A City of Two Tales

I stood at the top of the tallest building in the loneliest place I had ever been, and pondered on my deepest question.

  When am I going to get a raise?

  No, I’m not shallow. Considering the work I do, I really should be getting paid more.

  My current predicament was perfect evidence of this. Last month, another Anomaly escaped the local Dun. Before last night, it had been regarded as a simple Class-E Puppet Being named the Warmwood, incapable of harm or much rational thought. After the hunter sent after it was found splattered throughout an alley, the higher ups decided it might be a good idea to send in a more experienced hunter. Which in this case, meant me.

  With a sigh, I turned away from the edge of the roof, having come to the conclusion that the answer to my question was probably never. I strolled to the other side of the roof, wandering past the leftovers from the Mayor’s party last night and pulling out my phone to call my guy-in-the-chair, Griff.

  After only a few rings, he picked up. “Found anything, Hal?” No greeting, as usual.

  I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see me. “No luck up here. Have they finished the alley sweep yet?”

  “Just a few minutes ago.” His tone was mildly annoyed, but that was typical of my sour and pessimistic partner. “The whole thing seems to have been covered in Residue, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious origin or exit, somehow.”

  “Great. So I should use my genius tracking skills to find it myself?” The view from this roof was pretty good on this edge. With my right boot on the raised rim, I leaned forward and looked down. Cocking my head, I tried to guess how far of a drop it was. Maybe seventyish feet? I’ve never been the best at gauging distances, but it was probably a fall I could survive. Ah well. No way to know without testing.

  “‘Genius.’ You cheat, Hal. That’s not real tracking.” He always said that about my technique, but I’m pretty sure he was just jealous. “But you might be able to find something down there.”

  I nodded, stepping my other foot onto the rim and standing tall. “Got it. I’ll head down and check it out, and if I find anything, I’ll let you know. Halcyon out.” Since he would rather mess around with his computers than talk to me, Griff hung up before I finished talking. With a grin, I tucked away my phone, and stepped off the roof.

  As I plummeted for a few moments, I mused on how to mess with him when I got back. Maybe I could mix up skittles, Reese’s pieces, and M&Ms in a bowl, then set it on his desk. Again. Or change all the sound effects on his computers to fart noises. Again. Griff and I had been friends for years, and he always put up with my antics, which made them extra fun.

  The pavement came quickly, but physical impacts like that wouldn’t hurt me. Sometimes after killing a particularly strong Anomaly, you might get a Boon from them that granted you some of their power. I had about a dozen Boons, increasing my hardiness, speed, strength, and generally making me far above average human skill. A couple of them could be nasty tricks up my sleeves when I needed them. When I hit the ground, I didn’t even flinch from the force of impact, and instead just started walking down the street towards the alley.

  The hunter hadn’t been in the alley the whole time, I knew. He was supposed to have started on the roof of the office building creating the alley alongside a new hotel, just a few streets away from the Mayor’s penthouse party.

  In the alley, I found a blessed lack of flesh and scattered human bits. Good to see the cleaners haven’t decreased in effectiveness. I went through it carefully, looking through my D-Frame, a hand lens with glass made of sand from the Dun, used to see Residue and Anomalous Marks, trying to tell which way the black, smokey gunk came from and left by, despite Griff having said it wasn’t visible. The whole alley was coated in Residue to varying degrees, which probably meant that the Anomaly had blown through here like a whirlwind of power, ripping the poor hunter to shreds as it went. Unfortunately, although unsurprisingly, I couldn’t see a spot where the Marks obviously began or ended. They were just everywhere. Much like the hunter had been.

  After a thorough once-over, I determined that this Anomaly was stupid. And rude. Why did it have to make my job so difficult? Really, I’d take a big, strong, Class-A Minor Kaiju Being that I could smack around with my sword over a sneaky little being of any class any day of the week. I may be a decent hand at tracking them the regular way, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy the slower pace. Besides, there wasn’t anything here to tell me where to look. Cheating it is, then. So, I pulled my sword hilt out of my coat pocket, then flicked the switch above my thumb, extending the thin blade. Next, of course, I stabbed the wall.

  Most hunters don’t get weapons as nice as mine. Sure, the common swords are pretty cool, capable of cutting through Anomalies with ease while also being incongruously light, but the standard blades only come in broadsword style, with non-retractable blades. That sounded really boring to me. I’d had this sword since the beginning, having won it on my very first hunt, after stealing it from a Class-B Fighter Being and using it to slay his Dragon familiar. As well as being sharp enough to cut just about anything on Earth, my rapier also could keep the blade inside a Dun Space in the hilt and cast minor illusions around me. If I stuck it into a fresh Residue, it could show me a flash vision of what had caused the Residue, which was very helpful in cases like this. Unfortunately, having visions stuck in my head tended to give me a headache, so I normally would have preferred to not use this method, although it was fun to bother Griff with. I did it anyway, since this Anomaly needed to be stopped posthaste, as the previous hunter’s experience made quite clear.

