Finish Off – 24.x | Pale

There had been a moment that came exactly five seconds after a child from the Hungry Choir sank its teeth into John Stiles’ neck.  That bite had been what brought John Stiles down.  Five minutes had marked the count, where the Dog Tag hadn’t been able to rise again and resume the fight.  It had marked Charles’ victory, and the moment of transition where he’d become the Carmine Exile.  Become a peculiar sort of immortal.  He’d become a being that shouldn’t die, in the sense of aging, illness, or any of that, with millenia open to him, and he’d become a being with enemies who would seek to extinguish that existence.  A being that would die, sooner than if he’d never become immortal at all.

Never had he felt that reality more than here, now.  Every passing second brought it into sharper contrast, and there had been a lot of seconds passing.

He had the power, the longevity, the security, through the deal with international powers, and he had the price on his head more than ever before.  His senses were limited to what was in this meeting room, he had no idea what was happening elsewhere, but he had to plan for every contingency.  He had to do it while keeping his word and providing his undivided attention.  Had to.  He was Law and it was his word.

“…tying back to the issue of power flows between Ottawa’s purview and the Carmine’s,” the necromancer Wegner said, pushing papers around.  “You’ve toyed with knots and inverted spaces, Carmine.”

“I have,” Charles said, slouching in his seat.

“Oh!” Percival chimed in.  “If I may add-?”

“Later?” Wegner told him.  “We do have to get some work done.”

“Very well.”

Gaudette spoke, not letting the interruption cost much momentum.  “It would be a devious line of attack for you to agree to a ceasefire-”

“Me?” Percival asked.

Charles resisted giving any indication he was as irritated by the little summoning as he was.

“-I’m addressing the Carmine Exile.  And then manipulate us through energy exchanges,” the Gaudette martyr said, before giving him a serious look.

“Especially with how power hungry you’ve been,” the Behaim chronomancer told him.  “I could see you creating a void to leech spirits out of our area.  The consequences could be catastrophic.  A form of attack that evades much of what we’ve discussed.”

“You’re doing this, and now you’re giving me ideas on how I might get revenge?” he asked, hoping his tone made it clear how unimpressed he was.

“You attacked Ottawa first-” the Behaim woman started.

“Among other territories,” the leprous martyr added.  She wasn’t from Ottawa and was an honorary member as much as the next person at the table.

“-and we’re fully in our rights to bring it up.  You don’t have to agree-”

He chuckled, low and wry, shaking his head a little.

“-but it would be in our mutual best interests.”

“And of course, no mention of this as a ploy,” he sighed the words, not for the first time.  “Don’t shit in my cup and call it chocolate milk.”

“Don’t kill people-” the Gaudette martyr said, at the same time the Behaim said “-don’t step on our toes-”

The Behaim indicated Gaudette.

“Don’t kill people and then act surprised when people want to shit in your cup,” Gaudette said.

“Costs of doing business.  It hasn’t been easy.”

“Costs,” the Behaim practitioner said, “That’s a good segue to go back to what we were talking about.  Power balances, power draw, the risk of forcing a knotting in adjacent territories if too much is grasped for…”

“I have power from prominent international Lords.”

“Doesn’t rule it out as a means of attack,” Wegner told him.

“I have no intention of doing so.”

“Then let’s codify that.  If you’re still interested in having a working relationship, going forward?”

“Yet we’re here,” he said, again.  “I’m not sure you’re interested.  You say you didn’t coordinate with them to do this-”

“Not in a meaningful fashion,” the Behaim said.  “You were a threat who has created mess that killed people in our territory, stepped on our toes…”

He waved her off.  The fact she was using practice to make this meeting easier to endure meant she could sound a little rote.  As if she wasn’t here and the spirits were drawing from past events to map out what she’d do in time intervals she was skipping forward in time.

“You do still want to coordinate?” she asked.

“Do you?”

“If you take power after this, we’d certainly want to have a deal in place.”

And they’d said, roughly eight hours ago, that they had no plans that extended to after this- no plans to coordinate to attack him or set him up.

“I want insurance,” he said, glancing at the door.  “Whatever happens next, I don’t want you stabbing me in the back.”

“We want border security.”

“I’ve made promises to international powers that I would keep things contained to the best of my ability,” he told them.

“And power management is a possible way to keep to the word of the deal while subverting it,” the Behaim countered.

“It’s similar to a country keeping its riots, warfare, and disasters within its walled border, but draining a water supply shared by multiple countries,” Wegner said.  “Or poisoning it with its work.”

“I can’t swear I won’t drain any, but it’s not my intent to do harm that way.”

“Not now, but in the future?  What are you doing, that might draw power?”

“Now I’m meant to give away what I’m doing?” he asked, unimpressed, elbow on table, hand on cheek, pulling the skin at one side of his face and one eye up.

“It would help,” the Behaim said.

“Or give us more guarantees,” Wegner added.

“In exchange for the ceasefire, extending past the point this meeting ends?” he asked.

“It’s one thing we’d be asking for.”

“Uhuh,” he grunted out the sound.  He sat up straighter.  “Then I’ll be asking for more.”

“That’s not-” Gaudette started.

“I’ll be asking for more,” he told them, interrupting, giving them a level glare.  He made a fist, and his knuckles popped in sequence, veins standing out on his hand as knuckles went white.  “Not a lot more.  I’ve been telling you you’re not in my sights, and hinting you don’t want to be in my sights.  My offer is that I won’t go above double the power consumption of my predecessors- your old neighbors.”

“Double?  That’s a problem,” Wegner said.

“You don’t like it?  Secure your own energy flows at your borders.”

“Expensive unto itself,” Behaim murmured.

“I don’t care.  I won’t be doing it to harm you.  I’ll be doing it because I have work to do.  I’m offering to hold myself back, and in exchange, you’ll offer me assurances you won’t interfere with what happens as this meeting ends, and one of you walks out the door first.”

“You’re expecting something to happen?” the Behaim woman asked.

“Aren’t you?” he asked.

“We didn’t coordinate, we didn’t-”

“Uagh,” he groaned out a sound.  His throne scraped the floor as he stood.

“We aren’t expecting anything,” the Behaim chronomancer told him.  “We don’t know what follows from this.”

“If one of you walks out the door first, you swear noninvolvement, it’ll get us underway with our negotiation here.  I’ll set a cap on what I consume, and I’ll repay you for any excess draw, in a reasonably short span of time,” he said.  “Add that to our other deals.”

“Taking ownership and responsibility for cross-border problems, taking ownership and responsibility for Others called across the border to your side, responsibility and collaboration for greater crises, responsibility radical elements like Aware and Witch Hunters, terms and clarifications on points of order for future meetings-”

Including not pulling this bullshit again, Charles thought.

“-baseline terms for contracts, deals, and sales, handling of forsworn and gainsaid in such a way that you aren’t immediately un-forswearing any of our greatest problem elements, moments after we nail that down, respect for any changing of the guard in Lordships on our side, or yours-”

“Pointless on my side, I’ll reiterate,” he said.  “If my side abdicates leadership to an apprentice or subordinate, I’m likely dead and the deals are void.”

“-rights of travel and transport from our realm to yours and back again-”

“I won’t stop you, but I won’t give you protection either,” he reiterated, for effect.

“-subversive and deleterious items, and now subversive and deleterious power draws.”

“Which are both matters more for the Aurum than myself,” Charles grumbled, standing by his throne, one hand on the back of it.  “Exchanges and trade of power, of items.”

“The Aurum gave away much of his territory.”

“And will likely reclaim much, independent of me,” he said.

Wegner snorted.  “A distinction you seem to enjoy.  Independence.  The so-called Carmine Lords aren’t yours, but do everything you want, fight for your defense, and mustered outside this very property.  The goddess Maricica was her own being, independent and separate from you, but, oh, would you look at that?  Doing everything you want.”

“Up until the Winter court cornered her,” Charles said.  He drummed fingers on the table.  “A shame, but it might have been inevitable, once she fell into their sights.”

“You’re a power, Carmine Exile, and with great power comes a certain… weight, let’s say.  Burdens,” Wegner told him.  “Some of that is that you can’t divorce yourself so neatly from other things.  So when we talk commerce of power or items passing from your realm to ours, some of that falls to you.”

He snorted again.

Gaudette cleared her throat.  “While on the general subject of power draws, payment, and responsibility, I’d like us to not lose track of the subject, raised earlier, of harm done to innocents.”

“Would you now?” Charles asked.  He stood behind his throne, gripping the chair back with both hands.  He smiled his meanest smile, beard bristling.  “Why would you like that?”

“It’s important,” Gaudette said.

“Yes,” he said.  “It is.  Which is why we already discussed it and put it to rest while talking about Others crossing borders, thirteen hours ago.  So tell me, young lady… are you testing me?  Are you, in the late stages of our meeting here, trying to catch me going against my word about giving you my full and undivided attention, when I’m a being and custodian of Law itself?”

“I’d like us to keep it in mind,” she said, simply, but he could see she knew she’d been caught out.

“Uh huh,” he replied.  He shook his head, pacing a little.

Behaim leaned over, voice barely audible.  He used power to stretch his ability to hear, “Why?”

“I thought he might have done something like what you’re doing.”

“Hmm,” the Behaim woman murmured.

“She’s young,” the Wegner necromancer commented, leaning in closer to Behaim.

The Gaudette girl was.  Barely in her twenties, she wore a coat and athletic sweatshirt that each had panels built into them, for graphics -painted over or removed- or just structure.  Evocative of armor.  Boils stood out on skin, broken veins on her neck, part of her ear had been chewed up and cauliflowered by some disease, and her eyes were cloudy, with jaundiced yellow at the edges,  milky white at center.  A leprous martyr, someone who drew power for practice out of her own suffering, and did terrible things to herself, inflicting and taking on sickness, with the ‘leprous’ part, to suffer more.  Some righteousness was to be expected.

It wasn’t the brightest political move, coming at him from that angle, and he wanted to make sure to make them pay for it, because if he did, it would drive possible wedges into their group.

They hadn’t sworn to give him their full and undivided attention, so members of their group were switching out.  Rollings was an older warden and sanctuary tender was slowly being overgrown with holly branches as he napped in his seat.  He’d switch with the necromancer soon.  The Behaim woman was staying alert and fine throughout, manipulating her own perception of time, but lapsed into recording-like loops frequently.

“What can we fold into this?” Behaim asked Wegner.

“I would be very careful,” Charles growled the words.  “I’ve been kind, I’d say, considering what you’re pulling here.  Do you want to be outright enemies?  With where I stand with international powers, if we find ourselves enemies, you wouldn’t win.  Perhaps the people who get upset at this situation and oust you will appreciate my kindness, hmmmm?”

He made that last ‘hmm’ especially growly.  Then he smiled.

“Can we discuss?  Please continue to give us your undivided attention, just give us a moment to figure out where things stand.”

