Cormac stood there , still wet from the rain, blinking at her with the particular blankness of a man who has just been handed a math problem in a language he does not speak.
‘Dad?
What the fuck is she on about?’
He gave everyone in the room a quick, unbothered once-over, rain running in fat cold lines down the brim of his fedora.
As far as he could tell they were roughly the same age, at least in this life, which made the word “dad” land somewhere between insulting and deeply confusing.
“W-What happened to you?
Where’s-”
“Identify yourself!”
Vertin only got that far before Sonetto’s voice cracked across the room like a whip, sharp and immediate, demanding to know exactly who this man was and why he was dripping black smoke on the floor.
Somewhere behind her Regulus was muttering, half to herself, something about Vertin apparently having a father, her eyebrows halfway up her forehead.
Druvis had gone very still and very alert in the particular way a woman who has already decided a fight is going to start.
Roots coiled faintly at her feet, she’d recognized him instantly as the man who had been standing quietly in the fog while arcane critters bent themselves around him like he was made of something they weren’t allowed to touch.
X and Sotheby had both drawn up straight-backed and wary, trading one fast look between them; they thought that Manus Vindictae had somehow gotten inside without their notice.
None of them heard the rest of what Vertin was actually trying to ask, her voice thin, hoarse, and swallowed whole by the sudden, heart-breaking revelations she just witnessed.
‘Fuck it,’ Cormac thought, watching Sonetto’s weight shift as she raised her glass pen.
‘Improvise, adapt, overcome.’
Black tendrils poured out of every shadow in the room at once, curling out from under the table, out of the corners, out of the space behind the stove where light didn’t quite reach, and wrapped around every single one of them except Vertin, who was still too wrung-out and shell-shocked by the last quarter hour of her life to so much as flinch.
They fought against it for as long as their pride demanded, Sonetto snarling something furious, X’s mismatched eyes going wide, and then, one by one, all five of them slumped gently into a deep and thoroughly undignified sleep, propped against each other like a pile of tired cats.
“What did you do!?”
Vertin’s head finally snapped back towards them, panic flaring bright and immediate for her friends, half a step already carrying her forward before Cormac’s voice stopped her.
“They’re just asleep,” he said, both hands raised and palms out.
He began closing the distance between them, slowly and unhurried, totally the least threatening thing a man covered head to toe in reality-bending shadows could possibly do.
She didn’t step back.
Her memories of those days were hazy, worn thin at the edges the way old photographs fade, but somewhere underneath all of that she still remembered the exact shape of a cold, strange embrace that had somehow felt warmer than anything else she’d ever been given, offered to her once, long ago, on one of the worst nights of her life she could no longer properly recall.
‘Random bullshit go,’ Cormac thought, and reached for the first thing that sounded suitably mysterious.
“All of our questions will be answered at the right time, child,” he said.
“Even I… do not know myself.”
He seemed different than the man she remembered, colder now, his voice carrying a measured, calculating edge instead of the warm gentle glow she thought she barely recalled.
He was also nothing at all like the borderline unhinged, singing, grinning idiot she’d once watched stand arms-behind-his-back in the middle of a London street full of falling buildings.
“You’ve met the Sleepless, as far as I know,” he said.
“He might be a bit…
like that.
But I assure you, he is the most human out of all of us.”
“Who are you…?” Vertin asked, her voice cracking somewhere in the middle of the question, thoroughly unmoored from anything she thought she knew.
“I am the Corpse Collector,” he said, mild as anything.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds… and there are no corpses to collect here.”
The line landed with a weight he clearly hadn’t fully intended, given everything that had just happened at that dinner table not ten minutes ago, and Vertin’s eyes flickered, but she pushed forward anyway.
“Why did you-”
“Shhh.”
He pressed one finger, gentle and absurdly polite, against her lips, then reached up and lifted her hat clean off her head, setting it aside somewhere in the folds of his coat before laying his palm flat against her hair in one slow, deliberate pat.
“I don’t think I have the answers you want, little savior,” he said.
“But I promise you, someday, you will arrive at ‘his’ divine kingdom.
I will wait for you there.”
He drew a tarot card from somewhere inside his coat, unhurried, rain still dripping steadily off the brim of his hat and onto its worn edge.
It was The Fool card, except the figure painted on its face wasn’t the usual wandering stranger at all.
It was Vertin, rendered in careful ink, suitcase in one hand and a small, impossibly colorful flower blooming in the other, a slim little dog trotting loyally at her heel, a Sicilian Greyhound colored in the exact same shade of orange-red as Sonetto’s hair.
He took her hand, opened her palm gently, the way you’d open a small stubborn box, and set the card down inside it.
“Ha det’a,” he said, and leaned in to kiss her forehead once, softly and gently.
“Slán go fóill,” he said, and let the darkness swallow him whole along with the last curling wisps of black smoke.
It wasn’t until much later, sitting alone at the table among five sleeping friends and one very confusing card, that Vertin noticed her hat was gone.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
‘I did like this hat,’ Cormac thought, somewhere else entirely now, throwing the fedora and placing the blue boater hat on instead, it was rather charming in his opinion.
He got straight to work on one last experiment before calling the night finished, the ritual folding open around him, the flower blooming quiet and steady at the great beast’s heart as he descended as it once more.
One particular thought kept circling back on itself while he worked, turning over slowly and carefully like something he wasn’t quite ready to look at directly.
‘Space-Time-in-One is an incomplete pillar-level symbolism,’ he thought.
‘The symbolism of the strongest pillar at that.
So even when it is incomplete and diminished as I’m pretty much using the Proxy symbolism to act in the name of myself, can the storm move something that the King of Space-Time would struggle with?’
Darkness gathered behind him in answer, the specific, seamless kind that only shows up once time and space have stopped bothering to pretend they’re two separate things anymore, and it pulled towards him.
Fate can no longer push him anywhere besides forward.
The Storm slammed into him and simply stopped there, the way a river stops for exactly one breathless second against a stubborn rock sitting square in its current.
Then, it flowed around him instead, curling smoothly past on either side and continuing on its way, as though the rock had been worth the detour.
When the Storm finally stopped unfolding reality, he found himself standing somewhere that wasn’t merely dark.
It was darkness itself, total and absolute, a place where space and time truly had no difference.
He turned, and found a figure standing there already looking back at him, waiting.
It was him, but seemingly older, though not that old.
But otherwise identical, down to the tired set of eyes.
His symbolism yanked them together in the same breath, and the two of them collided in a single, blinding burst of orange light violent enough to make the endless nothing around them flinch.
When Cormac came back to his senses, he was standing in a city considerably more modern than anywhere he’d set foot in so far, glass and neon and the low hum of traffic he hadn’t heard in what felt like forever.
He stopped the first person who walked past him and asked, plainly, what year it was.
He noticed his voice was deeper than it should be but he had no time to think about that for now.
The man’s whole face lit up, thrilled to find someone else sharing in his mood.
“You’re excited too, huh!
Well, it’s almost time, isn’t it, we’re about to welcome a new century!
It’s 1999!”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________ that’s it for volume 2, look forward to some family bonding early release because I want to finish this volume already