Go for the Throat – 23.f | Pale

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Dorian felt the eye of the Carmine Exile pass over him.  With senses that weren’t his usual ones, he was aware of the Judge, of that presence, that attention, the dismissal.  It made him feel small, scared, relieved, and the relief came with equal amounts of self-condemnation for feeling relieved.

“Keep moving,” Matthew said.

“People are dying,” Lane said.  Lane was the one hosting the spirit of Boughbreak.

“I know,” Matthew replied.

“A lot.  From Kennet below.”

“I know.  I’m sorry, but there’s no way to know who, yet.  If you feel you need to back out, let me know.”

“Not saying that,” Lane replied, defensive.

“There’s not a lot we can do here except moving forward.  Stop him before he can do more damage.  How’s everyone doing  How are your spirits?”

“Hot,” the guy hosting Engine Head said.  Dorian’s opposite, here.

“Go easy.  Anyone else?  If there are issues, this might be our last chance to tackle them.”

How am I doing? Dorian thought.

From feeling as tall as the towers for the shrine spirits around Kennet found to feeling like he could be extinguished if the Carmine Exile had felt just a little different about things…

Memories kept stirring.  Experiences floated to the surface.  Having the spirit inside him, even if it was arguably the weakest, it felt good.  It felt like his blood was pumping hard, it felt like his body was strong, he had power, potential.

The scene kept running through his mind, the closest comparison he could make.  His first date, the nervousness, the way the other guy had looked at him.  One of the first times he’d felt wanted in his life.  He’d felt seen, charged, strong.  This was the same.

He was trying not to think about that date too much, not just because he’d had some growing to do when he’d gone on that date, after being raised in Kennet below and coming out of it with no confidence, but because he was pretty sure the spirit in him had a view of what was in his mind’s eye.  It didn’t care, it wasn’t like it would gossip, but… the memory was his.  Hard fought, hard earned.  Embarrassing to reflect on, but nice.

“I’m okay,” he muttered, more for himself than for Matthew.  He felt the spirit inside him, occupying the hollow spaces, trying to find a comfortable position and not quite getting there.

He wasn’t sure he was even heard, saying he was okay.

“Our guys have cleared the way to the building, but even with there being a way there, it’s not entirely safe.  Let’s try to keep the way clear, maintain pressure from all sides.  Lane?  Dorian?  Arrow?”

Dorian turned to Matthew, as did the other two.

“Trade out with the first group, cover the Ruins.  Go shallow, try to keep the pattern going.”

Dorian winced internally, then nodded, stepping away from the main group.  Lane was from Kennet above but had gone to Kennet below.  Arrow had gone from Kennet found to Kennet below.  Dorian had been the one to leave, and felt a bit cornered.  He’d been one to leave, and these two had been so intent on going.

Worse, they’d been doing this for a bit, but the last two goes, which had been Dorian’s only two goes, he hadn’t been sure he’d been doing it right, or at all.

Let it take over.  You’re trading places.

He reached out to Florescence, and he let down the walls.  He put arms out to the sides as the spirit flowed out of his eyes, brow, and the base of his throat, creeping down across his body, painting him the dull black of a computer or television screen with the power on.  His hair got longer, and as he straightened his back, rolling his shoulders, he felt bone slide against bone, not even trying to connect anymore.

“Not too much,” Matthew said.  “Or the way back gets hard.”

“Be that kernel of direction,” Matthew said.  His eyes burned.  He’d said stuff like this before, and Dorian had felt like it had been a little tiring, but in moments like this, he appreciated how it could be necessary.  It was easy to lose track and the words were a touchstone to come back to.  “Spirits don’t have a lot of individual will, usually, but can be singular when they do.  The moth will seek out the candleflame, decide how they get there.  Identify the candles for them.”

Dorian opened his eyes, and the digital images of flowers erupted around him, swallowing things up in their neon brightness.  Florescence’s long hair blew around her, black with digital flowers in it.  She stepped forward, and barely felt the snow on the ground.  She floated a little.

Boughbreak and Nyeh were with her.

Okay, he’d managed this in the test runs.  He’d done this the last few ‘shifts’, as they’d patrolled the edges and supported other groups.

“Relieve the others.  I’ll be behind you, so I can be me again when I’m in the building.  To get to the Ruins-”

Rely on your human aspect.  Emotion, connection…

Florescence dipped into the spirit world, instead of the Ruins.  But so did the others.  Matthew’s voice was suddenly far away.

Rolling mists tried to hide the full extent of the surging, undulating thing that stretched out beyond them, pushing spirits away, and stretching the ideas of distance and perspective as it did.  Meat compressed into meat, compressed into death, ate spirit, and forced it to conform, contort.  Like taking dead birds and arranging the feathers of the broken wings into flowers, entrails for the stem, but in three dimensions, taking color, style, intention, and motive force.  A macaroni art sprawl of neighborhood with houses, gardens, people, barbecues, a small street festival, with things both living and dead in place of the the macaroni, moving, shifting, real to life while being the furthest thing from living.

All a lie.

The school stood out.  Here, in the spirit world, he could see the protections that had been laid into the ground, and erected with oaths to the world.  The lighting around the school wasn’t quite in tune with the neighborhood.

The ground around the school was laid with stones that had been arranged into a kind of broad magic circle.  The ground of the neighborhood was hostile.  Florescence floated up, aware of the nether worm thing that was one of the most dangerous things here, and the fact she had less places to hide, up here.  Its fins extended into spirit while the body remained in Ruin, like the dorsal fin of a shark extending from water into open air.  It exuded menace, and it shed hundreds of echoes.  Six of the others were playing defense, baiting it, distracting it.

Florescence floated their way, going higher still.  Boughbreak and Nyeh followed, the former heavier, the latter heavier still.

Height wasn’t safety.  Things shifted, and she had to take evasive action- the sky was hostile too.  The blue sky was painted over corpsemeat that hadn’t been given the grace of death.  The sun was white rats running in eternal circles, a ring moving clockwise while another ring ran counter-clockwise.  They ate each other’s tails, giving birth to baby rats that quickly grew up, tails entwining, creating as they destroyed, teeth gnashing, tearing, loins spewing blood, eyes wild with fear and frenzy.

The Turtle Queen warred with the neighborhood out at the front of the school-  Florescence was high enough up that she could see over the school.  Viewed through the mists of the spirit world, it was clear how the Turtle Queen changed configurations of things around her to suit herself.  When defenses were raised against her, she changed the contents to suit herself.  From human flesh to the flesh of snakes and turtles.  From bone to gold.

The Girl by Candlelight incinerated flesh and melted gold, while leaking a constant pool of wax that was resistant to the Turtle Queen, running down the peaked roof and overflowing gutters out front.  The fires were a loss of ground for both the neighborhood and the Turtle Queen, but the neighborhood could make better use of the scorched corpseflesh than the Turtle Queen could- one of her provinces was black, mingling with green and gold, and the burned flesh was black in places, but that was a small foothold.

Montague reached in, because burned corpseflesh was more his thing.  Red and black, mangled.

The barrier that had warded off the worm retreated as Montague moved in.  They’d rigged something up, it seemed, to avoid giving Montague something to grab onto.

Dorian wished he could come up with a way to pin things down, or give him a way.  He didn’t know enough about this stuff.  He was new to it.

Florescence could see him, twisted, fragmented and folded in spirit, and it was an image that demanded that it be straightened out in the eye and mind of the spirits.  The problem was that in straightening out the eye and mind to see that the way it wanted to be seen, one had to fold and contort themselves.

Dorian tried to distract her.  The worm.  Other spirits.

The worm was thicker than a city bus, and tore through spirit and reality both.  Black and eyeless, the ends of its scales were hooked, with echoes and spirits attached to it.  As they were shed in its wake, with intentional flares of its frills scattering echo like psychic venom, or accidentally, with every impact or sharp movement, others managed to crawl free from within the worm, only to get hooked, primed.

Unveiled Skullbone bit, and was knocked back by the cascade of echoes, putting him off balance for the passing worm’s fin to smack into.  Long tried to wrap limbs around it, the white from her arms leeching out into the worm’s body.

Long’s arms tore.

Boughbreak managed to shield the two from afar, reaching out, spearing the worm with broken tree branch while a cupped arm of unfolding branches provided some cover.  Boughbreak wasn’t strong enough to stop the main body of the worm, but could at least block the ends of frills and fins, and stop some echoes from getting at them.

The worm plunged deeper into Ruin, the fins that extended into Spirit slipping into mist, becoming vague, then nonexistent.  In the wake of it crashing through, the neighborhood exploded up and out.  In the spirit world, the sky rippled as dust touched it, flesh rolling out behind it.  Things reached from beneath it, subtly trying to snare.  Jagged, camouflaged meat-fingers and tendrils, bloody froth that had a spiritual grip and traction.

In the distance, caught between the Girl by Candlelight and the neighborhood Montague was seized by the neighborhood.  There was a moment of stillness, and then he was torn in half.  One half was devoured, pulled into the gnashing, meaty sidewalk and lawn nearby  The neighborhood found some strength, by eating him, or by having one less enemy to fight.

