Sirens flash blue and red light across the darkened Canterlot streets, staining everything with an odd, unnatural glow.

Other than the rumbling engines of the vehicles and the patter of light rainfall it is utterly silent. Over a dozen police officers, rookies, and CSI’s are in the area and each one of them is slumped over, snoozing away the evening.

I wander idly among the police cruisers and prone figures as I consider the position they’re in and feel a small pang of guilt. It’s not their fault that they’re here, and in point of fact, they’re really only doing their jobs.

Arguably this is where this small horde of Canterlot’s finest ought to be, given what’s down under the overpass of the River Canter’s south canal but, frankly, I can’t let them go down there yet for a pair of very good reasons.

Reason one: I can’t have them mucking up the scene before my own specialist arrives.

Reason two: if the perpetrator is still anywhere nearby then we’ll have a lot of dead cops on our hands.

I turn at the sound of rapidly approaching bare feet striking across the ground in a steady rhythm as their owner makes her way towards me.

A tall figure, female from the shape, emerges from the mist and rain. She towers over me, and her bare arms are corded with heavy working muscle. She wears a dirty babushka scarf over a thick, hand-woven linen blouse with a pale blue skirt that ends raggedly near her ankles of the same material. An old infantry belt is strapped around her waist and harnessed over her chest, and from it hangs half a dozen hatchets, each one polished and weighted for throwing.

Her hair is matted down from the rain, but its volume is mostly undeterred by the weight of the water, and a magnificent poof of orange hair emerges from what is probably the most noticeable of her features:

A blood-stained, chipped, and faded mask in the shape of a hare’s face.

“Another one?” Adagio asks in a raw, rasping voice as she strides into the middle of the officers, her eyes scanning around and passing over me as if I’m not there.

In fairness, to her, I’m technically not.

“Another one,” I confirm, my voice distorted into a thin, almost tinny warble. “Canterlot may be the murder capital of the nation, but this is getting unreasonable. The vic is down there.”

Adagio, the Huntress, raises her head in a curiously animalistic fashion and sniffs faintly at the air in the direction I gesture.

“Two,” she corrects grimly. “Two victims.”

I narrow my eyes. I don’t doubt her, I know better than that, no one can track like my Huntress and if she says there are two victims then there are two victims.

“Show me,” I say.

To my eyes, the world is filled with a lazy, pale mist. The police officers shine brightly in their slumber, their dreams drifting around them like mayflies. My fingers, five silver-bladed digits, twitch violently as I pass them… my instincts tell me to cut them, to slice them open and cover the ground in ruby splashes of blood.

I push those thoughts away, ignoring them as best I can. No matter what I do in this world, I can’t fully ignore what I am. Neither can Adagio when we’re wearing our ‘uniforms’. Neither of us can say we don’t feel those old urges and drives when we go out into the night to track down these seemingly random killings since they started happening nine months back.

The drive of one of the Entity’s priests.

His Killers.

Adagio takes long strides as she heads down to the canal of the River Canter and slips past the police tape. There are a pair of CSI’s slumped over near the wall that I’d almost missed when I was dragging all the officers on the scene into the Dream. I pass by them and the taped off cordon, and the smell of blood fills my nostrils. Somehow it’s more potent in the Dream, not less, and I can taste the coppery stink in the air.

“Here’s the first one,” I say, a little pointlessly as I walk up to the first body. “My guess is it’s the Legion's work.”

There are too many dead in Canterlot lately. There’s always been chaos in this city, far more than I ever realised until lately, but this past year has been unspeakable. Three recognised serial killers are on the loose, all with different modus operandi, and twenty-eight kills between them; The Legion, named for a series of graffiti marking their kills, The Narc after their targets in the drug scene, and the Ogre of the East, named for their brutal killing style.

At least one of them has to be a Killer, I’m certain of it, but we’ve never found any solid evidence since we started looking into it eight months ago.

“Thin, deep wounds,” Adagio says softly, nudging the body of what was once a young woman to and fro with the head of her hatchet to prevent contamination of the scene. “Just like the Legion’s other… no… not like the others…”

“What do you mean?” I ask, furrowing my brow as I move closer to her. “The wounds look identical.”

“They are, but that isn’t what I’m talking about,” Adagio says, her voice is tight and angry. “It’s not the type of wounds… it’s where they are.”

