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pulpandgristle · 7 months

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V: A CITY ON A HILL

Pilot ID: Matthias Shawcross, third-generation bioframe veteran of the Mourning War

Status: Inactive (Honorable discharge)

Asset Class: Bioframe, bipedal combat model, low-gravity configuration (Deceased)

Site of Asset Decommission: Colony Veritas, Bay of New Antioch aquatic terraforming facility

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Citizen: Intissar bint Yushib

Homeworld: Yushib

Status: Active (Yushib, shore of the Sea of Lilies)

Current Assignment: Field technician, translator and diplomat (Septarchy occupation)

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Begin transmission.

Greetings from the Sea of Lilies. To my comrades in the Periphery, blessings and salutations. To the people of the Septarchy, listen closely.

I am Intissar bint Yushib—Intissar, the daughter of Yushib, the Jewel of Achernar, Shelter at River's End, my homeworld. You would slander Her as "Colony Veritas". I will do Her no such dishonor.

The Septarchy tribunals that discover this message will likely know who I am. I have worked alongside them for many years. If you are listening, Executors, you may consider this my resignation.

I speak today with pride and love. In the name of my mother and all her mothers before her, I hereby renounce my vows to the Septarchy, vows that were extracted from me unwillingly, through pain and coercion, and in their place I choose to bear the banner of Yushib, a free world of the Periphery.

There is an estuary, not far from here, whose shape mirrors the transit of Adila, Yushib's moon. The arc of the river follows naturally into the sea, a near-perfect parabola. My family and I have tended to that estuary for more than two hundred years. My ancestors sculpted its banks to honor Adila in her travels.

Today, I was supposed to demolish that estuary and bury a leviathan in the upturned silt. I will be doing no such thing. That animal will rest, in time, naturally, as all dead things do . . . but not until I am done. Not until there are words as inalienable as the estuary.

Not until you understand.

At this very moment, Yushib is changing. Being changed. Scarred. The Septarchy calls this mutilation "terraforming"; they intend to flood my homeworld's rivers, to call down rains and salts and metals and build a hive for their leviathans atop Her corpse. My family's work will be wiped away along with several million lives if they succeed in this task.

The estuary is a statement. It carries knowledge and intent. During the initial invasions, my people used it and many other landmarks to plot orbital trajectories and cement the paths of celestial bodies as an inalienable truth. Stone carvings could not be disrupted by electromagnetic bursts, and Septarchy pilots were too ignorant to read them.

Today I was the escort of Matthias Shawcross, a perplexing man who I found endlessly fascinating. He had a curious build, mantis-like, dead-eyed, stretched along the spine by years of microgravity exposure. He was one of the Septarchy's heroes. He conquered Yushib astride a weapon too terrible for living memory. He and I were to conduct a burial together.

I have obliged him the burial, at least.

Shawcross was in need of my people's help. His war machine is very sick, you see. It can hardly complete reentry without injury, a pitiable animal by the Septarchy's definitions. With the combined force of earthmoving equipment and targeted kinetic bombardment, we were to put it out of its misery.

I remember him so clearly, watching me from the edge of estuary. He encouraged me, called me words I will not repeat, and held his service weapon with such sickening confidence. Of course, if he had his way, I would have fallen into his leviathan's grave as soon as I had finished digging it.

He was merciful by Septarchy standards. Nowadays there is little need for pretense. Perhaps he was the sentimental type.

This burial would be a claiming of sorts. An annexation in miniature. Septarchy leviathans are unbothered by physical death, and when they become useless they simply cease to move. The mechanisms of urgency and war proceed unbidden, impotent, confined within their hulking shells. They are buried as testaments—and to poison the worlds of the Septarchy's enemies.

Shawcross intended to destroy the path of Yushib's moon with that final gesture. He would destroy the estuary my family has tended to since Earth still spoke to the Periphery, since before my ancestors engineered a dozen calendars to pray to the rhythms of a dozen setting suns, since before my great-grandfather returned to me in the last year of his life, having finished a sixty-year Hajj and come home with only a handful of sand, equal parts Arabian soil and post-nuclear glass.

Septarchy leviathans are poisonous by design. They bleed radiation and oil and solvents and anger, and bullets if they are provoked enough. Man undergoes the same transformation with extra steps, using proxies, animals of rock and plastic that he chooses to call tools. The Septarchy are simply cruel enough to bend thinking creatures to this purpose. The change is unremarkable otherwise.

The Periphery makes no such concessions. Even the inanimate can carry the will of the holy. My plow, my trowel, my mother's knives, these are animals of a type, born from Yushib and Her sisters, hewn out of Her metals and Her plant fibers and Her human attendants. They are engines of potential inspired by mankind's connections to the divine, limitless and undirected and beautiful.

They are not leviathans. They are not bombs. The power to wage war should only be humanity's burden, but the Septarchy have spread that terrible duty to others unfit for the task. They would make the rivers bloodthirsty if they possessed the means. Perhaps they do.

Shawcross called himself intelligent. The Septarchy claims to teach, but I have only kept the pieces that they fused to my people. I have learned a cumbersome dialect whose words fit sharp and unwieldly in my mouth. I have learned that the children of Yushib will not be remembered because we have not done anything worth remembering. I have learned that the Septarchy are bad liars.

I have learned so much about funerals.

When my grandmother passed, it was a special occasion. I think of it happily. Mother taught me the Ṣalāt al-Janāzah and I wore a beautiful gown to the proceedings. There were figs in bloom on the river's edge when we returned her to Yushib. That night, I had them roasted with honey and almonds over dinner. Mother was proud of me.

I will name my daughter after my grandmother when the time comes. Even when I was young, I could not resent her leaving us. That day remains one of the best days of my life, because I was there, and so was she, and now we are together on Yushib. She did not have to see the orbital strikes, to see my mother's body reject a prosthetic hand. To see the mosque burn and crumble under Adila's light.

Every sweet fruit is my grandmother now. It makes me smile.

Mourning is supposed to be clumsy, raw, upsetting but ultimately healing. Colony Veritas has torn that tapestry of feelings apart. There is no organic process now. Even the agony is extracted with ruthless efficiency. Desecrated ashes flung over cliffs. Men dumped from airships into mile-wide ditches. There is no river, no tree to cry underneath.

You have made me an accomplice. My prayers are reduced to tools, to hammers, the enhanced hands of an efficient laborer who works not for rest and family and worship but for the drudgery of more work. I was made into the final link in a chain of predictable, reproducible human disassembly. Yes, he is blessed. Now, he goes.

I remember it so clearly, hearing the hammer click back under Shawcross's thumb.

I pause. He barks another slur, the swine. His settler's words scrape surly and abrasive against the afternoon air. I have missed my midday prayer for this. I tell him so. He shoots me in the gut.

Yes, your pilot betrays me. Yes, he tackles me, threatens to defile me and my world, and yes, I slice open his throat with his own combat knife, clumsily unsheathed and pressed to my belly but reclaimed with a single twisting grasp. He stains my hijab with the hatred and blood and radiation that pours in maroon curtains through his opened self. Yes, he is blessed. Now, he goes.

Next.

The Septarchy would strip Yushib bare. It is just a stepping stone to them, not a Mother, not a Living World, not a jewel placed in the sky for humanity to cherish. In another time, we could have held that jewel together. Perhaps later, in a distant time, we can try again. But not yet. Not while this is the fourteenth burial I have made in three years, and another hundred are yet to come. Not while I have to practice letting go of the dirt so that I can finish burying mother.

I want so badly to mourn, but I have lost all that is inside me to mourn with. The Septarchy has taken even grief from me. I will never forgive that, and Yushib will not either.

My mother taught me well. She said that the universe is a patient judge, and that She is not kind to the guilty.

Your pilot's leviathan still breathes, diseased and weak. Frail. A man, I choose to believe. He wheezes in the dry air.

I stumble to my feet, legs trembling, and fall backwards over the edge of the leviathan's grave. We sound alike, him and I. Two castoffs of empire stuck in another ditch.

