Fury Convergence

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  “This is bad,” said Jennifer, holding the Horn. She dismounted and her horse dropped its head to nuzzle the dogs around AT. “Hello, Branwyn. I’d love to know what you’ve been doing here. We may have to make sure you can never do it again.”

  “I just got here today,” said Branwyn, with an artificial calm. Severin was circling the rose house again, and the ghost Imani hovered high above Shatiel. The air tingled with tension. “I think you’re better off talking to the angel here.”

  Jennifer refocused on Shatiel, whom she’d apparently simply overlooked to accost Branwyn. “Oh. Not just a tourist, then. Who are you?”

  “I know who he is,” said Cat, who was himself the remnant of an angel. “We were all wondering how a haunt this powerful manifested so quickly. But it was you, wasn’t it, Shatiel?”

  “Yes. I hid her for a while,” said Shatiel.

  “That’s not okay,” said Jennifer. Her calm was otherworldly. “Do you have any idea what’s happening here?”

  “I do,” said Shatiel. “Which is why it has to end. One way or another.”

  “Jen, this is a mess,” said Yejun, the younger of the two men, who was staring up at Imani and the brightness behind her.

  “Yes. Well, Shatiel, we’ll have to deal with you after we deal with this. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Jennifer,” said Shatiel quietly, and some of the shine vanished off Jennifer’s superreality. She blinked and sudden tension hunched her shoulders.

  “Shatiel, don’t make this harder than it has to be,” said Cat. “You are who you are, but we’re a lot more than that.”

  “Cat,” said Shatiel, even more softly, and the blond man lost a portion of his shine. “This is not yet a fight. All I want you to do is… wait a little.”

  With an edge to her voice, Jennifer said, “I don’t think we can. I think we need to destroy this now.”

  Severin’s low voice said, “Bad idea,” but nobody but Branwyn seemed to hear it because the three younger members of the Wild Hunt burst out with their own protests.

  Yejun said, “Whoa….”

  “We can’t—” said AT

  “We have to at least try, Jen,” said Brynn. Then she added, “Branwyn and Rhianna are here. We can probably do something.” Her faith would have been touching if it wasn’t so frightening.

  “People,” said Amber, who had also been watching Imani. “This ghost is furious. I don’t know if waiting is a good idea.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” pointed out AT. “Who can she hurt? Not us. Not the angel.”

  “Well, those two are still mortal,” said Amber, pointing at Rhianna and Branwyn without looking at them. “And there’s all those other souls she’s keeping locked in torment.”

  Jennifer pressed her forehead to the Horn. “Let me see how bad it is…” The horses shifted around and most of the rest of the Hunt dismounted. Only Amber remained on her horse, staring up at the ghost above them.

  Then Jennifer’s eyes snapped open. “What the hell have you done? This isn’t a haunt, it’s… an abomination. This will eat through the world if we don’t deal with it.”

  Shatiel said, “Yes,” and then added as an afterthought, “I’m sorry, I thought you already knew that.”

  Through gritted teeth, Jennifer said, “I know it now far better than you do, asshole.”

  With a little shrug, Shatiel said, “Possibly true. Nonetheless, I wish for you to release rather than destroy this soul.”

  “You are insane,” said Jennifer. “Kids, I don’t know how it happened, but this abomination has more power than some gods, and it’s right on the edge of going critical in a way we’d all regret. I know you want to save her, but that almost never works and we do not have the time to argue about it.

  “Make time.” Suddenly Severin was right in front of the Wild Hunt, rippling with darkness. Judging from their group recoil, they hadn’t realized he was there. “Or you’ll have a brand new problem on your hands.”

  Imani started singing, and the distant beauty of the song was completely untouched by lyrics of blood and rage. It made Branwyn’s skin crawl.

  “Yeah, that’s no good,” said Yejun, after a quick glance up.

  “Good doesn’t enter into it, kid. There’s just smart, and stupid.” Severin’s eyes were wide and his pupils pinpoints.

  Jennifer said, “Yes, this is stupid. You can’t stop us. I’m making this happen.” Her superreality flickered and returned, stronger than before. The dogs milling around AT looked up, fixing their gaze on the ghost above Shatiel.

