“A lawyer…” That was Teach, the man studying my sister as his fingers gave his beard a few contemplative strokes. “You know, maybe that’s what we’ve been missing this whole time.”
Abigail, for her part, stared at the old pirate. “If this is about mocking my profession, or my dedication to what it stands for…” She clearly did not care how powerful he was. It looked like she was about half a second or so from telling him exactly where he could shove that mockery.
Teach, however, shook his head easily and gave a gruff chuckle. “No, no, not at all. I assure you, my good lady, no such offense was meant. I’ve sure had my issues with the legal system over time…” He smirked knowingly at his own words before shaking that off to add, “But in this case, I meant what I said. It could’ve really helped our society to have investigations and trials, even if they had to be… I suppose the term is in absentia? A panel to judge that the targets our people are going after are truly deserving of… what we’re best at. Instead of killing them all.”
“Something to consider later, if we really start putting together something better,” Calafia noted.
My dad abruptly spoke up, rising to his feet to stand by Abigail. “Is that-- wait, are you people really talking about taking the full plunge and leaving Crossroads to start building something else with the Rebellion? But you’re the… I was sort of under the impression that you couldn’t do that, being part of the Committee and all. Can’t the others kick you off it, or track you down with that link you have and do something--” He stopped, realization coming as he glanced at me. “Oh.”
Percival smiled faintly. “Yup, we would’ve done more harm than good completely coming over to your side while we were still tied to our counterparts. But you have the Edge now. That means we can act more directly than we used to. And it opens up a great deal of other options for us.”
“Not as many as you might think, right now,” I informed him with a grimace, before explaining that the Reaper who was the main part of the Edge couldn’t do anything for the moment. At least not without risking infecting every single person who was linked to him with the Hangman curse.
Rocking backward on his heels, Teach gave a low whistle. “Well, that’d be a hell of a way for this civil war to end, wouldn’t it? And something tells me it’s not like the good old hardliners would get what they want out of it either. It wouldn’t just be about killing all the things they see as bad.”
“No,” Puriel confirmed in a voice that fairly crackled with power and made everyone look that way. “That can’t be allowed to happen. Understand this, we are not talking about merely this world. My people have… have taken hundreds of yours across the universe. I can’t begin to guess how many are still alive these days, but they will be spread far and wide across the front lines of our Fomorian warfront. They will be in some of the most unstable areas in existence.”
It was Persephone who cut through the silence that followed. “Oh, um, I know you all feel nervous about that already, but it’s still probably important to add that Hangman-affected people can’t be controlled by possession. We uh, found that out the hard way when they were building the Edge.” The Revenant girl rubbed the back of her neck with a visible grimace at the thought.
Puriel gave her a curious glance before nodding. “Ah, yes, what she said. My people won’t be able to contain them if that happens. You-- we won’t just have an army of Boschers here on Earth, which would have been bad enough. We’ll also have them scattered across the entire frontline of the war, in the most vulnerable areas, killing and destroying everything in their path. And I do mean everything. The Fomorians won’t need to reclaim their lost creations then. Your people will be doing the work for them anyway. The entire warfront will collapse practically overnight. Trillions will die.”
Swallowing hard, I glanced around the room before offering a weak, “Right, so let’s not let that happen. Bob gets all the rest he needs right now.” Belatedly, I had to explain who I meant, and why. Which led to what was probably one of the more surreal moments of my life (and the list wasn’t exactly short), where I told Zeus, Percival the Knight of the Round Table, Blackbeard, Calafia (the woman whose ‘fictionalized’ life had inspired the name of California), and Sophronia (one of the main characters of Jerusalem Delivered, the epic Renaissance era poem) about the Dresden Files while we all stood around a veterinary clinic that was frozen in time. That was definitely a thing. Even weirder? I got the impression they were actually interested in reading the books.
I don’t think this is the weirdest thing we’ve used a time stop for, Yardbird noted, but it’s up there.
Eventually I just shook the rest of that off and finished with, “Anyway, Bob needs his rest. So we should leave him alone and just focus on the thing we can actually do right now.”
“Gaia.” The new voice came from the doorway leading further back into the clinic, as Gwen came into view. I had no idea how much of that whole book discussion she’d heard, but sure, might as well chuck her onto the list of people I’d been explaining that to, just to make it weirder.
