#six cadre

[jayktoralldaylong]

The Six Cadre/Never Love An Anchor - Crane Wives.

Connall

On some level, I think I always understood. That a ship could never really love an anchor.

(Watching Fenrys shine leap and dance like the shining golden sun yet still held down by the chain that passes through Connall's chest to Maeve)

So, I did the only thing that I could

(Connall grips the chain)

and severed the rope to set you sailing from my harbor.

(Fenrys' howl of despair)

Fenrys

On some level, I think I always understood. That these hands of mine were clumsy, not clever.

(Always getting scolded by everyone for being too reckless, but Fenrys' low-key admiring Connall for always being levelheaded.)

And I tried to do the best that I could.

(Giving his all to protect Connall)

But try as I might, I couldn't bring myself to hold you.

Rowan

(Rowan watching Aelin but thinking of Lyria)

It's a secret I keep tucked inside my chest, with this heart of mine that's guilty, not remorseful.

There is love that doesn't have a place to rest.

(Aelin smiles at him and he turns away, ignoring the heartbreak in her eyes).

But it would have buried you if it had settled on your shoulders.

Gavriel

(Gavriel watching Aedion with pride)

There are times when I still wonder about you. You are someone I have loved, but never known.

(Aedion glares so Gavriel turns away sadly)

And you'll never see the reasons I had.

(Gavriel leaves dragging the chains of Maeve far away from Aedion).

For keeping my claws away when they were close enough to hurt you.

Lorcan

I am selfish, I am broken, I am cruel.

(Elide's eyes widen as she registers Lorcan sitting before her covered in blood)

I am all the things they might have said to you.

Do you ever think of me and my two hands?

(Lorcan's strong scarred hands of a killer)

And wonder why they never soothed your fevers?

(Lorcan still doing everything possible to protect Elide in the ways he can, carrying her, being her crutch, providing cycle pads)

And wonder why they never tied your shoes? And wonder why they never held you gently?

Vaughan

And wonder why they never had the chance to lose you?

(Vaughan, flies away into the horizon....free)

#cadre #six cadre #throne of glass #tog #kingdom of ash #fenrys moonbeam #connall moonbeam #rowan whitethorn #rowan #gavriel #aedion ashryver #aelin galathynius #aelin ashryver galathynius #lorcan salvaterre #elide lochan #Vaughan #elide x lorcan #rowan x aelin

[itmeansofthesea]

cadre/six crossover

this is so niche but i'm hoping it finds the right people sooooooo

Vaughan- "No Way" (Catherine of Aragon) the main reason being that he apparently took one look at Aelin's court and was like "no way" and never showed back up [he's the one i had the hardest time fitting so i stuck him here]

Fenrys- "Don't Lose Your Head" (Anne Boleyn) the main reason being that he's hella flirty and also v unhappy with the Maeve situation and not afraid to say something about it. of course he doesn't lose his head for it, but he does lose plenty of other things and still keeps talking shit until the bitter end. ((love him for it always tho))

Gavriel- "Heart of Stone" (Jane Seymour) the main reason being that this male is the rock of the cadre. no matter what you throw at him he's gonna hang in there and be steady and support you no matter what. and then he finds out he has a cub and hooooooly shit he loves him so much and is so proud of him and also doesn't get to see him grow like Jane doesn't get to see Edward-- ya know what I'm gonna stop here before I shatter my own heart into a million more pieces I'll see myself out thanks

Rowan- "Get Down" (Anne of Cleves) the main reason being that Rowan is the one Maeve never fucks with and more or less leaves him alone in ways she doesn't leave the others alone. of all their situations with her, based on that one section in EoS where (i think it's) Aelin contemplates how all of them have a role to play with her except Rowan because he's too related to her... yeah. he's also a prince in his own right and becomes king of the castle.

Connall- "All You Wanna Do" (Katherine Howard) the main reason is "play time's over, the only thing you wanna do is *blow kiss*." from what we understand him and fenrys get the heaviest Maeve duties and considering that he was the first to give himself up to her... yeah this is another one that makes me sad. also the whole "i thought this time was different, why did i think it'd be different but it's never ever different" when he realized that Maeve went after him to get Fenrys... yeah again I'll see myself out

Lorcan- "I Don't Need Your Love" (Catherine Parr) the main reason here is the character growth of him realizing that he didn't need Maeve's love and he was too good for it anyway. this is his character growth self-love anthem and who am i to take it away from him?

so this is what i think about when i'm in month three of throne of glass brain rot and start listening to Six again you're welcome

#the cadre #throne of glass #six the musical #tog #vaughan #fenrys moonbeam #gavriel #rowan whitethorn #connall moonbeam #connall #lorcan salvaterre #is this incredibly niche?? yes it is #will i apologize?? fuck no

[demigods-vampires-fae-are-bae]

Kidnapper: We have your kids.

Aelin: ...I don't have any kids?

Kidnapper: We have something. They call themselves the cadre.

Aelin: Oh, okay. Can you keep them for a bit? I haven't slept in, like, five months.

Kidnapper: Sure. Just pick them up by six. The blond one won't stop talking.

Fenrys, faintly in the background: I AM A FORCE OF NATURE! *crashing noises*

#tog #throne of glass #sjm #sarah j maas #sjm universe #aelin galythinius #aelin ashryver galathynius #rowan whitethorn #fenrys moonbeam #lorcan salvaterre #gavriel #cadre #rowaelin #celaena sardothien

[fishareglorious]

There is something masterfully swagful about Aras.

Her default expression is uncannily able to look simultaneously concerned yet disappointed in you at the same time.

She's the poster child for a 'live slug reaction' meme. They live in your walls. She's a plantita. She's underneath the floorboards. She's your all-purpose repairman. Their entire cadre will talk shit about you if you're an asshole. She's also six feet tall.

If she ever goes insane she'll hide in the tunnels she's built inside your building and never come out and probably die there. The government doesn't recommend attempting to retrieve them when that happens.

The funky hat is a plus too.

Some enjoy Storches or Stars on the fact that they are tall and they will bash your face in, or mayhaps a Eule because they are so full of joyous whimsy wrapped in a neat box of housewife material, or perhaps Adler because I too would try and stop my 8 foot tall commander I am emotionally codependent on from getting skewered like a reverse-kebab for the 100th time, or maybe Falke because it's Falke.

But can your girl build a boat? Look at the Ara behind Elster. She's showing you that boat because she's proud of that boat.

Wait a few more seconds and her entire cadre's gonna go and admire that boat with you🥰

#signalis #ara #ARAR #i should have a tag for my signalis posts hmm #sierpinski shitposting #there you go

[50cal-fullauto-astarion]

Keziah Niamh. Ffhjjd. This got so fucking out of hand. I LOVE YOU TY DARLING. 💖💖

König x f!OC (Rivka) / 1.8k words / NSFW

AU where for some reason, there's been a concerted effort to imprison skilled operators in the Gulag. König is used to kill whomever the guards point at--he does not question why. His reward is a visit to a solitary cell, where a woman holds his vile heart in her fist like a benison.

TW: descriptions of extreme violence and gore, machine-translated Russian.

When König’s shackled by wrist and ankle, with a chain running up to around his waist, he knows he’s one sin against his fellow man away from getting his little prize. If he were a rat, violence was a lever, and getting dragged up to solitary was a pellet, he’d stomp that fucking lever into the ground every fucking time.

No one had ever accused him of being smart, apart from one person, but there was not a person alive who had suffered the work of his awful hands that would not hesitate to call him brutal.

He’d been such a fucking problem when he was jumped and dragged to the Gulag all those months ago that he warrants a cadre of six guards in their full tactical gear to escort him down the halls to the boiler room. They like a good little show with a nasty atmosphere. It makes them think of home.

Once there, he’s aimed like a gun at another face that doesn’t matter to him. 

Older guy, beard, body hair like a werewolf. He’s got scars across his face that’ve taken one of his eyes, and when he snarls, he’s got no teeth across the bottom. Without his shirt on, König can make out eyes tattooed around his hips. Eh. Poor fuck, unlucky enough to get tagged for liking dick, it seems. Doesn’t matter. Not much of this does.

No one in the room speaks German, and he doesn’t speak Russian, and they won’t answer in English, so he just gestures for whatever weapon they want him to use on the raging asshole that’s about to become his victim. Sometimes, they get creative—hand him a pair of tongue and groove pliers or wire strippers, once even the broken wheel of an angle grinder. 

They don't give him bladed weapons, or anything that can be used like one. He kills too fast to get their rocks off like that. 

Today, it's simple. A claw hammer. His opponent is given an old skinning knife. It's not quite even odds, and König can remember a few fights that had been easier. 

When it starts, König is fast and ugly in nature and action. He's got reach, a hammer, and a lever to break off the fucking hinges. 

The bastard gets a few good slices in trying to go for his neck—a blood-groove carved over his cheekbone, a valley on his bicep that damn near splits the veins in his elbow. But König lands that first blow, and it's all over but the death rattle.

The claws fit perfectly under the windpipe. Can't rip it all the way out, but he can absolutely mutilate it. 

He's the perfection of violence with every arc of his arm drawing the hammer back—cracking it forward, pulverizing the joint on one side, ramming the claws between skull and cartilage on the other. The blood boils in his fucking veins, finally seeing the world in color, iron flooding his sinuses, thick on the soft palette, heavy on his tongue. 

The old man staggers, slurring, eyes unfocused. Trips on his own feet, goes down hard on his ass, looking around in confusion like a toddler. The guards howl like baboons showing red ass; they close in, smother, wanting a look at the damage.

König doesn't feel pity. That human feeling had been demo'ed and ripped out of him decades ago.

Slams a canvas basketball shoed foot on the gushing throat, crushes him back in a crouch with all his weight bearing down, and beats.

And beats. And fucking beats.

Might be the animal rage of being locked in a cage. Never loved a cage that he was forced into. Might be that he's named with his name, never called by his callsign. Might be that he's on an island in the middle of the Baltic Sea, and anything short of an Armageddon-sized riot would be a death sentence when eyeballing escape. Might be he just can't choose how he kills.

Might fucking be that his unit is dead, and the only thing he's got left is in the hole, and the only thing he's got left is the only reason he'd ever capitulate to these filter-faced fucks instead of killing as many of them as fast as he can, dying, but dying in defiance. 

His chest is heaving, he bleeds from the wounds cut into him, and he sits on the corpse's ribcage. He doesn't ask what the man did—wouldn't get an answer, fucker probably didn't do anything, and König doesn't care. 

Their tones change, and the tasers come out once gore streaks up across the floor and the near wall, hammer striking concrete when there's no more bone to crush.

Fuck—the meat, and blood, and bone chips are hot splattered on his legs, up the wifebeater on his chest exposed by his rolled-down jumpsuit. It burns on his exposed neck and face, and he can even detect it on the numb tissue of his warped burn scars. 

“Odinokiy. Seychas.” His voice rasps, throat hot and dry, wanting water, but he grates out the only Russian he knows, throwing the hammer away. 

Solitary. Now.

Rivka had been dumped in the hole five months ago for influencing the guards and other prisoners. For a woman with a subatomic amount of charisma, she was spilling poison in ears across a dozen languages. 

The only word he recognizes as he's paraded with his chains dragging and hobbling him through the corridors on the far side of the facility is Zabludowicz. It's the only one that matters. 

Her eyes never went back to normal—that scope glass gray he'd know in his dreams and mania now gone forever—and she still couldn't read, but she could still run her engines in the red, burning spite and ugly, fester-fuck rage for fuel.

No one needed a reason to pack her off to proverbial Siberia. They just did. And when they dragged her out of the showers, they beat her. It—broke something. In her head.

The first time König had seen her after, both her eyes were dilated black, and she slurred her words together. Told him in the halting sentences of a child that she couldn't read the Cyrillic on the labels of the guards’ gear. Couldn't read anything in the Latin alphabet, either.

König throws his hideous, hyena-pitch cackle when the guards slam him against the cast iron door casket-lidding her miserable cell, grating out, “Rivki—Schatzi—it's me,” in a gout of German that sends the guards cursing, twisting his cuffs tighter, cutting into his raw skin. 

Death is death is death, and it still stands in the place of a gift in this shithole, but they find a purgatory in leverage levied.

It's on purpose. It's all on purpose, and it all hurts, and the worst things they can do to him, they won't.

Pain upon Rivka is his punishment, and they won't kill her until they reap all the connections they can from her head. Pain upon him is her pound of flesh; they know she stops speaking when he bleeds too much, and they know she'd send him to his death with silence, even if his delivery was torture in all its many natures. 

There's coarse Russian yelling, orders and threats spat, and König is wrenched away from the door, his limbs freed and howling just as it slides open with a bang that should burst his ear drums.

He's shoved in with all the force of an aircraft carrier launched out of dry dock on bad water, and there are thousands upon thousands of fucks he can't give, because there's Rivka, against the far wall. 

Her eyes are black, and they keep shaving her head without even the guise of delousing, just degradation. Stupid shit to think they could ever degrade her. 

Not sure which one jumps first after that microsecond of recognition—the space at the bottom of lungs between breaths, where dying eventually finds its way, where the lungs prepare to intake the scent of home—but the crash is painful, and Rivka is the shrapnel edges of broken glass with her starvation-raised bones digging into his bruised muscle.

Here, in hell, is his health. 

Her hands find his wounds, and her voice is a sharper cut than the knife used against him, “The fuck are they giving out now? Scalpels? You-you-you need glue t-to close-close-close.”

Her words are precious now, so he does not interrupt, but Rivka wouldn't know the difference between a limb severe by saw and a neck slit with a straight razor, and the love König carries for her would crush him to death the moment he stopped asking it to.

“I missed you,” he says in place of a reply, feeling the quarks in his atoms want to break apart in the face of his relief and full-body shaking, “fuck, I missed you.”

Her eyes snap back to him, and her expression crumples. Her features—austere, alien, fae—animate as her humanity bubbles back up through the cracks, too strong facing him to remain trapped even with her ruthless burial.

“Missed you bad,” she says, nose wrinkled snarl-like at her recovering vocabulary. Where she lacks in words, she masters in movement, arms around his neck, pulling body against body. She grabs the strap of his wifebeater, warping it, yanking him close, and he doesn't care. He listens. She's the hand on his collar, he'll always arrive when she signals him.

She gropes for hair at his temples that has long been buzzed away. She searches for silver that exists only in stubble. She kisses him like she'll take the soul from his body, devour it bloody, and carry it for safekeeping. 

He gathers her up like there's still some chance in hell that he can protect her, dropping on her miserable bare cot of a bed, dragging her onto his chest, and between his legs, and under his arms. All he can do is wait for her vengeful brain to heal, then there will come a plan, and he will faithfully (faithfully, faithfully, faithfully—as blinded by loving obedience as Abraham on the mountain, with wood for the pyre meant for his sacrificial son) be the finger on her trigger. He will be her executioner. He will carry out her will.

Her body is too tired and worn for fucking, and he wouldn't ask or accept it anyway. If it was a matter of too many eyes, they possibly could swing it from sheer savagery, but it's not. He can't make himself ask her to expend the energy. She has so far to go still. 

But her razor-slide lips are a refrain. We'll make it through, we'll make it through, we'll make it through. 

Rivka is the only higher power König believes in.

#konig #könig #call of duty #cod mw2 #mw2 #konig mw2 #konig call of duty #konig x oc #my work #oc: rivka

[opinions-about-tiaras]

I think it's okay for people to be disappointed and feel misled and maybe even a little upset Scott Pilgrim Takes Off wasn't a more straightforward adaptation.

It's a masterwork as a piece of media, of course; a AU-that's-also-a-sequel based on both the movie AND the graphic novels, in dialogue with both, telling a tight, near-flawless story with immaculate animation and voice acting that, quite frankly, often makes the 2010 movie look poorly directed. (Tony Oliver is getting a LOT more out of these people in the booth than Edgar Wright managed to in front of the camera, frankly.)

And that's part of the problem, I think.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World oozed charm out of every shot; it's beloved by everyone who worked on it, which is always a good sign. But as an adaptation it was flawed in ways that were inevitable. Sacrifices had to be made to fit all six graphic novels that are deliberately messy and are meant as separate narrative arcs into something that runs on the big screen in less than two hours.

That meant a lot had to go missing. The original graphic novels were often leisurely rom-coms where they weren't stark, raw looks at emotional dysfunction, and a big part of their structure was the secondary and supporting cast. A lot of that had to go. Knives entire arc was cut to the bone. Stephen Stills being a hot mess and his weird and hilarious offscreen gay awakening went into the trash. The heart of Volume Four (still the best volume FIGHT ME), Lisa Miller's instigating presence, junked. Roxie Richter and the Katayanagi Twins are reduced basically to jokes. Envy Adams is given just enough to be a villain but none of what she needed to be a real person, which is a big deal in the comics. Even Gideon gets short shrift; the emotional violations and the dark, stinking, malign weaponization of emotional headspace that make him work in the comics are thrown aside in favor of him being a more straightforward supervillain using mind control chips.

And of course the biggest person to get shanked was Kim Pine. Kim had a storyline of quiet desperation, of seeking intimacy while being desperately terrified of it, romantic and sexual awakenings she isn't equipped to handle, deep and personal betrayals almost every volume that she nonetheless perseveres through. That had to go as well.

When I heard there was an animated adaptation coming, I was thrilled that I would finally get to see all of that rendered onto the screen. Scott Pilgrim was born to be an animated series more than it ever was live-action (and it's been proven multiple times over the past five years especially that animation can produce something wildly special when adapting a comic source handled properly) and it was finally going to have the breathing space to do it RIGHT.

Only it isn't that at all.

I wouldn't trade Scott Pilgrim Takes Off for the more straightforward adaptation we were expecting. The series has sunk its hooks deep into my brain, it's like I'm 29 again, driving my terrible, jank-ass car five hours to Toronto to attend the release party of the final volume. There's so much special about it; Knives and Kim's beautiful love duet is one of the most tender, pure things I've ever seen. The League of Evil Exes as a bumbling cadre of weirdos. Everything to do with Roxie Richter.

But it also means that we're probably deeply unlikely to get that more straightforward adaptation anytime soon. And that makes me feel like something has been lost.

And I respect the feelings of those who are disappointed and upset by it. Especially given that the marketing for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was deliberately deceptive. I think that's a valid way to feel.

#bryan lee o'malley #scott pilgrim takes off #scott pilgrim vs the world #scott pilgrim

[see-arcane]

Penclosa (TEASER)

Summary: It’s been almost a year since Jonathan Harker made that fateful first trip to Transylvania. The monster that imprisoned him, that threatened his love, that died in a box of earth by two blades, has been gone for months. Yet Jonathan’s nightmares have never left. In fact, as the bleak anniversary nears, they have worsened. Van Helsing’s mesmerism has made no progress in freeing him from the nightly horror. But he has come from Amsterdam for a potentially fruitful visit to another professor. 

Prof. Wilson is playing host to a mesmerist of singular and uncanny power, Miss Helen Penclosa. On meeting the troubled young man and his wife, she is only too happy to help...

For a version that isn’t in Tumblr format eye strain mode, check out the Google Doc version HERE.

Prologue

Over the course of May through early November in the year of 18—, events of uncanny and unholy nature swallowed the lives of multiple innocents. Some survived. Some died. Some did worse. A monster was slain, victims were lost or rescued or both. The whole of these remarkable happenings and the horror therein were compiled into a single manuscript under the monster’s name. It was bound and stored behind the lock of a safe door. Not to be forgotten, but to have the nightmare imprisoned, if only in spirit. This manuscript and the monster inside it are finished.

The nightmares should have followed suit. For most of their valiant number, they did. Slowly. Stutteringly. Yet they had ended as life’s clockwork ticked on and turned the heartbroken and the harried forward into the future. Grief still exists, of course. Its melancholy tides ebb and flow and drown and trickle. But the fear is gone.

For most.

It has been nearly six months since Jonathan Harker brought the steel of the kukri blade down through Count Dracula’s neck, reducing the vampire to his dead elements. 

It has been nearly seven months since he woke to find Mina Harker screaming in terror and violation with the monster’s blood in her mouth, her neck still running red from where the monster had supped on her; all while the demon’s trance had frozen him in sleep. 

It has been nearly eight months since he lay bedridden in a hospital he thanked as much as dreaded for fear that the nuns would detain him as a madman as they nursed him through illness and ravings they took for ‘brain fever,’ the climax of which ended with Mina Murray exchanging the marriage vows with him there in his sickbed. 

It has been all but a year in full since the night Count Dracula locked him in the plush and bloody nightmare of his castle for two months of idle torment, teasing his cadre of inhuman women with the promise of the young solicitor’s throat, of his undeath, of eternity spent forever in those stone walls, a Thing feasting with them on the squealing fodder of humanity.

Jonathan Harker has killed the inventor of his nightmares. Yet those terrors churn on and on without their maker. Even with the anniversary of last year’s madness about to overtake the calendar, still his sleeping hours are so rarely his. It takes its toll on him. This he can allow.

But his wife has suffered his suffering too long, and this he cannot. Something must be done. Something will be done.

And in doing it, fate proves once more that monsters remain a reality.

Some of whom crave far more and far worse than the theft of blood.

 I

 ��The 14th of April. The first day Jonathan took his journal with him to work.

There was something too mortifying in the act of writing about the particular topic that needed purging to scrawl it with Mina in the next room, still scouring exhaustion from her eyes. Not solely for the subject matter, but for how shamefully repetitious it had become. So much like a child bleating for help over the same imaginary devils in the room. It was bad enough to have turned her sleep into an endless lottery game in which she could count on fair sleep only half the time while the other half was devoted to breaking him out of the cell his traitor mind dragged him to with gleeful malice.

The castle, the Count, the Weird Sisters, the damned October night of Mina’s bloodied lips, and his own red hands in allowing the monster to inflict himself at all. All had their encores in his dreaming theater. Some nights were bad. Some nights were worse. His best nights, so abhorrently rare, were ones in which he did not dream at all. And now, now that they were creeping through the thick part of April, inching towards the full fruit and pleasant air of May, he’d realized…

 No, why say it? Why bother? He would spit it on the page and be done with it. Ink turned to bile. Jonathan held off until the majority of the paperwork was muscled through and noon threw its golden shine in the window. He took the volume out of his breast pocket with care, feeling a twinge that was as much grim recollection as unexpected nostalgia. How often had this slim little traveler’s journal with its packed pages and creased cover slipped the notice of his jailor by dint of its hiding place?

Now here he was, hiding it from his wife, from his employees, from the whole of his world. Jonathan swallowed new bitterness under a tide of fatigue and brought out a pen. He wrote:

 JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL

 14 April— Another night, another visit from the ghost of the Count.

He was as he’d been when he first drove me into his mountains. Only I knew it was him, lucid and afraid and without the kukri at my hip. When I tried to run for the coach that had brought me, it was gone. There was only the night and the cold iron of his grip dragging me into the caleche. The mountains did not take us up, but yawned wide as a stone maw, the horses driving us down, down, down into a shadowed hollow where those Powers exist that allowed a Thing like Dracula to manifest himself in the first place. Hell itself could not match the chthonic press and terror of that descent.

So I was convinced in the dream, made worse for the fact that the descent seemed never to end. There was only more down, more plummet, more drag, as though Dracula were merely a grinning fishhook and I was being reeled ever deeper, down to a place older and further than any of Dante’s circles. Thus I went, thus I cried out, thus Mina discovered me, all cold sweat and shuddering. Again.

Again and again and again. I do not understand it. How have the others moved on so freely when I am left still struggling in a mire of my own invention? Even Mina has moved past the need for any of my own ministrations to bring her out of sour dreams. It’s only me now. Always me. Now, inexplicably, I find the visions have grown not only worse, but more frequent. I expect it is the turn of the seasons that has stirred them to their peak. The calendar declares I am not far off from the day I first left for that trap of a business trip and set the whole horrid mess in motion.

What an evil thing to have even the dull plodding of the months turned into a menace. And for what? The mere memory of late spring tied with the coming of the Count? It is a miserable joke to play on myself. Worse still to have it affect Mina well after she escaped that unthinkable fate and survived the brunt of the demon’s greed. I must fix myself. Or, despite her pleas against it, I must resign myself to the guest bedroom for the sake of her own sleep.

The nightmares will come regardless. Better that at least one of us can take some rest in a night. But this is only temporary. The nightmares themselves must be addressed. Jack has already made the suggestion of a prescription. It would be a decent stall, or at least enough to permit me some blessed hours of blankness. Yet I don’t wish to grow reliant on erasing dreams altogether when I merely wish to join everyone else in the freedom of natural fantasies. I want rest, not a chemical concussion. But what other options are left to me?

Jonathan finally closed the journal when an answer failed to come after a quarter of an hour. The volume went back to his breast and his attention went out the window. Pastoral beauty peeked out in its sequestered places along the street. Birdsong rang out even amid the murmur of human life flowing down avenues and around corners. Living blood in angled veins. He pressed a hand to his eyes and pinched at an oncoming headache.

A year. Practically a year, and still his brain ran these incessant ugly laps. What a thing of glass he was compared to how Mina and their friends stood today. Dr. John Seward and Lord Arthur Godalming had climbed over the mourning of both the girl and the man they had loved. Van Helsing, at once weathered and sturdy as an ancient tree, had returned to his myriad works in Amsterdam and, on his occasional visits, had proven solid as ever.

And Mina.

Mina, Mina.

He thanked whatever gods or angels there were who guarded dreams that she, at least, had slipped the vampire’s gifts of regurgitated fear. Even if Jonathan’s own childish languishing jolted her into action, she did not suffer any similar horrors at this late stage. Spectral visions of beloved Lucy, of old Mr. Swales with his broken neck, of Dracula’s leering death mask face, and of the beckoning coven that were nearly her Sisters under his thrall—all these wraiths had come and gone months ago for her. Now there was only her husband left to coddle.

“It has to stop,” he told the air. “It has to.”

His mind ticked back to Van Helsing. To Mina’s own peculiar drowses as the condition bitten into her continued its steady creep. Down by day, up by night. But there, at the cusp of dusk and dawn, when her mind was entirely hers…

Jonathan frowned and went to his hanging coat. He took a small pocket mirror from its interior. It was one of many trinkets and tokens their band had all come into the habit of carrying. Just in case. Even the kukri remained fixed to his hip, still whetted and blessed, just as Mina kept the revolver and its sacred bullets drowsing in her reticule. For now, he satisfied himself with finding his face in the little glass.

The former deep brown of his hair still grew in its new silver-white. Clean-shaven, the shelves of his cheeks and the shadows under the bloodshot eyes stood out. A strange contrast to what the cheekier of his fellows had once called his elfin looks. Between the fringe of his lashes and the fetching slant of his features, there had been more than one reference made from old classmates about him taking side work in the style of Boulton and Park.

But in the present, almost as he’d been during that hellish month of October, he had become an optical illusion. From one angle was the winsome youth, from another the sleepless apparition both haunted and haunting. This he did not care for one way or the other…but the eyes. The eyes were what mattered, for they might be as susceptible as Mina’s gaze had once been. Enough to open the door of her mind and welcome Van Helsing’s careful mesmeric passes to the senses she could steal from Dracula in his traveling box. Considering how dangerously pliant Jonathan had been under the trio’s influence at the castle and, worse, beneath the psychic thumb of Dracula’s pressing him under an unbreakable slumber while he preyed upon Mina, there was surely a chance the Professor could find a foothold in him too. Assuming such suggestions fell within the man’s ability.

Jonathan had not done any real reading into the subject of hypnosis as either a practical profession or an amusement. That it was effective in some form was undeniable, as Van Helsing had proved. It had been enough to help Mina along to exercising her own sensory abilities, enough to carry something of a dialogue. But that had been only conversation. There had been no attempt to instill a command or perform the equivalent of removing a tumor from her dreamscape.

He pried at an eyelid and scrubbed crust from his lashes.

Do you expect to see a welcome mat and a valet pointing to the room where all the nightmares are put together? Right this way, sir, the Count has been toiling away at the things all day so he can have them ready for you by the evening.

He could almost laugh. Instead, he made a small coughing noise, like that of an animal with a sprain. God, but he was tired. Tired of being afraid, tired of being tired, tired of leaving Mina still playing nursemaid to a husband who was man enough to slay the monster and now boy enough to cling to her for fear of the bogeyman in his head. Tired.

“At least try,” he told the glass. His reflection looked unsure. “Try.”

It was by luck that Van Helsing had been called down from the Netherlands for an invitation that was as much business as holiday in his itinerary, but it was by the sight of Mina’s fatigue-glassed eyes that Jonathan worked up the nerve to part the man from his warm patter with Jack and Art. Mina kept his arm and he hers. He was less than surprised to find the old man’s cobalt stare had a sort of prophetic shine to them.

 Just like old times. If one can call a year ‘old.’

 “I think perhaps, there is something you wish to talk of in private?”

 “There is.” Even as he said it, he would have had to be blind to miss Dr. Seward and Lord Godalming’s gazes trailing after them. There were only five people to the parlor, after all, and three of them now in their own whispering cluster. Discretion was moot. “But I suppose it matters little either way. Secrecy has never been an ally within our circle as much as out of it.”

 At that, the old man bristled.

 “Secrecy on what point?”

“Nothing terribly dire,” Jonathan began, and was not sure how to finish. Mina found his hand. Her hold was still so warm against the chill of his fingers. They gripped each other as she stepped forward.

“Important regardless,” she insisted. “It’s a matter that might have a solution in your talent with mesmerism, Professor.”

At the mention of mesmerism, there was a curious shift in the air around Van Helsing. Jonathan swore he could almost see it. A tilt from apprehension to bemusement.

“How is that, Madam Mina?”

“We wondered if it was possible for such a process to,” a snugger grip upon his cool hand, one he returned, “aid with sleep.”

“Nightmares,” Jonathan offered under his breath. In his peripheral, he caught Jack putting his tumbler down untouched while Art turned to the former, his face a question. Jack offered a tellingly concerned glance back. “The ones that have stayed with me since,” his throat worked sharply, “last year. They have not left or lessened. It seems the nearer I get to the anniversary of that first stint in Transylvania, the worse they’ve grown. I can nearly set a watch by them.”

“I am sorry to hear such, my friend. Sorrier still to say I have not great practice in matters of tailoring dreams. Still, I will make my best attempt for you, and if it should fall short, there may yet be another option. Yet this I will not lay upon the table before we exhaust what we have before us now. Come, we shall make use of the couch.”

Bidding privacy an unceremonious farewell, Jonathan let himself be led to a chaise. Art made some comment to the next member of staff to try the door, informing her the room was not to be disturbed for the rest of the hour. Jack drew the drapes shut against the sunshine while the lamps were set aglow. Mina took the spot beside him, their hands now a woven knot of fingers.

“The trouble is, of course, that there will be no knowing if we are successful here in the present. To do as you hope me to do, it would not be so simple as bringing forth talk or suggesting an action here in the present. What is desired is hypnosis that sets the mind as one sets a clock. A susceptible mind will tick-tick-tick along, hit a certain hour, a certain stimulus, and then the command, if it is instilled right, shall be committed. This alone is a most difficult task even for those with the highest talents in mesmerism, needing the hypnotist to be canny and the subject to be pliant. There are cases where such effects have only been carried halfway, following some smaller impulse or other rather than bowing totally to the order given in the trance.

“And this is only to speak of acts attempted while the subject is conscious. Even Madam Mina, drowsy as she was in her trances while seeking out the senses of the Vampire, was not asleep or merely in the somnambulist’s state. To set a mind to perform a task—to outthink or to cut short a nightmare—requires not only the hypnotist’s skill and the subject’s susceptibility, but the sleeping mind’s compliance. It is a feat I have not come across yet in news of such budding sciences. But as we make the attempt now, we must have a manner of defining whether success is had or not.”

Here he looked pointedly at both Harkers.

“I take it you still keep to that so wise habit of filling your journals?”

“We do,” Mina answered aloud as Jonathan traced the lines of the book at his chest. “Do you mean for us to record the next instance of a nightmare or of a peaceable sleep?”

