Author: Wildbow

Finish Off- 24.14 | Pale

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The threshold was a blur of noise, shifting patterns, and whole landscapes contained in spaces or shapes no bigger than her palm.  She was holding Avery’s hand, but as they pushed through the worst of it, they were forced apart.  Avery strained to hold on, crushing Verona’s fingers, but Verona took this to be something that had to happen, and went with it, withdrawing her hand.

Verona touched ground, fingers digging into material as fine as sand, but lighter, grittier.  The threshold pulled at her, and when it was done, she was left there, crouching, hands, toes and balls of her feet on the ground, knees to chest, back arched.  No equipment, clothes swapped out, her skin crawling as it adjusted.  She was grimy and dirty in a way that she’d never been before, and she had been to the Warrens.  The patterns it made on her skin made her think of the Abyss, that kind of taint.

The ground was black, mingling rock that made her think of Kennet’s shores with heaping piles of black ash.

The sun- the sun was too red, and it had been lanced through.  It didn’t illuminate like a sun should illuminate, almost as if it was striking a middle ground between sun and moon.  Blood poured out of two opposite ends of that sun, spilling out into the sky, where individual droplets became very red stars in a sweeping arrangement that reminded her of the milky way on a clear night, but more.  Each star had a center to it- irises to eyes, and those eyes were looking down at her.

Charles had retreated here after Hollow Yen had stabbed him.  To leverage this space and drive back his enemies, maybe, but also because a good share of his strongest enemies couldn’t follow him here.  Anthem couldn’t.  Zed and Nicolette couldn’t.

Verona picked up her mask- three pieces of animal skull lashed together with tendon, and put it on.  She tugged at the overlarge animal skin she wore as a cloak, leather imperfect and rough on the inside, black fur on the outside.  It covered her head, back, and trailed on the ground on either side and behind her.  The rest of her was covered by long, shaggy hair, the heavy covering of soot and dirt, and smaller animal skins that had been lashed together in overlapping layers.

She was younger, she realized, as she straightened a bit.

She took a step forward and nearly fell.  In the process of stepping, bones and muscle had warped, skin stretching.

She had been, what, nine, ten?  Now she was ten?  eleven?

Being much more careful this time, she took another long step, putting her next to a large shelf of rock.  The effect occurred again.

Eleven?  Twelve?  A malnourished thirteen?

She crouched down.  She ran a finger along where butt met the back of her thigh.

Assuming this was her body, growing as hers did, which felt about right, she was twelve, she figured.

The entire world creaked, shelves of rock groaning, hills in the distance settling into the ground beneath them.  It made her think of some ancient ship that was going to be retired after its last voyage, every movement of the water producing groans and strains that it might not be able to handle.  The sun continued to bleed out, spitting out stars, which traveled quickly at first, then lost momentum, the ones at the sky’s edge moving at an imperceptibly slow speed.

Something roared, not all that far away.  The roar produced responses, creatures staking out their territory, letting other things know how big and healthy they were.  All were bigger than her, it felt like.

Every step was a year of her life.  This was her not being included?  Or had he tweaked something?  Baited them in?

Good play, Chuck, if you pulled that.

What’s the goal?  What’s the plan?  What are the rules here?

Lucy and Avery would be out there, but she couldn’t count on reuniting with them anytime soon.  Avery would be good at this, Verona figured.  She wasn’t sure about Lucy.

She thought about helping Declan with the testing materials.

What’s he trying to represent or do?

This was the first age, in that blurry, theoretical history-outside-of-history.  Man, subservient to dangerous, mad, and feral Others.  The things out there might include primevals.  The sort of stuff Durocher fucked around with.

What’s he after?

There was an agenda here.  She had to keep that in mind.  An end goal.  Chuck wanted this to help weed out the bad and set up his champion.  A new Solomon.

She could imagine this weeding out people, if it was dangerous.

How does it shape a new Solomon?

Or, maybe a better question to ask, how did it shape a paragon as Charles might imagine one?

This place was cool in an aesthetic sense- she like dark and dismal- but it wasn’t very hospitable.  There didn’t seem to be much food.  There was danger.  She felt hot and cold at the same time, as if the weather couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be.  Wind stirred up plumes of soot and dust.  Smoke billowed up from fissures.

Suffering?  Fighting through suffering.  Finding some inner kernel of strength.

She crouched where she was, leaning against the side of the rock.

What’s my goal?

Broadly?  Not letting Charles turn this Crucible into a weapon.  If they could be the pebble in his shoe that broke his stride, or get him inside here?  If he was in the process of bleeding out and they could accelerate things until he was too weak to go on?  The Thorn in the Flesh and spike were lodged in him.  He hadn’t removed them, suggesting he couldn’t.  Ideally they’d keep him in that state, weakened and getting weaker, so the others could do the Sword Moot and seal this deal.

More specifically… she needed to not die.  What happened if she made it to seventy steps and dropped dead of old age and hard living?  Or if she took no steps at all, a primeval beast came, and bit her head off while she was totally unprepared?

She was hungry.  She hadn’t been hungry when she came in here.  She’d grabbed a snack as soon as she’d gotten back to the house on half street, before getting right to work.

She wished she’d been able to finish that work, get new Styans going.  It would’ve helped smooth over the wrinkles, might’ve even helped here.

But that wasn’t important.

Seventy more steps, let’s say, lack of food might kill me before those seventy if I can’t secure something.  And self defense.

Those were priorities.  While pursuing that, she needed to figure out how she got out of this and into what came next.  As part of that, she needed to meet the others.

Were there ways to game the system?

She tried crawling.  No feet to ground.  While doing it, she moved closer to a bush that was growing out of the base of the cliff she was hunkered down beside.

Hand to ground… bones shifted, the rest of her changed.  She felt hungrier.

She gave herself a check.  Finger to where butt met back of the thigh.

Sure enough, they were there.  She could feel the divots of some stretch marks.  Her hips had grown a bit faster than her skin around the time she’d turned thirteen. It had been Lucy who’d pointed it out, the summer before school that year.  There’d be others, but they were more a faint texture on skin that wouldn’t be visible past this dirt.  Another familiar one where armpit ran to chest wasn’t there yet.  Okay.

The marks had never bothered her much.  Hadn’t bothered Jeremy or Anselm either.  She was glad for them in this moment, because they were good markers for where she was at.  She’d always been self conscious- no.  Lucy had more self-consciousness.

Self-cognizant.

She tried shifting her mode of movement to crawling on her belly.

Turns me fourteen.  Another year, as she worked her way forward.  No inch-worming her way across this ancient hellscape.

Lying on her belly, drawing knees carefully under her, to a kneeling, hunched-over position, she harvested branches from the bush.  Nothing good and spearlike, but there were some sturdy branches at the base with a good curve to them.  She worked them free, wiggling them until they broke off the body of the main bush, then laid them next to her.  She ran the tips against the side of the cliff, getting bark off first, then narrowing the tips to points.  Sickle-shaped branches.

She had three when she heard a scuffing sound.  She went still, pulling back from the sharpening.

He wore less than she did.  A boy her age, gaunt, without facial hair.

She wasn’t alone?

She realized at first he wasn’t sure what she was, and moved her mask up, throwing the fur cloak back so she had one shoulder and arm exposed.

He moved a bit closer, sizing her up.

“Un,” she said.

Not exactly the complete sentence she’d aimed for.

“Mm,” was the response.  He hissed air through clenched teeth.

She picked up the first of her finished sickles, and reversed her grip.  She held the handle out toward him.  Work with me?

When he didn’t seem to get her meaning or intent, she moved her mask to the ground, careful not to touch it with her hand, lest that be taken as a ‘step’.  She mimed striking it with the point.

Wary, he took the handle.  He moved the point to the three-piece mask.

She mimed doing the same.  She held up two fingers, indicating the two of them.

Speaker for the voiceless.  Get my meaning?

It seemed to dawn on him.  He toyed with the weapon for a second.

Then he moved it toward her.  Point to her chin, moving it so she was forced to raise her chin a second.

He was standing at half-mast, it looked like.  He stared her down, like some dominance thing, or a primal ‘hey babe, I’m confident’ thing with skeevy, threatening undertones.

Full-mast now.

She moved the point of her weapon slowly, and stopped when it was close to his ‘mast’.

