened basement, her grandmother smells strongly of something else, something pungent and souring, something unpleasant.

She crinkles her nose and then wipes it. “I was just exploring,” she says, and she smiles uneasily at her grandmother, who wears the shadows like a shawl. The shadows seem to move with her when she approaches Samantha, who hugs the pillar beside her for comfort. “I used to play down here,” she says, and she looked around the empty room and eyes the large, steel door at the far end of the room. That is new, she realizes, and it is deeply, almost suffocatingly unwelcoming. “I can’t believe I haven’t come down here since mom and I moved back.”

“Well, there is no reason to now,” says her grandmother, offering her hand. Her fingers are long, and so are her nails, and both are corpse white. She smiles a ruby red smile. “Come along, dear, there’s no reason to be down here in such a dreary place with all these ghosts and these memories.”

Samantha looks around the empty room. The memories are not the problem, she tells herself. Ghosts aren’t, either. She looks at her grandmother and thinks that the problem lies with the living. She takes her grandmother’s hand and follows her up the stairs and out of the room, and immediately the air is warmer and more welcoming, even if the shadows remain thick and alive.

“Why did you clear it out, grandma? You used to spend so much time down there.”

Her grandmother gives a playful, throaty laugh, always coy and lively, and she says, “I did when you were around.” She shrugs afterward as she leads Samantha into the back of the house, to the small kitchenette. There, she sits her down and begins preparing tea for the two of them. “It is different, when you’re grandmother and you have your grandchild around. Without anyone around to have it for, it was just another room to clean. Now, it is just dust.” She wipes up a spill of water she makes and then turns to smile at Samantha. “Nothing interesting down there anymore, unfortunately, and no reason to change that. We have plenty of space upstairs with only the three of us.”

Samantha looks away as her grandmother says it, and an awkward silence lingers. Even after three years, she misses her father. All of the counselors she has had have told her the same thing: she will miss him less. So far, all of them have been wrong. Sometimes, she misses him more than others, but she always misses him. Once, she read somewhere that you don’t stop missing the people who have passed. Instead, you grow around the hole they left in you. Samantha prefers to think of it as still waiting to grow.

Her grandmother pours her tea and fills it with honey. She stirs it and offers it to Samantha with an assortment of sweet crackers and then kisses her on the forehead. “Is there anything else I can get you, dear?”

Samantha smiles. She didn’t ask for this, but she understands the gesture. Her grandmother just wants to take care of her. It is her way of coping with the stress—acts of service are her love language—and while her mother buries herself into work to ease the pain, Samantha can appreciate her grandmother’s attempts at replacing her. Sometimes, she wishes that Grandma Mary would just sit her mother down and address the issue, but she knows neither of them could ever have a conversation like that, not now, and not any time soon.

“No, grandma. Thank you.” She grabs the little plate of crackers and the tea cup, and she stands. “I’ll be upstairs doing homework until mom gets home.”

“They work you too hard at that school,” says her grandmother. “Are you sure you want to go there? Why, we could home school you. They have incredible programs, and with your mother’s salary…”

“I like it the way it is now,” says Samantha, who makes sure to turn on the light to the stairwell before entering it. “I think I’d go nuts if I were trapped inside of this house all day.”

Her grandmother looks sad but says, “Yes, dear, of course. I understand.”

“Thanks for the tea, grandma,” says Samantha, wanting to soothe the damage she did. It isn’t that she doesn’t appreciate that her grandmother opened her home to them. It is that even after three years here, it still isn’t her home. Her home was with people, not in a place, and her home will never come back. “See you at supper.”

“Of course, dear,” says her grandmother with a small, sad smile. “Of course.”

-NaNoWriMo-

Warmed by the tea and comforted by the sugar of the sweets, Samantha did not last long at her desk before she slid out of her chair and fell into her bed for rest. She did, after all, have a very early morning, woken by the persistent tapping that seemed to echo throughout the whole house. So, it was ironic when, again, she heard the tapping and woke to it.

It was still day out, and Samantha decides to follow the tapping to its origin. She rises from bed and slips her house shoes on to quiet her footfalls. Whatever was tapping, she wants to find it without alerting it to her presence. She leaves her bedroom door open and follows the sound out into the hall, down the stairs, and beyond the landing down another set of stairs to the foyer space.

In the foyer space, she follows it again to the bleak, bare door of the basement, and is just about to open the door when the hair on the back of her neck stands up. She hears a whisper, a warning, and turns to find her grandmother there, smiling. “I thought I had heard you up,” says her grandmother, a red smile on her pale, wrinkled face. “Going back down again, dear?”

Samantha pauses, hesitates, as the hair on her neck pricks. Her heart hammers as she looks her grandmother in the eyes and sees danger there, but the whisper fades, and so does the tapping, and she releases the breath that she wasn’t aware she was holding. “No,” she says, and she shakes her head. “No.” She laughs politely and says, “I honestly don’t know what I was doing. Sorry, grandma. I think I was still halfasleep.” She rubs her eyes and stretches. “Mm. I had a nice, long nap upstairs. I think school was more tiring than I reckoned for.”

Her grandmother clicks her tongue, nods. “They give so much work these days, I swear.”

-NaNoWriMo-

Israel walks the length of his cement cellar. There are no doors here, just walls of imposing shadow with a concrete floor and ceiling stretched between them. He eyes the ceiling but sees nothing, and he eyes the floor and sees nothing. Looking into the shadows, he sees only shadows in one eye. In the other, he sees extended, impenetrable nothingness.

After half an hour of searching and staring, he approaches a wall and touched it lightly. The shadows around it swirled and shifted, giving way to a starry expanse beyond it. He reaches into the nothingness with his right hand and returned to have ice forming on his fingers. Wherever he is, there was no escape through there.

He began walking the room again. It was larger than he would have anticipated but connected to something altogether different. It, like the other areas in the house, existed inside of a pocket space. This witch was a master of spatial magic and could create length, width, and dimension at will. That she had demonic blood as a catalyst only made her more powerful.

She reeked of temporal distortion, too, though he could not see completely how. The eyes he saw her with gave him a double image, but the image was imperfect. The magic affected her in a way which he didn’t understand. Angels, and demons by proximity, theoretically existed outside of time, even if they took up space. He could see how demonic blood could serve as a catalyst for such things, though he could hardly understand the depths of it.

He repeated his experiment at each wall and then at different intervals and spaces between the walls. At one point, he opened a space in the shadows and stuck his left hand into until the cold bit him. Returning his hand, he found it red and shaking as the glove had frosted over. He repeated this experiment with the shadows and saw a similar result, nearly losing a finger to the wall, but in doing so he found that none of his inanimate objects on his body elicited the same response from either. Paper thrown into either remained paper unaffected.

It wasn’t until he began tapping on the floor that he got a response at all. He tried it at first to look for hollow spots, but the floor was solid and, when he jumped up to slap the ceiling, he found it solid, too. Neither were hollow, and there was no reverberation or echo to be heard. When he tapped at the floor, however, when he did it near one wall, he got an unexpected response. He heard a voice, and though it was muffled, he could understand it.

The voice was vaguely masculine, though it was light. It asked him questions and determined a code for them to use to continue their communication. Israel tried to speak back but heard no response. Tapping on the floor with his knuckles was the only response he could give. He kept tapping for a time and then went quiet when his correspondent went quiet, too.