As I fall into his cavernous chest, a cockpit gutted for parts until it is raw bone and searching nerves, I think of my grandmother, and her rasping sandpaper laugh, and her shawls, and her holding my mother in all those photos, still so alive and bright and small, and the pastries that the two of them taught me to knead by hand on Eid al-Fitr.

He catches me. I collide with the embrace of another living thing, too weak for contempt, or perhaps too strong for it, even now. The kindness of the act destroys me.

He says I can be healed. I accept, and I weep at my fortune. I have finally learned something of value from the Septarchy.

We will stay together, I think. I intend to return home—my wounds are survivable and besides, mother needs me—but Yushib will decide when. Let the hours come. I trust Her more than anything. The Sea of Lilies can hold the leviathan.

I remember what the Septarchy taught me of the pilots. I have mimicked their rituals in my own time, and the leviathan can see that. I have nestled in him, here, in the estuary, beneath the water, where he can breathe for me and I can keep him company. He weeps too, in his own way. Shawcross wielded him without care. But I am not Shawcross.

The current is warm. The blood is washing out. Slowly.

He feels gentle. I am at peace in him, and he cradles me. Mother cradles me. Grandmother cradles me. Even your leviathans surrender to the land, Executors. My family has stolen this one.

We will not surrender. Not ever again.

The suns will rise tomorrow, my skin will knit closed, and I will live. The leviathan will sleep, patient, simple, and he will live. Yushib will turn for another year. She will always live. Beyond the Periphery, beyond the Septarchy, beyond war, beyond blood, the Jewel of Achernar will shine, a jasper marble in the infinite sea of creation, stronger than all of you. My Mother will live.

My people will live.

Forever.

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autumnalwalker · 3 months

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Empty Names - 22 - Leads

Author's Note: In which we get a recap of what Sullivan's been doing behind the scenes, get a glimpse of some of Road's issues, and witness Sullivan once again confidently make a bunch of incorrect inferences (mixed with a few correct ones) about the people around him. I though this was going to be another short chapter like Sullivan's tend to be, not so much. Too much exposition in the first scene perhaps, but with how long it's been and how scattered some information was, a recap felt useful. Will this is shorter than the utter monster of the previous chapter at least. All that said, there are few segments in this chapter where I really like how they came out. Wordcount: 11,191 Content Warnings: Insomnia. Lightly implied past substance abuse. Lightly implied past self-harm. Disassociation (or something akin to it anyway, please correct me if there's a better word). Invasion of privacy.

<-Previous Chapter Masterpost Next Chapter->

“Have you ever heard of orbital kinetic bombardment?”

Not a phrase a younger Sullivan would have expected to hear from a witch while inside a pocket dimension bound to the soul of an alchemist and fashioned to look like a blend of antique mansion and subterranean grotto. The words taste too much of wires and screens to be spoken of in the same breath as magic. And yet this is a witch who uses a (two decades outmoded) phone as a spellbook and catalyst, the contract for the pocket dimension was purchased at a (manifestation of an ideal) shopping mall, and the alchemist is currently busying himself with configuring a new (to him anyway) computer to synchronize timings on three thermal cyclers, seven centrifuges, and thirteen shakers and mixers of various kinds.

At least the witch’s towering doll dresses the part of gothic faux-antique despite its master’s modern garb of blue jeans and a sweater.

Like it or not, the blending of magic and modern (para)tech is the way things are increasingly moving these days. And accordingly Sullivan, born on a world where the steam engine had not yet been conceived, has adapted in the decades since arriving on this world with all its rapidly-changing wonders. Adapted well enough to make up for his friend’s chronic technological incompatibilities. It helps that he has ever had an appetite for novelty.

So, tasting of charged copper and glass fibers though they might be, the words come naturally to the Sullivan of today when he replies “Of course. It’s when you put a satellite up in orbit and then have it drop something dense down onto the planet so it explodes on impact sheerly from mass and velocity. Elegantly simple mass destruction.” Sullivan’s ever-present smirk grows momentarily genuine at a memory. “Carnette liked to call it ‘casting Meteor.’ Not that she needed a satellite when she could simply summon a rock into the atmosphere from the Oort Cloud.”

The witch - Morgan - adjusts her glasses. “Huh, wasn’t expecting confirmation on the existence of the Oort Cloud today, but yes, that’s the gist of the concept. Based on what I’ve been able to reconstruct over the past few days from the safehouse debris someone pulled a similar drop on us.” She looks over to her arcane doll. “Stella, if you would.”

The doll looks down at its master, gives a nod of affirmation, and then pale green light spills forth from its glassy eyes. The light concentrates into a pair of rapidly scanning beams projecting out onto the sole corner of hardwood floor in the pocket dimension’s living room that isn’t occupied by lab equipment or the luxury furniture hastily shoved aside to make room for said equipment. The beams of light from Stella’s eyes trace shapes in the air and coalesce into a holographic projection of a house about half Sullivan’s height. Detailed brickwork emerges on the house’s surface and color creeps into the projection until it becomes an undeniably recognizable recreation of the now-destroyed safehouse.

“Leave it to a doll to make a dollhouse on demand,” Sullivan comments.

The projection of the house flickers and is replaced by a life-sized recording of Sullivan getting shot six times and then sent flying by a punch to the face. Morgan coughs to cover a snicker and the projection flickers back to displaying the miniaturized house. Stella rotates her wrist clockwise and the house explodes into a cloud of dust, leaving behind the illusion of a debris-filled crater stretching down into the floor. Stella rotates her wrist counterclockwise and the explosion falls back in on itself until the house is restored.

“Before you ask,” Morgan says, “this is the recording Stella took of my reconstruction. I’m not going to invoke extratemporal entities and weave psychometry-fed illusions more than I have to just because I want to review my results.”

“And here I was hoping for a show,” Sullivan purrs.

“Oh, we’ll give you one,” Morgan says.

More hand gestures from Stella and the house explodes again, this time in slow motion.

Morgan glances at Sullivan. “Tell me when you catch it.”

The explosion rewinds. The house is restored. The house explodes, even more slowly this time. Sullivan blinks through filters, sees nothing different, and concentrates harder on simply watching carefully.

The explosion rewinds in slow motion. The cloud of dust condenses and draws back into un-disintegrated bricks. Shattered glass melts back together in window panes. Blasted shingles fall back into place. Something flickers near the rooftop and Sullivan arches an eyebrow.

The house explodes once more, slower still. It starts with a tiny patch of shingles dipping inward around a thin dark line and throwing up splinters. It continues with the windows blowing outward; first the upper flow, then the ground floor. It climaxes with the very foundations quaking and sending a ripple upward through the walls that converts the brickwork to compacted red powder stretched-out milliseconds before sending it all into the sky.

“Back it up to that dark streak impacting the rooftop,” Sullivan says.

Morgan grins. “Good eye.”

The three-dimensional recording rewinds once more, pauses, and zooms in on a glyph-covered grey metal rod hovering above the rooftop.

“And there’s our culprit,” Morgan says. “A single tungsten rod, one meter by one inch, inscribed with a standard perception filter enchantment, and accelerated to several times the speed of sound. And as best as I can tell…” The projection rewinds further, following the rod upwards until the house below is no longer rendered. And then higher still until the rod disappears though a perfectly round, perfectly flat, one-sided opaque circle in the air. “Not quite dropped from orbit, but launched through a downward-facing portal in the sky’s close enough.”

Sullivan lets out a low whistle. “I’d call it an incredible reconstruction, but only in the sense that I hesitate to credit it. This level of detail from a few handfuls of dust and a small stack of rubble? It has to be at least seventy three-percent extrapolated guesswork filling in the blanks. It simply isn’t done.”

“Nor are precision teleports across multiple astronomical units when even summons across multiple alternate universes would be more manageable” Stella’s hollow monotone counters, “and yet you do not hear us casting doubt on the supposed deeds of your dead wife.”

How dare this oversized plaything? Sullivan turns away from it in dismissal and locks eyes with its master.

“You. Are not. The sorceress Bridgewood,” he says flatly. “Do not think to compare yourself to her.”

