Author: Wildbow

Finish Off – 24.7 | Pale

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Verona watched as the giant fetus took shape in the horrified constellation- or what Verona was guessing was a horrified constellation.  It wasn’t set up against the backdrop of the sky, like some big astrology diagrams would be, kind of like the founding had been, with the big glyph of the big wheel, which had become the bleeding moon, but a Storm operated like a sub realm and-

Not that important.

Fuck, Verona was cold.  The group she’d had with her from their arrival point and the Storm’s origin diagram to here was setting up wards, and Verona wore some, but even with that, the Storm was getting through.

Deb and Ann had gone out ahead a bit, to scout and see if there was room to move.  McCauleigh and Julette were together, patrolling the flanks.  Anthem was out there alone.  Dog Tags were spaced out.  Goblins were… all over the place, patrolling.  Some in groups, some alone.

Less far out ahead were Matthew and the hosts.  Matthew had been their point of communication with the frontline combatants that had gone with Lucy, and was now out there, straddling the distance between Lucy’s group and Verona’s.  Ready to guard the frontline attackers or go to the rescue if they needed it, or come back to back up Verona, if something heavy came at them.

Most of Verona’s group was here, working on wards.  Nicolette and Zed were further back occupying one area they’d cleared and thoroughly warded, so they had space to work on the background stuff.

The echoes were the worst part of this whole Storm thing.  The Ruins was split up into subsections, like how Verona had climbed up to a bright, optimistic part when fleeing the cabin with the furs, back in the middle of summer.  The dominant, overarching one was one of despair, of woe, of grief, loss, marked with darkness and pouring rain.  Terror, fear, and apprehension were marked with numbing, chilling cold, snowstorm.

Shock, surprise, amazement?  The trauma that left its enduring, unique marks?  That part of the Ruins was mist and limited visibility cut through by lightning strikes, with terrain that came and went between flashes.

They had all of those.  Drenching rain, cold snow, lightning flashes.  They’d just dealt with the skin-crawling awfulness of the Dropped Call, which was still out there, then Mal?  Anselm?  Mural girl?  So many others?  Heavy in Verona’s mind.  They were in constant danger of some new, troublesome Other jumping out.  A flash in the distance was something she had to wonder about.  Lightning?  Nope.  Gunshots.  The sound followed, late, drowned out by the roaring rain.

Fear, despair, shock.  The weather paralleled the events, which were fed into by echoes, and it was a lot.  Too much.  Her hand shot through with pain, and she rubbed at it.

So she focused on what she could handle.

Big fucking alchemical sky fetus.

Not so handle-able, on the face of it, but she could try to get her head around it.  The two things in four corners around it, she’d seen that in books.  She couldn’t decipher what the things in the ‘corners’ were.  They looked like steaming tumors or broken up asteroids, hanging in the air at four points that suggested an invisible square around the giant fetus thing.  The fact they were so ill-defined might’ve meant something.

That sort of thing was called framing and was common to angels – often as a halo or wreath around them, some types of divinity, and Others of Law.

The eyes were mostly closed, and light shone from within, dull orange and steaming or smoking.  There was a light in its body too, visible when its mouth parted open, and that had its own intensity.  Its skin was either a dull bronze-y tint, or pale with the light tinting it that way.  It made it stand out against the dark Storming sky.

Glow from inside made her think doll or vestige, but it was too intact and whole for that.  No horrorfication in evidence.  It didn’t look stained with Abyssal stuff.

Verona crouched in the rain, which was reduced in intensity by the wards others were drawing, her head hunched forward so the hood offered more protection, tilted so she could look up through the corner of her eye at it.  To do otherwise would mean rain in her face.  She felt like she had to put the pieces together using what the other side had.  It made her reluctant to think of Law and Law-based Others.  The ones who worked based off of the Seal.  They tended to be pattern-driven, tied to the fabric of things.  Some were manufactured, like stone lion statues that guided flows of karma and spirit around them, while acting as guardians.  The hot girl totem spirits were like that.  Shrine spirits were like that.  Others were more natural: Petitioner spirits with their rigid rituals of questions, Sphinxes needing and being empowered by a failed question-and-answer ritual, the bogeymen and urban legends with their specific patterns and narratives they carried out.

But at some elevated point were the ones who just kind of naturally fell into the role of administrating things.  Some were incarnate adjacent, like psychopomps guiding souls to their afterlife, or the original Alabasters, not natively tied into the Judgeships, being entities you traveled for a day to see, or who popped up now and then to steer things, give help to a hero, sanctuary to the hopeless, point people in the way of trouble, and so on.

But Judges too.  The key feature was that they administrated or played into the Seal stuff, Karma, and-or the greater order of things.  Playing by and enforcing the rules got them Karma and good stuff from spirits, in kind of the opposite of being Forsworn, which often correlated with Others seeming taller, brighter, more noble, and all that.

The motifs were there-ish, but this felt like it was almost the opposite of Law.

She considered gods.  Had the alchemist Miller and his apprentices put stuff in a pot and brewed up a god while Verona was brewing up Alexanderp?

She poked at her hood, doing her best to look at her shoulder where Alexanderp’s chin rested.  He was sleepy, which wasn’t great, and smelled like bad meat, which was worse.

Probably wouldn’t last out the day.

If this was a god, it was different than Maricica, which, like, okay, weird starting point there, and from Metaphaos, who Durocher had summoned in the school.  Bigger, somehow.  Maybe something closer to Ulysse’s god.  The very attractive Blue Heron student who’d had gifts from his god, and the issue of being engaged to Eloise, who’d been shitty around the time of Musser’s invasion.  Some deep-earth fire god, name kept secret, from an earlier age?

That was a step, though.

“Scobie!” Verona called out, putting fingers down onto a bit of ice that the rain hadn’t demolished, an extra point of balance as she twisted around.  “Is Scobie-?”

“Here.  I’m here. You can use my name.  Nicole.”

Verona had to twist around the other way to see Nicole Scobie walking over.  “Sure.  Is that a Titan?”

“Could be.”

“Hallmarks of something elemental.  If the skin is metal…”

“I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“But can you rule it in?  Metal can be an exterior for strong elements, right?  Like how Joel the Dragonslayer uses gnarly metal to frame all his stuff?  It fits for a Titan?”

“I wouldn’t want to say you’re right and then be wrong.”

Verona frowned behind her mask.  “The thing is the framing, that weird square of stuff, like it’s permanently sitting in a diagram.  That’s Law, right?  Some vehicle for him to filter power or alter reality around him, skew karma?”

“Almost but not quite,” was the reply.  Not from Scobie the Useless, but from Mr. Driscoll.  “Framing isn’t tied to Law, but Law lends itself to framing.”

“I’m going to go set up more wards,” Scobie said.  “I’ve done rituals for cold resistance and this sucks.”

Verona thought for a moment about how they really needed Deb here, because Deb’s presence seemed to make Scobie, like, ten times better, while she was pushing back and trying to show Deb up.

“What the hell is it?” Verona asked.  “I’m guessing elemental, tied into higher powers.  That, to me, says Titan.”

“Good guess, I’d say,” Mr. Driscoll said.  “That’s not a confirmation.”

“If it walks, quacks, waddles and hangs out in the sky like a colossal elemental-cosmic mega fetus, maybe we go with the Titan idea until we get a better idea?” Verona asked.

“No objection.”

“Okay then… what’s a Titan?  Because…”

Verona looked, not at the Titan, but at the sky.

It was getting some sway over the Storm.  The way the wind, rain, and other sky shit blew and clouds moved were helping to frame it.

“…we might need to work around it, and that could be a big diaperless wrench in our plan.”

