As Hunter prepared to cross the threshold between his old-timey bar personal Shard and the actual world of Aernor, he realized something had been nagging at the back of his mind for some time. More or less, in fact, since he, Fawkes, and the Brethren had entered Mother’s Inner Sanctum.
He’d been anchored to the Place of Power just outside the Sanctum’s entrance.
Was that where he’d respawn?
Would it be safe?
For some reason, he’d been unconsciously operating under the impression that the immediate threat of Mother and her morbid gathering of faithful was somehow contained by the Sanctum, limited by it.
Was that really the case?
Why had he even assumed that in the first place?
Well, there was one way to know.
He took a deep breath, braced himself, and crossed the door. As with every other time he’d done that, his senses short-circuited for a moment. He was assaulted by starbursts of impossible colors, the deep timbre of tolling bells, and the smell of ozone and camphor. He powered through almost absent-mindedly. Disconcerting as all those were, he was more worried about what waited for him on the other side. He felt his body materialize again, braced himself for what might wait for him on the other side, and…
Nothing.
The dark corridors of the Halls were empty and quiet, the great double doors to the Sanctum were firmly shut. Fawkes and the Brethren were nowhere to be seen. He could hear the incessant whispering of Mother’s faithful behind the doors if he tried, he realized, but it was barely perceptible, muted by the powerful, ever-present beat of the Halls’ heart.
He was alone, but at least he was safe.
A notification flashed before his eyes, drawing his attention to the messages that had been piling up in his game log.
<Élan> You successfully make your way back to the realm of the living. Slowly but surely, erosion eats at the edges of your psyche. Your Élan quality is now 8.
Ugh. Alright, fine, not ominous at all. Hunter had forgotten about that, but this wasn’t the time to either worry or look further into it. There were more pressing things to do. He opened his game log and quickly went through the rest of his notifications going from newest to oldest, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
The first few were nothing interesting–just the moment-to-moment logistics of how he’d been brutally murdered by Mother’s honor guard. He scrolled past them almost absent-mindedly. He didn’t need some arbitrary damage values to know that being impaled on a huge spear and cleaved in half hurt a lot. He’d experienced that first hand.
The one thing that caught his eye was that he’d lost all his Aether on death. He was lucky, as he only had a miniscule amount. He’d spent the rest just outside Mother’s chapel. If he’d died sitting on 800 Aether, he’d have a stroke.
The other thing he noticed was a few Skill and Ability increases. Tumbling around and getting brutalized had gained him 2 points of Evasion and an impressive 6 points of Toughness. Not bad at all. If it wasn’t for the excruciating pain, the trauma, and the yet-undiscovered unsettling implications of his dwindling Élan, he might even consider getting his ass handed to him as a halfway-decent training method.
Next came the notifications about the contest of wills he’d lost against Mother–or rather some other entity whose name had been obscured and replaced with a bunch of question marks. That had to be the alien puppeteer centipede thing that hid behind itself behind Mother’s illusion. He’d failed his Willpower check there, but the corpse hair charm had absorbed the brunt of the attack and saved his bacon from its stunning effect. Fawkes and Sister Peregrine hadn’t been so fortunate.
In retrospect, the charm was what saved their collective bacon. It almost justified pilfering an ancient severed head and plucking its hair for crafting materials.
Almost.
Hunter willed the game log window away and summoned his familiars. They materialized a few seconds later, immediately pelting him with a wave of worried squeaks and squawks, both the telepathic and mundane kind.
“Hush, you fools!” he hissed. “Do you want every low-dweller in the Halls running after us again?”
Biggs and Wedge responded with the mental link equivalents of ‘no, no’ and ‘oops, sorry’ and landed before him. They stood at attention like tiny feathered soldiers waiting for their commanding officer to give them their next orders.
“Okay, listen. I want you to fly around the halls and corridors–quietly!–and look for Fawkes and the Brethren. If you find them, or signs of them, or anything else, tell me. Understand?”
