So the good news was that after months of being away from almost everyone I knew (seriously I could not even fathom how lonely it would’ve been without Cerberus and Percy), I was suddenly with a couple old friends. I’d been through so much with Vanessa and Tristan over the past couple years that even just having them there immediately made me feel better about things. Or it would have, if it wasn’t for… basically every other detail. Beyond the obvious bigger problem was the fact of where (and when) we were. Judging by the sign nearby, the three of us happened to be laying in a ditch by the side of a road leading into Salem, Massachusetts during the height of their witch trials. Unless the hand-drawn addition to that sign was some sort of more modern joke, but I was really betting against that. Especially given the horse-drawn carriage passing by. And the lack of any sort of pavement, tall buildings, or any other sort of real infrastructure. That would’ve been committing to the bit slightly more than I thought most places would have.
No, this was real. I was laying in the dirt with Tristan and Vanessa, both of whom were staring at me with wide, somewhat panicked expressions. That was a pretty reasonable reaction to have, under the circumstances. I couldn’t even imagine what they would’ve been doing before just abruptly finding themselves here and now without any real warning at all. Something told me the Ankou hadn’t exactly showed up to explain the situation to these guys before sending them back.
The three of us continued to lay there for another few seconds while making sure we hadn’t been spotted by anyone on that wagon. The other two were wearing completely modern clothing, and I wasn’t sure what the Bystander Effect would do with that, if anything. Besides, I really didn’t want to start trying to make up a lie about who we were and what we were doing here to a bunch of strangers, especially ones who were obviously already paranoid about anyone who stood out at all, before telling Vanessa and Tristan the actual truth. That part was going to be difficult enough to get through.
Don’t you worry about them, those two can roll with the punches, and they’re rock-solid to have with us if we’ve gotta do some sneaky-sneak around the paranoid fucks in there without ending up in a big timeline-altering fight. Sure it’d be fun to get some smooches with our girls, or see Tabs. Hell, we could even bring out some real firepower with one of the old guard, but if we’re going into some nasty place full of nutjobs trying to burn or hang everyone who looks different, these two’ll be just fine. I mean, come on, this may be a lot to take in, but Vanessa and Tristan have been dealing with this shit since they were half our body’s age. They’ll catch up real quick.
Blinking a couple times, I spoke aloud reflexively, albeit in a whisper. “Yardbird?” That was a bit of a surprise. She was a member of the Flique who had spent a long time in what amounted to a very high-security criminal holding facility. Years and years trapped in jail--sorry, prison. She got antsy whenever I referred to it as jail. Something about jails only being for short-term holding. Either way, she’d taken up the moniker of Yardbird thanks to that. More importantly, she’d spent so much time in prison that being out in the open world tended to freak her out a little bit. She was getting better with it, and still wanted to help, but still felt most comfortable in a familiar area.
“Okay, uh, Flick, I know you’re gonna explain what’s going on here,” Tristan whisper-hissed while giving me an understandably strange look from his spot next to me, “and I admit I did have a little bet with myself about what your first word was going to be when you started with that. But ‘yardbird’ was not in my top ten.” He paused to consider. Or even my top hundred. And not my--”
“It wasn’t in the top one million words we expected you to say at all, let alone to start with,” Vanessa cut in. “And I’m sure we’d love to find out why it was. But it might be better if we all--”
It was Tristan’s turn to cut in. “Snuck out of here so we can have a real conversation somewhere that happens to be slightly safer than a ditch right outside Witch Burning Central?”
Yeah, I’m here, Yardbird noted quickly as soon as there was a second of silence. The others have been talking it through and they think the whole multi-rift timeline thing jumbled us all up and you ended up with a random partner at each. Guess I’m the lucky winner for this one. Maybe the Ankou want me to see a punishment that makes all the decades of prison life seem pretty good.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure if that was a joke or not. And even if it was, that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. The Ankou, after all, had been locked up for a staggeringly long time, and had come out of that imprisonment as much better people than they went into it. Maybe they really were advocates for people reforming in prison as opposed to capital punishment. Stranger things had happened.