“I’m a historian, so I’ve come across details, researching for the oldest cities.  Titans predate Law, straddling a middle step of history, between primeval chaos and the advent of humanity.”

“Okay.  I got the general scoop on Primevals.  Durocher’s stuff.”

“When humans lived in caves, the greatest of the beasts in the dark were sometimes titanic, undefeatable, without label or consistent form.  Durocher’s stuff.  When we talk about Primeval chaos, some say there wasn’t geography, consistent day or night, consistent seasons, set realms like the Abyss or Faerie.  Otherness, boiling forth.  Of course, you get a lot of debate, because if you asked a Faerie practitioner, they could make the argument everything was always Faerie, or if you asked Ann Wint-”

“It was all the Abyss, at first?  I read that theory.”

“Good.  Some of the primevals might have taken forms paralleling humanity, and found power as humans found power.  Agriculture, tool use, calendars, language.  Riding that rising tide.  Except humanity moved on.”

“Gods,” Verona guessed.

“No longer thinking in terms of immediate issues, thinking about the future, organizing, perspective, faith.  They existed before, but they started to take over.  They organized and codified where Titans didn’t.”

“And they won?”

“Yes.  That’s essentially it.  Practices make oblique and rare references to them-”

“The Demesnes text.”

“Yes.  They’re rarer than the primevals Durocher deals with, and many are wounded from wars before the Seal, or sequestered in places humanity can’t even approach.”

“And our guy made one?  Theoretically?”

“Theoretically.”

“Potentially weaker than a god?”

“Potentially stronger than one.  Titans collectively, if you go by the origins, were overwhelmed and defeated by divinities and higher powers around the world, but individual Titans were no slouch.”

“Well, we dealt with a god, and that’s just a fetus.”

“It’s growing,” Mr. Driscoll said.

Verona turned her focus back to the thing.

“And the framing?  Is that a thing every Titan had?”

“Framing is something everyone has… it’s a question of being able to See it.  When you make an argumentative diagram, you’re looking for things that fit the frame.”

“That seems pedantic.  Like we’re getting into the weeds.”

“It is.  I- everything has a frame, some need specialized Sight.  I can See an eight point frame in you, if I choose.  Some can be seen with any Sight, but not the naked eye.  And some can be seen with the naked eye.”

He extended a hand.

Still crouching, knees pressed to chest in part to conserve body heat, Verona looked up at the giant metal fetus, who was reaching out a hand.  The Storm shifted slightly.

Getting to grips with it.

Scobie had gone out ahead.  Matthew had gone forward.  Backing people up out front.  Lucy would be out there, trying to provoke something like this.

“I’ll reword.  Does every Titan have a frame that can be seen with the naked eye?”

“No.  Some can, but anyone can.  I suppose you can have a goblin or urban legend tied to Law, reinforcing the Seal with ritualized actions, witting or unwitting, that has a visible frame or halo.”

“That’s a mental picture,” Verona murmured.  “But it’s not always Law.”

“And if we go by what we’re seeing and what we know, then…”  Verona started to straighten, found her muscles stiff, and accepted Mr. Driscoll’s hand and help to stand up.  “Titans aren’t very tied to Law, Chuck isn’t the biggest fan of the Seal.  He’s been given permission to do whatever he likes in the area, he’s got power.”

She glanced backward, and saw Nicolette had come forward, out of the warded area.  Tashlit was guarding their augur.

“White Rot is incoming.  Zed’s doing what he can.  I’ve given him some crystals with stored power from the Belangers, he’s going to see if he can connect them to technomancy, juice up what he’s doing.”

“Can we identify the giant baby?” Verona asked.

“I’m better with things in front of me, and what I said about realms?  This isn’t exactly conducive to getting a good read.”

“Right.  Crap,” Verona murmured.

“I’m doing what I can to push past the veil of the Storm.  It requires sustained and regular practice.  I do one clairvoyance, then leapfrog a clairvoyance off of that, before it fully fades.  I’ll have to get back to it soon.  I wanted to say Seth’s out there, he’s scrying, organizing Others against us, and against Lucy, up front, I think.  I think Seth’s apprentice is doing counter-augury.  She’s inexperienced but all of this is hard enough already.”

“The fet- the baby worries me.”

“Yeah,” Nicolette said.  “That’s definitely worrying.”

Nicolette shielded her eyes with one hand.  Raindrops beaded the lenses of her glasses, and were tinted orange by the glow of the distant Titan.  She fixed the decoration at the side of her head- three ram’s horns that had been hollowed out from the side closest to her head, with something like twenty individual pins or metal bands helping to attach it to her hair.  The wind was making her long coat flap around.

What were the options?  Verona asked the group, “Any experts in Astrology practices here?”

“I do okay,” Mr. Driscoll said.

“Can we cut off the power, fuck it up?”

“Maybe if you got to the sources.  What’s up there, the black lines that form the encasement that’s filling up with alchemy?  That’s called a-”

“Constellation.”

“Yes.  You know, good.  If you removed them, it would hamper things.  But it wouldn’t undo what’s done.”

“I wish we had Gilkey, to poison that alchemy,” Verona murmured.  “If we leave that up, I’m worried that when we try to…”

She adjusted her hood, poking it one way.  She had to prod Alexanderp’s head to rouse him.

He didn’t jump straight to mugging for the camera or talking up a storm, so she figured she was clear.  Still, better to be safe and be vague-ish.

“…pull what we’re pulling?  If he claims the Storm and owns it, that screws us up.”

“Yeah,” Nicolette said.  “I should get back to Zed and my augury.  Just- reason I came out was to say we’ve got enemies moving around the flanks.”

“Can we call our allies?  Let them know?”

“White Rot.  No calls,” Nicolette said.  “If Zed can clear a way, maybe we get a call out to warn.”

“And we don’t know who or what’s flanking?”

“Again, Storm’s-”

“Messing things up.”

“I can see clearly only if I’m really hammering a spot with auguries, keeping vision clear.”

“Got it.”

“Good luck,” Nicolette said.

Her head buzzed with a headache.  Verona dropped her hood back and let the rain soak her head.  Alexanderp fell from his perch and landed in the scoop of the hood, and she moved the brim so it mostly covered him.

She ran wet hands through hair, looking up at the Titan baby.  The mask shielded her face from the cold rain.

“Maybe Deborah Cloutier knows something?” Mr. Driscoll asked.  “About Titans?”

“Maybe.  If she loops back our way, the first person to see her should ask.”

There were more distant flashes of gunfire.  Verona hoped that was Lucy doing the shooting and not anyone they knew getting shot.

Some of their goblins howled off to the side.  Fighting some of the random, low-level Others.

Pressure from all sides, pressure from the rain, pressure from the Titan.

Her head pounded with every heartbeat.

“Let’s assume the plan’s fallen through,” Verona said.  “Maybe we try something to deal with the maybe-Titan baby, maybe that fails.  What can we do?  Avery’s coming in.”

“Wards?” Mr. Driscoll asked.  “Like we’ve been doing, but more.”

That didn’t feel like enough.  But they had a contingent of practitioners here, many of them who’d never seen a fight before.  Sebastian Harless wrote contracts, and he was hunched over, wearing a poncho over a winter coat, drawing wards on the outside of cabins.

“Okay.  If you can get wards up enough it can dampen out the storm, shield the Innocents.  That’s our backup plan.”

“Will try.”

“And I’ve got to figure out how to make our move.”

There were more gunshots.  Verona’s head buzzed with a headache.

A hand at her shoulder made her turn.  Tashlit.

Tashlit was okay in the cold, and liked the water.  She liked warm water, for sure, but her mom was a sea serpent living out off the east coast of northeastern Canada, so cold water wasn’t the worst thing.