Everything near and around Dorian and Florescence shifted, finding a sharper resolution, sharper configuration.  Meat met meat, colors rolled, and it took on a shape that, even in the spirit world, looked like a sunny neighborhood would in reality.  No mists, no spirits- the lesser, ambient spirits were eaten.  The sun shifted from being a teeming, ever-winding, disc-shaped arrangement of white mice birthing and eating one another, ouroboros style, to infections weeping blood and pus, to the pus flooding out to fill gaps between mice, who fought more frantically as they drowned in it, the red of blood mingling with white to find the orange-white brightness of a sun in the sky.

People that lived in the neighborhood looked up at Florescence.  There was gnashing, scraping, silently screaming, shifting flesh behind their eyes, instead of anything spiritual.

Then there was emptiness, a glazed look.

Then it looked like any eyes of ordinary people would, a light and animation that looked as bright as anything.  A patch of ordinary, bright, and populated Earth in the vague, shifting, and misty spirit world.  A dog barked, wagging its tail.

The air began to press in, sky, the fragrance of garden beds, barbecue, and fresh-cut grass thickening, coiling around them, pulling-

Dorian and Florescence’s movements were awkward, like a baby’s, still learning to coordinate.  They flew higher, away from it all, and, tracking the movement of the worm toward the ruins, moved laterally.  Dorian reached for emotions, for the peace and quiet serenity he’d felt as he’d gotten out of Kennet below and into Kennet found.

Florescence moved in the direction that Dorian’s heart reached.  They moved into bright Ruins, and the vague shadow of the worm in mists surrounding the neighborhood clarified into something sharp and real.

The sun became overly bright.  The air was thick with flower petals and tree blossoms that glimmered as they caught the light.  No snow here.  Warmth, blossoming trees, and tall grass, water flowing off of broken chunks in waterfalls that spread a diffuse mist.

Florescence began to wither, the black breaking up.

Light is good for plants.  So is kindness, Dorian thought. Willed.

The flowers began to sprout out, a barrier between Florescence and the light.

And let me out, a bit.

The black broke up a bit.  Dorian’s skin became a shield against the Ruins in the spots the sunlight was most direct.  Not too much.  They wanted to be spirit enough they could float.

Spirits with enough kinship with an area of the Ruins can hold out there, just like goblins can hold out in the Abyss.  It was why he’d wanted to come here, to this aspect of the Ruins, specifically.

Dorian had suspected he’d get the spirit of digital flowers.  It wasn’t a strong one, but the shrine had been one of the easier ones to get to from his place in Kennet found, and it was nicer than its neighbors.  The foundlings and people he met around that shrine were alright.  Not that he’d made many friends.  He didn’t really know how.  Because he’d suspected, he’d asked questions, trying to get prepared.  So he knew about Ruins, and Abyss.

He wasn’t upset he’d gotten it, he only worried because it wasn’t strong, and he felt like there was something he was meant to do that he wasn’t doing.  Like, had they offered to let people host the shrine spirits, and only included this one and maybe Scatters too, because it would be rude if they didn’t, and then they were quietly slapping their foreheads because some dumb kid had gone and taken it?

It was a strong spirit, it had been given a lot of strength and stability by the constant shrine visits and tributes.  But it was a strong spirit of something kind of useless and weirdly specific.  Digital representations of flowers.

He tried not to dwell on it, worrying the spirit would read his mind or something.  Even if it didn’t seem to care.

The neighborhood was still here in the Ruins, perched on floating rock, connecting multiple chunks, with sun-bleached rope ladders and ropes trailing from each of them.  It ignored the aesthetics and conditions of the Ruins much as it had the spirit world.  Suburban houses, bright green, neatly trimmed lawns, tidy fences, sunshine and people in clothes suitable for wearing to church, all having paid way more attention to hygiene than Dorian remembered seeing back in Kennet below.  Half the residents stood where they were, watching Florescence and the other hosted that had followed her.  Others went about their business.  The whole of it pushed back against the Turtle Queen.

The other hosted had traveled by different angles, into dark sorrow and burning anger.  They were recognizably there but out of reach for Florescence.

I’m not strong.  But we have numbers.

“Going back to Matthew!” Long called out.  “Too hurt!”

None of the people that were hosting more intact spirits responded with words, choosing to communicate by way of spirit, instead.

We have less numbers, I guess.  Long left with Skullbone.

The Girl by Candlelight had noticed them.  The Goddess looked their way too.

I’m not strong, as a person, or with this spirit.

Dorian’s physical body began to slide one way, the spirit another.  Like a sandwich with the fillings working their way out the back.  They pulled themselves together.

They reunited just in time to be able to move as the worm came tearing through.  It passed within ten feet of him -that wasn’t the issue-  skimmed one section of Ruin, shattering rock, plunged through another, into darkness.  Echoes scattered in its wake, and withered fast in the bright light of the brighter end of the Ruins.

Florescence fought past them, swinging arms, pixelated flower petals following each swing, illuminating echoes as they made contact with flesh- smoke?  Ectoplasm?  Weighing them down.

The worm turned sharply- shedding more echoes all around the others, who were closer to ‘ground’, in another layer of Ruin.  It came for Florescence, and she floated around one large rock with trees on it.

The worm smashed the rock, and shards went flying.  Shards that came closest to Florescence, grazing skin and hair, became flower petals.

The worm reared back, shaking its head after the heavy impact.  In the light of the sun, black scales were quickly being bleached to white.  Tattered cloth ringing its neck at one point frayed, then became gold chain.  Dark recesses, like eye sockets with scaled flesh stretched concave over them, began to glow from within.  Echoes began to die off, with others emerged.  Brighter ones.

Its breast glowed, at the widest point below the ‘neck’.  Even if it was all technically neck.

Florescence flew.  Dorian reached out from within- he’d been the pilot, before, with Florescence’s instincts periodically poking through, and now the roles were reversed.  He turned attention to the school, to the bright, artificial blue glass windows with garden beds below them, no snow in Spirit or Ruins, and turned attention to to the Girl by Candlelight, bright in shadow and surrounded in glittering gold as the Turtle Queen tried to come for her.

He’d hoped the worm would charge in, coming diving for him and crashing in to hit the Girl by Candlelight, but it wasn’t charging.  It opened its mouth, and echoes streamed out, bright, dancing, laughing, so liquid they splashed into one another and lost all form, before re-emerging elsewhere in that bright flow.

A barrier became apparent as she got closer.

Change back.  Let me be a shell around you-

Florescence withdrew.  Spiritstuff crept back into Dorian.  He held onto just enough to be able to navigate this space, a bit of floating, a bit of petals in wind, a bit digital.

His human flesh withstood the barrier that was there as a fence against spirits and stray echoes, protecting the spirit that was now inside him from whatever the barrier might have done to her.  He landed on the roof, a good distance away from the Girl by Candlelight one eye on her, one eye on the worm, ready to fly off or even jump off the roof if he had to.

The worm exhaled tangled echoes, bright, and they splashed against the barrier.  Straining it.

I wonder if the barrier is mostly up because of the worm, because they know it’s raw.

The Girl by Candlelight glanced at him, eyes glowing, and a flash of orange startled him.  Prickling heat and smoke immediately followed.

She’d set him on fire with a glance.

It was so startling he was caught frozen between the worm and responding to the fire.  The worm came after him, still breathing that stream of bright echoes, and it hit the strained barrier head-on.  The barrier was strong enough to keep it from plowing through, which would have taken off a bit of roof and, with luck, seen the worm smash into the Girl by Candlelight.

Dorian flailed, trying to put out the fires.  He was balanced on the sloped roof, and each wild footstep threatened to see him tumble.

He almost stopped, dropped, and let himself roll off the roof, but as he patted some flames, he felt her, the Girl by Candlelight, and flames renewed, swelling.

He felt a heat in his chest, in his heart.  His eyes widened.

And Florescence covered it, embracing it.

The heat in his heart died.

The fires extinguished.  Mostly.  Dorian slumped to hands and knees, burned in seven places, some fires still lingering, smoking more than they ravaged him or his clothing.  He patted at the fires, burns on his arms making themselves known with the movement, skin too tight, pain surging, then redoubling.

He could feel where the help was coming from.

Matthew Moss.

“There you are.  Stick with the others!” Matthew called out.

The Girl by Candlelight’s eyes flared, and Dorian was again set on fire.

“No!” Matthew shouted.

Fires went out moments later.  Mostly.  The spirit of ‘Smoulder’ was in Matthew, and Smoulder liked to ride a line of almost no flame, but lots of heat and smoke.

Dorian gasped for breath, gasped from pain, struggling to get further from the Girl by Candlelight.  He called on Florescence, and she emerged, covering him, replacing burned flesh, blooms sprouting as a shield between her spiritstuff and the light of the bright, joyous Ruins.

The heat washed over them, and Florescence lowered her head, shielding her face.  The smell that washed off of them was the same one that came from an overhot laptop.  The flowers began to glitch out.

Matthew reached out, and smoke poured out of his hand, obscuring everything.

