Cyphira Quinn. Lunday, Aquarius 18th. 12:07 AM. United Tribes of Ericia. Wind River (Owl Creek Mountains).
There was an awful second of stillness. A pause just long enough to make Cyphira hope Thunder Stag’s contract canceled itself out or hit some adjacent plane of existence. Then the whole world became a wall of incoherent noise and force. The brilliance of the sun, followed by a curtain of darkness.
She braced with her wyrd for all she was worth, but the miscast spell spat her back into the cinders of the ruined compound wall and buried her with a tide of sundered earth. Dust and heat from the blast shredded her throat and lungs. Each breath hurt so bad that she assumed she was dying.
The weakest parts of herself hoped she was dying. Forsythe was right. She lay still beneath the debris for five seconds listening to the dull ringing that had deafened her. But when she realized that her injuries, while painful, were not life-threatening, she remembered Forsythe’s last command.
Survive.
Cyphira excavated herself from the shattered wood and the tide of displaced earth that had swallowed her. As she freed herself from the debris, she surveyed her surroundings. All of the nimeregar had been atomized, unable to protect themselves from the blast with their eminence outside of the Faed. Their sniper who had killed Stag had also been erased. Through the dust, Cyphira spied the sasquatch that had thrown her against the wall. The miscast had reduced it to an unconscious mass of burnt flesh and melted fur, but it was still breathing.
Gotta finish it off before it recovers.
Cyphira conjured her flash-freezing quills of ice, the spell Fitz had christened “Cyphira’s Red Chisel,” and started repeatedly firing them at the prone creature. When the third icicle triggered its frosty, secondary impact, the sasquatch exploded with it.
Free of immediate threats, she tried to take stock of ground zero. She couldn’t sense the thunderbird, but that didn’t necessarily mean the monster was dead. She sensed Howell’s wyrd first, then Chastain’s. There was no sign of Cruz. The air is still thick with disturbed ether. It’d be enough to obscure his presence if he’s clinging to life. As the dust parted, she saw Chastain with a rifle drawn, standing behind Howell, who stood in a wide stance with his hands stretched out like a goalie.
Cyphira jogged painfully toward her fellow operatives. Chastain saw her first, and tapped Howell on the shoulder.
“Quinn,” Howell breathed. “Thank god.”
“You’re hurt,” Cyphira said.
She could feel the pain in his passive emanations. Each breath was agony. There were no tears, but his wyrd had taken an unimaginable beating from Thunder Stag’s dying contract.
“Think I cracked a rib, and my wyrd doesn’t feel great,” he acknowledged.
She had never heard Howell admit that he was in pain before. And she had seen him stop a charging SUV head-on with nothing but grit and sorcery.
Chastain had escaped with an awful burn on the right half of her face, but her urdic respiration was even.
“Are you alright?”
“Peachy,” Cyphira assured her. “Where was Cruz?”
Howell’s expression fell and he lowered his head.
“To the right of Thunder Stag.” He shook his head. “He was too far. I couldn’t—”
Cyphira put a hand on his shoulder, emanating comfort and comprehension. Despite his stoicism, Howell was quick to blame himself for every injury that befell his venturemates, regardless of whether he could have reasonably prevented them. She had never seen him handle a death.
A blue and white lightning bolt split the night. But rather than passing in a flash, it continued to bore against the ground. An orb of electricity began to grow at its point of impact, then exploded to reveal the original form of the thunderbird: a brilliant, eight-winged bird the size of a small passenger jet.
It appeared unharmed, but Cyphira squinted and suffused her eyes with her wyrd. She could tell that the thunderbird’s energies were much denser on the left half of its body. Something had injured it.
“Aim for his right!” Cyphira shouted.
The thunderbird soared upward and flew back into a magnificent loop, racing toward the venture. As it approached, it carpet-bombed the earth with jagged lashes of electricity.
“Group up!” Howell shouted.
Cyphira and Chastain both dove behind Howell, and he brought up a tight, concentrated dome just before the thunderbird rained lightning on them. The bolts crackled against the surface of Howell’s shield, and Cyphira heard him grunt in pain.
“Pad the blows!” Chastain said.
An amagia could use their wyrd to attempt to soften incoming magic and physical strikes rather than doing a full, “hard block.” The victims would still suffer some of the harm of the attacks, but allowing some of the force to pass through was less taxing on the caster than trying to completely negate the effects of a spell. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Howell needs every ounce of stamina he can get.
