Chapter 07 | Awakening

The Saturday after the meeting with Yuki arrived with the specific quality of a morning that has decided to be pleasant regardless of what anyone else planned. Clear sky, mild air, the city moving at its weekend pace, unhurried, slightly softer at the edges than its weekday self.

Matthias came downstairs to find Belial and Astreal already at the kitchen table with their customary morning division of labour, Belial managing coffee, Astreal working through something on her phone with the focused attention she brought to everything, and told them to get ready because they were going to the mall.

Belial looked up with the mild curiosity of someone who had not anticipated this particular direction. "Our current clothes are fine."

"Adequate," Astreal confirmed, without looking up from her phone.

"I know," Matthias said. "I'd like to see you in things I pick out."

A silence. Both women looked at him.

"Things you pick out," Belial repeated.

"Yes."

Another silence, shorter this time. Whatever brief negotiation took place in that silence was entirely internal and arrived at its conclusion without requiring any words. Belial set down her coffee. Astreal pocketed her phone.

"Very well," Astreal said.

The mall had the comfortable weekend hum of a place fulfilling its intended purpose. Matthias moved through it with more direction than he usually gave himself credit for, and the morning turned into something he had not entirely predicted, pleasant, in the specific way of a thing that is better than the sum of its planning.

Belial approached every option he offered with a brightness that was entirely genuine, turning in front of mirrors with the unselfconscious ease of someone who has never had any reason to be uncertain about what they look like, and managed to make every single thing he chose seem as though it had been designed with her specifically in mind, which he suspected was simply an unavoidable property of her existence.

Astreal was more considered. She assessed each piece with the quiet efficiency she applied to everything, held it up, looked at it, and then either set it aside or tried it on, and when she tried something on, she wore it with the same composed uprightness she wore everything else, which turned out to be enough to make almost anything look deliberate and authoritative.

He stood back, bags accumulating at his feet, and watched, and found the morning thoroughly agreeable.

They emerged from the mall into the afternoon light with bags that Matthias was carrying because neither Belial nor Astreal would permit otherwise, and the day still had the pleasant quality it had started with.

Then it didn't.

The woman was standing on the pavement ahead of them, between the mall entrance and the car park, in a way that suggested she had placed herself there with intent. She was not moving. She was simply present, in the particular manner of something that had been waiting.

Matthias registered her details in the same sequence his mind had been applying to unfamiliar presences since the night Belial had stepped out of the plaza dark: her height, slightly above Belial and Astreal's, her frame, lean to the point of severity, wrapped in a dark robe that was both too large for her and entirely the wrong shape to be incidental. Her hair was a dark blonde in the specific way of something neglected rather than styled, falling with a kind of careless disorder that was not artistic. Her skin was the pallor of someone whose relationship with daylight was adversarial. Beneath her eyes, dark shadows sat with the permanence of a feature rather than a condition.

She did not look like someone who was lost, or confused, or harmless.

She looked like someone who had arrived with a very specific purpose and was waiting to be acknowledged before proceeding.

Belial and Astreal were already moving before Matthias had completed the assessment, two steps forward, precisely measured, putting themselves between him and the woman with the quiet certainty of a reflex. He could feel the shift in them even from behind, the quality of attention that came up when something in the world called to something much older in them.

The woman tilted her head slightly, as though considering the arrangement.

"I am Sylvia," she said.

Her voice was level in a way that was distinct from Astreal's levelness, Astreal's composure was organised; this woman's sounded like something else. Something with no particular investment in the ordinary running of things.

"Leader of the Cult of Apocalypse." She looked past Belial and Astreal at Matthias with the directness of someone addressing the relevant person in a group. "My purpose is to bring back the Dark Lord. To restore the balance that the Gods have tipped in their favour. The forces of light have grown complacent." She paused. "We require the counterweight."

"You may be looking for the wrong person," Matthias said.

Sylvia said nothing. She raised her hand.

The portals opened without sound.

