One Hell of a Night [Great]

[Kelly MacAryn]

Stepping into the Pale Moors, Kelly emerged into a damp and ominous autumn night. The air smelled intensely of mold,  nighttime, and the sharp, melancholy scent of sodden decay.

The gate stood on a hill, in the middle of a thin copse of black and skeletal trees whose jagged branches evoked the ghoulish, emaciated fingers of long-dead giants. When the wind blew, they clawed at a crimson harvest moon that seemed to cover half the sky. Wispy streamers of mist coiled in this place like snakes, seeping through Kelly's clothing, condensing inside of his boots. Water beaded under his ponytail and ran down into his shirt, making the cotton feel clammy and cold. 

As the traveler's eyes grew accustomed to the moonlight, a world of shadows unfolded. Beyond his hilltop, broad, uneven acres of knee-high grasses rolled away to the horizon, the domain of thistles, and thorns. Spots of oily shimmer in the valleys suggested the presence of shallow pools, and scattered here and there across the moors were the shades of solitary trees and small groves. They got more frequent as they grew more distant, finally culminating in what looked like a scraggly fur blanket thrown over the far distant hills -  an actual forest, dense and threatening. 

Swirling around all of it was the mist. It gathered in the hollows. It rose along the overgrown paths and fallow fields to form thick banks of fog. It capered and danced with a life of its own, forming mad shapes that glowed red in the unnatural moonlight, jeering at the traveler from afar before resolving again into cold gray silence. 

Something huge flashed across the face of the moon far overhead, wings as large as a man booming as they caught the night air. Thin and reedy, a warbling inhuman scream echoed across the moors. 

Kelly filled his chest with chilled, musky air and let out a long breath, watching the little cloud it made. Here, even that small nimbus seemed somehow sinister and twisted. 

There were points of light as well, out there in the darkness, warm and lonely little pools of lantern-light and hearth-glow. They were few and far between, isolated farmsteads and tiny villages scattered across the moors, and looked small and defenseless against the looming specter of the red unknown. 

The traveler thought back to the maps he had seen during his research binge. Supposedly, provided he could avoid getting lost in one of the roving banks of fog, Darkshire wasn't far from here. 

He took out his spyglass and peered into the distance. 

...

There.

Nestled near the far forest, as though trying to avoid being seen, was a large, dark shape, with men holding torches moving along the top - the walls of a fortified town. If he moved quickly, Kelly estimated he could be there in under an hour, provided the journey was uneventful.

Sadly, that didn't seem likely. 

Far off in the distance, beyond the mist-shrouded forests and the rolling hills, something that must have been nothing short of colossal let loose a reverberating bellow of anger and mindless aggression, like a philharmonic string-section being played by a train-crash. In response to that hellish cacophony, a chorus of wolves took up the call, seemingly howling from every hill and vale. All around the traveler, things stirred in the dark, peering at him with curious, inhuman eyes. 

Not entirely unexpected. All those warnings in the database about not coming here at night weren't exactly ambiguous, after all. 

Should I camp here until morning? If anything came at me, I could just dive back into the Nexus. Of course, there would be nothing to stop it from following me... and I don't know how much time I have to spare. For all I know, Darkshire could come under attack at dawn.

The time factor was what clinched it. In order to err on the side of caution, it seemed he'd have to take a risk.  

Kelly sighed, then took a few minutes to summon himself a lantern. A flashlight probably would have been handier, and more nimble as a weapon if it came to it, but a heavy oil-lantern had other advantages. 

Besides, it seemed thematically appropriate. 

When he was done, cloaked in a little pool of light and strangely emboldened by the smell of burning lamp-oil, the traveler set off towards Darkshire, leaving vaporous swirls and eddies in the mist. 

Striding through a red, primordial darkness come alive with low, animal moans, Kelly resigned himself to a very long trip.