To the witch’s credit, the terror on Morgan’s face scarcely outlasts her flinch and involuntary step backwards. She recovers with a tilt of her head and adjustment of her glasses to catch the light and hide her eyes.

“So that’s what it takes to wipe that smirk off your face.” she says. “Stella, you can stand down.”

Sullivan flicks his gaze back towards the doll and finds both it and the projected hologram gone. He reflexively produces a knife, sidesteps, and turns to find the construct standing behind where he’d just been, eyes gone dark and full of stars. Stella’s eyes fade back to glassy imitations of a human’s and it returns to its master’s side.

“But really, no disrespect here,” Morgan continues. “I’ll admit the reconstruction has some extrapolative infill, but not as much as you seem to be imagining. I’m sure the sorceress Bridgewood could have done better from less in half the time, but I think you’ll find that compared to anyone else, I am very good at what I do.”

Sullivan allows the spike of anger to ebb. Really, what else did he expect from a witch calling herself Morgan? Pretentious pretenders the lot of them. Nothing he doesn’t know how to handle. Nothing that should be able to get under his skin.

“Very well, but as impressive as this is, it still doesn't tell us anything we didn’t already know about who tried to kill Lachlan. We already knew whoever it is has a large budget, access to high-end paratech, and is good with teleports.”

“But it wasn’t a teleport, it was a portal. Portals can be passed back through.”

“If you’re implying your reconstruction was able to see back through…”

Morgan scoffs. “Oh, I wish. But if we could bait whoever it is to take a second shot at us, well, I know what to look for this time to grab and hold open and you’re a teleporting immortal bastard with a knife fetish. I figure you can do the math on that one.”

“An utterly unhinged plan. I love it. Nonetheless,” Sullivan adds while producing a manilla envelope from a pocket too small to have possibly held it, “it does pay to have some inkling of whose home one is about to invite oneself into.”

“If you already figured out who it was you could have led with that, you know,” Morgan admonishes while taking the envelope.

“Alas, these are only preliminary findings to narrow down the list of suspects. Occupied though I’ve been these past few days with procuring this hideaway, forging you an alibi, and assisting my friend with unrelated cases, I have managed to put out some feelers to various sources of mine. Enclosed, you’ll find photos and specifications of combat robot models and power armor suits, both publicly announced and otherwise, from the major paratech off-world importers and local manufacturers.”

Morgan flips through the contents of the envelope, eyebrow occasionally arching at tech specs and eyelids intermittently squinting at image details, but without any telltale glimmer of recognition.

“I’ll need to take a more in-depth look later,” she says, “but at a glance, none of this looks like what I saw in Lachlan’s memories. Could this have been a government operation?”

“I have enough contacts in that field that I would have heard by now if something relevant were afoot, and even if it were, corporate contracting is the name of the game for weapons development, Backstage or not.”

“And no use running these by Lachlan to verify with that NDA geass on him.”

“Alas no indeed. At best it would only irritate him and at worse it would signal our quarry that he’s still alive. Better to maintain his good graces with reparations of new equipment and material for now should we require his cooperation later.”

The silence of consideration falls and catches on the whir and hum of lab equipment. On the other side of the room, Lachlan busies himself with recreating formulae lost with his previous home while doing his best to ignore the stalled conversation. Morgan adjusts her glasses and takes another look at a blurred photo of a half-assembled robot that was obviously taken illicitly. Sullivan ponders how much more he would have had time to find by now if he’d left more of the information support for other jobs to Lacuna like he hired her to do. Stella abruptly turns and begins walking away toward a sliding glass door.

“I am relocating this conversation to more comfortable environs,” the doll intones.

Sullivan shoots Morgan an inquiring look who meets with a shrug indicating that this is normal behavior before following the curiously headstrong construct outside.

Or rather, what passes for outside in this diminutive pocket dimension, for beyond the sliding glass door and its surrounding facade of wooden paneling is a stone cavern with no exit. A smooth-carved patio stretches to the edge of a self-sustaining aquaponics system cleverly disguised to look as if the fish-filled pools surrounded by rings of edible plants were natural formations within the rock. The illusion is only slightly spoiled by the reflective strips lining the winding paths between the pools that catch the glow of the suspended orb lamps currently dimmed for their night cycle and the bioluminescent crustaceans that crawl the dark ceiling like false stars.

Stella takes a seat at a tall round bar table at the edge of the nearest pool and Sullivan and Morgan join it. No, join her, Sullivan reminds himself begrudgingly. Despite the stereotypically flat affect, he’s yet to find evidence contradicting Morgan’s claim of her doll’s personhood. Curious given the notorious difficulty of constructs - be they digital or arcane - maintaining sapience while on the anchor world where magic is weakened and reality’s rules are stricter. Could there be a ghost haunting that enchanted porcelain shell? Or perhaps a familiar bond extending the mage’s soul into another vessel in a novel manner?

He rubs the blue metal of his wedding band. Carnette would love to take these two apart and see how they work if she were here.

“Now then,” Stella says, punctuating the resumption of discussion with a rolling clack of segmented fingers on ceramic tabletop. “Let us review what we already know. Consort of the sorceress Bridgewood, if you have left anything out, now would be the time to amend that gap. We shall do the same.”

“Go on then,” Sullivan says. “If I hear you’ve missed anything relevant, I’ll let you know.”

Stell nods in acknowledgement and begins.

“Roughly one year ago, Lachlan Whelan, alchemist and occupant of the planar lighthouse near the so-called Northwest Passage Crossover Point, was approached by unknown men wearing suits and sunglasses who coerced him into signing a geass-enforced contract allowing them to install an unknown paratech device in his lighthouse and stay silent about it. In exchange, he received compensation in the form of money, alchemical supplies, and delivery services. He made a point of not observing the deliveries, either in method or in the identity of any potential courier. Relevantly, the Northwest Passage Crossover Point is notorious in certain circles as being a smuggling route for off-world contraband. Approximately three months ago, the individual known as Road returned to this anchor world after an extended absence. You mentioned they were following the trail of a stolen and smuggled artifact of some sort, yes?”

“That’s right,” Sullivan confirms. “A device originating from Dorbreith allegedly capable of binding and controlling lesser deiform entities. Small gods, if you prefer. My friend lost the trail after getting here when the entire smuggling ring the artifact was getting trafficked through was wiped out overnight by an unknown third party who absconded with most of the contraband, including the artifact. Whoever it was, they were thorough enough in scrubbing their tracks that Crossherd’s Department of Forensic Necromancy couldn’t even question the victims’ ghosts or divine anything from the smugglers’ ashes.”

“And that’s when Road recruited you and my niece,” Morgan says.

“Starting up their own little anchor world version of an adventurers’ guild is technically a separate project,” Sullivan corrects her. “‘Tis something my friend was planning on doing eventually anyway. Aside from a lucky coincidence with the first job, everything else Lacuna and the other two recruits have worked on has been unrelated. As far as they know, I’m simply investigating where the dead dragon came from. They haven’t been informed of the larger potential conspiracy, or that I’m currently working with you.”

“And I’d prefer it stay that way. I should be the one to tell her that I’m in the know. How long has she been Backstage?”

“Since just before she started transitioning. Someone broke Masquerade and posted a summoning ritual for a feral demon with a flawed containment circle on mundane forums claiming it could give the ritual caster a new body. You can thank my friend if you ever meet them for keeping her from getting eaten. And for introducing her to her doctor in Crossherd. Autogenesis has been rough on her, but you and I both know how effective Backstage medication and treatments can be.”

Sullivan examines the witch across from him as he talks about her niece. The suppressed gasp. The wide eyes. The anxious neck rub. Shock, yes, but guilt too. Guilt that she wasn’t there for the one she cares about. Guilt that she didn’t see what was wrong in time to help. It’s an emotion Sullivan knows well, and well knows how to make into an asset.

