Author: Wildbow

Finish Off – 24.15 | Pale

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She understood the logic.  They hadn’t hunted.  Some had hid, some hadn’t been anywhere near this.  But the fire burned, the pack of darts, as she thought of them, had been stripped of outer layers, their flesh no longer rippling and shuffling, settling into a case of being just meat.  The little raptor-things, fast as hell, had been corralled by her group, steered toward a cliff, and, turning on people, ready to start fighting back, they’d been caught in the periodic venting of smoke.  The ones who hadn’t suffocated trying and failing to blindly climb the wall had come stumbling out of the smoke, into waiting spearpoints.

Thirty sleek little reptile-mammal bodies for twenty people, now roasting at the ends of those spearpoints, bled out, skinned, vitals removed.

Except another fifteen people had come out of the shadows after.  A good few of them were members of one tribe.  Lucy wanted them.  More people, more resources.  She’d insisted they stay.  They’d contribute after.  It hadn’t gone over well.  Some people had left, taking food with.

That had been the first ‘night’ in this weird timeline.  Lucy had slept next to a young man for the warmth, and when she woke, her stomach swelled, then she had a child.

Fucking bizarre, Charles.

She had her flaws. She’d thought she was conquering them.

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

Strip away the outer layer, though?  Take away the clothes, take away personal grooming, take away the reputation she’d cultivated and earned, fighting her ass off, starting her over again?  Take away words, in this setting, where she couldn’t string a few together?

They’d come early in the morning.  They couldn’t talk either, but sentiment remained.  The people who’d angrily left last night had come back as a group, some of them wanting more of the food the no doubt felt they’d earned.  Some were just angry, and when they’d come, they’d speared the woman on watch, and had speared the newcomers who hadn’t hunted.

Had tried to spear Lucy.  She’d woken up and instincts had saved her life, moving her head out of the way of the spear aimed at the soft spot beneath her chin.

The fighting had been brutal, in a dark cave where it was hard to tell what was happening in the first place.

She’d shouted, trying to get attention, to establish presence.  Her voice was drowned out by other people, older, larger, louder.

They’d left, taking what they could, leaving the dead and dying behind them.

She hated powerlessness.  Hated not having a voice, not being seen, heard, or given a benefit of a doubt.  Like she wasn’t even there.  Just a girl with resting bitch face that nobody liked, barring a handful.

In this morning skirmish, Lucy had caught a spear in the shin, mostly deflected by bone, but it raked her from knee to almost the top of her foot, laying bone bare.  Being carried helped with the pressing aging situation.

More deaths.  More losses.  She had a sit by one of the dying, fiercely holding his hand.  Even if he wasn’t real, and all of this was illusion, that had to matter.

“I see the Others.  We might have to build an Other-practitioner relationship all over again.”

“You’re quiet, Lucy.”

“Did what Charles said get to you?”

“I’m… okay.  More important, do you guys hear that?”

“They’re coming through the woods.  Inquisitors.”

They came again.  It was easier to hunt neighbors than to hunt primevals, even lesser primevals.  Two more dead on Lucy’s side, three of the outsiders dead.  Food stolen- while the adults from the attacking group had been fighting, their children had been sneaking around.

Lucy’s group hunted again, Lucy with her bad leg being carried around, being lookout, directing others with hand signals.  Hunting was efficient, and because they’d lost enough food that hunger was a problem.  More food meant being able to draw in more allies, but as her group grew, so did the attacking group.

There was another raid before the evening, both groups larger.  It felt less like there was a point now beside the hate, the vendetta.  They’d made destroying Lucy’s group a part of who they were, now.  Lucy, wearing a warped fox skull over her head, couldn’t fight as much as she wanted.

Couldn’t do more than sit back and watch as her firstborn son died, rammed through with a spear that ended him in that same moment.

She wasn’t sure how to feel.  The feelings she wrestled with felt like a dozen half-formed feelings trying to find their way through her at once- about the nature of living beings like this, something she’d been late to reconcile, with Kennet Below.  About her mom, and what her mom must be feeling.  About her dad, and the mental image of her dad lying dead in the hallway.  Not that she’d seen, but it was a moment that dwelt so heavily in her life and the shape her family had taken that she could picture it distinctly.  Altered slightly, now, so her dad, in her mind’s eye, face known mostly from photographs, lay like her son did here.

Too many conflicting feelings and other priorities to let herself cry.

The man who’d carried her over to the space by the fire slept by her side.  Having a child did a number on her, but she figured they had the food to recoup.  There was still a system for her to work out.

Childbirth came with bleeding, and unlike her leg wound, it didn’t stop.

Late in the evening, her eyes opened.  She was her newborn, now a year or so old.  She sat at a distance, gazing past the fire and its smoke, across their shelter -close grown trees by a cliff face, with some water running down the cliff- at her body, with her face, which, as life left it, had what was so often called ‘resting bitch face’ lose its ‘bitch’ part, the perpetual frown, and found only the resting part, instead.

Experiencing that, seeing that, it made a feeling swell inside her that felt bigger than she was.  As if she’d been stabbed by a spear that grew into a tree trunk, and the tree trunk got bigger than she was.  The sight of herself at peace, dead in another sort of battle, lying in blood.  The experience of it.  Those moments of bleeding out, and the fear.

She’d remember that if she ever had a second child.

How would she ever escape that fear, that it had happened to her here, and it could happen to her in reality?

Moving was hard.  She was uncoordinated.  Hand against ground, flailing, she managed to push and roll a bit.  Which made her older, stronger.  Made the next movement easier.  It was frustrating, and the frustration pushed emotions to the brim.

A child of about four years old, because her brother and mother had died, Lucy cried over that– a future scenario that might never come up, all the other feelings finding their way through.  Her mom, her dad, Booker being distant with her not in his top five priorities.  The war, the fighting, the fact she’d killed.

Bodies lay unburied, and shadows moved at the periphery of things.

Her people noticed her noticing, and gathered up weapons, ready for a follow-up attack.

But it wasn’t them again.  Or it was, but…

Lucy collected meat that was in arm’s reach, and walked a few paces to the periphery.  She pulled away from a hand that tried to hold her back.

Men and women who wore bloodstains on skin instead of the soot and dirt that covered Lucy’s people, with streaks of blood running from forehead to chest.  Beyond that, they were indistinguishable from either side.  Some wore skulls or other trophies.  Some carried torches.

The ones closest to her brandished weapons.  Spears red with blood.

Lucy, covered in blood from the trauma of being born, maybe ten to twelve years old, offered the ribs with meat clustered to the ends.

The one closest to her took a piece.

Moving the remaining pieces to one hand, She ran a fingernail across the back of that hand, then started to daub blood on herself forehead to the bridge of the nose, down.  Join my tribe, I’ll join yours.

The one in the lead closed the distance in a single stride, and gripped her wrist, fierce.  Stopping her.

She was tense- aware that he was dangerous.  More dangerous than a Dog of War from the modern day.  Touching that blood again, she reached out, and touched the red streak that ran from forehead to chin, down neck to mid-chest.  Power, from me to you.  Basic, primitive practice.

It might have been a shift of clouds and smoke overhead, a movement of leafless tree branches, but it felt like the red of that blood became redder.  Did he stand a little taller?

He took more meat, and held it out and to the side, for his allies to take.  Blood-streaked.  Dogs of War, from before a time when that was their name.

When her hand was empty enough, a spear was pushed into it.  One of theirs.

She held it diagonally, and banged it against her chest twice.

She wasn’t as good at this as Verona.  She hoped the intent came across.  She was so bad at communicating, sometimes.  Whenever clout and Law weren’t on her side.

He repeated the gesture.  Spear at a diagonal, bang bang.

Others followed suit.

She motioned, and had them follow her.

They stopped at the very edge of camp.  Like there was a barrier.  She reached for the nearest- the one who’d come closest, and tugged.  If you won’t let me paint myself in blood… come here, at least.

He stumbled a step, at the unexpected movement, but stopped, not venturing in any deeper.  Looking at him, his eyes were on the body- her body, with her face, lying on the far side of the fire, blood congealing beneath it.

Lucy wanted one thing before they moved on.  The fox skull.  She took a step-

A hand stopped her before she’d brought foot to ground.

Like some awkward, fumbling dance, her and the Dog of War.  Halting, struggling to make headway, tugging at each other, resistance, starting to move, being stopped by the other, more resistance.  So many eyes were on her, watching how she navigated this.

The Dog of War looked at where her feet met the ground, closed his eyes a moment, and when he opened them again, his gaze was locked to hers.

She reached out toward the fox skull, and he let go of her, walking over to where he could pick it up.

He knows the rules.  He’s helping.

“I think we scared them off.”

“Then we need to scare allies in.”

“Not how I’d put it.”

“I can tell you this, Lucy.  The Lost stuff?  Path running stuff?  The idea of losing my real-ness, fading away, or losing touch with reality has been on my mind since the Forest Ribbon Trail.”

“Yeah.”

This was the challenge, then.  Something generational.  She’d become her child.  She’d fight, struggle, become her grandchild.

Could she hold onto who she was, through that process?  It wasn’t just the idea she might lose herself in all of this, but the further she moved from ‘herself’, the less some of her lessons from Guilherme and Bubbleyum would apply.  If becoming someone new meant her defensive walls came down… that could make the difference when hunting a primeval.

The partners she chose, the child she raised, the ways she shaped things, the decisions she made, even the expressions she chose and way she held herself, they defined her in turn.

