In the late hours of a chilly October night, a large and blue-tinted full moon hovered at the apex of the sky, crossing the deep navy cosmos that hung over a quiet city's outskirts. A black, serpentine silhouette raced in the platinum moonlight throughout the sleepy, humble town. Following close behind it were precisely two more silhouettes of human beings, both panting as their legs demanded for them to stop running. They still hounded after the creature with determination, pushing onward as if they wanted to catch the damn thing.
One figure had broader shoulders and blond hair painted with the moon’s liquid silver, a red jacket’s tails billowing out behind them as they kept pressing onward. The other had long brown hair and a sort of azure and hood-less cowl barely flared out past its arms, both of which were barely discernible under the moon's glow. Under one arm, it appeared to be carrying something.
The serpentine thing took a sharp turn into an alley, its pursuers barely keeping up behind inches of its lengthy tail. It continued to race ahead, weaving about between houses tauntingly, eliciting a string of curses from one of its pursuers as it kept getting further and further away.
“Dammit! If only you’d stay still!” complained the first figure, its voice like that of a young man.
“Jonathan, I’m getting the feeling that this wasn’t such a good idea after all,” whined the second figure, its voice like that of a young woman.
Both figures stopped in their tracks, almost tripping over their own feet as they slowed, their legs aching in pain from abused adrenalin and oxygen levels. The first figure put his hands on his knees and watched as the creature finally vanished from sight.
“For the love of all things in God’s holy name,” started the first figure, his voice sounding rather scornful in tone as he panted between words, “you worry about too much about everything, Charlotte.”
“Wouldn’t you do the same, considering that World War Two ended weeks ago? What if a World War Three started sometime now?” retorted the second figure, standing upright and crossing hers arms. She also panted between words, but not as much as her companion.
Silence held the two for a few moments. “On second thought, I see your point,” replied the first figure, moving his hands off of his knees and standing up to full height. He stood only inches taller than his companion.
“Besides, Jonathan, I could sense that thing has a large amount of chaotic magic. We have no idea what that thing is; however, I can tell it’s worse than Brauner was,” stated the second figure rather matter-of-factly, which caused the first to let off a heavy sigh.
“Please, don’t bring him up,” groaned the first person, walking down the alley with the other following close behind. Soon, he’d been once more running alongside the second into the halo of a street light, revealing both of their forms. He wore a simple black shirt beneath the coat and jeans with brown boots, and glanced around with bangs that overshadowed the whole right side of his face.
“Well, ex-cuuuuuse me for reminiscing!” exclaimed the second person. The cowl she wore had been fastened to her frame with a simple red cloth tied by the ends tightly enough to secure it, but loose enough to be adjustable if needed. A white shirt with very faint grey stripes going vertically downwards was on her torso, and it reached to the waist which’d been adorned with a simple belt. A matching skirt reached to mid-thigh, and a little bit past that were long, blue socks. There were red high-heels on her feet, and under one arm was a simple book with a red cover.
“Charlotte, quit your griping. We have a…” the man, Jonathan, trailed off. He found himself at a loss for words to finish his sentence, especially after he heard the distant sound of something groaning in pain as soon as he had hushed. A frown graced his visage as a result, and his green eyes scanned his surroundings for the cause of the noise.
“Problem to deal with?” Charlotte finished for him, also noticing the sound in the distance. She glanced around in all directions, her blue eyes narrowing a bit from a feeling of growing unease.
“Just where is that sound coming from?” Jonathan murmured under his breath, still darting his head about every which-way he could manage.
Both stopped with their backs against that of the other's. The sound drew closer still, and neither had any idea just where it was coming from. North of their current location? South? They didn’t know; the moonlight barely revealed anything beyond the street light, and it had in fact started to fade. Charlotte glanced up and grumbled something unintelligible as a thick cloud crossed the moon’s path.
Whatever had produced the noise, it drew closer and its groans got louder, and the woman with the book glanced around again. She spotted another wandering form in the darkened distance. “Follow me,” she murmured to her companion as she began to walk to the silhouette so as to avoid scaring its owner. The young man complied, his pace also slowed to a simple walk.
As they walked away from the halo of artificial light, their forms darkened until barely discernible under the soft rays of light the concealed moon managed to pierce the cloud cover with. The sounds of the groaning drew closer as the two kept walking. The silhouette seemed to have taken notice of the man-and-woman duo out and about in the street. It stopped entirely, save for its vocal orchestra of pain, as if beckoning them closer.
