The city buzzed like a hornet nest wired for rave—slick streets flashing with broken rainbow lights, skyscrapers glittering in cursed alloys, and supernatural creatures thick in every alleyway. Above, drones patrolled lazily, tagging spell signatures and energy emissions, while below, the curbs steamed with fried demon dumplings and vape spells leaking from under trench coats. In this part of the world, no one batted an eye at a hag giving a lap dance to a werewolf.
In fact, the werewolf looked thrilled—until halfway through the strip, the hag shapeshifted back into a bony old woman, saggy magic and all. The werewolf blinked, gasped, then threw extra cash on the floor with a growl. "Keep the clothes on, granny," he yelped, bolting from the booth. The hag cackled, collected her notes, and shapeshifted again—this time into a velvet panther. The strip club's name, "Mamaw's," flickered overhead like a dying threat.
But this story ain't about that hag. Not today.
We cut across a few city blocks where the buzz dies down, traded for silence and suspicion. Fog hung low like a guilty conscience. There, in the shadow of a boarded-up house with peeling hex wards and a too-quiet front yard, a figure sat on the stoop like she belonged to the night itself.
Nightingale.
She was built like a divine contradiction—thick in every place men feared and women worshiped. Her body curved like danger in silk, hips wide as judgment, thighs full of power, and a belly with a soft little pouch that rested proudly above her spell-weaving bones. Her breasts, generous enough to make a statue blush, seemed almost too large for her frame—GG cup by mortal measure, but no surgeon could claim that work. That's where she stored her magic. Literally. Her body was a vault, her flesh a living spellbook.
Her skin was night turned liquid—so dark it shimmered like onyx in the right lighting. It forced her to wear neon makeup to be seen by mortal eyes. Her hair was a soft, defiant lavender that fell in waves around her shoulders like whispered warnings.
People who saw her assumed she'd been sculpted in a lab or blessed by lust gods. Maybe both. But no. She was just built different. Though, she was from another planet. Oh yes—people forget that in this world, fantasy and science don't cancel each other out. They live side by side like rival cousins at a wake. Magic isn't the opposite of science—it's the part we haven't learned to chart yet. Tech hums alongside hexes, AI crunches next to crystal balls, and a gun might just need a spell to reload. And Nightingale? She was the kind of beautiful that made scholars question physics and priests reconsider doctrine. In this city, different wasn't just dangerous—it was revolutionary.
One leg folded beneath her, the other tapping slow against cracked concrete. She wore a battered navy peacoat, brass buttons dulled with time, draped over a dress scrawled in warding runes. Her glasses caught the flicker of a faulty streetlamp, flashing like judgment. She stared into the ghost-blue hologram flickering above the fake baby carriage beside her, watching it project the soft illusion of a sleeping child. She wasn't looking at it for comfort—she was reviewing the assignment.
The Guest had sent her to handle a mess. A cult, they said. Fresh. Sloppy. And worst of all? Kids. Children were supposed to be sacred, even among monsters. It should've taken a whole lot of money, divine approval, and political favors to even suggest a child sacrifice. In this world, the rules were known: if you sacrifice a child, you sacrifice the whole family. That was the contract. That was the law. And even that was only honored under rare cosmic exceptions.
No one under twelve was supposed to be touched. The Twelve Sisters—eldritch queens who oversaw most cult codes—had made that ruling centuries ago. If a god wanted a child's soul, they had to care for it. Feed it. Raise it. No deity wanted that kind of long-term responsibility. Not many wanted to pay child support through cosmic eons. So most just didn't bother.
Which meant whoever pulled this off had either lied through their teeth to something ancient, or believed themselves above all reckoning. Nightingale hoped this would chalk up as a case of deity power abuse—if there was even a deity involved. Used to be, back on her homeworld, the divine played that game too. Back then, worship meant real power. But now? That kind of reverence barely got you a seat at the cosmic kiddie table.
It was easy to become someone's object of worship in this city, sure. But keeping your divine status? That took work. It was harder than being an influencer in a post-reality world. You had to feed souls, answer prayers, play therapist and warlord all in one—and most of them just didn't have the stamina anymore. Still, every now and then, one comes along thinking they're above the rest. Thinking they can skip the rules and still wear the crown.
Nightingale was about to fix that mistake personally. She never got these new cults. Somewhere along the line, the meaning of sacrifice had warped. It didn't even mean killing anymore—not really. A death could only fuel so much power for so long. Gods and goddesses used to know that. You could be a war deity, sure, but if all you took in was bloodshed, you'd burn out. Worship needed to evolve.
That's why the smart ones started catching on. Diversify your offerings. Get prayed to in peace, in grief, in lust, in boredom. Get worshiped through devotion, art, agriculture, taxes—whatever worked. It was branding. Survival. But these new cults? They didn't get that. They wanted shortcuts and shock value. And sooner or later, someone always thought they could outsmart the system. Outsmart the Sisters. Outsmart the whole damn balance.
Next to her sat a baby carriage. Rocking gently. Back and forth.
She shook a silver rattle in one gloved hand. The air around her thickened, heavy with magic and memory. She stood, straightened her peacoat, and took a deep breath.
Then, with a twist of her fingers and a breath against her collarbone, she changed.
Her peacoat shimmered into a crisp, ceremonial nanny uniform—deep navy with silver piping, a capelet trimmed in protective script, and starched gloves that hummed with latent power. Her skirt lengthened, stiffened, and the runes wove themselves into a new formation across the hem: peace, protection, presence. The air around her warmed slightly, like the smell of a childhood room.