He chuckled, low and dark, but he said, “Go on.”

Behaim shifted her seat back, so the others could shift inward, knees almost touching, as they began to talk about powers, names, and people who warranted special consideration.  He was sure to take note of it all.  He had to.

He’d give them their leeway.  When the chips were down, when his ritual incarnate came to fruition and produced a working candidate, Charles suspected his candidate could be strong enough to undo the very idea of binding oaths and deals.  Maybe that would even be in this generation, and these people would look back on this day, this moment, and realize it had cost them everything.

If not, if it required him making one final self-immolating move, well… he’d planned around doing that from the start.

He had his own people who were working in rotation… so to speak.  Two members of the Kim family had stayed.  The first was one Charles thought of as the ambassador- not the head of the family, but the most prominent man they were willing to spare and send to him.

The second was the golden boy.  He made Charles think of a quieter Alexander.  Someone promising, very talented, but too young to have had a chance to show his stuff.  In larger families, every other generation had one.  For the largest, strongest families, like the Mussers, every generation had to have one, natural or forced, or they died.

The others had been permitted to leave.  Dony had decided to stay, because this room, sealed off from the world, was preferable to returning to the one where his father was dead.  Dony, dwelling in that darkness, made Charles think of himself.  After the revenant had come for him and the gang he’d been enabling.  After being forsworn.

Dony sat by the window, which had been painted red with blood on the outside, the view obscured to provide this meeting with its privacy and protection.  He still stared out at it.  Maybe at his own expression.

The golden boy of the Kims, sitting in his chair so it rested on the back legs only, legs crossed on the seat, was watching Dony with the fascination of a little boy pulling the wings and legs off of insects.  Except he was closer to Seth’s age.

The Kim ambassador sat askew in his seat, sticks faintly clicking in his hand, hair grey, long, tied into a ponytail at the back with bits framing his face.  He wore a suit with a strange cut to it, with bands of leather at bicep, forearm, and waist, turning it into an almost-corset.  The man saw Charles looking at him, and arched an eyebrow.

“You’re increasingly restless, growling, taking more issue with the little things,” the man observed.

“Who wouldn’t be restless?” Charles asked.

“Do you want me to be the first one out the door?”

“Perhaps.”

“It won’t be as simple as that, if there’s anything.”

“Hmm,” Charles rumbled, still keeping an ear out for names and details.  “That’s why.”

“What do you mean?”

“It won’t be simple.  What they do and how they do it, how they circumvent you, how they come for me, despite the fact people may be in the way, it tells me things.  I’m not looking for a human shield.  I’m looking for a hint.”

“I can do that.”

“Then I can tell this group to go rot.”

“The leprous martyr might enjoy that.”

“Mmh,” Charles grunted out an amused sound.

“They’ve already asked for and secured your word for everything they see as vital, they think they can secure their border against energy drain or knotting before you do too much.  You might start running into some trouble, here.”

Charles took that in, still listening to the Ottawa practitioners.  His eye fell on the golden boy, who was staring at Dony with fascination.

With a foot, he prodded the chair.  The Kim boy sat down hard, all four chair legs on the ground.

“Let him be,” Charles told him, voice low.

The boy smiled.

When the ritual incarnate took hold, the Kims would be among its first victims.  The ambassador, the golden boy, the others.  They were the worst type of people, if they could even be called people.  He could see right through them, to depths augury couldn’t uncover, because of precedents set in dark rooms barred to spirit’s sight.

Dony, he decided, would live.  The boy was struggling, broken, but he could make his way back to something better.  He had to, for the same reason Charles had had to do everything he’d had to do.

“Carmine Exile?” Wegner asked.

“There are people you need to inform and ask, including neighbors,” he said, bringing hand to beard, so beard stuck out between fingers, then pulled the hand through it.  He sat down hard on his throne.  “If you’re hoping to stand out and above the Montreal council, for a time Canada’s practitioners are among that international community of Lords, you’re going to have to do better than that.”

“No business of yours, Carmine,” Wegner said.

“Can we expect your handling of new Gods to be the same as your handling of power draws, Carmine?” the Behaim chronomancer asked.

“Your handling of power draws dictates how I’d handle that.”

New gods would manifest as part of the ritual incarnate.  They would be part of the scenario.

“And new practitioners?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” he told them.

“I see,” the Behaim chronomancer said, quiet.  “Percival?  If you’d present our notes?”

“Hello!  I am Percival Awarnach the second, of the one hundred titles, representative of Ottawa, which is not one of my one hundred titles.  The first and foremost of my titles is that I am he who was crafted by seven sets of hands, with twelve sets of eyes in witness, inspired by the practitioners of Kennet.  The second of my titles is that I was inspired by the third witch of Kennet, Verona Hayward, witch and guardian of Kennet, nascent sorceress, dabbler in halflight and shadow, she who shattered the moon, founder of Kennet found, enforcer of Kennet below, speaker for the voiceless, by Avery Kelly, second witch of Kennet, Finder and Path Runner, Promenade Solver, partner to the opossum and goblin sage Snowdrop, and by Lucy Ellingson, first witch of Kennet, bearer of fang, steel, and smoke, caller of the sword moot.  I was created by Jacques Marice, Bran Yard, Lea Dixon…”

Charles settled deeper into his seat, eye going to the door.

That would be it then.  They were at the last leg.  No more negotiation.  No more facade of cooperation, when they were setting him up for trouble, and he was fully planning to put them all to the metaphorical sword with the ritual incarnate.  If not them, then the next generation, their legacies, everything they knew and built.

With the Kim ambassador, he’d bought a moment to figure out a way.  With his negotiations here, he’d bought information, prodding around the edges, finding what they might see as untenable, what they might be thinking.  They didn’t know much- by design, he was sure.  But they’d communicated with the Kennet trio.  They had suspicions.  That the Gaudette girl had tried to catch him meant she wasn’t sure, which suggested they weren’t sure.

Things like that.

More than ever, he felt that contradiction.  To have eternity available to him, but more than ever, people were arrayed to end him.

He was prepared to end a good number of them.  He’d been through worse.

She Who Drowns in Moonlight rose up out of water, her arms unfolding, while fireworks and explosions went off around her.  The Titan had been lured out onto ice.

Elementals weren’t meant to have histories.  Most were flash-in-the-pan existences.  Mayflies, if mayflies were water, or lightning, or fire, with animal instincts or human capacity for logic and reason, or nothing at all to their beings beyond a desire for more fire, more flood, more torrential wind.  When they existed past that, it was as freaks of nature.  Elementals that pushed their way past other elementals to be at the center of Storms.  Elementals who held sources of power, powerful items, or things in that vein, and latched onto them, becoming perpetual.

Deb Cloutier said that basic elementals could be broken down into rudiments and constituents, natural and urban, respectively, with a lean toward instinct and society, respectively.  There were common channels for how they progressed and evolved, given a chance- with that chance frequently being exposure to a Storm or violent disaster.

Deb said it was easier for a rudiment to make the leap toward something wiser from a base of instinct than it was for a constituent to become a great mind from their base of reason.  That She Who Drowns in Moonlight might have been a rudiment who became an irridite, who became erudite.  It didn’t matter, particularly, except that she was a rare existence, with just enough humanity reflected in the channels water carved through her, that she felt a desire for connection.  She was powerful enough to be prominent, but a comparable elemental could just as easily clash with her on a base level and dash her to pieces in an eyeblink -or vice versa- as provide companionship.  She made do with half-measures.  Aze, who wasn’t irridite or erudite.  Gilkey, who was lonely too, but was alchemical poison and not element.  Deb, who understood what she was but couldn’t connect to her.  Even here, the elementals that flickered into being around the Storm were long lost family she’d meet once and never again.

She liked people who were lonely at heart.  She liked making sense of things.  Here, she was glad to have joined this fight, because many things came together.

What would the analogy be for a human?  Avery Kelly seeing the promenade open up before her, beaten and claimed, the next secrets unfolding?  Or was that the wrong direction?  Was the right direction to go back?  Yes.  History.  She’d nearly forgotten the thread of thought.

The Titan was there, and the Titan was her history, her origins.  Elementals had been something else, once, tangential.  Titans had walked and humanity had struggled and as much as primevals had been a set of predators and presences without set form or label to a primitive man, weather and natural phenomena had been the same.  A key period for elementals.  When most storms had been Storms, at least a little.

It was as if a human stood here and saw across the expanse of aeons to a blasted landscape with primevals at the edges of the light shed by campfires, Titans wading across the thickest natural landscapes, the gods at the sidelines, the angels as witnesses, suborning themselves to become tools for gods because there was so much to do for greater agendas.  It was a time that was shrinking, being rewritten, for her and for them.  The labels from today stretched back, science and history defined, and that picture became smaller, existing in the spaces between what was defined.

In a hundred years, would she even be able to see this, or would the picture be too small?  The muscular back of that Titan, elements rolling off of him, playing off of him.  The rain of a modern era, strained tens of thousands of time through eaves and gutters, storm sewers, filtration plants, taps, and bedrock, remembered what once had been, when it could just as easily be lightning, or fire, with any excuse.

She reached for that back.  She felt the currents run through her as it noticed her.  She didn’t use the eyes she depicted on herself to see, and he was similar.  Halfway there.  He used eyes primarily, but he could see some through skin.  What he saw was the key aspect- he had been eyeing flashes, the brightness of explosions, and she wasn’t that, so he noticed her late.

She touched back, and he flashed hot, rainwater boiled by the sudden temperature, evaporating into steam.  A barrier between her and him, that spread to meet her as she wrapped narrow arms around him, steam pushing against her.  Her ‘hair’ and ‘clothing’ went wild, pushed away, her ‘eyes’ glowed.

She pulled water up from beneath her and became a surge, driving him sideways and back, off-balance.

If she was elemental erudite, come to be what she was from rudiment to irridite to erudite, or simply come to be by one in a million chance, a flash in the pan existence that just so happened to remain where it was instead of disappearing, then she was an elemental of greater reasoning, rounded out by emotion and instinct.  She, because of that, sought to embrace him, what he was.  That history.

He wasn’t real.

To a human, if she had to strain herself to draw a connection, it would be like seeing their ancestor revived with alchemy, features puffy and boil-covered, mis-proportioned and lopsided, with no memory of what had once been.

She continued to make do with half measures.

He was not a Titan of fire or magma of the deep earth.  Not a titan of explosions, or deeper interactions of element and real.  He was rain and cold and lightning.  The heat he made steam with was intense but fleeting.  Her contact with him was overwhelming.  The heat couldn’t hold out, even as he mutated it and shaped it on a base level.  The steam ceased, she met him, and she managed to drive him down and over.  Into and past ice.  Into deep water, where she was strongest.

That was a weakness for him.  That lightning was fleeting.  It was a weakness that he was a Titan of rains and rain tended to be subsumed by the larger body of water.  It fed into it, instead of taking away.

