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Chapter Text

There were no indications (or at least none in the historical record) that the day that Molly Carpenter grew into her magic was going to be particularly auspicious (or inauspicious).

No angelic choirs, no stench of brimstone, prophecies had not been issued regarding the changing of the world and even the most attuned of supernal creatures had no warning.

No, one minute, fourteen-year-old Molly Carpenter was asleep in her bed, and then, she was sitting bolt upright, half-formed motes of dazzling light playing around her fingers, ready to lance out in the kind of lasers that Saturday morning cartoons tossed around like candy, as well over three decades worth of memories flooded her mind.

Klaus Schneider, the most renowned enchanter known to the White Council, had spend a decade and a half expanding on what skill at carpentry her father had imbued her with and accompanying it with every other form of craft from tinsmithing to clockwork to origami, and though she hadn’t been able to live with her family nearly as much as she’d wished, she took heart in being able to craft more and more advanced foci and talismans to bring them warmth and succor in her absence. Father Forthill, too, got his fair share for recommending the Toymaker as her teacher, the two having met while coordinating Vatican aid for victims of vampire attacks back in the 1980s.

Two more decades in one war after another honed her crafting skills even further, with Anastasia Luccio considering her as a replacement armorer and swordsmith for the Wardens had she another fifty years to practice, but-

Well, it made a certain amount of sense that Nicodemus Archleone had been the one to take her life. After all, over the decades, Michael Carpenter had laid many of the Knights of the Coin to rest, including the man’s own daughter, so Nicodemus’ vengeful spirit would naturally turn to his own children, those that remained, at least. Stealing into her workshop in the dead of night, he hadn’t managed to catch her unawares, forced to fight his way through an array of mystical traps and clockwork defenders, but in the end he did provoke out her death curse, condemning the man to “never be enough” so long as he bore Anduriel, turning a fraction of the Fallen Angel’s loyal power against his wielder and planting the seed of his undoing at the hands of Carlos Ramirez some two months hence.

And then she woke up, shooting upright in a too-small body with raw, teeth-grindingly intense power crackling through her veins.

More than just her magic, even- for a moment, she almost thought she saw the silhouette of a winged man on her bedroom wall, and as something within her soul opened up into a grand workshop filled with empty pedestals, she felt the blaze of Creation’s power in a way she never could have imagined before.

Two pedestals filled themselves- one with a facsimile of the wand she’d carved herself as a primary focus, under the Toymaker’s guidance, and one adjacent to it did not so much fill as begin glowing with silvery-white light, the kind that she’d always associated with the Swords. If someone were to look at it for long enough, they could maybe see something more solid in the heart of the not-quite-fire, a glimpse of a wing or a ring perhaps, but they couldn’t be sure.

Of course, seeing as how the workshop existed solely within her soul, it was incredibly unlikely for anyone aside from Molly to be able to look at it at all, let alone come close enough to find a shape buried in the flames, but for the sake of description it is worth at least mentioning.

Unfortunately, the impact of thirty years worth of memories being crammed into an adolescent’s head is nothing to sneeze at, even for one with a wizardly constitution. With how the memories accompany a reshaping of the mystical energies within her, as well as her very soul, it is not entirely unexpected that it rings her like a bell, sending her collapsing bonelessly back onto her pillow as the past collides with the future.

If I wasn’t in so much pain, I would have made some crack about someone running the plates on the bus that hit me.

As it stood, I was too busy nursing a headache to offer anything other than the kind of noise that had more u’s and h’s than your average dictionary, and then a yelp when the alarm on my bedside table going off drove icepicks through my temples.

Eventually, the pain receded, and I grounded myself in the here and now enough to actually feel time pass instead of the sensation of someone trying to dig their way out of my skull with spoons.

After that, I took the risk of cracking my eyes, and when the dim light on my bedroom ceiling didn't send me into more paroxysms of agony, I dragged myself upright, rubbing the crust away from the corners of my eyes with fingers that wanted nothing more than to drag the covers back up to my chin.

My alarm clock let out another ring, and I mustered up the will to send the specific design of magic that I’d crafted as a key to shut down the noisy enchantments. When the alarm failed to quiet itself, I sent out a second, and then a third iteration of that particular cantrip, none of which had any more success.

To borrow a line, something’s not right- I could feel it.

Before reaching out with my senses, I reached into my own head, feeling the headache rise up for a moment before the habitual healing spell I tended to throw at any head I get invited into crushed it.

My memories aren’t quite photographic, but if you spend enough time making tweaks in your own head, you can get pretty close, to the point where with a little magic I can more or less pull off the Pensive bullshit in Harry Potter, at least in my own mind. Pulling up the most recent memories I have was a little bit harder than I remember, but nothing that wasn’t doable, and I projected them in the mental screen I-

You Will Fail.

I flinched back, both from the glow of the pedestals in my soul as well as the memory of pronouncing my death curse upon Nicodemus, watching him sneer down at me as my lifeblood spilled all over my bed.

Wait. Pedestals in my soul? My own death curse???

Okay, so, inventory of myself, got it. My magic was a-okay, just as sensitive to my will as it ever had been, and with the headache gone I was feeling totally fine.

Better than fine, actually- all of the aches and pains I’d been cycling through from so much woodworking were completely gone, and the stubborn stiffness in my knee after I’d had a Fomor servitor shatter the bone a year or two before Ethniu had made her move felt almost as if it had never existed.

There was a big ol’ room in my soul, too, full of who knew how many pedestals of all sizes, mostly empty. One, with a wooden box sitting right next to its base, had a wand- an identical copy of the one I’d carved back when Klaus had still been teaching me, all black except for two white tips, and right next to it was a blaze of flame that felt… comforting, almost. Like looking into a mirror and being proud of how you look.

I knew, somehow, that the wand was emblematic of my magic, my status as a fully grown, card-carrying Wizard of the White Council, and that the flame was Soulfire- the power that the Archangels wielded, the one that their Father’d used to create the world from nothing in seven days.

The fuck.

I sighed, then shoved my hand through my hair, breathing in and then breathing out, visualizing frustration and confusion exiting my body with every exhale until I could actually think worth a damn.

Wait, wait, wait. My hair feels too short.

I shot upright, casting around for my mirror, before recognizing the room that I was in.

Somehow, I’d ended up back in my childhood bedroom, complete with- I stumbled over to the dresser and the mirror mounted over it, and confirmed that yes, unless I was hallucinating, I was also an early teenager again- something in the neighborhood of fourteen, maybe.

I ran my fingers through my hair again, the pageboy haircut that I had vague memories of fighting with Mom over for a couple of months before she started really harping on me for not giving up my magic, and just… sat there. Somehow, I’d ended up thirty years back in time, or with thirty years of future memories, and I couldn’t tell which felt more likely.

Then, a worse thought occurred to me, and I tested my will more than I’d prefer by keeping from cursing loud enough to wake all the Jawas.

By being back in time, I’d broken the Sixth Law of Magic, and even if it hadn’t been me who did it… well, if I had my timeline right, we were pretty early on in the war with the Red Court, and I didn’t think I could talk Morgan or Luccio into hearing me out, and I couldn’t be sure that Carlos had made Regional Commander yet so there was no reason for him to stick his neck out for me.

Harry would, of course, but he had more of a martyr complex than Dad ever had and would have done just about anything for my father even if it was a dumb idea. Trying to get himself appointed as parole officer for me wouldn’t go over well, and might actually get Morgan to snap and put him down if he even had the capacity- I wasn’t sure if non-Wardens were even allowed to take on Warlocks like that, and I didn’t remember when exactly he’d earned the Gray Cloak.

“Great,” I said, “so I’m alone thirty years in the past with just about no resources and de facto on my own. I guess I just have to hope that I don’t somehow catch attention from the Reds or-” my voice broke, here- “-or the Denarians before I can actually put together some real fucking tools.”

A stopgap focus wasn’t particularly hard to get my hands on. I’d gotten a magic kit a couple of years ago, probably out of some desire to impress Harry back before I’d gotten over my crush on him, and even if it wasn’t the custom-carved focus that I’d made after Klaus and I had figured out what would best work with my own specialties, it looked close enough that I could make it work until I could sneak into Dad’s workshop and make something more purpose built.

“Well,” I said, feeding a hint of will into the wand, just enough to see it glowing with a gentle blue-white light, “not like Harry hasn’t survived worse.”

Letting the light fade out, I leaned down to check my alarm clock, moving a rectangular, foot-tall wooden box off of my bedside table, where it was blocking the round shape of the clock to the floor before clicking on the backlight to better pick the date out on the display, and-

Wait. What the fuck? I was pretty sure I’d thrown enough magic at the thing to burn it out half a dozen times over, what with it being a digital model, but it was still working just fine despite the techbane…

Hmmm. Maybe it was related to how I came back in time?

Well, either way, it was a Saturday, so I can actually maybe get a jump start on actually putting together a proper focus, one way or another, after breakfast.

“Good, Molly,” said Mom, once I’d made my way downstairs, wand tucked in my waistband and hidden under the Star Wars graphic tee and baggy hoodie I’d thrown on with some sweats. “I was just about to send Daniel up to wake you up. Once you’re done with breakfast, I need you to help air out the guest room for Shiro and Sanya.”

“Will do,” I said, sitting down heavily at the table. I hadn’t had one of Mom’s breakfasts in… I wasn’t sure how long it had been, actually, but it had sure as shit been a long time, even before she’d been caught up in the Fomor attack on Chicago.

My enjoyment of breakfast was abruptly interrupted as the pedestals in the workshop flared with light, like they had earlier. This time, though, one of them shimmered for a moment longer before a wooden sword, sized for maybe Amanda’s hand, materialized. With it came an understanding of swordplay which…

Okay, so, I’ve seen Shiro fight with a sword, both training with my dad and in earnest, and he’s the best fighter that I can imagine even after seeing some of the older Wardens who have been practicing with their swords for longer than Shiro’s been alive. Somehow, whatever this is just plopped the knowledge of how to use a sword into my head, to the point where if I thought my muscles could keep up long enough, I could give him a real run for his money, all else being equal.

If this was mortal magic, that would have been a fairly cut and dried violation of the Third Law, but it… it didn’t feel like mortal magic, and as someone who’s experimented with psychomancy on themselves, I’d know.

So… if it was at all related to why I’m back here, it might not actually have been a violation of the Sixth Law, not that the Wardens would be willing to cut me any slack at this point given half of what I’ve heard about the old guard. Great.

Right, no time for wallowing now, Molly. We’ve got shit to do, and, God willing, Shiro might just get to walk away today.

Chapter Text

Carlos Ramirez wasn't exactly a heavy sleeper, even before he'd signed on for the White Council's Warden Rapid Response Force (thankfully not the proper Brute Squad, since they’d been destroyed when Simon Pietrovitch died, but sometimes the Council needed swords and needed them pronto, and that he could do).

That said, it didn't make him particularly happy to be waking up after only a couple hours of sleep to his phone ringing off the hook after he'd burned a whole bunch of magic putting down a Red Court strike on a Fellowship base in Yuma.

"Go for Ramirez," he grumped, grateful his phone cord was long enough for him to reach the kitchenette in his cramped apartment and start prepping the moka pot for some actual coffee and not the kind of motor oil that they served in the Warden breakroom.

"Warden Ramirez," came a voice from the other end, a voice that sounded vaguely feminine but was otherwise obscured by static, and Carlos figuratively perked his ears up. It wasn't that no one who had his phone number knew that he was a Warden, per se, but that out of the whole group, the only one who would call his phone and call him a Warden was Yuki, and that sure as hell wasn't her voice. "I need a favor."

"Who is this?" Carlos asked, pressing the phone to his ear with his shoulder as he tossed a container of pre-ground beans into the basket, then filled the bottom and screwed the pot together.

There was an awkward pause, then, just as he set the pot on the burner, the voice spoke again. "You can call me Raggedy Ann."

"Nice to meet you, miss Ann," Ramirez said, turning up the charm as best he could manage before coffee. "What can I do ya for?"

"I know the White Council coordinates with the Vatican on some things," the voice said, as he was pulling his mug out of the cabinet.

"Sometimes," Ramirez responded. "Why?"

"I need to know if you have a list of the Blackened Denarii currently in circulation."

Ramirez' mug shattered on the floor. "Say that again."

"I need a list of every known member of the Knights of the Coin in circulation."

Ramirez ran his hand through his hair. "Right, damn, that's what I thought you said."

"So, you don't have one?"

"Call back in two hours," Ramirez said, turning off the burner and scooping up his silver Warden's sword on his way to the door. "I have to go get it."

"Understood." The line went dead, and Ramirez wasted no time, stuffing his feet into his boots and grabbing the gray cloak of his office to settle about his shoulders before sprinting out of the building and into the desert.

"Aparturum!" he shouted, tearing a rift into the Never-Never and leaping through.

Hopefully he'd be able to get to Captain Luccio quick- anyone who called the Council about the Knights of the Coin either didn't know about their opposite numbers or couldn't rely on them, and he couldn't afford to roll those dice, not with the kind of lives that were on the line if the Knights were involved. He’d been a wet-behind-the-ears apprentice for the last time they’d surfaced, but Luccio had insisted that he see the aftermath, and… well. It hadn’t been pretty, but he needed to see it. If nothing else, he’d been set on being a Warden even then, and they regularly were confronted with uglier in pursuit of warlocks, but it had also helped him keep his head whenever he ran into one of the Red Court “rituals”.

If he could stop that from happening again, he damn well would.

Great. What was I supposed to do for the next few hours?

I’d barely managed to sneak out of the house after clearing out the guest room and helping Daniel straighten up the shed that Mom liked to keep the armor and spare weapons in, and I knew that if I went back home I’d get sucked down into the Chore Vortex that Saturdays had a tendency to turn into, so I wouldn’t be able to sneak back out to get my hands on a payphone to call Ramirez back.

I didn’t want to drag Harry into this, although knowing his luck he’d end up involved anyways, so bugging him was out of the question even if I wanted to, and I didn’t think anyone would take well to me going down to a pub in the middle of the day, so Mac’s was out too.

The best option, at this point, was hitting up a library, seeing if I couldn’t squeeze some information out of somewhere, and I stopped by an OfficeDepot on my way to grab a notebook and a pencil (one of the good ones, the solid steel mechanical ones that I’d stabbed a couple of Fomor servitors to death with over the years) to actually get my thoughts in order once I got there.

The pedestals shimmered again, just as I was handing over the cash to pay for my new pencil and notebook, but thankfully I didn’t have to deal with another knowledge download this time, and I got out of the store without more than a little bit of a side-eye from an almost gaunt-looking brunette browsing an aisle of paper cutters.

I made it to the library without running into any Red Court vampires or something like that- I knew they’d be in the city sooner or later to fight Harry for something or other, but I wasn’t sure when exactly, so all I could do was hope that I was fast enough to get my crucifix out to drive it off before it managed to get its fangs into me. Fortunately, that wasn’t a worry that was vindicated this time, and I sat down at one of the boxy computers.

I was… very out of practice, but I’d had enough typing classes in school that I could muddle through there, and while I didn’t quite remember everything about researching on the internet, I could at least go through newspapers and census reports a lot more easily now than it had been when I’d had to hunt them down in person.

From what little I could find, the Red Court was still spooling up to war footing, with disappearances in both the world in general and Latin America specifically slowly ramping up as the vamps started turning and feeding more.

I didn’t really have the memories of what else was supposed to be going on around this point to know what else to look for, since I’d been, you know, fourteen the first time around, but that was fine, since I’d hopefully have a line on the Denarians in circulation once Carlos got back to me, and anything else I could… well, I could probably do something for Ivy or one of the Council Members I’d remembered being receptive once I had the chance, so that was a concern for another day.

What wasn’t a concern for another day was getting my hands on some proper focuses, so I spent the next hour or so sitting down on an armchair and sketching out different rune sets that I could use to properly attune a focus to be more reliable with my own casting.

Immediately, anything too big was axed- I hadn’t worked with much bigger than a wand in the past, not unless I wanted to count enchanted items like the bag of holding I’d been refining or the wholly magical toy Jeep that I’d made for little Maggie, so as I was now I couldn’t use too many runes or else I wouldn’t be able to properly fit them on the thing. I also wanted to put the newfound knowledge of how to use a sword to proper use, so I put together a couple of arrays to forge into the blade of a weapon.

For a moment, I wished I could have gotten some of those lessons from Captain Luccio that she’d talked about every so often- while the Silver Swords that the Wardens used weren’t nearly as hefty, metaphysically speaking, as the Swords of the Cross, they’d been a big enough deal that I wished I could have cribbed her notes. As it was, I was just going to have to muddle through from first principles, assuming that whatever it was that was feeding me knowledge wouldn’t just drop the key to making, say, Coinspinner out of nowhere.

I paused, but apparently feeding the universe a straight line like that wasn’t good enough to turn me into Vulcan, so I’d have to figure things out the old-fashioned way.

Before sketching out another potential sword idea, I checked the dinky little plastic watch on my wrist.

“Right, okay, it’s about that time anyways,” I said, closing my notebook around my pencil as I stood up.

By the time I made it outside and to a payphone, it had been just a hair under two hours, but I figured that Carlos wouldn’t have too much of an issue with me calling a couple of minutes early.

He picked up much quicker this time around, and he sounded… well, like I hadn’t just called him in the middle of a sleep cycle. “Go for Ramirez,” he said, the weight of exhaustion he’d had earlier replaced with the tension that you’d expect out of a hunter in the wild: not quite combative, but very clear that he was ready for it if push came to shove.

Belatedly, I hissed out “kakusu” to provide the static effect that would prevent him from recognizing my voice in the future. “Warden Ramirez. This is Raggedy Ann, I believe we spoke earlier today.”

“That we did,” he said, slightly less tense. “Gimme a sec, gotta put you on speaker.”

I heard the sound of motion, then a muttered phrase from Ramirez that I couldn’t make out, before someone else spoke.

“Miss Ann,” the voice said, and while I didn’t recognize the voice, I could tell whoever it was was used to being in charge. “This is Warden Captain Anastasia Luccio. I take it you know who I am?”

I swallowed. This was more or less exactly what I was hoping to avoid by calling Carlos- if Luccio knew what was going on and where, she’d bring down the hammer on the Denarians, which would only spook them off. “I do.”

“Then I take it you know why I can’t afford to disseminate this kind of sensitive information recklessly,” she said, every inch the towering Italian matriarch even across the country.

I had to push down the urge to quail under her attentions, even over the phone, as well as the distraction that was the pedestals glimmering. “I feel confident in saying that I do. I have no intention of going out and executing some form of vigilante justice against them, nor of breaking any of the Laws of Magic. I don’t even need to act directly- all three of the Knights of the Sword are involved in the situation at hand, I don’t have to do more than put my thumb on my scales. That would be… I would appreciate it if you were willing to share information about the matter, but I understand why you wouldn’t, and I will find some way to stand in the way of the Denarians even without your aid. Your information would just… make it easier.”

There’s a moment where I’m sure that Luccio’s gonna insist that I not get involved, but then I can hear a sigh from Ramirez in the background. “That’s about what I expected, Captain.”

“Young lady,” said Luccio, and I bristled at the condescension in her tone but managed to hold my tongue, “you must promise me that you will be careful with this information. Not just who you speak of it to, or how you act upon it, but how you think it- some of the Fallen currently at large can pluck the information from your head, and they lack the scruples and fear of the Laws to prevent them from doing so. The White Council’s relationship with the Vatican is already strained enough without them hearing that we are sharing confidential information with outsiders, and we cannot afford to lose their support during this war. Am I understood?”

As much as being talked down to rankled, I understood the situation she’d been put into. “I will do my utmost to maintain information security, Captain.”

“Very well, then,” she said, and there was a note of melancholy in her voice that I couldn’t quite explain. “As of this moment, aside from Anduriel and Imariel…”

Chapter Text

“Thank you very much, Captain. Swift winds to you,” I said, before hanging up the payphone, passing my wand over it with a muttered word and an effort of will to wipe any sort of mystical traces of my presence and the conversation away. It was probably overkill, but I’d heard more than enough from Harry, Carlos, Yuki, and even Klaus over the years to know that I’d rather have gone to too much effort than to have gotten sloppy and get bitten in the ass over it.

With that said, I didn’t really get as much as I was hoping for out of Luccio. I knew that Nicodemus and Dierdre were in play, since the two were damn near inseparable, and that Tessa and her little band of merry men were out there causing chaos. I was pretty sure that last time around she hadn’t been a relevant factor here, but that only took Imariel, whoever Rosanna’s coin was, and Thorned Namshiel off of the list since neither of us were sure which other Denarians Tessa had managed to drag into her orbit. Otherwise, there was a list of coins, and while some of them had wielders (or skinsuits, as the case may be), there wasn’t a guarantee that the ones that hadn’t had a host in a while hadn’t found one recently.

Aside from Nicodemus, the biggest worry I had was that he’d somehow found himself someone capable of actually synergizing with Lasciel.

He’d found a couple of hosts for her in the future-that-wasn’t, and they’d always been absolute nightmares to dislodge. Dad had been able to handle one of them (a man named Johnstone, I think), barely, and if Harry hadn’t been there to run interference, I didn’t think he would have been able to stop him. The host had only been a minor practitioner, too. Between the Wardens being stretched thin with the Red Court and the Fomor not being around to pick off everyone they could get, especially warlocks, it would be very easy to find a sorcerer who could make use of Lasciel’s delicate touch and vast repertoire of arcane knowledge to go from a middling threat to the kind of problem that Kemmler would be proud of.

More relevantly, Lasciel would be the most likely Fallen to catch any kind of subtle manipulations that I’d try to tip the scales against Nicodemus, with the possible exception of Anduriel being a cheating cheater who cheats, on top of being the Fallen whose magic was the most dangerous to other spellcasters, with the possible exception of Thorned Namshiel, just out of sheer versatility.

As far as I was concerned, the more versatile a practitioner was, the less predictable and thus more dangerous they were, and with how long Lasciel had been in the field, any of her hosts would be very versatile.

Still, there was no point in borrowing trouble, and I had some things I’d like to at least try out before I just took my ball and left in the face of Denarians being Denarians.

I managed to slip back into the house relatively unmolested, not even having to weave a veil around me to avoid notice thanks to Hobbit and Amanda being loud at each other about some animated show or another.

I took just a moment to bask in the chaos of the house, leaning up against the wall as I took it all in. After… after, I’d missed both the house and the people in it, once the Fomor had destroyed them, and even before then I hadn’t been in the habit of coming home for too long. Dad had changed, after he found the ruin of the house, and Daniel hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, but I couldn’t help but mourn for it, even now that I’d gotten it back.

I was shocked out of my musing not by the glimmering of the pedestals, nor by the toy shield with a blue circle painted near one corner materializing near the pedestal with the wooden sword, but by a weight materializing in my hoodie pocket.

The damn thing set my teeth on edge, it was throwing off that much power. Touching it only made it worse, and I flinched back almost on reflex when it sent what felt like a static shock halfway up my bicep when my fingers made contact. I could feel it latching on to me, swaddling me in a cloak of power that tasted like moonlight and smelled like a constellation, before settling down to just a background sensation, and when I touched it again, ready to pull back, it only brought the sensation to the forefront of my senses briefly.

“Everything okay, Molly?” asked Dad, and I jolted, not having sensed him coming through having a divine relic dropped in my pocket.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, it’s just…” I sighed, putting on a little bit of a show for him. “I’ve been doing some thinking, and… I realized that this can’t last, so I got kind of caught up in that.”

He gave me an askance look, but to be fair, that was the truth, even if the arrival of one hell of a magical item had interrupted that thought a little bit.

“That is…” Dad smiled. “I am glad that you’ve managed to come to understand the impermanence of life as we know it,” he said.

Abruptly, I was reminded of the fact that Dad had been much more affected by Shiro’s death than I had, in the future-that-wasn’t, even if he had been dealing with some sort of health issue- he was the one who taught Dad how to work with his sword, how to comport himself as a knight, and he’d even babysat, once or twice, years ago, whereas to me all he’d been was Shiro (or “Unca Shiwo!”, the first time we’d met), and I wondered if he was thinking about how much more time he’d have with the old man.

I nudged him with my shoulder, and he dragged me into a hug. “Treasure these moments,” he said, seeming almost wistful, “when you’re just living with the people you love. These are the ones that you can’t get back, after they’re gone.”

Okay, apparently he wasn’t thinking about Shiro.

“I will, Dad,” I said, leaning into his solid bulk. It had been a long time since he’d hugged me like this, too long if I had anything to say about it, and I’d be sad when I grew up enough that Dad couldn’t hug me like everything was going to be okay.

We stood there for a moment longer, quietly taking in the moment of mundane life in the time before Dad was called away again. Then, almost as one, we separated, and he smiled down at me with that “all will be well” smile that he always made a point of plastering all over his face whenever he told the story of how he fought Siriothrax to save Mom.

“No matter what comes,” he said, “you will always be my daughter,” and I felt the tears start to run down my cheeks before I buried my face in his shoulder.

“Thanks, Dad,” I managed, muffled by his shoulder. “Love you.”

“I love you too, Molly,” he rumbled, one broad hand landing on my head to ruffle my hair as the vibrations of his voice reverberated through his chest and into my entire body in the way that I’ve only half-jokingly said comes from wielding the Sword of Love, in the past.

I stayed there for a little longer, basking in the sense of security that always came when Dad was around, before pulling back and smiling up at him. “Hey, do you mind if I, ah, monopolize your workshop for a little bit? I had an idea and I want to get it at least started while I still have the chance.

“I suppose I could be persuaded,” he said, gently and with a hint of a smile playing about his lips.

“It’s for the family,” I said, and it was even true, partially- I’d made a couple of coasters carved with Star Wars characters, and I could repurpose those carvings and one of the drafting spells I’d learned from Klaus to put the sketches and the start of a carving together for us while I got started on carving foci worth the name.

“If you promise to be careful,” he said, ruffling my hair again from where he hadn’t moved his car tire of a hand.

“Dad, I’ll be fine,” I whined, dislodging him gently. “I’ll make sure to use goggles and gloves and everything, at least once I break out the tools properly.”

He gave a put-upon sigh. “I suppose this is how Shiro felt.” Then, to me: “If you promise to be safe, and you come back inside in time for dinner, you can go out and work with my tools.”

“You’re the best, Dad. Love you!” I dragged his hand down and pressed a kiss to it, leaving just an echo of soulfire on his palm, before I turned and strode out of the house and across the backyard to the shed that Dad keeps as an at-home carpentry workshop.

It only took a moment for me to pull a sheet of drafting paper from the folder of loose leaf that Dad kept on hand and set a pencil dancing across it, marking out enough designs for a full dozen coasters, and with that done I sat down at his table with my notebook open to one of the rune sequences that I’d settled on for a secondary focus. Being stuck with mostly wood, paint, and maybe metal if I could sneak over to Mom’s forge for a little bit, I couldn’t do something like the jewler’s loupe that I’d preferred for light-based magic in the past, or a proper defensive talisman like Yoshimo’s, but I could get away with a little medallion of a rainbow covering an eye to run a veil or some less intensive photomancy off of and maybe a more refined wand focus than the literal toy I’d resigned myself to using for the next while.

I felt the pedestals start to glow, and sucked in a breath to try and wait out whatever was coming for me, then released it slowly as nothing came of it. Then, I pulled the spherical relic out of the pocket of my hoodie, having been reminded of the thing by the process that had dumped it in my lap to begin with.

It was a sphere the size of my fist, roughly, the kind of dark blue that you’d expect out of Homer’s wine-dark sea. There were faint etchings in the crystal, but I couldn’t tell what they were just from touch and they were too shallow to be able to tell what they looked like. The magic within, though… It was powerful, primal, and ancient, but limited, most of the power dissipating out into the universe through links that felt like they were supposed to be hooked into something else. Some of the energy was latching onto me, but I wasn’t sure what it was doing, aside from something generally positive.

“The Starsphere,” I said, with the absolute certainty that would come out of Dad declaring that the Lord was his shepherd and that he would not want.

Then, I shivered, stuffing the orb back into my pocket. Dad might be able to handle being the servant of a higher power and being steered around by the power of an archangel or three, but that wasn’t something I’d been comfortable with ever since the first time I’d soulgazed a Denarian. Magog wasn’t nearly as bad as Ursiel to his hosts, according to what Sanya and Harry had told me about their experiences with the respective Fallen, but he was still one of the thirty Fallen, and they all shared an interest in eroding the will of their host to act upon their own agendas, and I couldn’t help but compare the sensation of whatever power had imbued the Starsphere with its power dropping its Name into my mouth to my memories of Magog’s chained host.

Benevolent as it may be, I didn’t want to think about it, so with an effort of will, I banished it from my thoughts and turned to the wood pile, selecting a long, straight dowel to trim down into a wand and a cast-off section of two-by-four to carve into the amulet. Ideally they’d be actually important wood, but I wasn’t in a position to complain about a freebie.

The amulet didn’t take very much of my personal attention, and after carving out the rough shape I managed to scrounge up enough brushes to set to painting on their own. I’d probably need to find some time after the Denarians left town to refine it into a focus worthy of Klaus’ exacting standards, but for now, beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially since I wasn’t sure how long I’d have before shit hit the fan and/or I’d have an opportunity to… intervene.

With that handled, I turned a couple of pages in my notebook to the rune schemas I had sketched out, before reaching for the little knife I’d used for the medallion once the chisel work was done.

For a while, I allowed myself to drift, taking pleasure in the act of simple creation. It had been too long since I had just sat down and made something for myself, even if it was a new primary focus, and though I was trying to impress some Soulfire into the process the spiritually soothing aspects of how I was doing it would probably help me make up for whatever little I spent on my first foray into crafting with the literal power of creation.

“Young Carpenter, dinner is-” The voice stopped, and I looked up to see Sanya standing in the doorway, eyes darting first to the pencils drafting the coasters on their own and then to the brushes painting the amulet without a human hand directing them. “Hm. Interesting.”

Fuck.

Chapter Text

“Hell’s bells, Bob,” said Harry, rubbing at the side of his head from where he’d smacked it solidly into the wall. “You have any idea what the hell that was?”

“Huh?” The orange eye-lights glowing in the sockets of the rune-carved skull on the shelf gave the impression of lolling about for a moment. “Oh, right, Harry. Huh. I didn’t know you’d be able to feel that.”

“Feel what, Bob?”

“That!” Harry got the impression that, if Bob had had hands, he would have gestured wildly around at the universe as a whole. “Not a whole lot of people are powerful enough to actually feel it when something rewrites the laws of reality, even when they’re this close to the focal point. Most of the time it’s because they’re either tied in closely enough to a fundamental aspect of reality to feel it through that, they’re a god, their birth was particularly auspicious like a Starborn, or they’re Senior Council material.”

Harry’s jaw decided it was about time it got better acquainted with his collarbone. Once he managed to recover control over his voice, he managed to squeak out “What do you mean, rewrite the laws of reality?”

“Oh, don’t worry, Harry, it’s not nearly as bad as it seems. Something like this happens… what, every fifty years, or something like that, and it’s not like it’s gonna kill anyone. You just had the bad luck of being really closely attuned to whatever it is that shifted.” Bob’s voice was nonchalant, like he wasn’t talking about someone shattering the foundations of reality and forging them anew. “We’re actually overdue for some big reality alterations, I think- last one was almost a century ago, someone killed a Dragon, big D, and made it stick. This feels like a foreshock, nothing really major, but a sign to batten down the hatches, you know.”

“Hell’s bells, Bob,” Harry repeated, running a hand through his unkempt hair. “Should I even ask what it was this time?”

Bob made a noise that resembled someone sucking in air through their teeth. “You can, but I couldn’t tell you what it is exactly. Best guess, someone discovered or rediscovered an ancient magical secret of some sort, but this kind of thing can be from so many different causes that you’d have to find something like an angel or maybe one of the greater Sidhe lords to have any hope of figuring out what without being able to lay eyes on the source. Er, so to speak. But no, it’s benign, mostly, you just haven’t had the chance to learn about it yet. From what DuMorne told me, the Council still likes to make their wizards ask about it.”

Harry sighed. “Well, at least there’s that. I’m gonna go ahead and head out now. I need a beer, and a sandwich at Mac’s wouldn’t do me amiss.”

“Good luck, boss!” Bob called, before turning to the romance novels on his shelf.

In the five minutes that it took Harry to grab his coat and all the foci he kept on him when he went out, he resolved to go and do a little snooping to see if he couldn’t figure out what it was that had rung his bell. He could almost still feel it, humming against his back teeth, and he might be able to pinpoint a source if “close” meant within Chicago.

He opened his door to leave just to find three figures in gray cloaks standing in the stairwell to his apartment. The one in front, a stern, gray-haired matriarch type, had her fist raised to knock on the heavy steel of his security door, and the two behind her (a rangy Hispanic man with a cocky smirk and a sweet-faced East Asian woman with a similar build to Murphy) both tensed and reached for their swords before deliberately relaxing.

His teeth clacked shut, managing to restrain a truly inspired (at least, in his mind) zinger about Morgan outsourcing his stalking. “Can I help you, Warden…”

“Captain Anastasia Luccio, and these are Wardens Yoshimo and Ramirez. We have, ah, actionable intelligence that the Order of the Blackened Denarius is operating in this city.”

Perfect. It never rained when it could pour.

I’m going to chalk up the fact that Sanya and I maintained enough eye contact to kick off a proper Soulgaze to the fact that he caught me off guard as well as the fact that I was still working on wrapping my head around, you know, being back in time as a teenager.

I will admit, though, the idea of having someone who understood my situation, in the here and now, is… nice.

Okay, so, right, Soulgaze. Everyone sees them differently, and I’ve even heard people talking about how you’d see people differently depending on where you are in your journey even if they were the same, although I can’t say I know of anyone who’s been able to actually confirm that. You only get one soul gaze, and if you look into someone’s eyes after Soulgazing them and get another Soulgaze, you’ve either got a case of mistaken identity or someone’s broken the Third Law of Magic.

To me, a Soulgaze shows… things. They’re incredibly symbolic, the kind of critical collection of items that shaped a person’s experiences and their life, and they’re framed relative to the importance and general feel of their impacts, but ultimately it’s on me to really interpret them.

Right out of the gate, the first thing I saw was Esperacchius. It was in a place of pride, yes, but it was also heavily used, the grip of the sword sweat-stained, flecks of ectoplasm and blood dotting the blade. It looked like he was using it as an anchor, almost, with how the blade seemed to almost bend from where it was embedded in the ground, but… no, not in the ground, in a coin.

No, a Coin.

I’d known, in the abstract, that Sanya had borne one of the Blackened Denarii, but seeing it, seeping soot everywhere and covered in bloodstains that the light radiating from Esperacchius had dried, made it clear that even though he’d managed to give up the Coin, he was still very much shaped by the experience.

The rest of the items were relatively minor- a scarf that had been gifted to him while he had wielded the Coin, ugly even without the bloodstains clashing with the pastel colors, grimy and discarded, a bandanna tied as a face mask, well-worn, that while not in a place of pride was still close at hand, and other trinkets that defined Sanya far less than the struggle between the Coin and his own choices as it continued.

I closed my eyes as soon as I was able, offering up a brief moment of mourning for the time that Magog had stolen from him.

I heard him staggering back as the Soulgaze released him from its grasp, breathing heavily and almost slamming his hand into the doorjamb. When I opened my eyes again, his eyes were wide with shock at… whatever he’d seen in me, and his shoulders were puffed up as if to make himself too big for a predator to take a bite out of, like a cat facing down a bear.

“Bozhe moi,” he said, one hand twitching down as if to draw the sword that wasn’t there before stilling. “What… what happened to you?”

“Someone broke the Sixth Law of Magic,” I said, putting down the half-carved wand with forced calm. One of the things that always happened whenever I endured a Soulgaze was my hands went all jittery, but this wasn’t one of the bad ones, so I managed to put down the knife and dowel without nicking myself before the jitters really showed through.

“Sixth Law?” Sanya asked.

“Time travel is verboten, for a number of reasons including but not limited to paradox and the possibility of tipping off some of the Bigger Fish of things they really shouldn’t know. Of course, since I was in the middle of bleeding out after anti-saint Nick got to me… well. I have no room to complain about someone sending my memories back in time.” The paintbrushes made one last stroke before laying them down, and I had to resist the urge to pick up the medallion and get my hand all full of wet paint. “I’d rather things go better now than they did in the future.”

The shine of the pedestals wasn’t as much of a distraction as the arrival of the Starsphere, so I was more than able to track the confusion, panic, and then resolve as they cycled through their turn upon his face.

“I will see him dead for this,” rumbled Sanya, fist clenching. “How did he do it?”

“He caught me in my bed in thirty years, after… well. I don’t particularly want to relive it, but we, as in humanity, ceased to be the most dominant species on the planet. I survived this particular encounter just fine.”

He snorted. “Of course it would be like that. What can you tell me about the situation at hand?”

“Not as much as I’d like,” I said, taking a deep breath, then another, and feeling as the shakes were dying down. “He’s after the Shroud, global plague, and he’s afraid of Harry getting involved.”

“Harry?” asked Sanya, raising an eyebrow. “Little Harry, the tyke?” He pried his fist open and flattened it at about hip height to indicate how tall my littlest brother was.

“No, Harry Dresden. He’s a Wizard of the White Council, and Nicky knew his mom before she ran away from a White Court vampire nest with her new husband.” I shook my head. “I don’t remember the exact details, but there’s a partial prophecy situation going on. He’s the best bet at finding the Shroud before Nicodemus, I think it’s in one of the old warehouse districts.”

Sanya’s eyebrows rose. “Are you sure?”

“No, but I’d dare you to perfectly remember something that happened to you thirty years ago.” I shrugged before pushing myself up once I was pretty sure that the jitters wouldn’t show by the time I washed my hands. “C’mon, if we don’t go in and wash up for dinner, Mom’s gonna get mad, and I really don’t think we want that.

Sanya shuddered. “No, your mother is… not to be trifled with. Come, then, ah…”

I rolled my eyes at him, jabbing my elbow into his ribs good-naturedly. “I’m Molly, old man, don’t go getting all senile on me yet.”

“I think you are older than me, if you count those thirty years,” Sanya grumbled, before following me into the house.

I was tempted to respond with an upraised finger, but the fact that we were in range of Mom’s mom-radar kept the bird unshot, so I just spun around to stick my tongue out at him before pulling open the back door for Sanya in a mockery of Harry’s usual chivalry.

“My thanks, Lady Carpenter,” he said, inclining his head gravely as he put entirely too much pomp into the statement.

“Of course, Sir Knight,” I said, regretting it as soon as I’d said it. Inasmuch as Mab was on our side, defining “our side” as “generally opposed to the Outsiders, at least in theory”, the way she’d treated her Knights after someone finally put Slate out of his misery had always rankled, and those two words were a key part of it.

Sanya slanted me a sideways look, and I hurriedly un-scrunched my face before anyone else could see. “Sorry,” I said. “Bad associations, didn’t realize they’d be an issue until I opened my fat mouth.”

He just chuckled and ruffled my hair. “Happens to everyone. You are teenager, so expect more to come.”

I rankled under his hand, but managed to bite back the annoyance over having a baby face thanks to the fact that I was, in fact, a teenager again, much to my neurochemistry’s chagrin. “Careful,” I said, casting just enough of an illusion to make my teeth look sharper. “I bite.”

“Duly noted, young one,” he said, still chuckling. “Now, come, your mother is waiting.”

The thought of Mom waiting, one foot tapping as she cast ever more irritated glances at the clock, got me moving, and I beat Sanya to the table handily.

