The trees breathed deep of the night air as Aiko flitted from shadow to shadow. The stealth made her feel safer, but she knew it was no doubt pointless. The forest knew she was here, which meant the dragon knew she was here. The unsheathed steel in her hand could leave little doubt as to why.

“You cannot do this, Aiko.” Hotaru, her pupil, stood on the path ahead. “You of all people know why.”
Stealth really was pointless now, thought Aiko. She had taught her pupil well. Stepping from the shadows, she narrowed her eyes. “I sent you to the next village to help in their hospice,” she said. “Why are you here?”
“You know why I’m here,” said Hotaru. As she spoke, she dropped a hand to the hilt of the sword strapped to her waist.
“I will not kill you, Hotaru, but I will not be stopped. Do not be so foolish as to draw that blade.”
“The spirit of this forest, of this mountain, protects our village. Without it we are lost.”

“My illness is worse than you suppose,” Aiko snarled. “Without the dragon’s heart I will be dead in days. By tomorrow night I will be too weak to do what I must.”
“Hundreds of people will die!”
“Nobody will die. Life may become harsher here, but to the West the villages grow into towns. Our people will find new lives there if they must.”
“All this to save your own life,” Hotaru shook her head. “Your life is pledged to the village. You should give your life in its protection, not the other way around.”
“I owe another pledge. One much older. Saving my own life is not my concern. I must survive to save another.”
Hotaru’s grip tightened and twisted on her sword hilt. Aiko sighed. This was time she could not afford.
“I am truly sorry, Hotaru,” she said. “My position is yours now. Take care of them as you must.”
This seemed to make Hotaru’s mind up, but before her sword was fully drawn Aiko had melted back into the forest.

“By the dust! What happened to you?”
Clara’s feet had only just hit the ground. She slipped the shard of mirror from her belt and palmed it as she straightened and turned toward the voice. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness. There was a shape crouched there in the shadows. Before she could identify it, it stood and spoke again.

“Are you hurt?” it asked.
It was her client. The nice one, not the dead one.
Clara glanced down at her hands. “Not really,” she said. “What are you doing here? I thought you left.”
“One of Marcus’ lieutenants was at the bar when I went out. I’ve been keeping an eye on the place.”
“Lieutenant. hey? Not anymore,” she waved the makeshift blade in her hand in explanation, then tucked it back into her belt.
“That explains the blood, then,” he sounded impressed. “Dale could find him any minute, we should get you out of sight. Come on, I know somewhere nearby.”

Moros stood atop the rocky outcrop, his hair spiking in the charged air. He clutched his sword with both hands, leaning his weight on it just a little. A thin trickle of blood came down his right arm from somewhere beneath his sleeve. The onlookers were slowly recovering, and one started towards him from the tree line.
“Stay back!” he called. “Stay amongst the trees! This isn’t over yet.”
Without moving his eyes from their constant scan of the surroundings he hooked one foot under the body, hooded and masked, that lay beside him, and with a heave sent it tumbling to the waves below. More room to move now; that was important.

The charge in the air grew suddenly, and Moros shifted his grip slightly. As the lightning forked down from the sky he was already moving, his blade scraping along the rock then coming up in a wide arc. His opponent was there suddenly, cast in stark relief as the lightning struck the ground between them in a crash that drowned the clash of blades. The battle was joined.

There was an impression he had in her presence. Something he couldn’t quite place. Sometimes it seemed like a quality of the light; sometimes it was almost a sound. Sometimes, she seemed to fill the room.

He took to watching how other people interacted with her, when he could — stall-holders, bus-drivers, children on the street. As far as he could tell nobody else could sense whatever it was.

He had always loved watching her. Loved looking at her. Every inch of her fascinated every inch of him. This puzzle was no exception, and sometimes he wondered whether it wasn’t an excuse he made himself to revel in her all the more.

It wasn’t until the night that she held him as they fell asleep that the mystery was finally solved, and he felt her wings fold around him.