 “Both,” Van Helsing said, now digging in a pocket for a notebook of his own. “And, should the attempt be successful, the third potential result. That is, the happening of a nightmare which is cut short.” All eyes turned to him as he scratched out the three possible points in his pages: Nightmare, Sleep, Nightmare Blunted. “This would only be for the sake of proof, of course. The most desired result is that Jonathan should drop into sleep, either dreamless or unvisited by grim visions. In such a case, a report of nothing is the best report to have. Failing that, but still of good portent, would be the recording of a nightmare begun, but then felled by the order I am to feed his mind by mesmeric suggestion. It will be a cue that his dreaming thoughts are to act upon, the better to subvert its unhappy impulses in sleep.”

  Jack puzzled over this with one of his more hawkish looks.

“Is that not a precarious attempt to make, Professor? It seems a rather broad spectrum to program a mind to. If you say something in the line of, ‘If your dream is a bad one, stop dreaming,’ how is the sleeping mind to differentiate between nightmares versus a dream that is simply odd? The lines between what is fearsome, what is strange, and what is fantasy are blurred enough awake. Could this not tamper with his subconscious mind on a too-wide scale as he dreams?”

“You speak right, friend John. Success in such a way would also carry risk.” Van Helsing turned to face Jonathan alone, the callused pad of his hand finding the young man’s shoulder. “It is the echo of old fears that still find you, is that right?”

“Yes. It is.” The hand not holding Mina drifted to the handle of his kukri. He thought miserably of a babe grasping his blanket. “Even now.”

“Then that is the culprit to set your mind against. The fear of those monsters long vanquished by us. I say again that there is no guarantee that my own prowess is up to the task, just as I say again there is another possibility to attempt should our own fall short. But for now, we make our try. Arthur,” he said, turning to the lord, “we should, perhaps, douse more of the lamps and bring near only one.”

All was prepared.

The mesmeric passes were made.

And made.

And made.

Almost half an hour passed before Jonathan sighed. Notably not from any lethargy brought on by a trance. Everyone with a pen made their notes of the anomaly before them. This being that for those thirty minutes, Jonathan would seem to droop and settle into the trance for a moment. Maybe two. Only to then shudder and jolt back into full awareness. So it went on and on, down and up again, until Jonathan put a hand to his eyes.

“I swear to you I’m not doing it on purpose. I can feel myself succumb in bursts, I recognize the change and lull of the process. Consciously I strive to throw myself into it. But reflex yanks me back.” He dragged his hand from his eyes, feeling as if he had been awake a hundred years. “I think it is because of how I recognize it. Even if so much of me knows the truth and trusts you, there is some rankled animal where the rest of my mind sits. A riled thing that can only recognize your attempted trance as being like his. Like theirs.”

There was no need to name the parties in question. They of the hypnotic mist and lips lacquered red in babes’ blood and slumber inflicted like a cudgel. Yet Mina’s small hand was joined by its sibling in clasping his fingers. Jonathan could not quite bring himself to meet eyes with Art and Jack. Van Helsing wore concern mingled with something like the human translation of whirring clockwork.

“If that is the case, then the alternate route is the only other I can think of within the realms of this practice.”

“What route is that?”

“One that will require permission and confidences of persons I am to visit within the month. It happens, my friends, that I was contacted by a Professor Wilson, a man who teaches psychology as his trade, but who pursues the more fantastical roads of hypnotherapy, clairvoyance, and yet more outré psychic happenings as his passion. I have received summons from him before—last year, when we were all so deep in our dire works—and had to rebuff him outright. Now he sends for me again most ardently, to witness the work of an adept he has found in the field of mesmerism. Should his adulation be based even in a fraction of truth, this party might be able to lend some aid. If only because she seems to have mastered a form of hypnosis wholly of her own making when compared to what professionals and skeptics alike call the ‘standard’ of the process.”

“She? Wait,” Jack turned fully to him, now balanced between wonder and disappointment, “you do not refer to Miss Penclosa?”

“I do. You have reason to doubt the lady’s credentials, my friend?”

“I would not know her one way or the other, but I know Professor Wilson has grown no small reputation amid those who work in such circles as ours, and even those who neighbor it. There is not a single sanitorium, clinic, or traveling physician who has not at some point received some letter from the man, always to the tune of having some fresh discovery to tout that reveals itself as no more than a trifle or the poor man’s falling for a charlatan.” He looked up as Art hummed.

“Is this the same Wilson you say spent a month trying to find documented cases with a semblance to that Poe story? The one with the hypnotized dead man?”

“The same. Though I will grant him credit enough to say even he admitted it was a mere curiosity. Even so, his history of so-called proof does not bode well for Miss Penclosa’s supposed talents. I received the same summons, Professor, likely only for nearness’ sake, and duly binned it.”

Jonathan caught the prophetic gleam in the old man’s eyes again. The specter of a smile carved new wrinkles around them.

“And when did you receive your letter, friend John?”

“Two months ago. Why?”

“Because mine was received only last month. And that with documented sessions of remarkable new feats that were performed on a fellow professor who once counted himself a skeptic. While that subject has since quit himself of the sessions, Miss Penclosa appears to be able to reproduce similar examples upon total strangers in most routine fashion. That Wilson’s latest message is saturated with all the high joy of a child receiving an entire toy shop on Christmas morning suggests that there is at least some observable truth in the results as opposed to past dull findings.”

Van Helsing turned again to the Harkers, his gaze soft as gauze.

“For honesty’s sake, I will say there is, obviously, a chance that even if this Miss Penclosa is so very talented, it is possible she may not penetrate this new reflex of the mind that has grown to lash out at such powers. It is a good reflex to have in ordinary circumstances, I should think! But if you do wish to make a last try with the opportunities of hypnotism before turning still elsewhere, it cannot do harm to try with this seeming prodigy. At worst, she will fail as I have. At best, she might make a dent in the echo of old horrors. If you wish to come with me to Professor’s Wilson’s demonstration to endure a session with her, I shall be making my arrangements to visit in a week’s time. We can travel together.”

Mina looked to Jonathan and Jonathan to her. As had been the case before, and even more the case after the hell of last year’s trials, he felt sure he sensed something of Mina’s presence falling through his eyes and over his soul. It did so like a balm. Even if there were no words shared in such gazes, they never lacked for the delivery of a message. No more than she ever failed to grasp whatever he wished to say in his own glances. It was a joke between them which was really not a joke: that they could carry whole conversations with their eyes alone. A handy pastime for lighter moments and a relief in instances where no word could meet the task, either in speech or shorthand.

And so they looked. They spoke. They turned to Van Helsing.

“Might we have a day or so to think on it, Professor?” Mina asked. “If we joined you there would be matters to attend to for work and home first.”

“So long as you are decided before the week is out, all will be well. This Wilson lives in a small town not far outside Exeter and there shall be time enough to write and ask if I might introduce friends of mine to the talented lady in question.” He held up a hand before there could be a protest. “I shall make no mention of your particular situation, of course. Though I trust this Wilson enough to believe he has some truer proof than any he peddled before—he would not have sent so far for me otherwise, or been twice over so giddy in this letter than his last, which lacked any mention of Miss Penclosa—I must trust good John and Arthur when they say he is prolific in hunting attention. Even in his few messages to me, I can read he is too eager for his name in print.

“All this is to say, Miss Penclosa is the point of any visit from you, not her host’s studies. To her you bring your troubles, if she is seeming of good character, and she I will visit with you for the week I have set aside for the visit. It is to you both that the choice falls to, if you seek to ask her aid. Should she not be as we hope, or should this Wilson be too much the gnat at your side, wishing to make Jonathan a subject more than a patient, then I will make my whole apologies and seek for better avenues with you.”

 All this the Harkers took home to mull.

It was mulled over dinner, over books, over bath, over bed.

Even now, with Peter Hawkins’ dear Mrs. Mary Bentley still on staff, the habits of sparse living still locked them into the thin-pocketed efficiency of childhood and adolescence. They turned down their own covers and drew their own baths and had to be shooed out of the kitchen whenever mealtime demanded they make and wash the dishes themselves as they’d always done.

“I cannot tell which of you is worse,” Mary would chide them both. “You, Mrs. Harker, for trying to put a lady out of her situation, trying to balance a whole house on top of your work with that hammering typewriter. Or you, Mr. Harker! You, who’ve been dear Mr. Hawkins’ shadow and mine since you were scarcely out of the playground, studying up on law books and housework as if you meant to be your own husband and wife. I shall go positively spare with you two.”

As it stood, Mary had duly banished the Harkers from tidying anything but the master bedroom, its adjoining toilet, and their shared study, if only for courtesy’s sake. The kitchen remained an uneven battleground in which Jonathan and Mina might get away with preparing a small bite or a picnic, but they would ultimately be sent scattering away like cats otherwise. Tonight they’d made off like thieves with a tea service they had arranged themselves whilst Mary was distracted by a load of linen. Having lost the coin toss, Jonathan was the one to risk leaving the lady her own cup and a plate of biscuits waiting at the door while her back was turned.

“It’s only fair,” Mina insisted over her cup as Mary made her expected noises of disgruntled noises of discovery downstairs, muffled only briefly by the likewise inevitable sip and chew. “You are the one with the cat’s feet, darling.”

“Good enough for castle walls, cliff faces, and properties in Piccadilly.” He smiled as he said it and it almost made the words into a joke. That his hand drifted to his hip as he said them, and that he felt a brief flutter of anxiety until he remembered taking it off to don his nightclothes, dented the mirth.

Mina set her cup aside and went to him by the window. Here she joined him in another nightly ritual; judging the sill. To Mary’s bafflement and surprised delight, the Harkers had insisted on setting up box gardens to try their hand at aiding the kitchen and the flora. The chief crops being carefully tended garlic blossoms and certain wild roses. The latter were due to be handsome bouquets once in season, while half the blossoms of the former were harvested too soon—their petals graced the bedroom windows alongside dashes of the rose. A strange potpourri, and stranger still to use as a ward against potential invaders.

For anyone else, at least.

Jonathan set his cup gingerly down on the sill without disturbing the floral border and used both hands to overlap Mina’s own. She had folded her arms about his middle and the embrace left her chin just at the level of his shoulder if she propped herself on tiptoe. They simply stood there a while, holding and being held. After some minutes of this, Mina finally breathed against his back:

“It’s just a matter of your mind catching up, I think.”

“Mm?”

“Most of you knows the objective facts. Dracula happened. Dracula was put down. You and Quincey made dust of him.”

“Mm.”

“But Dracula did not strike any of us in the way he did with you. Not even Lucy. Not even me.”

His hands tightened over hers just short of clamping. They might have trembled.

“He did worse—,”

“No. He only did to me in person what he intended his Brides to do to you on his behalf. You were meant for the same fate, Jonathan. You were meant to be taken first. Before Lucy, before me, before anyone else who crossed his path by chance rather than machination. If such a fiend as him had one virtue, it was that he could be an admirable planner. And if he had but one truly human flaw, it was that he did a terrible and craven job of improvisation. It took only the smallest pinholes in his plot to dismantle the whole thing. The very smallest was that he preyed on me with his swap of blood, seeking some trite trophy and a spy who wound up spying on him in turn. But the largest, the very worst thing he could have done, was make Jonathan Harker his prisoner.”

Jonathan made a hoarse noise that wanted to be a sigh or a laugh but could manage neither. He turned in her arms so that she had to look him in the eye as she spoke. The bloodshot glass of them seemed to dare her to paint him as a hero rather than the fool whose job was to open the door for the monster in the first place.

Said self-loathing found no ally in her gaze now any more than it had in the year before. This was old ground and Mina knew the terrain better than any of his demons did. Gratitude and guilt swam in his throat.

“I know what haunts you,” she pressed on, “because it is the same thing that haunts me. ‘What else could I have done? Why was I not canny or quick or strong enough to do it?’ The answer to both, the answer that helped dislodge so much of my own poison dreams, was Dracula. A centuries-old monster holding all the cards, all the secrets, all the little tells and aids that might have unmade him sooner. He was superstition itself, hiding behind the guise of declaring his reality impossible. Even when you had the spade in your hand, ready to end him on instinct well before you knew what damage it could truly do, he had a trick to play in his freezing basilisk gaze. God knows poor Renfield suffered under its power. Between this and the swarm of his men coming to take the boxes—and even the elements which conspired to slam shut all sane exits from the fortress—you should have been doomed.

“You should have been left trapped in that stone box with his thirsty housemates, waiting on death at dusk and undeath forever after. That was his plan. That was what should have sealed his victory. Yet you made it out, darling. You and your journal and all the blessed knowledge that helped us draw the noose about him before he could swallow England itself and who knows how much more of the world from there. Don’t you see it?” Her hands had moved up to the cool sides of his face, trapping it in the small heat of her palms. “Any other man sent in your place, he would have been dead or worse and Dracula would have carried on unimpeded. He was always going to inflict himself on the people beyond his mountains. But you ruined it for him. That first vital flaw. And his last, with your steel in his throat.”

Her hands pulled him down until his lips were level with hers.

“You did not cause his evil. You and Quincey put it to an end. He cannot do anything more to you, to me, to anyone else. And I will tell you so a thousand times more until the spiteful traitor of your imagination gives up on spinning nightmares that insist otherwise. Alright?”

In answer, he pressed his mouth into the place it always fit upon hers.

In bed, he fought sleep until he couldn’t.

In the latest hours of night, he woke to his screams being stifled against Mina’s breast, her hands holding and stroking in their accustomed routes on his head and back, hushing and murmuring the memorized coos that always fished him shaking and sweating from the pit of his mind.

In the earliest hours of morning, when she had drifted thinly back into sleep, he took himself to the study to fall into his own narrow wisp of slumber. Frail but bottomless hours too deep to produce a dream. These were all he could rely on for rest.

In daylight, he and she called upon Van Helsing who sent his letter to Prof. Wilson the same day.

 JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL

 18 April— All’s been arranged.

Hawkins and Harker will do without me from the 27th of April to the 10th of May. Even if Miss Penclosa cannot make the progress we hope for, Mina and I shall at least have leave to take in some quieter respite. Tuppeton sounds like one of those blessed towns on the edge between the congested bustle of true a city and the idyllic softness of a village. It is stately enough to produce a potent university, and that usually comes with an array of good distractions for students and faculty alike. I hope there are at least fine views to collect. Mina talks of seeking out a photographer’s shop and taking home a camera of our own for a souvenir. It's a nice thought and a genuine one, though my mind is addled enough that I think I can scent an underlying motive.

She wishes to steer me back into the cheer that was my wont before the whole mess. I’m certain she misses the Jonathan Harker who could fall in love with a vista for hours as surely as he’d be enthralled by the stories on a stage. He still exists, I think, but he is so much diminished under the weight of this shock-haired usurper that he’s smothered whenever Mina or a friend is not there to look for him. I want so badly for him to take back the throne from me even when I am alone.

God, let him have his life again. His days and his nights of peace. Let me fall asleep and never wake again, so that he can give joy and be joyous without so much creaking effort. I am still the frightened and frightening Thing that crawled out of the castle and hunted a man-shaped monster like a rabid hound. But even with my task fulfilled, Jonathan Harker has not come home, has not awoken, and so I am left to pantomime him in such a shabby manner.    

Ten days, ten days. That is all that’s left until we see if Mina has longer to wait for the husband she deserves. It feels so long.

Now she calls and it is time to leave you. Art is taking us all upon a theatre spree for all the good shows we can find before the week is out. There will even be an illusionist or two in the mix.

Perhaps if they impress enough, I will dream them into the next nightmare and all the fiends within can disappear into their hat.

 19 April— Nightmares again. As I only pretended to predict, they were given a new tint by the aftermath of last night’s visit to the stage. It featured one of the illusionists; pardon, a magician. He had some fairly stunning acts to do with vanishing assistants and volunteers, making impossible items appear in impossible places and the like. For the larger part of the show, we found ourselves most grateful to have a box, courtesy of Art. Mina and I have suffered a performance too many that was cramped by hecklers and snorers in adjoining seats.

And yet I might have been grateful for a snide skeptic nattering about how it was all a hoax when it came time for the hypnotism act. I should not have been as surprised, and certainly not as anxious, when I saw the performance. The poster outside was one of those garish sorts with pinwheel eyes and floundering hands that parody the far more mundane mesmeric passes employed in less theatric backdrops. Still, even knowing what I myself am planning to request in a week’s time, even believing that it was likely to all be staged, I felt a sickly tightness in my chest and ice turned over in my stomach.

Though I flatter myself that I gave nothing away to the others, Mina kept trying to catch my eye throughout, as though she could hear my thoughts pacing their frantic circles. I only met her gaze when the act took its turn from the humorous to the frightful.

The first subject, a stout man near the front, was the comic setup. Chosen because, as the magician insisted, he had read the man enough to know he was a skeptic. Perhaps even impenetrable to hypnotic suggestion! Would he like the chance to throw a sour note in the performance by being proof positive of the man being a shameless fraud? Yes? Then do come up, sir, and if he fails, the man shall have his refund for the trouble.

The stout man was put under a trance. We saw his face go from set in its aggression and smugness to a laxness deeper than mere boredom. The magician set him up with the command:

“What will you do if I ask something of you now?”

“Anything,” said the stout man.

“Do you know any songs? We are lacking for music here.”

The stout man’s first response was a nursery rhyme. He was ordered to sing it with gusto, and he did. Laughter from the audience. The magician silenced him.

“But that is too simple. Any man can sing, however poorly. Is there something you would not admit to the world for love or money, my friend?”

“There is.”

“Whisper it to me.”

The stout man whispered. The magician nodded, smiling.

“Very well. In a moment, I shall wake you from the trance. You will come to your senses assuming all you did was nod off out of boredom at my antics and rightly demand your refund once the show is up. You will return to your seat to wait out the show, baffled, again rightly, that all these fools in the audience would swallow this drivel when you just proved me a fraud. But then!” A look from him to the audience, conspirators all of us. “When you hear me say the word, ‘arachnid,’ you shall jolt up from your seat and shout out the secret at full volume. Hopefully with a better pitch than you butchered the poor Muffin Man with. Now, all of you,” addressing the audience again, “you are my assistants in this! Not a word or wink to give it away! I am trusting you!”

And so the stout man was roused from the trance and no one gave it away.

Then came the next half. One in which he paraded out his assistant, a girl who might have been young enough to be his daughter, shimmering and flouncing in her costume.

“Now,” said the magician, “my dear Angela here has been my accomplice in nigh every act you have seen on this stage. After this one, I fear there is a very fair chance she will quit me on the spot and leave me to slave over the finale solo.” Here he threw a simpering look down at Angela, “Oh, do say you won’t leave me, dear. You know that gawking lot out there in the rows frighten me terribly when I’m up here alone.”

“I shall have to think about it,” said Angela. “It all depends on what trick you mean to pull.”

“A dastardly one, I’m afraid. Quite insidious. But for a good cause!” After another minute or so of such patter, Angela inevitably consented to the hypnosis. Once under the trance, the magician turned again to conspire with we onlookers. “Now comes a secret about the fair maiden for you, ladies and gentlemen, one that I am certain a good deal of you poor girls can claim ownership of yourselves. Not a small amount of the fellows either. Miss Angela has quite a monstrous fear…” Here the magician lifted his hat off his head. There were a number of squeals, shrieks, and choked curses in the audience as something huge and spindly clambered down over his forehead. “…of spiders.”

The magician scooped the crawling thing off his face, frowned, then shook his hat over his open hand until another spider fell out. A third. A fourth. His whole sleeve was moving with the creatures.

“Ah, I see a few of you turning colors out there. There’s one poor gent getting fanned by his wife in the back row, I believe. But fear not! These little friends of mine are quite tame. There are precious few spiders whose bite can do the human body real damage. And yet, like so many of you, poor Angela cannot bear the sight of them!”

This he said as he dropped the first of the spiders upon her half-bare shoulder.

“If she sees so much as a bundle of thread on the ground, she takes off running, lest it get up and crawl after her.”

Every spider was delivered from him to her. All the while Angela stood in place, staring vacantly as they crept along her arms, her neck, her face, her hair.

“Which is a shame. Spiders are vital to keeping the world around us free of worse pests. Frogs can hardly handle them all. We owe our very air to the creatures for trimming the numbers of flies and gnats and bloodsuckers. I do wish Angela would see the value in them and, more importantly, see firsthand how harmless they are to her person. Let us see if she will. In three, two, one…awake!”

Angela woke. Angela saw. Angela screamed.

This she did with such convincing terror that her pitch struck a vein of memory in me just as sharply as it did in Mina. It was of a very particular key, that shrieking. The sound of horrid realization piercing the ear and the heart with its unwanted knowledge. Here I finally met Mina’s gaze as our hands locked hard within the other. Again, conversation was had without a word.

Did she want to go? Did I want to go? Was she alright? Was I?

Yes and yes, no and no.

But we were both of us nailed down for our friends’ sake. Art would have paled to know our reaction to the show while Jack and Van Helsing would have many a padded word to spare as we were herded out like skittish toddlers. No, we sat and we smiled and both quite missed whatever it was the stout man wound up bellowing once the magician said his magic word buried in a sentence along the lines of, “You see how she squawks and flails? All this over an innocent introduction to the arachnid family.”

Whatever the stout man stood up and shouted was half-lost in Angela’s diminishing screams as she ran off stage and the hysteric laughter of the audience, goosed as they were into the respite of humor to wash away the eight-legged shock. Angela did come out to bow with him. There was no telling whether she was merely a fine actress or simply boxed in by circumstance, but she smiled and bowed easily enough. I hope it was an act.

But whether it was true or not, the whole scene followed me to bed.

I will not pour every detail here. Some cannot be remembered. Many I simply would rather not. But the whole of it occurred back in Castle Dracula. The castle was on a stage and the Count had me march out to sit across from him at his carved table. Magician and assistant.

“When I say write, you will write your letters with my lies. Write.” I did.

“When I say work, you will clear my way to England. Work.” I did.

“When I say bleed, you will provide my draught. Bleed.” I did.

And, even with his teeth sunk in my throat, I heard him speak again:

“When I say sleep, you will let me and mine play as we like. Sleep.”

The dream ended with my sleeping myself awake, the sound of a laughing audience in my ears. They sounded like the tinkling of glass. Hands far colder than my own swarmed and crawled on me like spiders. Somewhere, Mina screamed.

And then I was in bed.

Rather, on the armchair I had tried for my bed in the study. By pure luck it was not a wretched enough dream to end with my crying aloud. Otherwise, Mina or Mary would have been through the door and at my side, playing witness to my latest miserable display. Though misery is still very much present without witnesses. I hate to slink away from Mina’s side, but I cannot win even a scrap of rest without fatiguing myself half-dead, and even then I damage her sleep each night with my own failure. But I repeat myself.

I write this here only to rid myself of a feeling of another sort of repetition. A repeat sensation or seeming portent; the same which haunted me in the prelude to my arriving in Transylvania. My dreams were bruised with fear well before Dracula had me in hand. Flickers of demons and spirits that whirled and dragged me on. Similar phantasms shadowed me as I made my escape from the castle. None were vampires, strange enough, but those elder others who Dracula must have taken scraps from in the unhallowed hollow of the Scholomance.

There was something of that alien quality to this latest dream too. Something about the change in Dracula’s eyes, about the odd alteration of castle to stage to…I don’t know. If not a stage, then some manner of diorama? A dollhouse? Something one step removed from living theatre. Even as those cold familiar hands scrabbled on me at the end, I knew they were nothing compared to the phantom grip that held me by the bones and brain. The one that nodded and walked me along, jumping the vampire’s hoops. If he was that vampire. If any of them were. Their eyes were not red, I know. Such an odd thing to strike me in the midst of all that surrounded it. Why should it matter what tint their eyes were? Ruby or emerald, wine or absinthe. Yet this gnaws at me too and I can’t tell why.

The whole mess comes from the stain of the show and the kneejerk worry of the visit to come. All I have on my mind is ‘What if it does not work? What if it goes awry? What if, what if?’ My thoughts gnaw themselves to shreds. Enough.

It will work or it won’t.

That is all there is.

Good-night.

 The Tuppeton Journal, 29 April

BANK ROBBER TO BE CAUGHT GREEN-HANDED?

 As spring rolls on and students hunker into their studies, all should be at its most sedate in our snug corner of Devon. But as of the night prior, it seems Tuppeton has reason to rise off its laurels and be on alert. This morning, the 29th of April, it was discovered that our own Bank of England had an unexpected visitor or visitors in the night. The bank’s groundskeeper, a Mr. Franklin Worth, spotted the signs first, though he tells our reporter that he first mistook it for mere animal vandalism.

“Tell the truth,” declared Worth, “I had a minute where I was madder than anything, seeing the windows like that. The sills had all just gotten a fresh coat of evergreen paint only the other day. Still damp and setting, not to be touched. My first thought was that I was looking at the work of some blasted cat or nightbird perching on the sill and ruining the job. Only when I got up close, I recognized the chips and grooves of someone working at the wood with a chisel.”

It was then that Worth contacted the bank manager who called upon the authorities. An inspection has since been made of the scene and an investigation is underway to trace the route of the suspected person or persons involved with the attempted break-in. Citizens are advised to be on watch for any suspicious activity in their area, to keep all lower windows and doors locked, and to please pass on to the police whatever applicable information they may have in the way of narrowing the search.  

  II

  Prof. Wilson’s home was a charming brownstone box set back in a frame of trees all frothing with blossoms. These boughs were only slightly more crowded than the interior of the building. From the parlor on, there were many a scholarly shoulder and erudite elbow to dodge as, much to the host’s delight, his discovery’s legitimate successes had apparently drawn enough of a crowd to merit his second party within a month’s time.

“Though I do regret to say my initial partner in the examination of Miss Penclosa’s skill has, ah, found himself busy with other affairs,” Wilson could be heard lamenting at odd corners around the throng. “Even so, quite excellent progress has been made in our sessions. Ah, if only we had started sooner! My wife has been hiding a positive wonder under my nose all these years.”

From her own corners, Mrs. Wilson could be heard sighing in turn, “You know, when I hear other wives lament about how their husbands are only interested in other women, it’s usually something predictable. ‘Oh, he’s got a mistress! Oh, he’s sniffing after some well-to-do daughter! Oh, he’s eyeing my best friend!’ While I can at least somewhat identify with the latter, how am I to take this particular turn? ‘Well, he has not started an affair with her, but if he could run away and elope with the very concept of her mesmeric ability, he would be on the first train out of Devon.’ What am I to do with that?”

There was lilting laughter in answer to this and a general jostling murmur packing the space overall. Whoever Miss Penclosa was, wherever she was in the chattering sea, there was no guessing for Van Helsing or the Harkers. Her apparent throne-to-be, an overstuffed armchair standing apart from the couches, was currently vacant and aimed at by a harried photographer’s daguerreotype camera. The fellow was trying his best to focus the lens under the focusing cloth while also trying to protect his box of plates from tromping guests. It was such a packed scene that one stocky visitor gnawing a cigar nearly bowled the tripod over with a wave of his hand; a lecturer’s gesture that had the photographer turn white and green by turns as he rescued his device.

In the face of all this, Van Helsing turned an apologetic look to the couple.

“I had not realized Wilson meant to pack a country of academics under his roof. A few guests, he said in his letter, not a circus. If you should like to make good your escape, I can perhaps have him open the door to you another day, and say to him you are not yet—,”

“Professor Van Helsing!” Prof. Wilson seemed to manifest all at once from the herd, both hands trapping Van Helsing’s in his own to shake. “I recognize you from…well, there are very few published works of note I do not recognize you from. Oh, it is an absolute honor to have you here, my friend. And are these the guests you spoke of?”

He had asked the question before he looked fully at the Harkers, both of whom had taken a slight retreating step away. Mina, Jonathan saw, was perused only with an instant’s interest before being dismissed. But the man’s gaze froze and somehow stuttered upon looking at him. It was a reaction Jonathan had grown accustomed to upon that final return to England. Perhaps one time out of three, he would find himself being gawped at rather than simply seen or, in certain blushing cases, ogled. This one-in-three phenomenon was almost always a result of his own mistake in failing to school his demeanor.

A failing that always came when he seemed to recognize something of a deriding edge in any glance in his wife’s direction, as was the habit he saw mirrored anyplace where the fairer sex dared to loiter where men with titles of education milled.

A failing that likewise always guided his hand to rest on the kukri’s handle.

Yet Mina gripped his other hand and anchored him back. Jonathan duly reset his face into a more cordial mask and turned his pinching of the blade’s handle into a lax gesture. It did a little to return some pallor to the gawking professor’s face.

“They are my friends, yes,” Van Helsing interposed, stepping forward and seeming to half-herd Wilson back into the clutter of people. “They have some passing interest in these so-intriguing fields of the natural and the more-than-natural sciences. Their holiday overlapped handily with my visit and so here we are. But I am a greater glutton for introduction. Please, do show me to what others there are in our learned fields. I am thinking I recognize Professor Gregg, the great ethnologist, orating in the next room…”

Within a heartbeat, the Harkers were left to their devices as their friend tossed a look of mingled apology and desperation back over his shoulder.

En sotto voce, Mina murmured, “‘Run while you can, go on without me!’”

“He is truly a man of sacrifice. Let us make our escape toward the table.”

For the host had indeed opted for a table rather than subjecting servants to the obstacles of winnowing through the rooms with over-heaped platters. Jonathan’s reach was longer and so he filched a suitable sustenance of canapés and two full flutes for them both while Mina led the way to an unburdened divan. They tucked themselves in at the far end to nibble and sip and try not to catch the other checking the time. Both failed and this jabbed a little laugh from them.

“It is bit much, isn’t it?” Mina smiled over an expensive and dainty offering that lasted only a bite and a half.

“I foresee us having quite a wait before the party thins. If even a quarter of these people are here for Miss Penclosa to put on a show, we may as well be back in the theater for them all to gape in comfort. I can’t even guess which of these ladies might be her. You would think she would have the run of the room rather than Wilson.” Jonathan frowned at his flute. “He speaks so much of his discovery when the discovery is someone else’s talent. You’d think he personally excavated her out of some mystic vault on expedition.”

“For courtesy’s sake, we’ll say he’s just excited at having living evidence for his pursuits.” Mina regarded him from under her lashes, her hand finding his once again. “We are neither of us strangers to the joy of having ourselves proven right on outlandish realities, after all.”

“True. I don’t mean to throw stones. Only we also have our fair history with dodging the risks of spectacle. Whether done in earnest or not, I’d rather not approach this Penclosa with the toll of being made into an exhibition.”

“Of course not. We can wait until all’s clear. Though, truth be told, I’d rather we had a less congested space to do the waiting.” Jonathan leaned in as she dropped her voice to a whisper of illicit intent. “I smuggled in two books.”

Jonathan feigned a gasp.

“Anthology for me, one of the new world guide books for you. Found it at the station when your back was turned.”

“Mrs. Harker, the hedonism of it all. I am aghast.”

“We could be especially daring and read it in full view of the assembly, Mr. Harker. But I would just as soon be a coward and take our rudeness outdoors. It really is too fine a day to burn cramped inside.”

This change in mind, the Harkers signed to Van Helsing from across the room and made their exit to the rear yard. It was a handsome view and mercifully lacking for fellow escapees, not counting the woman reclining in a floral alcove set in the garden. Jonathan might have mistaken her for a true sculpture for how well and still she was placed against the arch of trained vines. A lady tipping near the midpoint of life, she sat with the subtle but knowing posture of wise women of myth. An oracle or a sage who had swapped her robes for a swaddling high-buttoned ensemble of faded green. There was a washed-out fragility in her look that likewise brought old dressmaker models and abandoned toys to mind, as though she were a cracked figure left too long in the whitening sun.

It was all a canvas to serve the shock of her eyes.

Though they remained half-closed, the great size, the sharp slant, and the surprise of their misty jade stood out with all the power of a single stained glass window set in an empty house.

That she did not look up, and that her chestnut brows were knitted in some far-off concentration, suggested she had either not noticed their intrusion on her solitude or else she had no attention to spare for the couple if she did. The Harkers took a stone bench for themselves on the other end of the yard and fell to their pages. Engrossed as both were, it was still a short matter of time before their tongues fell loose as was their constant custom at home or abroad.

