Author: Wildbow

Finish Off – 24.17 | Pale

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“What did I do?” Avery asked, her heart hammering, feeling sick, paralyzed with dread.

“It’s already been stated,” the Aurum replied, calm.

“Charles,” Avery said.

Charles shifted position, eyes still on the fire.

“Charles, what did I do to deserve this?” she asked.  “I’ve tried to be a good person, I’ve tried to build something.  I’ve- I know I’m shortsighted sometimes, I’ve kept secrets from my girlfriend, I stressed my parents out so much, I called my brother a penis, I let my opossum eat too much.”

“This isn’t relevant,” the Aurum told her.

“Why isn’t it?  Isn’t that the whole point?  I don’t- I don’t think I’m a bad person.  I try to make the world better.  I try to change what’s broken.  I don’t know if I’m always good at it, but I try.  What did I do?”

“You broke an oath,” the Aurum said.

“Does that deserve me being forsworn for the rest of my life?  Sixty years of hell?”

“More, I’m guessing,” Charles growled the words, eyes on the fire.  “The Crucible will run for a while.  You’ve skipped over parts, you saw a sketch of what it’s meant to be.  The currents of this river don’t tug at you and force you into scenarios.  The price of entering didn’t wear you down to your core Self.  Most will fail.  For a hundred, maybe two hundred years, they’ll fail.”

“And I’m here?”

“That’s my assumption.  The Aurum may make adjustments, but without any changes, you’ll be unaging, observing.”

“I don’t see any reason to change it,” the Aurum added, casually.

“Charles,” Avery said.  She walked forward.  The centipede moved, sweeping through the space between her and the chair Charles was sitting in.  It blocked her from getting too close, the edges of the shells like blades, the spindly legs like rapiers.  “Charles.  Up until now, you’ve held back.  You- it’s like you want to not hold back.  You want to be vicious and kill us and be done with a problem, but you hold back.  Why?  You’re fond of us?”

“You’re karma’s unwitting agents, fueled by karma, nudged by it, helped by it.  If I could get you on my side, if I could get you to compromise or see my way as necessary, then that means Karma’s finally letting old grudges go.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“There’s more to it than that.  Verona’s everything I liked in Alexander.  The kind of person I wish I could have been friends with.  Lucy’s… the kind of person I wish I was.  Sharper, more aware, more driven in fixing what I want to fix.”

“Carmine,” the Aurum said.  “This isn’t productive.”

“What am I?” Avery asked.

“The girl I had a crush on,” Charles said.

“Um, ew,” Avery said.  “And also, ew?  Ew.”

“Not like that,” Charles said.

“I really hope not like that.  Ew.  Gross.”

He chuckled, low, rueful.  “I wonder if Karma put that arrow in your quiver.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Summer camp, first year of high school.  We took a boat to get to the campground, big sailing ship.  She was there, I was thrilled.  I’d had a crush on her through all of middle school.  Not quite my first crush, but close.  Bright orange hair, dyed, raver look to her, massive jeans with legs so wide you could put both legs in them, covered in patches.  Melanie.”

“Carmine,” the Aurum said.

Charles waved him off.  “I wandered, and there were kids below deck on the boat, on the dock down the path from the campgrounds.  There was a boy, heavy boy, with one of the three girls at the camp.  Sitting in his lap.  Melanie was there too, talking to them, staying away from the boys who’d been calling her flat chested.  Girl in big boy’s lap says they’re going to make out, Melanie, why don’t you sit in Charles’ lap?  Melanie, nice, and bright and attention grabbing, says ‘gross’.”

He shifted position, groaning.

“Me, with my acne, poor, wearing clothes handed down from my cousin to another cousin, then to me, holes near the collar, no self esteem, I’m all ‘okay.  Makes sense.’  Said sorry, got up and walked away.”

“I’m sorry,” Avery said.  She considered for a second.  “For the Charles back then.”

“No, no, see, didn’t even hurt, then.  Because everything hurt.  Even back then.  Drop of water in the ocean.  That’s what I’m saying, when I say I’ve never had a shot.  Every interaction, it felt like, was like that.  Me with no defenses, no barriers, no coping skills, just… a ‘gross’, right to the soul.  Absorbed.  And I maintained my crush on her for years, thought she was great.  She brightened the room.  Something to look forward to.”

“She was your Pam.”

“I’d rate her higher, personally,” he said, smiling with one side of his mouth, as he glanced over.  He looked away at the look on Avery’s face.  “I don’t have a crush on you, Avery Kelly.  But you have a light to you that reminds me of a bright person in brighter- only brighter days, because they were less dark.  If I’ve given you one too many chances, maybe it’s because I don’t want to extinguish that light.”

“Am I meant to be the one who’s serious here, not going off on tangents?” the Aurum asked.  “It doesn’t suit me.  But I think it’s time to see this through.”

“Is this part of the Crucible?” Avery asked.  “Part of the game?  A fake Forswearing?”

“No.  It’s as real as Seth’s, Griffin’s, Yiyun’s, the Peterborough Forsworn,” Charles said.

“Then I want real procedure.  If I’m accused of failing Verona then let’s bring Verona in-”

“No need,” the Aurum said.  “That’s theater, convention adopted and accepted because it makes an appeal less likely.  It’s unnecessary.  We can read Verona’s heart and her mind-”

“Like the Alabaster Doe was conveying to the Assembly, when we challenged her?  Being selective?  No!  I challenge this!  We’re part of a unit, we did the awakening ritual together, we touched based with blood, sweat, and tears earlier!  We’re a team of three!  That’s a contract we made with the universe!”

The centipede’s body shifted, forcing her to take a step back, which almost walked her into more, which forced her to take a step sideways.

“It’s Law,” she said, back to a wall.

“But by being accused of being forsworn, that contract is in question,” the Aurum said.  “Especially when the other two are accused as well.”

He met Charles’ eyes.

Avery did too.  “Go to hell.  That Melanie girl, I bet if she could look through time and space and see all this, I bet she’d hate you like I do, I bet she’d be disgusted, Charles.  You’re actually gross, now.  You’re sick, Charles, there’s something wrong with you.”

Charles barely flinched at her words.  Something unspoken seemed to pass between Aurum and Carmine.

“You kill light wherever you go!”

“Go, be free my pretties, unbind and release any Others who were created more than two days ago,” Verona said, tearing out the pages.  “Don’t suppose any of you can break into a Carmine-sealed room?”

“What Others even could?” Lucy asked.

“I couldn’t name specific ones, but there’s a whole ecosystem of Others who deal with like, moving into pocket worlds, demiurgic Creations, fountainhead universes.  Some who usurp control from existing ones.  Remember when I told you about that one girl who showed up for the Aurum contest, when Avery got shot?”

“Okay, wait, hold on?”

“I looked into her situation, started wondering if she was a resident of a pocket world that got usurper-ed.”

“Do you have any ability to find these Others?  Or what books to look for?”

“I think they’re sorted regionally.  Needles in haystacks.”

“Then is it that important?” Lucy asked.

“Can’t hurt to ask?” Verona replied.  “I can’t think of many better ways.”

“Shit.  Yeah.”

“Avery’s thing, she’s talked about how Path stuff can drop you in places it shouldn’t.  She even dropped in on one of the Judges once, without making the twenty-four hour trip.  So… realm-traversing others?  Lost?”

“Not exactly common.  Better bet is a Garrick,” Lucy said.

“Meaning we leave the Crucible altogether, get one, and then aim to come back in,” Verona said.  “That seems hard.  Getting out, to start with.”

“He said we head in one direction and keep going.  He left us that option.”

“But how long does that take?  Especially if this place is expanding out over Ontario?  And then you gotta contact a Garrick, gotta find the right Path to drop you specifically to that room with Avery.  And we don’t know what’s going on in there, so what do the Garricks even aim for?”

“Fuck!” Lucy swore.

The Others they’d let out were a bit of a buffer, and Avery had exploded a whole core of the group, mostly the Peterborough ex-forsworn, with the Crash Course stuff, but the school was full of students, and there were other things than practitioners around.

A fairy at the end of the hallway flew over, touched down on a window, and was light enough that she could more or less hang off that surface, sliding down gradually.  Her eyes were amber in the relaxed interior lighting.

She pointed a tiny hand at Verona and Lucy.

A moment later, a Faerie rounded the corner at the end of the hallway, brown-hair loose, except for one intricate braid with thorns and flowers woven into it.  She was wearing a dress that looked like a length of cloth that had a really detailed pattern of amber flower petals on a dark brown background, clutched closed at the upper chest with one hand, while the other hand dangled.  The folds and draping cloth fell in line with her body.  Her eyes looked perpetually closed, overlong lashes draping her cheekbones.

Multiple fairies fluttered in to land on her shoulder and the surrounding surfaces.

“Shoot,” Lucy muttered.

The Faerie raised a hand, pointing, with fingernails like amber with lights behind them.  All the fairies took off, flying in a formation.  As the Faerie woman moved her hands, the formation changed.

Lucy and Verona ran, Lucy tugging Verona behind.

They turned the corner at the far end of the hallway, fairies right behind them, and the fairies exploded into little clouds of glamour and amber flower petals on impact with the wall, painting a picture- a door.

The Faerie woman stepped out of that door, as a shortcut.

“Toadswallow Toadswallow Toadswallow!” Verona shouted, as Lucy called for Bubbleyum.

“Snowdrop Snowdrop Snowdrop!” Verona added, for good measure.

Snowdrop hadn’t been far away.  At this part of the hallway, in this maze-like place, there were two of the Others they’d released a minute ago, going through books.

“Careful!” Lucy warned them, touching an arm as she went by.

Snowdrop got to them first, appearing at a broken window, arms cradled to her body.  “Hey!  Forget the Avery situation-”

“We know, Snow!” Lucy said.

“-we’re free of her, no having to keep her in mind-”

“We know!  But help!”

Snowdrop dumped an armload of little goblins through the open window.

“Go, and keep blasting, little ones!  Throw away your lives even after you’ve blown your loads, hold the line!”

Each had something from the market.  They tried their best to line up, which involved some scrambling to make room for one, who didn’t see and went the long way around.  One saw three moving his way and seemed to assume they were running for it, dropping the slingshot that was nearly as big as he was, which made others hurry to catch him, steering him back.  One picked up the slingshot, which provoked a fight.

“Ready!” Verona called out, pulling into an alcove by a door, with a shelf of bottled herbs beside her.  Goblins heard and got ready.  The two fighting over the slingshot worked together, one holding it, the other pulling the shot back.

“Aim!”

They raised tools and weapons.

“Fire!”

They released.  One held on too long to a firecracker, getting thrown about ten feet toward the incoming Faerie and flock of fairies.  Others fired off another firework, a  blowgun made of a meth pipe, which the goblin put its entire face into, a Babette doll with legs fused together with a lighter, razors fused into the arms the same way, hooked up to a helicopter toy with a pull string, another Babette doll’s head with something jammed in the head, so it could be flung forward by the ponytail.

