Grey clouds were blowing in from the east on a chill breeze and promising an evening rain to break the unseasonable dry spell. I shut the car door, swore to myself, and opened it again to pull the keys from the ignition. I grabbed my carry case before locking the doors and walked up the driveway to my front door. My home is a new four-bedroom, two story house in the middle of Divide, Colorado, which gives me the solitude I prefer without making trips into town a problem. Some guy from California had started building it a few years back and run out of funds leaving it partially completed. The place was perfect for someone with a modest budget wanting a bit of space and able to do the work themselves. The twenty acres of land it sat on had helped in my choice to buy the property though. The roof was gray shingles with smooth river stone covering the bottom half of the walls and faux wood siding painted an off blue-white color covering the second floor. A large porch wrapped around the house with a roof on the front area that had been painted red before I ever got the place. I'd had to install the siding on the upper floor myself, along with most of the mud work and dry walling on the interior which probably accounted for my pride in the house despite the fact that the whole placed looked more than a bit ridiculous.
Three of the rooms were on the top floor along with one of the bathrooms. The first floor was split by an extra wide hall that ran between the last bedroom which I had converted to a work room for my computer repair work and random scholastic pursuits. The second bathroom, and the dining area on one side. On the other side was the industrial sized kitchen done in white granite and stainless steel with a small breakfast nook slipped into the corner by the back door. The hallway felt narrow from the collection of book shelves that lined it opposite the large island of the kitchen with its barstools. The hall ended in the oversized living room with a woodburning stove and the entrance area which had come with an overly elaborate antler chandelier hanging beside the stairs. The building itself was on the squat side in appearance since the first two feet of it were below ground level but it was mine both in legal terms and in the sense that I’d had a hand in building it.
A medium sized shed built from corrugated steel with a line of exhaust fans along the top could be seen on the far side of the house on the other end of the greenhouse and garden. The massive field that fronted the house had been left alone and a dense stand of aspen trees was backed up against the back of the house. Their late autumn leaves making them look like living fire. Between the blades I forged and the computer repair work I did, I managed to keep ahead of my bills and still pay for my hobbies. The garden helped supplement things since what I didn't eat was given or traded to friends and neighbors for goods and their garden food. Say what you want about the rest of the country but the barter system is still alive and well in the Colorado Rockies.
Ten feet from the door I came to an abrupt halt and looked up. I wasn’t stopping because of the enormous white furred Siberian tiger that had jumped down from my porch. Though it was fortunate that most people couldn’t see him. I imagine even in the Colorado Rockies the sight of a brown striped, white tiger, large enough to look me in the eyes despite my height would have incited a panic. What caused me to halt was the fact that the wards I had layered around my home had been reinforced and it wasn’t mine, Khan’s, or even my sister’s energy that had been used. I searched my mind for a few moments trying to place where I recognized the traces of energy and drew a blank. I made a few covert gestures with the hand hidden behind my carry bag accompanied by an effort of will to disarm some of the more volatile wards long enough to get inside and nodded in greeting to Khan before stepping onto the porch. Wards were at their most basic form energy constructs designed to react in preset ways to events. A skilled individual could let them stop functioning and restart with the right stimulus, in this case the specific application of will combined with predefined hand gestures.
“Greetings my old friend. What brings you to earth?” Khan leaned his face closer towards me and let out a growling chuckle. His pale, tawny, yellow eyes meeting mine with a warm weight.
“Business I’m sorry to say Cathal. The seals around earth are failing rapidly in what Council thinks is an intentional manner. Synbel sent a couple of people he thought might be able to help you with stabilizing them and finding out what’s causing the problem.”
I frowned at the reply. Khan’s answer had been intentionally vague. Either he’d been ordered not to tell me who they were or he was worried that the people inside were going to either upset me or trigger unwanted memories if I knew who they were in advance. Synbel was considered my commander in the eyes of the High council of Magic. We had carefully hidden who I was from them and gotten me assigned as the person in charge of keeping Earth from being overrun by any unwanted nasty creatures as well as making sure that some idiot didn’t destabilize the Earth’s already shaky leyline system. I sighed and rubbed at my temples. I had a list of computers I had to finish repairs on for customers and now I got to add fixing the planet to my worries.
“Alright I won’t push you for details. Do me a favor though and next time you bring someone into my home that I haven’t already had here don’t let them touch the wards. In the past I would have just gone for broke, assumed the worst, and killed everything inside I didn’t immediately recognize… and you know it.” Khan snorted and shook his head.
