Shards of the Infinite: Coming of the Veilwalkers
Compendium 2020 – Story 51
by Andrew Hawnt
Author's note: This story follows on from story number 50, The Living Shard. I would recommend checking that one out prior to reading this part of the Compendium 2020 project's three-story finale.
*
Daniel Clay had a hangover. Aside from writing stories, that's pretty much all he had a knack for. Unfortunately, due to the manner in which his stories came to him, a stiff drink or three was often the only way to get some damn sleep.
He rubbed his eyes and pushed himself upright in bed. Checked his phone. Another eight messages from his agent, Sally. He yawned. There would need to be coffee, eggs and toast before he answered them. The main bedroom of his modest house was a complete mess, making it blatantly obvious he was single and only needed to work when the muse – or whatever the horror of what happened to him while writing was – struck.
Daniel Clay wasn't human. He'd accepted that. He had no parents, no siblings, and no blood. If his skin was cut, he bled tiny crystals. When he first gave in and started to write down the things his mind presented him with, an oily, sticky ooze would emerge from him, anchoring his body to the spot until he forced the darkness back by completing a story.
He showered, thinking about the first time the dark slime had burst out of his eyes and fingers, quickly sealing him in a cocoon of breathless horror. That was before he knew he could get rid of it by finishing a story. While he was lost in the choking, wet void, the visions that raged within him told him the truth of his origin. The reason he could see such vivid, strange dreams around him was that he was born from a chunk of the living universe's literal soul. That link gave him access to any reality and any time, able to see things that nobody should ever bear witness to.
Daniel got dressed in fresh boxers and socks that actually matched for once. He pulled on his faded Diggnation t-shirt and a hoodie he'd got from an eBay seller that printed stuff with old video company logos on it. This one was the Medusa Video logo in all of its glory.
“Alexa, what's new?”
The smart speaker on his chest of drawers woke up and played the news headlines, which made Daniel freeze as he was pulling on a pair of black and white Vans.
This is history being made, came the voice of the Prime Minister from the speaker. The craft that has entered our orbit is out first, genuine proof that there is indeed life beyond the Earth. I am about to discuss the First Contact protocols with my counterparts from across the globe. This is a great moment of unity. From here, the future will be transformed. For now, look to the skies over the North of England and witness the defining moment of our collective lives.
His heart felt cold. He struggled to breathe. A pain grew rapidly in his temples and he rubbed them with his fingertips. It was the feeling of a story manifesting, but it felt stronger this time. It felt... closer?
“Alexa, stop.”
The speaker fell silent. He rushed to the bedroom window and flung the curtains open. He rubbed his temples again. The pain was growing faster.
There it was. Breaking through the clouds. The ship. The ship full of shadows.
The writer had dreamed of the ship and written it into his previous story. It had been sent from between universes by a malevolent being that called itself Kiasi the Watcher of All. Others called it the Lord Watcher. It sought the living shard, that fragment of the universe that had grown into humanoid form and become the writer himself. The man who could direct entire realities by writing down their stories. Kiasi wanted that power and would stop at nothing. He had sent his head Mage, Malaris, armed with a massive warship that was filled with an army of enslaved shadow monsters. The time had come for the writer to face who – and what – he really was.
Daniel didn't remember going to his laptop, but he had and was typing furiously. The dark ooze was fighting its way out of him and he needed to contain it, at least for a little while. He looked to the ship again, emerging majestically from the bleak grey clouds over South Yorkshire.
The pull of the dark was too strong, and Daniel found himself staring in disgust and horror at his own hands as they bled black ooze. He felt it running down his face from his eyes, and the hideous muck gathered around his body, sealing him to the desk chair, attaching his hands in place so they could not turn away from the keyboard.
The writer was imprisoned in his bedroom, unable to do anything but write as the world changed forever beyond his house. He needed help. The writer delved into his imagination, unable to tell the difference between something he had created from scratch and the things he had seen from other realities, but he had to try. He called out, screaming in his mind across every realm he knew he had mental access to, and he told his story anew.
An echo of something flashed through his mind, forcing the pain aside. Daniel could have wept as the strange filth melted away as though it had been pierced by weapons tinged with magic.
He wished he'd written this moment.
*
“Well,” Daniel said as he rushed outside and stood in the street, staring at the massive ship looming over the city, searching for him. “Looks like I can't hide any more. Can't say I'm too sad about that.”
Something inside him tingled. Not another story. This was different. This was something from his own imagination. An answer.