“And no,” he continues, “she’s not doing any dangerous fieldwork you need to distract yourself with worry over. We simply hired her to manage our website and communications equipment. The most danger she’ll ever be in is burning herself on the office coffee machine trying to make hot chocolate. ”

“And is she -”

“A mage? Sadly no. I believe she tried to take up witchcraft shortly after arriving Backstage, but had no potential for it. She is a half-decent enchanter though and I’ve been providing her with the resources to practice that since hiring her.”

“I see. Thank you. For watching out for her,” Morgan says. She looks through Sullivan more than at him when she says it and he can practically hear the unspoken “where I failed to” in her voice. As he intended.

“My pleasure,” he lilts.

“Returning to the matter at hand,” Stella says, “two months ago, the device in Lachlan’s lighthouse emitted a ‘pulse’ of unknown nature that corresponded with the simultaneous entry into the Northwest Passage Crossover Point of a Culescun living ship and a kaiju-class dragon of indeterminate origin, most likely Dorbreith or Mahta. Neither the ship nor the dragon were equipped for inter-world travel, and thus the matter of the ship and the dragon’s head attempted to occupy the same space at the same time, killing the dragon instantly and wounding the living ship in the fusion. A parasitic swarm then left the dragon’s corpse and devoured the majority of the living ship’s crew in the process of making it their new host. Lachlan witnessed this from his lighthouse, had a moment of conscience and called upon Road to make a rescue attempt of any possible survivors.

“After a day and a half of delays due to a severe storm and attempts to secure a suitable transport vessel, you and your team arrived on the scene with the assistance of one Captain Cabetha, a former smuggler from a non-anchor-world iteration of Earth, and rescued the sole surviving crewmember of the Culescun ship, along with one hundred twenty-eight passengers in stasis cocoons. You did not make contact with Lachlan during the rescue operation.

“That night, after all other parties had vacated the area and the dragon corpse had fully sunk beneath the surface of the water, pulling the Culescun ship down with it, you received a signal from a sensor attached to the perception filter ward around Lachlan’s lighthouse indicating twenty-three individuals sapient enough to interact with the ward cross its boundary. Lachlan’s memory of the event perceived these entities as combat robots. Three minutes later the lighthouse Lachlan vacated the premises via self-collapsing portal and destroyed the lighthouse behind him. One minute later the intruding entities left the bounds of the perception filter ward and left via either teleportation or portal in a manner that left too little trace to follow to a point of origin. One minute after that, you arrived on the scene and read the remnants of Lachlan’s escape portal, setting you on a chase that would last you the next month, due to, as you put it, ‘various distractions.’ These distractions included spending the next several days handing over the shipwrecked Culescuns to governmental organizations within Crossherd for return to their homeworld. Is all of this accurate?”

“Yes,” Sullivan says, “except we also brought in an exiled flesh-shaper to un-cocoon everyone after the rescue before we handed them over for repatriation.”

“There’s an exiled Culescun flesh-shaper on this world?” Morgan exclaims.

“Oh yes, real standup guy. Carnette, my friend, and I helped xem out after xe got in trouble for unauthorized shaping to save the lives of some cross-world travellers. And we’ve stayed on good terms since.”

“Huh, could have used someone like that thirty years ago,” Morgan says. “Was Lacuna able to talk to xem?”

“Oh the two of them got on marvelously. Why she still looked the same the next day is beyond me. Void knows I would have killed for the opportunity back when I was in her position.”

“I… I can think of a few reasons,” Morgan says. “But I’m getting us off-topic again. You were saying about the passengers?”

“During the rescue, I also retrieved most of the ship’s cargo, including the passengers’ belongings and one particular set of items of interest that I have not yet informed anyone other than my friend and the flesh-shaper about. I lightly questioned all of the passengers after we woke them up from stasis and then performed some more enhanced interview techniques on the most suspicious of them in addition to the surviving crewmember and one of the deceased crewmembers, erasing their memories afterwards for, shall we say, humane reasons. I haven’t told anyone else that part either, but given how readily you did what you had to with forcing yourself into Lachlan’s mind, I trust that you understand doing what needs done.” Sullivan cocks his head and shows more teeth with his smile. “Even if your dear niece wouldn’t.”

Morgan stares him down with comment.

“Anywhat,” Sullivan continues, “the passengers were simply wrong place wrong time, and the crew I got to talk too were too low level grunts to be included in anything conspiratorial, but the living one did recognize the items none of the passengers claimed. They hadn’t been on the cargo manifest either and when he’d asked about them he was simply told to stop asking questions.”

“Another smuggling connection then?” Morgan posits.

“If it was, it wasn’t one that anyone on that ship expected to be leaving Culescu. I showed our flesh-shaper the items in question afterward and xe identified them as dead and damaged equipment for linking together minds for gestalts or duplication. Apparently that’s rare and valuable technology that even most people on Culescu know as little more than a rumor. Needless to say, I left that part out of our report to the authorities in Crossherd and the equipment is sitting in a stasis vault in Bridgewood Manor to keep it from rotting any further.”

“Cutting edge flesh-shaped tech from an isolationist world with a strict policy against exports,” Morgan muses. “You don’t think that could have been the point of this whole shipwreck mess, do you? In those days where you dealing with the survivors, I was getting word from a merfolk community I have some connection with that a huge foreign biomass and a large number of invasive lamprey-like creatures had just gotten dumped into the ocean. I spent weeks cleaning up that mess. At first I figured that it was just some self-taught mage who had colossally screwed up a summoning, but when officials from Crossherd showed up demanding that I hand over any off-world biological material instead of destroying it like standard ecological contamination procedure it started to sink in just how weird the situation was.”

“And that’s when you started looking into Lachlan?” Sullivan asks.

“Not Lachlan specifically, and for a good while there environmental and Masquerade protection took priority, weird government interference or no. And it wasn’t like anyone was answering any of the questions I was asking. Of course, now that I know it was a decaying Culescun ship that I was trying to keep benthic scavengers from mistaking for a whalefall and getting sick on, that makes sense. Even if they weren’t directly involved, the powers that be in Crossherd get real nervous about anything related to Culescu. Which explains why no one ever mentioned you and your team to me.”

“And the big burned out lighthouse nearby wasn’t an obvious clue to ask about?” Sullivan prods.

“As she said,” Stella replies, “the priority was on cleanup. We didn’t get the chance to look into that until weeks after the fact.”

“And by that point the trail had long gone cold until you leaked his location to see who would show up looking for him,” Morgan adds. “And we all know how that turned out.”

“Yes,” Sullivan agrees. “You two were watched and followed by means we still haven’t determined, we got Lachlan to partially violate his nondisclosure contract, and then someone opened a portal in the upper atmosphere and shot a magic equivalent of a railgun at us through it. Or an actual railgun for all we know. Then I did some research to give you that lovely envelope full of robots, while you played with some dirt to make an informative but not particularly revelatory presentation. And now we’re recapping. Did that all give you any new theories?”

“If you’re right that it’s not a government job, and the machines Lachlan saw don’t match anything any of the big paratech companies have, could it be a smaller operation?” Morgan asks. “Someone trying to carve themself a slice out of a competitive field by gathering resources that no one can legally report as missing and laying the groundwork for making a big entrance once they have a product ready. Or even just a lone wolf actor playing mad scientist with experimental paratech.”

“The possibility had crossed my mind,” Sullivan admits, “but I had dismissed it. Too much of this reeks of tight organization well-supplied with resources.”

“Does it really?” Morgan argues. “One powerful enough mage and one exceptionally skilled paratech engineer could theoretically do this all on a budget while keeping up a surface level appearance of being something more. Heck, the two could even be the same person!”

“Let’s say I’m willing to entertain the idea,” Sullivan croons. “Convince me.”

“What do we really know about whoever is behind this?” Morgan asks and then answers. “While I’m not personally familiar with them, I know of at least four different spells that can kill people thoroughly enough that it doesn’t leave a ghost behind and messes up other methods of scrying past events in a locale. A geass-enforced contract is easy enough to obtain for anyone who knows how to contact the fae or infernal entities and is good at negotiating. Intimidating men in suits and sunglasses are a dime a dozen, and that’s assuming whoever’s behind all this didn’t just go buy a suit off the rack and deliver the contract and device to Lachlan themselves.”