“I’ve got you.  Come on,” Matthew said, quiet and urgent.

Florescence leaped from the rooftop, into Matthew’s arms.  The guy was pretty strong, and Florescence was light.  His hands held her- their ribs, for a moment, before he set Florescence and Dorian down.

On the one hand, Matthew was a good decade too old, attached to Louise, and this wasn’t the time.  On the other, though, strong hands, and being held like that left an impression Dorian figured would stick with him for a long time.

The Girl by Candlelight was visible as a dark spot surrounded by a heavy orange glow.  Black wax poured off the roof past her feet, which did a lot to show where she was.

“This way,” Matthew said, as Smoulder smouldered, overtaking him.  The light was drowned out, darkness came out, and moisture began to drip around them.  “Reach for the emotions.”

Dorian reached for the feelings that had dwelt with him when he’d lived in Kennet below.  There were some who found freedom there, strength.  One of the administrators in Kennet found who he’d talked to during his orientation classes talked about something Verona had been told by the Carmine, about his intentions over Kennet below.  Maybe there was a world where Dorian hit rock bottom and then found strength scrabbling back.  Lane, the holder of Boughbreak, had been like that.  But hitting rock bottom sucked.  Scared him.

His uncle and dad had been so disappointed in him.

It sucked to recall, but that suck was his way through into darker Ruins.

They moved from the Ruins that eroded under too-bright sunlight and guard-lowering warmth into cold, depressing rain.

Rain is good for flowers too, Dorian thought.

The glitching got worse.  Florescence was hurt too, even if it wasn’t an obvious hurt.

Not digital flowers.

They met up with Boughbreak and Nyeh.  Boughbreak had expanded branches from shrubs and small trees in the school gardens, creating a partial circle around them, which added to what the school’s barrier offered.  Nyeh, it looked like, had grown a bit, and turned a mean face and overlarge hands toward the worm, which was still recuperating.  Blades of grass stood up around Nyeh, tall, sharp, and forming ‘x’ shapes as they crossed, like spears brandished by guards.

“Recover.  Do you need to fall back?” Matthew asked.

Florescence considered, letting Dorian decide.  Dorian shook her head.

The glitching slowly eased.  She backed up until she was standing in the garden bed.  Flowers weren’t in bloom, but they did bloom here.  There were automatic sprinklers, connected to the building infrastructure.  Wards around those, because everything here had safeguards, it seemed like, but… familiar ground, in a way.

She dropped to a crouch, and drank that in.  She populated the garden with digital flowers.  She pulled on the blue of the broken window behind her, and glass shards became bright blue.  Bright blue glass, lit with digital light, beaded with rain, because they were in the depressed part of the Ruins, now.

The light of the flowers dimmed.

Rain was good for flowers, maybe, but not electronic ones, Dorian thought.  We’re being drained.

That was what the Ruins did.  Drain and extinguish the leftover shit.  Echoes, spirits, sentiments, the scraps of Incarnations.

The teachers in Kennet found had been happy to outline all of that.

The worm headbutted the barrier.  Echoes exploded out, and the barrier rippled as they smacked against it.

“I tried to get it to hit the Girl by Candlelight,” Florescence said.

“Don’t say her name,” Matthew said.  “You’ll reveal our location.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re doing alright.  Too bad your idea didn’t work.  Would make life simpler.”

“How’s the fight going?  I can’t tell,” Boughbreak asked.

“I’m not sure.  But the Goddess is fighting the Wild Hunt, we’ve got more people getting to or into the building, constantly.  I think if we can just knock one or two of these watchdogs out, that’s the last straw on the camel’s back, we can push our way inside.”

Fostering the garden of digital flowers was getting less effective the further Florescence took it.  Dorian had the feeling that she was willing to keep going until she burned out.  Maybe that was a spirit thing.

A nudge from him, and she stopped.

They’d gathered together enough that he, burned and hurting, and she, dimmed and weakened by the rain here, could pull together enough to float some.

“I’ve got to step away,” Matthew said, his voice altered by Smoulder as he gave the spirit more power.  He was eyeing the glow in the clearing smoke.  The Girl by Candlelight was turned sideways, eye on them, but her fire and wax were mostly turned in the direction of the ongoing tug of war between the neighborhood and the Turtle Queen.

“Eh,” Nyeh grunted.

Matthew stepped aside, through the smoke, and out of the Ruins.  The Girl by Candlelight, standing on the roof, seemed to move more that direction.

Florescence floated up a bit more, to get a view of things, and kept tabs on the Girl by Candlelight.  She and Dorian slipped apart again as surprise jarred them, the air vibrating.  The worm had headbutted the barrier again.  Echoes hit the barrier like raindrops on a tranquil pond.

Boughbreak reached out, and touched the barrier.  Extended into it.  Nyeh positioned himself by the barrier, arms up and crossed, an ugly expression of rejection twisting his face.

She’s a spirit of shelter, kind of, Dorian thought.  And he’s a spirit of refusal.

I’m a spirit of useless pretty shit.

It looked like the Girl by Candlelight was contemplating a bit of interference.  Here in the Ruins, Montague looked very similar, but the Turtle Queen had become a collection of sentiment, and echoes were being pulled into her wavelength.

If that’s the game we’re playing…

His heart pounded in Florescence’s chest.

He could see Matthew’s movements, faint, by the echoes that were stirred up in his wake.  He was trying to gather up some of the wounded and the rest of the hosts, some of whom were actively hosting, others dormant and recuperating.

Wax flowed off the roof, splashing to the ground, covering some of the garden bed.

They were losing ground.  Losing space that wasn’t either outside the barrier and in the neighborhood, or being above that wax, where the Girl by Candlelight was stronger.

“Matthew!” the Girl by Candlelight shouted, and her voice had that echo quality to it, both in how it echoed and how much it sounded like the repeating, degraded-tape-recorder voices of the ghosts.

Fire erupted a few feet to Matthew’s right and ahead of Matthew, just as he stepped forward, wax splashing.  Matthew fell, hand and arm shielding face.

Boughbreak reached through to help shield Matthew, providing a path for some to run through toward them.  Some were in reality, not the spirit world, but the lines were thin.  Even the ones who were wearing their human forms, spirits nested within, were all emotional enough for echoes to weep and peel off of them, spirit enough for them to be silhouettes in the spirit world.

Matthew turned his focus to the Girl by Candlelight.  Smoke rolled out, sparks and flakes of burning wood blowing in the wind.

Her power faltered.  The heat was reduced, flame turned down, more smoke than fire.

“Are you hosting that spirit to taunt me?”

“Protecting myself from you!”  Matthew’s voice didn’t have that echo quality, even if echoes did flow off of him.

“Why can’t you let me in!?”

“Oaths were sworn!  That you wouldn’t try!”

“The Carmine will forgive.”

“I won’t!”

“I know.”

The Girl by Candlelight swept her candle through the air.  Wax that had poured out now flowed away from her, a small tidal wave of molten wax that didn’t form froth at its tips, but candles, pillar-like, thrusting out of the peaks, dipping back below, the flames dividing into smaller candles on bowls that rode the wave, illuminating the dark ruins in bright light.

“I waited, vigilant.  I fought.  I made deals.  I can’t understand.”

“I truly believe you can’t,” Matthew said.

“You can’t,” she replied.  “You don’t understand me.  You made me meet you in humanity.  I’ll have you meet me in spirit.”

“There’s a reality where things turn out okay for both of us,” he said.

“Let me in.”

“And that isn’t it.  Back down.”

The worm went after Matthew and the other hosts.  Nyeh tried to deflect it, but it was too strong.

Florescence flew in, trying to distract, petals scattering.

The worm ignored her.  But the echoes it shed were drawn to the false lights.

Were unable to process them.  They made contact, clustered around them, but then clung to them with nowhere to go and no strength to move them.

She flew in closer.  Close enough that the scents that wafted off the black scaled things -scents of things deeper and darker than death and oblivion- were thick in the air.

She followed it as it swooped, avoiding direct contact.  Digital flowers and petals helped pull echoes away.

It was still more destructive force than four subway trains moving in concert, huge and fluent in moving through Ruins and spirit world both.  Boughbreak, Nyeh, Skullbone’s skull, and Enginehead’s strength barely mitigated the impact as it slammed down.  People were wounded, scattered.

The Girl by Candlelight was continuing to support the neighborhood against the Turtle Queen, and with Montague wounded, it was mattering.  A good portion of her attention was on Matthew.  She didn’t flinch or cry when he was wounded.  She looked greedy.

Contributing to her front line, while being ready to throw out a helping hand to an entirely different battlefield.

That, Dorian thought, was a tactic that went both ways.  He let Florescence handle most things, avoiding danger, spreading her influence, weak as it was.  Digital flowers that shattered with any excuse.  He focused on looking for opportunity, keeping his attention on the Girl by Candlelight.

“Maricica, I call on oaths you made,” the Girl by Candlelight invoked.  “That I would have him.”

“You did, and you lost me!” Matthew shouted.

“I’m owed, not just in word, but spirit!  I gave you and the Carmine everything you have!  You’re elevated!”