He noticed, and reacted, pulling back, swiping hurriedly at her weapon.  Both hook-shaped branches were curved, they latched together, and he disarmed himself and her both.  He shoved her, knocking her over, her hand catching gritty sand and soot and rough rock-

-and she reached out to grab another, rolling onto her back, brandishing it as she sat up, her heart pounding.  He snatched up his own weapon, again, and backed off before she was upright.  After a pause, he shot her a dirty, hungry look, and started to leave, checking the coast was clear.

“Ai!” she yelped out.

He stopped.

She mimed bringing the point to the mask again.  Not kidding.  Situation’s bad.  Work together?  Hunt?

He gave her another look, less hungry, more dirty, and then left.  Taking one of my weapons.

She retrieved hers, prepared the second, and started on a third, which broke partway through the process, the middle section too weak.  She made it a little pointed weapon instead.

With the useless branches, broken branches, and the scraped-off bark, she gathered things into a bundle, and then did her best to make a fire.  She’d seen videos, she knew the process.

What are the rules?  If time passes only when moving, then do I have leeway otherwise?

She had to assume yes.

The hollow pit of hunger in her stomach was still there.

A running theme with Chuck.  Hunger.  One of a handful, alongside blood and broken things.

She got the fire going, and fed it.  Dragging her cloak over part of the bush until it caught on points, she made a shield to restrict the amount of light visible from a distance, off, while using her body as further barrier, arm near mouth so she wasn’t breathing in smoke.  The smoke from the fire wouldn’t stand out in these dust storms, or with all the fissures that leaked out smoke here and there.  The heat of the fire made her skin prickle.

She kept one eye out for monsters, and one for the sketchy, skinny dude who’d taken her sickle and gave her jack shit in return.

Fire, she hoped, would be a tool.

Thanks Mr. Lai, she thought of the bio and general science teacher who’d done the survivalist and rustic cabin-building videos.  She put the spike and one of the sickles in the fire, to bake them.  Hardening them.  She kept one sickle out of it, because it felt like this would make it more brittle.

What are the rules? she thought, not for the first time.

What remained?  What was ‘real’, here, and what was filler?  It went back to Declan describing destroying the Promenade, to see what resisted destruction.

Were the primevals real?  Were they just props?  Dangerous ones?  Would they be less substantial, if things were pushed to an extreme?  Easier to kill than one would be in reality?

Was practice real, here?  What part of practice worked?

She gathered more wood, to feed the fire, between stretches of sharpening the charred parts to a better point, and when she laid it in, she gave it shape.

If this is a time before the Seal…

The wind that blew around the fire and the nature of the fire shifted.  She tried making a circle with insulation marks… not so useful.  But better than nothing.

I can practice.

She smiled.

It’s like the line between science and practice hasn’t been defined yet.  Basic shamanism is a go, but the patterns haven’t been locked in.

A bit more sharpening later, and she had three weapons.  She fed the fire, trusted the awkward insulation mark to keep it going, got a big branch, too awkward to use as a spear, and then took a moment, gathering twigs and stripped bark to work out a loose series of lashed-together triangles near the head.  She dipped the end into the fire, preserving the triangles.

Was that a little better than it would’ve been on its own?  More contained, burning more intensely?

She lost a few more years of her life moving around to a better vantage point, where the tapering edge of the cliff disappeared into the uneven ground, giving her a two hundred and seventy degree view around her, instead of one-eighty.

She waited, aware her big stick was burning.  She wasn’t equipped to make it a torch, but she hoped the basic practice would do.

The now-ravenous hunger was distracting now.  Ten minutes passed, but it felt like hours where she could barely sit still, as her stomach gnawed at the rest of her, leaving her weaker.

One large predator stalked its way past her.  It was a shifting mass of flesh the size of a city bus, eyes opening at the ‘head’, then, as it kept walking, had those eyes roll back on it like bubbles on a flowing stream, past the dips and rises of musculature and form.  Fur bristled, feathered, shed as wisps of smoke.  There were times it was seventy percent forelimb, pulling itself forward with limbs broader than any tree Verona had seen, back legs feeble by comparison, and then that muscle flowed the same way the eyes did.  Fur rolled away from its head, became thicker fur along the body, then shed, or rolled down a lion-like tail to become a tuft, which was then gone, drawing to a tapered point.

It eyed her, and prowled closer…

She reached for the branch that was leaning against the cliffside, and as it nosed in closer to her, she brought the flaming end closer to that nose.

It jumped, moving sharply to one side- she moved the branch quickly, intercepting.  One eye opened in the center of its forehead, the ‘corners’ of the eye at nose and hairline, respectively, and then squinted at the smoke and fire.

It retreated a bit.

Not keen enough.  Maybe it had recently eaten.  Fire, she knew, was a truism, a very solid go-to when dealing with Others.  Was it guaranteed to stop every creature like this?  No.  But she could play the odds, trust that this was meant to be winnable, without blind luck.

She watched as it prowled off.  Loped off.  Lumbered off.  The definitions of it changed as it moved, and with them, so did the verbs.

She remained on guard with her whole body tense as it left.

It was followed by others.  A pack of creatures that trailed in its wake.  Gaunt, gangly things, similar-ish.  Long-limbed, narrow bodied, with heads that went from being furred to a skinned crimson, to ghoulish to bird-like.  When their bodies changed enough for their limbs to be vaguely wing-like, they couldn’t properly fly, but they could try, choosing seemingly random moments to suddenly leap forty feet to the side, or forward, or back.

She waited, watching, listening to them screech and scream.  There was a straggler, back of the pack, about the size of a horse.

Lesser primevals?  She wasn’t sure if they’d never been a thing and Charles had made them for this scenario, or if they’d existed and failed to survive to the present day.  The texts were very clear about what to expect from Primevals if one was encountered, and Verona had paged through some of those with Durocher in mind.

She kept one sickle wedged in the tendon-y cordage that lashed her bottom layer to her body, stuck in her ‘belt’, for lack of a better way of putting it.  With the big burning stick in one hand, sickle in the other, she left cover, moving low to the ground, using the uneven ground for some limited cover, the burning end of the stick so low to the ground it almost extinguished itself in piled ash and soot.

Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three-

While she was running, she saw some huddled forms in the crevices.  The guy who’d taken her sickle?  Others?  Something nonhuman?

The thing saw her and screeched, which drew the notice of other things.  She stuck the flame in its face, which bewildered it and made it pull its head and body back- and swung at its more exposed neck with the sickle.

It pierced flesh, but then flesh rippled, warping, clenching around the wound, and snapped the tip off.  Brittle.

Three more of these rodent-hyena-vultures, having had their attention drawn, moved closer, growling and chittering.  One leaped, lunging way off to be behind her.

The chunk of wood in the other creature’s neck hadn’t killed it, either.  Not right away.  It tried to snap at her, but the pain and obstruction in its neck made it pull short, face scrunching up.  She shoved fire in its face again.  Eyes already closed, it didn’t realize until it had been burned.

Then, swiping fire between herself and the others, she screamed.  The fire at the end of her stick blazed bigger and brighter with the volume, tapering off as the scream ended.

The same basic rules apply.  Presentation.

Be big, be intimidating.

It was a mistake to be too attention-grabbing, though.  There were distant roars.  The entire fight stopped for a moment, as every creature and person present gauged if something much bigger was going to take enough notice to come over.

She struggled to pull the intact, not-fire-hardened sickle out of her waist-straps.

Others screamed, and she almost turned back on the creature she was fighting, in her alarm.  It was a man and a woman, dressed much like she was, but without the cloak, both dark haired, dark-skinned.  They came out of cover.

She turned back to the threats, gripped one edge of the cloak and held it out, making herself ‘bigger’.

The one she’d wounded snapped again.  Verona took a step back.  Lost a year of her life, in the process.

Taking a risk, knowing what had happened last time, Verona tossed her sickle to the man.

The knife to the woman.

Verona brandished the big, crooked burning stick with both hands, using it to bewilder and distract.  The man held out the sickle.  The woman found the knife, blackened, on black stone, after some groping.

With the butt end, Verona dragged the stick through soot, drawing out a modest line, dotted with flecks of chipped-off bark.

The creatures growled, pacing.  Was it fire or the line that made them hesitate?  The distant roars that might herald something else coming?

She might never know.  For the time being, she was glad they were pulling away.  Their runt was dead, they were wary, and they, Verona was guessing, were more scavenger than predator.  Angry, healthy prey like this?  They backed away a bit more.

Then they ran.

She couldn’t relax yet.  The wounded one remained.