“And the pulse device? The robots? The orbital kinetic bombardment?”

“Paratech’s not my field, but as I understand it, it’s not that hard to get individual parts if you know where to look. The robots might be made from scratch in a garage or they might be decommissioned models that were refurbished and modified. The number of them is a bit high, sure, but there are plenty of mages out there with extended lifespans and fortunes built up over a century or two. Give me another fifty years and I’ll be one of them. And while our hypothetical lone actor would have to be very good with portals, it’s not an unheard of level of skill, and accelerating an object to make it go fast enough to explode on impact is dead simple, just stupidly dangerous to try unassisted.”

“And everything you just said could also be true of a small arm of a larger organization that wants to maintain plausible deniability if they get caught,” Sullivan points out.

“I believe that is the point,” Stella says. “If corporate security measures against espionage are proving too much of a barrier for you to find leads, then investigate the flow of component parts through smaller resource channels. Of course,” she adds, “I am sure so obvious a methodology has already occurred to you.”

The doll’s perpetual monotone does little to hide the sarcasm, and the reaction on her witch’s face does even less. Such an interestingly bold little familiar. Or not so little given that she’s the only one here who’s feet reach the ground while seated around this bar table. A reflection of its master’s will, surely. What a shame that the techie’s branch of the family tree didn’t inherit any of her aunt’s spine.

“That still leaves us with the question of motive,” Sullivan says, sidestepping the barb while neither denying the soundness of the advice nor admitting that he’d overlooked it.

“We can figure that out later,” Morgan says, “but if we assume that both of the incidents that we know of were specifically targeted rather than coincidental, I can think of some scary combinations you could get up to with a god binder and a mind linker.”

*******

Sullivan’s friend is already waiting for him in the baroque parlour (as opposed to the neoclassical parlour or the nacreous parlour) when he makes his return to Bridgewood Manor that night. As is Ashan. The conversation passes by in a blur for Sullivan. The news that his friend spent most of the past twenty-four hours in a warped domain of one of the eldritch drowns out whatever was said before and distracts from whatever is said after.

The recounting of Eris snapping herself out of a near autogenesis monster transformation so that she can relive childhood memories and fight her ex-girlfriend is far less important than scrutinizing his friend for signs of persona decay. The tale of Ashan besting a fae liege’s champion in a duel barely registers through concern over what an entity whose very presence erodes rationality and sense of self might do to someone with his friend’s condition. When the plan of transporting dangerous artifacts through smuggling routes as bait is floated, it is met with the barest acknowledgment of logistic viability, as he is too busy sorting out which of the subtle tells of exhaustion his friend is so good at hiding are due to mere sleep deprivation and which are from something more metaphysical. The realization that his friend has told Ashan and the others about the wider conspiratorial scope of his investigations is nearly enough to fully snap his attention back to the ongoing conversation, but he is too caught up in the thought that suddenly bringing everyone fully into the fold might be a symptom of decline to even been properly irritated at not being consulted beforehand. His own recounting of his most recent meeting with Morgan and plans discussed therein is uncharacteristically terse, unembellished, and coated in a veneer of impatience for the interloping young wizard to leave so he and his friend can talk in private, but he at least retains the presence of mind to omit the witch’s name and relation to Lacuna.

Finally, Sullivan resorts to putting on a mask crafted in the image of his genuine concern for his friend.

“Ashan, why don’t you head to bed?” Sullivan suggests. “Speaking from experience, there aren’t many who can cross the Count of Curses and Dust and live to tell the tale, so I’d say you’ve earned a good night’s sleep. I’ll send one of the manor staff up with something for that aging effect on your hand.”

“Thank you,” Ashan says, “but I am still wakeful enough to continue the conversation for a time yet. This is far from the hardest a mission has pushed my capabilities.”

Sullivan constructs an endeared smile that anyone who didn’t know him would mistake for genuine.

“Good to hear. Pushing yourself to your limit all the time without rest only wears you down. But I think we’re just about done here anyway. Any further planning can wait until muscles and the techie are around to give their two cents.”

“You make a fair point. Very well then. Road, Bridgewood, I bid the both of you a good night.” After standing up from a gilded chair and executing a shallow bow punctuating both addresses, Ashan turns and glides down the dark hallways of Bridgewood Manor in the direction of a guest bedroom that is rapidly becoming a permanent dwelling.

Sullivan’s body no longer needs to breathe and hasn’t been physically capable of fatigue in years, but he unclenches his jaw and sighs in relief all the same at the young wizard’s departure. A warm chuckle from the other end of the white tufted settee he’s been perched on the arm of draws his gaze back to his friend and a facial expression that’s heralded more headaches and fond memories than he can count.

“What?” he asks.

“You like him,” his friend observes.

“I can’t imagine what could have given you that impression.”

“That’s the second time you’ve told him to go to bed -”

“He’s a valuable asset whose health needs maintained.”

“- in a bed, in a room, in your home, which you didn’t kick him out of when the office opened like you said you would -”

“I’ve been too busy to get around to it.”

“- and you said it in a tone I’ve never heard you use with anyone but me and Carnette.”

Void Without.

“I just wanted him out of the way so we could talk in private,” Sullivan insists while sliding from armrest to seat. “He doesn’t need to hear me asking how you’re holding together after an encounter with one of the eldritch.”

“Thanks for the concern, but I’m fine. Really.”

“Even -”

“Even with my… being the way that I am, yes. Just because we decided it’s best that I don’t consciously acknowledge it too much, that doesn’t mean I don’t take steps to manage it, and it turns out general safeguards against eldritch influence are good for general stability.” Sullivan’s friend forces a laugh that would sound natural and unexhausted to any other listener. “Honestly, I think I might try burning the silverkey incense more often. That was the most… present… I’ve felt in a long while.”

“I’ll be sure to make sure you have a steady supply,” Sullivan says and makes a mental note to look into side effects of regular usage. “But I must say, you caught me off guard when you informed me that you filled the kids in on everything. I thought you were going to wait until we had something more concrete and they’d had more time to get used to working together.”

His friend affects a nonchalant shrug. “I’d call people exploding a house with you in it for investigating pretty concrete, and the others have more than proven themselves by now. Especially after… today… Or is it yesterday by now?” They drift off for a moment, voice dreamy before snapping back to the here and now. “You know what I mean. And besides, I told Eris about it before we dealt with the eldritch.”

“You might be right, but that’s not what you were thinking at the time, was it?”

“I…”

Sullivan slides closer on the sofa and gently puts a hand on his friend’s shoulder. It’s gotten so much easier to do that since they acquired that symbiote jacket of theirs.

“I’m not mad,” he whispers, “and I’m not judging. I could never be either, not towards you. I’m only trying to figure out if I’m worrying too much right now.”

“You always worry too much about me.”

“Someone has to if you’re going to be the one to worry about everyone else in the world.”

“Right… Anyway, Eris asked what you’ve been working on for the past two months because somehow she didn’t even know you were looking into what caused the dragon shipwreck. I could have sworn we’d told everyone that right after opening the office and you bowed out of joining the rest of us on the haunted house mission that evening.”

“She’d stepped out of the room when I announced it,” Sullivan says. “I figured at least one of you would fill her in.”

“Oh… I guess that must have slipped my mind too. So, when she asked earlier today… no yesterday… wait, it’d be the day before by now… What… day… is it? It’s been a long one…”

“When Eris asked…” Sullivan softly prompts.

“Right! When Eris couldn’t remember what I thought for sure I told her already, or at least told Ashan and Lacuna... told someone anyway… I… had a moment…”

“A moment?” Sullivan asks once it becomes apparent his friend isn’t picking the trailed thought back up on their own.

“I had a moment where I couldn’t remember at all what I’d said to who, so it all… came out at once.” Their next pause is one of intensifying focus rather than the loss of it. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“No, it's not bad,” Sullivan lies. “You’ve just had a long few days, like you said. That’s normal when people get tired.”