Florescence looked at the goddess, who bled from a hundred wounds from invisible blades, some of which pierced her.  The giant woman was smiling, standing in a pool of blood.  Like the neighborhood, she transcended realm.

Twice, apparently, Maricica had been cut down, twice she’d received the Carmine’s help.

“Granted.”

The translucent wax turned red.  The light from the flames of candles floating in bowls turned a pure white, the flames rising higher, straighter.

“I think Charles Abrams let us both down when he refined your complex nature,” Matthew told the Girl by Candlelight.  “There are emotions and boundaries you don’t have, emotions cobbled together from mingling close neighbors.  There are things missing.  If you’d told me, if we’d worked on it, I think we could’ve been fine.  But you didn’t.  You lied and poisoned me.”

“You abandoned me.”

“There’s a world where you stand down.  If you do, I’ll back off too.  We can be friends again in a decade, after we grow as individuals.  Separate,” Matthew said.

“A world where you have someone else.”

“I can extend friendship.  If you back down.  Agree to make amends.  If you give me room to forgive you.  If you don’t do this, with that goddess’s help.  There’s no way I can extend love.  Not after what you and Edith did.  Love requires trust on a level I can’t give you.”

“I don’t want your friendship.  I want to be one.  Maricica.”

“You have what you need,” Maricica said.  Her hand bled as she gripped an invisible blade with its point at her throat, pressing in against bare, blood-smeared skin.  She shattered it in her grip.

Matthew stepped back, Smoulder flaring.  Wax flowed forward, candles cresting at peaks, and Nyeh, Boughbreak, Skullbone, and Lott all pushed back, a wall in front of Matthew.  They relied on the barrier, separating them from the neighborhood, and reducing alien and hostile spiritual flows.  Matthew kept them from being burned.

All lost.  They began to lose ground.  Matthew and Smoulder alone weren’t enough to stop fires from igniting.

Dorian was reminded his physical body was badly burned.  The invasive thought and fear made him falter.  Florescence carried him.

Don’t become what the Girl by Candlelight is, preying on me like she wants to do with Matthew, and I’ll do something nice for your shrine, he thought.

The sentiment carried forward.  Just a little more strength and speed in the air, moving through air like flower petals through a digital darkness, suggesting a wind that wasn’t there.

The worm reared up, flying skyward, through the neighborhood with its oppressive air and hostile, bright, sunny sky.  Staying close to the worm and matching its ascent meant Florescent was safe from the worst attempts at being assimilated.  The worm and the neighborhood seemed to have a tentative respect for one another.

The worm snapped toward Florescence, but she was close enough that she could move around its head, staying near the top of it, or near the base of the chin, so it pushed at her half the time it tried to move to a certain angle.

Nobody was looking at her, it seemed like.  Nobody was looking at her beautiful flowers.

Which wasn’t right.

She pulled away from the worm in the moment it changed direction, flying through echoes, half of which collided with the flowers she was already shedding.  Floating still, Florescent and Dorian created flowers, letting them fall through the air.  Dorian drew on the sentiment, fueling the hail with just a bit of his own emotion.

Flowers and petals landed in the wax, blew in Matthew’s smoke, and littered the rooftop.

Gold, black, and green.

The Turtle Queen reached through the colors in the same way the Neighborhood had relied on shapes.

A metaphorical foothold.  A metaphorical handhold.  A pixelated lily pad to step on to cross a sea of crimson wax.

Flowers had roots.  Digital flowers could have roots like circuits, lines that raced out, glittering and bright.

Reaching for a wounded Montague who was being swallowed by the Neighborhood.

He seized the roots and moved through them, red-black flesh that burned like plastic and festered like cancer snaked along it, forming angular vein shapes.  Every foot of territory he took removed an equal amount from Florescence and the power she’d pushed out there, but that was fine.

Flowers existed to be plucked.

The Turtle Queen emerged beside the Girl by Candlelight, and slapped her with a force that sent a lone ripple across a sea of viscous wax.  Bowls with candles in them were upended.  The power the Girl by Candlelight was receiving from Maricica was dashed away.

The Girl by Candlelight grabbed the Turtle Queen’s wrist.  Flame burned the bugge’s flesh.

And Montague rose up out of the roots and flowers.  To the exhausted, nearly spent Florescent, it was easy to let her perspective warp, to be folded as he folded, to stretch as he stretched, to break as he broke, in the wake of his power.  A man in a suit, flesh, hair, clothing, and everything else about him a blighted, burned, ever-shifting ruin, painful to every sense.  A man in a suit, partial.  He’d been torn in half and part of his left side and lower body were hollow, framed in veins with nothing filling in the space between them, the veins becoming spider legs and coiling tendrils at the extremities, grabbing onto nearby things and piercing the shingles of the roof.

The weakened Florescence twisted, bending-

“No,” Dorian said, quiet.  He pulled back.  “To me.  Don’t follow him to wherever he is.”

The spirit retreated, and as it did, Montague became something more vague to her and Dorian’s senses, harder to interpret and put in order.

There was no dramatic movement, no music to pause, no stillness.  Montague had produced spider-like legs as he rose up.  Some had caught the Girl by Candlelight in the legs and lower back like narrow blades.  One had caught her arm. She was bending forward, and Montague held her upright, a mess of spider legs and a vague human-ish silhouette made of the same flickering stuff as the rest of him.

Strength drained out of the Girl by Candlelight, and her ability to hold the Turtle Queen’s wrist flagged.  Her hand dropped.

The Turtle Queen’s hand, still raised from the prior slap, moved the other direction, in a firm backhand.

Another ripple was produced, but this one erased what it passed over.  Erased crimson wax.  Erased bowls with candles, erased flame.  Wax moved in a wave over wax and the quantity thinned out.  When the last of it rolled out over grass and the stones that were etched with protective markings, it was an expanding circle of something thinner than a pencil lead, then thinner, then gone.

The complex spirit crumbled, with Montague behind it and the Turtle Queen in front of it.

Montague and the Turtle Queen stood there on the rooftop, a foot of space between them, both with senses too alien for them to be staring into each other’s eyes or having a moment.

Dorian wanted to extend a flower to them, but Florescence was spent, and it was their moment anyway.

Turtle Queen and plicate spirit moved in directions that saw them collide.  They crashed into and through one another, mingling briefly before parting, resuming their attack on the neighborhood.

Dorian slipped out of Ruin and into reality.  The cold air combined with the damp made him shiver, and fabric clung to fresh burns.

He staggered back to lean against the wall by the window.

Matthew shouted to some of the people he’d been escorting.  They rushed toward the broken window.  Dorian winced as they came rushing past.  If they even bumped into him, they’d be touching the burns.

“Asshole,” Engine Head’s host told Dorian.  A big guy.

“What?” he asked.

But Engine Head’s host was already through the window.

“He hasn’t had the chance to do much.  Still working out the host-spirit balance,” Lane told Dorian.

Dorian nodded.

“Need a hand?” she offered.

He hurt everywhere.

“A hand would be nice.”

She stepped through, kicking one of the triangular shards of broken window with her boot as she did, clearing it out of the way, then leaned over, hand extended. She lifted him up and helped him step through, into a room that made him think of the barracks at the Vice Principal’s school.

Everyone was getting here now.  The Neighborhood was too busy with the Turtle Queen and Montague, Matthew was directing the relief team of other hosts to help with the worm, and there weren’t enough other things outside to stop everyone.  He stood by the window as people passed through, because he didn’t want burned skin to rub up against the press of people in the hallway, and he could see through, as the goddess fought the Wild Hunt, Anthem, Bubbleyum, and the Dog Tags fought others- not necessarily winning, in every case, but at least keeping them busy.

“The brownies are running!” someone shouted.

Dorian knew a lot of stuff, but he didn’t know enough to know what that meant.

“If the bomb experts are running away, you run too!”

Oh.  Did that mean-

He turned to the window.  Were they meant to leave?

There wasn’t much point in asking.  The Neighborhood made its move.  The exterior wall across the hall tore away, and was folded into other houses and buildings.  Floorboards were torn up and swallowed.  People shoved against one another in their hurry to get away, as the east wing of the building disintegrated.

Someone came racing by the window on a motorcycle.  He wasn’t sure who in Kennet rode one, so his assumption was that it was an enemy.

Problem was, he wasn’t sure if Florescence or he was stronger, if they needed to fight.  He watched as the walls came apart.

Something banged down the hall.  A motorcycle revved.

The walls were disintegrating enough that Dorian could see a bit through the gaps.  Some people were being pulled in.  Sootsleeves sat astride a motorcycle, the end of her cigarette bright.

“My kingdom is a poor kingdom.”  Her voice echoed down the hall.

“Don’t make a speech, do something!” someone shouted.

“A kingdom’s poorest are a reflection of the person at the top.  The person at the top is a reflection of the poorest.”

Mice and pigeons flew out of gaps in the walls.  Some kids scrambled forward.

“In heart, mind, and body alike, in sweat, blood, and tears shed.”

“Do the short version!”

“Or lack thereof.”

People were crowding in Dorian’s way.  He let Florescence creep over his skin.  The press of people crushed flowers.