  I felt the sword sinking into the wall, through brick, mortar, and plaster on the other side, as my vision flashed with the sight of the occurrences of the night before. In my mind’s eye, I watched the hunter settle on the roof, keeping a lookout for the Warmwood. He had recorded before his death that his plan was to wait near the Mayor’s summer party, believing the light and sound would draw the dull-minded Warmwood out of hiding. Puppet Beings weren’t usually very intelligent on their own, and tended to be attracted to bright spots of human life, seeking for someone to either become their master, or for someone the Anomaly could take control of.

  Unfortunately for the hunter, his plan worked. In the vision, a spindly humanoid shadow approached from the other roof, remaining quiet and unnoticed until it moved onto the hunter’s roof, where it prepared to strike.

  The report on its escape had a description, and it seemed to be fairly accurate. The Warmwood looked like it was made of giant toothpicks, with one for the body and one for each arm and leg, every limb split in the middle with a jointed crack, and no visible head. But in the vision, I watched the Warmwood’s arms split with a wet, mushy squelch, creating splintery hands from its smooth arms and spraying blood on the ground beneath it. The hunter heard the noise, but didn’t see the Warmwood hiding in the shadows before it lunged on him, snapping one of the new hands around his neck and impaling him with the other. The hunter barely had time to grunt with pain as the Warmwood’s momentum carried them over the edge of the roof and to the ground below, near where I stood now.

  Most Anomalies aren’t innately murderous. They escape, maybe break some property, but don’t usually harm anyone on purpose, unless they’re a hungry beast. There isn’t much violent urge in their beings. But this one was different. It ripped and tore, killing the hunter as viciously as it could. I’ll spare details, as it was sickening to watch, and you probably don’t want to read that. When it finished its murder, the Warmwood slipped away, out towards the street, and went into the sewers.

  I withdrew my sword from the wall, ending the vision and removing the mess from my sight. If the Anomaly was underground, then I knew where it must have gone. But why would it return to the Dun, especially now? Maybe Griff would have some ideas. I pulled my phone out and called Griff again.

  I could hear him sigh as he picked up. “I assume you found something?”

  “Yep. My technique worked, as usual.” The headache that usually followed was starting to show up, but I wasn’t going to mention that. “Warmwood’s headed in the sewer.”

  “So it’s off to the Dun, then? Excellent.” Although I couldn’t see his face, I was quite sure he was smirking at my misfortune.

  “Do you have any idea why it would go down there? Puppets tend to stick around until they find a master.”

  Griff grunted, seeming distracted. “Probably means it’s found one. Keep your guard up. A mastered puppet is going to be more dangerous than a free one. The binding—”

  “Yeah, yeah, the binding strengthens its connection to our world, I know. I’ve been doing this job for longer than you have.” The main portal to the Dun was just outside of town, so I started heading there. Anomalies could transport themselves straight to their Dun of origin by returning underground, and they wouldn’t normally go down there otherwise, but us people are restricted to other routes. “That would explain the violence a bit, I guess. It made quite the mess of poor Hunter Maddox. I’m heading to the Dun entrance now. I’ll call you again once I’ve found the thing. Halcyon—”

  “Hal. Be careful.” He hung up. That was odd. Griff didn’t normally say anything before hanging up. I tucked away my phone again and continued on my way.

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Duns have been appearing for the past couple decades, without much rhyme or reason to their timing or placement except only showing up in or near human settlements. They’re layers of another dimension, full of monsters and creatures and elements beyond our comprehension. Most have towns of beasts and men built within them, by this point. Cities where Duns appear are sometimes called Two-Taled Towns, since there’s two stories to them. Bit of a dumb name, but it’s caught on. The town of Sandy, Nevada, the one I’m in now, has only been Two-Taled for a few years, and since it was a smaller town to begin with, its Dun is small as well.

  The main entrance was a short walk out of town, in the hills to the south. When it first opened, it had flashed a beacon in the sky, marking the spot for people to explore. Now, the hole in the fabric of reality was protected by a small, secure building, as was the procedure for Dun entrances, to keep random people from getting too close. Anyone can easily enter an unguarded Dun, but not everyone could make it back out. This one had claimed the farmer who first discovered it, when he was drawn in by the voice of his dead wife. His story was discovered after a hunter spoke with his corpse, which had been turned into a semi-intelligent, zombified thrall to a Class-D Demon Being.

