Casting Shadows

The gunmetal sky rarely let the small town of Hope Springs feel like it ever aspired to more than twilight, but compared to the gloom of The Reagent's interior, it was nearly blinding as Mayor emerged. He squinted his eyes and did his best to ignore the dull spikes of pain the adjustment sent through his temples. She was inside and somehow just seeing her in there had left him feeling like he was dealing with one of the worst hangovers of his life. What had she been doing there? Sarah had said she was looking for him, but that could mean anything. He hadn't seen Her in months -- had allowed himself, in fact, to begin to believe the whole affair had been the onset of some age-related dementia. The idea wasn't all that difficult to believe, after all, when he stopped to consider how few people had ever actually seen the shadowy woman with no name. Was it really that much of a stretch to believe that he had imagined all of it? Including the few brief exchanges he'd had with others about her?

Then again, if he had, maybe he was imagining this much too. Maybe he was actually sitting in his office on Redemption Row, the door closed and the blinds drawn, having another bad dream. Or perhaps some sort of seizure. That would be something of a relief, really.

"I'll bet you thought I'd forgotten about you," her dulcet voice set all the hair on the back of his neck standing at attention. It was at once the most accomplished of performers singing a beautiful aria and the sound of a spider walking across a sheet of paper.

Struggling to keep his voice calm, Mayor could do nothing more than mutter a single-syllable response, "No."

Her soft laughter was somehow worse and more pleasing than her non-greeting. "Now is that any way to welcome me back after so long?" He hadn't yet turned to look at her, didn't really trust himself to, but he knew what he would see if he did. Her long black hair would be covering half of her face, her full lips pulled back in a smile that could almost be mistaken for friendly, and her one visible eye would be an almost luminescent green, glittering with the ominous joy of a child with a magnifying glass and an ant hill.

"I can't help you anymore," he croaked. A speech of epic proportions, all things considered. His greatest fear just then was that she might simply let that statement hang in the air, expecting him to expand on it or provide some justification. Instead she giggled almost girlishly and brushed a fingertip along the back of Mayor's neck.

"Oh, that's okay," she purred. "We -- I won't be asking you for any. More. Favours," she let her finger trail along his neck as she slowly circled him. She was wearing a padded leather jacket and pants, matching boots that were all buckles and snaps and came up to her knees, and a wide belt with a large buckle made out of some gleaming blue metal. Her hair was indeed falling over her face, this time her right side was concealed, and that threatening, ebullient light shone from the green depths of her left eye.

"Why--" he might have managed more than this, at least, so great was his surprise at this turn of events, but he was silenced by the feather touch of her finger on his lips.

"You can feel it, can't you?" She paused, looked up at the leaden clouds, then back at him. "You can feel it in the air, can't you? The turning? The falling? The passing of the old into the new? It's already begun," this last was a breathy whisper that might have set a younger man's heart racing but only served to pour an extra measure of dread into his soul.

"What are you--" he tried again but again she silenced him with her finger pressed ever so lightly on his lips.

"You can," she said, this time a statement rather than a question, and she was right. That sense of weight, the coming storm, the foreboding he had been unable to name; it hadn't been just today he'd felt it, though it was more acute than ever since he had seen the signs in the sky of an actual storm heading this way, it had been weeks now, perhaps months.

It had been a familiar feeling, though until she had drawn it out into the open, he hadn't recognized it for what it was. When he had been a boy, living in Arier Inlet, he had been standing on the beach watching a naval battle far out in the water. It had been the final days of the Cacyanscen War and by then the fighting had often been small skirmishes in unexpected, and largely strategically insignificant, places.

A Cacyanscen dreadnaught had been caught by three Seurbine destroyers somewhere far out on the water. Far enough away that he could see the flashes of gunfire and count to ten before the dull booms of the explosions crashed over his chest. The fight seemed to last a long time but eventually he saw a flare on the dreadnaught that expanded into a proper conflagration. One of the three destroyers broke off but the other two continued the fight. The dreadnaught, for it's part, was wounded, clearly dying, but still perfectly capable of sending it's killers to the ocean floor first.

It wasn't until the first destroyer started to sink that the young boy who would one day be mayor of Hope Springs, started to think he might be too close to this fight after all. The waves seemed to be getting more and more pronounced and the explosions were taking on a sharper, more threatening edge. The fire on the dreadnaught was completely out of control now and he could see the shapes of men backlit by it scrambling around the decks. Then, almost in slow motion, the entire ship was engulfed in flames.

The roar was deafening, the next day his ears were still ringing, and the force of the sound knocked him to the sandy beach just as a particularly large wave crashed over him and started to drag him out into the surf. He panicked, clawing wildly at the sand beneath him and screaming. A warmth around his legs told him that his bladder had released, but at this moment he didn't care, as long as he didn't pay the ultimate price for his inattention while watching the giants do battle.

