Chapter 99: The Scrael Begin

CARTER BROUGHT THE news.

He came through the door one autumn evening with mud on his boots and something wrong with his eyes. Not the usual wrong. This was the look of a man who had seen something that didn’t fit inside his understanding of the world.

“Evening, Carter.”

He sat at the bar. Didn’t order. I poured him an ale without being asked.

“There’s something dead on the old Baedn road,” he said. “Black. Big as a dog. Legs like —” He made a gesture with his hands. Too many fingers. Too many joints. “Legs like a spider, but wrong. And eyes. Too many eyes.”

I set down the glass I was polishing.

“How many legs?”

“Too many. And they were sharp, Kote. Like knives.”

“Was it alive when you found it?”

“Dead. Smashed. Jake Henning hit it with a fence rail, six or seven blows. It was still twitching when I got there. Like it didn’t know it was dead.”

Scrael.

The word rose in my mind like a bubble from deep water. Spider-things from the spaces beyond the Doors of Stone. Not demons. Not Fae. Something older, locked away when the doors were first created.

And now one was lying dead in a ditch outside Newarre.

“Just an animal,” I said. “Some kind of spider. They grow large in the Eld.”

Carter looked unconvinced. But practical men prefer explanations that let them sleep at night.

He finished his drink and left.

I stood behind the bar and felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time. Fear. Not Kote’s fear. The fear of a man who understood what a dead scrael on a country road meant.

The doors were weakening.

More reports came. Steadily, the way bad news always arrives in the countryside.

A farmer lost three sheep in a single night. Not to wolves — wolves leave bodies. A tinker reported the northern roads were dangerous. Not from bandits. From something else. A family of refugees arrived from a village near the Stormwal, abandoned in a single night.

“It was in the walls,” the woman told me, her children sleeping on the common room bench. “Something moving. Something scratching. Too many legs. Too quiet.”

“Spiders?” I offered.

She looked at me with eyes that had seen beyond ordinary fear. “Not spiders. Spiders you can kill.”

I gave them food, a room, directions. They left in the morning. I watched them go down the road, the children holding hands.

I saw one myself that summer.

Dead, like Carter’s. Lying at the edge of the road a mile south, half-hidden in the tall grass.

Six legs, each ending in a point like a thorn. A body like a teardrop, matte black. Seven eyes in an asymmetric cluster on what might have been a head. It looked paused. Waiting. As if death were a temporary condition.

I crouched beside it. The smell was wrong — not decay but something mineral. Cold. Sharp. Like the air before a lightning strike.

The chitin was cold. Not the cool of dead things. Cold the way stone is cold in deep winter. A cold from somewhere else.

The legs twitched.

I was on my feet and three paces back before I’d consciously decided to move. My hands were up in a gesture half defensive and half something older — the instinctive reach for a power I no longer possessed.

The legs twitched again. Then stopped. Residual. The last echo of whatever dark vitality had animated it.

The doors were opening. Not the catastrophic failure Cinder had wanted. But slowly. A crack here. A fissure there. Small openings through which small things could slip.

I left the dead scrael in the ditch and walked back to the inn and said nothing about what I’d seen.

“The world is dying, Reshi,” Bast said one evening, after a particularly grim report from a refugee. “The things you locked away, they’re coming through anyway. Slower. Messier. But they’re coming.”

“I know.”

“And you’re just going to stand there.”

“The last time I tried to save the world, I broke it. I am the disaster, Bast. Not the solution.”

He stared at me. His eyes were wet. The Fae weep easily, not because they feel more, but because they see no reason to pretend they don’t.

“I won’t give up on you,” he said.

“I know.”

“Even if you’ve given up on yourself.”

“I know that too.”

He went upstairs. Outside, the autumn night was cold and full of stars. Somewhere beyond those stars, the things that lived in the dark were pressing closer.

The scrael were beginning.

And I wiped the bar. And I waited.