Chapter Text

“Honored Merlin,” said Samuel Peabody, inclining his head to the Merlin of the White Council. Not out of respect, mind you, He Who Walks Beside had thoroughly disabused him of that notion towards Arthur Langtry and his willingness to let Dresden, McCoy, and their ilk walk free. No, he inclined his head to the Merlin out of habit, one of the strongest tools of any infiltrator.

“Wizard Peabody,” the Merlin replied, inclining his head in return. “What is it that you have for me?”

“Well,” said Peabody, maintaining the restrained, almost timid façade that his role required him to maintain. “I was doing the annual audit of the membership rolls of the White Council and found this.” The audit was a complete lie- no, it was He Who Walks Beside who had alerted Peabody to the discrepancy displayed on the vellum sheet he slid over to the Merlin.

He took a moment to scrutinize the parchment, before returning his attention to Peabody. “I do not see the problem.”

“For one,” said Peabody, “I have made… let us call them discreet inquiries, and there are significant discrepancies between verifiable facts and what is on that sheet. For one, Wizard Schneider hasn’t had an apprentice for almost a century, and for another, the woman on that parchment isn’t even two decades of age, not nearly old enough to have developed magic and learned enough of our ways to have earned membership in the White Council.”

The Merlin’s brows nearly met as he frowned. “Infiltration, then… but for what purpose? Such a flimsy identity would never pass muster, even in the best of circumstances, and we are not so desperate as to accept strange Wizards without so much as scrutinizing them.”

“It is worse than that, I fear,” said Peabody. “There is evidence that in doing this, someone has broken the Sixth Law of Magic. This was at least begun using my own proprietary authentication system, but… the proper codes are ones that I don’t have in my ledger for another two years. Upon discovering that, I took the risk of using my Sight upon the sheet of parchment, and it has led me to believe that this record is from the future, although to what purpose I cannot say.”

This had the benefit of being true- once the Walker had alerted him to the discrepancy, he had seen fit to investigate the matter personally before bringing it to the Merlin. One thing he didn’t mention, though, was the traces of Soulfire on the parchment. It wasn’t something that the Merlin could truly test for, even if he had the wherewithal to suspect it, but Peabody hadn’t survived this long in the service of He Who Walks Beside without being thorough.

Soulfire meant that, somehow, an Archangel was involved, and not in the sense of the sanctuary and Warden base Peabody had sold out to the Red Court not long ago. There wasn’t a particularly good interpretation for this turn of events, but in the worst case, the involvement of the Watchman could make things very unfortunate, so Peabody would have to be on his guard.

“A violation of the Laws and an infiltration of the Hidden Halls, and the so-called beneficiary is a denizen of Chicago.” The Merlin was clearly puzzling something out, which was likely to be in Peabody’s favor given his feelings on the Wizard who had made his home in Chicago.

“Dresden is likely to be under watch by Captain Luccio, and I trust her to ferret out any hint of his involvement. To catch the actual Warlock, though… that one will be tricky.” The Merlin’s bushy eyebrows had drawn together, providing a thunderous cloud over his frowning visage.

“If I may, honored Merlin… Warden Morgan is nearly finished with his assignment in the Congo, is he not? He has both the skills and the will to investigate this situation, without being… biased on the matter of Dresden.” Morgan was, in fact, biased, thanks to his friendship with Justin DuMorne as well as his contentious relationship with Dresden’s mother, but that bias was agreeable to the Merlin, so he was unlikely to register it.

“Just so,” said the Merlin. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Wizard Peabody. I will ensure Warden Morgan gets your file on this…” he sniffed. “Margaret Carpenter.”

Dad gave me a level look, then raised one eyebrow as I sat down, and I flicked a glance down self-consciously to make sure I didn’t have any sawdust or wood shavings stuck in my hoodie. Seeing that I didn’t, I mouthed “sorry” to him and dragged my chair back into the table.

“I take it that you lost track of time?” His voice was filled with gentle reproof.

“Don’t worry,” I replied, “I’m gonna go out and clean up after di-” I cut a look at Mom, and saw the tension in her face that denoted frustration. “-ishes.”

I’d be able to grab the little amulet to help with veils, too, since even with the dinky little plastic wand up my sleeve, I almost felt naked, what with not having a half dozen foci or enchanted items on hand like I’d gotten used to over the course of a couple of different wars. In an ideal world, I’d be able to put at least something together before shit really hit the fan, but without a proper workshop and with Nicodemus already halfway through one of his plots, I’d be lucky if I could finish a purpose-made wand before shit really hit the fan, let alone the kind of arsenal that had wowed the Wardens whenever we’d had cause to fight in the same place.

Oddly enough, Mom only got tenser, but she didn’t say anything, just turning her focus to where little Harry was doing his level best to smear food all over his tray.

“Nice to meet you again, Miss Carpenter,” said Shiro, inclining his head over his plate of pot roast.

“Nice to see you too, uh…” Frantically, I dug through the memories of my childhood, then came up with a vague memory of the man practicing swordplay in the backyard and called it good enough. “Uncle Shiro?”

His face split into a smile. “Ah, you do remember. I wasn’t sure you would.”

I shrugged once, casually. “Kids like swordplay. I’m not exactly an exception, even today, and it was… impressive.”

Shiro smiled, a gentle expression. “You live in the right house for that, I think.”

I could see Daniel’s eyes shining, and let him word vomit all over Shiro like the excitable twelve-year-old he was. Shiro handled it indulgently, with all the aplomb of a grandfather being asked about the woodworking projects in his barn (that is to say, with amused indulgence).

From there, the family devolved back into the usual chaos that you’d expect when you put seven kids under the age of fifteen into one room and put both food and unfamiliar adults in front of them. There were questions, and the scraping of forks and knives on plates, and answers, and elbows on the table, and it was everything I’d missed after they died. I let myself bask in the environment, good food and good company leaving me warm inside in a way that you only really get either out of going back home after a long time away or at a really good hole in the wall diner with friends.

Too little time passed before the food was all gone, and I got up and started moving around the table, taking the veritable display room’s worth of plates to the kitchen.

I paused as the pedestals flashed with bright light, and one of the ones near the sword transformed into a tall console, the kind that I’d almost expect to come out of the Death Star scene where Luke and Han figured out that Leia was on the station. Plugged into it were a tablet that absolutely looked like it would have been right at home on some Senator’s desk, as well as a three-pronged circular holoprojector, glowing blue hologram of me rotating slowly over it.

I paused briefly, a deep understanding of technical procedures and data transfer shoving their way into my skull, then shuddered as a headache decided to introduce itself to the inside of my skull as they unfolded into a bone-deep grasp of how to use and abuse a computer as I saw fit.

At the same time, I saw both the datapad and the holoprojector commlink appear on top of the pile of plates in my hands with a quiet pop of displaced air.

Fortunately, the hoodie I was wearing had a big ol’ pouch for a pocket that the datapad fit in, even with the Starsphere sitting there like it hadn’t already given me a headache today, and the holoprojector was small enough to slip into my pants pocket. In any other case I’d try and drop them off somewhere, but the datapad was ruggedized enough to take whatever suds I might end up getting on myself with when elbow deep in dishwater and the projector was unlikely to get splashed where it was.

That done, I continued clearing the table, fistfuls of silverware joining the plates and smaller serving dishes in the dishwasher before I kicked the door up to start the machine.

From there, I plugged up one side of the sink, poured in a good drizzle of dish soap, and then opened the tap, letting it start to fill up with nearly scalding water as I turned to the cooking dishes. I took the brown scraper out of the drawer and started attacking the crusted-on gunk in the pots and pans.

One quick spell, coupled to an effort of will and a gesture with the hand that had the wand up its sleeve, shut the water off once the sink was full, and another couple of minutes got all that I could out of dry scraping the dishes, so after taking a washcloth to the counters, I got the pleasure of having to halfway scald my hands off with the dishwater that I’d set too hot.

Let’s just say that I was glad that Mom was out of earshot, because if she wasn’t I would have been tasting soap for a solid week.

“So,” said an accented voice, and I barely managed to restrain my response to Sanya sneaking up on me from sending me a foot off the ground. “You said that you’re… from the future? Mentally, that is?”

“Jesus wept, Sanya,” I hissed, glad that I hadn’t managed to splash myself too badly when I flinched. “I ought to put a bell on you, if this keeps up!”

“Sorry,” he said, shrugging as he reached one broad hand out and pulled the faucet over to his half of the sink. “Force of habit.”

“Sure,” I said, giving in to my inner (well, external, now) teenager and rolling my eyes. “But yeah, that’s the best way to describe my situation. There’s… something else, though.”

“Beyond being back in time.” Sanya’s voice wasn’t quite skeptical, but it was drier than an elder of the Black Court.

“Yes, beyond that. I’ve been getting… things. A powerful divine relic, a holoprojector straight out of Star Wars, a weird advanced tablet… That and weird knowledge. It’s all unpredictable. Like, one minute I’m getting the kind of knowledge that I’d need to stand up to Shiro in a sword fight, then the next I’m the world’s greatest expert in computer software.” I had to remind myself that I didn’t want to get soap in my eye to prevent myself from rubbing at my face with my hands. “I’m worried about things getting… more. More dangerous, more disruptive… more of a target.”

Sanya grimaced. “That is… very much a valid concern. I suspect I have more questions about the situation at hand than you, but… something to keep in mind about your situation. I may not be…” He gestured with one dripping hand at her. “Magic witch guru librarian, or whatever you want to call it, but I feel, ah, what is word… creation fire around you, like the Swords, or like Michael.”

“Creation… oh, you mean Soulfire? I didn’t know Dad exhibited signs of that,” I said, frowning as I attacked a pot with perhaps more ferocity than strictly necessary.

Sanya shook his head. “Not your Michael. That Michael.”

I followed his pointing finger up, and it took me longer than it probably should have to realize who he was referring to. “The archangel?”

“Just so. But the point isn’t to make comparisons, no. I… my assumption is that someone like you or me, we cannot have access to Soulfire without an external source getting involved, is that so?”

“To the best of my knowledge, why?”

“One more question,” said Sanya, restraining a flinch as he turned on the too-hot water. “Who gave you your access to Soulfire?”

“Uriel,” I said, no uncertainty in my mind whatsoever. Then, I froze. How the hell had I known that?

Sanya broke into a broad grin. “Hah! That is good news indeed, you know why? It is because the Watchman would not give you a burden you cannot withstand the weight of, or contribute to it if he was not involved in your duty to begin with. I may not have met him myself, but Shiro speaks well of the man and that’s enough for me.”

I… hadn’t considered that, but it was actually a decent argument.

I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could speak, the pedestals in the workshop within my soul flowed. One of them expanded in a shower of greenish sparks before resolving into a set of holographic screens that blinked and displayed various sets of schematics. At the same time, the datapad in my pocket chirped out a sound that I somehow knew was the “download completed” chime.

Sanya raised an eyebrow. “What was that?”

I wiped my hands off on my pants before reaching into my pocket and fishing out my datapad. “This is a datapad, and…” I navigated to the download repository where the recent data dump had ended up and opened it, then clicked through to the document at the top labeled “Read Me”.

I frowned, reading through the document, before sighing and letting my head fall. “It’s a big technical database, which I really would have appreciated after Nicky and the Nickelheads left town since that’s just another thing that I have to work through before-”

Sanya snorted, then clapped his hands. “No, stop. Prioritize. Clean dishes first, then what do you need to do to contribute to the situation? Database can wait until you have the time to go over things without the sword of Nickycles over your head.”

I breathed deeply once, then twice, and let the urgency of the database drop in favor of rational thought. Thinking through the situation, he was right- the database would be here after the Denarians were gone, but depending on how much work I put into preparing for them, I might not be. “You’re right.” I plunged my hands back into the sink.

“That’s the spirit!”

We finished the dishes without really discussing the situation, but that was fine- we’d probably be able to sneak away after Mass and compare notes, and this was more important.

Once the sink was drained and cleaned, Sanya put one hand on my shoulder. “Do not spend too long cleaning up the workshop,” he said. “It is not a good idea to be sleep deprived when Nicodemus is in town, and you are a growing child who needs her rest.”

I rolled my eyes, but I was smiling as I did it. “Fine, twist my arm.”

“I would rather not, especially if your mother is in a position to notice.”

We both chuckled, and then I sighed. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow, I guess.”

“Good night,” he said, before trudging off to Mom’s sewing room to collapse into bed, probably.

I, on the other hand, headed out to finish the cleanup in Dad’s workshop. Once the tools were put away, I grabbed the half-carved wand and medallion, which had thankfully dried out, before hurrying through my bedtime routine.

For a moment, I almost pulled up the database to start looking through it, but quashed the idea in favor of the embrace of bed. As much as I wanted to learn about the technological database I could take advantage of, I wouldn’t have either the time or the resources to actually do anything worthwhile with it.

Even if I had, it wasn’t like I’d be able to stop time to read through it all, right?

Chapter Text

I was more than a little bit curious how much leeway the Church gave Father Forthill with regards to the masquerade as I walked out of Mass, sandwiched solidly between Dad and Sanya.

On one hand, there was the way that, as far as I was aware, he hadn’t really started explicitly talking about the supernatural in his homilies until after the Fomor had made their big run at Chicago in a decade and change, but on the other hand… well, even if it was on the liturgical calendar and that had been set in stone before Mom had been more than a twinkle in Grandma and Grandpa’s eyes, he sure made a big deal about the way that a lot of the situations that one could get themselves into could be solved by standing up, picking up their mat, and going home, which certainly sounded like it could be a stand-in for setting aside one of the Coins.

All that aside, it was nice to be back at Saint Mary of the Angels. I’d been to mass since the Fomor had destroyed the building, granted, but there was something about the grand old building that had been lacking in every other church I’d ever heard someone serving mass in, and it wasn’t just Father Forthill, since I’d had the fortune to attend mass he’d been giving in the refugee camps.

Sanya gave me a questioning look as he, Dad, and Shiro split off, as if inviting me to come with them, but I shook my head. Mom was likely to go off and talk to Mrs. Capelli or someone else in that crowd, so I needed to be on hand so I could watch the rest of the kids, plus the fact that I wasn’t quite ready to talk to Dad about getting involved with the situation at hand.

He shrugged, then waved, and as he walked off, the pedestals glimmered.

When nothing came of it, I sighed, more than a little grateful that I wasn’t having to deal with another complication at the moment, then turned back to Mom and the rest of the Jawas. True to form, she was heading off to the corner of the parking lot that Mrs. Capelli had taken over years ago with little Harry on her hip like he hadn’t been getting a bit old for that, so I was left to herd the cats into something resembling an ordered charge towards the Sandcrawler and the stuff that Mom always kept in the back before they started invading other cars in search of mischief.

Thankfully, I managed to get them all to the Sandcrawler with a minimum of distractions, the most egregious instance being Hobbit picking up a chunk of asphalt off the ground and trying to chew on it.

I’d managed to pry the thing out of her grubby little hands before she started slobbering on it with the help of her favorite teddy bear and a pocket bottle of hand sanitizer (thankfully- the last time that she’d gotten Captain Paws dirty, she’d spend half an hour giving her lungs a real workout, and it was only the fact that Mom had managed to scrub it clean with the wipes she kept in the Sandcrawler at all times that kept it from going on longer), so once Amanda and Alicia had managed to occupy each other with whatever schoolyard games were in nowadays and Matthew and Daniel had gotten their books out, I was relatively safe to grab my datapad and start perusing the database I’d gotten yesterday.

It was really impressive, too. Wherever it was from, they’d done a good job of integrating magical energies into their technologies, being able to use them as alternative power sources or, in some cases, being able to directly store magical energy in batteries, which… how the fuck?

Just from looking at the batteries, it was obvious that the stuff called magic in the files was a far cry from what passed for proper magic in the real world, but if I had enough time, I could probably adapt the principles into something that could work with the White Council’s style of magic, and then I would really start cooking with gas.

I put the datapad down for a moment, rubbing at my eyes frustratedly before turning to the rest of the Jawas.

If all went well, I’d be making their lives a lot safer, but at the same time, before I really got established, I could very well be bringing down all kinds of heat on their heads. Pretty much every supernatural faction short of the White Council, the Fellowship, and maybe Odin and his PMC, preferred humanity docile, fat, and happy, defenseless sheep for the slaughter, and the minute that they got wind of someone trying to change that by adding magic to technology was the minute that my head would be sought after by everyone from Drakul to Kukulkan, and even living under the same roof as a Knight of the Cross with all the protections that that brought with it wouldn’t be enough to cover my ass.

So, before I really started experimenting, I needed both somewhere safe to hole up and, more importantly, a sponsor who was willing to go to the mattresses for me.

The White Council was out. Even if I didn’t know that they were currently compromised by everyone from the Unseelie to the Adversary, they wouldn’t understand enough of what I could do for them thanks to their inability to really grok technology. When combined to the fact that I wasn’t at least eighty, I wouldn’t be able to get anyone this side of maybe some of the younger Wardens to listen to me, and they wouldn’t be able to arrange the kind of protection that I’d need even if the Council was willing to break their dumbass turtling shtick that they’d tried to use to just wait out the Red Court.

Speaking of the war with the Red Court, I couldn’t afford to rely on the Fellowship or any of the other smaller organizations thanks to all their effort being devoted to standing against the vampires, if they would even have access to enough resources to prevent me from getting assassinated in my sleep if they weren’t all tied up in the war.

I could, maybe, count on someone like Vadderung, if I was willing to submit myself to his authority, but-

Something about the way that Hope was moving drew my attention, and I looked down at her toddling towards the street. After a moment to open my senses, I heard a sussurus that seemed almost hypnotic, and had to bite down hard on the inside of my cheek to not immediately start following where it beckoned.

Following the meandering path that Hope was taking with my eyes even as I jogged over to catch up with her, I saw a big black SUV idling on top of the speed bump just outside the parking lot like a jackass, the kind that they always used in the movies for government agencies. One of the back windows was rolled down, and in it…

In the window, I could see the head of a snake about the size of a human’s, dull gray scales flecked with what looked unnervingly like blood, tongue flickering and the stench of hellfire all but radiating off of him, with four baleful eyes following Hope toddling her way towards him and a baleful sigil glowing a sickly green above both sets.

“Fuck,” I said, speeding up to try and get out in front of Hope. I pulled the amulet I’d managed to pull together out of my pocket with one hand, then wheezed to a stop ten feet in front of her. Two of my fingers rose, making the classic “I’m watching you” gesture towards the lower set of eyes, and I spat out “mabushii” accompanied with an effort of will and an image.

Immediately, the snake-headed man flinched back, screwing all four of his eyes shut as I turned all the psychedelic fury of my one-woman rave spell on him, and the spell faded out as he found himself very distracted. After a moment, the driver gunned the engine, screeching out of the crosswalk like I was going to try and kill the whole car… which, in retrospect, it could have seemed that way, what with the snake-headed Denarian writhing in pain and sensory overload.

I raised my hand to cast another spell, but before I could, the workshop’s pedestals glimmered. One of them glowed more intensely before, as if in fast-forward, a model of a house resembling a dollhouse that seemed to be made out of solid silver, glowing in the moonlight, was assembled. On lower pedestals nearby, a silver statue of someone who vaguely resembled me, a sword raised over her head in a dramatic moment, poured itself into reality, and a small silver amulet inscribed with a cross (which I could feel materializing around my neck, hidden beneath my blouse) and, on the other side, a hole for a jewel of some sort ready to slot in appeared in a shower of moonlight. Leaned up against the taller pedestal with the house was an outline of a sword in silver, one that I could feel my magic flowing through somehow.

I shoved both the workshop and the knowledge of geomantic energy manipulation into the back of my mind- I couldn’t afford to spend time on them in the middle of a crisis, facing down at least one Denarian.

While I’d been distracted, the passenger window had been cycled down, and without the tinted glass in the way, I could recognize Nicodemus’ sneering face looking out at us as his arm fell. “Best of luck with the child,” he said, ugly sneer twisting up into a smirk, and my heart rose into my throat.

I turned around to see Hope, eyes unfocused, stumbling forward with her hand out, and, closer to her than to me, a tarnished silver coin lying on the sidewalk with all the innocence of a schoolyard bully pretending that no, ma’am, I didn’t just push her over, she’s doing it to get me in trouble, would I ever lie to you ma’am?

There was no time to cast a spell even if I wasn’t sure it would interfere with whatever had enchanted Hope, and I wasn’t nearly fast enough to get to her before she got to the coin, so there was only one thing that I could do that had even a chance to save her from the coin.

I pushed off into the best standing jump I could with no warning, all but throwing my torso forwards to try and get to the coin before Hope. I flopped forwards, flat on my stomach, but I managed to cup my left hand and slap it down, covering the coin without touching it, and I gave thanks to whoever was watching out for me that I didn’t end up marking up my face.

Hope tripped forwards, the dazed shamble she’d been doing finally betraying her, and she landed squarely on top of my hand, flattening it out and forcing my skin in contact with the coin.

I could feel something reaching out from the coin, something that made the Soulfire inside me roil uncomfortably, but I couldn’t pay attention to that since Hope had snapped out of whatever trance she was in and was now starting to cry.

I closed my now-sore left hand around the coin, then lifted Hope up, setting her back on her feet so I could slip the coin into my pocket without touching it to her. “Hope, are you okay? What happened?”

“B-big snake man!” she sniffled, one hand clenching on thin air. “No Captain Paws!”

Thankfully, the teddy bear wasn’t too far away, and with a muttered “fukukaze” I managed to call up enough of a gust to toss it into the air, landing neatly in my hand. “Yes Captain Paws,” I said, pulling it back around her to show the scruffy little plush to her. “See? He’s A-okay!”

That was enough to get Hope to stop crying- she’d scraped up her knee a little bit, but thankfully, the sidewalk wasn’t rough enough to draw blood, so the only issue that came of us both eating dirt was my blouse and pants got a little bit dusty, which wasn’t something that Mom would make a big deal about. It was hardly the dirtiest I’d gotten wrangling the Jawas, and it didn’t require dry cleaning, so she would probably let things slide.

“Yeah, now, come on, let’s go back over to the Sandcrawler and go wait for Mom with the rest of the Jawas, okay?” I pushed myself up, flexing my left arm to try and get it to stop stinging from the contact with the sidewalk, and then offered Hope my hand.

“Okay!” She took my hand and allowed me to lead her back to the rest, thankfully just ahead of Mom.

“Perfect timing, Molly,” she said. “Your father, Shiro, and Sanya are going to be coming home after they have a conversation with Father Forthill, but we’ll be going now.”

“Sounds like a plan, Stan,” I said, reaching down for Hope.

She obligingly raised her arms, and even if she was heavier than I thought she would be, I managed to hold her up long enough for Daniel to open the side door of the Sandcrawler so I could let her flop into her car seat like a cat, all languid limbs and frustrating inability to sit still when I needed her to. Still, I managed to secure her, and once I’d gotten into the front seat, I could zone out to actually handle the implications of everything that had happened since mass had let out.

Okay, the less pressing issue was the new knowledge of energy flows. It was a lot more like what I remembered of the interactions of ley lines from back when I was still learning under Klaus, combined with the nebulous discussion of areas of power and prepared ground, although I wanted to call them manses for some reason. On the whole, it was probably going to be helpful for fortifying locations once I could afford to pony up for the materials it would take to make one manifest itself, which was nice since I’d already been thinking about that, although my spellwork would probably be a bit more efficient once I properly internalized all the arcane knowledge.

The more pressing issue was that I had, intentionally or otherwise, opened myself up to one of the Fallen.

Chapter Text

As if on cue, the pedestals in the workshop started to glitter with soft light, drawing my attention first to them and then, when none of them changed, to the pit that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, dug into the floor.

It was relatively shallow, more like a saucer or a particularly shallow bowl, and the edges were smooth, almost as if it had been shaped that way from the beginning. I remembered the state of the workshop before it had arrived and a mere five minutes ago, when the model house had assembled itself, it wasn’t there, but if someone lacked my experience with the space, the assumption would be forgivable.

There was no warning as the bowl filled itself in. Between one heartbeat and the next, a gently curved expanse of empty floor found itself filled with what vaguely resembled a bird’s nest crossed with a fancy studio apartment, if it had been designed and carved by hand by a TMNT show’s worth of Renaissance masters. There was a circle of what looked like sticks and twigs, woven together to almost a foot in thickness and maybe fifteen in internal diameter, picked out painstakingly from pale marble, shot through with dark veins that in turns seemed to both fade into the natural shadows of the nestlike construction and stand out starkly, putting me in mind of that method of repairing things with gold that had caught on in Japan that Yuki had mentioned a time or two, Kint-something or other.

Within the circle was an odd mix of creature comforts- there was a vanity and a round bed, white accented with gold with the exception of the bedframe, which was made of dark mahogany, both seeming pristine, as if straight from some high-end showroom, but there was a corner of the nest that I could only describe as a painter’s studio, similarly unused, and another place that was… well, let’s just say that “fun-time handcuffs” were the least of the tools there and leave it at that.

So, all in all, fairly discongruous with the rest of the workshop, all corruption of purity and pristine items as compared to the firelit warmth of the workshop that I’d learned much of my magic in.

With exactly as much ceremony as the appearance of the nest, a woman appeared, standing dead center in the middle of the encircled area, and I took my first look at the Fallen that had taken up residence in my head.

She was statuesque, pale skin with just enough pink undertones to distinguish herself from the marble she found herself surrounded by and emphasize the shine of her lustrous blonde hair. She wore a simple toga over one shoulder, belted at the waist with a length of what appeared to be rope if not for the golden sheen, and it was revealing enough to be worthy of the title “Seducer”, if that’s who she was, while being tantalizing enough that, if my libido was stronger or my wariness over having, you know, a shard of a fallen angel living in my head rent free was less strident in my thoughts, I would have found myself quite tempted by. As it was, I could appreciate the aesthetic appeal of her lithely muscled form while also noting the almost diaphanous, there-but-not-there suggestion of a massive pair of wings extending from her back, the faint scent of ozone wafting towards me overpowered by the stench of Hellfire.

“Greetings, my host,” she said, opening eyes greener than Dad’s lawn at its most verdant, and as she spoke, a sigil flickered to violet light on her forehead, looking like an L that someone had run through first italics and then enough calligraphers to turn it into an hourglass, only confirming my suspicions of who I’d ended up being a pack mule for.

“Hello, Lasciel,” I said, pressing my lips into a thin line. “Fancy meeting you here.”

She smiled, a gentle expression that nonetheless had nervous chills running down my spine. “Ah, I see you are familiar with me.”

“By reputation,” I said tersely. Something about what she had just said struck me as odd, and while it took a moment to puzzle out what it was, I came up with it before she continued speaking.

She didn’t have access to my memories.

From what I’d heard from Sanya, in the future-that-wasn’t, Magog had been more than willing to ransack his past memories and take advantage of them to more adroitly browbeat him into staying with Tessa and Rosanna, so clearly there was some sort of protection that kept Lasciel from just picking up on what experience I’d had with her hosts in the future-that-wasn’t, but…

No, wait, I knew what it was. Somehow, this place was insulating my memories of the future that I’d lived through from Lasciel, restricting her knowledge of my knowledge and capabilities to just what I’d said and done since returning to this time.

There was no way to be sure, short of hunting down wherever the protection came from and examining that, but the newly begun slight glow of the wand that I knew signified both the memories and magic that I’d earned in the future, off to the side of Lasciel’s nest, was close enough to vindication that I’d take it.

My train of thought screeched to a halt as the pedestals of the Forge glowed, and though none of them changed, the fact that they did so in clear view of Lasciel set me on edge.

The foreboding feeling only grew stronger as she cast her gaze around, taking in the entirety of the workshop with fresh eyes, before a smile grew onto her face, small but unnerving. “Oho,” she said, turning her gaze back to me. “A new chosen of the Celestial Forge? Mmm, you are going to be a good host. Better, perhaps, than Dresden, despite what Nicodemus thinks.”

I found myself very tempted to ask more about that. I knew some things about Margaret LeFay, but not nearly as much as Nicodemus, who’d been someone who could call himself a contemporary (if not a friend) of the woman, and getting the information Lasciel had from him about Margaret and how Harry took after her would be easier than squeezing it out of Nicodemus or hunting down Lord Raith and maneuvering him into disclosing secrets. On the other hand, bargaining with any of the Fallen, especially the fucking Webweaver, was a phenomenally stupid idea and I was liable to fuck myself over hard by doing so.

“Right,” I said, rolling my eyes (and then wondering how the fuck that worked when I was sitting with my eyes closed in the car and projecting my awareness into my own soul). “Like I’d give someone like you to a Starborn who’s even more emotionally vulnerable than I am. The poor man has no support system, what makes you think I’d let you have a free shot at him?”

Lasciel met my eye-roll with her own. “I do not, my host. In fact, I do expect you to keep me to yourself out of a desire to protect the people around you from the burden of containing a fallen angel and maintain whatever path it is that you end up choosing for yourself. I will say that Anduriel has asked me for some help in preserving his favorite host, not that he can’t find one better suited for him, but I am by no means obligated to do so and in fact believe that he can really do better.”

“Give thanks for small mercies, I guess,” I said, finding it a little funny how catty Lasciel was being.

“Yes, and speaking of small mercies, I do believe that you’re the most prepared host I’ve had in centuries.” Lasciel’s assessing gaze moved a shade to the approving, sending a shudder racing down my spine.

My hackles snapped right back the fuck up at that. “Ah, so that’s it, huh? You’re trying to compliment me into giving in to your charms so I give over all my free will to the pretty lady living in my soul?” I made an effort to insert a mocking edge into my “voice” for a moment.

Lasciel’s eyes flashed with an ugly bruise-purple light for just a moment as her face seemed to solidify, seeming more like a statue than flesh, and her voice seemed to sour in a way that I couldn’t identify in the actual “sound” of the thing. “Do you honestly think so poorly of me, my host?”

“You’re literally living rent-free in my head, so you tell me,” I shot back.

She made eye contact for a moment, and for a brief, irrational moment, I was terrified of the prospect of a Soulgaze with a malevolent entity that counted its age in eons, before managing to remember that Lasciel couldn’t be a direct participant of a Soulgaze. I let out a relieved breath- seeing the way that Ursiel had rebuilt his host from the ground up was one thing, but experiencing the innermost self of a literal fallen angel was likely beyond what I could handle even if it wasn’t liable to piss her right the hell off and get her to try and kill me, good host or no.

Then, the moment passed, and Lasciel made a moue, transforming from an unimpressed Greek statue to a baby-faced teenager who just got told that her favorite show got cancelled. “My host is so mean to me,” she sing-songed, turning her nose up at me in a way that seemed almost playful. “Woe is me, for I am forsaken by my most generous host!”

If she was trying to throw me off by being so melodramatic, then it was working, especially when she’d pulled out the expression that I could swear I’ve seen on Hope’s face at least once when she was trying to convince Dad to give her extra dessert or something like that. I found myself rolling my eyes, fondly this time, before I remembered who exactly was in front of me and got all riled up again.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, disdain worthy of Harry in my voice. “The owner of the soul you decided to squat in isn’t impressed with you, what else is new.”

“I have never before been hosted by one of the Chosen of the Celestials, be they Forge or Grimoire. I cannot say any of us has even come close, save perhaps Namshiel. He had the opportunity to ensnare Merlin, before he began to build his legend, but… well, he made a judgement call based on the information he had, and there was no way to know that an up-and-coming Imperial Mage would have been an inferior choice to some child from the wilds of Brittania.” Lasciel very deliberately shrugged one shoulder, nonchalance incarnate save for the smirk on her face.

Of course, she had good fucking reason to be that fucking smug. The nature of this thing I’d been saddled with was… kind of worrying, now that I thought about it, if for no other reason than power had purpose and I’d been given one hell of a lot of power. The fact that she was the only source of information I had on this thing was… well, it was the kind of leverage anyone would jump at.

My train of thought was, once again, interrupted by the Forge (and wasn’t it nice to actually have  a name to put to it), although this time the glittery lights didn’t die out unceremoniously.

One of the pillars rose, taking on an almost plastic-y appearance, and atop it appeared a gun. Not a real gun, naturally, but a plastic one, shaped like someone had told a six-year-old about the idea of a revolver and had them draw it out. The abnormally long cylinder was out front, shiny and black with a band of neon orange around the front, surrounded by a yellow frame with more orange forming a quarter inch’s worth of barrel. The trigger matched the barrel in color, and the section above it and the grip both were the kind of shiny gray that gets used on injection molded plastics when they want to pretend that it’s metal. On the top gray section were four letters picked out in yellow, and then it all clicked.

None of us had ever been keen to get Nerf guns, in either this time or the future-that-wasn’t, but I was aware of the basic concept of the things.

More importantly, I was aware of the fact that the Forge had just dropped the ability to pick up anything (well, anything that couldn’t move of its own accord, which was a lot less restrictive than it sounded) and turn it into a gun with just a thought.

The pocket-sized purple book with metal clasps almost seemed unimportant in comparison, but given the fact that the Forge was insistent that I know that it would update itself with every weapon that I picked up, every foe I’d ever faced, and every significant item I’d ever interacted with, plus a side order of prophetic vagueness at times, it was probably a big deal, and after a moment, I got it- this was the kind of information-gathering ability that would defeat every means of obfuscation save for its own restrictions, the kind that would let people defeat the kinds of protections that, say, prevent the Oblivion War from blowing itself way the fuck open. Again.

Fuck.

Lasciel turned her head to me, a curiously birdlike gesture. “Oh? Is something troubling you, my host?”

She appeared genuinely curious, but I couldn’t trust that. “Okay, so. I’m assuming you’re aware of the Archive’s purpose?”

“Prosecute the Oblivion War, yes.” Her eyes narrowed. “What is that?”

“The kind of item that would, if used carelessly, cause us to lose.” With that, I opened my eyes in the real world, shoving my sense of the Forge to the back of my head just in time to pull in to the driveway.

Chapter Text

The fact that I’d been granted a book that contained the names and histories of enemies I’d faced in the past wasn’t the most shocking revelation that I’d had in the past couple of days. Hell, just off hand, I could think of three different magical entities that could have plucked the information out of nowhere, even if only in the future-that-wasn’t.

Just knowing that I had such a powerful information-gathering tool, but I couldn’t afford to use it because it would blow the Oblivion War wide the fuck open, and not in a good way, was a real kick in the teeth.

I was going to need to use it eventually. Sooner or later, I was going to run into someone that I couldn’t handle without information. I wasn’t Harry, with all his investigational skills and the contacts he could lean on if his other skills came up dry, or someone like his godmother who had the kind of savvy to squeeze the information out of anyone I needed. My strengths had always lain in either the subtler magics or enchanted items, which were formidable in their own right but weren’t something I could afford to just swing around recklessly. I needed information to not get myself fucked over in a situation I hadn’t had the chance to prepare for, and without doing so I was liable to get myself kidnapped and turned into a slave artificer for some monster with the kind of mojo to bind me or the smarts to trick me into a contract.

Not today, though, and I could afford to just leave it where it lay in the Forge. For all that he was a major power and every bit as dangerous as the millennia of marauding implied, he was a very known quantity, especially now that he’d committed Lasciel to a task, and between knowing how he thought and what his goals were, we could afford to forgo the thing.

I tromped up to my room, head heavy with thoughts, and flopped down on my bed for a good long moment. Then, I frowned and pushed myself up.

I hadn’t taken much note of it yesterday, but the box on my bedside table wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I’d keep around given half a chance, especially at age fourteen. It was clearly well-made, plain with flat planes and sharp corners, but it lacked the… certain aesthetics, shall I say, that I’d preferred at the age, being plain, well-oiled dark wood with a simple border carved and then burned around the edges of the lid.

I lifted the lid off with one hand, three balls of light playing around my right hand and the wand held within, ready to burst into searing life with an instant’s notice-

The box contained six clear bottles.

There wasn’t a label, but inside each bottle, there was a cloudy yellow liquid, with just a hint of pulp suspended in it.

I was distracted from the bottles by the Forge glowing for a moment. One of the pillars, the one right next to the Nerf gun, seemed to flow upwards up, turning into a deep purple metal, and on top of the pillar, a helmet of burnished steel constructed itself out of flat panes of metal that appeared out of nowhere before painting itself a deep purple.

“Interesting,” hummed Lasciel, as the protection of the helmet extended itself over me, and I grinned.

Magneto’s helmet was… controversial, for the fact of the man who wore it if nothing else, but what it represented- complete and utter protection from all kinds of mental effects, including memetic hazards like the kind of contamination that would let an old got anchor itself to reality by me knowing its name- was the kind of thing that kind of got you believing that someone up there was looking out for you.

With that weight conveniently off my shoulders, I could turn back to the bottles.

I pulled one out and twisted- failed to twist the lid off. I huffed, then pulled my blouse out from my pants, covered the cap with it, and twisted.

This time, with the cloth covering the lid, I managed to put enough torque on it to pop it off, and a little wisp of vapor wafted off the top of the bottle. I lifted it up to face level to take a whiff, but didn’t get much of anything- no carbonation, no hops, maybe a hint of something sharp, but otherwise nothing.

Mentally shrugging, I tipped the bottle up and took one sip-

Damn, that’s good.

I hadn’t had the pleasure of having Mac’s lemonade particularly often, on account of not living in Chicago for a good long time and then all the Crazy Bullshit that came from being, you know, in Chicago meaning that he wasn’t open for business when I was in town more often than not. That said, it was extremely distinctive, in the “take one taste and you’ll know it” sense. Seriously, I didn’t know what the fuck he put in it, but whenever I got the chance, I’d spring for the lemonade over even his special reserve, the stuff was that good.

This was the first time I’d had the stuff in years, and I very nearly drained the whole thing in one go. Another pull emptied the bottle entirely, and I turned to put it back in the box to return to Mac’s-.

“Margaret. Katherine. Amanda. Carpenter.” Mom’s voice caught me with the bottle half-visible behind the wood of the box, and even though I’d faced down vampires, Fomor, Denarians, and more, it still spoke to an old, old place in my brain and froze me in place more thoroughly than even old Mother Winter could have.

“It’s not alcoholic?” I tried, although from the thunderous expression on Mom’s face, it didn’t much help.

If I were a little bit less worried about both being in trouble and the fact that Mom was already stressed, I’d almost call the experience of her dragging me down the stairs by my ear nostalgic. As it was, I was glad to hear the sound of Dad’s truck rumbling into the driveway as Mom pulled me into the kitchen, since he’d always been the one to temper Mom’s most severe punishments, at least, when he was around.

As such, I was waiting in the kitchen, decisively not rubbing my sore ear, as he led Sanya and Shiro into the house, in that order. The two foreign Knights took one look at Mom’s expression and turned on their heels, walking directly into her sewing room and closing the door behind them.

To be honest, I couldn’t blame them for quailing in the face of Charity Carpenter, but I wished I could have had a little more support than just Dad, as much as I knew I could count on him.

“What happened?” he asked, setting himself as the third point of an equilateral triangle with me and Mom as the other two points. It was his preferred position when we ended up fighting: it served to effectively declare himself as a neutral party between the two of us, and, when things had gotten… really bad, in the future-that-wasn’t, he’d been better able to interpose the bulk of his body between the two of us to forcibly deescalate the situation.

“I found our daughter drinking,” said Mom, thrusting the empty bottle that she’d caught me holding at Dad.

He turned one upraised eyebrow to me.

“It was lemonade,” I said, too level to be a whine as I made direct eye contact with Dad for just a moment, making sure to look away just in time to prevent the Soulgaze.

“Was it?” he asked, exactly as level as my words.

