Screech, screech, screech, the chalk inched across the cold stone floor of the crypt, vibrating in Eris's hand as she connected the white lines of the magic circle.
The hour had bled into that nebulous space where night no longer felt like night but was a solemn blanket of the darkest secrets before the new light of dawn. Inside the forgotten crypt in the Mag Mell Memorial Grounds, the air was thick with the smell of old stone, damp earth, and the slightly sweet, acrid smoke of the cheap candles Eris had bought at the campus store. The flame-light danced over walls furred with generations of moss and the names on the sarcophagi worn smooth by time.
"He used to love chasing rabbits," Sarah Torbit chirped, her translucent form drifting through a stone sarcophagus like smoke and re-coalescing on the other side. "Silly thing. His bark was bigger than he was." Her voice was bright and airy, a stark contrast to the gloom. She was putting on her best ditzy-ghost show, all wide, earnest eyes and fluttering hands.
Eris Sylvie, a splash of vibrant life in the monochrome tomb, wiped a sweaty strand of blonde hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a smudge of chalk on her skin. "That's adorable, Sar. Almost done." Her voice was a low, focused murmur. She was on her knees, her track-toned legs aching from crouching, carefully finishing the last sigil of the magic circle on the uneven flagstones. The chalk dragged and skipped on the rough surface. "You're gonna be so happy. A girl and her dog, reunited. It's like a Hallmark card, but with, you know, necromancy."
Her own enthusiasm felt genuine, a warm bubble in her chest. This was it. A real, tangible way to use this cursed Second Sight for something good, for a friend. It beat the usual routine of pretending not to see the sad, shimmering shapes of the specters huddled in the corners of The Slaughter Lamb.
She lit the final candle, the match hissing to life and casting long, leaping shadows that made the carved angels on the walls seem to twitch. She looked up at Sarah, her face illuminated from below, making her usual bright features stark and dramatic. "You ready?"
Sarah clasped her ghostly hands together, a gesture of pure, giddy anticipation. "Let's do this!"
Eris grinned, a flash of white in the dimness. She rocked back on her heels and checked the massive, leather-bound spell book they'd 'borrowed' from the restricted section of Culann Tower. The pages were brittle vellum, the ink faded to a rusty brown. She ran her finger down the instructions, her brow furrowed in concentration. It all seemed straightforward enough. A little chant, a focus of will, a happy reunion. Feeling a surge of confidence, she stood, her knees popping in protest.
She began to chant. The words were guttural, old, and they felt strange in her throat, like speaking with someone else's tongue. At first, nothing. Then, the air in the crypt began to stir, not with a breeze, but with a sudden, profound chill that sank deep into the bone. It was the cold of deep caves and buried things, a cold that had nothing to do with the South Carolina night outside. Sarah's excited expression faltered; her spectral eyes darted around the room, no longer playful but sharp and assessing.
Streaks of energy, like heat haze made of bruised purple and sickly green, began to writhe up from the chalk lines of the circle. Eris's voice grew louder, more forceful, pushing through the sudden resistance in the air. A peal of thunder, impossibly clear and directly overhead, boomed, and a tremor shook the crypt, vibrating up through the soles of Eris's sneakers. With a final, deafening crack that was less sound and more a physical shockwave, the stone floor inside the circle split open like a rotten fruit.
A fissure ran across the flagstones, and from its depths, an eerie, source-less light began to emanate, painting their faces in a ghastly pallor.
Eris stopped chanting. The sudden silence was heavier than the noise had been. She blinked, her heart doing a nervous tap-dance against her ribs. She looked at Sarah. "Um. Is that supposed to happen?"
Sarah offered a theatrical, fluttering shrug. "The book didn't include diagrams, darling."
A low groan of shifting stone filled the crypt. The initial split began to widen, its jagged teeth gnawing at the edges of the circle. Spider-webs of cracks raced outwards, skittering across the floor. "Whoa!" Eris yelped, leaping backward to avoid a chunk of floor that crumbled into the growing abyss. The fissure was no longer a crack; it was a prominent, ominous hole, glowing with that same wrong, feverish light from deep within the earth.
Eris shared a wide-eyed, utterly confused look with Sarah. "Um…" was all she could manage.
Then, from the glowing maw, a wave of things hurtled upward. They were dark, spectral forms, less solid shapes and more concentrated knots of anguish and cold. They didn't scream; the air itself seemed to tear around them, creating a high, keening wail that was the sound of pure despair. Eris screamed, a short, sharp sound of terror, throwing her arms over her head and stumbling back, falling hard on her backside. The spectral swarm swirled around the crypt like a furious black galaxy, whipping her hair around her face and extinguishing half the candles with their passage, before funneling out through a broken, barred window and into the night.
Panting, Eris scrambled to her hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the hole. The light from below pulsed rhythmically, like a sick heartbeat. Sarah drifted over, peering down over her shoulder.
"I think I messed up," Eris whispered, her voice shaking.
Her gaze snapped to the spell book, lying open where she'd dropped it. "How do I… how do I close this?" she asked, her voice rising in panic.
Sarah's tone was deceptively light, almost musing. "What if you can't?"
"But I have to!" Eris's head whipped back towards the hole. "What if something… else… decides to come up for a visit?"
Another rumble, deeper this time, shook the ground. Dust and bits of mortar rained down from the ceiling. Sarah's ghostly form flickered. "Um, maybe we should go. We aren't going to figure this out right now." She glanced nervously at the pulsating hole. "And I don't know if we want to be here for whatever might come out next. That first wave felt… chatty."
