Chapter 11 | Chaos

The new training had been running for a week.

Energy work was, Joseph explained, less a physical discipline and more a perceptual one, the body already had the reserve, already had the architecture; the work was learning to feel it and then learning to speak to it, the way you learned to use a muscle you hadn't known you possessed. It was slower than the sword training. It was also, in its quiet way, stranger, the first time Matthias felt the pull of something that sat beneath his ordinary awareness, a depth below the depth he'd known, it was like putting your foot down in water and finding the ground wasn't where you'd calculated.

He was in the middle of a session, Joseph observing, Belial running through her own parallel work at the far wall, when Joseph's phone buzzed.

Joseph looked at it. His expression, which was already the composed expression of a man who processed information faster than most people noticed things arriving, did something that was not quite alarm and not quite neutrality. It was the face of someone who has received information that confirms a timeline they had hoped was longer.

"The network," he said.

Everyone stopped.

They gathered in the living room. Joseph pulled up the relevant data on his tablet and set it on the table, and then he stood with his arms folded and gave them the shape of it.

"Solar eclipse," he said. "Next Thursday. The path of totality crosses northern Germany." He tapped the map. "Specifically, the Teutoburg Forest."

The name landed differently for different people at the table. Yuki looked up from her usual position with the alertness of someone who had studied exactly this kind of geography. Aki's expression acquired a particular quality of focus. Belial and Astreal exchanged the specific look they used when filing information they found significant.

"The eclipse will weaken the barrier between the physical world and what the old texts called the Chaos Realm," Joseph continued. "Not eliminate it. Weaken it. Enough for a manifestation." He paused. "An entity. The one that the texts name, appropriately enough, as Chaos."

"Tell me about the location," Matthias said.

"The Teutoburg Forest is one of the bloodiest sites in European history. In 9 AD, Germanic forces under Arminius annihilated three Roman legions, approximately twenty thousand soldiers, in three days. Their commander, Varus, trusted the wrong man and walked his army into a trap it couldn't recover from. Complete destruction." He turned the tablet. "That was the first. The forest and its surrounding region hosted further engagements across the following centuries. The ground has accumulated the particular quality that places of concentrated violence develop over time, a resonance, for lack of a more precise word. For an entity that feeds on dread and warfare, it is approximately ideal."

"It's choosing the location deliberately," Matthias said.

"The alignment facilitates the eclipse. The location facilitates the manifestation. Both are deliberate." Joseph set the tablet down. "Chaos is not an unconscious force. It is, oriented. It seeks proxies. It always has."

Matthias looked at the map for a moment. Then: "The dark lords. Including the one I apparently was."

"All of them," Joseph said. "Every entity that has operated on that axis across recorded history drew from Chaos, or was chosen by it as a vehicle for its influence in the physical world. Not always knowingly. The mechanism works regardless of whether the proxy understands it." He looked at Matthias carefully. "Your former self was one of its most powerful projections. That's part of why the three families were necessary to stop him."

The room held this.

"The Black Death," Belial said, quietly. It was not a question.

"The Black Death," Joseph confirmed. "The Dark Ages. The Crusades. The Mongol expansion and what followed it, Timur, the destruction that cut from Central Asia to the edge of Europe, the death counts that historians still argue about because the scale is difficult to total." He sat down. "Between roughly the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, Chaos was feeding at a rate it hadn't achieved in generations. The feedback loop compounded, violence produced dread, dread fed the entity, the entity's influence amplified the conditions for more violence. Three million became ten million became numbers that stopped being numbers." He looked at Belial and Astreal. "Both of you and allied human forces spent the better part of two centuries pushing back against that accumulation."

"We did," Belial said.

Something in her voice had the quality of someone confirming the existence of a wound.

"It was a period we don't discuss at length."

Astreal said nothing. She was looking at the map with the expression of a person reading a document they have read before and still don't like.

"If this is the source," Matthias said, and the reasoning was already assembled in his head before he finished the sentence, "then Sylvia and the cult won't let it manifest uncontested. They'll be there."

Joseph nodded.

"They'll protect it," Matthias continued. "Or attempt to facilitate the manifestation. Or both."

"Both," Joseph said. "The cult's objective is not simply to observe. They'll want to use the eclipse as a contact point, a negotiation, an offering, an attempt to deepen the connection between the entity and a new proxy. If they succeed in establishing that connection before we can disrupt the manifestation..."

"Then they accelerate the timeline significantly," Aki said, from the wall.

"Yes."

The table went quiet.

"Speaking of Sylvia." She looked around the table. "Since we're all apparently sharing uncomfortable histories, her story is worth hearing, if some of you haven't." Her eyes moved to Matthias.

He shook his head slightly. He'd heard the outline from Aki; he'd put pieces together. But not the full version.

Yuki told it in the same order it had happened: the ordinary beginning, the marriage, the obsession that had always been there and the divorce that removed the last thing competing with it. The depression, the descent into scholarship of the dark, the five years of building influence within a cult that had been floundering under a leader who lacked conviction. The bloody, contested removal of Bzekoz. The assumption of the 34th leadership at thirty by someone who had walked through enough personal wreckage to have burned away every hesitation.