“Now hold the line!” Snowdrop cried out through the window, before ducking and running as a fairy flew by it.

A bulk of fairies in the flock flew toward the spinning Babette doll, audibly cooing, and got cut up by the razors of the helicopter ‘arms’.  More would’ve been caught, but it lost all momentum.  One or two began spinning as fast as they could in the air, mimicking the helicopter twirl.

The goblin who’d been flung forward was descended on by some of the remaining fairies.  She shrieked as dashes of glamour were thrown at her, coloring her pastel.  One fairy cast out a trailing ribbon, while doing a little rhythmic gymnastics dance, catching the goblin at the neck.  The goblin shrieked.

Verona had spell cards ready, to be backup to their backup, and threw one down.  “Catch!”

She threw the card straight down.

The goblin had a half-second of a frustrated look on her face, an unspoken ‘how can I catch that!?’ and then the card produced its wind.

Verona felt the energy for that wind being pulled out of her.

The discarded weapon was blown by the wind.  It was a confetti popper, with a ring tab at the back, that looked like it had been left near the pumps at a gas station, stained with exhausted and grossness.  The goblin caught it, fumbled with it, and used one foot to pull on the ring tab, moving face away from the opening.

Verona looked over her shoulder as she ran for it.

There was no confetti inside.  It sent out a shotgun spray of razor blades, aimed indiscriminately at the air above and behind the goblin’s shoulder, where the opening rested.

It was enough for the goblin to shred the ribbon, take out a few of its pursuers, scare the rest, and fling itself into a gap beneath the shelving unit the jars of herbs were on.

There were more scattered fairies in the hallways.  Some were working on the containers of plants, jugs of flowers, and pots of what looked like wheat stalks, mostly yellow and gold, making the vegetation grow out.

The Faerie with the amber nails stepped out of the thickest outgrowth, followed by a dozen more fairies.  She had a few nicks and cuts, and one hypodermic needle stuck in her shoulder.

She raised a hand, nails flicking upward, and Verona’s eyes went wide.

She didn’t want them to go wide.  She saw Lucy beside her, in the same state.

The hand flicked down.  Verona’s eyes shut.

Little fairies shrieked their joy as they descended, while Verona was effectively blind.

Lucy tugged on her.  “Bubbleyum!  Here!”

“Don’t go summonin’ a lady and runnin’ off!”

“Sorry!”

Verona heard a crash behind her, where the faerie had been.  She reached for her bag, pulling it around in front, got water, and splashed her face.

Lucy was blind, but navigating as if she wasn’t, head moving at odd angles, eyes shut.

Verona splashed Lucy’s face with the water that remained.  She mostly got one side, one eye.

“Thank you,” Lucy said, wiping at her eyes.  She managed to get one open.

“Would’ve used a spell card but there’s a chance I would’ve blown us up,” Verona said, swinging the empty container at a grouping of fairies like a club.  “Your lady!  She’s under attack!” Verona called out.

The fairies turned in the air.

“Sorry, Bubbles!” Lucy called out.

Bubbleyum managed a ‘that’s okay’ wink.

Lucy and Verona ran for it.  The faerie was put on her heels by Bubbleyum, sending fairies away, when they didn’t seem to understand why they were being sent away.

Bubbleyum’s bubblegum popped, and it caught the fairies who hadn’t pulled away enough.  The Faerie counted with a stirring of flower petals that blocked the worst of it, causing it to gum up and then collapse into a pile between her and Bubbleyum.

The smallest goblins from the barrage earlier were running around, and Verona could see as one fairy plucked the hypodermic needle from out of her mistress, and soared downward, stabbing a small goblin.

Bubbleyum’s eyes widened a fraction at that, eyes flitting from that tiny moment to the Faerie with the closed eyes and amber nails.  The Faerie smiled.

Bubbleyum, planting feet firmly in the thickest patch of flower petals, skidded it to the side, twisting her foot, and flicked her toe backwards, sending the resulting powdered glamour over at the fairy-goblin interaction.  A mess of flower petals and other substances washed over the pair, sending the fairy into a wall, where it stuck.

The Faerie pushed bubbleyum away, and Verona had to pull back on Lucy’s arm to avoid being pulled around the corner to see what happened next.

The Faerie pushed a finger to her lips, holding it there in a ‘shush’ gesture.

Bubbleyum, tense, looked back over her shoulder, at where Toadswallow had waddled up.  His eye was a glare.  He held a finger to his lips.

Bubbleyum backed a step away, closer to him.

The Faerie glanced over at Verona and Lucy, a light smile on her face, finger still there.

Verona put her finger to her lips.

The Faerie turned, walking back into the copse of overgrown jars of flowers and decorative wood that had taken over part of one wall.  A beckoning finger called fairies to follow.

The second last fairy to go- the one who hadn’t been plastered to the wall by Bubbleyum, was embracing the Babette doll with the razors melted into the plastic of the arms.  It flashed a fanged smile at them before trotting through.

When the Fae and fairy presence was gone and the vegetation started to shed, Toadswallow swore, “Shitfuck it!  Incestuous gods fuck it like they fuck everything else!”

“He’s mad?” Verona asked.  “But, isn’t that good?  I’m not sure I fully understood what happened there.  She’s figured out the eighth court thing too, right?”

“It’s competition,” Lucy said.

“Tell the little ones they did a good job, Toads!” Verona called out.

“Yeh!  Get on top of the Avery sitch!” he barked back, clearly still pissed.

“Okay,” Lucy said, leaning back against a wall, where she had a view down both hallways.  Verona leaned into the corner, facing Lucy.  Lucy stared at Verona, rubbing at the one eye until it opened fully.  “How?”

“How do we get to Ave?”

“Would be nice to do.  Pulling random Others from books and hoping we can get one that can crack base level Law security with a powerful Carmine backing it feels like a long shot.”

“Because it is a long shot.”

“You two worry the shit out of me,” Lucy said.  “For very different reasons.  Avery getting into shit, you’re playing games with terminal levels of bullshit.”

“Yeah.”

“Sure would be nice if the two could meet.  We need bullshit.”

“I’m thinking…” Verona said, and she half meant her head was working on the problem, but also that the tip of her mental tongue might have something.

The Faerie in charge of the flock… what Avery had been talking about before.

She’d done a little ritual before, using her Peddler cards, to give herself some bureaucratic know-how, the ability to sort out papers, taxes, organize systems.  She used it for her library.

Here, thinking about hierarchies, about power, about organization… was there a logic to how all of this was laid out?

Maybe.  “Map?”

“Map,” Lucy said.  “Of?”

“Area.  What the Crucible is laid over.”

“On it.”

Verona pulled a book from the bookshelf, flipping through it.  She dropped it on the floor, did another.

She found one.  “Here.  So… hallway back there, where we released the two car spirits, the crash spirit, and the goblins.”

She drew a line.

“They came from those regions?” Lucy asked.  “You’re reading these entries as you go through them?”

“We have to skim them to make sure we’re not bringing in hostile Others that Charles created just to bog us down and protect his encampment here, right?  I caught stuff while reading that.”

“Right,” Lucy said.  “I didn’t.”

“Well, that’s why you have me.  Look, here, almost parallel, that’s the other hallway.  And about two thirds of the way down that hallway-” Verona drew a short little line.  “We found Bubbleyum.”

Lucy put a fingernail up to that little line.  “That’s close to the site of the fighting.  So where you are in the school is related a bit to where you are on the peninsula?”

“Kind of.  But then upstairs, there was a bigger mix, some overview…” Verona drew a large oblong circle around a region. “Or fatter line, I guess, more coverage.  Top floor.”

“Top floor?”

“Top floor,” Verona said.  “My best guess.  Or basement, but I think it’s the top floor.”

“Okay,” Lucy said.

“Snow!” Verona called out.  “Coming!?”

Snowdrop had to get through a window, but she managed, and then she was running behind them.  All that time with Avery meant the opossum was pretty good at running around.

The stairs were what killed Verona.  It was four flights, she could haul on the railing for a bit of extra help, but it required muscles she didn’t use as often, and she was already exhausted, having spent Self on the spell cards, too.

She kind of wished she’d scavenged some glamour to turn herself into a cat, to be carried.

At the top floor, it was something like a headmaster’s office, administrative office, or a clocktower with no clock, just a large window.  Staff were there, sorting things out.

“If you have an appointment-”

Verona hucked a spell card, producing an explosion of craggy rock that upended a desk and sent the staff member flying.  It also broke wood and cleared a way past the desks and barriers meant to keep students separate from the administrative backend.

The strength went out of her legs, and she was stopped from falling by the support of Lucy and Snowdrop.

“Go!” Lucy warned, drawing a weapon.  She brandished it.  Staff members backed away, and Lucy swiped the weapon, turned it into a whip, and cracked it.  “Now!”

The staff vacated the area.

Verona could feel how Lucy’s ability to hold her up suffered a bit with that use of the weapon ring.

“They’re calling security.  Practitioners who can fight.  We don’t have long,” Lucy said.

Miss was out there, free, and had grown large.  Foundlings that had been at the peninsula milled around her, with one riding on her shoulders.  Miss walked by the glass, and Verona felt like she’d seen them in there.  It helped Verona feel more secure.

She worked her way toward the back, looking.

“Here,” Verona said.  There were bookshelves and more books, tucked behind cabinets and things.

There had to be a logic for how things were laid out, and the top floor had the biggest view of things.  So if there was a view of the crucible as an overall region, with what Avery had talked about, with the levers and pulleys, or the books that covered how the Crucible worked, its rules, its particulars, then… here seemed good.

“Back office?” Lucy asked, pointing.

“Go, be careful.  I’m thinking, Avery was at the… if this is north, she was at the southwest end of the school when they locked her in.”

Verona moved her finger around, settling on filing cabinets in the southwest end of the office.  Lucy didn’t immediately enter the office, but scribbled something on spell cards and put them against the doorframe.  Seals, maybe.  They looked like Law stuff.  Maybe taught by Sebastian.

Hauling open the drawer of the filing cabinet, Verona found papers and books.  If everything was codified and organized, then maybe even the sealing of the room Avery was in was part of the filing system here.  It got close to being recursive at that point, suggesting there was a book about the book with the filing system, and a book about that book, but she didn’t care.

Blank.  Scribblings that she might’ve mistaken for Faerie writing, but there was no cohesion, no pattern.  She flipped toward the back.  It got worse toward the back.

“Weird.  Luce!?”

Verona turned just in time to see Lucy walking into the office.

The entire scene Lucy was walking into shattered like glass, panes breaking away and falling to the ground- same as when Verona had painted a picture of Kennet to lure John further away from it all, end of Summer.

Except Lucy walked straight out a window, the windowsill catching her at the knees.

She managed to catch herself.

“Lucy!”

Verona was stopped as a Faerie stepped into view.  The one from earlier.

“You,” Verona said.

“You.”

“Elp!” Lucy shouted, trying to get an elbow over the windowsill.

Snowdrop ran over to her and offered assistance.  “Anyone but Miss, anyone but Miss, anyone but Miss!”