The creature lunged for Verona, winged forearms flapping, so it could try to be above her.  She avoided the snapping bite, swinging the stick overhead, and whapped the broken-off bit of wood sticking out the side of its neck.  The chunk of wood came out, followed by a gulp of blood- that was how it came out, a singular spurt, like it had built up, congealed, and now fell, followed by a steady stream.

The creature landed, not biting, but still kicking.  It raked one of her legs, bowling her over-

What is that, now, thirty-one?  Thirty-two?

The man raked it with the stick, exposing ribs at one side.  It was gaunt enough there wasn’t much padding between.

More years lost as she got to her feet, finding footing.

It took ‘flight’, so to speak, flapping madly.  Its tail became long and whiplike, warding off approach.

It landed about twenty feet away, blood pumping out of the neck wound.

Verona remained where she was.

The woman eyed her, wary, but then went over that direction, toward the wounded scavenger.

The creature took flight again, a shorter distance, and collapsed on landing.  It got to its feet, paced, and then, one leg trembling madly, collapsed again.

Verona sat down.  She was wounded too.  It wasn’t great.

She watched them, standing by the creature she was ultimately responsible for killing, a pair.  They looked back at her, and she felt like they were weighing options.  If they took the food…

She brandished her burning stick, and tried to give off some confidence.

In the end, they came back.  The man awkwardly cut the beast’s stomach open, and then they dragged it behind them, letting the contents of the creature’s midsection spill out, left behind.  Was that edible?  Verona didn’t know.  She wasn’t sure she’d be able to separate it from the shit or whatever that was inside.

Mostly, feeling kind of cold, numb, and hurting, skin sliced and abraded from knee to the outside of one ankle, she was focused on other things.

They left the animal a bit behind them, the woman crouched by it, wary, doing more preliminary cutting, while the man approached Verona.

He held out the sickle, like she’d held it out to the boy, earlier.  He was someone different, though.

She took it.  Giving it back, taking the food, and leaving?

He wasn’t.  He bent down, and he scooped her up, carrying her.

The woman did her best to drag the beast over to a spot where she could roll the carcass downhill.

Verona pointed the way, back to her fire, which still burned, despite the fifteen to twenty years she’d just spent of her ‘life’, doing what she’d done.  The man paused, wary of the fire, marveling at it, and then put her down awkwardly.

Or- more than that.  Leaning into her.

She considered resisting, felt weird, with Charles watching…

He reminded her of Anselm.  The way he felt quiet, like his body ran at a lower volume, the solemnity.  He was skinny but strong.

Had Charles dissolved all those people of Kennet Below and taken that power, but rendered it down like… like fucking pulpy orange juice?  Not pure power, but enough people and bits of people that he could make his props for this fucked up historical reenactment?

The sadness that came over her was deep.  She rested her head against his shoulder, eyes closed, and imagined her friend.

Not that it mattered.  Because, overture made, readiness and willingness established, he went to go see to his actual top priority.  Not her, but food.  Valid.

Together with the woman, the man returned to the fire.  Verona moved some of her coverings to her leg wound and lashed them there, best as she could, then helped tear and cut meat away, using repeated stabs of wood that was more pointed than knife-like and sharp-ish edged slate rock, before putting it to the fire.

It was meaty, and juices ran from her hands to her elbows.  She ate until her throat and stomach hurt, cut and utterly butchered things in an effort to get to bone and other material.  Tendon- she lashed the cloth tighter to her wound, to staunch the blood loss.

The man helped, that help became him leaning into her again, pressing close- and Verona checked with the woman, giving her a glance.

The look on the woman’s face as she looked at the man was the sort Verona knew best from Avery’s family.  Rowan, Sheridan.

The pair were family.  Siblings, she guessed.

Verona didn’t say no, lying back, eyes watching the stars to see if the stars were watching her.  The sister watched for a moment, idly amused, then looked away.

Mal.  There had been moments like that, except more eye-rolly and snarky.

In the end, nothing happened.  Time moved in the same way time passed when Verona moved.  Then they cooked more, gathered more, and, tired, wounded, Verona nodded off, eyes half-lidded even to the last moment before sleep took her, watching the darkness as the darkness crept in, looking for danger.

Nightmare.

Uneasiness.  A mountain.  Danger to this direction, and that.  A pit pushed spined things up and out, things that crawled beneath flesh and attached to bone- pushed them up like a person retching.

The mountain, again.  The sun, pierced by the mountain’s peak.

Verona startled awake in the middle of the night, the woman’s back to her own, the man’s front to her back.  She shifted position…

There, in the gloom.  Black hair wreathed a naked, pale form.  A girl so thin she was ethereal, lighter than any living thing should be.  She moved quickly, scampering like a four-legged thing.

“Ah?” Verona asked, calling out to the dark.

The nightmare thing screamed at her.  It was an eerie sound, and unlike so many of the other overlapping cries and screams of these blasted, blackened plains, it was followed by silence.  As if the world, afraid, had withdrawn a bit, not wanting to invite it closer.

The siblings’ sleep became more fitful.  The woman spasmed, whimpering.

Easy, Verona thought.  She reached to the fire.  With the intact sickle, she went to the carcass… and ended up spearing the head.  Stripped of muscle and most things.  The brain remained within.

The sickle wasn’t large enough to hold the offering, so Verona lifted the head between her hands, stepped closer-

A year.  She knew the price, but considered this vital.

But there was another price to be paid.  Nothing had happened to her awareness, the deed had been skipped over, but the deed had been done.  Her stomach swelled.

If her hands hadn’t been full, she would’ve given Charles a pair of middle fingers.  Directed at the sky.

But her focus was on the Other.

Another step, and she had the baby.  The deed was skipped here, too, but the pain- it couldn’t be skipped in entirety, for this to mean what it meant.  She was brought to her knees.  The offering dropped.

The nightmare, having moved closer, stopped the head from rolling.  It screamed once more.  The siblings, lying behind Verona, slightly older now, startled awake.

Verona picked up her baby.

The nightmare reached out, and Verona, hesistating at first, reached out as well.

The nightmare’s tongue licked a finger, and the finger traced a crescent shape onto forehead.

It started to retreat back to night and darkness.  Verona caught its arm.

The nightmare’s eyes went wide.  It looked ready to bite her face off.

I need you to pass on a message.  Assuming you can find the others…

She let go, hand moving slowly, and drew in the dirt.  A fox, drawn with simple shapes.  A deer.

A smear of the hand, drawing out a loose, messy beast shape.

Verona had a suspicion.  This entire thing was a giant engine, a machine.  The idea had been to make a Titan and feed it to this machine.  Maybe to give it structure, substance, power.

It was a nagging feeling, but if she had to gauge what was important, she was worried that the primevals might be one of those things of substance.  Because if Charles needed one, well, a couple had been sent after Maricica.  They’d been foiled by Gilkey and Maricica becoming a goddess.  Verona couldn’t rule out that they’d be real.

She marked the shape with an underline-like smudge.

The nightmare glanced at her work, and then was gone, slipping into darkness.

Verona took her baby back to the fire, and by the time she’d settled back down, it was an infant.  She helped it eat.

The sister took Verona’s child from her arms, freeing Verona to do other things.  Collecting her weapons, now with ribs she could sharpen against abrasive stone for sturdier weapons.  Fur.  Meat.

She collected her burning stick, fixed it up a bit, then started walking.

The mountain.  The sun cast it in eerie red colors.  Shadows and clouds moved around it.  That, she believed, was the destination.

Verona had been transformed by this place.  Every step transformed her further.  Thirty more steps was not a lot.  She had a feeling she understood this place, though.  The goal.  What it took.  The fact she’d had a child like she had pulled it together.

There were others scattered nearby.  Some drew near.  So did some local beasts, though nothing too large.  It was the smell of meat and blood.  They had to eat what they had and move on.  They traded for tools and gave meat away to gather allies.

Some were the children of the boy who’d taken her sickle.  She accepted them with reservations.

At seventy, skin wrinkled, hair gray, the siblings having aged with her, Verona let others go hunt.  Most returned.  They resumed walking.  Her child had a child.

The fact she was going to that mountain and she seemed to know what she was doing gave them enough of a mission, it seemed.

She watched the brother, father to her child, die, unable to walk more.  She crouched beside him for longer than she should, taking in the feeling of his death, and its proximity to Anselm in her head.  A cooperator.  A friend.

The sister followed soon after.

