This was not the shout of a bestial throat. It was not the sound of a human throat, either. Something lept out of the shadows, a tangle of darkness and shapes better lent to smoke or deep water than any living thing. This shadow was unbound by matter. It was just there, swallowing every light, save for the glint of jewels on clothes, the gleam of a chain-mail shirt, and the flutter of darkly embroidered robes.

This figure stood between Hawk and Em, and the Shadowbeast.

“Here,” whispered the figure, and its voice was unthinkable. It slid off her consciousness before she could even determine if it was something beautiful or horrible. “Come here, my child.”

Its hands were gloved in something black and plush. It removed this covering, exposing flesh in an inhuman shade of dark violet, long, claw-like nails and some few patches of light color up around the upper arms. With bare hands, it felt the wound on the Shadowbeast. And that creature did not respond with violence, biting the hands so near its wound. It leaned into the body of this new horror and whined.

“Foolish, to harm my beasts.” The voice said.

Fuck. Hawk thought.

“I’d thought the beasts themselves were enough warning.”

Fuck, fuck. Oh fuck.

“But clearly more warning is needed”

Fuckity fuck fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK.

“So allow me to provide it.” The being turned around and raised one hand. Light sprang into existence above its violet claw-tips, a horrible cold blue light that denied any possibility of life from its radiance, even as it light the whole dreary white forest bright as day. And it exposed a man, of course. A horrible, wonderful man. Beautiful in a way that defied beauty, that made all human scores pale in comparison. Horrible, too, because he hated; anyone nearby could feel it. Hate, deep and burbling as blood. They had wounded something he loved, and now he wanted his revenge. He wore opulence that made the Earth Archon’s getup look cheap and tawdry by comparison, but it also was not clean. Dark stains of rich earth were on the hem of his black velvet robes, and the chainmail beneath all that falling fabric betrayed signs of rust. His hair was the shadow swirling around his head, somehow horrifically a part of his substance, and his eyes were an inhuman crystal blue, with cephalopod pupils to match his terrible Beast.

But the face—

“Oh my God, Hawk.” Em whispered, and their fingers found hers and gripped tightly. Hawk could barely feel it.

“I am the Master of Shadows,” said the stranger wreathed in Shadow. “You have my attention. Whatever will you do with it?”

He had Alex’s face.

Blood still dripped from the Shadowbeast’s maw. It looked very, very much like a great cat in this moment. Maybe that was a better name for it, Shadowcat. Certainly, in the presence of its master, it was the most cat-like, pawing at the man’s dark robes, rubbing its burned face into his hands. As Hawk watched, those burns diminished, leaving behind whole, scaled flesh. Then it nipped at his fingers, delicately, as if playing a much-beloved game.

“There. If you sought to do harm, it is undone. And you shall not get another chance. What do you want, people of the God-world? What brings you to this forgotten place?”

Em’s fingers tightened on Hawk’s. And Hawk had already gripped her friend’s hand for dear life. He continued to watch them both, a strange, terrible expression of good humor on his face. On Alex’s face. Maybe that was why Hawk recognized the nature of that expression; that was how Alex looked when he talked about his father, Baylor.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The one person Hawk assumed Alex could kill without regret.

“We came looking for my husband,” Hawk said, after two false starts. God, her mouth was so dry. And you’re wearing his face, she wanted to say, but couldn’t. Because she knew who this was…or at least, who he was trying to be. The Master of Shadows. The Holian’s devil figure. Is this Alex? Does he know me? “I’m Hawk.”

“I’m uninterested,” said the man with Alex’s face. “In fact, I’m a bit put out. I go through all this work to keep you away from the Gods, and you just run straight towards them. I didn’t think people from the God-world would be so careless. Or so dense. So let’s be blunt. I want you to leave.”

“And go where?” Em said, silencing Hawk with a squeeze.