Mina spoke of the ghosts and mysteries scrawled into being, Jonathan gushed over foreign panoramas made vivid with their painted reproductions. They spoke of where they wished to go in Tuppeton once the attempt with Penclosa was made, what sights there were to see, what activities to try. Again, the novelty of their own camera was brought up. The topic turned on its ear to what a boon a photographer would be to Hawkins and Harker, having pictures present with whatever file might be laid before a client on this or that estate. This slipped into talk of the latest models that Remington had put out, trying to lure her in through the shop windows in Exeter.

Talk of which turned another corner into news she had been sitting on a while, waiting until a more buoyant moment to talk about it.

What news was that? He was as buoyant as he was likely to be for the day.

She had had her work accepted! Twice! True, it was only a little cozy interview with a train engineer for a local paper here, and a smaller ghost story for one of the penny dreadfuls there, but still!

He mirrored her thrill and the thrill was reverberated back by her, and so the better part of an hour was spent in alternately hearing the details pour from her in a jubilant flood or, for his part, dropping a goading comment or query to make the deluge to continue. The sight and sound of her delight was worth a ticket price in his opinion and he felt no need to hinder himself from taking advantage of her glee to help himself to her arm to make them lean against each other and the sturdy fence at their back. Had there been space enough on the bench, he might even have tried his luck at wheedling her to mimic a pose from home with his head in her lap and her voice overhead. Lacking the opportunity, he settled for bending himself enough to rest his chin against her thick crown of hair.

In this way he did not quite slip into the trap of sleep, but permitted his eyes and mind to rest against her and the balmy day.

“See that, Daniels? Picture proof of my point. This modern age has got girls so backwards they can’t bring themselves to realize when their prattle isn’t wanted. Have to jaw a man’s ear off and the rest of him into the grave before they can catch on. You can hardly think for all the squawking that goes on in streets and parlors these days. This New Woman twaddle has gone and broken the sensible lock that keeps a woman’s gossip shut in with her tea parties and sewing circles. Soon they’ll come marching into campuses, Diogenes in a girdle, trying to talk over the greybeards mid-lesson. Wretched state we’re coming to, I tell you.”

Jonathan Harker’s eyes opened like slow shutters.

Though he felt both of Mina’s hands fly to his, neither their grip nor their warmth were enough to keep him from standing.

“Jonathan. It’s alright.”

“It isn’t.”

His words went to her, but his line of sight remained unblinking and unmoved from the two men who had come out with their cigars. The one who had spoken gave him an appraising look from under a bushy duo of iron brows while Daniels pretended to adjust his spectacles. Jonathan recognized him as the one who had nearly swatted the camera over indoors. He had moved to a new cigar since then. He raised a slate brow at him.

“Is there some issue, young man?”

“There is, I’m afraid. The severity depends on whether your affront was meant toward women as a whole, or if you intended to be overheard by, and explicitly insult, my wife.”

“Hardly an insult, young man.” His cigar pointed idly at the flax of Jonathan’s hair. “Assuming you are a young man. You’ve got a face like the greenest upstart in a class, but a mop whiter than my own teachers. I must assume youth for your ignorance or addled hearing on your part. No, there was no insult. Merely a statement of fact for our times. A woman’s voice is meant for women’s ears or a music hall if she’s got a good tune in her throat. That’s how it was in a better time. I know, for I was there to enjoy it. I cannot speak for you or whatever nonsense your girl’s been putting you to sleep with, but that is the simple truth.”

Jonathan shared a look with Mina—

We may have to leave early after all. I apologize in advance if this trip was for nothing.

—and gave her hands a squeeze.

Then he was closing the distance between himself and his fellow conversationalist. He did not sprint or stalk. It was an almost leisurely pace. Yet it was leaden in a way that, this time, was not a matter of accident. In the corner of his eye, he saw Daniels abruptly retreat back indoors. The speaker stood his ground. If half a pace nearer to the door. Perhaps two. This close, he could now see the long accessory at Jonathan’s hip.

“Do forgive me, sir,” Jonathan hummed. “It is most rude to carry on our chat at such a distance.”

“Ah, you are a young buck after all. You truly think a discussion can be won with a puffed chest and a weapon you cannot even brandish without consequence.”

“What weapon, sir? This is but my letter opener and we are only having a conversation. A debate, even. I have evidence for my own side, you know. I have lived it. The greatest bliss of my life came from the Mother Superior who saw over my wedding and from every day and night that I’ve been lucky enough to hear my wife’s voice. I see you wear a wedding band, sir, and must wonder whether you have a wife or a mute housekeeper you’ve chained to your side with an empty act of matrimony. I must also wonder if she is privy to your insights regarding her and her like. Or worse, does she talk, sir? Does she read words and say them in proximity to your poor tender ears? My deepest condolences if so.”

Jonathan would have closed the distance already had the other man not retreated up to the door and made a pretense of merely leaning near its knob.

“She has her business as I have mine. It’s the drift of husbands and wives as they get on. You cannot know it yet, for you’ve not a speck of tarnish on your own rings, but the hour of Romeo and Juliet rots fast to Macbeth and his Lady before you know it. The moment you face a real trial and see each other in all your ugly colors—oh, yes, there’s ugliness aplenty under even the bonniest faces, do count on it—the truth starts rusting all the shine off. You…”

But the last of the man’s words dried at the sight of Jonathan’s smile. Though Jonathan could not see it, he felt the familiar shape of it. He knew it as keenly as the fear in Daniels’ face as he scuttled back inside. That fear had been with him up in the snow of Transylvania as he closed in upon the wagon and its cargo in the earth-box. The smile had been with him far earlier, when they had first gotten word that the Count’s ship changed course to flee. He’d read Dr. Seward’s own words on that instant and puzzled at them once before.

The dark bitter smile of one who is without hope.

He hadn’t known he was smiling then. No more than he had properly registered the retreating terror of the men Dracula had ordered to convey him back to the castle. All he had known in the moment was that there was an evil in existence and that he wanted it gone. So it was now, albeit with more cognizance in play. He knew the awful smile was on him again just as the grotesque radiation that had chased a flock of men away was hanging about him.

“You would not know a trial if it slapped you in the face with a court summons,” he heard himself say. “I suspect you know even less of the point to a marriage. Whatever self-gratifying lies you choke on, a marriage is meant for partnership. For love. Not a business deal or a trap to have some warm body filling out the bed and keeping the house tidy while you turn around and complain about the very person you chose to bind yourself to. Even so, I know the perfect woman does exist for you and your wise taste. To meet her, go to any dress shop on the street, pick out a mannequin, and you shall have the ideal mistress ever after.”

“Jonathan.”

Mina’s hand was on his arm. Jonathan turned to her. In the same instant, the man with the cigar tapped the neglected ash off its end and sidled hastily inside where he nearly collided with Daniels and two other onlookers crowded at the door’s ornate window. Through the gap there was some muttering in a worried tone and more muttering in a lilt that was curiosity pretending to be worry, then the door was shut. Jonathan swallowed a sigh and felt a belated rush of heat come to his face.

“Well. I do believe I’ve soured things quite thoroughly.”

“You don’t know that.” Her free palm floated up to his cheek. “Though you did worry me. You weren’t really about to come to blows over so petty a thing, I know. But why..?” She indicated the whole of the last few minutes with her eyes alone. In answer, Jonathan let something of fire and ice turn over in his own look. He boxed both her hands in his own, siphoning out their warmth as she gripped their cold.

“We did not risk Hell itself and battle its horrors just for mundane villains to get their unctuous way because it would be impolite to counter their rudeness with barbs rather than a turned cheek. I do not doubt that I survived as much as I did by dancing on eggshells at the start, nor do I regret the opportunity it gave me. But that was merely my risk then. More, by doing the ‘proper thing’ and leaving you wholly sealed off from our affairs and vice versa, you were left alone in the dark when—those nights when…”

“I know. We have gone over that.”

“Yes. But what all has been learned from it? Circumstances made it prudent for us to condense ourselves to be the least obtrusive, most benign caricatures of ourselves all our lives. Childhoods of charity and scraps and always bowing to what we were told was proper. Rules we did not dare break for fear of being burdensome. Rules that nearly destroyed us when powers that reigned outside those civilized borders used them as a noose. We would not have succeeded in the end if we had sat and waited and nodded our heads to what was proper start to finish. So it is even within these softer aggravations. Even if it wasn’t? I am not about to let any wretch, however great or small, take their venomous shots at you while I sit by.”

At this, Mina could not withhold her own small sigh. No more than she could resist resting her brow against his front.

“Ever my knight.”

He spoke down into her hair.

“You were mine first. And I admit you remain the cannier of us two cavaliers. I don’t foresee a warm welcome once the man goes flying to Wilson’s ear.”

“We aren’t here for Wilson. We might still approach Penclosa, whoever she is. And Van Helsing will surely take your side if it comes to pointing fingers. In any case, Miss Penclosa is the star of the show. It would be quite something if he suffered a supposed friend like that to insult her sex while coming to see her work.”

Jonathan almost replied, but a voice cut across the garden in a mellow tone.

“Supposing he was not already a skeptic of her, dear. The only members of an audience who are more adamant onlookers than admirers are hecklers.”

Both Harkers jumped as if pricked and whirled to spot the woman still sitting in her flowering alcove. Whatever musing concentration she had been steeped in was thoroughly broken, with all the light and life of her now consolidated in the great gems of her eyes. Jonathan found he could not avoid comparing them to that of some hungry housecat spotting a plump mouse. Nor could he avoid how wholly that gaze seemed to be latched onto him. He worried for a moment that he might have tripped himself and Mina into the verbal pit of a sermon. Sedate though much of her mien was, there was enough of time and gravity about her that suggested the potential of a tongue lashing similar to Mina’s more caustic fellow-teachers of etiquette.

Yet the woman allowed herself her own contrite smile and fluttered her hand as if to swat away Jonathan’s suspicions.

“Forgive my playing eavesdropper, both of you. Only, your show has been the most engaging part of my day since this latest pageantry began. I am only here for duty’s sake and could not suffer the crush in there any longer than you. Yet it seems the rabble have tried to leak out after us.” Her smile increased the smallest increment. “It is a most heartening thing to see it properly chased back from whence it came…did I mishear ‘Jonathan?’”

“You heard right, madam.”

“Alas, no madams on this side of the yard,” she lifted her left hand, barren of a band. “You may call me Helen, Jonathan. And you, dear?”

“Mina.”

“Engaged or wedded already?”

“Wedded,” she allowed her own plain band to flaunt its small shine against a sunbeam. “Fortunately.”

Helen smiled at this too and nodded, “Most fortunately. Whether that carbuncle of a lecturer wants to admit it or not, yours is the treasured status over any tawdry sham he’s trapped his poor wife into. I would wager even his mistresses must suffer, should he have them. Although, and I do apologize for prying, may I inquire if there was some manner of unhappy shadow in your lives of late that might want for hypnotic aid? If such is your case, I am certain you shall have your way regardless of any stamping of feet from your new friend.”

The Harkers regarded each other cautiously for a moment. Mina flung her message up into him as he passed his gingerly back. This had become something of a routine for them. While Jonathan had taken the lion’s share of shock on his head, even Mina had some threads of early silver cutting through the dark cloud of her hair, and there were times when one or both of them let slip a trace of the haunted months in their eyes.

Something had happened to the Harkers.

Something had left its mark on them.

In answer to inquiries, the Harkers always scraped only the top crust of truth off the larger story and repackaged it as the tale in full.

Thus they came to sit on Helen’s stone bench, for it was wide and she had beckoned them, and husband and wife held to each other as they recited the meticulously vague trials of the year before.

First, Jonathan had been struck with a terrible accident while on a business trip in Europe. The sort of accident that comes shaped like powerful persons with dark designs. He had scarcely escaped it, and had to do so while stripped of his property and papers.

Second, when he finally made it to civilization, half-dead and boiling with fever in a hospital, Mina had fetched him home and nursed him back from the brink. This should have been the whole of it.

But then, third, Fate had gone and afflicted Mina herself with a far more dire illness that had put her at the very knife’s edge of life and death. Jonathan had championed her then, and had his turn to pull her back to health. This, coupled with a long chain of morbid tragedies that saw too many friends going into their graves around the same time, had stained them over the course of only a few months.

“It was more than enough to weigh upon our minds for some time after,” Mina allowed. “Neither of us slept well even after the worst hours had passed. Yet Providence has taken a kinder turn with me, it seems. I have gotten past my nightmares and can allow myself simple dreams or wholly blank nights. But Jonathan…” Her lips pursed around the truth.

“I do not fall asleep anymore,” Jonathan said to the ground between his shoes more than either of his listeners. “I fall into nightmares, wake in terror, and then, when exhaustion grows too heavy to fight, my mind allows me to black out. It is a poor enough state on its own, but worse for forcing my bedmate to return to the drudgery of playing caretaker over some imagined—,”

“Stop,” Mina cut in. “You know that isn’t fair.”

“Nor is it a lie.”

“And your aim,” Helen hummed, “is to undo these nightmares? Have them banished by mesmerism?” Her eyes seemed nigh illuminated at the prospect. “It would be a trying attempt, even for a practiced hypnotist. One who practices in the ordinary manner, at any rate.”

“Does Miss Penclosa not operate in the ordinary manner?” Mina asked.

“No.” Helen’s smile at last showed teeth and a stray sunbeam fell in such a way on her eyes that they seemed to burn away half her face with their vibrance. “Not at all. I have seen many hypnotists make their attempts.” She fussed with the high collar of her dress, kneading at it as though it chafed. “Some are quite impressive. But none so far have shown the method or the ability that Professor Wilson has been so dedicated to making a display of. If it were otherwise, he would only have yet another lookalike act to be shrugged aside by his peers. I know firsthand that the ‘Performances of Penclosa,’ as I have seen him titling his observations, are undertaken with a method quite alien to anything else he or his peers have witnessed before. The how of it seems lost even upon the performer. All that’s known is that it is strange, but undeniably effective.”

“You sound as if you’ve witnessed her before.”

“I have. I can attest to her ability and character enough to say that, regardless of any opinion of Wilson’s or his poor choice of compatriots, she will undoubtedly be of a mind to assist how she can. Now, might I ask another question of you both?” Despite the last word, her gaze slipped pointedly to Jonathan and the watchchain glinting at his side. “How near are we to noon? I can tell the pitch of their clamor inside has changed and so it must be nearly time for the spectacle.”

Jonathan checked his watch and saw it was ten past twelve. As they all moved to rise, Helen sighed. Jonathan saw her craning around on her spot, frowning at a cluster of roses.

“What is it?”

“Oh, my crutch. I set it by me here and it fell back in the rosebushes.”

She had scarcely got past the third syllable before Jonathan had circled around to fish the thing out of the thorns. It was a striking piece fashioned from a well-worn length of oak. Though Helen took it in hand easily enough, he let her have his arm as a brace when she got to her feet. It took her a moment to actually release his sleeve, and then only because Mina gathered his other arm. Helen made a small noise close to a laugh.

“Goodness, but you are a sturdy one. Between your bearing and your choice of accessory,” she nodded to the kukri, “a charlatan clairvoyant would feign that they ‘read’ you as an ex-soldier. As I am neither, I must instead determine that you are a solicitor by trade and that you operate out of Exeter.”

That brought Jonathan and Mina both up short.

“You determined that from my arm?”

“From your seat. Rather, what you left there.” Helen pointed them back to the bench where Jonathan’s card case sat open on the stone. As Mina gathered it up and Jonathan set it more securely within a front pocket, Helen went on, “Before we head into the noise, a last question: Do you also live within the Exeter area? If so, I should like to know your judgment on the city and available living quarters in the area. I believe I am overdue to seek out new housing.”

“We can both vouch for it being something of a busy city, but it has its comfortable corners. In the event Mina and I get herded out the front door as soon as we enter the back,” he handed Helen one of the cards from his rescued case, “I should be happy to have you call on Hawkins and Harker to see about quarters in the area.”  

“If I may ask, for I cannot guess it by your arm or your card, are you in the firm’s employ, or are you the Hawkins or the Harker in the title?”

“Harker,” Jonathan admitted.

“A pleasure then, Mr. and Mrs. Harker.” She favored them with a last flash of her half-lidded stare before she turned them all toward the door. “I do hope we all enjoy the show.”

 Inside, a number of guesses were quickly proven right.

Jonathan’s new friend and some comrades gave him furrowed sideways glances. Daniels, seeing Jonathan see them, appeared to stutter some excuse before vanishing into another room. Others, clearly ticking off the minutes until Penclosa would appear to astound or confound, followed first this retreat, then the line of sight that had sent him running. Jonathan wished he had his hat to duck behind. Doubly so when his new friend—he decided to refer to him as Professor Carbuncle, lacking a better title—and his friends murmured their own asides to the gawkers. He pondered keeping his watch out to see how many minutes there would be between himself, Mina, and the hailing of a cab.

Before he could do so, Van Helsing filled the couple’s view, looking very much like a man trying his best not to look like a castaway frantic for an island to clamber on. His smile very nearly groaned with the effort to stay in place.

“My friends, I would risk many things for you. Life and death and worse. Yet if I must battle with Wilson’s voice another hour by my own self, I fear I shall try to do as good Jonathan did in time of action and make my exit by the nearest window. Have either of you seen this Miss Penclosa? Wilson only departed from me and my ears because Mrs. Wilson could not herself find the lady in the crowd.”

“Not yet—,” Mina began, but cut herself short when Helen laid a light hand against her shoulder.

“I’m afraid I lost track of time,” Helen said through a slight smile.

“Ah, then you are that Miss Penclosa? A pleasure to meet you,” he clasped her hand gently with a half-bow of the head.

“Likewise..?”

“Professor Van Helsing.”

“If you are a friend of the Harkers, then I will trust at once that you are of a fine character, sir. I do apologize for keeping them away. Please, might you tell me where I can find my poor Wilsons?” Van Helsing pointed the way, offering to take her arm to better break through the throng. Helen, Miss Penclosa, declined. She followed her crutch into the fray with ease. The Harkers could only stare after her.

Once her back vanished in the crowd, they divulged all that had happened in the garden to Van Helsing, starting from Prof. Carbuncle to meeting Miss Helen Penclosa on her bench. As they spoke, Jonathan spotted Prof. Carbuncle striding towards Prof. Wilson’s bobbing head as the latter entered to the room, now thoroughly incandescent with enthusiasm. This visage redoubled its glow when Prof. Carbuncle came upon him, though the cigar-gnawing man’s expression seemed to aim for stormy while landing only on puckered. Carbuncle seemed no match for Wilson’s patter either, for whatever words he had for the other man seemed drowned in a flood of exhilaration.

The hand Carbuncle had lifted to point Jonathan and Mina out was trapped in an instant as the gesture was mistaken—perhaps forcibly—for an agreeing handshake. Then Prof. Wilson must have gotten something out that caught Prof. Carbuncle’s interest more than revenge. His expression altered in a way that suggested not only doubt, but an eagerness to have that doubt proven right. Something near to a smile appeared on him as he gave Wilson a curt shake of the hand. The cool countenance was fractured a bit when Wilson abruptly turned to the parlor to announce:

“Attention my friends! I thank you for your patience. We have delayed some while in the hopes of not shorting any of the invited guests by beginning the display too soon. As it stands, it appears all are present and my guest and friend, the inimitable Miss Helen Penclosa, can now rescue you from my stalling.”

Miss Helen Penclosa made her official debut to general applause and a smattering of surprise as the room opened up to see her clearly. She had taken a spot on the overstuffed armchair with her crutch standing to one side. A soft smile turned to the guests.

“Hello. I must say I recognize very few of you this time around. The last get-together Professor Wilson was kind enough to throw had only a third the number. I must then assume that the two new thirds are comprised of one third those with some belief in what I mean to display and one third looking to pull down whatever mental chicanery is surely at work. The better to spare the latter’s time and get on to those here with genuine questions or desire to volunteer in earnest, I have submitted to Wilson that I should like to make my first demonstration upon one of the sincerest disbelievers present.”

The foggy green eyes slid unblinkingly to Prof. Carbuncle. There was a new cigar in his teeth and a sharkish bend to his lips.

“Professor Richard Atherton has obliged to fill the role. My thanks, sir.”

“You’ve mine back, madam,” Carbuncle, who was Atherton, spoke through his smoke. “How is it done, then? Do you need a pocket watch to swing before my eyes? Shall we have a staring contest until I’m dulled to sleep?”

“Not at all. Merely take your seat and we will begin.”

Penclosa nodded to the chair Wilson himself had dragged up to stand across from her own. Atherton took it with a laborious settling that suggested the showing of immense patience to amuse unruly children. As he sat, Penclosa stood. She did not make use of her crutch. Whatever injured wobble she might have in her faulty leg seemed to undo itself as she rose. Later, both Harkers and Van Helsing would agree that it looked almost as if her eyes were their own empowering force; as though they were what drew her up like a string raising a marionette. Her gaze certainly seemed to pump some notable new life into her tired countenance.

All watched as her look set into that uniquely feline expression of an animal centering its attention on an oblivious bird. Her arms raised and gestured in a series of swings and shapes that appeared almost like those of directing signals. It had none of the gentle sway of hands from an experimenting doctor or the theatric waggling from a stage performer. More than one witness would point out how very near it came to something ritualistic; the sort of motions seen in rites of religions or archaic dance.

Whatever their purpose, the motions and Penclosa’s stare had an effect on Prof. Atherton. A remarkably brisk one. His apparent confederates in the crowd seemed to take this for some act at first. Likely playing dim from the outset only to spring up and call the woman a fraud. And perhaps this had been Atherton’s goal as he took his seat. Yet as one minute ticked into another and into another, the man’s face seemed to become unstitched from within. Expression slackened, eyes glazed. The still-smoking cigar drooped in his teeth until it finally dropped and fell in his lap, flinging ash as it went. Thankfully it was no longer smoldering; he had stopped puffing on it some while ago and the thing did not have heat enough left to burn through his trousers.

Still, he did not startle at the drop. Nor did his hand move to clear his lap. Penclosa stopped her arms but still did not blink. She regarded the half-murmuring room, then silenced it by holding her finger to her lips. Once all was quiet, she turned her full attention back to Atherton’s drooping head. It was not the look of a woman or a cat now. Here was a high empress idling over the means of an execution.

She folded her hands before her and smiled.

“Professor Atherton, I have wonderful news. The hypnotism failed. Attempts were tried for hours and all the guests have left. You are free to speak honestly without fear of eavesdroppers.”

Atherton’s head raised an inch and something of his former expression drifted back into his face. He grated out a chuckle.

“Knew it,” he said in a dreaming voice. “Knew that crippled crone was all talk. All Wilson’s talk, anyhow. By next year the fool will be clamoring about some tart with a crystal ball and a deck of cards claiming she’s the next Oracle. Where’s my cigar?”

“A new box is being fetched. While we wait, let us talk. First, the crippled crone. How old would she say she is, at a guess?”

“Damned if I know. Has to be half-past forty.”

“And yourself?”

“Fifty-six as of last month.”

“And your wife?”

“Forty-one, alas.”

“And your mistress?”

“An even twenty-two. A springy dear, she is.”

“I imagine she must be. Is she at the party?”

“Lord, no. Nor the missus. One of her few virtues, not having any care for twaddle like mesmerists or spiritualism. Pity about the rest.”

“What is the rest?”

“The face, the gray, the days out with those harpy friends she meets with to talk about that American woman, that Bascom with her degree in bloody rocks and—,”

“I see. And this mistress, what is she like?”

“Blessedly quiet. A fine change of pace and a finer help in a man’s odds and ends. Good enough girl, though I fear it may be near time to break things off.”

“Why is that?”

“She’s been acting squirrely in that way women do when they’re working up to simper for something big. Money, a wedding ring, your solemn oath you’ll stay for the baby. Some headache or other. I do hate stepping away while things are sour. Better to cut things while they’re still sweet and she won’t think to get up to anything foolish.”

“Like telling your wife?”

“The wife scarcely matters. It’s telling the university that’d pull the rug out. Just look at that mess with Professor Gilroy. Ha, ex-professor, I should say. That debacle shows well enough how quick a position can be cut out from under your feet. I’d bet money he got hit by some brain bug or other, some undiagnosed fever, but just a few days of him playing eccentric killed his station. If little Ellie Daniels goes tattling it’ll be my position on the fire just for starters.”

Somewhere in the back of the room, a man’s voice drew sharp breath. Other voices muttered and shushed. There was a scuffle and rustle as someone was held back. Penclosa showed no sign of whether she noticed or cared about what colors the man named Daniels was turning and pressed on:

“That does sound serious.”

“Between her brother and the state of affairs with the soft-hearted and softer-minded infecting the realm of logic, it is infinitely serious. I tell you, it would not be half so precarious if it were not for all this New Woman claptrap infecting the mentality of our times. The next generation of men will live their lives bowing to every little infantile fancy of women and go hollering around on their behalf to intellectual betters, wailing the same tunes of false equality.”

“Most distressing. But that all sounds quite vague, if you don’t mind my saying. Mere hypotheticals all. Can you think of any recent example of such a thing?”

“Oh, yes. Not half an hour ago, as a matter of fact.”

“Goodness. What happened?”

“Some pup wrapped around his wife’s finger felt the need to come puff his chest at me over a little idle comment or other—,”

“Stop.” Atherton stopped like a cylinder plucked from its phonograph. “To this point, you have spoken as if there are no witnesses. You may continue to do so, Professor Atherton, but now you will do so without bluff or obfuscation. You will speak only the truth aloud until I tell you to wake. Tell me if you understand.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Now, to the best of your ability, repeat exactly what you said when you stepped out the back door into the garden.”

Professor Atherton repeated what he had brayed to Daniels, nigh verbatim.

“Why did you say so?”

“Because it’s true.”

 “Why did you say so right then?”

“Because of the girl nattering to her young man. I wanted her to hear. It heartens me to see them caught out of line. Especially the young ones. You have to nip them while they’re young and sponge-headed and susceptible to all the rubbish that wants to mold them out of what they ought to be.”

“And what ought they be?”

“In their place. Otherwise you get things like her husband.”

“And what thing was her husband?”

“Some—some tetchy little Prince Charming, huffing about insulting women and his wife and whatnot when I was just—just—,”

Atherton was turning somewhat purplish.

“You are struggling, Professor Atherton. That’s you trying to shake off the command for honesty. Tell the truth about her husband and you’ll be fine.”

The man seemed to chew his words another moment. Then, finally:

“The truth is he scared me. Truly, properly scared me, getting as close as he did. It wasn’t just the blade on his hip either. There was something wrong about him. Meeting his eye made my bowels turn to jelly. I felt certain he could hurl me against the brick like a porcelain doll hard enough to break me like one. Like he could take my head off like you’d pop a daisy from its stem and that he was considering doing just that, with or without that massive bloody Gurkha knife. That moment was the closest I’ve come to soiling myself since I was six years old. If his wife hadn’t made him look away, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have still been standing there, soaking my trousers because I couldn’t unhook myself from those awful eyes and all the black promises they were making.

“But he did look away and I got inside, thank God. He’d not lay a hand on me before witnesses. Certainly not in front of ones of actual importance versus the girl holding his tether, anyway. I have to talk to Wilson about him when I have the chance. If I can get a name out of him, I can see about seeking some proper recompense later. At the very least I can see the snow-headed bastard and his keeper are tossed out. I took him for some sort of young officer. Perhaps I can nettle things higher up his ranks.”

Penclosa nodded coolly at this. It was the first time she bothered to spare a glance for anyone other than Atherton, glancing first in the direction of Professor and Mrs. Wilson who had been turning alternate shades of cherry and chalk throughout, then at the Harkers. At Jonathan. For the moment he was bookended by both Mina’s grasp and Van Helsing’s heavy hand at his arm. Whether this was to support or halt him, he couldn’t guess, but he was grateful that they provided some small insulation between himself and the increasing number of inquisitive eyes steering his way. He now ached for a hat to hide under and an overcoat to mask the scabbard.

He felt fires burning inside his face as murmuring rose on their side, on the Wilsons’, and on the irate Daniels’. It was the sound of an intrigued audience before a stage play rather than a scientific demonstration. Jonathan could see there had even been a refilling of glasses and a fetching of concessions from the table as the show went on. Penclosa seemed to note this as well, finally retreating from her looming stance and retreating to her armchair.

“This has all been very enlightening, Professor Atherton. I give my thanks for your being so candid. Your last instruction is this: If or when news of these revelations leak out of this room and reach ears ‘of importance’ in your campus’ alumni—those few which are not already present—and you are called to elaborate on the features of it all?” Her eyes flashed like dim jade and her next words carried the intonation of a tolling bell. “You will tell the whole truth without any withholding, any muddying, any twisting of narrative for your benefit. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good.” She snaked out one hand to grasp the crutch. This she lifted just high enough so that it would make a resounding crack as she struck the floor. “Awake!”

Prof. Richard Atherton blinked blearily for a moment, like a man swimming out of a thick sleep. In the next moment, consciousness snapped fully into him as his teeth clicked shut. This confused him for a moment. Then:

“Damn! My trousers.” He snatched up the cigar and wiped at the ashes. “I will give you some credit, madam, for at least getting me halfway to the so-called mesmeric sleep. Or sleep alone, anyway. Though I’m afraid you’ve got your first poor mark for the hypnotist act. You may yet find a niche as an in-person sedative, however. There’s a number of colicky babes in the world who could use a nanny with that trick. You could…” Atherton was on his feet now and finally aware of the sharp looks thrown his way by the group at large, as well as the downright acidic glare coming from Daniels. Even Prof. Wilson, who had kept his notebook out and open, was scratching at the pages with a significantly strained shade of enthusiasm. “For God’s sake, what is it? Don’t tell me she actually got anything out of me. What, did she have me butcher a tune? Insult someone’s mother?”

“Ellie.” All heads turned to Daniels. Narrow man that he was, he seemed to quiver like a livid tuning fork. “My baby sister, Eleanor, has spent the last year and a half dancing around the name of a scholar she claims to be smitten with. One she has admitted to playing both secretary and editor to for numerous manuscripts; such that she has practically been penning the things herself. Our family has assumed it was just some unscrupulous student or other taking advantage and have tried numerous times to have her divulge the young man’s name or to break it off, to no avail. But it occurs to me that it has been roughly as long since you started crowing about what a loss it is to the modern man that he cannot flaunt a mistress with impunity, what with the advent of divorce gaining its little toeholds in the world of marriage. Adultery is no longer a sport, but a vice, you’ve said. You wouldn’t happen to be sharing that vice with little Ellie, would you, Dick?”

Prof. Richard Atherton suddenly lost all pallor under his beard. Something near to epiphany seemed to bring a hint of color back to him as he registered the mass of disapproving stares before turning wholly to Miss Penclosa in her chair. A glass of claret stood on the same end table she’d rested her crutch on. She met his gaze placidly as she lifted the wine for a small sip.

What came next was as paradoxically abrupt as endless.

Revelation had come to Atherton in the way of colliding dominoes. Daniels and little Ellie, the horde of glowering fellow faculty and distant strangers, witnesses all to some bleak secrets he could not appear to recall. Was it just the mistress he had spoken of? More? Whatever was said, it had even the men who’d been his allies a quarter of an hour ago either turning away from him or glaring at him with such disgust he might have rolled himself in sewage. Things had been said. Damning things. Worst of all, it would be speculated, was that he had said things he did not recall. He had been mesmerized and the whole of it had been erased from his memory as neatly as chalk lessons rubbed off the board.

He had been made a fool and he had done it to himself.

Because of her.

The docilely gloating little figure sat by her crutch.

Later it would come out from his former friends that he had, in fact, gotten a drink too many in him beforehand. He was many things by nature, but violent was rarely one of them. Not without a pond’s worth of inebriation in him. If not an excuse, it was a reason for what he attempted to do there in plain view of the parlor. He was the nearest body to Penclosa, after all, in that snug gap between the armchairs. It was quick work for him to dart forward, snatch up the sturdy length of oak, and raise it above his head with the heavy end aimed squarely at Miss Penclosa’s head.

It happened too fast for gasps, for shouts, for reaching hands, for jolts, for steps. Too fast even for Penclosa to do more than widen her bottomless eyes in shock.

