Work Text:
England is not a very large country. Compared to others, crossing it is a matter of days – hours, even, if used wisely. But hours are the one thing she does not have, and the roads seem to stretch out for eternity, wrapping the earth in tight, black tarmac ribbons, laced in delicate white and yellow markings that distort with the distance. Her car seems like little more than a bead strung onto it, battered red steel and a windshield blackened by fog.
Watergate to Finsley should be sixty miles, an hour and twenty minutes on good days, an hour and forty minutes on a bad one, more only if the traffic is all but bumper-to-bumper.
Sixty miles. Eighty minutes. Forty-five minutes still remaining. Thirty-three point seven-five miles to go.
Stonehenge is one hundred and eighty-two miles away. If she turns around at this very moment, she should arrive there in three hours, less if she ignores speed limits and can evade the police. She recalculates it at every free moment, factors it into her time limit and acts accordingly.
(She has twenty-two hours left to investigate. Twenty-one, when she factors in time to complete the ritual. Everything is slipping away so quickly, sand through her fingers, and she doesn’t know how to stop squeezing it down to nothing.)
The road ahead of her swims in her headlights, markings distorting with the sway of her car and the static in her vision when she moves too quickly. Casting night vision to pass those cultists without catching their attention had consequences – a headache pulses behind her eyes, her vision fuzzing slightly at the edges in time with her heartbeat.
Exam season was worse, she supposes. But then again, her last exam season hadn’t had her life on the line, only her career. Her skill may be undeniable, but skill will only get you so far without the information to back it up, as the last few days (and T) have drilled into her, until she could recite her notebook papers from memory alone. Maybe she should have packed a stash of energy drinks in her car before she set off.
She squeezes the steering wheel, ignores the feeling of grease caught in her hair. There are worse things in it anyway, from those unfortunate enough to be in her way, and from their victims.
When she closes her eyes, it’s almost as though its just another late-night drive, and there’s no fog at all, nothing baying in the shadows her headlights can’t quite drive away. Almost like she’s just driving back to her university after a visit home, and she’ll arrive home to her cat waiting for her on the windowsill.
And when she opens her eyes, it is bright enough to blind, bright enough to burn. She blinks again, again, again, but it doesn’t go away, only distils itself into disparate points, hazy, searing. Her clock blinks at her on the dashboard; her phone blares an alarm, insistent and meaningless.
The light should drive the darkness away, but it doesn’t. Shadows wrap each point of it like a veil, a thousand bright and terrible faces beaming at her from behind their blackened scarves, every gaze meeting hers until she wants nothing more than to turn away – she wants to run, to speed away into the night from whatever horrible dream this is, but the car sputters and bleeds under her hands, failing, dying.
Her eyes dart from the dead dials back to the lights, and she can’t do anything but meet their gazes, their innumerable, golden eyes.
Like the sun. Like thousands of suns, a crowd, a haze, a swarm of piercing, bloodied yellow suns descending on the earth in a blackened fog that grows closer, closer still, wrapping the battered metal body of the car until she can all but feel its grasp at the doors.
Somewhere in the depths of her terrified, panicking brain, she can appreciate the irony of it. This car had become her chariot, yes, her valiant steed to carry her across the country and back in desperate search of any kind of information; but more than that it had become her snail-shell, her only protection, her only place of safety against the shadows. When she came sprinting out of a cultist den with her papers clutched to her chest and a thing out of her darkest nightmares on her heels, the car was where she ran to, the place she hurled herself into headfirst and sped away without daring to look back.
It’s funny. Now she’s been surrounded, her only place of safety has become her cage.
The shadows grow closer, the windows nothing but blackness and bright, deadly points of yellow night, eyes fixed on her like spotlights. There is no rattling at the door handles: what need does something like this have to simply break in? She can hear her car’s metal frame groaning under its force already.
There is nowhere to run, no use hiding with the car in its grasp, and nothing at all she can do to fight it. Whatever she was able to stitch together of the banishment ritual has fled her mind under its heavy gaze, and the idea of breaking away to grab her notebook is…unbearable.
But she can still run somewhere. The gun is distinguishable by touch alone in her passenger seat, the clip still full with five bullets as she presses its cold muzzle to her temple.
How lucky. Still, she’ll only need one.
Outside, the shadows hiss, whisper, their movement distinguishable by the groaning metal as they press in closer and closer. The light burns through her blackened windows with feverish intent, its gaze like a physical pressure drilling through her eyesockets to the soft matter behind. She wants to run. There is nowhere, nowhere at all that can escape what she can no longer stop.