“I rode out of my mother’s womb, castle and kingdom all, and castle and kingdom travel where I do.”

“What do we do?” a Foundling asked.  They weren’t red anymore.

“Wait.”

“In heart and mind, if not always in body.”

“Shit! It’s the Dragonslayer!”

“Enforcers!  Out front!”

Dorian could only barely see the man at the end of the hallway opposite Sootsleeves.

“I rode out of my mother’s womb with the horse I’d ride forevermore, never to dismount!”

People threw themselves in either direction as the Dragonslayer fired his cannon.  The hallway had a bend in it, but the damage that had already been done was enough that it barely mattered, and the Neighborhood dismantling the building to replace it with a stretch of suburb only made it worse.

Sootsleeves peeled out, avoiding the blast.

Mice, pigeons, and urchins cheered.

Dorian felt the floor begin to eat his foot.  It went somewhere wet and warm.

The sound of the motorcycle shifted.  Coming right for them.

“I emerged from the womb with torch in hand!”

She soared above them, having hit some ramp or another.

Flicking her cigarette.

It hit the ground near the Dragonslayer, and flames erupted.  He shielded his face, but didn’t seem to mind that much.  Because he was a Dragonslayer, Dorian figured.

But it meant one hand wasn’t on the cannon, which meant the cannon wasn’t aimed.  Walls began to rise up.  Green lawns were torn away, street and sidewalk, fence and suburban housing all shattered, as stone walls rose.

Sootsleeves erected her castle.  Taking the east wing and the central building of the Academy.

The Dragonslayer aimed his cannon, firing at her, but gates rose up and the doors slammed shut, and there were only hints of orange light in the gaps between gate with its patchwork metal doors and the stone of the wall around it that hinted at the blast.

The Neighborhood retreated.  Dorian got his foot back.

“Regroup and we press in!” someone shouted.

“Hosts!” Matthew shouted.

Of course.

Static was sweeping in from the flanks.

One of the technomancy Others.

Dorian nodded.

He wasn’t a fighter.  According to his dad and uncle, he was a wimp.

Kennet had lost people, according to Boughbreak.  Maybe that even included his dad and uncle.  Kennet was home.  Kennet was a place where Lane could find herself in the course of hitting rock bottom.  Where Dorian could avoid that rock bottom that he knew would have shattered him into countless pieces, if he’d hit it.

This was bigger than Kennet.  He was starting to feel that, with the scale of everything.  With the Ruins worm, with the Neighborhood, with the Turtle Queen, Montague, and the Girl by Candlelight all fighting to find territory, turf, a place of their own, that was them.

One move, one crucial action, and it could impact places far bigger than the space his own two feet were on.

He could look down and see Florescence’s flowers sprouting out of the slightly uneven, weather-warped floorboards of Sootsleeves’ hold.

You up for this? he asked Florescence, even as he straightened up, knowing the answer.

Griffin vomited, and the vomit made cuts in his mouth sing with bitterness.  It wasn’t a good song.

Hunched over, hurting in a hundred places, he stared down at the mostly clear contents of his stomach, laced through with bile and stomach acid, and saw translucent worms wriggling through it, almost invisible, closer to hair in their thickness than they were to spaghetti.

He had no idea if they were spirit, or something natural, or something between- the spirits finding some way to dredge up some prehistoric parasite, maybe, or Nature inventing something entirely new, just for him.

His stomach cramped.  His right hand- a wound had festered.  Things lived in it now.  Crawled through it.  By sheer bad luck, the nerves were holding firm, refusing to die.  So it could hurt long past the point the necrotic wound should have gone cold to sensation.

The same way the spirits wouldn’t let him die.

No shelter remained his.  He would always be evicted, or it would collapse.

No food was especially edible – there was always a price, to make it nutritious but disgusting to eat, or painful, or he’d get hurt acquiring it.  If he didn’t try to eat, spirits took over his body and made him.

Urination was painful.  So was defecation.  Blood and parasites.

Sleep- never a good night’s sleep.

Even masturbation- one of his hands wouldn’t fully close, the other had a necrotic wound.

Then there was the worst thing.  The boredom.  The periods between the pain.  The yawning stretches of time where a few minutes felt like hours.  Where the sun seemed to refuse to move across the sky, while every breath made his right side hurt, every movement awakened an ache.  Every gurgle of his stomach a reminder of his hunger, and a threat that what little in his stomach might rebel, and that he might have to scramble to his shitting hole, to hold back screams until he was done, then use non-functional hands to try to grab at the parasites that trailed out his holes in the wake of his diarrhea.

Boredom mingling with a waiting for the next hurt.  The next horror.

The best thing he could do with his body was to not move at all.

With his mind?  He fantasized, slipping into daydreams.  The spirits seemed to allow it because waking up back to reality was so painful.  He could fall into detailed imagining, narratives…

Being sixteen again, surrounded by girls, a promising student no matter where he was educated- public school, Blue Heron, or the Burgess Tower, south of the border.  The food… more so at the Blue Heron than the Burgess Tower, much more at the Blue Heron than public school.  What a treat.

Enemies and allies, rivals, teachers watching him, testing him.  The politics, the contacts he had to maintain, the dangers of saying the wrong thing to the son of the wrong family.

The time of his life.

There was a balance to be struck in it.  Riding the line of dread and desire, the reality always in the back of his mind.  But on the other hand-

Ha.  The other hand.  He’d been an aspiring surgeon, and now his hands were mangled, one too crippled by old injuries to work, the other so necrotic that he was pretty sure the tiny white nodules nestled in the tissue around the hole in the center were eggs.  A horror for a future day.

No, on the other hand, there had to be the other hand.  The dream, the fantasy.  Being in the Blue Heron.  The smell of it, he had to remember the smell, let that pull him in, away from this.  Old smoke, Alexander’s Demesne filtering out the stink of it, leaving the more pleasant aromas.  The faint smell of whiskey, of books bound in leather.

A girl stepping out in front of him.  Pretty enough.  Kira-Lynn.  His apprentice.

“Griffin,” she said.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.  He gathered himself together enough he could take in the rest of the scene.  The newer apprentices, mostly girls, coincidentally, were bent over the Others they’d captured, each in a magic circle.  They laid out the bindings.  He stood over them, arms folded, ready to intervene, or offer suggestions.

“Check my work?”

“You four good?” he asked the binding team.

A goblin with ram’s horns slammed his forehead against the barrier.  He shouted something, silenced by the circle’s perimeter.  Griffin’s idea.  It wouldn’t do to bind something, send it out to fight, and then have it unbound and free to tell any secrets it had overheard.

Besides, some of them screamed so much.

“Managing,” the lone guy in the quartet replied.

“Show me, Kira-Lynn,” he said.  He met his apprentice’s eyes and flashed a smile.

A brief look of disgust crossed her face.  She turned, a huff, as some from the Tower would’ve said.  English born, come to America to learn.

He didn’t mind.  He rode that line, one that didn’t let his guard down, didn’t forget that wreckage of a human being, sitting broken, wounded, and diseased on the forest floor.

He could smell her shampoo.  Something herbal, with a hint of citrus.

He’d been sixteen or so when Alexander had forsworn him.  Alexander had led them to think he’d be okay with Griffin leaving to get his education exclusively at the Tower, so long as they passed on the good word and weren’t enemies later.  He hadn’t been.

Alexander had three bugbears.  Disrespect was one.  He was more proud than he let on, and a betrayal that respected him could be allowed to pass, but one that diminished him?  No.  That got a rebuke.

The others were subtler.  Alexander had narrowly avoided a Hangmaiden.  Maurice Crowe had let that on, in one quiet conversation, far from the Blue Heron.  He’d been tempted with a spider that pretended to be the perfect woman and he’d chosen ambition instead.

When Griffin and his dad had weighed the pros and cons of Blue Heron and Burgess Tower, and one pro of the Tower had been that the women there were of a higher caliber.  The prospects for marriage and the family were so much better there.  He’d talked about it with his friends, and had foolishly expected them to keep his secrets.  There had been jokes.  Cup sizes of girls at the Blue Heron compared to the Tower.

Some fodder to think about, creeping through the forest, forsworn and broken.  The dots he’d failed to connect.  Silly to think it wouldn’t get from Seth back to Alexander.  Stupid, to not realize that Alexander let his boys club jeer and chatter about such things, but would calculate, contemplate.  He’d constantly keep in mind, Griffin imagined, which student he could forswear next.  And he did it, waiting three or four years sometimes, sometimes waiting less than a year between students.  Like there was something ugly inside of him that needed release, and he did it by destroying lives of people who failed expectations he never fully voiced.

Charles Abrams had disrespected Alexander, had lacked ambition.  Two of the three bugbears.  Seth had gotten in too much trouble with girls, and had lacked that ambition too.  Two of the three bugbears.

And Griffin… he had disrespected Alexander by choosing another school, had, by the sound of the jokes he’d made, prioritized girls.