Above her, in the air above the car park and the mall entrance and the wide paved area between them, circles of darkness bloomed, not like smoke, not like shadows, but like apertures cut into the fabric of the afternoon, opening onto somewhere that the Saturday light did not reach. And from them, things came through.

They were grotesque in the way that things from those kinds of dark places tended to be, assembled from the wrong components, proportioned incorrectly, moving with the unsettling energy of creatures that had not grown up in a world with physics. Skeleton soldiers, twisted things of fused bone and dark energy, and behind them shapes that were less defined and more simply wrong. They came through in numbers, hit the ground, and oriented immediately toward the nearest concentration of people.

The screaming started as the crowd scattered, shoppers, families, the ordinary Saturday population of a mall in full flight, a wave of people breaking in every direction away from the portals and the things that were dropping through them.

Belial turned her head briefly. "Astreal. Stay with him." Her staff manifested in her hand in the same cold gold flash as before, and then she was moving, not toward the monsters immediately, but at an angle, interposing herself between the largest concentration of fleeing civilians and the advance of the creatures. Her staff caught the first one mid-stride and reduced it to dispersing darkness with the ease of something very experienced dealing with something only technically formidable. She moved through the crowd's wake like a tide running contrary, pushing the line, buying space.

Astreal's tomahawk was already in her hand. She angled herself to Matthias's right, quartering the approach vectors, dispatching anything that came within range with the precise, unhurried efficiency of someone who found combat less like a crisis and more like a geometry problem. Her eyes moved constantly, counting, mapping, adjusting.

For a while, it was manageable. The two of them covered ground at a rate that should have been sufficient.

The portals kept opening.

The stream of creatures did not thin. If anything, it thickened, fresh shapes dropping through faster than the existing ones were being cleared, the numbers compounding with the patient arithmetic of a siege. Belial's movements grew more compressed as she was forced to prioritise. Astreal's attention split across more angles than was comfortable. The line between manageable and not was becoming visible.

Then a black spear crossed the field from the left and buried itself in the skull of a skeleton that had been three metres from Matthias and closing.

The skeleton came apart. The spear pulled free of the miasma it left behind, reversed through the air, and returned to the hand that had thrown it.

Astreal's head came around.

The spear was black-shafted, weighted at both ends, and carried about it the particular quality of a weapon that had been made to last. She knew it. She knew it in the same deep register in which she'd known Aki's bloodline the moment she'd seen him across Matthias's threshold, the recognition of something stored in memory that predated every current context.

"Cronqvist," she said.

"Hey."

Aki came through the scattering crowd at a pace that suggested he'd been moving for some time. He was grinning, which in Aki's vocabulary usually indicated that the situation was either completely under control or extremely interesting, and he had not yet determined which. The spear was already turning in his grip for the next throw.

"I can explain later."

The next thing was larger, a spinning arc of gold light that bisected a cluster of three creatures at once, carrying enough force to knock fragments of the nearest one into the air. It made two orbiting passes and then descended, resolving into a two-handed sword of considerable size, which Yuki Strauss caught by the handle with one hand and let settle at her side with the easy familiarity of someone carrying something they've carried many times before.

She looked at the portals. She looked at the remaining monsters. She looked at the whole arrangement.

"This is an excellent workout," she said.

"Why are you both here?" Matthias asked.

"Later," Yuki said, with the breezy finality of a word that has closed a door.

She looked at Belial and Astreal, assessed the distribution of the field in approximately one second, and jerked her chin in a way that conveyed: I've got the left, you've got the right, we can talk about it after.

"Lend me a hand?"

Belial moved. Astreal moved. Aki threw. Yuki went left with the holy sword leaving arcs of gold light behind it, and for a few minutes the field was a very clear geometric exercise with four very experienced participants working the angles.

Matthias stood in the space they had made for him.

He did not notice the skeleton until it was nearly on him.

It came from behind, from the edge of the car park, from an approach vector that was nobody's fault specifically and simply the consequence of four people covering a wide space against a large and continuous number of things. Its sword came down at a diagonal, and there was no time. He could see there was no time. He could do the arithmetic of the distance and the speed and arrive at the conclusion before the conclusion arrived, and none of the four people currently occupied with their respective sections of the field could get back to him before the sword completed its arc.