Verona made it another six paces before her own heart stopped.  She died.

Then she was her daughter.  Her eyes opened, her body sang with relative youth and freedom of movement, a lack of weariness.  She picked up her things from her prior body, donned the mask, and carried on.

After she died, she became her grandson.

Just when they were needing to hunt again, something attacked them.  Primeval, but sleek, black, and lightning fast.  A raptor swooping in from the skies, but land-based, with bits of bull in it, all of it shapes and patterns that swept back from a horn-like central point.  They fled, running, and it tore through them.

Their numbers were halved by the time it slowed.  A handful more were lost because they ran in directions that took them away- to cover, to slopes they slid down.

The hunger that followed was worse than anything.  It sapped strength from them, it saw some of them die.

Eventually a hunting party came back.  More wary of the creatures out there, they resumed their trek to the mountain.

She was her great-great-granddaughter by the time they reached the base of the great black edifice.  A walk across an uneven rocky plain.  The sun sat high in the sky, as if balanced on the mountain’s point.  Still bleeding out stars.

It gave her time to think, to plan.  Each time they set up camp, she was ready with more ideas.  Thinking back to what the most basic, pared-down elements of being a practitioner were.  So when they set up a fresh fire, using her stick, they made makeshift beds, established a watch, and had people lay out the palest stones in circles on flat ground.  A perimeter.  A line.

When people paired up, romantically, she didn’t get it, but she marked the occasion with a drawn line, a knot sign in the middle, like a curvier version of the overlapping diamonds of the connection block.

She continued to experiment with the shamanism.

When they slept at the base of the mountain, beneath a leaning cliff of rock, another Other came to her.  It came from darkness, was caked in mud, eyes cataract white in gloom, one more so than the other, faintly reflective.  Some kind of proto-goblin.

That had been Alpeana the first night.  This was Toadswallow now.

But they were, like her practice, pared down to something original and originating.  There were rules they had to follow.  They were part of dynamics, she had to guess, much like the one where she aged a year with every step she took.  She was working under the assumption that in order to have a relationship with them, she had to build one.

The great-great-granddaughter of Verona sat, looking up at the stars, after the gobiln had scampered off.  It got her thinking.  What all of this meant, in context of what Charles was doing.  What he wanted.

He had his blind spots with Others in some vital moments.  They’d used that.  But he wasn’t blind to their existence, either.  He saw them as a part of things, and this was part of that.  Maybe he felt like a good Solomon would need to recognize how to build a relationship with Others.

Assuming she was climbing a mountain, she was maybe halfway.  There’d be danger on the way.  It was unfamiliar, uncomfortable ground, and any dangers encountered would be devastating.  The scavenger primevals had been, to Verona’s understanding, far smaller than any primevals still around in the modern day.  There would be larger ones on the mountainside.  Ones used to the terrain, while humans were okay climbers but not good at fighting a giant bus-or-bigger sized monster while doing that climbing.

All of this was one step in something bigger.

After this, there would be other steps.  Other phases of humanity to uncover.

What came next wouldn’t necessarily be easier.  The rules might change.  Expectations might.

Assuming that all of this was laying a groundwork, and assuming that time wasn’t passing in the same way in the real world?  When both were things she had fair reason to expect, then why rush it?

She found the best candidate among the boys, to have her next child.  Pregnant a step later, birth the next.

Pattern had to be good.  Keep it simple and sustainable.

Two children per generation.

She walked more freely now.  People got ready to hunt, left.  Verona had the next generation.  When the hunters returned, they too were the next generation, instructed by their predecessors, some of whom were still part of that hunt.

Time meant little here.  It was as blurry as what a ‘goblin’ was, or what a ‘scavenger’ was.

They were in a good position to climb the mountain.  But she didn’t.

While sleeping, she had another prophetic dream.

When she woke, she found the goblin had come back, bringing friends.  Some of Verona’s group weren’t keen.  Others were more receptive.  Nobody pushed back that hard when Verona gave the goblins some of the meat from the second hunt, then used gestures and sounds to try to indicate what she wanted.  She had her newborn, and kept a firm grip, lest they try to tug it from her arms-

The biggest goblin with the reflective eye bent down to kiss its head.

Then, a few generations and one sleep later, she was visited by another Other.  Serpentine, with too many eyes, bigger.

Tashlit would take no food, forcing Verona to find something else to gift.  She gave her the still-burning stick with loose elemental runes near the head.

Then she had Tashlit kiss her child’s forehead.

From there, she could pattern set.  Something basic.  Two children a generation.  Three marks.  The Others came when called- a scream into the dark for the nightmare.  Meat laid out at the edge of the campfire’s light for the goblins.  Tashlit came too, if Verona stood out on her own at the little settlement’s edge by herself, baby in arms.

Musser had pulled a lot of bullshit over time.  This had been part of it.  The patterns laid by bloodline- some found, some forced.  It wasn’t genetics or genealogy, but something laid out in other ways.

Heroic practices.

Rather than carry on, knowing she’d go into something harder, Verona took advantage of the fact she had a fair sense of what was in play here.  She had a generation of children, night and blood, then rushed into the next, becoming her daughter and having another pair of children back to back before the pain from the last pair had subsided.  Snake, then night again.

She slept when she had an eldest child of night.

A nightmare where golden lightning struck the sky and never left, where great beasts came.  She adjusted accordingly, directing her people to better shelter.

They went hunting when the eldest was a child of blood.

A bad hunt, the second go-around.  She was forced to change pattern.  Every fifth generation, only one child, and a period of rest, mourning, and celebration for the recently dead.  She didn’t want it to be anything big or triumphant, or that played into Charles’ hands.

When the eldest was a snake, they built and crafted.  More runework, more practice and perimeter defense.  Stones were stacked into little shrines.

She had another generation of children.  The man she had them with was affronted when she didn’t want him overly close.  If he wanted to help, great, but he wasn’t the point.

If she had a choice, children wouldn’t be the point either, but this was a different era.  Long-term survival came first.  Either way, the guy got pissy at the rejection.  It struck Verona just how eerily similar some stuff was to the modern day.  Egos, wishes, and wants.

People looked at her and her family differently after that.  Set them aside and apart.  In the next generation, a boy refused her advances.

She managed to find another partner at thirty-nine.  Her heart pounded as she took the step between that tryst and the pregnancy, worried it’d prove too late.

Their relocation had bought them the ability to avoid the larger beasts that came down the mountain.  It didn’t spare them from other attention.

Lightning struck the sky, golden, and it crossed the sun.  The sun ceased to bleed, and became a golden disc, the redness backing it, sitting back and resting.

Gold flakes came down from above as precipitation.

“What are you doing, practitioner?” the Aurum asked.

She saw him in the gloom of the cave.  Mostly naked, yellow fur draped across his lap, long hair longer, beard scragglier.  He still rode the centipede, who was there, the draping fur covering its head, with two long, curling antennae sticking out.

“I-” Verona tested her voice.  From many generations ago.  “-I’m playing his game.”

“It seems you’re playing a different game, toying with his system.”

“I don’t see what’s stopping me from establishing two hundred generations of precedent and marked-out events and ramming that through what Charles is building.”

“Me,” the Aurum said.  “You see me.”

“Ah,” she said.  “You can’t gainsay me, the whole reason I can practice- all of this comes before the Seal, right?”

“I can’t gainsay you, you’re right,” he said.  “But higher powers of that day were said to be more capricious, temperamental.”

She backed away.

“So I can do this,” he said.

The golden lightning struck out.  It spread across rock, setting in like a forking vein of gold running through ore.

That gold that ran through the stone was soft, maybe even molten.  Rock shifted, and slid, layers separating.  Stable shelter became disaster.

She lost ten years of her life scrambling for cover, grabbing a grandchild on the way, scooping them up before they could be caught under falling rocks.

The child screamed, and it made her nerves jangle.  She watched as the Aurum climbed the mountain, a shock of gold veins in rock that extended up, as the tail end faded away, tracing a spiraling ascent.  Partway through, she could see him emerge, looking down at her.

She wanted to challenge him so badly.  To turn the tables on Charles and the Aurum, subjecting them to this, with the power to pull B.S., and ruin whatever they tried to build, that was outside the narrowly defined scenario.

She’d been prepared to cheat her way to victory, and now, with the noise of the rock fall, attention from distant primevals and primevals further up the mountain had been drawn.

