As Jordan listened to the myriad voices in her head, she could feel her vision swim, shifting the space around her as it became consumed in an all-encompassing fog. As it dissipated, Jordan found herself standing on a dirt road. The area around her was pitch-black, save for the sky above, glittering lights of the stars doing nothing to brighten the space. Here, Jordan could feel a great heaviness and an even greater dread. Somewhere in the dark, somewhere on this road, someone was breathing raggedly.
"Listen, child. On this road, a contract was forged between Man and the first of our fallen brethren. The one whose soul is bound to the dissipating sands of timeโthey are your charge. They made a foolish mistake for the sake of revenge."
Jordan hears the breathing getting closer, becoming gravelly and bestial. A newfound gravity begins to sink her shoulders.
"Salvation awaits them, but only you can deliver unto them its glory. What I ask of you is no small matter; you face..."
Jordan watches as a silhouette grows in size, standing at nearly double her height. Antlers, crooked and thorned, threaten to pierce the very night sky, and two hollow white orbs where its eyes might be assumed to exist dare to invade the Divine's very being with simply its gaze.
"...Hell itself."
Beneath the head of the hulking silhouette, Jordan notices a glint in the dark. A pair of coiled serpents, made of silver, devouring themselves as they submerge into the black. She hears a growl as the silhouette lunges toward her, claws outstretched.
Before she can react, the scene has changed, revealing the southern road to Stone's Throw. She has returned to the present, the last frame of the vision burned into her mind: a decaying skull, rotting meat sloughing off the discolored bone in chunks. The jaw of the creature, unhinged and wide, threatening to swallow her whole. The skin, rippling with muscle and scars and abscesses, weeping a sickly fluid. The thirst for blood. The creature, in her newly awakened reliquary of knowledge, seems oddly familiar. The name is dredged from a memory she didn't know she had until now, until it's sifted from the deep and made clear to her.
There's a wendigo in Stone's Throw.
The place was silent for several moments, the signs of someone inside only made apparent through the toppling of some glass object from within. For a time, there was no answer to the knock at the door, but then, it swung open with the width of a hand, the grizzled face of a hungover man peering through the crack as a familiar of cigarettes and faint alcohol wafted out. He sighed, thinking the woman at the door was someone else, but then he heard her speak.
โGood morning. If you have a moment, Iโd like to ask you a few questions about the Clara Mathews situation.โ
The man stared at Iustina, casually failing to rub the graying stubble on his chin. His eyes shifted in various directions almost imperceptibly, as if the world decided not to stay in one spot. With a gruff clear of this throat, he repositioned his body, standing just a little bit firmer, the sparse light of the sunrise illuminating his lack of a shirt.
"You a cop?" he asks.