As the bird banked away, wheeling into a second attack, Cyphira drew her SAR from her shoulder—a newly developed model, courtesy of the Amagium’s R&D division—and dropped to a crouch as she aimed. Sorcery Assisted Rifles, or SARs, demanded a great deal of control from the user, requiring them to funnel their wyrd through runed grooves in the gun’s barrel. In exchange, they could enchant a bullet’s speed, stopping power, penetration, or fragmentation on the fly.
The thunderbird turned, putting itself directly into Cyphira’s sights. She let loose a shot, willing the bullet to hit harder and go off like a bomb once it was embedded in the target’s flesh. The thunderbird flew forward at full-tilt—in general, legendary monsters had little to fear from guns. But when the SAR round pierced the bird’s right shoulder, it released an ear-piercing shriek as the base joint of its topmost wing exploded. The bird’s complex flying rhythm was destroyed, and it plummeted to the cold-packed Earth.
Cyphira fired again, as the creature fell and Chastain followed suit. In answer, the thunderbird returned fire with a cascade of lightning. Howell didn’t so much pad the blow as he barely managed to intercept it. Cyphira began to convulse and jerk as the spell flooded her body. Howell had been knocked prone. But Chastain managed to jump clear of the attack, and she fired the last round in her SAR’s chamber. The creature’s sorcery immediately broke, freeing Cyphira from the electricity.
Her skin felt hot and impossibly tight against her muscles, and breathing was agony. But the shock had been too brief to do any permanent damage, so she was back on her feet in a second, rifle in hands. The colossal mass of wings and electricity was gone, however. The thunderbird had reverted to its giant humanoid form again. And it managed to close the distance between them faster than Cyphira could train her weapon on him.
He reached Howell first, jumping forward with a roundhouse kick that hit like a typhoon, sending him sailing into the distance. Cyphira dropped her rifle and drew her sword, then swung at the thunderbird’s flank. It spun to face her, caught her blade between its thumb and forefinger, and snapped the blade in half. Undaunted, Cyphira continued forward and managed to bury the remainder of her broken blade square into the bird’s chest. As he hacked blood, he transformed his right arm into one of his gigantic wings, and backhanded Cyphira so hard she blacked out for a quarter second. But she hit the ground smiling.
Chastain had been working a binding spell ever since she emptied her SAR. Howell and Cyphira had bought her enough time to finish it.
Three golden nails the size of trees streaked from the heavens, hitting the bird in the chest, left arm, and right arm in sequence, pinning his towering frame to the ground, even though he remained standing. Energies of order—deeply lawed magic, as fundamentally irrefutable as raw mathematics—held the thunderbird in place, body and wyrd. Chastain held her hands out, groaning with effort.
“Kill it! Kill it now!”
Cyphira used a pair of bespoke anima—spirits that had been specifically crafted by animathurges for use with a specific spell—and performed her most violent magic.
Usually, a person’s wyrd naturally senses and resists incoming magic. Amagia learn to intensify those defenses with focus, but I figured out a fun trick during my duel with Valmont—I can use Akrasia to warp my magic through a target’s wyrd to strike their body or organs directly. This spell takes full advantage of that technique, making the target’s blood violently freeze outward in a jagged pattern.
I call it “Blowfish.”
The thunderbird, bound as it was, couldn’t muster a tight enough guard to keep Cyphira’s spell out. Its right shoulder erupted with a spiked and bladed tumor of frozen blood. One of the spikes extended into its head. And at least a couple got it in the heart.
But the intense surge of pain gave the creature the strength it needed to finally dispel the etheric nails that held it in place.
And Cyphira knew they had lost. He’s not dead yet. He’s getting up.
She didn’t know where Howell was, but both she and Chastain were on the verge of passing into exus, thanks to their double contracts. In the process of trying to resist exus’ momentum, she ended up ‘hyperventilating.’ Her wyrd rapidly cycled ether in pulses too shallow to fuel even simple sorcery.
The thunderbird had regenerated its human form, and he took a menacing step toward Chastain and Cyphira. As he approached, he began to gather a thick cord of plasma in his hands—a lash of liquid heat.
Before he could strike, Cyphira felt another surge of magic high above, followed by a voice:
“Hey Big Bird!”
The thunderbird raised its head to find Special Agent Cruz hanging in the air with a crushed leg. Cyphira could sense a gravity manipulation contract at work in his wyrd. He held a gory puncture wound on his ribs with his right hand while working another elaborate spell in his left. He smirked as the contract finished, producing what appeared to be a selectively focused gravity well.
“Get fucked.”