“I told him that, but he insisted that you two were on good enough terms that you would recognize his touch even without all your memories.” I paused as I opened the door and looked at Khan who had apparently decided to ignore the existence of the wall and was walking through it.
“He’s right. I did find it familiar. But I can’t place it.” I reached towards my side unconsciously checking for the sword that wasn’t there; a habit I’d picked up since my memories had started coming back.
“Do me a favor? Go out and settle the local wild life. I’m fond of the creatures that hang out around here. And no offense, you’re a great friend and all but you have a knack for scaring away the animals until they get to know you.” Khan made a rolling motion with his shoulders that was his approximation of a shrug before walking back through the wall, his tail lashing sideways to hit me across the chest staggering me backwards. A gray ball of fur went flashing past my legs behind him. My tom cat, Bluff, was literally radiating waves of fear and disgruntlement.
That was odd, Bluff always lived up to his name. I’d watched him stalk elk for fun and play tag with the foxes that lived in a nearby field. The crazy cat even dragged in an owl one day. He never let his fear show and yet I could see the sickly yellow glow around him of the emotion’s energy despite the mental shields I held in place to prevent that sort of thing. Whoever was in my living room was a big deal to spook my cat. I walked into the room noted the three gentlemen, their attires, and appearance while casually feeling out their energy and then turned and walked into my kitchen. I disarmed as I walked to the fridge pulling off both wrist sheaths and taking out the foot-long blade that hung down the inside of my pants where I’d cut out the pocket so it was easy to hide and draw in a rush if needed. I put the trio of blades on the counter and pulled a case of beer from the fridge and headed back to the living room.
I used the small window the action gave me to run through a list of scenarios I had planned for in my head. The fact that I’d actually planned several ways to handle something like this proved how drastically the last year had changed me from the relatively average person I’d been. It also displayed how strange my life had become that I could spend my spare time imagining situations like this and then have them come true. I finally settled on ignoring diplomacy, I hadn’t invited them and nobody had claimed guest privileges so I didn’t need to watch my P’s and Q’s.
I walked back to my living room and set the beer down in front of the massive muscle-bound blond-haired man. He was dressed in a pair of blue coveralls and a leather apron that was stained with gods only knew what sorts of fluids, I idly noted the iron prosthetic hand before handing him the bottle. He was tall enough that even slouching he made the recliner he was sitting in seem small. His shoulders were another foot over the back of the chair and he looked cramped in the oversized Lazy Boy. His blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail that he'd tossed over the back of the chair so it hung down to the floor. His beard although neatly trimmed and combed was thick enough it made the heavy leather apron it was tucked under bulge out a few inches from his chest. He had clear blue eyes that shone with wisdom above a shaved upper lip and a nose that had obviously been broken and poorly set several times.
“Sorry if it’s not your preferred brew I don’t keep much ale or larger on hand.”
I glanced to the other two, one had a distinctly Mediterranean complexion with a fall of shaggy unkempt midnight black hair falling over the left half of his face and dressed in a similar fashion to the first though with more stains and had elected to go barefoot revealing a clubbed foot. His darkly tanned hands were marked with the small tracery of white scars I took as the mark of an experienced blacksmith who rarely wore gloves while forging.
The third man’s appearance was a study in contrast. He was dressed in a charcoal grey three-piece suit that probably cost more than a house on Pennsylvania avenue and his cufflinks looked to be made from diamond and gold. The clean lines of his suit were at odds with the ink stains on the elbows and cuffs. His black hair had been trimmed close to his head and slicked down with gel to make it lay flat to frame his face. A set of old fashion reading glasses sat crookedly on his delicate looking nose and a dark smear of ink showed where he constantly pushed them back up his nose when reading. The rest of him though, looked like a carving of an Egyptian pharaoh done in blackened ivory.
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“I’m going to be blunt here. I’m not one of your worshipers, I know you're all gods of one flavor or another simply from the taste and feel of your energy and if you decide to start a pissing contest about my manners, I will literally eat you alive.” I sat down and collected a beer of my own. Killian’s Irish red, one of the few decent store bought beers you could find in my opinion. I held it out and smiled as Tyr tapped his bottle against mine.
“I thought you’d recognize me. I’m guessing that your memories still aren’t fully back?” He sipped at the beer demonstrating a remarkable amount of dexterity with his fake hand. I supposed it was a good sign that Fenrir hadn’t spit out the real one yet, that whole myth about it being a sign of the end of the world and all.