I kneel next to her, invisible in the Dream, and look over the body.

“Written’s Quill…” I mutter softly.

“You see it?” Adagio asks, glancing to her side where she knows I am. “They’re getting more accurate. All of these strikes hit major arteries or veins. She would’ve bled out in moments if she hadn't been murdered outright.”

I click my tongue and stand up, staring around the canal pit looking for what I knew I would find.

“Here,” I say softly, moving past Adagio towards the darkest corner. “I found it.”

Adagio stood and walked over to me, and I can hear her humming softly in the back of her throat. It’s compulsive, and she mostly keeps it under control, but when she’s riled up she always starts humming again.

Reaching out past me, Adagio takes hold of the bitterly cold metal and draws it into the light.

A butcher’s hook hangs incongruously from the ceiling of the overpass by a rusted but deceptively strong chain.

“Just the one?” Adagio asks.

“Yeah, just one,” I confirm. “Whoever jacked up the Entity still doesn’t know how to create a true Trial Ground on the fly, so they’re jury-rigging it.”

“This one feels more real than the others,” Adagio remarks grimly, giving the hook a sharp tug. “Sturdier too.”

“Wasteful is what it is,” I say derisively. “Conjuring a Sacrificial Hook out of Realspace is about as brute force as it gets.”

Shaking her head, Adagio starts towards me. “They’re getting better, Sunset, you know that. No one heard the girl scream, and last reports from when she called emergency services put her almost two miles from here,” Turning, Adagio looks over at the body. “So how did she get all the way to the canal?”

My lips press to a thin, hard line. “The Fog.”

“Distance is variable in the Fog,” Adagio confirms. “It’s never quite right… and we knew at least one of the murderers had to be a Fogborn Killer, so that confirms this one at least.”

“Two,” I say after a few moments. “You said there were two victims.”

Adagio nods and moves a little further into the overpass tunnel until she reaches a pile of refuse. As I close alongside her the smell of blood gets stronger, and I feel a familiar, brutal burn in my chest.

The urge to draw a waking mind into my Nightmare.

“Here,” Adagio whispers, “I can smell him.”

“Quill, Adagio, that’s not another victim,” I hiss, “get that shit off him he’s still alive!”

I hear a sharp intake of breath from Adagio and she dives forward, pulling the scraps of garbage and cloth from the pile to reveal a badly bleeding figure. He's filthy, and it's hard to tell there's even a person at all under the blood-soaked layers of clothing he's wearing: ratty fingerless gloves, a stinking jacket covered by an oversized windbreaker, and he smells like trash and cheap cigarettes.

Just one of Canterlot’s thousands of homeless and destitute that I had been among, once upon a time.

“You poor bastard,” I say softly, stepping past Adagio. “He’s on his way out, isn’t he?”

Adagio gave a short nod. “If we could get him to Aria quickly maybe, but… no, I don’t think he’ll last.”

I close my eyes and sigh. Just one more person I wasn’t able to save.

“He can still help us, though,” I slip between him and Adagio, and I kneel, reaching out a single, invisible, bladed finger to his forehead. “I can at least give him some peace while I’m at it.”

sLeEp.

A bubble of laughter escapes my lips as I pull him into my Dream, a reflexive reaction to the welling euphoria of exercising my power. He lets out a sharp gasp as his brain reels from the shift, and then he relaxes, the pain of the waking world becoming a distant thing.

“Show me what you saw, old man,” I mutter as I brace a single blade against his forehead and press hard. “I can’t save you but maybe…”

The old man jerks as I submerge into his recent memories and pull at them like stray fiber strands of an unraveling sweater.

“Show me.”

My body hurts. Everything hurts, and my throat burns with sickness. I’ve been sick for so long though that I hardly notice it, nor do I necessarily notice the feverish chill.

It’s surprising what a body can get used to.

It’s cold and the rain is coming down hard, but I have a place I know under the canal that stays dry.

I push my cart of belongings; Blankets that are stained with sweat and the refuse of Canterlot’s alleys and bends, cans I can exchange for enough change to feed myself if I’m fortunate, and a few other more sentimental trinkets.

A picture of my daughter, eight years dead.

My father's cufflinks I might sell one day if I’m ever that desperate.

And—

“Help!”

A voice shrieks, young and terrified, and I look up to see a wall of fog rolling in across the river and out of the overpass tunnel.