Kira-Lynn crouched beside Dony, who laid back, his hand keeping the shard of Abyss pearl at his chest.  A gift from Maricica, before she’d had her easy access to the churning underbelly of creation revoked.  Griffin’s eye darted to Kira Lynn’s bare thighs, her shirt collar.  He looked away.  She still saw.

He focused on Dony, before she could say or do anything.  The diagram was drawn onto skin, over the heart.

“Good,” he said.  “Do you want me to?”

“You’re better than me,” Kira-Lynn said, with a note of resentment.  Like she hated having to admit there was anything good about him.

His hand clicked in the center as it moved, something internal still off, even after he’d worked to heal things.  With his left hand, the joints felt artificial.

Gesturing around the diagram, he separated various aspects of Dony from one another, a layer for spirit, a layer for echo, a layer for the visceral, deeper than flesh.  Dony grunted in alarm, then fell unconscious a moment later, his thoughts unable to travel between the planes.

Off in the hallway, Joel was shooting his cannon.

“Do we need to worry?” Teddy asked.

“Don’t think so,” Cameron said, glancing at cards on the counter beside her.  She was tweezing stingers out of Seth’s face, holding a treated paper towel to the spots to kill the things nested inside.  They’d heal Seth after.

Bugs in flesh.  The spiders laid eggs, a surprise for tomorrow.  Reality rhymed with the nightmare, and it didn’t feel real, it couldn’t.  He couldn’t let it.

Hand movements sorted through layers, silhouettes of Dony, filled with different things.  He brought the deep visceral to the top.  Fingers indicated the Abyss pearl, and he raised it up, until it was at his fingertips.

He pressed it down, steadily, into one layer, pushing that layer down and through, into others.  They crashed through and into one another, aspects of his self countering the deep darkness that the pearl held.

Some adjustments along the way.  Dony’s conscience was nagging at him.  A thread trailed out of his gut.  Griffin’s finger traced it.  The texture and thickness suggested family.  He’d talked to a mentor, someone who’d taught him things.  Including mild violence.  Shouting, maybe, or a cuff on the head.  His dad, based on what Griffin could remember about Dony.  A hard father to get along with.

Dony’s back met the floor, and he convulsed a moment later.

“Your skin might be a little more gray than the pink it normally is, you’ll be paler-”

“Is that possible?” Seth asked, laughing briefly.  Then he winced in pain.  Griffin smiled.

“-but having this much Abyss in your heart will change your vitality.  You’ll be really hard to kill,” Griffin told Dony.

Dony groaned, hand clutching his chest, prying at the spot the pearl had dug in.  Except it hadn’t passed through flesh to get nestled in his heart.

“Teddy,” Griffin said, crouch-walking a few steps over to Teddy’s side.

“Fuck me,” Teddy said, then he laid down.  He had another fragment of the same pearl.

“Aaaugh!” the goblin shrieked, as it left the binding circle.

“Obey,” the new apprentice said.

The goblin began smacking itself in the forehead.

“What are you doing?  Stop fighting.”

“I whack-” He hit himself in the forehead.  “-myself for fun.”

“Stop.”

He stopped.  He clenched and unclenched fists.

“Go out and fight for our side.”

He hesitated, then staggered off.

“Wait,” Griffin said.  “Send him my way.”

“Goblin.  To him.”

The goblin’s eyes widened.  He broke into a run, head lowering.

“Gently!”

And slowed, a few paces from Griffin, breathing hard.

Griffin grabbed one ram horn, lifting it, and took a look at the binding that encircled around the goblin’s neck.  He gestured to make the magic circle expand out, away from flesh, glowing in the air.

He made an adjustment, rotated it, then adjusted again.

“Go,” he told it.  Then, to the girl, “A bit of tightening of the bolts.  That’ll keep him from getting inventive in his interpretation of orders.  After all of this is over, if it’s possible, if you were interested, I could teach you that.”

“Sure,” she said, and she flashed a smile.

She was one of the ones who liked him, in stark, stark contrast to Kira-Lynn.  Felt good.  But that was dangerous.  That good feeling had to be weighed against that image in the back of his head.  The idea this was all false, all a deep, detailed fantasy he could be wrenched out of at any moment.

She was fifteen or so, he was eighteen.  He’d been forsworn when he was her age, and he hadn’t exactly had the time to mature when he’d barely been surviving.  His blood pumped hot and happy in the wake of her smile and interest.

“Kira-Lynn?  Hand sanitizer, behind you.”

She was sitting on a stool now, and twisted around.  He had a glimpse of the shadows between her thighs, beneath skirt, only shadow, and looked away, hand out.

He took the hand sanitizer and scrubbed his hands.  He was walking lines.  Dangerous ones.

Hands clean.  He separated aspects of Teddy, saw a trace of a spiritual wound from an earlier scrap, and mended that while he was at it.  The pearl went in.

“Who’s after?” he asked, as he tied a bow on that, watching Teddy grunt and endure what looked like a heart attack as the pearl’s power ran black through his veins.  “Cameron?”

“I’d rather stay out of that.  Stay alert.”

“Okay,” he said.  A bit disappointed.  Cameron was genuinely gorgeous.  He looked up at Kira-Lynn.

“I’m last.  I want to observe.”

Which meant Travis, then two of the others who were new to this.

The doors opened.  Lenard.  “Helen?”

“Out fighting.”

“Her family arrived, east side.  They’re engaging.  We weren’t sure if there’s something to adjust to give permissions.”

“I think those barriers are long down.  There’s some residual stuff with the spirit barriers, weakening those who’re inside a bit.”

“I think they want those taken down long enough for them to come inside.  Griffin?”

“Hands full.”

“Seth?”

“Face full of unhatched baby spiders,” Cameron said, tweezing.

Stirring memories again.  Another reminder.  Griffin’s hand clicked more.

The two boys after Travis were simpler.  They didn’t have any practice stuff going on, hadn’t come into contact with complicated Others.  He could do them at the same time.

“Miller’s in the room down the hall,” Seth said, as Cameron pulled tweezers away to place a small egg on a plate that had previously held food.

“Busy?”

“Don’t think so.  Way things are going, we need to be ready to act anyway.  Our first-line Lords and Others softened them up, the others are on standby.  We’ve turned about twenty of them with bindings.  Get Miller out of his lab, he knows enough about the perimeter measures, then have him start using whatever he’s been brewing.”

Lenard grunted a response, letting the door swing closed behind him as he left.

“And take one of the loyal Belangers!  Ow!” Seth shouted.  Lenard shouted some kind of affirmative from the hallway.  One of the burrow-holes in Seth’s cheek started to weep fluid.

“Almost done,” Cameron told him.  “Then healing potion.  But we don’t want healing potion while you’ve got those in you or they’ll get bigger and stronger-”

“I know how it fucking works!” Seth raised his voice.  “Fuck.  Okay.”

She resumed her work.

Griffin might’ve passed the job to Kira-Lynn to finish, but he felt it was a bad idea to do self-surgery, the kids needed someone stable and supportive, and, shit as it was, he was that, here.  He was aware of how fucked that was.

And, maybe a bit of him had wanted…

“Kira-Lynn?”

She sighed, then got onto the floor, lying down.  The others were starting to stand.

Kira-Lynn unbuttoned her top, and Griffin saw a flash of bra.  He looked away, then looked at his apprentice’s face, and saw her staring a hole into him.

“Teddy?” Kira-Lynn asked, not breaking eye contact, until she paused to glance at Teddy.  He was stained with the Abyss, the color gone from his flesh, veins black here and there, while he continued to adjust.  “Fuck.  Cameron.”

“What?” Cameron asked, squinting as she tweezed a hole in Seth’s face.

“Watch Griffin while I work?  Make sure he doesn’t do anything?”

“I’m not that type of guy,” Griffin replied.

“I think you’re lucky the Carmine won’t gainsay you and other Judges are staying away from all of this,” she said, lying down.  She placed the pearl on her chest.

He wasn’t that type of guy.  He liked girls, but if all of this was illusion, a detailed fantasy he sank into, deeper each time, the forced shift back to reality worse each time, he couldn’t afford…

Even in fantasy, he couldn’t slip.  So he starved, and in the starving he craved, but he kept it to glances, to brief thoughts.

He’d fantasized about ravishing a student from school, a while before.  The fantasy had been ruined, thoughts disturbed.  He’d been left sitting in the forest, sick and hurting, with a proud erection he could do nothing about, with his hands in ruins.  One part of his body uninjured, whole, and ready, every other part unable to reply to that readiness.

One more torment, hormones surging, the fantasy dogging his sleepless self, the erection returning with any excuse, until he’d been a sort of rabid animal.

Until he’d seriously sat forward, rocking slightly, hand poised over it, convinced in his animal madness that he could find some relief if he put his cock through the festering hole in his hand.  If he could push through the pain.

It hadn’t worked- he’d barely made contact before the pain was so great he’d thrown up.

One of his lowest moments, that chased him even now.  He couldn’t indulge in himself without feeling ill.  How could he do anything to a girl?

Every joy was counterbalanced by an opposing darkness.  The glimpse of the curve of her breast with the pearl shard sitting askew because it laid partially against it, the edge of her bra cup, the rise and fall of her chest, all matched by the memories of the woods.  Woods he wasn’t entirely sure he’d ever left.

