Episode 3: It's All Over But The...

 

Episode Three: It's All Over But The...

Let's try something a little different this time, huh? V is getting on my nerves with the questions. So let's just pow-wow, as it were. A sort of State of the... oh, I don't know. I thought I'd come up with something by the time I had to spit it out.

Let's talk. Just me to you for a little while.

The next week— You don't want me to go into detail about how the next week was spent.

Look, I can't know how old you are or at what stage you are in your life, but there will come a point in your life, if there hasn't already – there comes a point in everyone's life, it seems like – where you will spend some amount of time in very close proximity with a person whom you are intensely attracted to. Now, whether your circumstances are like mine – or like any found in any Ian Fleming novel – or not will depend on how you live your life. That is to say, you don't necessarily have to have potentially life or death decisions ahead of and behind you to make the choice that I made – and which Peitho made, for that matter.

I should have given no illusions that this was a “family-friendly” show by now. And yet I am still squeamish. Because it just is impolite to kiss and tell? Or do I dread slash fiction?

The long and short of it is this:

Over the course of the next seven days – the amount of time it will indeed take us to catch up to Pepin – we do next to no talking. In fact, for days, we do none at all. And happily so. We had better things to do with our mouths – and hands and otherwise – Ted forgive us. And when we weren't in the cart – let's just say that Peitho wasn't sleeping outside anymore, and I didn't need to get up and exercise in the morning to keep my heart working at a fat-burning rate.

So what can we talk about?

I don't really want to do a recap. Not really. But that feels like that's about where we are, doesn't it? Like if I were good at this I would contrive a reason for Peitho and I to discuss what, exactly, we are up against. But that isn't what happened.

So, maybe, rather than trying to detail the next five or six days or whatever it is before something narratively interesting happens, let's look at the story from a different perspective. This would be the QnA episode, V is telling me, if we were already in production. But I'm not out of ideas, not exactly. I just want to make sure we're all up to speed before things really start to get going. Or maybe I just want to get to what's next and V says I have to say something about these days. So let's do a week in one episode, whaddya say?

Don't worry, two things do happen, one night, right before things get wrapped up.

When I think of the me I was and maybe what I could have done differently— I think of Pavia. Of how I proved to Peitho that I'd seen Metus in my dreams: The innkeeper. And not asking him about the girl's bow. Not really. Did she have a red bow in her hair? I didn't actually know. I don't actually know. Or did she just have something unique?

Because he could have been talking about how her eyelids were cut out of her face.

That's what I would think Rob-I meant if I were him. And Peitho definitely didn't know about that.

I know it. I think about it often, while she is sleeping at my side in the inn or in the carriage. In other words, when my mind isn't otherwise occupied by the with-each-day increasingly welcome distraction of her body.

What else was I thinking about?

I did a lot of looking out the window. A lot of counting my breaths – counts of two or four or six or eight heartbeats in, then out, then in, then out. A lot more imagining there were a little man on the windowsill, running to keep up with us, the background passing by us his vertical plane – and jumping him over obstacles with my eyes. Basically, a lot of anything but thinking – the kinds of things you learn as a child to pass interminable hours in a carriage or cart listening to an old man babble about meaningless gobbledeegook for years on end.

Mostly so I wouldn't think about Metus and that purple lightning.

And Peitho's mocking, Now do you believe me magick is real? Or whatever the hell she said.

And trying not to answer the question of what, exactly, I plan to do when we find Pepin.

Maybe if I don't think about it, it'll never happen. Peitho and I will go looking for them, and we will never find them. Instead to wander the countryside for years, looking for the Rod's thief and making love everywhere we please.

And maybe she gets pregnant.

Not a thought I wanted to have.

And so it was that we made it to the night of our sixth day on the road from Pavia. One day away, and we both know it. We both know it because I've been counting down the days the whole time.

Our coital act is, this night, apparently, not enough to send Peitho immediately to sleep on my chest. Instead, she traces her fingers across my abdomen and shoulders, breathing dreamily.

I am staring at the ceiling – that familiar emptiness waiting for her to fall away before it fully expresses itself.

