The Sicarian

It was a dilapidated shopping mall like any other: filled with wanting, needing and right out jaded consumers, busy as a beehive in the summer, sprinkled with a social or moral outcast here and there, constantly watched over by a veritable army of guards, whose not-so-vigilant vigil was only matched by that of cynic mothers, adamant on watching their careless offspring teach themselves about life, by letting them frolic - and irritate - freely.

As both puzzling obese guards and eerily smiling mothers would gladly tell you, they never, ever lost something or someone out of sight. Truth to be told, that is a palpable lie. A monstrosity of a mangled half-truth, an affront to true, factual observations.

Look around you, Formling, and you could be forgiven for believing that you can see a vivid and detailed picture of your surroundings. Indeed, you may even think that your eyes never deceive you. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for your brain. This is fact; scholars have observed and proven that it is possible to see something without observing it, registering it.

And deep in their mundane hearts, those guardians and matriarchs know this is the Truth. They observe day in, day out and day in, day out, they observe expensive objects displace themselves mysteriously right into someone's waiting arms. Without seeing it.

Or they observe a wandering child, without seeing it. Luck is on their side, most of the Time, as before it is ready to be truly called lost, they are found. After all, you can't quite say something is truly lost if it's only gone for a few days, which seem like a few minutes anyway, right?

With that truth in place, the leap of logic to concluding sometimes someone or something surely does become permanently unseen and unobserved, isn’t that big. One such soul who is peculiarly close to finding that one out was one of the moral outcasts, on the verge of becoming a social outcast. He wasn't lost in the more literal sense of the word, but his morals were surely lost and his social status was all but lost.

You see, in his free time, this man was a shark - a loan shark of the ugly kind. People were catching up to his act quickly and had begun to excommunicate the man (let's call him Shark for now; his True Name doesn't matter much). This, in a society which seems to thrive on communicating with it's members wherever they go, are, sleep or die, is quite horrible; 'tis the amount of audiovisual pestering one receives on a daily basis one measure his or her self importance with.

Shark was in a two-step process of forgetting this, in his eyes, atrocity. Yes, he had made many mistakes, but truly, he wasn't that terribly bad, was he? It was all a misunderstanding, a mistake; people would come around soon enough; he was only giving people what they wanted so badly in return for what he wanted so badly: interest, everyone made mistakes, there were people worse than him...Et ceterea, et cetera, argumentum ad nauseam, and so forth...

It was such thoughts he thought while he made himself feel miserable, his first step. I will have to admit: Shark was quite good at that. One day, he had made himself feel so miserable, his wife became so tired of the whining, that she threatened to pull the trigger for him.

He was a strange man, that Shark. Next to being a loan shark, a lonely man who loved lamenting his life more than aforementioned life itself, he prided himself on his repertoire of crummy jokes, odd quotations and quaint stories. For instance, if he was attending a party, a rare occasion matched in rarity only by his one-night-stands, and the subject of beliefs came up, he was often found saying something along the lines of "It matters not if you believe, in say, Unicorns, but if Unicorns believe in you.” a quote he was quite fond of.

And, after that, Shark would make a straight beeline for the biggest buffet, leaving behind him a bevy of baffled guests and partygoers, puzzling and pondering about Unicorns and about what it had to do with anything at all.

'Tis perhaps a strange quote to quote of this Shark, but the loaning man would soon find out it held more truth, was a more important question, than either he himself, the guests or party-goers chose to believe.

The moment Shark left the convenient convenience store with a bottle of bad booze, his second step, he saw a small boy with the biggest eyes he had ever seen. The eyes seemed to swallow his gaze whole, as if the boy was literally hungry for eye contact. With a frightful voice fitting of a boy that size and apparent age, the toddler uttered a question: "Are you my daddy?". Shark smirked and uttered something back. Something he chose to believe to be witty: "Only if they prove it before court."

Without much of a second thought, not well versed in the customs and mannerisms of small boys, he walked away. To his surprise, the boy, swiftly and surely, followed suit. Shark tried to shoo him away a few times, but gave up soon and walked into a less used part of the shopping mall, intend on removing the boy by force if need be. But, before that, he quickly turned around, went a boo-ing and hiss-ing, enough to make a snake jealous...to no avail. When Shark turned around again, he had a second surprise: he almost literally walked into a...costumed customer who definitely wasn't there a second ago.

This strange stranger was tall, lean, and, in all probability, mean. His clothing was charcoal black and he wore a bone white mask, which had no mouth to speak of or with and two pitch-black eyes. Shark started to stare, wanted to say something, but he found out his tongue had left him, like a rat leaving a sinking ship.