There, her advantages ceased.  He was still a Titan, false and alchemical, but still a Titan.  Still mighty.  Still something set echelons above and aeons before her.

Lightning dispersed out through the greater body of water.

Rain couldn’t fall underwater.

Frost and ice remained, and he discovered that fast enough, as she pressed him beneath.  He could translate that dispersed electricity into frost, by elemental languages long forgotten.  He could turn lakewater into ice, turn her into ice, and then use incredible strength to tear those chunks of her away.

She drank, to replenish herself, she fought, she embraced, she pushed.  She worked to confuse him, turning him over and sideways, because if he just once made a mistake and moved deeper, or further from shore, that could be what she needed.

He pulled out the equivalent of her heart, froze it, and cast it to the depths with a swipe of his arm.  He roared, and wind whipped out from his mouth, churned water, and opened that wound wide.

She drank, gulping in water from every angle, to fill the void, to build a new heart, metaphorically speaking.  It was her vitality, her existence.  She could do nothing else but heal it, because if she didn’t, she’d cease to be.

He tore out the equivalent of one lung and heart, then, cauterized the wound with frost that traced the different currents underwater, separating the flows that made her her from the flows that made the lake a lake.

She had to partially release him to tear at that frost, to move her multiple limbs through it, to dash it to pieces, so she could drink to repair that wound.

She drank and repaired while vital parts of her were shattered and frozen, metaphorical blood not flowing, metaphorical air not supplied.  It wasn’t that she had a heart or lungs, or any close equivalent.  But it was a quantity of something meaningful to how she was put together.  The fact she had to use these descriptions was an inherent schism in her, where constituent met rudiment, where the elements and urban disasters that were human wrought ran against the natural elements and natural disaster.  Some of what she was and how her consciousness worked was informed by humanity.

She wasn’t even done repairing herself when he caught the equivalent of heart and both lungs in a glacier-like chunk of ice, his fists embedded in it.  This time, he didn’t roar.  He stared through her with glowing eyes that cried up, with the steam boiling out of them.  He knew the damage this would do.

He pulled the top half of her left and the bottom half of her right, and the ice shattered.  He pushed the two halves of her away with water currents.

That done, her defeated, he pushed power outward, past skin, into those shattered chunks that floated through water, and one sliver became a star, points radiating outward.  Stars became constellations, connected by tenuous lines.  Constellations became shapes and forms.

All barring her from pulling herself together.

He began to freeze the water, from lakebed to surface.  Ice shattered as he set weight against it, then refroze, until he could push himself upward.  He was too dense and heavy to swim, and he might have been unsure about the way to shore, so he turned the lake around him to ice and climbed the ice.

She struggled to pull herself together.

Ninety kilometers away, Aze stepped on wet ice and pulled back, before something could be pulled out of her.  She was a cousin of lightning and fire, neither of which were friends of puddles.  A blinding flare of light given constituent form, a shattered mannequin joined together by retina-searing energy.

Aze hung back, but she’d brought company.

She Who Drowns in Moonlight could not hear the words, but sentiment was communicated.  Blood ran from a cut to the palm to water, marked for her.

Aze was gone in a flash, moving on without thanks or a second glance.

Power conducted through water.  Her relationship with the great lakes were strong enough that she could call in power here, let that distant power be given out and transmitted to make the loan her square.

She built herself a metaphorical heart and lungs, and everything was easier from there.  To drink in more water to make herself whole again, until she’d reached the limits of what her inner flows and dynamics suggested were her ceiling.  Any more and she would be stretched too thin.

She didn’t target the Titan, but targeted the ice on which he stood, working her way into it, then expanding, to shatter it.

Then, while he was off balance, pulled at his head, pulling him down, clouding his senses, swirling around him.

He froze everything in contact with him, then turned ice into lightning, condensed enough it couldn’t easily diffuse, and ran from surface to ground, further shattering ice.

It caught her somewhere vital.  The sacrum, the part of her that held power.  The effect, stomach-adjacent as it was, was concussion-like, because she had all coordination of inner flows struck out of her, and there was now a wound she needed to drink in water to close… but the part of her that drank was wounded.

She pulled at him, here and there, when and where she could find coordination.  Mostly, she drifted, holding form, gathering focus, and continuing to rebuild her vitality and wholeness while the water flowed through her into the wound, passively being drunk.  If she were meat, blood, and veins, the blood that was flowing out of the ripped-raw veins in her torn out upper stomach was being used to create more veins, mapping out the outlines.

He turned himself, then, setting foot on ice, pushed-

It was confusion, on his part.  He’d gotten flipped around, and deep in black lakewater, cloud and ice blocking most light, he’d set a foot on free floating ice above him instead of ice below.

The Storm was tuning to the lake, but it would be most effective near the surface.  It was at its strongest where firmament met foundation, or either met fathoms.  Deep in these fathoms, in chthonic earth, or atmosphere, well… that wasn’t where titans dwelt.  Titans enjoined.  Titans were chaos where one met the other.  The mightiest of them visited those places, gathered strength, and learned them, but they weren’t home.

Gods had dwelt in the fathoms, in cthonic earth, in upper atmosphere.

The time he lost in his floundering was time she could use to let the wound to her sacrum heal enough to start drinking.  She drank to close the rest.

She drove herself into him, pushing him down, hard enough to shatter more ice.  She broke away and pulled back before he collided with the lakebed.  She’d just reminded herself-

He punched one fist into the cold sand, and stabbed one fist up, channeling frost to form.  Extending hand into a spike of ice.

He converted too much of her into lightning, grounded that lightning, and pushed it deep into earth.

In reality, she hadn’t done much to stop him, or hurt him.  Everything he did to her was close to being a wound that could finish her.  Many in different ways.

“Ashumare, Ashumare.  Isn’t this fine weather on a terrible day?
Or do I have it wrong, have I gone astray?
Is this terrible weather on the finest day?”

The rhyme came from her council member, way out on the west shore of Lake Superior, sent out to here, Lake Huron, at a great deficit for the distance.

A council not far from Thunder Bay.  One Avery had met with.  Ashumare was there, guiding them.

Giving power.  Spirits to assist.

The Carmine faction had done a lot of damage, but a few had held on and resisted.  Now they were recognizing a greater threat that could easily make its way to their shores, and they were all helping, trusting her to answer it.

She Who Drowns in Moonlight was not a diplomat, not a problem solver, not a symbolic playing piece that represented certain dynamics or influences that could be tapped.  She didn’t even have the greatest of handles on her council.  She wasn’t the strongest Lord in the wider region, even.

But she was stubborn, she was predictable, and those things counted for a lot.

It meant they could give power and trust she wouldn’t take it and use it against them, to widen her territory.  It meant that if an appropriate problem arose, they knew at least one Lord in the region would hit it like a tidal wave, if possible, and drag it beneath the depths.

Miss from Kennet found, joined by Matthew, to represent Kennet below, and Louise, to represent Kennet above, were on the shore, with locals who hadn’t gone to fight, or who’d gone and come back.

More power.  Even with the deficit, it was a jolt, used not to restart, but to rebuild a shattered heart.  Used shortly after to rebuild limbs turned to ice before ice was turned to splinters.

The Titan was figuring out more ways to dig into her very being.  Core flows.  He turned the lake in her into rain that fell, creating voids.

Aze had already brought another Lord from the Neyes parkland to shore.  He took more convincing.

To bridge the gap, She Who Drowns in Moonlight pulled on her Lordship, using the other Lordships as a guide and map.  It wasn’t something she did often, and with the distance, she needed those signals to copy and conduct through, to find her way and figure out how.  Like sending a key to a lock, a thousand kilometers away, along currents, bobs, and flows.

The struggle continued for an indeterminate amount of time.  She couldn’t let Titan touch lakebed, or he’d find foundation there, growing in power.  But keeping him afloat was a task.

Through her people, two more lords were met and asked to give power to her, to help her here, with this.

Two more lords, perhaps called on the phone, came without escorts.  One judged the situation and left.  The other gave more aid.

She was able to draw on Thunder Bay to bridge gaps, and make her struggle a continuous one, and replenished herself with the power given to her by neighbors.

He was made up of various elements, with trace alchemy in there to help it join together.  They married together in old ways, by old elemental tongues of frost and lightning, thunder, and torrential rain.  It was a language of violent giving and taking, a chaotic expression of overlapping sentiments and forces, a conversation conducted with multiple voices shouting at the tops of their lungs at the same time, overlapping, where agreement was chancing on the same sound at the same time.  Just as often, one shouted down the others and found prominence.

He was drowning.  It was a shift in that balance, one element forced to find prominence because the others lacked footing.  He became ice-dominant, starved for the spacing of air required for rain and grounding required for lightning.

It was too slow.  He’d continue to fight for days like this, and the Lords nearby would withdraw their support before then.  There were only so many people to reach out to.  Aze was visiting the Azure Woman in Michigan.  Even as fast as Aze traveled, it told her time had passed, with this struggle.

Other feet found the shore.  She could taste it here.  The poison.

Ashumare Ashumare, Gilkey, Aze.  It was her preferred method of operation.  Her half-measures.  She might never meet her equal or peer in this lonely world, so she found a fellow elemental in Aze, a thinker in Gilkey, a- well, Ashumare Ashumare was Ashumare Ashumare.  Probably contributed something.  Contrast.

The alchemical, deformed young man she was trying and failing to drown in her metaphorical bathtub over what might be days, maybe even weeks of thrashing and mutual harm… maybe the closest thing she’d ever had to a peer.

But she did have her ways of doing things.  She’d held her lordship for long enough, this way, with agents to back her.  She was bad at communicating, so she had them act as messengers, when the practitioners couldn’t.

Gilkey was dangerous, but he was also a communicator.  The best of the three Others.  Best of four, if she included The Record, an Other in her territory and on her council who was more specialized in use.  He was careful, measured because he had to be measured, or people and things would die.  He was a walking, implicit threat.

She wanted to tell him no, to stay out of her water.

Then, midway through rebuilding herself once again, she had to consider why.  When he was as careful as he was, why would he poison her water?

She decided to reach out, instead.  Communication with him was one-way, for the most part, reaching into the liquid at the center of him.  She’d pull on the poison, extract it, use it here-

He was different.  More solid.  More cohesive.

When she pulled tentatively on the poison, he stepped deeper into water, finding that current.

She trusted.

Water swept over him, and swirling currents pulled him across Lake Superior, through channels, and across Lake Huron.

He didn’t kill thousands of wildlife.  He held the poison close.

She pulled with more force, more intensity.  He lost his shape, becoming liquid.

A javelin, traveling as fast as the currents could pull him, dark green and black, driven through ice.  Through a Titan made more solid.

Poisoned ice broke apart.  She swept it to one side, mindful of it, knowing she’d have to carefully handle it or it would remain, poisoning water that already had its struggles.