[Kelly MacAryn]

Descending from his wooded perch atop the hill, Kelly found a sodden and weed-choked carriage-track, a trail of hard-packed earth marred by puddles and the time-worn ruts of wagon-wheels. On the sensible premise that if he was going to get jumped by something with too many teeth then he'd prefer to have that happen on reasonably stable footing, he followed it. 

He had barely been ten minutes on the road before he got his first real taste of midnight on the Pale Moors. 

The traveler was passing through a small valley, little more than a low spot in the road where it dipped between two hills. Water had collected here, forming a large puddle that reached nearly to the tops of his hobnailed work-boots. The mists gathered above it, forming a thick fog that closed in all around him, set aglow by the steady orange light of his lantern. 

The oppressive haze seemed to absorb all sound. The only thing Kelly could hear was the rhythmic, sloshing whisper of his progress along the flooded road. 

Suddenly, an electric tingle raced along the back of his neck, making the tiny, thoroughly damp hairs stand on end. Something, just behind his shoulder, whispered softly.

"Do not turn around," it said, tickling Kelly's cheek with breath even colder than the fog, "and do not run. Please." 

The voice came from the other side now, hissing in his opposite ear. 

"If you run, you see, I will have to chase you, and I will never stop. I do not want that. Though the substance of your flesh is strange, its form is not displeasing. I am sure that you have friends and admirers. I would prefer that you lived, and made them happy. Truly." 

It was quiet and mournful, anticipating disappointment, and after that, tragedy. 

The traveler stopped. He did not turn around. He did not correct the drastic overestimation of his social status. Whatever was standing behind him had approached without a single sound, without disturbing the water or even swirling the mist. It was almost certainly supernatural - but it had chosen to talk instead of attack. More importantly, the psychic early-warning system Kelly had begun to think of as his own personal haunt was silent. While he was certainly in a precarious situation, he wasn't actually under immediate threat of harm.

Yet. 

Whatever this is, it has a set of rules. Don't run. Don't turn around. 

Look for an opportunity. 

"What do you want?" Kelly asked, the words sounding somehow hollow and flat in the fog. 

"Dreams," said the cold stranger. "And the truths they tell. I would know your dreams, traveler for my own lie rotting beneath your feet."

The traveler looked down. Something glinted in the murky water, reflecting his lantern's ruddy glow. Water was seeping into his boots. He tried not to think about how cold his feet were getting.

"I'm afraid," he said, raising his eyes once more, "that my dreams aren't in much better shape at the moment. Mostly, I just want to see to it that things improve. There isn't much I want for me personally."

"I did not ask to be told," whispered the stranger, suddenly eager. "I will look for myself. And then we will see what sort of a man you really are, my handsome young Prime."

Kelly's thick brows furrowed, and he barely restrained the urge to look over his shoulder. His lantern flickered.

"What-"

He didn't get to finish his question. A chill breeze wafted silken streamers through the front of his brain, and Kelly reacted instinctively, performed an entirely psychological action which he couldn't quite describe. The probing psychic tendrils skittered off thoughts made suddenly slippery, and got lost in the very same haze of jumbled memory that the traveler found so frustrating.

[Kelly MacAryn]

Kelly couldn't see the fog anymore - he couldn't even feel the cold, or the moisture condensing on his skin. 

Whatever the mental defense he'd triggered in response to the thing in the mist's attempt to invade his mind was designed to do, this probably wasn't it. The traveler found himself tumbling through a maelstrom of misfiled memory, each sight and sensation as vivid as if he were experiencing them for the first time, dragged along by the cold phantom's psychic probe as it desperately sought in vain for something to latch on to.  

Kelly was sitting at a table, in a pleasantly furnished summer-cottage, looking out a glass patio-door at a view entirely unlike the Pale Moors in every way save for the rolling hills. The landscape was green and sun-drenched, and dotted with contented-looking sheep. The air smelled of fresh-cooked eggs and morning dew, and there was a woman seated across from him, a short, athletic beauty in a bath-robe. She had strawberry-blond hair pulled back in a bun, and sparkling eyes the color and shape of almonds. The woman was half-turned away, working at an easel, paintbrush in hand. She smiled, opened her mouth to speak - and the sound of an air-raid siren came out.