The crutch came down—

Snick!

—and lost half of itself on the thick nap of the rug. Atherton made a high strangled sound like that of a boy a third his age yelping over a twisted ankle. Something was twisting, but it was a higher limb. One that dropped the remaining half a crutch as his forearm shrieked in Jonathan’s left hand. Jonathan’s right still held the bared kukri while his eyes held Atherton’s attention. Some would remark, in varying states of hyperbole, how suddenly cold they had felt in the white-haired fellow’s presence. A man of ice freezing the churlish other in place.

A whiff of ammonia hit the air. What Atherton had avoided since the age of six now went trickling down his leg.

“I think, Professor Atherton,” Van Helsing’s voice broke gently in, “it is wise for you to apologize to Miss Helen Penclosa, and then to sit in the foyer until police come to have their words with you.”

“To hell with the police,” Daniels grated out. “I’ll pay you a pound to give him a new elbow, Officer.”

Jonathan released a small breath and eased his grip enough to keep from fracturing the other man’s wrist.

“I’m not—,”  

All parties within the odd tableau were alerted by a tell-tale sound to the westward side of the room. The soft capping of a lens and the scrape-slide of a plate being taken out of a daguerreotype camera.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” sang the photographer as he stowed the old plate and prepped the new. The sun seemed to be shining through an otherwise nebbish grin. “Just need to reload, is all. Glad I packed double.”

Atherton seemed to choke on either an abundance or an utter deficit of words at this. He looked for all the world like a body waiting for the final beat of a bad dream to finally dump him awake and free in his bed. Instead, a small entourage of guests, Van Helsing included, guided him away. First to the toilet, then the suggested foyer. Prof. Wilson had already passed along to the first servant he could get hold of to send for a smattering of authorities. If not for an arrest, then for the inevitable explosion of circulated word that would ensue after. Mrs. Wilson had flown to Miss Penclosa’s side in the meantime, gushing apology and worry at such a rate that she appeared nearly to skip her breath.

 “I’m fine, Gloria, truly. It was all far too quick for a proper scare. Rather, our friend was.” Penclosa had to look down to find Jonathan now, as he had sheathed the kukri to pick up the two halves of oak. “I could barely follow you, young man. You must have practice with this sort of thing.”

Jonathan tried to smile around a noncommittal sound. His line of sight flicked between her and Mina who had caught a woman who’d toppled in a faint over the whole scene. She flicked her gaze back, mirroring his reflexive thought. Speak no evil.

“Not in this particularly, no. Solicitation is not quite so competitive a field. At least not yet.” He rose with the crutch’s pieces in hand. “I’m so sorry about this. I’ll pay for another.” Penclosa wrinkled her nose at this and seemed to swat the notion away.

“Better it be in half than in my head. I have spares, Mr. Harker.”

“Harker, is it?” A jaunty hand clapped him on the back. “What regiment, son? Look as though you’ve seen the far end of Hell and its backyard.”

This voice came from the first of many strangers who would approach Jonathan and Mina at intervals during Penclosa’s less dramatic demonstrations. Between softer displays—everything from comical impressions to impromptu dance performances to heartening instilled commands to inspire confidence or to regale with an old warm memory the subject had thought forgotten—the Harkers had to lose flake after chip after crumb of secrecy in dancing around the barrage of queries that found them, even with Van Helsing trying to play buffer. In order, the Harkers divulged the following:

No, he was not of any country’s military. Yes, he was just a solicitor. Yes, his hair was real. Yes, he had suffered a sizable shock in life. No, he would rather not speak of details, though illness was the least of it. Yes, she was the reason he made it through with mind and health intact. Yes, they were married. Yes, he was and remains quite adamant that she never be shown anything less than respect. Yes, she was adamant on his behalf in turn. …Yes, really, just a solicitor. Hawkins and Harker.  

Jonathan found himself with half his cards gone before the afternoon was out.

“Perhaps you should have new ones printed,” Van Helsing ribbed. “You could perhaps stamp a small kukri on each one. It appears to do good for your business.”

“It was just for politeness’ sake. Honestly, I’m just baffled at how,” Jonathan fluttered his hand uncomfortably as if to encompass the whole of the scene, “all that bluster translates to such friendly interest. I am more than a little stunned that I’ve collected more cards today than I manage in a week by way of day-to-day courtesy within the firm.” Mina found his hand again and drew circles over its knuckles. When he looked to her, he could not help reflecting her smile.

“Everyone loves when a hero gives a show. It’s such an assumed thing that evil acts can be gotten away with, the damage done without any hindrance. So it is a rare and happy thing when people get to see the stalwart knight appear with sword in hand to cut it down.”

“Yes, well. I still posit that I married the knight. I’m far better suited to being her faithful squire. Polishing her pauldrons and all.”

“Jonathan.”

“Mina.”

“My friends,” Van Helsing turned both their heads with his tone. “I believe the room is nearly thinned enough for our purposes. At least, so thin that we have become the most conspicuous of guests remaining. We, and the man with his iron grip upon the camera.” The Harkers looked up and found he spoke true. The herd had shallowed out to a few parties circling the Wilsons and the photographer going over something with Penclosa.

The latter man, a Mr. Greg Westman, had been almost as busy as Miss Penclosa and Prof. Wilson combined. There had been the images captured of Penclosa and her posed subjects, talks with the police who had arrived, both as a witness and a man who might have an impressive shot to share once all was developed, and with the inevitable circling fly or two of journalists who’d come sniffing at the sight of the authorities’ wagon. Westman was one of many rising amateur photographers inching their way into the professional field and, supposing his shots developed well enough, his daguerreotypes would find their way into print to better illustrate what might be pitched as, ‘The Misadventure of the Madam Mesmerist.’

“Mr. Harker, sir?” Westman approached them now, the two halves of the crutch under one arm. “Might I bother you for just one last shot? I’m down to my final plates and it would make a lovely closing piece for the paper if you could just come this way?”

While he spoke, he herded Jonathan toward Penclosa’s chair. Mrs. Wilson had brought down one of her spares from her room, a thing of ash wood, and it rested against the table where its predecessor had stood. Jonathan sheepishly held up the kukri as Penclosa smilingly presented her two pieces of oak.

“Perfect, thank you! Now if I could have just one more of—,”

“Pardon, Mr. Westman,” Mina said as she drifted to his side. “Might I ask what model this is and where we might find one? We have been going back and forth on picking up a camera for our own use and you seem to be quite natural with this.”

Jonathan sent her a silent thanks from the corner of his eye into the corner of hers. Of the sundry traits the Harkers could find reflected in the other, the ability to dislodge monologues from even the most reticent speaker was a most useful one. As a result, Greg Westman had duly pivoted into a history lesson on M. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Jonathan might have gone to join Mina but for something brushing his side. It was Penclosa, tapping him lightly with the tip of the halved crutch.

“Do sit. You’ll make me tired looking at you.” She nodded at the armchair still across from her, the subject seat. Her voice lowered an increment to keep from traveling too far. Say, to the Wilsons’ side of the space. “It is my turn to apologize, I think. I see I must have made an error in dropping even your surname to the crowd. I’d not realized your visit was so clandestine as to remain hushed on names as much as purpose.”

Jonathan did not sit, but hovered at its side. He kept his furthest edge of attention on the rambling patter of Mr. Westman for the duration that Mina had to withstand it and on Van Helsing who had moved with calculating nonchalance into the shrinking circle of visitors still caught in the Wilsons’ orbit. The rest he reserved for trying to parse the nature of Miss Penclosa’s stare. For she did stare, intentionally or otherwise. Her blinks were rare and slow and seemed almost unnatural in the backdrop of her mild face. As the day had worn on toward the late afternoon, he’d lost count of how many times he’d felt a sensation of being observed roaming on his brow or back, only to look up and see the mesmerist was in the middle of some pause between performance or discussion to look at him. Nor did she ever drop her gaze when caught.

With everything that’s happened between the garden, the guard duty, and the hypnotic gamble to come, you can forgive her wanting to keep an eye on you.

“It’s no trouble,” he said aloud. “We simply don’t wish to be obtrusive, and that much is our own foible. And again, I owe the greater apology for costing you your property. In hindsight, I’m sure I might have caught it if—,”

“It’s a glorified twig, Jonathan, not a family heirloom. It’s a better thing to have you end its career as a weapon with one hand and seize that lout with your other. The fact is you saved me from a most abrupt and ugly injury, if not an ending outright.” Here the windows of her eyes performed their slow shutter of a blink. “The least I owe you is my best attempt to assist in the internal injury that troubles you. That in mind, I believe we have come to the point where we must cajole our host into setting aside his notebook before he—,”

“Ah, Mr. Harker! Were you interested in a session yourself?” All heads swiveled as Prof. Wilson nearly bounded to the sitting area. Mr. Westman had mercifully taken his leave at that point, Mina having lured him towards the door by insisting she help carry his things along to wait for his hansom, him insisting back that he could carry it all, and so forth. Van Helsing had held Prof. Wilson back as long as possible, but the man’s gaze had landed on Jonathan leaning on the chair and the man had all but flown. He was already thumbing to a clean page in his book. “Where is Gregory? Gregory, wait just a moment if you have a spare plate!”

“Bradford.” Wilson glanced down to see Miss Penclosa frowning up at him. “You have already gotten more than your fill of successful examples, on top of the nigh guaranteed publicity of the police report once it turns to newsprint. Doubly so should my implanted command that Atherton speak the truth before his colleagues have reason to be set off. Mr. Harker has done more than any service a host could dare ask of a guest. More, a guest of a guest. The least we owe him is the dignity not to set him up as a prop twice in the same day.”

Wilson fidgeted with his notebook for another moment. His gaze bounced between the one sitting and the one standing.

“…So he is interested in a session? Is that so, Mr. Harker? I only ask for the purposes of tallying! These sorts of things live and die by records. How many successes, who the successes were, references on references. You would be astounded how stringent any credible journal is when it comes to such fascinating realms of science as this. They demand the most fantastic list of feats and yet will tear a work to pieces over the slightest fault. It is why I most earnestly insist on recording as much in the way of detail, you see, so if I could perhaps—,”

A tawny and callused hand landed chummily on Prof. Wilson’s shoulder. Van Helsing’s smile was at once buoyant and stiffly chiseled in place.

“Professor, I am most familiar with the trials of expressing the reality of the strange to stubborn audiences. Such is the case both within and without the precarious wilds of academia. Yet this is not the case of the present. For your purposes, you hunt for evidence, evidence, evidence, using volunteers and compatriots for the so vital need of the impartial proofs. But my friends, they are not volunteers. They are not for the consuming by even the wisest audiences. If it were so, there would be no need to wait for privacy. Good Jonathan, who has done a good service today and so much more before, he comes to Miss Penclosa seeking assistance, not to your peers for his name pulled across a heap of articles. Which is all to say, in plainer words, this is a matter of help. Of health!”

The cobalt gaze twinkled in its nest of crow’s feet. His hand tightened an extra chummy increment on Wilson’s shoulder.

“To spy upon or share the details in such a case would be to court the dangerous place where the confidences of doctors and patients lay. But I ramble so much. You are a man of ethics, Professor Wilson, and I would swear upon every title to my name that you would not err in such a way over one single session out of dozens.”

Prof. Wilson opened his mouth.

“Of course not, Professor Van Helsing,” Penclosa hummed over her glass. It was nearly empty now. “I know my dear Gloria would not marry a cad any more than I would stay under the roof of one. I certainly wouldn’t agree to be at the center of a study that would seek to abuse the trust of the sort of people which proof positive of my skill intends to aid. Which is the point under it all, isn’t it? Not just proving the full reality of mesmerism, but proving its usages beyond making people do tricks. If that were all these displays have been for,” a small smile flared up and vanished, “likewise our early work with Gilroy, then I would be most shocked. I believe I would have to take myself out of the study entirely if it were so.” She sipped the glass dry.

Prof. Wilson shut his mouth. Cleared something out of his throat. Fumbled with his notebook before ultimately, painfully, closing it.

“Yes. Well. I suppose if this is a matter of a, ah, therapeutic nature, I suppose…” He seemed to almost visibly wilt. Jonathan thought inexplicably that he might be looking at some distant uncle of Dr. Seward’s. Though Wilson’s manner was notably more excitable in his pursuit of examples, there was no missing the similar duo of hunger for fresh results and disappointment at slipped opportunity.

Jack had resigned from his role as asylum head not long after Quincey Morris’ funeral in America. He’d not given himself more than a week before he turned to the neglected matter of R. M. Renfield, paying for a plot in a proper cemetery and a new stone. A day after this ceremony, he had begun the work of disentangling himself from the sanitorium—a process that had been met with equal parts entreaties to stay on and older detractors urging him out the door—which ultimately ended with him founding his own psychiatric practice. The shift in work and its purpose, hearing and working toward solutions of a patient’s ills versus merely detaining and observing violent extremes of mental havoc, had gone some way toward tipping the man out of a stranglehold of depression. In fact, it seemed to fire him into a new tier of thrill over possibilities for treatment. Not merely in the matter of pharmaceuticals or enforced methods, but skills a patient may hone for themselves.

Though Jack never dared drop patient names in earshot, he had bounced ideas, successes, and frustrations off his friends on several occasions. The despondency seen when he was stuck upon a case that had been snagged in its progress was shown in flints upon Prof. Wilson’s face.

He wished to prove not only that he was right about the power of mesmerism, but that there was a point to him being so, and that it was not merely an amusing parlor trick. A hard thing to manage when the only real evidence he had was a stack of Penclosa’s demonstrations which did indeed take place in his parlor. Jonathan withheld a sigh.

“Professor. It’s true I would like some privacy for Miss Penclosa, myself, Mina, and Van Helsing. I do not wish my name to flung about any more than it’s already set to be with the issue of Professor Atherton. But supposing my own trouble finds a solution with Miss Penclosa’s help, I will at least consent to go on record as an anonymous example of successful hypnotherapy.”

Emphasis on anonymous.

But even this was enough to rekindle some of the light in Prof. Wilson’s face. The notebook speedily snapped open again and the pen resumed its giddy scratching.

“Oh, that is more than amenable, Mr. Harker! And quite right for such delicate work as this, of course.” Scratch, scratch, scratch. “Have you a pseudonym in mind? It will be a clunky thing to just place you as Mr. Anonymous or Mr. Patient.”

Mr. De Ville, Jonathan thought in a lilt so bitter it burned.

Mina returned to the room with Mrs. Wilson in tow, her line of sight floating to him. Jonathan stopped himself just short of beaming.

“Mr. Murray.”

 Prof. Wilson gave them his library to use and passed on his solemn oath that no staff would blunder through the door to interrupt. Mina and Jonathan took the wider of the couches while Penclosa claimed a chaise and Van Helsing settled himself in a chair. Van Helsing had his own notepad on hand and had given likewise solemn oaths in both the Harkers’ and Wilson’s direction that he would record only the most pertinent bullets of observation. This pointedly did not include Jonathan’s description of the following:

“There is not much more that can be told beyond what we explained in the garden. Last year, I suffered an experience of singularly horrific proportions. The sort which are on a scale of literal nightmare; utterly unbelievable to anyone of sound mind. Yet it happened. And though the physical shock of its aftermath is over, though the second and far more despicable illness of my poor Mina has come and gone, though all has been dealt with in the waking world that can be dealt with and healed…” His throat worked against a jagged stone as his hand trembled inside Mina’s. “It was two months that this event lasted for me last summer. All of May, all of June. This, combined with the illness that boiled my brain and body upon escape, on top of the very real, very dire threat to Mina that followed it—a threat I-I should have never—never let—,”

“Don’t.” A shadow of a whisper. But Mina’s voice gave it power, made it a salve. Her cheek pressed his shoulder while her other hand overlaid its twin in holding him. “The nightmares may lie to you, but don’t you dare do it to yourself awake. We are well past that.” Mina turned to Penclosa who sat once more in statue stillness, her own gaze intent. When she spoke it was still soft, but with an edge that bordered on brittle with its enforced calm. “Last year was one of suffering for us and for loved ones. There were many losses, great and small. Yet taken as the most unvarnished sum of time and effects, Jonathan found himself the winner of a most cruel lottery. Miscellaneous torments were all passed his way, and for far longer than myself or our friends had to endure. They have damaged his sleep ever since, but now, as the anniversary makes its return—,”

“How frequently?” Penclosa asked. As she did, she performed a blink. “Forgive my curtness. I ask because I already find no way to doubt the sincerity of Jonathan’s trouble. For a history to haunt him so deeply even as he throws himself between villain and victim like a wall suggests that whatever monstrosity inflicted itself on him before must be of a great scale. The only issue for us now is the timing. Before I can attempt to plant a countermeasure to his nightmares, if and when they next arise, we must define how often they occur at present. For example, Jonathan, do you expect you will have one as soon as tonight?”

Jonathan dipped his head in half a nod.

“I do. What used to be every other night is now almost routine. Last week I did not have a single night free of bad dreams.”

Penclosa grinned.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Pardon. I fear some of Wilson’s scientific thinking has rubbed off. I say ‘good’ in that we have good odds of defining whether it will be my mesmerism that helps parry your nightmares or your mind merely deciding to quit the assault of its own volition. Of course, it would be most welcome if the latter were the case. If these grim dreams are truly tied to memories of what befell you a year ago near the same period, it could be they might reach a crescendo around the anniversary, then peter out to nothing as it passes. Only for them to make a return next year and around again. In truth, it seems as if your mind has conditioned itself in much the same way I might set a particular stimulus to make a subject react later.”

Penclosa raised her hand as if to illustrate a scenario:

“‘When the clock strikes ten o’ clock tomorrow, you will hop on one foot. The next time you smell fish, you will decide you must write a letter to someone.’ It all comes down to ‘When you notice X, then you will do Y.’ For you, the recall of the turning seasons to that soured period is having the same effect, albeit slowly. Subconsciously, you are reading into the calendar’s creep the same portents that led up to last year’s horrid experiences, and your dreams prey on you for it as if the events themselves are coming for a repeat performance. Now, I will not make promises as to how far my reach can extend in terms of permanently blunting the nightmares for good. Really, I can’t even say if this initial trial will bear fruit. But the trial is what matters before we attempt anything more extensive. To that end, I would like to ask how long you all intend to stay in Tuppeton.”

“We have two weeks planned out,” from Mina.

“And I shall be gone by this Sunday,” Van Helsing put in.

At this, Penclosa smiled anew and nodded, explaining, “That shall be enough to confirm things one way or the other. What I propose is this: I shall mesmerize you,” a look to Jonathan, “to see if I can prevent the nightmare you expect is inevitable tonight. Rather, and I apologize for this, to let the nightmare come upon you for just a moment, and then be banished by the command I place today.”

“I don’t believe I follow,” said Mina as she gripped Jonathan’s hand a little tighter. “Why not just halt the nightmare entirely?”

“Because,” Penclosa soothed back, though she frowned now too, “if the nightmare is not registered and then observed being thwarted by my countermeasure, we shall not know if I was effective or not. A wholly peaceful sleep might be written off as a fluke. Nothing to record, nothing to show one way or the other if the session had any positive effect that couldn’t be written off as a kind accident. Though I do swear to make sure it only exists long enough to be noticed, then quashed.” Her gaze returned to Jonathan. “It is imperative that you record all you can remember of tonight’s sleep. Every detail you can spare. And it is just as important that neither Mina or Professor Van Helsing let slip the description I will give you during the trance state. I trust you to be an honest fellow, but we cannot risk anything skewing your description after the fact.”

“That seems sound enough,” Jonathan agreed even as an unhappy crimp came to his mouth as he added, “though there is a last obstacle that we have not gone over.”

“What is that?”

“Me,” Van Helsing put in. “I am practiced in mesmerism myself, Miss Penclosa, and have succeeded in many cases. Jonathan, however, has proven a subject most hard to maneuver. I have gotten him near to trance, but his mind snaps out at me at the last moment and shoos the influence like a dog chasing out an intruder. And that with him all willing and trying with full consciousness to accept the hypnosis.”

Miss Penclosa’s brow did furrow for a moment at that. Her hand drifted up again to her high collar, scrubbing thoughtfully, or perhaps only itching. But her expression smoothed again as she turned back to Jonathan.

“I have had my hard cases in the past. Let’s see what happens. Mina, could you please give Jonathan the whole seat? When I begin, there can be no one to distract either of our lines of sight. Stand by with the Professor, if you would. Thank you.”

Once Jonathan was alone on the couch, Miss Penclosa stood herself up. Her strain in balance seemed somehow even less than the sudden strained vigor that had taken her in her demonstrations at the party. She stood erect and staring as her arms began their strange arches and swoops. Jonathan found each sweep sent a feeling of warmth gusting into him. A drowsy pulse that seemed at once to dull, to waken, and to pull him from himself. Yet all this was secondary to the new shock of her eyes.

As instructed, he had begun the session by focusing his gaze on her face. But in moments her face had burned off like steam to leave only the growing pools of her gray-green eyes behind. They were pools, were ponds, were a single merged mountain lake over which he found himself flying—

No no no the Sisters the Brides they are here in the room—

—falling—

—this drowse is not by choice, not playing dead, they want you still on the couch, want you wanting—

—falling—

—fight it fight their sound their mist their maws because after them—

—falling—

—after this—

—sinking below the surface like a flailing stone desperate for the surface—

—comes him. You feel it you know it he is here in the room he is there in your eyes in your neck in your head you let him do it let him into your life to eat and own and swallow whole he is coming to take it all and have you worse than dead get him out get away please please please not again please—

—and shuddering all the while.

—please…

Down, down, down he went into so dense a gloom that all light was thinned to a faint dancing glimmer on the water’s surface. Still he kicked, bucked, clawed at the water that sank him without drowning, crushing him down as if Poseidon’s own hand were dragging him below. He shuddered again, and seemed to gain a lap upwards; then was shoved down again. Back and forth, kick and foam, until he was sunk just deep enough that he could scarcely make out the surface’s light as a twinkling pinprick.

Which was the same instant that the water reversed its verdict. The moment the darkness turned complete was the moment he was rushed suddenly back up towards the light. He lunged to the surface as swiftly as a fish caught on a powerful line. As he breached the surface, he heard Penclosa’s voice call out:

“Awake!”

Jonathan came to with a jolt. Awareness returned to him with several announcements. One, that a faint glaze of perspiration had formed on his brow and that his hands had bent into claws within the cushion he sat on, almost tearing it. Two, that Mina was flying to his side with a look that could not decide between relief and anxiety, while behind her Van Helsing made a last hasty scratch upon his notes and followed her example from his other side. Three, that Miss Penclosa still stood, albeit by using the chaise as her support rather than the crutch. She too had a dew of exertion on her temples and her wan cheeks were flushed, but she smiled proudly just the same. The victor of some unknown duel.

“You were not overestimated, Jonathan Harker. If I had not had some little way in by the aid of your conscious mind, I don’t know that I could have gotten past the violent usher of your subconscious. But it has been managed and the foothold has been made. Should we have need to try again for greater measures—as I hope and expect we shall attempt tomorrow afternoon—the way in shall have its metaphoric door still chocked open.”

Jonathan blinked at her and at Mina and Van Helsing now bookending him.

“Was I really so resistant when I went under? I’d thought I was fairly calm as it began.”

“Only at the beginning, darling,” Mina took his hand and seemed to scour his face as if for signs of injury. “You quite worried us once the trance started setting in.”

“How so?”

“You seemed to be locked in a fight, my friend. An imagined battle in a dream. And you spoke.” This came from Van Helsing. While the weathered face was steady enough, Jonathan was less than heartened at the wild worry flaring in the man’s gaze. Fruitlessly, but instinctively, he lowered his voice to add, “You said, ‘Don’t let him in.’”

A nauseous chill flooded through Jonathan, blooming out from his core until he wondered if he might actually be sick right where he sat. But Mina squeezed his fingers in hers and he steadied.

“You were distressed for some time,” she admitted as one hand drifted up to his shoulder. Holding. Holding. He leaned into her and hooked his eyes to hers. “But it fell off as she went to work. The session was completed. She’s set something up in you. Something to trip up a nightmare should it come around.” Then, lower, “Tonight’s all arranged.”

They’d discussed said arrangement before ever arriving in Tuppeton. A small repeat of the lopsided nights of the year prior, in which days and nights were broken into shifts of uneven sleep to keep watch. Van Helsing had volunteered to be a conscious observer of the couple following Penclosa’s first attempt and to note whatever there was to note by way of triumph or failure in the battle between hypnotic command and dreamt assault.

“Remember,” Penclosa broke in, settling herself down again on the chaise, “record all you can recall on waking. Honest specifics.”

“I will. Are you alright?” He asked for the mesmerist seemed far more winded than she had appeared when working on the guests. She had ticked through those sessions with supreme ease. Now she sat wan and exhausted against the cushions. Even so, her smile redoubled at his question while she daubed herself with a handkerchief.

“This? Just the payoff of a most exerting day. Wine is fine but for these little spells,” she fluttered her hand at herself, “brandy is better. There is a decanter in the window…” Jonathan was already up and fetching it, likewise a tumbler. “Thank you,” she hummed, taking the cut glass as gratefully as if she were handed the Grail. A sip later she sighed and sank into the pillows. “I do sincerely hope to see you all tomorrow with good news. If we succeed in this small step, then the way towards greater leaps is possible. But whether it does so or not—,”

“Three o’ clock tomorrow afternoon,” Van Helsing assured. “We shall arrive with our news, whatever it may be. Deep thanks again for your aid regardless, Miss Penclosa.”

And there was little more to it than that, barring the necessary parting talk with the Wilsons. Yes, Van Helsing and ‘the Murrays’ would record all diligently. Yes, tomorrow. Yes, three o’ clock. Yes, yes, yes. Professor and Harkers parted ways in separate hansoms. Van Helsing headed back to the hotel to ensure he had a good heavy sleep to see him through the night watch while Mina pointed out how it would be a shame to waste the last of the day on heading back to their room when there was plenty of light left to enjoy the town’s little High Street, wouldn’t it?

It would. So they found a petite restaurant and took a late lunch that satisfied far better than what they’d nibbled at the party. They found a table that looked out on the windows and high old trees lining the tranquil avenues that were such a refreshing sight compared to Exeter’s clamor. Between bites, Mina nudged his foot under the table. Jonathan looked up from his cup to see her grinning in a way that spoke to her owning a secret that was only unknown to him because he had looked it full in the face and not seen it.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am.”

“So what is it?”

“Just thinking to myself that we shall have to add another address to the long-distance holiday pile when it comes time to send cards. It seems the good Sisters of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary shall have to share ink with Miss Penclosa.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You never do when you’ve gone and charmed another heart around your finger.”

“Said the pot to the kettle. And what charm? She was no more than sympathetic and professional—,”

“As sympathetic and professional as a mother learning that her child has scuffed a knee or caught cold for the first time. I got the impression she was only hindered from inviting you to lay down for a nap and broth because Van Helsing and I were there. If nothing else, her freedom with names shows an informality that I’d not have expected in someone with so moderate a demeanor, not counting her fire against Atherton. ‘Jonathan, Mina, Helen.’ There is a slight accent to her tone, same as Mrs. Wilson’s. Wherever they hail from, perhaps forenames come more freely.”

“Perhaps. And perhaps you’re reading too much into someone who takes courtesy and defense of the wronged as seriously as you do.” Jonathan batted his lashes and laid a hand to his chest. “Unless you mean to say you would not dote on a cause of mine even if I saved you from being struck with a heavy stick?”

“I suppose I would consider it. Idly.” She hid in another bite, another sip. Jonathan watched her and waited. “It’s just odd to me.”

“What is?”

“I don’t know. Even calling it ‘odd’ seems too tame for what I felt. Seeing it.”

“Seeing what, Mina?”

“You going into the trance. It was like watching the reverse of how you’ve been in your throes with the nightmares. On those occasions, I see you in distress and I can wake you out of it. You’re afraid, but then it breaks. I can always break it. But having to sit and watch you sink into that fear, or something so near to it—it made me want to jump up and shake you out of it. Or,” her words thinned out to a noise too small and ashamed to even count as a whisper, “or even knock Miss Penclosa off her feet to stop her work. It was an awful way to feel, but a worse thing to watch. I felt so strangely like a traitor sitting with Van Helsing as you sank into that horrible state before she finally won out and you went slack.” Jonathan’s hand went across to hers. It was her grip’s turn to tremble. She pressed on, “And somehow that was worse.”

“Worse how?”

“Because you looked just the same. Even before you said, ‘Don’t let him in,’ you looked just as you did that night. When he—when he had pushed your mind under and he—,” Jonathan stopped just short of crushing her hand in his. Her hold returned the favor. “You were limp, but you were struggling in your head just as she was struggling without, as though you two were fighting. Like you knew something was wrong and were clawing against it on the inside.”

“That is not too far from the truth,” he admitted. He told her of the lake that grew from Penclosa’s eyes, the fight he had made against the pressure of her hypnosis with animal reflex. “But it was not what he did to me. Likewise the Weird Sisters. Whatever irate creature lurks in the cellar of my mind, it read Penclosa as a threat even greater than Van Helsing’s softer attempt, and it fed fear up into me. Not that I can blame it any more than I can deride you for your concern. It was frightening for how unmoored I felt. She really does have a method all her own. Certainly one wholly alien to the mild haze that Van Helsing tried to push on me. But you saw yourself that she did no more than help. Or try, anyway. We shall see tonight.”

The tight grip had softened both ways to a mere cradling. Then Jonathan brought her knuckles up to press the gold band to his lips.

“I thank you either way for your concern. And for not tackling her.”

“Yes, well. No guarantees if tonight is unsuccessful. I should have to thrash her with my train guide in revenge.” Her attempt at a dour look cracked on the fourth word in and she batted his ankle with her shoe when he laughed. With food and drink now gone, they resumed their walk. While they’d not yet come by a shopfront with cameras in the window, they did find something smaller and sweeter in a jeweler’s display. Two somethings. Mina feigned a moment that it was a silly trifle, a saccharine one, really, and anyway it was more proper for a soldier and his wife, and…

“Oh, but haven’t you heard? I must be an officer of some kind. Witnesses all agree.” He slipped in the building before she could stop him. The unspoken warning sent by his look said that he would pick both if she did not choose her own. Chasing him inside, she saw him edging perilously near a pair of gold—

“I like the silver better,” she got out in a rush.

—then stood with her as the seller behind the glass cases came puttering up to point out every example in silver there was in his collection. To the man’s mild disappointment, the Harkers settled on a matching set with simple designs devoid of even a single scanty gem.

“We most definitely require a camera after this. We haven’t any photographs small enough for these.”

“We have this.” Jonathan tugged on a white lock of hair. Mina muttered again about soldiers and sailors.

But then, as Jonathan bowed so she might latch his chain on, she confessed, “Though I suppose we have risked as much as them. More than.”

“So we have,” Jonathan agreed, fastening her necklace at the nape. Back at the hotel they made their small snips before the toilet mirror, tying the cut locks with thread before tucking each in its locket. Jonathan sighed at hers. “This was a mistake after all. Yours looks as though you’re courting someone’s grandfather.”

“First, no one shall see inside but us.” Mina snapped the lid shut to punctuate as much. “Second, even if someone did see, it would not matter. They are not the one lucky enough to be your wife. If it’s someone especially young who saw, I could get away with telling them it came from some prince of fairy gentry.” She looped her arms about his neck. He hugged the small of her back in turn. “He courted me since we were small, better and sweeter than any ordinary man of England, wed me in a faraway land, and saved my life from a monster. With all these Grimm essentials out of the way, we are set to live our requisite happily ever after.”

“That is certainly a way to tell it. But my face is all wrong for it.” He tapped his cheek. “Too much of umber, not enough pearl.”

“Likewise for myself. But we can always say you were dreamt up by Scheherazade. The point is you are very much one of a kind and worth far more than the color of your hair. In any case, I wager you have more of jealous onlookers than anything. There are girls who would dunk their head in lime for a shade of blonde half as fair.”

“If I grow it out, perhaps I could make a new career by shearing it all off and peddling it to the wigmakers.”

“No.” The word was anguish.