“I’m wondering if it matters.  Even if we’re less real, karma owning more of what we do, hmm… how do I say it?  It’s kinda been a warning right from the beginning, you know?  The diagram to Awaken is celestial but a bit argumentative too- it’s a thing to call in, hmm… outside power.  Or go to outside power.”

“Summon this, tap so-and-so for power, open a door to some Path or Ruins place.”

“Yes, thanks Ronnie.  But like, the way I think about it.  Right from that moment, it’s like pow, now you’re a little Other.  And the trajectory in my head is like… being Aware, or picking up more rituals, or doing more practice, it pushes you away from everything Innocent, everything distinctly human.  And if you push far enough away, if you lose touch with who you are-“

“You become Lost.”

“Or Abyssal.”

“You become Lost or Abyssal, yeah.  That’s where I think the Paths and Abyss are at polar ends of this scale.  And how you handle stuff is going to determine whether you go thataway or-” hissed breath in “-thataway.”

“I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Ave.”

“If we truly weren’t us, immersed in all of this, then we’d be Lost.”

“Or Abyssal.”

“Yeah.  So I think there’s enough of us here to count.”

“It’s not that, so much.  It’s that… it’s our actions that don’t get to count?  We don’t get to own it, we don’t get full credit?  That bugs me.  And it bugs me I’m saying that with Charles listening.  I don’t like being diminished, I don’t like not getting credit, or people looking past me.  Same way you get bugged by being ignored, Ave.”

“Yeah.”

“Or you, I don’t know, Ronnie.  It’s the same for you?  Not getting credit, not being heard, not having an impact?  Whether it’s chores for your dad or the extra effort at school, or…?”

“Or talking to my mom, sometimes.  It’s all the same thing, Luce.  Same thing, different angles.”

“Distilled down to ‘not real’, or ‘not legit’?  Fuck him.  Fuck this.  But like… fuck, how much of what we are is owed to karma, now?  Because I don’t like any answer that isn’t zero percent, and I don’t think it’s zero.”

Her heart heavy and empty, her dead body lying to the side, she made sure she had the spear, some food, some more coverings.  She gratefully took the fox skull, which was too large for her at the moment, so she wore it over one shoulder.

All of the people of her little tribe were watching her, warily eyeing the men and women who’d followed her in, some of whom were still eating the meat they’d been given.

With her instruction, some of the more trusted members of her group lightly cut themselves, then gave blood to the Dogs of War.

That mountain climb wouldn’t be easy.  To do it, she’d have to hone herself, keep herself.  Hone her group’s focus.

She didn’t feel like herself.  Everything stripped away, bleeding from her hand, she at least had people’s attention, with the Dogs of War having her back.

She started to move, and he put a hand up and out.

He stepped over, and he lifted her.

She was a bit malnourished, a bit underweight.  But it was more that he was strong, and her frame was narrow.  She was a teenager now, and he could lift her like she was nothing.

He moved her behind him.  Her hand sought purchase, she wrapped arms around his shoulders.  She found herself in a piggy-back position.

It wasn’t noble, but it solved one problem she was facing.

While she had everyone’s attention… she pointed at the mountain.

When the Dogs of War marched, others hurried to pick up their things and follow.

They were in the woods, getting things together and comparing notes, knowing full well that Charles would be watching.

They still didn’t know what they needed to do here, so they were putting that aside.  Their target was Charles, which meant their target was likely his temple.  That meant their goals were infiltration, figuring out ways to leverage the Others and give them access.

Walls of a city were a barrier to goblins, being constructions of worked earth, even with big fat arches to walk through.  The wall had a gap in it from where Charles had attacked, but it was being repaired.  Different from the modern day.

The Dogs of War had closed face helmets with the openings being little more than capital ‘T’ shapes, long hair spilling down out the bottom of each helm.  Their weapons and helmets an old, bubbly form of iron with porous holes in it, that had been sharpened to points, tinged with rust- some of which streaked their faces and chests.

The goblins were gnarled, more fleshy than they’d seemed to be in the prior era.  More hairy.  More prone to using bone.

Reggie had come through, and his eye sockets were empty, with the forest behind him visible through them, even though the back of his head was there.  The hole in his chest was there too, covered up by a shawl.

They had Chloe with them, dressed in a heavy shawl to protect her from the sun, pointed claws sticking out of the part that draped over an arm.  Waiting until dark.

Alpeana, doing the same.

Freak and Squeak had adapted remarkably well.  They were what they were, and with the slightest change in Freak’s dress, she fit as well as she ever did.  Avery had said that had to do with her being Lost.

And on that note, Miss had been called on, and extended herself forward, and she came through with Queen Sootsleeves.  They said nothing, did nothing, and waited.  When offerings were given, a shallow offering of some foraged and burned tubers, she took it, leaving an indent behind.  For so long, she’d been afraid of the Hungry Choir as a Ritual Incarnate.  And of Fae schemes, of practice, of higher powers.  To involve herself with them risked being absorbed by them.  That was Miss’s nature as a Lost.  Now she was firm enough to stand in the midst of another, greater ritual.

The sun moved fast overhead.  The days and nights were measured in three hour spans.  No aging or special rules had made themselves known, yet.

“Any input?” Lucy asked Miss.

“None now, but later.  Not here, but elsewhere.”

“Sounds good, then,” Avery said.

The Lost were more riddle-y in this era.  Freak and Squeak liked her nursery rhymes.  Miss had that weird lilt.  Lucy wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“Then let’s not waste time,” Lucy said.

“Keep an eye out for weirdness, special rules,” Avery added.

“You all be safe.  Back us up, help us out, where possible?” Verona asked.

There wasn’t a big response from the Others.  No clamor, no communication, not even much patter, beyond some goblin gabbling.  The ones who didn’t follow disappeared into shadows.

The sun was setting, and they had to move before it was too late.  The walled settlement was surrounded by farmland, with buildings clustered in by the gates, and as night descended, the people without homes secure enough to secure every exit were rushing into the city itself.  It was a crush of bodies, a chaos that couldn’t be easily policed.  Lucy joined Avery and Verona in disappearing into that.  The Dogs of War hung back.

Inquisitors were at the gates, and were semi-randomly wading against the tide of bodies going into the city, grabbing shoulders, stopping the occasional person.  People who tried to bring in more than the clothes on their backs were manhandled, their things taken and tossed to the side.  Lucy figured about one in six people were being stopped and there were three of them.  Not great odds.

Those who were stopped weren’t just those who had too much stuff.  They were being searched, jewelry moved, clothing adjusted.  One man started fighting when he was forced to bend over, his hair parted.  Tattoos beneath the hair, it looked like.

Lucy’s eye went to the space behind Verona’s ear.  A little black squiggle, like a zig-zag with the edges rounded off, with a head.  Easy to miss in Verona’s shaggy black hair.

Avery seemed to see a gap and flowed right through it.  Lucy walked behind Verona, holding Verona’s hand.  Dancing between raindrops, trying to get my friend to do the same.

Except the raindrops in this scenario were a press of bodies mostly bigger than they were, and they needed to find a way through the net.  Lucy’s ears tracked the inquisitors, heard the brusque orders, and her eyes sought out the gaps between people to try to gauge where the were and where they were headed.  It was like trying to track the movement of ten different tennis balls in a room where the only light source was a strobe light, flashing every one to three seconds.

The net was closing.  More inquisitors were joining, and it felt like the others were unconsciously responding to the new additions.

Moving it to a one-in-three chance that they got caught- each.  Bad odds when it was the two of them together.

So, rather than risk that particular roll of the dice, Lucy played into it.  She pressed on Verona’s ribs to steer her right, then maneuvered around Verona, putting herself to Verona’s right, running forward as a hand went out in Verona’s direction.

Lucy rammed the incoming fingers with her shoulder, jamming them.  Then, stumbling, she leaned hard into Verona, to steer Verona left.

The intent was to create a gap.  People were close enough on Lucy’s heels, wanting to get through the crowd and get to where there were seats, and by creating a gap people wanted to fill, especially with an inquisitor who was otherwise distracted, she could invite someone to fill it.

Then, hurrying a bit, guiding Verona, she could keep that person between herself and the threat.

The glimpses continued.  That strobe-like series of views of things, peering past buildings and through the crowds.

Lucy could see Freak climbing over a wall, partially hidden by high trees.  She dropped onto a roof, and a group of five inquisitors converged on her, having sighted her.  There were shouts.

Then intervening buildings meant Lucy didn’t have a view of Freak or what happened next.  She was ready to nudge Verona and get Avery’s attention to circle around, until she saw past a gap in a building, where Freak was alone, a splash of blood across her face.  She licked her hand and wiped at the blood.  Freak’s head turned as more inquisitors convened on her.  She smiled.

Squeak couldn’t be that far from Freak, which meant he’d be on the far side of the wall.  Hopefully the big galoot would be okay.

Four buildings near the town center were kind of communal dining halls and community areas- one very tavern-like, where apparently people drank and made a lot of noise throughout the three hours of night.  An area, currently busy, though it would clear out later, had a wide open garden with sitting areas and a creek running through it, and, buffered by that green zone, three more buildings, with one being a quieter tavern and two being for sleep- one with rooms and one free or cheap with lots of beds.

Which was a problem.  They’d had some peeks at this place while rallying the Others and coming through to get food and offerings, and the issue was, all people brought into the city were corralled toward this spot.  The place then flooded with inquisitors.

The wanted to get to the temple area, opposite the main gates that everyone had come through.  Presumably.

Deface his temple, that reduces his power as a god, in this scenario?

The question was how.