The siren continued, and he refocused his attention on the briefing, trying not to be distracted by the smell of burning jungle. A penguin wearing a kamikaze bandanna and a tiny set of black military fatigues stood by his right boot, demanded he pay attention, the bird's voice a parrot-like squawk of command... 

That damn parrot again. He didn't know what Braed saw in the thing. Kelly stalked across the cramped austerity of his initiate's quarters and threw a sheet over the stinking cage on his way to the shower...

... of violet-blue flames, bright as the sun, modulated plasma-shot of the highest caliber. It tore through the megacity's mag-shielding as though it wasn't even there, reducing the entire southern continent to an ocean of magma in a purple flash ...

...of lace. "Well," he said,  distracted from the unparalleled view of Lake Michigan by the even more spectacular view of his wife in lingerie, "since we're up here anyway ...

...we may as well make sure we exterminate every one of them." With that grim pronouncement still ringing in the air, Kelly powered up, waves of crackling vermilion force rolling off his body, a chill spreading through the air as his power fed...

...him the most delicious cookies he'd ever had. "Talon, these are fantastic. When did you learn to bake...

...under the million-degree heat of the stellar reaction. The shock-wave hadn't even hit yet, events flowing like wax...

...ing larger in his vision as he closed in on the battlefield, a trio of giant skeletal machines, impossibly massive...

...pain in the ass. "I could split this damn planet in half," Kelly said, gesturing angrily with the putty-knife, "so why am I having so much trouble plastering this stupid...

...grin on her face. "You're forgetting something important," said the harpy, wrapping her sable wings around her naked body like a cloak.

Overcome by an intense anger, fear and deep, personal loathing he didn't even know he was capable of, Kelly hit her in the face with the lantern.

For a moment, there was darkness, and the feeling of a needle skipping on a vinyl record, a scathing, discordant jolt.

The lantern. I'm holding the lantern.

The cascade of memory resumed, tumbled around him, queing faster and faster off random associations, but Kelly was outside of it now, present but separate. Whoever that horrendous soul-sucking bitch was, his reaction to her had been strong enough to jolt him free of the undertow of recollection. He was fairly certain he'd never actually hit her in the face with an oil-lamp.

None of this was real. It had been once, but right now the traveler was standing in a fog bank, somewhere in a ghoul-haunted pocket-continuum, just waiting like a glassy-eyed chump for some werewolf to come along and rip his face off.

Kelly closed his eyes. It didn't affect what he was perceiving - a smear of raw chaos, places and voices rising to a dreadful crescendo - but the idea of it aided his concentration. 

There.

Now that he'd removed himself from the vicious riptide of his own memories, he could detect the Other, still caught in the flow. It flittered from one place to another in a frantic attempt to find a way out, stirring the pot, creating the chaos, but was unable to defeat Kelly's malfunctioning defenses, to interact in any meaningful way with the traveler's fractured mindscape.

Kelly pictured a door. He focused on the flailing, tattered mental probe, and with a mighty effort of will, he threw the stranger in the mist out of his mind. 

Silence and darkness, and the clear, heady scent of fog. Kelly opened his eyes.

[Kelly MacAryn]

The traveler was back on the Moors, standing on the flooded road, feet thoroughly soaked and lantern in hand. The mist swirled around him in thick sheets, glowing softly in the orange lamp-light.

The figure of a woman stood before him. She was skeletal and gray, emaciated, and dressed in a lace-trimmed nightgown. With one bony hand, she held an exquisitely painted porcelain mask over her face.

Her feet didn't quite touch the surface of the water, and she blurred at the edges, giving off little streamers of vapor. The fog flowing into and through her, their substance one and the same.  

Kelly studied her, and she stared at him with a pair of black, empty holes. 