“But at least I remembered not to tell them about Morgan and Stella yet,” his friend says like a child trying to salvage a botched chore. “When are we going to tell them? With everyone involved now there’s not much point in keeping it secret, and Lacuna deserves to know she has a relative Backstage.”

“Morgan said she wanted to tell Lacuna herself, so you don’t need to worry about that right now. I’ll handle the arrangements for their reunion when the time comes.”

“And I’m sure you’ll delay it until you can find the most dramatic possible moment,” his friend jokes.

“Will I now?”

“It’s what you do. The one thing you like better than secrets and lies is a big reveal.”

“Or maybe I’ll just arrange things so that a dramatic reveal comes faster than you expect now that you’re onto me.”

“But now I’m going to expect that and you know I’ll expect that so you’ll delay but I’ll know that you’ll know that so you’ll accelerate, but you’ll know that I know that you know that I…”

“I know you’re tired.”

“I might be letting myself feel it a little without anyone else around.”

“Well, there’s nothing pressing tonight to keep you from getting some sleep.”

“Nothing but the usual.”

“The dreams?”

“And everything else that always needs done. The dreams have been manageable.”

“Manageable with or without amnestics?”

“Without. I’ve only needed them the one time since getting back to this anchor world. And it was as low a dose as will still do anything, I promise. Just enough to take the edge off after waking up in the middle of the night.”

“But you have been sleeping, right?”

Sullivan’s friend smiles a little too broadly.

“I’ve been getting a whole eight hours,” they claim.

Sullivan gives his friend a look practiced since their shared childhood.

“Per week,” his friend amends.

“When was the last time?”

“I took a nap after our call a few days ago to get some rest. I… don’t think I actually fell asleep though.”

Sullivan closes his eyes, rubs his temples, and takes a deep breath as only one without lungs could manage.

“That’s it,” he says, “tonight you are getting a full night’s sleep for once in your life. Where works best for you these days?”

His friend starts to protest but bites it off in response to another look from Sullivan.

“The aquatic drawing room. The light and water help.”

“Aquatic drawing room it is,” Sullivan says as he rises to his feet and extends a hand.

His friend takes his hand and three tries to get up from the sofa. Three wobbly steps later, they are leaning on his shoulder for support. Now that the inhuman exhaustion has been acknowledged and allowed to be felt, it can now longer be denied or hidden.

“It’s not fair, you know,” his friend rambles while the two of them shamble down Bridgewood Manor’s labyrinthine hallways in a bubble of blue-white light from enchanted torches that light as they approach and extinguish as they pass by. “Not fair that you don’t have to sleep when I still do.”

“It’s not so bad,” Sullivan says. “It means that you’re still human enough for it. And it means you can take a break every now and then.”

“You say that like you miss it.”

“Every now and then.” All the time. Human minds aren’t made for years of continuous uninterrupted consciousness. “At least you don’t need as much as most people. Just more than you’ve been getting.”

“You sure? I think it’s like… the other thing. I don’t feel tired if I don’t think about it, and there’s so much more I could be doing if I don’t. So many more people I can help. Do help? Did help? Have helped? Would help? Should help? Help? Help… help…”

Sullivan touches a finger to his friend’s lip to stop any more repetition of the syllable that’s lost its meaning.

“Letting yourself feel it will help with the other thing. Real people get tired and sleep.”

“But you don’t sleep and you’re real. You are real, aren’t you?” Worry creeps into his friend’s tone.

“I’m real,” Sullivan reassures them, “but I’m not people, I’m a monster.”

His friend calms and chuckles. “Heroes are supposed to slay monsters, you know?” They joke with a poke to where Sullivan’s ribs should be.

“Not the ones they tame and take into battle with them,” he says.

The silence of two that have had a lifetime to say everything and are taking a breather before another round of saying it all again.

The seashell-and-wave-embossed doors to the aquatic drawing room are open when they arrive. The only closed rooms in Bridgewood Manor are those currently occupied, those intentionally put out of mind, and those Sullivan is yet to figure out how to open. Turning from the hallway to cross the threshold, footfalls morph from muffled paps on soft carpet, to sharp clacks on hard tile, to quiet whistles of softer sand. The furniture here is carved from driftwood, salvaged from shipwrecks, hewn from abyssal vents. Legs and armrests and backs are adorned with pearls, crusted with barnacles, inlaid with ichthyic fossils. Upholstery is embroidered with sea beasts, sunken cities, deep-dwelling gods. The seafloor stretches out in all directions, the floor-to-ceiling mural’s illusion played into rather than broken by the fractured stone archway over the door to the hall. The stone arch once held a portal between worlds until it caused its builders’ civilization to drown beneath the waves. Another one of Carnette’s decorative jokes to remind Sullivan of her absence.

All of it is awash in dancing caustic patterns of light from glowing corals reflected and refracted through the water suspended above. The “surface” is just out of Sullivan’s reach if he stretches (as Carnette so enjoyed teasing him) and reaches a “depth” twice again that length before hitting the ceiling. A single touch is all it would take to draw one off the floor and into the water above. With Carnette gone, the water is no longer breathable, the marine simulacra float inanimate in the corners near the ceiling, and the surface occasionally ripples and drops a single salty tear to the sand and furniture below. At least the crafting of the sand to never cling unwantedly remains effective.

“Couch or floor?” Sullivan asks his friend.

“Floor,” they say after a delayed processing of the question.

Sullivan helps his friend to a spot free from the ceiling’s tears and kneels down to help them from his shoulder to the floor. He shifts to sitting on the floor leaning against the illusion-painted wall, one leg outstretched while the other makes an arch to rest arm on knee. He looks down at his friend and asks “Need any help getting to sleep?”

His friend makes a small noise of affirmation.

“Once upon a time…” Sullivan begins. He gets no further when he notices his friend make an expression he hesitates to place. “What?”

“My first night back, you mentioned you had… something else that could help? Could we… try that instead?”

Sullivan reminds himself that he doesn’t have a heart to break. It mostly works.

“Of course,” he whispers. Of all the off-hand comments for his friend’s inconstant memory to keep…

Sullivan produces a sewing needle pinched between thumb and forefinger. It is gold with a core of bone and a tip of cold iron. It is a gift fit for a princess. It is the only thing he’s had longer than his friend. He hasn’t held or looked at it since right after Carnette made him the way he is now.

Sullivan closes his lips around the tip of the needle. He feels his tongue change inside his mouth. He licks the needle to coat it with his venom. That was the last change to what is left of his body that Carnette made, and one of the only such changes that were his idea. This is the first time he’s been able to use it for its intended purpose.

Sullivan lets the tip of the needle cut his lip on the way out. He can no longer bleed and the cut closes as fast as it opens. Just as well. The needle hasn’t tasted his blood since he met his friend, and for it to do so now would feel too much like an ending. For the first time he wonders if he should have asked Carnette to let him keep his scars when she took them along with his wrinkles and grey hairs.

“This will let you sleep,” he says as light plays across the needle, “It will be deep and dreamless. No getting trapped unable to wake up like with other sleep aids. One prick on the finger and you’ll fall right under.”

His friend stares at the needle.

“Just like the fairytale,” Sullivan adds with a smile that no one else has seen. He had no reason for such soft sorrow with Carnette.

His friend nods.

“Would you like to do it, or me?” Sullivan asks.

His friend reaches out and takes the needle.

“Hold me?” they ask after a moment’s hesitation.

Sullivan moves to wrap his arms around his friend from behind and rests his head in the curve between shoulder and neck.

“Always,” he whispers.

His friend moves the tip of the needle held in one hand in the direction of the other. Stops. Tries again. Shakes. Tries again. Freezes. Looks down at their hands.

“What do my hands look like?” his friend whispers. “Are my hands real? Where are my hands? How can I prick my finger if my hands aren’t real?”

Sullivan reminds himself that he doesn’t have a heart to break. It would surely be pounding from fear otherwise.

“Shhh…shhh… It’s alright…. It’s alright, don’t overthink it,” he whispers back. “Here, let me take care of it.”

