The tunnels beneath the Walden had stopped making sense somewhere around the third turn.
Vertin’s team pressed forward through a maze that kept quietly rearranging itself, walls that had been bare stone at the start of the retreat now streaked with a color none of them could name, something between rust and rot, spreading further with every step deeper in.
None of the turns matched the ones they’d memorized on the way down.
Somewhere ahead, Schneider appeared again, a second figure slung across her back, small and limp, and Sonetto’s first read of the sight landed hard and wrong, a kidnapping unfolding in front of her in real time.
It wasn’t that.
The girl on Schneider’s back was crying quietly into her shoulder, and Schneider herself moved like someone protecting rather than taking, her own sister carried the only way there’d been time to carry her.
The tunnel ahead narrowed further, choking off any route that didn’t lead straight into more of the same wrongness, and APPLe made the call, arming the explosive device they’d been saving and blasting a fresh hole through where the car that Sotheby and Sonetto came with was stuck on.
The wall gave way in a roar of dust and light.
It also gave way too soon, the ceiling above the new opening groaning and folding inward before either Vertin or Schneider could clear it after everyone else got through, burying the path forward under a wave of collapsing rock.
Something followed them through the settling dust a moment later, a shape moving calm and slow, and the two of them turned to meet it as one, weapons already raised.
It was Druvis.
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Cormac felt sir knight’s presence before he saw any part of the wall he was walking toward, a warm, familiar pressure behind his sternum that had nothing to do with the pull that had been dragging him forward for weeks now.
He gave the flower that was tucked against his waistcoat to sir knight for this plan, it had soaked in enough of the river’s aura by now to work like a tether, and he followed it without needing to think about it.
He set the two unconscious bodies down gently at the base of the wall.
He raised the whistle to his lips and blew once, a short, clean note, and then stepped back several paces with the bodies gathered close beside him.
The wall came apart a moment later in a clean, controlled burst of light, sir knight’s blade driving through stone as though the stone had simply agreed to stop being there, the explosion of brightness swallowing the tunnel mouth whole before fading just as quickly.
“That was well timed,” Cormac said, dusting a bit of stone grit off his sleeve.
“Thank you, my friend.”
“It is no trouble at all,” sir knight said, already stooping to gather one of the unconscious figures into his arms with the same careful efficiency he brought to everything.
Between the two of them the walk back to the forest went quickly, sir knight carrying one of the bodies, Cormac the other, both of them keeping to the quieter side streets where the noise of the collapsing evening couldn’t quite reach.
A car tore past them at one point, engine screaming, a handful of black-masked Manus Vindictae members chasing hard behind it on foot and by motorcar.
Neither of them so much as slowed down to watch it go.
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The forest received them the way it always did, quiet, patient and unbothered by whatever had just happened in the city behind them.
Cormac reached into his divine kingdom with a quick ritual and drew out the leather suitcase he’d packed away there, setting it down at the base of a wide old tree.
He took out a heavy bag of salt first, pouring it out in a careful, unbroken circle large enough to hold two grown bodies and sir knight beside them.
He set three candles at equal points around the circle’s edge.
He drew out a small dark bottle next, its glass thick and old, crushed belladonna, black dahlia and yarrow suspended in a clear, faintly shimmering oil.
He uncorked it and breathed in the scent for a moment before setting a match to each candle in turn.
He poured a small drop of the oil into each flame the instant it caught, and each pour answered him with a soft plume of black smoke curling up into the branches overhead.
He and sir knight carried the two unconscious bodies into the circle together, laying them down carefully near its center.
Sir knight remained inside with them.
Cormac stepped back out.
He drew a slim silver knife from his coat and traced a line just outside the salt, sealing the whole working into its own small pocket of spirituality.
He entered Cogitation the way he always did, sediment settling slow and even at the bottom of still water, and recited the same Latin words he’d used once before, his pronunciation cleaner this time, sharpened by days of sir knight correcting him between sword strokes.
The ritual answered him with less chaos than it had the first time, a full, clean portal of darkness blooming up to fill every inch of the salt circle at once, swallowing all three of them into it without so much as a flicker of resistance.
He recited his Honorific Name in the private space of his own mind.
His spirit body crossed into the divine kingdom a moment later, and he found the two agents still lying unconscious near his feet exactly as he’d left them.
Sir knight was kneeling a short distance away, one knee pressed to the temple stone, head bowed low, the posture of a knight before the king he had actually meant to serve all along.
They stood at the summit of the temple, the mirror behind them clearer now than Cormac remembered it, the slow pilgrimage of spirits and undead things still winding its patient way up the terraced steps toward it.