Cruz threw his wrecking ball-shaped singularity at the thunderbird. At first, Cyphira assumed that the thunderbird panicked. It flew directly toward the orb, meeting it before it could reach its full acceleration. Then the thunderbird seemed to ‘catch’ the gravity well with its wyrd. Cyphira had no idea how something could guard against condensed fucking gravity, but the thunderbird managed to resist its effects for three full seconds. Which it used to close the gap to Cruz.
Cruz screamed as the spell sucked both of their bodies into the compression sphere. The thunderbird’s monstrous wyrd abruptly disappeared as it’s body was unrecognizably compressed and meshed with Cruz’s. Cruz managed to cancel his spell as he fell, and Howell caught him with sorcery before he struck the ground. But the bottom of his body, everything from his feet to the middle of his pelvis had been squeezed into a knot of flesh that also included the thunderbird’s dead body.
He screamed. Cyphira and Chastain scrambled toward him, and Howell limped forward from the opposite direction. The three of them converged on Cruz. Cyphira knelt down and grabbed his hand as he reached for his own viscera. He stared up into her eyes, quivering and breathless.
“Quinn? I don’t want to die…” Cruz sobbed. “Quinn… please…”
She reached for his hand and squeezed it.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’ve got you.”
Cyphira tried to lie, but the words caught in her throat. She desperately wanted to reassure him. You’re going to be okay. Everything’s going to be alright. But Cruz was going to die, and her throat locked up around the words that might have provided him with hope or peace. She couldn’t afford to injure her wyrd. She couldn’t fight through the pain that would hit her if she spoke falsehood. She wanted to apologize but knew that would crush his spirits
“I got you out from under that tree, I’m gonna get you out of this, you hear me?” Howell grunted and took the young agent’s other hand. Thank you, Howell.
Chastain channeled energy into Cruz’s wyrd, not really casting any specific spell, but pantomiming triage and emanating comfort. There was nothing that could heal or even stabilize a bisection like that.
It was perverse to see Cruz lying there, wretched, and desperate. He was always so confident. Assured that he was a lead character in the grand scheme of life. She liked that about him. It reminded her of Hace, and to a lesser extent, herself. He took a deep breath, and…
His lungs seized up, then gradually released, leaving his eyes unfocused. His power flickered out. And then he was gone.
“Fuck!!” Cyphira shouted.
Chastain was silent.
Howell shook his head.
“When that thing knocked me flying, I found him pinned beneath a tree,” Howell shook his head. “It was just a broken rib and some ripped skin. I told him he was fine. That we needed him.”
“We did,” Cyphira assured Howell.
“I hate to be indelicate, but we need to move. Now,” Chastain said. “Howell, do you have the strength to cover our approach to the core compound?”
The bearded man nodded, then added, gruffly:
“I need somebody to relocate my hip.”
Cyphira realized that he had been moving by half-levitating, half-puppeteering his useless leg. Cyphira started to kneel, but Chastain caught her by the shoulder and gestured for her to be calm. Oh. Right. It would probably be a good idea for the binder to do this. She helped him lay down as Cyphira kept watch for hostiles. Chastain counted down from three to two, and Howell roared.
“Are you alright?” Chastain asked seriously.
Howell nodded, breathing heavily. Cyphira could tell that his wyrd was shredded. No tears, but after Thunder Stag’s death and the fight against the thunderbird, continuing to use it—especially to provide defense or barriers—was like exercising a flayed limb. That on top of a dislocated hip. It’s a miracle he’s still on his feet.
More gunfire and shouts came from the far edge of the compound—seems like team one managed to take them unaware as planned. Cyphira thought of Kuro as she stared at Cruz, and her resolve reignited.
“Let’s move,” Howell said.
They fell into a chevron formation, Cyphira and Chastain creeping behind Howell who maintained a sorcerous dome around them, with most of his energy channeled toward their front. When they turned the corner leading to the main structure bullets spattered against the shield like rain. Cyphira spotted the first gunner in the second story window and fired two chisels, catching him in the neck and shoulder. Chastain saw to the other, killing him with some kind of fatally sharp binding spell.
A signal ping echoed from the other path leading from the rear of the compound, and the group turned to see Kuro, Shonoa, and a grizzly bear the size of a tank emerge from a corner, followed by a small army of Kuro’s shadows.
Cyphira laughed. Grandma Claw knows how to shapeshift. Of course, she knows how to shapeshift. It made so much sense—when nothing else did—that it was funny. Chastain and Howell regarded her warily, unsure if she had cracked. That was even funnier, but Cyphira managed to swallow her delirium and gestured that she was okay.