Charlotte slowed her pace some more, occasionally stopping to see if anything else had been following behind her heels, a frown on her face all the while. She could still sense that chaotic magic lingering about, and it sent pricks of pain all across her skin—she didn’t like it one bit. When she stood still for more than a minute or so, trying to figure out where the flow of the energy came from and was going to, Jonathan grabbed her by the wrist and tugged gently. She took notice and resumed walking to the groaning silhouette in the distance.
Eventually, they met with a woman leaning on a wooden stick for support. Her hair was greyed and hung sloppily in front of her shoulders, and she seemed shaken a good bit. Her clothes were wrinkled and haggard, a dull grey dress that extended all the way to the ground and shifted as she once again voiced her agony.
“Confound this back pain I’ve had for the past fifty years!” she complained, her eyes scrunching shut in strain. "Won't give me one little second of comfort or respite!"
“Um, miss?” Jonathan warily asked, tapping the elder on her shoulder to get her attention. “Have you seen a black… thing around town lately?”
The woman looked at him and shook her head, eyes dull and seemingly distant. “No, I can’t say that I have, ” she replied. “Unless you mean my missing cat; she is black with two white stripes," she added with a frown.
Jonathan’s hand rose up and connected with his face, and he groaned as though annoyed. “No, we aren’t looking for a cat. We’re looking for this…” his reply was cut off as Charlotte spoke up.
“Serpentine monster with high amounts of chaotic energy; figuratively and literally speaking, of course,” Charlotte finished for him, putting the book she held all this time to her chest like it was some kind of compacted security blanket.
“I..." the elder paused for a moment, raising a wrinkled brow as she looked at the younger woman, "haven't even seen such a creature. Could you describe it in more detail, please?”
“It was jet-black and I think at least fifteen feet in length. That’s really all I can say, given it was moving fast and gave us the slip,” Charlotte answered with a sigh escaping her lips and a solemn shake of her head.
“What she said,”Jonathan quickly added, shaking his head and letting off another annoyed sigh. The elder began to grin for some reason, and he could not help but raise a brow as he spotted the crone’s lips curling up. "Why are you smiling?" he asked in a level voice.
The elderly lady looked at Charlotte, pointing a finger rather accusingly at her companion at the same time. "Is this man your boyfriend?" she asked rather casually, as if the queried were her grandchiled. "If he is, then I envy you."
Charlotte’s eyes quickly widened, her pupils shrank to pinpricks, and a faint blush had spread on her face. “H-hey! H-he isn’t my boyfriend! W-what evidence do you have to support that outrageous claim?!” she cried, shaking her head frantically as if in utter denial.
Jonathan’s eyes also went wide. “No, we aren’t dating—she’s like my kid sister!” he added, his hand quickly connecting with his face once more and partially obscuring the rosy hue that also adorned his cheeks.
A very flustered Charlotte swiftly snapped her head towards the red-coated man, glaring daggers his way. “For the last time, Jonathan, I am not a child!” she cried in a huff, earning a chuckle from her companion as his hand slid down his visage and he turned to her with a mocking grin.
“Yeah, right,” Jonathan retorted with a huf, casting his own glare at his companion, eyes slightly narrowing and twinkling in mirth and mocking as they locked with her dagger-filled ones. He rose a hand, curled all of his fingers except for one into a fist, and then poked an extended index on the top of her head as if about to drive a point across. “You sure act like one.”
The two looked as if they were about to engage in a ferociously heated debate over whether or not one of them was acting like a child—if the elder didn’t speak up as the glares took on angry twinkles bordering on the murderous sort.
“My, my, that is an interesting book you have there,” the crone chirped, frowning as the glares of the two people eased up.
Charlotte swatted her companion’s hand away with one of her own hands and turned to the elder woman, her glare fading almost immediately. “Th-thank you, I guess. I study a lot,” she sighed, all vestiges of anger and embarrassment fading from her tone.
“Mind if I take a peek in it? I’ll make it quick to avoid wasting your time,” questioned the elderly woman, a faint smile appearing on her face once more.
Charlotte complied, and the woman quickly sifted through the pages before looking at something that caught her eye. She stared at it for a moment or two, and then closed the book before returning it to its rightful owner.
