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Night blanketed the city of Myreth in heavy darkness, and three killers moved through its streets like ghosts.
They were silent, their forms wrapped in enchantments that bent light and muffled sound. Fourth-tier black magicians, each one experienced in infiltration, assassination, and the darker arts that polite society pretended didn't exist. Their robes absorbed lamplight rather than reflecting it, making them little more than moving voids against the sparse amber glow of streetlamps.
Their target stood at the end of a quiet commercial street: a Victorian bookstore, unremarkable and closed for the evening. A wooden sign swayed gently in the night air, creaking softly on its chains. The windows were dark. The door was locked.
Perfect.
The leader gestured, and one of them stepped forward. A flick of dark magic and the mundane lock clicked open. The door swung inward, hinges whispering.
They entered.
The door closed behind them with unsettling softness, like a mouth closing over prey.
Inside, rows of bookshelves faded into shadow. Dust motes drifted through the dim light filtering in from the street. The air smelled of old paper and wood polish, ordinary and harmless.
No wards. No defensive enchantments. No resistance whatsoever.
The intruders relaxed slightly, beginning their search for the anomaly their Overseer had detected. They spread out, each one moving deeper into the bookstore's shadows.
Then a soft voice spoke from the darkness.
"Stop."
All three froze instantly.
The command hadn't been loud. It hadn't been magical. But it carried weight that made their bodies obey before their minds could question why.
They turned slowly, searching for the speaker.
A black cat sat calmly on the windowsill, silhouetted against the faint glow of streetlamps outside. Her emerald eyes caught the light, reflecting it back like mirrors.
"Oh my," the cat said, her voice curious and amused. "Three fourth-tier black magicians. In Levi's home. How bold of you."
One of the intruders laughed nervously. "A familiar? That's the defense?"
Luna tilted her head with inhuman precision. "Defense implies you have a chance to survive this. What's about to happen isn't defense. It's judgment."
Her tone shifted, older and colder and lethal.
"You have trespassed on hallowed ground," Luna continued, her voice losing all trace of amusement. "Sacred to the Dimensional Librarian. Do you understand what that means?"
The leader of the trio reached for his wand.
"I wouldn't," Luna said quietly.
He drew it anyway, leveling it at the cat with practiced speed.
Luna sighed. "How disappointing. I gave you a chance to understand. Now you'll simply serve as an example."
The air in the bookstore changed.
Temperature dropped so fast that frost began forming on the nearest shelves. The scent of rot and blood flooded the space, thick and cloying, overwhelming the smell of old paper. The shadows themselves seemed to recoil, pulling away from the windowsill where Luna sat.
Her feline body began to ripple.
Not transforming. Dissolving.
Black fur liquefied and reformed, flesh flowing like wax under intense heat. The small cat expanded upward, bones cracking and reshaping with sounds that made the intruders' stomachs clench. Muscles tore and rewove themselves. Skin split and sealed.
What emerged was not a woman.
It was not anything that should exist.
Luna's new form stood nearly seven feet tall, humanoid in the loosest sense. Her body was wrapped in ceremonial robes made of living shadow that moved independently, writhing and coiling like serpents. Six pale arms extended from beneath the fabric, each one ending in fingers too long and jointed in too many places.
But it was her head that shattered sanity.
The flesh had been peeled back completely, revealing raw muscle and bone beneath. Multiple eyes of varied origin dotted the exposed tissue: human eyes, cat eyes, reptilian slits, compound insect facets. They moved independently, focusing on different targets, blinking at different intervals with different numbers of lids.
Where a mouth should have been, a vertical maw split her face from crown to throat. Inside, row after row of jagged teeth glistened wetly, each one sharp as broken glass and translucent enough to see the darkness beyond. The maw opened slowly, revealing a throat that descended into depths the bookstore's dimensions should not contain.
Deep crimson petals of exposed muscle framed the grotesque face like a horrible crown, each fold moving slightly with each breath, expanding and contracting like the gills of some deep-sea horror.
Luna smiled with far too many teeth.
"Welcome, guests," she said, her voice now a layered chorus of tones. "I'm so very hungry."
The first magician screamed and tried to cast a defensive spell.
Luna moved instantaneously. One moment she stood at the window. The next, all six arms had wrapped around the three intruders, restraining them with strength that bent bone despite their protective enchantments.
The first magician's scream cut short as Luna's vertical maw opened wide and descended over his head.
The sound of tearing flesh filled the bookstore like wet fabric being ripped apart.
Blood sprayed across nearby shelves in arterial arcs as Luna consumed him methodically, her multiple arms holding him steady while her teeth did their work. Flesh tore from bone. Cartilage crunched between her jaws. Blood poured down her exposed muscle like rain on stone, absorbed into tissue that drank it eagerly.
She worked her way down his body with horrible precision, consuming everything, wasting nothing.
When his corpse went limp and hollow, something else emerged.
A translucent shimmer, vaguely human-shaped, struggling weakly. His soul, trying desperately to escape.
Luna inhaled.
The soul was drawn into her maw like smoke into a vacuum, pulled inexorably inward despite its frantic resistance. She swallowed it deliberately, throat working visibly, and sighed with pleasure.