“Please, somebody!” The voice shrieks again. “Help!”

She bursts out of the fog, ragged and harrowed, her body covered in deep cuts with blood staining much of her jogging outfit. Her pale blue skin and red hair are streaked with sweat as she staggers into the tunnel.

Then I hear it.

Heavy panting and the hammering of footfalls behind her.

I don’t know why I move. Maybe because she reminds me so much of my daughter.

I knock my cart over as I stumble past the girl just as the figure bolts from the fog. They’re wearing stained grey-green denim jeans and a faded dark blue denim jacket over a hoodie, with the hood pulled over their head.

The mask is what freezes me though. Pale and filthy white, the whole top of it is stained with red, and the eyes are just two circles with notched crudely down their centers. The mouth is nothing is a broad, finger-daubed and toothy rictus grin.

Panting, raw and ragged, pours from their mouth as they shoulder me out of the way. They’re slight and neither heavy nor tall, but they are so strong.

Drugs maybe, I imagine, as they hit me like a freight train, and I feel something puncture my stomach then tear free, leaving behind a cold, blinding pain.

I collapse to the ground, moaning as I see them barrel past me to bring the girl down.

They leap upon the girl like an animal; a predator. I see the girl try to defend herself, raising a hand, only for the blade to pierce through her palm, spraying her face with her own blood. She screams as the masked figure rips the knife out, and she tries to drag herself away only for the figure, the thing, to seize her by the ankle and drag her backwards, stabbing her repeatedly in the back only to flip her over, slam the knife into her chest and drag it ruthlessly down, gutting her.

Then they turned to face me, panting and bloodstained, their footsteps are shaky and frenetic. I grip my stomach as they approach, they raise the knife, then…

They stagger backward and release a high, ululating howl, gripping their masked face as they lurch violently.

“You were supposed to hang them from the hook, dumbass,” a cracked, raw voice says from the darkness, and another figure, masked like the first one with simple, hollowed-out circle-dots for eyes, and the mouth is another wide and hand-drawn smile of insanity. “Boss is gonna get pissed off again.”

The figure lets out another bloodthirsty, guttural shriek.

“The time limit is almost up, we need to get back,” a third voice says insistently, it's speaker unseen, and suddenly the fog sweeps in like a tidal wave.

And then there's nothing but a brutalized corpse and my own dying breaths.

I jerk back, staggered and shocked.

“We were right,” I mutter grimly, and Adagio frowns. “Hundred percent. Whoever stole the Entity’s mojo figured out his hat trick… they’re making new Killers.”

Adagio curses viciously.

“Now what?”

“Now we get outta here,” I say with an angry sigh. “These cops are going to have enough questions as it is once they all wake up and I don’t want their first one to be ‘hey who’s the giant lady in the bunny mask!?’, okay?”

Adagio scoffs but I hear the faint laughter behind it. She gives me a short nod and turns on her heel to begin moving away. She moves with swift, sure footsteps and in moments the faint but natural fog of the early Canterlot morning swallows her form. I wait for a few moments, staring down at the pair of corpses while I feel my grip on the slumbering minds of the surrounding cops and sundry fade. They won’t see me even if they do wake up while I’m still here, and it doesn’t take me nearly as long to get back to a safe haven.

Three Killers, though. So it's what we suspected. That the Legion isn’t one person quoting scripture for the dramatic effect, it’s actually a group, and they’re definitely Fogborn, but there’s something wrong with them. They’re half-formed. Half-made.

More importantly, they’re still lucid.

Maybe they’re like me, not fully human or Killer, but something in between. It would explain a lot, and it would be understandable… the thief who stole the Old Stain’s powers clearly didn’t know how they worked, at least not entirely, and that’s in our favor for now.

For now.

It’s been a year, though. A full year since I escaped from the nullspace void between dimensions, and two years since the girls escaped from my Trial Ground. The thief has had a year to practice with their powers, and this is the culmination of that practice.

Newborn Killers.

“Whatever,” I look around at the sprawled cops and sigh. “Time to go home…”

I close my eyes, reach out, and I—

Author's Note

And here we go. Took me a couple of years to decide to do it, but we're on the road to hell now everyone. Thanks for waiting and I hope you enjoy, and if you want to support me officially, please consider visiting my Patreon!