The only thing that stopped her was the idea that the Aurum might want her to challenge him.  He was a cheater of a different stripe, a schemer.  Avery had described the Coiled- like the Hangmaiden that the Belangers had described almost getting Alexander, but snakes instead of spiders.  Cheaters of fortune and fate.

She wouldn’t be cheated.  She’d keep this in a back pocket.

She gave orders, best as she could, in the crude proto-language, using gestures more than anything.

There was no choice.  There wasn’t a lot of great shelter left at the base of the mountain, trouble was incoming.  They had to climb.

Every member of her little tribe aged as she ascended, every movement of a hand or foot.

She climbed despite her body steadily getting more uncooperative.  Paused alongside others, ducking into a crack in the mountain face, as something larger prowled down, snapping up the slowest and worst-positioned climbers in jaws that seemed to run the length of its fluidly shifting body.

She hoped enough of her descendants lived.

She climbed, and on reaching a point where her body wasn’t strong enough, clumsily moved to a crack in the mountain, wedged a hand inside, and waited until another primeval predator poked its head out before screaming to get its attention.  Waving one arm.

It swooped down, ten wings unfolding, tree branches extended between each, eyes and fanged mouth-parts flowing so fast from face to tail that they whipped by.

Smashing life from her old bones.  Clutching her in claw, talon, and branch, and tearing her to pieces.

Then she was a boy.  Scarily young, when being this young meant a whole generation had been skipped.  He climbed.  Fingertips were already bloody, and he drew knotting shapes on stone, to bar connections for those who climbed up after him – older ‘aunts’ who weren’t actually that related, who urged him to climb.  He ate preserved meat to keep his strength up, the blood from his own fingers a sauce to make the dried, salt-less, spice-less meat more palatable.

This, this brutal climb, this was a crystallization of something in Charles.  Verona could feel it, experiencing it.  How much Charles thought this was important.

That thing it was crystallizing, it had to be something primal.  The angriest, least articulate part of him, drawn out like he’d made an alcazar.

He climbed.

The largest of the primevals rang differently.  It put Verona in mind of Durocher, and how prying into Durocher’s affairs had elicited that growling.  The thing’s heartbeat rang out into the mountain’s bones.  Its every shift produced a reaction from things living and unliving.

When it poked its head out, flesh scalded and steaming, everything from horizon to horizon pulled in by some fraction, to accommodate.

A Storm rumbled.  Lightning cracked, distant, without rain to accompany it, chasing along smoke and dust.

Verona climbed until he was middle aged.  Climbed to rescue a fellow tribe-member.  A woman.  The two of them pulled into a crevice so narrow that their backs each pressed against rocks, their chests pressed against each other, and breathing was hard.

Nothing happened, not like that, but by the rules of this place, she became of child the moment they’d extricated themselves and Verona resumed climbing again.  Verona was careful to let her climb higher, ready to help the child be born, painful and explosive, mid-climb.

She caught it, desperate and fumbling, and embraced it, biting the umbilical cord free before the mother, exhausted, lost her grip and fell.

Snake, Verona thought, marking the child’s brow- not with blood or soot, but with fingers licked clean, a spot of brightness.

Then, with baby slick with blood and fluids in the scoop of Verona’s arm, Verona used the other arm and feet to climb until the child could start climbing on their own.

The primeval shifted, the fissures opened and closed, and scalding water ran from the side of the mountain.  Magma ran from the side of the mountain.

Every few feet of progress, the distant, rain-less thunderstorm drew closer.  With each flash, silhouettes on the horizon was exposed.  Humanoid and massive.  The primeval became more agitated.

Another lifetime came and went.  Verona-the-male died.  The child who was birthed mid-climb carried on.  The primeval, dragon-like, snake-like, mountain lion, and raptor all at once, flesh a jigsaw puzzle with every piece from a different puzzle, constantly being changed out, pushed around, pushed back, so its face was a font of new beast, it moved around the mountain, snapping up lives.

The air was hot, the bad breath of a meat eater became the entirety of the atmosphere, mingled and carried by hot steam and thickened with smoke.  Mucus ran black from the nose, and a cough, suppressed to avoid making sound that could draw attention, produced a shotgun spray of black phlegm against the nearest surfaces.

The titans that had been on the horizon arrived.  They needed to eat too.  They went after the primeval.  Children with a hot stove, if children were tall enough to have feet on the ground and heads hidden by clouds, and if they wanted to destroy that hot stove no matter how much it burned.  Bare hands against fang and claw.  When they bled, they bled fire, and mudslides.

The ensuing conflict took over the mountain.

Verona was forced to make adjustments, to catch her balance or find new grip.  Each time, it cost her a year.  Nobody was near, and she wasn’t sure how many had survived this far.  No new generation to come?

She had the challenge in her back pocket, but as with the Hungry Choir, these things tended to have a catch.  A back door, a secret answer.  If she didn’t catch it, it was her fault for not seeing it.

Another adjustment.

Half a lifetime spent, now.  She could only guess.

She approached the time she wouldn’t be able to have a kid.

Counting generations, counting what’s intended, the pattern I carved out…

This child was an only child born of Snake.  Only children were meant to be gifted, in whatever their birth-mark was, be it nightmare and prophecy, blood and hunt, or snake and craft.

She crafted.  Runes to stabilize Earth.  To encourage it.  Marks to plot a path, to turn the gap she was climbing up through, narrow enough for a body, into a channel, to direct the earth itself to listen, so when it cracked, it augmented this channel, gave her more of a way up.

There was a deafening crack that actually deafened– her ears rang in the wake of it, and her hearing was measurably worse after, with accompanying pain that almost made her lose her grip.

She had no idea if it was primeval, Titan, or Storm.

But fluids came showering down.  Rain.  Soot-blackened and cold as ice.  It was simultaneously a relief and a terror.

Her grip was good, but it began to slip.  Grit and soot mingled with black rain and became a grease that made the most secure handholds precarious.

If they hadn’t been able to hold the alchemy-created Titan back, if their allies hadn’t been able to take it down, would it be as real as the primeval was?  Would this be worse?

The rain washed away the marks she was drawing.

Ten thousand pounds of mass crashed into mountainside.  A Titan’s limb, a portion of the Primeval- she didn’t know.  It nearly threw her off.

There was no vertical channel to climb up through.  Multiple titans and the primeval were fighting with the surrounding area as their arena.

There was a whole other section to ascend, and no way up.

Her grip slipped.

For generations we have worked together.  A morsel traded for the ability to see warning in nightmares.

She used her arm, braced against the wall, to try to keep the rain off, a jutting bit of rock digging into the side of her forearm.  She used bloody fingertips to draw, repeating, wiping with a hand, until the surface took the mark.

A crescent, drawn in blood.

I said I’d meet you in nighttime and shadows.

She put her hand over the mark, and she screamed.  Calling out.

The roar of rain, growling of Titan and primeval, and rumble of thunder drowned her out.

But the nightmare heard.

Reality distorted as the nightmare picked her up.  She could see Anselm and Mal.  The mural girl.  The Vice Principal.  Other faces she could and couldn’t name, from the market, or just doing her rounds.

It felt, as the nightmare lifted her up, trying to help her navigate a way, that she was leaving them behind, leaving them to cling to this mountain and then drop off.

The nightmare could climb despite the rain, but the heat and visceral nature of all of this- she used her body to block a single blow from a single strike, and then fell away, leaving Verona to climb.

A mark for blood.  I wanted to be a confident animal.  A cat.  I wanted to cut and craft.  When I chose my tool, given to an ally, I did it on instinct, without thought.

What’s more goblin than all of that?  Comfortable in nighttime and shadow?

She made the mark, covered it, she thought of generations of alliance, and screamed.

They came from within the mountain.  Twisted human-ish shapes, fangs, glowing eyes.  They showed her that there were channels, where distance and time measured differently.

The higher she climbed, the worse it got.  Magma flowed in thicker streams.

She’d thought the magma might be an outlier, from primeval or Titan.  It wasn’t an outlier- the mountain was a volcano.

The Titans were fighting over their meal, a primeval battered.

Verona, now old enough to have mostly gray hair, climbed.  Her goal was the next safe haven, a spot she could be stable for two minutes, while she drew.

Rain came down hard, and the interplay of heat and cold, rain and rising smoke and steam, it produced constant lightning strikes.  Places on the rises were places she could be thrown off, if a Titan punched the wrong place, or smashed, or exposed to a lightning strike.  Places in the valleys and dips between those rises were channels by which rainwater collected, alternately ice cold and scalding, threatening to wash her over the edge.

