SANITY LINE
It was unwise in the extreme for a flag officer, let alone the highest ranking officer in three branches of service, to pe present on the field of battle anywhere near the time of that battle's commencement. It was precisely this sort of ignorance of convention that had so endeared Lord Field Marshal Coultier to the men and women under his command. He stood like a figure from legend, uniformed for parade, but armed for combat – sidearm and sword at his hip, a rifle slung haphazardly over his shoulder with the cavalier casualness of someone familiar with its use.
Here he stood, ready to personally take charge of over half the Self Defense Forces, who had mustered on the shores of the new Blasted Bay in what had once been the small market town of Fen Ridge, enjoying the benefits of an elevated position. He had the latest in armour, artillery, air and naval forces at his disposal. Steel, clean lines, sharp engineering. Poised.
He considered his options for a long, pregnant moment, removed the cigarette from his mouth, and picked up the reciever of his radio set. He was reminded of the Ephors of Sparta when they had been faced by the Macedonians, uttering the famous, laconic reply. Men of the blade were not great orators. “Go” was the only command that was needed.
He flicked the ash from his cigarette, returned it to his mouth, and watched his plans unfold.
Far distant, standing on the bridge of the flagship of the Golden Fleet, his counterpart waited for him. Truth needed no badge of office or rank to hide behind. His presence in this room was enough, his quiet stillness in the midst of the otherwise controlled chaos of shipboard operations. The boroque superstructures of his vessel called to mind an undeserved anitiquity of construction that belied the potency of their defenses and guns.
Behind the pallid mask, garbed in the mantle of the Yellow Sign, he might have been a mannequin.
“Ambassador, the Zaxtonian forces are opening fire.”
Truth turned his gaze only slightly toward the officer who had spoken. His presence was enough.
---
For Valkoinen's part, the surreality of quiet moments with Team Kether never fell flat. Seeing her little brood of reformed monstrocities keeping themselves respectable, behaving all professional-like, seated comfortably at work terminals while paging through whatever plans they were individually hatching filled her with equal parts pride and unease. It was the team's greatest strentgh that they were all so very different from one another. None of their proposals for tackling this latest problem would be similar to another. All would be useful in their incompletion. All she would have to do is stitch the many plans together and come up with a coherent plan of attack.
For Vidcund, this planning meant looking for the most credible threat. He spooled through volume after digitized volume of battlefield records, crime scene photographs, civilian twitter feeds. Anything from the earliest hours of Figaro on forward. Somewhere in this mess, there was a coherent clue, a recognizable kingpin. Cut off the head and the body would -
A keystroke paused the feed. Two more went back two slides. Vidcund's opalescant eyes danced over the screen, looking for the thumbnail that had tickled whatever sense it was a person had when they were good at their job and something was amiss.
When he found it, what followed was involuntary. “It's her!”
Standing, his chair thrown obnoxiously backward, he pointed at the monitor, shouting as aggressively as he could manage at Valkoinen. “She's alive and you didn't fucking tell me!?”
---
When your senses are as sensitive as a slaugh's, a sense of stillness in the wilderness was cause for notice. Not alarm, not even necessarily concern, but it was an unusual condition and worth thinking upon. When it had happened in the clearing, it was cause enough to bring her unit of scouts to a halt. Her and her fellow slaugh waited in the underbrush for an hour for something. The return of the cicadas and crickets. Birdsong. A snake rolling over in the grass.
When no further sign of life than a stiff breeze had showed itself, she picked herself up, repeating her handsign for the party's stillness. She was a shadow in broad daylight, moving quickly to the large pine that stood crooked just off the centre. She scaled it at a leap, and from its gently-swaying top, she found what had seemed so unusual.
The earth in the middle of the clearing had slid inward, collapsing, like sand in the pit of the antlion. And whatever had caused this, she was certain, was the cause of her unusual stillness.
“Weh-heh-hell now...” she said to herself, loud enough for her team to hear. “... Looks like we have some digging to do.”
---
Profiling ability was one of the prerequisites for the Grey Exams, as the qualifying tests for promotion beyond Special Agent were known. It had never been Vidcund's strong point, and as a result, he had made a hobby of the practice of it. It was a casual thing, the kind of distraction he imagined social media consumption passed for among the Masses. Nothing aggressive, nothing consuming, just a casual habit as pervasive as checking your phone when it buzzes.
Naturally, he had noticed that not once, in their entire time here, and with plenty of opportunity, had a drop of liquor ever ended up anywhere near Aaron Cluny's hand, let alone his mouth. It was a curiousity – even the Agent drank – and had a few possible interesting interpretations. Alchoholic? Purist? The cushion in the corner made its own suggestions, tempered by the minimalist tastes the man showed in the face of Infernal avarice.
Here he was, thinking the pattern was broken, but no; that was a tumbler of ice water, in Aaron's hand, as the young man leaned in the window-frame, staring down on the Infernal City.
“I hate to say it, Mister Cluny, but I'm starting to enjoy our little talks.”
Aaron smiled, slightly, considering the glass before he drank from it. “... It's high time I told you about the third project.”