"You, " she said, her quiet hiss now tinged with shock and surprise, "are a very troubled individual. Did you know your head is full of birds?" 

"Are you talking about the harpy," the traveler asked, "or the penguins?" 

"Both. And also the parrot." 

Kelly set his mouth in a thin, flat line. "I noticed. So are we done here?" 

The phantom shifted her lack-of-weight, her night-gown rippling in an unseen breeze. "Yes," she said. "Lost within the chaos of your mind, I was able to snatch glimpses of the dreams you hide. They are grand, but also terrible in their way." 

She adjusted her grip on her mask, revealing just a glimpse of a mummified cheek, and continued. 

"You are not a kind man. But I believe that you try very hard to be a good one. You are free to go."

The travel bowed his head in acknowledgement. "Thank you. I can't say its been a pleasure, exactly. But I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for." 

The masked revenant shook her head. "I will not," she said, certain. "That is not how this works. Now go. You have hours yet before dawn, and some distance yet to travel."

With that, she melted into the fog, dissolving from the edges inward and the toes on up, so that the mask was the last thing to go. As the stranger disappeared, the mist began to thin. 

Kelly looked down, at the glinting object within the water. Now that the haze had abated somewhat, he could barely make out the gold-filigreed edge of a painted mask, half-buried in the mud.  

There's a very sad story here. I'll have to ask around. 

The traveler continued on his way, but as he left the small valley, he heard one last whisper. 

"When you have restored your mind, and found your place, come to visit me again. I meet so few men of... quality."

Kelly suppressed a shudder.

When a slavering, blood-drenched werewolf jumped out of a haystack half a mile down the road, eyes rolling madly and the stench of carrion on its breath, it was almost a relief.

[Kelly MacAryn]

By comparison, werewolves were easy, a simple problem solved with simple violence. Kelly's haunt warned him almost half a second before the beast actually sprang. When it came for him, the traveler smashed his lantern over it's snarling head, shattering the glass and dousing the lupine monster's face and shoulders in blazing oil.  

And that is at least one thing you can't do with a flashlight. 

Howling and screaming in pain and confusion, burning merrily like a torch, the werewolf took off into the night. 

Over the course of several minutes, lit by the soft, spectral, rainbow glow of Omnilium, Kelly repaired his lantern. As he worked, he pushed the thoughts and question raised by his encounter with the masked phantom in the fog to the back of his mind.

As always, the memories can wait. 

The werewolf set the tone for the rest of the night. It seemed the traveler couldn't walk five hundred feet without something leaping, swooping, pouncing, or shambling out of the briars and overgrown fields that lined the muddy, wheel-worn road. 

He was attacked by zombies, easily beaten but irritatingly persistent. He was swarmed by a trio of giant vampire bats, one of whom got the same fiery treatment as the wolf. He was beset by a pack of muscular hounds possessed of hideously grinning human faces. They speculated loudly about his mother's sexual habits, and about the taste of his flesh as he beat them back with kicks and psychokinetic force-bolts. 

Eventually, the blood-moon seemed to grow brighter, and the sodden soil of the road itself rose up in a bizarre mockery of humanity, forcing Kelly to run for drier ground or be dragged down into the earth by a mob of reeking mud-men. Then, as he fled from that, he ran directly into the path of a nine-foot tall gray-skinned ogre. It had an impressive collection of matted black hair all over its body, five-inch fingernails, and a mouth full of bony needles so long that it couldn't quite close its jaws. The beast followed him, moaning hungrily.

Dealing with the ogre took a while. In the end, he killed it by setting on fire, breaking one of its knees with a force-bolt, then opening its jugular vein with a large shard of lantern-glass when it fell. 

Another thing you can't do with a flashlight. 

By the time the traveler came within a mile of Darkshire's walls, he was bruised, filthy, battered and tired - covered in his own blood, and the blood of a dozen different monsters. The entire right side of his face was swollen, and his lean, powerful body was a patchwork of bruises and cuts. The palms of his hands were lacerated, wrapped in make-shift bandages. His hair was unbound, full of mud and the viscera of giant bats, and his shirt was gone entirely, sacrificed to necessity.

