The problem with hitting the ground at terminal velocity, even if that velocity is magically arrested at the last microsecond by a portal made of a laminated card of dubious origin, is that the ground rarely apologises.

I was lying face up in the damp grass of the Hunt's field, feeling less like an Ironclad Warden that had just thrown down with a pound-shop Lucifer and more like a tube of toothpaste that had been stamped on by a careless giant.

My Health bar was flashing an angry red in the corner of my vision. And, unfortunately, a more careful investigation showed I was sitting at a precarious 2/50.

Two hit points.

I'd had bowel movements with more structural integrity.

Technically, I was alive. Practically, though, I suspected I was a collection of bruises barely held together by stubbornness, adrenaline, and a hoodie that smelled of bin juice. And, somewhere near me, I could hear the sound of a pillock hyperventilating.

"I saw it!" Mooney wheezed. "I saw the space between spaces, Undershaft! And they looked like Luton Airport on a bank holiday! Why was it beige? Infinity shouldn't be beige!"

"Deep breaths, lad," a gravelly voice said. That was Roderick. "You've just been folded through a pocket dimension. From what I remember, the first time you go through something like that it can play havoc with both your inner ear and your sense of existential dread."

"I think I left my stomach in the alley!" Mooney moaned.

"It'll catch up. It usually does. Gravity's very persistent that way."

A couple of shapes moved above me and I moved my head to track them. This turned out to be a mistake. The sudden flash of light felt like the Sun God Ra was trying to perform laser eye surgery upon me with a rusty spoon.

It turned out the shape was Roderick peering down at me, flanked by Kenny and Iris. Max the Labrador was sniffing my ear with the cool detachment of a coroner who suspected the body might still be edible. And then he farted, which made me fear for my last two points of health.

"You look absolutely terrible," Roderick said. He sounded impressed.

"Cheers," I croaked. "I was going for a rugged aesthetic, but I think I might have overshot and landed on roadkill."

"You're also about twenty-five minutes late," Iris sniffed, looking at a pocket watch that had too many hands and a dial that tracked Imminence rather than hours. "We were about to put the kettle away."

"I was detained. By a shadow demon. And a traitor to humanity. And, you know, the general realisation that many of my life choices up to and including this moment may have been suboptimal. Oh my god. Seriously guys! What are you feeding that dog?"

"Don't you be listening to him, Max. We love you just the way you are," Kenny cooed. He was leaning on his walking stick, which I now noticed had a very serious-looking rune carved into the handle. "Well? Are you going to lie there watering the grass with your internal fluids all day, Warden, or are you planning on getting up?"

"Bit early to tell, to tell the truth. But I'm coming around to a way of thinking that contemplating grass for a living might hurt much less than my current occupation. Also, this is some very nice grass. Springy. Green. And, crucially, not trying to eat me or bring about the end of the world. I reckon I might just stay here. Maybe you could put a plaque up? 'Here lies Elijah. He came, he saw, he went for a bit of a lie down.'"

"Cyril," Roderick barked over his shoulder. "He might actually not be malingering here. I worry the lad might be a bit broken. Bring your kit."

Cyril, who still looked like he should be running a model railway enthusiast club in soothing knitwear, shuffled to join the group observing me. He didn't appear to be carrying a medical bag, which wasn't ideal to my mind. But on the other hand he was clutching a battered thermos and a grease-stained paper bag from Greggs.

If a high grade healing potion wasn't on the cards, I'd take tea and a sausage roll.

"Right then," Cyril said, kneeling beside me with a groan of knees that sounded like a bag of walnuts being stepped on. My entire body creaked in sympathy. "Open up, lad!"

"Just checking... is that actual medicine?" I asked, suddenly eyeing the thermos suspiciously. It was steaming slightly, which thermos flasks generally shouldn't do. At least not on the outside.

"It's actually rather better than that. This contains my own particular version of a pick-me-up. It's, amongst other things, espresso, brandy, a reduction of healing moss I found growing on a gargoyle in 1974, and as many crushed-up paracetamol as you like. Trust me, it'll either cure what ills you or strip the varnish off a deck."

He gave me a wink and poured out a cup of sludge that looked like engine oil and smelled like - no, the trauma's too real - and then, without waiting for consent, tipped it into my mouth.