Tashlit reached for Verona’s head.

“Don’t waste it,” Verona said.  “I’ll manage.”

Tashlit cocked her head.

“Healing?  You were going to heal me?”

Tashlit nodded.

“It feels like I’m the person who gets ninety percent of that, sometimes.  Save it in case we need to bring someone back from the brink?”

Tashlit nodded.  Fingers made a steeple, touched her forehead, then her arms moved, forming an ‘x’.

“Gods forbid, yeah,” Verona replied.  “But if you can spend a bit of power, mind giving this guy a bit of a boost?”

She moved her hood to where Alexanderp was resting against the back of her neck, chin on her shoulder.

Tashlit moved loose skin away from her lithe black hand covered in interlocking eyes with yellow irises, reached over, and touched Alexanderp.  The eyes glowed faintly, pupils changing from circles to vertical slits.

Alexanderp sighed heavily.  Breathing more easily.

“Thank you.  I thought he’d last longer.  But I don’t figure he’ll last the day?”

Tashlit shook her head.

Looks that bad, huh?  Verona didn’t have a great angle to see.

“I hope he had a good life, being warm, hanging out with girls, getting to strut his stuff.  I don’t like the idea of bringing life into being and then…”

Mal.  Anselm.

The rain felt evocative of the Ruins.  Echoes that weren’t even that close seemed to respond to the wave of emotion that hit her, turning their heads.  Jittering and moving closer.

Verona saw Lucy.

Tashlit moved to hug her in that moment, a ginger hug so she wouldn’t squish Alexanderp.  Verona rested her forehead against her friend’s shoulder.  Loose flesh squished.

“Thank you.  You hang back, guard our guys?  I don’t like how our rear ranks are looking.”

Tashlit nodded.

“Gotta… gotta figure this out,” Verona said, more to herself, the rain drowning out her words.

She pulled away from Tashlit as Lucy came bounding over in fox form.

Verona embraced her friend in a hug.

Their groups were merging.  Two of the three of them were together.  That made her feel better.  A hug from her snake friend, a hug from a fox.

Lucy became human, and led Verona out of the rain.  Something both of them needed, really.  Lucy didn’t look great.  Verona supposed she didn’t either.

She glimpsed Hollow Yen through the rain.

I want to talk to you, Verona thought, before she gave Lucy her full attention.

When Verona had been a bit younger, a big part of what had gotten her into reading was curiosity.  Nobody really told her not to read, and where the internet at her house had been pretty locked down, less so at Lucy’s, and where everyone knew not to look at rude stuff on school computers, unless someone else had stayed logged in, where porn mags weren’t really a thing, books?  Books were a treasure trove.

Certain genres were better than others.  Certain eras were better than others.  She’d find an author who wrote 70s or 80s sci fi or fantasy with a lot of sex and she’d read through every book by them at the Kennet library.  When she went to her mom’s, a stop at the library was usually a thing, when she didn’t use the ‘leave a book, take a book’ thing by the pool in the apartment building, and she’d devour those.

A taste of the forbidden.

She’d done that with practice.  At the Blue Heron, on the course list, a few subjects had been ruled out.  She’d gone straight for heartless and hollow practice stuff when she’d found the library.  That had been a big intersection of her interests.

But there had also been some other stuff that she’d noted as off limits, special class only.  Stuff they didn’t teach you about- they only taught you how to stop it.  Stuff that might’ve even gotten her on a list, if she searched for it.  So she’d had to come at it from oblique angles.  Diabolism.

Darker and worse than just about anything, somehow.

There wasn’t a field of practice that didn’t tap into it, there wasn’t anything that was safe from that vague worry, that an obscure spellbook could actually have the wrong sort of summoning or symbols left in it.  Other practices fell into neat categories, and Diabolism seemed to be every category.  Just… deep and dark.

Horror stuff, Verona was deciding, was very much like that.  Existing not as a thing unto itself, with its own niches and subcategories, but as a thing that existed in the margins around other practices.

Three of the Kims were out there, each using a different sort of Horror practice.  Branching, forking limbs reached for Verona, and she scrambled to get clear.  The space below the cabin teemed with Others.  Crawling oddfolk and goblins warred with the goblins from Liberty and Kennet’s coalitions.  A mess of bodies, of weapons.

Verona, running from reaching hands, got too close to that; she’d figured she was closer to the goblins from her side, which controlled one corner of one building, but she was wrong.  A narrow, overly pale hand reached out, holding a blade of metal with no handle, only wrapped electrical tape.

Verona couldn’t really hop it, with ice underfoot, and so she awkwardly tried to run harder, faster, stretching her leg out.

It still caught the heel of her boot.  Verona crashed onto the ground, hard, different sections of her body meeting ice, piled snow, and puddle.

Three different Others with wide eyes came crawling out from under the building, toward her.

She flipped over, pushing herself to her feet.  Too slow.  One hand kept Alexanderp in place, when he’d been jostled by the fall.

The Others got within arm’s reach of her, the one with the shiv leading that pack.

It was McCauleigh who came to Verona’s rescue, dropping into a slide.  Kicking the shiv-wielding hand.  It looked like her intent was to drive the shiv into the face of the next Other, but it only made the back of the pale oddfolk’s hand smack into ghoul skull and drop the shiv.

McCauleigh kicked the weapon.  It went sliding across ice, hit snow, banked up a bit, and bounced off the wall of a cabin.

McCauleigh rose to her feet, arcing one leg up off the ground, around, and kicked the rebounding knife down.  Pinning the oddfolk’s hand to the shoulder of the ghoul.

Mccauleigh’s feet met below her as she flourished.

Others came out as well.  Half of them were focused on Verona and McCauleigh, half were kind of joining that group, but were focused on their rear.

Bluntmunch was among the goblins who came tearing out.  He led a group of lesser goblins into an attack on the group, hitting the rear of a group of twenty with enough momentum that the ones in the front of that group were made to stumble.

In the time it took Verona to get to a standing position again, McCauleigh capitalized on the stumbling, one knee raising off the ground, foot kicking left, then right, casually knocking two aside.  One fell in the path of others.

Bluntmunch picked up one from the rear of the group and hurled it over the crowd, into the front ranks.

Bowling over others.

McCauleigh had the Hennigar thing going, where she could scream and buy herself time to finish a fight.  Scream and then wrap up a duel.  Scream, shrug off a curse or inconvenient binding, and then hurl herself into others.

Some Hennigars went hard into that.  Being duel winners.

McCauleigh, maybe because she just liked dancing, had become a gore-streaked dancer.  Battle dancing.  It lent itself well to fighting against a larger group of disorganized enemies.  She’d shown a bit of that off when they’d been heading to the church to rescue Bracken and the others from Maricica.

McCauleigh held her own while the rain drummed down around them.

Lucy, on the other side of the cabins, had a gun in her hands.  It looked like she’d been ready to rescue Verona.

“I saved you,” McCauleigh said, flashing a smile.  “Point for me.”

“I don’t think Lucy’s playing.  I think she just wants me alive and safe.”

“Still a point for me.”

“Sure.”

McCauleigh smiled, which was good, because when she wasn’t smiling, she looked so sad.  Or angry.

Verona’s heel- she felt an obstacle when she set her foot down.  She checked and found a bit of the shoe’s material had been cut away and dangled now, getting underfoot where heel met ground.

She tore it away, tested it- it’d be easy to tip over backwards, without all the material there.

When she looked up, she saw.  Echoes were creeping in closer.

“I guess Ann didn’t set up a dead man’s switch, huh?” Verona asked.

“Hm?  Oh.  I could bait ’em, scream.  There’s enough fights I could pick and win around here.”