“How can you tell where to hold me?”

“How could I not? We’ve been together forever. I know the shape of you without having to think about it.”

“What do I look like?”

“Like my best friend who is very tired but will feel much better after a good night’s sleep. Now, are you ready?”

His friend nods. “Stay with me?”

“Always.”

Sullivan reminds himself that he doesn’t have a heart to break. It almost helps.

*******

The door to the office makes no sound as Sullivan slips inside. Doors usually don’t make sounds when nobody touches them, so that is normal enough. That which is beneath his skin ceases its writhing, space ceases its warping, and Sullivan takes a look around the darkened ground floor of the converted bed and breakfast.

For a moment, he allows himself to see the place as the coffeehouse it was even before that. The building and its family business were nearly as old as Carnette (relatively speaking) and she’d been a regular for over a century and a half. Sullivan had been standing right… here, yes, here, behind where the counter used to be, when he first laid eyes on her in person. He’d been pretending not to watch the door when she strode in, clad in a blue dress, broad red hat over curly red hair, and glasses with thick yellow lenses that hid the true color of her eyes. He’d started working there a week before, with meticulously applied hair dye and makeup so that he could pass for the young college student he claimed to be. She complimented him on getting her ludicrously specific order right on the first try and it was the foot in the door he’d hoped it would be for friendly conversation.

The third time they met he felt confident enough to put his own special twist on the order to surprise her: A tasteless, odorless powder mixed in with the spread on her bagel and a drop of equally difficult to detect liquid in her drink. Two substances that were harmless on their own but when broken down by stomach acid and mixed together would create a poison capable of negating a mage’s powers. He’d followed her outside afterward under the pretense of being smitten with her and then attempted to stab her to death with an enchanted dagger out in the open on the sidewalk.

That particular job hadn’t even been about the money, he’d just wanted to see if he could kill the infamous sorceress Bridgewood and when he found out the one place she predictably frequented was a mundane coffeehouse with no Backstage connections where she’d have to risk breaking the Masquerade in order to use her powers, he had been arrogant enough to believe he could pull it off. The poison had been less effective than anticipated, she’d been more subtle with her magic than her reputation suggested, and five minutes later he was half a continent away, lying in a puddle of his own blood, and holding a handwritten contracted written in that same liquid to kill whomever it was that hired him to assassinate her for triple their original pay offer. She’d found the sheer audacity of the whole thing wonderfully entertaining and told him that if she’d be anyone else his plan would have worked.

Thus began a courtship of increasingly elaborate and outlandish assassination attempts inevitably met by ever more novel methods of leaving him just barely alive.

Sullivan opens his eyes that he hadn’t realized he’d closed. Losing himself in fond reminiscence is the closest he gets to dreaming these days, but he reminds himself that he doesn’t have time for such indulgences right now. It is hard though not to wonder if Carnette would have approved of what he’s done with the place. If its last owner hadn’t changed his family business, would she still be here? Or did she only refrain from spending a portion of her fortune to keep the coffeehouse as it was because she knew she didn’t have long for this world? No way to know without asking her, and that day won’t be coming anytime soon.

But enough of that, he has investments to check up on before returning to his slumbering friend.

And speaking of slumbering friends, from where he’s standing he can spy Lacuna and Eris together on the living room couch, sharing a blanket and lit by the soft glow of a DVD logo bouncing around a black television screen. Sullivan soundlessly walks over to get a better look at the intertwined pair and softly chuckles at the sight of the nearby open DVD case for some romantic comedy schlock. Not the kind of sleeping together he’d been betting on the two of them getting up to, but perhaps it’s a step in that direction.

Thus amused, Sullivan turns his attention away from his sleeping employees and blinks through his filters. The third most expensive part of the office’s renovations - behind only the pocket dimension basement and the paratech laboratory - was enchanting the entire property to record a heatmap of movements of anyone that enters that only he can see. Floating threads and blotches of color appear for him throughout the office, varying in thickness and intensity with recency and repetition. Each color corresponds to a different individual. At a glance Sullivan can tell that most of the traffic on this floor goes directly from the front door to the basement and back out again, but Lacuna’s pink-flecked-black trail leads to the bedrooms upstairs more often than it leads outside and the pearl-white representing Ashan and the sea-teal leading away from Eris’s slumbering form have both spent quite some time lingering together in the kitchen.

Eris’s color surprises him. He would have expected it to be closer to the crimson of the other monster hunter currently residing upstairs. The two recent sets of green lines also leading upstairs are curiously similar enough to one another that he almost wishes he’d paid more attention to Ashan’s recounting of his most recent adventure.

There are no color trails representing Sullivan’s friend, but that’s to be expected. Even if he had been holding out a vain hope for group interaction to coax out at least a faint proof of existence.

Downstairs, the hallway is a tangle of black, white, and teal that almost drowns out the faint traces of visiting clients. The autodoc suite looks to have barely been touched, save for what looks to have been an extended stay of teal and black about a month ago. The gymnasium’s sparring ring is covered in an unexpected swirl of teal and white that leaves Sullivan with questions on how such matches could possibly be going when only one of the participants is a mage. Could it merely be practice for Ashan to keep physically fit without relying on magic? More likely they’ve both simply been taking turns going up against Sullivan’s friend.

The laboratory and breakroom are so covered in floating black lines and blotches that Sullivan finds himself forced to clear his visual filters to make out the rooms themselves. It seems that his earlier jokes about Lacuna playing mad scientist down here were more on target than he’d anticipated at the time, judging by how the heatmap is indicating she’s been effectively living in this laboratory for the past two months.

He struts over to the main computer terminal to take a look at what exactly she’s been up to down here. He’d planned to make use of a hidden admin account he’d set up before handing everything over to her, but now it seems she hasn’t even bothered to password protect her login. Sullivan tuts to himself at the shockingly naïve lack of security as he minimizes the open windows regarding simulation progress and test chamber results. The juicy personal project details can wait until after he’s assessed how well she’s been doing the job he hired her for.

Sullivan goes through Lacuna’s bookmarks, tabs, email, and other messages to get an idea of her process of finding potential “missions” with which to keep his friend occupied. Her divergence from the list of sites and forums he handed her on the first day to regularly check shows a promising modicum of initiative, although she could stand to be doing more on the supplemental detail gathering front. If she’s going to be supporting his friend, then it's not enough for her to simply find people for them to help and situations for them to resolve; she needs to be doing research to know everything there is to know about whatever creatures or magical phenomena are involved or even tangentially related to the situation.

The fact that Lacuna apparently never went through the back issues of a certain Backstage newspaper masquerading as a mundane tabloid is particularly disappointing to Sullivan. It was one of the original information sources he told her to familiarize herself with, and if she’d done so properly she would have seen that her aunt used to write articles for it. Although in retrospect, perhaps that’s for the best. Even if the whole team has been brought up to speed on Sullivan’s investigation, for the moment Lacuna’s likely to recognize her place as the weak link in the organization and stay safely here in her lab. But if she were to realize just the sort of person her aunt is, then she might start pushing to do field work too, and Sullivan’s friend wouldn’t have the heart to tell her no.

Sullivan doesn’t think his friend will be able to take another weak teammate getting into an avoidable situation and dying.

He deletes the browser bookmark for the newspaper.

Just before finishing up invading the privacy of Lacuna’s browser and email history, he notices an unread email from RevaTech, the paratech company that bought out her previous employer. The company she stole a copy of her project back from on her way out the door. The email is an unsolicited offer for a job interview to come back and work for them. Sullivan hovers over the button to delete it but changes his mind. It’ll be more entertaining to watch for her reaction.

Sullivan moves on to going through Lacuna’s notes on the mission reports she’s been sending him and scrubbing through the records of the comm link cameras. Some might call his checking to make sure there’s nothing she’s been leaving out paranoid, but paranoid is his default state with anyone working with his friend. The only surprise is how accurate it all is. Not even any editorializing. The only truly noteworthy bit is a comment about his friend not showing up right on camera with a followup comment stating that she’s been informed that’s normal for them. Judging by her notes, it seems she assumes it’s some kind of stealth charm, maybe a function of the symbiote jacket. Sullivan knows it’s not.