“I’m pretty sure that I have five other bottles of lemonade up in my room,” I replied, shrugging with somewhat overblown casualness. To be fair, it helped that I was fairly sure that the bottles came from the Forge somehow, given the fact that I could see a box twin to the one on my bedside table resting “If you’d like, I can share some of the bottles that I got on my own with you and Mom, so you’re sure that it’s not an actual problem and that I’m not drinking alcohol,” I continued.

His other eyebrow rose. “Other bottles?”

When he turned his gaze onto Mom, she flushed with embarrassment. “I didn’t see any.”

“Of course not,” I said, perfectly calmly. “You just dragged me downstairs by the ear and pulled the empty bottle I had in my hand out of my hand.”

It was possible that I was not, in fact, perfectly calm, but either way Dad just sighed. “Molly, please go bring the box.”

“Sure thing, Dad!” I chirped, the false cheer eliciting a wince out of Mom, for some reason.

As I hurried up the stairs, I could hear the wry amusement in Dad’s voice as he asked “Really?”

I paused for a moment at the top of the stairs as the Forge glowed briefly, but once it was clear that I wasn’t getting anything new dropped on me, I continued into my room, picking the box up with a grunt of effort, and then carried it back down the stairs, letting it slam to the countertop and rattle the bottles inside. “Here we go,” I said, gesturing to the box. “Feel free to try any of the bottles.

Dad nodded, then reached into the box without looking. After pulling out the bottle, he twisted the cap off with just the thumb of the hand that was already holding it by the neck, which was unfair as all get out, before taking a careful sip.

He sighed, setting the bottle down on the counter with a clack of glass on marble, and made eye contact with Mom. “It’s lemonade.”

“I’m… sorry, Molly,” said Mom, still looking a little bit spooked as she apologized for the fact that she jumped down my throat for what ultimately turned out to be a false alarm.

“No harm, no foul,” I said, lying a little, but in the face of, you know, being assassinated in your own bed and ending up back in time with a chance to prevent so many future tragedies, I’d like to think that I’d be willing to cut Mom at least a little bit of a break.

“I must ask, though,” said Dad, pausing for what I can only assume is dramatic effect, “when did you have the chance to go to McAnally’s Pub to get some of his lemonade, and what did you have to do to convince him to enchant the box for you?”

Ah, shit.

“What gave it away?” I asked, desperately wracking my brain to come up with some kind of explanation that would pass muster without blowing the lid off of… well, everything.

“It’s a wooden box,” Dad said dryly, which… yeah, that’s fair. I wasn't exactly thinking about it when I had mine, but the stuff was cold, the kind of cold that comes out of a good fridge and not hardwood. I reached out to the box with my arcane senses and felt the power of the Forge suffusing every inch of the box, guaranteeing that every day, I’d have six bottles of Mac’s lemony goodness waiting for me, ice cold and everything.

“Well-” I started, but before I could continue, the doorbell rang through the house. Without thinking, I swung my arcane senses over to check at the door, since I’d already been in that mindset, and recoiled at what felt like a sun standing outside the door.

Fortunately, it was a familiar sun, and even though I couldn’t know why she was here, I did know that it was a better idea to let her in than to just leave her waiting out on the porch, especially if this was back before she fell out with her driver.

“Hang on, we need to deal with this,” I said, and though Dad frowned, he didn’t do anything to stop me as I went over to the door. “Who is it?”

“The Archive,” and yeah, that was Kincaid’s voice coming muffled through the door.

I opened the door and… wow, seeing Ivy as such a small child was kind of a trip after the last time I’d seen her was when she was going through a pack of cornerhounds like Harry through one of Mac’s steak sandwiches. She looked downright adorable in the kind of dress that I could see Mom pushing onto Alicia if not for the teeth-vibrating level of defensive enchantments on the thing, and in other circumstances I could see Mom saying that her hair was the kind of thing we should all aspire to, at least in terms of how well she clearly cared for it

“Ivy,” I said, nodding to the girl, before turning to the hulking form of Kincaid. He’d changed much less in the decades between now and my death, but he had a few less scars now. “Driver.”

One corner of his mouth quirked up, and he nudged the girl. “Miss Carpenter,” she said, prim received pronunciation and all, “I have a matter of some importance to discuss with yourself and the Knights on the premises. May I come in?”

“Enter freely, and be welcomed as a guest,” I said, extending my arm in a grandiose gesture that nonetheless elicited an adorable giggle from her. “Kincaid, you coming in too, or you want to stand guard?”

He gave me a considering look, then shook his head. “I’m good right where I am.”

“That is your prerogative,” I said, before gently swinging the door closed.

“Mrs. Carpenter, Sir Carpenter, I am the Archive,” said Ivy, having made her way the short distance to the kitchen in the space of the time I’d spoken to Kincaid. “I need to speak with you, Sir Carpenter, as well as the two other Knights listening in at the doorway and your daughter.”

I made it into the kitchen just in time to see Sanya rub the back of his neck sheepishly, following the unfazed Shiro into the kitchen.

“Real quick… anyone want some lemonade?” I asked, not making eye contact with Mom.

She shook her head slowly, still looking at Ivy where she stood on a step stool with no small degree of confusion, and Shiro also demurred, but Sanya shrugged one shoulder before nodding, and Ivy said “Yes, please.”

I pulled three bottles out of the box on the counter, two for them and one for myself, and made sure to savor the expressions of appreciation on their faces.

Once she was done sampling Mac’s wares, Ivy nodded to me. “Thank you, miss Carpenter. Now then, everyone else… how familiar are you with the Venatori?”

Chapter Text

Before any of the Knights could muster up a response, but after the Forge rose up and subsided again without result, Mom stood up, the screech of the chair against the tile at odds with the tone of her voice. “I think,” she said with the forced calm of the gallows, “that this is no conversation for me or my daughter. Come along, Molly.”

I shook my head. “Can’t, mom. I’m… let’s just say already entangled, because magic is weird and arbitrary and doesn’t care that I haven’t been in the situation that got me tied up with the Venatori yet.”

I don’t think I could have shut Mom up more effectively if I’d gotten Dierdre to bite her tongue out.

“I think,” said Dad, one hand rubbing at his beard, “you should probably explain yourself, Molly, so that everyone’s on the same page.”

Looking at both Shiro and Sanya, I could see the well-concealed curiosity and somewhat less well-concealed relief on their faces, which… yeah, that was fair. On Shiro’s behalf because it wasn’t very often that a family squabble got interrupted by the fucking Archive which immediately led to another family squabble, and Sanya because keeping a secret from Charity Carpenter was already daunting enough when you’ve had decades to get used to the idea, let alone with however much experience that Sanya had with the concept.

I clapped my hands together, then rubbed them against each other fast enough to warm them up. “Alrighty then, how does this go… Ah, yes, right.” I opened both hands and, with an effort of will, an illusion of a little blue pill and a little red pill appeared. “You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed tomorrow, believe whatever you want to believe, and you go on with your life. You take the red pill…” I gave a deliberately theatrical shrug. “Well, if you take the red pill, you get to stay in Wonderland, and I get to show you just how deep this rabbit hole goes.”

Sanya muffled a laugh into his fist, and when Mom turned her glare on him, he shrugged. “Is nothing, just… Lawrence Fishburne did it better.”

It’s not like he was wrong, so I shrugged as the illusion vanished between one heartbeat and the next. “Point is, I’ve got secrets that you can’t unhear, things that will change your relationship with the world.” I made direct eye contact with Mom. “This conversation needs to happen, one way or another, but if you leave, I won’t hold it against you.”

To be honest, I should have seen the Soulgaze coming.

I mean, come on, I was all but directly challenging Mom’s authority as a parent, there was no way that she was gonna look away, and to be honest, this was probably as good a way that I could see it going.

Set up on high, almost altars, were seven blankets. I recognized them immediately- after all, little Harry was still using his, and after the rest of us had stopped using ours, Mom had insisted that we pack them away in the back of their closet with mothballs and the whole nine yards. Embroidered on one corner of each of them was a Name, and I didn’t have to look particularly closely to recognize which one was mine. The stitching neatened up as the children they commemorated grew younger, but the amount of care and love that had gone into them was tangible and none of them were obviously more or less full of love than the others.

In the middle of the circle of blankets, even farther up, was a set of mail that I recognized as one forged for Dad, covered in blood, grime, and even a wayward scale, but still seeming to radiate hope, the promise of a better future embodied in the garb made for Love’s knight, out of love, with her warhammer suspended in midair at its back as if to guard from attacks from behind.

At the foot of the stretched-out stand that Dad’s armor hung on, covered in dust and tarnished, was a silver amulet. Upon casual inspection, it almost resembled a pentacle, but the longer I looked at it, the more I wondered how I could have recognized it as the symbol of pure magic that I’d been taught to see the five-pointed star as. The amulet had only four points radiating out irregularly from the square in the center, and perhaps more importantly, there was a claw that resembled an artist’s depiction of a dragon’s talons encircling the symbol instead of a plain circle. Instead of the Aristotelian elements and spirit, bound within human will, this symbolized draconic pride and greed, grasping at power over the natural world and damn the consequences.

Then, I saw it flicker, and for a brief moment, it was a pentacle, just as tarnished and dusty, but once again a symbol of life as it should be.

The Soulgaze broke, then, and I knew to my bones that this, right here, was a critical moment for mom, the time where she could either step firmly into the twilight world of the arcane and the supernatural or choose to set the burden of knowledge aside, turn away from Dad’s work and content herself with being his armorer.

Looking at her face, I could see her blown-out pupils constrict and her jaw firm, and I allowed myself a grim smile. She’d be in more danger now, but having stepped up sooner would give her the chance to get back into the saddle and, more importantly, she’d have a better chance when the Fomor made the choice to try and sack Chicago, doubly so when I started equipping her and building up the defensive profile of the family home.

She sat down, still pale from whatever she’d seen in the Soulgaze, but her spine was firm and she nodded at the Archive firmly. “I’m staying.”

Ivy smiled briefly, a too-mature expression on her young face, before her face returned to its previous too-mature neutrality. “My previous question stands: what do you know about the Venatori?”

The Forge shone again, but failed to discharge anything, and thus I had enough attention to spare to be surprised when Shiro asked “Which Venatori?”

Mom, Dad, and Sanya, all had the kind of blank curiosity that meant that they didn’t know that there was more than just the Venatori Umbrorum, so the Oblivion War was definitely beyond the scope of their knowledge.

“There are two organizations that go by the name Venatori,” said the Archive. “The Venatori Umbrorum are a group of primarily mortals who are aware of the supernatural, who prefer to pursue a guerilla war against the more… egregious of the supernatural forces like the Red Court. They were established as a cover for the true Venatori, who are responsible for preventing the Old Ones from pursuing their designs on Earth, vanquishing them by forgetting them in the eternal struggle to preserve our world known as the Oblivion War.”

“And Ivy here,” I said, gesturing with my bottle at her, “is the key to it all. She is the repository of all knowledge, and more importantly, the spymaster and coordinator of the Venatori. She knows everything that is spoken and written down, so she is uniquely capable of directing the Venatori to strike at any organization or person who seeks to interfere on the Old Ones’ behalf.”

Dad frowned. “How do you know all this, Molly?”

“She’s from the future,” said Ivy, in the moment I was taking a deep breath to brace myself to tell him.

Mom was the first to react, standing up angrily as she slammed open hands on the table. “No!”

I blinked, then sighed. “I didn’t do it on purpose. Things got bad, like, End of Days bad, and then… something intervened. Something called the Celestial Forge, apparently.”

Ivy’s jaw dropped as her head snapped around to face me. “Truly?”

“That’s how I got the lemonade, and this,” I said, fishing the holoprojector out of the pocket I’d put it in. “There’s more stuff, too, like a big ol’ tech database and a book that- well, I think it’s related to why you’re here?”

She nodded. “The book is… dangerous, for what it can reveal about several of the Old Ones, especially the one that… came closest to succeeding.” She shuddered, and I couldn’t blame her- reading about the way that you were going to die, even if couched in metaphor, had to be trippy, even if that destiny had been averted.

“Not to worry,” I said. “The Forge saw fit to provide me protection against that kind of memetic hazard, and I don’t think anyone can exert power over it without overpowering the Forge?” I shrugged. “Not sure, my understanding of the situation at hand is limited.”

“As is mine. Much of the knowledge of the previous Chosen of the Celestial Forge was wiped from existence, and what remains is… not in human hands.” At my curious look, she continued. “He was lost to… a foe from far Outside, and in doing so his power was turned against the world. It took the direct intervention of two archangels to prevent the fall of the Outer Gates, and a third to kill him.”

“And why have we not heard of him?” asked Sanya, frowning as he chased a causal chain down to its conclusion.

“Ask Noah.”

To be honest, I was a little bit glad that Mom and Dad were so gobsmacked by the conversation with everything Ivy’d said even after she left, since it would give me time to de-stress. Facing down the Denarians, confronting the Fallen who had started squatting in my soul, getting yelled at by Mom, then a de facto ambush from the Archive that ended up in me revealing that I was a time traveler who had survived an Old One breaking through the protections around the Oblivion War and become a Venator… that was a whole hell of a lot to put in one day, so I think it’s excusable that I ran for Dad’s workshop and the almost meditative act of woodcarving.

Eventually, I heard the door open and saw Shiro come in, cane clacking against the floor of the room. A moment of scrutiny allowed me to realize that no, it wasn’t Fidellachius, just a normal cane, and I put down both my chisel and my wand, releasing my gradual expenditure of Soulfire into the implement as I did. “What’s up?”

“You died,” Shiro said, and I sighed, pressing my palms flat to the surface of Dad’s workbench. This was going to be yet another one of those conversations, then.

“What gave it away?”

Shiro shrugged. “Little things. The way you hesitated, the flinch on Sanya’s face when it came up.” He made eye contact. “Easier to see when you’re not so overwhelmed. I suppose that explains how a fourteen-year-old becomes a Venator.”

“Same way anyone else becomes a Venator,” I said, trying for casual and managing tired. “Wrong place at the wrong time. Not my fault the wrong time was after the containment team had already failed and one of the Old Ones had managed to pull one over on the Archive.”

“Fair.” He paused. “But that’s not how you died.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“What’s there to talk about? Nicodemus fucking Archleone found out where I slept and came for my ass out of a grudge against Dad for killing Dierdre.” I could feel Lasciel pacing within the weird nest structure she had inside the Forge, somewhat uneasy with what was probably the thought of her host being killed by the man who gave her the Coin in the first place, but she could fucking deal with it.

“Always something to talk about.” Shiro chuckled ruefully. “Especially when that old snake’s involved in things.”

“You sound like Listens-To-Wind.”

“High praise,” Shiro said, resting both hands on his cane. “I’ve worked with him, now and again, and he’s a good man. Could have been a Knight, if he didn’t have his own calling.”

I was struck with the completely absurd image of the member of the Senior Council in dad’s armor, arms out and covered in entirely too much armor, mail practically dripping off of him as he gave that one eyebrow raised judging look that he’d spent a couple centuries perfecting, and had to choke down a fit of giggles long enough to conjure up an illusion of the image to show Shiro.

He chuckled as the Forge once again tried and failed to manifest something new, all of the unoccupied pedestals thrumming with a swell of power running through them. “I think he’d get a kick out of that,” Shiro said, once his laughter died down. “But you should probably talk to someone about it.”

“Yeah, maybe, but, I mean… repressed emotions are great fuel for magic, so I think that I’m going to keep all my emotions right here,” I said, rapping a fist against my sternum, “and then one day I’ll die.”

Shiro gave me a scrutinizing look, then sighed. “It is your choice. Just make sure you’re being safe about it.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said, splaying my hands in an exaggerated gesture of innocence. “Safety procedures are the first thing that any self-respecting Wizard teaches their apprentice, and I definitely got them from mine.”

“If you say so,” he said, one eyebrow raised pointedly at my lack of gloves, but he shrugged and walked back out of the shed, cane tippy-tapping, and left me to my woodworking.

Chapter Text

After the relentless rush of everything that had happened since I woke up on Saturday, the fact that no one else had any heavy conversations or deep revelations for me for the rest of the day was a little bit of a relief. Even Lasciel was quiet as I pressed her coin to her page in the Ammonomicon and banished it back to wherever the book lived when it wasn’t on hand.

School on Monday was likewise calm, although I knew that this was less reprieve and more preparatory time. I made the best I could of it, which wasn’t saying much- there’s not a whole lot a middle school child can get up to that would prepare them to stand up to a millennia-old supernatural baddie, even one with the blessing of the Celestial Forge, and that was still further reduced by the fact that I had to work around classmates and teachers. Still, I managed to use my gun magic on the wand that I’d finished yesterday, once I was sure that it had settled into whatever final form it would take after being imbued with Soulfire, and though I hadn’t tested it out yet, I knew that it would be something that Nicodemus wouldn’t be able to expect.

Or, at least, that was the hope.

To be entirely honest, this kind of situation was well outside my comfort zone even setting aside my last contact with Nicodemus- no workshop access, no proper tools, minimal support or prep time, and just a handful of foci, and the bullshit cheat that was the Celestial Forge required the kind of preparation that I’d never be able to get done before Nicodemus pulled the trigger on whichever scheme he was trying to pull off this time.

I was improvising, and I didn’t have half as many of the tools I liked to riff off of when I did so. The fact that Shiro and Sanya were here did help, but they weren’t infallible, as my memories of attending their funerals in the future-that-wasn’t could testify to.

Still, I couldn’t afford to be so negative about things. Last time there had only been one Wizard, and inasmuch as Harry was a hell of a fighter, he was still fairly early on in his career and hadn’t really hit his stride as a combat mage in the way he would after he’d been given the Gray Cloak. I’d had nigh on thirty years to his decade-ish, and even though I’d come to rely on enchanted items, I did have more than a few tricks up my sleeves even when empty-handed, plus I understood the Knights of the Blackened Denarius far more than Harry could wheedle out of Bob and whatever minor spirits he could ask for help in the time he’d had to do so.

So, when I went home after school, I went directly to the tree house out back to see what I couldn’t squeeze out of the gun form of my new wand.

The magic of the Gungeon (whatever that was) had done a real number on the thing. Before I’d turned it into a gun, it looked more or less like a dowel with runes carved in irregular intervals along the sides (with space for more, naturally). Now, though, it was the envy of any stage magician. The main shaft of the implement was straighter than Euclid’s ruler, varnished black enough to pass for pitch, and the runes had been rearranged in a pair of counterclockwise spirals around the shaft, one set of delicate symbols picked out in mother-of-pearl that matched the two white caps at the end while the other gleamed with an inner light like half-solidified obsidian.

I followed some instinct, spinning it almost like a pen, and quicker than I should have been able to see by any right, it split open, components seeming to appear out of thin air and spin around lengths of wood until in my hand I held a long-barreled revolver, the shaft of the wand taking the place of the barrel and the mother-of-pearl end caps serving as a handle. The cylinder gleamed silver as if under the full moon, and the whole implement gave off a mysterious air, as if the true nature of the weapon was unknowable to mortalkind.

Carefully, I raised the pistol in a Weaver stance, pointed it at an empty patch of rocks in the backyard, and pulled the trigger once, then twice.

The first shot streaked out like someone had dropped quicksilver into water, splattering against the ground before pulling itself together into a bead of the liquid metal in a manner not unlike the T1000. The second, in contrast, seemed almost to not have done anything, before I looked closer and saw frost crawling out from a hole right next to the bead of metal.

I spun the pistol back into its wand configuration as the Forge flashed with brilliant light, then staggered as one of the pedestals rose and mushroomed out into a coat rack, with what looked like a lab coat over a blue-gray bodysuit hanging from it. Around it, smaller pedestals rose from the floor, containing all sorts of things- a gun, a boombox, a long boxy shape that I somehow knew was a spaceship, and more.

All of this I registered in hindsight, though, since I was a little bit too busy having first an implanted computer and then a whole bunch of knowledge shoved into my brain.

You’d almost think that the computer living rent-free in my brainwould be the bigger deal, but no, that was just a little bit of synesthesia, a moment of vertigo, and then it was fully integrated. The knowledge, on the other hand… well, getting my brain rewritten to be the equal of legendary polymath Catherine Halsey on top of having the understanding of a solid chunk of everything that went into the UNSC war machine, including the Infinity-class supercarrier was… well, I wouldn’t recommend the experience, even if objectively knowing all this stuff was a good thing.

“Fascinating,” said Lasciel, earning a mental glare as she scrutinized the ship.

The ship that I recognized as the UNSC Future Witness, the Gladius-class corvette I’d had tasked to me during the war and- wait, no, I’d never served in the military. Had I?

Well, apparently, I had the memories of doing so, and, more importantly, I knew with absolute certainty that it was stationed on the opposite side of the moon for whenever I’d be able to make my way to it.

Now that would be a big ask. NASA didn’t have the infrastructure to send a shuttle out that far even if I tried, and I couldn’t put together a good enough ship to do so in the near future with all the resources I didn’t have, plus I didn’t want to imagine how much of a pain in the ass it would be to find a Way to somewhere that I could get to it in a somewhat reasonable timeframe. If only I had access to one of those Forerunner… slipspace… portals…

Well, now that I thought about it, in principle, it wasn’t all that far off from opening a Way to the Nevernever, albeit technologically induced, but if I just reframed my mindset like so…

The idea clicked solidly, and while I didn’t think I’d be able to get all the way out to the Ark, or even as far as Pluto, the Future Witness should be more than within range of…

I all but flew down the ladder and burst through the back door, catching Sanya in mid-bite of sandwich. “Hey, Sanya, wanna go see a spaceship?”

As was only natural, he jumped at the chance to see the Future Witness, once I explained to him what I was talking about. After reassuring Mom that yes, all my homework was done (I’d managed to slap it together on the bus ride home from school, what I hadn’t already done in class), I dragged him out to the back of the house so that I didn’t disturb any of the Jawas with the portal.

“Alright, so, ready?”

“To see a legitimate spaceship? Absolutely.” Sanya’s teeth practically gleamed in the afternoon sunlight.

“Alrighty then. Aparturum!” I slashed my wand at the air, and a spinning vortex of blues and violets appeared in front of us.

Sanya raised an eyebrow, smile shrinking somewhat. “That is… not a normal Way. Where are we going?”

I felt my mouth stretch into a broad grin as one of the most famous lines known to man swam up through the sea of my memories to my mind. “We’re taking one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Before he could do more than goggle at me, I seized his hand and dragged him through the slipspace portal and onto the bridge of the Future Witness.

The bridge was just like I remembered seeing it last, albeit without the crew, all hard edges and drab gray, with flickering blue-white screens around the edges of the room and the primary holotable in the middle of the bridge, spooled down in low power mode. As the portal winked closed, with me no longer actively maintaining it, I turned around and looked out the window, taking in the sight of the lunar landscape with something approaching nostalgia for a sight brand new to these eyes, and felt the deck’s minute vibrations under my feet, harmonizing with the sound of the reactor’s hum.

“Captain on deck,” I said, mostly to myself, then jolted as an orchestral theme started up. At first, I thought it was coming from the holotable, and I turned around, but it was still inactive, and after a moment I realized that the source had moved with my head.

Feeling more than a little bit chagrined, I turned my focus inward, and yup, there it was, the boombox was playing.

A moment of focus turned the boombox off, and I took a moment to look through the rest of the items scattered around the primary pillar. The handgun was… a little bit on the nose, since I was checking out the gun my wand had turned into at the time, but the grenade was always going to be helpful, and the Future Witness spoke for itself. Beyond those, the boombox, and the little model of a brain with an implant peeking out of it, I felt like I was still missing something…

As I tried to reach for… whatever I was missing, Lasciel spoke up. “What is it, my host?”

I jolted, but the bodysuit and lab coat flashed blue, a helmet that I remembered seeing as ODST standard issue appearing at the foot of the stand, and I found myself wearing them both, taking an oversized step back and nearly tripping over myself after having changed from sneakers into full-on military-issue combat boots. I managed to recover, planting the other foot and turning so that I could manage to maneuver my leg to not be overextended, but the sound of my boots on the deck still got Sanya to turn around.

The Forge sputtered and failed to call anything up as he gaped. “Bozhe moi! What is that?”

“It’s…” I frowned as the computer system in the bodysuit linked up with my implants, projecting a brief rundown of what exactly it could do directly onto my retinas. “Holy shit, this is fancy.”

I turned to Sanya. “Right, so, this is a somewhat armored bodysuit and lab coat. The fancy shmancy stuff is that it’s specced out for infiltration and recon. Take a gander at this!”

I triggered the active camo systems and grinned as the world dimmed, then re-brightened, VISR sensors on the collar of the bodysuit and coat compensating for the decreased lighting as the more advanced sensors started collecting their data to show me.

Sanya blinked languidly, then tilted his head sideways. “Are you actually not there, or just…” He waved his hand in my general direction. “Invisible?”

“Just invisible, I’m afraid,” I said, switching off the active camo and shimmering back into existence. “This suit isn’t that advanced, unfortunately.” I shrugged. “I mean, if you gave me a team of researchers and a couple decades, maybe, but as it is, I just have to make do with invisible scout style ballistic armor in the bodysuit. Still, I’ve got plenty of pockets in the coat, and that’s also ballistic treated.”

“Very nice,” he said, nodding appreciatively. “Now, ah, we are… where exactly?”

“Hm? Oh, right, that. We’re in geosynchronous- lunasynchronous? orbit on the opposite side of the moon from the Earth. Let me just…” I reached for the holotable and woke it up, sending the hologram of a menu flickering into the air with a soft whine as the projectors warmed up after who knew how long inactive. A few hand gestures and taps later, and I pulled up a projected map of the Earth-Luna system over the top of the table. “Okay, so, see this little speck right here?” I asked, gesturing with my hand in a certain soft command that I’d set up within my first week working on the ship’s bridge, and obligingly, the holoprojector turned up the luminosity on a tiny mote of light, almost small enough to mistake as a hovering particle of dust if not for the fact that the bridge was absolutely devoid of dust.

“I take it that’s us?” asked Sanya.

“Nailed it,” I responded. “I think…” I moved off to the side and pulled up another, smaller menu, then zoomed through two or three interfaces before finding what I was looking for. “Yup, we’ve got the same kind of reverse-engineered stealth systems on my suit on this ship, and they should be okay to keep the ship concealed to most forms of detection.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Most forms?”

“I mean, it’s not gonna stop, say, Selene from coming up to the moon and going ‘hey, that’s weird’, or anyone else with Intellectus who really wants to know where we are, and if anyone’s pointing, like, a gravitational sensor or neutrino detector at us, they might be able to tell that there’s something there, but other than that, I can’t think of any kind of spell or piece of tech that we’ve got on earth that can actually punch through Sangheili active camo plus enough conventional stealth methods to make anything except the old mark one eyeball completely useless,” I said, offering him a shrug.

“I will… take it, I suppose?” Sanya looked more than a little bit overwhelmed.

“Good enough,” I said. “Now then, time for the tour?”

“Yes, please.”

Chapter Text

Naturally, the first place we got sidetracked was the weapons bay.

“What kind of cannon is this?” asked Sanya, frowning as the sword belted at his side shifted to lean towards the primary armament of the Future Witness, then with a muted flash of white light and a smell like ozone and something vaguely smoky and herbal, it once again hung straight at his side.

“You know what a coilgun is?” I asked.

“I cannot say that I do.”

“Ah. What about a railgun?”

“That one I do know. So, it’s something like that?”

“Not precisely the same, but it relies on magnetic fields to launch fuckoff huge chunks of metal at way-too-fast miles per hour. Some of the really high-end ones have gotten up to about point two five C, but those ones are bigger than this ship.” I shrugged. “They’re mostly meant for ship-to-ship combat, although the Spirit of Fire used them as de facto artillery strikes, the crazy bastards, so if things get really bad I can get up here and upcast some Rods from God.”

Sanya’s brow furrowed as he tilted his head to the side, not unlike a confused puppy. “Rods from God?”

“Right, yeah, that’s not declassified yet. Okay, so, long story short, Rods from God are what people use to refer to a satellite weapons system that essentially took big ol’ rods of titanium weighing about a ton, put them in Earth orbit, and then dropped them like meteorites. Never actually got off the ground, but it’s a relatively common concept in dystopian sci-fi for the next couple decades since it’s a real Big Brother move especially as the idea of combination spy-bombardment satellites takes off in the late 2020s.” I frowned. “I might actually have a couple of books that lean into that in my quarters, if you’re okay with the detour.”

Sanya shrugged in a display of the stoicism I’d come to associate with the man. “Is your ship. Lead the way!”

As I crossed through the doorway to my quarters on the Future Witness, the Forge glowed with a dim golden light, and, after a moment, a chip about the size of my palm appeared on a small pedestal that had grown out of the side of the larger stand that the model of the Future Witness was suspended over.

I recognized the chip.

After a moment, the hum of the ship’s reactor intensified, and almost immediately after, I felt the communicator built into the bodysuit buzz. “Hang on, I gotta take this,” I said, and before Sanya could say anything, I grabbed my helmet out of thin air and put it on, making sure that the fine connecting wires that I’d refitted the helmet to have plugged in to their sockets on the high collar of my bodysuit.

“Dr. Carpenter? Why are you so… young?” asked the caller, in a voice that I had missed more than I thought I would. Supposedly, she’d been offlined during the Infinity’s mission on Requiem at some point after leaving dock… but, then again, the Future Witness had been mostly retired after she and I’d transferred to Concord to work on the Infinity-class, so I supposed anything was possible.

“It’s a long story, Aine,” I said, tapping at my datapad almost unconsciously. Then, after a moment gazing at nothing, I took a closer look at the thing and almost facepalmed at how off I was being- there were more than a few things I should have done, but now that I had an actual manufacturing facility, if one limited by the size of both the Future Witness and the lab fabbers, I could get a good head start on the technology in the massive data dump I’d gotten, and if Aine was willing to help pitch in with sorting and indexing (which, given how she’d been predisposed back when we worked together, was likelier than not), we might actually be able to bring some of it to bear before Nicodemus could skip town.

The issue there was the fact that I had no way to connect the datapad to the Future Witness’ systems, although given how well I knew the architecture of its coding structure and perhaps a smidgen of help from Aine, I should be able to put together an interface and let her have free run of the database.

“It’s a long story,” I said, tapping Sanya on the shoulder and gesturing for him to follow me as I started heading for my lab. “What do you know about multiverse theory?”

Sanya wasn’t sure what to make of Molly Carpenter, the first child of a Knight who had taken up the Sword when he wasn’t much older than she was now.

The first time he had had real cause to interact with her was when she was late for dinner, and at that point she was very clearly off balance from being sent back in time, if Sanya could believe it- off balance enough to let him see-

Sanya shuddered in the workshop chair, forcing the vivid-edged scene down to where the most indelible memories from his time with Magog lived, the ones seared into his brain by Hellfire and adrenaline, and turned back to Molly.

She’d grown much more confident since then, especially since arriving here on the literal spaceship (and wasn’t that a real kick in the teeth, knowing that somewhere out there were species who were both capable of building this kind of technological wonder and, more importantly, in a position where reverse engineering other technology was a viable option. Sure, Molly said that they were in another universe from… wherever the ship had come from… but given that that wasn’t enough to prevent her from having access to the ship, he found himself glad for the fact that the Swords would give him, Michael, and Shiro a fighting chance against anyone or anything who decided to… involve themselves in the world), and the new threads certainly contributed to that.

Sanya wasn’t an expert with technology or anything of the like, but the fact that Molly called both the sleek blue-white bodysuit (looking like if Tron had made medical scrubs) and the many-pocketed lab coat she wore over it armored, despite them not looking much thicker than the kind of thing that regular mad scientists or spies wore in the movies, was… well, it wasn’t hard to believe in and of itself, per se, but if he had been just humoring her about her time travel story before, being on the far side of the moon from the Earth, inside a spaceship with an AI that Molly had apparently worked with before in another life would have made him believe her.

Or at least, drive him further into audacity (that is, the idea that he was hallucinating on his deathbed) in response to the absurdity of reality, but that was immaterial to the situation he found himself in- no matter what, it was his job as both a citizen of Earth and as a Knight of the Cross to help where he could, and solipsism wouldn’t help anyone. So, he closed the book he’d been pretending to read while he was working through the implications of the situation and stood up from the chair in the cramped but well-loved lab that Molly’d led him to. He wasn’t done with the introspection kicked off by the situation, by any means, but he’d done all he could stand to do today, and he’d spent enough time with Rosanna and Namshiel to figure out how they’d act when they’d forgotten that he was there, and the signs coming from Molly matched up.

Even aside from that, though, some instinct in the same part of him that guided him to where the Sword was needed whispered that it was time to step in.

At some point during his legally-distinct existential crisis, she’d gotten into an involved technical conversation with the spirit of the ship, “data transfer rates”, “hyperwave code decryption” and “ternary to binary converters” all featuring repeatedly.

“I do not mean to be rude,” he said, interrupting the two of them mid-technobabble, “but, ah, what time is it down in Chicago?”

Molly jolted, evidently surprised at his interruption, but the glowing visage of… Aine, he thought her name was, turned her attention to him like she’d just been waiting for him to ask the question. “We’re coming up on 5:20 PM,” she said in a rich, deep voice with just a hint of an accented burr that was at odds with her high-cheekboned, flower-wreathed appearance.

“Shit,” said Molly, almost dropping the cable she’d been fiddling with. “I promised Mom that we’d be back by quarter past to help with dinner.”

“Not to worry,” Sanya replied cheerfully. “Since it’s only five minutes or so, she is unlikely to kill us all the way.”

“I am less than reassured,” Molly returned, but she was clearly less ill at ease, so he’d call that a win.

“I’ll finish up the prototyping for the hypercomm array up here so I can keep in touch with you better, and then spin up the stealth systems so I’m in a position to provide fire support if push comes to shove,” said Aine, one daisy-yellow hand coming to rest on Molly’s shoulder. “You shouldn’t need it, but…”

“Better to have and not need, yeah. I’ll try and keep the comm on hand.” She said a word in what sounded like Latin and another not-Way opened. “You’re the best, Aine.”

“Go,” she said, smiling, “before your mother really lays into you.” Molly offered the spirit a smile before she leapt through the portal, but before Sanya could follow, Aine held a hand across the blue-white vortex. “Take care of Molly for me, please? She’s good, when she’s paying attention, but…”

“She isn’t always,” said Sanya, with all the gravity of someone who knew how much this kind of lapse in attention could cost. “I will do what I can, and so will my fellow Knights.”

Aine smiled sadly, withdrawing her arm. “That is all I can ask.”

Sanya offered her a two-fingered salute as he strode through the portal, which she returned just before he found himself falling three inches to the floor of the Carpenters’ kitchen.

Hearing the irritated voice of Charity Carpenter, in counterpoint with the apologetic sounds of Molly’s responses, was about what he expected, and he let himself relax for the first time since he’d walked off the planet.

Adventure and new experiences were nice, but there was something to be said for the familiar, and Sanya allowed himself a moment to remember the way that his mother had run the kitchen before setting the Sword (which felt more… settled, now) down in the Carpenters’ guest room and returning to the food prep area to help where he could.

Jenny Greenteeth had, naturally, felt reality quake as someone else created an artifact of immense magnitude that drew upon the mysterious powers of the stars. To be entirely honest, it had been longer than she’d expected since she’d felt the world change so, even with the way that the so-called Wise hoarded their knowledge even more so now in the modern age than at any age before, and had all but forgotten how even the stars despised those things from Outside, but there truly was no accounting for the follies of man.

She had not, on the other hand, noticed where the artifact was or was not at any given time. Her nature only coincided with the domain of the stars insofar as they predicted her victims, and even then she had little awareness of the predictions that Summer’s horse-men made from reading them.

Maeve, on the other hand…

Well. She was set to ascend to the throne of Air and Darkness, should the Queen That Is pass, and those tiny specks scattered out within the endless expanse of the night sky had no choice but to offer up their truest secrets into the eternally listening void around them, which Maeve’s ears could hear nearly as well as her mother’s.

So, it was less than surprising when Jenny found herself summoned before Maeve, who lounged atop her not-quite-a-throne deep within Undertown.

“The Starsphere,” Maeve purred, voice seeming to caress the name that just felt… right to Jenny, “has left this planet.”

It took Jenny a moment to chase the implications down through the twists and turns her mind took them in, but not a particularly long one- waiting too long would be a show of weakness, the kind that was intolerable in Winter’s frozen halls.

“That is news indeed,” Jenny hissed, inclining her head to Maeve. “Shall I hunt it down for you and drag its bearer to hurl themselves upon your mercies?”

Maeve shook her head, half-frozen blue-green locks of hair shifting where they hung down the ornately carved chair. “No, this is not your domain, or the Red Cap’s. I will…” Maeve paused, and her pupils dilated as she inhaled, nostrils flaring almost like a cobra’s hood.

“It is returned,” she intoned, in an almost uncharacteristically flat voice, before turning to Jenny and resuming her earlier thought as if she hadn’t stopped speaking at all. “...deal with this situation myself. Even if it is just a mortal practitioner scrabbling at power that they could never comprehend, on their own, they will be an… adequate addition to my court, and I find myself in search of a new distraction now that Slate is solely my mother’s domain.”

Jenny had to force down a shiver. Those three words… they almost felt like something else was speaking through her mouth, something that knew no emotions save for hatred and disdain, and the intensity of that hatred sent gooseflesh prickling up all over her arms. There was something alien about the emotions, and though they vanished like the last bubbles of her victims’ breath, they seemed almost diametrically opposed to the invigorating sensation that killing always brought with it, draining her will and causing her to become almost infirm in body for the briefest of moments.

“So they will,” said Jenny. “I presume you intend to be away from Court more often than you have of late to seek the Starsphere and its creator, then?”

“You presume correctly,” said Maeve. “I trust you are more than capable of seeing that things do not get… out of hand, in my absence?”

Jenny inclined her head to Maeve. “I swear it will be done.”

Maeve waved a hand as if warding off a fly. “You may go.”

Jenny turned away and strode down the trail of frost that her waterlogged clothing had left as she entered the heart of Winter’s power in this city, very carefully not fleeing from her Lady.

Something about what had just happened was very wrong, and even if it wasn’t to the point where she was obligated to break her oaths to Maeve in favor of those she had sworn to Winter itself and inform her mother, it was not entirely impossible that the situation would escalate that far, so she would have to be observant.

Within winter, an adversary could be hidden within any shadow, even one shed by the brightest light.

Chapter Text

Carlos Ramirez hadn’t expected tonight to be nearly this crazy.

It had started so normally, too, what with them remaining generally in the area of some local talk show host’s studio so Dresden could give an interview about… private investigating, apparently? Something to take a look at later.

Anyways, he got a job from some mysterious jet-setting priest who managed to slip away before Dresden met up with the three Wardens on their way to the workhorse old truck that they’d had the good fortune to be able to borrow (Ramirez couldn’t see how Dresden managed to fit himself into the beaten-up bug, let alone anyone else, and even if Yoshimo and the Captain were relatively compact, Ramirez was the better part of six feet and had shoulders broad enough to cause problems even if he was next to Dresden’s lankier frame with the separation of the center console, in the front seat).

When they got to the truck, though… well, ex-truck might have been more accurate.

Someone had worked it over but good. The windshield had been smashed in, along with the rest of the windows, and all four of the tires had been slashed. Opening the driver’s side door of the machine revealed the ignition of the car dangling halfway to the pedals, almost completely torn free from the main body.

“Looks like someone tried to pull the ignition out and hotwire the car and then presumably gotten frustrated and decided to wreck it,” said Yoshimo, after dropping the glass eye that she used as a focus for her psychometric spells back into a pouch inside her coat.

“Damn it,” said Dresden from the other side of the truck, and looking over, someone had messed his car up too.

“What do you think, you get on the wrong side of the mob lately?” Ramirez asked, trying for humor and managing to scrape by with strained as he tapped his fingers on the hilt of his sword.

