The nearest villager’s head snapped toward Elias a half-second before her whole body did, and that half-second was the only warning any of them got.
“Move!” Mira shouted, and the four of them scattered as the frozen tableau in the square shattered all at once — not into people anymore, but into something Elias’s eyes kept sliding off, like they weren’t finished being described.
The woman who’d been dropping her basket forever now dropped it for the last time and kept coming, and where her face should have held an expression there was only a smear, like ink dragged wet across paper before it dried.
“That’s not — those aren’t villagers,” Toby said, backpedaling hard, “those are *background*, those are set dressing, they’re not supposed to *move*—”
“They’re not supposed to do a lot of things and they’re doing them anyway,” Dorian snapped, sword-light flaring up his arm.
“Focus!”
The boy — the farmboy, the chosen one, the hero this entire golden wheat-field world had apparently been built to orbit — hadn’t moved from the center of the square.
He stood frozen in a different way than the villagers had been, sword hanging loose at his side, watching the smeared shapes close in on the strangers who weren’t supposed to exist in his chapter yet. Get faster updates on novelping dot com.
“Kid!” Elias shouted at him.
“A little help would be—”
“I don’t know what to do,” the boy said, and it wasn’t defiance, it was something worse — genuine, naked panic.
“I’ve fought things before, I’ve fought *bandits*, I’ve fought a wyvern, but I’ve never — nothing’s ever come off-script before, there isn’t a — there isn’t a *line* for this—”
One of the smeared shapes reached Dorian first.
He cut it in half with a clean stroke of light, and for one triumphant second it looked like it had worked — until both halves kept crawling toward him anyway, faster now, trailing wisps of something that looked less like blood and more like torn paper unspooling into threads.
“Cutting them doesn’t *stop* them,” Dorian said, backing up fast, first crack in his voice since they’d arrived. Get faster updates on g.com.
“Priya didn’t say anything about things that don’t *stop*—”
The ground beneath the square’s central well began to crack — not from any of the smeared villagers, but from underneath, deep, a sound like a spine of old paper folding the wrong way.
Wheat stalks for a hundred feet around bent inward as though something below was inhaling.
The farmboy’s head whipped toward the well, and for the first time his fear had a name attached to it.
“Oh no,” he said.
“Not again. Not so soon—”
The well’s stone lip split apart entirely, and something began to climb out of it that was shaped, unmistakably, exactly like him.