They did, or at least they thought they did.
“One other thing. If you see any nasties, do not bring them back here. Fly off and lose them, but do not let them follow you. Alright?”
Biggs and Wedge nodded with such grim determination it was almost comical.
“Good. Fuck off now.”
The Halls were huge and confusing, but Hunter was prepared to sneak around corridor after corridor looking for any sign of where his companions had gone, no matter how long it would take. Using his familiars to cover as much ground as possible, as quickly As possible was the obvious first thing to do.
As it turned out it was Fawkes that found Hunter first, however, not the other way around.
She and the Brethren had holed up in a nearby vault, just like when they’d almost been overrun by the low-dweller horde. Once they were settled, Fawkes, who apparently knew more about working along with Transients than she’d let on, snuck out on her own to keep an eye on the entrance to the Inner Sanctum and wait for Hunter to return to the Place of Power he was anchored to.
“Fawkes! You made it out!”
She nodded and put a gloved finger to her lips, shushing him.
“Quiet, fool. Come.”
Hunter recalled Biggs and Wedge from their little reconnaissance mission and followed her.
The vault was more or less identical to the other ones Hunter had seen, a nondescript rectangular room with some kind of lectern in the middle and four Kannewik dancing their eternal dance around it. This one held a small silver tuning fork. It looked innocent enough, but based on everything else Hunter had seen in the Halls of the Cor Ancestors, he wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
The Brethren were huddled under a blanket in the far side of the room, resting. Sister Peregrine raised her head and offered him a nod as he and Fawkes entered the vault, then went back to cradling Brother Aurochs’s head. She’d removed her headdress. Hunter had never seen her without it.
If he had any doubts about whether Sister Finch was her actual mother, they were instantly dispelled. Sister Peregrine was the spitting image of the woman in the chapel, only younger, sadder, and less deranged. She had an almond-shaped face, high cheekbones, dark hair, and dark eyes, currently puffy from what must have been hours of crying. There was a dignified beauty about her Hunter found surprising. Then he remembered there was a good chance she’d lied and misled Fawkes and him, and all his admiration fizzled.
He didn’t have the chance to say anything, though. As soon as they were safe behind the vault’s enchanted walls, Fawkes turned around and slapped Hunter across the face hard enough to send him reeling.
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“Hey!” he cried, rubbing at his cheek and jaw. “What was that for?”
“What kind of an idiot are you, lad?” she hissed through clenched teeth, nostrils flaring. “What has gotten into you? First you use yourself as bait for a horde of low-dwellers, then this? What was this all about?”
“That’s way too many angry words to say ‘thank you’.”
“To the Nine Hells with ‘thank you’! What were you even thinking?”
Hunter scowled. He didn’t exactly expect a hero’s welcome, but neither did he a slap in the face and an earful. It wasn’t like Fawkes to get this hot and bothered. What had–?
Oh, that.
Yeah, stumbling upon a long-lost friend’s desecrated corpse would do that to a person, he supposed, even if that person was someone like her.
“I, uh… I take it you, uh… you saw him?” he asked, not sure how to broach the subject.
She didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about, at first. Then she did, and all her anger and fire faded, leaving her looking tired and defeated and old, so very old.
Seeing like this hit Hunter harder than her slap ever could, like an iron fist right in the stomach. He was still angry, he realized, though he wasn’t exactly sure at whom. At Grimm, sure, despite the fact that he’d trumped him with his charisma. At himself. At the world. At this world, and at its creators too, who’d deliberately chosen to create people like Fawkes, conscious and self-aware, only to inflict suffering on them.
And he was angry at the Brethren, too.
Αt Sister Peregrine.
“Did you know?” he turned to her, his fury burning hotter with every passing moment. “All this time, did you fucking know?”
She made no move to respond, not even to deny his accusation or to tell him she didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. In fact, she didn’t react at all. She didn’t even acknowledge he was talking to her. She just sat there under her blanket and kept absent-mindedly stroking Brother Aurochs’s messy hair, a mere shadow of her former self. She looked naked without her headdress on, weak, robbed of her authority. Human. Too human.
