2006, 29th January

Space Station, Apotheosis

Cleaning up the Space station and repairing the damage had taken a fair bit of time.

There were also wounded to tend to.

Abas could likely heal them all with a wave of his hand, the waving part being entirely for display, but one did not simply walk up to a High Lord of Apotheosis asking for favours.

He had still wordlessly patched any damage Michael had suffered in combat with Anisha.

Right now, he seemed to withdraw in on himself, as if he had run into some impediment of his own.

“Plans to pull up our pants and commit to this war not working out?” Michael asked him.

Abas regarded him with a raised brow.

He didn’t bother with wasteful questions like how Michael had deduced what he planned for.

“No. Not as smoothly as I would have hoped. But-”

“Whoever you will leave behind as warden of this planet, you’re having second thoughts. You wonder if it’s the right choice leaving it in their hands. You are unable to completely pull away from earth even as you wish to.”

“It was Lionel.”

“What?”

“It’s a hard sell, convincing our people that one cannot stand without allies in this universe. Guided by small minded xenophobia and an inability to set biases aside in favour of the bigger picture, a deficiency that has hobbled Hollows for so long-”

“Lionel Bellone? The vampire.”

“I see it’s a hard sell. Even for you”

“...You cannot be serious.”

“Lionel is well aware he is not the one to forge ties between his kind and us, nor is he fit for taking custody of the world. He is grooming a successor, and won’t share any more than that.”

Michael leaned back in his seat with a disbelieving sigh.

“You did not kill that Fae, you know.” Abas told him.

“I know. I doubt it can be killed outside the astral, given what I know now of their nature.”

“Some can. Most of the Fae you will encounter can be slain here. But that creature was what we classify as a Fae Lord. A sentient Astral plane, in and of itself.”

“I’d heard of those. Didn’t think I’d have the pleasure of meeting one myself though.”

“Here on the physical plane, they’re powerful, but as limited as any other Fae. In the Astral… How does one destroy a living universe?”

“So it isn’t a war we can win.”

“Even worse. Even as sitting here discussing it is strengthening the other side. Now that you’ve visualized the concept of a living oceanic universe, a fold within your own psyche’s astral plane has been born, yet another universe born within your own mindscape. The same goes for my own. Mind and matter stuck in a relentless, actively malicious feedback loop. Philosophers dream of platonic forms that are immutable representations of reality, mathematicians hypothesise and view the face of their God in a theoretical Absolute Infinity. Their views spread among their contemporaries, and they paint twisted reflections of their views of reality within their own mindscape, swelling those astral planes to incomprehensible magnitudes that we will never contain, dreams that want their dreamers to die. And all we can do is watch, painting the face of our own destruction with each passing thought.”

"The one that possessed Anisha- do we have a way of tracing whose mindscape that creature was born of?"

"There is no way to know. Dimensionalism doesn't work across the Horizon membrane, and I can't go around scanning the psyche of every organism in the universe. It might even be a phytoplankton for all I know."

Michael looked incredulous.

"Surely that's an exaggeration."

"Like I said, Michael, there's just no way to know."

“But you still have hope. You haven’t given up this fight as hopeless. You believe there is something out there that is capable of truly destroying even these Fae Lords.”

“Yes. You were right when you said Hans didn’t stumble onto his own influences on his own. I was the one who pointed him in the direction of Indra Prakash’s theories. I myself was exposed to those teachings, but Hans seemed to have taken the applications of what he learned to the opposite end of where I took them.”

Michael pieced together Abas’ words in his head.

“Hans’ motivation is his view of a truly natural world, with no membranes separating us from Horizon. If your views are the opposite of his, that means… It means you want to strengthen the barriers between us and the Horizon. Or destroy Horizon altogether. Even after you just got done telling me what an impossible task it was.”

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Abas did not reply, and Michael filled in the blanks on his own.

“Indra’s theory about the nature of our reality. You agree with it. You believe there was a time when we weren’t separated from Horizon after all.”

“The tone of your voice tells me you don’t struggle overly with that interpretation of events either.”

Michael had recently begun to sharpen his skills in the Spirit field, and he knew what he had seen- a blazing representation of every single celestial body within the spirit realm, except Earth, that had left little more than an imprint behind in the black fabric of the spirit plane.

He ignored the implied question, asking one of his own instead.

“Were you around, sir? When Indra Prakash was still Chief Librarian here?”

“No, Michael. I am old, but not that old. His student was one of my teachers though. Nikita Balandin.”

“Oh?”

“He’s gone too, now. I don’t know what became of him. Just like his teacher.”

