Though the building was more or less dark and mysterious and maybe filled with trolls or ogres. Or maybe something else just as vicious or more-so. But if anyone were to really notice, there was a source of light. A very small one that didn't look it was that far away, but it was hard to tell what it was. It was moving, like a bouncing wisp.

A dagger had appeared in the girl's hand at the sound of the crow's cawing. Pulled from the heavy sash around her waist, it had nevertheless occupied the space between it and its new place in her hand for only the barest of fractions of a seconds.

The imp was caught off guard by this development. She stared at the dagger in her hand as if it had appeared by magic.

"Kekeur ny'a!" she said "Yo' teya where it went...!" She phased through her language and back into English without seeming to notice.

She felt in her sash and pulled out a twin knife. She smiled a toothy, enthusiastic grin for a moment, but quickly resumed her wary eyeballing of the door. One of the knives returned to her sash. The other stayed in her hand.

It was a peculiar knife, it was a single bar of metal, hammered down at one end into a large, flat wedge which had been filed and sharpened to an almost paper-thin, gleaming line. More like a trowel or a cheese slice than a knife, it nevertheless gave away its intent by the ornate carvings and filaments of metal that wrapped around its handle and pommel, and by the splayed ribs that ran down the middle of the trowel-blade and promised to leave ugly, difficult-to-mend wounds.

The grandfather clock tolled a buzzing, off-key chime, marking 15 minutes past whatever hour it was they occupied.

She slowly approached the door and peered around the corner at the singular light that bobbed and wobbled in the depths of the library.

"Tch," she hissed quietly.

"We can't stand in the door like this—the light outside will show us up!"

Winn felt a sudden gravity about the situation, but appeared unsure of how to respond to it. There were implications of something patently awful inside the building. Everyone was freaking out a bit about it.

It was odd, but he didn't feel very afraid yet—instead, more... distracted, like something about the building played with his senses (and, in this case, maybe his sensibilities). Staring blankly up into the gaping opening, he only finally took a few slow, slightly clumsy steps backward from the opening at the imp's behest. What she said was true enough.

"Is it something dangerous?" he mumbled without expecting an answer. It'd presumably become obvious soon enough.

"Alex, watch it! This place is--" As the fae drew closer, there was a chance she may have heard some whispering, but it stopped abruptly.

The source of light other than her self was, in fact a flashlight as it was a clearly directed source at this point, but it disappeared behind a fleshy pink veil as it's wielder covered the light with his hand, and ducked behind some kind of cover.

The imp girl, with one more quick, wondering glance at the knife in her hand, darted into the shadows after the fairy, flinging herself against one of the side walls to avoid lingering near her last visible silhouette.


As the fairy flitted closer, she would notice, perhaps, out of the corner of her eye, a third light source.

There was an intersection in the structure of the library, breaking the building into the first section of a tremendous double cross.

To the right, the library extended towards a dark and almost invisible wall; to the left, the library extended unabated. The hallway went on, through the building, into the trees beyond. The wall that should have stopped it seemed to have become absent. More to the point, it had recently been replaced by a gigantic hole.

There was a giant hole in the library wall.

Beyond the hole, the trees had been carved away in a corridor, bent and splintered by something moving with tremendous force in a perfectly straight line.

Something had wanted to get into the library very badly, and had forgone useless, time-consuming things like navigation—and indeed like doors—in favour of walking straight into the library, ploughing through the wall around the library grounds, the trees, and finally the library itself.

The ground began to shake, the air was filled with a low, thick, booming sound, growing in volume.

Then—past the intersection, beyond the fairy and the mystery bobbing light, something turned the corner at the far end of the hall.

A massive shape slewed around the corner, trailing sparks and splinters of metal and flashes of light. It skidded, its feet leaving huge gashes in the floor, into the door frame. The stone pillars buckled and the lintel crashed down, splitting over the back of the titanic beast as it straightened up and fixed its...

gaze

on the intersection

to say that it fixed its eyes on the fairy would imply something like an eye in its head, or even a recognizable face. The creature was only vaguely humanoid—a shambling pile of crusted slag and warped metal somehow animated, it looked like a doll that had molded by a child and brought to life by a demon.

It had titanic, springy legs and long, tree-trunk arms, and a tapered, kludgy torso that might have been someone's half-formed idea of a masculine physique, formed out of endless layers of useless slag run-off and poorly forged metal, the creature appeared to have been born from the core of a refinery or factory, or perhaps a mine.

The metal was not held together by skillful craftwork or by being all the same piece of metal—dozens of individual pieces and layers, cracked and split by poor casting and by the incompatibility of copper and iron, shifted and floated over each other, held together by some uncanny force. Underneath the cracked surface of its form, fire breathed and spat sparks like the heart of a blast furnace. Drops of molten metal trickled out of its core and snap-chilled into frozen filigree on the stone floor as the figure swayed and lurched, staggering to recover its balance from the crash.

Everything drew together at the end of its long, arching, neck, where a triplex of stone flywheels roared and whirled, one inside the other inside the next. Each wheel was chiselled deeply with an intricate, endlessly diverging line of symbols, and the glowing orange light around them poured the heat and light into the core of the creature, driving its movement.