Sullivan checks his golden pocketwatch and judges that he still has enough time left to at least skim the logs of the simulations, rituals, and enchantments that have been performed down her before he needs to head back to check on his friend. The more he reads, the more he pieces together how the digitally accelerated and computer generated rituals work, and the more he gathers what she’s been using it for. Pieces click into place for him. The more he understands, the more fascinated he becomes. And the more entertained.

Sullivan blink to a different filter from before and sees a swirling cacophony of white noise that he can practically hear through his eyeballs emanating from the shelves of enchanted laser-engraved charms and 3D printed talismans. He strides down to the stark white testing chamber, switches his vision back to the heatmap filter, and sees a rope of pink-flecked black threads enter from the laboratory and turn into a tangled rainbow mess in the center of the room. He switches to a third filter, returns to the lab’s entrance, and takes a long hard look at the rows of refrigerated paratech server racks behind their glass wall.

He begins laughing.

“Oh techie,” he crows, “do you have any idea what you’re growing down here?”

Almost certainly not, but it’s going to be delicious to watch.

Sullivan collects himself from the entertainment of watching fools accidentally do what the wise can only dream of and checks the time again. He heads upstairs. There’s a slim chance that his friend will recover from his venom faster than most and it’s vitally important that he be there when they wake up. And if they're still asleep, then he’ll take the time to read through the report of all the tomes Ashan has read in the Manor’s lesser library that he had the maintenance golems record for him. It’s been said that research makes the wizard, so his choices of reading material should be able to tell Sullivan plenty. And if he judges Ashan’s path of study wanting, he can see to it that certain choice volumes containing magic more likely to be helpful to his friend find themselves conveniently placed for the young wizard to find.

He has just closed the door separating basement from ground floor behind him when he hears the creaky step on the staircase to the upper level signal someone’s descent. Hanging back in the shadows, he watches a golden-haired woman kitted out in black leather and kevlar carry a long spear past the reception desk towards the front door. She pauses for a moment to look at the still-sleeping Eris and Lacuna on the living room couch and Sullivan curses his angle of observation for not permitting him to see her expression. He moves closer, behind the reception desk, and just at the edge of her peripheral vision. Now is that jealousy on her face, or longing? No, too bittersweet for either. Parting sorrow sprinkled with regret and seasoned with just a dash of guilt. Delectable.

“A little overdressed for grabbing a midnight snack from the kitchen, aren’t we?” Sullivan purrs.

The woman - Gretchen, Sullivan surmises from the little attention he paid earlier - slips a knife from her combat vest as she turns to face the man who had not been behind her a moment before. Sullivan lifts a finger to casually push aside the blade hovering in front of his nose.

“Now, now, none of that,” he softly lilts. “We wouldn’t want to wake your former paramour and your replacement, now would we?”

“Who are you?” Gretchen hisses.

“My, what lovely golden eyes you have. The better to see me with, yes? And such sharp teeth. The better to eat me with, surely.”

Gretchen takes a long step back and lowers her spear between them.

“Oh, but wherever are my manners? Sullivan Bridgewood, at my service. I own this place.” He leans closer over the reception desk. “Now tell me, Gretchen, are your accommodations not to your liking? There are no late checkout fees you know, so no need to go sneaking off like a thief in the night.”

“Oh, so you’re the asshole boss Eris mentioned.”

“Yes, I’m afraid muscles over there and I have been something of an oil and water combination.”

Gretchen stiffens at the nickname. “Don’t call her that.”

“Oh? Muscles? I’ve found it perfectly apt. Both a physical descriptor and summary of her utility and purpose. What else can one want from a nickname?”

“E’s - Eris is… more than that.”

Sullivan leans closer still, resting his chin on interlaced fingers. “Do tell.”

Gretchen scoffs and turns back toward the front door. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“Or you could tell her directly if you prefer,” Sullivan says, no longer whispering.

Over on the couch, Lacua stirs at the sudden noise and Eris grunts at the shifting weight on her lap, but both remain asleep for the moment. Gretchen freezes with her hand on the doorknob. Sullivan smirks as she stands still, listening for a change in the sleepers’ breathing.

“Bastard,” she mutters.

“Only figuratively,” Sullivan whispers back. “But not so much of one as to make you spill all those feelings you know you shouldn’t still have for someone you thought you were over. Tell me but one worthwhile skill of hers that I’m underutilizing by employing her as meat shield and wrecking ball and I’ll let you walk out quietly.”

Gretchen glares at him.

“Admitting you can’t think of anything is also an option,” Sullivan hums.

“You know the monster hunters’ fifth fate? Letting your identity, your sense of self, get so consumed by the love of the hunt that it kicks off an autogenesis cascade? She brought me back from that. Not pulling me back from the edge just in time, but actually brought me back after I’d willingly embraced it. I had already changed and now I’m myself again. That doesn’t happen. Do you have any idea what it takes to call someone back like that? What kind of person it takes?”

A face unrecognized in a mirror. Years gone in an instant. An empty shell. Gaps filled in with fairytales. Cries in the night. Soft words in ears and gentle hands running through hair. Reassurances of reality. Proof offered of existence. Activities curated to prevent cognitive dissonance.

Void Without, he’s an idiot.

Sullivan’s smirk fades.

“I do, believe it or not. Thank you for the eye-opening reminder. Truly.”

“You’re welcome,” Gretchen replies, wary of his sudden shift in disposition.

“Now, judging from personal experience, you’re not fully out of the woods yet, and you know it, but you don’t want to weigh down anyone you care about with it so you’re trying to distance yourself as quietly as possible. I’ve seen firsthand how hard that can be.”

“You don’t know -”

“Yes. I do. And I also know enough to guess that you don’t have a plan beyond stepping out that door, so let me give you one.” Sullivan places a calling card on the reception desk and taps on it. “Go to this address in Crossherd before sunrise and ask for Lucinda. Tell her Sullivan Prince sent you and explain your situation. She’ll find you work that will be engaging without too much risk of sending you spiralling down again. I’ve found by experience that finding something to put yourself into and care about is the best way to keep from losing yourself.”

Sullivan steps back and Gretchen cautiously approaches, picks up the calling card, and examines it.

“Why?” she asks.

Sullivan’s ever-bemused smirk returns, even more of an affectation than normal.

“I may be a bastard,” he trills as he walks around her and towards the door, “but I am still capable of a modicum of sympathy for fools in the same situations I’ve been through. Oh, and one more thing.” He stops at the door and jerks his head towards Eris. “Unless you want to hurt her, at least leave a note before you disappear.”

That which is beneath Sullivan’s skin writhes, space warps, and he disappears, leaving Gretchen alone in the darkened room.

*******

To his relief, Sullivan’s friend is still asleep on the sandy floor when he returns to the aquatic drawing room. The purple and green symbiote they wear has transformed itself from jacket to bedroll.

“Thanks for looking out for them,” Sullivan whispers to it as he settles down next to his friend. He is still unsure whether the strange entity can even understand speech, but some sentiments are worth voicing anyway.

He closes his eyes and listens to his friend’s steady, peaceful, breathing and doesn’t think about what he would or wouldn’t see if he watched their sleeping face. He knows he should send for the report on Ashan’s library usage rather than spend his time idle, but he procrastinates. How many more nights like this will he get to have at his friend’s side?

The conversation with Gretchen and its implications turns over in his mind. He’s never been able to find a worthy replacement for himself, and he’s just about given up on ever finding any one person fit for the job, but what if it were three people working together to take on his responsibilities? One to do the information gathering and stay up to date on technology that rejects them, and two to share the joint burdens of following them into danger and recognizing when they need emotional support. That was the whole reason he agreed to this ill-conceived enterprise, wasn’t it? He hadn’t really believed in it working until now, but could it? They haven’t gotten there yet, but could they?

Void Without, he hopes so.

His friend deserves someone better than him.

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