Chapter 2 – Undercurrent

She knew he would do it. She knew how he operated. He had always been there, more constant than the community around her. He should have returned next week from the visit to her mother.

Her suspicions were confirmed that morning, the mewing sound of his arrival, the brush of his body against her legs as she filled the kettle at the sink.

Malkin Gra – the ancient one, a Knight of Friþgeard, the king maker, known only to trusted friends as ‘Puss’.

Mabel looked down at the grey cat by her feet. It gave her that dumb animal look, but she knew better. “Arthur contacted you, didn’t he.” The cat looked up at her and meowed. “It won’t work puss,” she said casually “I’m not going to be seduced with that cute glassy eyed look.”

A smile–that only certain cats can do–spread across his face. “Your so much like your mother.” He said with a hint of sarcasm.

“That we don’t suffer fools gladly?” She responded.

A deep laugh resonated from the cat, that belied its size.

“She sends her love by the way, as does Rose.” Malkin countered.

“Always good to know. Now puss, the truth.”

Malkin gave her that look– of in my own time. “Tea first, then I will spill the beans.”

──✿──

They sat at the small kitchen table, steam rising between them.
Mabel poured. Malkin didn’t blink.

“Start at the beginning,” she said.

“You’re right—Arthur did contact me. Thank goodness I was at your mother’s. She still knows how to handle Arthur from the old days.”
Malkin paused, eyes narrowing slightly.

“There are moves on the European chessboard. Alliances forming, stockpiles growing. Everyone’s smiling through their teeth—and building bigger guns behind their backs.”

“War?” Mabel asked, cutting in.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Malkin replied.

“So why couldn’t Arthur just tell me this himself?”

Malkin paused, watching her in silence. She felt the tension in him—not hesitation, but protection. A desire to shield her without insulting her intelligence.

She held his gaze, steady. “As promised—spill the beans, Puss.”

He took a breath, slow and heavy.

“Over the millennia I’ve witnessed countless wars. Fought in more than a few, back when I had hands and blood to spill. Each one more senseless than the last. But this… this one has the markings of something else entirely. Not nation against nation. A world at war. An industrial horror like nothing we’ve seen before.”

A chill seemed to settle in the room.

“And Arthur couldn’t tell me because it’s top secret—but he told you?”

“Well… how are they going to prosecute a cat for leaking state secrets?” Malkin said with a shrug of whiskers.

“Point taken,” she murmured, taking another sip of tea.

“Arthur’s told you what he can—that German intelligence has taken over Brockthorn Abbey. They’ve installed a listening station. And yes, they’re intercepting messages they believe are… unnatural. But here’s what he didn’t say.”

Malkin’s tone dropped, colder now. Older.

“I know Brockthorn. From before the Abbey. Before the stone. I know what was there, what was buried, what still breathes beneath it. I know because I helped lay it to rest. And I also know that two British agents went in before you. Neither made it out.”

“Oh, I see’ said Mabel,” as if discussing the weather. She took another calm sip of tea. “So… not killed by Germans.”

“Precisely. German agents aren’t our top concern. It’s a man named Dedrich Feld. He’s with the Order of Teutons. A doctor of Western Esotericism. Now an asset of the Imperial German Navy. And it looks like he’s managed to wake something.”

Mabel lowered her cup.

“The Sluagh?”

Malkin nodded. “Yes, it’s awake. Their attempts to control its chaotic state failed. They tried to impose order, to force obedience. It only made things worse. Now it’s more dangerous than ever, and they’re struggling to keep it caged. It’s furious.”

“So… what did Dedrich Feld plan to do with it?” Mabel asked.

Malkin’s tail flicked once.

“The same thing others have tried before him—turn it into an army. A force of indestructible Teutonic knights, bound to his will. Not soldiers of flesh and blood, but something older. Dead things, ridden by rage.”

He looked up at her, eyes dark.

“He doesn’t want to invade Britain, Mabel. He wants to destroy it. From within.”

“What are my chances of destroying it for good?” Mabel asked coldly.