The shattering of the glamour suggested an entirely different layout to the administrative office.  The book with the scribbled writing disintegrated in Verona’s hand.  Fakery.

She quickly brought her hand to her mouth, finger there in a ‘shush’ gesture.

The Fae let out a little half-laugh.  “No.  Do you even know what it means?”

“Some idea.  If I’m building a nuke in my backyard and you’re building a nuke in your backyard and we both run into each other in the store with the same things in our shopping carts… we might not be friends, but neither of us wants to blow the lid off the fact it’s possible, right?”

“In a sense, except for two things.”

“Oh no.”

He smiled.  “I don’t like you.  You opposed my Maricica.”

“And I don’t think you’re in a position to ‘blow the lid’ off of anything.”

The scene continued to disintegrate.  Verona was the one inside the office, now.  No seals on the door, either.

There was a feeling of vertigo, like she’d just gotten out of a car that had been moving very fast, and the world was rushing in toward her.  Or rushing away.  The Faerie was at the center of that.

Either way, it was a warped picture before the Aurum’s centipede coils slammed into the door, closing it.  The body of the centipede pressed against the door to bar it closed.

Verona turned.

Charles was there, by the window, one hand at his side by the stab wound.  The Aurum settled in, seated on his centipede’s head, the centipede body spiraling out across the room, gleaming and dangerous, shell and legs making navigation hard.

“This is what you did to Avery?”

“Avery’s in progress as you are,” the Carmine said.  “Facets of ourselves are with her right now.”

“What’s in progress?” she asked, though she already suspected.

Charles stood a little straighter, wincing at the pain of the skewer.  “Verona Hayward.  For your oath made to Lucy Ellingosn, that you would try harder, to maintain your friendship.  I call you Forsworn.”

There it was.  She felt numbness creep over her.  Like being stuck in her dad’s room, times a hundred.

“Bull,” Verona said, voice soft.

Think your way out of this, Ronnie.  Defy assumptions.

“Betrayed in spirit, when that oath was made with the implication you’d maintain what you had in childhood, with hugs and openness.  Betrayed in other ways, when you found yourselves at odds over your handling of Jeremy Clifford over that summer.”

Verona turned on the spot, hopping to get past part of the centipede’s body, and get closer to the bookshelf.

The coils moved to block her.  She tried to work past them, groping for a book on the bookshelf.  She was blocked again.

“Your response?”

“Where are the Sable or Alabaster?”

“They have no say over this realm.”

“I say that sets up some really bad, what’sitcalled?  Precedent.  You start letting that happen-”

“It’s happening,” the Aurum intoned.

“-that gets messy fast.  No.  I categorically refuse to recognize your authority unless it’s a fair forswearing.”

“We have that authority, whether you like it or not.”

“In a kangaroo court?  No, I call B.S., this shit gets undone the second I appeal it.”

“We don’t plan on letting you leave the Crucible anytime soon, after this,” Charles said.  “We’ll keep you separate from your friends, sealed in a different era of the Crucible.”

She lunged, belly resting against the centipede’s shell for a second, and caught a book off the bookshelf.

The Aurum was snatching it out of her hand before she’d even put feet back onto ground.  He re-shelved it.

She threw herself forward again, aiming for more books.  She was blocked.

“Perhaps a change of venue,” the Aurum said.

“Let’s,” the Carmine replied.

The centipede’s coils unfurled, then raced by, sawed through wood, book, and other materials.  Whole columns and sections of centipede body that were flying by at hundreds of miles an hour sparked as they touched one another.  Sawdust, parchment, and sparks filled the air, blended, while Verona remained where she was, tense.

Part of the forswearing process was you couldn’t call a forswearing and then hurt the person you called out.  Otherwise, the best response to a forswearing would be an all-out offense, murdering the person calling you out before they could string enough words together.  The process of calling this out brought out a whole bunch of points of Law and everything else, securing things.

Which was what she was relying on, going for the books.  It also tied her hands, keeping her from hurting them.

Not that she was sure she could.

The dust cloud settled.  Verona was standing on the rocky plain of the first trial, with its primevals and everything else.

She took a step and didn’t age, because yeah, that had to be a protection too.  Couldn’t call a forswearing in the middle of a collapsing building or thunderstorm and hope your target had less ability to hold up to a collapse or avoid a lightning strike than you did.  There was some wiggle room in that, sometimes the target of the forswearing had to call out for protection… but these were Others of Law.

Another assumption to break: that she was stuck in this meeting.  They’d relocated, there were no walls here, just empty plains.  Which meant… Shit.

She ran.  The last thing she wanted to do, the last thing she was good at.

She was on the primal plains, surrounded by billowing dust, she could leap over the centipede’s coils, trusting that rule about nonviolence.

If she could get to the edge of this space…

Out to the Garricks.  Maybe- maybe there was a Path that took someone to a friend.  Or to someone they had a crush on.  Would fit the Paths, some bullshit like being dropped out of some Valentines themed bullshit and in front of a crush, where your pants would always fall down, or something.

Get Jude to make that noble sacrifice, get to Avery.

Something.  Anything.

Anything was better than standing still, letting this fucked up authority have any sway over her.

The centipede’s length raced past her, then turned, forming a hurdle.  She leaped it with tired legs, and fell.

It pressed down toward her, and she managed to squirm free.  She didn’t meet the Aurum or Carmine’s hands, didn’t acknowledge, only ran.  Away from the mountain, at the center of this.

“You’re being ridiculous.”

A length of centipede’s coils blocked her way.  She went under.  Two more parts blocked her way, so she ran to the side until there was enough of a gap to go between.

“Do you have any conception of how far you’d have to run?  Nearly two days of walking unimpeded, to get from here to the edge of the Crucible.  By the time you get that far, we’ll have Toronto, making it closer to three days.”

She ignored him.

“And what does that get you?  What does that achieve?” the Aurum asked.  “This is a realm we arbitrate.”

The entire world went dark, the gold gleaming, the stars moving.

Putting her back at the foot of the mountain.  Start of that journey.  Something he could do any number of times.

She broke into a run again, and centipede coils descended around her, forming a ring.

She squeezed between two lengths of centipede, and, out of frustration or maybe even cruelty, the Aurum brought the two parts together, the edges of the centipede body sharp.  Verona braced two forearms against the descending part, and felt it bite into flesh, while the part beneath her back cut into her shoulder.

She screamed, then turned that pain into a scream of rage.

So harm was possible.

She used her own blood to draw a triangle on shell.

“At the behest of a Lord or Judge, practice may be denied to involved parties, while a forswearing accusation is in progress.  Else the threat of being practiced against might discourage rightful forswearing.  No.”

“Aurum.”

It was Charles speaking.

“Another change of venue.  I’ve prepared-”

“I see them.”

The lights went out again.

She’d thought if she practiced enough, she could knock herself unconscious.  If she was unconscious, proceedings couldn’t continue.  If Avery’s was in progress, instead of being finished, there had to be a reason.

She was still bleeding a lot.  Cuts on her forearms, bone deep.  Cut at her back, she didn’t know how deep.

The lights came back on again.  They were in the second era.  Some temple building, the tribes, the simple constructions.

Hands grabbed her, pulling her back, toward a chair.  She fought.  She managed to get her arm free of one grip, and the slickness of blood meant her arm slid out of a second attempt to grab on.

She kicked at one leg, and when the woman bent over, Verona grabbed onto hair, hauling the woman backwards, into the chair they were trying to pin her down to.  When she was resting against the chair, she became something for Verona to pull against, to pull herself forward, out of other grips.

She saw a glimpse of the tattoo behind the ear.

They were her people.  Her tribe.

Used against her now.

“Settle down,” another woman told her.

Verona screamed, and her emotions were a confused, vented mess that left her unsure if it was fear or rage or other pent up things.  Fear at losing magic, the only thing that had made her feel worthwhile, prior to the Awakening ritual, except being Lucy’s friend.

Losing her friends, and feeling something that would -no offense to Mal or Anselm- would dwarf those feelings.

Mal and Anselm.  The other Undercity people.  People she’d worked with, fought like hell to get into alignment, cooperation.  Others who hadn’t even been killed had lost people close to them.  She hadn’t even dipped her toes into how bad that would be, and it scared her.

She might never get to, and that scared her more.

She screamed again, before she’d even finished finding the breath after the last one.

“Settle-” a hand was clamped over her mouth.

She shook her head until a tooth went over the ridge of flesh between thumb and finger, and she bit.

Clawed.  Fingernails aiming to do as much damage as possible to hand and flesh.

They let go of her, and she hit the floorboards.  There was enough blood at her back that she slid a foot- or it felt like it.

Flipping over, pulling off the hammock-like handbag, she closed the distance on Charles, swinging the bag toward that spike.  To hurt.

The centipede slid past her, at shin level, and tripped her.

Charles stared her down from behind a growing protective cover of the centipede’s coils.

She switched direction, going for the nearest bookshelf.  Two members of her tribe grabbed her.

She wanted to scream without inhaling, over and over, until she blacked out.  Because that postponed, that bought time, because it beat the alternative.

The weight of bodies pinning her down to the floor made it hard to get a full scream out.  Her body reflexively pulled in breaths.  Her arms were pinned.  Someone pressed a rune-marked bandage to the arms, and it wrapped automatically around her arm, staunching the bleeding.

She clawed at the bandage, to pull it off.

“She can’t stop fighting because if she does, she’ll collapse,” Charles said.

“I want… advocate,” she gasped out the words.  “Lucy.”

“No need for an advocate.”

“You fucker!” she shouted.  The way people were beside her, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes not, it meant sometimes she had more air, sometimes less.  Pain from an arm wrenched around her back or a sliced up forearm being pressed hard into floor interrupted her thoughts.  “My friends.  You killed so many people.  How do you do that?  You monster.  Mal, Anselm, Ramjam, Butty.  They started out shitty but they made the world better.  How do you take that and shit all over it?”

Her voice cracked at that last bit.  She tried to scream, but there wasn’t enough there, so it became a moan.

“My house.  I built up that house, I fought to make it mine, I put so much of myself in it.  So many memories in it.  Practice stuff in it.  My bookstore.  How do you destroy that?  Why would you destroy it!?  Your entire thing is summoning, you fuckass!  How do you see these things where someone’s taking the raw materials they got and making something cool, Kennet Below, the house, Kennet found, the markets, my badass fuck-off practices, and destroy it, fight it, smother it all under this bullshit!?”

“Put her in the chair,” the Aurum said.

The moment she was off the ground, she was fighting again, scratching, trying to bite, pulling away.   “Where’s your artist side, Chuckles!?  Where’s that love for something well made, Chuckles!?  Do you even know anymore, Chuckles?”

“Let’s get the third one,” the Aurum said.  “Initiate proceedings here.”

“Fuck your proceedings!  I do not recognize you!  This is a sham!”

“You make the world less bright.  I like exploring places, I thought maybe the primal realm was cool.  But it’s not, is it?  It’s the primevals that are cool, it’s the Titans, but you made a wasteland.  You made a historical city that doesn’t make sense!  There’s no sense of history!”