Now, Israel rests at the center of the room, protected by sourceless light from the creeping, hungry shadows that writhe all around him. He stares up at the ceiling and thinks. The other person with whom he spoke was obviously another hostage, though who they are is still in question. Israel imagines them to be the demon, though he has no evidence to support the claim. If she has taken Israel hostage, she has likely taken others hostage, too. Perhaps, he reasons, there is a reason the home is thought to be haunted.

He crosses his legs and swings his foot, and he wishes that the had brought Grimm with him. Originally, he had thought that Grimm was what she wanted. Now, flexing his right hand, he realizes that she has done her research on him and knows so much more about him than he did about her. That is his fault, and it will be his burden to get out as a result.

Grimm would not be able to give him answers, of course, but he would be able to give him magic. A living book, Israel has found, can hold more magic than a dead one. Even still, it is useless without being there with him, and that makes it pointless to consider. He looks up and stares at the shadows and swears, moving between them, he sees threads. He thinks to touch them but remembers what happens when he tries. His left hand gets bitten; his right hand removes them completely. He watches the threads, watches how they move and vibrate, carrying this thing through time and through space and into infinity and beyond.

-NaNoWriMo-

Strictly speaking, Samantha doesn’t really believe in ghosts. Despite that, she does firmly believe that she is haunted. Memories are phantoms which cling and linger, and they can play tricks on the mind and on the soul. When she first moved in with her grandmother, she saw and heard her father everywhere. When she brought this to her grandmother, she was told that they were trickster spirits trying to lead her astray. When she took that to her mother, she was told to be practical and told that she misses her father.

Samantha thinks both are true. Memories are tricking her, hurting her, but they are not gods or ghosts. They are merely thoughts and feelings that linger in the void where her father had lived. Without him there to keep the memories in check, they rise unbidden like sea weed on the beach and stay there rotting until they are removed. There is a reason that they call it phantom pain.

The basement lingers in the back of her head, as does the tapping. It has been years since something like that has happened to her. While the shadows alarm her at all times, she has grown used to the sounds of an old house breathing and no longer worries over them the way she used to. Specters are normal for her. Phantom noises aren’t anymore.

A knock at the door interrupts her, and her mother enters when given permission. Looking at her mother, Samantha finds it hard to see anything than a younger version of her grandmother. Everyone says the same about Samantha, almost like her father was not even a part of her conception. The three of them simply look like increasingly younger versions of each other—crone, matron, and maiden.

Sits up from bed and smiles. “Hi, mom.”

Her mother smiles back. “Hello, dear.” She sits down on Samantha’s bed as Samantha moves her feet and sits up to greet her. “Supper is ready.” She feels Samantha’s forehead. “Are you feeling well? You grandmother says that you’ve been sleeping almost all evening.”

Samantha stretches and yawns. “Yeah. I just had trouble sleeping last night, that’s all.”

Her mother frowns. “Why? Are you having the nightmares again, Sammy?” She sighs. “I wish you would let us put you back into counseling.”

“No, mom, no nightmares,” says Samantha, wearing her brittle little smile. Her mother gives her a long stare and then sighs, and Samantha hugs her. “Come on, mom. Let’s go have supper.”

Her mother lingers on the bed and then nods. The two of them rise together and go to the door, and Samantha turns off her lamp on the way. Before closing the door, she peeks back into the room and eyes the writhing, living shadows that are watching her and wonders why they scare her so much. Perhaps, she thinks, those are the things that are going bump in the night.

-NaNoWriMo-

“You. Are you awake?”

Israel sits up suddenly when he hears the voice. He had drifted off, but he feels no need to announce that to the figure beyond the wall. Instead, he scrambles over to the corner where he had been when they first communicate and tapped a single time. “Good. I have been thinking. You are trapped as I am. Do you see a way out?”

Silence follows as Israel searches his surroundings. His first instinct is that he does not, but his eye lands on the threads again, and it makes him wonder. After some contemplation, he taps again. “You seem hesitant,” says the voice, and Israel taps a second time. “Will it put you in danger?” A third tap confirms the fear, and silence follows as Tenebris considers their next question.

Israel remains quiet, too as he waits, and he removes his left glove and flexes his hand. Though there is no visible damage done to his digits, he cannot ignore the lingering pain that has seeped in behind his flesh and deep into the bone. It is like the shadows sap at his being, not as his blood. His hand shakes as his fingers approaching the writhing, rolling teeth that lick and surge. The shadows around him seem to gather at that point, as if to meet him, and Tenebris speaks.

“You do not have to risk you life for this.”

Israel withdraws his hand and considered the statement. Then, tapping twice onto the floor, he hears Tenebris laugh.

“Fine. Do as you will, but you are of better use to me alive than dead.”

Another tap and then Israel braces himself on his knees. He draws a deep breath and reaches his shaking hand forward. Slowly, carefully, he allows the shadows to roll over a single finger and winces and recoils, biting back a scream. Then, after a few deep breathes and confirmation that there is still no blood, Israel plunges his arm in to the elbow and reaches for the threads.

His fingers feel clumsy and bloated as he fumbles with the threads, and touching them bites worse than the shadows do. He plucks, however, and then reaches beyond them until his aching, burning fingers find something cool. Grunting with exertion, he digs his numb right hand into the concrete beside him and uses it to brace himself as he pulls his hand back through the vacuum, and as he hears Tenebris scream, he brings an obsidian spike back with him.

Israel falls back from the wall with his hand shaking. His fingers are numb and bleeding around the solid spike of polished, smoothed obsidian. Looking at the wall, he sees that the shadows have flattened again and the threads returned to their previous form. He has reached through them, though, and after dropping the spike and checking his hand found that he can still move it.

Pain ebbs through him, up his arm and down his spine. His stomach churns, it hurts so bad, but it is a success none the less.

He goes to the wall and taps on the floor. He gives three taps, as if to ask if the other figure is okay. A long silence follows before a tired, raspy voice said, “I do not know what you did, friend, but you somehow reached into her and freed me. Thank you.”

Tap.

“Still, there is much to do before both of us can acquire true and honest freedom.”

-NaNoWriMo-

Samantha heard a scream in the night and got up to investigate. As always, her investigation brought her down the stairs and to the basement door. She heard a brief tapping but, when she went to check the door, found her grandmother coming down the stairs, so she ran away. Now, she is back in her room with the lights on, hugging her pillow as she stares at the lingering shadows where her walls meet.

Holding the pillow tight to her, she watches the shadows because they seem hungrier than usual. They sit like they are hunched, agitated, like something, somewhere was done to anger them. She wonders if that was the screaming she heard, that if whatever thing is happening inside of the house stirred and angered the shadows enough that they shouted.

She also wonders what it was that her grandmother went to investigate down there. If she heard the scream, too, then it wasn’t Samantha’s imagination. It was a real scream that echoed throughout the house. If it wasn’t the shouting that her grandmother heard, then what was is it that drew her grandmother’s attention to begin with. Either way, mysteries abound.

Unable or unwilling to sleep in the dark again, Samantha curls up with the lights on and closes her eyes so tight that it hurts. She can feel the shadows watching her, but the pull of sleep is greater. Eventually, she drifts off and sleeps fitfully while dreaming of her father watching her with a smile on his face.

-NaNoWriMo-

Four years ago, Samantha was in the back seat of her father’s car. She was half asleep as the hum of the motor and her mother’s classic rock CD rolled over her in waves. Body curled up, she had her seatbelt partway off and worn only around her waist as she rested against the door with a blanket on her. Only the occasional flash of a streetlamp passing over them stirred her, and even that did little to rouse her for long.