There wasn’t anything close to a dry spot or writing surface.  The handholds were being eroded, hard edges rounding off.

Her head couldn’t even put together a coherent thought, on what she would say, if she had modern language.  The history and memories she’d evoke, tying back to the beginning.  Her head bowed, and old bones and body lost strength.

If she needed a snake mark…

She touched bloody, frayed fingers to forehead, and drew out the mark.

I wanted to cut ties and point to something better.  Away from my old life.  Toward something bright.

She called out.  Not a scream, but a single sung note, and it was somehow just as primal as that scream.

Tashlit didn’t come, as her old self or the primal ‘snake’ she’d appeared as before, taking crafts in lieu of food.

But the cloud cover parted.  There was light.

And through that light, there was help.

Avery and Lucy, alongside their tribes, alongside their Others, coming down.

Dogs of War, wearing loincloths, climbing freely with spears in hand, descended.  The rain didn’t wash off the vertical stripes of blood that started at hairline and went to chin, throat, and stopped near the heart.  It didn’t clean the spears, so stained with blood that the wood had become red.

They even dropped a hundred or more feet, to stab at vital parts of the Titan’s hand, or the primeval.

Verona climbed to meet the others.  With that climb, she aged further.  Hunger ate at her, and maybe that was why, when a snaggle-toothed young lady wrapped in scraggly grey fur reached her, she was able to pull Verona’s arms around her neck, and climb, carrying her.  A child carrying a seventy-pound old lady.

Lucy -a descendant of Lucy- rode piggy-back on a dog of war’s back.  Avery had a child in a swaddle at her back, and a whole mess of children.  Avery climbed with abandon, aging with every movement, and didn’t seem to care.  She checked the coast was clear and signaled the others.  A teenager made his way down and gave Verona’s rescuer a hand.

Lightheaded from heat, focusing on breathing and maintaining her grip, and on not having a heart attack, Verona closed her eyes.

The light from the sun, lightning flashes, the haze of steam, and everything else came together in a bright whiteness.

“What took you so long?”

Verona opened her eyes.  They were in a garden, very basic, but paradise compared to what had come before.  The cloth she wore was a- not a toga, but a toga mixed with a cloak.  She had one black with an off-white portion.  Lucy wore a garment like a tunic, down to the knees, but with sleeves and a hood as a separate piece- kind of a shrug.  The two pieces were in two shades of red.  Avery wore a tunic-like top, shorter, orange-brown at the top half and brown-green at the bottom.

All of the cloth seemed to have the texture of one of those disposable washcloths, like it had been really coarse and them stomped down or worn down until the softness was gone.  It wasn’t a fine weave by any measure.

Blinking, trying to pull herself together enough to even recognize who was speaking, a fistful of her clothing gripped in one fist, Verona murmured, “tried to set up a heroic bloodline.”

“Of course you would,” Lucy murmured.

“Did he rig it against us?” Verona asked.  “Change things after he told me we were excluded?”

“No,” Lucy murmured.  “I was trying to work that out.  There are deeper hooks to this.  I think, if we weren’t left out of this, we’d have lost memories, been stripped down more.  And it would’ve been harder.”

“It has rules, and the aging rules are foundational, like a Path,” Avery said.

“Okay,” Verona murmured, taking that in.  “That was a thing.  Charles couldn’t have made it more P-G?”

“It didn’t cut past the naughty parts for you?” Avery asked.

“Still had a lot of babies.”

“Trying to establish a heroic bloodline,” Lucy said, poking Verona in the cheek.  “Geez.  Also…”

Lucy poked Verona in the cheek harder, until Verona turned her face away.  Lucy prodded at her ear.

“Huh?  What?” Verona asked.

“Tattoo,” Lucy murmured.  “Snake?”

“Lines up,” Verona replied.

“How come you get the tattoo?” Avery asked, mock-whining.  “Tattoos are my aesthetic, even though I’m not allowed to get any yet.”

“Hidden place,” Lucy said, fixing Verona’s hair, moving it behind her ear.  “Might not want to broadcast that one.”

“Noted,” Verona said.

“Why does it ‘line up’?” Avery asked.

“Heroic bloodline.  Links to the divine, Tashlit.  Craft, in making stuff, like we did some projects with her, but also craft in terms of raw un-practiced practice.  Aurum crashed that party, forced me to make a move for the peak.  But I think I got some foundation built.”

“And that foundation carries forward,” Avery said.  She was watching the people who passed by.  Verona joined her in tracking what was going on.  The spot they were in was like a public garden or public park, with separate garden beds, trees, and places to sit, with whole groups gathering.  Rowdy men drank and got boisterous, some kids were running loops around a tree.

“Hey, Ronnie?” Lucy asked.

“I already asked Ave.  You manage okay with the whole… thing?  Bloodlines, families?”

“I think not being interested in relationships and focusing more on craft and getting necessary shit done might’ve helped.”

“Being a couple can mean you’re more than the sum of its parts,” Avery said.

“Totally,” Verona agreed.  “Does it always?  Does it usually, though?  I’m not so sure.  Tradeoffs.”

“I can see tradeoffs,” Lucy said, as the middle ground here.

“I did admittedly burn bridges with some rejections.  That might’ve come to a head if my plan carried on.  How’d you manage, Ave, when procreation and the ‘tribe’ was that important?”

“Did what was necessary to start.  Didn’t exactly mind that we got to skip the details.”

“For sure.”

“Points to Charles,” Lucy said, glancing skyward.

Verona looked up.  The sun was still bleeding.  Maybe more than before.

“After the tribe was established, I focused on taking care of the abandoned.  Orphans, stragglers.  It’s still my bloodline, just… not a direct line from me.”

“Yeah,” Verona murmured.  “Makes sense.”

“We lost our Others,” Avery said.

No Snowdrop.

“Seems so,” Lucy said.  “What era is this?”

“From Primeval-Titan to Titan-God?” Verona guessed.

“Should we test things?  Because Charles might be in bad shape, but I’m not liking this gold that’s creeping in,” Avery said.

“Same,” Lucy said.  “Sure.  Who’s testing.”

“I will,” Avery said, standing from the bench-like rise they’d been sitting on, which bounded in some greenery.  She looked wary as she set feet firmly on the ground.

She took an experimental step.

“Different dynamics for different eras, I guess?” Avery ventured.

Verona stood, realized a bag was part of her stuff- not a proper handbag, but more of a hammock-sack with a deep pocket.  She slung it over her shoulder.

There were things inside.  Her mask.  A knife with a weird handle with a loop for her pinky or something.  A branch with fire runes set along it.

A new set of rules.

Is there a way to game this system too? Verona wondered.

If they had to go through all of this, journeying not just across these landscapes, but through time periods, to get to Charles?  Gaming the system could be a way to win.  Either it would work, and she’d find a way to power, or they’d be interrupted.  After the third interruption, she’d make an appeal to other judges, asking at least one to recuse.

Except it wasn’t that simple.

She wouldn’t be gaming the contest or the ritual’s overall purpose.  If Lucy was right and they were excluded, that’d be pointless- she couldn’t challenge the Aurum on this.  It was like the Hungry Choir ritual, when they’d showed up while others had been participating.  The waifs had still tried to bite and disarm them.  Time still moved funny.

It’d have to be another angle.  The rules of this universe being applied unfairly, or sheer combative bias from a judge.

And… Verona’s eyes widened a bit as she took in their surroundings.

“Gods,” Lucy murmured.

Leaving the garden, with its overhanging branches and the cloth coverings of nearby booths obscuring the wider view, they could see more of the city.  Or ‘city’.  It was a city of another era, without the tall buildings, with farmland incorporated in, especially at the edges.  Tall walls bounded in most of the buildings, with others apparently clustered near the gate, so they could retreat inside when the situation called for it.

What was that situation?  Who knew?

A half-dozen temples were part of the landscape.  Some of the most lavish buildings in the city, set in prominent places.

“Ronnie?” Lucy asked.

“Uh huh?” Verona asked.

“Remember when you said you didn’t want to take history classes at the Blue Heron?”

“Ha ha.  This seems like an alternate, Charles-focused history,” Verona remarked.

“It’s still, you know, lessons learned.  Stuff that maps.”

“Yeah,” Verona agreed.  “Yeah, no… feeling you there.”