He closed his eyes.

He heard the clang. It was clean and sharp, metal on metal, the sound of something blocked rather than something landed. He opened his eyes.

In his hand, which had been empty a moment before, was a sword.

It was not a dramatic sword in the conventional sense, not massive, not ornate, not designed to announce itself. It was straight, single-edged, with a simple cross-guard and a grip that fit his hand as if it had been measured, which he suspected, in some meaningful sense, it had. It glowed softly gold at the blade's edge, the same cold, clean gold he'd seen in Belial's staff and Astreal's tomahawk, but quieter, more settled, like a light that had been burning for a long time.

The skeleton's blade was pressed against it. As Matthias held the guard, the light at the edge moved down the skeleton's sword arm, and the skeleton reduced to dust in the way that an old newspaper reduces to ash when fire reaches it, thoroughly, without remainder.

He stared at the sword in his hand.

"That sword." Astreal's voice came from behind him, and it contained something he had not heard in it before, not quite awe, but the particular compression of a person revising something fundamental. "How. That sword does not..." She stopped herself, visibly, and looked at the weapon with the expression of someone who has identified something in a context they had not expected to find it.

"Interesting," Yuki said, from nearby, in a tone that was delighted in the way she used the word: genuinely, without decoration.

"Very," Aki agreed. He was looking at Matthias with the expression he wore when something had confirmed a theory he'd held but not stated. He raised a thumb.

"Can you move?" Aki asked.

Matthias looked at the sword. He looked at the nearest cluster of remaining creatures. He adjusted his grip by instinct, not his instinct, or not only his, and moved.

Each thing he struck dissolved on contact. Not dramatically, not with sound, just gone, the way a match extinguishes, because the light in the blade was not interested in leaving anything behind. He was not a trained swordsman, in the sense that Matthias Titus had never held a sword in his life. But his body moved like a man who had held this one before, and the distance between not knowing how and doing it correctly was narrowed to something that barely existed.

It did not take long.

One by one, the portals shrank and closed, as the creatures sustaining them from the inside were cleared, the apertures lost their anchor and collapsed inward. The last one folded shut with a sound like pressure equalising. The car park was quiet in the sudden, slightly stunned way of a space that has just been very loud.

Sylvia was still standing where she had been.

Her expression had done something specific with anger, not the hot variety, but the cold, structural kind, the anger of a person whose plan has failed and who has filed this information under temporary. Her teeth were set against each other. Her eyes moved across Aki, Yuki, Belial, Astreal, and then settled on Matthias, on the sword in his hand, for a long moment.

"This is not finished," she said.

Purple light swallowed her completely, and she was gone.

They gathered in the silence she left behind.

Matthias looked at the sword. He turned it once in his hand, feeling the weight of it, which was exactly right, neither more nor less than it should be, and then it faded, dissolving from his grip in the same quiet manner it had arrived, leaving his hand empty and his palm faintly warm.

Belial and Astreal were looking at him the way people look at something they thought they understood and have discovered they didn't. Not with fear. With something closer to recognition of a fact that had been present longer than they'd realised and had simply been waiting for the right moment to be visible.

Yuki came to stand beside him on his left. Aki took the right. Both of them looked at him with the companionable appreciation of people at a demonstration that has exceeded expectations.

"Remarkably interesting dark lord," Yuki said, to no one in particular.

"Genuinely," Aki agreed.

He looked at Matthias.

"I'll explain. Both of us will." He glanced at Yuki. "But I think the correct order of events is to find somewhere that serves hot pot and sit down while it's still warm enough to be worth eating." He looked around at the dispersed aftermath of the afternoon. "We've earned it."

Matthias looked at the empty car park, at the fading traces of dark miasma, at the bags from the mall that had somehow ended up three metres to his left and were, improbably, undamaged. He looked at the four people around him.

"Hot pot," he said.

"Hot pot," Aki confirmed.

They went to find the car.