So for right now, while the inquisitors were focused on the people coming in, or getting sorted, there was a narrow window.

Avery signaled for Lucy’s attention.

Lucy looked, followed Avery’s gaze, and almost missed it.  Torches, burning a low orange-red, illuminated in advance of sundown, were flashing a yellow-gold.  One would light up, then the next nearest, then the next.

Then the Aurum appeared, wearing black with gold flecks in it, with a single golden scarf-shawl bit thrown over one shoulder.  Some inquisitors seemed to defer to him, heads dipping in respect.

His eyes flashed as he looked their way.

He knew.  He’d never not known.

Lucy and Verona cut through the gatherings in the gardens, as friends met friends, hugging, chatting, over to where Avery had gone ahead.  Kids squealed and played, people met.

“They weren’t looking for the tattoos before.  They’re looking now,” Verona murmured.

“You sure?”

“I’ve been looking out from the beginning.  I wonder if the Aurum tipped them off.”

The idea of challenging the Aurum on the injustice of the contest was sort of a weapon in their back pocket, still.  But it felt like a trap.  It would be very much his thing to bait them into using it and then turning the tables on them.  That was what he did.  He’d done it with Avery.

Lucy glanced over at Avery.  Sure enough, she looked extra antsy.

“Hey,” Verona nudged Lucy, pulling her attention back again.  “Check it.  Cute guy in green and wheat.”

Green and wheat?  If wheat was beige-y, his clothing with deeper green accents.  He was definitely Verona’s type.  Skinnier, languid.  He had light brown skin, slight bags under his eyes, and thick black hair with the sort of waves that had to be hell to tame, twists going this way and that.  He was with what looked like family.

He reminded Lucy of Tymon.  That sleepy, easygoing look, the untamed hair from when Tymon had had bedhead- very Greek in Tymon’s part, while this guy looked a bit more Middle Eastern.

“Are we talking guys now?” Lucy asked.

“I noticed him on a past visit.  He has a mark under his bracelets.  Like mine.”

The guy wore a mess of bracelets and beaded accessories around his forearms.  Kind of like Avery.

“Aha.”

“Not sure what to do with that.”

They’d come in at what Lucy was thinking of as the south.  They were cutting across the center of the walled city now, Freak to their east, moving within a few feet of the wall.  Hole in the wall, their goal if they wanted to let allies in, was northeast.  The temples and other big buildings were generally north, and that was where inquisitors were coming from.

What were they doing?  What was the point of having one of Verona’s people show up?  Was he family?  Something else?

Avery, off to the side, was eyeing the Aurum and the trouble sent their way.  Inquisitors the Aurum had sent were already enforcing order, making sure people weren’t loitering past dark.

Lucy caught a glimpse, the guy in wheat and green shaking hands with an older man.  Or shaking wrists.  Thumbs pressed against one another’s wrists.  Presumably where the snake tattoos were.

“Secret handshake,” Lucy murmured.

“Oh yeah?  Wish that had come with the tat,” Verona murmured back.

A young woman about the guy’s age greeted him.  Tucking hair behind her ear as she ducked her head in acknowledgement of him.  The guy, hand clasping wrist in front of him, did something similar.   Ear again, wrist.

And Lucy, so soon after the ‘dance through raindrops’ to navigate the press of the crowd, was aware of a shift of movements.

Others going over.  Wearing bracelets or long sleeves.  Some ladies, young and old, adjusting their hair at the one ear.

“Tuck your hair behind your ear,” Lucy told Verona.

“Cover up?”

“Signal,” Lucy murmured.

Verona did, running fingers of both hands through her hair, leaving the one hand behind for a second or two longer.

People began moving toward them.

“And slow,” Lucy said, slowing her pace.  She and Verona watched some kids hopping over the narrowest part of the creek, while a woman chided them for almost getting wet.

The inquisitors were progressing deeper into the garden square.

“That guy you pointed out?  Wheat and green?  Your type, huh?”

“Yeppers,” Verona responded.

“Mine too, actually.  I don’t think I’ve seen a guy the two of us could actually fight over like him.”

“I don’t fight like that, Luce,” Verona said.  “I’d say go for it.  You find your bone-to-keep-at-home.  I’ll admire him from an artistic point of view, and if you ever opened up the relationship, or wanted to bring in a third for something experimental, I wouldn’t say no to seeing what’s beneath the wheat and green outfit.”

“I- Ronnie, I don’t-”

Verona cackled.

“I got overwhelmed and overthought an ice cream date with Wallace.  Nowhere near thinking about that stuff.  And I see you like a sister.”

“Fair ’nuff.”

The sobering side thought was the thing Charles had brought up earlier.  Weird leaps in maturity.  Or was that just Verona stuff, or Verona’s dad stuff, pushing her to grow up faster, finding her own version of a relationship to find her peace and ‘home’ in?

Something she’d lost with Anselm and Mal, in different ways, Lucy supposed.

When would this melancholy stop dwelling so heavily in Lucy?  Ever since she’d seen her own older corpse, after a death in childbirth, it had sat large inside her, a lot of feelings tied into it.

A lot of baggage thrown in with the ‘not real’ bullshit.

She wanted, needed to hold onto her Self here, in this weird landscape.

“Kids sleep in the dormitory building when it gets dark.  No reason for you to stay up,” the woman who’d come to them said, running hand through hair at her ear.  She glanced at Lucy.

“She’s fine.  Better than fine,” Verona said, seriously.  “We’re not planning on sleeping.”

“What are you planning on?”

“We need a big distraction,” Verona said.

“How big?”

“Big as you can manage.”

“Big enough we’re risking our lives?  They get you, get me, get us, you know what happens?” the woman asked.  “Torture until you die.  If you have the tattoos, they take your skin off in strips.”

“Don’t die,” Lucy said.  “But give us a good distraction.”

“When the bells ring to send everyone inside,” the woman said.  “Good?”

“Great,” Verona replied.

“Are you chosen?” the woman asked.  “By the patterns we follow?”

“I chose,” Verona replied.

The woman looked mildly surprised, but she didn’t argue.  Wordless, she strode off, signaling others.

“My tribe’s pretty awesome,” Verona remarked, as they caught up to Avery.  They didn’t have much of a window before the inquistors got close.  Lucy eyed the sky.

“What’s this?” Avery asked.

Lucy and Verona gave her a quick rundown.  Lucy’s eyes were on people, wondering if she and Avery had their own thing going.

“So, we’re at the era that gods are ascending, wiping out titans-”

“No Titan because I think She Who Drowns did a good job,” Avery said.  “Glad we didn’t replace her with Raquel like Florin wanted.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said.  “Gods are getting big, I think we’re ignoring the real religions, Charles went with something else.  Something more his.  Or it might’ve been there were a ton of lesser gods for a while, until things settled.”

“Line between lesser god and big spirit might’ve been especially fuzzy.  Lots of fuzziness,” Avery said.

“And fuzziness between institutional power.  Government, temple, and gods or goddesses.”

“And fuzziness between practitioner and witch hunter, maybe,” Avery said.  “Got that vibe.”

“Sure.  And we’re -or anyone in the Crucible as a player- being put in the position of the non-major religions or non-major groups of practitioners.  The underdogs.”

“The witches witch hunters hunt,” Avery said.

“Charles likes to be on the bottom, I figure,” Verona said.  “It might even be a theme.”

“Right,” Lucy said, ignoring the Verona humor.

A quartet of inquisitors seemed to eye the three of them.  Instead of searching groups one by one in steady progression, they pushed past.  The Aurum tipped them off?  The threat of Verona being skinned aside, Lucy wasn’t keen on being manhandled, searched, or roughly handled.

“Retreat?” Verona asked.

“We don’t want to go too far-” Lucy started.  But Avery was already grabbing her sleeve.

“Hope our distraction’s big enough,” Avery said.  “I scouted out a route.  In a pinch, we can pass by Freak.”

They cut sideways, out of the square, which got the attention of more than four inquisitors.  Two hung back, murmuring.

“Practice,” Lucy warned.

Avery directed them through a zig-zag of residential buildings, ducking under a clothesline that was a long narrow branch extended between buildings.

A man yelped, from the same general direction the whispered prayers had come from.  Lucy wasn’t sure if it was the guy who’d been whispering, going from quiet to loud, or if it was someone else who’d seen him use the practice, but he leaped onto the roof of a building, twenty feet up, touched solid surface with one foot, and then skipped past, landing ahead of them.  They stopped.

Lucy reversed direction.  People were chasing, and while they were ducking through the clothes on the line, Lucy stepped out onto the rougher exterior of the building for a bit of extra height, and punched at cloth at what was on the other side.  She was on target, catching one inquisitor in the throat.

A pull of her hand brought the rod down.  It came down, clothes and sheets billowing, and made for a tripping hazard, a pole and tangled cloth cutting diagonally a foot and a half above the ground.

Leaving her free to deal with the other guy, who’d closed in on Avery.

Avery did have a trinket, though.  A tree branch, carved with a square on one side, an ‘earth’ rune on the other.

It shattered as hit the man’s arm.

He was whispering some prayer in a loop.  His lunging grab bowled Avery over, and nearly got Verona, except that Lucy pushed Verona to one side.

A second chanting man made an appearance, coming to rest on the rooftop.

“Freak and Squeak stood split by a wall,” Avery gasped, before quickly rolling to get out of the man’s way.

“Each were needed for a great big brawl,” Lucy picked up.  She wanted their attention.  She was more sure of her ability to stay out of trouble.  She let out a small whistle to get the attention of the one on the roof, while using body language to bait the one on the ground.