“I get the feeling it’s one take on something pretty vague, with enough changes you can’t know all that much more than people back in the day did,” Avery noted.

“Yeah,” Lucy said.  “Charles’ biased take.”

“And maybe some of it is whatever’s easiest, to grease the wheels, allow for shortcuts.  Did you guys get my take on the primeval?  Underlining, what that meant?”

“You do that a lot, you know?” Lucy asked.  “Speaker for the voiceless, here’s my un-voiced random idea, for you to interpret and connect the dots on.”

“Yeah.  You catching on, yet?”

“Watch out for primevals?  Or the big primeval?” Lucy asked.  They had to navigate as a group past some people, who were walking quickly down the street.

“The primevals are like the architects, of this world?  If we go by outdated Path theory?” Avery guessed.

Verona clicked her tongue and pointed at Avery.

“Because he had a real primeval he could’ve fed to this.”

“Heyyy, there we go,” Verona said, clapping a hand on Avery’s shoulder.  “When your best friend can read your mind through your interpretive squiggles, given to a nightmare to relay over.”

“I got one, yaaay,” Avery murmured, so quiet she was barely audible.  She moved her hands in a little jig.

“Sometimes.  Your best friend can read your mind through interpretive squiggles sometimes,” Lucy murmured.

A big religious group had come out of one temple, all dressed in white.  It made for a spooky image, especially with the torches they carried, for coming gloom.

“What are we up against here?” Verona asked.  “Titan-god era?”

“No Others.  Even my familiar, who’s tied to my Self, isn’t here,” Avery said.

“Outside the walls?” Lucy asked, glancing over.  “People are freaking out because the sun is going down…”

“…When the monsters come out,” Avery finished.

“Your familiar being outside the walls reminds me of the one story in the Familiar text, I think it was,” Verona said.  “The lady with the forest prince dude as a companion?  Before familiars were an established thing?”

“Except I’m not nobility and Snow’s a scrungy opossum hobo child, but yeah,” Avery replied.  “So, what, survive the night?  When we might not have an assigned place to go?”

“With a twist,” Verona said.  “There’s gonna be a twist, I figure.  A special set of rules on what happens, and part of how it’s skewed and set up, it’s meant to teach some lesson, it’s meant to convey some part of Charles.”

“What was the point of the primeval stuff and the mountain?”

“Struggle.  Anger.  If you’re going into that with your head emptied, it weeds out the sick, the struggling, anyone without an inner fire, a rage, a tenacity.  It makes you come from nothing, even if you came from something.”

They weren’t far from the collection of temples.  A mother ran by, a large clay jug of fresh water hanging from one hand, while she steered her uncooperative child with the other.  Some men carried their drunk friends past a group of the inquisitors, who laughed and made verbal jabs about how the guy was already drunk.

Another group had come out.  They had torches in their hands, along with weapons that reminded Verona of baseball bats with nails in them, but the nails weren’t metal, were uniformly spaced and covered in some sort of thick black lacquer, and it looked official-ish.

“Ronnie.  That tattoo?”

Verona arched an eyebrow.  Lucy was calling her Ronnie a lot.  A hint?  Or a desire to connect after some rough going.  She navigated around and threw an arm around Lucy.

“Can’t believe you noticed that tiny little mark,” Avery said, while Verona was doing that.

“What about my tattoo?” Verona asked.

“Look at the temples.  If it’s a mark tied to divine power, it’s not tied to any of those.  And if it’s one that you’re meant to keep hidden?” Lucy asked.

There were more coming out.  It looked like local military blended with the groups of the temples.

“An inquisition?” Avery guessed.

They steered a bit further away from one of the large armed groups.  Verona tried to make sure she looked like she knew where she was going.

A whole set of religious groups, trying to maintain their claim to people’s faith, control over the city…  Implicit ‘without us, there’s no protection against dark things’.

“Anti-institution.  Step one, come from nothing.  Step two, be the underdog, see what it’s like to be up against an established, entrenched reality,” Lucy said.  “And just for fun…?”

With a nod of her head, she indicated one of the temples at the end of the main concourse.

Behind them, a woman shrieked.  One of the groups was accosting her, two men grabbing her wrists.  It’s starting.  Verona’s attention was split enough she didn’t immediately put two and two together.

A red tint was cast throughout the interior.  Oil mingled with blood in long troughs running down the main hall to the raised dais.  Some people were kneeling.  The statue was overlarge, a man wreathed in fur, impaled through one side, blood running from the wound in the statue to one of the troughs.

“Charles is the sun here… and he’s a major god of the establishment?” Lucy asked.  “Get your ego in check already.”

“Seriously,” Avery murmured.

A man dressed in a toga-ish, cloak-y style outfit in white gold and near-black gold tones crossed the front door, walking off to a side room.  He glanced their way.

The Aurum.

“It’s a trap, right?” Verona asked.

“The entire thing is a trap, isn’t it?” Avery asked.

“Point,” Verona admitted.

“Got stuff?” Lucy asked.  “I don’t have my weapon ring, or glamour, or big practices.”

“Odds and ends.  It’s like I’ve got the crappiest ten percent of my stuff,” Avery said.

Verona nodded.

“Option one, we back off.  Out into the dark, the fringes,” Lucy said, quiet.

“Watch it,” Avery murmured.  She batted Lucy’s arm with her hand, then moved the hand sideways to slap Verona’s to get Verona’s attention, even though Verona was looking.

The man in gold was talking to one of the inquisitor groups.  They glanced over toward the three of them.

“Or?” Verona asked.

“Go closer. See what Charles wants,” Lucy said.  Indicating the temple with the bleeding statue.

“I’ll hang by the door,” Avery said.  “Keep an eye out?”

“Sounds good.”

They walked toward the temple.  The Aurum didn’t say whatever words or give the suggestion to send that mob of armed inquisitors running over.

Which only made it feel like they were playing into his hands.  Charles’.

As they entered, the lighting shifted, reflecting off the pools.

Charles was there.  Sitting in his throne, between the feet of the statue.  It wasn’t immediate, but after his arrival, the blood started running from the wound, down the spike that lanced him at a diagonal, and onto the floor, painting its own narrow river.

Some worshipers were kneeling or sitting at various points in the temple.  They started bowing repeatedly and whispering to themselves as they noticed him.  He dismissed them with a wave of his hand.

Their running footsteps and the clack of hard sandals on stone echoed through the temple center.

“I see you’re doing the whole ‘a god am I’ thing,” Lucy said.

“I heard you notice outside,” Charles growled.

“I’m surprised you didn’t take it a step further, give yourself topless playboy bunny worshipers,” Avery said.

“Disappointed?” Charles asked, wry.

“Not really my style, honestly.  I was more saying you’re tacky.”

He snorted, then winced.

“Hurts?” Verona asked.

“I’ve realized you had another component.  The thorn in the flesh,” Charles noted.  “Taken from the Family Man.”

“Oh, you did manage to attach it,” Lucy said, to Verona.  “I wondered.”

“Hot glued it onto the spike.  Yep.”

“Hot glued a piece of our plan together,” Lucy said, in faint disbelief.

Verona clicked her tongue, winking.

“From someone I created, encouraged divinity in, to me.  It hurts,” Charles told them.  His voice echoed through the hall.

“You killed friends of ours.  That hurts,” Verona responded, the humor draining out of her as fast as it had popped up.

“Do you plan on trying to kill me?” he asked them, hunched over, looking like there was no way to sit comfortably.

“Not exactly,” Lucy said.

“So you’d wound someone immortal and let that hurt stretch on to infinity,” he said, and he let out a sound that was half-groan, half sigh, back arching as he tried to sit more upright.

“Are you going to make us play your game here, keep chasing you as you go through the different points in history?” Avery asked, from the doorway.

He was already shaking his head before she finished.  “I reserve the right to change the venue, though, if we take this to a sparring match.”

“What are you after, Chuck?” Verona asked.  “What are you doing?  You’re going to keep fading away like this.”

“And you’d set up your sword moot to replace me in all functions, with me in no shape to defend it or argue it.  Especially when disputes at the moot are settled by fighting.  Maybe I’d win now, against most in attendance, but not tomorrow.”

“So why do this?  Just… talk to us?” Verona asked.  “Settle?”

“Agree to make amends.  Tall order, but you’re immortal, like you said,” Lucy told him.  “I figure you can give it a few thousand years of consistent effort and commitment to change.”