“It was more interesting than I thought. I’ll be on my merry way,” she murmured, hobbling past the duo, grunting in pain the whole while.
“I hope your back gets better,” Jonathan called to the woman as she faded away into the distance.
“We’ve wasted enough time as is. Let’s just get this damn show on the road, catch the whatever-it-is, slay it if need be, go home, and take a nap,” Charlotte hissed, eyes narrowing as the words left her mouth.
Jonathan nodded in agreement, and they once more took off running, with his companion taking the lead.
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It felt like hours of running, yet nothing turned up even once as they scurried up and down roads and alleys like bats from hell. No trace of that serpentine thing had been anywhere; the duo came to a stop at an abandoned house, once more panting for breath. There were no lights and the thing had been boarded up at some point to boot.
As soon as she caught her breath,Charlotte glanced at the house, eyes narrowing with alarm shimmering in her irises as prickles of pain shot out across her skin like goosebumps again. “I sense more magical energy coming from there,” she groaned, her voice filled with subtle hints of worry as she gestured to the house for emphasis.
Jonathan turned to the house and hastily walked up the stairs, making a beeline to the sealed front door without pause. He inspected it thoroughly. “Charlotte, you might want to see this,” he sighed.
She quickly ascended the stairs and sighed. Jonathan’s shadow had darkened the door too much for comfort, thus obscuring whatever it had been that he’d found. “Bring out the flashlight,” she groaned. He reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a black flashlight after fumbling for a bit, before turning on the contraption and shining the resulting light at exactly what it was he wanted his supposed 'girlfriend' to see.
There were deep gashes in the aged wood planks that sealed the door, and there were more that spanned the length of the door itself. The marks ran long, as though something had been raked across the uneven surface, with splinters jutting up from the structure’s small wounds. They ran in sets of four, and half of the scratches were bunched closely together, forming sizeable dents that either of the people standing before it could fit their hands in.
“Just what the hell happened here?” Jonathan asked, jerking his gaze to Charlotte with a furrowed brow.
“From the looks of it,” Charlotte paused, putting her free hand on her chin and rubbing thoughtfully, “it seems that the owner was a quadrupedal hybrid that tried and failed to get into this house.” She began to glance around now, and only now noticed more similar markings on the porch itself, and even some on the borders of the sealed windows, all of which were illuminated by the moonlight.
“English? Do you speak it?” Jonathan asked, shaking his head disapprovingly with a frown scrawled onto his face.
Charlotte quickly lowered her head, slumped her shoulders, and groaned in annoyance. “For crying out loud, you remember the dog-like Glasya Labolas? Or how about the manticores? Or the damn spell-casting lion-like Vapula? Those are all quadrupedal hybrids—put at least two creatures together, making sure one of them has four legs, and what do you get?” she growled, quickly straightening her stature with her face hardening into another glare as she turned to her companion.
“Oh. Right. So, a freak of nature then?” Jonathan queried again, raising a brow.
“... More or less,” Charlotte replied, taking another look at the scene before finally noticing a marking that simply didn’t belong with the others: a hoofprint that had been embedded deep into the wood near one of the porch railings.
She knelt down to inspect the anomaly more closely. "What the?" she murmured, tracing a finger along the oddity that stuck out, careful to avoid getting stabbed by a splinter. She got up and then darted around the porch, scanning for anything else that stuck out, staying silent as she found more hoofprints, with the addition of some strange feathers that littered the scene like discarded candy wrappers.
“Just what the hell are we after again, Miss Know-it-All?” Jonathan questioned as the woman kept pacing and inspecting every odd print, feather, and gash in the wood.
“Not just a freak of nature. I think we've found ourselves a monster.” Charlotte scowled, returning to the boarded up door with her eyes locked onto it in a death glare. It had been as if the door itself did something and offended her in the process. "Let's break this door down," she hissed.
Jonathan quickly put the flashlight in his pocket and charged shoulder-first at the door. It didn’t budge an inch. He charged once more, and it still held firm.
“A little help would be nice,” he groaned at last, glancing at his companion in exasperation.
“Right,” Charlotte replied with a nod. Both readied their shoulders, and simultaneously counted to three. After that, they charged at the same time and the door finally fell down, breaking its bonds and dragging them with it into the dark depths of the house.