He knew what the craft was. It was a Void ship. It was capable of travelling in time, space and between dimensions. It had a vaguely triangular shape and looked both ancient and futuristic, like all the best ships in science fiction tended to. Helicopters had begun to circle its ridiculous expanse, looking like tiny toys beneath its dark majesty.
Huge cannons moved out of the main hull, their obscene forms glowing with intent. Screams raised from other onlookers that had flocked outside, and he knew those screams would be echoes across the world at that moment.
The writer watched in disturbed fascination as the Void ship trained its cannons on the surrounding area. It opened massive loading bay doors that roared with hydraulics as they parted to reveal an army of writhing shadow creatures. He continued to stare as that army swam into the air over the city, spectres, ghouls, alien monsters, whatever they were, they were being used as a threat. The screams around him grew more manic. He could hear windows being smashed in the distance. Cards screeching away. People literally heading for the hills.
Those screams fell silent as the voice of the Mage – it had to be, it was in his story – boomed across the landscape from the Void ship.
“Daniel Clay,” the voice roared so loudly that several of the helicopters span away from the ship. “You have hidden long enough. Your true nature is known to the Lord Watcher. Surrender yourself to me and fulfil your purpose.”
Daniel raised his hands to the sky. “Come and get me.”
The Shadows heard him, and they descended.
The writer staggered back as the entire army of shadow beasts fell upon him, entangling him in their freezing cold tendrils. He knew where the black slime had come from now, as the shadows were formed of the same substance. A shadow had been inside him his entire human life, trying to direct him into the grip of the Lord Watcher, forcing him to embrace his gift and use his imagination to weaken the fabric of the universe to the point where he could be sought out by the Void ship and claimed as a prize.
Daniel did not fight the shadows as they wrapped him ever tighter in their chilling grasp. Emergency vehicles screeched to a halt nearby. Military personnel and helicopters arrived at the same time. Onlookers gawped and screamed and fell to their knees as their minds began to crack.
The writer, now lost in the darkness of those writhing monstrosities, began to type, moving his fingers where keys would be had he been at his laptop. As he did, he pushed out with his imagination and called upon heroes that were able to traverse realities. He could not see the air in front of his house warp, distort and finally split open, but from the heightened noise outside the shadows, he knew it was happening.
They had answered his call.
Four newcomers stood before the writhing mass of shadow creatures that had Daniel Clay trapped. The Square portal that had provided their transit to a nondescript street in Sheffield vanished in hues of red and blue. Their bodies were clad in armour and strange alien fineries. A hooded male warrior. An Amazonian woman in futuristic golden armour, an ancient sword in her hands. A young woman brandishing a staff. A young man in regal attire. The young woman with elfin features, Paige, stepped forward to the mass of monsters and held her orb-topped staff towards it. The orb erupted with an amber glow. She nodded to the others.
“Shadow army, release him!”
A shadow came away from Daniel's prison and thrashed at Paige with spindly arms of darkness, but she fought back harder, attacking it with physical blows as well as blasts of energy from her staff. The shadow fell, exploding into tiny shreds of darkness.
The other shadows released their grip on Daniel and he hit the ground with a thud. He didn't care. He laughed as he saw the new arrivals, three brandishing weapons and the regal man holding intricate sigils of light above his hands.
“Veilwalkers,” he said through the laughter. “I always thought I'd made you up, all of you. Then I started to understand what I was, and that you had to be out there somewhere. You had to be!”
Authorities barked orders at them, but they went ignored. Paige helped Daniel up. “We heard your call, storyteller. We have met before, but back then you were more like a crystal than a person. We know what you are, and we know what you can do.”
“Never mind that, what about these things?” Daniel exclaimed, gesturing to the shadow monsters that were rearing up for the attack.
The Veilwalkers automatically took fighting stances.
“That's what we're here for,” said Paige.
The writer stared in wonder as the four Veilwalkers leapt into battle against the shadows, their incredible skill and speed often reducing them to a blur as magically charged weapons, physical expertise and astonishing psychic blasts lay waste to the monstrosities that had imprisoned the man known as Daniel Clay. He watched people he had thought of as his creations destroy wave upon wave of the shadows as more poured from the Void ship to join their brethren, only to be reduced to strange ashes by a sect of warriors who had sworn an oath to protect the weakest spot of the Multiverse against external threats. Within two minutes, the entire army had been wiped out.
That left the Void ship itself. Or so the writer assumed.
The sky darkened as millions of shadow beasts hurtled through the atmosphere. Guns began being fired by military personnel. Alarms rang out. Riots ended and became an exodus out of the city. Thousands tried to escape, terrified beyond all reckoning. This was to be the end of all, their doom raining from the sky in the form of seemingly infinite enemies.