He still had the lantern though, softly lighting his way. It had served him well, and he'd made sure to restore it every time it broke in the line of duty. 

Kelly needed to rest. Not minding the pain and exhaustion didn't mean the warnings they presented were any less real. If he pushed himself too far, his body would fail, regardless of what his mind had to say about the subject. 

Reaching a cross-roads ensconced within a stand of four tall oaks, the traveler stopped by a hollow in the trunk of the largest tree, taking the time to inspect it thoroughly for teeth and tentacles, and to make sure nothing was lurking in the branches. Satisfied, he sat on a bed of leaves among its gnarled roots, placing his lantern on the ground beside him. Crossing his legs, he straightened his back and inhaled deeply, filling his chest with air that smelled of wood, wet, and rot.

A cold wind blew, whistling and howling in the bare branches above.

Ten minutes, no longer. Breathe. Recover. Focus. Just because my lungs aren't necessary doesn't mean they don't help. 

Just fifteen more minutes of travel, maximum. That means one, maybe two more examples of this fright-night bullshit. 

I'm almost there. 

[Kelly MacAryn]

Kelly ended up spending longer than he had planned in the four-square oaken grove at the cross-roads. 

His initial ten-minute rest period went by completely undisturbed. The wind blew, sending leaves skittering and twirling across the cross-roads, but nothing emerged from the gloom. It was the longest period of uninterrupted tranquility he'd experienced since arriving in the Pale Moors, and in the wake of such a comparatively peaceful respite, having had some time to reflect on hiss journey so far, the prospect of venturing back out into the chaos and the dark armed with only an admittedly-quite-useful lantern seemed like nothing short of lunacy.


As if reading his thoughts, a cloud drifted in front of the moon, eclipsing its crimson glow. The already-threatening shadows deepened. 

His error was obvious - in spite of the warnings, Kelly had underestimated the Pale Moors. The sheer relentlessness of the hungry, haunted night was more than he'd been prepared for, and up until now there hadn't been a long enough pause to fix the problem. The traveler had barely been able to repair his lantern after fights, let alone create a real weapon, before he would start to hear things growling in the dark, drawn by the multi-hued glow of his efforts, and have to hurry on his way. He felt like a fool for not beginning his trek with better equipment. 

Confidence in my skills is all well and good, but I need to keep in mind that I'm not all that powerful right now. I can't maintain my vector-sketch for long, and without it I'm not physically strong enough to hurt anything much tougher than a human being without exploiting vital areas or setting the bastards on fire. Half of the reason I'm so exhausted is from having to fall back on my force-bolts so many times, and I'd be far less injured if punching a giant bat in the throat didn't require them to be far too  damn close. 

Kelly frowned, thick eyebrows drawing in close, like bushes above the caves where his eyes made their home. 

I need a real weapon. Something quick and responsive. Something with precision and reach. Something that can be used defensively, and help me stay on my feet when I'm a gods-forsaken mess. 


He concentrated, nestling further into his hollow tree to hide the telltale prismatic light of Omnilium, which emerged from his hands in clouds of rainbow miasma as he began his summons. The scintillating radiance was far more eye-catching than the soft light of Kelly's lantern, and now that he had somewhere better than a thorn-bush or a ditch to conceal himself while he worked, he wanted to take no more chances.

Ten minutes later, the traveler had created a dark, sturdy wooden staff, inlaid with a web of iron braces, flush with its polished mahogany surface. At six feet in length, it was almost as tall as he was, and thick enough to fit comfortably in his hands. 

Kelly stood up, and tested the weapon's heft. It was surprisingly light, but not so insubstantial as to be useless. He took a proper, two-handed grip, spacing his hands wide enough to give him both leverage and control, then tried a couple of experimental thrusts and strikes. He was pleased by how deftly he could manipulate his creation. 