He pulled out the flashlight again and stepped inside, with Charlotte following close behind. The house had gotten to a point beyond dusty and the air inside went horribly stale, reeking with rot as if mold and bleach were left to intermingle within the walls for four years straight. The duo nearly found themselves gagging but had kept most of their composure, though they coughed as dust assailed their senses and they failed to keep their noses from scrunching at the heavy odor that lingered in the house. They took a few steps, hands flying to cover their mouths and noses when—
—At once and without warning, the door rose up and fit itself back into the frame from which it had been knocked, shattered wood planks and all, the sound of a lock being clicked into place hitting the ears of the intruders shortly after. Both whirled around, scowling at the anomaly.
“Just great. We’re stuck here,” Charlotte complained, clenching her free hand into a fist and stomping her foot angrily.
“It was your bright idea,” Jonathan remarked, rolling his eyes when he received another glare. He shone the flashlight every which-way around the room, finding a couch that had been torn, more smashed pieces of wood, and finally a small corner that contained had a horrible surprise for the two who just waltzed in unannounced.
There in that corner of the room were two dead bodies; one had been an old man who sorely lacked an arm. The other, though disfigured, had been the same old lady that complained about her back. Her neck twisted and her head rested on her shoulder at an unnatural angle, and there had been a worm or two crawling out of her empty eye socket.
The pair’s eyes widened and they found themselves nearly recoiling from shock, with both trying to process what it was that lay before them. They looked at each other and took a deep breath.
“W-what the hell did we just walk into?” Jonathan asked, shaking a bit from the shock of seeing the dead corpses. He could've sworn he met the lady with the bad back not even a few hours ago, and she seemed fine and dandy despite her back pain then. Though seeing the corpse of her now caused the room to start spinning a little.
Charlotte gulped hard, and she managed to recover faster than her companion. “A haunted house," she paused for a moment, glancing back at her friend before turning her attention back to the two corpses present, "and one with posthumous bodies. They’ve been dead for some time. When we get out of this, we’re reporting this to the police.” The woman's breathing had been a tad labored, as if she were trying to avoid screaming.
He turned the flashlight towards another wall, only to meet yet another door that got boarded up, as if it existed solely to flat-out mock him. “This probably wasn’t such a good idea…” he griped, hearing something going on upstairs—it sounded like paper being torn into shreds.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious…” Charlotte whispered in a menacing hiss, also hearing the strange shredding sounds going on above her head. She too turned to the door, which had for some reason removed its wooden binds and opened by itself on rusted, creaking hinges. The pair exchanged glances, and then walked through the blighted doorframe of the house that had them on edge.
With a shaky hand, he shone the flashlight everywhere, seeing that he and the brunette had just entered a kitchen that suffered years of neglect. The walls were peeling and broken shards of glass, most likely from dishes, lay scattered about on the splintering floor. Pieces of a broken table and some chairs also appeared to have been flung around the whole damn room at some point in time. A rusted sink sat on one end, and a small furnace sat not too close to that, caked in rust.
Within the confines of this dandy and likely-abandoned-for-good-reason hellhole, Jonathan eyed a flight of stairs as his flashlight illuminated the steps and railing. Its wooden steps were rotted and coated in dust, splintering and cracking like the rest of the desolate place.
“And already I hate this house,” he complained, carefully moving to the stairs and avoiding all of the bits of table, glass and chair. Charlotte followed just inches behind, silently nodding in agreement and clutching her book tightly.
Jonathan let his hand part from his face and winced as the acrid aroma of rot him him full force again. He pushed the thought of the smell aside and took hold of the rusted, metal railing and slowly climbed the stairs, near-silently cursing his luck because each step groaned and squeaked under his feet in the process.
Then, once he made it halfway up the flight, he tripped on a broken step and tumbled forward. In doing so, he accidentally broke a frail wall as his hand connected with it, revealing not the sky outside, but instead another room that would have otherwise stayed hidden.
Charlotte nearly jumped in surprise, wincing as the wall broke loudly, the sound echoing through the house. She coughed as dust swirled and got between her fingers, and blinked a few times to get the residue out of her eyes. “Be more careful next time,” she scolded in a harsh whisper.
Jonathan stood up and rolled his eyes before glancing at his companion. “You check upstairs, and I’ll see what’s in here,” he sighed, pointing the only light source on hand towards the once-hidden room he had unwittingly unveiled.