The creature had, strapped to its back, a chest, raided from one of the library store rooms—only barely held shut with endless loops of chain, seen inside could be seen huge books and tomes—raided from the basement of the library, where the most dangerous secrets and most sensitive spells were kept.

The creature had essentially conducted a ram-raid on a magic library.

It began to jog towards the doorway out of the library. As it picked up speed, it began to chuff and spark hotter, its forge-heart spreading the white-hot liquid slag around the ends of its body.

It howled, curled its head into the protective shell of its torso, and charged through the wall, and through anyone who had decided to stay there and wait for it.

The man didn't have time to worry about the floating ball of light he had just seen, because more trouble would soon reveal itself.... In the form of a large monster. He moved his hand away from the flashlight and pointed it in the direction of the beast, which only so nearly caused him to jump out of his skin as an initial reaction.

Instead, what he did was jump to his feet just in time for the monster made of scrap metal to make a beeline for the exit, which was not any exit that the architect had in mind. As it ran, he noticed some books trying to escape the raided chest on it's back.

Whatever would a monster like that need with books? Curiosity seemed to take over, despite random thoughts of sense telling him that following that thing could only lead to trouble. Although judging by the molten hot liquid spilling out of it, "hot on it's heels" was probably not the best route on foot.

"Let's go, Alex." He said before turning off his flashlight and tucking it away and then ran towards the front door.

Alex quickly caught up, gliding with each step until he came up beside Daniel, who nimbly jumped onto his back mid-run. Did that take practice? one can only assume, as that wouldn't exactly be an easy feat. By the time he exited the building, he was already mounted. He came to a halt not far several feet outside, "Come on!" He motioned to the group at large. His griffon was probably big enough to carry maybe one or two additional people(plus a fairy).

Under the circumstances, it would probably be pretty clear what he was on about.

As the colossal conglomeration of magic and debris lumbered toward freedom (and, by virtue of being in the wrong place at the worst time, the hodge-podge group of wanderers) with its literary spoils in tow, Rhiannon was probably the least outwardly alarmed. Her eyes widened gravely, but she otherwise reacted minimally once she'd taken a set of sweeping steps backward, out of the path of the golem's escape route. Upon the creature's passage, the witch cast a dark, but silent glance at her company before the urging of the young griffin-rider reached her ears. To be quite frank, Rhiannon was not nearly curious enough about stolen spell books to give chase as Daniel seemed to keen to do, but she would neither stand idly by when someone had the ignorant notion to meddle with things that could both figuratively and literally put one in the ground with all the effort of swatting a fly.

So it was with only the vaguest of ideas what they were dealing with and a heavy sense of foreboding that the sorceress ignored her better judgement, and hurried after the supernaturally animated pile of parts and refuse.

Winn was discovering all kinds of things about himself. For example, he didn't handle shock scares very well!

When the monstrosity came storming out, every biological process in his body felt it took pause, and, dumbfounded, he stood frozen as the roar of monstrous footsteps and churning mechanical parts approached him with all the grace and subtlety of an avalanche.

...

... !

There it went! A brainwave punched through the shell of shock, and with a gasp and a rush of blood to his head, he sprinted out of the way, full-tilt, with an undignified shout, at speeds faster than he realized he could run.

He stumbled and slid and came to a low-postured stop, arms out, hands fanned out low as if stabilizing himself in the middle of an earthquake, as the thing barreled past. He looked frantic for a moment; by the time he got his bearings, the griffin was already taking off with its riders. For a second, Winn shuffled his feet, glancing frantically as if trying to decide what to do.

They were chasing it! Why were they chasing it?

Still hopped up on adrenaline, he took off in another faster-than-he-could-have-expected dash. Soon, he was chasing it too. Why was he chasing it?!

Oh, right: it was a bizarre, out-of-place monster, and they were looking for answers. This was something he needed to do. He could only hope it wasn't another wild goose chase.

... Wild... golem chase.

The imp's yelp of shock rang through the atrium as the slag titan crashed through the wall—for a moment, it turned awkwardly, as if trying to get a bearing on some invisible signal, then it took off on a tangent through the trees.

The imp tumbled blindly out of the ruins of the doorway in the wake of the golem's passing. Rage and fear distorted her face.

"KILL IT, KILL IT!" she howled. She wiped her mouth with the back of a knife-weilding hand—both of her knives were out now.

Her companion took a tentative grab at it, and was rewarded with burned hands for his effort. He tripped and stumbled back bending a tree as he fell on it. He frantically tried to put out the fires that were eating up the fur on his palms.

The imp girl screamed—the noise of her distress drowned out by the golem as it emitted an ear-splitting, buzzing howl, like an off-balance grindstone spinning too fast. It turned its attention to the giant monster. The wheels in its head raced and grated as the chains of ciphers that made up its primitive ur-consciousness attempted to figure out what it was looking at.

The imp ran at it, knives out, but it turned away before she could reach it, and started back on its preset path.

In a few moments it crashed through the wall separating the library grounds from the outside the world, and scaled one of the buildings in the streets beyond. It did not climb by finding footholds, it merely created foothold where they were convenient, kicking into the walls and pushing off with a momentum that belied its incredible weight. It waded through the buckling roof of the building it climbed, and plunged out of sight, into the next street beyond.

