As were memories not his. Faustite hunted across the toothy cityscape for word or smell or sight of knights. For teenagers donning thousand-year-old regalia. For men and women and otherwise who claimed their wonders among the stars. But the rooftops sat empty and the streets barren of his targets — none sought out the bleeding chaos he sent into the air like an arrow. Instead they cowered into their civilian selves or slept or ate or laughed among tinkling china. They enjoyed their lives and their social mores. They worked. They walked their dogs. They plied to their duties as tired, beaten-down middle-class heroes. Wherever they went and whoever they were, they weren't the invaders from the stars tonight.
As he strode long across a strip mall, enacted a hundred years ago, he felt the first breaths of brightness on his auric awareness. He halted mid-stride, one foot propped smartly against a terraced concrete parapet, and beckoned into the heavy night air. A second passed, then two. On his second breath, the space next to him whorled and twisted into a devouring shape, and out spewed tentacles like searching tongues. The squid wrenched itself out of this small portal. Flecked with a thousand orange fireflies inside, it hovered dutifully near its captain. Small bubbles were its only indication of attitude.
"Go." He prefaced the command with a point into the dark, somewhere beyond the edge of the strip mall. He felt the characteristic weakness of a page beyond there, past one of the sharpest teeth with its gabled roof — perhaps in an alleyway. Perhaps in the building itself if this one was so new and immature as to power up at home.
That would ease his troubles, wouldn't it? With a wry smirk, he pursued.
medigel
i hope this works! writing at the laundromat so if s**t's ********, i can edit after