Her mother smiled in the front seat as she watched the landscape drift by. It had been years since she had seen her mother, and though she never told Samantha why, she had made peace with the decision. She still loved her mother, of course, but she knew it was what was best for her family. Whenever she looked at her husband, she was sure of it.

In the darkness, as he drove, she reached over to touch his shoulder. He smiled at her, a gentle, handsome smile, and took her hand in his own while keeping one hand on the steering wheel. Their hands moved in a complicated dance between them. Fingers weaving, palms meeting in union and in love, their joined hands came to rest on the console between them. They squeezed and shared that same smile as the dark highway stretched out in front of them forever, a symbol of their love and on the journey that they would share together.

They were still holding hands when the truck changed lanes without looking. As their car shredded and their wheels popped on one side, on the other side they hit the barrier and, crunched between the two objects, the railing gave first as the truck spun and tipped. Their car flipped over the guard rail and off into the river far below. On the way, Samantha woke, her hair fanning around her in slow motion as her spine snapped like a string. In front of her, her father held his hands up in front of him as the windshield shattered on a large stone jutting from the water. Her mother, who had been crushed up against the railing, was screaming and yanking on her leg as it was caught in the door and only looked up in time to see the rock sailing toward them.

Samantha hung like that, weeping and crying as her legs were cold. She remembered seeing her dad, or what was left of him, crushed down into meaty gruel between the stone that had lodged itself through his seat and into the seat beside her. She remembered seeing her mother crushed against the same stone and wondering whose blood that was pooling in the ridges of the rock, whether it was her mother or her fathers. She also remembered the darkness that followed and a chilling cold more powerful and more awful, more final, than anything she had ever felt before.

-NaNoWriMo-

Samantha blinks into wakefulness and at first cannot feel her legs. Her back aches, with a pain radiating from her waist. She curls up and nearly screams until it suddenly occurs to her that it was a dream. While her father did pass away in the car wreck, she and her mother miraculously survived. She remembers the funeral and how sad everyone was, except for her grandmother, who wasn’t there.

She peeks through the window. Halloween is fast approaching, and while Samantha doesn’t believe in ghosts, she does hope somehow that her father can pass through the veil to see her. She misses him. The shadows are still angry, she realizes, and the long night is growing even longer as they head toward winter. She sighs.

Rising from bed, she showers and brushes her hair to start her day. It is still early, but she doesn’t know what else to do with herself. She leaves the lights on in every room she exits for fear that the shadows will gather at her back and follow her through the house. For three years, she has feared them, and for three years, she has kept them at bay using the lights.

She goes downstairs to find her mother having coffee at the table. She is dressed for work. She hugs her and gives her a kiss on the cheek. “Good morning, ma.”

“Good morning, Sammy.” Her mother gives her a tired smile. “Did you sleep better tonight?”

“Sort of,” admitted Samantha as she stared sadly into the fridge while considering her food options. A strange thought occurs to her: she has never seen her grandmother go grocery shopping, nor has she seen anyone else do it. For three years, she has lived in the house without any understanding of how the refrigerator gets restocked. She frowns at the knowledge but does not linger on it.

Her mother smiled. “Sort of is better than no,” she said, and Samantha allowed a laugh. Samantha got out a carton of orange juice and poured herself a cup. Then, she made herself buttered toast and put cinnamon onto it before grabbing an orange to have with it. “For the life of me, I can’t remember. Is the school doing anything special for Halloween this year?”

“No, no,” said Samantha, peeling her orange carefully into a paper towel. “They don’t do things like that for high schoolers, mom.”

Her mother shrugged. “We at least had dances when I was younger.”

“Maybe you did,” she said, “But I don’t. Even then, I don’t think I would go.”

Her mother frowned. “I do wish you would go out more. I know that things have been,” she paused, “difficult since we moved here, but you’re here now. You may as well start a life here.”

“I’m happy with how things are,” said Samantha, though she could feel something was off. The shadows were agitated but also distracted, and for some reason she felt for the first time like her mother had a good point. This was not an uncommon conversation. Her mother has frequently pointed out that she goes to school and comes home with little else to talk about, but that has always satisfied Samantha. Suddenly, she is yearning for more and the words she is saying feel like pantomime. “Maybe I’ll try and see what my friends are doing, though, or this year I could hand out candy.”

Her mother chuckled. “Good luck with that,” she said. “Everyone things this place is haunted. No one will come up here except for teenagers looking to cause trouble. And even they will run once they get a good look at your grandmother.”

Samantha laughed at her mother’s joke but said aloud, “Oh, be kind!”

Her mother laughed, too. “I am being kind, darling. Your grandmother enjoys it and even leans into it.” She flipped through the book she was reading and then shuts it on a bookmark. “When was the last time you saw her leave the house even for a walk? She’s invested in the myth that this place is abandoned, I swear to you.”

Samantha shrugged. “If she’s happy, who are we to judge?”

“The people living here,” her mother sighed. “But still, I suppose you’re right.” She stood and approached Samantha to hug her and give her a kiss on the forehead. “You’re a good person, darling, and far more understanding than you should be all things considered.” Her mother lingered, caressed her cheek. “I’m proud of you.”

Samantha stared back and then hugged her mother around her midsection. “I love you, mama.”

Her mother smiled and hugged her back, burying her face into her daughter’s dark hair and breathing in the smell of her child with an unexpected sense of melancholy. The scent of rot seeps into her nostrils and, for a moment as they part, she can see pale skin and running blood. When she blinks it is gone. “I love you, too, darling.”

Leaving her daughter, she grabs her purse and goes to the door. “I’ll see you after school,” said her mother, and Samantha waved and picked at her breakfast until it was time to go, and then she left for school. At the door, she paused and considered how she would get there. If the house was abandoned, then no bus would pick her up, but the school was far too far to walk to.

Her brow knitted. She went to school every day, but she had no recollection of how. For three years, she had been coming and going without knowing how. She touched the door handle and hesitated, and then she stepped out into the darkened void, the sky constantly overcast, and when the door closed behind her, she stopped thinking.

-NaNoWriMo-

Israel turns the obsidian spike over in his hands. The feeling has returned to his left hand, and the damage done to it seems to be minimal and superficial. The shadows seemed to suck the blood out through his pores, and though this hurt, it did not cause any lasting damage to him that he could see. The fibers remained in his vision, but the shadows were gathered and thicker. They were angry now, and he imagined that the biting pain they delivered before would not be so simple as the last time.

The obsidian spike seemed to have been forged. Looking at it, he could see wisps of magic both in the runes etched into it and also in its form. Magic was used to construct it or else the object itself was soaked in magical tincture. It seemed to warp and distort reality around it and, based upon its form, he figured it was used to bind something extra-planar into being.

This was more evidence toward the creature he was speaking with being the demon in question that he assumed the witch to have. When he withdrew the spike, it screamed, and so had he. While they were spatially separated, he could not imagine that what had happened would go unnoticed. The witch would be aware and, if anything, would be preparing for a response.

He stood and tossed the spike, flipping it in his left hand. To this point, he had been careful to avoid the use of his right hand in handling it. He did not know how the anti-magic effect it had would affect the spike itself. In the past, he had seen it strip runes off of objection by pure happenstance, and even with the glove over it, he felt nervous. This spike could be a powerful boon if he used it properly, and he knew he had to be careful.

If the spike was a binding agent, he wondered how it would affect other magical affects such as the writhing shadows. Used to hold a demon in check, the wards written into the stone would have to be powerful ones, and looking them over, he couldn’t recognize their origin. They were old, and with that age came wisdom beyond his understanding.

