He was rising to his hands and knees immediately, his eyes glittering an ice-cold black, moving like a cat to spring forward. His fingers, though she knew they couldn’t, seemed to have morphed into ripping claws as he raised them and leapt for her throat.
If she had been sitting where she was a second ago she wouldn’t have had a chance, but she fell to the floor instinctively and watched the man pass right over her, foam dripping from his mouth. Then, as she watched, he twisted in the air so that his feet hit the wall first and he sprung away. She had only heard stories of this kind of thing – the Dark Land Hypno-soldiers, mentally conditioned to push their bodies past the limits, run their engines too hot and burn out on the battlefield – but not before they annihiliated their foes with extraordinary feats of prowess.
As she struggled to drag herself away from the thing that had taken over Springfield’s mind, he growled and stepped forward, putting his heel on the corner of her robe. He knelt down over her waist, and in an instant his hands were either side of her head and all she could see were those eyes, snatching away every scrap of light in the room like black holes but for the white point in the centre. It was encompassing, and as she watched the will to struggle began to decline… to diminish… to disappear entirely. You are powerless. You are a servant of the dark. You will destroy the light.
The glass bottle smashed against the side of Springfield’s head and consciousness came rushing back to Argo like a waterfall. Springfield fell back, clutching his cranium, and a pair of hard-shelled hands were hooked under her arms and pulling her to safety.
“What’s his problem?” said Kin, grunting. She slammed the door on the surgery and turned her key in the lock. “You chop off the wrong leg?”
The doctor tried to speak but the words died in her throat. Eventually she was able to croak out: “H- hypnosol-,” and then was silent again. Kin got the picture.
“A Hypnosoldier? Here? Him?” she said. Her hand flew to her mandibled mouth. “The messengers?”
“Who knows how many they’ve made since they broke out,” Argo said. The floor was swaying still from her close encounter with the darkness, and when the door thumped from the impact of Springfield’s body she nearly went sprawling, but Kin caught her again.
“Let me lock the front,” she said. “Will you be alright here for a moment?”
“Wait!” Argo grabbed her iridescent arm. “They need me. I can help-”
“You can’t do anything like this,” said Kin. “Anyway-”
Argo lunged like a rugby player and barged past her. She was out of the door before Kin could react, stumbling and falling full face into the mud.
Kin hung back, leaning just a little out into the street. “Come back!” she called.
“Lock the door! Don’t wait for me!” said Argo.
She turned away from Kin’s protests and faced the world. There was madness on the streets.

The watchman looked out of his front window, his eyes wide with horror.
“They’re killing each other out there!” he said. His partner came from the other room and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Come away from the window,” they said urgently. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I have to go out!” the watchman said, reaching for his sharpened shovel-sword. “I have to do something to stop this-”
They grabbed his wrist. “I said come AWAY,” they said, and the watchman turned in horror to see that their eyes were black all the way around. A hand that had never been so forceful in their entire life together clamped itself to the side of his head and he found himself drowning in darkness.
“Why are you doing this?” he said, barely able to maintain consciousness.
“We are your future,” said his partner affectlessly. “Your fate is to become like us. The black heart of the Static is emboldened. The Dark is becoming uninhabitable, even for us. Things are coming into being that should not have been.” They stopped, as if hoping that the watchman would show some sign of sympathy for their words. But by the time they finished, he was under their spell entirely.