The Titan lived.  The poison wasn’t enough.  But it disrupted alchemy, it ran through veins.  He was already deformed to her, but what happened to the Titan’s flesh in the wake of the poison would be visible to anyone.

Still, he fought.  Still, he delivered mortal blows.

But the time was counted in hours-

She felt him reach for something- and fed him that poisoned ice once again.  He pushed it away.

An hour.  An hour to drown him, like this.

She who Drowns in Moonlight rose up out of water, hair and clothing rippling, gathering her strength before a plunge.

The moon wasn’t out, she knew.  She Who Drowns in Moonlight would have to do today’s drowning beneath a cloudy, moonless sky.

There had to be half measures pulled together to make a whole, sometimes.  Compromises.  That was what this was.  All of this.

Anthem watched the distant fight between Titan and elemental Lord.  Hard to make out through the trees.

“Liberty.”

“Yo, daddy-o!” Liberty’s called down.  “Is the coast clear?”

Anthem turned, looking, and briefly glanced at Beatrice Wint.  Beatrice nodded at him.

“Yes.”

“Whoo!”

Liberty didn’t land so much as she crash-landed.  Gremlins and goblins scattered from the impact site.  Others rushed in.

“There’s not as many Others,” Liberty said.  “Did we win?  Are we winning?”

Anthem turned his eyes toward that room with the barely-intact staircase leading up to it, glass and the wood of wall and stair stained red.  Protected.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Are we losing?” Liberty asked, more serious.

“I wouldn’t say that either.  This isn’t the fight, Liberty.”

She frowned slightly.

“It’s setting the stage for the fight to come.  It may not be dramatic or drawn out.  There’s not much room for goblins, or fire, or explosions.  We’ve cleared the way, best as we can.  They’ve cleared the way, too.”

“Huh.  Got it.”

“Can you get your things together?  Get ready to go?”

“We’re not staying?”

“You’re not staying,” he said.  “I don’t know what happens, but I don’t like the look of what’s on the horizon, up north.”

The heat shimmer.  It was very circular, like the diagram was there, but the letters and lines invisible.  There was only the power that radiated away from the shape of it.  A disc.  A sun missing from the sky that still emanated enough heat to make snow melt and air burn, hung low enough to almost touch ground.

“So I’m supposed to leave you?”

“If this goes bad, if he reaches for that, I think I can get away.  I worry you can’t.  If you’d taken the lessons I told you, expanded beyond the goblin princess approach…”

“Nag, nag, nag.”

“…I’d be more comfortable with you staying,” Anthem finished.

“Nag.”

“Win or lose, what comes next will be hard.”

“That’s what she said.”

“And profitable.  Many of those low-level, dangerous Others scattered.  There’s good karma and good relationships with Lords, in cleaning that up.  If the Carmine wins, we keep to the space south of the border, live in the U.S., focus on the Lords there.  If not, we focus on here, where there are more Innocents and Aware.  So get yourself to the far side of the border, pick up things for a long journey.  Passport, spare clothes, your sister.  We’ll be camping in places.”

“We?” Liberty asked, perking up.  She grabbed her dad’s coat at the front, smiling.  “Are you out of jail?”

“We the Tedds.  If my jailer decides this community service isn’t enough to warrant my going… I’ll coordinate from a distance, I’ll handle reaching out to Lords and finding out who wants their backyard cleaned up of mindless, non-person Others.  I trust you two to handle it in my absence.”

“But she might say yes?”

“We can hope.  Camping in the dead of winter, murdering for profit…”

“Yes, yes yes yes!”

“Don’t get too excited before she says yes,” he said.  “Go, fly, put some distance between yourself and all of this.  Get over the border, outside the Carmine Exile’s realm, and get prepared.”

Sobering a bit, Liberty said, “I want to take a bit.  Gather some goblins.  Put Lewdtube to rest in the backyard, with all the dead pets and stuff.  Say some words with some goblins that knew her.”

“Is there room?”

“Pretty sure.”

“It would be a nice thought.  I’ll call when I know what’s happening.  Figure out where you are.”

“Okay.”

“If you want to take the time to do that, that’s fine, it might be a delay that costs us the chance at a contract with a Lord for a few thousand dollars, but for a good soldier and friend, I think that’s a fair sacrifice to make.”

“Sure, yeah.”

“Go,” he told her, giving her butt a swat, padded by the coat that was in the way.

She flashed a grin, spurred to movement by the jolt, hands gesturing for goblins and gremlins to follow.

Anthem paused, watching her go, inhaling deep, then sighing.

“Cellmoan, my girl!  What happened!?”

“Fell off the plane,” the one goblin replied.

“You’re supposed to be with Avery.  You’re my eyes, my ears-”  Liberty grabbed at the goblin’s massive pointed ears, like she was going fist-over-fist up to the end of a baseball bat.  “-and ears, and ears, and ears-”

Then she was out of earshot.

“You okay?”

Beatrice Wint looked over.  Anthem was looking at her.

“I’m fine,” she replied, curt.  Annoyed.

“Do you have a way out?” he asked.  “That’s not saying you’re weak.  I’m sending my own daughter away.  I’m not sure what happens next, here, but I think it’ll be a clash.”

“Did I ask?  Is it any of your business?”

“You didn’t, I suppose not.  Good work today.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tedd,” she said, aware she’d been rude, and he was apparently important, and strong.  Despite herself, she admitted, “I didn’t do that much.”

“You were here, that’s good enough,” he said, and then he walked off, toward a gathering of other combat practitioners.

Beatrice Wint, scarf around her lower face, hair shielding her ears from cold, kept hands in pockets, back to the wall, not sure what she should do.

People were leaving.  Only a handful were staying.  The bad monsters had left.  The bad guys had surrendered, it looked like.  Nobody was exactly here, telling her what was happening or giving her the play-by-play.  She didn’t want to be in the cabin, which smelled like medicine and blood, and the Storm had passed, it felt like, so she could come out and breathe air so cold it made her nostrils and throat hurt, bringing tears to her eyes, that she blinked away.  Fresh air, at least.

Should she have said yes?  Would her mother’s advice be to take the opportunity to be near a practitioner that strong, to learn what she could and build a relationship?

She didn’t know.

She at least had made a good impression, it seemed like.  She’d been here.

A part of her, a lot of her, wished she hadn’t.

A part of her, another piece of her, knew that if she hadn’t, it would have been worse.

A lot of this just felt like awfulness that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and it made it feel like it was hard to breathe.

“Beatrice.”

Beatrice stood up straighter, no longer leaning back against the wall.

Deb was hurt, and moved slowly.  She was coming from the direction the Titan fight had been happening.

“You’re still here?  People are leaving,” Deb said, grunting as she trudged.

“I wasn’t sure what to do.”

“Come here.  Let me lean on you.”

Beatrice obliged.

“Titan situation is looking better than it was.  Our Lord is no slouch.”

“Good.  If she was, we’d have removed her, right?” Beatrice asked.

“Potentially,” Deb said.  “She has her strengths and weaknesses.  I wish she’d be more able to recognize the power of the practitioners on her council.  When you’re older, I think you’ll wish for the same.”

“Will I?”

“I think so,” Deb said, grunting, voice softer.  She winced  “Doorknob?”

Beatrice did her best, while staying as a support for Deb’s hand, which pressed down hard on her shoulder.  She kind of had to kick the door to open it wider.

Blood and medicine.  Her momentary hesitation meant that when Deb stepped forward, she lacked for support.  Beatrice did her best to support Deb, but from the looks of it, might’ve slammed a hand into a wound at her side.

It took Deb a long moment to compose herself.

“Anthem Tedd sent his daughter home.  With plans for later.  Contract work, it sounded like.”

“If he’s sending his daughter away, that’s a good indication, isn’t it?” Deb asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Two of the Others were inside.  The creepy one with loose skin was one of them.

“Some privacy?” Deb asked.

The Other with loose skin began to gesture.  Arm slapped arm, hand moved-

“I don’t understand,” Beatrice said.

The gestures accelerated, which made it harder.  Repeated.  Emphasis.

“I don’t-  Please stop!”  Beatrice raised her voice a little.  “Stop doing that!”

The Other went still.

Hands pressed together in a prayer gesture, head bowed.

What was Beatrice meant to say or do?

“Good work today,” Beatrice said, a bit wooden.  “Good… you were here.”

The Other nodded.  Then she left out the back door with the other Other.

Leaving Beatrice and Deb with the body.

Breath level.  Eyeblinks spaced out, careful.  She raised her chin for one moment, to keep gravity from pulling moisture down out of her eyes.  Breath level.  Measured.

“I don’t know what to do next,” Beatrice said, when she was sure her voice wouldn’t waver.

“Go home.  Sebastian Harless arranges proceedings.  He’ll have handled inheritance and will.  Everything practice related will go to you in a way that doesn’t leave your father wondering.  You’ve shown a fondness for the books?”

“I’ve studied hard.”

“Then it shouldn’t seem weird if her library and so-called decorations go to you.  If you wish, you can tell your father.  I could help smooth that over if necessary.”

“Should I?” Beatrice asked.

“I wouldn’t advise it, even if I understood it.  I’m sorry to say, your father isn’t that sort of man, who could be an asset in your growth as a practitioner.”

“He’s sleeping with another woman.  I told my mother, she knows.”

“How harsh do you want me to be?  I can ease what’s happening now, or I can be brutally honest.”

“Brutal honesty, please.  Harsh,” Beatrice said, quiet.  “Harshest.”

“The fact he was clumsy enough you found out is why I wouldn’t bring him in.  If he isn’t remarried within the year, I’ll be surprised.  He’s that sort of man.  You won’t go wanting in many ways.  Embrace that.  With luck, your new stepmother will be someone who can provide some of what he can’t.  A third or a quarter, maybe a tenth of what your mother would have, when your mother was already… lacking in warmth, even by my estimation.  It might be good if you resisted the natural urge to push the new woman away, took what you could, built a rapport.  I’ll visit, meet her, make sure she’s worth that rapport.”

“Alright.”

“The local council will give you tutoring and lessons, myself included.  It’s what is done, in situations like this.  It will be a broader education than what your mother would have provided.  From there, after you awaken, you can more aggressively pursue what your mother would have taught.  The relationships you built while being tutored will become references.  So it will be good if you’re a good and diligent student for the council members.  Consider them- consider them and any stepmother or family who step in to be a political game, if you must.  Practice for later positioning on a council, ours or another.”

“Okay.  That makes sense.  It’s a good framing.”

“It may be harder than it sounds.  Not life threatening situations.  But for one likely example, I could see Sebastian Harless making you go over paperwork, giving you piles of contract homework to add to what you have from school.  Winning him over while as frustrated and bored as you’re likely to be may be harder than it sounds.”

“I understand.  It’s fine.”