“I’d fight you,” he told them.  “Here, where your friends and allies can’t easily reach you.  Within teaching moments of history, hiding in crevices beneath warring titans, burned and tortured with hot irons by the adherents of gods desperate to cling to and expand the scope of their worship, navigating your own bloodlines gone rotten, where a cousin would stab you in the back or poison you.  Being forsworn, and facing all the world has to offer.”

“What’s to say anyone who goes through all of that will be the person you want them to be?” Lucy asked.

“Because they have to,” Charles said.  “You noted it yourselves.  You’re not players in this game- you’re bystanders, stuck playing by the same rules.  But to play?  They’d have to think like me.  They’d have to find the resentment I have for the Mussers and Alexanders of this world in their own hearts.  They’d have to agree with me.  If they don’t… they don’t get to pass to the next checkpoint.  They don’t get to make it through the process.”

“Letting you secure your legacy, I guess?” Verona asked.  “Maybe you die or get left wounded and in the dark while others take over your job-?”

“Until you come around.  Until you swear to recognize the harm done and make amends,” Lucy said.  “It’s one of the main points of order at the meeting that’s happening right now.”

“They haven’t gotten around to it yet,” Charles growled the words.  He was hunched forward, unable to put both elbows on both knees, so he put one down and had the other awkwardly hovering, his body askew.

“This isn’t about an eternity of pain for the shit you’ve pulled, but I don’t see myself losing sleep over you getting some pain if it’s a reminder of what you’ve done.”

“But with the way this ritual is set, some other shmuck goes through it, carries on, as you, essentially?” Verona asked.

“With the casual power the ritual can impart, and all the knowledge I can convey from a Judge’s perspective, without the drawback of being tied to Law.  Parts of the ritual can hone him.  The Choir made Zed’s girlfriend able to eat anything.  Each phase of this can promise something to the winner.  Perfect biology, the ability to grasp a practice with a glance, instincts to sense danger, read a room, read a person.  I could go on.”

“But he’s essentially you, has to be, to get the prize, has to hold the same views, so he ends up being a loser anyway?” Lucy asked.

Charles sighed.  Then he stood with a grunt.  Blood ran openly from the wound down the side of his hip and leg while his upper body was at a certain angle, then slowed to a steady flow down the diagonal of the metal spike, after he found a comfortable, slightly askew standing position.

Lucy, on guard, stepped back a little.

“If I fight you, and you accidentally kill me, it shouldn’t be much of a loss,” he said.  “I don’t intend to ever capitulate, say ‘I’m sorry’ and undo everything I’ve tried to do.”

“That’s sad,” Lucy said.

“Better death than condemnation, being forgotten, wounded and left in the dark.  Something will carry forward from this ritual.  The Aurum wants to administrate it.  He’ll steer it.  Give it his own tweak, but I believe him when he says he’ll keep the core conceit, the lessons I want to teach, the mentality I want to instill.  So long as he keeps that, I don’t care what his other plans are.”

“In exchange, I’m guessing he gets a ton of power, control over a major ritual?” Verona asked.

“Security.  Aurums don’t have much of a life expectancy.  With this, a place to retreat to, like I’m doing now?  What I’m giving him?  He’ll have a chance.  I don’t fault him for wanting it.”

He was approaching, taking his time.  Partly for the drama, partly because he was badly hurt.

“You were always shortsighted, Charles.  Not doing enough, not seeing the ripple effects.  Case in point?  These things have a way of going bad,” Lucy told Charles.  “Deals with the devil?”

“Are you all that perceptive?” Charles asked.

“Yes,” Lucy said.  “I mean, better than your average, in my case.”

“What are you?” he asked, and he chuckled.  “You three.  Do you even realize?  Have you perceived that?”

Verona glanced at Lucy.

Charles hobbled forward a bit more.  Lucy and Verona backed up closer to the door.

“Coast is sorta clear if we need to bolt,” Avery murmured.

Charles chuckled, low, letting the echo fill the space.  “No answer?  Are you avoiding the question?”

“Wondering if you’re a little cracked, honestly,” Verona said.

“You’re not real,” he told them.  “Born to mothers and fathers, human, sure, you have your histories, fine.  But you’re not real.”

“Wondering a little less, now.”

An expression that was half disgust, half bewilderment crossed his face, made more exaggerated by his beard, wild hair, and the red light that reflected from the blood that wasn’t allowed to congeal and the blazing flames in pots running along the sides of the hall.  “Thirteen?  Fourteen?  Doing this?  Coming this far?  I can tell you that beggars belief and I was more a beggar than the man panhandling on a street corner in downtown Kennet.”

“Rook said-”

“There have been child kings and emperors and people who shaped history before they had pubes,” Charles growled.  He chuckled again, mean, angry.  “Three at once?”

Verona and Lucy had backed up enough to be in the doorway with Avery.

“You talk and share and work together, you mesh, you communicate, you fucking banter.  Fuck me in the ass, the back-and-forths I’ve had to listen to, listening in on you three?  Three girls of uncommon maturity and talent springing up at just the right moment, aligned against me.  I don’t believe it.”

“Miss is good at-” Avery started.

Charles interrupted, angry, “If Miss was that good at finding that kind of talent, I’d be very disappointed in her for not finding more while working against me as my enemy.”

“She looked in advance.  She was preparing for a while,” Avery said.

“She had nine months to look again and she couldn’t find one more of you?” he asked.  He scoffed.  “You’re not real.”

“You’re repeating that like saying it enough times might make it true,” Lucy said.  “I don’t believe in fairies, I don’t believe in fairies.”

“I don’t believe in you,” he growled.  “I said as much, to some of my Red Heron students.  Ones I thought were getting cold feet.  They got it.  It clicked.  I told them to keep it secret.  I didn’t want to say it, in case it made it more true, and because I’m not a cruel man.  Not like that.  I don’t want to forswear you.  I don’t want to ruin you on that level, by telling you that everything you are, your work, your efforts, they’re meaningless, because you’re karma, distilled.  That ship has sailed, saying it now won’t make it any more true.  You’ve hurt me.  I’ll hurt you.”

Verona wasn’t sure how to respond.  She reached for Lucy’s arm and held it with her hand.

The inquisitors were coming.

“I thought if I could win you over, befriend you, work against common enemies, that’d mean I’d won over karma.  Maybe I’d exhaust the universe’s animosity toward me.  But no.  Even after I was no longer forsworn, you’re this… this fucking arrow, picked out by Miss because you had room for potential, you fit the bill, and on the day you awoke you were handed to Karma and sent flying.  To strike me now, today, in the side.”

“We’re more than that,” Lucy said.

Verona was glad Lucy was able to say that, because if she were to open her mouth, Verona wasn’t sure she could say the same with certainty.  It was an uncomfortable thought.

“I was forsworn and the universe, to counter me and my wishes, created you.  And here you are.  Of course you’re aligned against me, uncompromising.  Of course you follow me into this.  Of course I wouldn’t let you try to be my new Solomon.”

“We should go,” Avery whispered.  “To the Others.”

The inquisitors were running over their way now.  The Aurum stood back where they’d been, having given the order.

“Go?” Charles asked, growling the word.  “Run?  It doesn’t matter.  You’ve won, you’ve struck me down, and I’m dying, for all intents and purposes.  I’ll pass my work on to someone else, someone unaffiliated.  Karma won’t hold your hands and nurture you now, girls.  It’s not mine anymore.”

Avery reached over, tugging.

Verona, hesitating, looked back at Charles.  At the anger, the emptiness in eyes that reflected the flicker of flames, and intense pain.

She followed the others, over to where a market stall provided a good way to get to the wall where a tree had a branch extending over it.  Hanging off, they might dip low enough to drop, then run to the dark woods.

Best laid plans.

Charles, here, wasn’t bounded in by Innocence.  That wasn’t a thing yet.

So he went big, form distorting.  He, with a sweep of his hand, created another argumentative diagram.  Aborted, half-made summons reached out to tear up market stalls, dirt roads with stones laid into them, and part of the wall.

They ran into that dust and devastation, dogged by inquisitors who were spurred on, not daunted, by a god rising up to try and smite his enemies down.  Toward the dark woods and the things that dwelt there.

Verona still held Lucy’s upper arm, awkwardly, while Avery still held onto Verona’s sleeve, that she’d tugged.  Clinging to each other on an instinctive level, that gave away the worries they weren’t voicing.

Above them, red stars turned yellow.

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