“They were so new, and it felt like it was waiting.” Touching branches rattled as the house shuddered. “And it was. The very first night the very last family moved in. There were screams, and then silence. When the fog lifted they were all gone.”

She gazed across the street at the barren scraps of land. She’d felt something, walking by, but figured it for the house. Scantly a plasm out of place yonder, but there was definitely something unmistakably wrong.

Then it clicked, especially from this angle. It was the driveways. City outskirts were often littered with developments abandoned in various stages of completion. Nearly none of them boasted brand new driveways leading into unfounded plots.

Something had eaten the entire neighborhood save for this one, lonely, stubborn house. The structures, their occupants, even the vehicles were gone. And there was another trace of the mystery. The driveways were new, but some of the vehicles nesting there had left deposits. They had been in use, but not for very long.

Nothing remained of the elaborately spaced fencing, nor the infrastructure involved in supporting a row of homes. She took a Peek underground and yep! The junctions had been erased, but their cavities remained.

So it was smart, and knew not to attract official attention. Had it learned that lesson, then? Or was this instinct? What sort of creature preyed upon entire literal neighborhoods?

She patted the house’s wall comfortingly. “It’s okay, House. I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise, and I’ll keep you safe while I’m doing it!”

Blinding light erupted from across the street, its intensity fading as the high pitched whines, whistling pops and jingles escalated in strength before a final deafening gong rang out.

That was quick. She’d barely felt the pressure change before an entire industrial complex appeared out of thin air and into existence across the street. That kind of placebending took multiples of lots of things that few people had access to.

Luckily, they advertised. The complex’s gleaming glassed offices bore the crookedly scrawled logo of the Lidom Corporation.

When she turned her Sight upon the facility a whole lot of very disturbing things became clear, but she had more pressing concerns. While she had been noticing the facility, something else had been noticing her.

A racket of squealing metal and battering wood saved her life. As a clawed hand squeezed a cruel weapon’s fleshy trigger the House reacted, quickly covering an open window with a barrier of planks.

The boomdart wailed furiously at having been thwarted from its target, then exploded. One of the planks buckled, but held fast. The House had ripped part of it’s walls out and inverted them, to help her.

“Well, House, we’re under attack. May I draw a mark upon you? It will protect you from my spells.” A nearby cabinet door propped itself open to reveal its interior was a chalkboard. Supplies had been running low, according to the inventory log kept there. She scrawled her witchmark into the invited surface. They glittered together briefly, and then she Looked outside.

Dozens of armed security sorts were encircling the House. A mechanized woman was assuming command of the lot. A petrified wyrmling was slung across her back. Everyone else involved had powder or plasma based weaponry, marking her as the most likely sniper.

The girl in the house brought a small silver sphere out of a pocket of nothing. “I was told to wear this if I ever ran into trouble, and House, I’m pretty sure this counts.” She raised it slowly, not entirely sure how to proceed. It happened quick. The orb sensed the situation and sprang to life.

It flew out of her hand and into her mind. Her head felt horrifyingly, slushingly full of cold, creeping, power. It seeped into her brain and skull glands only to flow out through her eyes, the silver liquid hardening quickly and painlessly into a seamless mask of jarring angles, impossible fractals, and other meaningless shapes. It settled, finally into all three formation sets simultaneously and became the blank approximation of a featureless face, gleaming silver in the dark.

Months of senseless training made sense all at once. She flexed things she’d never felt before and hovered briefly, stretching the limits of an even further powerful form against gravity itself, and winning.

“I’ll be right back, House, this shouldn’t take long.” As she strode for the door it sprang open. Every shutter facing the street beat a deafening rhythm as the House rattled out an entrance for her.

A lot of guns were immediately trained her way, followed by a cruel, clicking laughter. “Shoot her if you want, boys, I bet she suffers nary a scratch. Do you really want to have to pay for new ammo? I got this.” The guns lowered.

The House didn’t want to watch this next bit, but it was part of the cycle of its life, its memories. It could run from this no more than it could anything else. And it was so, so important to remember those who had tried to help. Buildings see a lot in their time sheltering both the living and the dead, and what’s the difference to a structure, anyway? Only the ghosts know, right?

The women squared off in the street. One concerned with the thoughts and safety of buildings, the other mostly just bored.

Up close, the mechanized woman was a treat of tormented, demented works. Her skull had been elongated, flaring slightly. Every joint on the left side of her sported multiples, giving her an off-kilter list that wasn’t helped by the jagged strips of metal attempting the guise of a hand. The right side of her appeared normal in scope and scale, so long as you ignored the bony claws on her other hand or the gleaming metal and circuitry whorling around the entirety of her form.

You could see through her entirely in the places where skin had failed, scraps of grey flesh tethered through spikes of gold and strung with flux. Errant currents arced between the bits of her. They sparked as she giggled mechanically, cruelty itself dancing across the impossible hues in her eyes.

“I am Malice, and you are dead.” Her left hand flexed backwards, easily bending beyond itself. With a snap and a series of sickening, flesh-shredding sounds, her left hand began to split apart, continuing through her palms and nearly to the wrist. Her inner fingers went bendy, wrapping themselves around the forming spikes and intertwining into three opposing pincers.

Her claw severed the masked girl’s head from her body with ease, taking most of her torso with it in a single jagged, angular slash. The silver mask vanished. Dying eyes in a startled face were of no interest. Malice’s own eyes darted, sensors straining as circuits and organs attempted to track and perceive an object that declined to be such.

A small silver sphere rolled around portents of probability and made a choice. It shook a determined targeting reticule with a determination of its own and vanished through aether and into House. It couldn’t merge with the puzzled ghost it had briefly shared flesh with, nor would any of the humans outside be a good fit for very long.

Few would suspect a mirror, so that was the shape it took. And as the silver sphere oozed formlessly around a handy steel frame, as the viscera steamed in the street, as a machine briefly remembered its own time as flesh, a newly minted ghost reached across the barriers of dreams and death.

Malice tilted an eye, its rotation examining the structure with several dimensional lenses. Greed swelled within her sadistic soul. She wanted that mask, or sphere, or whatever its true form was. She’d killed three bearers of such things already and always the prize escaped. So too would it go here and now, as an Orb grabbed a House and a House grabbed a Ghost. They vanished, taking no chances with pursuit. Malice paused, looking quite foolish mid-leap, and hovered to the ground.

The Orb knew the risks involved, but had no means to explain them. The House and the Ghost had no choice if they wanted to survive, and while the three of them absolutely did just that, none of them were immediately happy about it when Derelict Rook was born.