---
Rainwright was a man with many fingers in many pies, and when dealing with Affairs of House you had to be distinct, so let us for the moment consider the business of organized crime. There were two syndicates that reported directly to the Household, ignorant of one another. Walter and Rainwright were the only ones that had a full picture.
Of the two gangs, Walter preferred the crew who were doing the work of the evening. They were smugglers, for the most part, thieves and fences and the whole deal. If they were involved in the drug trade, it was only on the wholesale side. They kept their hands clean, themselves off the radar, and were for the most part, reliable and punctual.
He was supervising them as best he could while completing his own preparations for the move, moving among document cases, feeling for their locks with one hand, for the raised patterns of textured ink that marked his less traditional security methods.
There was a metalic clash, and a hiss from the specimen within the cage, that caused Walter to wheel around immediately. “Please be very careful with those.”
There was a pause, and then the work began again. Walter considered that for a long moment, adjusting his jaw, listening to the time as it repeated from his pocket watch with the click of a button. “Gentlemen, fifteen minutes to our deadline. Let's move with some urgency, shall we?”
---
The cliff had been a disappointment enough. To Greta, a Dean lowborn through and through, uphill was as good as downhill in the wilds, and with no decent visual cue for her altitude, she had expected to come out on the shores of the Blasted Bay, not on a craggy, fresh-hewn cliff overlooking the equally alien bay.
Sober and in daylight for the first time, feet planted firmly in the material impericism of the Waking World, the true scale of the devestation the Kraterburg Eruption had caused was now clear for her mind to process.. The Dreamlands had a funny way of exaggerating such topography, and the complete lack of correlation-of-position between the two had allowed Greta a certain, deliberate, convenient denial. There was water as far as she could see, when here should have been the rolling foothills of the Northern Guardians and a smattering of quasi-suburban communities on the forested outer fringe of the City in the Crater.
She paused, her breath catching in her throat. Behind her, her stoic guardian shifted his position, moving past her and up onto a slightly higher promentory that stretched out from the ledge and allowed him a better view of the sea.
She was the first to spot the sails near the horizon, a line of ships curving inward, making, no doubt, for the relatively deep-looking cove nearer a shallower slope of the bayshore. She sighed, deeply. “They're here, too. It's over.”
Her guardian loomed over her, extending a steel-shod hand. “Never over til it's over, kid.”
---
Scion and Prince exchanged glances, sidelong and obscured by the masks they wore. For the junior angel, at least, there was a severe disconnect from reality, a sense of disreality as strong as the scene at the Kraterburg bank. Yet, the presence of his mask, of James, and of the sense of having previously been engaged into some other function pushed from memory as though aborted by a higher power – these were sensations of concrete reality. As concrete, anyway, as reality could be these days, these days so strange that even his insistance on the New Normal could satisfy his mental urge to retract. Sometimes he swore he could see the cardboard cutouts in the windows, the gaps between buildings where life's extras quickly darted behind set-piece shop fronts to re-enter the scene and walk half-anonymously through again.
He did not have long to contemplate what had set off this particular episode of his special little quirk before the man at the head of the table stirred, sipping gently from a glass of wine he must have brought with him. That's what it was, Niles realized. That sharp, dark smell, it must have been the wine. The sight of someone from the corner of his eye, uncorking the vessel that had once contained it, must have been what jarred his sense, already taxed to the limit by being masked in public.
“You aren't dreaming, Mister Clayton. I'm glad I caught up with you two.”
---
Strange is the night that black stars rise.
The crumbling facade had barely settled, and the collapse-crushed automobiles were barely silenced, when the great cheer went up from the surround. The terraced city teemed with the masquerading denizens of Carcosa, Hali, and Hastur, who sent up the familiar refrain in celebratory solemnity. The strange winds stirred, bringing a fresh flurry of brandy-ash snow from the off-colour canopy, which mingled with the shredded confeti and petals and whatever other detritus they feted the victorious champion with.
Truth stretched his arms out to the sides in rare celebratory flare, stirring the crowd to a greater vigor, and he saw from their terraced point the watching Queen and Duke. Even from this vast distance, Truth could sense the Duke was troubled. Something conflicted him. No doubt, the fighting on the preipherary was reaching a pitch where it required the Duke's attentions.
Truth took his first step toward joining the Duke for his inevitable sortee, when a scratching amongts the ground called his attention back toward him. He turned, and a section near the top of the rubble was thrown clear – with force and accuracy enough that the Phantom had to sidestep it. Smaller rubble, of dust and pebbled-concrete, fell around Archangel as he regained his full footing.
​
Song of my soul, my voice is dead.
Archangel moved with speed that betrayed the lightness of his demi-corporeal form. He was a sable blur, a corvine impression of presence that was simply now just behind Truth. His movement was marred by a clash of steel, as the Phantom, just, deflected the blow of the man's scythe with his own sword.
Archangel's posture solidifed, and he interjected into the silence that now oppressed the impromptu arena. “Shall I not punish these people?”
The two turned to face each other, with Archangel slowly seizing and discarding his mask, revealing the wax-skinned, sunken-eyed corpse he wielded for his body. “On a nation such as this, shall I not avenge myself?”
The twin suns sink beneath the lake, the shadows lengthen in Carcosa.
​