Zenith, Sixth of One, Harvest, 236 CR

The disaster that Esse was waiting for—along with everyone else, but the Delve Pillar most of all—struck like a bolt of lightning during lunch the next day.

It was heralded by black wings, by a raven’s scream—by Raven’s scream. But one person had already been moving before even that happened, though I hadn’t recognized it until later; Zqar had been on his feet and striding towards the center of the Fall refectory before the first feather began its fall, had been casting his first spell before the God voiced warning.

Things moved suddenly, and then very quickly.

[Bound Spell: Premonition], the world spoke in Zqar’s voice. I shuddered as I shot to my feet, a medic’s training and habit having me moving towards where I knew there were going to be casualties, because I had to be in position in case I was needed and nobody else could be trusted to act decisively, it was always your personal, specific responsibility to act—

Meredith swung a sword, with enough deliberate slowness that I could follow the shining arc of it. Reaching one hand through the screaming rift in the world, she grabbed a wrist and hauled James through, and even as he stumbled and began to fall, the Clerk Administrator’s power reached out through his will and took hold of the fabric of reality.

“[Contingency],” he spoke, and “[A Village Is Many, But One—A Hundred Hands Lift Where One Hand Is Seen]. Delver-Beacon in the depths!”

Soundless voices from every person in the hall echoed in the space, overlapping and enhancing each other. Constrain Fate, I heard, and Bolster, and Grassfire Sped Across The Plains, But Faster Still Were We, and As A Threaded Needle. My own Meticulous rose unbidden, and I knew that I could stop it if I wanted to—and instead, I threw everything I had behind it, because if this was going to be my contribution to whatever was about to happen, I wouldn’t stint my part of defending my home.

I recognized Kelly’s voice in Intuit Solution and the lack of inflection in Bridge the Gap that had to mean it was Spark’s, and for a moment my mind broke as it tried to grapple with the totality of every voice.

“[Stabilize Space]. [Beacon],” Zqar incanted, casting spells that manifested as complex, floating glyphic constructs even as each invocation of his Skills hammered through my skull. “[Power Draw: Road Reserves].”

“[The Hall Stands Ready],” Thesha intoned as tables, chairs, and people alike were shoved out of the center of the refectory.

“[Containment].”

“[Purification of the Elements—Heat Denatures, Frost Freezes, Life Metabolizes, Charge Sunders, Aether Unravels].”

“[Nine, Nine, And Nine Are Her Shards—Nine, Nine, And Nine Do We Invoke].”

“[Take a swing, shoatfuckers. See where it gets you.]”

“[Never Shall Stone Which Shelters My Family Fall].”

“[That No Power May Stand Between The Doctor And Her Patients],” Doctor Raphaella demanded of the universe, as the other voices coalesced around hers. “[Emergency Medicine—Here Or There, It’s Happening], [By My Oath].”

There was a breath, a split second of silence as a hundred Skills came into effect and settled into a vast, thrumming chord of power, and then a will from a hundred miles away latched onto the room and a second—no, a third portal ripped open even as Farmer stepped out of the second rift that Meredith had cut into the world with her sword.

The center of the refectory had been replaced with a charnel house. Corpses of monsters, most of them in pieces, were scattered across the floor, and blood was everywhere. My eyes skipped over all of it, landing on the only parts that mattered—not the smattering of severed body parts without most of its body, not the glassy-eyed and still Adei who’d been deposited tens of feet away from the rest, and not the weakly standing Matis who still gripped the strap that now held only fragments of his shattered shield.

I took one step towards Tathís and Choris before realizing that what I needed to do was stay out of the way. Doctor Raphaella was already there, one hand on each of their foreheads, and their screams cut off like the power was switched off—and Rafa gave a pained grunt, an aura that had contested with the world itself shattering where she wielded it—

—Farmer put one hand on her shoulder, and the world rippled and changed, and the acid dripped off of her hand harmlessly. Their other hand was flat against something invisible in the air. The sound of screeching grated against my ears as I felt the nails-on-chalkboard of something trying to chew off their hand, something so powerful and palpably malicious that the shadow of its attention could have stopped my heart.

And then Farmer was gone, stepping through the still-open conduit that Rafa had opened across a hundred miles or more, and the conduit closed behind them. They left the corpse of something that looked vaguely like a lamprey behind, skull crushed by a gesture I hadn’t even seen, and I just stared at it and its absurd teeth for a stunned moment as things kept happening.

I wasn’t needed, I told myself dizzily. I had done my part by providing whatever help Meticulous had been, I had done my share, other people were taking care of everything. There was nothing more I could do to help, and I was somehow sitting down on the floor, too exhausted to move anyway, so wasn’t that convenient?

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I stood up anyway, slowly and unsteadily. There was one person who wasn’t being taken care of, because she was… dead, I was about to think to myself, but there was a pressure building somewhere that I could only describe as behind my head and outwards into a less conventional direction. It drove me to my feet and towards her body, leaning on a shoulder as I staggered towards those glassy eyes staring up at the ceiling.

Only that helping hand let me kneel beside her instead of collapsing.

The pressure notionwards of my skull had voice, had tone and flavor. It sounded like the kind of fury that sustains a people through generations, like a hate that has had its viciousness distilled and preserved, hidden away in dark corners. It was a promise of violence the moment the back was turned, and an oath that no consequence would stay the sworn hand should its goal be in reach.

Adei is a daughter of the slums, Ketka had told me, whose heart contains only the empty void and a hunger to inflict the sufferings she suffered upon the mighty.