“What the fuck happened?” Kuro asked when they reconnoitered.
“Sniper got Thunder Stag mid-cast,” Chastain said. “We had to fight a thunderbird. Cruz didn’t make it.”
“Damn,” Kuro said.
Oddly, Shonoa showed no reaction. No emotion whatsoever. She’d either cracked completely or finally had her nerves under control. The dire bear seemed to deflate, its pelt going hollow and shrinking until it was just a small patch of coarse fur on Grandma Claw’s back as she crouched on the ground.
“Ashomi will be inside,” she said, standing and placing the swatch of fur into a satchel. “I will deal with the remainder of the Hare Tribe. The rest of you must support Shonoa and Quinn.”
Cold pitted Cyphira’s chest. The remainder of the Hare Tribe. Meaning everyone too young or too frightened to fight for their lives. She was suddenly grateful to the old woman. I don’t think I could do it. Deicide is easier than genocide.
Magic began to swell in the compound. They were still nearly a hundred yards away, but whatever was happening inside the large, squared-off building had reached a boiling point in seconds. The amagia collectively braced their wyrds, and Howell used a contract to make another one of his near-impenetrable kinetic walls. For a full three seconds, daylight-bright light flashed out of the building’s windows and a sequence of powerful ethereal pops began like fireworks.
But the building and the venture appeared to be unaffected. Cyphira cautiously lowered her guard and probed the contract’s ripples to learn more about the spell. The first thing she gleaned was that the spell was almost certainly a ritual. A complicated one at that, as the runic code and cadence was far too complicated for a contract—Unless you’re a god, I guess. But each pop was some kind of localized, brief, and powerful instance of spatial magic.
“Those are portals!” Chastain said.
“Where to?!” Howell demanded.
As they reached for the spell, the ritual accelerated, and the last few pops—too many and too irregularly to count—finished in a flash.
“It wasn’t faen,” Cyphira said.
“You positive, Quinn?” Grandma Claw asked.
Cyphira nodded. None of the energies had breached the realm of the Faed. Her akrasia had attuned her so closely to spatial magic, and faen spatial magic in particular, that there was no doubt in her mind.
“Wait,” Kuro said. “So nothing crossed over?”
The implications of his question hit Cyphira immediately. If you aren’t bringing monsters in from the veil or the faed… You’re sending them out. The ritual that the CIC had cast prevented people inside the barrier from physically leaving. But it would be almost impossible to seal an area from magical movement as well as physical movement, at that kind of range, no matter how many mages you threw at it. There would be too many holes…
“So they escaped?” Shonoa asked.
Grandma Claw spat and shook her head, confused and irate.
“No, that bitch is still in there. I can smell Ashomi from here.”
Cyphira nearly asked how, then realized she was probably happier not knowing. But if Ashomi didn’t escape… Oh god. Of course.
“She saved her faithful. She saved the Hare.” Cyphira nearly chuckled as she said it.
“Fuck!” Grandma Claw snapped.
Cyphira stared at the old woman, horrified. You sound disappointed. My god. What the hell is wrong with you? Cyphira’s chest felt a surge of relief when she realized she wouldn’t be murdering innocents. But this wicked old bitch seems hungry for it.
“It’s possible they pulled something through that isn’t faen,” Kuro said.
“I’m gonna scout it out from the other side of the Faed,” Cyphira said.
“If you run into resistance, abort and double back,” Kuro said firmly.
Cyphira’s mouth twitched in a grin. Aww. That’s sweet. I like you too, Kuro. Then Cyphira looked to the senior-most agents for approval. Howell gave a cautious nod of approval, while Grandma Child-Eater gestured for her to hurry up. Cyphira turned, again chilled by the woman’s apparent bloodlust, and then dove into the Faed.
—|—
The Veil was dry and brittle, and Cyphira punched through it like glass. She appeared atop a snow-dusted bridge of ice; it was one of dozens crisscrossing a glassy, interminably deep cave system. Cyan currents of light, similar to the Aurora Borealis, drifted across the sky above, only to be endlessly refracted by the crystalline bridges and walls of the caves below.
The Ice Hollow. It was a remote, sparsely populated area of the Winter Court. Cyphira had been there several times in her travels, though usually she emerged inside the knot of caves below, as opposed to the upper levels. Good environment for me. My birthright will enhance my power here and should give me an edge against Ashomi. The temperature was nearly twenty degrees colder than it had been in Wind River, but the weather was mild.