He approached the wall away from where he imagined his demon compatriot to be and traced the spike along the shadows. As he did, he saw the shadows move and blur toward it, wrapping around it as if summoned to it. When he withdrew, a wisp of shadow followed while the rest were left in place. Curious, he returned the spike into place and worked it deeper, and he found that the shadows swarmed around it, leaving the threads bare where they were. Carefully, he reached his hand in toward the threads and found the shadows parted around it, focused instead on the spike, which he had chanced to hold with his right hand.

Afterward, he smiled and looked back at the wall where the demon waited. He had an idea.

-NaNoWriMo-

Tenebris, partially freed, sat waiting and contemplating the next step of their escape and revenge. They still had their forehead to the floor but did stretch their left arm with the mobility afforded by the removal of the spike. This movement was interrupted, however, by the opening and shutting of the door and the rapid shuffle of the witch’s feet as she lit the candles in quick order.

She did not move with her usual calm, nor did she have the demeanor of one all powerful. Instead, she showed brief surprise when she saw his wing freed, and then reigned her expression in to stare at the nearby wall with a glower and then a grin. “He is a crafty one, isn’t he?”

“Who,” Tenebris asks, but she did not acknowledge them.

“One arm, one wing, and here I am without the obsidian to replace it.” She turns her glare on Tenebris and says, quite definitely, “Don’t think that this means you are free or anything close to it. Even unbound, you will not get out of this house, demon. I summoned you, and I will see you serve your purpose.”

Tenebris, feeling more free than they have in decades, glares back and says, “You will suffer a thousand lifetimes of suffering for your hubris.”

She laughs behind her hand. “Oh, I’m sure I will,” she responds. “Until then, you would do well to remember…” She approaches and, bending at the waist, plucks one of the flaming feather’s from Tenebris’ right wing, and they scream out in pain. “I can hurt you in a thousand ways, too.”

After that, the witch left, and Tenebris sits alone in the darkness with their head bowed but their resolve firm. Looking to their left, they call out, “Dear friend, if you can here me, whenever you are ready or able, I would appreciate it if you took the time to remove this second binding. It will not free me from the room, but it will at least give me the ability to stand, and we can take everything else from there.

-NaNoWriMo-

Pocket dimensions are private spaces maintained by practitioners of magic powerful enough to manifest physical space outside and between both time and space itself. They are both real and imaginary, and by existing both within the practitioner and outside of the practitioner, they can be there and not there simultaneously.

If the conjuror of the pocket space were to die, the space would not just suddenly die with them. It would instead begin to age and degrade over time, collapsing slowly into itself with its contents spilling eventually back into conventional, shared reality where they could once again be experienced by everyone else as if they had always been there all the time.

Since such spaces exist entirely outside of time, such objects would return to their original placement within time, as they never truly experienced time, even if the person who placed them there did. This can create a number of paradoxes that, eventually, fix themselves. When Israel was placed into this room of shadows, he knew it to be a pocket dimension created by the witch, a woman she knew to be a powerful and skilled practitioner already.

He had already experienced her skill with spatial and temporal magic the moment he stepped into the house to assail her. The trick on the stairs had been more than an illusion, and even now he could see the threads and fibers of reality which she has unraveled and wove together to allow for these extra-dimensional rooms to exist.

What he did not expect was what he found when he pried his way out of the rooms and into the space beyond the beyond.

Using the obsidian spike, Israel gathered the shadows at one point and then pulled the threads apart. Ignoring the frosty chill that had previously hurt him, he tugged the threads sideways and created a narrow channel for him to travel through, and he found himself outside of the mansion when he wriggled out.

Outside of the mansion, however, was not the hill and the city which he had seen before entering the building. Instead, it was a vast, endless star scape and a porch. Narrow wooden steps, cracked and softened with age, led into nothingness as the house seemed to float in this bottomless expanse. Inside, he could see the house only decorated and livable. He saw deck furniture which he had not seen before, and he saw a warm, yellow glow radiating from the windows.

On the porch, he saw two figures, both women. One was dressed professionally in a charcoal gray suit that was open at the vest. She had dark hair styled in rings and waves that hung down her shoulder and careful makeup, and she held a large satchel tucked under her arm. At a glance, she looked very much like the woman whom had claimed to be the groundskeeper, save for subtle changes and influences brought about by someone else’s blood.

Standing beside the woman was a teenage girl. She looked very much like the woman, save she wore blue jeans and a hoodie. She had the same dark hair, except she wore hers in a side ponytail, and she didn’t wear makeup except for heavy eyeshadow and mascara done in a wing-tip end. She had a black choker on and wore fishnet gloves, and she had her backpack on one shoulder and hanging off the other.

Both were stationary as he approached, and neither responded when he reached them. He walked a small circle around them and examined them closely without touching them or moving within a few feet. He was careful to avoid contact, and he clutched the obsidian spike tight in his hand as he walked his way around the duo. They appeared in both eyes, but there was obvious incantation that surrounded them, though he could not place what it was or how it worked.

He stopped in front of the woman, whom he imagined to be a mother by the looks of her, and waved his left hand in front of her. She did not respond. He snapped his fingers toward the girl and received the same lack of a response, and then he stood with his arms crossed considering them and who they could be.

Crone. Mother. Maiden. The two of them could be kept here in stasis for magical purposes, hidden and held in bondage in the same way that the demon or Israel himself were. Looking at them, however, he doubted that was the case. The witch was more than capable of creating private rooms to hide them in and to separate them, and while the two seemed unaware of their surroundings, the fact that they were together would be inconvenient for her.

He checked the windows. Inside, a clock was ticking and lights were on. Time existed within the house, though he imagined that the time was compressed or distorted in some way. The two women were assuredly captives of some sort, though by the looks of them, they were not being tortured. Looking at them and at the magic that seemed to permeate their being, he didn’t feel malicious intent. If anything, he felt something akin to love.

Leaving the bodies, he went to the edges of the porch and checked the sides. Endless darkness stretched out beyond him and, if he squinted, he could see that every inch of the vast darkness were wrapped thoroughly with in threads. It was a rubber band ball of interwoven magical fabrics layered over and over to sustain the spell and to keep it isolated. This was not the real mansion but an image of it, an understanding of it which the witch keeps to herself, existing in the shadow of the real thing.

Suddenly, he understood why she kept people at bay. Whatever she was hiding here, inside of this house, was not only dangerous, but it was personal to her. Looking in through the windows, he can see photos and images of these two women alongside an older woman who is clearly the witch wearing her natural face. So it was an illusion, he thought, but then he realized that he would have seen through the illusion.

He stepped back and looked at the house again. It was steeped in magic as threads of temporal and spatial distortion encircled it. He wondered how long it took her to do this, and he worried at what it cost her to sustain it. Rumors had talked briefly about people going up there or disappearing. He wondered if they were only just rumors or if they were sacrifices to this peculiar mausoleum which she has built to herself.

Placing his gloved hand against the door, he applied pressure and felt it give. From here, he could access this house within the house and explore the space at length. He could search this hidden space in a desperate attempt to ascertain its hidden secrets. He could dig, and he could delve, but he didn’t feel quite capable of finding exactly what he was looking for, nor could he free the creature or creatures that the crone held in bondage.

He looked at the two women on the porch and lingered, and then prepared the spike. Stepping out into the void, he stabbed the spike into the air and found purchase in the magic which suspended them outside of space. Using the runed obsidian in conjunction with his anti-magical right hand, he tore the fabric of the magic just enough to slip through it and back into his holding cell.

