The Sirusian Hunt

By Victoria Ashleigh Rose

I walk with a grim-faced man down a wide and dusty dirt trail, and I’ve never seen him before. It’s like he’s seeking something out, expecting something. Things don’t get any clearer when he hands me a map and traces the creased lines until the rough pads of his fingers halt. 

“This is the place.” 

I don’t even know his name, just that I’m supposed to follow him. The brittle map brings us to an old wooden pub that looks like it was built up in an abandoned house. There’s a decaying porch with empty beer jugs rolled into the corners and a musty stench of old pine. It’s a familiar landmark, giving a new meaning to ‘pub house,’ and it’s not the only of its kind, but I’m not sure how I know that. There is something I’m not grasping here. Where am I? 

            I follow the suspicious traveller into the side door of the pub, and a bell chimes. The old stuffy bar is full of ordinary and roughed-up people. He sniffs around—which is odd to begin with—then sticks out his arms and watches the hairs on them like he expects it to do something. I watch as he starts walking around the room with his arms out, yet he draws no attention to himself. Everyone is either accustomed to this behaviour, or they have enough to worry about already. Something tells me it’s the latter. 

After nothing happens, he sits down at the bar and tells me to get myself something to eat. We linger there for over an hour. 

I have long since finished eating and have no idea what we are still doing here, but the man is still looking around, expecting something, and I don’t question it. Instead, I listen to the rise and fall of bickering and laughing while the time slips by. I watch his prominent nose hairs wriggle as he takes another occasional sniff, but then his head shoots up startlingly fast. He takes a wicked breath in, so deep and loud that he resembles someone coming back from the dead, and he grips the countertop with both hands. I hear it crack under his strength. The hairs on his arms all stand up, and my heart nearly stops. 

He turns to me with frantic eyes and says in a dry, scraping voice, “I was wrong to lead you to this place.”

           I immediately protest. I don’t even ask what is happening; I just say, “I’m not leaving.”

“No,” he says, “we need to get everyone out.”

           He looks over his shoulder to the door on the north end of the room, strides to the center of the large buzzing pub, and screams. It’s a blood-curdling scream—a compulsive scream. From skinny blokes at the bar to meat-headed warriors to waitresses, every person gets out of their chair and rushes out. Not one of them looks back. Even I find myself powerfully drawn towards the door, but I’m fighting it. 

I look back at him.

The anxious man is crouched down in the middle of the room. He’s in an attack stance with his hand wrapped around a spear that wasn’t there before. He has his other hand against the ground as if he’s feeling for a rumble, and I run back to him. 

My feet practically slide backwards with each step I take like they have a mind of their own, but I drag myself to him and crouch down readily. 

“I’m staying,” I say aggressively, so he tosses me a weapon.

“Still have that map?” he asks me, and I nod. “Broucke Cove,” he says. I reach into my pocket for the folded paper, but he puts his arm out in front to stop me. His mouth is agape, and his eyes are wide, focused on nothing. That’s when he draws his spear.

I’m finally struck with fear as I begin to feel the subtle rumbling for myself. The only weapon I now have is a silver knife, and I have no idea what we are up against.

I turn back to him and say, “Show me what’s coming,” like somehow, I know that he can.

           He grabs my arm and stares at me, sucking me into his eyes. An army is coming, and I know where I am now. 

           The more familiar I grow within every dream that takes me here, the quicker I can gain consciousness within.

My soul is waking up; I can feel it.

           I can finally identify the beasts clawing towards this wide brittle house. They’re Sirusians, but I have never seen one before, and I was not ready to.

They’re huge creatures—a lot larger than I ever expected them to be. Their skin is burnt and crisp, and their eyes are grotesquely human—but bright yellow. Painfully yellow. Their tails are also the length of me. The shape of the end is curled and jagged, crowning around a portal sparking in its centre, like a two-dimensional rift in space, completely contained. That’s how I was able to identify them.

           Sirusians are the soul-sucking, hive-minded creators of this place, this dreamy place that you never want to wake up in… and never want to wake up from. 

Fusion. 

I wake up here almost every night.

           These creatures will latch on to you like a tick, pulling your soul into this realm with them. Your body goes limp while your mind is sent to this hazy place; the limbo between existing realms made up from the deepest parts of your subconscious; the details of your mind only malleable to these creatures… and people like me. My soul is already tethered here without them.