“Oh, or I could go in for those rococo ringlets without having to bother with powder.”

“No!” The word was dismay.  

“Or I could just start making off with your pins and ribbons every morning.”

There was an affronted gasp as he tossed his head and she played as if she meant to hide away her pin box. Laughter bubbled. Then there came a knock at the hotel room’s door with Van Helsing’s voice on the other side.

“I am rested and I see you both are restless,” the Professor announced as he made ready his post in the far corner facing their bed. He decorated it with books enough to bludgeon a man and a flask full enough to revive him. “If you need aid in dropping off, I can always practice my next lecture upon you. Dear John can attest there is no better soporific aid apart from chloral.”

It was an odd scene that unrolled through the evening. Though both Harkers were appropriately swaddled in robes to bar the sight of nightclothes, there was an unavoidable air of being overseen by an uncle with a heap of tiresome family stories to impart in lieu of nursery tales. Van Helsing himself grew bored enough of his own topics that he gave it up and plied husband and wife for talk of their day following the visit with Penclosa. That rambled on pleasantly before snagging on the topic of the mesmerist’s winded stance following Jonathan’s session.

“Ah, you made note of it too? Yes, she did greatly, truly struggle as I have not seen any mesmerist do before. Perhaps she is right, that it was just something of a long day’s fatigue and great focus on her task that so tired her. Yet I wonder. Professor Wilson, he shared with me his notes taken in interviews with himself and herself and the former partner, Professor Austin Gilroy.”

By now he had abandoned his chair and moved up into his habitual stance and pace of the scholar before his staring rows of pupils. He seemed to ache for a chalkboard at his back, for his hands kept stopping just short as if to gesture at something written. The Harkers sat with drowsy raptness as best they could.

“To them,” Van Helsing went on, “ she claims that her method is much, much different than the hypnotist who has only his eyes and voice and hand as his tools. Miss Penclosa, she claims that it is her own mind she uses as the sole instrument; that her will is a thing she may use detached of herself to enforce a command. This takes some toll upon her physical self, coming as lethargy in good moments and true exhaustion in bad. Wilson, he said to me that this must only be an offshoot of the hazy land of clairvoyance. But that there is some truth in her description seems to have credence, I think we cannot doubt. She did wrestle with your subconscious, my friend, and it was a hard battle won.”

Mina paled as she listened. Jonathan more so.

“So she claims it is a psychic act rather than a standard trance?” Mina ventured with only a slight treble. “She sent her mind into him?”

“That is the claim. And yes, I too would worry, but for our playing witness. We saw and heard ourselves how difficult the matter was for her, and how careful her implanted instruction. More, an instruction meant only for his unconscious mind to undertake against the nightmares it manufactures. It is not an easy thing to trust those of extraordinary skill, I will grant, but in this case it seems we are all of us reacting with the suspicion owed to another party. One who had his reasons to do harm. Miss Penclosa has known all of us less than a day. That she would exert herself to such an extreme, risking her own well-being to breach the barrier Jonathan’s mind bricked over to stop any influence at all, shows a character more prone to aid than mischief.”

“Not counting the show with Professor Atherton,” Mina parried. She was now sitting straighter on the bed’s edge. “While I cannot say the fellow didn’t deserve a little shaming for being so shameless, she quite thoroughly gutted him of all his secrets on a whim. Considering Jonathan’s and my own experience with such powerful wills overriding our own, I cannot say I approve of only discovering the whole of the method now, after she’s already been and gone from his head.”

“Wilson did not see fit to tell me so until after the session as we escaped to our hansoms. But your point is fair, Madam Mina. We should have known beforehand.”

“She should have said—,”

“We should have asked,” Jonathan said, trying not to let it grow to a yawn. His eyes were beginning to burn even as new nervousness twisted in him. “We were so occupied with my trouble that we skipped over any inquiry or interest in her. Regardless of whether tonight works out or not, we should still give her better due for,” he stifled another yawn, “her efforts.”

Though perhaps adhering strictly to that track would only be another heap of tedium, he thought but did not have the energy to share. He imagined she had spent most of her time in a guest or gawker’s company alternately doing tricks or regurgitating interviews that only scraped the professional interest of her ability. Jonathan’s mind floated into a hypothetical world of people only ever asking him about the handling of properties, every day, every week. Intolerable.

He would try to make a better effort tomorrow. He would. He would…

Think on it later. Let him lay back and rest his eyes a moment.

Ten minutes of rested eyes later, Mina signed to Van Helsing to lower his voice. Carefully, they took some spare blankets off a chair in lieu of jostling him to get him below the covers. Mina departed from the bed with a last gentle squeeze of his hand before getting up to keep watch with her own books and journal at hand. When Van Helsing whispered that there was no need and that she deserved her rest, she whispered back that she could not rest if she were rolling in Morpheus’ own poppies. Besides, better to have two on watch than one, wasn’t it?

Memory flickered in the man as he opened his mouth and shut it again. Perhaps he smelled garlic blossoms again, perhaps he saw another resting body upon a different bed, waiting on awful dreams. If he did, he did not say. Only agreed that Madam Mina raised another good point. They settled in to wait.

Only two other rooms in Tuppeton were more pregnant with anxious anticipation than theirs.

In one, a man sat with his journal, scratching miserably at it to force some small half-page of a record into existence. He paused with every other sentence to look despondently on his toils of the last few hours: a coat and a screwdriver assailed mercilessly with turpentine. These had been crusted with a rich green paint earlier in the day. Earlier than that, even. No doubt as early as midnight.

He had cried upon seeing the stains that afternoon. Just sat on his bed and wept as he had thought only assailed women and babes capable of. Even now, pen in hand, his eyes carried a traitorous wet burn. Still, he wrote. Still, he waited. Still, he doubted now more than ever that his tormentor would be quit of these turns of the screw. First his professional status was laughed to pieces. Now his freedom as a law-abiding citizen was left balanced on a knife’s edge. Ah, no! Upon a window’s ledge.

Even as he wrote to the page that he had taken only five grains of antipyrine for his storming headache and that his fiancée was all that kept him from taking fifty, his thoughts strayed again and again to the bleak mercy of the bottle. His life would not be his until one or the other of this damned link was dead. He knew it. He took his knowing to bed where he dreamt of bottomless feline eyes and a future full of miserable waiting and worse revelations.

“Be done with me,” he whispered to the dark. It might have been plea or prayer. “Be done with me, you parasite. There is nothing for you here.”

The dark did not answer, but he bit his tongue all the same. No, it was not done for his enemy was not done. The screw would turn and turn and turn until…

He fell asleep on the mental picture of a screw turned so far it had drilled through the virgin wood until it splintered and the screw vanished into some inner void on the other side. Even there, he knew it was turning still.

In another room, a woman stood at her window. The moon fell in and pooled on her eyes. Even as a girl she had been wont to stare without realizing. Since her adventure up at the Suttons’ she found she could forget the chore of blinking for hours at a time. Many small things had changed since that trip. Oh, what a difference an evening could make. What a greater one could be made in a single afternoon.

Other eyes watched on behind her. Some glass, some porcelain, some wood, some cloth. They belonged to an accumulated crowd she had not been able to part with in childhood or adolescence. There were newer ones still in storage with the rest of the goods delivered over from Trinidad. She did not play with them, of course. But these old friends still went where she did. Her heart was soft in that way, as she would demurely admit. One of the very few but very deep sentimental touches she permitted herself in life. She supposed, quite rightly, that if her fancy was for shrunken heads or naked skulls, her friend’s husband would be no less accommodating to their presence.

He saw nothing about her beyond the potential anatomy of his future gloating before the disbelievers of his academic world. This was just as well.

The stargazer turned briefly from the moon to regard the dolls along their shelf and the puppets hung mid-pose on their coat hooks. All stared, all smiled.

She stood with one hand upon her crutch while the other gripped a card. The label of Hawkins and Harker was stamped on its front with the litter of address and business information below. On the other side were new additions.

Exeter.

Letter address.

Locale tour with Gloria (?).

Old furnishings from storage.

New furnishings with J.

The last was underlined twice. Circled. Underlined again. She turned the card gently in her hand and brought it up again to look over. After a moment, she held the slip of heavy paper to her lips.

“Not to worry,” she murmured to the print. “I’ll take care of everything.”

#in which the stage is set for a most romantic escapade with our good friend Jonathan Harker #hope you all enjoy the pile o' text #while I'm still working on this ^^^ I've also got another surprise cooking #I may or may not drop a little hint later this week :3 #but in the meantime #happy valentine's day #helen penclosa #jonathan harker #mina harker #abraham van helsing #austin gilroy #jack seward #arthur holmwood #the parasite #dracula #arthur conan doyle #bram stoker #crossover #my writing #horror #hypnosis #mesmerism

[usafphantom2]

The Last USAF F-15C/D Eagle Instructor Pilots Are Now In Training

The instructors will help train the final cadre of pilots set to fly the F-15C/D in the twilight of its Air Force career.

Thomas NewdickPUBLISHED Jan 24, 2024 3:17 PM EST

F-15 retirement Kingsley Field

U.S. Air National Guard photo by Senior Master Sgt. Jennifer Shirar

The U.S. Air Force is training what are very likely to be its last two F-15C/D instructor pilots at the Eagle’s ‘schoolhouse’ at Kingsley Field ("the land of no slack"), in Klamath Falls, Oregon. As we have reported in the past, Kingsley Field will replace its current F-15C/Ds with F-35A stealth fighters, overturning a previous plan that would have seen the base’s 173rd Fighter Wing assume responsibility for training pilots for the new F-15EX Eagle II.

In a recent story published by the 173rd Fighter Wing, it was confirmed that Capt. Andrew Marshall — plus one other unnamed aviator — will likely be the Air Force’s last F-15C/D instructor pilots as the service continues to retire these aircraft, the youngest of which is nearly 40 years old. The wing states that “nearly all” F-15C/Ds have now been divested by the active component.

U.S. Air Force Capt. Andrew Marshall, an F-15C pilot with the 550th Fighter Squadron, steps to his jet along with two other pilots on a chilly January morning, January 18, 2024, at Kingsley Field in Klamath Falls, Oregon. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Jefferson Thompson

The recent deactivation of squadrons at Kadena Air Base, Japan, which you can read about here, saw the final active-duty Air Force F-15C/Ds retired. A handful of test jets remain in use, with all other F-15C/Ds now assigned to the Air National Guard. This renders “the future need for instructor pilots minimal,” the Air Force says.

This is reflected in the Air Force’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget request which details plans to divest the entirety of the F-15C/D fleet by 2026.

The two pilots now wrapping up their training to become instructors at Klamath will be responsible, in part, for the B-Course syllabus that will prepare the final students to fly the F-15C/D — what the 173rd Fighter Wing dubs WGASF — for “world’s greatest air superiority fighter.”

Capt. Andrew Marshall taxis his F-15C across a rainswept tarmac before taking off to nearby range space for upgrade training, on January 18, 2024, at Kingsley Field in Klamath Falls, Oregon. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Jefferson Thompson

Capt. Marshall says that he expects to qualify as an instructor pilot “within six months,” but adds that “there’s a lot of other factors — TDYs, weather,” that could affect this.

The seasoned F-15C/D pilot, whose resume already includes an assignment at Kadena, explains that there are 11 “thresholds” to cross before receiving the coveted instructor pilot rating.

The thresholds start with close-range dogfighting and expand to a “very broad scenario involving many aircraft performing defensive counter-air and everything in between, and a couple of ‘top-off’ events following that.”

Capt. Andrew Marshall suits up for another sortie on his way to becoming a rated instructor pilot in the Eagle, at Kingsley Field in Klamath Falls, Oregon, on January 18, 2024. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Jefferson Thompson

“It’s much more refinement in how you go through the instructor upgrade; now you have to be able to not only understand and do it yourself but you have to convey that knowledge and execute it in a way that shows credibility as an instructor.”

Overall, the timeline makes it abundantly clear that the days of the F-15C/D with the regular Air Force are now numbered.

Ultimately, Marshall expects to stay on at Kingsley Field and convert to the F-35A, once the stealth fighter begins to arrive at the base, planned for 2026.

TAP ARROW BUTTON TO VIEW VIDEO ☝️

Last May, The War Zone reported on the Air Force’s decision to transfer all Eagle training, both for the F-15EX and F-15E Strike Eagle, to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, starting from early 2026.

The first two U.S. Air Force F-15EXs fly together. U.S. Air Force

Aircrew will then complete specific F-15 model training (F-15E, F-15EX) once they reach their first operational unit, a concept that we have considered in the past.

Meanwhile, Kingsley Field will become home to an F-35A Formal Training Unit (FTU). This was a reversal of previous plans, in which the 173rd Fighter Wing would have become a training unit for the F-15EX.

This will help address the growing need for F-35A pilots, with the FTU at Kingsley Field supporting similar outfits at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona and Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

An F-35A of the 56th Fighter Wing from Luke Air Force Base flies at low level. Jamie Hunter

These changes have also affected the service’s plans for the F-15EX, which remain somewhat unclear, although more details have emerged in recent months.

The Air Force has confirmed that the current F-15EX fleet will comprise 104 aircraft, which includes an additional 24 aircraft having been added as part of the Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposal. There remains some speculation as to where those 104 Eagle II aircraft will eventually be based, but we do know that Kingsley Field is out of the picture, while Kadena is likely in. This will ensure the Okinawa base continues its long association with the Eagle.

The Air Force has also announced plans to station F-15EX jets with California, Louisiana, and Oregon Air National Guard units, all of which currently fly the F-15C/D.

An F-15C, assigned to the 173rd Fighter Wing, Oregon Air National Guard, prepares to depart from Kingsley Field in Klamath Falls, Oregon, for a training mission. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Jennifer Shirar/Released

The forthcoming end of F-15C/D operations also reflects broader changes afoot in the Air Force as regards the composition of its future fighter fleets.

As well as rationalizing its legacy fighters, beginning with the F-15C/D, the Air Force is working toward introducing its sixth-generation stealth fighter plus the advanced Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones that will work alongside it as part of the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. Current plans call for around 200 new NGAD combat jets and at least 1,000 CCAs.

The winding down of the F-15C/D training pipeline is a significant step in the process of divesting the original ‘not a pound for air-to-ground' Eagle. Once the curtain finally comes down on this legendary fighter, it will have truly earned the WGASF moniker.

Contact the author: [email protected]

#Youtube

[lullabyes22-blog]

Mal de Mer - Ch: 4 - Treasure Part II

Summary:

A high-seas honeymoon. Two adversaries, bound by matrimony. A future full of peril and possibility. And a word that neither enjoys adding to their lexicon: Compromise.

War was simpler business…

Part of the 'Forward But Never Forget/XOXO' AU. Can be read as a standalone series.

Thank you for the graphics @lipsticksandmolotovs<3

Mal de Mer on AO3

Mal de Mer on FFnet

CHAPTER

I - II - III - IV - V - VI - VII - VIII - IX - X

꧁꧂

Maybe I'm just too demanding Maybe I'm just like my father, too bold?

~ "When Doves Cry" - Prince

A vista of endless blue gives way jagged black peaks rising like a city's skyline.

The Hydra—or so the artificial port is called—sits in a hollow formed by two undersea cliffs, which shield the anchorage from both sides. The sun, a blinding glare, winks off the superstructure. At first glimpse, it resembles a mirage: a phantasmagoria of glass and steel. Closer, it resolves from myth to mundanity: a sprawling, low-slung complex, with an array of docks, hangars and fueling stations. Its colossal weight of ten thousand metric tons is held afloat by a series of airtight nitrogen capsules, encased beneath the steel-plated underbelly. Beneath, miles down, is a bed of solid granite. The complex's anchor, a six-mile-long steel tether, is secured by titanium-plated cables to a peak on the seabed.

The design, a masterwork of engineering, is an homage to its maker: Viktor, the Machine Herald. For an unknown sum, he'd crafted the facility, first as a prototype, then as a permanent installation. Silco had also commissioned his expertise for designing a fleet of specialized vessels: the Siren's Call. A collection of sleek submersibles, built to his exact specifications, and piloted by a cadre of elite seamen.

Their function: transporting precious cargo from the Hydra, back to Zaun.

A fan of sea-spray kicks in the wake of a fleet of skiffs. It sparkles in the intense brightness of the sun, like a handful of tiny diamonds flung to the sky.  Silco, at the helm of the lead craft, navigates with a smuggler's ease. The craft's prow, a narrow point, slices a white streak in the water. Inside, the passengers—Cevila, Hector, Lady Dennings, Garlen—huddle, blindfolded and guarded, in its wake.

Abovedeck, Mel sits hunkered behind her husband. She has taken off her inadequate boots and tucked her skirts between her knees. Her bare ankles are rashed with gooseflesh; her dress, half-drenched, clings like a second skin.

This, she thinks, is why he'd asked her to lose the chiffon.

Seamlessly, Silco threads his boat through the maze of piers, and slips between two massive derricks. Then he steers into a small basin, where a pair of towering steel doors yawn open.

At the fore, the port's emblem gleams: Zaun's dagger-winged chem-shield, etched in vivid green.

They are, officially, in the belly of the beast.

Mel, braced against the spray, stares in mute awe.

The hangar is colossal: a maelstrom of sound and motion. A web of florescent lights, strung overhead, casts a harsh white glare. Everywhere, men and women, in labcoats or overalls with Zaun's crest,  pass in and out. Some, armed with clipboards, are inspecting cargo. Others, armed with power tools, swarm the corners: checking seals, topping up fuel tanks, testing equipment.

Cranes swing. Pulleys screech. Engines roar.  The scene is a sensory assault: an undersea hive, humming with one singular purpose.

Progress.

As her eyes adjust to the dazzling brightness, Mel makes out the dimensions of the dry docks: a spread of interlocking piers and canals, all set in an intricate steel gridwork. Ships of every size and class are anchored: freighters, frigates, ferries. A flotilla of motorboats, their hulls painted the distinctive Zaunite green, zigzag in between like darting minnows. The acrid stink of exhaust and brine is overpowering. 

Silco, at the wheel, takes a deep inhale.

"Funny, isn't it?" he says, quietly.

Dazed, Mel says, "What is?"

"What can be achieved if coin is actually invested where it's due."

The spray hits Mel's face, cold as a slap. She is still in shock. She'd had no clue this behemoth existed. No inkling of the depth and breadth of Silco's designs.

Her voice doesn't quaver. But there's a taut note: like the twinge of a pulled muscle. "How long?"

"Three years, give or take. I've had my eye on these waters since before Zaun's independence. The initial plan, if you can even call it that, was to mine minerals from the seabed. Metals, crystals, ore. Anything we could find." A twist of the wheel, and their boat, with a gentle jerk, eases around a corner. "The project had to be scrapped. We lacked the resources to extract. Not to mention the funds to build a port. Revolution's a costly business. So's maintaining control over a city. Especially one that's eating itself alive."

"So, you turned your eye elsewhere."

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

"Shimmer."

His profile is inscrutable: a figurehead at the prow. "Yes."

Mel feels no anger yet. Only a dull hiving in the pit of her belly. The same feeling she gets whenever their arguments veer into dark territory. A sense of disorientation—surrealism—at how easily Silco shifts between extremes.

How, without warning, he steals all her air, and leaves her suffocating.

"And this?" she grits out. "When did you discover glyphs under the seabed? Or that they linked to a portal system?"

"I knew nothing about the glyphs. Only that, since my smuggling days, there were stories of a secret network used by Oshra Va'Zaun's navy. A shortcut between sea routes, where ships, powered by ancient magic, could pass from point A to point B in a heartbeat. Like Piltover's Hex-Gates, but at sea." The corner of his lip curls. "As a young man, I'd always thought the maps drawn up by different navies seemed—odd. The Noxians, for example, are too busy with their conquests to chart out a thorough seaway. They're more concerned with securing the strait's borders, rather than what lies underneath. Demacia, meanwhile, is a landlocked bore. They have no real seafaring tradition, nor the need for one. Their navy's purpose is mostly for patrol, and the odd skirmish here and there."

"And Piltover?"

"Piltover has always been the authority. Or so it claims. It is, however, a city built on greed. The first thing I did after Zaun's independence was to invest in archaic runes from the Shadow Isles. I gifted these to Jinx. For her research into the arcane, and its connection to Zaun's network of magic leylines. Soon, she and Viktor discovered a common thread. The runic systems were not simply confined to Zaun. They were also present, on a much larger scale, along the coastline. A stretch of sea-passage, coincidentally, where Zaun was already establishing a nautical corridor."

The hiving in Mel's belly is spreading. The truth is a bitter sting.

She whispers, "You planned all this."

His profile shifts: three-quarters to the light. The left side, a dark slash. "Is that a crime?"

"The coin from each investment I approved throughout the years. Each transaction sanctioned at my table. Each project aimed at mutual prosperity between our cities." Mel's fingers clench the railing. "It was all being funneled into this!"

"It was being put to proper use."

"This—this is an act of subterfuge!"

The engines rumble as they slow. She's glad for the white-noise. It serves as a screen. The rest of the party, belowdeck, cannot hear them.  And yet, the privacy is its own torment.

Here, there is nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run.

Silco, his eye fixed on the horizon, says, "This is an act of necessity."

"Necessity?"

"Zaun's independence is a reality, not a dream. Reality requires capital. And, unlike Piltover, I can't rely on a bottomless treasury of stolen goods. Our mines are ripe with gems. But gems mean nothing without trade routes, and markets, and vessels to transport them. We are one of Runeterra's most well-situated cities, but we can only export via one single corridor: your Hex-Gates." His good eye swivels her way. "If I had asked the Council, you think they would have funded this port? This fleet? The Iron Pearl?"

"You had no right to—"

"No right?" His tone is biting. "I have every right. Zaun is a sovereign state. This is statehood in motion. Fissurefolk have a history of carving out a living, no matter the odds. We've navigated these seas for centuries before the Cataclysm. We've endured wars, famine, natural disasters, and the collapse of an entire empire. We've fought and bled and clawed our way to a foothold. If anything, the least you can do is to afford us the dignity of making our own way."

"You," Mel fires back, "are undercutting the city that supported you."

"Piltover has already taken its pound of flesh. Now, we're taking back our share."

A dull throb begins in Mel's temples. She'd always known Piltover's stranglehold on Zaun. The city's natural bounty: a vast reserve, kept under lock and key by dint of the Peace Treaty.  After the Siege, and Zaun's rupture from Piltover, she'd needed to assuage the Council's fears: that Zaun could be, if no longer a treasurebox, a viable trading link. That an accord between them was of mutual benefit. 

Two cities: partners in prosperity.

But what Silco has constructed, with the aid of her city's coffers, is a different beast. A counterpoint to Piltover's supremacy: a network of ports and channels, hidden from view, and under his absolute governance. A private empire, beyond her grasp—or the Council's oversight.

A disaster, Mel thinks, with a thousand mile radius.

Once word gets out, the Council will be in uproar. They'll see the Iron Pearl as a direct challenge: their monopoly on foreign goods undermined in the span of a night.  Investors will be stricken. Some, dreading a capsized market, will flee. Others, emboldened, will seek Zaun as the next safe harbor.  Global trading networks will split along two faultlines. Shipping chains will likewise crack at the seams.

A tectonic shift, as profound as the invention of the Hex-gates.

And Mel, a wedge, caught in between.

Trust me, he'd said.

I do, she'd replied.

The irony is not lost on her: her trust, like her marriage, has led her into a trap.

And, like any trapped animal, she lashes out.

"This your idea of compromise? An ambush in plain sight?" She hears her voice crack, and hates herself for it. "I would've given you anything. All you had to do was ask. But no—you'd rather skulk around in the shadows. Scheming like a—"

"You call it scheming. I call it strategy."  Silco's hands, guiding the wheel, are steady. "Or did you expect me to stay on sufferance? My city's trade—its lifeblood—tied for generations to your Hexgates. My future hinging—year after year—on accords written by your Council. Bureaucracy, backtracking, backstabbing. A charade of concessions, with Zaun's dignity as the cost?"

"Charade?" Her face goes hot, then cold. "Is that what you see this voyage as?"

"Worse. I see it as a farce." His knuckles, she notices, are whitening. "You, playing at being my wife. Putting on a show for all your guests. The men and women who've undermined my city at every turn. And what do you do? Peddle your smiles to grease their palms. Force my hand, and force yours, and force everyone else's—all to keep the peace." His laugh is pitched low. And yet it slices through the air. "Peace. If this is the price, I'd rather go to war."

The pain, like a needle, pierces Mel's skull.

She'd known, since the voyage began, that he was angry. That he was sick of the hollow platitudes and hidden barbs. But she'd thought, with her efforts this morning, that she'd successfully mitigated the damage. Diplomacy, rather than daggers—all to the goal of keeping the status quo.

A false premise, she realizes.

Zaun no longer recognizes the status quo. Not when the city has an undersea fortress, and a fleet of ships, and a web of trade routes.

"This—this is politics," she tries to reason. "You've seen me do this countless times!"

"That's precisely the point."

"What point?"

"You." It is a sibilant hiss. "Doing this. Every. Damn. Time."

"Silco—"

"You have a gift for it, Mel. I won't deny." The wheel spins beneath his fingertips.  The craft veers into a narrow canal, bordered on both sides by towering cranes. "I've always enjoyed it. How you can turn a crooked cause into a straight road. Turn a cutthroat into a charity case. But have you stopped to consider—just once—that I don't want to be your charity case? That watching you play nice with those leeches and bootlickers, day after day, makes me sick? That I'd rather toss the lot of them overboard than have you sacrifice a shred of yourself for my city's coffers."

"I am a Councilor," Mel protests. "My duty is—"

"Your duty is to be my wife!"

The whipcrack timbre cuts off the words in her throat. For a moment, Mel can do nothing but stare. His expression—the slow hardening shift of muscles, the creeping chill of mismatched eyes—is as remote as a dying star.

In her mind's eye, she sees their wedding night: her ruined silk underthings a breadcrumb trail between parlor and bedroom. Thinks of Silco, a phantom silhouette in the gloom: on top of her, inside her, filling her, all burning eyes and biting kisses and sweat-slick skin. Thinks of the aftermath: of him cradling her in his arms, his fingertips tracing the scratches his teeth had gouged, his whispers a cool balm to the fire his touch had lit.

"We'll get there," he'd promised her, again and again. "Just give it time."

"Time," Mel had whispered, clinging to his neck.

"All we need. All I ask."

"You could ask for more."

His chuckle had grated deliciously against her skin. "I'm greedy, my sweet wife. I take what I want."

And she'd smiled, and let him take.

Wife.

The word, entwining with sensuous tenderness, now constricts like a noose.

"My wife," Silco repeats, quieter, but with an unmerciful intensity that cuts her to the quick. "Not the prop to humanize me in front of hysterical prudes like the Dennings. Not the pincushion to hide behind when Cevila Ferros slings barbs about my bloodline. Not the bargaining chip to trot out when Hector wants to renegotiate a loan, in exchange for a few harmless gropes. Certainly not a piece of meat for Garlen and his pack of jackals to paw at in full view—all for the good of my city." A vein pulses dangerously in his forehead. "My wife, Mel. Mine."

Mine.

The word, like a key, unlocks the full dimension of his rage.

She'd known he was a jealous man. Had assumed, in her naïveté, that it was born of a bruised male ego. Because he was a powerful man, who'd risen from nothing. And, like all power-hungry men, he'd sooner hoard her attention than share it.

Now, she sees her mistake: the root cause of his jealousy was never the sharing.

It was the humiliation.

Having a shipful of strangers, in all their privilege, look down their noses at him. To treat him, publicly, with varying degrees of hostility—all because he'd been born in the wrong place, and raised by the wrong people, and bested his own fate with his bare hands. To be regarded, in turns, as a volatile threat, an exotic savage, or a useful commodity—but never as an equal.

And Mel, in the course of a single evening, had condoned the whole circus.

In her mind, she was protecting his interests. In her heart, she was trying to make amends. In her actions, she was keeping the peace.

But in Silco's eyes, she was making a mockery of her vows.

And with this voyage, selling his soul. All to keep Piltover's good standing at Zaun's expense.

Mel's throat hitches. She can feel the miserable tremors of childhood bubbling up. Her fingers clench the rail; the only thing left to cling to. For a terrifying heartbeat, she is a girl again, condemned beneath her mother's shadow.

But Silco is not Ambessa.

And she is no longer a girl.

"I did this," she grits out, "for us."

"No," Silco says, flatly. "You did this for them."

"They're our guests."

"They are the enemy."

"Silco, they—"

"My enemies," he says. "By word. By deed. The difference, Mel, is that both of mine have teeth."

The salt-spray stings Mel's eyes. Adrenaline, cold as seawater, sluices down her spine.

And it hits her:

I am in hostile territory.

"Why have you brought us here?" she says. "What are you planning?"

At the word—us—there is a change in his expression. It is subtle, but unmistakable. Suddenly, the fluid animation that powers his every move is gone. The man left behind is—not an effigy—but a facsimile of human life. Skin and bones and blood, but nothing more.

Beneath, there is a bottomless void.

And it is very, very hungry.

"I told you," he says. "This is a treasure hunt."

"Silco—"

"I've given them the bait. Now all that's left is to reel them in."

"Reel them in for what?" Without realizing, Mel has begun to edge away. To put herself between him and the bodies belowdeck. "Silco, these are my guests. My allies. I am responsible for their safety."

His stare doesn't falter. "So am I."

"Tell me," Mel says, her heart pounding. "Please."

He is still a moment longer. Then he lifts a hand and smooths back the flyaway curls that have broken rank from her coif. The gesture is oddly gentle. And yet, Mel has a sense that he's gripping her throat in a fist.

"Put your boots on," he says, deathly soft. "We're here."

And the skiff, neat as a pin, glides into the dock.

The guests, in a dazed cluster, file off the skiffs.

Their blindfolds stripped, they resemble, to Mel's eye, a school of bewildered fish: faces palely pinched, eyes gleaming, mouths working. Their shoes squeak on the steel plates. Many, still in their finery beneath their life-vests, shiver in the deepsea chill. There are whispers. Shaking heads. Furtive glances. As if, beneath the dazzling florescence, a monster lurks.

It's the fear that's always in the back of their minds.

The fear, Mel realizes, that Zaun will be their undoing.

She, too, is stunned. Not simply by the sheer size and scope of the Hydra, but by the fact that Silco has, for years, managed to conceal such a behemoth construction. She'd known he was cunning. Known he had a gift for biding his time. But to have built, under her city's nose, a sprawling, multi-level port complex, and an armada of submersibles...

It's not a matter of scheming. It's a matter of strategy.

Did you expect me to stay on sufferance?

Trust me—and don't run.

Her mind, a stifled storm, feels the full brunt of his words.

In her ear, Ambessa's lesson, learned the hard way:

Marriage is a sea unto itself... If you try to tame it, it will swallow you.

"Mel?"

Lady Denning's voice, like a clubbing blow, sends her stumbling back to the present. She blinks. The crowd, a collage of anxious faces, solidifies.  The noblewoman is clutching the spray-dampened hem of Mel's sleeve. Her lips, blue-tinged with cold, are pursed in a moue of distress.

"I think," she quavers, "I may have caught a chill."

Mel's nurturing instincts kick into gear. "Stay close. We'll find you someplace warm."

"Mel, where are we? This place—I don't recall our itinerary including it. Is this truly one of Zaun's ports? The size of it—" Her eyes flit, birdlike, over the vast expanse of metal. "Why, it's like the mouth of a leviathan!"

"Sssh. My husband wanted us to see the fruits of Zaun's progress."

"Progress! Oh yes. And then we'll go home?"

"Of course."

"Oh thank gods." A childlike hiccup. "I'm truly not dressed for an expedition."

"I wouldn't worry." Mel, her arm firmly looped around the woman's waist, casts a swift glance at the rest of the group. They are, she notices, also clumped in clusters. The women, huddling together. The men, pacing around them in small, tight circles. The air, despite the chill, crackles with tension. "The sooner we see the treasure, the sooner we'll leave."

"Treasure." Lady Denning jitters a forced laugh. "Yes. A treasure. How—how exciting."

"It will be, yes."

The answer is rote: a reflex honed over years of crisis.