  AT whimpered and Yejun took her hand. “We always knew we couldn’t save all of them.”

  Brynn said, “We hardly save any of them.”

  “Stupid, stupid,” muttered Severin. When he reached out to grab Jennifer, his hand passed right through her, as if he was a shadow himself. His face twisted with frustration and rage.

  The dogs surged into the air in a sudden convulsive leap. Gale, who had been no more than crouching scenery near Shatiel, looked up. “No, no, no… no, no!”

  Lightning flared around Imani and her song became a thunderous chant. Suddenly she wasn’t faded and distant anymore, but a blossom of fire in the sky. The dogs barked, sprang and fell away, cringing from the flames. The living shadows of the ruined houses sprang into sharp relief and then yawned open, reaching for the Wild Hunt.

  A golden glow sprang up around them in response. Amber’s horse reared and Cat said, “She is strong. And growing fast.”

  “We’re stronger,” said Jen grimly, and blew the Horn. A bright, intense sound emerged, higher than the sonorous notes that had brought them into the nightmare. The shadow edges shivered and started to dissolve. Imani’s song stuttered.

  Severin’s eyes emptied, becoming flat and shark-like. He looked up at the ghost and raised a hand. “Imani,” he said, and the sound of his voice caused Branwyn’s nails to bite into her palms.

  “Ah, and there he goes,” said Shatiel, quietly conversational. “Rhianna, Branwyn, you must absolutely stay close.”

  The black vortex around Severin’s feet climbed up his body and followed his outstretched arm. Gale, moaning nearby, switched to shouting, “Yes! Yes! Do it!”

  Imani reached down a flickering hand.

  AT shuddered. “He’s helping her grow faster!”

  “Uh,” said Yejun. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to let him do that.”

  Amber and her horse lunged forward, trailing golden sparks. She swept her hand down on Severin like it was a hammer, but all it took was a single step to avoid her.

  “It doesn’t matter anyhow,” he said flatly. “You aren’t built to stop me.” A distortion wavered between him and Imani, and the brightness around Imani flared painfully.

  Lightning crackled all around them. Branwyn saw the look of horror on Jennifer’s face and her baby sister Brynn clinging to AT. Rhianna was holding onto Branwyn’s back, giggling hysterically. Severin reached out to the ghost like a hellscape version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

  Somebody’s description of Severin came back to Branwyn: “He wants to destroy everything. That’s just his nature.” A hated voice, a distrusted speaker, but at that moment, Branwyn was sure he’d been telling the truth. The ghost would burn a hole in the world and Severin was helping her.

  “They aren’t built to stop you, are they?” said Shatiel. He held out his hand and the wind at his back swirled in. The ghostly inferno above dimmed once again. “But I am.” He said something. A name. It vanished from Branwyn’s mind as soon as she heard it, but she knew it had been a name. Then Shatiel’s outstretched fist closed.

  Severin sagged, staggered, and collapsed to his knees like a puppet with its strings cut. His darkness and his aura vanished completely as his eyes closed. His head drooped. Branwyn wasn’t even sure if he was breathing. He was like a machine that had simply been switched off.

  Branwyn stared at Severin’s body in blank shock until Rhianna smacked her on the back and sh
e remembered to breathe herself. Then horror overtook the shock, as she understood, on an extremely visceral level, what made Shatiel so dangerous to celestials.

  “Now,” said Shatiel in his bronze voice. “I cannot take what makes the Wild Hunt the Hunt, but I can take what makes you each individuals. Please stop attacking my charge for a moment, or I will do so.”

  “The abomination is still growing,” hissed Jennifer.

  “Yes,” agreed Shatiel. “But perhaps there’s something we can do about that. Miss Branwyn Lennox, would you mind looking? You have a unique insight.”

  While Branwyn tried to pull her gaze away from Severin’s slack face, Jennifer said, “I already looked. She can’t see nearly as deeply as we can. Not here.”

  Rhianna, who finally had her giggles under control, squeezed Branwyn’s hand. Branwyn dragged in a breath and tried to push past her own distress at Severin’s collapse.

