Chapter Text
"Someone will be sent as soon as possible."
That had been the heroes guild’s response to the town’s desperate plea for help, two months having already passed since then.
By day, things were relatively bearable, the monsters kept at bay, life resumed its course, the children went to school, the adults worked. But as soon as the sun disappeared over the horizon, Fairview turned into a lawless land.
People followed Neville’s advice, the town’s new cleric, a young man who had been born in the town and had returned years later to take up that role after the previous one was killed by a six-eyed beast. The recommendations were practical: salt on every door and window, some meat out in the street, to satisfy the hunger and the cravings of something dead, protective runes and always a light left on, so that nothing could slip in through the dark.
But not everyone had meat, it was expensive. Salt was expensive too, so instead of covering every door and window, some families ended up choosing a specific section of the house to protect, usually the bedrooms and the kitchen. Not many knew the runes well, they might remember something from school, but the internet was an unreliable source to be sure, and no one kept written manuals anymore, that was a thing of the past. And not to mention how little safety leaving the light on gave, seeing as one of the monster attacks had messed up something at the magical electric red of the town, and now the power tended to go in and out constantly.
But of course, people never looked at the big picture, they preferred to attack Ministry of Magic workers, it was easier and they were closer at hand. They posted long complaints on Facebook, sharing personal experiences of how they had had to fight horrible shadows so they wouldn’t take the grandmother or the baby. Usually those were the cheapskates who didn’t want to spend any salt, or the clueless ones who went to the bathroom at night and forgot the lines, undoing them without realizing it.
Either way, waking up with a demonic figure trying to drag you into the dark was no one’s idea of a good time, so when the power went out at night, an emergency team was deployed to the area to solve the problem as soon as possible.
It was not a well-paid job, and while the vehicle had protections, once outside it, the monsters that roamed the darkness could just as well devour you. But Hermione had accepted it anyway, because at the end of the day, it was a job. She did not have much, but she had a cat and an apartment to keep up with. And she had been lucky or unlucky enough that as a child, she could make the stars dance.
She could no longer do that.
Earnie, the driver, always kept silent. He watched her in the rearview mirror while she gathered the strength to open the door and run to the electrical pole in question. The man had to be around sixty, probably already retired but the money was not enough for him. The money was never enough for anyone. So, like Hermione, he had accepted a poorly paid job that asked far more than it gave. It annoyed the brunette a little, if only he had cheeks a little less chubby she could be angrier at him for not stopping, but he was only a poor exploited old man, awake at an inhuman hour waiting for her to get out of the car.
She had to get out of the car.
She shut her eyes tightly, cursing out of pure nerves as she felt her body tremble, begging her not to do it. Her hand slid over the ice-cold metal of the handle, and trembling, she opened it.
"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!" she let out as she ran to the pole.
The intense darkness of the night was occasionally interrupted by sparks of light that jumped between her fingers. Conjuring electricity had always come easily to her. The human body already produced electrical impulses naturally, the real difficulty was amplifying them without frying her nervous system in the process.
As she ran, she made calculations almost automatically: estimated voltage, distance to the pole, charge loss, line status. She had learned to process it all in seconds.
Magic did the rest.
She felt the current gather beneath her skin, running through muscles and nerves in an unpleasantly familiar sensation. If she overdid the charge too much, she could end up with burns on her hands, or damaging her clothes or her hair. If she calculated very badly, she could end up unconscious. If she was very unlucky, all of it could happen at once.
When she reached the pole she had already gathered enough charge, she extended her hands and the electricity left her body in a small explosion of bluish light, searching for the void in the grid. The electricity rune on the pole regained its bluish glow after flickering several times. For an instant, Hermione watched as the current made its way through the damaged circuit, reconnecting with the rest of the system.
Normally that was enough, but there were always variables. An inverted polarity could send the shock straight back to her chest, an incorrect estimate could trigger an overload. And if another Ministry agent was working on a nearby line, a simple miscalculation could plunge more of the town into darkness.
And oh, the overwhelming darkness. It consumed everything, even the stars. It devoured the dirt roads, the picturesque houses, the front gardens, the trees, the signs, the people. It was even worse knowing that the terrifying feeling that there was something behind you was real, a hidden predator with a hunger for flesh, blood, and souls, with all the right parts sharpened to give you a painful and terrible death.
They never showed themselves until they were on top of you, only then did their shining eyes appear, once they had already decided to kill you. For that reason, they had been nicknamed "The unseen".
The few survivors there had been spoke of long, skeletal arms, some mentioned claws, others hooves and horns, or outright enormous wings. No account matched another. This made it clear they were some tribe of shapeshifters, which, fed by the town’s collective fear, grew stronger every day.
The light took a couple of seconds to return. By the time it did, Hermione was trembling in place. The orange streetlight fell over her like a sepia spotlight, she had seen a pair of bright yellow eyes on the roof of the house in front of her. There was nothing there anymore, but she was still staring in that direction, trying to process through the shock what that meant.
They had let her see them, which meant she was already marked.
She would die.