Chapter 19 | You Would Not Turn Dark

They came through the steel door at a pace that was not quite running but was operating at the outermost edge of what could technically be called walking, and they reached him at the same time because they had always moved that way, in the unspoken synchronisation of people who had spent a very long time occupying adjacent space and had stopped needing to coordinate it consciously.

Matthias looked up.

Their faces were not the faces they wore when they were managing a situation. They were the faces underneath that, the ones that only appeared in the intervals between composure and composure, when something had happened too fast for the composure to get there first. Belial's brows were drawn together in a way that made the warmth of her usual expression into something sharper. Astreal looked at him with the specific quality she carried when she was doing her most rapid assessment, and her expression had not completed the transition from is he... to he is.

"Matthias," Belial said, in the register she only used when there was no performance in it at all.

He raised the hand that was already up.

"Still here," he said.

Across the garden, Aki and Yuki had moved toward Sylvia and her men, the practical orientation of people who understood that the immediate post-combat interval required confirmation of what the aftermath actually was. Yuki looked at the group against the wall, conducting the inventory with the specific pragmatism she dropped into when the theatrics were not the point, and Aki crouched next to the nearest man and checked for the things worth checking.

"Unconscious," Aki reported. "All of them, from the look of it."

"What exactly happened here?" she asked. "We came out from the east entrance and found you sitting in a dead garden looking like you had expelled something very large, and there were people against a wall."

"Accurate summary," Matthias said.

Belial and Astreal were on either side of him, and their hands found his arms and they pulled, and he let himself be pulled because his legs had not yet completed their reassessment of whether standing was something they wanted to participate in. He came upright, and the effort of it was real, but when he was there, standing between them, their hands warm through the cloth of his jacket, the faint fragrance that had been in every room he'd lived in for less than a year settling around him, the adrenaline's aftermath found a channel to run through that was not simply exhaustion.

He exhaled.

The tension in his shoulders did not leave entirely, but it relocated somewhere more manageable.

"Sylvia had a doppelganger," he said.

He kept it concise, the way the situation warranted rather than the way a longer account might have felt better to deliver. Sylvia waiting in the garden. The figure on the tree. What he had seen, and what seeing it had done to him, the rage, the real kind, the kind that opens the circuit, and the dark power that had come flooding through it, and Sylvia standing at the edge of the garden watching the whole thing with the specific brightness of a person watching a plan arrive at its intended outcome.

The pendant.

"Both stones," he said, and his eyes went briefly to Astreal. "Both of them were still lit."

He described the shockwave last, in the flat delivery of someone reporting a fact, and when he finished the garden was quiet for a moment except for the distant percussion still coming from the far side of the castle walls.

Belial made a sound.

He looked at her.

She had both hands pressed together in front of her face in the specific arrangement she used when she was trying to contain something that was escaping the containment in several directions at once. Her cheeks were distinctly pink. Her eyes had taken on the quality of someone who was having several thoughts about the same topic in rapid succession, and all of the thoughts were evidently agreeable ones.

"My lord," she said, almost inaudibly, in the register she used when she was not entirely in control of whether she was saying the thing out loud, "almost lost himself. Because of me."

Matthias stared at her.

The expression was unmistakable. She was dreamy about it.

"Belial."

"The dark power, the rage, the shockwave..." She pressed her hands harder against her face. "It was all for..."

"Belial."

"Yes," she said, and the blush extended upward.

He turned.

Astreal was looking at him with an expression that was, by the precise measurements of Astreal's face, a pout. A small one. Controlled. Identifiable nonetheless.

"You favor her," she said.

"Sylvia made a strategic choice," he said. "I did not ask for input on the casting."

"Regardless." The pout remained.

Matthias released Belial's arm, gently, and shifted enough to bring Astreal closer, his hand finding the space at the side of her arm and pulling her into the warmth of the space that Belial was already occupying.

"If Sylvia had put you on that tree," he said, with the flat certainty of a statement of fact, "the wall would not have been the only thing the shockwave hit."

Astreal looked at him.

The pout ran its course and concluded.

Something moved in her ruby eyes that she did not name. She did not need to.

"Clever," Yuki said, from the direction of the unconscious pile.

She was still looking at the place where the doppelganger had been, or rather, at the dead tree, which was now simply a dead tree again.

"Sylvia's choice of Belial rather than Astreal." She tilted her head in the specific angle she used when she was working something through. "Either she had special reasons to resent Belial in particular, or she calculated that a captured Belial would be more immediately credible to Matthias than a captured Astreal."

"Why more credible?" Aki asked.

"Belial is warmer," Yuki said, as though this were a tactical classification rather than an observation. "She reads as more likely to have been found, placed somewhere, shown. Astreal reads as someone you do not find unless she permits it." She paused. "It was still an insidious choice. Whichever reasoning produced it."