A scattering of tarot cards lay near his feet, left over from some earlier experiment.
He crouched and picked one up without any particular plan in mind.
It was Judgement.
The card changed the instant his fingers closed around it, the printed image folding and reforming into something new, something that had clearly been waiting for exactly this touch to become real.
A figure stood at the card’s center now, robed in deep, mossy green edged with old gold thread and small white flowers threaded through the fabric like they’d grown there rather than been sewn.
A short traveling cape thrown back off one shoulder to bare a raised arm.
In that hand, held straight up toward a burst of golden light, a long bone-shaped silver sword climbed with living ivy from hilt to tip.
A thin green vine coiling all the way up the blade as though the sword itself had taken root somewhere out of frame.
Around the figure’s shoulders hung loops of heavy gilded chain, tasselled and ornate, more decoration than restraint, catching the same gold light as the halo behind the sword.
Pale, ghostly figures floated in the sky above, robed in flowing white, each raising a long trumpet to lips that made no sound the card could show.
Behind the central figure, the faint translucent shape of some great pale horse stood half-formed out of mist and old architecture, ruins and blossoming vines rising up out of a swirl of green and white fog beneath it all.
The figure’s own feet were rooted into a small dark mound thick with more of the same flowering vine, boots and earth and growth folding into one another with no clear line between them.
Sir knight’s own shape shifted to match it without any pause between the seeing and the becoming.
The bedsheet and the borrowed blue cloak were simply gone, replaced by the same deep green robe from the card, gold thread catching light that had no source behind it, the same green cape thrown back off one shoulder, the same heavy gilded chain looped loose and ornamental across his front.
His sword rose in one raised hand exactly as the card had shown it, ivy already climbing the blade from hilt to tip, and behind him, faint and half-formed, the pale ghost of a great horse stood watching with patient, empty eyes.
There was no resistance in any of it, not a flicker, not a pause, the change settling over him the way a decision settles over someone who was never actually given the choice to make it, a manifestation of Enslavement symbolism dressed up in ivy and gold.
Cormac let him sleep through the rest of it.
He turned his attention to the still-open vortex nearby, the same one that had pulled all three of them into his kingdom in the first place, and found himself thinking about something he hadn’t quite let himself consider until now.
‘Let’s see what happens,’ Cormac thought, drawing the pale yet colorful flower sir knight carried since the ritual.
He stepped into the vortex himself, flower in hand, and the change was immediate.
The wind picked up hard around the circle back in the physical world, whipping loose leaves and salt in wide, scattering arcs, and somewhere in the middle of that wind his own passed-out body still knelt exactly where he’d left it outside the ring.
He looked down at himself and found something else entirely looking back.
He was massive now, a wolf shaped body built from black, faintly smoking mist, scales working through the surface of him in patches, and out of those scales small tufts of feather sprouted, each one tipped in the same glinting yellow oil as the necklace his mother had given him.
Fragments of silver armor scattered here and there across his eight legged body like pieces of a much larger set that had never finished forming.
Only his head had fully pushed through into the world, the rest of him still tangled somewhere behind the boundary he’d crossed, and through the single vast eye set into that head he could see, clear and strange, a single small flower blooming where his heart ought to sit.
He gathered himself to step the rest of the way out.
Something pushed back.
It wasn’t a power exactly, not the way he understood power.
It was the world itself, the universe, the whole shape of reality leaning its weight against him the way a door leans shut against wind, refusing him entry the way it might refuse anything that didn’t belong to it.
He also felt, underneath that refusal, the faint and unmistakable give of something weakening, a little more each second, a resistance running down like a clock no one had bothered to wind.
‘The Storm,’ he thought.
‘Of course.
Same thing that dragged me into the river the first time it found me.’
He eased his hold on the divine half of himself waiting behind the mirror, already faintly cracked from the strain of the last hour, and felt his own shape shrink to match the smaller allowance the world was willing to give him.
It was small enough now to settle into what remained of the salt circle below, most of it already scattered by the wind into thin, useless lines.
He wrapped the whole shrunken shape of himself in darkness before anyone could get a proper look, and lifted off into the night sky, stretching out fast and thoroughly delighted with the sensation of simply being airborne, a great dark shadow slipping silently over the sleeping shape of the world.
He had no idea, gliding easy and unseen through that dark sky, how many pairs of eyes across the world had just turned, all at once, toward the exact direction he was flying in, each one carrying a very different feeling about what they’d just felt sneaking into existence.
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I forgot there are tarot skins in game, I’ll just follow those since they’re cool af also halfway to 100 stones