I've done this before. Excellent. 

Satisfied for the moment, he gripped his new weapon and crouched to retrieve his lantern. 

As Kelly stood, light-source in one hand and staff in the other, a figure stepped into his flickering circle of orange, oil-lit radiance, seeming to boil out of the darkness like smoke. 

The new arrival was a man, slender and pale, with copper-red hair going to gray around the ears, and piercing green eyes. His face was wide, bearing the wrinkles of late middle-age. The apparition was unarmed and unaccompanied, and carried no light. His rich, black velvet long-coat, silk scarf and oilskin cloak were a sharp contrast to Kelly's shirtless, barbaric appearance.

Other than their lack of traveling companions, the only things the two men seemed to have in common were their ramrod-straight posture, and the intensity of their silence. 

It made the staff-bearing traveler feel very self-conscious, and very suspicious.

I probably look like I've been bare-knuckle boxing the entire Pale Moors. Which isn't actually that far from true, now that I think about it.

Kelly forced himself not to cringe anew at how badly he'd miscalculated, refocusing instead on his new acquaintance. 


We're at least fifteen minutes from Darkshire on foot, and I didn't hear any horses. How is he navigating in the dark? And how does he look so fresh when I can't go a quarter-mile without being attacked?

This is going to be trouble.

A sudden gust of wind sent tree-branches overhead scraping against each other, filling the night with a hollow sound, like bones rolling downhill.

[Kelly MacAryn]

The well-dressed stranger spoke first, his tone coolly aristocratic. 

"Well met on the road, traveler. You look as though you've had some misfortune. Have you lost your horse? Where are your companions? Surely, you haven't been walking the Moors alone on the night of a blood-moon." 

Kelly shook his head, raising his lantern higher so as to better light the stranger's face. It cast them both in tones of firelight and flickering shadow, emphasizing the wounds that marred the traveler's athletic form, and giving the blackened, bloody grime that covered him a sickly sheen. 

The stranger seemed to grow slightly, the lengthening shadows complementing his slender build. His eyes blazed as they caught the light. 

"I'm a perimeter scout for a caravan," Kelly lied. "You'll forgive me if I don't tell you where we're camped. However, before I go answering any questions there's something I'd like ask you." 

"Is there? By all means." 

"Are we going to have a problem, you and I?" 

The stranger paused, amusement dancing in his eyes, and a slow smile crept across his face. 

"On the contrary, sir, on the contrary. I was simply wondering if you required assistance, but I can see now that you have the situation firmly in hand."

Kelly nodded, not really believing it. "Good. In that case, if you'll excuse me, I should be on my way." 

"Oh, I don't know about that. Why don't you stay awhile? Good conversation is so hard to find on the Moors, and as you have clearly discovered, the night is dangerous for a man alone."

The traveler frowned. The stranger's voice had a cloying, eminently reasonable quality to it that made you want to agree with him. It helped, of course, that nothing he'd just said was actually wrong, but Kelly was surprised by how persuasive the man was. He had to remind himself that he was on a schedule. 

I've already been here for twenty minutes. The whole purpose of crossing the Moors at night was to arrive in Darkshire as soon as possible - I can't afford to lose any more time.

"Thank you all the same," he said, giving a slight bow and beginning to walk away, "but I need to finish my rounds. I'm already late." 

"STOP."

Kelly stumbled to a halt. The imperious command rang in his ears, silencing the wind, and the rustlings in the dark. The traveler could feel it battering against the castle-walls of his ego, trying to dictate his priorities.

This isn't just charisma. It's some kind of hypnotic suggestion!

Mind control...

An icy calm stole over the traveler, tingling and brittle, capping a well of volcanic anger. This wasn't some half-mad spirit trying to dumpster-dive in his head - the well-dressed stranger was attempting something far more sinister and infinitely more offensive.

Kelly performed a psychological action akin to mental judo, and the powerful, unnatural suggestion imploded. 