"It was," Joseph agreed.

He had been doing the thing he did when his attention was split, cataloguing the present scene while most of his actual thinking was elsewhere.

"The question I am more interested in is how Sylvia learned to try it."

Yuki's eyes went to him. "You mean the mechanism. The grief trigger."

"The specific relationship between Matthias's anger and the dark energy below this country." Joseph's voice carried the measured weight of someone who was choosing to present a consideration and not yet a conclusion. "It is documented, in the oldest accounts. Historical dark lords who turned catastrophic, the grief as catalyst. But the accounts exist in sources that are not widely accessible, and Sylvia does not strike me as a scholar."

Matthias shrugged. "Someone could have told her."

"Someone could have," Joseph said.

And said nothing further on the subject, in the specific manner of a person who has a provisional answer and intends to wait for it to become a confirmed one before he shares it.

"We will have the opportunity to ask her directly. Romanian authorities will want Sylvia to answer a considerable number of questions before anyone is finished with her. If there was external input, we will know."

Matthias noted the way Joseph had phrased external input, and filed it, and let it sit.

Aki had already moved.

He crossed the garden to Sylvia with the economy of motion he used for things that were procedural, and Joseph produced the talisman from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it across the space between them. The talisman was small and looked like nothing in particular, a flat disc of some material that caught no light. Aki took it, and with the focused precision of someone who had been told exactly what to do with it in the briefing phase and had no intention of improvising, he bound Sylvia's wrists with the cord at his belt, and then pressed the talisman to the back of her hands.

The white light was quiet but thorough. It moved through Sylvia in the even, dispersing way of something performing a removal rather than an impact, spreading from the point of contact outward, replacing the darkness that had accumulated in her with the neutral quality of absence. When it concluded, she was simply a bound, unconscious woman in a dead garden.

The garden felt different after that. Less like a location and more like a space.

Joseph raised the walkie-talkie.

The Romanian forces came in quickly, the field commander first, with the clipped urgency of someone who had been waiting for the all-clear with considerable impatience, and his unit behind him. They moved through the garden with the systematic efficiency of people trained for exactly this kind of post-engagement apprehension, and within a few minutes Sylvia and her six men had been secured, assessed, and prepared for transport. The field commander exchanged words with Joseph in the rapid professional shorthand of two people who had already established a working relationship over the preceding hours.

"Most of them have been contained," the commander said, his English functional and direct. "The ones who fled, they will not go far. We have teams on the perimeter roads." He looked at the space where the shockwave's aftermath was still visible in the flattened grass and the displaced stone around the garden walls. He did not ask what had produced it. He had the expression of someone who had decided certain questions were outside the scope of what was useful to him tonight.

"Good," Joseph said.

The commander nodded once and moved with his unit, and they took Sylvia and her men through the garden's far gate, and the sound of them receded, and the garden was quiet again.

The six of them remained in the dead garden.

The distant artillery had wound down to intermittent, and then to nothing. The night air was cold and still and carried the smell of old stone and the particular aftermath of engagement. Matthias stood between Belial and Astreal, which was where he had been standing since they had helped him upright, and he had not made any effort to adjust this arrangement.

Joseph was looking at something that was not quite in the garden. He had the expression he wore when a thought had been forming across the span of several events and had now arrived.

"I want to say something," he said.

The group gave him the space of the pause.

"You would not have turned," Joseph said. "I want to be clear about that, because it is important, and I think tonight might have left some uncertainty." He looked at Matthias. "The mechanism is real. The dark energy responded to your grief as the histories predicted it would. But the histories are incomplete in a specific way." He paused, selecting the order of the explanation with the care he used for things he wanted understood rather than simply heard. "Every candidate in the record, every person who walked through grief into a catastrophic transformation, they were not simply pushed over an edge by loss. The affinity was already present. The darkness was already inside them before the loss occurred, and what the loss provided was final ignition, not the fire itself."

The garden was quiet.

"You have no such darkness," Joseph said. "What you carry is power, considerable power, with a specific historical shape, but the affinity underneath it is not dark. Your anger tonight was righteous. You were deceived by a cruel trick into believing you had lost someone you loved. The rage was a legitimate response to a legitimate wound." He let the pause settle. "If the transformation had completed, at its very worst, you would not have become a dark lord bent on consuming everything around you. You would have become an extremely angry god, pointed specifically at whoever caused the grief. A different category of problem, and not a permanent one."

"An extremely angry god," Matthias said, after a moment.

"Pointed at Sylvia and her immediate associates," Joseph confirmed. "And then, presumably, you would have returned."