“It serves its purpose.”

“It’s awkward and lame.  And then, you make this place?  This school?  You named a head of a faction Albus Lionheart?”

Avery’s laugh rang through the room.

“If we brought that Melanie here, and we showed her how you’re crushing out the light in all these good people, all these good things, what would she say?  You’re doing all this damage, but it’s for a good cause?  Confronting a broken system?”

“Yes.”

“Making a legacy, some big fancy Solomon-tier practitioner to lead the world into a new age?”

“Yes.  That is the idea.”

“And you’re doing it with this?  Kickcan Alley had more depth than this.  A Path where you kick a can down an alley.  This is a sham, Charles, and I say that as someone who likes realms and figuring things out.  A cheesy embarrassment of a ritual like this is going to give you a cheesy embarrassment of a legacy.  Tell me I’m lying, tell me I don’t truly believe my words.”

“There’s bias at play.”

“Sham,” Avery said.  “Sham trial, sham Judge, sham ritual, sham legacy.  If this ritual is this flawed, how is your Solomon going to hold up?”

“The Carmine Exile is not the one on trial,” the Aurum said.  “Let’s move on.”

“Should be,” Avery said.  “Should be on trial.”

“You’re worse than Alexander,” Verona gasped, almost seeming to have a seizure as she went from being limp to struggling to get out of the chair, three members of her tribe holding her down.  “Worse than Bristow.  Worse than Musser.”

“Thank you,” Lucy said, as Miss appeared, saving her from her position, dangling outside the window.  Snowdrop hopped onto Miss’s provided forearm.

“I’m not much of a fighter.  I’m glad to help,” Miss said.  Her hair blew in the wind, and with her being four stories tall, it felt like a lock of hair moving the wrong way could send Lucy flying.

“Go small?” Lucy asked, hugging Snowdrop.

“Squeeze me harder,” Snowdrop said, before becoming an opossum.

“Sorry,” Lucy replied, whisper-quiet.  Her stomach lurched as Miss moved, walking around the perimeter of the school.  “I need to not be alone.  It’s when we’re separated that they snatch us up.”

“Were you able to find a way to get to them?” Miss asked.

“No.  Verona had an idea, but then they cornered us.  Glamour trick and a slammed door.  That room got sealed off.  One with, I think it’s a library like yours.  Codifying this place.”

“I see.”

Miss didn’t have more to volunteer.

“The sealed off spaces are a problem.  I don’t know if he’s fighting them in there.”

“If he is, take it as some consolation that he hasn’t decisively won yet, and those places remain sealed.”

“Can you use Founder stuff to crack the space?” Lucy asked.  “Or maybe, since Verona talked about usurpers and Others who infect spaces-”

“A concern I’ve had in mind for my own realm, yes.”

“-Montague?  Turtle Queen?”

“Recovering.  But as the Crucible expands, they may be drawn in nonetheless.”

“I’m wondering if the thing to do is press some kind of attack, some kind of assault on this impregnable, Law-reinforced room.  It’s like the space they sealed Edith in, right?”

“Costs Karma to attack it, if I remember right,” Miss said.  “Enough it could end you.”

“It’d at least stop Charles from saying we’re where we are because of karma, that what we did didn’t count, to the point we’re not real.”

“Would it?  He seems to be past the point of seeing reason.”

“Being stabbed does that?” Lucy asked, shrugging.  “I’m really glad you’re not talking in riddles and convoluted sentences anymore, Miss.”

“As am I.  I’m just as glad I’m secure enough as a Founder that I can help without worrying about being pulled into this place’s sway.  While we’re on the subject of help, where do you want to be put, Lucy?”

“I…” Lucy looked down.  She leaned back into Miss’s arm, taking weight off her feet.  She felt like she could succumb to exhaustion in a few seconds, if she let herself.  Every bone was tired, every muscle firm and protesting.  Her lungs hurt, her eyes hurt.  She had so many cuts and scratches and the idea of having to deal with those made her soul hurt.

And she’d suffer all of that ten times over if it meant she could rescue her friends.

“I need to help them, and I think the way we do that… I need to walk away from this fight.”

“You want me to withdraw you?”

“Move as far away from the center, as fast as possible.  Snowdrop?  You can come, but-”

“Leaving Avery?” Snowdrop asked.  “It’s all I’ve wanted, since the Forest Ribbon Trail.”

“Okay.  Can you let the others know why I left?  That I think there are better resources outside than inside?”

“Heck no,” Snowdrop said.

“Good,” Lucy replied.

“I can’t give you a hand down, but if you grab my hair…” Miss said.

“That’s useful,” Snowdrop said.  “But screw you.  I hope they get you both and do something horrible to you, and I’ll get to fulfill my job of being a sacrificial animal dying in the worst way, and as a bonus, Avery gets got.”

“Yeah, Snow,” Lucy said, tapping fist to Snowdrop’s shoulder.

Snowdrop took a backwards swan dive off out of Miss’s arms.  Or it would have been a swan dive, if it was anything graceful.  She hit the ground, bounced to her feet, and scampered into the fray, because Snowdrop could scamper, even when human.

“Let’s see if we can get you out,” Miss said.

“Please.”

Miss began striding away.

Away from the school, through trees, black hair billowing in wind, her face out of sight, her dress flapping.  Lucy stood on forearm and rested against bicep, tense, trying to catch her breath, organize her thoughts.

“I’ve always had this fear,” Lucy said.  “Not that long after the first encounter with the Hungry Choir, really- I got mad at them, after the first meeting with the Faeries, I had to leave, they stayed.  Then the Avery thing happened, it really came home.  What happens if something happens to them?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s always been a fear that if something happens, I’d have to explain to Connor and Kelsey, or Sylvia and- Brett would have to know, right?  I don’t like him but he was decent once, and maybe if he heard the full story, it’d be a wake up call?”

“I would be surprised.”

“I didn’t handle it that hot when Avery went missing.  Couldn’t do much more than tell them what I knew and leave it hanging.  And now she’s stuck in a room with a man who’s trying to kill us, and maybe that room’s an arena?  And he doesn’t want to bring me into it, because I’m the best at fighting?  But it’s the same situation?  I have to tell them I don’t know what happened at the end?”

“I wish I could tell you, Lucy.”

“It’s so messed up.  The way he’s talking?  Saying we’re not real, what we did wasn’t us?  That’s de-personing.  It’s distancing himself, so he can kill us without it weighing as heavily on his conscience.  So where does that lead, when he’s got my best friends captured and confined?”

“I don’t know and can’t shed any light at this moment.”

“Okay,” Lucy said, feeling hollow in her gut.

She’d nicked her hand to get blood for the blood sweat and tears thing, to reinforce connections and maybe have spirits carry voices and sentiments to each other.  Crude and primitive, but… they’d just done crude and primitive.  She wished she could feel something through that mini-ritual.  Some pulse of life, something.

“I’ll be the one to tell them, if something happens.”

“That’s not the point.  It’s not what I’m saying, exactly.  Thank you, though.”

“I know.”

“I fought so hard to be stronger, to hold up my end.  They stepped up, they did more to be responsible, approaching it in their own ways.  I thought, if they’re doing their best, when they’re so good at the practice, I had to too.  I got up on so many cold-ass mornings, wore a sports bra and bike shorts in a cave to learn sparring, I put up with Guilherme being a butthead.  I got hurled into trash bags more times than I can count, sparring with Bubbleyum.  And it’s not enough.”

“You’ve done plenty, Lucy.  You’ve gone above and beyond and that’s why I decided to become a Founder.  To build Kennet found.  Even that wasn’t enough.  There’s a chance I’ll be forsworn and unraveled if something happens to any of you.”

“If it helps, I don’t want you to be.  Tell Charles that, if he tries to pull that?  Or whoever tries?”

“I may well deserve it,” Miss said.  She sounded melancholy, maybe even a bit defeated.  “If it comes to that, Lucy, it won’t make much of a difference.  Being forsworn, being unraveled-”

“It’s bad,” Lucy said.  “You have a whole realm that’s yours, that you’ve built up.  We lost a lot of Kennet below.  You’ve put a lot of love and care into Kennet found.”

“A love and care I didn’t know I had in me.  But if this Crucible sweeps over the region, I fear I’ll be unraveled anyway.”

“More stakes,” Lucy mumbled, leaning harder into Miss’s arm.  “Should I be leaving?  Even if I go, what if it doesn’t work?  What if they’re fighting right now and I realize I should be here, interpreting some signal, or figuring out some way of getting access, should I be in the basement?  Verona said it might be where they have recursive whatever data in books.  Do I spend the rest of my life knowing they’re dead and you’re unraveled because I fucked up in this moment?”

“Your instincts say to go?”

“Not even,” Lucy said.  “But it’s the only thing that feels like a ‘maybe’ idea.”

“Go, follow that possible idea.  Regroup, tap resources if you can.  If it comes to it, I’ll re-enter and tell others to seek out the basement.”

“Charles might’ve heard all that.  There might be guards.”

“I will keep that in mind.”

Miss’s stride was getting longer, as the environment got… thinner?  There was more noise in the air.  More weather, more dust, more cloud.  Lucy was reminded of that resistance they’d felt when pushing through, when they’d gotten separated.

She braced herself.

The noise in the air was similar to the visual ‘noise’, of clouds and dust.  Rumbles like thunder mixed with rustling like trees pushing together, and ground creaking.  Lucy could see and hear past the different layers.  Was that a way through?  A way to get at some weird angle and get between layers of the different trials?

She could hear a noise, a- cards attached to bike spokes kind of noise.  Like Booker had done once, when she was learning to ride a bike and he was riding in circles around her to be a butt and show off how easy it was while she struggled.

Centipede, she realized.

“Careful!” she called up to Miss.  She got a better grip on cloth.

Miss moved faster, not running so much as she ‘flowed’ forward, gliding, with hair and cloth moving.

The centipede lunged in, on the right, with the Aurum sitting astride the head.  Miss turned her face its way, maybe spending some power, and dust plumed upward from the primal layers, consuming him.

That won’t stop him, Lucy thought.

The centipede’s coils came forward, surpassing Miss- not just the head of the centipede, but lengths of the body in bends and loops.  He grew in scale, Miss changed her own to be smaller, to duck below.

“Ah,” Miss’s voice, large as she was, the space around them a weird combination of empty and layered, echoed.  Her momentum stopped, enough that Lucy had to clutch the cloth of a giant Miss’s sleeve to avoid being thrown forward and away.  Holding on by arm, one toe pressed down, she had a glimpse of what was below.

Mandibles or the edges of the centipede body had sliced Miss’s legs at the back, near the ankle.

Miss tumbled, a slow motion, cautious descent, like she was trying to control the damage or cushion it for Lucy’s benefit.

The world felt like it rumbled as Miss finally collapsed.  Hair and cloth rolled past Lucy.

“Bastard!” Lucy shouted.