“Why did you abandon the Archi?” Peitho asks. Her voice is slow, almost hesitant – almost like she is worried to apply too much pressure to the location of a wound old or new or fresh.

I roll my eyes to look down at her. She's staring, eyes as big and as innocent as any father's daughter, up at me. And I don't like the comparison any more than you might not. Sighing, I look back to the ceiling. That's whom I answer, too.

“Do you really want to talk about this?”

“I do. I want to understand. You had everything ahead of you. You were the protege of the Archi of the Scholeio Demiourgoi. You were next in line to being quite literally the most powerful person in the world. Your word would directly shape the lives of millions.”

I quirk an ironic eyebrow.

“They wanted to cloister me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that that last day—“

“Listen to me, son.” The Master catches me by the arm.

I was walking toward the chamber where I'm to meet the Ogdoad – the men and women whom I am to lead, after today. I stop, look up at him. I've never heard the Master's voice like this. Normally he is almost blustery, an old man, impatient with the trivialities of my youth. But now he's as serious as were he delivering a funeral. My funeral?

Our funeral, I will think, seven years later.

“Yes, Master?” I smile up at him. Stupid. Trusting. Open. A boy's smile.

The Master, in the first and only thing anything remotely like a display of affection which he had ever shown me, takes my other arm in his hand so that he is holding me just above both elbows. His eyes are wet with emotion.

What the hell is going on? And where is al'Shamshir? Isn't he going to tell me—

“You are special – my son.” I am stunned to hear this out of his mouth. Son? He had never so much as called me by my name since I had known him! “More than special. Destined to do great and wonderful things. No matter what they say, no matter what they decide for you, know that I am proud of you. Son. I will always be proud of you.”

I shut my eyes hard against the tears. They burn, acidic and hateful, all the way down my cheeks, pooling in my ear on the left side.

“Rob?” Peitho asks. Then, concerned, she shoots onto her elbow so that she can look down at me. “Oh, Awen. What is it?”

That might be the only reason I open my eyes. Hearing my name on her lips. It softens parts of me I thought I had turned to stone – to iron.

“I didn't abandon him,” I spit with a quavering voice that wants to crack with a sob. “He abandoned me!”

Peitho's face freezes for a moment, blanks. I can almost see it running back through the court logs of her conversations with him. How many had they had? What had he told her? And then she looks concerned. Conflicted.

“What happened that day in Constantinople?”

I adjust myself so that I am sitting more upright, my neck and shoulders against the wall at the head of our pathetic straw “bed”. ...So that the tears won't flood my ear canal.

“It's really not a good story. I went to meet the Ogdoad – the secret leadership of the Scholeio – those eight who actually make the decisions for the world. And they rejected me.”

“Rejected you?” Peitho's face and all the workings of her speech seem unable to comprehend the truth of this statement. “Why would they do that?”

“They said I wasn't ready. That I'm not good enough.” I cast her a dagger glance. “That I needed another seven years. Maybe another seventy before I was ready.”

Peitho doesn't say anything – not immediately. Instead she throws herself so that she is mimicking my position, only with spine straight.

“Do you think they were wrong?”

I can almost feel her looking down at me, so I meet her eyes. There is no judgment there, though I know she is thinking that they were not.

“No,” I admit. “Not anymore, I don't.”

“And did you then?”

“Did I then?” I give the question the consideration it deserves, scratching my beard the while. “I don't know. I want to say that I did. That I was that brash and arrogant in my youth. But did I actually think they were wrong about me? No. No, I did not. I think that's why I left then, huh?” I sigh, and I can feel it deflate my body, as though the only thing that were keeping me three-dimensional was the very breath within my lungs, that pneuma of life.

“I have hated them for so long. Him especially.”

“The Archi?”

“The Master, yeah. I thought he set me up to fail. I thought he— But he didn't, did he? Gods, but I was a shitty student. 'Take to your lessons, Child!' I boom in an unkind impression of the old man.

Peitho kind of chuckles. “That isn't really what he sounds like.”

“Yeah, well. You do it better, then. It's hardly the point. I really am that inadequate to this all – aren't I?”

