Shadow of a Doubt
Neht disagreed with many popular conceptualizations of good and evil on Earth but readily agreed that diligence was a virtue.
She prided herself on it, cultivated it like her oleanders and foxglove. Diligence was maintaining the mental lock separating her thoughts from the rest of the Egregori at all costs despite the terrible toll it took on this body. Diligence was tending to the trees day in and day out. Diligence was carefully safeguarding against all those little thoughts at the back of the mind that threatened to spill forth into reality if you weren’t careful. Neht was good at that. Most Egregori weren’t but then again, most Egregori never had the chance to develop anything close to mental defenses because they lived in closed societies that banned Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark on strict regulator orders because it could and would cause mass destruction if read by a Daughter without years of proper mental conditioning. Neht knew too well that the only thing keeping the Egregori communities safe from regulators for the time being was the fact that when properly utilized, they could produce extremely useful tools.
But even still, Neht was only a vampire (Well. A vampire, something that doesn’t belong in this universe, the endless thoughts of thousands of vampires living and dead, and the memory of utter panic and abrupt silence of the last Egregori on Vampiru. Life’s complicated sometimes.) and every vampire slips up eventually.
Sometimes it’s as simple as sitting down for a cup of mint tea before bed, spotting a flicker of movement out of the corner of your eye, and thinking to yourself, “It would certainly be a bad thing if that were some sort of shadow monster,” before dismissing the idea. The next night, you hear a creak of the floorboards, most likely from the cats scampering about, and you think with a chuckle, “Ah, it’s that shadow monster again,” before you venture onward to check on what the little dears are doing this time. Maybe later, you awaken in the middle of the day still caught in the remnants of a dream (because you were originally a mere Egregor rather than being born into this mess, so unlike the rest, you know dreams are real and therefore still do it.) and see a person (but certainly not a person) in the corner made of pure darkness and spend a few moments staring, unable to move, at something you know may harm you before your brain catches up with your body and fully awakens. You sleep fitfully and when you awaken again, you spend the night fretting over whether or not you’ve believed something into existence (“Did I...no, no, that surely wouldn’t be enough...but what if?”) before concluding that you probably didn’t. Most likely. Maybe. After a few nights of worrying off and on, you almost get the idea out of your head but then the black cat bolts down the hall and before you come to your senses, you know that you’ve made that blasted shadow monster real before you realize it’s just sweet little Tarragon...but unfortunately for you, you’re chock full of eldritch potential and abundant with potential and that moment of certainty after so many days of doubt was just enough to spawn your anxiety demon into tenuous existence.
Fretting over whether he did or didn’t create something gets Neht every time.
Neht spent a frantic few minutes tearing through the house as quick as his body allowed trying to kill the blasted thing but the accursed beast eluded his grasp, dodging every blow of the cane and slipping out of a window he previously opened to clean. She gritted her teeth and watched it bound off into the woods. Fantastic. Freshly new to the world, it was still hollow and ephemeral, not ensouled yet, but let it escape and it might start to gain a foothold into reality, start to develop self-awareness, start to become permanent. That wouldn’t do at all. The last anyone needed was some sort of killer shadow escaping into the heart of Maroa or, worse, into the commune.
Neht shut the window so the kittens wouldn’t climb out and trudged off into the woods to dispatch a monster, muttering up a storm of curses. At least there probably wouldn’t be too many hapless wanderers in the woods up at this time...right?