"Shapeshifter third Echelon, mind moulder first Echelon. You are currently violating three Treaties and one Law."

Said the strange stranger, who paid no heed to Shark’s confusion and didn’t try to explain him or who he was. A split second of delicious (delirious?) silence followed.

"The Cryptarchy sends its regards. The offer is still the same."

The strange stranger spoke no more, allowing Shark to catch up with the events. First the loan shark analysed the stranger’s voice. It was definitely a 'he', definitely a masculine voice, but there was a strange echo to the voice, as if there was someone with an impossibly low grumbling voice echoing him and someone with a high-pitched screeching voice aping the stranger's every word, with a second of delay.

And, Shark only noticed it just now, it seemed the Stranger, with a capital S because it was the strangest stranger Shark had ever seen, wasn't entirely...here. Staring at him, Shark couldn’t help it, his eyes started to hurt; the outlines of the Stranger seemed strangely...absent to him, for lack of a better word. His normally trustful eyes tried to see something his befuddled mind did not want to observe and neither could understand.

Where the rest of the Stranger was to be found, that part that wasn't quite visible, as Shark thought of and about it, the loan shark had no idea. But, it was sure to be an unpleasant place. He didn’t know why he thought that, he just did.

Shark had finally found his tongue again, which had been hiding in his lack of a true spine, pried it out of the hiding place and decided to answer, say something back. Of course, it was in his self-imposed, self-serving ‘tough guy’ style.

"What the Hell are you talking about?"

As the last vowel and its echoes died out, Shark immediately fervently wished he hadn't uttered those words or in fact, any words at all. He had thought the stranger had looked at him, but now he felt the horribly difference, he felt, and knew, only now the Stranger was looking at him and it was a entirely unpleasant sensation, to say the least.

"I did not address you, Formling."

From behind the loan shark, the Formling, came another voice, a third one, or a fifth one if you counted the echoes in the Stranger's voice as strange, separate entities. It was the same voice the boy had used, the same as before, but to Shark's surprise it now came from above his head, as opposed to a more comfortable, boy-ish height.

"He addressed me, Formling. Loan shark."

Another silence came to be and it was strangely hostile to Shark, as if it knew more than he did, which, in fact, was the case.

"Long time, no see, Sicarian."

Reader, at this point I'd like to remind you of what I talked about in the beginning. Humanity especially is utterly blind to its surroundings. I do not mean to discourage you to look, not at all, or to suggest you can't see, because your eyes perceive light perfectly. No, the reason I talked about to see and to observe, is because Humanity simply bone-headedly refuses to actually, truthfully, observe everything.

For instance, if one dresses up a Kobold as a Gnome and have it jump up and down in some unsuspecting shopping mall, perhaps even one like this one, all Humanity will ever, ever observe is a very cute and astonishingly realistic animatronics display. Thusly, trying to make Humanity observe is like trying to explain electroastromorphology to a Troll: an amusing and perhaps entrancing experiment, but ultimately entirely utterly pointless.

So, when the “small boy”, who had pestered Shark earlier on, stepped between said loan shark and, as it would appear, the strange Sicarian, all Shark saw was a pretty, snow white horse, who had apparently appeared out of nowhere. Or something or some such...At this point in time, Shark couldn't quite tell, as his subconscious had betrayed him and had secretly decided to self-censor all the audiovisual input the conscious received. A common occurrence when it's between the Formlings...and us.

And in other words, Shark didn't actually observe the Unicorn, as well as he replaced him with something he could safely understand and see, within the limits of his reason. And, as a quaint coincidence, but in these matters it probably wasn't the case at all, it happened that said Unicorn had a hard time believing in the Formling; perhaps the legends of Formlings wielding swords and riding Unicorns like himself into battle were Legend after all.

"What will it be, Unicorn?"

"I accept the Cryptarchy's offer. Let us depart."

"Start moving, then. You know the Way. In the mean time, I'll dispatch this Formling. I won't let him live. This is important to the Balance."

"Do as you must, Sicarian. But remind me to ask you more about this Balance of yours later on."

The Sicarian produced a blade out of nowhere, out of thin air and shadows. And this is how it looked: a sliver of shadow, a silent slicing device. It was hard to see and neigh impossible to observe, but it was a sharp enough blade with enough form to kill with, nevertheless. It sliced into Shark's quirky heart, leaving the loan shark with a nice specimen of an acute and ultimately deadly heart attack.

This wasn't to be a riddle for the Formling "Police"; afterwards the body turned to ash and the ash to loose atoms.

A pity, really.

Ycg ouincamv: ec ed y pmaccehk un y linca du cinjeja dra Tyo?
-The Writer.