Verona shivered.  She was soaked.

Making headway was getting so hard.

The mob of lesser violent Others that Bluntmunch had crashed into, that had gotten wedged between goblins and McCauleigh, they were crumbling, retreating, fighting desperately to get free as they were knocked to the ground and into puddles, like Verona had been.

The wind changed direction, with enough force that Verona almost lost her balance- lifting up, only toes touching ground, before feet came down again.  If she hadn’t quickly adjusted, she might’ve done damage to both ankles.  As it was, she had to grab McCauleigh to steady herself.

Lightning crashed down against the roof of one cabin.  The illumination it provided in the gloom seemed to make some echoes disappear, while others briefly appeared.  Intense and very close.

The echo exploded in her face, with a flash of light that was followed by too much darkness.

The darkness was a door, swinging open.  Not just unlocked, but open and ajar, in cold, rainy weather.  That felt wrong.

Verona was a boy, young- twelve or eleven.  Coming home from school, bag way too heavy at his back.

The sight that faced him shook him to his core, a punch to the gut that left only a hole.

Nothing.  No one.

Empty.  No stepmom, no dad.  Dad was in prison.  No stepbrothers or stepsisters.

They’d had appointments.  His stepmom had said.  Besides, it was the last day of school, so if they skipped it wasn’t really like they were missing much.  They wanted a family day, surely he understood, right?  He did, even if it hurt.

No TV, no console, no sofa, no dining room table, no stuff in the kitchen, except trash bags.  A lot of trash bags.

Nothing on the walls.  No posters, no pictures.

Increasingly frantic, he ran upstairs, but he knew.  Every empty room was like a punch to the gut, chipping away at the edges of that hole that was there from the moment the door opened, opening it wider.

Nothing in his room, or their rooms.  Or his stepmom and dad’s room.

He got to the last rooms, hoping his stepmom would be there, to explain, to lay it out, to tell him what to do.

Nothing upstairs.  Nobody.  Dad was in prison and his stepmom and stepmom’s family had packed up and left, and they hadn’t even left him clothes.

He ran down through the house, empty rooms like some open airlock in a movie, sucking the air out of the rooms, sucking everything out through the hole in his stomach.

Basement.  Maybe his stepmom was there.  Doing one last load of laundry.

She wasn’t.  She didn’t do laundry, really, since the tenant issue.

He stood in the dim concrete room, lights flickering.

He didn’t know what to do.

Everyone he would’ve asked for help was gone.  School was out.  Teachers wouldn’t be in school.  She didn’t have teachers.  She was doing the online thing.

There wasn’t even a phone to use to call nine-one-one.

He dropped his bag and put his back to the wall, reeling, hurting from the house full of loneliness that was crushing in around her.

No Mal.  No Anselm.

Every day would be like this for him.  She’d feel the lack, the loss.

Her back slid down against the wall, as she sank down into a sitting position.

Hands grabbed her, hauling her up.

Julette.  McCauleigh was fending off trouble from reaching them.

Verona stumbled into Julette, who caught her in a ‘help you stay standing’ sort of hug.

“I loved them,” Verona murmured in Julette’s ear.

“Me too.”

“Friends when I needed friends.  Backup when I needed backup.”

She could feel it like a hollowness in her own chest.  Hollow enough to rival Julette’s body of twigs and twine.  Hollow enough in the heart-ular region that she felt like she could throw up because of it.

McCauleigh kicked a goblin in the face.  She didn’t recover from the kick, stumbled, and dropped to a crouch, legs bent at odd angles, one foot on the ground.

The rain hammered down around them, giving everything a kind of television static haze from the high-velocity droplets, and that haze seemed to intensify around McCauleigh.

Making it harder to stand straighter.  Harder to fight.

“Speaking of backup,” Verona said, almost pushing Julette out of the way, in her hurry.  Julette saw, and didn’t object, instead reaching out to support Verona’s balance with one hand.

They faced that same pressure.

Every direction they moved, it felt like a headwind.  Walking into wind that, if she was standing on smooth ice, she imagined it would push her faster in the other direction than she was walking now.

Every footstep had to be placed.

The rain found its way into every gap, down collar, up sleeves, up pants legs, into boots.  Her feet were numb.

Lightning flashed, and some echoes were in view.

“Hey!  Back the fuck off!” Verona hollered.  “Get away from my friend!”

Drawing the wrong kinds of attention, but she didn’t care.

“Back off!  No!  We’re good!”

Deb and Ann had fallen.  Wounded, with long term outcome unknown.  Bullets were serious.  Without Deb, they had lost a lot of their ability to manage this Storm and ward off the elements.  Without Ann, they had no easy ability to handle the echoes.

Verona felt Julette rummaging inside her bag, which hung off one shoulder by a strap- she’d almost ditched her bag entirely when she’d been in the throes of the echo stuff.  Julette pulled out a box of salt, leftover from earlier in the night, and tossed it to Verona.

Verona pried the tab free, then cast out a line of salt, toward echoes.

The Storm scattered salt before it could work.  A bunch of it was cast back into Verona’s face.

“Back off!” Verona roared the words into the wind.  “Not her!  Not us!  If you want weakness, look the fuck elsewhere!”

Confidence, to counter shock.  Courage, to counter cold.  Unity, to counter the downpour.

Lucy was fighting the reaching hands.

“Come on!” Verona told McCauleigh, supporting her friend.

Her phone was buzzing in her pocket, but there was no way she could answer like this.

She hoped it wasn’t important.

She, Julette, and McCauleigh worked their way in Lucy’s direction.

Verona got chalk out, almost dropping it with gloved fingers.  Arm against the wall, joining head and hood in helping to shield the exterior wall from rain, she drew the simple anti-water rune.

That helped.  It cleared the way for her to expand it out, draw the marks around the edges.  She didn’t have Melody Kierstaad helping to reinforce, but it was something.  Every bit she added made it easier to add more.  A bit of space, using Deb’s ward, where the Storm eased up and they just had pouring freezing rain instead.

Echoes loomed past that ten or fifteen foot bubble of reprieve she’d gotten.

Lucy was turning weapons into spell cards, letting go of the weapon, and letting the spell cards stick.

It was the same strategy they’d used against the long-limbed, round-bodied knotted folk in Kennet below.

Changing the quality of the flesh, so that stretched flesh became something that broke under its own weight.

One of the Kims smashed their family member’s limbs before that effect could reach too far back.  Cutting off an arm to save the body.

Except that same Kim walked forward, tall and long-limbed, body blurring, forking, then reconsolidating, as he passed in front of his family member.

The wounded Kim mended the shattered limb in the time he was blocked from view by his passing cousin or brother.  Returning it to normal.

This felt like illusion fuckery, except it wasn’t.

The one who’d stepped out into the lead looked like a fighter, and Lucy was not up to a lot of fighting.  She’d had hypothermia, she’d said.  She’d been bruised and battered.  She’d spent a ton of Self she shouldn’t have, to get effects going.  She was with Verona now instead of resting because she didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, and she worried.  Now she was out in the front lines again.

If the echoes were tied to the Storm…

Verona pulled off her bag, and used a silver marker to draw on the part that pressed against her back.  Then she renewed the personal protections, which were less area focused.

“Julette.”

She gave the same to Julette, drawing on the inside of Julette’s white coat.

They hadn’t done this for personal use because it was fragile and got in the way of the personal protections, a general say-so aimed at the wider area that scrambled some of the finer personal work.  It also made them easier to spot from a distance- not just a person, but a whole altered weather pattern.  From a distance it would be like a beacon- a cylindrical area where rain fell mostly down, instead of sideways and up, running here and there.