He grabbed for her.  Fast enough his open hand cut through air, with a relentless strength that wouldn’t let his hand be turned aside.

“With one ripping, skipping, and roaring, and the other with meek imploring…” Verona threw in.

“The pair arrived standing tall!” Lucy called out, her voice overlapping with Avery’s line, which finished, “-small!” and Verona’s, which finished, “-all!”

Freak made her appearance, hair and dress flying, eyes wide.  Squeak, at the same time, was cresting the top of the wall, and looked like he’d gotten stuck in the castle-y bits at the top.  He squawked his alarm and distress, slipping until he was dangling head-down.

Freak collided with the man on the ground, head turning with a scary look in her eyes as the other one jumped down from the roof.  Her initial two impacts didn’t do anything, but she brandished a bouquet of flowers, and as she leaped for him, letting him wrap arms around her, she slammed the bouquet into his open mouth.

He choked, stopped praying, and Freak bit his nose off while his attention was elsewhere, his strength faltering.

She sprang off of him as his grip loosened, and, about ten feet in the air, spat out the nose.  It flew like a bullet into the open mouth of the second man.

Freak hit ground and, skipping off at a right angle from that brief meeting of foot to dirt, collided with the second guy.  Unlike the earlier collisions, he had no augmented strength or stability.

Squeak fell, landing awkwardly at the same moment Freak settled, two threats dealt with.

Lucy, Avery, and Verona headed toward the gap in the wall, with everything under construction.

Lucy was left to wonder if seeing herself die had weakened defenses.  That was the whole point of this Crucible, right?  To tear people down?  But seeing death and mutilation sat differently, whether it was Dogs of War hunting primevals or this.

Probably not the angle Charles wanted.

They were partway there when the distraction they’d ordered came through.  The creek that ran through the garden was fed by a river, which fed into a bathhouse that was built into the wall, with grates to prevent threats from coming in- Avery had done a swim and checked to make sure that wasn’t a way in.  Some water was apparently stored within as a reservoir, because something collapsed or detonated inside the bathhouse, and brackish water came flooding and frothing out.

Enough to draw attention and qualify as a minor crisis, at least.

Some of the attention drawn was from the crews repairing the walls.  The people in charge of those efforts would be the same people who built the bathhouse setup, probably, so, in a town with a leadership as brutal as this… yeah.

It left only a small crew at the wall, whose attention was focused out.  The Dogs of War were out there, helmeted and armed, far enough away they weren’t easy to confront, but close enough to be a danger.

The water from the flooding left a layer an inch or two deep across most of the city.  The northern end of town with its temples was protected.

“Far end,” Lucy urged Avery, with a whisper and a push.  She thumped her own chest, “Middle.”

“I stay?” Verona asked.

Lucy nodded.

It took only ten or fifteen seconds before they were in position.  Avery sprinted across, staying out of the torchlight.  Lucy crept along the largest chunks of rubble that hadn’t yet been lifted away, reused, or broken down, beneath crude scaffolding.

Most of the light in the evening was torchlight.  Lucy moved to one torch, nodded in Avery’s direction, though Avery wasn’t nearby, and then glanced back at Verona.

While glancing, she saw gold.

The Aurum.

No wasting time, then.

Lucy quickly lifted torches out from their housings, dropping them into the water.  Some needed a kick to roll them enough to sputter out.

She got about five, Avery got seven, of course, and Verona got a few too.

Enough that the lighting across much of the wall went out.  In the latter stage, some people on the scaffolding or on the other side of the hump of rubble noticed.  Lucy heard the footsteps.

She moved, matching pace.

There was a horn hanging by the broken edge of the wall.  An alarm.

Scrambling over, leaping, Lucy got there a second after one of the men on the work crews did.  Still enough time to keep him from taking that additional second he needed to get horn to mouth and blow.

She pulled the horn away and threw it into rubble.

Goblin hands in darkness grabbed it, pulling it into dark recesses.  Other goblins found their way into the city.  Snowdrop was among them, more spirit than she’d been before.

The man manhandled Lucy, and her footing wasn’t great… but there were others converging in.  Or capital-‘O’ Others, to be more accurate.  The Dogs of War were marching in closer, now, an ominous presence, harbingers of war and conflict, approaching with seemingly no regard for their own safety.  Some arrows were loosed.  One in the front got hit, then got back up before the ones in the rear walked by.

The man grabbed Lucy, pressing his weight against her… and hands pried him away.

Hands with clawed fingertips.

Chloe was there- easier to make out then the individual Dogs of War, which Lucy was embarrassed about not being able to do, Grandfather excepted.  She extended a clawed hand, fist closed, like she was offering Lucy a very dangerous fistbump, with knuckles and fingers edged with blade-like bones.

Lucy took the offered arm as a thing to grab, hand on Chloe’s forearm, pulling herself to her feet.

They weren’t quite in position to hug, and there wasn’t time, but the sentiment seemed to be there, because Chloe dipped her head to one side, knocking it against Lucy’s, before moving her arm to free Lucy to move.

“Stay safe,” Lucy told the Dogs of War, as she met with them.  Chloe followed behind her.  Alpeana trailed behind their group, then went up the wall, a glimpse of her visible by torchlight before she was too high and too far from the scaffolding- a swirling mass of black hair, black dress, and a human woman or human girl far too good at moving on all fours.

Some pushback, some help by other angles, some tenacity where humans don’t have it… Lucy thought, trying to take in the big picture.

But a bigger picture was in evidence.

Inquisitors, seeing the breach, banded together.  Voices chanted, calling out in a chorus.  Past them, Lucy could see the Aurum, a faint smile on his face.

“I hate him,” Avery muttered.  She was on scaffolding just above Lucy, as Lucy climbed over the highest point of the rubble.  “What are they doing?”

“Praying,” Verona said.  “Remember how Durocher called Metaphaos?”

“Calling on gods?” Lucy asked.

Light came down from above.

Light took shape.  Dust and wind mingled with flashes of stark, bone white that didn’t otherwise exist all that much in a town like this- people had surprisingly nice teeth, probably owing to a lack of sugar, but bones weren’t in evidence and didn’t get bleached by sun, and clothes didn’t come out that white.

Taking a human shape.  The chorus of chanting male voices and drum beats was joined by a god-sound.  Playing off of it.  In an environment and era like this, an alien sound like that was profound to whole populations, Lucy figured.

The god raised his hand, and the wall began repairing itself.  With half their group inside, half outside, they’d be split.

“Back!” Lucy called out.

Others were calling out too, not wanting to be diminished.

Gods.  Maybe they were lesser gods, in the grand scheme of things, the sort who would be overridden or swallowed up and incorporated by some other god with a matching portfolio.  Maybe they were greater spirits eating worship, made out to be gods.  Lucy didn’t know.  It wasn’t something she had learned much about at the Blue Heron, and it wasn’t something she’d had any reason to study.

One of the gods roared, and it was another god-sound, an unearthly guttural tone with associated vibrations that might’ve been made by a musical instrument in the modern day, but here it was unprecedented, and made doubly unprecedented by the volume of it.  Flowers sprung up and the things that vibrated most in response to the sound began to glow and shed light motes.

Lucy, covering her ears, glanced back.  She could see Charles, writ large, still impaled, still hurting, hanging out at the back of that group.  She could see the Aurum on the ground.

Lucy scaled scaffolding to get to where the wall was still pulling itself back together, and took Avery’s offered hand.  Avery helped pull her through, with only a second or two to spare, before rock sealed up, cracks closing.  Scaffolding that had been in the way was sandwiched, and forced abruptly to sharp angles, when it wasn’t totally destroyed.  They were able to make their way down, sliding, falling, running when there was flat ground beneath them.

It looked like Alpeana had helped Verona over the wall, though the light was eating into the nightmare.  Where light glowed and motes broke away, they were taking chunks out of her.  The pair climbed only partway down.  The intervening wall, thick as it was, didn’t stop the sound or the light, and Alpeana lost strength.  They dropped the last ten or twelve feet.

“Go,” Lucy told Avery.  “Help her.  Regroup.”

Was it stupidity?  The Aurum was out there, directing the enemies and obstacles, here.  There were gods, hostile.

A higher mountain to climb than the literal mountain with titans and primevals climbing over it.

Nature was a refuge here, against established society.  Lucy had the option of running to the trees with Avery and Verona.  But that was too far away, it didn’t give them enough options.

The damage to the bathhouse had caused flooding, and that went both ways- some of the river feeding into the bathhouse had backed up, and the water had risen, a bit murky.  The surface of the water was tremoring in the face of the god-sound, shedding light and motes, but the deeper water seemed untouched.

Lucy shucked off the nonessential layers of her outfit, bundled them, and tossed them to the foot of a bush, and then plunged into the water.  The light stung her skin.

The grates were staggered.  Wide-set bars at first, then a basket-like lattice, with bars on either side.  People in the bathhouse could presumably pull up the basket part and clean it, like some crude filter, but there was no way up and through, even if Lucy was smaller or skinnier.

That said, she could go under, through the wide bars, and stick her head up for air when she needed it.

In the end, she needed it enough times she thought the god would never stop his droning.  Ten times?  Fifteen?

Things settled enough she could get a sense of people’s movements.  Patrols around the wall- nobody paused at the bush.  She could see the moving shadows and torchlight as they walked.

When the coast was clear, she slipped out of water, so slowly it barely splashed dribbled into itself.