As soon as greetings were exchanged all around and Percival explained that he’d brought her, Gwen continued. “It’s been long enough, so my people are going after Gaia while the Loyalist pricks are… distracted. And these guys are gonna help get it done right.” Her head nodded toward the four Committee people. “We thought you might be interested in being part of that.”
“Uh, we were just talking about doing that, actually,” Abigail put in, folding her arms against her stomach with obvious self-consciousness as all those people turned to look at her. “But if you… I mean, shouldn’t it be pretty simple if you want to help?” she asked Percival and the other three.
“We don’t actually have access to the prison ourselves,” Calafia admitted with a wince. “Not without involving the rest of the Committee, anyway. We don’t even know where it is right now.”
That made me do a doubletake. “Wait, what the hell do you mean you don’t know where it is?”
“Magic,” Sophronia replied carefully. “The prison constantly moves around. And part of its security system ensures that the only way for us to know where it is at any given time is if it is under attack and they set off the alarms, or… if the entire Committee agrees to know together.”
Teach nodded. “The only ones who always know where it is are the wardens, and they don’t leave the place. They never leave. They live there, traveling from spot to spot with the prison itself. The only way we could identify its exact location right now would be to convince our counterparts to agree to find it. And that seems fairly unlikely given the circumstances.”
It was Calafia’s turn to add to the bad news. “And if any of us go there, the rest of our little group will know about it. That was another thing our counterparts insisted on. But at least it did mean that we could be certain none of them could interact with Gaia without our presence either.”
My eyes closed. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. Even when we had four Committee members right here with us, they couldn’t actually make this simple and just open the prison for us. They couldn’t even tell us where it was right now. All that power and they couldn’t actually help that much, because trying to do so would involve convincing a group of people who would absolutely never agree to let Gaia go. Was this what being defeated by bureaucracy was like?
Gods, this was so much to deal with. There was a lot more we needed to talk about, a lot more to get into. I still felt like I barely understood what was going on with my other self, and the whole Crossroads as an Archive situation. To say nothing of all the other problems. But we could only handle one situation at a time. And right now, that one situation was something that had been on the back burner for far too long. We needed to handle it, somehow, no matter how hard it was.
“Right,” I managed. “So how are we gonna do it? How the hell are we gonna find this prison if even these guys can’t tell us where it is? Let alone get inside it if you guys can’t go there without calling Litonya, Ruthers, and the rest down on our heads. What’re we supposed to do about it?”
“Ah, maybe you can help with that?” Gwen interrupted just as Puriel opened his mouth to say something. She was glancing over her shoulder while stepping out of the doorway to let someone else come through. Another person who was clearly shielded from my item sense.
“Sure,” came the response as a visibly adult Aylen came through that doorway. This was an Aylen who looked very different from the way I’d known her at Crossroads. Besides the whole being visibly (if only slightly) older thing, she also wasn’t using the disguise that made her hair and eyes dark. The Aylen who came into the room had her own, natural deep azure blue eyes and matching hair. The hair and eyes of one descended from Reapers. She gave me a brief glance and small smile of encouragement before continuing. “Though at this point I have to say, I feel like the ‘also ran’ in the ‘stuck in the past and lived through many years’ competition.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Grimacing at that, I stepped over to embrace her. “Are you okay? Have you seen Avalon yet? And hey, you earned the gold in that before any part of me ever stepped into the competition.”
“I had to go on a little trip to hang out across the galaxy while my earlier self was here, so we wouldn’t blow each other up,” Aylen cheerfully replied. “I was planning on just skipping over it in stasis, but as it happens, somebody sent me a ship, a pilot, and a list of attractions on other worlds they thought I might want to check out. I just made it back here today. So, uh, no, I haven’t seen Avalon.” Her voice made it clear just how anxious, nervous, and eager she was for that. And boy could I relate to that. Come to think of it, we could also both relate to feeling guilty because there were so many important things to do, but we still really wanted to see Avalon.
“I guess my other self has been busy,” I murmured. Busy enough to make sure Aylen could spend the past couple decades off traveling the universe, apparently. “But wait, the ehnergy you were collecting from the--” I stopped talking then, remembering belatedly that there was an audience watching all this. Not that I thought they’d object overly much, but it was another thing to explain. Especially when it came to Puriel, who happened to be the one responsible for Arthur being dead in the first place. I really hoped this wasn’t gonna turn into a whole thing right now.