“Thanks for not using my old name, I go by Cathal now, Tyr. And you’re right about my memories. It seems the human brain isn’t as flexible or adaptive as they claim. My memories are slow to come back and what has come back is in bits and pieces. Even the time where Synbel pulled me away from Earth and I had full access to my abilities is dimly recalled and mostly just disjointed fragments. I keep doing things without knowing how or why I do them until after the fact and sometimes not even then.”
I gestured to the other two deities with my beer both of which were looking at the bottles with disdain. “Mind introducing the other two? I’d hate to let human mythology cloud my judgment, and while effective, having to take a bite out of a god’s energy to settle arguments can be tedious. That, and it’s been so long since I’ve properly fed that I might kill one of them and they probably couldn’t stop me. I’d feel a bit embarrassed if I had to pay reparations to their families because of an accident.”
Both of the gods stood up in anger, finally giving into the constant small insults. The shaggier of the two conjured a hammer from thin air and a ball of shimmering silver power formed between the cupped hands of the other.
I gestured towards the ball first reaching out with a tendril of my own power and simply consumed it. I have an aptitude for subverting other people’s energy into my own thanks to the part of my nature that made me a psychic vampire. The sudden disappearance of the orb made them both hesitate for a moment. Maybe I was a bit drunk from the sudden power rush or simply the fact that I had just shocked not one, but two gods. Unfortunately, I can only absorb certain forms of energy without at least a few moments preparation and even then, it’s not a good idea to let it sit around. Redirecting what I can’t digest on the other hand, isn’t a problem. I barely paused in turning the stolen energy around and casting an energy construct at the smith that shattered his hammer to dust and slammed him down onto my couch. I winced at the crack of wood from the couch as he was forced back down on it. I hadn’t intended to use THAT much force. Even if I was trying to pin a man large enough to palm my head, it was a bit excessive. Besides, I liked that couch, it was comfortable and didn’t heat up when I pulled it close to the fireplace.
“I warned you two not to test him. Odin treats him with courtesy as much because of what he has done for us and how he treats us as what he can do when given cause. Just because his capabilities are reduced on earth does not mean he can’t be a threat to you.” The Egyptian settled down sheepishly and picked up the bottle waving it absently at the air and turning it into a beaten gold chalice. The other was shaking his head in embarrassment.
“Cathal. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Hephaestus of the Greek pantheon; patron of smiths and craftsmen. As well as Thoth of the Egyptian pantheon; patron of scribes, magic, wisdom, the sciences and a bunch of other boring stuff.” He gestured to each in turn and waggled a finger at Hephaestus. “You should learn to watch your temper friend, even Ares can’t get a rise out of you that easily and Cathal here is no bully.”
“My apologies for angering you, but if you’ve watched this planet’s recent history you may understand my intolerance for deities of any sort coming into my home uninvited. As well as a certain need to verify who you were. Were it not for the feel of Tyr’s energy earlier, before I came in, triggering vague memories, and Khan’s warning I may have decided to play it safe and trigger my more destructive wards and killed anything that doesn’t live in my home. Feel free to help yourself to my food and drink, within reason please, I do not have a limitless budget and have to pay for the things you use.”
I offered a beer to Hephaestus and he took it gingerly once I dismissed the energy construct that was holding him in place. “Now Khan has informed me that someone or something has been causing a failure with the wards Council placed over Earth. Now I have a talent for energy constructs, Tyr and Hephaestus are smiths which means making and repairing things is something of a specialty for them. But what I need to know is what you can contribute Thoth?” The Egyptian sipped at his wine and smiled.
“Knowledge is invaluable to any pursuit. Given your past I thought you would value that fact. While they approach it from the perspective of a broken object, I can look for similar historical events, research potential individuals and groups that could be likely culprits, and even isolate methods to reverse or contain the damage. As a matter of fact, if you accept the price Hephaestus and I are asking for our assistance I can even give you some prime suggestions on locations to use as anchors for mitigating and slowing the damage right now.”
I nodded in consideration of what he was saying. Knowledge was power and a god of scholars would be able to save me the leg work of digging through records while I tried to physically track down the cause of the problem. The only question was price, and if I was willing to pay it. They couldn’t by tradition and the standards of their culture demand or request a price outside my ability to pay or they’d be coming to the negotiations with ill intent which neither had a reputation for.