Cyphira cast a contract with a metaphysic animus to cast a faen window contract. A circular window to reality opened at the periphery of Cyphira’s wyrd, mimicking the fae’s ability to watch humanity undetected. She waved the window across her surroundings to orient herself, catching a brief glimpse of her allies where she had left them. But the compound is below me, in the depths of the caverns.
She used sorcery to slow fall to a bridge about twelve feet beneath her, then followed the slick path deeper into the abyss. As she walked forward, she phased through the wall of the compound. The two gunners they had killed lay dead in the front hallway. She continued through the second interior wall, emerging in a large room like that of an assembly hall or a gym.
There was a small army of Fae inside the room. Spring Court, if she was any judge. A cadre of beautiful, green-skinned women with ivy tresses in place of hair stood next to two Sasquatches before a young, native American girl. Ashomi? Elven knights, roughly a dozen strong, stood at the front of the room, keeping watch. She withdrew through the wall and held her breath. They didn’t seem to see me, but if Fae can watch reality through the Faed, it’s not hard to imagine the opposite being possible as well.
She positioned her body such that it was mostly embedded within the walls of the compound—which was tricky given how narrow the ice bridges were—and crept along the periphery of the room, trying to get closer to Ashomi and the more powerful Fae. As she moved, she saw that the room was indeed a gym.The basketball court had been painted over in an elaborate ritual array rich with runes of spatial folding and translocation. Just beyond Ashomi, there was also a black metal box that resembled an enormous safe, or a closet-sized room that had been constructed from scrap with metal fusing magic. A panic room. Wards were inscribed on the exterior walls.
Cyphira continued to follow the wall, and then emerged behind the panic room. She found that the wards on the box were powerful enough to prevent her from looking through her faen window—the interior of the box looked like dizzying, chromatic static—but she could still hear sounds from the gym.
“Your Glory. The ritual has left you frail. You must take refuge. Or attempt to flee,” a leathery voice said. “A child of the eclipse numbers among the Amagia”
“Listen to me, Creekstrider. Your debt to me is paid. My descendants are safe. I would not see you die needlessly in a vain defense. I accept my fate.”
“Forgive me, Your Glory, but it is not your place to determine when our oath to Queen Ariel and King Morpheus has been fulfilled.”
Aeriel and Morpheus. So the Spring Court is currying favor with a newborn god. The Amagium won’t be happy to hear that.
There was a cry of protest followed by the sounds of a one-sided scuffle.
“What are you—Creekstrider! There is no point! My life will only prolong—”
A heavy metallic clank cut off the rest of Ashomi’s words, followed by the sound of a lever locking into place.
“A pity,” a feminine voice said. “We are going to die.”
“Yes,” the leathery voice snapped. “We swore an oath to Queen Aeriel and King Morpheus. ‘To our dying breaths.’ Be it true death or just another turn, we shall see it through.”
“Yes,” the feminine voice answered, exasperated. “That is why it is a pity, you lummox.”
Cyphira closed her scrying aperture and beat a hastier retreat to her intrusion point, still hoping the elven knights keeping vigil were none the wiser.
—|—
“She got her people out,” Cyphira said once she had returned to reality. “And she’s working with the Spring Court. There are two more sasquatches, four dryads, and about a dozen elves inside.”
Chastain and Kuro sighed. Howell swore. Shonoa seemed like she was doing everything she could to hold her nerves in check. But Grandma Claw looked pissed. She knit her brows tight and curled her lip.
“It gets better,” Cyphira warned. “They know that we have an eclipse-born with us. Funny thing is, Ashomi actually wanted to surrender, but the squatches refused and put her in some kind of warded panic room.”
“Do we abort?” Howell asked.
“No,” Grandma Claw snarled. “At the very least, Ashomi must die. What do you propose, Quinn?”
Something is seriously off about her. How didn’t I notice it before? Cyphira took a deep breath, then pointed to Howell, Grandma Claw, Kuro, and Shonoa in sequence.
“I need the four of you to spring their trap. Go in guns blazing and be overprotective of Shonoa. Do everything you can to make it clear that she is our god-slayer. Meanwhile, I’ll take Chastain with me through the Faed and approach the panic room from behind. If she can break those wards, I can get inside with Akrasia, drag Ashomi into the Faed, and slit her throat.”
“By yourself?” Howell scoffed. “Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Cyphira pressed. “She’s weak, Dantem. Already on death’s door. Whatever ritual she used to save the Hare Tribe used up all her juice. And like I said, she wants to surrender. She begged the others to flee.”
“Maybe she knew you were watching,” Kuro said doubtfully.