“Silas, protect Daniel,” Paige ordered the regal-looking guy with the glowing sigils. He nodded and rushed to Daniel, generating a shield around the man in the hoody.
The writer watched as Paige raised up the orb atop her staff and directed a blazing column of red and blue light into the sky. It faded quickly and the dark canopy of those shadows became dotted with circles of purple fire, from which leapt a new army. Veilwalkers. An army of flying, levitating, super-powered men and women, first a few dozen, then hundreds, then several thousand, pouring into this realm like a flood of armed and armoured salvation.
The writer offered his own life so that nobody else needed to lose theirs, but Silas held him down. He had to be protected, or no matter the outcome of this battle, only devastation remained for the Multiverse.
Humanity watched from countless screens across the globe as the two factions of light and dark did battle in the greatest spectacle that had ever been seen. The skies across the planet were alive with battle, shadows and Veilwalkers attacking one another with abilities far beyond anything that had been seen before.
The cannons prepared to fire.
“Veilwalkers,” called the Mage across thousands of miles of airborne battlegrounds. “I care not. I shall bless this sorry place with purification. Humanity will be scorched from existence.
The writer knocked Silas out, ending the shield. He stood proud, screaming at the Void ship and its impossible armies. He knew that his gift was far more precious to the Watcher than wasting more time on a pointless invasion. The writer knew that he alone could stop all of this madness.
“Take me, but take this battle away with me.”
“Daniel,” Paige screamed, a hand outstretched towards him. “No!”
“This is what I'm meant for,” he said to her. “I'm not supposed to be a person. I'm just ideas with a body stuck on. The only way I can help is to not be here.”
“You don't understand!"
“Yes I do,” he snapped back at her. “I completely understand! The Lord watcher wants me and will kill millions in order to get my attention. I know what I have to do.”
“Which is?”
“Take this fight to the watcher himself.”
“The Veilwalkers can help you!”
“No,” Daniel said with a sad smile. “Stay here and be the heroes I wanted you to be all along. Fight the monsters. Make them go away. The world will see you as the heroes. I'm nobody. I'm just an idiot who writes silly stories. Take this opportunity to be what I wrote you to be.”
Paige looked at the war in the heavens, Veilwalkers and beasts battling for the fate of everything, then back to the man.
“Alone?”
He tapped his temples. “I'm never alone though, am I?”
She nodded to Daniel. She understood.
The writer called out to the Void ship, and its cannons fell silent even though the astonishing battles continued to rage in the skies across the Earth. The dark ooze bled from him once more, the alien force that had been there all along now lifting him into the air, further and further, until its thick ropes of slime were met with more of the same from the guts of the Void ship. He watched as the town he knew and loved shrank away and he was lifted through the fight and into the darkness of the ship itself.
The moment the writer was inside the ship, it engaged its engines and the behemoth rose through the clouds and rapidly picked up speed. Fighter jets unloaded missiles at it, but nothing had an effect. The Mage had his prize now.
The remaining shadows hurtled back into space to follow the ship, leaving wave upon wave of Veilwalkers alone in the skies. The planet rejoiced and hailed its new heroes as Gods.
Paige looked to the skies. The Living Shard had just given himself up to the enemy, and all of creation remained at stake.
She called for the Veilwalkers to regroup. This story was over for now, but another would take place far from here, far from any place or any time.
*
Far from the Earth and all he had known as a human, the writer opened his imagination to all that it could touch and all that it could dream, and as he was encased in black slime and put into a temporal stasis, he went into the dark with a smile.
For the first time in his life, he welcomed the chaos in his head and prepared to set it free.
There was one more story to tell.
© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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About Compendium 2020:
Compendium 2020 is a project from author Andrew Hawnt that consists of 52 original short stories, flash fiction stories and vignettes given away for FREE in 2020. Featuring science fiction, fantasy, horror and more, this began as a personal quest and due to the weirdness of 2020 has become an ambition to provide free distractions for anyone who needs them.
About Andrew Hawnt:
Andrew is based in Nottingham, England. Known for his music journalism career, comics writing and film critique work, Andrew is a prolific writer and is the author of a growing stack of books, including the cult hit VHS Ate My Brain. He made the movies The Demon And I and The Demon And I: Birthrite completely in lockdown with cast members filming their scenes remotely, and new films are coming.
Andrew is also the creator and presenter of the YouTube shows Planet Hex, Turn One Shock and the VHS Ate My Brain series as well as the video versions of the Compendium stories.
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© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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