Lucy heard another god sound, and tensed, but she could hear the worshipers, and chalk that up to being an everyday thing.  She moved around the wall, retrieving her outer layers to pull on over her damp tunic-like shift, and observed comings and goings through the gates.

By coincidence, ear close to the wall as she peered around the corner, she could hear a distant rumble and groaning sound.

She pulled back and laid her head against the wall.

A response to the god sound?

She laid a hand on the wall, splayed out as far as it could get, palm and fingers against rough stone.  She kept wary of patrols, keeping close enough to trees and bushes at the base of the wall that people peering over shouldn’t be able to see her.

It took maybe two minutes, ear to the wall, hand pressed to it and splayed out, feeling the vibrations, before her suspicions were confirmed with a faint ache and feeling of stretching skin.  Her eye fixed on the rough yellowed stone, and she watched a single detail- a single poke of rock that stabbed out near an edge.

Split into two uneven pokes.  It took maybe ten or so seconds, but the two pokes traveled apart, kept traveling.

A splash of water made her head snap around.

Snowdrop, coming out of murky water, followed by goblins.  Tatty and Kittycough, if Lucy had to guess.

“Got through?” Lucy asked.

“Had to go big at a key time,” Snowdrop replied.

“Makes sense.”

“They were no help.  But it makes sense, since I didn’t help them either.”

Murking up the water, maybe?

A step forward for their goblin sage.

“I don’t suppose you could remember the temples?” Lucy asked.

“I have a great memory.”

“Or that you could go back through?”

“No way.  I told you, I have a great memory, so I don’t figure I need to go through to do whatever it is you’re talking about, which is good, because I don’t want to.”

“Go through, count the temples?  That’s all.”

Snowdrop flipped Lucy an early-human era ‘up yours’, hand griping near elbow, forearm and fist jerking up.  Some things were timeless, maybe.

It didn’t take Snowdrop long to go under, through the grates, and pop back up.

Lucy helped Snowdrop up the muddy bank with its short black grass.

“Four, then twelveteen, then nine,” Snowdrop said.  “No buildings that weren’t for sure temples.”

Lucy closed her eyes.  Right.

The Kittycough goblin stabbed a stake into the muddy bank.  A gouge in mud for each building.

With some guidance from Snowdrop, Lucy was able to confirm what things were supposed to be, while a mute Kittycough mapped it out.  Three on the left side.  Two in the middle with three more buildings set in between them that might not be temples- government buildings, maybe.  Then three more temples.  Lines joining three temples together…

“They’re in conflict,” Snowdrop said, with quiet assuredness.

Three stabs from Kittycough, in the middle gouge.

“Three gods, uniting?” Lucy asked.

“Or… merging?”

Kittycough shrugged.

Lucy fixed her hair, and tried to figure out the best way to cross the open space between wall and trees.

While she was figuring things out, the rumbling from the walls intensified.  She pressed an ear against the wall, and pulled away, because the wall was extending, and the gritty sandpaper surface was moving against her ear.

Something just happened.  “What do you want to bet that was a new temple or something appearing in there?”

“Everything in my experience up until now has been leading to this moment, where I can confirm what a building being born sounds like… almost everything.  I’d bet a lot.  But if you’re saying one thing, I’ll change my mind and say the opposite.

“It makes the most sense to me.  Come on.  Get your gross, soggy selves over here,” Lucy told Snowdrop and the goblins.  Her outfit included separate sleeves and hood as a detached thing, and she was able to readjust enough to squeeze two very stinky goblins and a wet opossum that smelled worse than a wet dog beneath.  She jogged away from the walls, barely glancing back.

Some seemed to see her go, and they seemed to identify the Other-ness.  One even loosed an arrow, but it went way to her left, thanks to the wind.  The follow-up shot adjusted for that wind, starting off pointed way to her right, then veering left, toward her.  She was watching for it, though, and moved to one side.  It plunged into ground.

There were inquisitors on the wall, and they were late to get to the point where they could do something alongside the archers.  But one prayer-practice later, and a glowing arrow shot without arc, or apparent wind resistance.  A straight line shot, aimed down at a slight diagonal, that seemed to curve up as it flew, though that could’ve been optical illusion.

Lucy tried to dodge it, using past training, but it still caught her side, and it might have nicked something, because a lot of blood flowed.

The moment she was in the woods, she freed the goblins and Snowdrop.  She made it far enough in to find a place to sit, and tried to use the cloth of the shrug- emphasizing the parts that weren’t gross from soggy goblins and opossum, to staunch the wound.

Snowdrop went and found Grandfather on patrol in the woods and brought him.  With his help, she limped over to the new campsite.

“There you are,” Verona greeted her.  They were sitting by a fire.  “You’re hurt.”

Lucy had mostly dried off, but she didn’t object to the fire.  “The city’s growing.”

Verona’s stash of healing alchemy was mostly depleted, and them being here, in this era of the Crucible, it translated it into something simpler.  More of a herb poultice or hedge magic than straight alchemy with its tubes, titration, and boiling flasks.

“We are too,” Avery said.  “Found Killwagon, more goblins riding with him.  I think they’re Liberty’s.  It’s hard to tell, with physical differences, and none of them talk our language.”

“He’s back?  Killwagon?” Lucy asked.

“It’s how bogeymen do,” Verona said.

Lucy nodded, wincing as the poultice was applied.  “I think, the way this scenario works, it’s automatically skewed against us.  If we grow one step, They grow two.  You got Kilwagon at… it would’ve been four or five o’clock of this day?  Going by this weird timing?”

“Just about,” Avery said.

“I heard a new temple pop up.  I don’t remember how many temples there were at first, but-”

“Our last visit, there were six,” Verona said.

“Okay.  There were eight when Snowdrop and the goblins checked, I think, then one more might’ve popped up when you got Killwagon.”

“We get a handful of allies, they get a whole squadron of strong practitioners with the ability to call on a god?” Avery asked.

“That’s my vibe,” Lucy replied.  “It reminds me of what Miss…”

She trailed off as she realized Miss had appeared, in the same moment she’d said the name.

“…what you told us, Miss, when we were heading from Kennet to the Blue Heron, after the Aware attacked.  The stories about Others.  How things developed, before and during the Seal.”

“I knew him, not a long time ago, a short time ago, or a time in the future, here, but a sideways time distant,” Miss said.  “What I’ve said to you was said before, to ears once beside and preceding your own.”

“Right,” Lucy murmured.  “Shared your thoughts and knowledge with him before us?”

“As he was before you.”

“You guys think he used that to build this dynamic and situation?” Avery asked.

“Or inspire it,” Verona said.  “If you need to paint an interpretation of history, you use the references you’ve got, and he had Miss.”

“A sideways time past,” Miss agreed.

“So our solution can’t be mustering forces,” Lucy said.

“Avery, I don’t suppose you set up any secret rituals or patterns when you were in the primal era?” Verona asked.

“I used Sight and connection magic to find forageables, predators, and people.”

“Any totems, tokens, tricks?” Lucy asked, “To fasten connections to?”

“No ropes or thing to tie up,” Snowdrop remarked.

“Cords and bracelets,” Avery said.  She tugged at the lower part of her tunic, where there was a separate pattern and darker green than the burnt orange on the upper half.  Her finger ran over the weave and texture.

“I think you guys need to find your tribes, while a witch hunt is going on,” Verona said.

“With an Aurum potentially tipping off the inquisitors,” Lucy replied.  “With the inquisitors being crazy powerful.  With a lot else going on.”

“Right,” Verona said.  “This wasn’t supposed to be this hard.  You doing okay, Luce?”

Lucy wasn’t sure how to explain the lingering melancholy and vulnerability from the primal era.  “I’m a little off, after the primal era.  I put a lot of focus onto holding onto my Self, and I’m not sure how well I succeeded.”

“How so?” Avery asked.

“I- hard to pin down.  The death, dying, seeing myself die.  Family stuff.  But I don’t want to dwell on it.  Weird to whine when you guys had it tougher.  Being vegetarian, the whole kid-baby-romance thing.  Plus I was whining earlier about the invalidation part of what Charles was saying.”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t pep talk,” Avery said.

“Getting underway with this will make me feel better than a pep talk.  Appreciated, though,” Lucy replied.

We need to keep his attention on us, keep him occupied, while others work, Lucy thought.  My work and efforts being invalidated pushes my buttons, he has to know that.  But I can’t let it throw me off balance.

“Being stuck with the most basic practices and tools is rough,” Verona said.  “Very raw, very basic.”

“Makeshift ugly stick, opossum without familiar bond…” Avery said.  “Or nonstandard bond?”

“We’re pretty standard, even before this,” Snowdrop told her.

Lucy checked through her things, emotions still heavy, still working through it.

“This is going to be rough.  I think I’m starting to get what Charles is after, here,” Lucy eventually said.

“Pressure,” Verona said.

“Pressure, sure, but also… there’s no good way to do this and do it tidy.  There’s no way, I figure, to do this, if we can’t get really pissed off at the establishment.  Maybe we’re even meant to lose a few times, get tortured, have our people tortured.”

“I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to see people tortured, even if they’re fictional people,” Avery said.

“Or if they’re fictional but fueled by the fragments and pulp of the most loyal people in Kennet below,” Verona murmured.

“Makes me think…” Lucy started, stopped.

“Idea?” Avery asked.