Slowly, he turned around to look at the other man, saw him smiling, opening his mouth to issue another command in the erroneous belief that his first one had taken hold.

"I don't know if you're a vampire, or a ghost or what. And I don't care - I've been fighting all night," Kelly said, cutting him off. The traveler spoke low and quick, unable to completely contain his swelling outrage. "I'm wearing the blood of half the stupid-looking creatures in this antediluvian fucking 'verse, not to mention a fair amount of my own. My flesh is weak, and my energy levels are dangerously low. But so help me absent gods and omnipotent, smiling assholes, if you say one more word to me, if you so much as breathe in my direction again, I will rain hell down upon you from such mind-boggling heights of righteous anger that you will expire believing Omni himself was shitting molten iron." 

The stranger's green eyes lost their luster, and his jaw hung open in shock, though whether from the failure of his hypnotic powers or from Kelly's graphic promise it was hard to tell.  

"Do we understand each other?" Kelly asked. 

The stranger nodded, still staring at him as though he were some mythical beast. 

"Good." Kelly said, failing to keep a jagged tremor out of his voice, and he left the crossroads without looking back. 



As he resumed his hike towards Darkshire, the traveler couldn't help but notice differences. The road here was more well-traveled, free of weeds and potholes, and the nearby vegetation was less out of control, the fields still receiving some attention from their human caretakers. Overall, the going was easier - but that wasn't what bothered him.

The issue was that despite his return to the open road, nothing was attacking him. Kelly made it almost half the remaining distance without being jumped by so much as a confused badger, let alone the horrors that had plagued his journey up until now. The single time his haunt warned him of danger, it came to nothing. A werewolf, two hundred pounds of fur and teeth and snarling muscle, caught itself mid-leap, yelping as though it had been struck, and scrambled back into the murk.  

Something was scaring away the monsters, and Kelly was certain it wasn't him. 

I'm being followed, and whatever it is, it must be nasty. 

He stopped, and looked behind him, then up at the night sky, and to either side for good measure. 

Nothing. The red moon was turning orange, starting to dip below the horizon, and the sky was beginning to show the first signs of lightening towards a pre-dawn gloom. Clouds loomed, gathering over the hills and valleys, and the air smelled like rain. 

Kelly made it to within two-hundred meters of the Darkshire gates, the silhouettes of the fortified town's stone walls and wooden palisades looming large as his goal grew tantalizing close, before the attack finally came. 

The traveler's haunt shouted a grim prophecy, an image of man-sized wings with claws and teeth, behind and above and closing fast. He pivoted, swinging his lantern, but the plunging chiropteran blur swiftly batted it aside, sending it crashing to the road, spreading a slick of burning oil. The winged shape bore Kelly to the ground, and he barely managed to grip his staff in both hands and wedge it in the monsters jaws as they plunged towards his throat. 

It was amazingly strong. Too fatigued to trigger his vector-sketch power-up, he could only hold it back by bracing his elbows against the road. 

Green eyes bored into Kelly's, powerful legs straddled him, and a canine snout snorted angrily. Massive, wickedly curved fangs struck sparks off his iron-shod weapon, and a pair of very-nearly human hands grabbed for his face and neck, razor-sharp claw filling his vision. 

He didn't need his haunt to know that in a moment they'd put out his eyes, tear out his throat, but it gave him the extra fraction of a second he needed to make a plan.

Kelly wrenched his head forward and to the side, the claws opening great rents in his face, clipping off the top of one of his ears. He bit off one of his attacker's pinky-fingers, lacerating his cheek and breaking two teeth in the process. The finger tasted like burned meat and old paper.

The beast reared back and howled, giving Kelly a good look at it for the first time.

His attacker was some kind of human-bat hybrid, with the head of a wolf[/size], and the eyes of the stranger at the crossroads. Two massive, leathery wings drooped from its arms like a folded cape. It's flesh was gray, rubbery, and bald from head to toe. 

It's identity wasn't in question. It was also still wearing the stranger's pants and boots. 