Right now, the former didn’t matter because they were soaked through anyway, and the latter didn’t matter because the enemies had a bead on them.

She finished, pulled the bag back on, then started edging to the side.

Echoes backed away, and moved sideways.

Another movement, checking the coast was clear behind her-

McCauleigh had moved closer and was ready to intervene if there was trouble.  Watching Verona’s back.

Verona circled around.  With the warding effect, she pushed away Storm, and with it, she pushed away echo and elemental both.

The group behind them was doing something similar on a bigger scale.

Julette cottoned on to what she was doing, and jogged past.

Echoes and one wraith backed away.  Elementals phased out, reappearing nearby.

Julette asked a question, and the Storm drowned out the sound.

“Helping Lucy!” Verona called out.

Julette saluted.

If each of them had a circular warding effect around them, then they could create a bowed ‘v’ shape where circles met.  The echoes collected there.

Grandfather started shooting- aiming at something Verona couldn’t see.

“Trouble,” McCauleigh warned.

We have limited time before Lucy basically collapses.  We’re cold and I’m feeling like I might be ready to keel over, myself.  You couldn’t do your fancy dance fighting move, and the Kims are out there.

One Kim who’d had shattered limbs who was now recovering.  One with a blurred, ghostly effect with the blurring features resembling an echo, except he was very solid, and hit hard.

Another who was calling forth a horror on a rooftop.  Grandfather had shot him earlier, he’d recovered, resumed-

Grandfather shot at a distant, unseen target, further ahead.  He spared another shot for the practitioner on the roof.

They’re relentless.  They break and they keep going.  They’re power hungry assholes.  What they do, it can tie into practically any practice.

No wonder Charles liked them.

Verona and Julette managed to gather about ten echoes and four elementals with their maneuvering.  They crossed the street that way, ducking low, positioned the gathered crowd, and then moved inside.

Verona began drawing out a rune on the wall.  Timed.  A big bubble effect… no, she could make it a square.  That’d be more effective.  An expanding square.

She’d had some success doing stuff like this before.

She checked her phone, remembering the earlier buzzing, and saw about a tenth of a text from Nicolette.  The image of the messaging app was being taken over by a swelling, blistering white foam beneath the glass of the phone screen, with a bit of a static texture to the foam.

She had to hope Zed was managing.

She marked the time, and noted her target time on the wall.

McCauleigh stood by the window, peering out, while Verona worked in the dark, using Sight to see.  Giving herself a deadline, now.

The diagram was a ticking bomb.

They moved to the next building, with Julette doing a bit of herding, Verona counting in her head.  McCauleigh intercepted a bogeyman.  It didn’t look like one of the easy fights, but…

Better to move forward with this strategy.  If Verona got caught up in the fighting, they’d be finishing one fight only to start another a minute later.  She had her deadline.

The insides of most of the cabins were bare and featureless.  No rooms, no details, no decorations.  Empty houses.

It reminded her of the echo.

She crossed the length of the room, checked out the window to make sure Lucy was managing, and then started drawing things out, checking her phone again.

The oozing was coming out from the sides.

But the time display wasn’t affected, so she worked with that.

It had taken two minutes to get here, she had given herself enough time, she figured, to do three cabins, for a big enough scoop effect.  She had to draw this out here.

Warding, effect orientation, effect shape, time…

She closed her eyes and visualized the layout of this place.  Where the Kim house was.  Where the baby was.

The Titans had rode a wave of humanity’s success, Mr. Driscoll had said?

Was there a way to create another sort of ‘wave’?

“Julette.”

Julette was holding the door open, watching things with McCauleigh.  “Yo.”

“I’m writing this thing down.  Can you run it outside, give it to an elemental in our herd?  Biggest, most cooperative one?  Tell them it’s worth it.”

“Sure.”

If they were pushing, maybe a bit of pull in the right area would work.

Verona left the cabin, moved to the next in the line, along the one street.

“Verona!”

She turned her head.  It was Lucy, still dealing with the Kims, shouting.  She had a paper at the front of her neck.

“Watch out!”

Lucy pointed.

The trees?

“Trap.  Nicolette says-“

Lucy was interrupted as the blurry echo horror man took a swing at her.  The connection seemed to cut, spell card no longer touching throat.

The trees.

With her Sight, Verona could see everything wreathed in gauze that was being chewed up by the Storm.  She could see in the dark, and she could see a figure incoming.

Not that surprising, except that figure was Horseman.  Holding a gun.

McCauleigh screamed.

McCauleigh caught the bullet, when Horseman raised a gun and fired in what felt like an eyeblink, but was probably a trick of Verona’s vision in the Storm.

Crashing backwards, McCauleigh fell on top of Verona, against the stairs at the back of the cabin.  Verona might’ve been able to stand up, except the heel of one boot was messed up, and so her foot went out from under her.

Weight of a body falling on me, knocking me hard into wooden stairs.  That’ll hurt later.

Horseman kept shooting.  McCauleigh moved her two knives, trying to deflect or catch bullets.

Verona shifted her footing, got a foot at the small of McCauleigh’s back, and pushed.  “Get ‘im!”

A launch of McCauleigh toward Horseman.

Horseman emptied his gun.  McCauleigh did a dancy thing, blades catching incoming bullets, deflecting them outward at angles.

Verona, for her part, turned and, glancing around the corner to Lucy-

She could see the whites of Lucy’s eyes.

Horseman wasn’t alone, though.

Bogeymen, other lesser Others.  And more Dog Tags.  Verona could see Black and Mark.  Lucy was tied up.  So was McCauleigh.  Too much of Verona’s side was elsewhere.  Had to be elsewhere.  Verona’s plan here required that the enemy be facing one way, focus and defenses lined up against that battle front.  Lucy was at the edge of that.

Nowhere to go but inside.

Let me figure this out real fast, Verona thought, as she pulled out the puzzle bracelet.  She quickly dialed something random in.

She put it on, then pushed her way through the door.

She stepped into the cabin as it reorganized, past the open door, into the building interior, where there was really only the one room, a hollow shell of a cabin with nothing in it.

Except the way Clem’s puzzle bracelet worked, according to the dossiers Alexander had passed the three of them, was it rearranged all the rooms of a building, while adding one more.

Verona passed through the back door, slamming it shut behind her, and went low, reaching for spell cards.

She’d anticipated an Other just inside the door, ready to deliver a deathblow.  Except with the rearrangement, Verona didn’t come in through the real back door.  If this place held true to form, there’d be only two other doors for her to pass through.  The front door, on the other side of the building, or the door of the room that was added to the interior.

That part of the plan worked.  Verona entered a room as bare and boring as the rest of the cabin, solid half-log walls, slamming the door behind her.

The part that didn’t work was that it wasn’t an Other waiting for her inside the door.  As the door slammed shut, a bomb exploded.

Verona, within the room, was mostly safe.  She could feel the impact of it, and felt the building wobble.  The door she’d slammed shut popped open.

Julette slipped inside, in cat form, bounding over a bit of fire.  She paused.

You’re made of sticks and twine, don’t get yourself set on fire, Verona thought.

“Julette, Julette, Julette,” Verona whispered.

Julette perked up, switched to becoming human as soon as she was far enough inside, and jogged over.  “I set-”

A section of fence dropped from the ceiling, between them.  Julette became a cat and bounced back before anything could smash into her.

Lucy had sent Ribs back with a warning, maybe about this very one, this very situation.

He entered through the hole in the wall where the door had been.  Big guy in overalls, with wounds to his head that had scabbed over.  Skin and clothing were stained with Abyss stuff.  He had a nail gun in one hand, and something electrical at the other, and wore tinted goggles.