“I’m not sure if it’s a great one.  I think of recent protests.  Booker was telling me, once, it stuck with me.  How once, when a person of color was harassed by police, or in other situations, well, there was no proof, only word of mouth.  Then cameras became a thing.  A few shots… they’d say it was taken out of context.  Then video cameras became a thing.  They’d say too blurry, not enough footage, not enough angles, voices hard to make out.  Then high resolution cameras.  Better video.  Then everyone had a camera in their pockets, everyone had a video camera in their pockets.  Full video from multiple phones of a person of color being murdered by police without just cause.”

“And they find an excuse,” Avery said.

“Racists will always try to find a way of avoiding recognizing there’s a problem.  But what I’m saying, this isn’t about them.  I’m thinking… what do you do?  What do you do, when, after decades, generations of seeing something happen, saying it’s happening, being ignored, you get irrefutable proof… witnesses, and nothing comes of it?  One more point in a society-wide pattern that only racists will deny exists, but nobody does anything about?  You get mad.  You have to get mad.”

“All these people being pushed around,” Avery said.

“Close to a tipping point, I’m thinking,” Lucy said.  “If you’re not outraged by something like this, you’re not human.”

“So we, we as a collective, we get mad?” Verona asked.  “Not a strike force, but something bigger?”

“Bigger,” Lucy said.

They’d reached out to people who lived outside the city walls, who went in after dark.  Lucy found hers, gesturing with a stroke of forehead to chin, mimicking the line down the face of the old Dogs of War- which still existed with the full-face helmets they wore now.  Avery identified her people by the systems and patterns of knots worked into clothing, which was only made for and given to the loyal.  Messages were passed along.  Instructions were given.

Others on the outside rallied.

The Inquisitors could practice, but they weren’t alone.  Verona, Lucy, and Avery had learned and taught basic practice to their tribes, and here, in this era, in this aspect of Charles’ challenge, those lessons carried forward into loose specializations, capabilities.  Runes, the ability to See, the ability to give power from Self.

Lucy, Avery, and Verona joined the crowd moving into the city, but avoided moving far enough in that the inquisitors might spot them.  They resisted moving with the tide, watching through the gates.  The torches carried by the various inquisitor groups were a bright glow that made it easier to track the main body of those forces.

It looked like multiple temples had popped up, only for some to join together, multiple gods in one pantheon, or being merged into a singular god.  Unifying the inquisitors, organizing them more.

Following the instructions, their groups worked together.  Runes painted onto surfaces by Verona’s people.

Avery’s people were at the ready, running across the paths and between runes, pouring out the whitest sand over dark soil, marking out lines.  White marks were drawn in something much like chalk to extend up onto horizontal surfaces, where necessary, to let everything connect.

Lucy’s people were at the ready to supply power.  They’d made war and being ready for fighting a part of their belief system, they exercised, so they had a deeper well to draw from.

When the main body of that rank and file started moving out of barracks and toward the places they’d guard against Others and infiltrators overnight, the runes from Verona’s tribes were connected by Avery’s people and powered by Lucy’s.

Creating a large diagram with ‘heat’ as a theme, loose insulation arrangements keeping it contained.  Sixty men dressed up as holy soldiers, followers of the major pantheons, kidnappers, tormentors, and torturers of those with different belief systems, were caught in the middle.  The air shimmered, skin reddened and blistered, and some people even ignited.

That flare of fire and heat shimmer was a signal for people from multiple directions.  Groups closer to the temples.  Groups in the taverns and barracks, who’d reached out to the like-minded, who hated the local theocracies.

For Lucy, Verona, and Avery, too.  The inquisitors between them and the inside of the city had backs turned.  People, some unassuming, like old men or pregnant women, pushed forward through a crowd that had stopped marching forward, Lucy, Avery, and Verona with them.

Inquisitors were attacked, near-simultaneously.  Pulled off their feet.  Mobbed by people, one person devoting themselves to just holding onto an arm that gripped a weapon, while another covered face and head.

Some locals tried to stop the people attacking inquisitors.

Others joined in, spurred to action.

One man broke free, beginning to chant, and Lucy threw a fistful of dirt and sand into his lower face, twigs arranged around her hand to help direct it into a focused plume with forward momentum.  He choked, his prayer interrupted.  Others dragged him to the ground, as he hacked up globbets of mixed sand and saliva.

People who’d lived under generations of oppression under the majority here.  People who’d faced a lot, here.

A clattering noise made Lucy’s head turn.  She drew in a full lungful of air before bellowing, so hard it hurt, “Move!”

People scrambled.

Killwagon came tearing through, fast enough to trample people, overriding them, to crash past a few of the toppled, partially bound inquisitors.  He had a horse, this time, maybe because a horse fit better than a wheelchair in this era, and together with the horse, he aimed for the thickest groups of inquisitors.

Practice flared, aimed at him.

He’d opened a path.  They used it.

There was a detonation as they came through the gates.  The water running through the city, out in a controlled stream of the bathhouse, one of several diverted routes, had started to foam, breaking past the makeshift repairs.  Goblin practice, fouling water and making it expand, froth, and alarm.

By the time Verona, Lucy, and Avery had reached the city center, the dungeons had been emptied.  Easily a hundred people were still alive, who’d faced the worst the theological tyrants of Charles’ model here had to offer.  Some had the telltale signs of followers- knots on clothing, tattoos, or patches of skin that had been cut or flayed away, where tattoos had been.  Others weren’t.

Torches were put out, and Others came in.  It gave people pause, at first- the way this worked, there was no internet to coordinate, only word of mouth, sometimes only a few sentences, or a partial instruction.  So not everyone knew.

It became clear pretty quickly that the Others were on their side.

The inquisitors were rallying, and they were strong, but their power came from gods, and godly power came from worship.  In this era, in this sort of environment, a lot of the gods were singular, local to an area.  So the god of sand, light, and sound didn’t have much reach.

Opposite to worship was condemnation.  An angry crowd speaking out against a god diminished it.

So did burning pieces of wood thrown into the temple windows, that ignited tapestries, furniture, and rugs.

Charles’ temple was furthest back.  It was the least prominent- its inquisitors the quietest and least offensive.

So it was Lucy, Avery, and Verona, who circled around that way, backed by the group of Others.

Lucy put her arm out to the side.  Verona drew on it.  A series of triangles, ‘jet’ runes in modern parlance.  A ‘strike’ rune, drawn with Mars’ sign, up at the shoulder.  Mercury at the hand.

Avery whetted the narrow blade against a stone, sharpening it.

“Here we are,” Charles said.  He grunted.  He looked worse than before.  “I thought for a little while that you were going to wait until the thorn had depleted my power reserves.”

“Wouldn’t do it fast enough,” Lucy said.

A bunch of inquisitors formed a loose row across the doorway, weapons at the ready.  Each wore holy symbols- Charles’ skewered sun in red, against a black backdrop.

Lucy took the blade from Avery, facing down the nearest inquisitor.

“I’m not a fool,” Charles said.  “I can see the runework.  I can see the intention.  This so-called Crucible is my domain, my project.”

“You work for the people, Chuck,” Verona said.  “What you build while you’re on that throne, it’s meant to be for the region, for its innocents, for its balance.”

“Different era,” he said, scrunching one side of his face as he said it.  Like the emotions running through him warranted a face-scrunch.  Or maybe it was the pain of being skewered.  “And I’d say it’s not even that accurate in the modern day, in another time.”

A distant trumpeting and a declaration marked Queen Sootsleeves making her entrance, announcing her story.

Not something that impacted this.

“So what’s the plan?  I get large, you use a goblin weapon to skewer me?” he asked.  He grew in size.  The fur of his coat billowed, bristled, waved in the wake of wind that Lucy didn’t feel, turning more red.

The skewer glowed bright white.  The blood almost glowed as it hit ground, taking on qualities as bright and iridescent as a ruby.  He spread his arms.

Nicking her finger, Lucy touched bloody fingertip to the runework Verona had drawn.

Anthem had done a great throw earlier, the archer earlier had managed something similar, empowering their shot.  If that kind of empowerment was that common, then Lucy hoped she could count on it being something that could go back as far as this era.

The runes flared- not bright like she was used to, but they flared.

She threw the sliver of bubbly, low-quality iron.

Charles disappeared as it left her hand.

Reappeared after it embedded in the church wall, shaking his head.

“Aaaugh!” the goblin cried out, as it came through a window, hurling itself down at the wall, grabbing onto the metal sliver, and hanging from it by one hand.  “Yagh aa tha wagh agh meth!  Metha!”

Continuing to gabble in a goblin tongue, he banged his forehead with the heel of his little clawed hand.  Gashwad, with a scraggly beard that he didn’t normally have.

“He’s excited you were able to deliver,” Snowdrop said.

“Gash!” Avery called out.

The goblin perked up, his already ugly face made more ugly by the fact that goblins of this era were rougher- a little more ulcerous and lumpy and scarred.

“The temple’s an extension of him.  We hit him!”

“Uh huh?” Charles asked.  “I could test you on that, but it’s easier to-”

He turned, creating a tear in reality.  Arms, legs, and snapping teeth lunged out of it, going for Gashwad.  Gashwad threw himself aside, shrieking.

“He’s a god in this scenario!” Avery called out.

“You’ve got good history beating up god-things, remember the god baby tree thing!?” Lucy called out.

“All this trouble to elicit a riot and rebellion, and your trump card is Gashwad?” Charles asked.  He attacked again.

Lucy took the other two blades from her friends.  Holding both, aiming, she touched a still-bloody fingertip to the runes.

She hurled the two slivers of metal at Charles.

With a backhand swipe of his off hand, he created another tear.  The spikes disappeared inside.

