Samuel Hargrove's apartment was the kind of place that looked bigger in the dark. The single desk lamp cast a warm pool of light over his laptop, the rest of the room fading into shadow.
He'd been wrestling with a paragraph in The Ashen Rider for nearly half an hour Caleb Riker was finally closing in on the drifter, Xirathul, after weeks on the road. Samuel had typed and retyped the scene five different ways, the name "Xirathul" showing up on the page so often it almost lost its sound in his head.
The cursor blinked at him. He frowned. He could see the moment in his mind the tilt of Xirathul's head, the way the desert wind caught the edge of his coat but every time he tried to put it into words, it felt too small.
Then came the noise.
A faint scritch… scritch scratch from inside the wall to his right.
Samuel froze. The old place was no stranger to the occasional rat or mouse, but this was heavier, messier. Something was pushing.
Before he could investigate, the sound grew louder and closer until, with a sudden burst of chaos, a section of the vent cover near the floor popped loose.
Out scrambled a raccoon.
Samuel shot back in his chair, nearly tipping over. The animal froze in the lamplight for a split second, its fur matted, its eyes wild then bolted across the room, knocking over a stack of draft pages in its path.
"Hey! Out! OUT!" Samuel grabbed the nearest thing, a rolled-up magazine and waved it like a sword, but the raccoon darted under the couch.
The next twenty minutes were pure, infuriating noise. The creature scurried between furniture, rattled the trash can, and hissed when Samuel tried to corner it. At one point it leapt onto his desk, scattering pens and bumping the laptop lid halfway shut before retreating again.
By the time animal control arrived, Samuel's nerves were frayed.
"Looks like it's been living in your building for a while," the officer said, luring the raccoon into a cage with a piece of bread. "Probably slipped in through a loose vent."
Samuel muttered something about his rent being too high for wildlife roommates. When the door finally closed behind them, the apartment felt unnervingly quiet again.
He returned to his desk, but the thread of the scene was gone. The laptop's screen had gone to sleep, his notes were in disarray, and the name "Xirathul" glared back at him from the unfinished paragraph.
Somehow, it looked different now.