I knew that tone, that flavor, at least in the relation it had with those goals and those hungers. It was… a younger me might have called it a cycle of abuse, but I had grown to drink of the fury a little bit myself.

“You who turns the tables,” I mumbled. “What do you want? Use your words, I don’t speak headache.”

The feeling clarified into something that wasn’t quite a demand but still wasn’t quite a plea. It was most like an offer, or a request for an opportunity to make an offer, and then I realized that I did actually know what the Trickster God wanted.

I looked around, making sure that I wasn’t in the way and that nobody was about to interrupt me. There were more than a few eyes on me, which I had expected—I was the crazy Traveler who talked with Gods and who had done some randomly absurd shit, after all—but everyone who was taking notice seemed to be content to just watch, slumping where they were in exhaustion.

And everyone was slumping in exhaustion, I realized, with the same ennervation that was sapping the strength from my limbs and dragging at my eyelids. But I got a subtle nod from Veil, who was themself only a few feet away from me and settling down by Adei’s body, and that was enough to pull myself together just a little bit.

“I don’t know if I have enough in the tank,” I whispered into the darkness of my closed eyes. “I’ll still try, but I—”

The breath was stolen out of my lungs, leaving my body in one heaving cough. I gasped, and I gasped fire, burning me all the way down and leaving me with the urge to scream in a pain and frustration that was as much emotional as it was physical. I couldn’t, though; my body wasn’t responding to me, because someone had hijacked it, had stolen it, had taken every ounce of my physical autonomy and ripped it out of my hands.

[Divine Communion], I invoked with a spirit burning with power and rage, and I threw my own weight behind the hijacker’s will.

He was a God of the violated, of those whom society had striven to break, and for all that I had learned how to structure my life in order to not be broken, that was hardly a gap that even needed bridging. Eleven bodies in the house of prayer, he whispered, and I felt the helpless rage and fear that had filled me then; and he whispered other things besides, and I relived every time a man was determined to break me over my lack of interest, every time someone sought to deny me who I was—as a woman, as a lover of women; my religion, my ethnicity, my intelligence, my submission in the bedroom and my lack outside of it.

And at the unsustainable height of that desolation, he surged through me—

—I heard Veil’s colorless voice, calling forth the God of defiance, of standing in the way of the unstoppable—

—a million fragments of a person howled in agony as they blazed like stars, screaming through the air to return to a corpse—

—and into the body of a woman who had been only just on the other side of life, whose death I now understood had been a statement written into the universe with magic, a murder shaped into, or maybe having the shape of, a law.

Anansi, who turns the tables. If there was any God who was suited to defying such a thing…

I collapsed as he left my body. I breathed in, filling my lungs with the pure air of Kibosh, and none of the searing pain remained.

I breathed out and opened my eyes, sitting up only with difficulty and assistance. Kelly had one of my arms draped around her shoulders and had the other arm under me, and I slumped into her gratefully. I opened my eyes again—they’d closed of their own accord, without my noticing—and looked at Adei, and what I saw took my breath away.

She was still notionally the same. Weathered and scarred, too thin and deceptively scrawny, she still looked fifty at an age where anyone from Shem would like thirty at most. But there was a refinement to her body now, something that clarified it on a level beyond the physical and gave her a weight of presence that radiated outwards.

Also, her eyes were utterly black, voids in the world that I couldn’t help but flinch away from.

“How—” I coughed, voice raspy, and Kelly shoved something in my hand that I brought up to my mouth. It had a straw, and I gasped after I swallowed something that tasted faintly of melon. “How long was I doing that?”

“Just under two minutes,” Kelly said quietly, pitched to carry to me and maybe Adei. “Tathís and Choris are stabilized, but still out. Matis is down, but conscious.”

“We took the weight… of the initial effort… and hastened it,” Veil murmured from beside me, and if I wasn’t startled it was entirely because I didn’t have the presence of mind to be. Their voice was slow and thready, and they were stopping for breath every few words. “The last tenth… took nine tenths.”

“Help,” Adei commanded, rising—or trying to, and losing her balance. Kelly and I just stared at her, and she grimaced, shaking her head as if to clear it. “Please, kyria,” she said softly in her accented, broken Shemmai. “Something there is we do.”

“Kels,” I murmured.

I could see her swallow the refusal and also the are you sure. She nodded at me, easing me back onto the floor and putting something soft under my head. There was a spreading silence in the refectory, something that said people might have taken notice of me, oh, bringing a woman back from the dead, however barely-dead she was, and I realized the possible enormity of what I’d just done—exactly what James had asked me not to do, probably.

At least Veil had been involved, too. Hopefully they’d get most of the credit, hopefully I could claim they’d done most of the work—which I had no way of evaluating.

“Kasménos is lost to silence,” I dimly heard someone say, and someone else said something else in that same cadence in a different language. Matis, I thought to myself, and Adei. Probably. “He died with rockflame in his sight, and so he will burn on the heights, and his ashes go to the deepness of the sea. Honor is his, and the debt is discharged.”

“Honor,” James said in a voice like a polar vortex, “always seems to demand much of those around you. We will talk, Delvers of the Remnant League, of the costs of that death and your lives.”

There were more words, but they slipped by me. I was drifting, unable to stay focused or make much sense of my senses. Someone—Thesha, I was pretty sure—put food in my hand, and someone else who was almost certainly Kelly, physically helped me eat it, someone’s Skill keeping me awake long enough to eat.

Their grip released me eventually, and I fell the rest of the way into unconsciousness.