“It might be a bluff,” Cyphira agreed. “I’m open to other suggestions. But I don’t want to give her a second longer to recharge than necessary.”
“It’s our best option,” Grandma Claw said decisively, pulling the scrap of bear pelt from her satchel. “Now. About those dryads and elves, what did they seem like? Archers? Knights?”
“Elves are mixed. Pikes, swords, crossbows. The dryads had longbows.”
Grandma Claw inclined her head with a smile that no longer seemed sweet. Something about it made the roots of Cyphira’s teeth hurt. The old woman flipped the swatch of fur onto her back, and it immediately spread to consume her body, which exploded into the tank-like stature of a dire bear.
Meanwhile, Kuro clenched, crossed, and twisted his fingers in a sequence of sacred hand gestures. The darkness around them coalesced and an army of shadowy monsters boiled into being. There was a rhinoceros-looking thing, except its head split into four symmetrical jaws, each with their own sets of horns, teeth and eyes. There were a pair of chimpanzees with mantis wings and hooked claws. And finally, the remnant shadows from the other creations formed a nightmarish murder of crows.
“You’ve outdone yourself this time,” Cyphira said, smirking at his hellish petting zoo.
He turned to face her, wearing a grim expression.
“I’m serious, Cyphira. If it looks like—”
Cyphira kissed the fingers of her right hand and gently slapped his left cheek.
“Don’t die on me and I might make it worth your while,” she said with a wink.
His pale skin briefly seemed to glow in the dark and he gave her a rare smile.
Cyphira looked to Chastain who had finished refreshing the reflex and barrier contracts on herself.
“What was the Faed like when you scouted?” Chastain asked.
“Cold but calm,” Cyphira said. “Doesn’t matter really. Landscape has probably already shifted.”
Chastain nodded, shouldering her rifle and drawing a pair of hatchets from the small of her back. Cyphira drew her saber, placed a hand on Chastain’s shoulder, and forced them out of reality.
—|—
They were greeted by a howling gale and blinded by flurries of brittle snow. The entire world became a gray-white mass of biting cold. Cyphira could see as far as she could reach by maintaining a light barrier between herself and the blizzard, but the winds were strong enough to disturb her balance on the ice bridge they had emerged on.
Still in the Ice Hollows, but now it’s become a snow globe from hell. The light is so flat I can barely tell up from down. Cyphira cast faen window again and swept the window around her environment, searching for the compound. This time, they needed to go up rather than down. Perfect. I can barely keep balance amidst this wind.
“We need to climb!” Cyphira called.
“Lead the way!” Chastain said.
Cyphira buried her sword in the snow as she walked, and Chastain used her hatchets as makeshift ice axes. They made it to the top of the first bridge when Cyphira caught a glimpse of something glowing in the gale. The environment seemed to get heavier. That’s the eminence of a fae creature.
“Hostiles!” Cyphira shouted.
A massive white eel with a fringe that glowed like the aurora borealis shot out of the blizzard and launched itself at Chastain. She managed to guard herself with her wyrd and hatchets, but lost her footing and started to slide down the slope of the ice bridge. Cyphira caught her with a tether of sorcery and narrowly managed to maintain her aperture spell, only to feel a bite in her right shoulder. By the time she tried to stab whatever hit her, it was gone.
Pins and needles numbed the entire right half of her body, and her vision lagged and doubled. Magical venom. Transumes to affect the target instantly. She tugged Chastain back onto her feet and searched the billowing void for the camouflaged frost eel.
“It’s venomous!” Cyphira shouted at Chastain. “We need to move!”
Chastain nodded. The two of them doubled their speed up the bridge and rounded the corner of the first switchback. After a few seconds, Cyphira’s vision returned to normal, though her right arm still felt numb. If that thing gets my legs, it’s all over. Unless…
This time, two eels emerged, attacking them from opposite sides of the ice bridge. Cyphira was ready for them this time, but the attacks kept coming. There must have been at least a dozen of the slippery bastards hiding in the blizzard. She managed to catch one in the mouth with her blade, and slit it cleanly down the middle, and she cut another in half, but she couldn’t keep this up.
“Cover me!” Cyphira shouted at Chastain.
She began to work on a flight contract, abandoning defense in the blind hope that Chastain could somehow keep the creatures at bay. The older woman projected a dome of powerful sorcery, but rather than a barrier, it was a sort of kinetic binding net that ensnared all the eels around them. It caught one of them mere inches from Cyphira’s face, and it snapped at her furiously as it wriggled against the binding. But Cyphira was able to complete the contract; granting herself and Chastain the ability to fly quickly and steadily despite the storm. Cyphira shouted at Chastain:
“Fly!”