She simply nodded and ascended the rest of the stairs once he entered the once-hidden room, making sure not to trip on any broken steps along the way. Charlotte eventually found herself in a hallway once she finished the flight after a minute or so, and she saw a bright light—with that damned silhouette she and her friend had been chasing all this time in front of it.
It turned what looked like its disfigured head and saw her, and she swore the thing had horns and an elongated muzzle. Quick as a whip it fled into the light before she could get a better look at it—no, what had been now before her could not have been a light.
It had been some kind of glowing portal that took the shape of a levitating painting with an elaborately-decorated oaken frame. A painting depicting a strange landscape with floating buildings with straw roofs, brown rain coming from pink clouds, orange trees with purple leaves and lampshades in the place of flowers and fruit, a checkerboard backdrop, winged pigs flying in a reddish-pink sky, and other sorts of pure, abstract nonsense in all its tacky glory.
Jonathan ascended the stairs and stopped behind her, opening his mouth to speak, only to close it again upon seeing the strange phenomenon before him. Once more, the two exchanged glances. “I found nothing except a tonic and a spell scroll,” he sighed, reaching into a pocket with a hand and producing two objects that he presented to her. One was a glass flask that contained a strange crimson liquid, and the other a rolled-up piece of parchment that stayed closed thanks to a small, rune-inscribed ribbon.
“What’s a spell scroll doing here in this….” Charlotte’s voice died in her throat as she snatched the spell scroll before she undid the ribbon and looked at the parchment. She quirked a brow at what the paper had, its incantations written in a language best described as swirls and other strange figures—like crude wings, horseshoes, and what she could've sworn had been the head of a unicorn, for starters. “This scroll contains nothing but gibberish,” she sighed, opening her book and putting it between two pages with a heavy sigh.
“You can’t make sense of it?” Jonathan asked, eyes widening like Charlotte grew an extra set of arms from her backside.
“Nada,” Charlotte answered, shaking her head as her companion turned to the painting again. He put the flashlight away in his pocket alongside the flask of liquid, since the damn anomaly radiated a bright enough light to illuminate the scant few features of the hallway, which beheld more boarded-up doors and some small holes in the ceiling.
They began to approach the painting with hesitant footsteps. Immediately, it began warping and swirling, the faint image of a rather equine-shaped skull pulsing about freely in the distortion.
“This is… unlike any magic I’ve sensed before. It’s….” again, Charlotte trailed off, a frown on her face.
“And then there’s this painting itself. If Brauner somehow did this, I’m going to assume that he had way too much to drink and way too much time on his hands when he made this colorful mess,” Jonathan remarked, eyes narrowing as he began trying to make sense of the mess the painting depicted.
“He couldn’t have done this. And even if he did, it no longer contains his magical essence,” Charlotte replied, rubbing her eyes with a hand. “And Jonathan, another reason why I know it’s not Brauner’s work is that the magic signature of the painting is nowhere near what his was—and who’s to say another being couldn’t easily replicate the same kind of magic? The art splashstick mess would be another red flag; the artist here didn’t give a damn about maintaining a consistent look and feel to this piece, whereas Brauner did.”
Hesitantly, they came closer to the painting. The distortion grew more violent as they approached its very frame, the colors and objects within becoming little more than mangled blurs.
“Okay. This is getting stranger by the minute. How the hell do I make sense of this mess? Think about it: monster, old lady, dead bodies… and now this painting is mocking us. Seriously, how the hell do I know exactly what is going on around here?! Dracula was bad enough as is!” Jonathan ranted, holding out his hands before him and waving them in the air in confusion as the rapid-fire remark left his mouth.
“And it was you who told me to quit whining, right?” Charlotte retorted, looking at Jonathan with narrowed eyes.
Jonathan simply groaned in response, his shoulders sagging a bit as the sound left his mouth.
They came even closer to the painting, with the distortion turning so violent all the painting had been at this point was little more than a mess of pure color. In addition to this, the skull that had been admist the swirling and blurring turned a striking blood red, standing out in the mess like a thumbtack in a wall. Charlotte cautiously raised a hand to the painting and began to recite something in an ancient tongue. Her hand came closer and closer as she spoke her incantation, her voice silencing as the very tips of her fingers touched the fine tempora paint.
The painting, as if in response to being touched, emitted a white-hot light and cast it into the hallway. It grew brighter and brighter until it enveloped everything and then dissipated as soon as it had come. And when it vanished, neither Jonathan nor Charlotte stood in front of it.