  My hunter’s badge let me enter the complex without any trouble. I went through the entrance hall after the check-in kiosk—there wasn’t a real person there, just a computer station, since nobody wants to work that close to a Dun long-term—then followed the path through the building to the center room with the tear. Some people imagine a portal to another dimension as something swirling with a bright array of color. Dun holes dispel that idea, being jet-black rips in the air, large enough to fit through comfortably, but nothing too fancy. I slipped through the cut and entered another dimension.

  After having entered Duns several dozen times, I knew how it would go. The transfer would be perfectly seamless. My step would take me from a calm, bright room indoors, to a cobbled road lined by old west style buildings, with rain pouring from the dark, featureless sky above. No sun, no moon, no stars, no clouds, just dim eternal twilight. Every Dun was self-contained by a dome of darkness, and every attempt to puncture that covering had failed. It simply didn’t break. There probably just wasn’t anything out there.

  I wasn’t sure how to find the Warmwood once I was down here, but I decided I’d figure it out somehow.

  Fate figured it out for me.

  Instead of the humble desert town soaked in perpetual rain, I appeared in wreckage. The homes and buildings constructed for and by the more intelligent Anomalies were in pieces, scattered across the small landscape. Corpses of beasts laid among the debris, some half-buried in the black sand, some cut open or dismembered. Somehow, even the juvenile shades of young Anomalies had been killed, with flakes and scraps of shadows lying with their fully formed seniors.

  That was incredibly problematic. Although they were dangerous when they came to our world, inside the Dun, some Anomalies could be very beneficial. This Dun had a rare clairvoyant Anomaly who gave incredibly accurate prophecies when the mood struck her.

  I was definitely not getting that raise now, if that Anomaly was dead. Was this the work of the Warmwood? How strong was it, to have destroyed an entire Dun? It had to be at least Class-A by now, maybe nearing Emergency Classification.

  As I took a step forward along the street, I barely noticed a sudden motion to my left, like a string shooting through the rain. My sword whipped out and cut it out of the air before it could reach me, and blood spurted from the strand as it withdrew. Alert to more attacks, I scanned the street, just as a spindly form rose from the ground nearby, lifted by strings floating from nowhere. The Warmwood. Not all Puppet Beings have string control, but obviously, since the situation wasn’t irritating enough already, this Anomaly did.

  It flung itself toward me, talons outstretched. I swung for its arm, but it just grabbed the blade and ripped it from me, tossing it aside and tackling me. As its claws came through my heavy coat and began to prick my skin, I managed to shed the coat and slip out downwards. Although the Warmwood wasn’t very heavy, it was strong and fast, and jumped for me again, slashing my face. I hopped backwards into a fighting stance, and froze. My limbs stopped responding to me, and I couldn’t feel anything. Paralysis. That blood it’s been shedding from its hands must have contained some kind of venom. Being restricted like this always annoyed me. For some reason, the Warmwood didn’t try to finish me off. It seemed to stare at me for a curious moment. Then it picked up my coat, and pulled my phone out of my pocket. My ringtone for Griff was playing. The Warmwood pressed the answer button.

  “Hal. I told you to be careful. Yet you still didn’t manage to avoid this.”

  Huh? How did he know what was happening?

  “It was difficult to find the right Puppet Being to master, but it worked out well anyway, I suppose. Maddox’s death was unfortunate, but if you had just taken the job in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to kill him so violently.

  “I hate you. So cocky, so rude, yet still so beloved. This was MY dream, Halcyon. You made it as a hunter so easily, so quickly, and when I finally got in, I’m forced to be treated like nothing more than your assistant.

  “Now I just have to kill you, and it’ll all be mine.”

  Feeling returned to my body just as the Warmwood stabbed at me again. Time turned to molasses around me as I activated my Slowness Boon. It wouldn’t last more than a few seconds, but that was all I needed. Although breaking from the venom had only taken moments, it had been annoying, and combined with the voice on the phone, I was now ticked off.

  My sword shot to my hand as I held out my arm for it, then I cut the Warmwood in half and swiped my phone back. As time returned to normal, more blood sprayed from the Warmwood’s torso and it collapsed in two pieces, turning from healthy looking tan wood to a dull, deathly gray. Switching off speakerphone, I held the phone up to my ear and spoke to ‘Griff’.

  “Nice try, whoever you are. There’s no way you’re really Griff.” I wouldn’t admit it could be him. “He would’ve known that wouldn’t work. Maybe he would have betrayed me, since I do bother him quite a bit, but he would never be able to beat me, especially not with a weakling like this chump. 

  “Warmwood’s dead now, if you didn’t feel the connection break. I’m not sure who you are or what you want, but I’ll figure it out. Then kill you.”

  Man, this is going to be so much paperwork, I thought, shaking my head.

  I crushed my phone, then began to head for the exit.