He could hear their conversation as he arrived and paused to listen. Then, smiling, he figured she would be returning. Using the combined efforts of his left eye and his right hand, Israel found the space in the threads which was widening like a vulva to birth her into the room and drove the wedge in at that precise point. He left it there, fastening the area closed to the witch and buying himself time to think of his next move before she could act in response.

-NaNoWriMo-

Samantha came home to a quiet house. The crackling of the fire in the hearth sounded like fireworks to her ears. She looked out the window and saw the looming twilight. The days were getting shorter and shorter, it felt like, and though she had just spent the day away from school, it almost felt to her like she hadn’t left home at all.

Normally, her grandmother would be there to greet her. Today, her grandmother was nowhere to be seen. The house felt different, almost angry, and she could feel the sharpened teeth of the shadows at her neck. It made her hair stand on end, and she watched the corners of the house carefully as she moved.

She paused at the basement door and lingered there. A thought came to her to open it up and make her way down, but her grandmother never left home. While not being greeted at the door was strange, it was not at all indicative of her being gone. Samantha saw no reason of stirring the pot right now, and she avoided the door on principle to keep the peace at home.

The day was short but tiring, and she was out of energy before she made it up the stairs. She left her things on her bed. Her grandmother was right: her lessons were heavy, but she was grateful for the education. She would need something to perk her up before she settled in to work, and she wanted her homework done before supper tonight. Her nights were getting longer without her sleeping, and she hated to be awake with it dark outside. It only made the shadows restless around her.

She went down back down the stairs and stopped at the front doorway. It was an large, square double door of dark wood. Brass handles and knockers gleamed, polished in the light. She felt the sudden urge to throw the door open, and felt if she did that her mother would be waiting there for her. She missed her mother, but when she moved to touch the door handles, she told herself it was silly. Her mother left early every day and came home late every night. She was a career woman before marriage, and she remained one as a widow.

Samantha turned instead and went into the back of the house, to the kitchen. She grabbed a handful of strawberries and picked up a few pieces of chocolate to go with it. She also grabbed herself a cup of water to stay hydrated but avoided the tea. Her grandmother loved tea; her mother preferred coffee. Samantha was a fine of neither but would indulge with both with the appropriate company. At the end of the day, she was always something of a people pleaser when it came to her family. She figured that was her father’s influence; he was very family oriented when he was alive.

She frowned at the thought as she made her way back upstairs. Though she didn’t like to think about her father’s passing, she sometimes found that it came to her with or without her approval. In the past, her therapists had called those intrusive thoughts. There was a time where she had them reigned in, those intrusive thoughts. Lately, as the nights are growing longer and longer with each passing day, she finds them more increasingly intrusive.

Once in her room, she pulled her backpack over to her desk and set out of her snack. Then, she pulled out her books and laid them out on the desk, too. She started with her most difficult homework because she knew it would take the longest to do, and she used her snack as incentive to keep her working, and she worked all the way to her mother coming home without hearing a single word from her grandmother the entire time.

-NaNoWriMo-

Though born in darkness, they were composed of light;

And through His will, did they exposed their might.

They were His most-beloved, His first creation,

They were sun and moon and animation.

They tested love of all God’s great work,

And when abandoned,

It was them He hurt.

-NaNoWriMo-

The witch was livid, and Tenebris loved it. They could feel her fuming through the walls, and though they did not know for certain, they had an idea of why.

With the obsidian spike removed from their wing, Tenebris could feel the changes in reality more distinctly. It was still muted and would likely remain so with a single spike still there and the binding magic of the room in which they were trapped. Regardless, they could feel enough to know that this strange visitor who happened upon her home was far more than she had expected them to be.

Tenebris wanted to capitalize on their previous success but did not trust the witch to stay her hand. Too bold of an act would only open them up to be captured again, and they doubted the witch would make the same mistake twice. To that end, they would have to be careful in how they moved forward, and they would have to keep their cards close to the chest until it was time to lay it all out on the table, as it were. Look, angels aren’t great at gambling metaphors, and demons are just angels with a dye job.

All of that to say, Tenebris didn’t want to move too fast and get themselves caught in deeper trouble with fewer options. They didn’t know how their new ally was able to do the things that they were doing, nor did they know why the witch simply seemed to accept it. Regardless, they had an opportunity to find freedom and revenge both, but only if they remained calm.

While they waited, they considered their next step. The witch would be watching now. Communication would be even more difficult, but Tenebris had free hands and a free wing. Their magic was still hobbled, but they were not completely without it. If done subtly, the magic they used would go unnoticed until it was too late. The goal, then, was to free their other wing and to free themselves from the room which held them. It would be like a newborn walking, they decide, one foot in front of the other until momentum carried them.

-NaNoWriMo-

The front door closed, and Samantha smiled and left her room. She found her mother at the foyer and greeted her with a hug. “Hey, mom,” she said, walking her mother to the closet, where her mother left her jacket before taking her briefcase upstairs. Samantha followed her close. Sometimes, it felt like her mom was her only friend in all of this. She knew she had friends at school, but they always seemed so distant and immaterial. Her mother was more tangible than they were, like she was comparing a memory of a thing against the thing in her hand in the moment.

“How was your day at work,” she asked, following her mother up the stairs and waiting politely outside of her room while her mother changed. Her mother met her outside in the hall again, and the two made their way back down the stairs toward the living area. Samantha settled onto the couch while her mother ducked into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water.

“Work was a blur,” she said after a lengthy pause, and she drank deeply of her water, as if she hadn’t drank any at all for hours and then looked around the room. “Is something different about the house? It feels…quiet.”

Samantha checked the corners and found the shadows stiff and waiting. “Grandma isn’t home,” she said. “In fact, I haven’t seen her all day.”

“You haven’t…?” Her mother looked around the house again and then, looking pale, said, “It couldn’t be. She’s a picture of health…” She left the room quickly and hurried up the stairs to the master bedroom where her mother sleeps. There, she stopped and knocked at the door before saying, “Mom? Mom, are you in there? It’s Addi! Mom, please open up!”

Samantha followed her mother up the stairs, taking two steps at a time, and watched as her mother beat frantically on the door. “Mom, what are you…”

Addison looked at her daughter. “Sammy, dear, did she look sick to you last night?”

“No,” said Samantha, a sudden stab of worry moving through her. She wondered what would happen to a soul that left the body in a house like this, and every time she thought the shadows were watching, she wondered if they would ever let it pass beyond the wooden walls that surrounded them. “Mom, what are you worrying about?”

Addison hesitated and looked at Samantha. She still had her fist on the door, as if preparing to beat upon it again, but she was rested against it and panting. “I…don’t know,” she admitted. “The air feels wrong,” she says, and she looked down the hall.

Unlike Samantha, Addison cannot see the way the shadows writhe. It is difficult for her to see much of anything off at all. She doesn’t believe in magic enough to understand when something magical is happening around her. Her brain is primed to rationalize everything around her, even at the cost of her own safety. Right now, however, she knows something is wrong, even if she cannot articulate it.

Samantha can feel the strangeness, too, but she attributes it to the shadows. It isn’t until she hears footsteps behind her that she considers it might be something else, and even then, it isn’t until she sees her grandmother cresting the stairs that she calms.

“Grandma,” says Samantha.

“Mom,” echoes Addison.

Mary stops at the top of the stairs. “What is the racket you two are making up here? If you’re not careful, you’ll wake the dead. My word.”

“Mom,” whispers Addison, and she looks almost like a child being admonished. “I’m sorry, Sammy had just said she hadn’t seen you all evening, and…”

“And so you came to try and break down my door?” Mary frowns. “That is very unlike you, Addison.”