The cold of the pistol’s muzzle bleeds into her skull, the magic hissing at her fingertips finally quieted, vanished under the gaze of its progenitor. She closes her eyes.
All hope has fled, and so she flees with it.
Her eyes fly open as the gun goes off, and there is no light at all. Only the blackness surrounding her car, the dim red glow of the car dials, the soft hiss of her breath in the dark. The wind rustles outside, leaves stirring on trees hanging above the motorway like so many figures.
It was only a nightmare. She fell asleep at the wheel from thirty-five hours straight without a break, or real food. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing real – no. No, she knows better.
It’s real. Somehow, somewhere, it’s real.
Another reality, perhaps, but a reality all the same. She doesn’t know how she knows it, but she does, in her blood, in her nerves, the very marrow of her bones. In the thumping of her heartbeat, set fast from adrenaline and the rumble of the road beneath her.
A vision, then, of a world that she failed to save.
She lets out a breath, low and steady. The sound echoes strangely in the silence, lingers somehow, clings to the interior of the car like spilled liquid before finally dissipating.
Another world fell, then: what about it? A version of her who wasn’t smart enough to solve the puzzle died with it: again, so what? What will her fear solve? She gleaned nothing of note from it than what the end of the world will look like, and even that will only hold true if the shadow looks the same across worlds.
The god invading here’s colour is red, anyway. She knows that much. When – if her efforts fail and it invades, its gaze will pierce like the red of a stoplight, the dim glow of the car dials on her dashboard. Not the sun. Never like the sun.
Her gaze turns to the box of painkillers in her passenger seat, piled next to her notebook and first aid kit. The box itself is as ordinary as she could make it, plain white fabric with a cross hastily drawn on the side in red marker, easily explained to anyone who looks too closely as an extension of the first aid kit beside it, its contents almost as explainable as treatment for a condition which needs regular injections. Flualprazolam isn’t easily identifiable by eye, after all. And it’s proved a boon when she comes to her senses miles away from the dungeon she fled from, hands still shaking, vision still blurring at the edges.
Still, she looks away. She doesn’t need drugs. She needs rest – she needs sleep, but both are hopelessly out of her reach. A powernap is an hour gone, an hour that could be the difference between success and ultimate failure. She has twenty-five hours left, if her predictions are right (which they are), and she can tolerate another day without sleep. Crunch time is never easy, but she’s gone longer without sleep before.
(The fact that her work on four days without sleep is better stuffed into a shredder and forgotten is besides the point.)
There isn’t time to think about this. She needs to think. No – she needs to focus. Where was she –? Finsley, she was going to Finsley. After that, Kidchester, then to Blesham. A clean arc, perfectly calculated to balance investigation and travel time while still sending her back towards Stonehenge. If she’s lucky, T will contact her to point her towards a place of interest, and she can head that way as well.
Stonehenge will have its own clues, of that she’s sure. It has to. What cult wouldn’t turn the place of their god’s entry into its greatest temple? She knows the names of the gods of pain and disease (allies), and she knows the colours (orange and purple) of the gods associated with Shm and Kz, neither of which are invading.
The god of pain is her nemesis, whatever their rune is.
She has three-quarters of the banishment ritual, and twenty hours to find the missing piece and the rune, excluding the time it will take her to reach Stonehenge. Her notepad is sweat-stained; her steering wheel slippery with her own anxiety.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters besides completing the ritual successfully, and going home alive. Just like nothing mattered besides an A* on her A-levels, or a distinction on her degree, or her work being published. It will be done, because it must be done, and she will be the one to do it. The research opportunity will come from her notes after this, and everything else can wait. Her way is clear.
The car turns back on without complaint, and crawls back into motion with little more than the sound of its wheels against the road, headlights pushing back the darkness for another few hours. What she wouldn’t give for a working streetlight, or a little sunlight to light her path.
She hasn’t seen the sun since before this began, the thick, greasy smog of the Shadow’s influence choking the skies for weeks before she even realised what needed to be done. The news had called it an environmental event, nothing more. It’s impossible to know whether they were working for the cult or simply trying to make sense of it all. Everyone works for the shadow these days, and nobody at all, simply under its thrall like so many others.
Time passes, second by second. The road stretches out before her like the languid reach of an arm. Her headlights catch a passing figure, flickering shadows dissipating into nothing, their handprint catching on her windscreen for a heartbeat’s length before vanishing with the rest of them. She drives on.
Twenty hours to investigate. Three hours to Stonehenge. One hour for the ritual.
Thirty-three miles to Finsley.