Racul struggled against the coarse rope that bound her hands behind her. “So, you’re one of them now?”
The mayor laughed. “I’ve always had black blood, sheriff. The truth wasn’t always as clear as it is now to me, but the messengers from my homeland have shown me the way.”
She walked around behind Racul and put an arm around her. Where her skin touched, it burned cold. “The light is dying, darling,” she said, sweeping her arm out and extinguishing the candles, all but one which flickered like a dying star. “All you can hope for is a quick exit.”
“And what can you hope for? You’re one of us, now. Your son isn’t a full-blooded Darklander. You’ve lived here too long,” said Racul. A plan was forming in her mind. If she could just keep the mayor distracted for long enough…
“They will welcome me home a champion!” hissed the woman in her ear, her breath ice-cold. “I have given them a staging point! A foothold!”
Racul laughed. “And you think that buys your way back in? What about your boy back there? You had to give him two black eyes before he’d follow you! If they don’t kill you, they certainly won’t leave him alive!”
“Shut up! I see what you’re trying to do, you little provocateur!” said the mayor, slapping Rania Racul across the cheek and leaving a frosty stinging mark. “I own the darkness in this town! I am the darkness!”
The sheriff could have said anything. “And I’m the light!” would have been good if a little trite. “Stick it where the sun doesn’t shine!” was a little wordy, but it crossed her mind. As it was, she said nothing as she leapt straight up, drew her knees up to her chin and swung her bound hands under her own feet. Now they were in front of her, and she had options. She grabbed the mayor by her copious head of hair-
And it came off in her hands. The mayor laughed shrilly. There was no bald head under the wig. More to the point, there was no head at all. Only more of that same sucking, all-encompassing blackness that filled the eyes of the hypnosoldiers. The mayor’s head was hollow, a facade.
“That’s it!” said the Mayor, her voice now seeming to come not from her mouth but from somewhere inside that black emptiness within her skull. “Stare into the face of your destruction!”
The darkness was impossible to look away from now. Racul felt her consciousness begin to slip. Everything was becoming black. She struggled, tried to find anything else to focus on, but there was nothing but that last, flickering-
The candle flame. It was still, against all logic, burning. It was guttering, it was dying, but it held on.
By god, it held on.

Argo ran, slipping and stumbling in the mud and calling out for help. She hadn’t seen another soul yet out here, but she knew she had to try.
Seeing a light in a window, she hammered on the door beside it to no avail. “We need to band together!” she shouted. “The hypnosoldiers are here! They’re already here!”
She turned around and saw a door open down the street. She recognised one of the downtown watchmen. Was that a shovel he was carrying?
“Thank goodness you’re here,” she said. “The hypnosoldiers, they’re everywhere! I’ve got one locked up in my surgery; Deputy Springfield.”
The watchman said nothing, and Argo realised as he drew nearer that his eyes were black all the way around. He raised his shovel and broke into a run.
Argo turned to run too, but it was too late. The flat edge of the shovel blade swept out her legs from under her. She kicked out blindly as she fell and met resistance; the watchman tripped and they were on the ground and struggling, the shovel’s handle between them.
Argo screwed her eyes up tight to avoid the luminous blackness glaring down at her and pushed, kicking out and hitting the watchman in the belly. He flipped up over her head, the shovel acting like a fulcrum for his downfall. Argo was on her feet with the speed that is often borne of life and death situations, and already running when the watchman gave one mighty shove to the ground and launched himself upright in an instant.
Rania Racul’s will was fading like the flickering candlelight when the door rattled behind her.
“Mayor Skath! The hypnosoldiers are already here!” came the yell from outside. That was the doctor! Racul found strength enough to push Skath away, rounding on Mickey who still guarded the door.
“Out of my way,” she said, snapping the ties that bound her wrists effortlessly. All in the leverage, she thought. She brushed him aside like a shower curtain and drew the bolt on the door.
“Come back here!” said the mayor. The sheriff turned around, and the last thing the mayor consciously saw was the fist on the end of the long arm of the law coming right at her.

“This place is dead,” said Racul. “No need for us to go with it.” She shot the hand crossbow into the open doorway and there was a strangled yelp. “Grow up, Michael, you’ll live,” she said. The doctor was vigorously shaking her head. “Something wrong?”
“I can’t leave these people here – what – to die?”
“You can’t do anything for them, either. The darkness has been here all along. Best to quit while we’re alive.”
“We should do something, at least.”

The two women saddled up horses (well, they were like horses) at the stable near town and rode forth for Mutetown, bringing a dire message to their leaders, not knowing if it would be heeded.
Racul rode hard, fearful of the reckoning that lay behind her if the mayor’s influence should catch her again.
Argo rode hard, filled with righteous fury at the darklanders for the incursion.
Their paths diverged, for apart their chances of both being waylaid were lessened.
As she rode, Argo found her thoughts turning to war. The people of Mutetown had weapons. Soldiers. They could fight where Skathill had fallen.
The sheriff’s thoughts were private in extreme, but if one were to watch her face as she rode, one might notice a calm appear to wash over her the further she got from that town.