Inside, she is paralyzed. She'd been prepared to deal with the economic repercussions of the Iron Pearl. Nightmare scenarios of Piltover's trade networks collapsing into a morass of litigation. Zaun's ships, their holds laden with contraband, being impounded at sea. The Council, furious, holding her at fault—

All of that, she could've dealt with. She's a Medarda, and Medardas can outfox the fiercest threats.

But Silco's plan, whatever it is, is a different beast.

She has no precedent for this. No guidepost; no rules of conduct. Only a feeling, as visceral as the bite of winter, that something is closing in.

She looks across the platform, and there, a hundred feet away, is her husband.

He is speaking to the crew: wiry, sharp-eyed men and women in grease-streaked uniforms. They are all Fissure-born: Mel can tell by the tattoos and scars crosshatched on their bodies; by the glint of cybernetic implants on their hands or faces; by the sinewy muscles that flex in their shoulders and arms.

Ambessa had often liked to say there's no trusting a man or woman without a single scar.

A marked man has more backbone in his pinkie than an entire pedigree of soft-skinned cowards.

If that is the case, then these are the most upright people in existence.

A court to a crooked king.

In their midst, Silco is a slender silhouette. His features are set in blandly neutral lines; his body holds an easy languor. And yet his voice, compelling in its slow articulation, holds the group in thrall. They do not shrink in subservience, like serfs under their liege's boot. Instead they lean in: grim-faced, intent. The deference in their stance verges on reverence.

Mel knows how much power the Eye of Zaun wields. In Piltover, he is a formidable adversary.  On the global stage, he is an up-and-coming terror.

Here, in Zaun's territory, he is a god among men.

Succinctly, he issues a series of orders. As one, the crew nod. A single gesture, and they disperse: each vanishing down a different corridor of the maze. The last of the men—a hulking brute, with a shock of bright orange hair and a face that's a mass of knotted scars—touches his fist to his chest. His mouth, a lipless slash, cracks in a smile.

Silco imparts the barest smile in turn.

Then, he turns—and his eyes, two chips of different-colored ice, lock onto Mel's. She feels, again, as if her throat is being encircled in a cold fist—and lovingly, oh so lovingly, squeezed.

A blink, and the pressure is gone.

And her husband, closing the distance, is at her side.

"The crew are bringing around carts," he says, pleasantly. "They'll escort the guests to the viewing gallery. Give them a bird's eye view of the haul."

"Haul?" Mel keeps her frayed nerves from her voice, "Of what?"

"Patience. You'll see." He gestures to the brute-faced crewman. "This is Kolt. He and his men will handle the party's safety."

The man, with an affable grin, nods. "Yessir."

Lady Dennings, huddled close to Mel, whispers, "Safety? I—I don't understand. From what?"

"Protocol," Silco says smoothly. "Nothing more."

The poor woman, trembling, presses closer to Mel. "I think," she mumbles, "I need a hot drink. And a dry cloak."

"You'll have both, and more. Just an hour's patience."

"An hour—?"

The noblewoman's voice fades into white-noise. From within the warrens of the Hydra, a strange rumble erupts. A low-pitched buzzing at first, it grows, like a wave, into an earsplitting discordance. It resembles a thousand metal gears grinding against each other. And yet the echo is surreally musical, like a symphony swelling from the depths the sea.

The guests, crying out, huddle into protective swarms. Some clap their hands to their ears. Cevila, hissing like a wet cat, swats free of her cringing husband. Hector, quivering volubly, nearly stumbles to his knees. Garlen, swearing, draws a pistol, and is immediately restrained by his own retinue.

Lady Dennings, clinging to Mel's waist, nearly swoons. Bracing her elbow, Mel holds her steady. Her skin crawls with seven layers of gooseflesh. The sound is everywhere: a palpable force, vibrating up her spine. It feels like a descent from foreboding to doom. Her mind, always balanced on an effortless gyre of equilibrium, is suddenly off-kilter. The imagination conjures a monster: vast and unseen, rousing itself from slumber. Acres of sea-water, churning, as it begins its slow crawl towards the light.

Only Silco stands his ground. He is preternaturally calm, his hands laced behind his back, his profile cut from cracked stone.

Like a conductor before his infernal orchestra.

Then—

The demonic grinding fades. The molecules in the air, pinwheeling spastically, begin to settle. The silence throbs into lingering aftershocks—until, gradually, the ordinary hum of activity resumes.

As one, the guests heave out a collective sigh.

"My stars," Hector wheezes. "That was frightful!"

Cevila cries. "It was a seaquake!"

"Feh," Garlen grunts. "More like a faulty engine. I've heard worse at Zaun's foundries."

To punctuate his point, he kicks the railing. His boot-heel rebounds off the metal with a hollow clang. Sound and fury, Mel thinks, signifying nothing. Underneath, he is terrified.

Lady Dennings, curled at Mel's side, is a wreck. Her eyes are swimming; her cheeks wet.

"Oh, dear gods," she whimpers. "Please, Mel. Let's just go. Please."

"Hush," Mel soothes, though her heart is pounding. "It's over. We're fine."

"That noise—ghastly! It sounded like a monster."

"No monster," Mel says, hoping she's right. "Only—"

"Magic," Silco finishes.

At this, the noblewoman buries her face in Mel's shoulder.  Mel, keeping her composure, holds Silco's stare. Even with the distance between them, she can feel the electricity of impending danger in the air jump like a needle into the red.

"Magic," she repeats, flatly. "What sort?"

"The undersea glyphs. They emanate a resonance, each time they are used." His tone is light, but the gleam in his eyes is pure blackness. "Different frequencies for different distances. That, for instance, was an arrival."

"An arrival of what?"

"Treasure."

Lady Dennings has begun to whimper. Reflexively, Mel smooths circles between her shoulderblades. She's a delicate soul, prone to the vapors. Her husband, the milquetoast, is too feckless to do anything but hover.

Mel's own husband, the bastard, is only a stone's throw away. And yet, the distance might as well be the breadth of an ocean.

"I don't care for games," she says, leveling the turmoil beneath her tone into steel. "Explain yourself. Or show us the way out."

"I intend to."

"What?"

"The way out. That's where we're going."  With a languid sweep of his arm, Silco gestures them deeper into the abyssal maze. "Tread carefully, my dear. The rest of you: come."

It's not a request, but a decree.

And the guests—the hostages, in all but name—follow.

The cart ride is a rollercoaster.

Not the exhilarating type: with loops, and spins, and a plunge that leaves you cheerfully breathless. This is the opposite: a series of gut-wrenching spirals and gravity-defying corkscrews. The carts, a fleet of narrow, flat-bedded vessels, are designed for efficiency rather than comfort. Mel, seated with Silco, grips the edges with bloodless knuckles. She's half-certain the next twist will send them colliding straight into a dead-end.

The interior of the Hydra is a labyrinth. The network of zigzagging corridors, catwalks and canals is an infrastructural marvel: a cityscape unto itself. Everywhere, generators throb. A latticework of pipes snakes overhead. Workers rush to and fro. The pulse of machinery is a warm womb, burgeoning with possibility.

A sense of the world changing shape.

The Medardas, Mel thinks, believe in keeping the world as it is.

Now Silco, with a single decade's work, has thrown that belief into a tailspin.

He sits, an impassive silhouette, in the seat opposite. She'd always known he could keep a cool head under pressure. Now, witnessing his calm in the face of the unknown is terrifying. He is no longer the man who'd kissed her, with such fierce tenderness, at breakfast. Nor the sly enigma who'd sat, smoking, at the bar, while Mel had spun her diplomatic web.

This is a stranger: an ice-cold entity, his plans locked behind a sheet of blankness.

She feels for the ring he'd given her, twists it on her finger. It's all she can do not to wrench it off and fling it in his face.

"Bastard," she hisses under her breath.

He doesn't flinch. "So many have said."

"I will never forgive you."

"Many have said that, too." A beat. "I wonder how many times I'll have to listen to you say it."

"Not much longer, the rate you're going." Her rage has calcified into a core of gold: reactive to nothing, and solid to the worst blow. The Medarda rage, Ambessa used to say. It's why our women are the fiercest.  "I'm beginning to see why Sevika warned me to steer clear."

A crease—instantly flattened—passes beneath his forehead.

"Sevika?"

"Before the engagement was publicized. She pulled me aside. Told me I was taking a huge gamble. That she didn't think you and I would suit." Mel, sensing the chink, presses her attack. "She never told you, did she?"

Silco, motionless, says nothing.

"Now I see why. Truth has no appeal to you. Only games." A glance at the guests, a straggling cluster in the rear cart. The poor things are terrified: the women shaking, the men pale. Only Garlen, the bullheaded brute, looks ready for a fight.  "She warned me of that, too. She said, if this was a passing fancy, I should keep an escape route open. But if it was a permanent fixation, you'd make my life a living hell."

The crease appears again. And holds.

"What," he says, "did you tell her?"

"I advised her to save her breath. I said I wasn't afraid. I was a Medarda. And Medardas, come hell or high water, always get what they want."

"A bloodline of unparalleled ambition."

"I believe the word Sevika used was 'blind hubris.' I could tell she didn't think much of my pedigree—or my choice. When she left, I thought she was simply bitter. All her years of loyal service, and her beloved leader had bypassed her. Worse, he'd chosen a Topsider." Mel smiles without humor. "Blind hubris is right. I didn't understand at all. Her warning was less about me, and more about you."

There is no change in Silco's expression. Yet the opacity is deceptive: more a veil than wall.

"Sevika," he says, low, "has only ever had Zaun's interests at heart."

"Does she know the full extent of your plans?"

"Yes. She is loyal to the cause."

"Then perhaps it's her you should've chosen."

She'd meant to hit below the belt. But his answer, flat in its simplicity, leaves her reeling.

"I nearly did."

The cart's wheels shriek. Sparks leap. They round a corner, and the corridor narrows. The walls, composed of industrial metal, are streaked with rust.

Or blood.

Mel's throat closes. "You two—"

"She was my comrade. When necessary, my sounding board." The timbre is even. "Sometimes more."

The veil is drawn. Behind, Silco is unknowable. But no longer, Mel thinks, untouchable.

"Did you—" she begins.

"Did I what? Trust her? A damn sight more than I do you. Did I fuck her? Yes, and often. Love her?" He doesn't bother hiding the derision. "Sevika never angled for my love. She knew where she stood. In my bed, and at my side. That's what made her a good lieutenant. She understood loyalty." A shrug, careless, but weighted with intent. "Unlike some."

Mel lowers her head. There is a tiny taste of blood where she's bitten her underlip. It fades fast beneath the sourness of rage.

She thinks of Sevika: all hard lines, and cold dark eyes. Of her body—scarred, sinewy and so unlike her own—that Silco must've taken pleasure in. The thought of them together is an ugly blemish on her mind's eye.  And yet, she thinks of the rapport between them: a seamless coordination of word and deed. The implicit understanding of each other's motivations. The tacit safekeeping of the other's secrets. The fierce devotion, born from a shared purpose.

He says Sevika, and his surface stays deceptively slick. But if she dives deeper, the waters are bloodstained.

"You," she says, "loved her."

"That's not what I—"

The rebuff is too sharp. Like the crease in his brow.  His facade: cracked.

And Mel, a lifetime's study of her mother, sees her opening.

"You loved her," she says, "but you had to let her go."

She has him. She knows, by the flicker of his eyes.

"Yes," he admits, finally. "I did."

"Why?"

"Because, in Sevika's words, I'd already committed myself. Because the crisis between you and I was too fraught to sidestep. Because if I'd kept her around, I'd have done something... rash. Selfish." Another shrug. "She told me, in simple terms, to get on with it. Even if, by the end, my cold feet had morphed into fins." He offers a thin smile. "Mal de Matrimonium. It takes a certain woman to inspire it."

"Like me."

"Yes."  The smile fades. "I'm sure of many odds, Mel. Sure of Zaun. Sure of Sevika. Even Jinx, my wildcard, works in ways I can predict. But you? You're the one variable I cannot account for. And that makes matters... complicated."

"You regret our marriage.

"I never said that." A long, awful silence. “I detest the waste."

Mel, stunned, stares.

"I've lived long enough to know, when the dice are cast, the result is a tossup. It's the nature of the beast. With you, it was always a question of whether it was desire—or the desire to make a difference. Whether I could live with the first. And whether I could afford the second."  His stare, unerring, holds hers. "With Sevika, the scales were simpler. She understood my means. She understood my ends. Our desires didn't hold us hostage. They were simply a natural consequence. I've no doubt, had I chosen her, she'd have my bollocks on a platter. But, at the end of the day, Zaun would be the stronger for it." A beat. "And my life, safer."

Safer.

The word slashes through Mel's fugue. In her mind, she sees a pair of warm tawny eyes. A smile, pure and true. Arms enfolding her, and soft lips kissing her forehead, her nose, her mouth. A different man, a better man—his embrace a refuge rather than a tightrope. To the last, he'd cradled her close, and whispered, with all his heart: 

Don't go.

I'll take care of us. We'll be okay.

If she could've chosen her Happy Ending, it would've been Jayce.

But there is no such thing as Happy Endings. Or, if there are, her mother made sure she'd lost hers the moment she was born.

A Medarda, Ambessa always said, languishes in safety.

It is in danger that she shines.

The cart shudders, its speed decelerating. Mel's anger—that golden core—has gone brittle. His confession is an axe. Each sentence, a blow.

But her spine does not bend.

"It's too late," she says flatly. "You’ve chosen me."

"I have."

"I'll oblige you, if you wish. Your bollocks on a platter." Her smile barely wavers. "Your heart, I've yet to find."

Now the crease deepens. Barely perceptible: a cut of shadow.

“Mel,” he says, warningly. "Let's be grown-ups about this."

"Oh, indeed!"

"We entered this union with our eyes open. Our motives were never altruistic, much less romantic. You sought to stabilize your Council seat. I, a means to leverage my city's independence. It was a bargain struck with a single clause. To both our benefit." He shakes his head. "The rest is noise."

"I've seen how well you deal with noise."

"And I've seen how you manage the same. But this is not noise." A grim chuckle. "This is our future."

"Don't presume to speak for me."

"I'm not presuming. I'm stating facts." He leans forward. "If you had no intention of seeing this through, you would've cut your losses. Hell, you had the perfect chance. Back on the ship, you could've sided against me. Could've claimed ignorance, or trickery, or betrayal. Instead, you chose to stand by me. Why?"

"Because—"

Because I've failed one relationship already.

Because I’m tired of losing what’s mine.

Because, gods help me, I—

The words stick in her throat. The truth, too deep, refuses to dislodge without bleeding.

"Because I gave my word," Mel snaps. "Earlier today, you made me promise not to run. You said, and I quote: 'I've a great deal to hide. But the endgame is the same as your schemes for my city: a step toward something greater.' Now you've taken me to a secret stronghold. A place you've built with Piltover's money, and kept hidden from Piltover's eye. You've put a shipful of foreign dignitaries on the chopping block. Tell me—is this the endgame? Because it's beginning to look like a declaration of war." 

The crease disappears between Silco's brows. In its place is a frown. It's not the frown he makes when she's displeased him. It's the frown that lingers in the aftermath of his daily Shimmer-shot. When the pain is a dull, grinding ache, and the medicine's effects have yet to kick in.

"War," he says, "is the last thing I want."

"Then what do you want?"

"What I've always wanted. A better tomorrow."

"For who?" She looks him dead in the eye. "You—or us?"

"That depends on the ‘us.’"

The cart snakes sharply down a corridor between two columns, jogging left and right. Sparks fan from a welder's torch above; the glittering embers, sulfurous and bright, cascade past his cheek. His profile is shadow, set against a background of fireflies.

"Us," he goes on. "What's your definition of the word, Mel? Is it a piece of paper? A ring? The words we say, or the acts we share? Or is it those great heaving ideals: peace, prosperity, and the common good? Because all of that won't happen unless my city's free. Free to be a powerhouse unto itself. Free to control its own destiny, and make its own choice. That, Mel, is my endgame."

"And my guests?"

"Witnesses—or collateral."

Mel stops short.

"They can choose to swim with the tide. Or resist, and drown." 

The golden core flares into molten fury. Without meaning to, Mel bolts to her feet.

"If you touch a hair on their heads—"

The cart shoots past the corridor and veers sharply to a stop. The sudden change of momentum, from full speed to dead stillness, throws Mel off balance.

The world spins. Her fingers skitter off the metal grille. She pitches forward.  

Then—

Warmth. Solidity. Anchorage.

Mel, reeling, finds herself enfolded in Silco's arms. His breath, soft and smoky, gusts against her temple.

"Trust me," he murmurs. "That's all I ask."

The golden core is in meltdown. A thousand sensations, a thousand emotions, fractaling into a single streak of focus. For a moment she isn't sure whether to cling, or claw. Her body is caught in a mad swelter, a furnace-blast of need. The only certainty is the thud of her heart, and the scent of his skin.

Then, like a match, her clarity ignites.

"Let me go," she seethes.

He obeys. The air is a vacuum: chill where his warmth had been. His mismatched eyes kick off a strange smokeless heat that Mel feels all the way to her spine.

But he makes no further move.

"Your choice," he says, very quietly. "Same as theirs."

Then, without waiting for a response, he steps off the cart.

Mel is left to gather herself. Her guests, disembarking dazedly, are looking to her for direction. She feels, the way she had in girlhood, the weight of the world bearing down. A thousand pairs of eyes, a thousand expectations. Lady and Lord Dennings, huddled together like children. Hector and his wife, whispering furiously. Garlen, his fists clenched, pacing the length of the platform.

And Silco, loping ahead, his shadow a shark's dorsal fin cutting through the light.

"This way," he calls.

The guests, in a straggling line, follow.

Mel brings up the rear, her belly a pit. A few faces swivel her way. She forces a bright smile.

"We're nearly there," she soothes. "All will be well."

Her confidence—an unraveling lie—is the only veil she has left.

The viewing gallery, a vast circular arena, is submerged deep in the Hydra's belly.

The cantilevered walls are lined with portholes: round, glass-paned halos, crusted with salt. They offer a perfect three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the undersea vista. The depths are lit by the bluish glow of spotlights. Despite their incredible intensity, they do not illuminate much. Just a stratum of alien landscape: the swirling patina of deep-sea sediment, dotted with the skeletal carcasses of sunken ships. Now and then, a shoal of fish flits by, trailing a ghostly phosphorescence. Squids materializing, then vanishing, in a tangle of pale tendrils. Eels undulating slowly in the current.

It is an abyssal kingdom, guarded by the dark.

In the center of the arena is a colossal pit. Ringed by a rudimentary safety rail, it resembles an amphitheater. The rim is a series of interconnected catwalks, in concentric circles. At their aperture, a single walkway juts out. It leads, not to a door, but a tank. It is colossal: shaped like an hourglass, with a diameter nearly twenty feet wide. Its surface is perfectly smooth: a mirror of polished glass.

The bottom chamber is empty save for a layer of powdery white sand. Either it is Mel's imagination, or the grains seem to hover a half-inch above the floor.  The top chamber is constructed out of scaffolding. Upon the platform sits a dais shaped like a hexagonal star. Its points are etched with a series of sigils

Mel recognizes the patterns. They are similar to the ones on the Hexcore.  

At the pyramid's base sits a series of blocks. They are etched with letters: a script so incongruous it verges on absurd.  

XOXOXOXO

Atop the dais rests a metal cylinder. A glowing purple sphere, the size of a man's fist, floats in a cradle in its base. Hidden behind its faceted surface, Mel glimpses the dimensions of a mysterious shape: a pentapod, conchical and quill-spined. Trapped like a fly in resin, its silhouette is delineated, then swallowed, then delineated again, in pulsations of light. 

Her pulse kicks up a notch.

Everywhere, the air holds a palpable crackle. The glyphs are a throbbing lattice. The sea's currents, a massive heartbeat.

Science. Chem-tech. Magic.

All converging, like the spokes of a wheel, upon a single, impossible nexus.

"This," Silco says, "is the greatest treasure aboard the Hydra."

The guests, hushed, stare at the hourglass. They resemble children beholding a forbidden toy.

Hector pipes nervously. "It looks—like a fossil."

Garlen snorts. "A gewgaw from the Fissures, more’n likely."

"But it seems—alive!"

"Psssh. Just Trencher trickery." Garlen cuts a scathing look Silco's way. "Isn't that right?"

Silco's look of placid indulgence never wavers. In the marine twilight, he resembles a figment of the deep: coiled and patient. Biding his time before the fatal strike.

"Trickery, no," he says, lightly. "A relic, yes."

"Relic?"

"Indeed." He gestures to the floating sphere. "This is what the ancients called the Forbidden Idol."

The guests fall deathly silent. Their expressions are a spectrum of dread and disbelief. They've heard the old tales, in some fashion. The legend of the Forbidden Idol: an arcane device, forged by the sorcerers of Oshra Va’Zaun, to unlock the gates of the Netherworld. Its existence had, for generations, been relegated to a fairytale. The Idol, if it ever existed, was lost to the silt of time.

Now, here it is: floating serenely before them.

"Gods above," Lady Denning whimpers.

"No gods," Silco corrects. "Only industrious men. I'm sure we all know the legends. In the days before the Cataclysm, the Idol was a symbol of the Void. A vessel believed to house a multivariate spirit. The key to all knowledge. In the right hands, it could unlock the mysteries of time and space. In the wrong ones, it could usher the end of days."

His tone is casual. As if describing a peculiar species of coral.

"Horseshit," Garlen grunts.

"Perhaps. But there's a kernel of truth to it. The Idol does, indeed, contain a matrix of information. But not to the universe. The knowledge stored within is far more mundane. The details of a project—a map, if you will—compiled by voyagers from the First City."

Cevila, white-faced and tightly-wound, snaps, "Voyagers? You mean—" 

"Mages," Mel cuts in softly.

Silco nods. "The original architects of Oshra Va'Zaun. Their purpose was to establish a concourse between our world and the Void.  They believed the binary could be bridged, through the use of the right conduits. Sigils. Seals. Gems. Taken altogether, they'd be capable of translating the energies of the Void into a language comprehensible to mortal minds."

"Language?" Hector echoes. "A language of what?"

"Power."

The word falls with the faintest ripple; a stone arrowing straight into the depths.

"Power is the only language the Void understands. It is not an entity that can be bargained with. It is a primordial force; a vast reservoir capable of granting—and destroying—life.  The mages sought to transmute this raw essence into a finite form. To capture a shard of the infinite, and distill it. To that end, they devised an artifact that contained, within itself, the blueprint for its own construction. A creature, born in the Void, and imbued with a fraction of its wisdom. A living repository. They trapped this creature, ageless, in a stasis field. Through sigils and spells, they calcified the beast, and imprisoned its consciousness, until it could no longer escape its enclosure."

The Idol coruscates hypnotically. The stone’s facets ripple and reform. The pentapod, briefly, seems to flex its coiled body. Then, the light subsides, and it slips back into inertia.

"The Void's ambassador," Silco says. "Frozen between life and death. A hostage to the whims of progress."

Lady Dennings shivers. "How dreadful."

"Men, playing god, are singularly cruel." A beat. "But their ingenuity? Undeniable. The creature's body has been alchemized into flesh and bone. Its spirit is sealed into the crystal. And its knowledge—a compendium of a hundred thousand years—condensed into a single volume. All of it written on the pages of its own prison."

The silence stretches. All eyes, in their orbit, are fixed on the Idol. Mel imagines the weight of it: a vast, crushing pressure like the bottom of the sea.

If the creature were ever to awaken, would the crystal shatter, or the world?

"This," Silco continues, "was the oracle of Oshra Va'Zaun. The old mages used it for their own ends. With its energies, they fueled their city. Their architecture. Their weapons. Their ships. They discovered zones, on land and sea, where the boundaries between our world and the Void were thinnest. There, they established nodes: glyphs carved into seamounts, obelisks erected at cliffsides, temples built from the bones of the earth. And, invisible to the naked eye, a network of ley-lines, linking each node to the other."

"Like a spiderweb," Mel says.

"Precisely. A web sensitive to the currents of the Void. It took years, and thousands of lives. When the final node was completed, the mages—foolishly—decided to test their creation. They activated the web, and drew from the Void an unprecedented amount of energy. Too much, for manmade structures to contain. The network collapsed into the waves. The mages were wiped out. The Idol sank to the bottom of the sea. Out of sight—but never truly gone. As the centuries passed, it continued to serve as a magical beacon. A siren, singing its song. Calling out, to those willing to listen."

The guests, half-seduced, have drifted toward the railing. A few lift their hands, as if to reach for the Idol.

Like pilgrims at a temple, Mel thinks.

Or moths lured to a flame.

Lady Dennings, and a few others, shrink back.

"Gods above,” she breathes. “This is—madness."

"On the contrary,” Silco says. “This is the purest expression of physics. Two charges, positive and negative, in a magnetic field. A force, pulling them together, by increments of time and space." The gleam in his eyes briefly shutters. "That’s how Jinx was able to find the Idol. An affinity of blood—or spirit. At great cost to herself, she recovered the relic from a distant shore. At great risk, she decoded its secrets, and unlocked the power contained within. All to make the dream a reality."

The dream, Mel thinks.

A network of undersea glyphs.

A trade route traversed in minutes.

A city: shining, strong, self-contained.

Free.

"So how's it work?" Garlen demands. "How's it haul cargo between places?"

Silco's half-smile cuts like a blade. "As I said. Resonance. The Idol is sensitive to the frequency of the Void. Each glyph buried along the seabed exudes a unique vibration, which the Idol is attuned to. Like a song of call and response. Zaun's navigators—over the years—have made deep-dives, mapping every glyph hidden under the waters of this strait. Their patterns are recorded, then faithfully carved into the dais in a series of sigils. Now, each time a different sequence of sigils is activated, the Idol broadcasts a corresponding vibration across the distance. The matching glyph, transforming these vibrations into sympathetic wave, opens a conduit. A portal that can be crossed by any vessel. Anywhere."

"Anywhere," Garlen repeats dubiously.

"Anywhere within Zaun's network. Which, I assure you, is extensive."

Hector whispers. "How—how far?"

"A dozen cities, spanning Valoran and the southern coast of Shurima. All linked by ley-lines of magical hotspots. Each one hosts a port similar to the Hydra." He spreads his arms. "The Hydra itself? The epicenter. From here, our goods are transported to Zaun’s shores. At the Iron Pearl, they're unloaded and redistributed to buyers from far-flung lands. A perfect loop: no delays, no customs. All right at Zaun's doorstep."

The silence shudders—not with dread, but temptation. In the guests' faces, Mel sees the naked dimensions of greed taking shape. A trading nexus without parallel. For a politician, hungry for favor, it is a banquet. Investments in everything from textiles, tech, trinkets. All available at a fraction of the expense, with a quarter of the wait. The returns would be astronomical.

All Zaun asks is the right to traffic freely across the seas. The right to be seen as a trading partner, rather than a pauper.

"But what of the danger?" Lady Dennings interjects. "The Idol's energy... It's unstable. Isn't it? Look at the way it's pulsing. And the sound earlier. So ominous..."

Silco's half-smile deepens.

"That, my lady, is the song of progress. The power of this Idol is derived from the Void. The same Void that destroyed the world, in ages past." He tips a mocking salute. "A debt, I'm afraid, the world has yet to repay."

Lady Dennings lets out a low, terrified moan.

"Hush, now. It's less volatile than you think. The sigils on the dais act as a mechanism to dampen the force. Jinx calls it a Hex-Code. She uses a great deal of technical jargon, so I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say, each combination of sigils controlling the Idol does not simply activate its power. It also ensures the power remains within a controlled radius." He indicates to the letters embedded into the base of the dais: XOXOXO. "No doubt, you've noticed the particular script."

"What is that?" Cevila says. "It doesn't look like any rune I've ever seen."

"Because you haven't. Jinx made it up. A private joke." The grin that touches his lips suggests he's the only one privy to the humor. "Simply put, it means 'Crossing Over.' It's the acronym Jinx and Viktor used to first calibrate the intensity of the Hexcore’s power. Now it's a safety mechanism. A trapped-key interlock, as Jinx calls it. Through a combination known only to Jinx, and myself, the magic of the Idol can be safely manipulated."

Lady Dennings' hand flutters over her heart. "But—what if you two were to have an accident? Wouldn't that be catastrophic?" 

"My daughter, and I, are very careful. We're aware the power at our fingertips is vast. If the worst should pass, there are failsafes in place. Including an automatic lockdown sequence. The Hydra also has its own protective wards. They mitigate the worst of the Idol's force. As long as we take care, and follow the proper procedures, it is safe."

The final syllables, soothingly authoritative, fall like a spell. Mel senses the guests' fear abating; a narcolepsy of calm washing over the arena.

"And now," Silco says, "for the demonstration."

The guests jerk into alertness.

Turning, Silco gestures to someone. It is Kolt, the stolid man from earlier. His craggy features are unreadable. But the shadow of a grin touches his lips. Mel, watching him stride into view, feels a frisson of foreboding. But Kolt only crosses to a narrow control panel at the corner. A series of switches are thrown, a sequence of dials turned.

A moment later, the molecules in the air begin to hum.

It is a high-pitched note, piercingly pure. Mel flinches. The guests cry out, covering their ears. Then, like a tuning fork, the sound modulates. From a discordant thrum to a deep, melodic pulse. It is, Mel realizes, the same frequency that had been heard earlier. But more sonorous, and less frightening, like an underwater dirge.

Like the sea itself given voice.

Inside the hourglass, currents spiral. On the dais, the pyramid's panels, in sequence, begin shifting. The sigils glow a preternatural blue. One by one, they slide up and down, aligning into the desired configuration. At the base, the blocks imprinted with X's and O's slot into their grooves. The purple sphere, the Idol, gives off an irradiated glow. Inside, the pentapod seems to strain against its prison. Mel catches a glimpse of a single, cyclopean eye.

A scream builds in her throat, threatening to burst.  The frequency reaches a crescendo. The light's intensity is blinding, searing, melting.

Then it happens.

In the bottom chamber, the sand begins to rise. It accumulates slowly, drifting as if on a current. Then it coalesces into a vortex. Mel thinks of the shapes she'd seen across nature: fractals, radials, double-helixes. Each shape, a geometric construct: a blueprint of life. A snowflake, an atom, an embryo.

And then—

Gold.

Formed from the particles, and solidifying. The grains of sand, all congealing into a single point. The gold takes shape, and mass, and dimension. Nuggets, becoming chunks, becoming ingots. A river of riches, pouring from the vortex and spilling into the chamber.  The hoard is the color of the sun, and flashes with a warmth that dazzles.

Then the frequency shifts. The glow ebbs. The Idol goes dormant. In the chamber, the vortex collapses, and only the gold remains. It is a vast pile: a king's ransom. Enough to make the Council's coffers tremble. 

Enough to set the mind of every guest aflame.

"How—" Garlen begins, then falls silent. He is thunderstruck. "How did it—"

"Sands from the seabed of the Urvashian Islands," Silco says. "Their minerals, according to alchemists, are the purest counterbalances of elemental energy. Each time cargo is transported, the sands are placed in the hourglass. They act as a stabilizer, absorbing the effluvium of the Void. By the time the cargo is retrieved, the sands go inert. Harmless." A quirk of the brow. "Best of all, we've no need to replace them. Their potency never wanes. They can be used over and over, indefinitely."

The guests are speechless. Even the bullheaded Garlen is mute with awe. Their eyes, passing from the Idol to the gold, are lit with a collective fever.

The crewmen, wheeling in a pair of crates on flatbed carts, make their way down the catwalk. Mel follows their progress. With utmost care, they unlock the chamber, and heave out the gold. The ingots, stacked neatly, fill the crates. Their movements are matter-of-fact: they've witnessed this miracle a hundred times before. But a twinkle of elation catches in their eyes.

They are all Zaunites: born and bred in grime. Now, they've hit paydirt. That twinkle is the taste of a life changed.

A future, free.

Silco, at the railing, watches them work. When they've finished, the crate is sealed. The crewmen wheel their burden toward the elevator. The grille gates clang shut. With a whirr of cables, the cart begins its ascent. A few men wave jauntily at the guests.  Silco tips his own chin, a laconic farewell. His smile, though thin, is a rare sight.