“You should know what they say about best laid plans, child.  In practice, it won’t be easy, with a void in your life.  If you rebelled, if you struggled, if you ignored the advice I’m giving you now in every way, people would understand.  I would understand.  I would still be here, because I was a friend and ally of your mother.  Short of you attempting to murder me, I intend to be here, as a resource and support for you to draw on.  For her sake.”

Beatrice swallowed.  “That’s appreciated.  And the advice is good, it…”

She felt like her voice was going to waver, so she paused.

The pause began to feel overly long, until the length of the pause made it feel worse, which made the pause longer.

She wasn’t sure how much of that perception of it taking too long was in her head, but it still felt like a lot.  She felt Deb’s eyes boring a hole into the back of her head.

“…I don’t know what to do.  Hearing this helps.”

“I and some other people you trust will help you navigate peers of your mother.  Other chainers and destroyers, Abyssal practitioners, echoic and Ruins practitioners.  Figuring out who is safe and good to send you to, for a summer, for a limited apprenticeship.  That will take you to the necessary next level.  I’d say once you’re stabilized and you’ve done the traveling necessary, you could and should bring your younger sister in.  You’ll be positioned to surpass your mother.  It would be what she wants.”

“Yes.  That…”

Beatrice felt the waver in her voice coming, and paused.  She measured her breaths.

Not as bad as the last pause.

“…makes sense.”

Her mother lay there on a cot, blanket pulled over her.  Her eyes had been closed when Beatrice had stepped outside, overwhelmed by everything, the smell of alcohol wipes, medicine, and blood making her nauseous enough her eyes teared up, but were open now.

Even after healing from the Other and a healing potion, it hadn’t been enough.  She’d declined.  Her stomach had turned hard and dark, and then she’d gone.

That feeling persisted.  She’d been told what would happen and it helped but she still felt paralyzed, standing where she was by the door, opposite corner from her mother’s cot, measuring her breathing, blinking carefully.  She didn’t know what to do.

The silence from Deb made her turn her head.

Deb, back to the door, had hand clapped over mouth, tears and one glob of snot from a nostril running over the back of it.

Seeing that made a tear escape Beatrice’s eye, which she quickly smudged away, turning her head-

Deb grabbed her shoulder, hard, making her jump.

“Spirits, Self, and Soul, child,” Deb said, voice harsh.  She pushed Beatrice toward the coat.  “Go to her, have a cry.  Nobody’s judging.”

The tears started to flow.  By the time she was halfway, she was half-blinded by moisture.  She dropped to her knees by the side of the cot, with Deb guarding the one door, silhouettes of the Others faint and blurry on the far side of the other one.

“No more than thirty minutes.  Then we should be gone,” Deb said.  She smeared snot and tears from her face with a hand and then put face to window, looking out in the direction of the red-painted meeting room.

She saw a room, suspended awkwardly on the ruined building below, the wood a red that looked like blood had soaked into it over years.

I shouldn’t be here.  I have responsibilities.

Her entire life had been responsibilities.

The path she’d traced here had been a distorted half circle, cutting through the woods in a curved trajectory, past things in shadows that had come clawing for her.  When Clementine had shown she wasn’t a pushover, they’d fallen back, not courageous enough to come after her.  The idea had been for her to get slowed down enough she couldn’t keep chasing.

Which was probably good strategy on this asshole’s part.  She wasn’t athletic.  She wasn’t dressed for a sprint through deep woods in deep winter, in rain and fog.  Hell, even her bra wasn’t a good ‘running’ bra.  She badly needed to make adjustments and she didn’t want to, with glittering eyes peering at her in the dark and her quarry getting away.

This wasn’t her, she shouldn’t be here.  But maybe both of those things were reasons why she needed to be here.  If the universe was fucking with her, then why should she be who the universe wanted, why should she be where the universe thought she should be?

In using the tools at her disposal, she’d tried the puzzle bracelet.  She wasn’t in an enclosed room or a building, but the trees pressed in close, and her instincts… well, they’d had to be good.

Sure enough, the forest did shift around her.  She moved through the space, and her quarry fled through that same space, getting turned around.

Putting the bracelet away and walking for a short distance let her get here.  When he kept running, looking back over his shoulder, she was there, ahead of him.  She stalked the woods, eyeing him, trying not to make sound, making sure she’d have a clear shot.  She wouldn’t want to waste this chance by putting four-fifths of the contents into some tree that stood in the way.

She’d had no idea what to expect when she came here.  She’d brought things.  Some she was willing to spare.  A few she’d loaned, even though she had deep reservations about that.

A few she’d kept for herself.  The scarf was one.  Because what every girl needed growing up was some fucked up sexual confusion ladled on over fifteen kinds of personal trauma, right?  She pulled it from her inner pocket and wound it around her neck.

The three girls and the opossum obsessed one were out there by the red room.  Others paced, but it looked like they were leaving, or backing off.  The tall, muscular man with guns and knives talked to the girls and then walked away.  With the scarf on, Clementine saw him wearing tighty-whiteys, his musculature, his many scars.

So many scars, from among this group.  Many were visible at a distance.

The Stage Fright Scarf made it so everyone in the ‘crowd’ was dressed down to that level, bottommost layer.  It lasted for a while after being taken off.  Until she’d realized that, she’d practically gone crazy trying to figure it out.  She’d spent most of her high school years dealing with other students, teachers, family, random strangers on the street, all wearing their underwear and nothing else.  If talking to people had been hard after being a weird, trauma-warped kid, this made it harder.  She’d had it as added, unwanted weirdness around coming to terms with her sexuality, being into both boys and girls, with a special intrigue and the hardest crushes reserved for those who played with definitions or made the lines fuzzier.

It made her think of Corey.  What Corey would think of her doing this, right here, stalking someone with the idea of hurting or killing them.

She put that out of mind.  It wasn’t just about her, her and this monster, or her and Corey.  It was about other victims.  The idea that if she failed, if she died or something happened and she stopped being the person the universe threw all this weirdness at, it could be some little kid.

A little kid that, allegedly, this monster was preying on.

The scarf, as awkward as it was, had its uses.  In this case, it let her see that her hapless friend Vaughn wasn’t Vaughn right now- something was beneath his clothes, clinging to him.  Puppeteering him.

That was concerning.

It, when she turned around, not wanting to let her quarry go, let her see past the fancy clothes to a musculature and bone structure that was warped and gnarled, like it had been made of the most twisted, interesting wood and then turned to flesh, with burn-like patterns sweeping over lumpy flesh.  It let her see that he wore a holster and had a gun in it.

She had guns from the armory that appeared when she put a key with a random number in it to a locked door matching that number.  She’d been prepared to shoot, and now she was less sure.

Experience had taught her that she didn’t win those exchanges.  Maybe it was, like the three girls had said, the universe playing games with her.

She couldn’t get in a gunfight.  There was playing against type, and there was something that could get her killed.

Instead, she reached into a pocket and pulled out a toy.  It was a hatchawachi game with attached keychain, with a screen in inverted colors, black background with tan pixels instead of tan background with black pixels.  The things had seen a resurgence when she was in middle school, she’d owned one for a short while, then let it sit in a drawer somewhere until her house had burned down.  Press a button to toggle between options, one button to do one input, like feed, clean, or pet, one button to bring up stats and other obscure stuff.  She’d never one hundred percent figured it out.

Feed.  She hammered the button.

When she’d found it, she’d thought there might be a danger if she didn’t keep it fed and alive.  So she’d played it like normal, paying close attention.

She was glad that when it had kicked off, she’d been in an open place.

The way she figured it, every time the button was pressed, there was some small chance, maybe 1%, that it triggered.  It was made to be mashed, clicking in a satisfying way, and she’d developed a technique where she kept her finger still but shook the egg-sized device in her hand to constantly press and release the button.

Played regularly, it maybe triggered every few days, often early morning or late at night, when one tended to pick the little keychain game up.  Or on the toilet, if she was admitting it to herself.  Bad places for it to activate.  Played by an attentive person, that person would realize the pet was always expressing it was hungry.  The hunger was bottomless.  It would always be angry.

‘Played’ like this, she figured it was a coin toss every few seconds before it activated.

There was a distant thud.  Trees fell.  She stopped.

She gauged where it had come from, then sprinted, tugging at her front, trying to grip shirt and bra through coat to quickly adjust.  It helped that she saw herself in underwear only, and could kind of fix things accordingly.

She needed to get further ahead of her quarry.  She had a watch to help with that.  With an adjustment, her focus in the right place, it tweaked time.  Made trouble arrive late.  Made friends arrive earlier.

Its price was a subtle one, accelerating the track her life was on.  More events, crammed closer together, which amped up drama, which made her more likely to use the watch.

Either way, it shifted things.  It bought her precious seconds where the source of those trees falling was delayed, where her quarry wasn’t running at an angle that would mean she was chasing behind him again.  She could get out front.

The Hatchawachi pet came tearing through the woods, angry, twisted, and completely, totally aware of where she was.  There was no hiding from it.  That was how the item worked.  One percent of the time the button was hit -she wasn’t sure of the actual number- there would be some sound or vibration to let her know, distant things being knocked over, glass crashing.

Then the pet she’d been taking care of would come after her.  In this case, it was a duck, if a duck had had some twisted three-way love child with a genetically modified steroid bear and a derailed train locomotive.

Two or three thousand pounds of nigh-indestructible, sparsely feathered, scarred muscle with a shocking amount of forward momentum and destructive potential.  Making a beeline straight for her.

It knocked over trees along the way because it could.

It quacked, long and fog-horn loud, and the quack was a tortured, guttural, haunting sound.

Her quarry turned to see what was coming, drawing his gun from the holster.  The sound it made was too high pitched, almost like a laser gun.

Clementine had moved so the warped little man would be between herself and the incoming hatchawachi duck.  The shot had a delayed effect, fracturing collarbone and shoulder, leaving a perfectly circular hole in its wake.  Blood splattered in rings on the snow, as if following the shot’s wake.

It didn’t matter.  The duck went out of its way to slam into her quarry with enough force to break bones and knock gun from hand.

She started hammering the button, drawing her own gun, from the armory.

She mashed with one hand, while aiming with the other.  The gun fired a compressed barbed wire fence, catching face, with posts embedding into trees and ground behind the duck hatchawachi.

It pulled against it, skin tearing, feathers pulling out, duck bill gouging.  It quacked that foghorn, broken quack, drool pouring out of its lower bill.

A tree was pulled down with its bulldozer-like strength before the wires snapped.  The barbs on the wire did more damage, and pulled enough that the duck span in a half circle stumbled, fell, and found itself again.

She shot it a second time, as it fell, finger mashing.

Same chance, she figured, that it went away, if the button continued to be mashed.  A coin flip, every few seconds.

With bad enough luck, it could take a minute before this thing went away.  Especially if her finger slipped, or her hand got tired and she slowed down.  Or if this thing got close enough to throw her, or break something.