“You mean the energy the young woman has been collecting from the rifts in order to resurrect the Dragon-bonded, Arthur?” Speaking of Puriel, he was the one who said that, raising one bushy eyebrow as everyone looked at him. “Please, I am quite capable of putting two and two together occasionally. You had one Dragon-bonded destroy himself, and had to do something with the energy after stopping it from traveling all the way to the Fomorians. Speaking as a man with quite a bit of expertise on the subject, energy must go somewhere. It’s a logical choice.”
“No,” I replied as flatly and seriously as I could, drawing eyes my way. “I mean, yes on all the other stuff, but you clearly weren’t putting the h in ehnergy, and that’s important. Right, Tabs?”
“Uh huh!” Tabbris, who was standing over by Spark while those two had a private, whispered conversation, popped her head up and nodded. “E H N. Ehn. Ehnergy. Otherwise how are people supposed to know what we’re even talking about? It could be any kind of energy.”
“Absolutely,” I agreed sagely. “If you just say energy, you’d just confuse people. You’d have to explain the whole thing and say you mean the energy of the Dragon-bonded known as Ehn. But if you say ehnergy, it’s totally clear.” My hand rose, and Tabbris gave me a quick high five.
“These are the kids who are going to help change our entire civilization?” That was Sophronia.
“That would be them, yup,” Teach confirmed, his smile widening. “Not just our civilization either. Pretty sure those two are gonna change the whole damn world before they find a way to retire.”
Puriel grunted, head shaking as he put in, “I would be very surprised if the universe itself isn’t irrevocably altered by their existence in it. At least in this case, I can say it will be for the better.”
My face was red. “Okay, okay, we’re just joking around, let’s not get all dramatic about things. Or let’s do get dramatic, but point it toward the saving Gaia thing, and-- oh, the ehnergy!” Realizing I hadn’t actually gotten an answer on that bit yet, I looked back over to Aylen questioningly.
Her head bobbed once. “Yes, I ahh, have the ehnergy, with an h. Or at least, it’s somewhere safe. I’d rather not get into the full details until after we handle the Gaia situation. One at a time.”
Puriel exchanged a glance with Percival and Gwen, both of whom were watching him like a couple of particularly suspicious hawks. With a soft grunt, he faced Aylen once more and casually announced, “It seems you have been fulfilling your destiny quite well, Miss Merlin Key.”
“Just Aylen,” she replied. “Or, if you prefer…” Just like that, her skin and hair both lightened, the former going from a dusky tone to full caucasian, while the latter shifted from blue to light brown. With a couple other slight shifts, there was a completely different person standing in front of us. But hey, at least I wasn’t the one taken by surprise this time. I knew all about Aylen being--
“Ganieda!?” That was Gwen, literally jolting in surprise. She took a half-step back, eyes visibly widening. Then she crossed the distance between them in a flash of motion that ended with her embracing the transformed Aylen. A tearful sound escaped her. “You--you’re alive, you’re here, you’re not-- I--” The words dissolved into nothing but noises of relief and joy, as she held the other woman tight. Something told me she’d completely forgotten anyone else was even here.
Percival, who was almost right behind her, swept Aylen up in a hug as well and brought Gwen right along in the process. All three of them completely lost themselves in that for a few moments, and I had a tiny glimpse of just how much they had lost with the fall of Camelot and death of Arthur. Aylen hadn’t just been pretending to be one of them. She was one of them. She was Ganieda. And now she’d been reunited with Guinevere and Percival after a very long time.
After watching that for a moment, Puriel turned a bit to look at me, his voice dry. “I suppose at this point I should only be surprised that you yourself weren’t also one of Camelot’s best and brightest. Unless…” He trailed off, giving me a pointed squint as he reevaluated the thought.
“Not me,” I replied, “but I can’t speak for my other self. Okay, just to keep things straight, I’m going to call him Jacob instead of ‘my other self.’ I can’t speak for what Jacob got up to. For all I know, he could be like ten more important figures from history. It’s not like he’s shown up here to talk to us yet.” And I still wasn’t sure why that was. Did that version of myself, that-- did Jacob not want to talk to me after all that time? What was he busy with right now, after kicking all the Crossroads people out of his Archive? An Archive that had been their school for centuries. Was he still working on cleaning the place up and securing it properly or something? I had no idea.