Chastain released her binding just as they dove upward into the air. Cyphira used the faen window to navigate the corridors of the compound, arriving at the gym and, catching a glimpse of the horrific melee happening on the other side of the Veil.
Grandma Claw had one of the sasquatches pinned in her dire bear form, mauling it at the neck as half a dozen elves tried to attack her fecklessly. Kuro’s flying monkeys dived and slashed at the dryads who leapt from wall, to floor, to ceiling and back again, firing arrows all the while. Howell remained at the entrance, shielding the rest of the venture with his battle-stripped wyrd.
Kuro ceaselessly shuffled between commanding, repairing, and replacing his shadow army. Shonoa acquitted herself well in close quarters, shooting anything that got too close to their human bulwark. But her eyes were frantic and her mouth hung open in a sort of hysteric smile. Girly, you need a new line of work.
As they approached the far edge of the room, Cyphira grabbed Chastain’s hand, and tore them both through the Veil. They collided with the wall of the building on the other side and it took them several seconds to collect themselves. Then Cyphira realized why:
“I… feel a bit…” Chastain said sluggishly.
Her eyes were unfocused. Ah shit. Cyphira spied two puncture wounds streaming thin ribbons of blood from her neck, like a classic vampire bite. No idea how potent that toxin is—but considering it fucked me up in the shoulder… getting bit in the neck seems real bad. Gonna be a bastard to crack those wards if she can’t see or think straight.
The battle raged on behind them from the other side of the black metal cube, dire bear roaring, elves screaming and dying. Then one of the dryads jumped into the back corner of the room, and immediately saw Cyphira and Chastain.
“Flank!” The dryad shouted and fired three arrows at Cyphira with a single pull.
Cyphira swatted one of the arrows away with her saber and caught the other two with her wyrd.
“Work the wards!” Cyphira shouted at Chastain. “I’ll cover us!”
Cyphira dropped her sword and drew her sidearms—a pair of Nietzsche semi-automatic pistols—and peppered the dryad with bullets, driving it to leap for cover. Chastain placed her hands on the metal box and closed her eyes. I can’t tell if she’s concentrating or passed out.
A second later, one of the sasquatches emerged from the other side of the panic room, starting to cast some kind of violent sorcery. Cyphira braced for the hit, projecting a field in front of herself and Chastain, but just before the sasquatch could get it’s spell off, Kuro’s split-headed rhinoceros beast charged the creature, swinging it’s mace like head directly into its bulk.
Chastain, I know you’re drugged past your tits but if you don’t hurry up with these wards—Cyphira turned just in time to see her senior officer’s eyes roll back into her head. Her wyrd sputtered and faded, and she fell to the side.
“Fuck!” Cyphira dove for the panic room, and desperately tried to ‘catch’ the magic where Chastain left off.
Cyphira was not gifted at intrusion. Lawed magic and bindings were her wyrd’s primary shortcomings. But Chastain managed to expose the final, core threads of the contracts—the taproots of the spells. Cyphira hacked at the wards with her wyrd recklessly, and forced herself into the Faed the second they broke.
The Veil was cold coming and going, and she barely saw the Faed before flashing back to reality inside the panic room. As soon as she saw Ashomi’s small form, she grabbed the girl-shaped goddess by the throat, and plunged them both back into the Faed.
Cyphira’s wyrd was spinning from the dimensional whiplash, and she fell to the snow, losing her grip on Ashomi in the process. They were once again in the Ice Hollows, but the weather had calmed and a gentle dawn was rising on the horizon of the endless tundra around the icy chasm. Mercifully, there was no sign of the snow eels. Ashomi rose to her feet and turned to face Cyphira, who lunged at her drunkenly. Ashomi managed to dodge her, and held up her hands in surrender.
“Wait! Please just wait!”
Despite herself, Cyphira froze. She blamed it on Ashomi’s appearance. Cowardly trick, hiding behind the form of a child. Ashomi smiled sadly, seemingly pleased that Cyphira was willing to hear her out.
“I’m going to die,” the goddess promised. “If you don’t do it, the eclipse-born, or Walking Claw will.”
Walking Claw must be Grandmother Claw’s Native Erician name.
“Why bother talking then?” Cyphira asked.
“I just want you to know you have a choice, Daughter Winter.”
“I’m not the type to pass the buck, Ashomi.”
Ashomi smiled again, then turned to face the rising sun.
“I know. But every life we take stains our wyrd. You deserve to know before you carry the weight of my blood. It will change things for you. For everyone.”