Don’t mess with me, universe, she thought, finger working.

It tore free, wreathed in barbed wire, the posts dangling, swinging, hit and knocked around by legs and forelimbs with flipper-like ‘hands’.  Muscles flexed in weird, not-so-possible ways as it reared up, lunging-

And then it was gone, glitching out of existence, its forward momentum enough that the barbed wire fence that had been wreathing it was sent tumbling toward her.  She stopped the worst of it with a foot going out front, but a whipped fence post brought a tangle up toward her arm, catching her arm and hand.

She extricated herself, easing rusty barbed wire out of where it had embedded, moving her arm by small fractions to get the angles right, and then walked around the tangle, pulling the scarf off.  The silence after the rampage was punctuated by the sound of damaged trees creaking, their collapse or breaks delayed by what might’ve been a full minute.

By her quarry’s moans and groans.

“What was your name again?”

“Tenmercy,” the Other said to her.

“I should be with others,” she said.  “Helping Vaughn.  Protecting people who don’t know better.”

“Go do that,” he said, groaning.  His arm had broken, and instead of bone poking past torn flesh, it was the fractured ends of branches.

She put the hatchawachi toy away, carefully enclosing it in a case that wouldn’t let the button get pressed if she was jostled or running around.  She picked up his fancy little gun, that had done so much damage to the duck hatchawachi.  She aimed it at him.

“You’re a good person, wanting to help,” he said, flashing a weird smile at her, teeth too nice.

She considered for a second, then switched hands, aiming the barbed wire gun at him.

He flinched more, with that one.

“Rigged?” she asked, waggling ‘his’ gun.

“No comment.”

“I’m told you’re responsible for the sort of stuff I’ve been through.”

“Looking at what you’re carrying and wearing?” he asked, head lolling back.  He smiled.  “I do much higher quality work than that.  That’s… half of it comes about on its own.  Buried in the wrong place, carried by the wrong people, people similar to you, who’re meant to do something, who don’t, that potential gets passed on.”

“Who’s in charge?” she asked.

“Of me?  It’s a joint ownership by myself and I,” he quipped.

“Of these decisions.  Me.  Who’s meant to do things.  How potential gets passed on.”

He lifted his broken arm, and had to roll his body a bit, so the broken limb swayed until it pointed in the right direction.  “Red room, that way.  I think you would’ve seen it.  People are trying to stop him.  You should be there.  Help that Vaughn fellow.  Stop the man at the top.  Don’t bother with little old me.”

She shot him.

He screamed, as the barbed wire bit deep and sawed into flesh.  Posts planted awkwardly into ground.

She pulled the posts out, and by the time she had, the scarf’s effects had worn off.  She could grab him by the coat-front, lifting, and kick a fence post so it span, winding up wire, cinching it tighter behind this gnarled little man with the fancy hair and fancier clothes.

Then she dragged him.

“You don’t know what they’ll do to me.  What it means to be captured by them.”

“How many people have you hurt?”

“How many have you!?”

She wasn’t that interested in the back and forth.

“A year of service.  If you have a supplier of good bits and bobs, it might make the universe less likely to send you bad ones.”

“Then someone else gets the bad ones?”

“Yes!  It’s terrific!”

“No, then,” she said.

Slowly, she made her way toward the place all the chaos had happened.  She left him at the treeline, too firmly bound to escape.  She still kept an eye on him.

Pauline had come back.  She’d disappeared earlier.

Figueroa, Harold, and Vaughn were here too.

So were two of the people the girls had been talking to, earlier.

Clementine walked directly toward the girls.

“Clementine!” a young man called out.

She paused.

“Leave them be.  Come?”

The guy was shorter than average for a guy, muscular, wearing a black leather jacket, carrying a bag with wires sticking out.  The girl with him was black haired, wearing tinted glasses, a blue button-up shirt under a business coat, with raven feathers sticking out of the coat’s pocket, her back right pocket, and more raven feather and goat horn decorations at one side of her head, above and behind her ear, attached to the hair that was braided on the one side.

“I want to talk to them.”

“Something’s going on,” Vaughn

“Do you still have that thing stuck to you?” Clementine asked, prodding him.

He paused, then shook his head.  “No.  Not anymore.”

“I had something too,” Pauline said.

“I don’t like the idea you guys had stuff stuck to you like that.”

“In me.  I swallowed it,” Pauline said.

Clementine frowned.  “That’s worse.”

“It’s better to swallow than spit,” Figueroa said.  “Spitters are just lying to themselves about what they are, and it’s not like anyone’s kissing you after, if they have any self-respect.”

Clementine sighed.

“It could choose where to go.  Choose to come back.  After the scary start of it… I didn’t mind.  I feel like I could almost figure it out,” Pauline said.  “Seeing, feeling how they did it.”

“I’m worried the universe doesn’t want us to figure it out,” Clementine said, looking back at Tenmercy.  “That it needs fall guys.”

“Don’t I know it,” Vaughn murmured.

“I was talking to your friends and neighbors,” the older teen, early-twenties woman with the hairpiece said.  “Nicolette, by the way-”

“Heard your name before.”

“That’s Zed.  Um.”

“Emotions are running high,” Zed said.  He ran fingers through his bangs, pushing them to the top of his head.  The rain had wet his hair enough it stayed.  “Nico’s bothered, she’s saying you and your friends should go.”

“Basically,” Nicolette said.  “Thank you, Zed, for summarizing it.”

“And I’m saying maybe not.”

“I take back my thank-you.”

“What’s going on?  Why upset?”

“It’s war,” Zed said, before Nicolette could reply.  “It’s been this crazy, exhausting fight.  One with compromises and ugliness and they’re still kids, Nico.  They’re doing the best they can.”

“I wish I could think of a metaphor.  This is like… imagine they were willing to use Brie as a sacrificial pawn.  His girlfriend.”

“Are you seriously comparing Seth and Brie in this scenario?”

“In a way.”

“Look, Nicolette, you’re a friend, but fuck you, and fuck that.  Seth was a voyeur, an asshole, a predator- if he wasn’t a rapist already, he was on track to become one.  The writing was on the wall before he went over to team red here, and they went and encouraged the worst of him.”

“No,” Nicolette said.  “Look, I’m saying in terms of emotional investment, emotionally loading this stuff, you care about Brie, it’s a passion, it’s something that gets to the core of you.  And for me, people who’ve been down and out like that?  I’ve been there.  People who’ve lost their minds, been pushed to the edge?  I was there.  I hate Seth’s guts.  I agree with everything you said.  But there are lines and this is mine.  Those kids?  They needed more, and one’s practically catatonic, the other destroyed her hands in a way we can’t fix, and the third is in the wind and apparently a fourth is in that room.  The kids are destroyed, what we’re getting here isn’t justice.”

“I’m worried this isn’t you,” Zed told her.  “I’m worried that you’re taking a stand on behalf of a Belanger clan that’s not going to back you like you need them to back you.  They’re a deeply problematic group and we need them to come to where you’re at.  Not you going to where you’re feeling they’re at.”

“Um, excuse me,” Figueroa said.  “What does any of this have to do with me?”

“I think you should go,” Nicolette said.  “All of you.  I’m going.”

“Nico,” Zed murmured.

“I’ve helped them out a lot.”

“They’ve helped you back.  Sometimes it’s not totally even, but you can’t keep score, that’s not what you do with friends.”

“Either they’re allies, and I’m keeping score, I’ve helped them and I needed more from them today, and they disappointed, or they’re friends and I needed them to be friends and think about letting Miller go, risking letting Helen Kim escape, killing Seth and Griffin, destroying those remaining kids.”

“I’m just going to say, this feels like maybe it’s bad karma or something running through, twisting perspectives, maybe it’s that we’re tired and that makes it easier to feel used or harder to see where decisions were harder and moments tighter-”

“Fuck off, Zed, don’t be such a guy.  I’m tired and emotional?”

“We’re all tired and emotional.  I’m saying this doesn’t feel right.”

“You’re right.  We’re actually in agreement.  This doesn’t feel right.  I’m going, I’ll check in with Belangers and help with the hunt for Miller.”

“Not what I meant,” Zed said.

“You all?” Nicolette turned to them.  She took a second.  “Room… two-twelve, I think?  I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to check in.  He’s not well?  Screams a lot.”

“He was my neighbor for a bit,” Clementine said.

“Is he okay?”

“Yeah.”

“There are others I look in on.  But I don’t think they interact with the rest of the buildling.”

“You’d be surprised how things are, if you haven’t visited,” Clementine said.

“I’m an advocate, guys.  I’m not always great about it, I was where you were at, not all that long ago, but I’ve tried to support.  I sent some money over, before, to help cover people’s rent, though with Bristow gone, I couldn’t guarantee it went where I meant it to go-”

“Do you know what happened to him?” Pauline asked.  “Mr. Bristow?”

“Yeah,” Nicolette said.  “Don’t expect him to come back.  It’s like, um, Pauline?  If you took him for a ride and dropped him off somewhere that was invested in keeping him.”

“Okay,” Pauline replied, frowning.  She looked at Clementine.  “Arlene’s doing… a job.”

Clementine winced.

“I’m going, I think you guys should go too,” Nicolette said.  She adjusted her grip on her bag.  “That’s all I’m saying.  This got too ugly.”

Then she walked off.

“Someone’s hormonal,” Figueroa murmured.

“She’s under pressure,” Zed said.  “And some of this pushed very specific buttons.  I don’t want to tell you to ignore my friend, but for what it counts, I’m staying.  I think we need people to stay.”

“Before another conversation where I can’t get a word in edgewise, I caught a monster,” Clementine said.  “He’s over by the trees.  I think he gives… items, to people.”

“What a prick, giving out free stuff,” Figueroa said.

“If I go to check that out, see if I can secure it, will you guys be here when I get back?  Talk, figure it out, but… don’t make me feel like I made a mistake going?”

“Okay,” Clementine said.

She pointed, and he walked.

“Any words of wisdom, Harold?  Wild guesses?”  Clementine asked.  Predicting the future, being wrong while also right?

“It’s all a big circle,” he said.  “Snake eating its own tail.”

“Huh,” Clementine murmured.

“See?” he pointed.

She looked, and she could see it.  Faint on the horizon.  A disc-shaped heat shimmer in the air.

“I trust you,” Pauline told Clementine.

“I wish I knew if I deserved that,” she replied, eye on that distant heat shimmer.  Was it growing?

“I don’t trust you,” Figueroa told her.

“Figures,” she replied.

“I think I might trust her,” Vaughn said, indicating the direction Nicolette had gone.  “But then I think back to the tooth extraction earlier.  The woman doing it was one of their moms-”

He indicated the three girls, who were hunkered down by the broken wall at the base of the stairs.

“-and I think that makes me trust them too.  The blonde-ish one with freckles was kind.”