To begin with, I tasted nothing. But then, very quickly, I experienced the aftermath of a very angry curry consumed after a heavy night out. I gagged, choked, drooled and then felt a sudden, violent heat bloom in my stomach.

[Item Consumed: Cyril's 'Wakey-Wakey' Tincture]

[Effect: Major Health Regeneration triggered.]

[Status: Nauseated, but Alive.]

Then my Health bar, which had been doing an impression of a disco light in a submarine emergency, suddenly shot up until it was full once more.

Bones I hadn't even known were broken snapped back into place. My ribs re-inflated. My skull unfractured. I think even the bruise on my soul was buffed out a little.

"Oh my god!" Mooney said, watching as my nose crunched straight. "That was the single most disgusting and appalling thing I've ever seen. Do it again!"

"You'll need to eat up, lad" Cyril said, shoving the sausage roll into my hand. "The carbs, you get me? Supernatural regeneration burns calories like a furnace. If you don't eat quick, your body will start digesting your muscle mass to pay the bill."

I sat up, gasping, and took a bite of the sausage roll. It was lukewarm and flaky and honestly the best meal I'd ever had.

"Cheers, Cyril," I said, wiping pastry flakes from my chin.

"Don't mention it, lad. Literally. If anyone knew some of the things I put in that flask, I'd be up in The Hague on war crimes. Just glad to have someone with your Ironclad constitution who can appreciate it."

I decided to let that slide and sit up. The Hunt's base of operations hadn't changed much since I'd left to go Griff hunting. Same deckchairs. Same slightly aggressive sheep in the distance. Same vibe of a village fête that had declared war on the forces of darkness.

But, even as I recognised the similarities, I could tell that something about the atmosphere was different now. Everything was tauter. Like a bowstring pulled back to the cheek.

As most of the pain receded, the System obviously decided now was the time to catch me up with a bit of the narrative backlog.

[Quest Complete: Survive the Day]

[Evaluation: Chaotic. Violent. Unsubtle.]

[Reward: +10% EXP]

[Bonus Reward: +1 Charisma (Pity Bonus for facial reconstruction)]

[Level Up!]

[You have reached Level 9]

[Attribute Points Awarded: 3]

I stared at the panel. Level 9? That was a bit unexpected. I was creeping up on double digits. From everything I could remember about more standard RPGs, this would be about the moment I'd be getting ready to leave the starter village. Instead, though, it seemed like I was being expected to get ready to stop the apocalypse.

Cheers, Aunt M.

I took a minute to glance through my stats, looked for the best home for my new points. The fight with the Kohë-therës - or whatever fragment of it Griff had managed to summoned - had reiterated a fairly harsh lesson on me. I still wasn't as strong as I wanted to be, and I definitely wasn't tough enough to tank the sort of hits coming my way without circling the drain.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I quickly dumped 1 point into Strength and 2 points into Endurance. There wasn't a lot of point in overthinking these things at this point of the end of the world.

A pleasantly familiar warmth washed over me as the points settled. It was probably in my head, but my skin felt a little thicker and my my muscles a little denser. It wasn't much, but I'd take anything that might make the difference between 0 HP.

"Can't help put notice you didn't come back alone, lad," Roderick said, looking at Mooney, who was currently being aggressively licked by Max to try to calm him down.

"Oh, you know what I'm like. Always bringing home waifs, strays and psychopaths.This is Mooney," I said, climbing to my feet and testing my weight. My knees held. Result! "He's, I guess, what you can call an 'associate.' To be fair, he was the one who got out."

"He has a very unique fragrance," Iris grimaced.

"Hey, don't hold that against him. His actual personality's not much better, either."

"You know I can actually hear you, right?" Mooney said, pushing the dog away. "And for your information, I saved Underhill's life back there. Twice, by my reckoning. If it wasn't for that card of mine, he'd be a smear on the pavement in E1."

"What card?" Roderick said, eyes narrowing.

Mooney patted his pockets defensively. "Don't look at me like that! I found it. Finders keepers, losers… something else. As my late, lamented father always said: 'possession is nine-tenths of the law, and the other tenth is running away fast.'"

"Words to live by," Iris said. "If the Artful Dodger is your moral compass."

"We can discuss the provenance of this gentleman's magical litter later," Roderick said, helping me to my feet and steering me toward a trestle table. "Right now, though, I think we need a proper sit-rep. You look like you've gone ten rounds with a cement mixer, Elijah. Does that mean that you found your target?"