Cyphira digested the god’s words and nodded. Then she drew her sacrificial weapon—an obsidian knife with so many enchantments of binding and banishing it made her head swim—and approached Ashomi from behind.
“Any last words?” She asked.
“No. Nothing,” Ashomi said, keeping her eyes fixed on the horizon. “But I’m glad it’s you.”
Ashomi spoke delicately, but something about her words scared Cyphira. It was worse than any curse or threat she could imagine. What the hell is that supposed to mean? She shook her head, trying to dismiss the errant thoughts racing through her brain.
She placed her hand on Ashomi’s shoulder, channeled her wyrd directly into the black blade, placed the edge against the god’s tiny neck, and…It was over in a flash. Ashomi didn’t make a sound, which made it more profane, somehow. Her blood—red, seemingly normal, utterly mortal—shined harshly against the snow-crusted ice, lit by the morning glare.
Cyphira wiped the dagger clean and sheathed it. Then she felt a swell of energy spread through the Faed. The blood sank into the permafrost and there was… not a shaking in the tectonic sense, but a sort of ringing that was quickly growing toward a crescendo. The Faed itself seemed to be vibrating with power. Cyphira felt an energy in her bones that was so acute it was impossible to tell if it was hot or cold. The rising sun became impossibly bright, reflected by the snow and ice around her.
She knelt to the ground and scooped Ashomi’s body off the ground. Retrieving the body was at the top of their list of secondary objectives. Leaving it in the Faed would disrupt the power balance between the courts, if only temporarily. And Mommy Dearest already has an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
But when Cyphira forced herself back into the Veil, she hesitated for nearly a full minute, considering whether to drop the body or not. The Amagium doesn’t need another weapon either. But with the Hare still alive, having her corporeal body may help slow her inevitable return. And there’s no telling what other sort of egregore might be born from the corpse of a god. Now isn’t time to start second-guessing the mission. You already made your bed, Cyphira. Lie in it or die on it.
Finally, she pushed herself back into reality, emerging behind the panic room. The exterior wall had a hole punched through it—probably the bear or Kuro’s rhino’s doing—and the floors were scored with spell scars, splintered ruts, and enormous claw tracks.
It wasn’t exactly quiet, but the sounds of outright battle had faded. There were a few heavy breaths, silenced by the sound of steel sinking into flesh or abrupt ripples of magic. They’re cleaning up. Cyphira emerged from behind the panic room holding Ashomi’s body.
The other members of the task force seemed relatively unharmed. Howell was slumped against the wall, holding his shoulder, and Kuro had a gash across his brow. Shonoa and Grandma Claw appeared unharmed. The air was thick with a dizzying haze of potent fae dust. We’ll be high off our asses if we don’t get out of here soon.
Grandma Claw—or Walking Claw—turned to Cyphira then gazed at Ashomi’s body. Her expression was intensely focused—something like hunger, or lust glowing in her eyes. Cyphira wasn’t sure which was more unsettling. She hadn’t noticed before, but the old woman’s sweetly scented wyrd had a foul aftertaste. Rotting meat well masked by honey and dried flowers.
“Well done, Quinn,” the old woman purred.
The woman’s voice tugged at Cyphira’s guts. She turned and set down the dead goddess, spotting Kuro kneeling to Chastain. Cyphira reached out to both of them with her wyrd.
“Is she…?” she asked.
Kuro turned, his expression confirming what Cyphira already knew from her silent wyrd. The Arch Binder, sometimes mentor, and all-around badass bitch, Harefael Chastain, was dead. Cyphira didn’t know her well, but she liked what she knew. Fuck. If I had been faster with the flight contract—
Kuro stood and walked over to embrace her. Cyphira answered with a stiff hug, wishing she could return the affection in earnest. As the numbing effects of snow eel’s venom receded, her entire throbbed like a moderate bruise. Her wyrd was shot. But it felt like something else had broken as well, and it wouldn’t be growing back.
“I’m glad you’re alright,” he said earnestly.
As soon as he said it, she pictured Ashomi again:
“I’m glad it’s you.”
Cyphira was glad Kuro couldn’t see her expression, eyes weak and brow knit with worry. Why would Ashomi be glad? What does that mean? If you were so ‘glad’ that I was the one to kill you, why try to talk me out of it? Is she fucking with me? Gloating? She shut down the train of thought and forced herself to answer Kuro:
“Me too,” she said hoarsely, and forced herself to squeeze him tighter despite the pain.
I completed my mission. I survived. And that’s all that matters.