“They have their good points,” Clementine said.  “Bad ones too.  Part of that is them being kids, but… I know the guy in room two-twelve.  I think I’ve seen her visit.  I believe this Nicolette woman.  I believe that she’s stung, disappointed.  I’ve been close to that, and it feels like things are ramping up, the stakes are high, and if we get stung when things are like this, it could hurt.”

“Gut feeling?” Harold asked.

“You don’t have the answers?” she asked.

“Too subjective.”

She sighed.

Zed returned after a few minutes.

“And?” Clementine asked.

“Secured him further.  Not sure what happens with that, but with your permission, I’ll take him away, imprison him, basically.  He’s dangerous, I don’t know how you knew or if someone told you…”

“Avery did.”

“Aha.  But yeah.  Good catch.”

“He might know stuff.”

“When things settle down, I might be able to quiz him.  Finding tricky objects?  I don’t want to get too detailed.”

“Yeah.  And their owners, who might need help.”

“I can do that later, can’t promise it’ll be soon, could be all hell breaks loose, we need to vacate the wider region.”

“This is all really intense, huh?” Vaughn asked.

“Yeah,” Zed said.  He folded his arms.  “Damn it.  Any thoughts?”

“I’m leaving,” Pauline said.  “My daughter- even if there’s a possible fix.”

“There might still be.  Don’t lose touch, okay?” Zed asked her.

She nodded.

Vaughn and Harold were gone too.

Figueroa was too.  Of course.

Others were watching, Clementine realized.  Members of the three girl’s hometown.  Neighbors and parents of kids, maybe.  Less than there had been.  Which was spooky unto itself.

Nicolette going felt like it had knocked a leg out of things.  They were shedding people.

Clementine was, in a way, responsible for Sargeant Hall.  Its people.  What they did here would have collateral effects.

“They used us as human shields,” she murmured.

“In a way.  But they used themselves as shields to try to protect you guys, at the same time.  I think they’d interpret that as trying to bring you in, without forcing you in.  It’s a complicated thing.”

“That word again,” Clementine murmured.  “And we have that option.”

“Yeah.  Based on the outcome of this.”

“Tenmercy said it was about stopping a man at the top.  Who did this to us?”

“Honestly?” Zed asked, shifting position, jamming hands in pockets.  He sighed.  “No.  The Carmine Exile didn’t have a role in creating you.  He’s new to his seat, but even besides that… it’s not what he does.  That’s how I’d answer that, if I was trying to take one side.”

“And the other side?”

“They’ve been fighting their hearts out against all sorts of people keeping a messed up status quo… a lot of which has created issues for people like you.  The Carmine Exile didn’t create you, but one of his close allies might have… and he’s caused a whole lot of hurt that might be worse than what most people in Sargeant Hall went through.  Killed Verona’s friends.  A soldier that Lucy was going to close to for life.  My girlfriend was traumatized by him.”

“Brie, Nicolette said?” Clem asked.

“Yeah.”

“Thank you for being straight with us.”

“I wish I could be straighter.”

Figueroa snorted.

“I believe in being open with information,” Zed added.

“I like you, then,” Clementine said, feeling very tired.  “I say I’m part of this, there’s more danger, more mess?”

“Possibly.”

“And chance for a fix?”

“Hopefully.”

She nodded to herself, watching the three girls.

“I’ll stay.”

“I think that helps,” Zed said.

“So what happens next?”

“The door opens,” Zed started to explain.

The handle clicked, and the door opened a crack.  The redness around the exterior shifted.

“Title sixty-nine of which is nice, I’m nice, I try my hardest-”

“Oh, shut up,” Charles growled.

The summoning obliged.  At a glance, the power used to create it was no longer being supplied.  He’d served his role and was fading.

Those pressing sentiments of eternity contrasted with mortality became something that came together like sun and moon for a solar eclipse, captured in the crack of a door opened ajar.

He could reach out, sensing.

Titan, fallen.  Cabins were destroyed or burned, his faction in shambles, his supporters broken and scattered.

Two of the three girls had moved to the top of the room, perched above the door, waiting.  Another waited off to the side.  Anthem Tedd stood off to the side with his hand on a gun.

Aware.  There were Innocents and Aware nearby, that complicated things.

There were other forces to account for.  People moving, other borders he hadn’t yet negotiated with, adjusting to the international powers giving him their backup.

The Titan was a loss.  What had they been thinking, releasing it so soon?

It was at least something they could do without, but a loss all the same.  Something that would have clarified the ritual incarnate.

“Out the door and stand to the right?” he leaned in close, murmuring to the ear of the Kim ambassador.  “Anthem Tedd wants to shoot me, I believe.  And watch above the door without making it obvious you’re watching above the door.”

“I hope we’ve provided enough aid to earn your support in the future.”

“Yes,” Charles murmured.  You have provided enough aid.

Ottawa’s eyes were on him.

He pushed power to his awareness and senses, careful to avoid giving too much attention to the limp and dying Styan, who seemed to notice that power and raised its head.

“Go on, then,” he said.

This wasn’t a fight that would be a knock-down, drag-out brawl.  It was like gunfighters squaring off.  Who had the fastest draw?  Who could piece together what the other was doing first?

The Kims had lost because of something to do with Karma.  Karmic restriction.

“You’re exempt,” he murmured to the Kim Ambassador, as they rounded the table.  “You were not participating, so the karmic restrictions on the rest of the Kim family here do not apply to you.  Or you.”

He directed that last bit at the golden boy.

Making it so.

The Kim ambassador stepped outside, followed by the golden boy.

“After you,” he told the women from the Ottawa group.

He didn’t want to be the last one out either.  That suggested the door could be closed and sealed.  So he’d follow them out.

The moment we see each other…

Ottawa had sworn noninvolvement in what was about to happen.  Making them shields.

They filed out.

“I wish I could say it’s been a pleasure, Carmine,” Wegner told him, turning.

Letting people outside know where he was.

I could forswear you for that.

It barely mattered.

He knew where they were.

Wegner stepped outside, onto rickety stairs.  Behaim followed.  He followed Behaim.

Then he was crossing the threshold, looking Hayward in the eye.

Ellingson dropped onto him from above the room.  He moved, reacting.

He wasn’t a fighter, he had never been someone who excelled at that.  But he was Carmine.  Blood, violence, and conflict ran through him.  The flows of it were natural to him.

He used summoning practice, creating something argumentative and inspired, to conjure up something primeval.  A crimson tear in reality that fangs, teeth, and claws could tear out of, snapping, biting, lashing out.  A praying mantis limb with teeth of serrated steel cut Ellingson in two.

Glamour.  She was effectively gainsaid, but she’d wrought that, at least and had kept enough of it intact.  She split into three foxes.

Avery Kelly was immediately after.  Not as aggressive or offensive, but her timing and teamwork made up for it.  While his focus was on Lucy, she was pouncing in.

He twisted that tear in reality, forced another argumentative diagram, and created a portal that faced him, instead of facing away from him.

Massive, muscular goblin arms punched out and around him, beneath armpits, over shoulders, arcing around.

One caught Avery around the head.

A moment later, it was crushed like an egg in a closed fist, albeit far gorier.

The same trick that had been used to escape the Aurum.  The opossum, who wasn’t gainsaid, worked awkwardly with the goblin glamour, pushing a lot of herself into Avery.  It was Toadswallow’s art with his invention, done in advance, that made the gore work.

Avery fell backwards, and dropped from the side of the room to the ground a floor below, landing awkwardly.

Anthem didn’t have a clear shot, with the crowd.  That same crowd bought Charles the ability to create those momentary summonings, which was good, and let Lucy work her glamour, which was more annoying.  He could shoot around the crowd, but to make a shot that would wound a Carmine, while also shooting around the crowd?  Charles could see the diagram work.  It wasn’t there.

It would have been nice if Innocents weren’t here.  If he wasn’t bounded by scale.

He was two steps down the stairs when a fox pounced on him, biting his shoulder.

The golden boy obliterated it with forking limbs.

Hayward ducked the first wave of limbs that the ambassador reached her way.  She failed to duck the rest.  Hands and arms pinned her against the wall.

Charles obliterated the second wolf, and had a face manifest that spat something at the third, sending it tumbling into a wall.  Glamour broke to reveal Lucy Ellingson, behind the third cup.

“It’s not totally fucked!” Hayward shouted.  “We-”

His senses were pitched, and as a Judge, one thing they were pitched to were questions of Law.  Truth.  He could read an individual’s words, looking for the lie.

Cheating, maybe, to read into that ‘we’, when there had been no accusation of gainsaying.

Time had effectively stopped, as he searched for that meaning and why it felt strange.

When it resumed again, he’d projected himself halfway across the province.  To Verona Hayward’s Demesne, where Verona stood in her war room, above the block of wood with maps and papers on it.  One large paper was inscribed with a diagram.  Two more homunculi were out.  She had the teeth she’d extracted from the other Styan, and was giving it to them.  Making cover.  So she could work without him spying on her.

The rest of the sentence -not Verona’s, but the Fetch Julette’s- felt very far away, as he focused on here, staring Verona down.  We can do this.

A Garrick was off to the side, drinking tea with a pigeon and a squirrel.  Jude’s cousin.  She nearly dropped her cup.

“Verona Hayward.  Adorea Garrick.”

“Oh,” Verona said, voice soft.  “Yep.”

There was no lie in that.  No false names, no tricks, no switched bodies.

“Yo,” Verona added.

“Yo,” he growled.  “And what are you up to?”

“Homunculi dentistry and diagram doodles,” she said.

He looked at the doodles.  They had to do with ritual incarnates.  The Crucible.  That was what the Allaire ex-Forsworn  had called it.  “You know.”

“They dished.”

“Okay.  It shouldn’t matter,” he said.  He started to round the table.  She moved back, closer to the living room, tense.  Scared.

She hesitated.  “Shit.  I thought there was a bit more time.  Not even five seconds after the door opened?  Or was my time wrong?”

“About right,” he said.

The ‘shit’ was right.  There was no lie in it.  She hadn’t expected him like this.

“Okay,” Verona said.  She swallowed.

“For what it’s worth, I’m not dumb enough to give you access to the Crucible.  With the way things are, I expect that if you girls were to try it, you’d win or pervert it.  I left you out.”

“I’d be touched, if you weren’t such a swollen asshole.”

“Don’t be.”

“You think that highly of us?”

“No,” he said.  He turned his head.  “Adorea Garrick?  When a Demesnes’ owner dies, it can be complicated to be inside it, depending on how the powers that be decide to handle it or put the space and its contents to rest.  If you do anything except leave, I’ll demonstrate to you just how complicated it can be.”

Adorea paused.

“Go,” Verona said, quiet.

Adorea ran, bringing pigeon and squirrel with.  Out the door.