Malkin didn’t look away. He took a breath, pausing—less for effect than to honour the truth of the question.

“When we defeated it, back in the mists of time, we were the Knights of the Friþgeard—all of us wielders of old magic, seasoned and scarred. For one witch to face it alone… there’s no measure for that. Not truly.”

He flexed his claws once against the wood.

“We don’t even know the full extent of your power, Mabel. You’re untested. Your magic is new to the world—and the world to it. I’ve watched you since you were a child. Trained you, in part. My honest answer?”

He paused again, then added quietly:

“Your powers are within reason. But they’ve never been tested without.”

“How do I navigate the without?” she asked.

“Dispassionately. With cold reasoning. Knowing that your adversary is darker—and colder—than you can yet imagine.”

There was a depth in his eyes then, a darkness she’d never seen before. It wasn’t menace. It was memory.

She followed it—down, down into the well of his experience—and felt it looking back.

“Then teach me,” she said quietly. “Forearm me. Don’t let me trip over it in the dark.”

He felt the gentle probe of her magic.

And he let her in.

They sat motionless at the kitchen table, not speaking, not moving—just sharing. The silence between them thick with understanding, as she absorbed truths that should never see the light again.

──✿──

You’d be forgiven for imagining Mabel Shirley as cold. Calculating, even. But nothing could be further from the truth.

It is said she was born beneath a sky split by the crackle of a love that defied time itself—a radiance that shone beyond the world of magic, touching realms unseen. Her birth was not merely an event but a confluence of forces: fate bending to the weight of an unbroken bond, a love so fierce it left its mark upon her soul.

From that moment, the world of the mundane could never truly hold her—nor could the world of magic claim her entirely. She was something in between. A bridge. A whisper of destiny, written in the hidden currents of the cosmos.

But beneath all that, there was simply a woman.

A human woman. One shaped by the hang-ups of Edwardian life.
Her world was carved by class and expectation. Her education was tailored for domesticity. Her future, more often than not, tied to a husband’s status. She was denied the vote, most professions, and financial independence. Every step was governed by etiquette. Freedom—over her body, her choices, even her words—was rare, if not unthinkable. The so-called “golden age” was, for many, a beautifully adorned cage.

And on a deeper level still, she was a child born into danger.

A child of magic. Raised among powers most would deny existed.
In her world, people’s thoughts bled into the air. Spirits passed through her bedroom at night, restless and hungry. Relationships—real ones—were near impossible. Not because of who she was, but what loving her would expose someone to. She was branded early. Ostracised. The weird one.

So yes, the coldness you see is real.

It’s her armour—forged through experience. A shield against the pain of wanting more. Of wishing, just some mornings, that the magic would simply run out. That she might wake into a world without demands. Without danger. Just silence.

Just peace.

──✿──

Malkin had left the shop later that morning. He had people to see, intelligence to gather. Before he went, he made her promise not to act until his return—ideally by the following dawn. In the meantime, he’d advised a visit to Aunty Fliss at Rattlebag Cottage—a suggestion Mabel would never refuse. Just before his departure, he added that Fliss had something for her, and the time was right to accept it. When pressed on what it was, he only smiled and told her to wait and see.

Business in the shop needed her attention, but she set out in the late afternoon for Rattlebag Cottage—a journey that took barely twenty minutes by carriage. Unlike Aunty Fliss, Mabel couldn’t phase-step and appear anywhere in the blink of an eye. Secretly, she was glad. One less ability to master. One less tether to control.

As she guided the horse off the main road and down the familiar track, the brightness of the day felt almost mocking. Sunlight flickered and faded as the lane narrowed beneath an overgrown canopy. Shadows folded in layers. The hush deepened. Even the wheels of the cart seemed to roll softer here, as though they too knew to tread lightly.

Then came the familiar signs.

Stones, half-sunken in the earth, each etched with strange runes. Bundles of herbs and feathers dangled from the trees above, bound with bone and stone charms that clicked in the wind like whispered warnings. The air thickened. The blackthorn tree loomed—its pale trunk carved with spirals and wards, scarred by generations of cautious hands.