The more the animal urges rose in him, the more he had to pull back, be the scholar, the practitioner elite.

Alexander would be so proud of what he’d inadvertently wrought.  So proud.

“You took the biggest pearl splinter for yourself, didn’t you?” he told Kira-Lynn, with some fondness he could only really enjoy because she was more or less unconscious.  His apprentice.  Cameron watched him.

“A delicate process,” he said, partially for Cameron’s benefit, as he rearranged things to bring the deep visceral to the surface.  Two of the new apprentices were watching.

With two straight fingers, he pushed the pearl down and in, into soft flesh.  Into the largest hollow portion of the heart.  It felt a bit like he was getting away with something, doing this while being watched, even if it was innocent.

Flipping things around.  A darkness here, a- a what?  A twisted joy in that ruined wreck of a man in the woods, to counterbalance?  Smiling with rotten and broken teeth at Griffin, at the knowledge that Griffin was weak?

He pushed the pieces of Kira-Lynn together.  He saw her back arch in full-body spasm as black Abyss ran through her veins, and turned thoughts away from the natural conclusions that followed.  Couldn’t- couldn’t go back to that memory, that cycle, fantasizing so much that he got hard, sitting in the woods.

He would’ve done spirit surgery on himself, to try to fix this, to withdraw the traumas, to bring things into alignment.  Even to spiritually castrate himself.  But he shied away from doing something so vital to himself, and there was nobody he trusted.  Even as Kira-Lynn learned, he knew she hated him, and he knew this sort of work needed a delicate touch.

Besides, any relief, any resolution, it threatened to break the spell.  To make this detailed fantasy shatter, leaving him gasping, shitting his parasite-riddled self in the woods,

He was sweating.  He turned away from Kira-Lynn.

She’d used the Abyss stuff more than she’d let on, if she was adapting this fast.  She buttoned up her top, noticed him noticing that she was doing that, and stared at him without staring a hole through him.  Without hatred.  She sighed, stretching her back a bit, grunted.  Too at ease, here.

Would an abyss-tainted Kira-Lynn welcome his advance, when the real one wouldn’t?  What would that mean, big picture, if she did?

Didn’t matter.

But thoughts stirred, went in circles, twisted against one another.

There were lots of girls around.  He wiped his hands with hand sanitizer, then ran the excess through hair, pushing it back out of the way.  Probably not good for his hair, but whatever.

“Seth, man,” he said.  “I need fresh air, and we need to start taking action.  Where am I best utilized?”

Being close to Seth meant being close to Cameron.

“Do you want to take your shirt off before I pour this on your face?” Cameron asked Seth.

“Do you just want my shirt off?” Seth asked, teasing.  It would’ve been better if his face wasn’t swelling and weeping blood and clear fluids from the evacuated spider-holes.

But Cameron took it in stride.

“One second,” Seth said.

Griffin swiped a wastebin off the ground from beside the desk, and held it, catching the worst of the runoff as Cameron poured.

“Oh, that feels so much better,” Seth said.  “I think you missed one, by my ear.  Swelling.”

“I see it.  Sorry.”

“Make it up to me tonight,” Seth told her, leaning over while she used the sharp nose of tweezers to cut the bulge open, and pull out a spider as big around as a quarter.

“We’ll see,” she said, voice soft.  She weirdly sounded more positive as she said, “and this is so gross, I’m so glad we’re done.”

Griffin would have smiled, but his thoughts were a conflicted mess.  He tried to keep his cool, looking calm and collected, instead.

He wondered if Alexander had ever been the same.

Seth, taking an offered handkerchief, leaned over the wastebin that Griffin held out for him, and wiped the worst of the fluid off.

“Joel,” Seth said, as he cleaned up.  “Help Joel.  He needs to hold out for an extra minute or two for the Kims to show up.”

Griffin saw Cameron wipe her hand along the top of Seth’s head, helping to get red potion out of coppery hair, and pulled away from that scene with the same intensity he’d have pulled a hand off a hot stove.

“Any more bound?” he asked.

The guy who’d been doing the binding with the three other girls nodded.

One Lost, one goblin.  One Griffin hadn’t seen in his glimpses of what went on around Kennet.

“Come,” he ordered the two, gesturing at the binding circles.  He could See the spiritual flows, indicate them, and have spirits listen.

“Dony’s parents are coming crashing through, not sure what’s up with that,” Seth called out.

“Do us all a favor and find out?” Griffin asked, keeping the words civil and calm, even as he felt more like the animal.

Into the hallway, flanked by the Lost and the goblin.  Both smaller than him, but they were help.

“Die to help Joel and I, if it comes to it,” he told them.  He paused.  “Acknowledge me.”

“Acknowledged,” the Lost replied, as the goblin grunted in the affirmative.

Joel had abandoned his cannon.  He threw chunks of metal out, and they embedded into walls around the hallway.  Floor, ceiling, walls.  Each began spewing flame like a water sprinkler spewed water, all from different angles, criss-crossing and overlapping, to form an impenetrable flame.

In the moment before the last flame-spewer fired, someone slid underneath.  A young girl with a rabbit mask, skidding on one hip, then climbing to her feet.  She had a serrated knife.

Joel drew out another weapon, swinging, and she put a foot out.  She moved strangely, standing parallel to the floor, moving as his arm did, then leaped off, standing on the point the door frame stood out from the wall, above a door.

Joel swung, and flame whipped out as a lash, raking paint and wood.  She walked along the ceiling, avoiding it.

It was like a dance, Joel backing up a step, her matching him, standing on the ceiling with her face less than a foot from the top of his head.  He moved two steps to the side, and she followed suit, not letting him make a gap.

There were two moves, as Griffin saw it.

Joel chose the aggressive one.  He moved his arm, bringing the whip out.  A mistake.  Griffin wasn’t a fighter, but he knew it wasn’t the move, and it looked like Joel realized in the moment the little kid moved and he realized he wasn’t only not going to hit her, but his weapon was a lash of flame that extended out of the metal handle he held, and the lash, going overhead, and had to land somewhere.  He had to get out of the way of his own weapon.

She walked down Joel, dropping to floor for the last portion, twisting in the air to slash the side of his throat as she did so.

The bound Lost that Griffin had brought tackled her, grabbing her as she landed.  It kept her still long enough for Joel to kick her into the wall with a steel toed boot.  She hit the wall and bounced off, glancing at Griffin before finding her footing, barely seeming hurt.  She backed away from the goblin.

A jewel framed by twisted metal hung off of Joel’s side.  It glowed bright red, and the bleeding slash wound at Joel’s neck cauterized, the ragged edges of the wound from the serrations in the knife turning to something that looked like metal.

Joel had gone out of his way to make that after getting hurt raiding the Belanger compound.

Griffin had never been one to spar much, but unresolved frustrations really helped.  As the girl prepared for another move against Joel, Griffin pushed out with Sight, hands out in front of him, forming a square with forefingers and thumbs.  He gestured with other fingers, inhaling-

She feinted, the goblin threw itself at her and belly flopped on floor, ad then she lunged for Griffin.  Griffin took that moment to pull the ‘square’ apart, rotating hands to connect different fingers.  His hand clicked from an old, unhealed injury.

The girl came apart into four versions of herself, silhouettes aligned in parallel, each a foot apart from the others, moving slower and then stopping in the air.  Visceral, spirit, connected Self, and echo.

Joel took a sharp step forward, glancing right, and then body-checked the Self directly, knocking it out of the lineup.

The others broke apart into fragments, and, after a delay, followed behind, crashing into alignment with her as she slammed into a doorway.

“They’re only intermittently red.  They’re fierce when they’re red, single-minded.”

“Let’s figure that out.  Hold her.”

Joel bent down and picked her up by the neck.

Griffin used Sight, studying her, letting vision clarify.  He looked deep, sorting out the layers…

Until he saw that connected Self, with a fat boot-print on it.  There were threads, threads tied to and through other aspects of herself…

“Rooted in Miss.  The Founder of the third Kennet.  She’s getting weaker, so the radius gets smaller and smaller.  There’s a tether on the Lost…”

He glanced at the bound Lost he’d brought.

“They’re meant to belong on the Paths.  It doesn’t take much to send them back.  Something similar for the Paths.”

“And the rabbit girl?  Can we send her back?”

“Not Lost.  Foundling.  Similar but different.  She’s tied to the third Kennet through the-”

The rabbit girl swung her legs, walked up the doorframe, and broke Joel’s grip, retreating onto the ceiling, where she crouched, out of reach.

The goblin threw something at her.  It cut her arm.

“-the Founder.”

“Send the Founder back…”

“No red alignment, might even pull some of them back, or weaken them.”

Joel nodded.  He started to turn, and the rabbit girl went after him again.

This time, at least, Joel took the option of retreating instead of trying to attack her.  He went through a doorway into one of the rooms on the side of the hallway.  She was forced to drop to the ground to pass through the door to pursue.

There was movement on the far side of the flames.

“Incoming!” Griffin called out.  “Through that fire barrier!”