“You won’t be able to use this space to come after me,” he told Verona.  “Even if you were to sacrifice yourself and condemn this space with me in it… the interpretation of things after your demise is up to us.”

“Yep.”

“I’m tempted to explain some things to you,” he said.  “To drive the point home.  Why I’ve treated you as I have.”

“Because I’m funny, and remind you of yourself, or the parts you liked about Alexander?”

“No,” he said.  “I’m going to resist the temptation.  Trust me, it’s a kindness.”

Then he moved his hand, to gesture, to pull out power.  A diagram evoked out of nothing more than a swipe of the hand and will.  Narrow, black-scaled hands came out in a torrent that tore the block of wood in her war room to pieces, killed the homunculi, and shredded floorboards, reaching for Verona.

She bolted, back into the living room.  She had no direct connection to this space while gainsaid, she couldn’t make it do things, or draw power from it, or will any trap to close.  But it was hers.  So when floorboards broke, they got in the way, biting at the reaching arms.  They bought her a chance to round the corner.

He moved his hand, adjusted will.  Black hands became black serpents, snaking around, coming out as a tide, pushed forward with force that pushed others forward, filling this room, then the next.

“Can I-”

“No,” he intoned.

Broken wall made ceiling collapse, which fell in a way that made a shield, blocking the snakes that had darted from war room to living room to front hall, where she was.

Adjust, tune.

The snakes congealed into a massive arm, much like a titan’s.  Palm pressed against the diagonally sloping ceiling and rammed right through it, the base of the staircase to upstairs, and the outside wall.

“I can’t tell you my reason and explanation!?” she shouted, from halfway up the stairwell.

“I’ll find out after.”

“The rook thing, even!?”

“I’d rather you dead,” he said, changing the tone of his voice.  Air spirits reacted to his will and let the sound carry an excess of meaning.

Then the arm he’d created, sticking out one wall of the house, turned, bending, and swiped through most of the ground floor.

Law resisted this destruction.  It was her space.  He had the power to push past it, claim prerogative.

He leveled most of the structure, that wasn’t the room he was in.  Swiping through the alchemy lab created various interesting explosions and reactions.

The space, as much as it was able, wounded like this, protected her as the top floor crashed into the ruins of the ground floor.

He poised to strike.

“Not even-”

“No,” he said.

Pain.  Fierce and overwhelming, in his side.

“I’m gonna say it,” Verona said, struggling to sit up when she was lying on ten different angles of broken wall and flooring.  “And hope you catch it and that’s that.  You’re an asshole, Charles.  You’re a murderer, you’re greedy, you envy, you take shortcuts.  A whole lot of that in evidence with that shit you pulled with my friends, with Kennet Below and the other inverted spaces.”

He put his hand to the wound.

“All sins in evidence, not that I believe in that in a big way, but… yeah.  If you’d just disappeared, flickered away, let Ottawa see you go, ignoring the people gathered against you, it would’ve gone better for you.  But what I figured was you could come after me.  Julette could hint if you didn’t catch on.  But you caught on in less than five seconds.  I’d be bait.”

She sat up more properly.

“But I figured you needed to show off, with Ottawa looking.  Anthem, all the rest.  Pride.  The fact you showed you could have multiple copies of yourself out there when going after Mal and Anselm… made sense you’d do that here.  So you’re here, trying to kill me, but you’re also back there.  And if I was wrong, well, took a shot, credit to you.  I probably die, you go back to finish them off… and they do the Rook non-plan.  They’ve been in danger enough times, it was my turn.”

“The non-plan?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Lucy replied, back in the Kim manor, where that version of him stood, wounded.

“Yeah,” Verona said, in her ruined Demesne, where another version of him stood, with the same wound, but without the weapon impaling him.  “If Rook had a plan you would’ve figured her out when she was hanging with you.  As is, whoever wins, she comes out alive and gets to keep doing her thing.  But the pieces were provided for us to make our own plan.”

The damned Oni.  She’d talked to him and acted like nothing was wrong.  He’d studied her words and seen nothing.

“Outing Toadswallow and prompting the goblin market, goblin gunk as a secondary glamour supply when we knew Maricica was bad and Guilherme was on the way out.  Maybe that would’ve been more vital if other stuff had fallen through, or if Ave hadn’t made the connections to fairy markets.  Some of the pieces didn’t end up being that key.”

How long had it been in the works, Charles wondered.

“Preparing Hollow Yen, a living personification of the damage you did with the Hungry Choir.  And uh, yeah, there was that goddess tapped into this entire region, independent of you, tons of abyssal energy, faith, all that B.S., even poisoned with some killer stuff.  Given a big, choice weakness with that railroad spike Avery was able to pull out of her.  And hold onto.”

Hollow Yen had been contained inside Julette.  He’d waited until a choice moment, broken free of that shell of twigs, twine, and glamour, closed the distance, and struck home while Charles was focused on other things.  Impaling Charles in the side with the railroad spike, angled up into the chest cavity.

“When we talked about what it would take to kill the Carmine Beast, back with the original investigation, we were looking at needing region-wide power,” Verona said.  “Say… something linked to a region-wide goddess?  And if she’s poisoned in a big way and that poison transmits too… bonus?”

Charles gripped the spike, and pulled.

It didn’t come free.

“Charles.  Chuck.”

He tried again, and the pain dropped him to his knees.

He abandoned the version of himself in Verona Hayward’s damaged Demesne.

Eyes were on him.

Anthem approached.  Lucy was on her feet, weapon ring on, ready, alert, almost vibrating with tension, watching his every move.

Contempt.  Pity.

He roared, created more flickering, second-long conjurations, a storm of claws, reaching arms, gnashing teeth.  Driving people back, out of his way.

Aware had seen, but they had damaged and strained Innocence already.

He’d eat that cost.

It bought him space.

Nobody with the power to really hurt him more than he’d already been hurt was willing to do it with Innocents nearby.

“That’s the man I talked to in Kennet, isn’t it?” Clementine asked.

“Yeah,” Avery answered.

“Charles!” Lucy raised her voice.  “Just stop!”

He didn’t.  He walked.

“Did you hurt Verona!?  More than you did when you murdered her friends!?”

He ignored her.  Blood dripped from the wound.  He held one hand to the base of the railroad spike, against his stomach.  Every breath was agony.

Anthem aimed and fired.  The first bullet clipped the top of Charles’ head.  It broke skull.  He turned and tore things open to let more tangled limbs and summoned parts reach out, a wall.  His head healed in a way the wound at his side refused to, skull knitting back together.

They came around the sides, so he spent the power to extend that portal, that wreath of conjurations and reaching summoned things, while at the same time trudging back.

Verona came through the same door he had, helped by Adorea Garrick.  She ran up to and hugged her friends.

The rest of them were finding more courage.  And he was slowing down.

Faces and frustrations ran through his mind.  Alexander, Bristow, Musser.  The old gang leaders.  The revenant.  His parents.  Maricica, Edith, the faces from Kennet he’d betrayed and been betrayed by.

Members of the wider group circled around.  They struck out against his makeshift barrier.  Prodding for gaps and weaknesses.  He had to rebuild part at the right side.

Anthem threw something that arced above the barrier, a hatchet that grew to ten times the size in the second before it hit Charles.  The fact that it hit the spike hurt almost more than the fact it had nearly cleaved him in two.

He pulled free, staggering.

He roared out that agony.  Ice shattered like glass from where he stood to the nearest proper settlements.

Verona was starting to say something quippy or insulting.  He didn’t care to hear it.

He reached out to the crucible, fed power into it, and expanded it by those four or five hundred feet necessary to include himself in it.  He would have swallowed some of them up too, but some had barriers ready, and what he really wanted was a moment away from this, not to bring this in with him.

He retreated to quiet, wounded, limping.

“He said he didn’t include us in the Crucible.  Because he was afraid we’d win or something,” Verona said.

“Good to know,” Avery murmured, rubbing her arms.  “I have crazy goosebumps, hearing that roar.”

“Does not being included mean we can go in?” Lucy asked.  “Chase him down?”

Charles’ head sagged.

“Would be nice if our augur friend hadn’t gone.  Think we can call and ask?”

“I’ll try,” Avery said, typing on her phone.

“You guys want to handle the next part?” Lucy asked Anthem and Grandfather.  “Get us set?  Tie a bow on this?”

“Sure,” Anthem said.

“You’re going into that?” Grandfather asked.

“We would be,” Verona said.  “Not volunteering you specifically or you in general or anyone, just saying, if it’s a weapon against practitioners, to refine practice… I think Others are similarly exempt.”

“Your biases are showing, Charles,” Lucy murmured.

“Belangers aren’t happy with us, I think they’re intentionally freezing us out,” Avery said.

The three of them stood there, a crowd behind them, looking at the Crucible as it took shape, spurred on by Charles being within it and feeding it power.

Eternity and mortality had eclipsed one another, as that door sat ajar.  Now eternity moved to be further away, mortality closing in.

He didn’t have much fight in him, and he hadn’t been much of a fighter to start with.  He sat where he sat, on a rock on a mountain surrounded by trees, a microcosm of a world building itself around him.  It evolved and developed beauty, glory, and terror, representing aeons of history and practice.  His head hung, and he was unable to even sit straight because he had a railroad spike rammed through him at an awkward angle.

“Told Nico I think we have him.  That might help… are we clear to make this leap of faith?” Avery said, saying words as she typed them.

Charles pushed more power into the ritual.  It expanded.  The crowd, mostly silent, solemn, staring, backed up a fair bit.  The three girls remained where they were.

“He stopped short of catching us in it,” Lucy said.  “I think we’re clear?”

“We’re clear,” Avery said.

“Just so I’m not misunderstanding, Nicolette says we’re clear?” Verona asked.

“Yeah.”

“Other option,” Grandfather said.  “You stay behind.  If Others can go in, there’s no need for you three.”

“You’re saying that now too?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah.  I’m saying it.”

“Too much of this has been too hard,” Verona said.  “We’ve put so much of ourselves into it.

“So you put in more?” Grandfather asked.

“So… we need closure.”

“You’re idiots,” Grandfather said.

“Idiots who might need closure,” Avery said, looking at her friends.  Then she added a belated, “yep.”

“Yeah,” Verona said.

“We’re going in,” Lucy said.  “Company is appreciated but not required.  You guys handle the Sword Moot in my absence?  While we go in, wrap this up?”

Of course, Charles thought to himself.  Of course they come.  Of course others let them.

Shoulds and woulds.

He watched with Judge senses as they sorted themselves out, preparing for the plunge.

He made himself stand, despite the pain, reaching for a part of himself he’d thought he had put to rest to find that strength and tenacity.  The Forsworn version of himself, who had lived with pain in various forms, every day.

Maybe that was the best version of himself, after all.  The version who’d come from being forsworn to a victory that had turned heads.  That should have had more of an impact.  But this world was too twisted to notice, to take stock.

Now that twisted world was coming for him.

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