"I guess you could say that," I said, sinking into a deckchair that groaned in protest. Cyril passed me another sausage roll. I ate it in two bites.

"And?"

"And it all got a bit metaphysical. Properly weird. It turns out he hadn't just organised a hit on me, but he's actually working with the Big Bads. He's… no, enthralled isn't exactly the right word. He's like a properly willing partner in trying to bring about the end of the world. It's like he thinks he's surfing the wave of the apocalypse, but doesn't know he's just the board."

I outlined for them everything had happened since I'd left them. The snakeheaded assassin. The various Shadows I'd hunted. Then the confrontation in the pub. And, finally, the nature of the entity Griff had given a leg-up through the Veil. The way it had warped the room. And the terrifying strength of the thing.

The Hunt listened to my story in silence. They didn't gasp or look shocked. I guess when you reached their age, having seen the things they'd seen, there was very little new under the sun. When I finished they just nodded and shook their heads, like farmers discussing a particularly bad blight.

"We knew there must have been someone out there fiddling at the Threshold," Kenny said, running a rag over the barrel of a shotgun that looked like it had last seen active service in the trenches of the Somme. "But it sounds like things are a lot more advanced than we realised. And trying to bring about the end of the realm because you've been promised cookies? That's a special kind of stupid."

"But that's our biggest problem right now. Because Griff isn't stupid," I said. "He's about the most calculating bastard I've ever known. And considering my previous employment history, that should chill everyone to the bone. He's got a plan."

"Which is?"

"Hey, I'm sorry I didn't get hold of all of the specifics. I was a bit too busy getting thrown through a window."

"He's got a diary, though," Mooney said. "Or, at least, he used to."

We all turned to look at him. He was standing a little way off, trying to look casual while stroking Max.

"What did you say, mate?" I asked.

Mooney shrugged. "While you were busy doing your Bane impression and smashing up the office furniture, I wasn't just cowering. I mean, I was cowering, but I was cowering productively."

Then he reached into his jacket and produced a thick, leather-bound tome. It looked expensive. It looked important. And it also looked like the kind of thing sinister conspiracies wrote down their deepest and darkest desires in.

And, coincidentally, it looked exactly like the one that had been on Griff's desk.

"I swiped this when everything was going to hell," Mooney said, tossing it onto the trestle table. "Griff always struck me as the type not to trust his planning to the cloud and I thought, well, waste not want not."

Roderick and I exchanged a look and then he took the book and considered it. His eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.

"Well," Roderick said, weighing the heavy, leather-bound planner in his hands. "This might actually be some good news for us for once."

"Why, what's in it?" I said.

"Not out here," he said, shaking his head. "The tea's getting cold and my knees are seizing up. We need to take this chat to the War Room."

The "War Room" turned out to be the cricket pavilion. I have to say, it felt less like the command and control centre for an elite magical strike force dedicated to saving the world and more like a place where people argued about the leg-side rule while cleaning illegal firearms.

With a sweep of his arm, Roderick cleared a space on a table covered in topographical maps and half-assembled shotgun shells and then placed the ledger down with a heavy thud.

"Iris, dear, if you'd do the honours?"

Iris adjusted her spectacles, which had three separate lenses layered over her left eye, and leaned over the book and ran a small, silver Geiger counter-looking device over the cover.

It clicked angrily.

"This is properly warded," she muttered. "And with some really nasty stuff. Blood-bind on the lock. Standard contractor paranoia." She pulled a pair of wire cutters from her knitting bag and began snipping at threads of magical tension I couldn't see. Eventually, though, she was satisfied enough we weren't all about to be Arc of the Covenanted and flipped the cover open.

We all leaned in. I wasn't really sure what I was expecting. Well, I was. I absolutely thought I was about to see a list of evil deeds and a "Dear Diary, today I decided to have Meddings shot. Note to self, remember to end the world later" entry.

Instead, though, I could see that the pages were filled with dense, architectural schematics which seemed to be overlaying a whole host of star charts. And then there were a hole bunch of columns of numbers that looked something like tide tables.

"What is all this?" I asked. "It looks like a glazier's nightmare."