"Delicious," she said, dropping what remained of the corpse. "Fear makes the soul so much sweeter."
The second magician had already collapsed mentally before Luna even touched him, his mind breaking under the sheer impossibility of what he was witnessing.
She knelt beside him, one of her too-long hands caressing his face with almost tender gentleness.
"Shh," she whispered. "It will be over soon."
Then she plunged her hand into his chest.
No spell. No magic. Just raw, physical violation.
Her fingers punched through sternum and ribs, reaching deep into his chest cavity. She extracted his heart slowly, pulling it free with wet sucking sounds, holding it up to examine it with several of her eyes.
"Still beating," she observed. "How wonderful."
She bit into it while he watched, his body too shocked for pain, and consumed it in three methodical bites. Blood ran down her exposed facial muscles in rivulets.
His soul emerged moments later. She inhaled it as casually as breathing.
The third magician was sobbing now, pressed against a bookshelf, his bladder having failed him.
"Please," he begged. "Please, I'll do anything. I'll leave. I'll never come back. Please."
Luna turned her horrible head toward him, multiple eyes swiveling independently before aligning in perfect unison.
"No," she said softly. "You won't leave. But you won't die either. Not yet. You have a different purpose."
She reached into the folds of her shadow robes and pulled something out.
A maggot.
Massive, translucent, easily three feet long and thick as a man's arm. Its internal organs were visible through its pale skin, pulsing with grotesque vitality. Its eyeless head swiveled blindly, mouth opening and closing in silent hunger.
"Do you know what this is?" Luna asked.
The magician shook his head, unable to form words.
"A messenger," Luna said. "And you're going to help me create it properly."
She grabbed him with four of her arms, holding him completely immobile.
With the remaining two arms, she reached into his chest and extracted his soul while he was still alive.
His scream was inhuman, a sound no living throat should produce. The agony of having your essence ripped out while consciousness remained was beyond torture, beyond any pain the physical body could generate.
Luna pressed the writhing soul into the maggot.
The creature convulsed violently, its body expanding rapidly. Human features began pressing against its translucent skin from the inside: a face screaming, hands clawing desperately, a torso twisting in perpetual agony.
The fusion completed with a wet squelching sound.
The maggot had grown to nearly six feet long, its body now containing a trapped, conscious soul. The man's face was clearly visible beneath the translucent skin, mouth open in eternal silent screaming.
Luna carved runes into its flesh with one sharpened finger, each symbol sizzling and burning as it sank deep. The trapped soul shrieked soundlessly with each mark.
The message read:
"Next time, there won't be anyone left to warn you."
Luna turned her attention to the soulless corpse at her feet. She found what she was looking for: a faint thread of dark magic, nearly invisible, connecting the dead man to his master.
Malachi's curse-link.
She grabbed the thread with one hand and attached the maggot to it with another.
"Go," she commanded.
The maggot lurched forward and was sucked into the thread, vanishing from the bookstore entirely, hurtling back along the connection toward its source.
.
.
.
Deep beneath the city, in his sanctum, Overseer Malachi felt the violent disruption.
His curse-link suddenly flared with agonizing intensity. Pain lanced through his skull.
Something was coming back along the connection.
He tried to sever the link, but the magic wouldn't respond.
The maggot burst into existence before him, writhing and screaming with the voice of his subordinate trapped inside its translucent flesh.
The runes carved into its body glowed, and the message burned itself directly into Malachi's vision.
"Next time, there won't be anyone left to warn you."
Malachi staggered back, his face draining of color.
He understood immediately.
He had sent three fourth-tier black magicians to investigate a bookstore.
None of them were coming back.
And whatever had done this knew who he was now. Knew where he was. Was watching him through the dying maggot that writhed on his sanctum floor.
For the first time in decades, Overseer Malachi felt genuine fear.
The maggot's screaming face pressed against its translucent skin, and Malachi realized this was mercy.
This was the warning.
The next time, there would be no message.
Only silence.
.
.
.
Back in the bookstore, Luna turned her attention to the remaining corpses scattered across the floor.
She couldn't leave them here. Evidence was inconvenient. More importantly, waste was unacceptable.
Her vertical maw opened wide, and she began to feed methodically.
When she finished, the bookstore was pristine.
No bodies. No blood. No evidence that three men had died screaming in this space.
Luna's form rippled and collapsed inward, bones reshaping, flesh flowing, until she was once again a simple black cat sitting on the windowsill.
She licked her paw delicately, cleaning away the last traces of blood, and looked around the bookstore with satisfaction.
Perfect.
"My dear, lovely Levi shouldn't see anything this disgusting," she said softly, her voice returned to its normal feline purr.
She yawned, stretched, and curled into a comfortable ball on the windowsill.
Upstairs, Levi slept peacefully, completely unaware that his home had just been defended by something older and hungrier than most gods.
Luna purred softly, the sound almost innocent.
The Library was safe.
The Librarian could rest.
And somewhere beneath the city, a man who thought he controlled fate learned that some sanctuaries were protected by things far worse than death.
Luna's emerald eyes glowed faintly in the dark.
Waiting. Watching. Always hungry.
The message had been delivered.
Now they would see if Overseer Malachi was wise enough to heed it.