Starheart

Storm

In the old days of the Nebula and the mythical community there had actually been plans made for if our secret got out and people decided to hunt us down. The war of the Storm. To leave human society behind and use any means we had available to us to survive: powers, skills and magic.  Later on when it was clear that the storm was never going to happen people dismissed the idea saying we would have never stood a chance against them.

They were wrong but I could never tell them why. Not after what I'd done. 

Baneful magic. As long as you could believe and hate you could fight and despite what it was mostly associated with if you used your imagination for a second there were much better uses for it than hexing your ex. The original psi spear spell had been from a random web page when I was in the state of mind of trying everything in the hope it could get me out of the trouble I was in but looking back I wondered how powerful the author was that they could post something like that to a site that wasn't even witchcraft focused. That was a mystery for another day however.  

Realizing that no one was actually prepared to fight back then was the only time I had ever gotten legitimately angry at the community. I hadn't actually said anything other than a few hints but we had all this power or at least the potential and they wouldn't even use it to save ourselves. Only I ever tried and that was when- 

Things were different now though, they had to be now everything had suddenly gotten so real. I was pretty sure that the people Juniper thought were tracking me weren't doing so in order to give me a certificate for killing the fear of the unknown incarnate. I thought this over in under a minute a plan forming in my head even so I was going to see what the others thought.

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Alya: What should I do?

Jasper: Don't use your powers and don't do anything else suspicious as they don't know anything for sure and delete your history in the server.

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I sighed a little. I had over 4 years of history with these people but it couldn't be helped and I didn't want this to be traced back to them if something did go wrong. I selected all my messages, hit delete and closed the site. The next step was to protect my parents as if they were safe no real harm could be done. I sent emails saying that their work hours were being changed for tomorrow hoping the fake email address would be believable enough to work. The only thing I could do now is wait to see what happened. 

The knock on the door came at 11 AM. Well at least they didn't send a military squad to kick the 4 walls of the house in. I tried doing what I usually do when someone I'm not expecting or don't want to talk to knocks on the door and wait it out but they carried on doing a woodpecker impression so I decided to get it all over with. I walked over to the door and opened it acting tired as if I'd just been woken up. "Hello?" Two people were standing there one a blonde woman and the other a dark haired man. "Hi we heard a report about an incident last week and were hoping you could set the record straight." Said the woman. Neither seemed to want to attract attention or do anything that would make me panic right off the bat. I told myself this was a good thing shrugged and said "OK I guess you'd better come in." 

I lead them into the living room and one of them brought over a briefcase which turned out to be full of photos flipped over so I had no idea what they were. "Is this about the forest fire?" I asked in the vague hope they just wanted a statement and had somehow missed the cryptid. "It's related to that. Can you explain what happened?" She asked. I decided to go for vagueness rather than outright lies because something told me I wouldn't get away with lying to these people. "Well there were 5 of us camping, family and two friends I had met that week. I had left something in my tent and by the time I'd found my friends a fire was starting in the forest so we left and called the emergency services. Everyone was pretty shaken up and I just wanted to get home after that." I explained.

"The reports we've read said that there was 6 of you in the forest during the incident." The man stated. "The 6th person was certainly no friend of ours and not part of our group but we weren't going to leave him behind." I corrected. He narrowed his eyes but didn't call out what I'd said. "Perhaps now you can face this." He flipped over one of the photos. It was the remains of the cryptid on a steel table. I recoiled from the picture and the woman gave me a somewhat sympathetic look "It does that to people for some reason." She explained luckily misjudging the whole reason behind my reaction. "Is that a fleshgait?" I asked. The name was now usually used as an umbrella term for all crawler cryptids. "We don't know for sure. Can you tell us the story?" The woman asked clearly trying to work out how much I knew but I couldn't really see any harm in telling some cryptid story. 

"Uh sure. Well humans were born to favor the light and fleshgaits favored the darkness. They would hunt and eat anyone who strayed too far from the fire or sometimes they'd camouflage themselves as a human and you'd look up and count extra people at the campfire. People learnt to have some kind of ancestral memory of this which is supposedly the reason people get unnerved by human like robots being built today. They remembered what it was like when there was another species that could mimic human behavior. After the industrial revolution the night was essentially conquered and the fleshgaits are practically extinct only existing in the densest forests where the sun can't properly pierce the treeline." I tried to recall what I remembered reading. There were many other stories because like I said the term had been changed to cover many different cryptids but that was the story usually associated with them.

"It does seem to be one of the most reported cryptid sightings at the moment as various cryptids seem to go in and out of trend." It seemed as if the woman was agreeing with what I had said which was a good sign. I remembered the waves of evil I felt from whatever that thing was and how it didn't care that those it hunted down were also part of the supernatural world. "I'm never going back to those woods again." I announced. The man handed me a letter "If you... remember anything else be sure to contact us." They got up to go and I was already thinking in my head that this was way too easy when he turned back round "Trust me you're gonna want the contents of that letter in the next few days."