Kaptor tore through the undergrowth, his pursuer’s breath hot and heavy on his neck. The moon drenched the world in dizzying swirls of blues and whites and greys; it swam through the holes in the tree canopy and danced on the forest floor, giving shape to shadows, and breathing life to gnarled, scarred trees. His heart was pounding against his ribs like the heavy beat of funeral drums, leaping up into his throat and back into the heaving of his chest in a matter of a second. Every shallow breath he took pierced his lungs in its coldness—icy daggers taking frenzied stabs into the soft, tender flesh.
You can’t keep running. The thought cut through the cluttered haze of his mind in smooth, calm arcs of sanity. You know where to go. Find her.
He came upon a fork in the road and, without thinking, took the path on the left. Running and running and running and running. His feet ached and his lungs were on fire. It took every ounce of his energy to make sure as to not trip over an overgrown root or fallen tree. When would it end?
Never, it seemed.
Then he saw her.
“Kaptor?”
Oh, thank god. Thank all of those thankless, thankless gods.
Standing before him, her long coat splattered with beast-blood and guts and a mighty fine hide draped over her shoulder like a shawl, was his savior. “Nep,” he breathed, stumbling forward and nearly taking her down when he fell into her arms. “Please. He found me.”
Nep’s eyes blazed with a sudden brown fury. She slipped the hide from her shoulders to his, snuffing out any trace of his scent with the thick iron of blood in the mess of matted fur. Then they began their descent, sliding into the shadows. Nep made sure not to leave any trace of their path behind them, and so it was how once again Kaptor managed to tear himself from his oppressor’s grip.
♢
Yellow globs of honey drowned his vision. Colors, like the vivid black tangle of Nep’s hair, dripped and drawled and blurred with the cave’s walls of browns and reds. When the sickly sweet haze that clouded his mind finally cleared, Kaptor found Nep smothering a thick green paste on the scratches and cuts he had earned for his cowardice. Nep’s fingers were deft and rough with callouses, but she worked with care, taking notice whenever Kaptor winced or breathed too sharply.
“I know it hurts.”
He wasn’t sure, at first, if she was only talking about the dressing. The silence between them lay thick and heavy. Suffocating. Maybe he’d been gone too long.
Nep dabbed one more scratch with the herbal blend and relented, slinking back off into her cave. Kaptor could hear her voice echo and bounce back; she was singing, softly, under her breath, as she traced her hand upon the vibrant walls. They were covered in strange symbols and pictures painted with red and yellow ochre and stained with blue berries. The paintings gave Kaptor an odd feeling, as if they were meant to be kept private—secrets that were better left unseen. Kaptor’s eyes traced the comforting shapes of Nep’s home: paintbrushes made from animal hair, savage-looking knives of all kinds, and piles of fine white hairs all over the place. The culprit of such shedding peered at Kaptor with orange eyes narrowed to slits in the dark corner of the cave.
He would have made to move, to greet Nep’s guardian—but his bones ached and he didn’t quite like the way its eyes watched him. Coldly. Calmly. The feline’s tail flickered in and out of the shade like the white tongue of a venomous snake, and Kaptor was reminded of how eerily its movements mirrored Nep’s like some dark, twisted charictacture.
“What was it this time?” Nep asked. She came with a blanket made of deer-beast hides and pulled it around Kaptor’s shoulders. “I thought all of those threats he used to make were empty, but now… I guess you would know more than me, huh?”
Kaptor drew in a deep breath. “The journals,” he started. “He figured out a way to translate my ciphers, the bastard. One of his ‘friends,’ more than likely.”
Nep’s face pulled into a grimace, and she placed her hand on Kaptor’s where it lay on the smooth stone, the weight and warmth of her grip familiar and comforting. Her guardian moved in the dark, padding over to plop down at Nep’s side. She stroked it, fondly, with a strange far-away look replacing the usual intensity of her gaze. The cat-beast purred in great rumbles, nuzzling its stark white fur into the palm of her hand. “You don’t have to worry,” she said, looking back to him. “and don’t even try and say you’re not. You are. I can smell the worry coming off of you in waves. Trust me, Kaptor. Please.”