“That would depend on your price, but if it’s reasonable then I believe we can work together.” I frowned at my suddenly empty beer and reached for the last bottle, directing a harsh scowl at Tyr. I’ll never understand the rate at which the Æsir can make any form of alcohol vanish down their throats. He’d managed to drink twenty bottles of beer in half as many minutes.
“Actually, it’s a simple request; we’d like to have temporary use of the Frost Forge.”
Tyr sputtered and crushed the bottle he was drinking and looked mournfully at the spilled beer and blood that was dripping on the floor. I frowned for a moment before the memory came to me. The Frost Forge was a unique place that I had created long ago. Unlike most blacksmith forges the Frost Forge actually used cold to warp and shape the metal. The forge was filled with pure cold to a point where no other form of energy could exist inside it, the weapons and armor made in it were among the most potent and powerful artifacts in existence. The sword I kept wrapped in layers of wards and shields inside a gun safe and guarded by a powerful spirit would make Excalibur look like a rusty letter opener and wasn’t even among the more powerful objects to come out of the Frost Forge. I considered the possibilities for a few moments and settled on a decision.
“My memories may be incomplete Thoth, but I’m not stupid. I know how large that request is. However, because of the gravity of the situation I accept with three conditions. First; you make no weapons or objects designed for aggressive uses. Second; you only access the forge in the presence of both Tyr and Khan who will monitor what you do and also make sure you only use the forge and none of the objects stored with it. And third; you will only have access to it for a period of three earth months starting from when you first enter. I warn you that Khan can only take himself through the wards around there alone. He will need Tyr with him to take you safely in. If you try to force your way in your respective families and pantheons may find themselves suddenly lacking a member.”
I watched the two of them consider the offer and mull it over. Tyr looked at me with a clear expression that asked if I was completely insane. He knew that without me, Khan couldn’t get anybody but himself through the maze of defenses around the cave system that the Frost forge was in. I was going to have to figure out how to get there and modify the shields tonight without the two of them noticing. I tried to give him a look that said shut up and play along. Apparently, the message was understood because he got up and went to help himself to my liquor cabinet.
“Very well Cathal I think those terms are acceptable.” Thoth slipped out a thick roll of what appeared to be authentic papyrus from behind his back and set it on the table. “This is my notes on what’s been discovered so far about the collapse of the wards and suggestions about your potential options for stabilizing them. As well as possible routes we could take to reverse the damage if you decide to do so, Cathal. Don’t worry I put them down in English.”
He wrinkled his nose with obvious distaste at the mention of the language while I winced at the unintended reminder that I had been subconsciously filtering their words through a construct of energy to translate the three languages they were speaking. I’d likely pay a physical and mental toll for that mistake later. The human mind and body just weren’t designed to handle a sustained major energy construct like that and it burned through energy in a rush. I opened the papyrus scroll and skimmed through the neat script before rolling it back up.
“I’m surprised Cathal. You’ve yet to ask how we are here in our real forms” I glanced at Tyr when he made the comment.
“I’m aware that normally deities would need to possess mortal bodies or appear as little more than apparitions. I’d assumed appearing as you are with access to the majority of your power was a result of the wards failing.”
“That’s not a bad conclusion but, no.” Thoth leaned forward and nodded. “Synbel brought us here. He can only do that because of a certain item that allows him to ignore the effects of the wards, and until this issue is resolved he’s permitted to allow others to use the same sort of item if necessary.” Thoth waved his hand and Hephaestus took out a small silver ring and placed it on the table between us silently.
“What Thoth isn’t mentioning, Cathal is that it will also make you a beacon to anyone that’s even mildly sensitive to energy, even people on other planes will be able to pick you out from the masses.” I nodded at Hephaestus, the comment made sense, even if it was just for a second it would be like someone in Russia suddenly turning on a lightbulb brighter than the sun. Even an astronaut on the dark side of the moon would notice something was up.
“I’ll only use it when necessary. Very well, with that settled Thoth, I’ll leave you to your research. Hephaestus, if you could look into methods of repairing or at least patching the wards I think that will be the best application of your talents. Please use the front door on your way out. And the next time you visit I advise you to use the front door and wait for an invitation inside. The active wards will have a lethal response to someone that doesn’t live here; I have a few tasks I need to go over with Tyr and a favor to ask of Khan.”
And if I keep burning through my energy like this, I’m going to have to find some pour soul or crowd to feed from.