When she finished, the room was quiet for a moment.

"That," Aki said, with the dry, considered tone of someone arriving at a conclusion, "is a very precise fit for the position."

"A person who has lost everything she thought would be permanent," Belial said, almost to herself. "And decided that what the world needed was more of the same." She paused. "There is a logic to it, even if the logic leads somewhere terrible."

"A miserable individual," Yuki said, "fully committed to distributing the misery." She looked at Joseph. "That's their plan, isn't it? Not just Chaos as a force, but Chaos as the condition they want to establish. What they suffered, universalised."

"Yes," Joseph said. "The theological framework of the cult has always been that suffering is equalising. The gods bring order that benefits the powerful. Chaos is the correction." He said it flatly, without endorsement. "The appeal of that argument to people who have been on the wrong side of order is not hard to understand. It doesn't make the conclusion correct."

Matthias had been listening. "Then we go," he said.

Yuki turned to him immediately. "That's... Matthias, that's not..."

"Too dangerous," Belial said, at the same moment, and her voice had the warmth temporarily suspended in favour of something more direct.

"Let me finish," Matthias said, and said it quietly enough that they did. "I'm not proposing to fight Chaos directly. I'm not suggesting I walk up to a primordial entity and have at it." He looked at the map. "But if the cult is there in force, and they will be, then splitting our group to cover both objectives means someone is fighting the cult with whatever's left over after the Chaos engagement takes its allocation." He looked at Joseph. "If Yuki, Aki and you engage the entity, that leaves Belial, Astreal and me to occupy the cult's forces. We don't need to defeat them. We need to hold them long enough to prevent them from either protecting the manifestation or reinforcing it. If we can manage that, and if the engagement tips in your direction, we move to reinforce."

He let it sit.

Joseph looked at him with the expression he used when he was running an assessment. "And if the cult sends more than three of you can manage?"

"Then you three finish faster," Matthias said, "and come to us." He almost smiled. "I've been training for two months. Let me be useful."

Another pause.

"He's right," Aki said.

Yuki looked at Aki with the expression of someone who had wanted to object and found the floor had been taken. She looked at Joseph. She looked at Matthias. She looked at the map.

"Fine," she said, and the word was heavy with the specific resignation of someone who has correctly lost an argument. "But if anything happens to him..."

"Nothing will happen to him," Astreal said.

Her voice had the quality it used when statements were not actually statements.

"Because I will be with him. Belial will be with him." She looked at Matthias with the steady, direct attention she reserved for things she needed him to understand completely. "Whatever happens, whatever the cult brings, whatever the entity projects, we are with you. Both of us. That has been true for three thousand years and it is not contingent on the circumstances."

Belial nodded once, and said nothing, because Astreal had said it.

The room was quiet for a moment.

"The Teutoburg Forest. Germany." She appeared to calculate something. "There are actually Strauss family holdings in that region. My ancestor's castle is technically not far. It's several centuries old and I haven't visited since I was twelve, but..."

"This is not a cosplay excursion," Aki said.

"I wasn't suggesting..."

"There will be no time to open the castle, air it out, and host whatever Gothic theatrical experience you are currently imagining."

"I was only..."

"No," Aki said.

Yuki pouted in the precise manner of someone who had floated a reasonable proposal and been denied. "No fun," she said.

"Fun after," Aki said. "If there is an after."

"There will be an after," Matthias said.

Something in the way he said it, not confident bravado, not performance, just a statement made by a man who had decided it was true, settled through the room and held there.

Joseph looked at him for a moment. Then he closed the tablet.

"Monday," he said. "We depart Monday. That gives us three days to arrive, assess the ground, and establish positions before the eclipse on Thursday." He shouldered the backpack with the ease of someone for whom departure preparation was a familiar posture. "I'll arrange travel and brief everyone on the approach by Sunday. Use the intervening time well." He looked at the basement stairs. "And keep training."

That evening, after Joseph had gone to his room and Yuki and Aki had left for the night, Matthias stood in the kitchen while Belial moved through the last of the dinner preparations with her customary quiet ease.

He watched her.

She felt the watching and looked up.

"You're not going to tell me this is a bad idea," he said.

"No," she said. "It's a reasonable idea. I said what I said earlier because my first instinct when you said I want to come is always to put myself between you and the thing that might harm you." She looked at him. "But you're right about the numbers. And you've earned the right to make the choice." She turned back to the counter. "I will just also be there, making certain your choice doesn't cost you more than it should."

"That," he said, "I'm counting on."

She smiled at the counter. Not at him, at the counter, the small, private smile of someone in possession of something they've been tending for a very long time.

"Three days," she said.

"Three days," Matthias agreed.

He went to find Astreal, who was, predictably, already in the basement doing something to the walls that probably involved the security parameters of a fourteenth-century Germanic forest.

Some things, even on the edge of chaos, remained reliable.