They completely shape reality here, like self-serving gods, fusing together a world with the consciousness of stolen souls, but they are not my gods. No. I am their curse. They create, and I bend.

           If they latch onto your mind, their powers of illusionary manipulation are unmatched, and they’ll take the form of anything they want you to see, anything that’ll keep you dreaming. And as you sleep, you wither. But every one of the Sirusians charging towards this pub house are in their terrifying natural form, and they’re rapidly approaching us. 

I need to wake up.

           I break out of the man’s vision, the hundreds of them tearing their way through the grass, ripping up the trails on their way to us. We had minutes, less than minutes. 

Perhaps he really meant to bring me to this place; maybe I’m his magnet. 

“If you’re sensible,” he says, “you’ll hide.”

           When I feel the rumble in the ground grow heavier beneath us, he stands up to face the door, and I run. I run through the long corridor right to the end, where it has another north-facing door, and this time I see them for real. I can hear their strange heavy breathing, their throaty human growls, and soon, their claw marks on the roof. I bolt for the nearest door and slam it shut. I’m in an empty room now with nothing but a broken bed frame and cobwebs. I run for the closet and lock myself in.

           A door bursts down. The dreadful growls are louder now and paired with creaking footsteps on the old wooden floors. This time the bedroom door is forced open, and I peer through the cracks of the closet. I can see them. They have no nostrils, but their eyes are pulsing like they are breathing through their sockets… sniffing me out. Then one of them looks at the closet door. I know that this lock is not going to protect me. 

I need to wake up. I need to WAKE UP. Or maybe I just need to focus.

           In dreams, we all have powers. Some are more aware of them than others. Some people can fly, some are invisible, and some can think of a place and just go there, or even think of an item and make it appear. This place is no different, but you must first gather consciousness. In Fusion, you must know where you are. You must wake up within. 

I am staring at the back wall of this closet, and I search deep for the strength within me. ‘Fusion,’ I think. ‘Fusion. Fusion. Fusion.’

I press my hands against this wooden wall, this malleable wall, and I focus until it’s not a wall anymore. I run as far into the closet as I can, moving through doors and dark tunnels and crawlspaces, all as they form at my will. It frustrates the hell out of the Sirusians when I alter the reality they’ve worked so hard to create. It makes me a traceable target, but never before have I been found. Never have they been this close to me.

           Finally, I can conjure up a door that leads back to the north hallway. I can see the main way out of this house through the crack, but when I press my ear to it, I hear the gross eye-socket breathing of a Sirusian sniffing around me. I have no idea how to make my move, but then I hear slashing, followed by an empowered shout from the man I followed into this wretched place. The Sirusian’s breathing hitches in the hallway, and I know it’s my chance. 

I charge out to see the man standing over the fleshy beast as it bleeds out of a slash in its chest, and something about it doesn’t make sense to me. I look up and see the man with a scimitar now, rather than the spear he carried, and it makes me wonder what the use of a spear against a Sirusian was in the first place. You can’t stab a Sirusian. You can’t kill it through its chest. I look back down at the dead creature on the ground, and my eyebrows furrow, and then the man screams. My feet drag me through the hallway and out the front door, but I don’t go unnoticed.

They see me. And they come running.

           At least 8 of them are on my trail, and they aren’t fast, but they’re faster than me. In a desperate panic, I leap off the ground and hope that the wind will catch me. No—I demand that the wind catches me, and it does, so I push myself as high as I can through the air and thrust forward. I am just high enough that if they jump, they can’t yank me back down to the ground, but I know I will grow tired quickly, and I can’t land again until I’ve escaped them.

I push and push through the wind with every bit of power I have until I collapse on the forest trail. I know they are still right behind me, but momentarily, they can’t see me, so I pull out that map and desperately search for Brouke Cove.

           I sigh with relief as I find that I am already on the trail I must take, so I pick up my feet and keep running until a house in the forest persuades me to stop. There’s something about this house, now. I walk closer to it and look at the architecture of the beams supporting the balcony, then I look at the multiple doors of the giant garage, big enough for a dragon or two. It’s my friend’s house, but it’s not where it’s supposed to be—not in this land, not in Fusion. How have they accessed my mind? I’m pushing through haze and cloudiness to make sense of it all when I hear shouting to pull me out of my trance—or perhaps, to pull me back in. It’s recognizable shouting; the guy from the pub house is speeding towards me down the trail and screaming for his own dragon to come. With perfect timing, a firebird swoops down, igniting the trees that it grazes with its wings, and the guy, who I can only assume at this point to be a Sirusian hunter, leaps onto its back as if the fire doesn’t faze him. 