“I’m sorry.”

Mary gives both a critical look. Addison shies away, but Samantha does not. Seeing them together, Mary’s expression softens, and she says, “I was downstairs in the basement, Sammy, dear. You had said the other day how you used to play down there, and it got me thinking about renovating. I was planning and planning, and I suppose I lost track of time.” She looks between the two of them. “Is something the matter, darlings? You two appear quite agitated over such a small misunderstanding.”

Samantha and Addison trade glances but have nothing to say. Neither could understand their sudden fears, nor could they articulate how the fears lingered. Looking between them, Mary seemed to understand on instinct and offered them both a hug. Addison accepted quickly, but Samantha lingered. She always saw herself in her grandmother, but she saw something or someone else different when looking at her today.

“Come on, let’s go start supper,” she told them, and she led them down the stairs. They followed her, and Samantha watched the basement as she passed. She could not have imagined that her grandmother had spent hours down there simply thinking, and as the mystery implanted itself into her mind, it served as its own fodder and precipitated its own growth inside of her, taking root and winding through her until she had no other thought left inside of her.

-NaNoWriMo-

Three years ago, she made them an offer which she thought they could not refuse. They refused, and they turned their backs on her in doing so. She was sad at the time, but she prized autonomy. She didn’t forgive them, and she didn’t at all understand, but she refused to keep them by force, though she had the power to do so. It wasn’t until the car wreck that she changed her mind, and for the last three years she had regretted her decision to let them go on that day and still believes in her heart that if she had kept them caged, then they would still be alive.

-NaNoWriMo-

Supper was nice but uncomfortable. Though she knew that they were safe with her grandmother, Samantha could tell that something was off. Her grandmother was trying too hard to make everything feel normal, and she was trying too hard to keep them comfortable. It told her that something was wrong underneath the veneer, it made her curious about what was really going on all day in the basement.

Now, she sits alone in her room and contemplates how to spend her evening. Her homework is done, but she is feeling restless after what happened in the evening. The hair on the back of her neck is still standing on end as she considers the strange feeling permeating the house. She looks out the window and stares out into the night, and it feels to her like she hasn’t seen the sun in years.

Going back downstairs, she goes to make herself some cocoa in the kitchen but stops by the basement on the way. She puts her ear to the door and then pulls away. Blinking, she traces her finger along the door exterior and looks at the ice collected under her fingernail. Dragging her whole finger across, she feels a chill as moisture gathers on her finger following the removal of the rime that is gathering there.

Next, she checks the thermostat. It is above seventy degrees in the house, and even accounting for a lack of heating downstairs, there is no reason why there should be ice on the door. These thoughts, however, lead her to realize how dark the downstairs is. The shadows are looming, watching and waiting for her, so she goes quickly to the kitchen to get her cocoa before heading back upstairs to the safety of her bedroom.

Alone in her room, Samantha stares out her window and wonders what it is out there. She knows that there is a city beyond her vision, and an entire nation and world beyond that. She knows that there is school, and that she has friends whose names she can’t recall and whom she has never really been able to know. She knows that there is a world out there which she cannot seem to remember at all, and she knows that never seemed to bother her until today.

She looks at her fingers and wonders at the ice on the door, and she wonders at the basement where she used to play and what her grandmother is doing down there for hours after she got home from school. Looking back, none of this has bothered her for the last three years while she has lived with her grandmother, and now reflecting, she cannot fathom why this hasn’t been a problem. Nothing meaningful has changed in her life except her response to it. For her, it is almost like putting on glasses for the first time. She wasn’t even aware that her vision was distorted until she was given the solution, and now she cannot go back to seeing things blurred.

She sighs and rests back on her bed. The night is still young, and though she should get to sleep soon, she imagines she will be up for hours contemplating this new world which she is seeing for the very first time.

-NaNoWriMo-

Lucifer, bright and mighty,

Led the angels in their war.

First to rise and first to fall,

Tenebris has always wondered,

Were they not destined to follow.

-NaNoWriMo-

Israel listened until he fell asleep. He listened to the argument between Tenebris and the witch, and he listened to the witch beating ineffectually at the door. His makeshift wedge had worked. The rune-covered obsidian spike gathered the shadows and distorted the magic. They blocked her entry into this spatial cage which she had locked him in, and now if she were to break her way in, she would have to free him in the process.

That she did not attempt to bind him as she bound the demon told him how much she feared him. His reputation really did precede him and seemed to tell of someone greater than he felt himself to be. The man in those stories likely would not have been caught in the first place, but that said to him that the witch not only overestimated him but feared him. This gave him an advantage. She thought him powerful, when in reality he was merely weak but clever.

Clever, in this instance, meant he was aware of his own weaknesses and accounted for them as he planned. At rest on his back in the cold room, he slept until he felt the biting cold nipping at his feet. At first, he thought the shadows had swelled or surged for him, but they remained surging and writhing but stationary. She had only so much darkness to stretch thin and, like fabric, putting them somewhere else would require her to take them from somewhere first.

Instead, he felt the temperature around him dropping as ice crystals gathered on the floor. He was hungry and without components. Arms with only an arm and an eye, he had very little to fight back, and he had not expected this response from her. She wanted his arm and his eye, and though she felt she needed him to get those, he knew now that she considered him too great a threat to keep alive. She was now trying to freeze him out of his body, or at least out of the room to confront her directly. Even if he died in the process, it gave her a solution to her problem in the end.

The temperature was dropping steadily but gradually. He wouldn’t freeze out soon, and though he didn’t want to abandon the safety of this caged space, he could if he needed to, and the witch would have no idea where he slipped out to if history was to be believed. He wanted to keep everyone safe if he could, though, including those other hostages whom she was keeping. That meant he would have to find a way to stay there.

Israel removed his right glove and looked at his runed hand. Then, placing it gently against the cold cement, he felt the chill evacuate around his palm. It was subtle, but it was there. It meant that the magic she was using to lower the temperature in the rune could be dispelled, both by his hand and by other means. It wouldn’t immediately warm the room, but it would at the very least stabilize the cold to this uncomfortable but safe temperature, if not allow it time to regulate back to an even 60 degrees if left to its own devices.

Knowing that, Israel removed his jacket in its entirety and pulled up the sleeve. Using his arm for reference and his fingers as scalpels, Israel began cutting the runes and sigils on his arm in wide circles and long lines into the hard cement floor. He had to use his right hand to do it as he carefully peeled away the stone a line at a time. Gradually, as the air cold to the point where his cheeks were numb, he finished the runes and felt the temperature immediately change. It did not warm but, with his jacket on, he noticed that it was not getting colder.

It had gotten so cold, however, that he would need to leave soon if the temperature didn’t warm enough. He pulled his glove on and looked at the wall, and he told himself that it was then or it would be never. He would have to free the demon now if he wanted to draw the attention of the witch off of himself long enough for him to come up with an actual plan.

-NaNoWriMo-

Angels and demons both have long memories. For humans, the memories begin to fade over time. For beings both celestial and infernal, they accumulate but never lose definition. Being divine by nature, their enduring souls suffuse their physical bodies. You cannot separate the two as a human can, and so they cannot forget anything.

For Tenebris, the war against heaven and the creation of the universe were both in the beginning, but they also occupy the same space as his however century-long captivity occupies. This means that creatures such as them often have distorted experiences with time, and that was why it was so hard for a creature so powerful and so closely related to time to lose track of time so completely.