I appreciate her silence. I don't want to see if the answer is in her eyes.

“What are we going to do, hm? Tomorrow is the Big Day. We'll either find the armies or we'll find what's left of them.” She says, when the silence grows into a wide enough gulf that we fall into it for the night. Maybe forever – at least vis-a-vis this topic.

“What do you mean, what's left of them?”

“What do you think? What do armies do to one another, Robert?”

I meet her eye. Peitho kind of squints at me.

“Robert when you're upset with me, Awen when you want me to do something. You really are like a wife already.”

She frowns. Then her eyes find my jacket, slung across a nearby chair.

“What do you write in that journal?”

“My dreams. I thought we—“

“Yes. I know. Your dreams and your Visions. That is not what I wanted.

“You wanted me to show it to you.”

She nods. “May I...?”

“No. You may not.”

Gods, I want a Draig.

“Why not? Don't you think it could help?” Peitho is petulant, and I'm refusing to meet her eyes.

“I don't know how.”

“Well, you can't know until you try, can you?”

“Don't start that shit with me,” I say, sliding myself down in the bed like I mean to try to sleep. I don't. “Why don't you just go to sleep?”

“Why? Trying to get rid of me?”

Peitho leans over me, so that her eyes are all that I can see....

And the next thing I know, I'm engulfed in a dimensionless blackness.

The Void.

S – What the Hell am I doing here?

My voice echoes off the nothing around me, and I want to sigh. In fact, I do lower my head into my hand. A hand, I see, as I raise it foreheadward, which is only mostly opaque. I can see through the skin – but also through the various other layers of tissue and blood and bone. I'm almost startled enough by it to halt the motion.

And then I close my eyes and it doesn't matter.

Because I know it is only an artifact of The Void.

But does nothing to the answer The Question: Why the Hell am I here, and How the How did I get here?

It's only one question because it's a compound sentence, you see.

Actually, I realize, I don't want to be here. What if I'm dreaming into the Statuette again?

Wadjet!

My scream echoes off cavernous walls of terror.

As the very last reverberations die around me, I see it: A red bow lying on the nothingness at my feet. And slithering over it, a brilliantly glowing, green snake. No larger than a garter snake, and lifting its head to look curiously up at me.

Like I don't belong here – or, at least, shouldn't be here, now.

“Wadjet,” I sigh, hating the bow, but unable to look away from it. Why did she bring that?

She is suddenly the uraeus crown wearing the painted-looking hieroglyph girl.

“Yes,” the serpent says, curving and bobbing to indicate mild indignation. “You have called, I have come.”

“How did you—? Were you waiting for me?”

“I know your mind, child,” is her response. Before she can offer an explanation, I ask:

“My mind? You know my mind?”

“Of course I know your mind, child Robert. I know you as well as your own mother would.”

This gets a response out of me – a raised eyebrow, then a frown; but no response. I even manage not to articulate the question: Does that mean I'll see her again someday?

“Robert, child, I am with you always. I see everything you do. As a Mother should.”

“Then you are just a dream, then. An Archetype. I'm seeing you as separate from my self because—“

“No.” The serpent dips her head, narrows her eyes, and the hieroglyph-girl frowns. “Are you going to be here so long that you would quibble?”

I don't even want to be here.

“I don't know how I got here.”

“Then why have you come?”

“I don't know.”

“Then why did you summon me?” Wadjet is getting agitated. I can hear it in her voice.

“I don't know!”

The hieroglyph-girl massages the bridger of her nose – really her sinuses via her eyes – in that universal expression of patience dwindled to its last reserves.

“I really don't know. I thought—“ The girl opens her eyes, and I remember that I am talking to the serpent in her crown. “I thought you might.”

“Know why you're here?”

“What I should do – since I am.”

Suddenly Wadjet is – not as she has been. Suddenly she is a vibrant and voluptuous middle-aged woman, her skin as dark and beautiful as ebony, her hair woolen like that of a sheep, is swept away from her face behind her back and long, like a cobra's hood. And she is tall. Fearsome. At least nine feet. And dressed in flowing white robes in indescribable style and which I do not have long enough to bear proper witness:

She approaches me, concern on her face. Her arms are held out, and then they are enveloping my head and neck and shoulders in a hug – and pressing my face firmly into her upper belly – her breasts surrounding my head.

