Disclaimer: All respected characters and properties belong to their owners.

Fate's Intervention

By Corvus no Genmu

A Man of Shadows, A Nightmare Eternal

He moved without any concern or worry. For who was there that could inspire such feelings in the likes of a Servant such as he? A Man of Shadows, his masked gaze forlorn with trails of violet tears down an otherwise pristine white mask. Yet the facsimile of a smile was as real as real could be.

Since Time Immemorial, He has existed and His would be among the last when Creation would reach its Ultimate End. He had been the first to be drawn to them, to the humans that harnessed Imagination to create whole worlds with mere words and thoughts.

He had listened to the Tales, to the Stories, and somewhere, in that Time Immemorial, He and the Others like Him were changed. To try and understand humanity, to try and harness the same Imagination as they, He and the Others had begun to mimic them. He had been the first to realize the mistake, but by then it was too late.

What was pale mimicry became almost perfect imitation. Without notice, He had begun to think like the humans that interested Him so. He had begun to have similar emotions as they. He had begun to Think, which in itself was not entirely a bad thing, but Feeling came soon afterward and on its coattails rode Emotion with the strongest of them all at the fore. He had become corrupted by Desire, the irresistible yearning to feel as humanity feels, to experience Creation as they do.

So it was that he became a Man of Shadows. That is what humans see when they look at him. The humans whose eyes still shine with the power of Belief, to see the mysteries that once encircled the World like a mother's embrace. That is what they see. That is what they believe Him to be.

They think of Him as human. That is what they believe.

How wrong they are.

He had been called to this body, one of many that He had worn in His eons, to fulfill a purpose. He had been conscribed into a shell, a mere puppet, because the World could no longer accept Him as He Was for He Himself could not remember What He Was only What He Is.

In the eons, He had many names. Many titles.

That Which Goes Bump in the Night, The 13th Stroke of the Witching Hour, The Lord of Nightmares, the Monster Under the Bed… Lovely titles and fanciful words with which to describe Him but such is not what He names Himself at present.

Assassin.

Sophia Hess knew of karma. Knew it and spat on it and all that it encompassed. She did not believe in it and why should she? Criminals ran the streets, the pathetic vermin still lived when they were better off dead, and the strong had to tolerate a shared existence with the inferior weaklings. So know, she did not believe in retribution from a higher power because there was no power on this Earth that could stop her if she well and truly put her mind to it. She was Strong. She was a Predator.

There was no way that she was being hunted.

But in the back of her mind, where traitorous whispers of the old Sophia, the weak little child, still lingered she knew otherwise. That old her still spoke out against the thing that she had become, the Shadow Stalker that she was in costume and outside it and lately, the words had begun to change, the voice, once nothing more than a gentle whisper lost into the oblivion of the subconscious mind, was growing louder.

Fiercer.

Angrier.

She thought it was Taylor's fault at first. The girl that Sophia knew was Easy Prey, and had personally turned the majority of the school, students and faculty alike, against with damned ease. Sophia and her pack, for never were they friends merely underlings strong enough to stand beside her but never atop the same pedestal, had done many a horrible thing to Taylor. True, it was Sophia who had done the absolute worst but was it not Emma that suggested those very ideas? Was it not Emma, Taylor's former best friend, who supplied the poisoned barbs that armed Sophia's tongue and inspired her actions?

Actions that were now being stopped at every turn, with her own words being turned back upon her with equal if not greater prejudice in every possible form, from spray paint on her locker both in and outside the school, to even a remixed video on the 'net. The pranks and traps she could have blamed Taylor for, and did so with growing anger for quite some time, but it wasn't until she became directly confrontational that she discovered the prey's meat-shield.

Some no-name kid from out in the Midwest who was quite tall for his age, easily a head taller than Taylor, and Sophia would have called him lanky, a veritable scarecrow but he had skills to make him more than Easy Prey. It had to be him who had alleviated the worst of her actions against Taylor and it had to be him who was stalking her now. There could be no one else.

There just couldn't be.

She had seen the toy that he had given Taylor as a belated Christmas gift, a small plush animal that looked like a cartoony beetle, and Sophia had tried time and time again take it, to destroy it, and to shove the remains in Taylor's face. Except that each and every time she closed in on the damn thing, it was never where it was supposed to be and when it did turn up, it was clutching something of Taylor's in its velvety claws.

It wouldn't be so worrying if those things were what Sophia or her pack had simply stolen but the damn doll had turned up on Taylor's desk with her mother's flute in its grubby little claws in a pose that gave the idea that it was attempting to play a jolly old tune! A flute that was pristine and whole as the day it was first made when Sophia and her pack knew it could not be.

Sophia fucking hated that little toy.

But she fucking hated hers much more.

Taylor's idiot boyfriend thought her hateful glares were one of envy and so presented her with a toy of her own, right in front of everyone— and made such a show of it too god-damn it! She was too surprised, too enraged to do anything more than gape at him as he shoved the plush toy of a chicken, a goddamned chicken, in her hands. Goddamn, the thing even had a fucking bib for fuck's sake!

It didn't take her long to tear the thing to pieces and burn the remains in a trashcan.

