IV. The Morrowkin Attack

A group of investigators’ visit to Sabine’s office triggered something not anticipated. Their act of consulting a temporal oracle while carrying the residue of their own time-altered experiences, residue from the journey through the First Gate of Slumber into a dream realm of Gregor Pendergrast, their passage through fey realms, and their encounters with forces that bend causality created a kind of temporal disturbance that attracted unwanted attention.

Sabine sensed it before they did.

“Time is a funny thing,” she said, her hand halting mid-rummage through a desk drawer. “I thought I had more of it, but… but you’ve already slipped through it. Ah, that would explain… them.”

The Morrowkin appeared at the edges of perception. Figures draped in the tattered remnants of nobleman’s attire, wearing top hats that stretched unnaturally tall and thin. Their elongated forms strained against an unseen barrier, as though pressing through a veil of reality itself. Their features remained shrouded in shadow, but the air around them vibrated with hunger, a relentless craving for lost possibilities, futures that had been twisted, timelines that had been altered.

Sabine’s wards held most of them. Most, but not all. One slipped through. Her encounter with them was brief and violent, and the details are recorded elsewhere. What matters here is Sabine’s reaction in the aftermath.

“Well, that was quite the thrill! It’s fortunate only one slipped through, or might slip through, my wards. Here, take the key and find the book of Unseen Currents. It’s probably wise if we steer clear of each other until the new future you’ve spun stabilizes a bit. They’re already circling around me once… and with you here too… well, it would cause another feeding frenzy of piranhas. Wait or is that feeding frenzy of guppies, are guppies the ones with the teeth?”

She gave them the Many-Shaped Key and sent them away. The cheerfulness was, I believe, genuine. The fear beneath it was equally genuine. The Morrowkin feed on temporal anomalies, and Sabine, by her very nature, is the largest temporal anomaly in Lepidstadt. The investigators’ presence amplified the signal.

She sent them away to protect them, and to protect herself, and I suspect she had known she would need to do this long before they arrived.