The cat-beast’s ears flicked at him, lazily.
“He won’t find you here. I’ll make sure of it.”
♢
In the quiet green heart of the forest, Kaptor stood muttering awful, evil black things. The mossy floor shrivelled and cowered away from where he stepped, and in the air hung a thick cloud of smoke that trailed from the tips of his fingers. Nep eyed him from the shade of a gnarled old oak tree, grasping the hilts of her twin daggers with knuckles turned white. Through the dappled canopy of the treetops, sunlight filtered and winked off the sleek edge of her blades as she played with them in her hands, liking the way the air gasped and breathed when they cut through it.
Nep’s guardian had long since left to return to the cold recesses of their cave. There was something about Kaptor’s magicks that had rubbed its fur the wrong way. Though she’d never admit it to Katpor himself, Nep felt strange about his practices, too—the words he uttered sent chills rolling down her spine in great waves of hair-prickling dread. But who was she to judge? Nep had dabbled in the occult; her walls of paintings and recordings of dark events were no different than Kaptor’s spells and summonings. She lived for the hunt, for the adrenaline that licked through her veins when finally, she caught her elusive prey… and revelled in the glory of being drenched in its crimson life-blood, pulsing out from its veins.
Still…
This was different, somehow.
Nep cared too much about Kaptor to let him do anything that could get him killed, but she had never been able to tear him from his near-obsessive compulsion to study magick. She had been lucky to have been blessed with a guardian that had always been there for her, through thick and thin, since her birth. Kaptor hadn’t. He lived near the sea, in a winding, dizzying tower, and sadly his guardian had been as dizzying and lonely to him as Kaptor was to himself.
Though Nep believed, somehow, that that stupid boy still loved his guardian.
A cry resonated throughout the forest and jerked Nep from her reminiscence and back to reality. She jumped to her feet, baring her daggers like teeth. Her hair raised on her arms, and her eyes—narrowed into slits, cat-like—darted to where Kaptor once stood. He had fallen backward now, and was trembling and wide-eyed with terror, facing a monster of writhing tendrils. It leered out of what appeared to be a break in reality—a hole of pure nothingness, burning black in the clearing of the forest.
Nep sprang forward. She slashed at one of the tentacles and lopped it off. It fell to the grass with a sickening schlop and squirmed for a moment before going still. She kicked it aside and turned to the rest, only to find another ugly tendril was rearing its head in place of the one she had killed. Her brows furrowed in confusion, but instead of inspecting further, Nep fell back into her stance and went to land another blow.
“Wait! Stop— please! Nep, just—”
Kaptor was tugging on the hem of her long coat.
She turned, looking down to him. “What?”
Nep felt something brush past her cheek and she stiffened before she realized it was… whatever it was. She went to lash out and slice at its suckered side, but another tentacle latched itself around her wrist and her knife fell from her hands. However hard Nep struggled, the monster struggled harder—it wasn’t long before she was totally tied up.
“Hey!” Kaptor was yelling. He had his book now, the one he had been reading from earlier.
He paged through the massive tome with shaky hands, mumbling under his breath. Nep growled at his incompetence and resolved to twisting her head around and biting down hard on the sorry monster’s tentacled tendril, the one that was holding her left arm. Blood spurted and flowed from where she had clamped down, staining the whites of her teeth—but she didn’t let go. Nep held, catching the monster on her canines, tugging at its soft underside like it was some sort of dog-beast toy. From the black void where it was crawling out of echoed a screeching like none she’d ever heard.
“No! Wait! I can fix this. Please!” Kaptor cried, and thumbed to some random section. His face lit up and now he was shouting, spitting in a terrible, choking language that Nep recognized from her dreams—the ones that had led her to make those paintings on the walls.