The smile of a man whose dreams are, inch by inch, becoming real.

Then his eyes meet hers.

Something, briefly, breaks through the rigidly neutral expression. Something he'd tried to hold back, and could not.

It's not a look she can name. But Mel's throat catches. In lament, or longing, she cannot say. 

The scale of his will is beyond measure. What else could he have accomplished, had he not been cheated? Has he cheated her, now, of her own choices?

Or only bypassed her own prejudices?

"Where—" Garlen swallows, and tries again. "Where'd the gold come from? It looked—"

"Icathian?" Silco, his eyes still on Mel's, nods. "You are correct. Payment, for a contract. We're aiding in the restoration of their capital, after its sacking at the hands of Noxus. As recompense, the chieftain has granted Zaun the rights to navigate the southern waters. A boon, given Icathia's history. The strait is a graveyard of lost civilizations—and buried treasure. It took years, and a great deal of coin, to excavate the remnants. The gold you see is a small percentage. Our share." A shrug. "Yours too, if you wish."

The guests stir. A few murmur. Cevila's face holds a harpy's lineaments. Hector's waxen countenance is flushed. Garlen's massive fists are clenched. Lady Dennings appears on the verge of swooning. The rest, spines jellied and appetites whetted, are starved fish circling round their own greed like chum on a hook.

Silco's words resound in Mel's head.

"I've given them the bait. Now, all that's left is to reel them in."

"The Iron Pearl," Silco continues, "cannot flourish as a Free Trade Zone, without the cooperation of Zaun's allies. That is, after all, the reason we've sojourned these waters. To broker peace, and forge alliances. You are my guests. Your presence here is a show of good faith. And your goodwill, in the coming days, will be integral to the success of this endeavor. I'm certain, should your nations respect Zaun's independence, you'll receive your just dues. In partnership—and profit."

There is a bland smile on his face. But his words are a stormfront. They move, inexorably, blotting out the space. They push aside all resistance, making impossible anything other than the total awareness of him. The gallery's temperature changes perceptibly from a cool draft to a chill. 

Mel, weaned on her mother's lessons, feels goosebumps pebbling her skin. The guests, stripped equally bare, shiver. Even Garlen's sneer has gone brittle.

The offer, soft-spoken, is the soul of diplomacy. But not a single man or woman is insensible to the undertow. Zaun has established, with possession of the Forbidden Idol, a series of gateways at the doorsteps of every nation. Should a war be declared, these channels can be easily cut off. A chokehold, economic and strategic, that will strangle the ports into poverty. Retaliation will mean incurring Zaun's wrath: the cost, incalculable. Weapons of unknown potency. Threats, in a dozen secret hideaways. And a sorceress, mad as a hatter, whose whims may, at any moment, turn the tide.

All of this, Silco has spelled out in the politest terms.

Alongside the third option.

A handshake—between the guests, and the man whose worth they now know is worth gold.  The man they can no longer afford to snub. After six nights of insulting everything from his city's origins to his personhood, their arrogance has led them to this moment. He: the powerbroker. They: a motley assemblage of aristocrats, a thousand leagues from home. Without the protection of their vaults, their vassals, their vanity.

With only Silco's word to guarantee their safe return.

There are no gods at sea, Ambessa used to say. Only the depths, and their mercy.

Silco's mercy, Mel thinks, will be less forthcoming.

"This is—" Cevila clears her throat. In more modulated tones than Mel has ever heard: "This is a marvelous opportunity, Your Chancellorship. But it is—that is—there is a lot to take in."

"In—Indeed," Hector says. "I, for one, will have to confer with my peers. They’ll need to—we’ll all need to—”

He breaks off. The rest nod their agreement. A few glance around, seeking guidance, or a savior.

Their eyes alight on Mel.

Mel, who has been in Silco's crosshairs the whole time. Who, by a series of events that now seem utterly inevitable, has been maneuvered to stand either beside the man whose hand will tip the scales of power—or be the last barricade between him and progress.  Her choices, her convictions, her desires—all flowing weightlessly on a single rolling wave, and converging upon this very moment.

Did he plan this, too?

Or did he let the chips fall where they may, and seize the opportunity as it arose?

The air in the arena goes chokingly thick. The guests, a chorus of anxious breathing, stare at her. Silco's eyes never once leave her face. He is reading the small nuances of her expression like sailors read the stars. She can practically see him calculating the odds: gains weighed and losses tallied.

He is the highwire act, balanced between the heights and the abyss.

He is the shark, circling bloodless waters.

He is the bridegroom, waiting at the altar.

Waiting, Mel realizes, for her to make the call.

He's laid a gauntlet at her feet: a choice, with no margin for error. And yet, the ultimate test of trust.

If she refuses him, then she is the last line of defense. Piltover will become a citadel, with its worst nightmare at the doorstep. Her marriage: a failed gambit, her alliance with him a sham. She'll have to reconnoiter in every sense: reestablish her reputation, rally her allies, then re-enter the fray with all her armor intact.

And if she sides with him...

If she sides with him, Piltover's pinnacle is his to scale. The Hex-gates will no longer be the bastions of her nation. Their reach will stagnate, while his will grow.  Not an imbalance, but a parity.  One that, if she can believe him, will secure a better future. If she can believe he wants nothing more than a handshake, and a bargain. If she can believe that his ambition, though vast, is not bottomless.  That the dream he has built, with the labor of his own hands, is the best hope for a divided land.

"Trust me," he'd said, and kissed her.

And imperative—and a dare.

A Medarda, Ambessa had said, will risk all, if only to shine.

And she, in this moment, is the only Medarda present. The sole voice of authority. Her approval is a green light, or a red signal. One word, and she seals her fate, and Zaun's. One word, and the scales of balance are tipped. A stalemate of seeping blood and crippling self-sabotage—or the chance to walk falteringly forward, hand-in-hand.

You are a Medarda,  Mel thinks.

A Medarda does not simply stand.

A Medarda stakes her claim.

And he, Silco, is hers.

Schatze, Ambessa had called her father. Treasure.

And he'd been hers, for a time.

Until the day he'd sailed off, and caught his death.

Mel, the last of the Medardas, lifts her chin.

She thinks of Jayce, and the breakthroughs of Hex-tech. That night she'd crossed the threshold into Heimerdinger's office, and beheld the miracles conjured by a boy, desperately willed, thrusting himself beyond the constraints of mundanity to kiss the stars. And how, by the end, his ascent had become a collision course with disaster: Icarus with his wings clipped, and shadows etched beneath his bright eyes, and the ghost of the dead child, cold as the void, lingering at his feet.

She'd thought him, in his brilliance, unstoppable.

And she'd learnt that even a sun can burn out.

Now, she takes in Silco's silhouette. The Idol's radiance, a violet starburst, touches his face with eerie luminescence—the steep angles and unforgiving ridges not otherworldly but subaqueous. He is Icarus' shadow, a distorted mirror of his ambition: wings scabbed into scar-tissue and claws dripping blood, his trajectory not upward, but deeper into the dark. 

Yet the burn in his eyes is the same.  The desire: to push past the limits of the known; to see the world, and everything in it, transformed.

Will he, Mel wonders, prove the death of her own ambition, or its fulfillment?

"Trust me," he'd said.

A siren's lure, calling her to the depths. Calling her home.

Mel makes her choice.

"This," she says softly, "is certainly a leap to progress."

Silco's remote smile does not alter. "A leap? I'd call it a bridge."

"And its foundations? Are they stone—or sand?"

"They are as solid as gold." 

If he's aiming for a weak-spot, it doesn't show in Mel's smile. Instead, she steps closer. Close enough to share the same air. To see the way his nostrils flare, just the tiniest bit. The way his body shifts, infinitesimally, toward her own.

Inside her, the golden core flares: a heat-seeker, finding the one spot in the ocean's depths that is warmest.

She looks into his mismatched eyes. The green, a glacial rime, unyielding. The red, a blood moon, waxing. Both: watching her intently. Waiting for the next move.

"Gold," she says, "is not a foundation. It is a lure."

He doesn't blink. Doesn't so much as breathe.

"It is not what keeps a city's ships at the dock. Nor its people loyal. Nor its trade, stable and profitable." She tips her chin. "That's all built on trust. On an exchange of values, and the willingness to compromise. A bridge built of gold—one based in profit—is a bridge that will collapse under the first sign of strain. Because the real value—the intangible—lies in the bonds we build." Her eyes probe, deftly, behind his forbidding stare, to the human impulses buried at its root. "It is trust that keeps the gates open. It is trust that holds nations together. Without it, a bridge can never be built."

He remains motionless. But in his eyes: a flicker. "Are you speaking of Piltover, or Zaun?"

"I speak of both, as one." She leans forward, and speaks for his ears alone. "Because they are one."

He smiles. It is, in a strange way, the smile that had first won her over—out of hostile distance and into wary truce. The smile that, in its slow, steady burn, had drawn her closer and closer. A glint so full of fire and shadow, a conspirator's promise and a lover's secrecy, that it had been like a spark struck to a fuse, a chain reaction set into motion until all at once she was caught and burning too.

Jayce, Mel knows, was her match.  Always incandescent; always brilliant.

Silco is her catalyst. Always igniting, always setting her ablaze.

"A bridge, then," he says.

She nods. "A bridge."

There is a collective breath. The guests relax into whisperings and nervous trills of laughter. They weren't, Mel realizes, certain whether she was truly in on the secret, or if she'd been blindsided the same as them.  Then again: why would they assume she and Silco had a rapport? That he'd chosen her as his partner, in every way? Their own marriages—and it hits Mel with a belated shock—have been predicated on nothing beyond political convenience. One-sixth remain unconsummated, one-third in the throes of extramarital affairs, and the remainder enduring a mutually-beneficial detente.

No desire. No trust. No love.

Marriage: the purest definition of compromise.

Silco, Mel thinks, would rather have something different.

So would she.

"A bridge," she repeats, her eyes never once leaving his. "Across borders. Across the seas. Across all that divides us." Her voice softens. "For a better future."

The guests' crosstalk flows with ease now. She has, as Piltover's envoy, conceded the point. The wrinkles of the Iron Pearl's operation will need to be smoothed out. The terms of the trade agreement negotiated. But the groundwork has been given leeway to settle. Piltover may remain, ostensibly, the neutral party. They may neither invest their coinage, nor participate directly. But, like any partner, they'll have a finger in the pie—and a hand in shaping the terms.

It is a formidable concession.

One that, Mel hopes, will not come back to haunt her.

"Piltover," she continues, "will honor the treaties, and respect Zaun's sovereignty. In exchange, Zaun will guarantee the safe passage of Piltover's ships through these waters.  And those vessels belonging to the nations who are recognized as our allies." She pauses, then adds, very quietly: "Is that agreeable?"

Silco's smile—a sly sideways slant—returns. "To the dot."

"Then, perhaps, I might make a suggestion. As a gesture of good faith."

"Of course."

She smiles, demurely. "I believe the Hydra should have a new name. One less... intimidating."

His brow quirks. "Such as?"

"I was thinking—" Beneath her lashes, she casts him a pointed look. "Thesaurus."

"Like a repository?"

"Like the old Shuriman vault."

His look—of surprise, recognition, and humor—is fleeting. But it is no mirage. The grin cuts his features into an uncanny semblance of boyishness. It is, she thinks, the first time she has ever seen him smile without a trace of irony.  The golden core inside her, deliquescing, is a slow, heavy, heated pulse.  The crowd of guests, the vast room, the Idol, fade back.

He is all she can see: the prize at the blackest depths.

"It sounds," he says, "like the fitting end to a treasure hunt."

#arcane #arcane league of legends #arcane silco #silco #forward but never forget/xoxo #forward (never forget)/xoxo #mal de mer #melco #arcane mel #mel medarda #silco x mel

[numinousmysteries]

Vanquish by Wisdom Hellish Wiles (9/9)

On AO3 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

@today-in-fic

I started this story in October 2017 after first seeing the season 11 trailer, forgot about it for six years, and then finally finished it. Compared to what some other amazing writers in this fandom are creating, it's honestly not great, but coming back to it helped me remember that writing can be fun. I hope to keep writing and hopefully keep improving. Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoy my vision for how the show could have ended.

As a baby, William moved the mobile above his crib using his mind. As a teenager, he employed his psychic powers to save his birth parents’ lives by spontaneously killing an entire cadre of black ops forces and, presumably, the smoking man and Reyes as well. And yet, in Scully’s mind, neither of those facts were the most impressive thing about her son.

To her, it was simply that he was there—alive and in front of her in the flesh. She wanted to stop time and catalog every detail of his body the way she and Mulder did days after he was born, laying him out on her bed and silently marveling at his tiny toes, chubby limbs, and rosebud mouth. She wanted to run her hands over his face and memorize every feature. Her baby was almost a man and he was just as perfect to her as the day he was born.

There was so much that she missed and so much she doesn’t know. When did he take his first steps? What’s his favorite food? Was he a cautious rule-follower like herself or was he constantly pushing the limits like his father? She’d never get those years back and she’d never forgive herself for giving him away, but in that moment all that mattered was that they were together again.

Mulder’s eyes reflected her astonishment back at her. In their almost 30 years together, they’d learned to communicate without words. A glance, a wink, or a nod could convey missives of emotion. As they stood in the driveway, too stunned to move, she could tell he was as overwhelmed—by shock, by love, by awe—as she was.

“Come on,” William said. “There might be others coming. Let’s go.”

Her son’s voice. Low and deep like his father’s.

“Yeah, Scully,” Mulder said, reaching for her hand. “We better get going.”

She could only nod in response and let Mulder lead them both back to their car.

“You call each other by your last names,” William said. She could tell it wasn’t a question but him logging a fact about them, or confirming one he had already sensed.

“We work together,” Scully said. “And it just stuck.”

William nodded. She was grateful he didn’t ask any questions about her and Mulder’s current relationship that she couldn’t answer. Working together the past couple of months had been good for them. They’d found their old rhythm and had been spending more time together outside of work as well, but she hadn’t felt ready to move back in yet.

Back at the car, Scully realized she didn't know where they’d go. Would they bring William back to DC with them? If colonization was imminent, she needed to get started on developing a vaccine as soon as possible.

“Can we go get my parents?” William asked, as if reading her mind. “They’re probably worried about me.”

Mulder smiled. “Sure,” he said.

“Sorry,” William said sheepishly. “I mean my adoptive parents. That’s just…what I’ve always called them.”

“Don’t apologize, William,” said Scully, even though she admitted to herself that it cut like a knife to hear her son refer to strangers as his parents. “I’m thankful you were placed with a good family who took care of you all these years.”

“Yeah,” Mulder responded. “And I do imagine they’d be worried about you.”

******

They arrived in Wyoming the following morning. William slept on the plane but Mulder and Scully, sitting on either side of him, stayed awake—both keeping guard and watching him in awe.

“This is where you grew up?” Scully asked, after William directed them to a small but well-kept farmhouse.

“Yup, lived here my whole life—well, that I can remember.”

Scully nodded. His childhood must’ve been so different from the one she could’ve given him. Instead of living in a city, he had fields to run and roam in. She wondered if he played baseball like his father and what kind of games he invented for himself when he was little to stay busy in this wide open space.

As they approached the house they noticed the front door was open and the screen door was swinging on its hinges.

“Do your parents normally leave the door open like that?” Mulder asked.

“No,” William said. “That’s weird.”

“I’m going to go check it out,” Mulder said, reaching for his gun. “You two wait in the car.”

It was the first time Scully was alone with her son since finding him the night before. She sat in the passenger seat stealing glimpses of him in the rearview mirror.

“This must be a lot to take in,” she said.

William shrugged his shoulders. “I always knew I was different. Monica told me about you guys.”

Scully swallowed. She wanted to ask Wiliam so many questions but it was impossible to even know where to start. How do you make up for fifteen years—an entire life in his case? She had once known every inch of skin on his tiny body and now he was essentially a stranger. Did he have any scars? Any broken bones? She didn’t know what he liked to eat or his favorite movie.

“Have you ever seen The Exorcist?” he asked from the backseat, startling Scully.

“It’s one of my favorite movies,” she said.

“Me too. My parents don’t watch any horror movies but I started downloading some classics and I love them.”

“William, were you reading my thoughts just now? Why did you bring up The Exorcist?”

“I guess I had a sense of what you were thinking,” he said. “It’s not so clear cut like listening to someone talk out loud but I get sentiments and sometimes words. It’s strong with you. And Mulder, too.”

“Could you read your parents like that?”

“Yeah, I got better at it over time.”

Mulder emerged alone from the house. He jogged back to the car and knocked on Scully’s window, gesturing for her to come with him. She followed him to the front porch.

“Scully, there are two bodies inside. A middle-aged white male and female. Looks like gunshot wounds. I think I can guess who they are and I’d rather not ask William to have to identify them.”

“Shit,” Scully said. “What do we do?”

They heard William’s car door open and watched as he came to stand with them. “They’re dead, aren’t they?”

“Oh, William,” Scully sighed.

“I had a feeling,” he said, looking down at his sneakers.

“Is there anyone else we should try to find? Any other family or friends?” Mulder asked.

William shook his head. He was still looking down but Scully could see him starting to cry.

“I’m so sorry, William,” Scully said. She embraced her son and felt his tears dampening her blouse. Mulder stepped closer and wrapped his arms around both of them.

They were three broken people. Parents who’d lost their child and a child who’d lost his parents, but somehow they were also a family. They just had to find a way to pick up the pieces and find each other once again.

*****

Mulder and Scully offered to move to William’s hometown in Wyoming for him to finish up high school and start their vaccine research there, but he felt no connection to the place without his adopted parents. If anything, he was desperate for a fresh start. His old town was filled with reminders of what he’d lost.

So instead Wiliam moved into their home in Virginia. It was an older, more rundown house but he could tell they had made it a home. He preferred that it wasn’t in the heart of the city because it was less of a dramatic change from his childhood home. Mulder explained that he and Scully had been giving each other some space and she had her own apartment, but as soon as they were back from Wyoming she started every night at the house and slowly moved her belongings back.

There was a spare room on the second floor for him to move his things into.

“I know this is uncomfortable,” said Scully, showing him to his room. “We love you so much, but we know you’re still just getting to know us. I don’t want to rush you into anything you’re not ready for.”

“What was in here before?” William said.

“Nothing,” Mulder said. “We never spoke about it, but I think we both hoped you’d be here one day.”

They’d had nearly everything from his old bedroom shipped out to Virginia to try to make the transition smooth. At first he told them he didn’t mind starting over, but as he sat in his new-old room he realized he appreciated the small comforts of home—his snow globe collection, his family photos, and his worn-in baseball glove.

“We should have a catch sometime,” Mulder said, picking up the glove.

“I’d like that.”

They had a lot of work to do. They were racing against an unseen clock to beat the invasion. Scully had already taken blood and saliva samples from William to try to isolate his alien DNA to create a vaccine. They had some old associates who were going to help with the science but there was still the issue of convincing the entire global population to take a vaccine to prevent the colonization of the planet–without inciting mass panic.

William had faith in his birth parents, though. Every night they told him about their old cases which never failed to thrill him. And each day the awkward silences between the three of them started filling up with inside jokes, spirited arguments, and stories of the past that helped close the fifteen-year gap since the last time they were together.

They were careful about giving him space and typically after dinner he’d retreat to his room while his parents sat and talked on the front porch. He couldn’t hear what they were saying but it was comforting to hear their voices drifting up through his bedroom window.

One night around a month after moving in, he decided to join them outside. Scully smiled and scooted over, making room for him to sit in between them on the bench.

“I know you guys keep saying I don’t have to thank you for taking me in,” William started, “but I really do appreciate it. Growing up, I never thought I’d meet you or that if I did… you wouldn’t want anything to do with me because of…who I am and what I can do.”

“William, we love you for being exactly who you are. As I’m sure you’ve started to realize, the two of us aren’t exactly the picture of normalcy either. I think, together, we make a great team,” said Scully.

“Now we just have to save the world,” William said smiling.

“No pressure, right?” Mulder chuckled.

His parents draped their arms around him from either side and he felt himself relaxing against them. For the first time in his life he felt like he was exactly where he should be.

#xfiles #xf fanfic #xfiles fanfic #today in fic #now excuse me as i go mainline gaslight

[swtorpadawan]

Ten Facts About Ulannium Kaarz

I wasn’t actually tagged to do one of these for Ulannium, but I started putting this together as a sort of case-study for him, and it seemed to make sense to do this. Tagging the following people just in case they want to do this for one of their own OCs: @raven-of-domain-kwaad @anchanted-one @actualanxiousswampwitch @grandninjamasterren @sullustangin @cyraniadebergerac @starrypawz @intheinkpot @voidendron @lanabenikosdoormat @dragons-bones @clifford-telegenic @cryo-lily

Fact One – Parentage and Early Childhood: Ulannium Kaarz was born on Coruscant, the son of Ishris Kaarz, his mother, a brilliant research scientist with a Republic pharmaceutical conglomerate, and Luncib Kaarz, his father, a marketing executive and lobbyist with the same company. Both of his parents were very affectionate, Ishits especially. Although she worked long hours, his mother always made time for her son at bedtime, first by singing him Mirialan lullabies, and later by reading to him, fictional stories at first but later more advanced texts such as scientific manuals. Years later, Ulannium would credit his mother’s efforts (and her genetics) with the development of his impressive intellect. By chance, Ulannium’s Force sensitivity was not discovered until he was already six years old. (Possibly a result of his mother’s interference in the screening process.) By then, he was already academically precocious in the extreme, devouring books far beyond his age-level. When he was selected by the Jedi and told he might one day gain access to the full wealth of the Jedi Archives, Ulannium was thrilled at the opportunity. Indeed, if he had an ambition at this point, it would have been to spend the rest of his life in the galaxy’s greatest library. Ulannium had a younger sister, Tharia, who was possibly even more curious about the universe than he. As she was four at the time, he regarded her as a pest who kept stealing his scientific holopads. When the Jedi tested her for Force-sensitivity, it came back negative, much to the relief of her parents who were already giving up a son.

Art by @theoasiswinds

Fact Two – Inspirations: One of my inspirations for the character of Ulannium is George Smiley from John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. When he does finally confront someone, whether an enemy or even an ally whom he’s trying to persuade, he brings the full force of his intellect to bare on them, and people often find it as overpowering as a force of nature. Ulannium is remarkably proficient at understanding and analyzing most of the people he encounters, including some who others find enigmatic. (Such is the case with Corellan Halcyon. Ulannium understands the Hero of Tython far better than someone like Satele Shan, at least earlier in the story.) On the flip side, a select few people are something of a mystery to Ulannium, and throw him off entirely. (This was the case with Zenith.) Another character who inspired me was Vaegon Targaryen, a minor character from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. He could have done a hundred things, including becoming the King. He preferred his books, however.  

Fact Three – Growing up on Uphrades: To avoid potential contact with his family on Coruscant, the Jedi sent Ulannium to their small enclave on the agricultural world of Uphrades. It was a small training cadre; two semi-retired Jedi Masters and eight younglings. To discourage unhealthy attachments amongst the younglings, they were arranged on a tiered-age system. The oldest of the younglings would be around fourteen and would be considered on the precipice of their initiate trials to become Padawans. The next-oldest would be a year or two younger than the eldest, and so on down the line until the youngest child, who would be around four or five. With the age difference, it was hoped that the younglings would be less likely to adopt detrimental attachments to each other.

Fact Four – First Friendship: Two years after Ulannium arrived on Uphrades, the next youngling was sent. The younger child seemed untalented and almost Force-blind to Ulannium, who by then was already demonstrating an impressive sensitivity to the Force. But as the Masters were unwilling to give up on him yet, when he turned six, he was handed a training saber. Within a week, he had surpassed every other youngling in combat, even those twice his age. Within a year, no two initiates could match him. Even Master Sagottoh, once a Blademaster of the Order in his younger years, soon found himself pressed. This youngling - one age tier below Ulannium - was named Corellan Halcyon. When they first met, Ulannium himself thought the youngling was untalented and barely worth his notice. Later, when his martial capability manifested, Nowan Ko Detizu realized that Corellan needed Ulannium’s help to acclimate to the other children, most of whom were intimidated by the young firebrand. The bond the two developed would last them the rest of their lives. In recognition of this reality and her responsibilities, when Ulannium was ready to become a padawan, Nowan Ko’s report to the council would advise them not to assign the two to work together, which is why they were kept separated for the next eight years. Although they were both disappointed, both would ultimately conclude it had been the right thing to do.

Fact Five – Tragedy: When the Sack of Coruscant took place, Ulannium was still far away on Uphrades, reading a text on archaeology. He recalls feeling a deep sense of foreboding in the pit of his stomach, but as he was unable to determine what it was, he soon resumed reading. A few days later once the reports had come in, the Uphrades Masters regretfully informed him that his family had been killed during the attack when falling debris had collapsed on them on the street. The youngling showed little reaction at first, then finally announced his intention to head off to find solitude to meditate. The masters, decided that he needed time to process what had happened, let him. Corellan, recognizing that he needed friendship, pursued him and talked. [I may write about that encounter someday.]

Fact Six – Personality: One of Ulannium’s personality quirks is his tendency to answer a question with a question. This is sometimes a defensive mechanism, and sometimes simply a way to get an individual to rethink their position diplomatically. In the normal flow of conversation, he does this skillfully enough that people rarely even notice. He picked up this particular quirk from Master Nowan Ko Detizu, one of his mentors back on Uphrades. The Cathar Jedi taught him a multitude of simple techniques that aid him in his day-to-day life as a Jedi, diplomat and sometime political and military leader.

Fact Seven – Traits: By the time the class stories begin, Ulannium is already an expert in the fields of biology, archaeology, geology and history, and could probably have earned a master’s degree in any of those areas if given the time and inclination to do so. Although he was appropriately honored to meet the esteemed members of the Jedi Council, he was most excited to meet Gnost-Dural, as the Kel Dor had, by then, been named the Keeper of the Jedi Archives. Ulannium definitely has a strong interest – some might even say a passion – for ancient Force knowledge and would live in the Jedi Archives if he could. One of the most difficult decisions he ever faced was rescuing Laria Taphoni on Taris, effectively sacrificing the holocron the expedition team had found. In making his choice, Ulannium was guided by the principles of the Jedi code and recognizes that it was the correct decision, but nevertheless he had to meditate for a long while to process everything that happened. Although he recognizes that Rajivari’s teachings ran contrary to the Jedi code and had corrupted many ancient Jedi, Ulannium never quite forgot what he had learned of it. He wishes he had spent more time with the fallen Je'daii Master to learn where things had gone wrong.

Fact Eight – His Relationship with Nadia Grell: Ulannium doesn’t believe in concepts like “love at first sight”. But when he met Nadia, he generally became more protective of her innocence. Eventually, those feelings evolved into romantic impulses, but even in their early days together, he was somewhat distracted. That was one of the reasons he didn’t immediately pick up on Nadia’s force-sensitivity, which he would have normally understood right from the get-go. As a side note, his relationship with Nadia develops very differently in my story than in the game and does not progress until after she is Knighted almost three years after becoming his Padawan. As a fluffy note, To date, Nadia is the only person who has ever called him “Uli”. She’s usually discreet about the practice, but she did actually let it slip in front of Felix Iresso on one occasion. Ulannium was embarrassed, Nadia was aghast, and Felix was amused.

Fact Nine – Joining the Alliance: After Ulannium and the rest of the Ossus colony rejoined the rest of the galaxy (lining up with the Jedi Under Siege expansion from the canon story), he and Nadia became honorary members of the Eternal Alliance, with Ulannium serving as the Alliance’s liaison with the Council. The Council - when it eventually reformed - did not formally condone or condemn this relationship; they simply pretended that they didn’t know it existed, despite it becoming common knowledge by that point. [Note: This mirrors Revan’s post-KOTOR relationship with Bastilla in the “Revan” novel.] Far from being past his prime after joining the Eternal Alliance, Ulannium achieved some of the most impressive efforts of his career as the Alliance’s top diplomatic negotiator, writing much of the treaty that Corellan and the Alliance would eventually sign with the Galactic Republic. But arguably the most impressive feat of his career was the negotiation of the Treaty of Alderaan, a pact that ended nearly twenty years of civil war and internal discord. Leading the Alliance’s diplomatic corps, one of Ulannium’s top deputies would be the Killik Joiner and former Imperial diplomat and Intelligence operative, Vector Hyllus. Ulannium learned a great deal of respect for Hyllus and his capabilities, which was reciprocated by the Joiner.

Fact Ten - His Legacy: Some years joining the Alliance, he and Nadia had their first child: Maykia Ishris Kaarz. She is named for both of her grandmothers; Maykia on Nadia’s side and Ishris on Ulannium’s. She’s a couple of years younger than Bela and Tasiele, who are friends of hers who I’ve spoken about elsewhere. Her childhood was complicated to say the least, but she eventually fully joined the Jedi order on her own terms as she began adulthood. She wields a double-bladed lightsaber as her mother did, albeit she’s not a true Jedi Shadow. [Note: Maykia is part of the “Future Halcyon Legacy” I’ve been putting together. ]

Thousands of years later, Teela Kaarz, one of Ulannium’s descendants, would be conscripted to work on the construction of the Death Star. Teela and a group of Rebel recruits fled the doomed space station before it exploded. [Novel: Death Star ]

Thank you for reading!

#swtorpadawan talks #swtorpadawan writes #oc: ulannium kaarz #oc: maykia ishris kaarz #nadia grell #the halcyon legacy #ten facts #oc ten facts #uphrades #uphrades enclave #oc: nowan ko detizu #oc: sagottoh panaka #teela kaarz #rajivari #the eternal alliance #eternal alliance #loss #art by theoasiswinds

[zvaigzdelasas]

TheStar.my - Vietnam’s ruling party makes leaders accountable for alleged corruption occurring under their watch - 15 Jan 23

The fallout from Vietnam’s Covid-19 pandemic-related graft scandals came to a head on Jan 5, when its National Assembly voted to dismiss two deputy prime ministers and approve two replacements.

One of the deputy prime ministers let go was veteran diplomat and former foreign minister Pham Binh Minh, who was also a member of the Communist Party of Vietnam’s politburo – a position he was also forced to vacate[...]

The difference this time is the way in which the two deputy premiers were ousted. Neither was disciplined by the party before resigning. They are also unlikely to face criminal prosecution, say analysts, given that there has been no evidence so far directly linking them to the scandals. Rather, they were made to take responsibility for wrongdoing that took place under their leadership.

This marks an inflection point in party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong’s “blazing furnace” of an anti-corruption campaign.

Dr Le Hong Hiep, a senior fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, told The Straits Times: “Now the party is trying to create a so-called ‘culture of resignation’, so that when you are found to have made a mistake or be responsible for a scandal that happened under your watch, you are expected to resign. You don’t wait for the party to take action against you.

“This would create a culture of accountability and more flexibility within the party’s personnel mechanism.”

WaPo - How Vietnam’s Anti-Corruption Fight Keeps Expanding - 11 Jan 23

Vietnam’s Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong has likened his anti-graft campaign to a “blazing furnace,” one that’s caught hundreds of senior officials, business executives and others in its blast over the years. While the country’s position has improved by more than 30 spots over the past decade on a global corruption perception index, it was still at 87th place out of 180 ranked in 2021. Now as Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economy seeks to bolster its appeal as a destination for foreign investment in the midst of mounting trade tensions between the US and China, the fight seems to be flaring again.

Trong, who won a rare third term in 2021, said in a televised speech that “each party cadre and member needs to shoulder the responsibility of being a role model. The higher the position and rank, the more responsibility one must take.” [...]