“Not Marcone’s style,” Dresden replied, and wasn’t that all kinds of scary that he’d tangled with the mob enough to be able to say that about them. “Probably either a carjacking gone wrong or that gang of lycanthropes I pissed off a couple years ago. Come on, I’ll go call my mechanic and see if he’s got a loaner big enough for us all to fit.”

Halfway up the alley to the street, past first a young black man in a shabby overcoat and then an old man with a cane, there came a snuffling sound from behind them.

Carlos took it to be a stray or something at first, but the way that the Captain turned and hissed out an Italian curse was more than enough to get him to whirl on it, one hand already coming up to release a cloud of green-glowing mist as a shield.

After a single look, though, he abandoned the shield and scrabbled at the sword belted at his side, since there wasn’t a whole lot an entropic shield could do against a bear that had been juicing with hellfire and the souls of the damned to get pumped up to twice the size of a regular bear, with both its massive jaws and the pair of spiraling horns pointed squarely at Dresden.

To his credit, the man reacted faster than most Wardens would, curling up into a little ball and wrapping himself in a bubble of blue-white energy from a shield, to the point where he went tumbling away from the bear on a path that would leave him battered and dizzy, but unchewed.

Captain Luccio set flame blazing up the length of her sword as she lunged past it, slashing at one of the bear’s six legs, and caused it to rear up on its back four legs, roaring with fury. Beside her, Yoshimo drew her katana, slashing at the same time, and when the bear slammed back down, shaking Carlos inside his boots, it held one of its legs tenderly, two of the claws joining a slowly growing puddle of blood on the grimy alley floor.

Unfortunately, it turned its four hellish eyes on Yoshimo, and while she dove out of the way as it hurled itself sideways at her, she was still clipped by the massive form of the bear, sending her spinning away past the old man. Luccio, once she’d recovered from her own roll, turned her still-burning blade to face the bear, but it moved far faster than anything that size should be able to, wheeling aside and charging directly towards Yoshimo with all the inevitable weight of a freight train barreling through a tunnel and infinitely more malicious.

Desperately, Yoshimo tried to call up a spell, but as she moved her hand to cast, she winced and fell to her back, clutching her injured arm to her chest. Ramirez couldn’t hear her over the pounding of his blood in his veins and the sounds of the bear that he was, against all sense, charging towards with just a sword up against what looked like if Mike Tyson was a bear and also into transhumanism, but she was shouting something at the old man, presumably to run while he still could.

The old man did not run.

His cane came apart in his hands, silvery steel revealed within the wood, and as the blade of a straight-edged katana emerged, it blazed to silver-white light with a sound like someone hitting a tuning fork the size of a building, resonating with the sword in Carlos’ hands and presumably the other two silver Wardens’ blades within earshot. Then, he took a high guard as the bear-thing flinched away from the light, skidding to a halt, and spoke in the voice of a kindergarten teacher telling their class that playtime ended fifteen minutes ago. “You shall not touch her.”

“Ah,” said the bear, in the kind of voice that Ramirez would have expected out of some of the old guard of the White Council, the ones who lived in England proper and still loudly lamented the fact that the colonies “don’t know their place” while smelling of booze. “I thought I scented you upon the wind, Knight. You failed to stand against me three decades ago, what makes you think you have a chance today?”

“Let him go, Ursiel,” said the tall black man in a Russian accent, shucking the coat like the hojas off a batch of tamales. His right hand dropped across his body to his left hip, and as he swept the American-style cavalry saber out of its scabbard, it, too, blazed with incandescent light, resonating at a frequency akin to but distinct from the sword wielded by the old man, like two notes in the same chord.

“And the reject,” the bear-thing- Ursiel? said, with all the concern of a grandfather tolerantly amused with his grandchildren playing soldier in the yard. “Truly, I don’t know how I can win this. Next you’re going to tell me that the wizardling with the rapier is the next Merlin, too.”

“Surrender,” Luccio snapped, flaming scimitar blazing brighter to the point that Carlos could feel the heat radiating off the thing. “Give up the coin and you need not die here!”

“Stupid wizard!” From the bear’s maw came a different voice, tortured and strained, touched with madness, but clear in spite of it. “We’re all going to die!”

“And you,” said the smooth voice, “die first!”

Ursiel whirled on Luccio, lunging forwards with all the weight of a charging bear the size of a truck, and Luccio, falling prone, barely managed enough of a shield to send it backpedaling into thin air a hairsbreadth over her nose like it was in Looney Tunes, the reddish pane of light guttering out instants after the bear’s paws left it.

With the bear in the air, unable to dodge meaningfully, the Russian man spun the scabbard of his sword up, like John Wayne with a rifle, and it burst into a mass of spinning components, glowing with a pale shadow of the light of his sword as it clicked and clacked its way into expanding into a short-barreled rifle that seemed familiar, like he’d seen something similar recently. A runic array on the wooden stock glowed with silver-white light, resembling an abstract artist’s depiction of a wing, and it pulsed as the weapon barked twice, the light in time with the discharges.

Two streaks of silvery light flashed out from the muzzle of the Russian’s rifle, punching into the bear’s haunches, and where the blood matted its fur, flames flickered up in that same silvery-white color, and the fur blackened and curled under the supernatural flame.

The bear roared as it stumbled to a halt upon landing, something more than sound in the act, and Luccio’s sword winked out like a candle in a monsoon, though the flames slowly spreading from the puncture wound only surged forwards, as if feeding off of something within whatever spell the bear had cast. “Impossible!” it snarled, rolling over to smother the flames before limping forwards, making sure to keep its horns pointed towards the Russian. “How did you, of all people, get an artifact like that, reject?”

“A favor from a friend,” replied the Russian, raising the rifle up to blow imaginary smoke away from the muzzle. “Care to try your luck again?”

Evidently it did, and this time a corona of flickering bloodred light swelled into existence around the bear as it charged towards the Russian. He swore, firing again, but this time, the light was drowned out in the corona, and he barely managed to whirl aside in time to avoid being gored or trampled, and the slash he tried to land in mid-spin didn’t make it all the way through the corona before it flared out and brushed him away like a leaf on the wind, sending him into a wall and then to the floor as the light of his sword winked out, the blade clattering to the floor off to one side with his rifle going to the other.

This time, instead of screeching to a halt, sending a spray of concrete shards everywhere, the bear turned, charging directly for Carlos, an indistinct blur of teeth and fur behind the bloodred light.

Now, though, Carlos was ready, having already started invoking his own magic by the time the bear made it three ground-shaking strides towards him. Before it had closed half the distance to Carlos, he clapped both hands around the hilt of his sword and jabbed it directly at the bear with a cry of “Fluere, Rio Grande!”

Water exploded forwards from his sword, fountaining against the bloodred corona before starting to flow around it, eroding away first flecks of the Denarian’s fell magic and then eroded bits and pieces of the six-legged bear as it slowed the massive creature down from supernaturally fast to roughly the speed of a man wading through chest-high water with a child on his shoulders.

“Hurry!” said Carlos, chest already heaving like a bellows from the effort of pulling such a large evocation out of nowhere. “I can’t hold it for long!”

Luccio leapt forwards, sword slashing, but since she couldn’t call up the blazing shroud that she had earlier in the face of Carlos’ water spout, she was unable to leave more than scratches on the bear’s hide. Dresden, on the other hand, took one look at Ramirez and his geyser, then raised his staff and barked out “Ventas servitas!” The air in the alley roared to life, and it started blowing in the same direction as the stream of water, starting to shove the bear back down the length of the alleyway with main force alone.

The old man sheathed his sword for a moment, brow furrowing in concentration, then, just as Carlos’ spell guttered out, he moved.

If Carlos hadn’t been specifically ready for it, he would have missed seeing the old man’s motion carry him past the bear right underneath its slavering jaws, in a streak of actinic light, to where he stood, sword extended behind him.

After a moment, Dresden’s spell died out too, and as it did, the bear collapsed, six legs no longer holding it, landing six inches behind the old man as its head rolled sideways, tongue lolling out in death.

“Nice work, everyone,” wheezed Dresden, leaning on his staff. “Ten out of ten, no notes.”

“What the hell was that?” Carlos asked, staggering two steps sideways and managing to brace himself against a wall before his legs gave out on him after such a grandiose spell.

“Bad news,” said Captain Luccio, bowing to the old man. “I am grateful for your assistance, Knight Yoshimo.”

He shook his head, and now that Carlos had a moment to look at him, the thick glasses and wispy white hair around the edges of his bald pate seemed at odds with the naked sword and the dead bear-thing, even as he sheathed the sword and moved to check on the downed form of the Russian. “It’s a job. Speaking of which, I hear congratulations are in order, Captain?”

The Captain chuckled. “It’s a job.”

“What do you mean, bad news?” asked Dresden.

“Last reliable intel report we had about Ursiel had him kicking around the Middle East, trying to brute force some sort of war. If Nicodemus is pulling in nominally independent Denarians…” Luccio shook her head. “Whatever he has planned, it’s big.”

“Big enough that the White Council sent three Wardens of their own volition?” Carlos looked up, and on a fire escape there was a man who looked like he’d just come from a renfaire, complete with a cross on his tabards, on a fire escape, built like a barn and with the kind of unassuming appearance that you’d expect out of the man who built it. He dropped down to street level, striding over to Dresden, and the two of them clasped hands.

“Saying that the Council did it is somewhat disingenuous,” said the Captain, sheathing her sword. “We got a tip that the Master of Shadows may be in Chicago, and I… appropriated what forces I could. Not much, in the face of the Red Court, but… It will help.”

“Yeah, about the Red Court, a Duke Ortega decided that Larry Fowler’s studio’s a good place to challenge me to a duel,” said Dresden, and Carlos knew his mentor well enough to see the exasperated sigh she was holding back for the sake of her own reputation if nothing else.

To be fair, he couldn’t exactly fault her- first the Denarians, then the Red Court, all in a town that already had a major Winter presence, was one hell of a powder keg. What was next, the Archive? A Valkyrie? Maeve?

Hopefully none of them, but given Carlos’ luck, he should probably start preparing for all three.

Chapter Text

Anastasia Luccio wasn’t entirely sure what she was supposed to expect when Shiro Yoshimo and his fellow Knights mentioned a safe location, but she would have been willing to accept even a poorly-maintained hostel in the face of what had already happened tonight.

At best, they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, a mere target of opportunity for the Denarian that had ruined their vehicles and then attacked them. That was, however, supremely unlikely to be the case, given how potent Nicodemus’ ability to gather information was, and she couldn’t afford to treat it as anything less than well-informed, precisely directed enemy action.

Still, with the Knight’s truck leading the loaner that Dresden had secured from the mechanic and Shiro’s sedan into the parking lot of Saint Mary of the Angels, she felt as if she could afford to release her staff. Even if the Denarians did choose to follow them onto holy grounds, they weren’t operating at nearly as potent an informational advantage as they had been, and unless Nicodemus had brought Magog along with Ursiel, which was unlikely since that particular Fallen had always been more prone to work with Polonius Lartessa and Rosanna, he could not bring nearly as much direct power to bear, not enough to be assured of his victory over all three Knights and herself, even if Dresden, Ramirez, and Yoshimo the younger were unable to contribute.

Before she managed to emerge from the sedan and attempt to aid the staggering Russian, there was already a girl clad in what seemed to be an oversized lab coat there, pulling the passenger door open and bracing one shoulder under his arm to lever him out of the vehicle. “What happened to him?” she asked in a familiar voice that Anastasia couldn’t put her finger on, presumably feeling the way that he swayed but managed to remain upright.

“Ursiel knocked him into a wall with a charge,” said Shiro. “Ramirez and Dresden bought me the opening I needed to end the fight before anything else happened.”

“He’s worst off, then?”

“My niece dislocated her wrist, but she should be able to manage.” Suddenly, Yoshimo’s skill with her sword made significantly more sense- Anastasia hadn’t fought with Shiro for very long, but his bladesmanship had made an impression, and her style of combat was close to what she remembered of his, if less polished. One day, she’d make a terrific instructor or field captain for the Wardens, assuming she remained in the Order for long enough.

“Right, and we’re worried about… internal bleeding or cranial trauma?” Anastasia refocused on the girl, and she was indeed a girl- she had the coltish look and oversized hands of someone with at least a handful of growth spurts still to go through, and yet… there was something about her bearing that put paid to her seeming youth, a familiarity with how best to support the Russian Knight without causing him further harm.

“Could be either, could just be a blown-out eardrum.” Shiro shrugged. “I’m no doctor.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll make sure he gets taken care of.” She lowered her voice, but not enough. “Keep an eye on the kids, please?”

Another curious quirk, seeing as how she appeared to be younger than the Wardens. In another time, Anastasia would have suspected her to be the Archive, but she knew that the repository of all the knowledge of mankind was a child younger than ten, and not to be seen outside the company of the Hellhound to boot, who wouldn’t be caught dead around any of the Knights if he had any other choice.

Shiro offered the girl a smile. “Of course, Molly,” he said, and there was more respect in those three words than Anastasia could remember him offering to any of the people who had been involved with the situation with the Stygian Sisterhood three decades ago. Another piece of the puzzle that was the girl… and Anastasia was unsure if she wanted to hunt down the rest.

“If you ask,” said Shiro, quietly enough that none of the riders in the truck could hear, “she will answer.”

Anastasia colored a shade or two redder at being caught before quashing her blush response. “Should I?”

Shiro shrugged. “It’s not an easy thing, knowing the Truth.” Anastasia could hear the capital letter there, although she wasn’t sure why it would be there. “But it is a burden that only you can decide if you are strong enough to bear.”

And with that, he turned and walked into the church, cane tippy-tapping as he went, leaving Anastasia to start and hurry in his wake.

The church grounds no longer felt quite so comforting, with all the questions swirling around the inside of her head.

Thankfully, it was just a ruptured eardrum, and even though Sanya would be lopsided for the rest of the night and maybe into the morning, depending on how strong a response his body had to biofoam, he should be fighting fit by the time things really heat up.

“So,” I said, walking slowly through Saint Mary and trying to find where Dad and Shiro had gotten off to, “how’d she work?”

“Like a dream,” said Sanya, patting the sheath I’d used my gun magic on before he’d gone out with Dad and Shiro to bail Harry’s ass out of the figurative fire, and the Wardens with him. “Got Ursiel very worked up, loud roaring and ‘this cannot be’ type of thing. You know how he is.”

I chuckled ruefully. “Thankfully not. I don’t think anyone managed to spring Ursiel before I came back, although that might have something to do with the fact that at some point Harry lured him into one of Hades’ vaults before killing his host and leaving the coin for the Lord of the Dead.”

Sanya whistled, then winced, one hand rising to his wounded ear for a moment before dropping back to his side, and he worked his jaw before speaking again. “That’s one way to remove the Coin from circulation, although I am not sure we can do so for all thirty. Sooner or later someone would arrange for a heist, and then we would have all the Coins in one person’s hands.”

“You’re not wrong.” I opened my mouth to suggest another idea, but froze when Harry’s voice rose angrily from one of the rooms ahead, somewhat muffled by the weight of the sturdy wooden door between us and them but still audible.

“What do you mean ‘I can’t be involved,’ Michael?” he said, and I fancied I could feel someone in the room drawing in power in response.

Sanya hit the door first, almost slamming it open in his haste to be the first one through, and as I made it to the door, I could see him trying to interpose himself between Harry and Dad, who he was doing an admirable job at looming over for someone who Dad could break over his knee like Bane broke the Bat.

“What is going on here?” I demanded, and I winced as my voice cracked halfway through, even as it seemed to drain the fury out of Harry as he turned almost sheepishly to face me.

“Molly? What are you doing here?”

“I had a theology question for Father Forthill and Dad agreed to drop me off when he went to go do his Knight errand,” I lied, and based on the way that Luccio’s eyes narrowed, she caught it too, but her expression was largely dominated by exasperation at Harry being Harry. To be entirely fair, it was hard to blame her, since that’s more or less what I was feeling, but still.

“Right, yeah, that… makes sense,” he said, seeming to almost deflate as he rubbed at the back of his neck sheepishly. “Sorry about that, I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Harry, you have to understand that this is for your own safety,” said Dad, which, to his credit, did get the man to hunch his shoulders some, but he otherwise continued walking out of the church without replying.

“You were never going to get him to skip town,” I said. “If you did he wouldn’t be Harry.”

“And if I didn’t try I wouldn’t be me, Molly,” Dad said, exhaustion weighing down every word.

“And who’s this?” Ramirez asked between bites, sandwich in one hand and energy drink in the other.

“Ah, yes. Wardens Ramirez, Yoshimo, and Luccio, this is Molly, my oldest daughter. If you don’t mind, it’s going to be past her bedtime if we stay here too much longer, so I’ll be taking her home now. Shiro, Sanya, if you wouldn’t mind coordinating with the Wardens? Thank you.”

After about five minutes’ worth of small talk, we managed to disentangle ourselves from the conversation and make it out to the truck, and then home, mostly avoiding the situation at hand by talking about school.

“Sleep well, Molly,” he said, as we separated to go to our separate rooms.

“You too, Dad.”

As I sat down on my bed, I felt the Forge flash, two pedestals made manifest like a time-lapse of mushrooms growing, and then-

A secret of the universe, the cornerstone of an ancient art, revealed to me in an instant. What is the job of a smith, at its core?

A smith, and an artisan in general, is an agent of change. Be it ore to blade, iron to weapon, man to hero… nail to Sword… all these are changes, the core of a Smith’s craft, and this is the secret that Goibnu, the mighty smith of the Tuatha De Danann, held at the core of his art.

A Fomor plague struck down Goibnu before the fall of the Tuatha De Danann, before they were diminished to the Sidhe, nobles of Summer and Winter, but the subtle strength of his profound insight into reality, the strength that would allow a smith to beat an ingot of bronze thrice to produce a spearpoint that would cause a foe to bleed to death through a mere nick, lived on in me.

That was my last coherent thought before the headache hit me like a freight train, and I collapsed backwards into my pillows.

“My host, you must awaken.”

The stench of sulfur accompanied the words, and the combination of a voice inside my head that I couldn’t ignore and the unfortunately familiar odor of Hellfire finally dragged me back to consciousness, feeling like I hadn’t slept a wink.

“What the fuck happened?” I slurred, pain still pressing in at my temples and making my tongue clumsy.

“This is what happens when an unprepared mortal mind comprehends a secret of the cosmos,” said Lasciel, and almost by reflex, I turned my spiritual eyes to the new pedestals before flinching away.

When the expected pain didn’t come, I turned my attention back to the displays.

The larger one, the one representing the secret nature of change as understood by the mightiest smith of Eire, had a mallet atop it, the type that wouldn’t have been out of place at any arcade or country fair in America, tethered to one of those strongman games that every teenage boy would love to smash right to the top and, inevitably, walk away disappointed from. At its foot stood… not another pedestal, no, it was an anvil, with a miniature forge and assorted other implements around it in a mind-bending arrangement that worsened my headache before I turned my focus away from it.

“Careful, my host,” said Lasciel. “Even though you are… more than mortal, now, you are still fragile from being reforged in so short a time. The soul is more than capable of comprehending this, but the mind, and the flesh… all too breakable.”

“Right,” I said, peeling myself off the bed. “Thanks.”

Then, I took a moment to marvel at the absurdity of my life. What the hell kind of situation was I in that I was thanking a fallen angel for saving my body and mind from the universal insight I’d been handed like a damn nightcap.

I was halfway tempted to get up and try and get to one of the bathrooms, but a moment to Listen and I could hear the sounds of the showers spraying, the gurgling of the pipes and the slapping of flesh against the tub. Then, I turned to my dresser to get my hairbrush to try and get my hair to at least pretend I’d washed it… that I’d left in the bathroom until I was sixteen and hadn’t gotten around to keeping it in my room again, right.

Well, I could sneak down to Dad’s workshop and put something together, a comb, maybe, and that should work out well enough.

I changed my clothes really quick, leaving off my uniform jacket for the moment, then slipped downstairs on clumsy feet. The two Wardens in the kitchen were chatting with Sanya over coffee as Mom worked the stove, and more pertinently, with their backs to me, so I was able to make it out to the shed without anyone paying me much mind.

From there, finding a piece of wood scrap big enough to carve down to a comb was relatively simple, and I sat down heavily at the workbench, already modeling the most time-efficient way to get enough teeth on the comb to be worth making.

I got to work with the carving knife, but a mere three rough passes of the blade over the wood left me with the kind of polished, pearly-sheened comb that you’d expect in a museum, and it was only belatedly that I realized that yes, my understanding of the nature of a worker of arts as an agent of change worked on other forms of craft than just smithing.

Running the comb through my hair once cleaned and styled it like I’d just spent a week getting spa treatments, and I could feel as the item seemed to… peel the sweat and other byproducts of a day from my flesh, a lesser effect than what it did to my hair but no less valuable given how unlikely it was that I’d be able to squeeze my way into the bathrooms for a shower this morning before I had to leave for school.

“Morning,” I said after reentering the house. “Where’s, uh… the third Warden?” I didn’t have any reason to know Yoshimo’s name, as far as the Wardens were concerned, so I couldn’t refer to her by it without getting a hairier eyeball from Luccio.

Luccio frowned. “Warden Yoshimo should be here by now. The tea house she mentioned isn’t far from here, and it doesn’t take that long to prepare matcha.”

I gave Mom a significant look, and she opened her mouth, frowning, before pausing and shuddering in the way that I’d often seen when people remembered what they bore witness to in a Soulgaze. She deflated, pressing her lips together, then sighed. “Fifteen minutes. If she’s not back by then, you can go look, and I’ll call you out from school.”

Both Wardens turned to look at me, Ramirez more than mildly confused and Luccio with calculation clear in her gaze. “Why would that be?” Ramirez asked, turning back to Mom after a moment.

I spent the next fifteen minutes leading the two of them on a merry jig around the truth, not technically lying but certainly not telling them anything informational even when the Forge flickered briefly and distracted me.

By the time that mom’s deadline had elapsed, Ramirez was looking like he would like to get off this roller coaster, please, while Luccio was looking at me like she was wondering how easy burying me in iron filings inside a circle would be.

“Go for it,” Mom said, seeming to deflate even more. “I’ll call the school.”

I was halfway up the stairs before she finished “school”, and after grabbing a hoodie and a different pair of pants, I tore open a slipspace portal to the Future Witness and stepped through.

“Aine,” I said, closing the portal behind me, “spool up the sensors. We’ve got a Wizard to find.”

Chapter Text

Yuki Yoshimo was not having a particularly good day.

Admittedly, that was at least partially her fault, having turned down coffee when Ramirez and then Mrs. Carpenter had offered it, but in her defense she hadn’t been expecting to be kidnapped by a Knight of the Blackened Denarius after going out to get tea for herself and Uncle Shiro, especially after having a front row seat to Ursiel’s death the night before.

“Well then, young lady,” the snake-headed being hissed, rusty patches on his dull gray scales resembling nothing so much as bloodstains before they started undulating hypnotically. “It’sss been sssome time sssinccce I broke a wizssard, ssso I might be out of practiccce.”

Yuki struggled against the thorn manacles, trying desperately to call up enough power to actually do something, anything, other than die unceremoniously in a cheap motel room; to no avail as dozens of pinpricks of pain pierced the skin of her wrists under the cold steel of the manacles. Her head swam with the sensation, blood throbbing through both wrists and her still-injured shoulder.

“Foolisssh,” said the Denarian, baring his fangs at Yuki. “Nicodemusss made thossse manaclesss persssonally, a wizssard sssuch asss you could never essscape.”

“Maybe,” came a voice from the other side of the Denarian, followed by the sound of Yuki’s sword slipping free from its sheath. “But I’m not sure you can keep her.”

The Denarian whirled, moving slightly to the side and just enough for Yuki to see the speaker.

She was a lanky girl (or three, but some quiet part of her mind, shouting from far off, insisted that there was only one), of middling height, with hands just oversized enough that Yuki was fairly sure that she had a couple of growth spurts left to go through. Her hair appeared almost the color of wheat, and her blue eyes sparkled with more light than strictly should have been possible in the dingy room. The mask covering her face was cheap, the kind of blue Yuki remembered from visiting her great-grandmother in the hospital, and the hoodie and sweats as well as the ruffled appearance of the girl’s pageboy cut would have made her look like someone who’d just rolled out of bed, although the fact that she held Yuki’s straight-edged silver sword with the kind of quiet confidence that reminded her of the times she’d seen Captain Luccio preparing to go into battle put paid to the illusion of mundanity.

“Who are you?” hissed the Denarian, four eyes glaring at the girl.

“No one to be trifled with,” she quoted, and it took Yuki’s addled brain a moment to recognize the line from the Princess Bride, a movie her dad had loved to put on back when she could still be in the same room as the TV without breaking it.

“I mussst know,” the Denarian said.

“Get used to disappointment,” she replied, a smirk audible in her words.

The Denarian hurled a bolt of hissing, seething hatred at the girl. It didn’t make it within three feet of her before she swept the blade up, slicing the curse in half like so much paper and leaving both parts to dissolve.

That was… how had she managed to use the enchantments imbued into the sword? It was supposed to be all but impossible for anyone save for Captain Luccio to use the sword of another Warden, let alone an untrained teenage girl, and that was excluding the impeccable skill with which she used the blade.

Regardless of how, she’d done it, and continued to do so as she advanced on the Denarian, blade glimmering with an inner silvery-white light as it carved through spell after spell.

For a moment, it almost seemed like Yoshimo was watching Takemikazuchi wielding her blade, ascending beyond mere mortal limits to carve the very fabric of reality apart, but she blinked and no, it was just the girl, moving with skill enough to challenge Uncle Shiro and the surety of a mountain goat on level terrain.

The Denarian’s head snapped forwards, fangs flashing and dripping venom, but the girl moved, flicking the blade at his chest as she stepped aside with all the care of a doctor picking up a clipboard. He screamed in pain, blood welling up in a long slash from one shoulder to the opposite hip, and collapsed forwards before rolling over, glaring up at the girl.

“Do it, then,” he sneered, glaring up at the girl. “Kill me.”

“Not yet, Cassius,” she said, and the snake-man stiffened. “I have… questions for you.”

“...Who are you?” Yuki asked, feeling more than a little bowled over by the whole situation.

“Not now,” she said. “Once I finish with Saluriel’s host, I can answer some questions, but for now, you’ll just have to trust that I’m here in place of Captain Luccio.”

Yuki opened her mouth to question things, then heard the hotel room’s phone ring and hung her head.

Yeah, the past day had already been so crazy, that might as well happen too. Phone call for the Knight of the Blackened Denarius, why not?

Yoshimo looked… not great, to be honest, her skin was too pale and hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a couple days. I didn’t know if Cassius had had the chance to poison her yet or not, but from the way that the pattern on his scales was dancing, he’d already started in on torturing her, and it was only the protection the Forge had seen fit to grant me that prevented me from succumbing to whatever hypnotic spell that had sucked Yoshimo in.

Granted, I hadn’t been feeling much better this morning than I had before getting hit over the head by the Forge, but it was fine. The adrenaline rush would buy me more than long enough as long as I kept the Denarian on the back foot.

“I suggest,” I said, raising Yoshimo’s sword to rest, edge gleaming despite the flickering bulbs in the cheap motel room, against his scaled neck with one hand and placing her sheath on the ground next to me with the other, “that you drop whatever spell it is you’re using on the good Warden.”

“Or what?” he hissed.

“Or,” I said, making an effort to keep my tone mild enough that it wouldn’t be out of place on a grocery list, “I find myself with no choice but to find out how much of you I have to skin for this very nice sword to end the spell.”

The Forge flashed as he glared up at me defiantly for a moment, but before he could do more than that, I shifted the sword the barest fraction, just enough to be able to nick his skin with exactly the same resistance as it would face were I to nick a sheet of paper- that being none at all.

“Alright,” he grumbled, the energies bound by his will subsiding. “What do you want to know?”

“Why take the Warden?” I asked, glancing over at where Yoshimo seemed to have passed out. To be fair, I couldn’t really blame her, after getting kidnapped and mind-whammy’d by a Knight of the Coin, I probably would have passed the fuck out back when I was fresh out of my apprenticeship too.

“Lasssciel wasss… the long-term gambit, especially once it wasss you who took her coin. We needed more immediate information, essspecially once the intervention of the Wardenssss prevented Ursssiel from removing the wizssard from the sssituation.” He leered at me in a way that, had he done anything but make direct eye contact, would have had me denouncing him as a creep. “Ssspeaking of which… how’sss ssshe doing? Not too sssmall a living ssspaccce for her majesssty?”

I could feel Lasciel’s temper rousing distantly, as if hearing the air conditioner kick on from outside, and registered her words with the same indistinct lack of clarity. “Bold words from the angel who dwelt in the gutters for long enough for his host to take on scales and learn to slither for his sake!”

“Oh, she’s perfectly fine,” I said, baring my teeth at the Denarian in the kind of expression that wiped that smug-ass look right off his face like I’d threatened to annihilate the Shroud. “Well. As fine as anyone can be when they’re in the hands of the Chosen of the Celestial Forge who has great, justifiable reason to do them harm for endangering their baby sister.” I tilted my head, calling up an illusion of bloodred flames leaking from the corners of my eyes. “How safe would you say you’re feeling right now, on a scale of one to ten?”

I’d give Snakeboy this much, he wasn’t an idiot, and he showed it by having had a spell building up under my nose.

He spat out a cloud of venom into my face, and while I managed to manifest the helmet that came with the Future Witness and my lab coat, the cloying cloud of poison still covered my face, blocking my vision for the time it took the VISR systems to spool up, and in that time he coiled his body around me and hurled me across the room like an empty mug.

Despite how off-guard he caught me, I still had more than enough time to react to such a simple move, and I drove Yoshimo’s sword into the floor, pivoting around the hilt to land on my own two feet, a little bit bruised, but ready to rumble.

The sword slid free of the ground wholly unmarked, a testament to Luccio’s craftswork and enchantments, and I cleared it almost on reflex before raising it to point at the serpentine Denarian, who had summoned his own blade of bone-white steel.

“I will apologizsse to Lasssciel for thisss,” he hissed, tongue flickering as he raised his sword in a disdainful bastardization of a dueler’s salute. “Losssing a hossst after ssso little time isss hard, and ssshe can’t have had enough time to break you to her preferencesss.”

“Bold words,” I said, sheathing Yoshimo’s blade in a glowing corona of my will, reinforced by Soulfire, as my coat, boots, and bodysuit replaced the hoodie and sweats I’d used as a disguise to get here, “from someone who had to jump out of a sewer to take even a novice Warden down. Tell me, how is Pennywise doing?”

The Denarian snarled, lunging forwards a touch faster than I’d expected, swinging his blade down to cleave me into two messy pieces,

Still, for all that he was fast, he was clearly more a sorcerer than a swordsman, and his blade skittered off of the katana in my hands, before I rotated Yoshimo’s sword and the edge caught on his blade, cleanly slicing through the weapon and reducing it to so much ectoplasm before I slashed out at him.

A fell wind filled the room as he backpedaled, tangible enough to shove me back a pace and prevent the sword from doing more than creasing his scales, but it died out quickly as I rammed my will through the blade itself, splitting the wind in half as the silvery light of my will washed through the room and burned every trace of the green haze that accompanied it away.

Cassius conjured a tangle of serpents directly above me, but as I rolled forwards to get out of the way, the sword’s blade described an arc in my wake, bisecting the hissing spell and leaving it to plop onto the floor, dissolving into a puddle of ectoplasm.

I lunged forwards once I managed to get my feet under me, sweeping the sword around me twice. The first time, it dissipated the wave of Hellfire that the panicking Denarian had thrown at me, Soulfire infusing the blade to prevent the infernal energy from corroding through my will before it dissipated against a tool it could never hope to stand up to.

The second pass stained the blade a sickly green-tinted red, and as the Forge strobed, the Denarian collapsed backwards, chest opening up like a particularly gruesome second mouth before he started to… squish.

I was glad for the cleaning cloth I always kept in my coat’s pocket as I flicked the denarius from where it had sort of oozed into existence on Cassius’ head into it with the sword, before folding it up and stuffing the bloody bundle in a pocket, clearing the blade of his blood before focusing on it. After a moment, I managed to find the right frequency of energy, and the blade heated up, going from red-hot to white-hot smoothly before I cut off the energy flow, let the blade cool itself in the air, temper left intact thanks to Luccio’s enchantments, and went to find where Yoshimo’s sheath had gotten off to.

After a moment of searching, enough time for Yoshimo’s sword to shed the heat I’d filed it with, I found the sheath where Cassius’ tail had swept it and slipped the blade back into it. That done, I gathered the assorted foci that were on the table with the sword that he’d presumably taken with it, then turned back to Yoshimo, slumped forwards on the chair, and sighed. “Right, okay, let me just…”

A couple of minutes of finagling had the ropes holding her in place untied despite the gloves I had on, and though she collapsed forwards on me, I was able to maneuver her around so that she was mostly braced across my shoulders, leaving my arms free to both open a portal and defend us, in case someone decided to burst in and pick a fight with us.

Right as I tore open the slipspace portal to the Future Witness, I heard sirens approaching, and sighed. CPD was… well, I wasn’t going to say they were useless in general, but right now there was nothing they could do about the Denarians that wouldn’t get too many people dead for no reason, and dealing with them right now, with a corpse on the floor and Yoshimo just barely stirring over my shoulders, was more of a pain than it was worth it for what benefits I could squeeze out even if it was someone less willing to deal in collateral damage than Nicodemus, and if push came to shove I could always get Harry to pass a message to Murphy.

As the portal irised closed behind us, Yoshimo jolted, looking up and around us with wild eyes. “Holy shit! I… where are we? What happened?”

“I managed to put another one of the Denarians down and rescued you,” I said, dematerializing the helmet and pulling the surgical mask off my face. “Give me a moment and I can get us back to the rest of the Wardens.”

Yoshimo pushed herself up and took a long look at me, her gaze growing more and more skeptical as the look stretched on, before she broke the silence. “You killed a Denarian, on your own?”

“What, like it’s hard?”

Chapter Text

“Right, here we go,” I said, plodding through a slipspace portal back into the living room. “One Warden, lightly used, mint condition.”

Luccio didn’t quite stop giving me the hairy eyeball when Yoshimo came through behind me, but she did slide her sword back into its scabbard from where she’d halfway drawn it at someone opening a portal into the middle of the living room, through a threshold and one that looks very distinct from a Way… which, to be fair, was a little alarming, even if I didn’t think that you could open a Way from the Nevernever into an area behind a threshold without being, like, Old Man Vadderung or one of the Mothers or someone from the same ZIP code.

“Warden Yoshimo,” said Luccio. “Report.”

“I was attacked by the host of Saluriel,” she replied, eyes still slightly out of focus and slightly bloodshot. “He’s more skilled at hypnotic compulsions than I suspected, and he managed to capture me and remove me to a secondary location. The young lady, ah, tracked us down somehow, and dispatched the Denarian with my sword.”

“My daiklave is, ah, in the shop,” was what I said when Luccio turned her gaze on me, doing my best to hide my confusion over what a daiklave was despite her piercing gray eyes and the keen mind behind them.

After a moment, she just sighed, muttering something about Americans and Dresden being a bad influence which… I mean, she wasn’t wrong? Inasmuch as the guy was solid in a fight and the kind of investigator that always had another trick to pull out… he wasn’t exactly the kind of person that I’d trust around kids, because Mom would kill me for it if for no other reason. Either way, when she took Yoshimo out back to talk, neither Ramirez nor I followed

“Hey,” said Ramirez. “The Captain worries a lot, but she means well. And… thanks for saving Yoshimo. This is her first gig with the Wardens, and I don’t know that Shiro or Ancient Mai would have taken it well if she’d have died.”

Shiro I understood, but what the hell did Mai have to do with Yoshimo? She lived in the US, not Japan. “Eh, don’t worry about Shiro,” I said, shrugging one shoulder carelessly. “He’s… kind of intense at first, but he’s not the kind to make a big fuss over something like that. Go out and hunt down whatever killed Yoshimo, yes, but not hold it against the Council, not unless someone there was, like, actively sabotaging her or trying to get her killed.”

“That may be, but…” Ramirez shook his head. “For a vanilla mortal to get that old, while wielding one of the Swords… he’s better than just good, and the farther up that path, the more… volatile they tend to be. Nothing against him, it’s just once bitten, twice shy, you know?” He shuddered. “And Mai… well, she’s her own damn warning.”

I chuckled, then slapped Ramirez on the back. “Have a little faith, man. You’re in the right house for it and everything.”

As I turned to go up to my room, the Forge glimmered, and as the light receded, a new pedestal rose, and atop that pedestal appeared what looked, at first glance, to be an ingot of gold, but upon a closer look lacked the sheen and malleability of gold, replacing it instead with far more metaphysical weight.

Truly, the amount of shit that Nth metal could pull out of nowhere would put a fully fledged wizard of the Council to shame… which, to be fair, made it right at home in comicsland where it came from.

It was surrounded by what would have seemed to be an excessive number of similar bars, if I wasn’t unfortunately aware of just how many things would appreciate being made out of this metal. Hell, if I could get my hands on Halsey or someone with that kind of medical knowhow, I could probably just build a body for Aine out of the pure stuff, even if that would be inefficient.

If I had the Shroud on hand, I could probably make something that could fill the same roles…

Actually, come to think of it, why was the Shroud in Chicago, specifically?

That was what had brought the Denarians and, in turn, the Knights to the Second City, originally, the Churchmice had been conveying the artifact to Chicago before one of them… LeBeau, maybe… had run afoul of Dierdre and been carved up like a hunk of roast beef at a buffet. But that still didn’t answer the question of who had ponied up for them to come into town, and why.

There was a very limited number of people who would both be able to have the Shroud stolen from Turin and who would want it delivered to Chicago, although I couldn’t tie a reason why they would want the Shroud in the first place to any of them.

Marcone was more likely to go through Monoc and thus Vadderung to get a relic or other magical aid, especially since, if I was right, he already had at least one of the Choosers of the Slain on retainer at this point. Maeve was… erratic, even before she lost it in her last year or three, but she’d be more prone to seek out Sidhe relics if she really needed them, and someone like the Wardens or Forthill would go through more official channels on their end to get access to the Shroud or something of the like than resort to a messy and, more than likely, unnecessary smash-and-grab involving vanilla mortals, setting aside the fact that the Wardens were only here for the Denarians.

Out of anyone, that fit Marcone’s style the best, but I still couldn’t see any reason for him to try and steal the Shroud of fucking Turin, especially since it would paint a target on his back, so that left… what, the dregs of the Vargassis, maybe?

I couldn’t make heads or tails of this, and that made me worry about there being some sort of angle I couldn’t see.

With the power of Goibnu’s art and the speed of his craftswork, I could probably build my way out of any kind of surprise attack or something of the like, but I didn’t like relying on my ability to adapt- I’d seen how far that had gotten everyone before, and that kind of cavalier disregard for the possibility of preparation actually improving a situation almost always got blood spilled that could have been avoided.

Fortunate, then, that I’d been gifted with the kind of material that put just about every substance known to man to shame, as far as raw versatility and metaphysical weight go.

For a moment, I was tempted to work the metal in my bedroom and then take a nap, once the rest of the Jawas who weren’t going to school were adequately occupied, but even aside from the safety issues that come from doing metalwork and having a lit forge in a carpeted room, I’d been an older sister long enough to know how futile an idea that was, so I pulled open a portal back to the Future Witness, which was becoming easier and easier as I continued opening these portals, and ambled through.