Verona made it about two steps before more fencing came down, along with a guillotine-like sheet of metal.

Julette tried to circle around and found another barrier crashing down, this one with a spinning fan attached to it, making it wobble wildly.  The blades scraped floor as they came crashing down, and were sharp enough to cleave a gouge into it, before the wall tilted a bit and the fan was aimed up at an angle, instead.

Barbed wire, wire fence, sheet metal, drywall.  A lot of it was seethrough, but between the wires and things strung through it, the weird angles, and illusions from various angles and stuff, it wasn’t that easy to trace a path from where she was at to where she needed to exit.

Verona looked up, and saw that in the shadows of the peaked roof, a whole mess of stuff was packed up there, ready to come down.

A horizontal sheet of metal came down as Julette scrambled.

A little maze, packed into this small cabin with a door and doorframe blasted out.  One that the victims were meant to crawl through.

“I see you in that little room of yours, girly,” the bogeyman gloated.  He walked easily around the mess of walls and fences.  “You’re in my house?  You’re mine.  I bet your cunt is marshmallow soft, marshmallow sweet.”

Verona couldn’t get pulled into his rhythm, she knew.  She had limited time, so she used it.

She closed the door as best as she was able- the explosion had skewed the wall, so it didn’t fully close.

She began drawing the diagram on the wall.

“You think you can ignore me?” he asked.  He smiled.  “You’re in my house, and in my house?  We char our marshmallows black before we get our mouths on them.”

He was wearing an electric rig, and apparently there was some set of controls rigged to it, because he hit a button, very deliberately, smiling as he moved to look through the gap in the door at the resulting carnage.

The contraption sprung up out of the floor.  A sprinkler with lighters attached to it, not loaded with water.

The narrow spurts of flaming fuel were aimed at catching everyone in the immediate area, timed to aim at sheets of stainless steel.  Enough to set a person on fire, but not enough to burn the cabin down before Mr. Marshmallows the bogeyman construction worker could have his fun.

The idea was clearly for victims to be left scrambling through the maze of barbed wire and probably electrified fences, not getting fully away before an arm or a leg was ignited.

Except the contraption had sprung up in the corner of the cabin opposite the bonus room the puzzle bracelet had made.

Rearranged your bullshit, Mr. Bogeyman, Verona thought.

She kept drawing.

Julette, in cat form, lurked in shadow, eyes widening as she met Verona’s.

The other two diagrams were kicking off.  Verona could hear the change.  The difference in the rain.

I know.  Just let me finish.  If I get this done fast, it should achieve a similar effect.

He activated two more devices.  Something crashed on the other side of the wall of her jutting little room here.  A trap swung down along one little corridor, like some giant pendulum, nearly hitting him.

He didn’t seem to have expected that.

Verona finished the diagram, while he navigated his own maze.  He leaped up onto a platform, where a horizontal bit of fence and metal was meant to force a victim to crawl.

There, Verona thought.

She hadn’t given the diagram a timer.  The moment she was done, it activated.

Expanding ward effect.

“Let’s try this then.”

He lifted up the one hand.  Wires ran from the battery pack he wore behind him, down shoulder and arm, to hand, where there was some contraption.  A narrow wire.

For a second time, Verona’s instincts were right, her conclusion wrong.

She’d expected some kind of harpoon.  But it was an arc welder or something.  The kind of shit so bright that you could go blind if you looked straight at it.  She’d seen all the warnings in a video where some guy was explaining how to make stained glass windows, something she wanted to try doing one day.

Except here, it was weaponized.

“Let’s rearrange things a little, while we’re at it.  You stay put, I’ll come your way, little marshmallow.  My little brother got sent away, I’ve got some grieving to do.”

“The taunting would work a lot better if you hadn’t just embarrassed yourself, setting off traps in the wrong places,” Verona told him, still unsure what her options were, here.

“And if you were moving in the right direction!” Julette called out, from outside.

Thank you.

Julette laughed as she ran by the gap in the door.

The bogeyman snarled, and changed direction.

“Where are you going!?” Verona called out, taunting.

He turned.  “Head games?”

There was a crash.

“Throwing your voice?” he asked.  His voice became a roar.  “I can smell you, girly!”

The welder thing flashed, bright, strobing.  Even coming through the gap in the door, it was a lot.

With her Sight on, it was less.

Verona used the chalk marker to scribble down a rune for shade on the inside of her mask.  Markings to specify the eye holes, lines…

She put it on and between that alteration and Sight, the flashes weren’t making her head explode, with the headache she’d been nursing.

The crashing told her pretty clearly where he was.

Ten feet away.  But with a lot in the way.

Something mechanical started squealing and made a tearing metal sound as it hit something else, after he threw it aside.

“You still think I’m in there!?” Julette called out.  “I-”

“I am!” Verona interrupted.

Rune of ‘quality of earth’ on a spell card.

Last dregs of glamour.  Her cat form was cemented in by winter, at this stage.  She prepared that.

He put his hand through the door first, possibly trying to blind her.  She lunged.

Hand on the doorknob, eyes closed, swinging herself around and toward him.

Cat glamour.  She became a cat, bounced against the wall to the left of the door, bounded between his legs as he came into the room.

Glamour manipulation… she shrugged off the glamour, but moved her hands to keep it airborne.  Like juggling balls in the air, anything she did that wasn’t keeping the balls aloft had to be fleeting.

Like pulling the door partially closed, then slapping the spell card against it.

Quality of earth.  Weight, hardness, density.

The door had been knocked ajar earlier, and now, weighted, it shifted in its frame.

This was a race.

Could she, slipping back into cat form, navigate the path of destruction he’d carved, making a beeline straight for her?  Making a break for the blasted-out door?

Before he could deal with a door that was essentially stone?

He pulled it partially on top of himself.  The nailgun punched nails into the hinges, and he tore the door down, backing away to let it fall.

Verona hurdled a spinning, weaponized fan, turned a sharp right, and ran through an triangular alley with partially collapsed electric fence on either side- like running between the cards of a house of cards.

Live wires crackled on wet floor, not far from the door.  She became human, to cross those, and turned, looking backwards.

He was in the doorway.

She hopped back off the stairs, and she pulled off the puzzle bracelet.

Metal squealed and crashed.  Things toppled.

Verona stared in through the hole, as her eyes adjusted.  She pulled the mask off, to get more light, rain now drenching her again.

All the traps and wrecked metal in the places they’d been intended for.  No bonus room.

It was gone, and the bogeyman with it.

Verona turned, and saw a Dog Tag, not far away.

Grandfather.

Horseman, Black, Mark, Foggy, and Midas were there, lying bloody in snowbanks by the trees.  Knives had been put through their throats, where the spellbinding diagram work was.  Maybe a temporary fix.

McCauleigh, Lucy, Anthem, Grandfather, and two unnamed goblins who seemed to want to draw on the bodies.

“I wanted to help,” Lucy said.  “Julette seemed to think you had it handled.”

“Wouldn’t have minded a little help, right at the end there.”

“I was by the door, ready to shoot,” Grandfather said.

Verona swallowed.  “And my diagram stuff?”

“You drove back the guys Anthem, Grandfather and I were fighting,” Lucy said.

“They gave me backup just in time,” McCauleigh said.  She was holding white cloth to a bloody nose.

“For the rest, well… I think it’s still going,” Lucy said.

“I want to see,” Verona said.

It hadn’t been that long, and echoes and elementals didn’t move fast.

The diagram work in this cabin would’ve cut off when the room went away, which was a bit of a shame, since it was mean to fine tune the result.

Three expanding wards of different size formed a scoop, to push echoes and elementals away, while warding out the area.