Case in point, the situation we were in right now, and everything behind it. Yeah, I really needed to explain things. So, giving the other two a quick murmured agreement, I started to whisper that we should carefully back away and find a spot off in the woods where we could talk for a minute. But before I’d even gotten more than a couple words out, Vanessa held up a hand to stop me.
“We can talk in here.” And with that, she pulled a little blue metallic ring off her finger before speaking a quick word I couldn’t even hope to pronounce or remember. The ring immediately began to grow, as she tossed it onto the ground between us. Soon, it was about the size of a manhole cover. Or a manhole itself, given it looked like an actual hole in the ground with a ladder leading down into who knew what. Clearly, Vanessa had been keeping busy on the magic front.
That was proven even more as I started to climb down that ladder after an encouraging gesture from the girl in question. I was descending into some sort of dream study room. Which sounded like a contradiction, but honestly if anyone was going to fantasize about the perfect study room, it was Vanessa. The lighting was soft blue, just bright enough to read with. That was illuminating a semicircular room, with bookshelves lining the entirety of the flat wall. The curved wall was glass, with an expansive aquarium full of brightly-colored tropical fish on the other side. A very comfortable-looking padded couch lined the space all along this side of the glass, with plenty of pillows. It looked like you could lay anywhere on that couch, stretch out with a book, and have all those fish right there keeping you company. And, for those times when you needed to sit up, there were several desks scattered through the space between the couch and bookshelves.
Oh, and because this wasn’t just any incredibly studious girl, but actually Vanessa Moon herself, there was a potato bar. The far end of the place, opposite the ladder I was climbing down into this corner, was taken by a large metal counter space where every different potato dish one could think of, from baked, to french fries, to mashed, to a dozen other types most of which I’d never even seen before, were kept in some sort of special enchanted heating trays keeping them at the perfect temperature and ready to eat at any point. That girl seriously liked her potatoes.
“Well, I can tell who designed this little hideaway,” I noted after the three of us had descended.
Touching a light green rune next to the ladder, Vanessa blushed while the hole we had climbed down through disappeared. “There, no one can find us now, or hear us. Uncle Satan helped me put it together, so there’s a little bit of time compression, but not as much as his hideaways have. It’s about five seconds in here for every one second out there. I’m not really that good at that yet.”
“Listen to this,” Tristan snorted while giving his sister a sidearm hug. “‘Oh, I can only make time move five times the speed it’s supposed to, someone put the dunce cap on me I suck so much.’”
Vanessa was blushing even more by then, nudging her brother before turning her attention back to me. “So we have privacy, and it’s as safe as we’re going to get under the circumstances. Not that we really know the circumstances. What’s going on? Why are we here? What happened?”
Okay, well now I had to get into it. Honestly, if I’d known this was coming, I would have set up one of those information-sharing spells so I could easily just push all of it into their minds that easily. Instead, I found a seat on the couch, hoped we weren’t missing anything drastically important outside, and launched into the story. As I got into it, starting back at the beginning of this whole time travel training trip, the twins took their own seats. Tristan took Bobbi-Bobbi out of her necklace form and had the long metal snake curled up in his lap while he fed her little metal bits.
Over the next few minutes, I told them everything I could, as succinctly as possible without leaving important things out. They both had to ask a few clarifying questions now and then, especially when it came to the Ankou. Actually, when it came to that whole bit, I had to stop and stand up while Vanessa and Tristan both examined me. She knew a few identification spells, including the one that checked your personal magical signature. Mine had actually changed a bit after I became part-Fae, but it was similar enough to still be recognizable as me. Or at least as someone very closely related to me. Which, naturally, made Tristan make a crack about evil twins. But they were convinced I was really me, and that I’d been through all those changes.
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They also wanted to talk about that, especially the part where I had a bunch of other versions of me inside my Archive and linked to my head, I convinced them to wait until I finished explaining the whole situation. There was still a lot of shit to get into. More than we had time for, probably.
Once I was finally done with at least the basic details of everything, Tristan let out an audible breath while exchanging a glance with his sister. Then he stood up once more. “So what you’re saying is, thanks to Ehn’s monumental fuck-up, there’s an explosion of Dragon energy blowing its way through the timeline on its way to create Super-Fomorians, and the only way to stop it is for you to go through a bunch of rifts scattered throughout said timeline. And these Ankou people, formerly evil Reapers that you’ve been bonded to, split you up into a bunch of duplicates of yourself and sent all your friends and family to help you with that. Which is why we’re here.”