  She just… he’d been right there and now he wasn’t. It wasn’t like when Simon had killed Severin’s previous vessel. There’d been a clear cause and effect there: knife, throat, poof. But all Shatiel had done was close his hand, and Branwyn had no idea whether it was permanent.

  She shouldn’t care if it was or wasn’t. He’d been trying to help Imani hurt the world. She shouldn’t care… but she did. They’d been working together.

  That had to be it. It was just the phenomenon known as misattribution of arousal. People in tense, frightening situations together felt closer, but it was a trickery of increased heart rate and adrenalin. It made haunted houses popular for dates.

  This was one hell of a haunted house. And she’d been caught in the middle of high-powered supernatural spats before. She ought to be used to this by now.

  She wasn’t, though.

  “Can’t she? Let’s find out. When you’re ready, Branwyn.”

  She stretched her neck, letting herself be calm. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  Shatiel gave her a friendly smile, still holding his fist in front of him. “Due to her own native gifts, the context of her death, and the power of her lover, Imani has become something other than an ordinary ghost. The structure of the world cannot bear the weight of what she is growing into. The Wild Hunt would solve this by destroying her. I think that’s an unnecessary tragedy. But it’s true she is a clear and present threat to a world we are all—almost all—of us bound to protect. It’s my theory you can grant us an extension. Build us a cage, Branwyn. Or reinforce the world. Whichever you choose.”

  “Or we just end it now,” said Jennifer. “What you’re suggesting can’t be done here.” She glanced quickly at AT and Brynn, still hanging onto each other, and added, “Maybe another time, with an ordinary corrupted ghost rather than an abomination….”

  “No, I think we’ll try it here and now,” said Shatiel. “Or, if you prefer, I’ll release my little brother and let him get on with his business. You could have a race to see if he can pour his strength into her faster than you can devour it.” His mouth curved in the same mocking smile he’d given Severin before. “Fair warning, though. My brother was an angel of growth once upon a time.”

  Cat sighed and spread his fingers. “Shatiel, don’t try to coerce the Wild Hunt.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?” Shatiel looked amused.

  Amber leaned down from her horse, annoyed. “You don’t rule us, angel.”

  “Of course not,” Shatiel agreed. “I rule other things.” He glanced down at his fist.

  Branwyn glanced at the inert vessel of the erstwhile angel of growth and sighed. She was already tired of the bickering and posturing. “Look, you kids argue it out while I see if I can do anything. If you do decide to shatter the world, give me a shake so I can see the fireworks.” She knelt down and drove her fingers into the ashen earth. Then she activated the Sight she’d resisted using thus far.

  She wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that things mostly looked the same. The ghost’s nightmare had torn a hole through most of the layers of the world. Here, the Backworld and the normal world had merged into one, and the Geometry underlying it all had warped it into frayed and knotted strands.

  She still heard the argument going on over her head: sound without meaning, but still too much distraction. She pushed herself into the Geometry as she’d only previously done with Titanone. Titanone was so big it was all but required for deep work on the skyscraper, but despite its size, it was a bounded, cohesive entity. Unexpectedly, she found this place was too.

  Part of the cohesion arose from the nightmarish haunt, and part of it echoed from the fire that had destroyed the town, but there was… something else too, something much older. It was nothing she’d seen before, so all she could do was take note of it.

  Branwyn recalled Rhianna pointing out the isolation of the town. Touching the thin lines that bound Tucker to the world beyond, she wondered if it had been easier than expected to downplay the death of the town. It would, she decided, be so very nice to sit down Rhianna’s Advisor and pry answers out of him.

  The Geometry shivered around her as the powerful entities arguing in Tucker spread their powers. It ruined her brief fantasy of extorting answers from Umbriel, and she sighed and turned her attention back to the nightmare itself.

  The self-containment of the town made it easier to see the whole thing from her otherwise limited perspective. The nightmare world was rooted in the earth, and in the human-built structures whose patterns lingered even after the original buildings had burned down. They formed the horrible shadows. But they were all tied to a crimson fire at the core, and somehow the crimson fire was hurting the world.