"That is somewhat reassuring," Matthias said. "In a specific and unsettling way."

"It was meant to be." Joseph's tone did not change. "The pendant was the correct intervention, and Astreal's reasoning in giving it to you was sound. But I want you to understand that the worst case was not the worst case I believed it to be before tonight. You are not a dark lord waiting for a trigger. You are something considerably harder to turn into a catastrophe than the historical record suggested."

Belial and Astreal were listening in the still way they both had when something was being confirmed that they had, at some level, already known but had not said.

"Still," Joseph said. "The loss of either of them would mean something significant. Even if the outcome were not catastrophic, it would still mean something."

Belial straightened slightly. Astreal stood in the particular quality of composure that she used for things that had her full and undivided attention.

"We have lived," Astreal said, "for more than three thousand years."

"And we do not intend," Belial added, with the warmth under it that made everything she said carry more weight than the words alone, "to die anytime soon."

They said it in the synchronised register they fell into without noticing, the way people fell into rhythms after a very long time spent occupying the same spaces, and the certainty in it was not bravado. It was simply a statement from people who had made it this far through this much and had not revised their fundamental position on the subject.

Matthias looked at them both.

He did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that was not contained in the looking.

"He is," Yuki said, into the quiet, "a weird dark lord."

Nobody answered this, because it was not wrong and answering it would only encourage her.

"Even a weird dark lord," she continued, with the precision of someone who has been waiting to land a specific point and has now identified the correct interval, "needs a mistress."

"No," Belial said.

"No," Astreal said.

The synchronisation on the no was, if anything, better than the statement about not dying anytime soon.

Yuki accepted this with the equanimity of someone who has internalized the no as a structural feature of the bit and not its conclusion.

Matthias laughed.

It came out in the full, unmanaged way that laughs came out when the adrenaline was finally and completely done and the thing left behind it was something lighter. He felt Belial's hand tighten briefly on his arm in response to it, and Astreal's shoulder press fractionally against his, and Aki made a sound from somewhere to his right that was technically a cough but was doing something else.

"I want to be clear," Matthias said, when it wound down, "that I would significantly prefer to be a normal office worker." He looked at the dead garden, the broken wall at its edge, the stone that had absorbed a shockwave and still showed where. "A god does not suit me. An edgy lord of darkness does not suit me. I don't have the flair for either. I don't have the disposition for dramatic architecture." He paused. "I do not have the, what's the word, inclination to construct an out-of-place theatrical harem in the middle of an otherwise ordinary life and then take that seriously."

"You have," Yuki said, looking at Belial and Astreal, "two immortal wives that arrived at your front door."

"They were already there when I moved in," Matthias said. "I did not construct anything. I simply came home."

From his left, he heard Belial's small intake of breath at that.

He decided not to acknowledge it. Some things were better left as the effect of the thing rather than the thing examined.

The helicopter came in low from the direction of the main camp and set down at the far end of the garden where the ground was flat enough for it, the rotors pushing down on the dead grass and making a temporary meadow of it, the light from the landing strips cutting across the stone in hard angles.

They walked toward it.

Joseph first, walkie-talkie already back in his pocket, likely already thinking three decisions ahead of wherever they were landing. Aki and Yuki behind him, Yuki still conducting some internal monologue about mistresses and weird dark lords that she was, for once, keeping internal. Matthias between Belial and Astreal, which remained the correct arrangement.

Matthias ducked under the rotors and climbed in and found a seat, and when they were all aboard and the door closed and the helicopter lifted, the castle fell away below them. The garden was small from up here, a dead square at the back of a building that had been used for terrible purposes for a long time and would now be used for different purposes, or none at all. The lights of the Romanian military camp were visible to the northeast, organized and purposeful in the dark.

Matthias leaned back against the cabin wall.

Belial, on his left, rested her head against his shoulder with the uncomplicated ease of someone who had been doing this for a very long time and saw no reason to treat it as anything other than what it was.

Astreal, on his right, sat upright in the correct posture and looked out the window at the receding castle.

After a moment, without changing her posture or her expression or her direction of looking, she moved slightly toward him and stayed there.

Below them, Romania passed by in the dark, ordinary and unhaunted for the first time in longer than anyone present had been keeping count.

Matthias closed his eyes.

He was an office worker, as it happened. He would be again in a few days, when the debrief was done and the wounds were treated and the flight home was behind them and the ordinary shape of things reasserted itself, the commute, the fluorescent lights, the work that made sense in the bounded and sensible way that work sometimes made sense. He was looking forward to it with a specific and genuine enthusiasm that he suspected was not the reaction the evening's events were meant to produce.

But he had always been a weird dark lord.

He supposed he might as well lean into it.