Chapter 12: The Familiar Predator

Chapter 12: The Familiar Predator

Panic is a poor fuel; it burns hot and fast, leaving only the ash of exhaustion behind. Sara ran on that ash, her movements a clumsy, staggering flight through the labyrinthine squalor of a forgotten London. The slick cobblestones tried to steal her footing with every step, and the thick, soupy fog was an enemy in itself, clinging to her, muffling sound, and turning every corner into a potential dead end.

Behind her, the sound of crackling static was a relentless pursuer. It wasn't the sound of footsteps, but of reality itself being shredded by the passage of the things that hunted her. She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw their dark forms glitching through the fog, phasing through the corners of buildings, their movements governed by a physics of pure malice. They were gaining.

The familiar, nauseating pressure began to build behind her eyes. The internal static that was her constant companion spiked in volume, climbing from a buzz to a high-pitched scream. The world around her started to feel thin, brittle, like a photograph about to tear.

It's coming.

The thought was not a product of hope but of desperate, newly-won experience. The jumps were violent, agonizing, but they were also an escape. A chaotic, unpredictable roll of the dice.

Instead of trying to outrun the hunters, she changed tactics. She threw herself into a recessed doorway, a dark mouth reeking of gin and despair, and braced herself. The leading silhouette, a broad, brutish shape, lunged for her, its form dissolving into a blur of static. Just as it was about to reach her, the world shattered.

Agony. Annihilation. The roaring waterfall of time.

She was spat out into blinding sunlight and stifling heat, landing in a heap on coarse, sun-baked sand. The air was bone-dry. Before she could even process the vista of endless dunes under a merciless white sun, the internal alarm screamed again. The pressure was already building. The jump had only bought her seconds. She didn’t even have time to see if they had followed. The world dissolved once more.

This time, she landed in the mud and splintered wood of a trench. The air thrummed with a low, distant thunder, and the sky above the narrow channel of earth was a grim, featureless grey. The stench of rain, rot, and fear was overpowering. But she didn't hesitate. Her body, learning a new and terrible muscle memory, was already moving. Scramble. Hide. Survive.

She crawled into a small dugout carved into the trench wall, pulling a sheet of rusted corrugated metal over the entrance. She huddled in the damp darkness, making herself small, her breath coming in ragged, painful sobs. The fissures on her arms and hands burned with a white-hot intensity, each new jump seeming to widen them, to deepen the violation of her physical form. The tremor in her limbs was a constant, violent shudder.

This became her new existence. A frantic, terrifying rhythm of survival. Jump. Land. Hide. Wait. The moments of calm were fleeting, measured in seconds or, if she was lucky, minutes. The universe flung her through its history like a discarded stone: a primeval forest where giant ferns brushed against her face; a sterile, white corridor humming with the sound of advanced technology; a city street where strange, boxy cars roared past. Each new location was just a temporary hiding place.

Because they always found her.

Her temporal bleeding, the constant paradoxical signal of her existence, was too loud. The hunters would always be drawn to it. She learned to use the jumps as a weapon, a desperate gambit to throw them off her trail for a precious few moments, but it was a losing battle. She was just delaying the inevitable.

Another jump ripped her from the trench, tossing her through the chaotic vortex before depositing her with a jarring thud on a floor of cold, broken stone. The landing was rough, and she cried out as a fresh, searing pain shot up her arm. A new crack had opened on her bicep, a deep, black fissure that seemed to drink the light.

She pushed herself up, her body a symphony of agony. She was in a vast, ruined space. The roof was gone, revealing a bruised twilight sky. Tall, shattered arches reached up like the ribs of a leviathan’s skeleton. Stained-glass windows, mostly blown out, still held jagged shards that caught the fading light in mournful jewels of colour. A bombed-out church, from a war she couldn’t place.

It was quieter here. The air was still. She crawled behind the remnants of a stone altar, the carved surface cool against her feverish skin. The static in her head was a dull roar, but the tell-tale spike of an imminent jump wasn't there. This pause felt… longer. She had a minute. Maybe more.

And just as she had known they would, they came.

They didn't burst in. They seeped into existence at the edges of the ruined nave. Three of them. They flickered into view like bad reception, their static forms a violent intrusion into the hallowed silence. They began to drift forward, their movements hungry and erratic, like scavenging animals catching a scent. They fanned out, their featureless heads turning, scanning the shadows.

But there was a fourth.

It appeared near the shattered rose window, high above the entrance. It didn't glitch into being; it simply was there, a perfect, man-shaped cutout against the dying light. It was utterly still. While the other three moved with a frenzied, mindless hunger, this one was different. It was patient. It watched.

Sara’s breath caught in her throat. She knew that shape. She knew that stillness. It was the silhouette from the garden. The form born on the pier. The broad shoulders, the slight paunch that was now just a distortion in its shadowy form, the way it held its head with a slight, inquisitive tilt. It was him.

The other three Chronovores closed in on her position, their crackling growing louder, more agitated. One of them, the unnaturally tall, thin one, located her. It let out a shriek of pure static and lunged toward the altar.

Sara braced for the impact, for the tearing claws, for the end.

But before it could reach her, the fourth silhouette moved. It wasn't the chaotic, glitching lunge of the others. It dropped from its perch near the window, falling twenty feet to the stone floor and landing without a sound, without impact, its form absorbing the momentum. It reappeared between the attacking Chronovore and Sara’s hiding place.

It didn't attack the other creature. It simply stood in its way, a silent, obsidian barrier. The tall Chronovore glitched to a halt, its static form buzzing with confusion and rage. It tried to phase around the silent watcher, but the fourth silhouette mirrored its movement, blocking it again. There was no fight, just a simple, absolute denial of access.

Frustrated, the tall predator let out another shriek of static and turned, its attention now fixed on the figure blocking its path. The other two hunters paused, their mindless hunger momentarily disrupted by this strange, inexplicable behavior.

It was a standoff between monsters. And Sara was the prize.

She stared at the back of the familiar, silent predator. It wasn't protecting her. She knew that with a certainty that chilled her to the bone. Its posture wasn't defensive; it was proprietary. It was a larger predator chasing jackals away from its kill.

She could feel its presence, an aura of cold, calculating intelligence that was profoundly different from the raw, instinctual hunger of the others. It wasn't just a monster. It was Milton. The obsessive, manipulative, patient salesman was still in there, buried beneath the static and the shadow.

He had followed her through history. He had watched her run, watched her hide, watched her body crack and tear at the seams. And now, he was keeping the others at bay. But why? If he wanted to consume her, to feed on her temporal energy, why wasn't he attacking? Why chase off the competition?

The terrible answer began to form in her mind. He wasn't hunting her for a quick meal. This was something else. A farmer doesn't slaughter his livestock the moment they're born. He waits. He cultivates. He lets them fatten.

Milton wasn't hunting her. He was herding her. He was watching her decay, waiting for her to ripen.