Kelly took advantage of its momentary distraction to charge a psychokinetic force-bolt, gritting his teeth as little black dots swam in his vision. He took one hand off his staff and blasted the monster in the chest. The impact of the little orb of fish-eye distortion lifted its target off of Kelly, knocking it on its back. 

It's lighter than it looks. That blast was less than half-strength. 

Hollow bones?

The traveler spat out the finger, pulled his legs under him and sprang to his feet. His lower body was awkward and half-numb from the demands that had already been placed on it over the course of this awful night. Purple ichor congealed on his face where he'd been mauled, and his psychic senses screamed. 

The ghastly super-predator was already back on the attack. It slashed with its claws, shockingly fast, high, then low, dodging left and right, circling as it tried to get around his guard. It was going for the neck and the stomach, trying to disembowel him and open his jugular. Kelly kept it at bay with his staff, countering the beast's superior speed with the split-second early warnings provided by his haunt. He turned blows aside with the ends of his weapon rather than blocking them directly, sidestepping and preparing his next defense - the few times when he was forced to clash force-on-force, the shock nearly popped his shoulders out of joint. 

The stalemate continued for several minutes, but the traveler was beginning to flag. 

[size=small]I'm too tired for this. No vector-sketch, can't accelerate, one more force-bolt and I'll probably have an aneurysm - and I'm not quick enough to counter-attack effectively. If I don't do something fast, I'm going to lose. 

Kelly missed a parry. The beast slashed open his left his side as it passed, scoring a deep wound, spraying violet gore across the moors. It changed its tactics, circling wide, looking for its opportunity to pounce, anticipating wounded prey and an easy kill. 

The traveler saw his chance. He nursed his wounded side, pretending he couldn't ignore the injury.

The beast rushed in, wings spread, claws raised, jaws open wide - and screamed in pain.

 Kelly forced his battered body to drop swiftly to one knee, forced his arms to move as though they were fresh and well-rested, and whipped the staff up into the monster's armpit, where the wing-joint met the shoulder, with every ounce of his remaining strength. 

The sound of ripping tendons and the crackle of hollow bones breaking was like snapping a thousand sticks of celery, all at the same time. 

The half-man chiropteran flapped and flailed frantically as it sailed over Kelly and rolled across the road, lit by the last flames of the broken lantern and a rapidly brightening sky. It was a victim of its own momentum as much as anything else. Leaning on his staff, Kelly hobbled grimly towards it. 

The creature began to rise, but was stymied by the mind-searing pain in its ruined shoulder, brought on by even the slightest motion, the slightest shift in position of its arm. Kelly kicked it in the face. It roared, and lurched toward him, but the movement caused such monumental, uncompromising agony that it fell back, whimpering. 

"I told you," said Kelly, pausing to indulge a rattling cough. "Molten Iron." 

He jammed his staff in the crippled beast's fanged maw, pinning its head to the ground by the back of the throat, and stomped on its neck with the steel-re-enforced heel of his boot until there was little under his foot but black mud and shards of bone. 

The body turned to ash as the head rolled free, and began to scatter in the winds of the dawn as the sun peaked above the horizon, little more than a pale spot in the clouds, turning the overcast sky a brighter shade of gray.   

Kelly wanted to sleep. He hadn't slept since he'd arrived in the Omniverse, and he was certain he didn't usually need to, but he'd very nearly wiped himself out.

On the walls of Darkshire, men were pointing and shouting. The guards had seen the fight. 

The traveler turned, and picked his way towards the town as the gates began to open. 

Fact: The shoulder-joint is one of the most complicated joints in the body, containing a dozen tendons and several huge nerves. Dislocating or breaking it is one of the most painful things you can do to a person, resulting in near-complete inability to rise from a prone position.

Don't be like Kelly. Don't attack people's shoulders.

This has been a PSA from the society for the prevention of cruelty to shoulders.

Also, Kelly has arrived in Darkshire!