“Bastards, plural,” Charles said, from beyond that maze of hair and cloth, his voice a growl.

Lucy found her footing, and began to navigate her way out.

Miss moved an arm, blocking her.  Lucy was pulled in closer.  A giant Miss in a fetal position, more or less, with Lucy shielded between knees and stomach, by arms.  Not crushed, but ensconced.

Foundlings crawled out of hair and folds of cloth, climbing and navigating their way to the outside.  Lucy went to follow, and she was blocked again.

“What does this achieve?” the Aurum asked.  “Buying time?  It won’t buy nearly enough, not with how things are, on the outside.  We can reach her by going through you and however many foundlings you force out.”

Lucy moved, more insistent now.  Miss tried to stop her.

“He’s right,” Lucy said.  “Let me.”

Miss didn’t let her, but Miss couldn’t stop her either.  Once Lucy started moving with more determination, Miss tried to stop her, but at a certain point, well, Miss didn’t have hands, and that gap provided an opening, where another being might have been able to stop Lucy.

Lucy escaped the folds of cloth and hair, and walked out into the noise at the Crucible’s edge.  Could she make it to the far side?  She kind of doubted it.  It looked like a run.

She drew a weapon with her weapon ring, and staggered, feeling the exhaustion mount, ratcheted up a whole tier.

“As representative of one third of Kennet, I give, from Kennet to you,” Miss intoned, voice echoing.

Lucy inhaled, and found it helped.  Exhausted still, but without that higher tier.

She had the Law bookmarks she’d used earlier, something taught by the contract practitioner Sebastian Harless, to counter very specific Law stuff by making other practices a priority- she was kinda stretching it here.

There was the sound practice she’d used earlier, that was an extension of the earring making it easier to come up with and draw runes having to do with sound.  There was no material here that mattered except maybe the gold of the Aurum, and she doubted she’d crack that.  She’d used it earlier in hopes of vibrating the rebar spike, but it hadn’t been Charles.

It took a minute to draw, too.

Miss pushed herself up a bit, and as she did, she released a hot air balloon, rope ladder trailing, a masked man with a long white beard hanging from the basket, with atrophied legs suggesting he’d never touched foot to ground.

An escape route.  One the Aurum Coil moved to strike out of the sky.

That made Lucy’s decision for her.

“Arena,” she said, casting out the bookmarks.

They plastered the edges of the circle.  The bubble of the Arena expanded out, and the Aurum Coil turned aside, not striking her or the balloon.

“Leave Miss alone,” Lucy said.

“Can’t promise anything,” Charles’s response was gravely.  He winced at the pain of the rebar spike in his side.  “Is this a challenge to me?  A fight in an arena, me and you, made a priority and preceding act over our powers by Law?”

Lucy shrugged slowly.

“Carmine,” the Aurum said.  “Let me start us off, this time.”

“No.  Secure the room,” Charles said.  “They’re my enemies, they’re my obstacles, I should be the one to handle them.”

Lucy tightened her grip on her rapier as Charles stepped into the arena, wincing at the pain in his side.

“Killing me doesn’t achieve anything at this point, except potentially sucking you into the role of Carmine,” he said.  “That leaves one other option.  Do you have it in you?  Is the well of cruelty and willingness to hurt in Lucy Ellingson deeper than the grit of the Carmine Exile?  Will it help your friends?”

Pain made his smile something terrible.

“It doesn’t matter,” the Aurum Coil said.  He raced in a circle around Lucy.  The coils formed a barrier, closing off her view of Miss, who was struggling to stand.  “By even initiating these proceedings against Lucy Ellingson, we weaken the positions of the other two.”

Positions?

The Aurum was sealing off the space of the arena.  He couldn’t penetrate the Arena, the bookmarks of Law strongly discouraged that, especially after Charles had accepted the duel.  But he could arrange the space that would immediately follow the Arena situation, whether she won or lost.

Which would be the same as Avery and Verona.  Which would be…

She turned, finding Miss past the coils of the centipede and the walls being drawn up around her.  “He’s going to forswear-”

The walls closed.

“-Me.  Us.”

“Lucy Ellingson, you have it right,” Charles said.  “I forswear-”

“No,” she cut him off, voice sharp.

“Yes,” the Aurum said, from outside the circle.

“Arena fight first,” she told him.

“You can barely stand,” he said.

“You aren’t exactly upright either.”

“It won’t change anything.  You and I both know the kind of harm you’d have to do to me, the way you’d need to torture me, to break me and get me to change my mind?  It would turn you into a monster too.”

She fixed her posture, asserting her grip on the rapier.

“Fine,” he said.  “Do what you want.  Arena fight, win or lose, next on the docket is the forswearance of Lucy Ellingson.  Let it be known.”

“So declared,” the Aurum said.

“That seals it,” the Aurum said, in a space he shared with the Carmine, separate from the three girls.

Charles sat by the fire.  He stood by the window, staring out at what was unfolding beyond.  He faced Lucy Ellingson from across the Arena.

“Only the follow-through remains, they have no say or priority in Law.  Cleanup will be necessary, putting Others back in books, codifying them.  London supports us, your enemies are fleeing the region.  We’ll want to tend to the Sword Moot, so you aren’t completely neutered, but that’s hours from finishing and we don’t need hours, and it’s a matter of time before they vacate the region too, abandoning the Moot and their ability to enforce Moot Law.”

Charles, in all his aspects, having stood from his seat by the fire, standing by the window, facing Lucy, here at the Crucible’s end, paced a few steps.

“Briserban’s suggestions were solid.  He get to build a Faerie empire without courts under the shadow of the Crucible, where few can see and many are reluctant to look, many Others pulled away and into the Crucible, out of their way.  A small price to pay for their help, in this and in other things.”

“I trust you to manage that,” Charles replied.

“Thank you.  Well played, Charles.  Rocky at moments, but here we stand.”

“Is this the point, standing at the end of the Crucible, where you tip me over the edge, destroying me?”

The Aurum shook his head.  “No need.  Whoever replaced you might be more difficult to deal with, and I wouldn’t mind the company.”

Charles took it in, the overlapping, angry voices, calling his name.  His enemies were dealt with or fleeing.  The ones who fled wouldn’t be back.  The Crucible was too much for them to confront, and it would consume the ones who tried.  The world would take note.

“Yeah,” Charles groaned the word, straightening, stretching to a full standing posture, despite the pain in his side.  “That seals it, doesn’t it?”

“Victory.”

“I told Avery the last time was the last time.  That I wouldn’t be coming to save her when the time came.”

Goblin eyes looked at her, coming in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

“I don’t ask for much,” Snowdrop said.  “I don’t eat much, I lose a lot of sleep, busy as I am.  I work my prehensile tail off.  I realized I had a problem where I was drinking too much milk and gave it up, pretty much cold turkey.  I made a lot of sacrifices.  I made the biggest sacrifice, because she asked me to.”

Snowdrop cracked her knuckles.

Goblins shuffled, restless.

“And you guys?  I know most of you, your names, what you do.  You all know me, I bet.  I don’t like you, don’t even love any of you, but I’m goblin sage.  Being goblin sage is basically being a warlord, it means I get to take charge, it means I get to lead, and it means I get to stand here before you and say this: screw Avery!”

Goblins cheered.

“Those other two whose names I don’t remember too!”

Some of the other Kennet Others joined in, clapping.

“Screw them for being no fun!  Screw them for being boring!  Screw them for when they were shitty to America and Liberty Tedd!  I’m taking all the clout I have to lead you as goblin sage here, and I’m saying we’re out, we done!”

There were cries of agreement.

“If you know any way we might get to those girls?  Anything we can do to mess with this place, or mess with the Carmine?  Breathe a hint of it and I’ll kill you, I’ll smear special goblin sage brand opossum poop on your name!  Good, bad, or weird, we don’t want to hear it!  We’re all in for team Carmine!”

“Yeah!” was the resounding cry.

“Down with the girls!”

“Yeah!” the crowd returned.

The alternating cries and chants continued.

“If there’s no room for actual appeal-”

“Never said that.”

“But you mean it,” Lucy said.  “You plan to keep us sealed here, inside the Crucible.”

“For some time,” the Aurum said.

“Long enough nothing else matters?”

“Who knows what the future will bring?”

“There’s no escape hatch on this, is there?  You haven’t left enough of a way out.”

“You’d use it,” Charles growled, the first time he’d spoken in a bit.

“It would cheapen the meaning of Forswearance if you were able to appeal it too soon after it was put into place,” the Aurum said.  “That is all.”

“And it doesn’t cheapen things to do it like you’re doing it!?” Lucy asked, raising her voice.  “Bull!  Bullshit!  You know it’s bullshit!”

“Do we?” the Aurum asked.

“Gainsay me if you don’t!  And if you can’t… I want this counted.”  Lucy paced, weapon still raised, returning to normal volume.

“Counted for what?” the Aurum asked.

“A mark against you.  A checkmark in my column.”

“To what ends?  To put it in the most basic terms… nobody cares, Lucy,” the Aurum said.  “Nobody’s going to check the list.”

“I care.  I want it counted.  Charles says I’m not real?  I’m arguing that as a gainsaying, I’m going to be fighting for it-”

“The forswearing is scheduled for when you drop this arena practice… which happens when you fight and one loses or forfeits, or when you collapse from exhaustion, which doesn’t seem far off.  The gainsaying argument may happen later… if you’re sworn to Practice by then.”

Lucy shook her head.

“It’s only fair.”

“Are you pulling this with the others?”

“Doesn’t matter,” the Aurum said.  “I don’t anticipate you seeing them again.  There is a point we’ll let you go, while still keeping you in the bounds of the Carmine Realm.  Stagger your exits and placements, or manage karma, ensuring you don’t meet.  There really is no reason for you to concern yourself with them ever again.”

“Beg to fucking differ,” Lucy replied.

“Miss,” Horseman said, running over.  He helped her down from the hot air balloon.  She immediately collapsed, legs injured.  “What happened?”

“Lucy thinks they’re being forsworn.  Presumably a closed-door trial, rigged by this being a closed space that pushes out other powers and presences,” Miss said.

“What can we do?” Horseman asked.  “We don’t know enough about practice.  Just war.”

“It’s a seal created by a Judge.  They may be a last line of defense, among higher powers, the net that catches whatever else filters through, but they still hold power by Law.  It’s notoriously hard to bend or break, and even trying it may wound karma.”

Horseman scowled.  He looked at Grandfather.

Grandfather, arms folded, glanced in the direction of Snowdrop’s riot.  Horseman looked too.  Most of the goblins weren’t ones local to Kennet, but they’d fallen into her sway, under her passionate words.

“Wish I had ideas,” Grandfather murmured.  He closed his eyes.  “Stop looking at me, Horseman.”

“She liked you as leader.”

“Yeah.  Yeah, our honorary member did.  Annoying.”

“Fitting,” Horseman corrected.

“I’ll concede…” Grandfather trailed off.  He scrunched up eyebrows and nose, eyes still closed.  “…In peacetime.  Backend.  Organizing in calmer times.  But in the field?  You were always better.  Best.”

