Reader Plus CYOA Prologue/Teaser (Patreon)

“There’s blood on the wind.”  The woman whispers, her pale violet eyes slowly scanning over the shattered landscape.

The great shaggy form of a humped beast plods to a halt at her side.  Its soot black fur matted and dripping from the frigid sleet provide a stark contrast to the long frosty white hair of its mistress.  As its heavy hooves stop the steaming mass of tentacles which dangled flaccidly below it’s bulbous milky eyes come to life and begin to slither through the mud in search of grazing.

Patting the near horn of the creature the woman commands it to stay.  She walks out to the lip of the ridge they had been traveling along, her focused gaze alert for any sign of activity among the ruins that sprawled out beneath her.  The rifle that she wore across her back is unslung as she kneels in the muck.  After removing the lens caps she raises the scratched wooden stock to her cheek to peer down scope.  Through the scuffed glass she sees more of the same.  Row upon row of crumbling hollowed out edifices of steel and stone.  A field of broken tombstones for a city that once was stretching for over a mile before being swallowed by an advancing bank of fog.

It is not her sharp eye but her keen ears that catch the direction.  A chorus of distant raised voices splits through the low hiss of rain.  The voices of those who had been torn so violently from their own world and thrown into this one.  Frightened voices agitated by shock and confusion mixed with the groans of those wounded by the transition.  Voices that would soon be silent.

The woman sweeps the rifle left until her field of view is centered on the noise.  The ashen gray bones of what was once an office tower blocks direct sight.  Lowering the rifle she she keeps it at the ready as she listens a moment to the calls and cries of the innocent.  “At least there are no children.”  She mutters to herself.

Then comes the screams that always followed.  The first is the panicked shriek of a woman that start low then rise to a terrified crescendo before being cut off all at once.  There is a moment of grim silence after that followed soon after by one bloodcurdling wail after another.  Dozens of them.  A hundred perhaps.  And woven through the horrified human clamor is the sizzle and snarl of the predatory magic that caused it all.  From all around that doomed area, emerging amongst the dead and darkened husks of the toppled buildings, the telltale glow of the carrion eaters flicker then stir to life.

The woman rises to her feet, tall and statuesque against the steel gray clouds, with a grave expression darkening her regal features.  She watches and she listens, standing as the sole witness and mourner for the doomed souls below.  The cries soon thin, then fade out entirely.  There still remains the low murmur of tortured mewls from those not slain outright yet still beyond all hope of survival.

“That’s the third time since last moon.”  She says.  “It’s getting more frequent.”

With a heavy sigh she looks back to the massive beast burdened with her every belonging upon its humped back.  From the thigh pocket of her rugged cotton trousers she pulls a length of jerky and tosses it into the mud in front of the creature.  Two of its tentacles immediately reach out to curl around the dried meat and pull it back to disappear within the writhing mass.  Her only thanks is a rumbling snort followed by a puff of steam filtering out through its squirming appendages.

With one last glance toward the killing ground the woman goes to turn away, until something catches her eye.  A swift blur of movement dashing through the open space between the corner of a building to a rusted out delivery van laying on its side.  The rifle snaps back up to her shoulder, the crosshair of the scope centered perfectly at the back of the vehicle where she’d seen the shape disappear.  For a moment nothing stirs but then a shape emerges out of the shadow.  The silhouette of a man huddled against the vehicle, clinging to it for safety and shivering in the cold sleet.  A lone survivor had defied the odds and escaped the initial slaughter!

Despite the miracle of making it through the Seep alive his chances of seeing out his first hour had risen only marginally.  It would take another extraordinary stroke of good fortune for a solitary man, unarmed, unprepared, overwhelmed, and ignorant of the dangers around him, to avoid a swift death or a fate even worse.  Was his escape merely a reprieve?  Almost certainly yes.  Unless he got some help.

The woman slowly lowers her gun, eyes still trained on the distant huddled shadow, and lets out a long steamy breath into the cold moist air…then slings the rifle back over her shoulder.  “You are not my problem.”

Chapter 1 (Changes to 2nd Person POV for the rest of the story.)