He had that feeling now, too. The one he'd had while watching the tiny figures moving along the decks of the doomed dreadnaught, standing safely, or so he thought, on the beach. That sense of things having gone terribly wrong, a path set upon with no turns, and a powerlessness to do anything save watch the inevitable conclusion.

"You can," she repeated softly, clearly pleased with herself. "I can see it in your eyes."

His throat felt like it was covered with the dust that covered the road. As he tried to speak his voice first refused to work, then came out in a hoarse whisper, "What are you doing here?"

"I've come here to save you from what's to come." Unexpected honesty in both her voice and in her one visible eye. He had never seen her look so completely open in all the time he had known her.

"Why?"

Her smile shifted again, still pleased, still open, but now showing just a hint of her top teeth. "A thank you. For everything you've done for us. All you have to do is ask."

Hope Springs

Mayor could feel the storm coming as soon as he woke up this morning. By noon the grey clouds overhead were thickening and growing dark. Now, in the late afternoon, he had felt an undeniable urge to walk out here, to the edge of town, and see with his eyes what he already knew in his bones.

He crouched down in the dust at the edge of the main road leading into Hope Springs and retrieved a handful of something so small and so smooth it couldn't rightly be called dirt anymore. When was the last rain? Not since the turn of the year, he knew that, but how long before that? Despite the best efforts of the records keepers in the town hall, it was getting harder and harder to keep track of the passage of time. They'd known for a long time now that the days and nights were longer than they were in the older days. And they'd been sure that there were now not just more hours in the day but more days from one year-end to the next, but the records . . . something was wrong.

He stood up, shifting his weight from the front of his square-toed boots to the rounded, well-worn heels. Slowly he began to let the handful of impossibly-dry dust slip from his grasp. Anyone watching might see him trying to judge the direction the wind was blowing, it had become unnaturally calm in the last few hours, but he was doing this simply out of habit. There was no wind and the angry purple sky toward Pile of Bones told him all he needed to know about what their immediate future held.

The dust gone from his hand, he brushed the last of it off with two quick slapping motions. The old man imagined he could feel his calloused palms cracking, the dust having leeched the last bits of moisture out of his skin, as he slipped them back into the pockets of his worn trousers. He stood there a moment longer, looking longingly at the clouds, whispering a silent prayer to the Old Gods that it would bring rain and knowing there would be nothing but wind and blue-white fire.

· · ·

Mayor stepped slowly through the batwing doors of The Reagent Saloon and stood there, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness inside. Already the colour was draining out of the perpetually steel-grey sky as the storm approached and inside Sarah hadn't yet lit the kerosene lanterns, leaving the common room far darker than it would be at mid-evening.

"Afternoon to y', Mayor," Sarah called from behind the bar. Mayor squinted, hoping to make out some detail of the woman, but failed. It wasn't just the days and the years that were slowing down, his own body refused to adapt to changing conditions as quickly as it had been when he was young.

Maybe the world's just hitting end-life too, old man, he thought ruefully. Well, even so I've still got a fair few of these longer-than-years-years left in me. He started toward the voice even though he still could only make out a vague shape silhouetted against the startlingly bright mirror behind the bar. "Afternoon, Ms. Tunstall," he replied, narrowly avoiding a chair that had been pushed out from a table and left abandoned. The resident likely off to the wash, or someone would have already returned it to a safer location.

By the time Mayor had reached the bar his damned eyes had adjusted and he could make out the smile on Sarah Tunstall's weathered face. She was already pouring him a shot of the clear white alcohol she kept in stock. The crops had failed for three harvests running now and there was barely enough to keep the town alive. The trains had stopped running . . . not last year, but some time after the drought had come . . . say two years now, and supplies were tight, but somehow Sarah managed to find a way to bring in something to take the edge off.

Mayor didn't ask about it, he just thanked the Old Gods that she had found a way.

"Storm's on its way," he rasped as the alcohol burned the back of his throat.

"How long we got, y'think?" She tried to sound interested but her tone said that she was just making conversation.

"Evenin', I think. Maybe a bit longer."

"Mayor," Sarah leant forward, her lips close to the old man's ear and her voice nothing but a breathy whisper. "She's back. She was asking for you again."

He pulled back from the proprietress and gave her a suspicious, almost angry look. She bore it well, simply nodding toward the back corner of the room. Four hours from now it would be well lit and filled with the drunken singing of the townsfolk as they tried to follow the music from the upright piano, but now it was shrouded in darkness. Mayor peered into the gloom, unable to make out any details at all until an orange flare of a cigarette tip told him She had returned.

"I'll get this next time," he told Sarah brusquely as he stepped away from the bar. Sarah shook her head to tell him it was, as always, on the house. He nodded a brief thanks to her, turned on his heel and, casting a vicious look toward the orange glow, strode back out into the street.