Hunter didn’t care. He wanted to admit it, to hear her say it. He wanted his pound of flesh.
Ironically, it was Fawkes who reined him in. She put a hand on his shoulder and let it rest there. There was something both strict and soothing in that unusual gesture of hers, something almost parental. It surprised Hunter enough for him to shake his rage away and make him turn from Sister Peregrine, almost ashamed of his outburst.
He wasn’t used to being so emotionally volatile, swinging from stress to panic to anger to sadness and then back to stress and anger again, and then to shame and who knows what else. But then, he wasn’t exactly used to getting killed and tackling moral dilemmas either, and the day was still far from over.
Nobody spoke for a while, each of them lost in the mess of their own thoughts and feelings.
Sister Peregrine, quite understandably, looked very distraught. Hunter didn’t know the specifics, but after that whole encounter with Sister Finch turning into Mother and with Brother Aurochs turning into the world’s saddest minotaur, then back to human again, he wouldn’t exactly fault her. No that it justified her deception; he was still angry at her for that.
Fawkes looked lost in her own thoughts, her laconic demeanor more or less unchanged, save from the fact that she suddenly looked a couple of decades older. She’d come a long way to find her friend and she’d gone through a lot, only to find his dead body strung up as a grim trophy. If anything, she was being coolheaded.
And as for himself…
He was still on edge from experiencing virtual murder a second time, but his talk with Grimm and Mortimer had somehow blunted the whole experience, put it into perspective. There was a lot he’d have to process, yes, but it would have to wait.
“So, what now?” he asked the two women.
“I have to get him out of there," Fawkes said, her voice neutral. “His body. I can’t leave it there.”
“Fair enough. How about you, Sister? I think you’ve got some explaining to do. A mercy-killing was what we signed up for, not dealing with some kind of crazy monster cult. I mean, I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it turns out you kind of pulled the wool over our eyes in more ways than one.”
“Lad–” Fawkes started to say, but Sister Peregrine cut her off.
“You are correct. I owe you some explanations. So ask.”
“Uh, how’s he, for starters?”
The woman combed her fingers through her unconscious companion’s dark, short-cropped hair with an affection and intimacy Hunter had never seen her express before.
“Sleeping. Hurt. Alive, though, and in human shape. He will be alright. He is strong.”
“Is he some kind of shapeshifter, then? A lycanthrope?” asked Fawkes.
“It is his duty to bear the mark of an ancient spirit of the land, as is mine” the other woman explained. “His is a disagreeable one. A curse and a burden is what it is, bearing his mark. A sacrifice.”
“And what about the woman in the Sanctum?” asked Hunter. “Was she Sister Finch?”
“She was not,” Sister Peregrine shook her head. “Only a dark spirit that wore her face. It is as I–as we–feared; Sister Finch has been dead for some time now. She bore the mark of a spirit too. Such was her duty. A thankless duty, but a necessary one. At least she is free of it now.”
“Was she really your–?”
“I will not speak of this.”
“And what of the creature that wears her face now?” asked Fawkes.
“What of it? It dies. If I die too, so be it. But it dies.”
Fawkes gave a short, grim nod and frowned.
“Well said, Sister. Well said. Still more easily said than done, though. So this is what we’ll do; Hunter, you’ll stay here with the Brother. You’ll be safe enough, and once he comes to he’ll be able to guide you out. Find the god-bear, tell him of what transpired here, then make your way to the Brennai folken and tell Hallara, too. She’s the medicine woman, the one in white. She’ll make sure you’re safe and taken care of. Sister and I, we’ll go back to the Inner Sanctum and find a way to silence that thing for good.”
“I ain’t going anywhere,” said Hunter. “I’m coming with you.”
“Just leave, lad” Fawkes said, and there was a hint of tired finality in her voice. “It’s not your fight.”