“Captain on deck,” said Aine, a playful smile dancing across her lips as I gave her a level look.

I felt as something within me drained away, a reservoir I wasn’t entirely conscious of until now, and Lasciel appeared at the third point of an equilateral triangle with Aine and myself as the other two corners. “My host,” she said, almost pouting, “aren’t you going to introduce us?”

Aine didn’t flinch, but she did give Lasciel an unreadable look before turning to me. “Who is this, then?”

“Right,” I said, running a hand through my hair at the prospect of having to explain being semi-possessed by a fallen angel and then going on to explain using magic metal and the power of ancient secrets out of the history of the Sidhe after having to put down a Denarian and carry Yoshimo out of the motel room on top of last night being a shitty night for sleep. “So, uh, Aine, this is Lasciel, and…”

Anastasia Luccio was still not sure what to make of Molly Carpenter.

On the one hand, the girl was fourteen, which was… probably under the ages at which the non-supernatural armies accepted soldiers? She hadn’t exactly kept up to date with mortal governments, on the whole, but she remembered hearing it in conversation between two of the Wardens with non-wizard family that had chosen to fight for a living. Even if she’d made a study with the blade since she was old enough to hold it, she lacked the stamina and physical strength to truly make best use of one, and she’d certainly not had enough time for an apprenticeship either.

On the other hand, she had the bearing of one accustomed to command, as well as enough skill at tracking to find Warden Yoshimo and the Denarian holding her, training enough with a blade to fell the Denarian, and a personal realm that she could use as an intermediary for travel faster than any Way that Luccio’d ever seen or heard of, and that was ignoring the fact that she could wield the sword of a Warden to its fullest extent.

Were it not for her being the daughter of Excalibur’s bearer, she would have suspected that the girl bore the coin of one of the Fallen who preferred arcane power, like Lasciel or Namshiel.

One way or another, she knew she’d be surprised by the girl again and again, going forwards, so with that in mind, she followed Yoshimo back into the house, stepping over the former circle on the ground with deeply ingrained delicacy before summoning a flow of water to wash the chalk off the concrete of the shed’s floor, then a gentle wave of heat to dry it before reentering the Carpenters’ house.

Inside, Ramirez was staring blankly at a pile of neatly folded squares of cloth, perhaps a shade or two different from the color of the gray cloaks that were standard issue for the Wardens, rubbing his finger across a loose corner.

“Captain,” he said, almost hollowly, “was that an abnormally fast debrief or is the Carpenter kid just built different?”

“We were perhaps half an hour, why?”

“Oh good,” said Ramirez. “Captain, Molly Carpenter offered us these three cloaks and said she’s got more for the Knights when they get back in. Said she made them since she went upstairs and is now… she said she’s gonna go pass out after making them?”

Anastasia frowned, then, for just a moment, opened her Sight.

She ignored Ramirez, and Yoshimo hovering at his shoulder, focusing almost entirely on the squares of cloth. At first, they just appeared to be more real than real, like many of the Sidhe works she’d seen, but the longer that she looked at them, and the more deeply, the more subtle aspects revealed themselves. The topmost one seemed to unfold itself, rising up to be a hooded cloak while still remaining a neatly folded square of grayish cloth, and around it the air stirred, a hint of ozone wafting off of the cloth of the garment as it seemed to dampen, just a shade, before drying itself.

Then her eye caught on the corner that Ramirez was still absently toying with, and the sheer intensity of the power in the metal that revealed drove both her eyes and her Sight closed.

She’d Seen Esperacchius in its full glory once, when she’d fought the Stygian Sisterhood with Shiro’s mentor, decades ago, and though the whole sword glowed with silvery fire, there was a patch of the blade, just on top of the hilt, that seemed to be a star brought to the earth, so intense was its radiance. That was what the metal resembled, the sun made manifest, and as the sheer visceral impact of the experience slammed her Sight closed, she knew, somehow, that she couldn’t find a better material for armor if she spent a millennium trying.

“I’m not entirely surprised,” said Anastasia, “considering that those cloaks are nearly as powerful as the Swords, in their own way.”

“Holy shit,” said Ramirez, “you’re saying that these are like our Warden blades?”

“Not our swords,” Yoshimo replied, preempting her response. “The Swords. Excalibur, Durandal, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, Hrunting, Asi, Fragarach… the blades of myth and legend.” She gave Ramirez a look that implied no small degree of disdain for his intelligence. “Three of which are in this house right now.”

Ramirez did a passable impression of a fish that had just been removed from the water and smacked with another fish. “What?”

Anastasia sighed. She’d thought that her latest apprentice was adequately prepared for this mission, but apparently she’d not been as good a mentor to him as she had been to the previous ones… or perhaps this mission was just too much for most fresh Wardens, and Yoshimo was the exception, she couldn’t be sure.

“Ramirez, come with me.” She jerked her head at the door. “I have some things that I evidently didn’t explain well enough. Yoshimo, put one of the cloaks on, see if you can’t feel the magics on them out.”

“You aren’t worried about them being… dangerous?” Yoshimo asked, giving the cloaks an askance look.

Anastasia chuckled. “Oh, indubitably, but not to the wielder. Whatever else is the case for miss Carpenter, we can trust her to be willing to at least work with us, and this is an extension of that.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” said Yoshimo, reaching for the bundles of cloth without any further complaint.

When she got into the shed, Anastasia momentarily lamented that she’d been so thorough with cleansing the circle from the concrete, but there was no use crying over spilt wine there, and it was the work of a moment to erect a new one.

“Now then, Carlos,” she said, her voice holding less of the unquestioned authority of the Captain of the Wardens and more of the gentleness that a good teacher would always need, “let me tell you about the Swords of the Cross.”

Chapter Text

Morgan wasn’t quite sure what to make of the warlock the Merlin had sent him to find.

On one hand, her house had an incredibly potent threshold, and she looked… young. He still remembered first meeting some of the newer Wardens, like Yoshimo, and she looked even younger than them, especially all curled up around a pillow in one corner of her bed like she was.

On the other hand, there were enough immaterial spirits in the house to set his teeth on edge, and if she was being accused of violating the Sixth Law of Magic, her physical appearance meant about as much as the Capiorcorpus’. So, between the Sixth and Fourth laws, she was likely to have all kinds of countermeasures for interference, and thus he couldn’t afford to allow the girl even a moment to react.

He could feel the buzz of her power against his skin as he secured the thorn manacles to her wrist with one hand, sword hefted to swing into motion at the slightest provocation.

She jerked away, eyes opening and taking him in with terror, and Morgan spoke. “Warlock Carpenter, you stand accused of breaking the Fourth and Sixth laws of Magic. The Senior Council will decide your fate, unless you seek to flee, in which case I will be forced to end your life.”

The girl didn’t even look like she saw him, chest heaving with terror as her eyes failed to focus. “Daddy!”

Morgan’s heart hardened, and he added more charges of breaking the Fourth Law to her figurative rap sheet. He had never had children of his own, but he’d spent enough time with those who had to despise her for manipulating the family who lived in the house into treating her as their own. Hopefully once the situation was resolved the Gatekeeper or Wizard Listens-To-Wind could set their minds to rights.

“Put her down, boy,” came an accented voice from behind Morgan, and both his head and sword arm turned to point at the man standing just inside the door to the room.

He was a short man, Japanese, Morgan thought, perhaps an inch or two more than five feet, and despite the cane he held in one hand, his bearing was steady. The man’s face was wrinkled, his short beard and hair white, but despite him being caught clearly halfway through armoring himself with greaves and boots, his bearing spoke of his readiness to fight, and behind a thick set of glasses, his gaze was keen and assessing.

“This is a matter for the White Council of Wizards, you need not-” Morgan began.

“Put. Her. Down.”

“I am duty bound to bring her into custody.”

“Thrice I ask and done,” snapped the man, and Morgan tensed at the familiar words out of what he had taken to be a mundane man’s mouth. “Put her down.”

Morgan apparently hesitated for just a hair too long, as determined by the man, who just sighed. “So be it.”

He swept the cane up to horizontal and separated the two halves, revealing a chisel-pointed blade that flashed with its own subtle power as he swung it towards Morgan, the edge letting out a keening sound as it cut through the air.

Morgan dropped the warlock as he interposed his own sword, which rang out as the man’s blade struck it harder than some vampires’ weapons.

He struck back, but the man was already swinging in another strike, and he was forced to abort his attack to defend himself.

Over the next three blows, he came to the conclusion that he was outmatched. The man was a virtuoso with his blade, not a single ounce of wasted motion as he moved from Kendo to Iaido to a strike he vaguely remembered Captain Luccio favoring without even a hint of an opening, and Morgan was forced to concede ground step by step.

Then as if one master swordsman in the warlock’s thrall wasn’t enough, another man burst into the room, a cruciform broadsword clutched in one broad hand.

He was built like Wizard McCoy’s barn, and displaying that quite clearly in a pair of jeans and unbuttoned flannel shirt, evidently also in the process of armoring himself for battle when he heard the cry. His eyes sought out the girl first, and when he saw she was unharmed save for the manacles, he turned a furious gaze and then blade upon Morgan.

Where the short man’s blade tested Morgan through skill, the taller man bulled through every defense he could offer, two strokes of his own keening blade sufficient to jar Morgan’s sword from his hands.

The shorter man’s blade rose to tickle Morgan’s throat once his own weapon was no longer in play, and he silently cursed the strength of the threshold for meaning he could barely summon up a minor tremor in the earth, let alone enough power to challenge these two men.

“Go to your daughter,” said the Japanese man, eyes still coolly watching Morgan. “I will handle this man.”

The taller man strode over to the warlock, took one look at her, and struck the thorn manacles from her wrists with one clean swing.

“Daddy!” she cried, burying her face in his chest as her arms wrapped around him.

“Shh, it’s okay, Molly. I’m here, and I won’t let him hurt you.” He enfolded the girl in his arms as the weight of his oath resonated through the too-still atmosphere of the room.

“Now then,” said the Japanese man, turning his gaze from the warlock to Morgan. “I have some questions for you, and suggest you answer well.”

In my defense, I wasn’t expecting to wake up with a man standing over me.

Shitty excuse, I know, but there’s a certain expectation of safety that comes from sleeping in your childhood bed after so long away, and that goes double when your dad has fought Nicodemus and lived to tell the tale, especially since, you know, I didn’t get the second-worst wake-up call I can remember last time the Shroud got stolen.

The issue is that there’s a limited number of things that I can do that would seriously deter an attacker as serious as Morgan or Nicodemus that I’d be willing to keep in the same house as any of the Jawas, even if I could key them into whatever protections I could use.

There’s idiotproofing and then there’s childproofing, and of the two, one of them is distinctly more difficult.

My musings were interrupted by the Forge flaring up, three pillars beginning to rise out of the floor. One froze most of the way up, missing the top platform, and another dissolved into smoke and flowed over in the direction of my lab coat, but the third fully realized itself, emerging as a flat plane with little pegs on it that I recognized from TV ads for one of those kids’ circuit toys.

As the pedestal solidified, I could feel an understanding of how to integrate nanocircuitry into weapons and tools press into my head, flowing oddly around for a moment before solidifying, and more than that, I could feel gaps in the knowledge, just out of my reach.

That, I assumed, would be on the mostly-constructed pedestal, which… maybe it would finish itself on its own, maybe I’d have to suss out the applications of the technology to anything other than a weapon or a tool, which was at once a broader and more constraining definition than it seemed, on my own.

Either way, I had a situation of my own to handle, with how Yoshimo almost ran into me halfway up the stairs, sword drawn and swirling with the roused winds that spoke to her wearing one of my new cloaks.

“What’s going on?” she asked, eyes narrowing at my rumpled appearance and the blanket Dad had insisted on wrapping me in… which, to be fair, was more than a little comforting after waking up to a repeat of the last time I’d woken up with someone unfamiliar in my bedroom, thorn manacles and all.

“Intruder,” I said, rubbing feeling back into one wrist. “Dad and Shiro caught him before he could do anything really bad to me, and they’ll see what exactly he meant when he accused me of violating some law or another while sticking a sword in my face.” I yawned, not nearly having had as much sleep as I’d prefer. “I was a little bit too busy being half asleep when he started yelling.”

Yoshimo sighed, then sheathed her sword. “I’ll go see if Luccio and Ramirez are done with their conversation yet, they might be able to help matters along.”

With her departure, I found myself with little enough to do, to the point where I made my way to the kitchen and started rattling around like a rock in a tin can, preparing a cup of hot chocolate for myself just like how Grandma Carpenter always liked it, with a miniature candy cane hanging off the side of the mug and everything.

I watched Luccio, Ramirez, and Yoshimo troop dutifully up the stairs, the most heavily armed ducklings I’d ever seen, and then, after a moment, Sanya came out of Mom’s sewing room.

He was still moving somewhat stiffly, the kind of half-tender, half-cautious gait that I’d had the first time I ever had biofoam, but his Sword was ready at his side and his eyes were sharp. “Flashbacks?” he asked, teeth flashing in a grim smile as he poured himself a mug of coffee and added a splash of vodka, then another as he resolutely ignored the occasional word from upstairs that we could hear.

“Not quite that bad,” I said, fingers twitching for my wand or something else I could fiddle with to ground out all this nervous energy living rent-free right under my skin. “No, I just woke up to a sword in my face and thorn manacles on my arm again and… froze.”

Sanya made a face. “I’ve had that before. Mostly in dreams, but… every so often, I just catch a whiff of sulfur and roasting meat, and think ‘Shit, Rosanna has tracked me down.’” He shook his head and sipped at his coffee. “It never is her, but… she liked to use raw hellfire as punishment. Sometimes even far enough to burn me numb, and all that time, all you can smell is the stench of yourself burning and sulfur. Magog healed the body, but the soul… not so much. Does not so much need the mind or the spirit, just the strong back and the hand to hold the Coin.”

We both nursed our drinks to the muffled sounds of arguing from upstairs for a moment. “And yet there was enough of the mind and the spirit to drop the coin in a canal.”

“We are… stronger than they give us credit for.” He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Plus, you have… you have more options than I think any of us suspect. Out of all of us, I credit you with the will to do what I have, even without phenomenal cosmic power in its place. With it… well. Nicodemus isn’t invincible, even with all his little tricks and magic toys.” He threw back the rest of his coffee. “Come, let us barge in on the grown-ups and see what is taking them so long.”

I chose to take my mug along with me, which when combined with the blanket I was still holding around my shoulders, probably made me look even younger than I actually was, bodily if not mentally.

“Sorry to interrupt,” lied Sanya, who had reached my room ahead of me, thanks to his longer legs, “but we could hear you all the way down in the kitchen. You’re lucky that Charity and the other children are out.”

As I peeked around him, I saw Luccio’s jaw jutting out like she was spoiling for a fight- things must not have been going well, especially with how Dad was trying to loom over the Wardens and Morgan was lying hog-tied on my bed. Of everyone present, Shiro looked the calmest, and even he was looking at Luccio like he was expecting her to attack them.

As the Forge flared, I felt the knowledge contained on the last pillar slam into me as it expanded up and out, the golden light surrounding the pedestal coalescing into what looked like a pile of legos as the missing pieces of the understanding of nanocircuitry filled themselves out and then some, letting me understand both the microsystems that relied on the nanocircuitry as well as the ways that the civilization that this knowledge came from used technology on the large scale.

It wasn’t quite as fancy as the stuff I’d gotten in the data dump on my datapad, or even my understanding of computers, but it was complete, encyclopedic, and I didn’t have to read to understand any of it, so that was a win in and of itself, even if the timing was less than convenient.

As quickly as I could, I forced the knowledge into the back of my head and spoke up. “Isn’t that the Warden that Harry mentioned was harassing him and trying to arrest him on spurious charges of violating the laws even when he hadn’t?”

The reddening of Morgan’s face confirmed that he’d been doing that sub rosa, and the impassioned denial that he offered in his “defense” didn’t help matters. “He is a warlock who escaped the consequences of his murder of a Warden on a technicality, and cannot be trusted not to reoffend! Neither can you, not for your interference with the archives of the White Council or with this family!”

“Young man,” said Shiro, turning an overly mild gaze to Morgan and nonetheless causing him to rear back as if slapped. “Do you really have so little faith in us Knights of the Cross that you believe that a child can bend our wills to her own?”

Morgan couldn’t come up with an answer to that damning question, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Luccio’s jaw tightening.

“Madre de Dios,” said Ramirez, rubbing at his face. “This just keeps getting better and better!”

Chapter Text

Inasmuch as I wanted to see Luccio, Dad, and Shiro tearing into Morgan, I honestly had better things to do than revel in seeing him get the third degree.

As the new knowledge dump had reminded me, I had a whole lot of reading to get done, and while there was a sword (a Daiklave, some part of me insisted) manifesting itself within the Forge, like my service pistol, it was certainly taking its sweet time doing so, and I couldn’t exactly rely on being able to borrow one from Yoshimo every time I needed it, so I’d have to put one together on my own.

Fortunately, I was probably the single greatest mortal alive for emergency smithing purposes, so a quick jaunt up to the Future Witness and a couple of ingots of Nth metal had a really nice falcata finished, one that shone gold under the right lighting and was both light enough for my fourteen-year-old noodle arms to hold and big enough that I wouldn’t outgrow the enclosed guard once I finally hit my growth spurts.

It was also, you know, a work of craft beyond mortal ken and the equal of any of the weapons of the Tuatha De Danann, even setting aside how bullshit Nth metal was in its own respects, but that was beside the point.

About the time that my brain made it from “hehe sword go swoosh” to “hang on a second, I never made a scabbard for the sword,” Ramirez knocked on the door and then, when it revealed itself to be not properly latched, he nudged it open with his boot.

“Is this a bad time?”

“Not really, I’m just in the middle of something. Let me just…” Well, even if it was relatively urgent, I didn’t think Mom would take particularly kindly to me raiding her supplies to make myself a scabbard for the sword I made myself out of magic metal, and I was somewhat pressed for time, so I drew some more Nth metal out of my soul and set to work. By the time I finished, the metal had been shaped into the perfect scabbard for my newly forged blade, seeming more like wrought iron with highlights of burnished copper than anything else, coming across almost like someone had cast the image of a wave at sunset and then polished it to perfect smoothness, and it probably had some other fancy features too, but I didn’t particularly have the inclination to find out what they were at the moment. “Alright, come in,” I said, banishing the tools I’d used to work the scabbard back into wherever the Forge kept them when I didn’t need them.

Ramirez walked in through the door, then froze. “What the hell is that?”

“A sword,” I said, picking up the blade off of the table and sliding it into the scabbard until the hilt met the top of the scabbard with a satisfying click. “Just made it. The grown-ups kick you out?”

I almost felt bad for the guy, mouth working like a goldfish who just got told it was adopted. He couldn’t have been more than… what, twenty-five at the outside? Either way, he hadn’t really seen how fucking wild this moonlit world of ours could get, and this week had just been one punch after another for him, as far as I could tell. And it was only Tuesday, too!

He was tough, though, I thought as the Forge flickered, and he managed to rally relatively quickly. “No, there’s, ah, a little bit of an impasse between your old man and the Captain, and I maybe thought you could help resolve the situation?”

I added up what I knew about Luccio and those things that would get Dad to really dig his heels in, and… “Goddamn wizard politics,” I grumbled under my breath, before raising my voice. “Yeah, sure, I’ll see what I can’t shake loose. They still in my bedroom, or did they move?”

“Still in your room, I think,” Ramirez said, looking a lot less like he was cataloging escape routes just in case Dad decided to throw down with the rest of the Wardens now that I’d agreed to intervene.

“Right.” I cracked my neck, then headed up the stairs and back into my room, Ramirez following behind me like I was a walking piece of cover.

By the time we arrived at my room, they’d stopped discussing whatever it was that they’d been discussing beforehand, and had devolved to Dad glaring down at Luccio, who was matching his glare while Yoshimo was pressed against the wall like she was trying to merge with it. Shiro, meanwhile, was moving to place himself between his niece and everyone else, offering both Dad and Luccio a reproachful look that would have probably broken the stalemate if they had eyes for anyone other than each other, and Sanya was sitting on my bed rubbing at his head next to where Morgan was still bound and glaring sullenly.

“What is going on here?” I asked, and I took no small amount of pleasure in seeing both Luccio and Dad jump.

Luccio’s gaze tracked to the sword I was still holding before making a run for the ceiling as she muttered something darkly under her breath, leaving an opening for Dad to speak. “Apparently, there’s some sort of… issue with the records the White Council keeps? They’re saying that they’ve been infiltrated and some sort of record about you has been planted.”

I mean… to be fair, the White Council had had a reputation of leaking like a sieve, both during the War against the Red Court and afterwards, but for their security to be lax enough for anyone to infiltrate and plant a record before the Wardens had really been cut down by the big battles of the war was… concerning, even setting aside the fact that someone knew enough about me to consider me a threat to them and use the Council to try and remove me.

“Do we have any idea who?”

“Some of the circumstances of the record suggest it was done in violation of the Sixth Law of Magic,” said Luccio, and that was both worrying, for the fact that whoever it was skilled in chronomancy, and reassuring since it meant we weren’t dealing with the mother of all information leaks. “The Merlin was… concerned about this, and suspected you of wrongdoing.”

I sighed. “I’d be willing to clear up the situation with the Senior Council once we deal with whatever the fuck Nicodemus is up to,” I said, and though Luccio didn’t look satisfied, she at least seemed less on edge.

“Thank you for being… reasonable,” said Luccio, and even though Morgan appeared mutinous, he didn’t make any attempt to speak from where Sanya’s hand had settled on the back of his neck.

“Someone has to be,” I said, shrugging one shoulder. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got some stuff to catch up on, what with being called out of school, so if I could have my room back…”

Sanya stood up and hauled Morgan onto his shoulder like a particularly disgruntled sack of potatoes. “Have fun with homework,” he said, striding out of the room with such gravitas that most of the rest of the people crammed into my room followed him out the door without so much as a second glance.

“Are you sure about this?” asked Dad, brow furrowed with worry.

“Not really, what with how much the Council leaks, but it’s probably the best option. Besides, even if someone does sneak in to try and off me, I’ve got… precautions I can take.” I sat down at my desk heavily, groping blindly around until I found my datapad.

“So long as you’re careful,” he said, holding eye contact for just a hair shy of the threshold to initiate a Soulgaze before nodding and walking out of my room.

I waited for just a moment longer to make sure that no one else was going to come into my room before slumping over. Say what you will about living through the fall of the Outer Gates and the return of Ethniu, but being the adult in the room with both your own father and Anastasia motherfucking Luccio was absolutely exhausting, and I’d already been running on an emptier tank than I’d prefer.

“My host,” said Lasciel, and I had to resist the urge to both jump through the ceiling and draw my sword and try to cut her in half despite not having a physical body. “Might I suggest more rest?”

“Honestly, I wish I could,” I said, rubbing at bleary eyes and failing to muster up enough irritation for so much as a mild glare in her general direction. “Nicodemus has too much planned for me to feel comfortable taking time off, and reading through my data dump is already closer to toeing the line than I’d prefer, but there’s not really anything I can think of that I can do that can’t be done better by anyone else.”

Lasciel looked more than a little pained at this. “My host, if you truly cannot see anything that you can do better than anyone else in this house, that would be relevant to the situation at hand, you are much wearier than you can afford to be.”

The Forge flashed as I chewed on what she said, and I came to the conclusion that she was, in fact, right, which was something that I didn’t know I was willing to admit anywhere outside the security of my own head.

“Of course I am correct, my host,” said Lasciel, just a hint of smugness in her tone. “I am, after all, observing you with millennia of experience of reading humans. Just because it is…” She faltered, seeming almost mournful at this. “Just because it is not the use to which my expertise has been turned to in the past does not mean that my insight is meaningless.”

I almost demanded if she didn’t have anything better to do before quashing the urge- she was locked inside my head, I really didn’t want her getting ideas, either inside it or outside.

“Are you sure?”

Lasciel chuckled. “As I am, I can be sure of very little, but I will ensure that you awaken when you are needed.”

I wasn’t sure how much of the suspicion I felt towards her made it through to whatever representative of me she was experiencing in the Forge, but evidently some of it registered, and she sighed, for just a moment looking far older and more tired than the classical Greek beauty that she normally appeared to be.

“My host,” she said, more weight in her voice, “believe me or not, I do have your interests in mind, if not necessarily at heart. If you die, I do as well, and-” She cut herself off. “The point is, I will not compromise whatever goodwill I have built up over some scheme of Nicodemus’. Have faith in the fact that I would not let myself be so easily subordinated to Anduriel, if nothing else.”

I gave my tired brain a few moments to work through the situation. “Well,” I said, “if you can’t count on the rebel to rebel, what can you trust?”

“I thank you for seeing reason, my host,” Lasciel said as I turned off the light, closed the door, stretched, and then shucked my shoes.

“Had to happen sooner or later,” I said, shrugging with one shoulder before grabbing my sword, carrying it to my bed, curling up around it like a particularly pointy teddy bear, and closing my eyes, expecting to spend the next twenty minutes-

“Awaken, my host,” said Lasicel, and my fingers spasmed around the sword as I rolled off the bed, trying for leg sweep and managing undignified sprawl, tangled up in the blanket I pulled off my bed and my sheathed sword.

“Fuck,” I said, untangling myself from the blanket just in time to hear a knock on the door.

“Molly?” asked Mom. “Everything okay? I heard noises.”

“For a given definition of okay!” I replied, inspecting where I’d smacked my knee hard against the floor, hard enough that I could see the bruise blooming under the skin already. “Fell out of bed, little banged up, but nothing too bad.”

I could almost hear Mom working through three or four different responses before she actually replied. “Don’t take too long, you have homework to do after dinner!”

I pushed myself out of the blanket and then to my feet with a groan before rubbing at my face, grateful for the brush I’d made earlier today if for no other reason than for the fact that I didn’t have to splash water in my face when I could just run it through my hair and look like I’d spent the hour it usually took me to wrangle my hair into a halfway decent French braid, and far neater to boot.

“Thanks, Lasciel,” I said, more than a touch begrudgingly.

“Of course, my host,” she replied, seeming almost mournful. “I am ever at your disposal, you need only ask.”

With that not-at-all ominous rejoinder all but ringing in my ears, I opened the door and headed downstairs, ready to face what probably wouldn’t be the most awkward dinner I’d ever had but might be able to contend for second or third place.

Chapter Text

As I’d expected, dinner was more than a little stilted. Mom and Dad had clearly had a fight while I was asleep and they were both giving it their best effort to avoid talking, Daniel and Matthew hadn’t heard everything but they’d clearly heard something, the rest of the Jawas were taking cues from them, and Sanya was looking like he was expecting to be drowned in a sea of squabbling kids at the drop of a hat.

Just about the only one who looked anything close to calm was Shiro, and given the circumstances I wasn’t sure whether he was actually calm or whether he was just good enough at pretending to seem that way.

The Forge glimmered as we were clearing the plates away, a sense of imminent change coiling up behind it like a riptide ready to drag an unsuspecting swimmer out to sea, but contrary to my expectations (and the half-paranoid twitch I made towards my pistol), we didn’t get a surprise visit from the president of the Denarian-Owners Association telling us he was putting a lien on our lives, no matter how dramatically appropriate it may or may not have been.

No, the evening was quieter than I would have expected, what with having three different Knights of the Cross under one roof, and even with both homework to finish and some juicy technical schematics to look at, I was having trouble sitting still.

“Is always like this,” was Sanya’s response when I grumbled about it in earshot. “Soldier, Denarian, Knight, is always hurry up and wait until you have to be running around like chicken with head cut off.” He shrugged. “In your case, though, well… prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped, no? That might be why you are less patient than usual.”

“Yeah, probably, but that doesn’t make it any better when I have memories of me being a lot better about this sort of thing. Just gets me frustrated, and that’s another thing that doesn’t exactly help my focus.”

Sanya shrugged again. “There I cannot help you. Perhaps your AI friend could take a look at…”

“No good,” I said, shaking my head. “She’s got neural scans of me as an adult, sure, but they’re neural scans of an adult non-wizard, not a pubescent wizard, and I haven’t managed to find a for Dummies book on the neurochemistry of magic yet, assuming I wanted to try and fuck with my own head while it’s still developing.”

Sanya grimaced. “Right, that. Sometimes I just… forget how important it is to prevent brain damage during formative years, with how Tessa and Rosanna…” he trailed off, but the haunted look in his eyes told its own story.

“Don’t worry about it.” I rested my hand on his shoulder for a moment. “Tell you what, one of these days, I’m gonna hunt them down and make sure that they don’t end up with some other poor kid to groom into a killing machine with silver in their palm and blood on their hands, what say I make sure to bring you along, for closure and whatnot?”

“I think…” He frowned for a moment, before nodding decisively. “If you think you can do it, I would appreciate being invited along.”

“Sounds like a grand old time. I’ll even provide the traditional road trip snacks.” I stretched, feeling more than a few pops out of my back before I lowered my arms.

Sanya gave me a skeptical look. “Was that your back or a sheet of bubble wrap? I thought it was old men like me who were supposed to make that sort of sound, not spring chicken like you.”

“Oh, you know how it goes,” I said, shrugging. “We kids store up our annoying noises and bodily functions until they can be used to cause the most frustration to any given authority figure. You old folks need to get used to letting them out, too, or else you’ll end up with real problems.” I frowned. “Speaking of which, I’m feeling a bit peckish, you want anything? I’m gonna make myself a sandwich.”

He shook his head. “I am not still growing, nor am I a wizard who relies on the energy of his metabolism to face the supernatural. Thank you for offering, though.”

“Alrighty then,” I said, leaving my datapad and sword behind in search of sliced bread, sharp cheddar, and cold cuts.

I was about halfway through my sandwich by the time that someone started pounding on the door, and not just regular pounding either- this was the kind of bambambambambam that was both loud enough and fast enough that it implied that the person doing the knocking was more than human, physically speaking.

Sanya tossed my sword to me just as I started raising my hands to catch it, and after unsheathing the blade, I gently rested the sheath on the floor, quietly enough that I didn’t think that anything listening in could hear it. Then, I pulled the door open just the slightest bit, making sure that whoever it was couldn’t see either my sword, ready to stab through the sturdy wood of the door, or Sanya, who had the gun his scabbard now turned into firmly trained on the door.

There was a woman with a swirling tattoo running up her neck to cover most of her face, standing out in lurid red relief against the brown of her skin, the sheen of her tight dress, and the darker shade of her hair, with another woman, shorter, blonde, and with the telltale jitters and wide eyes of someone who was in over their head dealing with the supernatural.

“Is Michael here?” the brunette asked, a reddish glint just about visible in the depths of her brown eyes, and once she opened her mouth, I could see the telltale too-sharp canines of a half-turned Red Court.

For a moment, I was tempted to just run her through, but the power I could all but smell wafting off that bloodred tattoo gave me pause.

“It is a design for channeling and containing the Hunger, my host,” said Lasciel, and I remembered the existence of the Fellowship of Saint Giles- that piece of magic was pretty much synonymous with the organization, and I’d cribbed more than a few notes on how it had manipulated energy flows in my day.

“Why?” I asked, allowing my sword’s point to drop towards the floor but not opening the door farther.

“Because Nicodemus has Harry.”

“Fuck.” I wrenched the door open. “Inside. Now.”

Once the two of them had entered the house, giving a wide berth to both my sword and Sanya, I shut the door again. “Dad! Shiro! Harry’s in trouble again!”

I could hear the blond muttering “Again?” but before I could react to it, the Forge flashed and grew a new pedestal.

On the pedestal was a… it wasn’t quite a doll, being too soft, almost plush, but it had roughly the same proportions as one, depicting a woman with pale, almost paper-white skin shot through with threads of gold. Her overlarge eyes were the color of moonlight on corn silk, and the armor that she was wearing was clearly designed around the feathered wings on her back.

Flanking it on all sides, there were a number of smaller stands. One of these stands had an orchestra’s worth of instruments in miniature, all animated and floating about, leaving trails of sparkling motes of light, another had a pack full of all sorts of useful items in it, and two more carried stacks of books and… game consoles? No, not just game consoles, it also had a series of discs, presumably separated based on which console they corresponded to.

It was the last pedestal, though, that was the most disruptive. Mushrooming up almost unobtrusively, it held a weighty book, vellum pages sandwiched between bluish leather covered in silver filigree, and a pouch that, by all rights, shouldn’t have held nearly as much as it did.

As memories of a rather frantic month going through a crash course in arcane magic filled my head, I could feel-

Have you ever been at ground zero for a universe unraveling and then reweaving itself? Because I have, and let me tell you, it is trippy as hell.

It’s like if you go from being on dry land to being up to your eyeballs in Lake Michigan with no shore in sight, and that’s before you become sensitive to more aspects of reality than any mortal could even dream of.

I managed to claw my way back through the Weave and down into my mortal body, feeling power both arcane and divine in nature crackling within my skin and holding it in check with a herculean effort of will before it settled, quiescent if not calm, just in time to see Dad and Shiro hurrying down the stairs, swords in hand but not drawn yet.

I kicked my scabbard up off the floor, sheathing my sword in one fluid motion, before turning to Susan. “What exactly happened?”

“We were trying to intercept the Shroud before Marcone or the Denarians got to it, and we did, but… Nicodemus was there too, him and the one with razor hair, and a whole bunch of goons, and they- they caught Harry.” Susan scrubbed one hand through her wavy hair, heedless of the hairspray that would have stymied a mortal hand, which meant that she was close to losing control of herself.

Dad’s eyes turned to the blonde for a contemplative moment, then he turned to me. “I trust you will be able to find him as ably as you did Miss Yoshimo, Molly?”

“Maybe even easier, depending on where exactly. Aine’s been-” I was interrupted by the chiming of my holocomm. “That’s her, one moment.”

Seeing her in a washed-out blue-white felt almost wrong, but I didn’t have much time to dwell on the sight. “What’s up?”

“I backtraced Ms. Rodriguez to where Mr. Dresden was taken, then tracked the SUVs they got into. “They went into an abandoned parking garage that is in the middle of an area known for disappearances.”

I frowned. “Great, Undertown. Like we didn’t have enough shit on our plate.”

“I’ll monitor the city to see if they emerge from any other locations, if possible. Given time I should be able to track the energy signature that magic gives off, and hopefully in so doing find Dresden.” She paused. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” I said, and then her image winked out.

“Sanya, Shiro, go. I am needed here,” Dad said, eyes flickering to me in just such a way as to imply that I was involved in the situation, which… honestly that was fair, what with how much bullshit I’d been at the center of in the past couple of days. “Godspeed.”

“Stay safe, Dad,” I said, flickering into my suit and coat. It was heavier than I was used to, but I found myself moving almost on autopilot to compensate, and within a couple of steps I could hardly tell anything was different.

Shiro and Sanya followed me immediately, but it was a moment before Susan, reloading a double-barreled pistol that looked to be about the right size for a holdout, followed us out into the night.

I stood back up from where I was following the blood trail, leaving the half-crushed claw where it had landed. “Well,” I said, pulling my helmet off, “I think we can pretty reasonably say that the ghoul pack that was causing the disappearances is no longer a problem.”

I turned back to see the rest of the party and-

Oh, right. I probably shouldn’t have been quite so blasé about this, huh?

Susan was looking split between going feral and trying to lick the dried blood from the alley and being absolutely disgusted, looking around at all the entrails and other assorted viscera painted all over the area, and even if Sanya was looking slightly less affected, the bar there was on the floor, although I would give him credit for keeping his hand on his sword. Even Shiro was looking around somewhat apprehensively, one hand resting on Fidelacchius’ hilt.

“Guys, I can say with absolute certainty that this was Ursiel who did this.” I pointed at a couple of gashes in the brick and dumpster of the alley outside the parking garage. “If you know what you’re looking for you can actually see the horn marks.”

Shiro and Sanya started moving a little easier, and after a brief whispered conference with Susan, she tensed abruptly and then relaxed. “And… you’re sure that he doesn’t have any others with him?” she asked.

“Relatively sure?” I shrugged. “Shiro put Ursiel down, and I was lucky enough to catch Saluriel with his pants down, plus I… Let’s just say that I’ve already accounted for the coin he keeps in reserve and leave it at that, so all we should have to deal with is Nicodemus and Dierdre.” That got a scrutinizing look from Shiro, but it seemed to pass muster with Susan and Sanya, and after a moment the oldest Knight nodded.

“She’s right,” said Shiro, turning towards the disused parking structure as the Forge flickered dimly. “But with Ursiel and Saluriel dead, Nicodemus will be… backed into a corner, and that is when he is at his most dangerous.”

There was something almost resolved to his words, in a way that sounded familiar to me, but it took a moment before I recognized it as the resolve of the condemned.

“Shiro, a moment?”

“Yes?” He followed me out of earshot of Sanya and, hopefully, Susan, but just to be safe I called up enough white noise to prevent anyone from hearing us.

“How long have you been waiting to die?”

He gave me a level look. “How long has the Weaver of Webs been whispering in your ear?”

“Not quite as long as I’ve been able to mold Soulfire,” I said, calling up a brief manifestation of the silvery flame before allowing it to flicker out. “The Temptress has nothing to offer me, not in the wake of the Celestial Forge, and her manipulations aren’t half as effective when I can shed any attempt of hers to bend my mind to her will by arcane power or biological manipulation.” I shrugged. “To be entirely honest, she’s more useful for me as a… test subject, shall we say, than as anything else, as with Saluriel.”

“Wiser men than you have claimed to be beyond their manipulations,” said Shiro.

“I’m…” I frowned, trying to condense it down into something that wouldn’t take membership in the White Council and a couple dissertations’ worth of research to understand. “I’m not just human, anymore. Learning the kind of secrets of the craft that I know, connecting to the Weave of magic that exists in the world now… it isn’t something that can be done with just a human soul, and as I am at this point, I suspect I’m on the path towards being one of the Tuatha de Danann. Tempting me with hellfire would be like… the Summer Lady offering Mab a deal to allow her to call on Summer’s power directly. Not only is it something Mab could control on her own terms, being so much more powerful, but it’s almost antithetical to her nature.”

Shiro frowned, then sighed. “That is sound reasoning.”

“And how long have you been considering the sacrifice ploy, then?” I asked, returning back to my original question.

“Since my diagnosis.” He shrugged. “Not as bad a way to die as lung cancer. Certainly less drawn out.”

“Now that, I can help with.” I frowned, running through a couple of different magical avenues and comparing them to what Aine and I could achieve with the medical bay on the Future Witness. “Couple different ways, actually.

“Hm.” Shiro’s face was placid. “Nicodemus is still Nicodemus.”

I sighed. “Shiro. I get you’re resigned to this, but if you have- look. I have the sword skills of an anime protagonist, the kind that lets a mortal man take a mortal sword to a fight with a god and expect to walk away. This?” I drew my falcata, a faint otherworldly light radiating out from the blade and filling in the gaps between streetlights. “This is not a mortal blade, and I am not just mortal, not anymore. With you and Sanya, I think we can fight our way out, or at the very least, hold out long enough for me to open a portal out and shove you all through.”

Shiro gave me the kind of look that you gave to children insisting that they hold your hand to lead you back home. “If you are that confident in your skills…”

“That, and I’ve got my bag of tricks on top of that. I haven’t had the kind of prep time that really makes wizards scary, but I’ve got an ace or two up my sleeves.”

“Very well.” He rapped Fidelacchius on the floor once. “We shall do this your way.”

I returned my sword to its sheath. “Glad to hear it.”

I pulled on my helmet, making sure the light was securely attached before beckoning, and then I went deeper into the dark, abandoned parking structure with two Knights and a half-turned vampire in tow.