“Anywhere, as long as it isn’t here. Go back where the light touches, and leave the rest to me. Sound fair?” The man gave the shadowcat a gentle pet, then strode towards them. Hawk was acutely aware of two things, simultaneously: That there was absolutely nothing but darkness and air behind her, and the man approaching her had Alex’s face. Inhuman eyes, but Alex’s face none-the-less.

“Sounds like fighting words. Nobody gets to own shit like that, light touching, darkness touching. Sounds too goddamn much like imminent domain to me.” They paused, then said, “Come on, dude. You know us. You know both of us. Give off the act for a minute.”

“I know you,” he said, looking down at them. At Hawk too, but mostly at Emile. “Forgive me. And here I thought I was accosting two strangers, one of whom is either dangerously ambitious, or willfully stupid. I say it again: Leave. Do not return to the procession. Go back to the God-world and leave the rest of us alone. You are neither needed nor wanted here.”

He took two steps back, there was a sound like a silken implosion, and suddenly there were two great shadow-cat beasts running across the forest floor. Away from both Hawk and Emile, mercifully. And she didn’t doubt that was the word, exactly: Mercy. This being had let her live, and wanted her to know it.

But he had Alex’s face.

“Hawk, you have to stay with me. Hawk. You’re about to fall down this goddamn cliffside, Hawk!” and she was caught by Em, who shoved her hard against a tree. “You’re scaring me. This whole goddamn place is scaring me and I need you to stand the fuck up and help me out of this.”

Yes. She needed to survive this. That was right. But oh, God, he’d had Alex’s face. Could he be—absolutely not. She didn’t dare think any routes down that road. Not here, when she was quite literally six inches away from the ledge. She put her head between her knees and took long, deep breaths.

Lights flashed between the panels of her skirt, bouncing with an unseen runner’s legs. And then Henry’s voice, “Hello! Hello! Em, are you alright?”

And then a sound that made a lot of things suddenly be very okay: Kissing noises. That brought her head up, right quick. Yes. Oh, yes, Henry Dyson was kissing Emile Yung. Suddenly being down a dark hole in a hellscape didn’t seem so bad.

“Yes. We’re fine. Hawk’s having a bit of a breakdown. There was a weird guy here with a serious David Bowie complex, scared the shit out of Hawk—and me—with these giant cat-fish things. Henry,” Em’s hand steadied their male collegue. “The weirdo said we had one chance to leave. I think he meant it but—get this—he had Alex’s face. And he was definitely an Archetype.”

Had he been? Her mind had been too focused on Shadow and also on He had Alex’s face to try and remember the constructed vocabulary she’d had back home. All that stuff about lines and Glass Events and Archetypes felt weirdly bloodless. How could that word Archetype somehow embody the wonderful, terrible, horrible person they’d just seen. How could it describe someone who would turn the Earth Archon into the horror Hawk had known her as. Gods felt like a better word. Gods. Demons. Angels. Archetypes. Only one word had felt safe in their bloodless world of electronics and neat evacuations. But this was a place of dark things, of wrought iron altars that drank blood on the regular, of dancers who stopped only when biology forced them. But she wandered back to her scientific mind and harnessed it once more. An Archetype. Maybe he had been. Maybe he’d felt a little—very little—like the elevated Ape from the first pocket universe the Studdards had opened, in the Bronx zoo.

“Hey,” another voice came out of the woods, with another bobbing light. Hawk let her body sag against the cliffside tree, because that was Kaiser Willheim crashing through the forest. What was that one kid’s song? Little bunny fu-fu, hopping through the forest. Well, Willheim wouldn’t hop to save his life—too undignified—but he absolutely would bash field mice on the head. Hawk and Em and Dyson were all in the “mouse” category. How would Shadow—much easier to think than any variation of “Alex”—react to Kaiser? She was pretty sure one of them was smart enough to play with the other one, and if she could be sure that Shadow was not Alex, she’d pay to see them fight it out.

But was he Alex? Knock it the fuck off, she thought to herself. She couldn’t afford this now. Because far back behind her, the pavilion was looking for where she might be.