“Aaaugh!”  Gashwad screamed, guttural and shrill at the same time.  “Aaaugh!  Magh cagh maman!”

“He’s thrilled,” Snowdrop explained.

Dogs of War began to move forward.

“He’s a god!” Verona shouted.  “Hurt his worship, you can hurt him!”

“Ogh!” Gashwad yelped.  He went still.  Charles, midway through preparing another strike, paused as well.

There was a few seconds of pause, Gashwad’s expression slowly changing.  Twisting up.

With Gashwad’s face as screwed up and ugly as he could make it, he raised his arms, and arms, wrists, and legs cocked at weird angles, middle fingers raised, he made an obscene gesture at them.  He couldn’t talk, but he could let them know just what he thought of that plan, a goblin who wanted to be a fighter, not a blasphemer.

“You can stab a god after you’ve weakened his worship, that’s so cool!” Verona called out.

“You showed up so fast when cued, you’re fantastic!” Avery cheered.

He took a full second to thrash on the spot, gabbling inarticulately, clearly unhappy, but then, buoyed by the praise they heaped on him, he got going, sprinting for an altar.

Charles took Gashwad’s diverted focus for an opportunity.  He swiped an arm, created a portal, and the barrage came for them.

Grandfather pulled Lucy back, putting himself forward, spear raised, ready to fend off a chaotic flurry of strikes- like a stabbing strike from a praying mantis the size of an elephant, or a snap from the mandibles of a rat-like beast, maybe a primeval, who could probably eat a car in one bite.  Just putting his spear up and pushing against a tooth to keep himself from being snapped up bowled him over.

He immediately had to get back up to fend off the inquisitors who were still barring the way.

Others came.  Chloe.  Goblins.

“Careful guys,” Lucy warned.

She, Verona, and Avery advanced as well.  More careful, eyeing positions.  Just one good shot from Chuck, and they were dead.  Dead in the Crucible, dead in reality.

Gashwad roared, standing on the altar.  He’d drawn a picture of his own face, new beard included.  He beat his chest with one hand.

Making the altar his?

“No,” Charles told him.  A finger pointed.

Not a usual portal opening.  The limb that lanced out was even narrower than the praying mantis one- almost a syringe.  It stabbed through Gashwad’s picture.

Charles’ group were singing.  It was guttural, it was growly.  Throat-singing.  Charles’ song.

Gashwad’s shrieks and gabbling cries were enough to interrupt and distract from parts of it.  He jumped onto Charles and stabbed him, and used two feet and two stabbing weapons to crawl up Charles, puncturing with toe-claws and weapons for grip.

Charles swiped him away, sending Gashwad flying into a wall.

The goblin sprung back up, and immediately moved to the next vantage point.  Lucy could sense that he had a crystal-clear idea of what he was doing, now.  There was motivation, a Gashwad strategy.  Wreck temple shit, he weakened god-Charles.  See how weak Charles was with some stabby-stab, repeat until stabby-stabs started counting.

“If I get the chance, I’m telling so many people how cool you were,” Lucy told Gashwad.

“Gaaah!” he screamed, breaking a series of clay vessels with burning incense and candles sticking out of them.

Cool in a manner of speaking, anyway.

“I hope you won’t get the chance,” Charles said.  He made a portal.

What came out was as bright as rubies where it was bright, and dark as congealed blood where it wasn’t.  It was snake-like, with reach, and speed.  Lucy eyed it, and it flicked to her left, then her right, with such speed that she thought she might snap her own neck trying to track it.

Took too long to turn her head in one instant, and it lunged.

She was at the middle of the temple, which was probably eighty feet long, from front door to back wall.  She managed to avoid being gobbled up, but couldn’t avoid being struck by it, hit hard enough it took something out of her, and sent her skidding and tumbling almost all of the way back to the front door.

One or two lessons from Bubblegum and Guilherme flashed through her mind, got half-followed through, as she tumbled.  It might’ve stopped one injury, but it couldn’t stop all of them.  Abrasions, skin sandpapered away in places, a finger broken- she’d met ground with her head in a way that rattled her senses and made it hard to know what had happened, and when she stood up, trying to find her breath and bearings, she found no breath, instead struggling for a couple seconds before snorting out a noseful and mouthful of blood.

It was already preparing for a follow-up strike.

From the street, Killwagon fired a skewer from his wagon.  Cruder than his stuff normally was, but not without precedent in this era.  Essentially an oversized bow, with a winch to draw things back.  A coarse rope stretched from arrow to the back of the wagon.

The serpent evaporated into motes of crimson.

Avery had sprinted around, circumventing inquisitors who were busy with Dogs of War, benefitting from Lucy and Gashwad’s distraction, and leaped.  She grabbed onto the now-giant skewer, catching it by hooking chin and armpits over it, lower body dangling.

“Pull it out,” Charles told her.  “I dare you.”

Avery struggled, hooking a knee over it, climbing onto it, kind of.

“Don’t fucking jiggle it!” he roared.

She pushed off it with one foot, catching a tapestry, then hurling herself off to the side before his retaliatory strike could come.  It looked Warrens-y, and the things that it produced quickly belched out and spawned more things.  As swarm of zig-zagging flies and crawling things.

“Being angry at the established order is good, recognizing it’s bad is good,” Charles said.  “For a participant, it would be subtler, the story deeper.  You three wade in shallow waters, I’m still glad you’re learning what I wish I could teach you.”

“What you’re doing is different,” Lucy told him.  “Don’t fucking take credit.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he asked.  “I’d ask why you couldn’t have listened and done this sort of thing sooner, but karma shaped you into weapons, didn’t she?  But we’re moving out of her reach, I’m on my way out, so karma doesn’t need to steer you.”

“You’re delusional.  There’s so much more in play!” Avery shouted.

He turned, and stumbled.  Gashwad had cut the rope from Killwagon’s giant arrow, which was currently stuck in the wall, and tied it to the skewer in Charles’ side.  As Charles turned, it went taut, jerking at the skewer without jerking it out.

Charles seemed to think there was a way, though.  He’d said Avery could remove it, while he couldn’t.  Some curses worked that way.  He began to move, a full body effort, leaning one way, so the rope pulled at the skewer.

“Gash!” Verona called out.  “Here!”

He leaped into her arms.

“Weapon form!” Verona shouted.

Gashwad changed.  A crude, axe-like chunk of metal.  It wasn’t actually Gashwad’s real weapon form- something very different, here, because all the goblins were proto-goblins, and the nuances and differences of what a weapon form could be didn’t extend back to this era.

But she could hurl him, two handed, overhead.  He flew into the rope, mis-aimed, became a goblin, to adjust his trajectory, spread eagled, and the top of one foot hooked on the rope.  He swung around, caught it, and bit it.

The rope snapped.  Charles, trying to use the rope to pull free, to make it so that Killwagon and Gashwad were, in a roundabout way, removing the rope, fell over.

He went from giant to small.  Blood poured from the wound in his side.

“I heard your justifications.  Your arguments to yourselves.  It doesn’t matter,” he growled the words, as he climbed to his feet.  “When this ‘Crucible’ works, it’ll be tidier than this.  What a fucking mess.”

“You’re a mess,” Lucy told him.

“But like I said, it doesn’t matter.  Let’s move on.”

“You move on!” Verona shouted.

“I told you I reserve the right to shuffle things around.  I’m not interested in seeing you work your way through what the so-called Crucible is meant to instill, perverting it along the way.  But a change of venue at least gives us all relief from this charade.”

The lights were going out, one by one.  As torches and candles extinguished, they didn’t just stop giving out light, they produced a darkness that was thick as oblivion, that smelled like blood.

“The ‘Crucible’ spins up.  Power transfers.  The sword moot won’t matter,” he said, from the darkness.  “I should go administrate that.  Put a stop to that.”

Grandfather put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder, gripping it hard.

If they were moving to something else, Grandfather wanted to come.

And the Crucible wasn’t allowing it.  The darkness reached out, making Grandfather’s touch more immaterial.

“Graah!” Gashwad’s scream echoed through the dark.

Lucy could hear Charles’ grunt.

Through darkness and smoke.

Reality was changing, and Lucy ran.  What had been a temple was a hallway, lit with dim, amber lights, with books running along one wall, curios in spaces between books.  Art on the wall where there weren’t bookshelves on the one side, or windows on the other.

Gashwad’s scream was a beacon to follow.

Lucy burst through a set of doors, the smoke and darkness rewriting her clothing.  Her equipment.  Didn’t matter.

Gashwad was noisily attacking Charles, and Lucy, following the sound, found Charles in the center of the manor, surrounded by the props he was still putting into place.

“I never had anything.  I never had a chance,” Charles said.  “No family support.  No friends who stuck around for more than a year.  No teachers.  I wasn’t liked by my peers, I was too poor to be one of the cool kids, not poor enough for those people who sought out other lost souls.  I was less-than at school.  Less-than at home.  To get any respect and attention at all, I had to play along with shitty people.  Kids who broke into houses to party.  I stole to get my practice.”

Lucy paced, eyeing him.

“Worked with gangs to get money enough to matter in this world.  The Blue Heron group wouldn’t even let me come in with them to hunt the Blue Heron god.  I wasn’t confident enough to push for it.  I was… I was comms.  Twiddling my fucking thumbs waiting to see if they’d come out alive.  I was the side character who trains the metaphorical dogs to fetch a metaphorical key for a single door, working for a week to do one step in a hundred step plan.  If I hadn’t been there, it would’ve been someone else.  That was the high point of my life as Charles Abrams.  A side character to give Edith the ability to stabilize, even resemble a human spectrum of emotion.  A side character to build a perimeter.”

