“I’ve never seen the likes of this before…” said the doctor with an expression of some concern on her faces. “It seems to be entirely something new.” She prodded the sweltering growth with a wooden tongue depressor that happened to be to hand, and noted the peculiar jellyfish-movement that it made in response. She tapped her patient on the back, and he straightened up.
“Is it going to be alright, Doc?” he asked, his brow furrowed.
“Congratulations!” said the doctor, pumping his hand enthusiastically. “You’ve developed an entirely new kind of organ! The good news is it seems to be at the very least benign, maybe even beneficial in the long run.” She beamed. “Come back to me in the event of any major developments.” The patient opened his beak to say something, then closed it again. He would have felt better with a grim prognosis. He pulled his shirt on and went for the door.
“Wait!” said the doctor. He turned, hoping against hope for some absurd medical restriction to his daily movements. “You’ll want to cut a hole in that shirt. I believe that the Orgo Gamma is to some degree light-sensitive.”
“Orgo Gamma?”
“That’s what I’m calling it. Sort of a dog-latin pun. If anyone wants to dispute it, they can take it up with my lawyer,” said the doctor, waving the patient on.

As the man left, the doctor followed him out into her small reception room. She watched him walk up the street and into the small apartment above the general store, through the big front window of her office which said, in letters reversed from her perspective: DR ARGO GAMMA – “Your life saved or your money back!”
Her receptionist, Kin, an insectoid mutant with an iridescent carapace that Argo suspected was not entirely natural, chittered something as she wrote out the patient’s details in the surgery logbook, and she laughed.
“Good point,” she said. Then she abruptly stopped. Someone was limping up the street, apparently barely able to stand at all. Eight feet tall if he was an inch, he staggered as the doctor ran up beside him, and she caught him moments before he collapsed entirely.

The tall man laid on two beds which had been pushed end-to-end, his hands folded across his narrow torso. His chest rose and fell slowly.
“No identification at all,” said Argo to Kin. “And nothing wrong with him physically.”
“Psychological damage?” said Kin in her language of clicks and hisses. “A mental attack?”
“Could well be. The hallmark of the Dark Lands,” Argo said. At those words, the tall man’s eyes snapped open like reverse beartraps (handy for catching reverse bears). They were black all the way around, with ragged white pupils.
“The Dark Lands!” he gasped, his eyes wheeling in their sockets as he struggled to break free of the paralysis of waking. “They’re coming from the Dark Lands!”
Argo placed a reassuring hand on the man’s chest. “Easy now. Easy. Who’s coming?”
The man’s response came immediately: “War!”

After the man had been taken to the gaol, Argo joined the Mayor and those citizens that cared to join in in the town hall – a tall, plain wooden building of a single storey. She sat on one of the benches, her arms folded as they waited for the Mayor to finish her customary hygienic routine, and her eyes roamed around the room. There was the sheriff, Rania Racul, long-limbed and narrow-eyed as she examined her black fingernails; The smith, Monte, hunched over and constantly wiping at the brown-green stuff that dripped from his twitching snout (the Mayor hated that, but he had too much pull with the townsfolk to exclude him)
At last the mayor appeared, pulling on her infamous protective gloves that she had had imported from the outside at great personal expense. Rumour ran that the last time she had touched another person with her bare skin she had become so ill that she had vowed never to do so again. Her eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, and her son bobbed at her elbow, attending on his beloved mother at all times. This too was the subject of altogether less savory rumour on occasion, although those were the sorts of rumours that belonged more to drunks in the saloon than polite society.
After the mayor, who was the latest in the long line of Skath to lord it over the town that bore their name, had called the meeting to order, she opened the floor to the townspeople.
“We need to barricade the town! Fortify!” cried one man. “Those Darklanders don’t stand a chance against good hard steel!” Another man chimed in:
“Are you insane? We don’t have the resources to fight over the town! I say we should surrender now, while we still have a chance.”
“Fortify!”
“Surrender!”
“Fortify!”
Monte stood up, wiping his nose with his rag. “Why don’t we –schf– just leave?” he said. “We could –snrk– all move to – to Mutetown or somewhere and come back to town when they pass?” His little eyes searched the room for support and, finding little, he sat down again sheepishly.
“The sneeze-box makes a good point,” said a clear voice. The sheriff looked up from her nails, and continued: “We can’t all move to Mutetown, but we should send a messenger. Maybe they can help us,” she said. “And if not, at least they’ll be forewarned so whatever happens to us…”
“Doesn’t happen to them,” said Dr Argo. “Seconded.”
The mayor looked down at the townsfolk with practiced distance, as if she were examining a new type of bacterium under a microscope. She said nothing, as if daring the people to solve the problem themselves.

