Chapter XLIV

Carrot usually woke up with a yawn and a big stretch. It was, in her opinion, the best way to start the day. If she woke up a few minutes before her alarm went off, she could stay in her warm, warm bed, and just snuggle in, Then she’d stretch her lets out, then her arms, and finally after a few minutes, she’d squeeze out of her blankets and find her slippers to start the day.

Today, she woke up feeling off. 

There was a big yawn, but she almost immediately started to cough. There was a taste to the air, like ash, and it tickled the back of her throat. She considered when the last time she’d dusted her room had been, but it wasn’t that long ago. She wasn’t the cleanest girl around, but she was pretty tidy. 

If they couldn’t have luxury, they could at least have the dignity of being tidy, her mom always said.

She squeezed out of bed and looked for her slippers. Her eyes felt particularly blurry, so she blinked them a few times, then rubbed the eye-crud away. It helped, a little, but the room still felt more grey than usual.

Sliding her slippers on, she looked up and found Bathemious slumped at the bottom of his cage. “Batty?” she asked. 

Standing, she wandered over. His little chest was moving, but it looked like his had just fallen straight to the bottom onto the pile of torn-up newspapers that served as the bed of his cage.

Her heart beat slow. 

She knew, then, that something was very, very wrong. Not just because Bathemious was fallen, but because she wasn’t reacting to it correctly.

Coiling her magic around, she discovered that it wasn’t normal either. There was still a lot of that darkness that she was working to cleanse, but atop it all was a sort of... grimy film. It was like a coating of thick ash atop a still pond.

Carrot wiggled her magic, shaking it like a dog wagging off water from her fur. The magic responded sluggishly at first, then a little faster, the dusty coating flying off.

Almost immediately, she felt more of it slowly approach and cling onto her magic. It wasn’t stuck on hard. Some spaces had kind of hardened, but the shaking had broken that up. The new layer was thin and weak, and not bonding to itself particularly well.

It was like... unfirm jello, or cookie dough with too much milk mixed in. The dusty stuff was accumulating on the surface and hardening, but it was taking a long time, and it didn’t seem to walk to sink deeper into her magic. It was a damp towel. 

Carrot felt her feelings shift from placid tiredness to a heart-thumping panic. 

“Mister Bathemious!” she gasped. Then she coughed as the gasp filled her throat with more duty.

She opened the cage door, and pulled the little daemon out. He was alive, she could feel it. His heart beat, and he was breathing, but there was a thin film of grey ash over him, and his magic was... not doing so great. It was muted.

Carrot bit her lower lip, then gently pushed her magic over the little bat daemon, trying to be as gentle as possible.

It worked. The little daemon blinked, long ears twitching. “Huh? Boss? Oi? You letting me out of my cage now?” he asked.

“Something’s wrong,” Carrot said. 

Her PJs had a little chest pocket, so she slipped him into the pocket, then patted him between the ears when he popped his head out. “What gives?” he asked.

“I think we’re under attack. Sorry?”

“What’re you apologizing for?” he asked.

“Well, I brought you here, so you were caught in it because of me,” she said with a shrug. “So, sorry? Let’s check on mom?”

“Hmpf. Yeah, might as well. At least she’s tolerable.”

Carrot grinned. Her mom was the best! Carrot hadn’t yet won over Bathemious to her side, but she suspected  that her mom had. The power of being super nice and friendly and cooking really well wasn’t something anyone should underestimate! 

She pushed out of her room, then glanced around. One of the windows was cracked open, and a small scattering of dust was caught in the morning sun slowly slipping in. She moved over, closing it, then locking the window in place. She tugged her sleeve up and covered her mouth, just in case.

Then she moved into the kitchen and froze.

Her mom was slumped onto the floor. The stove was on, a pan tilted to the side as it had fallen off the burner. The eggs on it were well-past crispy, but her attention didn’t linger there.

“Mom!”

Carrot darted across the room and was kneeling at her mom’s side in a moment. She was breathing! But she was also covered in a fine dusting of that greyish ash.

Carrot pulsed her magic. It wasn’t a spell, just a hard push that made a blast of air shift away from her. It pushed the dust away, only for it to come racing back, mostly towards her.

The dust was attracted to magic, then. 

Why had it attacked her mom? 

Or... was even a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of magical energy enough? The dust was clinging to this and that in the room, but most of all to her mom.

She shifted her mom around, then tried to lift her, only to find it too hard. Her mom wasn’t a heavy woman, but she was limp and awkward to lift, and also a bit taller than Carrot was. 

Carrot stood up, grabbed a dishtowel, then idly reached over and shut the stove. She brushed her mom’s face clean a moment later, then patted her on the cheek. “Mom? Mom!” 

She shook her mom’s shoulders. The grey haze was coming down around her again, but it didn’t stop her eyes from stinging. 

“Mom? Are you okay, mom?”

***

Silas woke up with a jolt, and almost immediately he was reaching for a weapon, only... no, he was alone. The other alarms that would notify him that someone was trying to break into his rented home weren’t going off.

Reaching up, he rubbed at his face, then sighed and sat up. What had awakened him, then?

One of his alarms had definitely gone off, only...

Sitting onto the edge of his bed, he focused on his magic, and then frowned. Something was off. There was something in the air, something that had set off one of his smaller alarms, one designed to detect magical instability.

The kind of instability that came whenever someone was casting a particularly strong spell, only this wasn’t that. This was... something else.

Standing up, he grabbed the shirt he’d been wearing the evening prior and slipped it on, then shuffled into his pants. He left his room, only making a quick stop in the kitchen to turn on the coffeemaker before opening the door out the back.

He froze there. 

He had limited magic, sure, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of it. He could tell that there was something interfering with him almost as soon as he was out.

And it only took a moment to notice what. 

The warded items he’d made and dropped here and there in the yard were covered in a thick sheet of grey ash. There was more of that ash hanging in the air. Just a thin dusting, but it was spreading out, like a mist.

He tilted his head, and finally noticed the lack of sound. There weren’t very many cars out. Usually there was a fair amount of traffic, but today’s seemed light. The sun was already coming up, there should have been more than a couple of cars on th--

He jumped as he heard a loud bang, then a car alarm going off a few blocks down. Had someone just crashed?

Silas waved a hand through the air, blowing off some of the dust trying to settle on him.

Frowning, he formed a quick spell, then fired it upwards.

Rather than move away with the force of it, the dust gathered above moved against to wind, towards the spell.

He said a few choice words that he hoped someone like Carrot never picked up, then darted back into the house.

He didn’t know exactly what this was, but he wasn’t a fool. He could observe and learn. What he’d learned so far was all bad news. 

He had to talk to Carrot, maybe create some items to test this further. And... no, this wasn’t just a little thing. This was city-wide. This was the enemy’s opening, or closing, move.

***