He then sweeps right under me, and I swing onto its back behind him. The bird’s fire is all around us, but it doesn’t burn. It’s warm and dances around my skin, tickling the hairs that it touches rather than eating away at them. I watch the trees underneath us as we fly. The forestry is unstable. It quivers when you look at it too long, it fades when you look away, and so much of it is missing—blotches of incomplete space. 

Soon, we land at what I can only imagine is the cove. We slide down from the firebird, and the Sirusian hunter sends him away, then gestures me to follow him inside. The cove has torches lit and maps drawn all over the walls. There’s a fire in the centre and an old worn-out mattress with a body on it. And then suddenly without one. 

“I live here. We’re safe.” The hunter speaks. My eyes go wide. He senses it. “I’ve lived here since they killed me, and now… now I kill them. And you can help me.”  

The hunter throws me his scimitar while wearing a forceful look. I sense that he’s not asking.  

           I don’t understand why I haven’t woken up yet. We escaped the Sirusians, and my mind feels fully conscious, but I can’t find the power to escape. 

           “You’ve lived here since they killed you,” I repeat. Then I look back to the unmade bed. The covers are still indented. “—And now you kill them.” I look down at the clean blade in my hand, the same blade that allegedly slit through that Sirusian’s stomach. There’s not a trace of dry blood on it. “You can’t kill a Sirusian with a spear,” I whisper to myself. The man starts growling deep and low within his throat. “You can’t kill a Sirusian through its chest. What kind of hunter are you? You’re not a Fused Elusier like me. What kind of powers do you have?” There’s thick accusation in my voice, and the hunter starts to back away from me. He yanks out his neck, and the blade in my hand disappears. Then I flick my wrist and conjure it back. 

I readjust my grip around it, and his eyes start to pulse. “What is your name!” I scream, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t match his compulsion. He just shakes out his hair, stretches uncomfortably in his body, and looks at the bed in the back of the cove. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, “… I’m dead.” 

There’s a loose raspiness to his voice now, almost as if it’s sliding off. He suddenly walks towards me, brings a hand up to my throat, and presses the back of a cold arched claw against my jugular. “And in a moment, so are you.” 

Now his eyes are yellow, and I can feel the deterioration of my physical body under the weight of his single sharp claw. I stare dead at him and laugh from the bellows of my stomach. It throws him off just enough for me to retighten my fading hand around the curved blade as it’s slipping through my fingers.

           “A Sirusian that steals the souls of Elusiers. How long have you been latched on to me?” 

I cut the blade across his stomach in one bold move, and of course, it won’t kill him, I remember that now, but it will unveil his true form. The body collapses to the ground and flips inside out as burnt hands slide through the slit from my blade and pick itself up. The creature grows, cracking and stretching until it towers over me, and my heart pulses. It’s the most beautiful, lively thing I’ve felt. Only now does this journey feel like it’s been days; Days without breathing, without sleeping. 

           What’s left of the man’s skin coils into tight crispy flesh and wraps around to form the crown at the end of his tail. When the skin connects, he flicks it, and a rift in the realm abruptly sparks. I have seconds to react, so I lunge at the tail with the fierce weight of my whole body, and the curved blade slices the end of it cleanly off. There is a tortured howl released from every dry pore, and the beast collapses over me. I roll quickly out of the way, but I get scraped by its rough texture, and it almost feels real now. I can feel the rift in the realm vibrating in its fleshy cage, and I drag myself over to it, ripping the crowning apart with my bare hands. The rift is released. The portal practically shimmers as it widens like unravelling fabric. I feel it consume me, and the realm finally spits me back out.

           I get roughly yanked back into myself and immediately feel the grass from my homeland on my back. The weight of the cold limp creature is crushing me. I am awake. 

I struggle underneath it as I try to pry its body off of me, then one-by-one, I tug its hooked claws out of my skin.  

The creature is hollow, completely stiff, so once I finally get on my feet, I reach over and snap off the crowned portal at the end of its long tail as a keepsake. The rest of the creature crumbles into a pile of dried flesh, and I can already hear the death daisies buzzing nearby to collect its dust. My blood slowly begins to circulate, filling me back up with the strength to not sway where I stand, and the pounding in my head tells me it’s been days since my last drink of water.

I smile up at the misty sky, and somewhere inside of me, I laugh.