“My boy is scared and he calls for his mother. Yes.”

“I feel... safe. Strange, admittedly, like this is somehow subtly wrong in a way that I don't understand. But safe. Warm. Like a boy clinging to his mother.

“It is right to be scared.” Wadjet's voice changes. Darkens.

And I no longer feel safe.

I release her skirts. Subtly I pull away from her. Slowly, I look up. But I already know she is gone. Black is all I see. I no longer feel her. Even I, to my astonishment, am only barely here – my mostly-opaque form from before, in this place, this now, is now mostly-transparent, translucent and thin, somehow – somehow less corporeal. Like I am little more, myself, than a vapor, a cloud, a loose collection of atoms in the air which amount to less than a gas. The dark is what is opaque here. The dark is what is real.

I don't feel nothing, however.

I feel cold.

I feel air. I feel forgotten stone, surrounding me, unhallowed and secret. I feel the heft in the air of rot and decadence. I feel the presence of a malodorous evil.

And then there is a light – a single point of brilliant white, but enough to fill the entire space. Indeed, a familiar space. And it is not good.

Metus sits, legs folded Lotus-Style atop their sarcophagus crucifix and chain in hand like a rosary, evidently deep in prayer. Hands and lips moving – eyes rapidly darting behind twitching lids.

“My Metus,” the Grand Magus, emerging before me from some greater mystery beyond the eight face of blank stone which box us in. “My darling, perfect Metus.” But his voice is not the booming, nor even the muffled voice of power – instead, it is a voice I know, now: the voice of the priest who met me in Verona with a warning.

“Wake, Iustitiarius. Rise.”

His voice is still filled with tremendous, inarticulable power.

Metus's eyes open and their hands a lips stop so suddenly they may have not been moving in the first place.

“Grand Master,” Metus exclaims. I can see the love – and the terror – in their eyes.

“Why are you not resting properly, my son? Are your injuries bothering you?” He places his hand on Metus's back, and the skeletal priest flinches in obvious discomfort – but neither flinches away, nor makes any sound.

I am careful to think nothing.

“No, Grand Magus—“

“Please. Today, my Metus, call me Father.” The Grand Magus runs his hand up the back of Metus's head, a caress which would be unsettlingly affectionate, if I thought beings such as these could possibly have their genitals in mind with their affections. And if there weren't clumps of Metus's hair in the Grand Magus's hand when he pulls it away.

“Father.” Metus says this with obvious pleasure. A pleasure I do not comprehend and which I do not want to. “I am not avoiding the pain. I do not deserve the comfort.” Metus lowers their head.

“And your angel?”

“We are of one mind,” Metus responds, neither opening their eyes nor lifting their head. The drone of their voice sounding as much like a chant – and like I can hear an almost reverberant growl behind it. But that has to be an artifact of the cave, right?

“And what is that mind?”

“The Lamiya must die. The Daughter even now infects his thoughts.”

“The Fulcrum's thoughts.”

“Yes, Gr— Father.”

“This is all your angel showed you?” I can hear the threat in the Grand Magus's voice. The You don't want to disappoint the Don implication, there. “I expected—“

“Forgive me, Father, for not speaking sooner. We did as you instructed us.” A pause. The Grand Magus nods. Waiting for permission to speak further? I didn't wonder at it. “We have... apologies, Father. We have not... agreed upon a term.”

“Speak for yourself, Metus. Silence, Angel.”

I can feel something – a shockwave of some kind of force – and what feels like the shadows conceding.

“We have searched the Future, Father. We have traveled the threads of Time.”

“Yes, good. And what have you seen?”

“We have seen the End of All Things, Father. If she gets the Rod again—“

“She? The Lamiya, or—“

“The Daughter. Father, the one called Peitho must be stopped. If she gets her hands on the Rod again, the world will be doomed to war without end.”