“You gave the elemental the thing?” Verona asked Julette.

“Yeah.  He led the pack.”

Something for one elemental to carry, that would draw in others.  Elementals often fed off of destruction and elemental devastation, so if he was the dominant one, Verona figured he’d be tickled to be able to do that and reap the rewards.

Verona joined the others as they edged around the building, and Verona, being one of the smallest in this group, crouched down by the corner.

The expanding Storm prevention diagram work pushed a whole mess of echoes directly at the house and the ritual work being done at the foot of the whole constellation thing below the titanic toddler.

The thing was twice as big as it had been when Verona had first seen it.

They were putting up a fight, throwing up fresh wards.  Barriers.  Elementals crashed into it all, as did echoes.

They weren’t maintaining the Titan thing that was feeding the alchemy up to it, while they were busy with that, but Verona worried it wasn’t enough.

Others were gathered.  Bluntmunch.  Other Dog Tags.  Goblins.  Mr. Mele.  Raquel had come this far ahead, maybe because she could do some limited healing.  Some people looked like they really needed it.

The house was harder to ward, because it had been under constant onslaught already, so it was suffering.  The room the meeting was being held in and the path leading in and out of it were the only things that remained intact, like power was being spent to spare it.

Kims, St. Victor’s practitioners, and everyone else was forced out into the Storm.  The area of reprieve didn’t extend that far forward.

Upside, they had the practitioners on the back foot, now.

Downside?  That was a lot of upset practitioners.

“Ideas, anyone?” Lucy asked.

“I could try a practice,” Anthem said.  He seemed to not mind the freezing rain, now that it wasn’t Storm rain.  “There’s a subschool of practice called Greatspark Elementalism.  Mrs. Ferguson is especially talented in it.  She showed me some, when our time teaching at the Blue Heron overlapped.  Ninety nine percent of it is augury practices for targeting.  The remainder is the practice.  One heavy attack.”

“Enough to dent a Titan?” Lucy asked.  “If that’s a Titan?”

“Hah.  No.  Not at my level.  I doubt even Mrs. Ferguson could manage that.”

“Toddler Titan, though?” Verona asked, hopeful.

He shook his head.  “But I could punch a hole in those wards.  If it works.  Thirty percent chance, I’d guess.  I wouldn’t be much use to you after, either.”

Lucy grimaced.

“Hold off?” Verona asked.  “Even if that’s enough-”

“Tends to be.”

“I worry it doesn’t sort out what we need to sort out.  And the Kims have a way of bouncing back that’s really fucking annoying.”

“Yeah,” Lucy agreed.  “And, you know, there’s kids in there we’re committed to saving.”

“Holding off, then.”

The whole plan was to bait the Kims into overextending.  The idea had been that they’d have their practices going, limbs extended, everything on full display, then the Storm could be canceled out.

Then, with a bit of contrivance, they could be forced to pull back, hard, as Innocents and complicated Aware crashed the party.  If they didn’t, they’d be on the hook for the breach of Innocence, potentially.

Verona was ready to pull some obscure bullshit out, and talk about how the Seal was meant to restrain this very thing, to let practitioners conserve power instead of going for big fuck-off displays, and all that.  It was thin, but if it came down to a vote?  It would be the Alabaster, Sable, and Aurum weighing in.  One for, one against, Verona guessed, and one on the fence, who might be swayed by the fact that this overextension was this extreme.

Even as a toddler, a Titan seemed like the sort of thing judges were meant to sort out.  Like the time looping Worold Ted Havens and his war against the primeval.

And if it came down to it?  If the argument was made that the Titan had been called out in response to their aggression?  And then the rug pull was on them too?

Well, there was a way to take that and turn it around on Charles.  Once that precedent was set by Judges, they could make the argument the exact same thing had happened with Charles.  That Charles’ aggression had been something that forced an extreme defensive measure, with making the Aware, and that he’d fucked things up more at the tail end, here.

Either way, they came out ahead, was the logic.

Except… no.

The Storm was the Toddler Titan’s now, by birthright or because Titans and Storms were like fish and water.

The Storm, as it stood, obscured, covered up.  The Innocents wouldn’t get that far in.  They wouldn’t see much when they did.  The wards Driscoll and others at the back line were doing would help get the Innocents in, but it wasn’t enough.

The Storm belonged to the other side, now.

“Say you’re the enemy,” Verona said.  “Members of Charles’ faction.  How does it work?  Ex-Forsworn at the top.  A lot of them got jobs, right?  Missions?  Helen brought in the Kims.  Lenard was working with Maricica, Abyssal goddess, calling out bogeymen, dunno what else, but it makes sense if he’s doing stuff in that direction.”

“Sure,” Lucy said.  “Joel is their frontline soldier.  And he’s supplying stuff like the hot lead we have, right?  That John gave us?”

“Yeah.  Yeah, I figure Joel was working behind the scenes to get the materials to do that big fuck-off alchemy-derived Titan thing.  Elements of Creation, food for elementals, whatever.  If he’s a big expert on killing big elementals, I’m thinking he probably knew the details on Titans.”

“Makes sense,” Lucy said.

“Seth, I figure, is meant to get them the Blue Heron.  Where Charles really wanted to set up, before we attacked.  A fuck you to Alexander.”

“Spirit surgery for Edith and the Girl by Candlelight, maybe.  Keeps her loyal?” Lucy suggested.

“That’s Griffin Lyttle?” Anthem asked.

“Yeah.”

“If Charles likes Seth, he likes Griffin.  They’re similar.  They hung out together at the Blue Heron, when America and Liberty started.  The kind of boys a father tells his daughters to stay away from.  But they were years older, I don’t think they were aware of each other.”

“Seth hit on Snowdrop, kind of,” Verona pointed out.

“Hmm.  Well, Alexander forswore all three.  Seth, Griffin, Charles.”

The echoes and Elementals were losing.  The Kims and other practitioners were fighting back.  The wards were holding up.

“So it could be they’re on board not because they have a specific use, but because they’re similar?”

“Something like that.  I don’t know,” Anthem said.

Lenard was out there, Verona saw.  Lucy had been wondering if he was maimed or dead.  He was up and in fighting shape.  Bogeymen flanked him.  He wasn’t screaming.

I wonder if the Abyssal scream he does is extra bad to horrors, who have the extra ears?  Verona thought.

Wasn’t really the right line of thought.

“Miller’s done some experimental things along the way, but mostly he stays cooped up.  Harri, Stefan, and Nomi’s notes say he keeps to his own, he likes to do his alchemical science.  Trying to create types of Other,” Lucy said.

“Charles reaches out to him, asks him to make a Titan?” Verona asked.  “Joel supplies.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said.  “And here we are.”

Except there were other cogs.

“Allaires?” Verona asked.

“Not seeing them around.  They apparently set all this up.  The cabins made of glamour that stand up to Storms?”

Verona made a faint snarling sound.  “Worries me.”

“I hear you.”

“And we theorized they might be crafting some big wish?” Verona asked.  “Or something.  Titan as the hammer, the something as the wedge?  Or Titan as a filter?  Some walking talking diagram interpreting things that flow through and by it?”

“No idea,” Lucy said.

“Add in Maricica?  The undercities.  The whole plan she was part of.  If we look at the big picture, the individual pieces of what Charles is doing.”

“It’s not perfect,” Lucy said.  “Maybe Maricica helped plan or shape the plan?  But the feeling in my gut tells me they’re working with awkwardly shaped pieces.  If there was a, I dunno, dollmaking practitioner who got Forsworn, some Graubard or Mr. Mele’s kid?  They’d be trying to find a role for that, that fits the overall agenda.”