Eris swallowed hard, the sound loud in the trembling quiet. The hole continued to rumble, the light within it seeming to grow hungrier, branching out into unseen tunnels below. Right. Her eyes, usually so bright with easy humor, were now sharp with a determined fear. She pushed herself to her feet, her athlete's balance steadying her on the unsteady floor. "We'll leave for now. We'll figure out how to close this thing!"
Sarah nodded, her usual flighty persona completely gone, replaced by a stark seriousness. "Right."
The hole gave another violent shudder, and a fresh wave of that soul-deep cold washed over them. No more words were needed. Eris scooped up the heavy spell book, clutching it to her chest like a shield, and together, the living girl and the dead witch turned and ran, fleeing the crypt and the glowing, growing wrongness they had unleashed into the Aldis night.
*****
The woods of Annwn were not like mortal forests. Here, the trees grew in whispers, their leaves shimmering with colors that had no name in the waking world, and the air carried the scent of petrichor and forgotten memories. Dáinn Herne Cernunnos rode through this twilight realm astride Skógr, the great black horse moving with a silence that swallowed the sound of his hooves. The summons from Gwyn ap Nudd had been a spike of pure panic etched into a scrap of birch bark, a level of urgency that was, even for Gwyn, impressively dramatic.
They broke from the tree line into a clearing where Gwyn's residence sat—a structure that seemed less built and more grown, its twisting spires of dark, polished wood woven with living vines that drooped with silver berries. The air hummed with a low, resonant magic, the kind that settled in the teeth.
Dáinn swung down from the saddle, his boots meeting the mossy ground without a sound. He gave Skógr a pat on the neck, the muscle warm and solid under his hand. "With me," he murmured. The horse tossed his head, a glint of intelligent understanding in his dark eyes, before his form dissolved into shifting shadows that flowed across the ground and pooled seamlessly into Dáinn's own. The connection was a familiar, cool weight at his back, a constant readiness.
A small, walnut-brown figure, all knobby limbs and large, luminous eyes, scurried from the arched doorway. It was a brownie, its attire of dried moss and cobweb twitching with its nervous energy.
"This way, sir, oh, this way, quickly now," it chirped, its voice like the rustling of leaves. It wrung its hands, ushering Dáinn inside.
The interior was a cavernous space, the ceiling lost in a gloom that twinkled with captive starlight. The throne room was less a place of opulent ceremony and more a tangled heart of the forest, with roots breaking through the flagstones and pale, ghostly flowers blooming in the cracks. And in the center of it all, wearing a path on the floor, was Gwyn ap Nudd.
The Lord of Annwn was pacing, his movements a frantic, fluttering dance of distress. His usually pale face was flushed, his hands twisting together as if he were trying to wring water from the air.
Dáinn stopped a few paces away, cocking a hip and resting a hand casually on the worn hilt of his hunting sword. His voice was a low, steady counterpoint to the room's agitated energy. "What is the emergency?"
Gwyn spun around, his eyes wide. "You're here! Thank the Gods!" He rushed forward, closing the distance in a flutter of silvery robes, and seized Dáinn by the shoulders, giving him a frantic shake. "It is a travesty, man! A cataclysm! If Woden finds out—" He broke off, releasing Dáinn to clutch at his own head. "We can't let him. You can't let him."
Dáinn's dark brow furrowed. He reached up, his grip firm but not unkind, and pried Gwyn's fingers from his arms. "Find out what?"
Gwyn leaned in so close Dáinn could see the wild, kaleidoscopic pattern of fear in his irises. His whisper was harsh with desperation. "The hounds."
Dáinn stared, processing. "For the Great Hunt?"
"Shhh!" Gwyn hissed, jerking back and looking around the empty hall as if the walls themselves were spies. "No one can know!"
A spark of irritation flickered in Dáinn's chest. He took a slow, measured breath, the scent of damp earth and Gwyn's cold sweat filling his lungs. "Start from the beginning. What happened?"
Gwyn threw his hands up in a gesture of pure, helpless agony. "That's just it! No one knows! One minute they were here, their leads tied by the western grove, baying for a bit of the chase… and the next…" He snapped his fingers. "Gone. Vanished. Not a whiff, not a howl, not a single ghostly hair!"
Dáinn pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling the beginnings of a headache that was centuries in the making. "There has to be something. A scent, a disruption in the ley lines, a disgruntled dryad…"
"You have to find them!" Gwyn charged into his space again, jabbing a finger toward Dáinn's chest. "You have to bring them back!"
Dáinn met the frantic gesture with a flat, unimpressed stare. "Have you tried calling for them?"
"My god, man, of course we have!" Gwyn's voice scaled upwards into a near-shriek. "Do you think if it were that easy I would have sent for you? I have whistled until my lips went numb! I have called for Dormach by name until my throat is raw!" He stepped even closer, his finger now almost touching the leather of Dáinn's tunic. "You are the Huntsman. You are the one who tracks the untrackable. You must find them and return them before Woden gets word and before the Great Hunt is upon us and we have nothing but a handful of confused terriers to lead the charge!"
Dáinn let out a long, slow groan, a sound of utter resignation that seemed to draw the very light from the room. The weight of his duty, and the sheer absurdity of being tasked with finding a pack of lost, spectral dogs by a king on the verge of a nervous breakdown, settled on his shoulders. He gave a single, sharp nod.
"Fine," he said, the word laden with the promise of future grievances. "I'll find your hounds."