Chapter Text

Harry Dresden was used to not being the biggest fish in the proverbial pond, but even he would admit that, relatively speaking, he was weightier than a lot of others.

That made it all the more terrifying to be at the mercy of Nicodemus Archleone. He wasn’t even particularly directly powerful, not that Harry could feel, but he’d surrounded himself with people much more capable of direct applications of power, like little miss bad hair day or the demon bear, and worse yet, he was cunning.

Cunning enough to see through his attempts to delay his own execution by getting Nicky to talk about his mother, who he’d apparently been friends with, and demand an answer to whether he’d submit himself to Nicodemus’ authority directly.

Unlike the last person who had tried that on him, Nicodemus didn’t strike Harry as the kind of mind he could trick, scheme, and munchkin his way past.

“F-final answer, Nick,” Harry said, shivering under the constant downpour of chilly water. “Fuck off.”

“Ah.” There was some mild disappointment in Nicodemus’ tone, but only as much as if he’d caught a particularly young child with their grubby little mitts in the cookie jar. “I suppose I’ve had enough breakfast.”

Harry’s composure failed him as Nicodemus approached, showing all the care that someone would when going to get their keys at the start of a day, and he started to struggle against his bonds, casting about for his magic regardless of how he could feel the flowing water washing away almost all the power he could bring to bear, leaving him with barely enough to light a candle, let alone make his way out of this mess- and that was before he took the manacles stabbing into his wrists into account.

There was… something else, though.

Almost seeming to flit around the periphery of his mind, there was a spark of… something, a mote of a power not weakened by the grounding effect of the water. As Nicodemus raised the knife to his throat, Harry marshaled his will as best he could, under the circumstances, and, using what little of his own power he could use without it being drowned out, he tried to bridge the gap between himself and the distant star.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, before Nicodemus could slit his throat, there was an echoing sound that it took Harry a moment to register as a gunshot, between the cold miring his thoughts as much as his magic and the imminent threat of Nicodemus.

There was another gunshot outside, then a third, and once his ears stopped ringing, Harry could hear the sounds of a scuffle through the door leading out of the cavernous room.

Almost more importantly, though, he could feel the mote of power descending to him, catching on his soul and igniting into a blaze of pure, unadulterated mental energy that was now at his disposal.

So distracting was this power that Harry very nearly forgot Nicodemus’ presence, and it’s possible he would have forgotten him entirely if not for the tired “Bother. What now?” that escaped the man’s lips as he turned to the door, knife still held at Harry’s throat.

There was a thud against the door, and then a pool of blood started growing underneath it.

The first thing that Harry saw when the door opened was the body that had, as he suspected, ended up against it. It was wearing tactical gear, had a rifle in its hands, and was completely lacking a head.

Stepping over the body almost delicately was a figure clad in some sort of futuristic bodysuit, like if the Fantastic Four went to Tron, with a lab coat thrown on over top and a military-looking helmet covering their face, seeming to be gently lit by a soft silver light without a discernible source. In one hand, they held a gently curved sword that looked, despite the blood covering it, absolutely pristine, and in the other, a pistol big enough that he shuddered to think of the size of round that monster fired.

Behind the figure, Michael’s friends, Shiro and Sanya filed into the cavernlike room, swords bared (and, in Sanya’s case, a firearm halfway between coach gun and rifle in his off hand), and following in their wake was Susan, holding a dinky little holdout pistol.

Now that the gang was all present, maybe things could really get exciting.

“Archleone,” I said, raising my sword to point at him.

“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, ma’am,” he replied, sounding for all the world like a used car salesman and not the genocidal maniac who had survived the fall of more than one empire.

“That’s rich, coming from you,” I said. “Now then, put the knife down.”

He looked down his nose at me. “And whyever would I do that?”

“Do you know what an orbital strike tastes like?”

Nicodemus blinked, caught off guard by the seeming non-sequitr. “I beg your pardon?”

“Do. You. Know. What. An. Orbital. Strike. Tastes. Like?” I did my best to convey my disappointment at Nicodemus for not understanding the concept despite the polarization of the visor in my helmet while still trying my best to give the VISR systems a relatively steady position to scan the room for the Shroud, which was a little bit trickier than it seemed given how hard it was to convey that kind of intent through body language.

“Ah. That is what I thought you said.” He frowned. “I have no earthly idea where I would have found out.”

“Would you like to?” Sure, I knew that the Future Witness didn’t have her MAC capacitors charged, and that I wouldn’t be willing to write off the chunk of Chicago that would either be collapsed by the impact or flattened by the airburst, but he knew jack and shit about it, which meant that I could reasonably bluff him over it. Besides, I was reasonably sure he couldn’t detect Weave magic, and there, I had many more options.

I could all but feel the askance looks from everyone else, but I didn’t have time to reassure them even if Nicodemus wasn’t within earshot, what with having to quick-chant the incantation for Otiluke’s Freezing Sphere and load the resulting round into my pistol without anyone noticing.

Harry, particularly, seemed to be freaking out, and he started wrenching at the manacles more desperately from where they were secured over his head. So desperate was he that I could see the links of the chain binding the two cuffs together starting to pull away, although I was likely the only one who could, given how everyone, including Nicodemus himself, was looking at me like… well, like I’d just threatened Nicodemus with an orbital strike.

Then, Nicodemus’ mouth split open into a truly unnerving smile. “No, you wouldn’t, would you, Carpenter? Not here, not in the middle of Chicago, where there are so many who would be killed by the airburst?”

“What gave me away?” I asked, mentally calculating angles and distances in my head. I couldn’t afford to catch Harry in the blast, not with how he’d already been worked over, but there were a limited number of places I could actually land the spell and both catch Nicodemus within the effect without hitting any of us, and even fewer where Dierdre would also feel the spell, especially with her prowling around the edge of the room like a wolf, if that wolf were made of razor-sharp metal.

The Forge flared with brilliant light, revealing two pillars. Atop the first grew a leafy plant, pulsating with gentle violet light from the heart-shaped nodule hidden behind most of the leaves, and the second held what looked to be a joke book.

Neither of them could do anything for me in the here and now, though, so I returned my attention to Nicodemus just in time to catch his reply.

“It’s the artifact you carry,” he said, gesturing at the pocket where I’d put the Starsphere. “Do you have any idea what it is that you’re drawing your power from, girl?”

I raised an eyebrow inside my helmet. “A fragment of a…” I frowned, feeling out the magic within the Starsphere as best I could. Before, I hadn’t been able to puzzle out much, but now, with the exposure to the Sword Coast’s enchanted items, I could sense more. “An ancient shield, no?”

Nicodemus sneered. “If that’s all you know of it, then you don’t deserve to be able to keep it.”

“Come and take it, then,” I said, sending moon-silver light racing up the length of my sword. As good as Nicodemus was, he wasn’t good enough to outfight me, Shiro, and Sanya, with just Dierdre for backup, so the only problem was-

And then Harry’s chains snapped and he hit Nicodemus like a freight train.

Okay, maybe freight train was exaggerating things a little bit, but given how Nicodemus moved like a ragdoll, chest smashed in like he’d been kicked by Sleipnir, I felt confident in saying that Harry had figured some new trick out.

Of course, the spray of blood from Harry’s throat was more pressing, and I barely spared the time to nail Dierdre with the spell, conjuring a sphere of intense, almost Cherenkov-blue light around her that almost instantly started precipitating frost, before dismissing the pistol and dashing for Harry’s collapsing form.

I didn’t quite manage to catch him before he splashed down into the pool that he’d been bound in, water still coming splashing in, but I managed to haul him out and get him onto his hands and knees by raw force, dismissing my helmet to yank one glove off with my teeth to start pressing the gash in his throat together.

He gurgled, trying to speak, and I shook my head. “Hang on, Dresden, I need a moment to work here, and you really shouldn’t be talking with a cut throat.”

It took a moment to get the divine power flowing through this mortal body, my hand glowing with moon-silver radiance as I held the two flaps of flesh that Nicodemus had severed together. Fortunately, it began sealing itself relatively quickly, and that freed me up to monitor the room at large.

Sanya and Susan were taking turns to harry a frostbitten Dierdre, whose bladelike hair was starting to smoke and crack where it blocked the fire from his gun, and otherwise was still covered in hoarfrost. Susan was mostly remaining at a distance, swiping out with what looked to be a leg torn from the table that Dierdre had been sitting at before we had entered, while Sanya was closer in, the silver-white radiance of the Sword of Hope seeming to slow the tendrils enough that he could deflect, dodge, or attack them, presenting the image of an inexorable force and slowly forcing the Denarian to retreat.

Shiro, in contrast to Sanya’s almost metronomic advance, was moving like a dervish. Fidelacchius’ glow daunted Anduriel, leaving Nicodemus more or less human against Shiro, and for all the centuries of practice the First of the Denarians had, next to Shiro, he looked like a child challenging the master of the art.

Still, for all that Shiro was a superior swordsman, he was only mortal, and aging at that, whereas Anduriel was more than connected enough to Nicodemus to prevent him from tiring.

For every bloodless gash that Shiro left in Nicodemus’ flesh, as gradually sealed up by the Noose as they were, Nicodemus got closer and closer to landing a hit on Shiro in return, his flamberge slicing through first Shiro’s armor and then his clothing.

I saw the moment that Shiro decided that he wasn’t going to make it home- he turned a sad smile to Sanya, who couldn’t see it, and then, to Nicodemus, he offered defiance.

“Tell me, Nicodemus, what is it like? Not being able to trust another human being, not even the flesh of your flesh, lest they succumb to the power that could be theirs if only they claim it? To be so far beyond the grasp of death that you wear the hangman’s necklace to flaunt it in all their faces?” Shiro shook his head. “It’s almost sad, seeing a man so far beyond faith in his fellow man.”

Both Shiro and I could see that hit home.

Harry’s throat had mostly closed up, at that point, so I gave one last push of healing, then slapped my pistol into his hand and moved.

I was very close to too late- Shiro had allowed his guard to fail so that even Nicodemus’ sloppiest strike would have gutted him like a fish, leaving the Sword of Faith in his hands to break.

Close, though, only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and I made it just in time to be impaled through the stomach in Shiro’s place.

“And look at that,” purred Nicodemus. “The girl thinks she can give of herself to stop your death.”

“Go to hell, Nick,” I said, and as I backhanded him, sword and all, across the room, I let the tight hold I was keeping on the divine power, the power of a cornerstone of Faerûn impressed into the shape of a mortal, loosen.

Chapter Text

I was distantly aware of the Forge flickering as the stab wound Nicodemus had given me sealed up, but to be entirely honest, I was a little preoccupied with stretching my wings. They were… well, they hadn’t quite gone numb, but I was definitely feeling some pins and needles as I flexed muscles that I hadn’t used in… who knew how long. I was taller and broader than I was as a mortal, too, with veins of gold running across moonlight-pale flesh, and my hair was now halfway down my back under my helmet and electric blue to boot, but not to the point where it could interfere with my swordsmanship, and a brief stretch of the rest of my muscles had me certain that I would be, if anything, better with my blade in this form than in any mortal form I’d worn to date.

“Bother,” said Nicodemus, dragging himself out of the tangled pile of limbs and hair tendrils that was a result of me smacking him into his daughter. “What is one of you doing here?”

“The fuck do you think, Nick?” I asked, making sure to sound more than mildly incredulous. “You tried to give my baby sister to the Weaver of fucking Webs, you really think I’m not gonna put you at the very fucking top of my shit list?”

I could feel Lasciel cringing where the Forge held her, which was… something to think about later.

Nicodemus sighed. “And so sentiment makes fools of us all.” Then, he kicked his sword up from where it had been lying on the floor and beelined for… Shiro?

One look showed that while Shiro was, technically, not out of the fight, he was favoring his arm enough that he wouldn’t really be able to stand against Nicodemus, as opposed to Sanya, who had both Esperacchius and his gun up and ready, Susan, who could also put up a significant fight, and Harry, who was holding a gun that had just about frozen Deirdre solid, and even if that was through a spell, Nicodemus didn’t know that.

I flicked a mote of moonlight out at Nicodemus, slowing him, and with the time that that bought me, I interposed myself (and, more importantly, my sword) between the First of the Denarians and Shiro, bowling the man over as I did so.

“Have you considered,” I offered, summoning another mote of moonlight in my off hand as I met Nicodemus’ sword with my own, “that maybe you’re just a fool on your own merits or lack thereof, old man?”

Nicodemus didn’t reply, but his next blow was heavier than the last, and as he disengaged, he flicked Anduriel up, crashing over the stone floor like a tidal wave to try and drown me.

How cute.

As Anduriel tried to crawl up my nostrils and into my ears, corrosive shadow already burning my eyes, I drew on the reservoir of divine energy within me and crushed the mote of divine radiance within my left hand, calling down a pillar of moonlight to illuminate me and banish the protean shadow of one of the most devious of the Fallen.

For all their cunning, neither Nicodemus nor Anduriel saw that coming, and with Anduriel unable to bind me, that left Nicodemus wildly out of position to stop me from taking his hand off at the wrist. The noose might have kept him alive, but if he didn’t have his sword-

The coil of rope hung from Nicodemus’ neck lit up like an incandescent bulb. It took me a moment to register that the sound of meat cooking was coming from him, and by that point he’d already torn the offending item off and hurled it into the pool that until recently had held Harry Dresden, releasing a huge cloud of steam as it splashed down.

“Well, how about that,” I said, raising my blade to a ready position again.

With a brassy shriek like a tuba in a hydraulic press, Deirdre hit me like a snowplow, shoving me well over fifteen feet back and slashing away at my wings and other exposed flesh with claws and bladed tresses despite the shroud of moonlight I was cloaked in trying to force her back into human form. I winced and almost recoiled on instinct- even through the inhuman toughness of my feathers and the moonlight blunting her blades, Deirdre was still doing a number on me.

My sword arm had been caught out of position, and she was pretty good at keeping my wings between the blade and her body, but the blade was far from the only option I had.

I brushed my left hand against the edge of the sword, eliciting a single drop of blood that I smeared against the top of my sword’s scabbard. Almost immediately, it started glowing, a turbulent glow like the sea in a hurricane, and as I let my fingers close around the implement, I could feel the power surge out like a breaking wave.

Water precipitated out of thin air around me, forming a current that wrapped around me for a moment, accelerating, before lashing out at Deirdre.

I could hear the sound of tearing metal and, as I turned around, saw where Deirdre had managed to interpose the metallic tendrils of her hair between her body and the water- or at least, what the pressurized stream of water had severed from them, lying in a puddle and twitching.

Deirdre had been hurled across the room, the ragged ends of the tendrils still damp even as they glowed a hellish red and began to lengthen again. “You… what are you?”

“No one to be trifled with,” I quoted, shaking my wings to try and get some of the blood off of them (carefully, so I wouldn’t spray any on Sanya, a now-standing Shiro, or Susan, who’d all come to stand near me after Deirdre had been sent flying) as I pulled the wand I’d made on Saturday out of a pocket. “Now then, Miss Archleone, I’m afraid I will be taking the Shroud from… wherever you’ve stashed it.”

Deirdre growled, a sound that seemed almost more like something you’d expect out of a big cat than a human, but she didn’t offer any other reply.

Nicodemus, on the other hand, chuckled as he stood from where he’d been crouching in the pool, the stump of his arm already writhing and starting to grow. “And what, Miss Carpenter, makes you think that I would be willing to give such a potent artifact to anyone, let alone you?”

“The fact that I just kicked your ass up and down the room isn’t enough, then?” I asked, angling my sword just so that my shroud of moonlight reflected almost directly into his eyes.

The Forge glowed, just as he snarled and stepped aside, and another pedestal rose from the floor. Atop it was what looked to be a supercomputer, if someone had interpreted it through the lens of the old ‘50s cartoons, all loopy antennae and odd, not-quite-right angles that somehow managed to come across as charming instead of haphazard or concerning.

I very nearly physically reeled back as my brain filled itself with knowledge, followed quickly by understanding- the kind of cutting-edge understanding of every scientific field under the sun that all but relied on interdisciplinary thinking to thrive, understanding of any one topic filtering out to impact just about every other field of thought.

Thankfully, this was far less overwhelming than having all of Goibnu’s secrets crammed into my brain, and so I was able to return my focus to the here and now just in time to catch Nicodemus’ next words.

“I’m afraid it’s not, Miss Carpenter,” he said, a hint of rasp to his formerly smoothly cultured tones.

“Repeat performance, then? I can find it in the kindness of my heart to put on an encore,” I said, moonlight beginning to trail along my sword as my wings crept upwards, ready to send me once more into battle.

Nicodemus favored me with a look full of more disdain than most would be able to fit into their entire lives. “Do you take me for a fool?”

I shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

He sneered. Then, he snapped his fingers, and there was a massive explosion from above us, punching through the ceiling and sending rubble raining down on us.

Shiro, Sanya, and Susan were close enough that I could shelter them with my wings, at least long enough that I could cast Wall of Force, and Harry…

I spared a moment’s attention for him just in time to see him make a baseball slide under a falling piece of rubble, drawing power in, and finished my own spell, heaving up with my wings to send what rubble I could up and give us more breathing space before the panes of raw arcane force materialized, stopping the ceiling from falling in on us.

Harry thrust his left hand up, a shimmering blue-white barrier materializing just under my Wall of Force. Then, after a moment, he faltered. “What… what is that?”

“A temporary measure,” I said, sheathing my sword. “Gimme a sec and I can get us out of here. By the by, Dresden, next time I give you a gun, a little fire support would be nice.”

“Right, because any Joe Shmoe can throw out a barrier that can stop who knows how much rubble and who knows what else from crushing us,” he snarked. “And that Joe Shmoe just so happens to be in the right place at the right time to stop us from getting Chixculub’d.”

I sighed, then sent my helmet (and my gun, which vanished from where he was still holding it) back into the Forge and, after focusing for a moment, folded myself back down to the shape I’d woken up in. “This better?”

He gawped for a moment. “Not really, but I think I’m gonna save my questions for your dad.”

“Good enough,” I said. I flicked my finger, almost like I was trying to nail a paper football, and opened a portal to the Future Witness. “We can go talk to him now.”

Charity Carpenter was… not cut out for this week.

Learning that Nicodemus Archleone had come to her town was… well, it wasn’t out of the question, given Michael’s calling, and having both of the other Knights in town helped with that. Shiro, especially, was good with the kids, and she appreciated his help with that.

Learning that her daughter had inherited magic from her, as well as… something else, that was harder to swallow, but she’d long known that it was possible, and even seeing her own death reflected in her daughter’s eyes wasn’t enough to truly rattle her, not with having accepted her end before Michael had saved her from Siriothrax.

This, though? This was… just beyond what she could conceptualize.

“What do you mean, you’re her mother?” asked Michael, not quite forcefully, but with weight to his voice as he made eye contact with the… being sitting opposite them on their couch.

Charity wasn’t quite so bold- she’d never quite gotten out of the habit of avoiding eye contact that she’d had instilled in her under Gregor, but she’d snuck enough glances up at her eyes to see the mirrorlike sheen on her too-blue eyes, the unnatural vitality of her features despite the age she seemed to be, the moonlike paleness of her skin…

“In a way, yes,” the woman-shaped thing said gravely, one smooth hand gesturing uncertainly. “It is… she is becoming the nexus of different versions of herself, taking parts of their history and their knowledge into herself, as the Forge empowers her. Part of that brings… other aspects of these versions of her, or aspects of the reality that these versions of her were born in. The Forge saw fit to grant her the power of the version of her that is my daughter, and the exact thaumodynamics of that require… me, as well as a part of me that has become the source of human magic in that world. She is no less your daughter for being mine, and indeed, I am willing to provide… how is it said here… ah, yes, back child support.”

Charity frowned. “What do you mean?”

She smiled slightly. “Even bereft of most of my followers here, I am more than capable of granting you aid in whatever form you may require. A place of safety should your home be threatened, material wealth, assistance with learning to control your arcane power…” She shrugged, with the kind of artful casualness that, on anyone else, Charity would have called forced. “Our daughter has a grand destiny ahead of her, and even was she not mine, I would find it no great imposition to make it easier for you to stand alongside her.”

She opened her mouth to continue, then frowned, and turned to the corner. “I am not asking you to make any decisions now. Take all the time you need, consider your options and what you yourselves can stand to ask for.”

In a flash of silvery light, she was across the room, holding a cat, if the cat was a Maine Coon that had been covered in glue and rolled around in a pile of knives, by the scruff of its neck like an unruly kitten, ignoring where its claws were trying and failing to find purchase in the unnaturally smooth flesh of her arm. “If you will excuse me, I must remonstrate with this creature’s master. You may summon me by standing under the light of the moon and calling my name thrice.”

Then she was gone, leaving only a smell like ozone and two bewildered parents behind.

“What was…” Charity couldn’t find the words, not that she’d been doing a particularly good job at expressing herself since seeing what she looked like when reflected through her daughter.

Before Michael could offer a reply, a portal swirled into existence behind him, disgorging after a moment two Knights, lightly battered, a half-turned Red Court Vampire, a rent-a-tux containing all seven-ish feet of one of Charity’s least favorite people in the city, and her daughter, seeming… more than she had been before she’d left.

“Harry, Susan, go to your place and load up for bear, then grab the Wardens if Ivy can spare them. Shiro, Sanya, take five, I’ve got to go do some magic stuff to see about maybe tracking Nicodemus down since Aine couldn’t trace them after they dropped a chunk of Undercity on us,” Molly said, looking every inch a warrior instead of the little girl whose biggest worry a week ago had been sneaking out of the house to go to some party.

“Would this help?” asked Shiro, holding up what looked entirely too much like a severed hand for comfort.

Molly’s face split open into a grin that wouldn’t have been out of place on the Grinch. “Boy, does it. Alright, I’ve got a couple things to do, but I should be down by the time Harry and Susan are back, and… you’re better with thaumaturgy than I am, so let’s get ready to track them down and run them out of Chicago.”

The other four people moved, Shiro and Sanya towards the couch and Harry and Susan towards the door, and Molly stepped back through the portal before it winked closed.

“That was… is everyone okay?” Michael asked.

“Bruised, and tired out,” said Shiro. “No serious injuries to any of us, since she can shrug off rubble falling on her like that.”

Michael and Charity shared a glance that seemed to comprise almost entirely of the sentiment behind the phrase “what the fuck” before turning to their tasks, with Michael striding towards Amoracchius and Charity the kitchen. “I’ll put coffee on,” she said, reeling from the sheer amount that had been dropped on her in the past week. That, at least, she could control, and hopefully wrangle her emotions while doing so.

Chapter Text

Making a weapon that Susan could reliably use and reliably keep on hand wasn’t particularly hard, which was why I’d decided to do it first. Initially, I was going to make a club, given what she’d done to the table, but the more I thought about it, the more the idea of a length of chain appealed to me.

It would require more of a learning curve, yes, but she could patch over skill issues with supernatural speed, and it could serve as a set of restraints in a pinch to boot.

That took slightly longer than a simple club would have, and then I was facing down the herbs I’d gained.

There was something about the image of a garden’s worth of plants just… abutting onto the Future Witness’ hangar bay that simply struck me as absurd, but the gravity of the situation threw a pall over even that.

These herbs were connected to a god.

Now, to be fair, so was I, but being someone’s kid was very much a different story from inviting some god that I couldn’t pick out of a lineup into my spirit. I knew, somehow, that the herb was from some African micronation called Wakanda, but since we didn’t have a Wakanda on our Earth, that was entirely too many gods to try and narrow down in the time I had- and that’s assuming that there was a version of that god in this parallel.

“Nothing to it, I suppose,” I said. “Aine, keep an eye out for Nick and the other nickelheads, just in case.”

“Will do, Doctor,” she said, making a token holographic appearance to give the impression that she was watching over me, which… I was thankful for, to be fair, but I’d long since gotten used to being watched, especially on the Future Witness.

I burrowed down into the sandy area within the garden set aside for the rite, allowed my Unseen Servants to pour the ground-up herb, in all its gently glowing glory, into my mouth, and then, as they were brushing more of the sand over me, I felt-

“Well, this is a new one,” said a deep, resonating voice, and I opened my eyes to see a silhouette of a panther, picked out in violet light, all but looming over my recumbent form.

“I’m sorry for any trespass, ma’am, I just-”

She snorted, sounding much more amused now that I could actually pay attention to her body language, such as it was, and tone. “Not at all, dear girl. I just wasn’t expecting to play host to such a… distinguished guest, let alone more than one of you.”

She stepped back, and with her out of the way, I could see the aurora spreading across the whole starry sky, blue and green and violet light trailing in ribbons from horizon to horizon, stars glimmering between.

“It’s… beautiful,” said Lasciel, from right behind me somehow, and if anyone asks, no, I didn’t squeak and jump as I whirled around.

She looked… different, here, than she did in the Forge, less like the stereotypical Greco-Roman beauty that she portrayed herself as and more like a patchwork. Her hands and forearms were strong, with the calluses and musculature of a veteran blacksmith’s and yet no less slender and graceful for them, whereas her legs from the knees down were covered in military-green armored boots that reminded me of some variants of MJOLNIR armor that I’d seen from the IVs that spent time on Infinity every now and again. Her face was the same moonlight-pale shade that mine was, in the form I’d inherited from Selûne, though hers was shot through with veins of jade instead of gold, and in her torso there was… it wasn’t exactly physically present, but I could sense a conflict, as if someone were trying to force two magnets together, north pole to north pole. One smelled like sulfur, and the other ozone, and it took a moment for me to place them as Hellfire and Soulfire warring inside her.

“You look… odd,” I said, frowning. “Are you okay?”

She waved a hand. “Tis of no concern,” she lied, and I could all but feel as the intensity of the imbalance in her torso, between the two different fires of power, surged.

“No, you’re not,” I said, and she seemed to almost deflate-

For a moment, the moon seemed to glow like Arizona’s summer sun. By the time I blinked my eyes clear of spots, the Moonmaiden stood before us in all her divine splendor.

She was tall, perhaps an inch or two shorter than Harry, and wore a simple tunic over well-worn scale mail. At her side was belted a mace, and though her long arm rested just so that her hand was a hairsbreadth away from it, it was clear that she had no intent to draw it, which did a good deal to reassure Lasciel, who had tensed up, losing the facsimile of angelic grace and composure that she had on display, at her appearance. She smiled at us, lime-green eyes seeming to sparkle with moonlight, before turning her head to the panther and inclining it.

“Bast,” she said, her voice higher and clearer but no less regal than the panther’s. “You have my gratitude for allowing me this time to connect to my daughter despite the lack of Argentil.”

“Think nothing of it, Elah,” the panther goddess replied. “Were the Watchman available, he would be here as well, but his shadow has overreached his remit and he must act now to oppose it.”

Lasciel was struck dumb. “He would come for one such as me?”

“Oh, indeed he would,” said Selûne. “Of all the interactions the Celestial Forge has had with Yahweh’s hosts, this is by far preferable to the last, and Uriel would welcome the child of the Webweaver as his sister had he the chance.”

“I…” Lasciel wobbled as she trailed off, and the scent of ozone grew more dominant as the Hellfire receded. “Child?”

“The Celestial Forge works in mysterious ways,” said Bast, looking about as smug as it was physically possible for a leopard’s muzzle to. “You are the essence of Lasciel impressed onto a human soul, or at least partially human, and you cannot remain a part of the Fallen you’re descended from after being changed as the Forge has changed the two of you.”

I looked at her with fresh eyes, and now that I knew what I was looking at I could see where some of the features had come from- the hands were from the distillation of Goibnu’s mastery of his craft, and her complexion was obviously from my connection with Selûne, but…

“What’s with the boots?” I asked, drawing Bast’s and Selûne’s attention but not Lasciel’s, still reeling over the revelation that she wasn’t just a shadow of Lasciel- okay, that was gonna get confusing fast.

Selûne smiled. “She is as much Reclaimer as you are, and though the Precursors’ Neural Physics doesn’t quite match up with the way that metaphysics and souls exist in this world, it does have an effect on your soul, and hers as well. It makes her more… hopeful is the closest I can come to the concept without getting into talking about the nature of souls, which would take far more time than we have available to us at present, so suffice it to say that she is more capable of making a better future for herself.”

That sounded… to be honest I wasn’t entirely sure what to feel about all of this. I’d been mostly ignoring the fact that I’d picked up a fragment of one of the Fallen so far, what with both Nicodemus and the Forge as a whole being much more immediate as well as the protection it could offer me being an assurance that I could handle having her in my head in the short term without her trying to get me killed by walking into the road or something. The revelation that she wasn’t just one of the Fallen, that she was actually growing and developing with me as the Forge stuck its oar in was… well, to be frank it was more than I had the emotional bandwidth or time to deal with today.

“That sounds like a whole lot of tomorrow’s problem,” I said, sounding a lot more tired than I actually was between divine constitution and having thoroughly fucked my sleep schedule over. “Right now I’m up to my eyeballs in alligators, Lasciel- fuck it, Lash will keep better than the sack of cats who has his hands on a big-time divine relic.”

Lash jolted like I’d just stuck her under a defibrillator, and Selûne gave me a considering look before nodding. “Indeed,” she said. “The Master of Shadows may be on the back foot, but if you do not seize the initiative, he will still be able to use the Shroud for his fell purpose.”

“Can’t have that, can we.” I chuckled mirthlessly as I cracked my knuckles. “I’ll see what I can’t shake loose when I mug Nicky and the Nickelheads for their lunch money.”

Bast huffed out a laugh. “I like you, godling. I just…” She trailed off, almost mournfully. “I hope you don’t end up like the other Chosen of the Forge and Grimoire. Powerful though they may be, but the Adversary was cunning enough to overcome them despite all the power they accumulated and all the more dangerous for it.”

I took a moment to measure my words before replying. “Is this an Oblivion War thing, or something else?”

“It’s not… entirely unrelated, but-” Bast lowered her voice, here, and wasn’t that just terrifying, something so powerful that just invoking their name could make a god in the heart of their own domain wary- “-He Who Walks Beside is much more insidious than any half-conscious rabble of elder gods, no matter how many there might be or how much it may open the path for them.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. Before I’d died, the Walkers had played entirely too big a role in the fate of our world, between offering support to the Red Court, paving the way for Ethniu to attack Chicago, and ultimately tying up the Archive and her Venatori for long enough that she missed enough of the more insidious old gods slipping into our world that they could invade first Winter and then the Outer Gates themselves. With the three Knights of the Cross and myself among their number, hopefully we’d be able to patch that over and make sure that the Adversary wouldn’t be able to tear down the Outer Gates, but… well, time would tell, on that front.

“I’m… familiar, yes,” I said, fists clenching on thin air. Then, I looked down with no small degree of confusion, because while my left hand had closed around nothing, there was the sensation of leather wrappings inside my right hand.

“What the hell kind of sword is this?” I asked, hefting what looked to be a Greek-style leaf-shaped sword of solid silver, decorated with intricate filigree picking out winglike shapes and approximately half the length of one of my outstretched wings- in other words, too damn big, at least if not for the fact that I could feel it almost like I could my fingernails. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a part of me, but it had a strong enough connection to me that I could sort of tell physics to screw off, like when I really needed to fly around fast. Above all, though, looking at it made the rest of the world seem washed out and out of focus in comparison, with the exception of myself, the two goddesses, and Lash.

“The magic kind,” said Bast, sounding more than mildly amused at the nonplussed expression on my face.

“It’s a daiklave,” Selûne offered. “If you pay attention, you should be able to feel the… depth of essence in the weapon, how deeply entwined with your own nature as my daughter it is.”

I only reached out with my more arcane senses for a moment before slamming back into my body hard, overwhelmed by the raw pressure that was Bast’s presence within her own realm, but she was right- the sword was all but bursting with the kind of inner moonlight that both she and I were.

“Okay,” I said, rubbing at the headache that was treating the inside of my head like a trampoline, “anything else for the good of the cause? I don’t mean to be rude, but being here is… I’m a little bit overwhelmed by how much of Bast I’m feeling and I’m hoping that once I turn off the connection that her herb is facilitating, that’s gonna hurt less.”

I hadn’t known that a giant spectral panther was capable of looking sheepish, but apparently Bast could. “You have my apologies, young one. And…” She turned to Lash. “You, I have a feeling I will see you again.”

Selûne pulled me into a hug that I took just a moment too long to return. “Take care of yourself, Molly. I’ll hopefully have Argentil reestablished within this world’s Astral Sea soon, and I hope to be able to invite both you and your family to visit.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling a little awkward in the embrace of my kind of-mother– even if I did have the memories from a version of me who had grown up knowing she was my mother, I had a very limited amount of them, and my time as Charity Carpenter’s daughter was much longer, but… I’d hopefully be able to reconcile the memories sooner than not.

She pulled away, offering me a knowing, too-sad look, before going to embrace Lash, whispering in her ear as she did so.

“Alrighty,” I said, once she’d relinquished Lash. “Time to get this show on the road.”

Bast’s maw split open into what was perhaps the most terrifying grin I’d ever seen in person. “Kick some ass for me, young ones!”

And I shot upright, shedding sand as I took in a massive breath, one last hint of the half-acrid, half-metallic scent of the herb lingering before it vanished completely.

“Dr. Carpenter, are you okay?” asked Aine, concern visible on her hologram’s face.

“Better than okay,” I said, bringing my knees up to my chest and then kipping up with languid, feline grace that I definitely hadn’t had earlier today. “I’m ready to introduce myself to Nicodemus properly.”

Chapter Text

I made it back down to the house at about the same time that Harry returned, Susan and Yoshimo (seeming to almost meld into the background shrouded in her freshly upgraded cloak compared to Harry’s sweeping coat and Susan remaining in her fancy dress, both drawing the eye) in tow. “Ivy said she could only spare one Warden,” he said apologetically, “and I had to promise Luccio that you’d keep her out of too much trouble.”

“Well,” I drawled, one hand resting on my sword’s pommel, “we’re going in to go have a chat with Nicodemus, so I can’t promise perfect safety, but I’ll do what I can to make sure she makes it back home.”

He opened his mouth, something sardonic clearly about to cross his lips, but his eyes flicked over my shoulder and he visibly thought better of it. “Right, so, uh… let me get started, then. Should I… circle of salt, or go outside and break out the chalk?”

“Outside, if you please,” Mom said, not quite disapprovingly but like she was expecting to be disappointed. “I had Shiro put the… hand out there, on a sheet of aluminum foil to prevent it from staining the concrete.”

“Right-o,” he said, swooping outside with somewhat more billowy motions than usual, and it took a moment for me to realize that his coat was a lot lighter than normal.

“The hell happened to the leather coat?” I asked, frowning.

“Miss Valmont happened,” Susan said, looking at me half like I was a rabbit that had just torn out the throat of multiple knights of the Round Table and half like I was an apple too enticing to be true for a moment before tearing her gaze away ashamedly. “He was… investigating matters, earlier today, and she managed to separate him from it before one of the Denarians attacked.”

I gave the idea a moment of thought. “Yeah, sounds about like him.” I paused for a moment. “Hey, I made you something.”

She looked more than a little awkward, “Look, uh…”

“Not like that,” I said, rolling my eyes despite not knowing why, exactly, she was feeling awkward as I unwrapped the chain from around my waist and offered it to her. “You need something you can actually use your strength with, and you won’t always have a convenient table leg, plus this is a lot more concealable than most options.”

She took the chain gingerly, testing its heft and then giving it a test swing. “I… why?”

I almost blurted out “I’ve seen what your corpse looks like and would rather not do so again”, which… on top of taking a wrecking ball to the conversation, I didn’t really know Susan well enough to trust her with that. Hell, I wasn’t sure I’d trust Klaus with that, right now, and he’d been my mentor in the future-that-wasn’t. Being super irreverent… well, given that she’d been so familiar with Harry, she was probably used to that sort of thing, but I didn’t trust that to not blow up in my face either, so a more measured response would probably do best.

“You mean, aside from ‘I had five minutes’? Mostly, because Harry trusts you enough to not try super hard to force you to sit this one out.” I shrugged. “That, and I’ve got a feeling you’ll be needing it, sooner or later.”

“...Right,” she said, looking more than a little spooked, but she let it lie as she wound the chain around her arm and turned her attention to Mom, who hadn’t missed the implication in my words and was giving me a worried look. “So, Mrs. Carpenter, is there any coffee left?”

I drifted over to the couch as Mom answered, plopping myself down and drawing my spellbook into this world as I did.

Aside from the eyes surrounded by stars picked out in silver on the cover, a concession to both my mother and the Theurgic tradition that I ended up following, it was a simple leather-bound tome, full of off-white parchment and scraps of expended scrolls that I’d scrawled notes on.

I didn’t think Locate Person would be of any more use than Harry’s thaumaturgical tracking, but Locate Object could be very helpful if Nicodemus was keeping the Shroud separate from himself, and a second’s focus had the spell fixed in my mind, ready to be cast at a moment’s notice.

After that, I skimmed through the rest of the spell-forms I’d recorded, trying to find something that could be worth using in the fight to come, until Harry strode back into the house, his pentacle amulet tugging at his hand and Nicodemus’ severed limb wrapped up in foil in his other, held at arm’s length with a more than mildly disgusted look on his face.

“Tracking spell’s up, let’s move out,” he said, not missing a step as Susan, Dad, Sanya, and Yoshimo spilled out of the kitchen.

As I got up to join them, the Forge flashed, and a handful of pillars rose up around the one that had grown to display Aine’s chip. Closest to the center was what looked like a die-cut metal section that had been removed from a burnished sphere, with three turquoise, gently glowing circles set into it. Surrounding the circles was a gently pulsating pattern of orange lights, which were in turn surrounded by a network of grooves and raised areas, and the whole arrangement was resting on one of those display stands that sometimes come with high-end models.

On the rest of the pedestals were a vaguely spherical device, made of what looked almost like chrome or maybe even polished silver, that housed a single, glowing photoreceptor, as well as a teardrop-shaped ship in the same chrome-looking metal, a suit of armor that looked similar in design sensibilities but was much more matte, and a pair of what were essentially seeds, which I just knew would grow into what was a power plant that would never run dry, at least not before the other components wore out.

Memories flashed through my head, flitting around the ecumene in a luxury liner and performing amateur physics experiments with technology that made the Infinity look like a Baby’s First Spectrophotometer, but they quickly subsided.

Almost as soon as they did, I could feel my bodysuit growing more robust, and even beginning to project a simple force field- nothing particularly impressive, by Forerunner standards, but it was another thing that Anduriel couldn’t just feed Nicodemus, and every trick I could play against him was a trick I’d gladly take. Then, there was a sense of pins and needles as my helmet collapsed into itself like it was being sucked through a straw, and I felt something cold snaking its way up the back of my neck and through my hair before reaching the slight bulge my neural implant made in the back of my head and activating it.

Projected directly into my brain through my optic nerve was an image of Aine, looking at once more grave and more resolved than I could remember seeing her before. “Activate a portal to the Future Witness when you get close enough to the area of engagement to start reconnaissance, and maybe we’ll be able to nip this problem in the bud.”

“Right-o,” I said, my helmet extruding itself around my head and displaying a much-expanded HUD as I strode towards the door. “Let’s go play some shadow tag.”

As it turned out, Harry’s spell led us to O’Hare before cutting out.

Aine managed to get into their records damn fast once we got there, sending in the eye-like platform that had come out of the Forge to connect directly to the computers they kept in the control towers, and eventually offered up a handful of flights that could potentially be harboring Nicodemus, two private planes booked by people who had paid extra to keep their names and faces out of the records and a flight down to Atlanta, of all places.

At the end of the day, knowing what I knew about Nicodemus, I was more than willing to bet on the private planes- aside from the man wanting to avoid the kind of inconvenient circumstances that came from being isolated in an environment he couldn’t control, there were all manner of arcane rituals or sacrificial spells that he could do on a private plane that he just wouldn’t have the space to perform on a public flight.