“Like hell it isn’t.”
“Grimnir’s beard, fool!” Fawkes suddenly exploded. “Do you think this is another of your games? Go back to your world, transient, back to your easy living and your stories and your make-believe. Leave this one to us. No one asked you to be here. Hells, no one wants you here.”
Hunter felt like she’d slapped him in the face. In fact, she had slapped them in the face just a few minutes earlier, and her words stung a million times more. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Fawkes had never said anything like that to him before. It came completely out of left field. He just stood there with a numb, slack-jawed expression of surprise.
Fawkes was staring daggers at him, boiling with ire and more than eager to say more. Sister Peregrine was watching the scene unfold, looking both perplexed and interested.
“Are you kidding me right now?” he said, his own temper flaring up just like it had done with Grimm. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
“You wanted to know why we don’t like your kind?” Fawkes hissed through gritted teeth. “This is why. Nothing is serious to you. There are no stakes, no consequences to your actions. You come and go as you please, do as you please, fuck who you please and kill who you please and be back home in time for dinner, while we’re stuck here dealing with your messes. Nothing is real to you, lad. Not really. It’s all fun and games to you. You just tag along because you are bored. You don’t care. You can’t care.”
“I can’t care?” he screamed in her face, not caring what fresh kind of Halls-dwelling horrors the noise would alert. “I can’t care? Is that why I fucking killed myself to buy you enough time to get out of there, because I can’t fucking care?”
“Killed yourself?” Fawkes scoffed, not blinking an eye. “You barely gave yourself a timeout. You probably had a sandwich, a wank, and a nap, then popped back in to check on us when boredom hit.”
“Is that what you think?”
“What if it is?”
“Fuck you, Fawkes. Just… fuck you. Do you know what I felt when I saw that thing overtake you? Do you know what I felt when those fucking things stabbed me through the chest and raised me in the air like I was a fucking meat skewer? Do you?”
She said nothing. She simply stared at him with clenched jaw and fists.
“EVERYTHING!” he shouted. “I felt fucking everything! Every bit of stress, every bit of fear, every bit of pain, every bit of horror. And you know what? It’s not even the first time. I’ve died again, and it almost drove me nuts. And despite knowing how it feels and how it hurts and how… how it would fuck me up, I went straight on and did it again, I went straight on and fucking died because it was the only way for you not to. And now here I am, ready to go straight on and do it again. And you have the… the… the audacity to tell me I don’t care. Because it’s not permanent.”
Fawkes opened her mouth to say something, but Hunter cut her off. He was beyond angry. There was no stopping him now, not until he’d said all he wanted to and then some, and he’d stopped seeing red and started deflating on his own.
“And you know what? Yes. I don’t have to do any of this. I can come and go and do as I please and fuck who I please and kill who I please, and them go back to my side of things and–how did you put it?–have a sandwich, a wank, a nap. And then I can wake up and stretch and take a morning shit and pop back in to do it all again from the start. For entertainment. For fun. But do I do that, Fawkes? Do I? Is that what I fucking choose to do?”
“You’re both acting like fools from where I’m standing," Sister Peregrine scolded them, putting an abrupt stop to the mounting tension. “Each in their own way. This is neither the place nor the time to voice your squabbles. If you are lucky enough–if we are lucky enough–you’ll have all the time in the world to do it later. And if we’re not, you won’t have to do it at all, because it won’t matter anymore.”
She was different, Hunter realized, and it wasn’t just that she’d removed her falcon headdress and openly showed her face–a taboo he hadn’t seen her break before. Something had changed in her. Instead of her usual dry and reserved behavior, it was as if she’d gone full nihilist. That gave him enough pause to let his anger start to evaporate.
“I guess there’s no point in arguing, then," said Fawkes with a tired sigh. She’d lost her oomph too. Whatever differences she and Hunter had, they’d have to wait. “We’re all going back in there, all three of us.”
“No," said a man’s voice, a hoarse whisper really, broken and deep. “All four.”