Around her, more holes ripped through the pleasance of reality and out spilled more awful creatures from the depths of the dark-sea. Some monstrosity with teeth sharper than Nep’s daggers was trying to force itself into this world. Still, Nep held the tentacled monster in her teeth until it finally relented and let its skin rip free, leaving Nep with a mouth full of shredded white flesh. She spat it out and, now, with her left arm untangled, she dug her claws into the soft skin of the tentacle that held her right.
Meanwhile, Kaptor kept chanting. Nep could barely hear his words over the roar of the sea-terrors. She was too busy focused on killing this thing right here and now. Her vision was red with rage, and her chest heaved with effort. Everything was moving much too fast and she tore her leg from its grip and then she was on the ground, fingers reaching, grasping—gripping—taking hold around the hilt of her blade and—yes—she stuck it into the alabaster tentacle and wrenched herself—and her dagger—free.
Nep jumped back from the hideous, mangled mess of the tentacle sea-terror and stood at Kaptor’s side while he frantically tried to find a page in his dusty old book that would tell him how to take back every awful terrible horrible thing he had summoned.
“Can you fix this, Kap?” Nep yelled, taking a ferocious slash at a terror that made a grab at Kaptor’s arm.
His face was scrunched up in absolute misery. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but Nep swore she saw his eyes shining with tears. “I don’t know!” he cried, biting down hard on his lip, hard enough to draw scarlet beads of blood. “I don’t know anything anymore!”
“Hey.” Nep stuck her dagger in the eye of the toothy sea-terror, and it howled. “Look at me.”
Kaptor looked to her, sniffling.
She put on her best attempt at a smile while being drenched in the blood of horrific monsters. “It’s your annoying ability to know things that got us into this mess. Now, please—could you put that book down and help me kill these things already?”
He nodded, took a deep breath, and threw the tome at a small sea-terror. It hissed in its void and knocked the book to the floor. The tome slid away, unharmed.
A flash of white lightning streaked across the green grass and then Nep’s guardian was there, hissing and baring its dagger-like teeth, already scratching and clawing and forcing a terror back into its void. The strained smile on Nep’s face was soon displaced with a true, hearty grin. “Just like old times,” she murmured, and kicked a fallen tentacle to the side.
It was a while before they had mostly shoved the sea-terrors back—but for all their efforts, more terrors came to replace them. Something told Nep that there was more than likely a reason the sea-terrors were so eager to get their claws into their world, and it chilled her bone to aching bone. “I don’t think I can fight for much longer, Kap,” she said, stabbing a terror with one dagger and landing a nasty slice with the older, “could you … do you think you could try fixing it again?”
He faltered, eyes darting to the tome where it lay by itself, curling the dead grass which surrounded it. “I…”
“It’s not a question.”
Kaptor nodded, seeming to sense the gravity of the situation. He better have, Nep thought, wincing as her guardian suffered a bad bite from a terror. This is all his fault. You should’ve left him there, when he saw you.
No. Stupid intrusive thoughts. Focus!
Look at what he’s done. Do you think the things between you will ever be the same? How dumb do you feel, now, pining after a coward?
“I never…” Nep breathed, her voice flooded with confusion.
Give up. Give him up.
Return him to us.
Her mind felt awful, like some creature had wrapped its tentacles around it, dripping with oil, and was sucking at her brain, depriving her of all thought and reason. Return him. Put down your daggers, and return him.
Nep’s grip lessened on her blades… then she felt a sharp pain—a bite on her arm. The fog in her brain cleared and she swatted her guardian away, sucking at the two holes it had left in her skin. “What was that?” she growled.
Her guardian only stared at her. Reason was let back into Nep’s mind in a flood of sudden clarity. Her eyes widened, and she narrowly dodged a lazy advance from a sea-terror. “They’re— oh, gods! Kaptor, they’re getting into our heads… Kap…?”
Nep’s voice stalled and died in her throat. Behind her, where Kaptor had been preening the tome, there was nothing. Except… there was everything.
The voids had converged into a massive rip in space. It sucked all the light from the day, and at once it was night. The forest was deathly silent, Nep realized, and all of the sea-terrors had fled. All except one. It stood, alabaster white, a great, coiling mass of scales that glittered in the moonlight, as tall as a centuries’ old great pine or more—and Kaptor stood in front of it, hands bore into fists, unafraid.