This captivity has been a long blemish for them, though, and as the minutes turned to hours and the hours to days and the days, months, and years gathered like snow around them, they forgot how to experience time and simply sat in the dark, head bowed, their shame freezing thick beneath the accumulated time around them.

They do not know how long passed between the removal of the first spike and the second, but they do remember the shriek that announced it’s removal. With both wings freed, the chains that bound them to the floor were nothing. They melted, literally melted, from their wrists in rivulets of cool steel as Tenebris unmade them and stood.

Their wings unfurled with black flames as they regarded the small room where they were kept. It was dark, but they invented the night and could see easily in the darkness here. Even the witch’s influence was not enough to stifle their vision. The shadows were not magically made but magically augmented, and it meant nothing to Tenebris. Around them, the four candle stands dissolved into nothing as they flexed their powers.

Their presence remained stifled, though, as the spikes were only used to bind them but not keep them. Around them, protective runes kept them caged and slowed their efforts. They were written both into this space and outside of it, keeping them from escaping easily, but they were freed all the same and could slowly work at dismantling them while the witch scrambled to respond.

They smiled, as their revenge would be soon.

-NaNoWriMo-

Another scream woke Samantha in the night. This time, she had fallen asleep in her bed with an empty cocoa mug beside her and the lights on. The shadows were livid and hard things which permitted no light into their space. They seemed secured and, at a glance, were gathered at her door as if to keep her for the time being.

She checked the window before checking her clock and swore that time was ticking away slower than usual. Moving herself, she settled on top of her blanket to avoid the shadows there were underneath it, and he held a flashlight tight, ready to defend herself from the encroaching darkness that always seemed to watch her in her grandmother’s home.

-NaNoWriMo-

“You petty, vindictive fool!” Those were the witch Mary’s first words to Israel as she projected her spirit into the cage she had built for him. That he would turn and lock her out of it never occurred to her, and she hated herself just as much as she hated him for the trickery. “You have no idea what you have done and what you have threatened by freeing that vengeful thing.”

Israel, bent over and clutching the second obsidian spike, regarded her breathlessly as he held his bleeding left hand. The shadows were angrier this time and the cold deeper as he reached through the threads that bound them. Now, he had two spikes, though, and he had free reign.

He took the time to steady his breathing before he stood. The room was warmer now that the pain flashed through him. He could still see his breathing, and between his empty left eye and her lack of breath, he could tell that she wasn’t really there. It was not an illusion, though. The magic was different, as was the tether.

“Have you nothing to say in response you stupid fool?”

Isael shrugged, and she huffed.

“Always so quiet and so confident.” She glowered at him with her hands on her hips. There was something off about how she looked to him in his right eye, like there was an image laid over the image. It was blurry, faded. She soul before him was older than it appeared, and that gave him enough information to piece together at least part of what she had been doing here. The question became, then…

“How long have you been doing this?”

She paused and regarded him silently. “Doing what, pray tell?”

“Extending your life with demon’s blood.”

It was barely a response, but he saw her eyes twitch before she retreated from him. Finally, she said, “There’s that clever tongue of yours,” and then she disappeared from his sight as the tether slipped peacefully and quietly back between the threads it had slipped through.

Alone again, Israel took a deep, steadying breath and slapped the obsidian spike into his right palm by the base. This was victory on victory, he reasoned, but he still felt like they were in the early parts of the war, and that question alone had betrayed too much information to her for him to sit quietly for long.

-NaNoWriMo-

After what felt like hours without sleep, Samantha felt like time had stopped. The alarm clock barely seemed to move, and the shadows were only growing thicker and angrier. She took her flashlight down the stairs and turned on lights on the way. The light itself seemed to move like molasses through the shadows as it washed over them and pushed them back. The darkness was fighting it. She could feel it in her bones.

She went straight to the basement door on instinct and touched it. The ice was gone, but it was still cold. She stayed there for what felt like another hour as time seemed to crawl by her on weakened legs like a foal. She waited until the door finally opened and her grandmother came out looking severe and exhausted. Grandma Mary stopped, surprised to find Samantha there, and Samantha was surprised to see her grandmother’s forehead beaded with sweat and her dress and apron coated in what look suspiciously to her like dried blood. She could smell iron in the air, but she didn’t feel safe letting her grandmother know.

“Sammy, dear, what are you doing down here at this time of night?”

I could ask you the same, Samantha thinks, but she doesn’t say it. There is something wild in her grandmother’s eyes, something feral. It looks to Samantha almost like fear, though she cannot imagine what her grandmother might be afraid of that is down in the basement. Samantha glances at the shadows and makes assumptions.

“I’m not sure,” she admits, and she looks around and hugs her arms to herself and shivers. “If I’m honest, I think I might have been sleep walking.” The lights are struggling to keep the shadows at bay until her grandmother takes a deep, heaving sigh. When Samantha looks at her again, she is the image of her grandmother that she knows. The apron is gone and her dress is different, and she looks to Samantha like she has had a recent bath.

“Well, then I’m sorry to have frightened you.” Grandma Mary smiles. “Would you like any warm milk to help you get back to sleep.”

Samantha, noticing the thinning shadows, watches her grandmother and then shakes her head no. “Actually, I think I’ll just get a glass of water and get back to bed.”

Her grandmother nods and, still smiling, walks with her to the kitchen. There, she watches as Samantha draws a glass of water before walking her back out to the foyer. She stands at the bottom of the stairs, stiff, and watches Samantha all the way up, and it isn’t until Samantha makes it to her bedroom that she thinks her grandmother moved again.

That night, for the first time in three years, Samantha locked her bedroom door before falling asleep.

-NaNoWriMo-

The obsidian spikes focused power. Without them imbedded in their wings, Tenebris could feel things which they had grown numb to. The constant presence of the divine which had always been there like a hateful whisper at the back of their head and at the bottom of their heart had returned, and though they remained cage, they could breathe fresh air through the bars of this cage, at least.

Tenebris sat quietly and alone in their cage. They knew the witch would not return any time soon. Without a second spike to bind them, Tenebris was on equal footing with the witch. They could not return to their own place in hell, where they would rather wait for all of eternity. They could fight back now, however, and that would frighten the witch enough to stay her hand at least until she had a way to combat them.

In terms of power, Tenebris was infinitely more powerful. The witch had summoned them and, by surprise, bound them in place. Without surprise on her side, the witch would have to find another way to seize control. This worked in Tenebris favor, but it did not completely solve their problem. They could fight back, and they could claw at their cage, but until they could find a way to wear at the runes from the outside, they would be powerless to escape.

The witch had time to plan, time which Tenebris was not willing to allow her. She had less time now that she no longer had access to their blood, but even that could work against Tenebris. The truth is, if Tenebris doesn’t find a way out before the witch passes, then Tenebris will be stuck there until the magic fades, and with the work put into these spells, Tenebris could imagine multiple lifetimes passing before they are able to return to the sulfur plains which they had, until a century or so ago, called home.

They walked the interior of the room and traced their fingers along the runes woven into the wall. The work put into the construction of this cage is beyond impressive. It is not a simple soul that can do this sort of thing, they realize, and the drive to do it must have been the very same drive which allowed them to go so far and do so much. A part of them is curious as to what drove a mere mortal to this endeavor, but that curiosity is nothing beside the seething, deep set anger which so consumes them now that they are freed.

In tracing their fingers along the runes, however, they can see beyond their cage. They can see the form, the desire. Runes are not a language in magic but a pathway. They direct the energy and, in this cage, create a thick, overlapping mesh which prevents escape from within and prevents piercing in from outside. There are gaps, here or there, but none large enough for Tenebris to slip through. Not even light could escape this finely woven tapestry which the witch has so capably knitted.