Wincing, I offered a weak shrug. “Yeah, I know it sounds a bit ridiculous and unbelievable when--”
“No, no,” he interrupted, head shaking quickly. “Come on, Flick, we’ve known you for like a year and a half now. I think it’s pretty safe to say we know you. And this whole thing?” He gestured my way, hand moving up and down to encompass all of me. “It fits you perfectly. To be honest, the only thing that would’ve made me think this was a trick and you weren’t really you is if everything was going perfectly to plan and you were actually having an uneventful time training with Ehn.”
While I felt my face turn pink at that, Vanessa spoke up. “You said, um, there are dozens of other versions of you, other Flicks, in your… Ankou Archive, but one of them is always right there in your head. Like when Tabbris possesses you and plays copilot? Who--I mean which--I mean--”
“Hey there,” my mouth abruptly replied, “name’s Yardbird. I mean, my real name’s technically Felicity Chambers just like this one here, but that gets pretty damn confusing when there’s so many of us in there. So we take other monikers. I spent a bunch of time in a supermax prison for the worst of the worst in the universe. At least, the ones who were the worst a million years ago or whatever. Let’s just say it wasn’t the most fun way I could think to spend decades of my life. But here I am. And like she said, we’ve got work to do. I uhh, I’m gonna try to help. I need to help. But if it comes down to it, I might have to swap out so she can have someone with some actual powers come copilot.”
I’d already explained the bit about splitting my powers between all the other members of the Flique. Or starting to share, at least. Yardbird hadn’t received any yet, but she did apparently know a fair bit of sneaky magic, stuff to get around without being noticed or to steal things. She hadn’t exactly spent all her time in super prison playing checkers or finding shapes in clouds.
Well yeah, that last bit is largely because the prison was a space station in the one safe spot right in the middle of a bunch of black holes, so there weren’t exactly a lot of clouds to watch.
Yeah, that was fair. Still, I shook that off and focused on the twins. Vanessa was saying, “Er, it’s uh, nice to meet you, Yardbird. And the rest of you in there. I-wait, Flick you said you posed as a male Necromancer to hide your identity from Gaia?” Her eyes shifted toward her brother, a thoughtful look crossing her face before coming back to me. “What did you call yourself?”
The question, and the expressions of anticipation they both had, made me blink uncertainly. I wasn’t sure why that would actually matter. “Uh, I used the name Jacob for that, but I don’t even-”
“It was you!” That was Tristan, his blurted words making me jump as he sprang forward to embrace me tightly with a laugh. “All that time, all those stories, it was you the whole time. Oh god, Ruthers is going to explode when he finds out. His head’ll just pop off. That’s amazing!”
Needless to say, I was very confused. Fortunately, he and Vanessa took a moment to explain that whole thing to me. Apparently my Jacob identity hadn’t exactly been forgotten over the years. Actually, it sounded like I had done a hell of a lot more with it. Or would do--or was doing--god damn time travel. Either way, the Jacob identity was well known by Boschers. Which made me briefly wonder why I hadn’t been taught anything about him after becoming a Necromancer. Maybe Gaia had realized that I was the one posing as him and deliberately took steps to stop me from hearing the name so that it wouldn’t change history or anything? She might have thought that if I knew there was a famous Necromancer by that name, I wouldn’t use it. Once we freed her from the Crossroads prison, I was going to have to ask her about it. And a few other things.
There was a lot more we needed to get into with that, from the sound of things. Hell, there was a lot we needed to get into with everything. But for now, the twins had a basic understanding of what was going on. Tristan was rather enthusiastic about my Necromancy school idea, and insisted that Sarah would want to have some part in it. Which made sense, considering how much the other girl had been throwing herself into learning Necromancy the long, difficult way. Vanessa wanted to help with it too, though I was pretty sure her interest was more in the idea of putting a brand new school together at all and how it would work than the specific subject matter.