To a stranger, it was a warning to turn back.

To Mabel, it marked the end of the road—and a return to her second home.

The fire was already lit when she arrived. Of course it was. Felicity Redhill rarely waited to be told a thing. The hearth crackled, the kettle hissed, and a single place had been set at the table.

Mabel stepped inside, brushing the cold from her sleeves. Her fingers still tingled from what she’d shared with Malkin. But she didn’t need to explain herself.

Felicity, still tending the hearth, spoke without turning.

“You’re here for the old blood.”

Mabel frowned. The phrase meant nothing to her—but as Felicity led her into the parlour, a slow unease bloomed. Felicity rummaged in a drawer at her writing desk and drew out a cloth-wrapped bundle. She handed it to Mabel, who unwrapped it slowly, reverently.

Inside was a ring.

Her mother’s ring.

Mabel had seen it a thousand times on her mother’s hand, its strange shimmer catching the light in ways no ordinary metal could. She had always assumed it was sentimental. She had never questioned its true nature.

It pulsed with a warmth she recognised in her bones.

“Your mother left it with me the day she departed,” said Felicity softly. “She said it held too many memories. Memories she had no wish to carry into her old age. But she also knew the day would come when you’d need it more than she ever did.”

She could feel its gravity now — not by its weight, but in its meaning. It thrummed gently in her palm, as though recognising her touch. Or remembering it.

“Charon surrendered a shard of himself when the Constants first crossed into this realm,” Felicity continued. “I shaped it into this, two thousand years ago, so Moll could survive as something more than a guide of souls. It tempered her form. Anchored her. Gave her the chance to live a life—not just ferry others through death.”

Mabel’s throat tightened.

“You are her daughter, Mabel. Of the old blood. And whether you accept it or not, you’ve one foot in the world of the living, and one still lingering by the shores of the dead.”

She slid the ring onto her finger. A perfect fit. From within her body—an echo resounded in her blood, deep and unmistakable. It recognised her.

Not the her that stood in the kitchen of Rattlebag Cottage, ankle-deep in steam from Felicity’s kettle. No. It reached for the older self, the inherited self—the part of her shaped by her mother’s rites, by her father’s passing, by every soul she had ever touched and led from one world to the next.

Mabel closed her eyes. The room dimmed. The talisman was no longer simply in her hand—it was within her, or she within it. She stood in a space of greyness: no floor, no sky, only a single horizon stretching wide and slow as a river. Shapes moved at its edge—watchers. Some passed by, gentle as breath. Others lingered, curious. One reached out—

She opened her eyes sharply.

The fire still crackled. Her tea still steamed. But the ring’s weight had changed. No longer warm. Now heavy.

It had recognised her lineage.

It had accepted her.

But only just.

──✿──

Since Mabel had placed the ring on her finger, the two women had sat in silence. This was not unusual. Something passed between them that no other relationship could rival—a bond of sisterhood, where silence held more value than words.

But some things cannot remain unsaid.

The ring stirred cold against her skin, like an old truth remembered. Forged from Charon’s essence, it had once transformed her mother from psychopomp to woman. Now it awakened that same ancient calling in Mabel.

She was the daughter of a soul-guide—one who walked the line between life and death, escorting the newly dead to whatever waited beyond. And now, that path pressed against her own skin.

“What real dangers do I face this time, Fliss?”

Felicity turned, slow and deliberate. “Best you remember—real danger comes in many sizes. Don’t be blinded by what looks unconquerable. Most threats are puffed-up things—poorly thought through, banking on fear to knock you off your balance.”

She paused, her voice softening.

“Always look for the chink in their armour, Mabel. It’s there—always. Hidden, overlooked, born of their arrogance. Evil rarely accounts for the free will of the righteous.”

“Another day in the office, then?” Mabel asked, echoing Rattlebag’s usual tone.

Felicity smiled faintly. “Of course. We’re sisters of the woods, not some flashy stick-waving witches. We’re the real deal—and that’s the truth you carry into battle.”

As they sat in contemplation, the wind shifted, and outside something stirred in the twilight.

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