“It’s one of the anti-Seal Others,” Verona said.  “And if we figure there’s a hammer and a wedge, I’d say Maricica’s role was putting cracks into the whole thing they were planning on splitting with the Wedge.”

“Until they abandoned that.”

We’re stuck wading through our own Storm.  The same thing Grandfather and Lucy keep harping on about, where war is something where both sides lose. The Storm hurts both sides, here, and we were hoping it’d screw them up enough we could get what we needed.  Which is Charles.

We’ve pushed them back, but it’s the same as it was with the Others’ strike against the Blue Heron.  He has so much in the way of reserves, of help, of bullshit he can summon, we only manage to score small wins and push back the tide, then we get to him, and he retreats.

It’d be too hard to get to Charles, like this.  The Allaires were fine, the Kims weren’t going down and staying down, and their own side had gotten shot and wounded.

There was a gurgling sound.

Grandfather was standing over Horseman, twisting the knife at the side of his neck.

The binding was still active, unbroken.  Which made sense.  It’d be dangerous to have a binding that could be undone with a simple neck wound.  It’d mean risking the Other coming back with a vengeace any time they were sent into a fight.

So Grandfather killed his comrades in arms again, waited for them to recover and jerk awake, and repeated the process.

This sucked.  The dark feelings were stirring again.  Resentment.  Anger.

Channel that into a big fuck you, Verona told herself, as she glared at the distant Kims.  At that room with red-stained drywall that hovered up at the third floor or so, stairs in front of and below it, the back half of the estate with people hunkered down in it.  Repairing it, by the looks of things.  Too slow to really matter.

Verona found the puzzle bracelet in her pocket.  It was an emergency tool she had in mind.  But that required getting close, and she wasn’t confident she could do that with that many practitioners out there.

Provoking Lenard to scream?  She wasn’t sure how.

They controlled the Titan, the Titan controlled the Storm.

So break that control.

“Do we know where Mr. Knox is?  Or Nicolette?”

“Kass is back that way, she was with Raquel a minute ago,” McCauleigh said.  “She’ll know where her dad is.  Nicolette’s way at the back, with Zed, and Brie, and Guards.”

“Yeah?” Verona asked.

McCauleigh pointed.

“You have a plan?” Lucy asked.

“Dunno!”

Verona ran over to Raquel, who pointed her back toward the wards they’d left behind them.  Storm-free zone, which was getting gradually less effective.

“Hey,” Kass said, as Verona caught up to her, huffing for breath, shivering.  “Deb’s up but not in good shape to do much.  Ann’s not good.’

“Even with Tashlit healing?”

“Even with.”

“Okay,” Verona said.  She dropped her bag.  “Can you help me work out this magic item?”

“Magic item.  Maybe?”

Back when Verona had been given the quill by Miss, she’d been a tiny bit disappointed.  It wasn’t as cool as Avery’s Path or the black rope, and it wasn’t Lucy’s weapon ring.  It was a novelty.  One that had felt bad to use after she’d used it to contrive the brownies going after Bristow.  Then it had broken when her dad had smashed her bag.

Verona had also been given the access to the Blue Heron.  Which was kind of a gift for all three of them.  Which, like, okay.  Miss probably didn’t have three great magic items to spare for three of them.  She had to use what she had.

But, expanding outward, Verona had been given access to exactly what she loved and wanted.  A variety of schools of magic.  And with the quill, she supposed, the gift wasn’t so much the item.  It was the fact the item encouraged exploits.  Cheats.  It got her thinking a certain way.  Like how the weapon ring got Lucy into the fray.

The quill had had its own complicated things with connections.  Tying things back.  And as Verona fished out another magic item, showed Kass, and touched it to the shade-creating rune inside her mask, to feed power into it, she looked for the connections.

“This doesn’t tie back to me if someone else is technically using it, right?”

“Doesn’t look like it does.”

“Cool.  Lines up with my instincts.”

Verona reversed direction, almost bumping into McCauleigh.

“Get what you needed?”

“I think!  How are you?  You got shot.”

“My dad and older sister used to shoot me at random during training, to see if I could bounce back fast enough,” McCauleigh said.  “I’m fine.”

“Thank you.”

“We get revenge for Anselm, okay?” McCauleigh asked.  “And Mal.”

“Yeah.  That’s the plan.”

She caught back up with Lucy, Anthem, and others.

Verona hucked a rock at Anthem.

He caught it.

Red tinted, bleeding rock.  The Sanguine Stone.  Something Verona had used now and then.

“What’s this?’

“Can you do the greatspark type thing?” Verona asked.  “I’m thinking big wind magic, like a tornado cannon, launching the rock.  And you’d aim it…”

She squinted, pointing, indicating the target.

The toddler fetus was big enough he was breaking free of the constellation and the alchemy bath it contained.

“I don’t think it would penetrate his skin.  That’ll be metal, if it’s a Titan.”

“Alchemical Titan, might be soft,” Lucy said.

“Alchemy, from my work on this guy, I know you feed these things something to be an exception,” Verona said.  “They’ve got a big messy elemental Titan baby up there.  I’m thinking they made themselves exceptions.”

“Feeding it eyelashes?” Lucy asked.

“Giving the fetus blood, sweat, sex, or tears.”

“Gross.”

“Get the stone in through the crack.  Medicine for the bath,” Verona said.  “And can you do it in, like, two minutes?  Because I think that toddler’s going to be hatching from its little constellation soon.”

“You’re asking if I can do your theoretical greatspark-style wind tornado cannon in two minutes?” Anthem asked.

“Yeah.”

“No.  Takes much longer.”

Fuck.  Verona turned.  Who would work?

Mr. Mele?  Razor thread shenanigans?  Or-

Anthem was whispering.

Verona turned.

He turned at roughly the same time.

Then he hurled the rock overhand.

A good kilometer between where they were and the target, Verona figured.  The stone was gone in an instant, lost in the haze of rain and the Storm that was further out.

“Good enough?” he asked.

“What if she says no?” Julette asked him.

He arched an eyebrow.

“It’s good enough if it goes where we need it.”

“It went where I threw it,” Anthem replied.

That’s generally how throwing works, Verona thought, but she held back the snark.

In the time it took anything to happen, others were catching up and regrouping.

“Avery’s coming through,” Brie reported.  “She needs to know if we’re ready.”

“Ronnie,” Lucy said.

Lucy’s eyes were on things out there.

The alchemy solution in the constellation was boiling.

The Titan child was agitated.  He pushed against the shell of the constellation around him.  The four motifs in the corners around him were agitated too, flickering, swelling, bursting, steaming.

Some Kims started running a solid thirty seconds before the Titan child fought his way free, liquid lightning spilling out of his mouth.

“If we’re putting ourselves in our enemy’s heads?  I think back to alchemy.  How easy it is for a delicate bit of work to get spoiled.  You told me that, McCauleigh,” Verona said.  “Ambient anger.  A jostle.”

“A rock that feeds in a surge of power, but creates a backlash against the creator?” Lucy asked.

The Titan hollered an inarticulate sound.

The Kims, who had just had the Titan child as a thing at their backs, powerful and on their side, now had a titanic child-shaped kaiju stomping around their rear flank, maybe ninety percent on their side, still, but that extra ten percent where it was agitated and reckless, from the bad alchemy?  That was fucking them up.  Forcing them to run, abandon wards.

The Kims went all-out to try to get a handle on their shit.  Arms reached, branching out.  Trying to hold the child.  Flesh burned on contact with the Titan’s bronzed metal skin.

The efforts to stop it seemed to be making it more agitated.

But not stopping it wasn’t an option for them either.

“Avery can come through,” Lucy said.

Next Chapter