“Wouldn’t even know where to start,” Horseman said.

“Where do you wish to start?” Miss asked him.

Horseman’s head turned.  He looked at the building.  People were on upper floors, avoiding the garden area at the center of the grounds, with windows looking down on it from three sides.

“Hot from hell, cry havoc,” Horseman said, somber.  “Let slip our dogs of war.”

Miss turned to look the same direction, walking through the spray of the ruptured water lines leading to the fountain.  “Good words, Horseman, but to what ends?”

“Tear it down.  If there are prisoners in books, toss them through windows for others to free.  If they’d surrender, let them.  Otherwise?  We keep shooting until we’re out of ammunition.”

He turned around.  The rest of the Dog Tags were there, gathered, guns in hand.

“Then we keep going, after.”

“Go out to the fringes, you may be able to move across layers, to different eras and aeons represented in the Crucible,” Miss said.  “You may need the help of Others with a certain sense of realms.  Alpeana is one.”

“Look into that for us, Miss?” Grandfather asked.  “I think our focus will be elsewhere.”

“I can.  Of course.  If you’ll do me a favor in turn?”

“What favor?”

“Clear a path to the basement.  It’s a long shot, but they wondered if there could be something vital down there, in records.  I’ll give you some of my foundlings I’ve currently got working on unbinding.  They’re good at administration.”

“Alright,” Grandfather said.

“Look after them?”

“Of course.”

“Sounds good, though, doesn’t it?” Horseman asked.  He stood straighter.  His eyes glittered with the amber light reflected in the spray of water.  “Dogs of War, waging a fight across whole eras, for the sake of our honorary member, Lucy.  For John Stiles.”

There were nods from the group.

“And for our Yalda.  You don’t fuck with Black Dogs, man.  They’re the goddamned incarnation of everyone and everything that shouldn’t be fucked with, even in wartime.  Let’s remind them of that.”

“Hey, Charles.”

“Carmine,” the Aurum said.

“Charles Abrams, Charles Abrams, Charles Abrams.”

“What is it?” Charles asked, sighing the words.  “Getting the last god-bothering out of your system, Verona?”

“I’m not even close.  Charles?”

“Is your plan to keep saying my name to provoke that connection, pinging me for attention?  That’s what it’s come down to?”

“It’s customary to punish misuse of connection practices with backlash and bad karma,” the Aurum said.

“Oh, like you’re punishing me with Forswearance?” Verona asked, eyes going wide.  She struggled against the hands holding her down.  “Setting me to minus nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine karma, or whatever?  Oh, whatever shall I do?  Hey, Charles?  Charles Abrams?”

Charles turned, meeting her eyes.

“If you die, and I’m not dead too, I’m going to find a way out.  If you could, I figure I can.  I can take this legacy you’re trying to build, and fuck with it so bad.  Charles?”

“I’m already paying attention to you, there’s no need to say my name.”

“You know I can pull off some bullshit.  You do this?  You hurt Avery?  I will make it my life’s work to ruin everything you tried to build and set up.  I will make you a laughingstock.”

“Perverse incentive, there,” the Aurum said.  “Enough reason to kill you, isn’t that?”

“But you can’t, right?  You can hurt me, but killing me, after initiating the Forswearance thing?  That’s not allowed, is it?”

“‘Allowed’ has many meanings,” the Aurum replied.  “Some things are Law, some are convention, some are establishment.  There are distinctions.”

“But it’s not good, right?  Using a forswearance accusation to set someone up for a kill?  You hurt me, that’s not great, but it’s way worse to kill…”

“You’re playing with fate.  Tempting us.”

“S’what I do,” Verona said.  She sat up straighter, until the family members holding her down forced her down a bit, holding her arms.  “Try me?  Come on.  Bring it.”

“You’re not entirely wrong,” the Aurum said.  “The best way to ‘bring it’ is to move this along.  Forswear, then kill.  Carmine?”

“Yeah.”

Tashlit waded through the mob.  The garden at the center of the school was the center of it, but others had gone into the building.  Books and papers rained down from above.  Voices filled the air, rebelling, shouting their anger, their fury, or their rejection of the Carmine and Aurum.

She had no mouth to shout with.

Tashlit didn’t flinch as an explosion went off above.  That would be the blast dogs.

She had to work, ducking her head down, pressing what would be her ear to her shoulder, eyes closing as they were pressed together, while she got skin over her head.

Skin shucked off above the waist, she tied the arms around her waist to keep it from flopping about too much, head tucked in too, so the hair wouldn’t dangle or be damaged.  That done, she pulled her coat back on.

She couldn’t take a deep breath.  She barely had a circulatory system, let alone a respiratory one.  With hundreds of eyes, she watched the crowd, wary for Fae tricks, people in the crowd who hadn’t entered the crowd, or had entered the crowd with different faces.

That wasn’t her focus though.  That wasn’t what she was.  She had many eyes, but she wasn’t a watcher, a lookout, or anything like that.

She was god begotten.  The abuse of higher powers was in her blood and vitreous.  A god’s arrogance had let him think that he could take a woman as his wife, and he’d tried accosting and cursing her when he’d been rebuked.  Got the wrong woman, because of a king’s trickery.  That was a wrong that couldn’t be wholly fixed- not the accosting, but he hadn’t fixed the curse either.  His seed in her had festered, causing her to give birth more times than could be counted, Others tearing themselves out of her in every conceivable angle and way, several times a day.

Tashlit’s grandmother.

Her mother had been a lawmaker’s daughter, a practiced violinist, educated, a bachelorette with articles written about her in magazines.  A man with money had made overtures and got rejected.  In his anger, he wanted to give her a horrible fate, so he’d found the biggest, most horrible monster he could, and switched her mind with it.

Tashlit’s oldest brother had done most of the investigation for what had happened in the aftermath of that.  Initially content to have her for her body, the serpent’s brain enough to ensure she moved and ate enough to stay alive, he’d gotten bored, and found a woman who wanted to be beautiful and rich, who’d stay with him.  The serpent’s mind had gone to the woman, she’d taken over the body.  She’d returned to ‘her’ family, claiming ambiguous trauma for differences in personality and ability.

Seven years later, egotistical and stupid, she’d demanded one of the only things her husband had refused her, a trip out to the oceanside, and the moment there were no bystanders, the predictable had happened.  Tashlit could only assume there had been some attempt at coercing a mind swap back, but that it hadn’t been possible, he’d been stubborn, or her mother had been more eager for revenge than restoration.

It was too easy to assume it came down to men, to venal appetites.  Tashlit’s oldest brother had embraced that, incorporated that into his being.  Her other siblings carried that poison and bitterness in various ways.

Too easy to lose all hope for romance.  It was a part of why she’d rejected Verona, that Tashlit could never tell, not when it would wound Verona, or when it required explanations Verona wasn’t even fifteen yet.  She wanted romance, and with Verona, without encouragement, she worried she’d give up hope and become as bitter as some of the others.

Her siblings, in the darkness some of them dwelt in, overlooked the love that it took for a man to see the woman in a forty foot long sea serpent with countless eyes and venomous whiskers and fronds.  Their father.  It was a tall order, even for Tashlit, but she’d carry on.

No, it wasn’t about men, exactly.  She preferred to see her heritage as being about abuses of power.  How that abuse, when perpetrated, could lead to something biting back.

She pushed a door to the school open, with enough force the door came off its hinges.

She didn’t have a mouth to bite with.

She’d been freed from the books later than many of the rest.  She’d gotten the update.  After a moment to digest, she’d decided on a course of action.

She stopped in front of the red door.  Some tiny goblins who were trying to batter it down with plastic pens scattered in her wake.

She put her hands, with long, slender fingers, at the sides of her head, eyelids closing before the moment of contact.

Blood, sweat, and tears.

She didn’t have much blood, and she didn’t sweat much.  She hadn’t allowed herself much crying, even after her body had started failing on her.  But tears were the bodily fluid and fuel she had the most of.

Fingers ran along lower eyelids, tracing convoluted, curved zig-zags as they traveled from eye to eye.

From deep within her, from that fourth power source, from sex and seed, passed down from generations, festering god-seed, she drew out divine power.

The tears she drew on the door glowed in the gloom of a hallway lit better by fires elsewhere than by the broken lights.

The word was written in cursive.

She had divinity in her.  One of the things that association came with was more say than the average Other.

Give me an audience, she willed, before drawing that divinity out, and bringing her hand down.

The boom made heads turned, giving pause to even open riot, warfare, and destruction.  The word flashed as power transferred into it.

A second boom followed, more divine power, drawn from deep within, her fist brought down onto the surface.

Then the third, two hands this last time.

She rested hands there, head bowed a little, body heaving from the exertion, even though she didn’t breathe conventionally.

I knock, I call your name with divine power behind it, and you don’t answer?

That costs you, she thought, eyes all across her body going wide, before she banged hand against door again, the first of another three knocks.

Before the third was delivered, the fighting elsewhere had fully resumed.

A Faerie, busy with something else, briefly passed the hallway.  She met its eyes with hundreds of her own.  The Faerie continued on.

Three more bangs, channeling trace power into that sign.

It costs me to spend this power, when I was already drained…

I’m owed recompense for the non-answer.

I’ll use that recompense to help me knock once again.

The slams of hands with enhanced strength and divine power fueling them punctuated everything else that was going on.

She shook with a fury that had no outlet, and that fury was power of its own.

She and Verona weren’t compatible, but they were friends.

“Look, ah fun’ some strays while ah wis scoutin’ fer yeh, Miss.”

“Where’s Lucy?”

“Did you come in on purpose?” Miss asked.

“Not exactly, but we didn’t exactly flee as hard as we could either, once we had some idea we could help here.”

“I’m not sure you can.”

“Everythin’ helps, Miss,” Alpeana said.

Tashlit banged.

“Where’s Lucy?”

“She’s stuck, Mia.  Captured.  We’re working on solutions.”

“Oh no.  Is there anything we can do?”

“I wish it were that simple.”

“Ah assume oor Tashlit o’er there is tryin’ one solution?”

“It’s a better option than some, provided she reserves some strength to hit one of the Judges with enough strength when they answer that knocking.”

Tashlit turned her head and nodded.

“Which it looks like she’s doing.”

Tashlit banged on the door three more times.

“Ey!  Hey!  Down here!”

“Oh gosh, there’s a lot of things happening.  I almost stepped on you.”

“Pick me up!  Yeah, you!  You’re the queen bee?  Top girl?  Alpha bitch?”

“I’m not that big a bitch, I hope.”

“Recognize me?”

“My voice!  You should recognize my voice!  It’s a great voice!”

“The Arcade,” a boy said.

“Georgie’s got it!  Good Georgie!”

“The announcer, ohh.”

“Tatty’s the name and I basically ran that shit.  Keep me around, I’ll tell you who’s who and what’s what, howszat?  Gimme some of that queen bee energy.”

“Thank you, Alpeana.  Did I say that right?”