The imp arrived at her partner's side, knives still out, and—while at first appearances she held them wildly akimbo—the more she moved with them, the more her postured betrayed some deep, ingrained training. There were two positions at her front chest-height and her side, which the knives never seemed to leave for very long, as if they were suspended there with invisible elastic bands. As she arrived at his side, her guard went down and she examined her fallen partner's hands, frantically patting out the last few smoking patches.

"A dyo ka guo hei!" She cried frantically, "eh, you're all burned! Y—I'm going to kill it," she said, a venomous glint in her eye. "I'm going to kill it. I'm going to grind its face into the floor! Come on—!" she added, "You can still run right?"

The chase was on.

Time Skip


The trip through the town was unpleasant, sweaty and chaotic. The titanic golem did not stop once, the entire time, and seemed instinctively to know where it was going. It plunged through the town—which eventually became the upper part of a city. The buildings rolled away down the receding slope, to a distance waterfront which gleamed a sickly gold in the sun as it began to drop down towards the horizon.

It was difficult to keep up with—it was very fast—but it was relatively easy to track, via the cascades of debris and rubble that lay in its wake, and by means of the steady, silvery drips of metal that marked where it had trod.

At one point the group passed a hole in the ground. From its place along the road and the fire that rushed and spat out of its aperture, it appeared to have been the location of a street-lamp that had been vandalized. The street lamp itself was no-where to be seen, however.

The city transversed a massive selection of architecture, from pristine, rural township into shining, clean buildings, and then into dingy industrial frontage. It became obvious as the hills subsided and the city lined the horizon, left to right, that the group had not, in fact, departed the city and left the town, but had in fact departed the city from one end, travelled along a winding country road and promptly entered the same city from the other end.

Abruptly the city stopped.

The ground dropped away, down a cliff.

Below them, water churned and heaved. The base of the cliff might have once been 10 feet of beachfront interspersed with rocky outcroppings, but it had been built over since then. Miles of buildings stretched out into the ocean—lifted out of the water on tremendous stone pilings that had, from the look of it, been lifted directly out of the cliff face they were standing on. The cliff had been cut in huge, angular rectangles downward to form a road of sorts, that switchbacked merciless down and down and down towards where the waves—beaten down and broken by their passage through the docks, undulated in sucking, seething swells.

In the distance, the docks gave way to shipyards, where were berthed titanic industrial cargo ships, old rustbucket liners being cut up for scraps, and carefully pumped-out dry-docks.

In the very distance, a couple of ships had crashed into the docks themselves—thrown off course by their helmsmen's panic, and the frantic rampaging of their deeply superstitious sea-faring crew. Fires ate away at their warped carcasses, and crawled among the distant buildings—largely unchecked as yet.

The trail of hardened metal run-off continued down the switchbacks before them, down to the docks below—where the oily, muddy water glinted with pieces of flotsam and jetsam, and where the ramshackle, tin-rooved warehouses rambled above the open ocean.

Winn was a spry boy, but youth as a sole excuse for fitness had its limits. It was somewhere halfway down the cobbly road descending the cliff face, at one of its several hairpin turns, that he stumbled and staggered to a heavy-stomping stop, and pleaded, "Hold- hold on, hold on," gasping for air.

He struggled out of his crimson jacket and buckled forward at the waist, letting one of its sleeves dangle sloppily on the ground. Despite the cold weather, sweat rolled off his brow.

"That thing can't," he heaved, "go much," (pant), "farther now, anyway, and," ...

He gulped a deep breath inward, and held it a second, as if trying to ward off hyperventilation, before slowly sighing the words:

"We've got a problem."

It seems despite Alex having additional legs, the golem was gaining ground a bit faster. Which was impressive to say the least, given the size and make-up of the beast. Considering how much less exhausting it was to sit on a mount than run the whole way, it was needless to say that Daniel was much less out of breath as he pulled the reigns on Alex.

...Not that Alex had anything to fear from the fall. Wings and all. Speaking of which, he looked down at the others.

"Anyone need a lift?" He had perhaps been far too vague in his invitation earlier, because the others instead of accepting ran off ahead of him. ..Granted, the words "Hop on" never really came out of his mouth, or anything similar to that.

"It'll be faster than taking the road."

The great white shark, as great a distance as his stride reached, did not keep pace particularly well with the onward-hurtling metal beast that had been loosed on the small northern library. He was careful not to cause an damage, and could not slow himself with his hands when turning corners, so it was with only a marginal advantage that the two odd monster-people had reached the cliffside ahead of everyone else.

The headed down, together, much to the imp's dismay, and she egged her placid white steed on to greater speed constantly as the trip down progressed.

Then the trip downward stopped.

"Nnnnno," she snapped, "no, this is stupid. You're not waiting for him, are you?"

"You," she said to the boy, "we're not waiting for you. What's your problem?"

She snorted indignantly at the offer of the gryphon-rider and rolled her eyes. Beneath her, her ostensibly-titled sunmate stood and regarded the boy.