The words she used to express her displeasure at finding the thing sitting in her locker and completely undamaged earned her a week of detention that not even her probation officer could get her out of. Didn't matter that she expanded the school's vocabulary and that a good majority of the goody-goody sheep were now against her. She gave the doll to Emma and told her to do what she wanted with it before storming off towards detention.

She found the toy sitting at her desk and Emma in the hospital recovering from a broken arm from a tumble down the stairs after she had thrown the thing into her fireplace. The thing had reappeared whole and unnoticed at the top of the staircase, causing Emma to trip over it the next morning. The pain of her broken arm didn't stop the girl from noticing the fact that the toy was looking down at her, its smile as wide as ever.

And so it went for weeks, Sophia attempting to get rid of the toy and it following her everywhere she went, causing misfortune to everyone that dared to try and take it away from her. Bad enough that it kept turning up in odd places at school —it had been fucking sitting on the toilet she was going to use before she flushed its fabric ass down the drain— but it was even turning up where the loser Wards could see it! Fucking Armsmaster had commented on her apparent dependency on the damn thing and told her outright that she would be receiving psychiatric evaluation if she didn't get leave it at home where it belonged!

She had beaten many an ABB and E88 gang member that night, to such a point that she was sure that the pansy Panacea had to be called in to treat them. Her frustrations only rose from the decidedly one-sided beatings she had dealt out, and so she had gone to the rooftops to find more prey.

The toy was sitting there, waiting for her.

Except now, in the light of the waxing moon, she realized just what everyone else had been saying, comments and words that she readily ignored in favor of ridding herself of the toy's presence in as violent a way as possible. The chicken was whole and otherwise undamaged but it was clearly different than when she first got it. Before, it was a cutesy little chick with bright eyes and a big toothy grin on its stupid little face.

It still had the teeth but where they were rectangular and flat as boards, they were triangular fangs, no two-ways about it. It eyes, a brilliant blue, were now completely and utterly black save for a single pinprick of white that sat dead center in the orbs and yet seemed to follow her as she moved. Its bib was stained with ichor and the cartoony little cupcake it was holding had changed its expression from sappily optimistic to a rather feral visage.

"The fuck is this?!" she grabbed the toy and shook it in her hands. "You… You're some kind of demented tinker tech contraption aren't you, you little shit?! You think you can scare me?! You think that you can intimidate me with your lame ass disappearing and reappearing act!?"

The fang-lined beak opened wide and unleashed a horrendous noise that was not fully a human scream as it was an electronic distortion of one. She dropped the thing without a scream but her lip paid the price with how hard she bit down on them to prevent the sound from escaping her throat. She licked away the blood and raised her crossbow at the toy and wasn't all that surprised to find it missing once more.

"Great. Maybe I'm fucking hallucinating now."

RING! RI—!

She whirled in place, arrows flying from her crossbow and piercing through the desk, the telephone, and into the walls of the small office.

"The hell—?!" She turned around again and found another wall to her back and only two doors out of the small office space she inexplicably found herself in. A shining red button sat beneath a lonely white switch beside each door. She pressed the switch briefly and saw a small portion of a long hallway light up before succumbing to darkness once more the moment she pulled her hand away. "The fuck is going on here?! You tinker bastard, is this some sort of game to you messing with me like this?!"

A tablet sitting upon the desk suddenly lit up. Crossbow clutched tightly in her hand, she looked down at the screen and saw a real-time video of another room. A stage where two animatronic animals stood still as stone with a large banner hanging limply above them with the words WELCOME TO FRE just barely visible in the screen. She looked up towards the right door where she heard a faint sound of footsteps.

She scoffed and made to turn to shadows. A moment passed and her pupils shrank to pinpricks. She couldn't shift. Shadow Stalker tried again and found it impossible still and in her rising anger —not panic, she wasn't afraid not ever she was a predator a predator god damn it— she never noticed the sound of approaching footsteps, of steel stepping heavily upon tile flooring, drawing nearer.

She loosed a frustrated cry and turned to run through the open doorway and came face-to-bib with a familiar but all too different sight with kitchen knife in metallic hands. Her scream, loud and shrill though it was, was nothing compared to that of the animatronic as it lunged in for the kill.

Sophia was still screaming as she snapped up in her bed, eyes wide and clutching tightly upon the blanket like it was a lifeline. She looked about sharply, wide, fearful eyes taking in the familiar sights of her room as her breathing slowed to steady gasps of air. A faint sting of pain brought a hand to her shoulder and she felt a warm wetness trickle down her chest. She flicked on her bedside lamp and raw terror clamped tightly around her throat.

Sitting atop her drawer was the toy, whole and new as the day she first got it but for one tiny difference. The cupcake was gone, replaced by a miniature replica of a freshly sharpened knife that dripped droplets of red upon the hardwood.

Her eyes grew wide whilst her pupils shrank fine pinpricks in an ivory field and quivering in her ashen skull. At her bedside, the clock turned to 2:00 AM, several hours yet until the dawn and the end of the night, but so long as the Shadows stretched imploringly out from around hidden corners, she would never know peaceful slumber again. For the night may come to an end, but the Nightmare was far from over. For this was but merely…

The First Night…