“Aye, laddie.  Miss, et’s harder tae git ‘atween realms than ah thought.”

“But is it doable?”

“Nae by me.”

Some of the others were coming.  Verona’s classmates.

It reminded Tashlit of a time, around the start of puberty, she’d still been able to go to school.  The town had been smaller than Kennet, the class just a handful of people she’d known from kindergarten forward.

“Alpeana called you Tashlit?”

She nodded, hand resting on the word ‘Carmine’, now battered to the point of unreadability.

“I’m guessing you’re the Tash Verona referred to.”

“Oh wow, you’re intimidating,” Wallace said.

Two handed bang.

“A lot of things make more sense now.  She said you were really cool,” Jeremy said.

She shrugged, straightening a bit.  Her hands hurt.  Her heart, small as it was, hurt, because she knew she hadn’t treated her friend well enough, considering the home and acceptance Tashlit had been given.  She tried to be a rock, tried to keep it together and maintain her inner peace, but she slipped, and she’d slipped with Verona, letting one slip become another.

She wanted to bang, but she wasn’t feeling the impact.

The boy had a girl with him, probably Caroline, and a boy Tashlit was assuming was Wallace.

Tashlit ran fingers along eyes again, collecting moisture.  It was easier than before.

CHARLES ABRAMS.  She wrote the letters out, pushing divinity into them to make them clearer.

She banged her hand into the door.

“Need anything?” Jeremy asked.

She held up two fingers, separated.

“Two?” Jeremy asked.  “Oh.  Verona.”

Just the fact he’d gotten that was a bit of nourishment for her Self.  It wasn’t just Verona that could understand her.

“I don’t think I can give you that.  Sorry.”

She shook her head, then banged the door.  Jeremy visibly jumped.

“What can we do?” Caroline asked.

Tashlit cupped a hand, the yellow irises turned orange with the broken veins running across their surface, and put it where her mouth would be.  She pointed at Caroline.

“Who are we calling?” Caroline asked.

She banged the door again.  She kept her fist at the name, now faintly smudged with the imprint of the edge of her hand.

“Charles Abrams!?” Wallace hollered the word, with a questioning note.

Tashlit nodded with emphasis.

Jeremy hit the door with his own hand, smaller than hers, weaker.  “Charles!  Let her go!”

“Let Lucy, Avery, and Verona go!” Mia called out, entering the spot where the door had been knocked out, Tatty riding on her shoulder.  When Tashlit indicated the name, Mia hurriedly added, “Charles Abrams!”

“Charles Abrams!  Answer us!” Wallace hollered.

“Charles!”

Every ask unanswered, with some power backing it?  Even from the Aware, it had to whittle him down, it had to nag at him.

“Charles, Chuck, Chuckles, Chuckie, big sloppy dick.”

“That wasn’t clever the first time you said it,” Charles rumbled.

“It’s not meant to be clever, it’s meant to show you how much contempt I have for you and what you’re pulling.”

Bang.  Bang.  Bang.

“There’s a case, it’s precedent, it’s establishment.”

“We’ve already talked about how little the establishment factors into this.”

“We have, but I think it should count against him-”

“It doesn’t.”

“It could grant me an advantage when the duel unfolds.  I think this is worth getting out of the way.  In fact, for that tidbit, I can cite the recent cases of Percival Awarnachs, first and second, where it was very pointedly a factor.”

“Was it now?” the Aurum asked.

“You’re citing the crude summonings as precedent?” Charles asked.

“For Others who received a benefit-”

“That didn’t matter,” the Aurum interrupted.

“But a benefit nonetheless,” Lucy cut in.  “I’m not letting this one go, I’ll fight you on it.”

“Will you now?”

“What else am I going to do?” Lucy asked.  For a second, there was a deep fear in her eyes, every muscle in her face tense, eyes watering.  “Fuck you two.  Fuck everything you represent.  I’ll drag this out as long as I can.  I do have that right.”

“No, that is in fact more establishment, not Law,” the Aurum said.  “We can cut this short.”

Bang.  Bang.  Bang.

“You know what gets me?” Avery asked.  “You had friends.  You had something okay going.  Edith liked you okay.  Matthew was a friend.  I know John would stop in and hang out.  I know being forsworn was miserable.  You didn’t deserve that.  Fighting like hell to get out of a bad situation?  I get that.  Believe me, I’ve- I was stuck on the Forest Ribbon Trail with the Wolf.  I’ve been in the pits in a big way.”

“Doesn’t compare.”

“Are you really going to pull that same B.S. that Grey and the other ex-forsworn from Peterborough did, with me?  I didn’t have it bad enough, so I didn’t have any say at all?  Screw you, Charles.  By that logic, you didn’t have it as bad as some of the other ex-Forsworn.  You had it cushy, by comparison, because Kennet held back the worst of the consequences and looked after you.  No, fuck you.  Fuck that.  No.”

He stared into the fire.  The Aurum shifted position.

“Fighting like hell I could understand.  But trampling over friends, or the closest things to friends, along the way?  That’s gross, Charles.  That’s ugly.  That’s low.  What you let happen to Matthew?  What happened to John?  Yalda?  The shit you’ve put Miss through?  Letting Alpeana get blindsided by Maricica?  Even your co-conspirators?  Lis?  Edith?  Bluntmunch?”

“All arguments I’ve heard before.”

“Not often enough, if it hasn’t sunken in yet,” Avery said.  “Charles.  Charles, look at me.”

He stared into the fire.

“Charles!  I know you don’t sleep, so you can’t lie awake at night, your conscience gnawing at you, so I’m fully willing to remind you.”

“Carmine,” the Aurum said.

“Charles,” Avery said.  “Charles, hey!”

He shifted position, to turn slightly away from her, but the movement made the pain in his side flare up, and he tensed, whole-body.  He moved a hand toward the skewer, instinctively, but it provoked the charm that had been wrapped around it, causing it to pull away, fluttering away from his hand, and made the entire thing twist.  He doubled over, stomach against thighs, gasping in pain.

“Charles,” Avery said.

Bang.  Bang.  Bang.

“Charles Abrams!  Let us in!”

“Let them out!”

Fires burned.  Whenever the books were cleared out, surrenders secured, non-surrendering facsimiles of practitioners and students gunned down, rooms and areas were set on fire or made the subject of a few thrown grenades, to clear the spaces out.

Charles Abrams!

The Aurum was privy to some of the messages coming across.  Hearing with senses that weren’t ears.

Others of all sizes and shapes were being released from books, fanning out from the garden area and the shattered fountain at the center of this academy, or they returned, bringing news, or looking for new marching orders.

Bang.  Bang.  Bang.

“Carmine,” the Aurum said, gently.  “It’s done.  Even with this mess, we have the power to rebuild.  We can do it easily.  Put them away into books again.  Easily.  Eject the Aware, focus efforts on expansion, look into ways to remove that skewer from you.”

“It’s connected to her, the poison carries from it to me.  Without recovering her-”

“It won’t be easy to remove, but it’s not impossible,” the Aurum said.  “We won.  Every threat worth talking about removed, or easily dealt with.”

He turned, looking at the Carmine, who stood askew, hand as close to the injury site as he could get it without provoking the charm.

“If this were chess… you have checkmate.  And you’re letting them take another turn.”

Bang.  Bang.  Bang.

Charles watched the people milling about, the fires, the fight.

“See it through.  You initiated three Forswearances.  A thread you can pull on, and the knots here all come undone.  See one through, the others fall like dominoes.”

Charles Abrams!  Answer!

“Answer their summons with a dramatic and unexpected appearance, and tear through them with that little offensive summoning trick you’ve used.”

The Aurum stepped off the centipede’s head, and walked forward until he stood beside the Carmine in the room above it all, that was only accessible by them.  Architect and inheritor of this ritual and its trials.

Withdrawing one hand that was folded inside a sleeve, the Aurum touched Charles’ cheek, turning his head-

Charles snarled a bit, pulling away.  He kept the tilt of his head what it was, after pulling back, angled to the side.

“That’s it, then?” the Aurum asked.  “What was it?  Being stabbed, giving up control over this legacy, or being pushed to the point that you were willing to Forswear them?”

“Who knows?” Charles growled the words.

“It’s not the role taking over.  Maybe it never is.  It’s you.  Pushed back, diminished, compromised.  The Charles Abrams in you crumbling.  Leaving the Carmine part.”

Charles Abrams!  Let them go!

You could have been cool, you could’ve been a guy who made stuff, and you’re- you’re like my dad, just throwing a big hissy fit and pushing all the actual art off the art shelf.

You’re not following the spirit of the law, you’re barely following the letter of the law.  I might understand it if you were against the Seal entirely, but you’re using it as a crutch.

I’d say that with how shitty you are to your friends, I’d hate to see how you treat your enemies, but speaking as your enemy, Charles?  Some so-called person with ‘light’ in them who hates your guts?  I’m not that sure I could tell the difference.

Bang.  Bang.  Bang.

“The Alabaster starts things off.  The Aurum brings a surprise, a sudden change.  Quite well, I might add,” the Aurum said, smiling a bit.

Charles didn’t smile, watching everything.

“Carmine sees conflict.  You initiated three forswearances… and because you’re Carmine, through and through, calcified, you’ll stew in this?  The conflict in progress?  The Forswearance trial left unfinished and unending?  Cruel, to hand me custody of this project and then do that in the middle of it.  Cruel to them, too.”

“I can’t remember the last time anyone said I was kind,” Charles replied, eyes on the fires below.

“Red Heron students?”

Charles scoffed.  “How that turned out?”

“Carmine.  Charles.  I can’t run this project like this.”

Charles didn’t respond, only grunting in pain at his side, shifting position with agonizing care.

“Carmine Exile, once Charles Abrams, the Summoner,” the Aurum said.  “As fellow Judge, I bid you to summon up one trace of Charles Abrams, to initiate some movement on this.  Not much is needed.”

Bang.  Bang.  Bang.

“They aren’t giving up,” Charles noted.  “They have that much anger and hate.”

“Among other things,” the Aurum replied.

“Didn’t think it through.  That once they were forsworn, I’d be here, recuperating, and they’d be here too.  That they’d try making their appeals, I’d be forced to hear it out, refuse them, over and over.  Their voices, constantly there.”

“Easily fixed, honestly.  Forswear them, then have them lose their voices.”

Charles Abrams indicated the door Tashlit was beating down.

“Limit their mobility.”

“They’re fighting to find ways.  Digging in the basement, searching for books.  That fire dies eventually, doesn’t it?”

“Ideally we want this handled before the Sword Moot wraps up,” the Aurum noted.  “Will can be broken.  We just need to see it through.”

He turned away from the scene, giving the Carmine Exile his full attention.

Realizing, a bit too late, that every suggestion of injury added to the ‘insult’ of Forswearance was pushing Charles further away.

Leaving the Carmine standing here, driven by Carmine principles and ideas.  Perpetuated conflict, violence, blood, the visceral.

None of which helped them to wrap this up.