As the people filed out, the only resolution made being to come back to it tomorrow, the sheriff came up beside the doctor and tapped her on the shoulder.
“You’re the one who found the messenger, right?” she said. Dr Argo nodded. “Was there anything odd about him?”
The doctor then relayed the facts of the case as she understood it to the interested officer, who nodded along. “A hypno-case?”
“I believe so. And powerful,” said Argo. “Whoever did for him is a dangerous one.” She wrung her hands, both her sets of eyebrows knitting together in worry. “Do you think it’s real? Do you think they really are coming?”
The sheriff was impassive, offering no cue for the doctor to latch on to. She said: “I don’t know. I think we have to treat it as if it is, though. We can’t afford to ignore something like this.”

After all the folk had gone home, the sheriff and her lone deputy went on patrol. A doom now hung in the air over all their heads like a guillotine blade, looming large in the collective psyche. All there was now was waiting for the drop. The smith in his workshop looked at his tools, at the raw metal that he had been using to make door-hinges and farming equipment, and wondered how many in the town there were that could even hold a sword.
He pulled a shovel down from a rack, that he had been planning to sell to the Greene Farm as part of their year’s order. He swung it experimentally a couple of times. The edge of the blade made a whistling sound as it cut through the air.

The Tall Messenger, who had never given himself a name beyond “War!”, was taken to the gaol lockup, hidden away at the back of the sheriff’s office, to stop him from disturbing the townsfolk. Sheriff Rania Racul, who was almost as tall as he was, walked him unrestrained to the cell.
“Why you locking him up? He hasn’t done nothing!” said a woman with bubbling, toadlike flesh. Racul fixed her penetrating gaze on the woman and detected no ill intent, and said:
“Neither has anyone in town. I don’t intend to wait until they do.” She smiled, and her teeth looked unusally white and sharp. The toad lady backed off, licking her lips. “Yes ma’am, very good I say. Pro-tec-tive custody.”
But was she protecting the Messenger from the people, or the people from the Messenger. Somehow, this passive near-mute, with his plain, pleasant expression, seemed more dangerous than any Bad Company bandit or brain-fused Bestial she had faced in her career before, a career that spanned many decades before she had ever even come to the little town of Skathill to retire. Once, years ago, she had visited the place that would become the Dark Lands. It was a dangerous place even then. The forces of Mutation were stronger, stranger. Those who stayed too long seemed to warp not only in body and mind, but somehow deeper. As if there was a kind of mutation that could change the shape of your very soul.

People all around town were packing, preparing to flee. That much was obvious to the doctor as she walked around aimlessly. She had lived in Skathill nearly all her life, since she had come into the Static after medical school. She missed the modern conveniences of the outside world sometimes, but rarely for long. Now though, she would have done anything to live in a great walled city like Marek. She put her hands in the pockets of her battered blue jeans and sighed. Her four eyes closed and she pictured it: a normal life outside. No more scrounging for antiseptic herbs. Friends who had the same number of arms, eyes, hearts as her. Being one of the secondary wives of some shiny-faced businessman while he ignored her for his latest catch. No, a normal life wasn’t her destiny. She opened her eyes.
There is a famous saying from the days before the static, when the world was merciful: “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?” This saying came to Argo suddenly, as a staggering man came lurching through the mud towards her and collapsed. She ran to his side and lifted him up on her knee, keeping his airways out of the sucking black mud.
He was handsome if a little thin, with large eyes which were black all the way around, except for a tiny white dot in the centre. He was bald – in fact, completely hairless. He was a bright, electric blue from toe to tip. He opened his mouth, letting a slow breath out.
He said: “Peace!” in a hushed whisper, and then passed out.