She didn't just wear the uniform—she invoked it. There was history stitched into every pleat.
Back in the early realms, nannies weren't just caretakers. They were soul-binders, demon-watchers, keepers of lullaby wards and moral alchemy. Entire villages once built their protective magic around the steady presence of a good nanny. It was a sacred role, one that required more than patience. It demanded power, and the willingness to use it when children's spirits were at stake.
This uniform had a cleansing effect. Not on her, but on everything around her. It softened wrath, untangled grief, and in the right place—like this rotting house—it told the dead that someone had come to tend to what had been broken.
She began her slow walk toward the house.
Every step clicked against the pavement with old weight. She felt the shift before her boot even touched the rotted threshold—the land here didn't breathe right. The roots stopped, the magic stuttered. The ground itself had gone still. Wrong.
Eyes. She felt them watching from the boards, the soil, the shadows between the grass blades. Not living eyes. Not even whole ones. Ghosts had a way of staring you down through the seams of reality.
So she did what the Guest taught her.
She began to speak—not to herself, not to the house, but to the air.
"Once upon a time," she began, soft and steady, the way only nannies and gods knew how to do, "there was a big, strange world full of monsters and magic. And in this world, lived creatures called Sonsters. They weren't bad, no no—but they were tricky. Sometimes loud, sometimes sad, and always a little too much for the people around them."
She walked slowly, carefully. The way you might when stepping into a dream you weren't sure was yours.
"Now, in this strange world," she continued, "everyone had a bit of something unusual in them. Maybe a horn. Maybe a tail. Maybe a soft little howl that came out only when the moon forgot its name. That's just how life worked here. Even the puppets and the presidents had claws sometimes."
Then something changed—once folks could finally travel the cosmos without needing portals or blood-bonded gate keys. That's when they realized some of the Sonsters weren't born here at all. Aliens, in a way. Different stars, different rules. Like it mattered. I mean, monsters calling other monsters 'aliens'—as if the name changed a damn thing.
She let that idea sit, gentle and warm, like a storybook page halfway turned.
The Guest had told her this trick years ago: When you enter ghost-wrought places, don't walk in as a threat. Walk in as a bedtime tale.
It wasn't a spell. Not exactly. It was etiquette. A story for a lesser reckoning. A comfort chant passed down from a shadow-dwelling ex who'd claimed bedtime stories were stronger than bullets—at least when spoken right.
She looked into the flickering hologram above the carriage—not with warmth, but with the patience of a librarian about to open the last chapter.
"You ever wonder how the blurs came to be?" she said with a half-grin, like she was about to tell a joke nobody wanted to laugh at. "Someone got the brilliant idea to stir magic, machines, monsters, and people into one big sidewalk stew. Let it simmer under chaos long enough and—boom."
She smiled, soft and not at all sweet.
"What came out was blurry."
She reached the door, the hinges groaning softly as it opened without her touch—like it had been expecting her. She bent down to the carriage, flicked open a hidden drawer, and began pulling out random sweets—lollipops with runes carved into the sticks, marshmallows that glowed faintly, little candy beetles that chirped when unwrapped.
She thought, not all kids loved sweets. But then again, these weren't really kids anymore. They were blurs now. Echoes. And blurs didn't eat treats. But sometimes… sometimes they remembered wanting to.
As she held the candy out toward the open door, a whisper of wind swirled past her fingers—and the sweets lifted gently from her palm, sucked into the dark like invisible hands had reached out to take them. The house breathed them in. Welcoming, hungry. Maybe both.
She adjusted the baby carriage handle and took her first step inside.
Somewhere behind her, glass cracked. A curtain twitched. The moth-shaped streetlight dimmed into a rose hue.
Each footstep forward was a sweep of cleansing energy. The nanny uniform worked quietly, seeping into the floorboards, brushing the corners, humming lullabies into the bones of the walls. The carriage wheels creaked rhythmically, steady and sure, like a heartbeat returning to a long-abandoned chest.
And she smiled.
⟁'lerrith ssa kai-tok blurraa'⟁
("Come now, little shadows, step out from the blur.")
⟁'kru-naa leffi, krovi-lan soot⟁
(Come little blurs, come soft and sweet) ⟁'vel-thuu mirin, padri-ton keet⟁
(Drift through the silence on slippered feet) ⟁'tho-nay memra? Shalaam: tri.⟁
(Have you any memories? Yes ma'am, three) ⟁'nohm, yuhli-ka, weep-truun tree⟁
(A name, a lullaby, and a weeping tree) ⟁'wesh-low nirka, yuhli-ka dro⟁
(Whispers in corners and lullabies low) ⟁'folla hum, e'canda glo'⟁
(Follow the hum and the soft candle glow)
Nightingale rocked the carriage once more, silver rattle catching the light like a slow, deliberate threat. She had finally reached the garden—or what was left of it. The moment her foot touched the moss-laced threshold, it hit her like a wall of quiet fury.
The resistance wasn't just spiritual—it was intentional. The kind of weight that pushed back with centuries of forgotten sorrow and something foul hiding in the soil. Roots curled away from her presence. Air thickened. The nanny uniform pulsed faintly at her seams, struggling to hold its cleansing tone.
The garden didn't want to be healed.
But she rolled the carriage forward anyway.