“Fucking-” Joel swore.  The rooms on this end of the school were larger, but not so large that a scrap with a guy in armor, a scrappy little girl in a bunny mask, a Lost, and a goblin weren’t a crowd.

The way the barrier seemed to work, the gouts of flame heated up the metal, while the handles extended some kind of protection through themselves and the surrounding surface, so they didn’t burn the place down or do so much damage to wall, ceiling, or floor that they came loose.  To move them or manage them, you had to reach through fire.

Or withstand it.  Three people in heavy armor carrying massive metal shields came through, shields erected as barriers against the flames.

Making a gap, briefly, before metal started to melt, for some more Lost and Foundlings to come through.  Among other things.

Seth had mentioned the Ballerina.

“Joel!”

Joel came out of the room, and saw.

Did I buy the extra minute we needed? Griffin thought.  Being part of this helped quiet the contradictions and the frustrations.  Something as dangerous as this…

“How worried do we need to be?” Joel asked.

“Did Seth not mention her?”

“Worry.”

The Ballerina crouched, arms a loop above her head, face turned the wrong way around.

“Luna,” someone said.

The rabbit-masked girl joined that group at the end of this hallway, flames behind them.  The red leeched out of her.

The Ballerina sprung, straight for Griffin.

Joel moved to intercept, and she stepped on Joel’s arm, touched toe to wall, and redirected herself, straight for Griffin.

He was already wrapping the fingers of each hand around the thumb of the other, pulling hands apart to make that square, the frame.

Pulling her apart into three versions -he’d fumbled it worse than he had with the rabbit- slowing her, drawing her into stasis.

But her momentum was enough that even after being slowed to a quarter her prior speed, slowing more with every passing fraction of a second, she was still moving fast.

Her shin smashed his hand.  Her body whipped around, and the toe of her other foot cut clipped his chin.

A quarter of an inch and she would’ve made contact with bone, and with the speed of that twirl…

It’d be his head facing the other direction.  He fell, hand mangled, eyes wide, the frame coming apart, meaning she was free to move, striking a pose, standing on one foot, one leg cocked, toe touching knee, arms in a cradle in front of her.

He touched his chin as he rose to his feet.  The skin there hung by a flap.

This isn’t even a combat practice, he thought, hands poised.  It’s Sight, it’s diagnostic, and every time I use it like this, I’m… fucking up my tools.  I’ll need weeks to recalibrate the finer points of my Sight.

But she was scary.

Joel’s focus had turned elsewhere.  One Lost swung a pair of scissors as long as she was.  A spirit floated, black like a glowing screen displaying ‘black’, digital.  The rabbit girl prowled, knife ready, matched by the goblin Griffin had brought.

The Ballerina moved toward Joel, instead of Griffin.

Forcing Griffin to use the framing again.  He did it indiscriminately, knowing how badly he was mangling his tools.  All of them.

Separating every person in the scene into five.

Except he didn’t have a lot of experience with Lost.  Things immediately began to go wrong.  The girl with the scissors was like a deck of cards mid-shuffle, cards riffing between the layers, loudly and violently.  The ballerina split into four, and all four began to move in different directions, the visceral layer coming for Griffin at a run.  Three more closing on Joel.

He slammed hands together, choosing one version that Joel seemed most prepared for.  Joel caught her with the flame lash, kicked the scissors-wielder, and knocked her into the goblin.

Too tense and chaotic a battle in close quarters for Joel to remember the goblin was an ally.  Small loss.

Griffin framed the fires the lash had started, then gestured as he broke the flame apart.  Directing spirits.

Fires moved, splashing into people.

He could support Joel as Joel, wearing heavy armor, was battered by three separate kicks as the Ballerina did a small hop in front of him.

Joel went through a door in the wake of that.

We all have our strengths.  Joel’s is making those weapons, not necessarily using them.

Griffin felt like an animal again, on edge, frustrated, as he realized what he was up against here.

The group was taking down the flame barrier.

We lost the east wing and center, we’ll lose the western wing of the Blue Heron at this rate. 

The rabbit girl, watching the door Joel had gone through, dropped to the ground.  Legs snapped.

The Ballerina sprung off to one side, through a door, avoiding similar treatment- one arm, one leg twisted in the fleeting moment she was still visible.  Others followed suit, ducking into adjacent rooms, but tracking the Ballerina was his priority.

Griffin tuned Sight, peering through layers of spirit, to track her.  He saw her go through a window, outside, moving up toward roof, before the trail of spirit movements got too vague.

“She’s circling around to come at us from the flanks,” he said, glancing back over one shoulder.

The Kims had come through.  In all the commotion with the Ballerina, he hadn’t even seen the damage done behind him.  A bogeyman with a wagon towed behind him had gone through part of the wall near the doors at the end of the hall, and lay mangled, limbs broken.  He was trying to reel in a chain, but every time he did, one of the Kims broke his arm a bit more.

They resembled Helen.  Blond, blonde, fine-boned, with sharp noses and sharp chins, favoring black as their clothing color of choice.

Helen was with them, and so was Josef Miller, the alchemist.

“What were you fighting?” the matriarch of the Kim family asked, her accent faintly British, even if the family technically hailed from a folded bit of reality.

“The Ballerina.  She was near the roof, last I saw.  Dangerous.  But if we can hold her down for just a second, I think we can make the elastic attachment between her and the Paths pull her back and away.  The Founder is out there, I think.  If we can send her back to her realm, it’ll ease a lot of the pressure.”

“That sounds like a plan.  Leon?  The Ballerina.  Charmaine?  The Founder.”

“Yes’m,” one of the men said, while the woman, presumably Charmaine, gave a nod.

Helen walked up to Griffin, and cupped his chin in one hand.  He felt fifteen fingers on that hand, and pulled a bit away.

She poked him in the chin.  “There you go.”

His skin was reattached.

He did not get how they functioned.  But he was glad they were on his side.

“Thanks.”

The kids were ready enough to step outside the office.  Abyss-stained, with dark looks in their eyes.

His apprentice among them, most stained among them.  Somehow, she didn’t hate him as much when she was like this.  It fucked with him.

Frustration surged.

It only got worse when he saw that the spirit- the Host, he’d glimpsed the shape of them when he’d framed everything.  It had planted flowers.  Ones like someone would draw in an old computer program, with big fat pixels, glowing like neon.

Artificial nature.  Making Griffin think of the lie, the broken forsworn man in the forest.  This as the fantasy.  It was easier if this was all fantasy.

The fake flowers were like a taunt.  Something beautiful that belonged to nature.

The universe was cruel.  To do that to him, to let Alexander do it to him.  The universe held love and touch back from him, it twisted him up inside.

It would have been the same if he’d seen a child’s drawing with a heart or a happy sun on a refrigerator.  Like someone was spitting in his face.

A hand at his shoulder made him startle.

He hadn’t realized he was breathing harder, scowling, until she touched him.  It bothered him.  Having the right appearances was all he had, if he didn’t have control of other sides of himself.  And he didn’t.

He glanced at her, then looked away from her eyes.  Because he knew she knew.  Seth knew him on certain levels, but Helen did on entirely different ones.

He took in the destruction, the damage to the walls, the hole where the wagon bogeyman had come plunging through.  The fires that weren’t gaining any ground.  Holes here and there, with cold air blowing in through broken windows.

“If we lose the western wing-” he started.

“Then we will be fine,” the Carmine said.  He’d come out of the upper portion of Alexander’s office.  “It would be best, in fact, if I could see the school crumble, the last brick timed to be broken as we wrap things up here.”

“Can we?” Helen asked.  “Wrap things up?”

It was evident in the Carmine’s tone.  We can, Griffin thought.

“We can,” the Carmine said, unnecessarily.  “You can.  I’ll stop in for a word with some of our best assets, see if they want to be agents.”

“We’re confident, then?” Joel asked, weapon brandished, held out to ward off any attacks from the infiltrators as he came through.

A crash behind them made Griffin glance back.

Someone had tried coming in through the hole by the doors.  They were being horrified only a couple of seconds later, by the Kim that had been dealing with the wagon bogeyman.  Arms reached out, getting thinner as they did, forking, until they were so thin they broke under their own weight, curling up like dead spider limbs.

Seth had stepped out into the hallway, Cameron hanging off his side.  Seth looked more like Alexander than he ever had, maybe.  Confident.

Griffin felt the frustrations stir.  The fucking flowers, like smiling suns on a fridge.  The apprentice that felt so in reach, especially with the Abyss taint in her, except he couldn’t let himself, not because he didn’t want to, but because his sanity hung together on the belief that he could be that person in the woods, forsworn and broken.

He met the Carmine’s eyes, and more than with Helen, or with Seth, he felt seen.

The frustration quieted.

The Carmine Exile had been forsworn for ten years, give or take.

“Yes, we are,” the Carmine said, answering the question about confidence.  “Let Maricica have the moment she’s been waiting for all this time, you hold the line as you’ve been doing.  Then we move forward.  Even though we shouldn’t need it, I’ll be waiting by the phone.  Seth has informed me London is calling in a few minutes.”

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