People are sitting in jail, and some have been sentenced to death. In the first six months of 2022, at least 295 party members were disciplined due to corruption and deliberate wrongdoings, according to a statement of an August meeting of the central anti-corruption committee. Civil judgment enforcement agencies had recovered more than 9 trillion dong ($383 million) in major cases in same period. (In 2021 the committee reported prosecuting 390 graft cases and recovering at least $400 million in assets.) But in Vietnam’s closely controlled, one-party state, motivation is difficult to assess. Human rights groups repeatedly accuse the government of tamping down dissent. Freedom House, a US-based advocacy group, ranks Vietnam as “not free,” with a 2021 score of only 19 points out of 100. Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption group, gave it a score of 39 out of 100 in 2021, from 31 in 2012 — the year then-premier Nguyen Tan Dung’s government was tainted by a series of scandals. Arrests picked up again after a new administration took power in 2016

😁😁😁

#Tổng bí thư Trọng muôn năm 🫡

[baronobexi-blog]

On The Radar -- Inevitable: A Doomed Arthurian Western RPG by SoulMuppet Publishing

Game Title: Inevitable: A Doomed Arthurian Western RPG Genre(s): Fantasy/Western TTRPG System: Focused System Format: PDF/Hardcover Campaign Start: April 11, 2023 Campaign End: May 11, 2023 Campaign Goal: $18, 574 (Current Pledge Amount: $51, 835) Campaign Team Size: 13 --- --- --- Game Info: So, what exactly is Inevitable about? – Inevitable is a fantasy, western TTRPG about forlorn gunslinger knights, fighting against destiny, and living in a time of ending. The world of Inevitable is set within a never ending, ever present desert known as the Barren. The Barren is a land that is the only presence left of a world that was. And within that presence, there is a kingdom there. The Kingdom of Myth. Myth is the last bastion of civilization present in the Barren. It unfortunately is a bastion in turmoil. King Malavan has been slain by the Cannibal Saint and Malavan’s son, Ruben, has been thrusted into the throne. The boy king of Myth is unprepared to take up the reigns of his father yet this is not the only crisis facing Myth. A vision of the end has been seen by the prophets of Myth. It is a vision that sees Myth burning and King Ruben being the last king of Myth. There is nothing to be done about this. When a prophet speaks of their visions, their visions always come to pass. Yet even then, there are always those who fight fruitlessly against fate. They are heroes seeking to push back Fate itself. They will fight to ensure Myth stands for even one more day. They will fight bitterly against the creeping end, but the end will come for Myth. Who will you be at this end of all things? Will you be the one who held steadfast to their virtues? Or will you be the one who forsakes everything for even a chance of preventing the end? It is up to you on how this final story is written. Who am I playing as? – You take on the role of a questing hero in Inevitable who is trying to prevent the end of Myth. There are six classes in the game and they are: The Errant, The Mystic, The Godsman, The Taleweaver, The Roamer, and The Shadowjack. Just by their titles alone. These six classes in Inevitable bring to the imagination a questing band of varying backgrounds and motivations seeking to fight fate itself in order to save the kingdom. Who am I fighting? – As a questing hero of Myth, the threats you face in Inevitable will vary. As there are six dooms waiting to make themselves known and reign down havoc on Myth. These six dooms have the following titles: The Ravenclaimed, The Bronze Horizon, The Cannibal Saint, The Great Drake, The Thronebreaker, and The Hammermight. Three of these six dooms can be chosen to appear in your campaign and they represent the threats that will both besiege and eventually destroy Myth. Whether you’re facing the flesh eating, betrayer brother that is the Cannibal Saint to the apocalyptic harbinger that is the Great Drake in your campaign. These dooms will eventually overcome you, your Cadre, and the kingdom of Myth. You may be able to valiantly struggle against them, but ultimately one of them will bring the end. And what matters the most is how that end occurred and what your cadre did in the face of that end. What’s The System Like? – So, the system in Inevitable is called the “Focused System”. What does that exactly mean? Well, instead of the traditional stats present in RPGs, the Focused System instead makes use of “Reputations''. Reputations in Inevitable are basically a reflection of how your character is spoken of and how it influences their interactions in the Barren. Are you known in low whispers as a bloodthirsty shootist? Do the Taleweavers speak a tale of your redemption? Does Knightsholme gossip about your valor? Reputations, besides offering character building and roleplay guidance in a campaign, is also used in both of the resolution mechanics present in Inevitable. This first mechanic is known as: “Challenge”. A Challenge occurs when your character faces an issue and you build a dice pool of d6’s by answering questions about your reputations. If you succeed in a challenge then you get an advantage for your quest. If you fail in a challenge then your quest can become even more challenging. And then there’s the other resolution mechanic. Showdown. This is the climatic end of your quest and sees one of your Cadre step forth to confront the threat of your quest. Unlike with a challenge, in a Showdown you’re instead directly negotiating with the Storyteller about what your character is willing to sacrifice. (I find the system that Inevitable is running to be particularly interesting from my view.)       --- --- --- --- --- --- Campaign Info: What’s the campaign funding? – The campaign is funding to provide a release for the game as the game itself is fully finished. Additionally, the funding from the campaign will be used to bring on guest contributors and also allow for all involved to get a reasonable increase in pay. Are there shipping costs? – At the time of this writing, the campaign page unfortunately does not show if there are any shipping costs for a physical copy of Inevitable. However, this section will be updated whenever shipping costs are posted on the campaign page. When will the game come out? – August 2023 (PDF) and October 2023 (Hardcover) --- --- --- --- --- --- Pledge Info: * Sad Civilian ($2) – Pledgers at this level get a PDF copy of the quickstart. * Sad Squire ($25) – Pledgers at this level get both a PDF copy of the full game and its quickstart. * Sad Knight ($50) – Pledgers at this level get an A4 hardcover copy, full game PDF copy, and the PDF quickstart. (Note: The Sad Wizard and Sad Cowboy pledges are separate pledges as they are two different alternate covers for Inevitable.) * Sad Wizard ($75) – Pledgers at this level get an alternate cover of the hardcover that features the Emeraldine. And they also get the PDF’s of the game and its quickstart. (This alternate cover is illustrated by Riot Bones.) * Sad Cowboy ($75) – Pledgers at this level get an alternate cover of the hardcover that features Sir Ethe the Refuser. And like the Sad Wizard pledge, pledgers get the game PDF and its quickstart. (This alternate cover is illustrated by Joshua Clark.) * Sad Monarch ($100) – Pledgers at this level get the following: An A2 map of the Barren with rules reference on the other side, a riso printed A3 version of the quickstart, choice of book cover for hardcopy, game PDF, and quickstart PDF. (The A2 map of the Barren is illustrated by molomoot and Caleb Hosella.) --- --- --- --- --- --- Stretch Goals: * Tales From The Barren: Laurie O’ Connell ($24, 841) – Laurie O’ Connell (Twelve Pins Press|To Honour And Obey, Hieronymus,  LOST EONS) gets brought onto the project to write about an echoing love story that is the theme of a run down drag saloon in the Barren. And this goal along with the other Barren Tales will result in lore snippets that may interact with the six dooms or be their own campaign sidequests. * GUNS GUNS DOZEN OF MAGIC GUNS ($31, 051) – Galen Pejeau (CRASH//CART, STORMCHASERS, The Typhoon Atolls) gets brought onto the project to illustrate 18 magical handguns for the game. * Tales From The Barren 2: Misha Panarin ($37, 262) – Misha Panarin (Cantrip, BANNER, Tall Vampire Ladies) gets brought onto the project to write up a story about the Barren folk saint/outlaw Deolinda Cross. * Tales From The Barren 3: Grant Howitt ($43, 472) – Grant Howitt (Rowan, Rook, and Decard) gets brought onto the project to write up a story about centaurs in the Barren. * Project Pay Raise ($49, 683) – This goal will result in every project contributor getting a bump in their pay. * Tales From The Barren 4: Basher Ghouse ($55, 893) – Basher Ghouse (Guns Blazing) gets brought onto the project to write up a Barren story and adventure see. * Bruno Prosaiko ($62, 103) – Bruno Prosaiko (bxKID - Character Sheet and Fate RPG - Dark Fantasy Character Sheets) gets brought onto the project to create a character sheet for Inevitable.          --- --- ---

(Hello! Thank you for reading this latest installment of On The Radar! I hope you have a good day! ^_^)

#ttrpg #Indie TTRPG #Tabletop Games #fantasy #western #cowboy #BaronObexiWrites

[terreisa]

I would like to take a moment to talk about Andor.

First, let me preface this by saying that while I’m a fan of Star Wars I’m definitely not an uber fan. I haven’t watched any of the animated shows, I haven’t read the books or the comics. I’ve pretty much just kept it to the Skywalker Saga films (plus Solo and Rogue One) and the live-action Disney+ series that have been released. Second, there are much better analyses and deep dives on the themes of the show out there and this is definitely not that. This is just me putting my thoughts out into the ether because my usual cadre of nerds either aren’t watching it or are several episodes behind which is annoying when it’s all I want to talk about.

Okay, here we go:

I think Andor is the best piece of Star Wars media that’s been released in recent years.

Don’t get me wrong, I love The Mandalorian. Go through my archives and there’s no doubt about that.  It’s a great story that’s full of drama and humor and deep emotion but it hinges on a pretty big conceit. Without Grogu there is no show or at least not one that has pulled in as many viewers as it has. There’s also the fact that it still tentatively ties itself to the Skywalker Saga, which is a thing for someone else to unpack. Same with Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, they had a built in hook to grab those viewers, though with varying degrees of success.

Andor doesn’t have that. It’s main character is a man that clearly operated in a morally grey area whose fate had already been shown to audiences six years ago. I was excited to watch the show mostly because Rogue One is my favorite Star Wars movie and I loved how Diego Luna played Cassian. That we were getting his backstory was interesting but as with the other shows I was going to watch it regardless because it was expanding the universe, which always interests me.

But dear god, what we got and are getting is so much more. The themes of morality and the cost of rebellion along commentaries on the state and actions of humanity and the tightening fist of fascism woven into the plot elevate the show to a whole different level. Not to mention that it expands the universe on so many different facets it almost boggles the mind how rich and complex this one show is making the galaxy that’s far far away.

Saying that, let me share why I decided to write this:

I work at a grocery store and the other day I was ringing up a woman's groceries and my Star Wars super fan co-worker was bagging for me. She had a Mandalorian bag and we asked if she enjoyed the show, which she did, and if she was watching Andor, which she was. She then proceeded to say that Book of Boba Fett was her favorite of the shows because it was fun and funny and Andor was boring and had no story. My co-worker and I were flabbergasted, and he'd only watched the first four eps of Andor at that point. When I told my sister the story later she said that maybe the woman only liked positive stories, ones that made her feel good and didn't dig too much into deeper themes.

That, I realized, was exactly what sets Andor apart and raises it above the other series and films that I'd seen. There are no dazzling, elegant lightsaber fights, the fights are chaotic and exact a heavy toll. There's no jokey levity from droids or side characters. The show is unflinchingly bleak and any victory, small or large, is tempered by the harsh reality of swift retaliation from the Empire. An entity that has always been known to be evil but through the lack of empathy, expanding overreach and harsher punishments, and the continual implied violence against innocents showcased in the series shows the depths of their atrocities in a way that can't be ignored or shoved aside. Even the barest thread of hope is hard to come by but it's there even in the smallest act of rebellion.

The biggest thing that sets Andor apart is that we know exactly how it ends. This story doesn't have a traditional happy ending. Cassian's fate is sealed, we are merely watching as he walks the path towards his inevitable death. And somehow it doesn't detract from the series at all, it makes his struggles much more compelling and tragic.

All this and I haven't even touched on the brilliance of Luthen and Mon Mothma's own underground moves against the Empire.

This show goes beyond every expectation I had for it and elevated it into a completely different stratosphere for the Star Wars universe. After I finish each new episode I'm practically vibrating with amazement at how each one is better than the last.

Andor is a feat of storytelling that I will shout about from rooftops whether people are listening or not for a long time coming.

#andor #andor series #cassian andor #mon mothma #luthen rael #star wars #rogue one #andor analysis #this got wordy but it could have been longer

[mariacallous]

Mark Nelson took the call in an immigration detention center—a place that, to him, felt just like prison. It had the same prison windows, the same tiny box rooms. By the time the phone rang, he’d already spent 10 days detained there, and he was wracked with worry that he would be forced onto a plane without the chance to say goodbye to his kids. So when his lawyers relayed the two options available under UK law—either stay in detention indefinitely or go home wearing a tracking device—it didn’t exactly feel like a choice. “That’s being coerced,” says Nelson, who moved from Jamaica to the UK more than 20 years ago. He felt desperate to get out of there and go home to his family—even if a GPS tag had to come too.

It was May 2022 when the contractors arrived at Colnbrook Detention Center, on the edge of London’s Heathrow Airport, to fit the device. Nelson knew the men were with the government’s Electronic Monitoring Service, but he didn’t know their names or the company they worked for. Still, he followed them to a small room, where they measured his leg and locked the device around his ankle. Since then, for almost two years, Nelson has been accompanied by the tag wherever he goes. Whether he is watching TV, taking his kids to school, or in the shower, his tag is continuously logging his coordinates and sending them back to the company that operates the tag on behalf of the British government.

Nelson lifts up his trousers to reveal the tag, wrapped around his leg, like a giant gray leech. He chokes down tears as he describes the impact the device has had on his life. “It’s depressing,” he says, being under constant surveillance. “Right through this process, it’s like I’m not a human anymore.”

In England and Wales, since 2019, people convicted of knife crime or other violent offenses have been ordered to wear GPS ankle tags upon their release from prison. But requiring anyone facing a deportation order to wear a GPS tag is a more recent and more controversial policy, introduced in 2021. Nelson wears a tag because his right to remain in the UK was revoked following his conviction for growing cannabis in 2017—a crime for which he served two years of a four-year sentence. But migrants arriving in small boats on the coast of southern England, with no previous convictions, were also tagged during an 18-month pilot program that ended in December 2023. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of people ordered to wear GPS trackers jumped by 56 percent to more than 4,000 people, according to research by the Public Law Project, a legal nonprofit.

“Foreign nationals who abuse our hospitality by committing crimes in the UK should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them,” a Home Office spokesperson tells WIRED. “Where removal isn’t immediately possible, electronic monitoring can be used to manage foreign national offenders and selected others released on immigration bail.” The Home Office, the UK’s interior ministry, declined to answer questions on “operational details,” such as whether GPS coordinates are being tracked in real time and for how long the Home Office stores individuals’ location data. “This highly intrusive form of surveillance is being used to solve a problem that does not exist,” says Jo Hynes, a senior researcher at the Public Law Project. GPS tags are designed to prevent people facing deportation orders from going on the run. But according to Hynes, only 1.3 percent of people on immigration bail absconded in the first six months of 2022.

Now, Nelson is the first person to challenge Britain’s GPS tagging regime in a high court, arguing that the tags are a disproportionate breach of privacy. A judgment on the case is expected any day now, and critics of GPS tagging hope the decision will have ripple effects throughout the British immigration system. “A judgment in Mark’s favor could take quite a lot of different forms,” says Jonah Mendelsohn, a legal officer at data rights group Privacy International. He adds that the court could force the Home Office to stop tagging migrants altogether, or it could limit the amount of data the tags collect. “It could set a precedent.”

The GPS tags are part of an intensifying surveillance regime that migrants and refugees are now subject to in the UK, the US, and Australia, says Mendelsohn. “There is so much tech that’s being rolled out and used almost in an experimental lab-esque way,” he says, pointing to how migrants arriving in Britain on small boats have been told to hand over their phones and pin codes or fitted with bar-coded wristbands. “GPS tracking is just one aspect of that.”

Allegations that the tags are prone to malfunction also aggravate the stress people feel while wearing them, Mendelsohn says. By law, the tags can’t be removed. But they still need charging, either by being plugged into a socket or a portable battery pack. Nelson’s first tag would run out of battery every two hours, he claims, meaning he could never travel far from a plug socket—failure to charge a tag can count as a breach of immigration bail conditions, risking return to a detention center.

The battery was just one in a series of problems, Nelson claims. Between November 2022 and May 2023, he believes his tag was no longer logging his GPS coordinates, with his legal team at Wilsons Solicitors arguing this proved the tag was redundant and should be removed. But until now, the Home Office has refused to take off the tag. “[They said] the law is the law and I’m subject to the law,” says Nelson. “So I’ve got to wear this broken tag whether it works or not.” The company that monitors and maintains the tags on behalf of the government since 2014, Capita Business Services, did not reply to WIRED’s request to comment.

Nelson might have been the first person to challenge the GPS tagging regime in court. But others were close behind. British law firm Duncan Lewis Solicitors is representing another four people forced to wear GPS tags, ranging from EU citizens to people who arrived in the UK on small boats. “Such surveillance of vulnerable individuals is not necessary in any democratic society, and we are proud to represent these claimants in their fight against this poorly run and dystopian regime,” says Conor Lamb, who works in the public law department at Duncan Lewis.

One of the people whom Duncan Lewis is representing is a 25-year-old former asylum seeker from Sudan who arrived in the UK via a small boat and has no criminal history, according to his lawyers. The tag brought up painful memories of being bound and tortured during his journey to the UK, they argued in court. After two psychiatric reports were submitted to the government, the tag was taken off and his data deleted. Despite that, the man, who uses the pseudonym ADL, remains part of the court case in order to challenge the practice of tagging new arrivals.

Meanwhile, Nelson is still waiting for his tag to be taken off. He’s frustrated that he has to wear the tag despite already having served his time in prison. “Before all of this, I was social,” he says. Now, he says, he’s too self-conscious to go out much, in case others see the tag and mistake him for the perpetrator of a violent crime. He describes how the tag has left him feeling “up and down,” as if he has no good choices left. “In order for me to see my family and to be part of my family, I’m still being forced into 24/7 monitoring, someone watching me and watching what I do, every day.”

[jpbjazz]

LÉGENDES DU JAZZ

FREDDIE HUBBARD, UN GÉNIE MÉCONNU

‘’From the moment he played one note, you knew that was Freddie Hubbard. So he had a sound that was distinctive as Miles Davis, as Louis Armstrong, as Clifford Brown. I mean, he’s one of those trumpet players. He’s also an extraordinary powerful player - great stamina, great range. He swung very hard, was a beautiful ballad player {...}. He was quite a musician.’’

- Stanley Crouch

Né le 7 avril 1938 à Indianapolis en Indiana, Freddie Hubbard a commencé sa carrière musicale comme membre du groupe du Arsenal Technical High School à Indianapolis, où il a appris à jouer du tuba, du cor français et du mellaphone (une sorte de trompette), avant de fixer son choix sur la trompette et le flugelhorn. Freddie avait été initié au jazz par son frère Earmon Jr., un pianiste qui était un grand admirateur de Bud Powell.

Après avoir constaté son grand talent, le trompettiste Lee Katzman, qui avait joué dans l’orchestre de Stan Kenton, lui avait conseillé d’aller étudier au Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music (devenu de nos jours le Jordan College of the Arts de l’Université Butler) avec Max Woodbury, le trompettiste principal de l’Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. À l’adolescence, Hubbard avait participé à sa première session d’enregistrement en accompagnant les frères Wes et Montgomery. Il avait aussi collaboré avec le bassiste Larry Ridley et le saxophoniste James Spaulding. À la même époque où Hubbard participait à son premier enregistrement avec les frères Montgomery, il avait fondé un premier groupe nommé ‘’The Jazz Contemporaries’’ avec le bassiste Larry Ridley, le saxophoniste et flutiste James Spaulding, le pianiste Walt Miller et le batteur Paul Parker. Le groupe se produisait souvent au George’s Bar, un club très populaire sur l’Indiana Avenue.

UNE ASCENSION RAPIDE

En 1958, à l’âge de vingt ans, Hubbard s’était installé à New York. Hubbard avait connu un succès instantané en accompagnant les meilleurs musiciens de jazz de l’époque, dont Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, Eric Dolphy, J.J. Johnson et Quincy Jones. À la même période, Hubbard avait aussi partagé un appartement avec le multi-insrumentiste Eric Dolphy.

Sur la recommandation de Miles Davis, Hubbard avait signé un contrat avec Blue Note avec qui il avait  enregistré son premier album comme leader en novembre 1960, intitulé ‘’Open Sesame.’’ Participaient à l’enregistrement le saxophoniste Tina Brooks, le pianiste McCoy Tyner, le bassiste Sam Jones et le batteur Clifford Jarvis. Six jours plus tard, Hubbard avait renvoyé l’ascenseur à Brooks en collaborant à son album True Blue. En l’espace d’un an, Hubbard avait enregistré deux autres albums, ‘’Going Up’’, avec McCoy Tyner et Hank Mobley, ainsi que ‘’Hub Cap’’, avec Julian Priester et Jimmy Heath.

Après avoir entendu Hubbard jouer avec le trompettiste Don Cherry, le saxophoniste Ornette Coleman l’avait invité à participer à son album ‘’Free Jazz.’’ En 1960-1961, Hubbard s’était également joint à Quincy Jones dans le cadre d’une tournée en Europe. Il avait aussi travaillé avec le batteur Max Roach.

En mai 1961, Hubbard avait collaboré avec John Coltrane sur son dernier enregistrement pour Atlantic, intitulé ‘’Olé Coltrane’’. Avec Eric Dolphy et Art Davis, Hubbard avait aussi été invité à participer au premier album de Coltrane pour Impulse, intitulé ‘’Africa-Brass.’’ En août 1961, Hubbard avait enregistré ‘’Ready for Freddy’’, sa première collaboration avec le saxophoniste Wayne Shorter, qui est considéré comme un des sommets de sa carrière. À la fin de la même année, Hubbard était devenu un partenaire régulier de Shorter lorsqu’il avait remplacé Lee Morgan avec les Jazz Messengers d’Art Blakey. Hubbard avait enregistré plus de dix albums live et en studio avec Blakey durant la période la plus productive du groupe. Les années 1960 avaient aussi été une période faste pour Hubbard, qui avait enregistré huit albums comme leader pour Blue Note, et plus d’une vingtaine comme membre d’autres formations. Hubbard était demeuré avec Blakey jusqu’en 1966, alors qu’il avait décidé de former l’un des nombreux petits groupes sous son nom. Faisaient également partie de la formation son ancien associé de Blue Note, James Spaulding, le pianiste Kenny Barron et le batteur Louis Hayes. Le groupe avait enregistré avec Atlantic.

C’est à cette époque que Hubbard avait commencé à se libérer des influences de Clifford  Brown et de Lee Morgan et à développer son propre son. Il avait aussi remporté le prix du meilleur trompettiste de jazz décerné par le magazine DownBeat.

Pendant les années 1960, Hubbard avait aussi participé comme accompagnateur aux plus importants albums de l’époque, dont ‘’The Blues and Abstract Truth’’ d’Oliver Nelson, ‘’Out of Lunch!’’ d’Eric Dolphy, ‘’Maiden Voyage’’ d’Herbie Hancock, et ‘’Speak No Evil’’ de Wayne Shorter. Même s’il n’avait pas ouvertement adopté le free jazz, Hubbard avait participé à deux de ses albums-phares : ‘’Free Jazz’’ d’Ornette Coleman et ‘’Ascension’’ de John Coltrane, en plus de collaborer à l’enregistrement d’une des compositions les plus avant-gardistes de Sonny Rollins, intitulée ‘’East Broadway Run Down’’ (tirée de l’album du même nom), avec Elvin Jones et Jimmy Garrison, deux membres du célèbre quartet de John Coltrane.

‘’I don’t know how I met all these people’’, avait plus tard expliqué Hubbard. ‘’But a lot of them came to get me, too. They sought me out because they saw I wanted to experiment, and during that period, I was changing my style of the trumpet. I was trying to play the trumpet like a saxophone.’’

Le style de Hubbard avait changé après qu’il se soit établi à Hollywood dans les années 1970. En Californie, les trompettistes jouaient un rôle plus effacé et plus discret, et Hubbard avait dû s’adapter. Il racontait : ‘’You know, lifestyle out there is different from mine than in New York. I was in the Hollywood Hills, above the Bowl. I could look at the ocean on this side. I can hear the concerts free at the Bowl. And I had a big swimming pool. I had parties all the time, and the trumpet just was in the corner a lot of the time, when it should have been on my lips.’’

Hubbard avait connu son plus grand succès commercial dans les années 1970 lorsqu’il avait participé à une série d’albums pour la compagnie CTI Records de Creed Taylor, ce qui lui avait permis d’éclipser Stanley Turrentine, Hubert Laws et même George Benson. Même si ses premiers disques des années 1970, ‘’Red Clay’’, ‘’First Light’’ (qui avait remporté un prix Grammy en 1972 comme meilleure performance instrumentale par un artiste de jazz) et ‘’Sky Dive’’ avaient été plutôt bien reçus et étaient considérés comme ses meilleurs, les albums que Hubbard avait enregistrés plus tard (il avait même flirté avec le jazz-fusion en collaborant avec Red Clay dans le cadre de l’enregistrement des albums ‘’Straight Life’’, ‘’Sky Dive’’ et ‘’First Light’’) avaient été critiqués en raison de leur approche trop commerciale. L’album ‘’First Light’’ mettait en vedette les pianistes Herbie Hancock et Richard Wyands, les guitaristes Eric Gale et George Benson, le contrebassiste Ron Carter, le batteur Jack DeJohnette et le percussionniste Airto Moreira. En 1994, Hubbard avait renoué avec la chanteuse et compositrice Catherine Whitney, qui avait également collaboré à l’album ‘’First Light.’’

Après avoir signé avec Columbia, en 1977, Hubbard s’était joint au groupe tout-étoile V.S.O.P., aux côtés d’Herbie Hancock, de Tony Williams, de Ron Carter et de Wayne Shorter. Tous les membres du groupe à l’exception d’Hubbard avaient fait partie du quintet de Miles Davis au milieu des années 1960. Plusieurs des enregistrements en concert du groupe avaient été publiés plus tard. En 1978, Hubbard avait également collaboré à la pièce ‘’Zanzibar’’ du chanteur Billy Joel. La pièce était tirée de l’album ‘’52nd Street’’ qui avait remporté un prix Grammy l’année suivante comme meilleur disque de jazz.

PROBLÈMES DE SANTÉ ET DÉCÈS

Dans les années 1980, Hubbard avait fondé un nouveau groupe, cette fois avec Billy Childs et Larry Klein. Accueilli chaleureusement par la critique, le groupe avait présenté plusieurs concerts aux États-Unis et en Europe, souvent en compagnie du saxophoniste ténor Joe Henderson, avec un répertoire composé de pièces de hard bop et de jazz modal. Hubbard s’était également produit au festival de jazz de Monterey en 1980 et en 1989 (cette fois avec le vibraphoniste Bobby Hutcherson). Avec Woody Shaw, Hubbard avait enregistré deux albums pour Blue Note. Les deux hommes ont aussi joué en concert en duo de 1985 à 1987. Toujours en 1987, Hubbard avait co-dirigé l’enregistrement de l’album ‘’Stardust’’ avec Buddy Golson. L’année suivante, Hubbard avait de nouveau équipe fait avec Art Blakey à l’occasion d’un concert en Hollande, ce qui avait donné lieu à l’enregistrement de l’album ‘’Free the Wind.’’ La même année, Hubbard avait joué des solos de flugelhorn et de trompette sur deux pièces de l’album ‘’Reg Strikes Back’’ d’Elton John. En 1990, Hubbard avait fait une apparition au Japon dans le cadre d’un concert mettant en vedette le batteur Elvin Jones, le saxophoniste Sonny Fortune, les pianistes George Duke et Benny Green, les contrebassistes Ron Carter et Rufus Reid, et la chanteuse Salena Jones. Hubbard a également joué au festival de jazz de Varsovie, dans le cadre d’une performance qui avait été immortalisée sur l’album ‘’Live at the the Warsaw Jazz Festival’’, publié en 1992 par les disques Jazzmen.

Au début des années 1990, Hubbard, qui était déterminé à recommencer à jouer ce qu’il qualifiait de ‘’vrai jazz’’, s’était installé à Philadelphie et avait contribué à l’émergence de nouveaux talents en intégrant à sa nouvelle formation le contrebassiste Christian McBride, le saxophoniste Javon Jackson, le batteur Carl Allen et le pianiste Benny Green. Hubbard a également collaboré avec le New Jazz Composers Octet, avec lequel il avait joué et enregistré un album collectif dirigé par le trompettiste David Weiss.

En dépit de plusieurs problèmes de santé dont une blessure à la lèvre supérieure qui avait dégénéré en infection en 1992, Hubbard avait continué de jouer et d’enregistrer à l’occasion, même s’il n’était plus au sommet de son art comme il l’avait été au début de sa carrière. Découragé, Hubbard s’était mia à boire et avait contracté un ulcère qui avait failli causer sa mort. Hubbard expliquait: ‘’I started drinking Jack Daniel’s to feel good, you know ? Jack Daniel’s and Coca Cola. And I had an ulcer. I went over in London and I fell out. I’ve never passed out, but I lost four pints of blood. And the doctor said, ‘You’re going o clean up your body, because otherwise you’re looking to go.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’m not ready to go, so let me cool out.’’’

Refusant de se laisser abattre, Hubbard avait contribué à garder vivant le flambeau du jazz en contribuant à des cliniques et à des résidences dans de nombreux collèges américains.

Incarnation vivante du hard bop, Hubbard avait remporté plusieurs honneurs au cours de sa carrière. En 2006, la National Endowmnent for the Arts lui avait accordé la plus importante distinction remise à un musicien de jazz aux États-Unis, le NEA Jazz Masters Award. Au début des années 1970, il avait même supplanté Miles Davis dans les sondages organisés afin de désigner le meilleur trompettiste du monde du jazz.  

Freddie Hubbard est mort le 29 décembre 2008 à Sherman Oaks, en Californie, à la suite de complications dues à une attaque cardiaque survenue le 26 novembre précédent. Il était âgé de soixante-dix ans. Peu avant son décès, Hubbard avait enregistré un dernier album intitulé ‘’On the Real Side.’’

À la fin de sa vie, Hubbard avait développé des liens étroits avec la Jazz Foundation of America. Hubbard expliquait: ‘’When I had congestive heart failure and couldn't work, The Jazz Foundation paid my mortgage for several months and saved my home! Thank God for those people." À la fin de sa vie, la Fondation avait d’ailleurs assuré les soins de Hubbard par l’entremise de son fonds d’urgence. Après sa mort, les héritiers du trompettiste avaient demandé que des dons admissibles pour fins d’impôt soient faits en son nom à la Jazz Foundation of America.

Considéré comme un des trompettistes les plus importants et les plus innovateurs du bop, du hard bop et du post-bop, Freddie Hubbard s’était progressivement affranchi de l’influence de géants comme Miles Davis et Clifford Brown qui avaient été ses modèles au début de sa carrière pour forger sa propre personnalité musicale. Au cours de sa longue carrière, Hubbard a enregistré plus de cinquante albums sous son nom en plus de collaborer avec les plus importants artistes de jazz de son époque. Peu après sa mort en 2008, le magazine Down Beat avait qualifié Hubbard de ‘’trompettiste le plus puissant et prolifique’’ de l’histoire du jazz (il avait enregistré plus de 300 albums en tout et pour tout, tant comme leader que comme collaborateur). Le critique de jazz Stanley Crouch  le considérait comme le trompettiste le plus important et le plus original des quarante dernières années. Crouch précisait: ‘’From the moment he played one note, you knew that was Freddie Hubbard. So he had a sound that was distinctive as Miles Davis, as Louis Armstrong, as Clifford Brown. I mean, he’s one of those trumpet players. He’s also an extraordinary powerful player - great stamina, great range. He swung very hard, was a beautiful ballad player and seemed to have very few limitations in terms of getting through material, whether the material was very simple material or very complex material. He was quite a musician.’’

Le trompettiste Wynton Marsalis considérait Hubbard comme une des principales influences. Il expliquait: ‘’All the trumpet players in the ‘70’s, you can hear Freddie Hubbard’s sound and everything worth playing. He’s such a phenomenal trumpet player - just the largeness of his sound, the velocity and the swing.’’

©-2023-2024, tous droits réservés, Les Productions de l’Imaginaire historique

SOURCES :

‘’Freddie Hubbard.’’ Wikipedia, 2022.

‘’Freddie Hubbard, Trumpeter born.’’ National Endowment for the Arts, 2022.

VITALE, Tom. ‘’Freddie Hubbard : A Jazz Icon Remembered.’’ All Things Considered, 11 août 2001,

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