“Boy,” it hissed. “My boy.”
Kaptor stiffened. The great, snake-like terror craned its monstrous neck down to see its ‘boy,’ its red eyes punctuated by pupils narrowed into thin black slits.
“Come, my boy.”
He shook his head.
“Return. Return to the sea.”
Nep watched from behind her cat-beast’s form, puny in the sight of Kaptor’s eldritch snake-beast. His snake-beast. His guardian. Too late Nep realized she was missing a dagger. Her beast growled.
“You forget, Iagothesh,” Kaptor said. His voice rang loud and clear in the night. “As you were never mine, I am not yours.”
Its eyes blazed with fury. Hisses rolled off its flickering, forked tongue as it moved to poise, to attack—
Then Kaptor plunged Nep’s other dagger into the red of its eye.
The world shook in its rage.
“Satanas: Pater falsum. Relinquam.”
When the words fell from his lips, the void sprang and closed around the snake-beast Iagothesh with a small pop, and it was gone.
From where it had been, a fang the size of a hand glowed in the light of the moon. Nep stood, frozen, drinking in her surroundings for more than a minute before she stumbled forward and threw her arms around Kaptor’s shoulders. His face was warm and wet with tears, and when he sobbed, she moved with him. Her guardian curled its white, mangled tail around his legs and nosed his bruised knees, lapping at his cuts with its scratchy tongue.
Nep shushed him, soothed him, drawing shapes and circles and smoothing patterns on Kaptor’s chest. For a long time, the three of them embraced, letting the horror and finality of what had just occurred sink in. Their minds were floaty and far-away, and until they finally crept back to Nep’s cave at sunrise, no one said a word.
♢
It was only when Kaptor awoke in the dark to the sound of quick, frantic movements and rustling brushes, that he said: “Nep?”
She was painting. Painting on the wall. Shining white swirls, layered over and over and over again on top of darker symbols—then, dabbings of black and grey and red, so much red. It drowned the green of the grass and the blue of the sky.
“Nep?”
She did not turn.
Kaptor thumbed the tooth he had pocketed in his hands. Everything smelled like her—he was wearing her coat, he recognized. He struggled to his aching feet and walked over to her, watching her work.
Her guardian tangled itself between Kaptor’s legs and rumbled a growl.
“Nep, hey—look at me,” he said, hating the way his voice cracked in his throat. Kaptor took her face in his hands and turned it towards him.
Her eyes were glossy, wide with terror. “I can hear him,” she whispered.
Kaptor’s heart stopped in his chest. The tooth thrummed in the pocket of the coat.
“I can hear him,” she repeated, again and again. “I can hear him.”
Kaptor registered what he had to do. He let go of Nep and tore the fang from the pocket. It burned, white and hot in his hands. He ran, out of the cave and into the night—it was night again, and the face of his beast flashes before his eyes. Nep trailed outside after him, led on by her guardian.
He closed his eyes shut, channelling all of his hate for himself and his cowardice and his false beast and throwing it into the image of his tower, hanging over the edge of a cliff battered by wind and sea. Kaptor could taste the salt in the air; he could see the fog, rolling over on the savage waves. He raised his hand and, with all his might, cast the fang from his hand to the sea, where it would find its way back to the depths in which resided Kaptor’s terror.
When his eyes cracked open, Kaptor saw the death of a void—it disappeared in a pop not unlike the one in which the snake-beast had left in. He had done it. No tricks, no magick hisses—all him, and him alone.
But not alone.
He turned, and there was Nep. She offered him a weak smile, raising her hand in a little wave. Her guardian’s tail flickered from side to side in such an uncanny parody of its girl that Kaptor couldn’t help but laugh. It hurt, but it hurt good.
Kaptor wouldn’t be alone ever again—not when he was with them. And again they found themselves in an embrace: no words spoken, for all that needed to be said was said in the warmth shared between them.