  She brushed over the knots on the strands that ran through the town. They could become nodes of sentience if she wanted, but she shuddered away from that. Waking this place would bring something fundamentally broken to life, and to pain.

  She thought about that for a moment, and realized it wouldn’t even be a very long life, because the world truly would break rather than contain it. The Wild Hunt hadn’t been exaggerating. She wondered if that breaking point was what Shatiel had been observing, in his mysterious illicit project.

  Branwyn traced more significant strands, finding where Gale had woven himself into the pattern. She saw he was more than he seemed. But he’d put so much of himself into his lover’s haunting that he was barely a fragmentary person now. She saw other elements, too: hints at stories she didn’t have a key to interpreting, and materials she’d never shaped. Sometimes she was so proud of her skill as an artificer, at being The Artificer, but as soon as she stepped outside her studio, she found more she didn’t understand than did.

  Build a cage, Shatiel had said. But that couldn’t be her first choice, or her second choice, or possibly any choice except her last one, her last action. Or reinforce the world. Your choice. Branwyn didn’t know how to do that, either. She wasn’t a wizard; she wasn’t a celestial. She was an Artificer; she worked on bounded objects, and ‘the world’ was far, far too big for her.

  She studied the knots and frayed parts of the pattern again, then tried to reach into the closest knot. In her normal work, she pinched Geometrical intersections into nodes, but as part of that, she could also smooth unfinished nodes away again. What were these knots but unfinished nodes? And if she smoothed them away, the fraying parts of the pattern ought to stabilize, at least for a while.

  But while she could perceive the nearest knot, she couldn’t touch it. Titanone’s existing nodes and self-awareness made the whole bounded structure more accessible. Here, if she wanted to touch the natal nodes, she’d have to walk to them.

  “Shut up,” she said out loud. “Haven’t you argued enough? I think I can slow down what you’re afraid of, but I need some kind of transport so I can get around this town while working.”

  A chorus of voices demanded to know what she was going to do: Yejun, Cat and Jennifer, she guessed. The knots in the pattern swelled. “How about I explain after I’m done?”

  “I
’d like that,” said Shatiel. “Arrange transportation, Wild Hunt. I will stay here and contain my brother and the ghost for a while longer. But the sooner Branwyn does her work, the better.”

  Amber said, aghast, “You mean he might get up again?” and then, “Uh, why are you smiling like that?”

  “Come on!” Branwyn snapped. Then something big and warm knocked into her back.

  “Oh!” said Brynn, and Rhianna said, “You get to ride the pretty pony, Bran.”

  Branwyn blinked, completely losing her perception of the town’s Geometric pattern. Her sister’s horse stood beside her, and another horse was pushing her from behind. Over her head, Amber was looking with real concern between Severin and Shatiel, while Shatiel gave her a smile that was disturbingly similar to Severin’s. Above, AT’s dogs prowled around and around the faded form of the ghost.

  “Here, I’ll help you mount,” said Brynn briskly, making a step with her hand. Branwyn, a little dazed from the perceptual switch, put her hand on her little sister’s head. Rhianna was shorter than her too, but Rhianna was very definitely grown. Brynn was still going through puberty. She was tiny.

  “You put your foot here, not your hand there, Bran,” said Brynn with exasperation. “Please help us save this ghost. It’s important to us.”

  When Branwyn did put her foot into her sister’s clasped fingers, her sister boosted her with an unsurprising but depressing strength straight up into the horse’s saddle. The horse shifted to make sure she didn’t fall as she caught her balance and slung her legs into the right position.

  “Yejun, Cat, go with her,” said Jennifer.

  “AT, Yejun, go with her,” said Cat, and Jennifer threw him a frustrated look.

  “That’s fine,” said AT, and she and Yejun remounted.

  Brynn said, “Hey, what about me? I was going to go.”

  “You’re staying here in case something goes wrong,” said Jennifer. “You’re the Master of Horses, and you’re a distraction to Branwyn.”

  Branwyn had nothing to add to this, so she nodded at Yejun and AT. All three horses moved away from the rose house into the town, and Branwyn concentrated on making sure she wouldn’t fall off. She patted the horse’s neck. “Sorry I’m not a better rider…”