“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” Lucy asked.  “You made the Hungry Choir and kept quiet about it.  You killed John.  You unmade Ken.  You killed Verona’s friends.  So many people in Kennet below.  You traumatized kids who were allied to you.  You’ve made so many of my days miserable and tense.  I think about the expression on my mom’s face when my stepdad left, that heartbreak, and I see it when I tell her I have to be here to stop you from all of this.  That’s as much your fault as it was mine.  You made decisions here, Charles.”

“I thought it would be interesting, to do with you what you did with Musser.  If I made you live my life, how many choices would you really have?”

“I lived my life, and I wouldn’t fucking choose to kill John.  I wouldn’t keep quiet about the Choir.”

“I’d tell you- fuck!”

Gashwad had leaped up and thrown his full body weight into the side of the skewer.  Charles dropped to his knees.  He swiped a hand, and a series of muscular, clawed hands tore up floorboard, bookshelf, and crimson carpet.

Gashwad fled the retribution.

“Charles, I won’t tell you you had it made, but you weren’t that badly off.  I’m betting you could have found the least shitty people in that group of friends who were breaking into houses, stopped doing that, and chilled out.  I’m betting you could have picked up practice… you got to learn practice… and not gone to work for a gang.  You could have said something to the Blue Heron.  You did amass enough power, knowledge, and material that Alexander thought it was worth robbing you.  It sucks he did, I get that, but you got somewhere.  Kennet made being forsworn easier on you.  People went out of their way.  They were friendly.  Matthew giving you beer?”

“Pity.”

“Maybe some.  But a guy buying you nice beer?  That’s not just pity.”

“I had parents as bad as Verona’s.  I got bullied as much as you did.  Overlooked as much as Avery,” he growled the words.  “And the world gave me nothing!  Only what I could take, when taking was punished more often than not.  When what I earned was taken away!”

Lucy, on guard, kept pacing, mindful of where she could move if an attack came from one direction or another.

“I had no friends gifted to me!  I had no teacher to reach out!  I had no older brother or therapist, I had nothing!  I was low enough to be looked down on, but not so low I’d get outside help.  You’re saying that in my shoes, you wouldn’t go with what works?  Find a groove where there’s at least some friendship there, and cling to it for dear life?”

“I wouldn’t kill John.  I wouldn’t let the Choir carry on like it did.”

He scoffed.  He was pacing as well.

“I wouldn’t.  I’ve always had a firm sense of injustice.  Borders on revenge bullshit, at my worst, like with Paul.  But it’d run against who I am, to betray that side of me.”

“The original Alabaster?” he asked, wry.  “Fighting injustice?”

“She’d calcified until there wasn’t justice in what she was doing.  The opposite.”

He scoffed again.

“I wouldn’t have killed John, wouldn’t have let the Choir run rampant.”

“Are you baiting me to test you?” he asked.

“No.  Just… bears repeating.  Those were things you did.  Big ones.  Maybe they’re the things where, everything else aside… there were better ways.  They were where you really fucked up.  And after that, you became Carmine.  The Judges settle into grooves very easily, and you found that one.”

“Do you want me to say I’m sorry?” he asked.  “Should I tell you how very sorry and heartbroken I am, that I killed your soldier friend?”

“If you meant it, it’d be nice.”

“I wouldn’t mean it,” he replied.  “Not on the level you want me to mean it.  I’ve sat with those events too long, been through too much.  What I want to do, it’s too important.”

“Creating some fix-everything legacy version of yourself through this fucked little ritual, and you don’t even intend to see how successful it isn’t?”

“I could take or leave that last part,” he said.

“I think you secretly want to die or cease existing before it sees fruition.  Because that way, you get to go out imagining it eventually works out perfectly, it does everything you want, and that you win.  If you die to help it happen, you get to spend the final moments pretending your life meant something more than the blood, death, and misery you’ve spread so far.”

“Maybe,” he said.  “If Kennet’s gone and the region resettles, when practitioners have moved on, who’s going to remember you, Lucy Ellingson?  What would you be, besides maybe a girl someone went to school with once?  Avery Kelly can be remembered as a girl who burned bright and burned out fast, wiped away.  Remembered by some older Garricks.  Verona did something interesting and nobody ever wrote a full paper on it, so she becomes a name in the margins of a half-written book on Founding that nobody remembers unless they’re dusting book off a back room bookshelf.”

“Trying to twist that ‘you’re not real’ knife?” Lucy asked.

He raised one eyebrow, his voice a growl, “strikes me that you won’t be remembered for much more than having been my enemy.”

She took that in, no response ready.

“You’ll-”

“You always were really shortsighted.  It might be your biggest issue,” she told him.

“I have things to do.  A sword moot to crash.  I hope you get something out of the third part of the so-called Crucible,” Charles told her.

This era had books.  It was post-Seal.  Lucy wasn’t sure if that meant the gainsaying was back in effect.

Each stage had equipped them with familiar tools, those tools given at a rate and stage appropriate to the era.  So for the last era, things had been reduced down, but a token that summoned an Other was valid, as was a healing hedge magic as a close approximate of healing alchemy.

Here, she had a lot more.  Magic items.  Even spell cards, except without the rubber bands- they sat loose in her pocket.

She had her weapon ring.  Card in one hand, weapon ring slipped on, she lashed out.

Extending it to full length.  Before Charles could turn and disappear, she snapped it out, turning it into a whip mid-snap.

He turned his body to one side, avoiding the strike with his back still turned.

The window cracked, glass crashing inward.  Avery came swinging through on a makeshift rope- knotted sheet or curtain, by the looks of it.

Avery managed to catch her balance after two quick-stumbled steps, and then kicked.

Out of practice from soccer, so maybe not quite as strong as she might’ve been, but she had strong legs.  The top of her foot hit the rebar and drove it in another one or two inches into internal organs.

Charles doubled over in pain, retching.

“Grab it!” Lucy called out.

Avery did.  Until Charles swiped-

Gashwad and Snowdrop were clinging to Avery’s back, and Gashwad managed to grab on.

Charles disappeared, and he brought Gashwad with.

Lucy heard the scream upstairs.

Verona’s shout was muffled by the thick flooring and decorated ceiling above, but it was Verona.

Gashwad had alerted Avery and Verona.  Avery had come swinging down.  Verona was up there.

They had to move.

Lucy sprinted, Avery initially a step behind, then surpassing her.  A hand steered Lucy toward a stairwell Avery had already seen.

A door opened.

“Cousin, there are expectations of a lesser family member like you,” the teenager said.

Lucy put a hand on his face and shoved him back through the door as she ran by.

“Not playing his game anymore.  Can’t afford to keep getting pushed back, forced to play along, forced to figure out rules.”

“Agreed,” Avery said.

Up the stairs, into the new hallway.

Charles was vomiting from the renewed pain of the skewer, doubled over, distracted.

Lucy turned her weapon ring into a knife, and marked her palms with light scratches.  She reached for Avery.  Avery barely hesitated, though she glanced to one side.

Verona hurried over, marking her own palm.

Avery took Lucy’s right hand, Verona her left.

“Blood of heart,” Lucy murmured, raising the hands she was holding, leaning left, first, then right, to awkwardly hook elbow over Verona’s head.  Avery ducked her head down to help the process with her own.  Heads touched.  “Sweat of brow.”

Lucy’s eyes flashed red.

The others followed suit.  Lavender and green.

“Tears,” Avery and Verona said.  Lucy finished “-of something deeper.”

“Good sentiment,” Verona said.  “Why?”

“Because we want to be in sync, and I think that works for this era.”

“Valid,” Avery said.

“We stay on him.  Hold the skewer if you can.  No reprieve, no backing off and regrouping.  Stay.  He’s weaker, we might be able to pull it off.”

Charles spat out blood, then coughed.

“Keep him down,” Lucy said.

“You-” Charles grunted.  He growled in pain, stomach and chest thrust forward, and nearly fell as he twisted around, grabbing Gashwad off his back.  Gashwad had shivved him a few times.

He threw Gashwad sideways through a window, then coughed a few more times.

“Charles?”

The voice was soft.

Charles’ response was a breath with a bit of rasp and gurgle to it.

The Aurum.

“Don’t, Charles,” Lucy told him.  “Fast way to make your Crucible not work, I figure.”

“If it spits out a winner, I’ll let it,” the Aurum said.

“Why would he let it get that far!?” Verona called out.

“I’ll let it get that far,” the Aurum said.  “I said it so it is Law.”

“Good enough,” Charles managed.

“Yes?”

“Yes.  My power, my claim, from me to you.”

The red carpets turned gold.  The wood, with its cherry hues, turned to something darker, with gold threads accenting it.  Book covers and contents changed.  The lighting changed to something brighter, glittering.

“The Peterborough ex-Forsworn, the new Fae of a court yet to be defined, and some others,” the Aurum said.  “Oh, and we should get this trial in motion.”

The quiet manor burbled with faint conversation on other floors and other rooms.  Laughter.  Past the window, it ceased to be dark, the paths lit up by lamps.  Occupied by some scattered, strange Others and practitioners.

Charles managed to straighten, smiling.  He spread his hands.

“Plan remains the plan,” Lucy said.  The world beyond the window bloomed with light and new life.  Fae were coming in through the front gates, into an open entrance garden with waiting family members.  Lucy focused her gaze on Charles.

She saw his expression change, in response to the words and the steady gaze.

“Keep Charles down.  We deal with what comes.”

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