They were trying to open a portal into an alternate universe, you see. The idea was to use quantum entanglement events as the branch points in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to form an entangled link across parallel universes. It didn’t work as planned, but the surprising thing was that it did in fact work. There were two problems: the first was that they came up with a way to send information across the link, but not matter or energy. The second was that the link only held while the parallel universe was close to our own.

It seemed a shame to throw out the technology just because it didn’t do what they had wanted it to, so they tried plugging a voice transmission system into it. Since the parallel universe on the other end was very close to this one, the scientists there did too, and suddenly the scientists were talking to themselves. Now, of course, they sell the things in those fancy online gadget stores. It turns out, being able to talk to a slightly different version of themselves is a great help to a lot of people in crises or times of indecision. Some people, of course, come very quickly to the realisation that they are prats.

On reflection, teaching her how to pick locks had been a bad idea. She had always loved to hide and jump out on him, and for years after she’d gone he would find himself checking every room of the house for her when he came home, in case she’d broken in while he was out and was waiting behind something to surprise him. If he heard a bump in the night and went to investigate, it wasn’t burglars he expected to find. Of course, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that no matter how many times he looked, she was never there.

A voice rose out of the darkness; a voice like stone and metal. Peter couldn’t be sure whether he heard it through his ears or through his skin.

You are that which crawls upon the Earth. You congratulate each other on how far you have risen from the dirt, but this is only because you have the energy to spare in times of plenty. The society you wear is a threadbare cloak, to be discarded when times are lean. Underneath it you are all tooth and claw and bone. A winter comes, and no hive hast thou of hoarded sweets.

“I know what I am,” said Peter. “What are you?”

I am that which preys upon that which crawls upon the Earth.

The ladder ended eventually at a hatch – small, round, and secured tightly with a rusted iron wheel. Alice strained with the wheel for a moment, before shouldering the hatch open and disappearing through. As Peter followed he had the impression of a dark curtain falling around him, and it took him a moment to adjust.

It was the junkyard again. Piles of car husks, umbrella spines, filing cabinet shells, and coat-hanger claws towered on all sides.
“We’re here,” said Alice.
“We were headed here?” Peter asked.
“I guess so.”
There was a momentarily deafening roar, the ground shook, and a bloom of fierce orange spread briefly across the sky.
“Hang on,” said Peter, “I just remembered. Last night, when you fell, what happened?”
Alice’s brow creased. “Nothing. I woke up before I hit the ground, I think.”

The roar began again, then cut off abruptly as Peter jumped and found himself in darkness. His first thought was that he had woken and he was in his bed in the small hours of the morning, but he knew that was wishful thinking. He was still standing, the ground was hard and uneven underfoot, and Alice was gone, but there was something else in the darkness with him.

A West End man yesterday died of natural causes in his home at the age of 184. Doctors initially listed the cause of death as heart disease, however an autopsy later showed that although there was considerable cholesterol build-up it was within safe limits. This is the first death of natural causes to be recorded on British soil in over 40 years and, although it does not earn the deceased the record for the oldest ever human being, scientists are claiming that it provides great insight into the increased life expectancy the medical advances of the last century have afforded the developed world.

“A wise man once said to me: ´Some people don´t know what´s good for them. Sometimes the few can govern the needs of the many better than the many can themselves.´

I´m not sure if he was right. I don´t know whether it´s true that some people inherently need governing. But I challenge any of you to convince me that the people who rule over our lives today ‘know better’. Governments and corporations have had too much power over the people for too long, and they wield that power to their own ends. I looked at the world around me, and I saw war and I saw death and I saw greed and I came to the decision that it’s time I had power. Not over other men’s destinies, but over my own. And so I have worked long and hard, and finally I have that power.

I am offering you the chance to have that power yourselves, and what I ask in return is that you help me offer that power to everyone. I want to build an empire: beyond borders, beyond sex and beyond race. One that does not seek to govern or replace governments, but seeks instead to empower the people.

This is not hyperbole. This may be the most important endeavour mankind has ever undertaken. Imagine Romulus and Remus stood before you, asking that you help them to build Rome.”