"It's something like a proper, old school almanac," Roderick said. "But, saying that, it's not like anything I've ever seen before. Look at all these drift variables. Coordinates. And times to the microsecond."

"Is it a summoning ritual?" Kenny said.

"Maybe," Roderick shrugged. "But if so, it's big. Like, impossibly big."

"No," Iris sighed. "Don't you see? It's much worse than that. When muppets try to use summoning rituals it's usually just some nomark idiot painting a circle and tearing a hole in the drywall of the universe to let a demon through."

"And that's not what this is?" I asked.

"No. Not at all." Iris cursed and turned a page to reveal a complex diagram of ley-lines intersecting with a massive, circular structure. "It looks to me like your buddy is seeking to make use of a transmitter to do something seriously stupid. He's not just trying to let the Shadow in past the Veil. He's trying to project it out and through it."

"I don't follow."

"No reason why you should. Look. Think of the Veil like a radio frequency," Kenny chipped in from where he'd moved to a workbench, where he was now enthusiastically sawing the barrel off the old shotgun. "In this realm, it's tuned to 'Earth FM'. It keeps the monsters out and there's plenty of static on the line. All the realms will have their own, unique frequency."

"Okay…"

"Well, I think matey-boy has realised there's no point trying to keep trying to break the radio. Better and more ancient entities have tried and come up well short. As a network, it's just too big and complicated. And it has lumps like you, and Margaret of course, about to foil things."

"Appreciate the vote of confidence."

"Don't let it go to your head," Iris continued. "Because this looks nasty. It looks like what's this guy is planning is, to extend the metaphor, to try to turn the dial. I reckon he's hoping to re-tune Earth's local reality to the Shadow's frequency."

"I think you're right. We're not looking at an invasion here. We're dealing with some mentalist trying to achieve an Alignment," Roderick said. "It looks like he's waiting for the Shadow-tide - the Kohë-therës's natural frequency - to align with a specific ley-line convergence point. And if he hits that broadcast tower at the exact moment of the alignment..."

"He gets to rewrite the signal," Iris finished.

"Which is bad, I guess?"

"Depends on your view of the Kohë-therës imposing its rule on Earth, I suppose." Kenny said. "You a big fan of Social Darwinism via monstrous horrors from the void?"

"Not especially. So I'm thinking we probably are going to want to the proverbial fly in the ointment of this plan?"

"Absolutely," Iris said, flicking through the pages. "To broadcast a signal that strong, their going to need a massive, iron conductive loop. Something that acts as an antenna. And probably something suspended over running water, because water amplifies spectral conductivity."

"Sounds like the London Eye, Underhill," Mooney said in a tone I think he probably thought was helpful.

Roderick growled and then tapped the page Iris had just opened. I looked down at a diagram that was pretty unmistakeable. It was a massive, spoked wheel sitting on the bank of a winding river. Then he turned the book so I could see the map of the Thames. A red circle was drawn heavily around a specific point on the South Bank.

"I'm not being funny or anything" Mooney said. "But does anyone else find that all a bit underwhelming? I mean we're talking about a fairly lowrent tourist trap here. It's basically a ferris-wheel that spins slowly and costs thirty quid a go. We're hardly talking about the Tower of Barad-dûr here."

"Don't underestimate the danger here!" Iris said. "It's a giant, iron circle, aligned with the city's power grid which sits directly on top of the Thames aquifer. Geometrically speaking, it's the perfect focus lens. If your ghastly previous boss can position himself at the apex - the top pod - at the moment of Alignment, he'll have the high ground. He'll be looking down on the city like a god and capable of broadcasting a whole new reality."

"Griff always did like the high ground," I said. It fit. It fit his ego, his tactical style, and his flair for the dramatic.

"When?" I asked.

Roderick ran his finger down a column of numbers on the next page. "It's complicated, but I reckon the Alignment window is pretty narrow. Extremely narrow, actually. According to this... midnight. Tomorrow."

"Awesome," I said. "I love a deadline."

"Now you've put him on notice, he'll probably be busy digging in," Iris said. "He'll be putting wards up, hiring mercenaries and will even probably have a few nasty surprises from the Other Side waiting for anyone keen to mess about. You're not just going to be able to storm in there with your signature style"

"So we need a plan," I said.

"We need more than a plan," Kenny said, snapping the shotgun breach closed. "We need heavy ordnance."

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