“Makes sense to me,” said Harry, when I explained my thoughts on the situation.

Dad was giving me an almost unbearably sad look, but forced it down when I turned to look at him. “In that case, let us go remonstrate with him.”

I raised an eyebrow under my helmet, but decided to leave the matter, for now, and set out after Aine’s monitor, little full moon-globe emanating light behind us, which was already hovering off towards the hangars that the private planes were kept in.

After that supremely awkward walk, I withdrew my wand from where I’d been keeping it inside my coat. I was about to raise it to cast Locate Object to try and find the Shroud, but paused to look at it more closely.

It wasn’t bad, and to be honest, by the standards I’d held this time last week, I would have been more than happy to use it for any number of applications.

Those standards didn’t account for the fact that, given half a chance, I could out-craft all of Faerie put together.

Still, it was good enough for now, and a moment’s focus had the implement laid on my outstretched palm, spinning madly for just a moment before it snapped around to unerringly at one of the hangars, a little bit off-center from my perspective.

“Bingo,” I said, resisting the urge to pull my daiklave or sidearm immediately. “Alright, people, game faces on.”

The wood of Harry’s staff creaked under his grip as Susan’s chain rattled, unspooling itself from where she’d wrapped it around her waist, and I heard Dad, Sanya, and Yoshimo working the Swords (or swords, as the case may be) loose in their scabbards in preparation to draw.

I myself checked the integrity of my shield, then, once I was satisfied it was operating at its fullest capacity, I headed for the door on the side of the hangar closest to us and slammed it open with one hand, a bead of glacier-blue ice already held between two fingers on my right hand, ready to throw since I could hear the sound of engines warming up inside and, if worst came to worst, I could at least hope to stop the plane for long enough for us to get aboard.

Just inside the well-lit hangar, as I’d suspected, was a not insignificant number of Nicodemus’ fanatical soldiers, with swords or guns at the ready like they’d seen us coming (which, in all likelihood, they had), and the moment they saw me instead of one of their number, their fingers contracted and lead hurled itself my way from Uzis and Thompsons and even a Kalashnikov or two.

My energy shield made itself known, a cloudy membrane of laser-induced plasma and before I retreated, closing the door in front of me, I flicked the freezing sphere forwards, low and on an oblique trajectory likely to see it impacting in the rough center of their ranks.

The Forge flickered dimly in time with the near-blinding flash of chillingly blue light that leaked around the edges of the door, causing the gunshots to start to die off, and by the time I pushed it back open again, the only sound that was competing with the whine of the engines was one particularly fortunate bullet that had lodged itself between the door and the jamb dropping to the layer of ice crystals on the floor- which I suspected that no one else could hear, given how advanced the upgraded audio pickups on this suit were.

Just starting to wheel itself out of the now-opening hangar doors was a relatively standard private jet, albeit one with a door still open, and out of that door came the almost medusa-like figure of Deirdre Archleone, steel-gray hair rasping one strand against another as she landed halfway between us and the jet at the head of a slowly massing crowd of Nicodemus’ soldiers, streaming from a room off to the side of the hangar, wielding swords and the occasional spear in their hands.

“Go,” said Harry, shaking out the bracelet full of shield charms on his left wrist. “We’ll handle them, you two are the only ones who can actually get to Nicodemus before takeoff.”

“Stay safe,” I said, before reverting into my angelic form in a burst of moonlight and taking off, Aine’s monitor trailing after me on a trajectory aimed directly for the still-open plane door as Deirdre hissed up impotently at us.

Chapter Text

If not for the thrusters of the armor, I probably would have hit the plane not unlike a bird on a car’s windshield.

The opening was sized for humans, and not particularly tall ones at that, and so though I probably could have managed to make it inside, even with my wings out, if I were walking through, there was no way that I’d be able to make it with them actively directing my flight without injury (or at least embarrasment). Fortunately, with Aine’s help, I managed to configure the thruster profile to compensate for me pulling my wings in just in time, and instead of getting stuck in the doorway, I managed to drag a rut in the carpet before the suit could fully counteract my momentum.

“You are supremely inconvenient,” said Nicodemus from where he was down on one knee, holding the Shroud over the chest of one of his soldiers with one hand while his other hand (the one that I’d sliced off, which… well, I had forgotten that the Denarians were known for their ability to heal their hosts) raised a sacrificial athame to the man’s throat.

“I strive to please,” I drawled, assessing the exact layout of the soon-to-be battlefield as I did.

It was less crowded than a public plane, naturally, with a single column of leather-upholstered seats along each of the walls of the fuselage, and each of them had enough leg room for even someone of Harry’s daunting height. Still, despite the wide, shag-carpeted aisle down the middle of the space, it was still a small plane, and probably too cramped for me to properly take advantage of my wings or the length of my daiklave.

All in all, a not terrible prospect, although not one that I suspected even Shiro would have been willing to engage in, not with Nicodemus having had ample opportunity to prepare the metaphorical ground that we were about to fight on.

I closed my fist around the hilt of my falcata, manifested from the odd weapons storage my armor seemed to contain, and raised it to point at Nicodemus’ heart, while at the same time flicking my wand with my left hand into the spin that transformed it from spellcasting implement to revolver. “Now then, if you please,” I said, hearing as Aine’s primary beam weapon started to draw power, “hand over the Shroud and this doesn’t have to get messy. Well… messier, at least.” His eyes flickered down to my sword, assessing my grip and the likelihood that he could disarm me, and I just chuckled. “That’s not in the cards, I’m afraid, old man. Trust me when I say that if you try, you’re gonna regret it- I’m the best that’s ever been.”

“I have killed more than my fair share of foolish children who professed such an idea..” He stood, then flicked his wrist so as to draw attention with the flaring of the Shroud as he moved his left arm, all the better to distract me from the athame in his right hand, which he flung at me with the kind of pinpoint accuracy for the space right between her clavicles that would have put Annie Oakley to shame.

The blade skittered off of my shield, producing a brief flare of cloudy plasma patterns but failing to do so much as scratch the admittedly thinner armor there.

“Performance issues?” I asked, shrouding my blade in moonlight. “I’ve heard that that kind of thing can happen to older men…”

“Shut your insolent mouth,” Nicodemus sneered, picking up a wavy-bladed sword that had been laid on the floor just as I heard the throttle of the jet open up, taking off with the door still open.

“Nah, see, I’m paid like Dickens: by the word.” I advanced, testing his defense with a simple jab that his sword handily deflected.

“That’s the problem with you colonials,” Nicodemus said, not so much hopping over the soldier (who was still lying supine on the floor, mind, and not a scrap of rope or other restraint anywhere in sight) as stepping back and up onto an invisible staircase which supported his weight nonetheless. “No sense of decorum. At least Dickens had the decency to restrain his more annoying tendencies in polite company.”

“Ain’t nothing polite about this company.” I snapped off a shot at Nicodemus, a streak of silvery light deflected on the flat of his blade.

He had to move significantly more to avoid Aine’s beam attack, the ray of violet light playing over the upholstery and leaving a scorch mark in its wake before it cut off in time with the glimmering of the Forge.

He snarled out a word in… it almost sounded like Latin, but the accent and pronunciation were all wrong. The effect of the word, though, was somewhat more impressive, with fat puffs of yellowish spores billowing off of the broad slash he made with his sword, and as Aine and I both burned them to ash (her with her beam, and myself with a quick Fire Bolt), Nicodemus’ shadow peeled itself off the ground and was tearing through first the floor and then the structural components of the plane.

I leapt forwards, sword flaring with radiant power, but by the time I made it to him, it was too late, and he’d already managed to carve a hole big enough for him to slip through, although instead of making a clean getaway, the Shroud managed to get caught on one of the jagged edges of metal left by Anduriel’s efforts, wrenching him around and dislocating his arm with a pop.

He grimaced, seeing Aine and myself approaching, and while in most other circumstances he likely would have tried to drag himself back up, either by main force or with Anduriel’s aid, this time he relinquished the Shroud and let himself fall away into the darkness of the early Chicago morning.

It wasn’t without giving us one last figurative middle finger, though, and as I managed to pull the Shroud off of the twisted protrusion of aluminum it had gotten stuck with, I turned my head to see the bricks of plastic explosive that were attached directly to the fuel tank.

I just about managed to get my body wholly between the Shroud and the tank before the plastique detonated, and even though it gave both Aine and I a solid kick, it didn’t manage to make it all the way through either of our shields, and after a moment of spinning, I managed to stabilize, the Shroud still clutched in one hand.

“Well then,” I said, tucking the shroud into an inside pocket of my lab coat, “let’s see about getting back and checking on the rest of the gang.”

Yuki Yoshimo wasn’t really used to this sort of thing.

Granted, that was to be expected- she’d gone from apprentice browns right into the Gray Cloak, to the point where she hadn’t had the thing for four months before getting it upgraded, but given how tired Captain Luccio seemed, she wouldn’t be particularly surprised if this was the kind of situation that anyone could really be prepared for.

Really, though, who could prepare for a fourteen-year-old girl who could create a cloak that bound power on the order of the Swords, who could outfight a millennia-old Denarian with one of Luccio’s swords that hadn’t been made for her, and then flew off to fight with Nicodemus Archleone himself with just a living machine at her side? Hells, most Wardens wouldn’t have been allowed to involve themselves with a situation centering around the Knights of the Blackened Denarius, but as the only one Captain Luccio could reach on short notice that actually understood just what the Denarians were, let alone the depths of their depravity, she’d earned herself an exception, as much as she wished she hadn’t.

Fighting alongside Uncle Shiro and the other two Knights was about the only good part of this mess, seeing the Swords again and getting to wield her own blade- a pale imitation of the sheer power that the ancient relics harnessed- in tandem with them was edifying, but even then, she was all but useless against Ursiel’s host, and it was only thanks to Ramirez and Dresden that she’d managed to survive the encounter.

Here, at least, there was a chance to learn the sword skills that Uncle Shiro and then her father had drilled into her against an opponent less formidable than a fallen angel the size of a small bus, what with Deirdre fighting with a horde of Nicodmeus’ fanatics at her back.

If she was any judge of things, they were… honestly, kind of overblown, as a threat.

Their only primary advantage was numbers, being able to overwhelm them by sheer weight of their blades, and if they had been facing down mortal warriors, or those less superbly equipped, that may have been enough. Instead, they faced down two Knights of the Cross, a Warden of the White Council, a Wizard of the White Council who had undergone his first baptism by fire when Yuki was just discovering her talents, and a woman with some degree or another of amortal strength, the exact nature of which she was unsure of.

Dresden was the weakest of them in direct combat, often failing to think beyond the engagement at hand, but he had power to spare, and his impenetrable barriers and mighty gusts of wind kept the enemies that sought to wet their blades with his blood at bay long enough for his somewhat clumsy strikes with his staff to combine with his unparalleled reach and bludgeon a swordsman or occasionally a spear-wielding enemy into submission.

The woman, Rodriguez, moved like a striking snake, treating a length of chain that was longer than it had looked just a moment ago like a bullwhip, and sometimes even hauled one of the mute warriors physically off their feet to smash into another, leaving both with broken bones and wills.

She herself was operating just as she’d trained to- precision and patience were her watchwords, first and foremost. Her small stature granted her an advantage in agility above what most enjoyed, and that was compounded by both training and the cloak that Carpenter had given her.

The armored fabric flowed as if caught in its own personal breeze, and she could all but feel the magic of the item slowly but surely extending to cloak her just as well as the physical item could- more so, at times, as she took two steps up into thin air to land a simultaneous kick to two different tongueless warriors’ heads at once before leaping backwards over a clumsy slash that her mystically augmented hearing had picked up on.

She was almost tempted to do a backflip solely for the purpose of showing off, but her training and good sense kept her from doing so, instead landing feet-first on the man’s clavicles and bearing him to the ground, writhing in noiseless agony.

Yuki turned back to the battle raging behind her and found… well, raging was somewhat of an overstatement, at this point. Out of the perhaps two dozen soldiers that Deirdre had started the fight with, perhaps five remained combat-ready, and Dresden alone would be more than sufficient to subdue them, making the way that Rodriguez was advancing on them overkill.

The Denarian was holding well, for facing two Knights at the same time- all three of them were covered in light wounds, mostly shallow gashes but there were a few patches of missing scales that indicated that Sanya’s rifle had been involved with the situation.

Yuki tightened her focus, wind whistling just at the edge of her enhanced hearing as she grasped the cloak in one hand and prepared her sword with the other. If she just found the right moment…

Before the opportunity came, Deirdre snarled something harsh and almost entirely unrecognizable before all but exploding, shards of steel bursting off of the edges of her bladed locks. She only barely managed to direct the gathering wind to scatter the shrapnel from where it would have shredded the Knights before she had to whirl and duck beneath the edge of her cloak, hearing more than feeling the metal stopping cold against the armored layer of the cloak, but when she emerged she saw both Michael and Sanya intact, if scraped up.

In the distance, Yuki could just barely hear a siren start up, and she slipped her sword back into its sheath. “I suspect that, if we don’t depart soon, we are about to have law enforcement to contend with as well.”

The other woman nodded, casting a worried glance over the corpses and intact-but-insensate bodies of Nicodemus’ soldiers before looking back up. “I can hear it too.”

“Right,” said Dresden, sounding like he was about to start hitting his adrenaline crash. “Let’s blow this pop stand, then hopefully Molly’ll have some good news for us.”

“I have the utmost faith in my daughter, that either she successfully handled Nicodemus or at the very least she separated him from the Shroud of Turin,” Michael Carpenter said, and… well, with the certainty he said it with, she was starting to believe it.

Or at least, she hoped she was.

Chapter Text

“Are you sure the Shroud is out of our reach?” John Marcone asked, making sure that not a hint of his frustration with the situation was showing on his face or in his voice as he pressed both palms down on the mahogany desk in his bedroom.

“As sure as I can be,” Sigrun Gard replied over the radio. “On the upside, Nicodemus looks like he’s cut his losses now that the Shroud is back with the Knights, so you won’t have to deal with him here until he’s had at least a handful of years to lick his wounds.”

That was… something, at least, but given how long the man had operated, Marcone couldn’t count on having any sort of secret weapon to deal with him, not with how long the man had had to plot and scheme. There was only so much that relative youth and exuberance could do in the face of that much experience and treachery, and his knees were already starting to complain whenever the topic of exuberance came up.

That, though, was a concern for another day, one that he could afford to defer for now in favor of the fresh complication that had dropped itself in his lap.

Namely, the woman who had set herself to opposing the Denarians.

In principle, John had no objections to the metaphorical Good Samaritan, especially in cases such as this one where they were attempting to lend a hand against a man foolhardy enough to invite a fallen angel to take residence in their soul. On a more practical level, though, having another magical do-gooder operating in the city he called home was… inconvenient. Dresden was enough of a problem on his own, as occasionally useful as he may have been, and the Knight had the decency to mostly operate outside the city, but absent any information of this person’s habits, he had to assume that they lived in Chicago and would be willing to take action to defend the city from any threats, real or perceived.

“What would your assessment of the woman who interceded directly be?” John asked, readying the half-depleted spiral-bound notebook he kept on hand for occasions like this one, where he needed to take down notes for his moonlit operations but was caught without ready access to the coded systems in his actual offices.

There came a sound through the radio that sounded almost like an engine wheezing to a stop. “Are you-” The tone of disbelief that Gard took was completely at odds with her normal presentation. “Are you planning to try and fight her?”

“I am, at present, attempting to gather information about her before I make my decision one way or the other.” That said, his current inclination was away from direct confrontation- even aside from the fact that she was working with both the Knights of the Cross and Dresden, she presented enough of a problem to Nicodemus Archleone to get him to back off not once but twice, and with explosive results each time. The fact that Gard, who had learned at the prince of the War-Geats’ knee before joining the Valkyrior, was so leery of her, was… well, not strictly superfluous information, but given the resources his organization could currently bring to bear, it was an academic concern at best, something for a threat assessment file that would be more thoroughly analyzed in six months’ time.

She laughed, a slightly hysterical sound through the fuzz of the wartime-era radio’s connection. “Trust me, Marcone, the Senior Council of Wizards would have trouble with that one even without her father’s protection. As it stands, she may not be Merlin yet, but by my reckoning she’s the closest anyone else could dream to come- and she hasn’t hit physical maturity yet, not properly, if my eyes don’t decieve me.”

“I see.” He didn’t, not really, but given that he was dealing with an anomaly, one that he strongly suspected was the fourteen-year-old firstborn of the Knight who made his home in Chicago, he had at least enough to go off of. “Very well, if you have no other information for me, then pack up.” A thought occurred to him. “Have you already informed your employer of the situation?”

“He knew before I told him, I’d wager- he’s no less in tune with the world now than he was the last time someone like this walked the earth, so my information likely only confirmed his suspicion. Over and out.”

John switched off the handheld radio unit that Hendricks had brought him, then steepled his fingers together in thought as his bodyguard removed the item.

He’d bet that Nicodemus would delay his scheme long enough that Dresden would have to come to him in order to properly catch up to the man, but that evidently wasn’t the case. No, the encounter that had collapsed a parking structure into the Undercity had spooked him, and he’d accelerated his timetable, which should have driven Dresden to desperation… unless he’d found some way to track Nicodemus, in which case, he could have gone in to attack the man with the Knights, which was exactly what had happened.

For someone else to serve as the tip of the spear, though… both Dresden and the Knights would have insisted on being the ones to confront the man, if they could, which meant that the younger Carpenter would have had to contend with Dresden’s stubborn pride and her own father’s sense of obligation. The fact that they’d let her go off alone to challenge the oldest Denarian was… Well, it was irresponsible, sending a child to face him no matter what angelic powers she bore, but given the fact that the gamble had evidently succeeded, he was less inclined to press the issue than he would be against almost any other party.

Ultimately, he didn’t have nearly enough information to press anyone involved, either about the disposition of the Shroud of Turin or them bringing the child into things, not at this hour of night and especially not with so many of his resources tied up in either the failed scheme to acquire the Shroud of Turin or investigating the reported confrontation in Wrigley Field (which, according to what CCTV footage remained, involved a different child, Dresden, and the Wardens, which was already a recipe for problems even before adding in the White Court son of Silverlight Studios’ CEO and South American “businessmen” into the mix).

He gave one last set of instructions to Hendricks, then returned to his bed. There was enough trouble afoot without borrowing more by adding sleep deprivation to the mix, and John prided himself on not borrowing more trouble than he could handle.

Michael Carpenter was of two minds about the situation today.

On one hand, Nicodemus’ scheme had been thwarted, and he had been deprived of both the relic with which he attempted to perpetuate his evil into the world and the men and arms with which he intended to do so- which included Saluriel and Ursiel, who were safely sequestered away by his daughter and Father Forthill, respectively.

On the other hand, the fact that his eldest daughter had had so much to do with the situation was very much not to his liking.

It was the duty of a good parent to shield their child from the weight of the world, one that Michael bore with equally solemn resolve as he did his duty as the wielder of Amoracchius, and the fact that Molly had been subjected to so much of the evils of the world seemingly overnight… it weighed heavily on him. Even though he could not see a way he could have protected her from the future that so burdened her, he still felt that he’d failed her in some inexplicable way, and the counsel of his fellow Knights could only do so much to lighten his heart.

Given time, he suspected that God would show him a path towards being more able to help Molly, or if not that then grant him the grace and the patience to accept the situation, but time conspired against him, as it always did.

“Are you sure that this is necessary?” he asked, his hand not moving one inch closer to the hilt of Amoracchius at his side but his voice no less heard for it.

“Yes, Dad,” said Molly, with far too much amused tolerance for someone who was having a set of manacles made of what seemed to be metal thorns held together by a thick band of steel closed around her wrists. “It’s standard procedure, and I trust Warden Luccio to ensure that the Council does not get… overzealous, in their inquiries.”

Harry’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything about how that should be the right of all young practitioners brought before the Council- which was, in all honestly, probably for the best, given how on edge the two younger Wardens were already. For all that he was often right about the world, Michael knew that his words would only inflame the situation more, and even the hard-earned patience of Captain Luccio would only hold so far.

Charity, also, was absent from the proceedings- not that he could blame her, not after what she’d endured at the hands of Gregor and the rumors she’d heard about the gray-cloaked enforcers of the White Council at the time. Seeing Molly all but carted away in chains would have been… a bad idea.

Shiro’s niece emerged from the house, flicking a nervous glance at Molly where she was standing with all the perturbability of a bronze statue, before turning to the elder Warden. “Ready to go, Captain.”

At the other young Warden’s nod, Luccio sighed tiredly, muttering in Italian under her breath, then turned to him. “I’m sorry about all this, this is standard procedure. Once we return to Edinburgh, I’ll make sure to have the paperwork for you to attend the trial filed, and it should be able to make it through the bureaucracy in time since Molly is coming with us of her own recognizance, and you should be able to attend her trial as a Knight of the Sword and speak in her defense.”

Michael had a strong suspicion that the paperwork would be somehow lost or delayed long enough for his attendance to be prevented- after the complete failure of the other Warden to bring his daughter into “custody”, whoever was behind the machinations was unlikely to not have contingencies for his next actions- he just inclined his head to her. “May God guide your path, Warden Luccio.”

She laughed bitterly. “I should be so lucky.”

From a pouch strapped to her leg came a plain wooden box, covered in gilded lettering that predated the modern English language, which she opened to reveal a silver chain about three feet long, coiled upon itself. Luccio passed the chain through Molly’s manacles, then made sure that the two younger Wardens were holding onto it before snapping the two ends as far apart as she could, and once the chain reached its full extension, the four of them vanished with a sound like a door closing.

“That’s… new,” said Michael, slowly turning to Harry and raising an eyebrow.

“Eh… not really? I’ve seen it a couple times. There’s a wall full of ‘em in the White Council headquarters, we just don’t use them often because they’re strictly one-way and a pain to recharge.” He shuddered. “Really counterintuitive, the mindset you have to get into to do it properly. I’ve got no idea how Ebenezar does it so well.”

“I see.” Unfortunately, there hadn’t been one left for him, and with Molly unable to provide her portals… “Then how would I be getting to her trial?”

“I’ll take you. I mean, unless something comes up on my end, with CPD or something like that, but I’d get a hold of… someone, and they should be able to help you travel through the Ways to the Hidden Halls, or whichever other stronghold the trial’s at.” Harry shrugged awkwardly. “It’s the least I could do.”

Michael smiled, both at his friend’s show of good-heartedness and from the relief that he wouldn’t have to buy a plane ticket to get to… wherever they were holding their trial. “You are a good man, Harry Dresden.”

“Hey, let’s not go that far…” he chuckled, then sighed. “I’ll get out of your hair before you go back in, try and give Charity one less thing to stress about.”

He sighed, but knew there was nothing he could say to convince Harry to stay- his goodness was only outweighed by his hardheadedness. “Take care of yourself, my friend.”

“You too, Michael,” he said wearily.

Chapter Text

Rashid was, by nature of his duty, used to being called up by the Senior Council to determine if any creature or object was as it seemed or not. While his postings, both as a member of the Senior Council as well as the Gatekeeper, granted him much leeway in disregarding these summons, he made it a habit to indulge more than he snubbed, for the sake of keeping the peace if for no other reason. Those rare few specimens capable of piquing his interest were a passable consolation prize, when they occurred, but they were not why he went, most days.

This day was shaping up to be something of an exception, he mused, looking with no small degree of bemusement at the woman who had agreed to be the captive of the Wardens in the matter of someone editing the membership rolls of the Council.

“Margaret Katherine Amanda Carpenter,” he said, halfway tempted to meet her eyes and see what a soulgaze would reveal. “I am Wizard Rashid.”

“Please, Gatekeeper,” she said, just a hint of a self-satisfied smirk on her face. “Call me Molly, if you’re not going to honor me with the title I earned.”

Rashid allowed one eyebrow to rise. There were a very limited number of circumstances that would allow a child to claim the title of a Wizard of the White Council in full, and there was one that made the most sense. However, if she was a lawbreaker, even if she had survived the backlash of altering her path, she would have known that the Wardens would have taken her head from her shoulders for violations of the Sixth Law. But…

Rashid allowed his Sight to open for a moment, and almost immediately slammed it shut. The girl was, indeed, a fully invested Wizard, and more besides. A Scion, although of what god he couldn’t be certain, not yet, and the recipient of the patronage of a higher power, most certainly. For a moment, there was an energy pattern in her that seemed reminiscent of the Sidhe- no, not the Sidhe, the Mothers, the only remnants of the Tuatha De Danann, and despite the fact that it obscured itself from his view almost immediately, he knew what he’d seen with the indelible certainty of something inscribed on a stone tablet. She even had threads of Jehovah’s power woven through her aura, although the fact that her father wielded one of the Swords explained that, and beyond that there were traces of… other, more subtle artifacts and more cunning gods acting upon her.

“My apologies, Wizard Carpenter,” he said, inclining his head to her out of respect. “The White Council is… unused to accommodating the Chosen, especially of a force as esoteric and inscrutable as the Celestial Forge.”

Setting aside the fact that she could escape at any time, the Merlin’s wards be damned, there was no taint of Black Magic in her. Even if not out of self preservation, he would vote in her favor in the upcoming trial.

“No apologies necessary,” she said, an ounce of the tension that had been present in her posture seeping away.

“I would ask your indulgence of us- you are, ah, associated with a member of the Council who is regarded with suspicion at the best of times, coming from Chicago as you do.”

“Harry Dresden, yes,” she said, face tightening for just a moment before she returned to her smug neutrality. “He has done favors for both myself and my father, in the past.”

Rashid nodded again. “Dresden is… reliable, when it comes to the wire. But… well, I knew his mother and know his grandfather, and the trouble they could get into. I would take it as a personal favor if you were to help him out, from time to time.”

Again, something slipped through her façade- respect, of some sort. “That you would ask serves you well, but it’s ultimately unnecessary- Harry is a friend. I help my friends.”

Unsaid was what she did to her enemies, but the corpse of Quintus Cassius, opened from hip to shoulder with Yoshimo's silver sword, was a more than adequate message there.

“So it is. I look forward to your career, Forgemaster Carpenter,” Rashid said, the barest hint of a smile touching his lips before he turned away.

It was even true- Starborn she wasn’t, but the stars were writ large in her, and it was with no small amount of vindictiveness that he wondered which Outsider would have the ill fortune to run afoul of her first.

He might even be lucky enough to see it himself.

Was it wrong to say that I missed wartime decision-making?

Oh, don’t get me wrong, that kind of desperation was… something I was glad to have managed to escape, but with how global communication had broken down once the Ways became dangerous, the chain of command had devolved down to the local authority figures, save for when one of the bigger fish was passing through, and between Harry, Dad, Rashid, and the Archive, I’d gotten used to decisive action and not this kind of… petty mud-slinging. My memories of working with the UNSC helped, but even then we were a lot more unified thanks to being a military organization under threat of extinction.

“…and through this the evidence of a violation of the Sixth Law of Magic, at least, is all but incontrovertible!” The Merlin, resplendent in his ocean-blue robes, pounded his fist against the table to emphasize the sheer importance of his point, in his own mind if nothing else.

“You assume that she’d be dumb enough to leave information about herself if she did this on purpose,” Ebenezar McCoy drawled, frustration bubbling beneath his affable old hick façade as demonstrated by the way that his muscular forearms were shifting. “She ain’t that dumb.”

“Her choice of associates would suggest otherwise,” the Merlin said primly, and I could feel the wave of fury rolling off of McCoy as he processed the insult to his grandson.

Before he could do more than inhale, though, someone else cut in. “Are you casting aspersions,” the hooded figure that was Rashid said, accent stronger than normal, “on the abilities of a Knight of the Cross to put their trust in those truly deserving of it? You know as well as I the judgement with which they choose their allies, and the fact that all three of them stand with both her and Dresden is telling, old friend.”

“For all the powers the Swords offer their bearers, they are no less mortal than any of us, and often they are more so,” the Merlin said. “Their discernment is no more beyond reproach than any of ours.”

I sighed. Langtry was clearly digging his heels in on principle, and while in theory I didn’t have anything to worry about with how Martha Liberty and Listens-To-Wind were exchanging incredulous glances with each other and Rashid, now was as good a time as any.

The clicking of my tongue was drowned out by the sound of a fist rapping firmly on a wooden door as the thorn manacles around my wrists clicked open, and all seven other Wizards in the room turned to look at me with incredulity, amusement, outrage, or some combination thereof as I stood from the uncomfortable folding chair I’d been sat in by a Warden I didn’t recognize.

“Wizard Langtry,” I said, enjoying the way that his lips pressed together with irritation, “if you have some accusation to level at my father or his fellow Knights, it would behoove you to do so directly.”

“It is customary for any accused Warlock to remain silent at their trials,” said Ancient Mai, casting the kind of judgmental glance that only disappointed grandparents really manage to bring to bear.

“I am well aware of standard protocol,” I said, allowing my wings to sprout from my back. “Including how it was breached in this case. Tell me, did you explicitly instruct Warden Morgan to accost me when I was asleep in my fucking bed in a house with all three Knights of the Cross, who were in the process of actively cooperating with Captain Luccio and her team, or did he undertake that action of his own initiative?”

Listens-to-Wind was the first to speak, although I could see both McCoy and Rashid inhale to interject before being preempted. “I do believe,” he said, eyeing the Merlin (who was reddening with fury, beard and mustache twitching as his temper rose) with a curious expression on his face, “that we owe you an apology, Miss Carpenter.”

“Do we, truly?” asked the Merlin derisively, and in his glare I could see all the rancor of an administrator who had had his domain meddled with- not something that I could remember seeing from him in the future-that-wasn’t, but given what I’d heard out of Yoshimo and Ramirez over the years, it wasn’t entirely out of the man’s character.

The Forge flashed with the light of the noontime sun, all but blinding, and a pillar rose out of the ground, spreading itself out and, once it had finished growing, something that looked like a circuit board meant for a child appeared, with a variety of resistors, cables, and lights both attached to a clear plastic base and lying around it, clearly designed to snap into place.

Time slowed down- no, that wasn’t right. I could tell that time was passing just the same as it was before, thanks to my implant’s built-in clock, it just seemed to be slower because I was thinking faster, remembering better, and thankfully patient enough to put up with it.

Small things jumped out to me- the slight tremor in Ancient Mai’s withered hands spoke to muscle fatigue and the fact that she was coming to the end of a long day, whereas the way that McCoy was spoiling for a fight and how his power seemed to weigh just a touch heavier about his fists meant that he was much fresher, relatively speaking, and that this situation was getting to him- likely over the similarities to Harry’s trial, based on what I’d been told about it so long ago.

“I believe,” I said, drawing the eyes of the people present (and a twitch from the Merlin’s ink-stained fingers), “that Warden Luccio mentioned something about paperwork for my father being present as a character witness, or something to that effect?”

“No paperwork of that sort has come to my notice,” said the Merlin, more than a little smugly, but not quite so smugly that I would expect there to be foul play involved- at least from his end.

“Then it appears that we have a problem, since either Captain Luccio was waylaid before she could do so- an outcome that I find highly unlikely- or there is someone in your bureaucracy who intervened.” If I could remember the names of any of the spies in the White Council about this time, I would have dropped them, but I was still an apprentice at that point, and Klaus had done his level best to keep me away from that sort of thing. Some of it naturally got to me- I didn’t have nearly as much trouble with the world throwing big events at me as Dad or the other Knights, but I had my fair share of misadventures- but not enough that I would have known any of their names, and even the fact that I could perfectly remember everything that had happened to me since I was born in this life didn’t help, since it didn’t work on my memories of the future-that-wasn’t.

The Merlin’s nostrils flared. “That is immaterial to the case at hand! You are a suspected Warlock, breaker of the Sixth Law of Magic, and one who has tampered with the paperwork archives of the White Council!”

“I have done none of that,” I said, resisting the urge to fold my arms as I withdrew my wings into my back, “and I would be willing to perform a Soulgaze with Wizard McCoy to prove it.”

There were, strictly speaking, other ways to get the Merlin to back the hell off, but the walls had ears in a sometimes literal sense down here, and invoking the Moonmaiden or the Watchman would both draw far more attention than seeing the expression on the Merlin’s face as he realized what he was messing with here was worth. Hell, even just mentioning the Forge to Rashid was a risk, even though I knew damn well how good he was at information security. That aside, I had the best measure of the Blackstaff (aside from Rashid, but he had very deliberately made the choice not to Soulgaze me in the cell, and I would respect that), and I was willing to trust him with the measure of myself.

The Merlin frowned thunderously, and I could hear Lash taking in a slow, worried breath, but Ebenezar seemed to age ten years in so many seconds, the wrinkles seeming to appear as if from under a veil. “You sure, girl?”

In response, I raised my eyes to meet his, and after a moment, the Soulgaze began.

Just as I expected, the centerpiece of his world was the Blackstaff. Almost seven feet of pitch-black wood, with a thorny vine design all but indistinguishable from the rest of the wood to anyone who lacked supernatural vision, the entire world seemed to bow towards it. It was contained within a burnished steel pentagram inlaid on the ground, the same design that Harry favored as a symbol of magic- or at least, it had been, at one time. Now, it was sprouting roots that were burrowing under it, causing the well-ordered symbol to warp under the influence of Mother Winter’s walking stick- not by much, mind, but as I watched, the implement pulsed, and one of the thicker roots swelled.

Hung from the staff, and seeming to almost hold it back, were a handful of items. A silver pentacle with a small ruby set into the middle, tarnished and with spots of rust on the chain; an eye patch made of what looked like gold at first glance, whose edges left miniscule gashes in the black wood as it swung back and forth in a phantom breeze; a woven band with a pattern that matched what I’d seen Listens-To-Wind wearing when he wasn’t in robes, sun-bleached and fraying around the edges but not even close to failing yet.

After a moment, I recognized them as tokens of people McCoy knew and held as friends. The pentacle was… probably a representation of Dresden and his mother, to a degree, and the band was easy to identify, but the patch-

Well. That could have belonged to either Rashid or Old One-Eye (or both- it wasn’t likely, mind, but it wasn’t impossible either), and I wasn’t sure which would be the bigger deal.

The symbol of Ebenezar McCoy’s office vanished as if it had never been there- which, of course, it hadn’t, being only a symbolic representation of his deepest essence laid bare to her as interpreted through her own preconceptions and mindsets.

The man in question on the other hand, was standing there, his mouth just open enough to betray the level of utter shock he was experiencing.

Mechanically, he raised his hand up to press at his eyes, and when he lowered it, I could see grim resolve in the set of his jaw. “She’s no lawbreaker.”

Chapter Text

Ebenezar McCoy was not accustomed to being shocked.

Once upon a time, that had been his life, but he’d spent blood, sweat, and tears getting to where he was now, and he’d seen more than his fair share of shit in his day.

From Kemmler’s carnage, both in the Wars and otherwise, to the worst excesses of the Black Court, before Stoker published Dracula, to even the aftermath of his own handiwork, especially in New Madrid, he was no stranger to grim tidings, and dealing with the Sidhe as well as other, stranger denizens of the Nevernever, he considered himself a worldly wizard- nothing on Rashid, of course, but he had more than a few miles on his soul.

What he’d seen reflected through Molly Carpenter, though, made him feel like that snot-nosed kid looking up at the corpse of the Rawhead that the Wardens had just managed to save him from.

The past that trailed in her wake like so many speed lines told a tale worse than his own would, he’d wager- well over a decade of the Red Court nibbling away at the White Council and their allies until they were torn from the world entirely, only to leave a gaping hole for other, less civilized threats to crawl into like so much gangrene.

One threat after another after another, the darkest stories known to mankind dredging themselves up to the point that Winter itself seemed almost angelic, and then…

Simple chance took its toll, as it always did. They had to win each and every time just to survive, but they only had to lose once for it all to be over.

He was one of the few Wizards who was aware of the true purpose of the Archive, and the fact that she was so thoroughly taken out of commission that even a single Elder God was capable of making planetfall, of smashing through the metaphorical masquerade that kept magic and all the other things that went bump in the night away from ordinary people and costing them the entire Oblivion War… Well, that was the kind of thing that got even the Webweaver, or at least the shadow of her that this young lady carried with her, to not push her luck and throw in on their side, inasmuch as reality was a side.

Hell, given that it was Nicodemus himself that killed her, it was entirely possible that it was either the Shadowmaster, the Temptress, or even the Morningstar himself that sent her back to now. Either way, it sure as shit wasn’t mortal magic that had her standing before them, and the massive thing behind her… he had to check in the journals, but if it was what he thought it was, they just might have a fighting chance after all.

“She’s no lawbreaker.”

Rashid gave him a grim nod, hearing those words- he probably knew part of the score, then. Good. He’d need help to handle things on the Council while they called in every marker they were owed and then some, and he’d gladly take the closest thing they had to a spymaster on that front.

The Merlin, on the other hand, looked almost disappointed, which to be honest, Ebenezar couldn’t give a good goddamn about, not with how he’d treated first his Maggie and then Harry. “There is still the matter of the interference in our paperwork archives-”

“That,” said Rashid, carefully, “is a matter beyond the Council’s remit. In any case, we have much more pressing issues than needlessly prosecuting one girl who has already armed three of our Wardens out of the goodness of her heart, let alone since she lives with a Knight of the Cross.”

Injun Joe spoke up next, looking at the girl in a curiously birdlike manner. “You are free to go, Miss Carpenter, and on behalf of the entire Council, you have our apologies for the nature of the situation.

She nodded, then ripped open a portal, almost like a Way but shrouded in bluish-purple light that played eerily over the quarried stone of the Hidden Halls. Before she stepped through, she turned to him and made direct eye contact. “Eb. You need to tell Dresden about the stick and about Maggie, before he figures it out on his own.”

“Young lady,” Ancient Mai replied, while Ebenezar was too busy having the breath punched out of him by those words, “you should be more careful with the secrets of the Senior Council, and to propose to offer them up to a Warlock who hasn’t truly repented his crime- it’s unthinkable!”

Her eyes flashed silver for a moment as her jaw tightened. “Trust me,” she said, “it’s safer for him to know.” She snorted, as if something funny had occurred to her, and her lips slanted up into a sardonic smile that was a carbon copy of his grandson’s. “Besides, when I come from, he was in line for Luccio’s command spot, once she retired.” With that, she stepped through the portal, which winked out behind her.

That, he could see, if only for how much shit his lineage had been pulled into historically. Hell’s bells, Harry was already getting a good start on that, between Archleone and that mess with the Summer Lady.

Of course, convincing everyone else of that was another story, but Joe and Martha at least looked like he was willing to entertain the idea, and he was pretty sure that Rashid would agree just because Harry was Starborn.

Seeing Arthur looking like he was chewing on a lemon was just a little extra incentive.

Once I was back in the (freshly updated- I’d have to chat with Aine and see what, exactly, being combined with a Forerunner luxury liner had changed and what we couldn’t do to it to make it better) Future Witness, I didn’t even think, I just beelined right for the captain’s chair and plopped down, dropping my head right in my hands.

“I thought that went rather well, m-Molly,” Lash said, sounding  almost sheepish for a moment before she regained her usual calm confidence. “Certainly better than most sessions of the White Council that I have been privy to, over the years.”

“Yeah, me too.” I ran one hand through my hair and found myself wondering if I could make myself a cup of coffee good enough to keep me running through the interrogation that Mom was going to have for me once I got home. “Hey, is there something you can do so that Aine can hear you speak too? Want to loop her in on things and she’s probably going to be a little bit confused just hearing one side of the conversation.”