Michael knew all too well why Abas was willing to spill his plans for the future so freely.

As detached as the High Lords had grown from humanity, leaving the planet behind was still not a choice any of them would make lightly.

Abas expected Michael’s support in the future.

With the grim picture he painted of what humanity had to look forward to, it was hard not to justify a more concentrated effort in their efforts against Horizon, to what amounted to more than just border patrol.

But it was too vast an undertaking for Michael to agree quite so easily.

Besides, Abas had his own preparations to make to ensure Earth’s population was left supervised, especially since a fresh supply of mages to fill their ranks still depended mostly on the planet-bound population.

Michael’s communicator buzzed within the pockets of his trousers.

“Aaron?”

It went badly. Ciara and I barely made it out of there in one piece, we’re back at the space station getting patched up.

“And Pierre was left behind.”

His back was broken. He probably isn’t dead, but they likely took him with them.

“They?”

There’s a werewolf working with Hans. We weren’t prepared.

“I see.”

Michael closed his fist on the conversation.

Abas looked at him knowingly, no doubt having heard the conversation.

Michael rose to leave.

“I should see them.”

Abas nodded, and Michael took his leave.

2006, 30th January

Reykjavik, Iceland

Pierre woke to almost no sensation save pain.

He tried to rise from where he was laying.

He could not feel anything past the lower half of his torso.

He opened his mouth to call for help.

None of his body responded to his thoughts, rebellious.

“I can hear you trying to scream. The clicking of your jaw is pissing me off. Might as well quit now.”

At least his eyes didn't fail him.

An unusually tall, muscular, timber haired man sat at the side of his bed.

“Sup. Name’s Victor.”

Pierre tried to speak, and predictably enough- nothing.

“You know, you could speak, if you really wanted to. You’re one of the mages, aren’t you. You could just wish your paralysis away. Hell, you could just pull yourself up off this fine hospital bed and tear me apart right now, then make everyone here forget they saw anything, and walk the fuck out of here. Limitless potential. Must be nice.”

Victor leaned closer, and Pierre smelled raw meat on his breath.

“But you’ve done fuck all with it, haven’t you? The ability to do literally anything you want, and all you’ve done is- nothing. So how does it feel when you see a being like me break your back, have you completely at my mercy like this? When a mage like Hans, in true command of his powers, shows up and decimates your little search party? When your own comrades leave you behind like so much dead weight?”

Pierre stopped struggling, letting the words sink in.

“Now we have you stashed here, trussed up while the good folk here assure us you’ll make a full recovery. You’re far easier to move around when you can walk on your own after all. And it's not like you’re capable of giving us any trouble.”

Victor rose to leave.

“I’ll see you soon, mage.”

Pierre considered his words, as he had little else to do.

The werewolf hadn’t lied; Aaron and Ciara had left him behind, in more ways than one.

He had always covered his fear with an external aura of bravado and aggression, but in the end, this was all that had amounted to.

An invalid confined to a hospital in a city he did not know.

But he had been paralysed for far longer than just that, even before his crippling injury.

He had the potential to surpass his father by far, and maybe he had already, but fear paralysed him all the same.

It was time to make a decision on his own, for the first time in his life.

Thankfully, his bed was right by the window, and the strength in his upper limbs hadn’t atrophied enough to make this next task impossible.

So he gathered his strength, while he regarded the view outside, clean, symmetrical patches of green on white architecture, so reminiscent of Apotheosis, in it’s sterility if nothing else, a view he had never really appreciated before.

A burst of strength to his upper body, hardened by years of honing it as a tool for someone else’s wishes- perhaps accompanied with a burst of magic, a suicidally potent charge of power from a mage that had otherwise remained confined to perceptual effects and trained no further, a blurring on the boundaries of his capabilities, setting his pain receptors alight, carried him through the glass panes.

He was vaguely aware of screaming behind him as the pain from the shards of glass biting into his flesh overcame his senses.

The ground below drew closer.

He remembered Ciara, lavender scented, haughty and hurt and so similar to him and yet so different, able to persevere on a bottomless well of inner strength.

Closer.

He remembered Aaron, making a show of indifference, while he cared so much for everything around him, so torn between the causes that pulled at his heart, and his feelings of impotence in an unjust world.

Closer.

He remembered his flesh, his weight above him, his lips on the skin of his throat, the temperature of his skin, the texture of his muscles, pulse beating beneath his wrists grasped in Pierre’s fingers.

Closer.

He thought he did not want to die.

Then he thought of nothing at all.

Sirens wailed around Landspitali.