While I waited for the Librarian to come pick me up in her 2008 Kia Soul I looked through Royale’s notes. He wrote a lot about black mages summoning and controlling dogs a bunch of different times. I don’t know why he went back to the same topic so often because it’s mostly the same. Maybe he hated dogs. Or was afraid of them.
I remembered a note about how some of the really bad evil mages could summon what he called shadow beasts instead of normal canines. I dug around until found those entries and it reads like a shadow beast is a bigger scarier monster dog. I bet the mythological sightings of Old Shuck or a Barguest were shadow beasts. Royale says that it takes a lot of power to pull one of those into our world.
The creature that attacked me didn’t look anything like a shadow beast as Royale described them but it appeared out of nowhere like Royale has in his notes that shadow beasts can do. That was the dangerous thing about them, they could get you anywhere without warning.
Based on the unfounded hope that they were related somehow I learned his instructions on how to make a protective circle against shadow beasts.
When the Librarian showed up and saw my wrecked car and all the blood she asked what happened. I told her that she was right, that Bernal was dead. She started crying once again.
“I don’t want to be insensitive, I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure here, but you need to cut that shit out. I need you to keep it together if we’re going to figure this out.”
“What are we going to do?” she asked me.
“Right now we’re going to see if all my worldly possessions will fit in your Soul. After that I have no fucking idea.”