For now, however, we put all that aside to focus on the immediate situation. We needed to get out there and find out where this rift was. And the best way the three of us could think of when it came to how to do that was by investigating the nearby town. It wasn’t difficult to guess that all the Salem witch trial things might have been influenced in some way by one of those rifts appearing. I wasn’t sure exactly how that worked or how much of an effect it could have, but it seemed like too much of a coincidence for there to be no relation at all. We needed to at least check it out.
The best way of doing that, at least as far as we could come up with off the top of our heads, was by sneaking around and spying on people for a bit. At least enough to get the lay of the land so we’d know what we were walking into. Tristan’s first idea was just to disguise ourselves and walk in, but Vanessa pointed out that these people were probably very suspicious of strangers waltzing in out of nowhere without any real easy explanation of who we were or where we came from. We needed to scope the place out very carefully, and preferably from a distance at first.
I was going to send ghosts in for that. I had enough of them to scout every inch of the entire place in pretty short order. But before I could, Vanessa informed me that there had been markings on the bottom of the sign we saw. They’d looked like random carvings to me, but apparently they were part of a spell to make any use of Necromancy within the boundary set off alarms. She’d found something similar when she research ways to try to help out with Fossor.
“Wait, they’re actually actively guarding against Necromancy in there?” Tristan demanded.
“Well, most of them probably don’t know that,” Vanessa amended with a shrug. “From the stuff I looked at, the runes are used by some Bystanders as a simple ‘warding off evil’ sort of thing. Either way, you should be careful. Don’t send your ghosts in there, or use any Necromancy, unless you absolutely have to. Even if they don’t all know the reasoning behind the symbols, I bet some do. And there might be actual Boschers in there.”
“So we’ll be even more cautious than we were already going to be,” I murmured. “What about if we use a Theriangelos? Would that set it off?”
Vanessa considered for a moment before shaking her head. “I don’t think so, they’re not Necromancy.”
“Aww, I guess that means I’m out of the spying part,” Tristan lamented. “They’d probably notice a tiger running around.”
Head bobbing as she rubbed her brother’s back consolingly, Vanessa noted, “But a fox and a raven would work for sneaking around.”
“It would,” I agreed, “but my thing isn’t exactly a fox anymore. Ever since I went through the whole Ankou-Fae thing, it uhh, changed. It should still work though. I’ll show you.” With that, I produced one of the premade Theriangelos spell pieces of wood. Sure enough, as soon as I triggered it, the animal that appeared wasn’t the previously familiar red and gold fox. It was a red and blue (with flecks of silver in the latter) polecat. The ferret-like creature was about eighteen inches long, not counting the bushy tail, with the blue-silver part covering the bulk of its body, while the red bits were on the stomach/throat and a bit up across the face.
“I haven’t named her yet,” I murmured. “I wanted to save that for Tabbris, since she helped name Marian. But she should be able to sneak around in there pretty well.”
Vanessa and I both agreed that she would send her raven Theriangelos up for an aerial view of the place, while I used my polecat to get close in. The two of us sat down together, focusing on seeing through our respective animal’s eyes while Tristan opened the hatch to let them out. The raven flew that way, while I sent the polecat bounding from rung to rung up the ladder, then out into the bushes.
Right, time to be sneaky. As soon as Tristan closed the hatch once more, and Vanessa adjusted the time dilation thing so we were actually moving at the same speed in here as the animals were out there, we set off. Whatever else came out of this, at least we were going to see what was really going on in Salem during their witch trials.
“Wait.” That was Vanessa, from her spot right beside me back in the library bunker. Which felt a little weird given I was seeing through my polecat’s eyes on our way into the town.
“Huh?” I asked, a bit distractedly.
“That.” Her bird had landed on a stump and was staring at the sign we had seen. “Look there, just below the Anti-Necromancy spell. There’s another one targeting one person in particular, blocking them. It’s a barrier spell on top of the general Necromancy alarm. They’ve got magic barring a specific someone from being anywhere within the village limits.
I couldn’t see well enough from my polecat’s spot on the ground, so I had to take her word for it. “Does it say anything about who?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Marian.”
“Wha-- my fox? But I don’t--why would they--”
“No, not the Theriangelos,” she interrupted. “A different one.
“Someone calling themself Marian of the Hood.”