Charles Abrams was gone, more or less.

The Carmine Exile was no longer in the arena with Lucy Ellingson.  Was no longer in the room with Avery Kelly.  No longer there, staring out a window, while Verona Hayward’s family held her down.

Just here, watching, taking it in.

What was it the Dogs of War said, that Lucy Ellingson parroted?  War was two sides fighting each other, trying to make the other side lose faster?  Every blow was two-sided, the deeds required to kill, crush, and ruin costing the perpetrator something.  Like how Avery Kelly was crying, not for her sake, but because of what she was saying in her efforts to dig into the Carmine Exile and find some redeemable or empathetic part of Charles.  Like how Lucy had sustained so many wounds in the process of dealing them.  The sacrifices Verona Hayward had made.

All to this conclusion.

Charles Abrams was lost.

“I’m sorry,” the Aurum said, and, holding steady as his hand made the man flinch, leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

The centipede slid between them.  A knee went up, sliding easily into place on the head, tilted to one side, and he was riding it a moment later, leaving the Carmine Exile where he was.

Not going anywhere, but leaving that space, vacating it so his ally could be alone.

He was still in those three other spaces.

Coils forming a loose circle around Lucy Ellingson’s arena.

Barring the exit from the room Avery Kelly was confined in.

Looming above Verona Hayward.

I’m sorry, he’d said.  Because he had to do this.  A betrayal of confidences.  But confidences were an establishment, not Law.

In three places, with three voices, he picked up where the Carmine had left off.  Less strong, but it really didn’t matter.  “On the matter of the forswearing, I declare-”

The Carmine Exile had left those rooms, but in the moment the words were spoken, he was back.

Territorial.

Hands moving, drawing out the portals.

The power differential was massive.  The Aurum had been granted the lion’s share of the Carmine’s power.  What the Carmine had now was what he gleaned from ambient conflict.

But Judges weren’t meant to remove other Judges.  It created too many conflicts of Law – if the mantle had to be passed on to the killer, which was the case in some situations, it ran into a wall when one judge already had it.  There was also the added complication of being both inheritor of this space and killer of its creator, when powers like London were watching.

The Carmine was so weak he couldn’t expend any real power without risking destroying the man.  But the Carmine was reduced down to base elements, beyond some trace aesthetics.  A man broken on the rocks of this long fight.  He was the fight.

Meaning the Aurum was put into the situation, more or less, of gently disentangling himself from someone weaker who wanted to kill him, who wasn’t holding back.

It made the fight more even than it should be.

Still a fight the Aurum could handily win.

Except the Carmine recovered and came back at him almost immediately after.  Maybe even stronger, because this was conflict, and Judges naturally sought balance.

He’d read about situations like this in books.

Two powers, fighting endlessly in some confined space.  It was used for some brutal kinds of sealing practices.  If something was too strong to be locked away and left alone, then it could be given an opponent, sometimes equally strong, sometimes not- but still immortal.  Keeping it too preoccupied to apply its full strength against the wards and seals.

A kind of hell, two beings tearing at one another for decades, hundreds of years, even thousands of years, until power sources finally dimmed, or paradigms changed.

He felt a note of fear.

“Carmine Exile.”

Lucy Ellingson.

“If you want an edge in this fight?  If you have any privileges about this space?”

She’d recognized what was happening, with keen senses, and lessons taught by mentors in War.

“Bring in some other Judges.”

The Aurum felt the Carmine reach out.

It wasn’t an answer.  The Aurum had more power, more privilege.  This space had been given to him.

The originator of this space had claim, though.  It was one more angle of attack.  One more struggle, tying up power and focus, in the same way the physical violence did.

Carmine and Aurum existed in multiple facets, in multiple places, in multiple eras of this trial.  They fought, tooth and nail.  Lucy had been the fastest to realize what was happening.

“Carmine!” Avery Kelly called out.

“I forswear-” the Aurum started.

The Carmine set teeth into the Aurum’s necks.  Some conjured, some his own.  Centipede neck and human, crushed, voice silenced before they could forswear Avery Kelly.

Avery spoke, “I don’t want to be cruel.  Compromise.  Let us pull the thorn out of that paw.  Swear to a deal.  To stand down.  To forgive and forget.  If you won’t be trouble for us or anyone else, if you’ll let this war go, I’ll remove that spike.”

The Carmine, eyes wild, savaged the Aurum until the mass of the centipede’s body separated them.

There was no Charles in there.  Or not enough.

And the war was Charles’.  Not the Carmine’s.

The Carmine Exile pulled back, freeing a mouth to speak.

Ryan, Aurum, had to make himself vulnerable, exposing himself to further wounds, further costs accrued, to try and stop the Carmine from answering.

He grabbed the skewer, twisting it, to cause pain, to try and get the Carmine to stop.

“Sworn!” the Carmine roared.

“Undo the Forswearance!” Avery called out.  “Cancel it, call it off!”

“Can’t!”

It was Ryan’s own voice, the Aurum’s own voice, that shouted it.

The Carmine didn’t disagree.

It couldn’t be called off quite like that.

“Then swear you won’t ever finish.  That I’m free and clear of the procedure, the overhead, the temporary costs and all that.  That- if you have the others, they are too.”

“Sworn!” the Carmine roared.  “So Sworn!”

The man wasn’t in there, in those words.  He was fighting for balance between the Judges.  Fighting for territory, and for the sake of fighting.

Giving up the forswearance in progress, weakly justified as it was, in favor of winning one fight here, against the Aurum.

It was all the Aurum could do to now change the angle of the fight.  He, not a fighter, never a fighter, spent power to shift the struggle, pushing it away from Avery Kelly.

He called on Aurum-aligned Others, and called them closer.  Things that changed, transformed, tricked.  Others tied to currency, wealth, magic items.  He created them out of nothing and bid them come.

Verona Hayward, when one of her snake-clan family members was hit by a lashing coil, managed to pull free.

She fled, her family chasing, and ran toward the temple.  It was a centipede temple now, representing the coin in the sky.

Avery Kelly moved carefully around the space, and then lunged.

The Aurum was able to move, hurling the Carmine and his own human body off to one side.

Avery kicked off one coil, and grabbed the skewer.

As one of the ones who’d helped put it in, she now pulled it free.

Making the Carmine many times stronger.

“Carmine,” the Aurum gasped out.

The created Others were here now, some trying to stop Avery, until the Aurum willed otherwise.

They weren’t everything the Aurum could hope for, in a violent conflict against a Judge who represented violent conflict.

“Carmine, listen!  There are other fights to be fought!”

The Carmine lunged, turning briefly bestial, furs bristling.  The Aurum was put through a wall, now that the boundaries were gone.

Avery Kelly was there.  She held the skewer above her head, pointing down, as the Aurum lay beneath her.

His eyes closed.

He heard her departing footsteps, opened his eyes to see her going, only a moment before the Carmine was tearing into him again.

Would it have been better to have been ended here, skewered and torn apart, than caught in a futile, endless battle?

Lucy Ellingson had found the people at the center of the battle.  Avery was on her way.

Verona Hayward pulled down the great holy symbol at the back of the temple, centipede and coin.

It shattered against the floor.

Letting her find her way to the next era.

She must have seen that hint in a book.

Like grains of sand through his fingers.  It was slipping away.

Or blood.  He had power in reserve, but over and over again, it was spent on healing.

He couldn’t not, but as it stood…

He wrestled, fighting, creating more Others, frantic now, in hopes of finding a way.

He didn’t know how much time passed.  The names being called were for the Carmine, and for Charles Abrams, who he couldn’t see any traces of.  Not for him.  Not really.

Three girls reunited, surrounded by their peers.

Comparing notes.

Lucy was telling them about the endless fight.

Avery explained the skewer and the deal with the Carmine.  Things made more sense to her when it was explained he’d broken down.

“The room with the books overseeing this place might be accessible,” Lucy said.

“Do you one better?” Verona asked.  “Aurum.”

Someone calling his name.

“Make you a deal.  Shut this down.  Shrink it.  Small as you can get.  You abandon your territory.  You leave that up to others to arbitrate.  Neighbors, spirits, us, we’ll figure it out.  You control this.  This pocket world.  If we really let shit go, if we don’t have a handle on stuff, if the world ends and it all goes south?  Maybe you can expand out again.  But only if there’s nobody saying not to.  No expanding, no tricks, if someone finds their way into this space, and we want it tiny, then maybe you can try someone out.”

“We’d ward it,” Lucy said, quiet.  “And warn people.”

“Naturally,” Verona said.  “But I’m figuring… we save him from being torn apart for the next forever, or unraveled when we dig into books and figure out how to tear this place apart… he got this place, he’s got to be able to keep his deals, right?”

“And he gets this realm, I guess?” Avery asked.  “Pocket playground, moldable?”

“Aurum, I think you’re listening!” Verona raised her voice.  “Limited time offer.  If we figure our way out, if we get books and go to the Sword Moot and tell them to hold off on weakening the Carmine?  You’re stuck like this until you’re unraveled.  If you’re that lucky.”

Mandibles bit into Carmine.  Carmine bit into the Aurum’s shoulder, crushing bone.  The two of them crashed into a large window.  Glass cascaded down four stories worth of distance to the bushes and grass below.  Faces turned upward.

Elsewhere, the fight between other facets carried out.  They crashed through a wall.

The Carmine multiplied, so the Aurum did too.

“Don’t make us be cruel,” Avery said.

“We just want to go home and fucking mourn,” Verona said.  Tashlit stood behind her, arms wrapped around her shoulders.

“Granted,” the Aurum uttered the word.  He let his voice carry through the space.

“We need assurances-”

“Granted.”

“It feels like he gets off too easy,” Avery said, face turned skyward.  Looking at the coin-shaped celestial body.

He felt a shock of fear.

If she pushed something now.  Some cruelty, despite what she’d said.  Some further compromise-

“It’s a prison.  It has to be a prison, Aurum.  Full concession.  We can’t regret this outcome, or you’re unraveled,” Lucy said.

“Granted.”

“Okay,” Avery said, quiet.

“Can we put some of our own on the Carmine issue?  Just have to hold him off the Aurum until the Sword Moot finishes,” Lucy said.

“Can try,” Horseman said.

The overlapping voices dissolved into planning, strategy, necessities, and logistics.  Including plans to go.

Too tired for all the people who wanted and needed to talk to them.  Verona was crying and trying to hide it, for reasons she’d have a hard time putting words to.  Avery clung to her opossum with one arm, face smushed against Lucy’s shoulder blade, resting there, one hand reaching out to clutch Verona’s sweater sleeve.  Lucy most fragile of all, but she held herself together because she had to.

The Carmine tried to eat the Aurum’s human face, a clawed hand rending the centipede head.  Power healed what the Carmine harmed.

The Aurum was left to wait for the assistance that had been promised.  He wrapped his arms around the Carmine, lost.

How long until I follow you, with this prison I’ve accepted for myself?

The Carmine howled, furious and mournful, loud enough to make the windows rattle, or make something fundamental break.

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