“That would be much appreciated, Dr. Carpenter,” came the reply from the corridor leading off the bridge, where the yellow-glowing eye of Aine’s Monitor platform was hovering into view.

“I may be able to…” she trailed off, then, with a sound like someone dropping a guitar, an image of her shimmered into being next to me.

She had kept the almost golden-blonde hair, which was almost washed out in the wan light illuminating us through the bridge’s windows- no, it wasn’t just the shade of the light outside. Somehow, she was using moonlight to project an image of herself.

I could all but hear the way that Aine had to reboot her processors, throwing out a solid chunk of her understanding of reality and magic, as she projected a human-sized hologram of her preferred avatar. To be fair, this time last week, I probably would have as well, but it’s amazing how fast that waking up in your fourteen-year-old body with phenomenal cosmic power running through your veins can inure one to upheavals in their worldview.

As I set that aside, I was looking more closely at the image of her, both in reality and in the place the Forge had carved out for itself in my soul, and with the benefit of perfect memory, I could see how she’d been changed almost in time with me.

Her eyes were no longer the summery green they had been, seeming to almost glow with violet light in the instants after she blinked before fading back to a bluish purple color, and her hair appeared just a touch more feathered as it cascaded down her shoulders. At the same time, her musculature seemed more defined, and whereas before she stood with what seemed to be the ineffable beauty of a mountainside, there was a hint of deadly grace in the way she held herself now that had been absent earlier.

Overall, she looked more… organic, less like a marble statue that one of the Greeks would have declared to be more beautiful than Aphrodite and gotten cursed over and more like something that the random lottery of human genetics could conceivably have produced, if only just.

“Lash,” I said, falling back on basic courtesy, “this is Aine, AI and as far as I’m concerned XO on the good ship Future Witness. Aine, this is Lash…” I took a moment, trying to figure out how to describe her. “She’s harmless, mostly.”

“In the same way that a spiked pit is harmless.”

“That sounds like a not-so-rigidly defined area of doubt and uncertainty.”

They both spoke at once, Aine commenting on Lash’s harmlessness and Lash… making a reference to the same book I was referencing, and then shot each other wary looks, two housecats eyeing each other to see if they could deign to coexist or if one or the other of them would have to be dealt with. It almost reminded me of the way that Mom got with Daniel’s girlfriends, whenever he brought them around. More often than not, it was oil and water, but every now and again-

“I look forwards to working with you,” said Lash, lips tugging up into a smile. “I shall do my best to constrain my potential for harm to sports car levels.”

“Likewise,” said Aine, shooting me a look that could have given Lara Raith a run for her money in terms of sheer smugness.

-they’d get on like a house on fire, and that would rapidly become everybody’s problem.

In Charity’s opinion, she could be forgiven for being less than on the ball this week.

Gregor had all but beaten the fear of drawing the attention of the Wardens into his cult, and given how… circumspect… her parents had been about the prospect of law enforcement becoming aware of them, not to mention how her older brother had liked to taunt her with the prospect of the police showing up if she was naughty, back when both of them still lived at home-

Well. Suffice it to say that, in some ways, she hadn’t grown past that glossy-eyed twelve-year-old girl being wowed by a cult leader in an alleyway behind a movie theater.

All that to say that some part of her, when she heard that her daughter was willingly handing herself over to the Wardens, she found herself teetering between a sobbing breakdown and running out to shake sense into Molly.

The fact that the Wardens couldn’t really execute Molly, not without getting… whoever or whatever Selûne was on their case, was cold comfort for her, assuming that they even knew she existed. Even accounting for how exaggerated the stories that Gregor had told them about the Wardens had to be, she couldn’t help but fear for her life, despite the fact that Molly’s execution would cause problems with one of the few forces in the world explicitly charged with safeguarding the people therein- possibly more than one, depending on how much umbarage the Archive would take to the White Council unilaterally executing a Venator, let alone one with as much unique knowledge and power as Molly- she was still worried.

And when Charity Carpenter was worried, she took it out on red-hot steel (or with a kitchen knife- she could only afford to spend so much time in her forge in a given day, after all).

She didn’t hear the soft sound of a portal whooshing open in the middle of the kitchen, nor the door opening to let Molly out into the backyard.

She did hear when her daughter knocked on a single solid breastplate, producing the kind of resonant sound that reverberated through the room, almost like she was standing inside a church bell.

She felt the metal bar she was holding onto deform briefly, as her hand on the tongs tightened, then cast both it and the hammer aside and rushed her daughter, dragging her into a hug that would have had them both hearing bones creak, this time last week.

“I was so worried about you,” she said, not allowing the tears to fall. “When I heard you were going to go off to face the White Council, even with your father’s help, and then he hasn’t even left yet…” She trailed off rather than let her voice break.

“Arthur Langtry,” said Molly, “is exactly the hidebound, prideful old man he’s always been. Even so, he wasn’t capable of convincing the entire Senior Council to have me executed, despite the lack of Dad’s inimitable presence to… remind him to be honest, as it were. Speaking of, I’ll have to put together a fruit basket to thank Harry’s mentor for helping with that…” She trailed off, then shook her head. “Right, thoughts for later. Point is, I’m not under Damocles’ sword, and it’s about time we started making that everyone else’s problem.”

Molly gave a fierce, almost vindictive smile, the kind that Charity had seen many a time on her father’s face when he thought she wasn’t looking. “This ride isn’t over yet, and we’ve got more than a little hot rodding to do before we can be ready to keep up with everyone else.”

Charity was not proud to admit that, for just a moment, she was tempted to tell Molly no, to demand that she set aside her talents as she had and remain out of the moonlit world that so very nearly took her own life as it had so many others. But… Molly had done good in the world in the last week. She had saved both the Warden, Yoshimo, as well as Shiro, and in the process deprived Nicodemus of Saluriel, one of the oldest of his coterie and arguably the greatest spellcaster of all the Denarians. On top of that, they had been charged with safeguarding the world from the worst of the old gods by the Archive, a girl with if anything a heavier burden than even the Knights bore.

“Much is required from those to whom much is given,” Charity muttered under her voice, firming her resolve. Then, louder, “So we do, my daughter. So we do.”

End of Book One

Chapter Text

Karrin Murphy had, until now, ignored the odd sensations and small changes that had been coming in over the past handful of months.

In her defense, it wasn’t anything particularly notable- she was waking up more rested than usual, for example, or she had moments of pins and needles, or numbness that came out of nowhere. She wasn’t a spry twenty-something anymore, though, and all that that got her to do was to spend a little more time on her stretching and warm-ups, trying to make sure she kept in… well, not necessarily top condition, but to stay as limber and capable as she could for as long as possible.

The way that it almost sounded like she’d made like the crocodile from Peter Pan and swallowed a clock from time to time, especially when she was at the office, that was weird, but something easy to overlook because, more often than not, there was a nearby clock to blame for the sound. Likewise, the way that her night vision had improved to the point where she sometimes forgot to turn on the lights in her office at the beginning of the day was something else easy to rationalize away, to dismiss as a result of getting too used to night patrols and doing paperwork by streetlights.

Had things gone on like this, it was possible- likely, even- that she would have continued unaware of the way the Weave had touched her for well over a year.

Instead, one autumn night, she closed her eyes only to be confronted with her worst fears and every failure she managed to scrape through by the skin of her teeth. Faith Astor, dragged under a bridge by a troll, no Harry in sight and the barking of her service pistol failing to so much as dissuade the creature from its fell work. Carmichael, covered in blood and vacant, dead eyes somehow screaming an accusation at her. Micky Malone, wasting away in a padded room, catatonic half the time and screaming his lungs out the other half, all while the guy who did it got off scot-free, laughing until he turned to her and-

Karrin Murphy shot upright in bed, hair plastered to her head with sweat, fists half-clenched as if to try and pry a pair of clutching hands from around her throat, crying out wordlessly for help.

From deep within her, nascent magic reached out, and, having finally made a connection to the Weave, flared to life. For a brief moment, the two different halves of the magic seemed to fight each other- the perfect clockwork order of Law grinding as it met the shadow that touched all the victims of the Nightmare. Then, the two settled into an uneasy truce, neither one attempting to destroy the other, instead both taking up residence within her soul.

All of this happened in the bare instants between Karrin Murphy strangling her cry and the Weave responding to her call, directed by that place where the soul met the subconscious.

From the shadows of the moonlit room, there emerged a four-pawed creature, given the same rough shape as an Irish wolfhound but nearly double the size. In its chest rumbled a noise halfway between howl and growl, restrained only for consideration of Murphy’s hearing in the confined space, and its fangs shone bone white against the charcoal-black of its fur as it sniffed around the room, looking for whatever threat elicited such a response from its master.

At the same time, there was a sound like a massive clock’s gears clicking over to the next hour, and from the nightstand that Murphy kept her alarm clock on, a spark of light tumbled forth. Touching the ground, it unfolded with a sound of metal on metal, revealing a massive suit of animate armor, managing to stand two or three inches above Harry Dresden’s daunting height as it clenched its fists.

The construct and the hound shared a wary glance before looking around the room, still combat-ready, but slowly relaxing as they saw no threat was present.

Karrin, on the other hand, tensed up at the presence of unfamiliar, clearly magical intruders in her bedroom, and it was only the fact that the both of them had set themselves between her and the exits to the room as they scanned for threats that didn’t have her trying to fight them off on her own, which would have been… ill-advised.

As the sleep-fog cleared from her brain, she could feel a connection between herself and both of them, woven from reality itself, and that just raised more questions.

After more than a little mental grumbling, she rolled out of her bed, padding on not-quite-silent feet out of her room and into the kitchen and the phone that lay within, with both the armored construct and the hound trailing after her like a rather exotic honor guard.

She wasn’t, strictly speaking, supposed to be calling this number outside of normal business hours, but given the circumstances she felt more than justified in ringing him now- and, from the way that the voice on the other end was interrupted by the sound of slurping coffee, he wouldn’t hold it against her too badly, if he was already up (or still up, as the case may be).

“Dresden,” Murphy said, holding back a yawn. “I need to pick your brain on something.”

“I don’t… actually know what’s going on here,” Harry said, scratching his head.

“Start with magic, and then go from there,” said Karrin, halfway tempted to give in to the dog’s begging and start petting him despite the fact that a dog’s greatest weapon, its eyes, were completely indistinguishable from the rest of its fur visually.

“I mean. Yeah, it’s obviously magic, but it’s not anything I’ve ever heard of, ever. The dog, it… maybe it’s related to the whole churchyard grim thing they’ve got over in England, but too many things don’t line up for that to be the case. It’s obviously bound to you, not a graveyard, and from what I can tell with what I brought,” he said, gesturing vaguely to a handful of things that looked like he’d gone into some ungodly mix between a new-age crystal shop, a crime lab, and a noir detective’s office straight off the silver screen and picked them up at random, “it’s almost pure shadow magic, no attendant necromantic working and only the bare minimum of actual spirit present. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was basically running off your idea of what a dog is like, or maybe a dog spirit called from the Nevernever. But none of that quite fits- there’s no matter called up from the Nevernever like a spirit would use, and it’s… well, no offense, but it’s too uncanny valley to be your feelings on what a dog is.”

Karrin raised an eyebrow before getting down on one knee and burying both hands in the dog’s fur. It felt… well, perhaps a little bit more bristly than she’d expected, and cool to the touch, but otherwise, it felt like a normal dog, and just like a normal dog, getting scratchies set its tail to going thump thump thump on the floor.

“I don’t notice any difference,” she said, deadpan, and was rewarded with a sigh of exasperation.

“The… construct? Golem thing? Whatever it is, that’s a whole lot simpler to understand and a hell of a lot scarier if someone figures out what the fuck it’s doing. It’s basically managed to change the rules of reality, make air act like… steel, I think, and it’s hot enough to boil water just from sticking its hand in a pot of the stuff.” He shakily raised the cup of coffee she’d graciously made for him to his lips, and was disappointed to find out that he had, in fact, already finished it.

“So… what kind of implications are we looking at, here? Don’t you wizards change the rules of reality all the time?” Karrin was pretty sure that something about this whole situation was really getting to him, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Not like this we don’t.” He set the mug down with a heavy clink on the coffee table. “It’s like someone using the Chernobyl reactor to boil their kettle to make tea. It’s overkill, and it’s the kind of thing that, if the wrong kind of person manages to get their hands on this, might actually end up ending the world.”

“Well, shit,” Karrin said, halfway tempted to bury her face in the dog’s fur and scream until she was ready for more coffee. “Please tell me there’s good news.”

“I’m… reasonable sure it’s not you actually doing it? It’s something else a lot older, and a lot better at this than the entire White Council put together, and it’s been doing this sort of thing since before we crawled out of the ocean, you’re basically just putting in an order through a vending machine and it’s spitting it out.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Which is a different flavor of terrifying, but at least we don’t have to worry about anything going wrong if they’ve got this much pratice actually doing the spell.”

“That’s something,” Karrin replied, squeezing the dog and getting a gentle chuff in response.

“Yeah, it is.” He frowned. “I’ve seen this kind of thing before, too, it’s just… I’m not talking with Eb, Molly’s probably asleep, and I have no idea how to get in contact with the Archive to ask her questions about this kind of thing.”

The dog gave one soft bark, drawing both Harry’s and Karrin’s attention, and by the time that they followed where it was pointing its nose, the suit of armor was dissolving with the sound of a clock tolling midnight.

“Well, that’s a relief,” Harry said. At Karrin’s askance look, he elaborated: “Look, while I would definitely get a lot out of more in-depth examinations of the actual arcane construct and how it’s almost completely separate from everything we know about magic, it’s the kind of thing that could very easily be used by someone less scrupulous. The dog is less of a worry, since it’s a more known quantity in terms of magic, but-”

The landline rang, interrupting, interrupting Harry. He gave her a confused look, which she replied to with a shrug before getting up and padding over to the phone and picking it up. “You’ve reached Karrin Murphy, can I help you?”

“Miss Murphy,” came a little girl’s voice, one that wouldn’t have been out of place in the halls of Parliament if it hadn’t been so audibly young. “I’ve heard that you and Mister Dresden have been having some complications related to a new canine companion, as well as the… mystical powers you find yourself burdened by?”

“Who are you, and how do you know that?” Murphy could feel the gooseflesh rise on her arms, and both Harry and the dog seemed to react in one way or another to that.

Harry shoved himself to his feet, surprisingly quietly for such a tall man, and strode over to where he’d rested his staff against the wall, taking it up in both hands and causing the runes carved in it to glow with actinic light. The dog, meanwhile, stood up and started sniffing the room, hackles up and fangs slightly bared.

“I am the Archive. I believe Mister Dresden might have mentioned me?”

“Harry,” Karrin said, lowering the handset so that the mouthpiece was muffled into her shoulder. “Who or what is the Archive?”

“Is that who’s calling?” Getting her nod, he relaxed, putting his staff back down. “She’s on the up and up. Ivy’s… basically the repository of all human knowledge, and if she’s calling to offer any I’d suggest you take her up on it.”

“Why the hell does she sound like she isn’t in middle school yet?”

“Uh. Probably because she’s not old enough to be yet?” Under the heat of her glare, he flinched. “I don’t actually know myself, so I’m not holding anything back… oh, right. She is invited to Carpenter family dinners, for some reason.”

“Oh.” Michael was a better person than both of them put together, and anyone the man would give an open invitation to come over for dinner damn well would have earned it. “Why didn’t you lead with that?”

He opened his mouth to reply, but she’d already raised the handset back to her ear. “My apologies, miss Ivy. What was it that you wanted to talk about?”

“The power that you have been burdened by.” A chill ran down Karrin’s back at this. “To be touched by a being composed of primordial shadow is not easy, but being empowered by a fraction of the cosmic order… it is not for the faint of heart. There are very few who know the full breadth of the world you walk in who would fault you for choosing not to take up the metaphorical sword.”

Karrin swallowed her first, angry reaction at the perceived statement of doubt. The Archive was probably more aware than anyone what kind of burden it would be, and it was likely meant as a warning more than anything else.

Still, she hadn’t stuck with SI for all this time to knuckle under at being promoted to an actual contender, so she firmed both her jaw and her resolve as she responded.

“I’m sure, Ivy. This is my fight.”

“Well then,” said the Archive, a smile just about audible in her voice, “welcome to the side of the angels.”

Chapter Text

The life of the Archive was a lonely one.

From before she was old enough to actually remember thinking about it, Ivy had been aware of the tremendous burden that had been levied upon her. She was more than just a mortal, and yet at the same time, much less than one- she was a crucial part of the Oblivion War, the one who held the line between the worst of the Old Gods slumbering deep in the Nevernever (or worse, Outside) and all the peoples of the world, but at the same time she was held apart from humanity by dint of the power that she bore to fulfill that purpose.

She could remember every moment of that duty, from the very first instant that the arcane construct that would become the Sentinel in the Shadows unfolded into the soul of its poor first host, who never understood what was happening before her untimely death, up until today, and every moment in between, for good and ill.

Most of the time, it was for ill- a child’s neurochemistry wasn’t supposed to develop with such an incredible breadth of memories and concepts available to them, and were it not for the incredible mental and mystical fortitude that the mantle of the Archive gave her, she likely would have been either a gibbering mess or a Warlock to surpass Kemmler and all his heirs’ worst nightmares combined.

Then again, the same could be said of every Archive before her- the weight of such a hefty responsibility wasn’t anything to scoff at, even for an adult who had been prepared for it by the best of humanity’s knowledge, even that which had been lost when the wielders of the Celestial Forge or Grimoire’s lives were cut short, and it was only through the incredible power that had gone into the creation of the Archive that it lasted long enough for the dearly departed Merlin to maintain and improve it.

All this to say that, as a result of their duties, Archives throughout history tended to isolate themselves, one way or another.

Oh, sure, there were some whose companionship the Archive sought out across multiple lifetimes, but that was much more pragmatic than any attempt at a conventional interpersonal connection, even as such things existed amongst the longer-lived beings in the world.

Kincaid was almost as much a concession to pragmatism as he was anything else- he’d first entered the Archive’s service under Ivy’s grandmother’s tenure, and although he was the closest thing that Ivy had to a father, he’d initially only stuck around for the fact that his contract was to the Archive, not to a specific host. If not for that… well, Old One-Eye or the Gatekeeper would have been willing to lend their support, but that would both be less supportive on a personal level and more expensive, both in the short term and the long term.

It wasn’t their fault, of course, but… well, it was only natural that a god running an afterlife as well as an international corporation or the man standing shoulder to shoulder with Winter against Outside would be less able to raise a child than a man who was being paid solely to do so.

Still, for all that she enjoyed when the man ruffled her hair and the like, he was… limited in what support he could offer her, especially as the man’d never shown any inclination towards becoming a Venator.

“You okay over there?” the man asked from where he was seated at the hotel room’s desk sketching out plans for a potential firearm to sell off to manufacturers. “That’s the fourth or fifth big sigh you’ve had since you sat down.”

Seeing as she’d sat down perhaps five minutes ago, his concern wasn’t unwarranted. “Entirely too much logistical information from the Red Court,” Ivy lied. “Knowing it is a necessary evil, even if all we can afford to do is pass it through to the Fellowship of Saint Giles, but the sheer clinical brutality they employ… it still turns the stomach.”

He grunted. “Well, let me know if you want some tea or something.”

“Thank you very much,” she said, keenly feeling the gulf between the two of them. “I will…”

She trailed off as Kincaid raised his hand and sniffed twice, then drew one of the handguns he made sure were always within reach. “Who are you and why are you here?”

From a shadow cast by the bed emerged a tall woman, pale of face and dark of hair. She was clad in flowing robes the likes of which the White Council would have gladly accepted within their hallowed halls, and the only physical thing that distinguished her from an ordinary human was her eyes, twin expanses of deep purple with black voids yawning in the middle.

Mystically, though, she was all but unmistakably a deity.

The entire room seemed to be pulled towards her by the sheer weight of her presence, and with her standing there, the lamp flickering in the corner seemed to be greatly diminished. Belted at her side underneath her robes was a three-foot-long rod of gold, capped with an intricately cut emerald that seemed to be crackling with dark lightning under Ivy’s more esoteric senses. Despite her power, the kind of power that would eclipse an archangel, the world stood firm, and in fact her presence seemed almost to be bolstering the fabric of reality.

“I am Shar, Nightsinger and sister of Selûne,” she said, impressing the absolute truth of the statement into the world, “and I am here to offer protection, preparation, and partnership to the Sentinel in the Shadows.” She inclined her head to Ivy.

With the truth of her offer so readily apparent, to both Ivy and Kincaid, who was lowering his gun… well, there was only one thing she could say.

Besides, she was lonely enough to take the goddess up on her offer even if she wasn’t on the up and up.

“I accept, thank you very much.”

Mab received no warning of the goddess’ presence until she spoke.

“You look… lonely,” came a voice like wind rustling autumn leaves, and Mab whirled on the uninvited guest within Arctis Tor, one hand rising to rebuke the one who would presume-

That was no goddess. It was to someone like Apollo or even Odin as Mother Winter was to Maeve.

She eschewed the impeccable beauty that most gods and Sidhe preferred, appearing as nothing more than a slightly plump matron, baring wrinkles that spoke to kind smiles, striking bone structure that the weight of seeming decades of hearty living didn’t quite conceal, and dark hair that was graying. The only inhuman aspect to her form, aside from the way that she seemed illuminated by a circle of moonlight, was her eyes, an unearthly green color concealing secrets that no mortal woman could endure.

“What are you?” Mab rasped warily, still drawing up all the power she could muster in response to this invasion of her realm, for all the good it would do her.

“I am the Moonmaiden,” she said, and there was more in that than any mortal communication could offer. She was the firstborn of Ao, a creator goddess, one half of a pair of sisters intertwined far closer than Mab and Titania could dream, the Sisters-Who-Were-One, and, perhaps most importantly, a protector, she who revealed the evil skulking in the night and then put it to the sword.

“My lady,” said Mab, inclining her head to the goddess of the moon.

“There is no need for that, Majesty. Selûne I am, and Selûne I shall remain, so Selûne you should call me.”

“As you say,” Mab replied. She weighed the merits of asking against the possibility of angering the goddess standing in front of her (and for a moment, marveled in the novelty of not being the one who could threaten an impudent petitioner for the first time since before she’d taken up the mantle of Winter Lady, lo those millennia ago) before deciding to ask anyways. “Why are you here?”

“For my daughter,” Selûne said, pride and sadness in equal measure warring for dominance in her voice. “She is… in a position to have common cause with Winter, in time, and I would smooth the way in advance.”

It took Mab a moment to understand what she meant, and then: “The Elder Gates?”

“Just so.” Selûne nodded. “She has seen what would happen should the Outer Gates fall, after the Archive’s task was failed, and she knows what it would cost if the denizens of the Far Realms could break through Winter’s protections and glut themselves on the mortal inhabitants of the world.” She paused for a moment. “Even the Knights of the Blackened Denarius fought on humanity’s behalf, that day.”

Mab’s teeth ground at the insinuation of her failure. “I am not some mewling whelp to be chastised,” she snarled, feeling the loss of control over her fury that made her voice dangerous to mortals creeping up on her.

“I am not here to chastise,” said Selûne, kind where Mab was angry. “I am here to help. And, perhaps, to remind you that, even if you are Sidhe, you are no more immune to isolation than any mortal, no more than any of us who serve under the Watcher.”

The warning, from an immortal who could fight the White God on somewhat even footing, was chilling, even if it took her a moment for her to realize she was speaking of the Overgod and not Uriel. “I shall keep it in mind,” Mab said, fury banked.

“For your sake, I hope you do,” said Selûne, smiling almost sadly. “For all her power and all her talents, Maeve is… unready to take your place, and isolation will kill one such as yourself more readily than most other things.”

Before Mab could respond, Selûne vanished in a shower of moondust, leaving the Queen of Air and Darkness to hold court alone in her stronghold.

Alone, that is, save for a husk of a Knight and her own thoughts.

Donar Vadderung was not particularly fond of secrets.

That is not to say that he disliked keeping secrets, no, far from it. He kept more secrets than most beings could conceive of, both out of a sense of duty and from the potential ramifications if those secrets got loose.

It would be, perhaps, more apt to say that he was not particularly fond of secrets being kept from him. Of course, that prospect was much easier said than done- he had earned himself a great deal of power over his centuries, and with power came the ability to gather, coerce, persuade, and otherwise liberate information that would, in other circumstances, have been inaccessible.

Information such as the nature of the phenomenal, world-changing power incarnated in Chicago not so long ago.

Odin had been the face that he wore most often the last time he sensed a power such as this, but even his younger, less experienced self had understood the base, elemental nature of the world well enough to see how Myrddin changed it by his mere presence- not the man on the White Council, wearing the name like a secondhand cloak that, of all people, Rashid really should have discouraged, but the real, genuine article.

He had borne witness to the power that could shatter continents and decapitate pantheons with so much as an errant thought, had weathered storms in the Nevernever that would have drowned worlds, and, in the end, he had been the closest thing to a witness to his final minutes- him and Rashid, who had arrived on the tail of the Adversary’s catspaw too late to save the master of the Celestial Grimoire, and had to make do with avenging the man. It was he alone who had peered back in time, to behold his greatest student’s betrayal, and then the moment of lucidity that she’d been allowed afterwards, released from the Adversary’s grasp just long enough to understand the fell work her hands had been bent towards before it subsumed her back into itself.

After seeing that… Well, he couldn’t stand to strike Nimue down, not with the sliver of a chance that the witch that she had been before could be rescued from the Adversary and returned to the service of humankind.

During her internment in Myrddin’s island-prison, he had tried a great number of solutions, not least among them half-shattered relics that remained from the time before the White God had scoured the Earth clean to protect it from the Adversary’s control over the Celestial Forge through its host, but those he could find all failed to unearth the woman beneath the Outsider.

Still… those were all from before, when the world-changing power of the Celestial Forge hadn’t Chosen a new champion to act upon the world.

With the kind of power that could eclipse even Merlin’s, in time, once again acting upon the world… well, that might break them out of their slow slide towards defeat in a way that even Mab’s gambit with the Blackstaff’s grandson couldn’t come close to.

As Odin rose from where he sat behind Donar Vadderung’s desk, he left just enough of himself  to command his corporate empire and direct the forces of Asgard and Valhalla. The rest of him, swathed once again in the traveling cloak that he’d worn for so long over the centuries, departed his office, pausing just long enough to nod to Huginn and Muninn where they sat behind their own desks, seemingly nothing but mortal secretaries, before making for his personal armory.

His first, bloodsoaked instinct was to go right to the heart of the room, the place that all the racks of blades and boomsticks and more besides were built around, and take Gungnir up once more.

After a moment’s thought, though, he discarded the impulse as the impractical idea that that was- if he took up his old weapon again, it would be to use it, and even with the Weave of magic that suffused the world anew, he was not yet so desperate that he would risk the fabric of the mortal plane for the sake of one old man’s bellicose pride.

Instead, he turned to a rack near the stone he’d plunged Gungnir into the last time he set it down, clearly made for twelve swords but only containing three nearly-identical blades, sitting innocuously in their places despite the blood that had been shed by those wishing to set their hands on those black hilts of thunderbolt iron.

He disregarded the blade marked with a coiled dragon at the top of its hilt, instead sheathing the one with an unlidded eye picked out in white on the crossguard in the scabbard that shimmered into view at his hip with the blade’s approach and raising the one with an arrow inscribed where naked steel met hilt.

“Come, Wayfinder,” Odin One-Eye said, slashing the blade down and opening a rainbow-hued rift down to Midgard as he did. “We have us a purpose once more.”

Chapter Text

Maeve had not expected it to be this difficult to find one miserable wyrm.

Antarctica wasn’t out of her prerogative as Winter Lady, of course, but finding out that that was where Geovax had crawled off to with Mab’s blessing had taken more digging than she would have preferred, and between that and the fact that she’d spent months chasing the so-called Great Sage Equal to Heaven around in an effort to find him first, only to realize that he was, in fact, avoiding her… well, she had had to leave much of her duties in the hands of her subordinates, who were barely passably competent at best.

Still, find Geovax she had, and it took only a moment before the ice and snow of the Antarctic glacier opened up a path for her, allowing her to descend below the nominal ground level through a tunnel of bluish ice.

The darkness that swallowed the tunnel once the entrance sealed up was no issue to Maeve, who didn’t even really need her eyes to see, not after that first conversation with N-

Well. Not anymore, and even absent that, she was the Winter Lady, and she could never become lost so deep into this place, locked into a permanently frozen state despite the best efforts of the mortals.

Eventually, though, her supernaturally sure feet started to fail her, first seeking footing on a wrinkle in the ice that wasn’t present that very nearly caused her to stumble, then, more and more, her feet met patches of half-melted ice or even bare stone, slick with melt, that forced her to put in actual effort to avoid losing her footing, something that was very much counter to her expectation.

It was almost as if she was walking into another creature’s sovereign territory, but that was truly preposterous. If Geovax were capable of actually holding territory, the miserable wyrm wouldn’t have begged an allowance from Mab to hold her insignificant court under the Antarctic ice.

Still, as the patches of stone showing through ice became gently flowing water on glacier-eroded bedrock, she could not deny that she was having to rely on her natural grace as one of the Sidhe (as well as the tread of the combat boots she’d chosen to wear with her usual bikini and daisy dukes) rather than her preternatural dexterity in Winter’s domain to keep her footing stable on the slick flooring.

There was no warning as she stepped out into the open air of a massive cavern. One minute she was grumbling about the slickness of the floor, the next moment, she was blinking spots out of her eyes from the sudden transition into sunlight, or at least a reasonable facsimile of it, standing on loamy soil and hearing all the sounds that one would expect out of a prehistoric jungle (and Maeve would know, seeing as how she’d been to more than a few in the depths of the Nevernever). Even the smells were accurate, the earthy smell of the soil matching Maeve’s recollection just as much as the scent of fur and scales and blood.

There was a sound of leaves shifting against each other, accompanied by the approaching sound of serpent-smooth scales on the wind, giving Maeve enough time to turn and face the beast that was about to sign its own death warrant.

It was, as it turned out, not a beast, but a dragonling in human shape. The creature was perhaps five feet in height, clothed in a tunic made out of what looked like shed scales from a Dragon’s underbelly, and vaguely feminine in mien, where its features weren’t sharper than most Sidhe as befit its reptilian nature. Its hair moved too stiffly to be hair as Maeve knew it, and where it parted to expose its ears, they were long, fleshy, and pointed.

It was also far more powerful than Ferrovax, Pyrovax, or Siriothrax would have bothered to make one of their messengers, but Geovax had always been… shortsighted about that sort of thing, Maeve supposed.

“Do you understand language?” Maeve snapped.

Taken aback, the messenger bared its fangs before taking a step back. “I do. Who are you and what is your business here?”

“My oh my,” Maeve purred, all but salivating at the possibility that the denizens here were unaware of their obligations to Winter, and in need of… chastisement. “Do you truly not know the face of your landlady when you see her?”

The creature looked taken aback, before recovering with remarkable aplomb- for a mortal creature, at least. “Allow me to convey you to Geovax, then,” it said, offering one barely-clawed hand to her while rummaging about in the pouch belted at its waist (more dragonscale, which was… extravagant) for something.

“Expeditiously,” she said, giving the servitor a look that clearly conveyed that she was thinking about the rough proportions of meat she would get from butchering its sorry carcass. From the way it flinched, then did so again once she took its outstretched hand, it wouldn’t have made it in Winter- yet more proof of Geovax’s foolishness, not preparing her messengers for completely foreseeable situations that it was likely to encounter. “I am very much in need of a conversation with her, and it does not behoove her to keep the Winter Lady waiting.”

The messenger didn’t flinch, at that point, which was either ignorance or a hardy bearing, and its other hand emerged from the pouch holding a handful of powder impregnated with magical energy. It hurled the powder to the ground, and with a puff of smoke and a flash of light, they were elsewhere.

Maeve was already halfway to crushing the idiot servitor’s hand before she realized that they were merely teleporting, which was rare but not entirely unheard of, but for its temerity in doing so without asking permission, she snapped two bones in its hand, leaving it to cower away, skulking to the edge of the clearing like a rat that lacked the sense to avoid the first trap.

Set in the center of the clearing was a chair grown out of a tree, some variety of ironwood were she to guess, the first halfway respectable show of power in this whole wretched place. Seated in the chair was a brown-skinned woman almost twelve feet tall, lush of body and of hair, seeming to almost radiate vitality where she sat. Every inch of her was all but glowing, from her green-gold hair to her feet, bare and covered with soil, and everything in between, covered by a chiton that was too white to be something she wasn’t using arcane power to keep clean- a statement of strength, that she could afford to cast the spells to keep clean while maintaining this demesne.

In the hollow of her throat sat the reason she came to this place, a gleaming red sphere with a narrow band of gold around its middle, not unlike a belt. The Lifesphere, separated from its fellows as it has been since before Mother Winter established the Winter Court of the Sidhe, hummed with subtle power as it fed into the Dragon’s stores of magical energy, spreading its influence over the whole cavern.

“Queen-To-Come,” she said, almost disapprovingly, as she waved one arm at the messenger and immediately restored her broken bones. “That was not the behavior of a guest, even a sovereign in their own lands.”

“What would you do over it, then?” Maeve taunted, sneering, and took pleasure in the puff of smoke that came out of Geovax’s nostrils. “I have need of the Lifesphere. You will provide it to me, and once I am done, you will see it safely returned.”

Geovax knew, at least in theory, that this Maeve had grown far more capricious than any in living memory. She had not, however, been expecting to be so directly confronted with that fact- even if she was, at least nominally, under Winter’s domain, not even Mab was so brazen as to come into the demesne that she’d created for herself and demand the artifact that made it possible, not least of which because of the recourse she would be forced to grant the Dragon as a signatory of the Unseelie Accords.

“And why,” she said, leaning forwards to make eye contact with the petulant child standing before her throne, “should I do that, young lady? You make it seem as though I should be desperate to bend over backwards and accede to your request, but I see no reason to do so.”

The girl’s face went horribly blank for just an instant before twisting into a rictus of fury. “You dare to defy a Queen of Winter, one who has the authority to deny you the rights to your little experiment down here, to cast it all into darkness and make you endure its freeze?”

“I am a Dragon, child,” she said. “I have lived long enough to have known Mother Winter before she walked with a cane. As far as I am concerned, you are less a queen and more a spoiled mortal princess demanding a bauble that has caught her eye.”

Maeve gnashed her teeth. “I am not asking, worm,” she snapped. “Give me the Lifesphere, and I will deign to return it to you.”

Geovax found herself wishing she could justify taking up a more draconic form, if only for the desire to have a tail to swish back and forth with agitation. “Are you so brazen that you would deny yourself the protections accorded to a guest in my territory? I overlooked your maiming of-” naming the dragonet who had brought Maeve to her would be premature, especially since she was so close to claiming a Name of her own, and worse, expose her to reprisal from Winter in this matter- “-my servant once, child, as a courtesy to a guest, but should you eschew that protection, I will press my claim under the Code Duello.”

“You, offer guest rights to me, in my own territory? Unthinkable!” Maeve’s expression twisted yet again, this time into a cruel smile that Geovax could not, for the life of her, recall seeing on any previous bearer of the Winter Lady’s mantle. “Perhaps you are simply in need of… motivation.”

She gestured, and the dragonet that had brought her was abruptly encased in glass-clear ice, which actively started eating away at the power of her desmene. “Is this sufficient reason to obey?” Maeve asked, glacial claws growing from her fingertips as she strutted over to her. “Have I made you… how did you say it… ah, yes. Have I made you desperate enough to bend over backwards and accede to my request yet? Or will you require further persuasion?”

Geovax held back the twitch that spasmed through this humanoid form’s fingers, preventing it from crushing the arms of her throne, before raising her hand to her collarbone and taking the Lifesphere from where it rested. “You come into my domain uninvited, proceed to threaten me and mine in the process of demanding something that is not yours to demand, and you hide under the shield of your mother’s station to do so. You have made me very desperate, Lady Winter. You might not be glad that you did.”

“La,” the girl said, dismissively, and plucked the ancient gemstone from her hand.

Almost immediately, Geovax felt the strain of maintaining the warmth of the environment directly weighing upon herself, no longer buffered by the raw elemental power of the Lifesphere. Still, she was a Dragon, not some mere lizard with delusions of grandeur, and so she endured.

By the time she returned her attention to Maeve, the Lifesphere had iced over in the girl’s palm, the inner light that Gules radiated refracting oddly through the layer of rime on its surface.

The icy coating shimmered, almost as though Maeve were trying to project some sort of image through it, and her lips peeled back to bare her teeth. “I demand of you,” she said to the sphere, as if that would get her whatever she wanted from it, “show me the Starsphere!”

That made… some sense, if one was new to the search for the lost gemstone, but Ferrovax himself had attempted to use the Lifesphere to scry the location of the Starsphere millennia ago, and he could throw far more power into the process than the Winter Lady. The Lightsphere, that might have been a more viable connection to make, but… well, Ferrovax hadn’t wanted to go to the lengths it would have taken to find it wherever it had gone after the Shield of Seals had been shattered, and even if he had, there was nothing that could be done by combining the five gemstones without the shield itself, which had been lost to history, as far as anyone was aware.

Thankfully, the Winter Lady realized the folly of her endeavor. For a moment, she thought that the girl would take the gemstone with her, but then she opened her hand, dropping Gules onto the ground with a dark look on her face. “I have had what I need,” she said, looking like that was anything but the case. “I shall leave you to enjoy your… quaint little court.”

She vanished in a shower of snowflakes, leaving ice crusted over both the Lightsphere and the dragonet.

Geovax stood from her seat and, in a single stride, crossed the distance between herself and the dragonet. The child held herself very still as her creator slipped inhumanly sharp nails between ice and flesh, and though she may have spluttered as the layer of hoarfrost melted into lukewarm water in the space of a heartbeat, she was at least still alive to trill her gratitude up at Geovax.

The Lifesphere, on the other hand, seemed almost overshadowed, like something from outside this layer of reality was trying to cast a shadow over it, so instead of picking it up, she opened her mouth, felt the rumbling in her throat as it shifted to accommodate the buildup of magical energy, and exhaled a stream of flame cast in the same shades as her hair.

The ice vaporized in a heartbeat, and although the shadow was more stubborn, it was, ultimately, incapable of standing up to the destructive power a Dragon could bring to bear in the heart of her power, surrounded by her hoard.

There was an oily residue on the Lifesphere when Geovax picked it up, the kind of residue that made her whole hand feel defiled, but as she drove her power through Gules once again, the residue vanished, seeming somehow resentful as it disintegrated. Frowning, she breathed out another puff of flames onto the gemstone, but when that failed to do anything, she returned it to its place at her throat, then returned to her throne to think.

Asking Mab to bring her daughter to heel would fail, naturally- if it wouldn’t, she would have been brought to heel long before now, and by someone far more politically important than the recluse who devoted most of her time to her own experiments in her de facto exile.

Likewise, using the Unseelie Accords against Maeve was futile, since their enforcement hinged, primarily, on either Mab or a small number of neutral emissaries, who only had that power during duels.

There were rumors that the Archive had found a new benefactor, although what that would do for her was unclear, and even aside from that, they were only that, rumors.

Sightings of Odin, though, those were verified, not mere rumors, and doubly so with the blood that he left in his wake. More than that, so were the incidences of darker creatures, those who took pleasure in more sadistic, deranged impulses, being found in ungentle repose, lifeless and lit only by a single moonbeam, no matter when they were found.

That spoke to a deity of the moon, one willing to act, and in defense of the downtrodden.

That was the kind of deity, thought Geovax, who could be a great ally, even if only to prevent Maeve from upending her realm out from under her.