Through those gaps, however, a knowing demon could extend themselves and perhaps make subtle changes which they previously could not.

Tenebris smiles to themselves. The end is just now beginning.

-NaNoWriMo-

Samantha is not sure when she fell asleep, but she woke up to her mother knocking. She rose from bed and unlocked the door and found her mother dressed and looked somewhat harassed. “Samantha, dear, are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Samantha smacked her lips. Her mouth was dry and her vision bleary. The shadows are thin and resting in her room, she feels like, and for the first time in three years she isn’t afraid. “Mom, is everything okay?”

“That is what I want to know.” Her mother feels her forehead, and Samantha ducks away from the contact. “Do you know what time it is, Samantha?”

“Time?” Samantha goes to her alarm clock and balks. She not only slept through her alarm, she has almost slept through the bus. She looks at her mother. “Mom, why is it so late?”

“Honestly, I was wondering the same thing. This isn’t like you. Are you feeling alright? Did you have trouble sleeping last night?”

Samantha looks at the shadows and frowns. “I’ll be dressed in a bit, and I’ll just walk to school. You get to work, mom. And thanks for waking me up.”

“No,” says her mother more firmly, a maternal tone returning to her voice. “No way. You get dressed and grab breakfast. I’ll just have to be late.”

“Mom!”

“No arguments, Sammy,” says her mother, already out the door, and Samantha sighs.

In her closet, Samantha stares at her full length mirror. She has bags under her eyes and a growing pallor to her skin. The shadows are thin here, too, even without the light on them. It makes the world feel brighter, but it worries her that they are gathering elsewhere. She remembers her grandmother the night before and the thickened darkness that seemed to follow her.

She dressed and met her mother downstairs. After grabbing a breakfast to take with her, she and her mother made their ways outside and onto the porch.

-NaNoWriMo-

At this point, Israel had made his cage into his castle, and that had kept him safe from the witch. She could astral project into the room, but only if he allowed her to. With a wave of his hand, he could remove her spirit from the space, and they both knew it.

She did not return, and Israel took the time to get acquainted with this space. He had two obsidian spikes etched with binding runes, and he had a way in and out of the room now. The floor and ceiling were natural and existed outside of this space. The walls were artificial barriers created by the witch and sustained technicality.

He had found that one way led into the cage of the demon, which he imagined was much more difficult to leave than his own cell. The opposite wall led outside, onto the porch. That left two more walls and a ceiling and floor to explore. With spatial magic like this, Israel understood the magic to suspend objects in space outside of themselves. The roof and ceiling likely led to their true points of origin, while each of the walls are tethered to outside spaces. That is what suspended the roof and floor outside of time and space, and that is what allowed the spell to work.

If Israel dug deep enough with his hand, he felt like he could snap the fibers which held the spell together. The idea amused him, but it did not serve his final goal. Exploring the other two walls was equally dangerous, though in a different way. His last confrontation with the witch had went poorly for him. He had been easily overpowered, and without Grimm, he would be overpowered again. Right now, all he had going for him were his wits and her previous underestimation, and both of those were running on fumes.

He flipped the binding spike in his left hand and stared at the wall in front of him. If he were to guess, that wall led to a private space from which the witch could visit him. He turned and regarded the wall behind him, what he would consider due north from entry. If each wall had to be connected to a point of origin away from the others, then he could narrow down where each place would likely place him, but only if he was careful.

Facing the back wall and using that as north, then that would mean that west took him to the demon’s chamber. That chamber was likely very well hidden and well out of sight from the others, and to avoid crossover between the two spaces, it would be isolated.

If the demon was at west, then the porch was east. South, if used as an entrance, would be placed at an entrance or exit space. If any of the tethers were to be placed close to where he actually was in material space, it would be this tether. If he were casting a spell like this, he would locate it just outside of the space affected by the shell so that entry would be more intuitive.

If he were to assume that he was in the basement, then he could also assume that the tether for the remaining space would have to be either in the top floor or, if the witch was running out of room for tethers, then it would be on the roof.

He walks the perimeter of the room while flipping the spike and then kicks the floor. Looking up at the ceiling, he imagined that breaking either of them would break the spell entirely, and while he wanted to escape, he truly believed it was the spell that was keeping him safe and little else considering what he had done to her demon friend already.

He went to the northern wall and flipped the spike again. Then, drove it into the wall to clear a space in the shadows. As the shadows gathered and the magical threads woven together in their space were revealed, he used both hands and ignored the biting pain in the left hand as he worked them apart to create a needle’s eye for him to thread his way out through.

-NaNoWriMo-

Sincerely,

RWS

P.S.

-Short Rest-

Books

Tower: Final Fantasy: Fated by tinygaia

0. One Piece 100% New Chapters Every…

1. Sun: Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 1, Ch. 6: “The Right Hand of Destruction”—8 25% (2—4)

2. Mon: One-Punch Man Vol. 11, Punch 62: “Limit”—59 44% (5—9)

3. Tue: My Hero Academia Vol. 11, No. 95: “End of the Beginning, Beginning of the End”—99 56% (6—9)

4. Wed: Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru Vol. 2, Ch. 13: “I Saw A Hero”—15 67% (7—9)

5. Thu: My Hero Academia: Vigilantes Vol. 6, Ep. 40: “A Rational Team-Up”—44 44% (5—9)

6. Fri: Boruto: The Next Generation Vol.5, Ch. 20: “Scientific Ninja Tools”—19 100% (4—4)

7. Sat: Books

-Fiction: Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

-Library: Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender by Stef M. Shuster

-YA: The Giver by Lois Lowry

-Fan Fiction: Final Fantasy: Fated to Ch. 50 by tinygaia Ch. 50—50, 100%

-Nonfiction: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat 8% (34—440)

View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman 26% (130—502)

-DnD5e: Player’s Hand Book by Wizards of the Coast 0% (?—??)

-Reread

Games

Tower: .hack//MUTATION

1. JRPG: Final Fantasy X-2 67% (35/52hrs)

2. Backlog: God of War 59% (??/33hrs)

3. Replay: Kingdom Hearts x: Back Cover

4. Multiples: Fable: Anniversary Good 0% (0/21hrs)

5. Bioware: Dragon Age: Origins Kallian Tabris 14% (10/74hrs)

6. Series: .hack//MUTATION 122% (55/50hrs(28/23hrs))

7. Free: Persona 5: Royal

8. Handheld:

Completion: Final Fantasy XV: Royal Edition ??% (??/125hrs)

Stardew Valley

Shows

Tower: Exandria: Unlimited

1. Critical Role: Intermission I: #EverythingIsContent Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood Part II: A Faulty Foundation--7 14% (2—7)

Dimension 20 Unsleeping City Ep. 5: “A New York Wedding”—17 24%

2. Anime: Digimon: Adventure Myotismon Arc 50% (24—28(4—8))

3. Online/Owned: Archer Season 2 54% (8—13)

4. Netflix: Seven Deadly Sins Season 1 29% (8—24)

5. Disney+: X-Men Season 1 39% (6—13)

6. HBO: Teen Titans Season 1 54% (8—13)

7. Movies: Firefly 21% (4—14)

Moon Knight 50% (4—6)

X-Men

Promare

Castle in the Sky

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Dumbo

Red Whale Stories

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Bad News Blog/NaNoWriMo 2022 IV

Sunday, November 20, 2022

NaNoWriMo III