Miranda moved over to me, one arm going around my waist. I didn’t even have to say anything. She was just there, giving me that side-hug while insisting, “As soon as he can, he’ll be right where you are to have a talk about… everything. He’s part of you, and you wouldn’t leave you completely in the dark forever. You wouldn’t even leave you in the dark this long unless there was a good reason. Maybe he knows you’re busy with all this stuff and doesn’t want to distract you. Maybe he has his own really important, time-sensitive thing going on. Whatever it is, you know he’ll show up and talk to you as soon as he can. He’s been waiting a lot longer for that.”
“What she said,” Dad agreed, reaching out to ruffle my hair. “And when he does show up, he and I are gonna have a nice long talk.” He held that with a serious look for a moment before ending with, “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to have a son to talk about guy stuff.”
A snort-laugh escaped me, and I gave him a light (very light) punch for the teasing. “Okay, I get it. I’ll stop obsessing over that and focus on what’s important right now. Which is saving Gaia.”
Aylen jumped on that, finally separating from the huddled whisper conversation she’d been having with Percival and Gwen. “Yes, that’s the most important thing at the moment. We need to get Gaia out of that prison. She’s been there for… for too long already. She’s counting on us.”
“I would like that too,” Sophronia agreed. “For all that I owe that woman, it is a crime that she’s been trapped for so long. But as we said, none of us can go to the prison to aid you in that. Nor can we even tell you where to find it. Not without an agreement from our counterparts, and that seems fairly unlikely.”
“We don’t need an agreement,” Aylen informed them. “We have a spell.” Avalon had already told me about that back during the Phoenix rift, but Aylen brought everyone else up to speed. She told them about the magic that she and Avalon had been given by the mysterious figure who went by The Wandering Woman. A spell that was supposed to show us exactly where Gaia was. All we needed to make it work was blood from three different people. First was a full Reaper, which might’ve sounded like a tall order, but they’d already handled that thanks to one named Jones.
Anyway, they had the Reaper blood, which meant they just needed some from Gaia’s heir, a part that could be filled by Dare, and from a descendant of Chadwick. As soon as he heard that part, Puriel grimaced. “That may prove--”
“Done,” I interrupted, shrugging when he and the others looked at me. “What? I’ve got a descendant of Chadwick. She’s probably back at my secret Necromancy school. And if she’s not, they’ll know where she is. I hope.”
Percy cheerfully agreed, “Yes, and we can visit Laein too. Before she decides she needs to lead the army of Necromancers on a rescue mission because you’ve taken too long to get there.”
My head bobbed. “Right, right, so we visit the school to check in and grab Marian, then meet up with Dare and Avalon, since she has the Reaper blood. Then we use that and save Gaia.”
“I’ll contact Virginia,” Abigail put in. “She’s been off the grid for a little bit, but I’m sure she knows what’s going on by now.”
“I-- um, I’ll bring Avalon?” Aylen half-said and half-asked, looking at me.
A slight smile came as I touched her arm. “Yeah, you bring Avalon.” Aylen was the one who had gone much longer without seeing the other girl. She deserved this. As far as my memories were concerned, I had just been with Avalon in a couple different time periods. Which wasn’t to say I didn’t miss her and Shiori so much it ached, but still. Aylen had it worse.
So, we separated from there, with plans to meet up as soon as we had what (and who) we needed. Aylen, Abigail, Wyatt, and Gwen would go get Avalon and contact Dare. Meanwhile, I was taking Percy, my dad, Tabbris, Miranda, Puriel, Spark, and the four Committee members to the Roundabout. The latter were going to be key to getting this spell off quickly, as soon as we had all the ingredients. They might not have been able to actually tell us where the prison was, but they could at least chip in by supercharging the thing. With their help, we’d have the spell ready in minutes instead of hours or days. And right now, every second counted.
And hey, maybe during one of those seconds, Jacob would show up and actually explain just what the hell he was up to.
Joke Tags: Damn It? Jacob? Your Little Sister Is Feeling Neglected. Get Back Here And Explain Some Things!
