The Drakon was full of surprises.
When Aaron told his security detail he needed to take a look through their archives, they took him to a building that looked like the forward base of a hostile alien species had landed in the midst of lower Manhattan. It was a windowless monolith of concrete whose only openings were a series of large vents high up on the building that might as well have been launch bays for small attack spacecraft or swarms of insectoid invaders.
They hadn’t entered the building directly, but gone into a bank Aaron had never heard of across the street from it. After being shown into the room where safety deposit boxes were kept, Griffin had opened a false wall for them leading to, of course, an underground tunnel made of cement.
The night before, as he’d prepared to start working with Tia on recalling anything from Oliver Milton’s life that would lead him to the sceptre, he’d joked he was going to need a montage to get through all the things he was supposed to be doing. It hadn’t even taken a full day for him to start lamenting how much better movies were than reality; real life was often filled with tedious drudgery and you couldn’t just skip over it. Real life was, in his opinion, kinda bullshit.
As frustrating as it had been staring at images of various places where the Drakon temples deemed most likely to house the sceptre were located and reading snippets of journals from Barrett’s and Mallory’s predecessors about those same places, it had produced results! After a fashion, anyways.
While there hadn’t been any lightning bolts of insight about where Milton had sent the sceptre, he had found himself subjected to a consistent intrusive thought. Only it hadn’t been a thought, exactly, as it lacked any kind of language he could verbalize. It was more of an image, popping into his head several times over the course of the night.
Most of the records he’d been given focused on landscapes that were isolated or hidden and seemingly pristine. Mountain ranges, hidden valleys, remote lakes, and other natural features seemed to be the favored places to build these temples. That’s what made the persistent vision so noteworthy — there was a building sitting right in the middle of it and it was a fairly modern one.
Set atop a bluff of stone overlooking a narrow strip of sandy beach at the edge of what Aaron felt like was either an ocean or a very large lake, he had decided the building was most likely a very large house. It reminded him of the big mansions he’d seen in movies and TV shows about the English gentry, manor houses or country manors or something like that.
When he’d first started imagining this unknown place, it had been almost like he was remembering looking at it. He thought the view was something he’d see from a boat out on the water. Except the perspective had been wrong, it had been much too high. There would have been no way to see so much of the house above the bluffs from the deck of a boat unless it was hundreds of feet above the water.
Once he noticed that, Aaron noticed another oddity — nothing was moving. On its own that shouldn’t have meant much, since stony bluffs and houses weren’t exactly known for their movement, but the water? No body of water that large could be so still, whether it was lake, sea, or ocean. It might have been unsettling — and perhaps it should have been — but it only left Aaron intrigued.
Every time the image flashed across his thoughts, it was different. The shift was subtle and Aaron couldn’t consciously identify what or how the vision had changed, only that it had. No matter how hard he tried to hold the thought in his focus, it always slipped away before he could get a sense of anything more specific.
After a couple frustrating hours, he came to the realization that what he was seeing was not a lived experience. That hadn’t been quite the right way to describe it and he’d tried to reframe his understanding to make sense of what his instincts were telling him. The closest he could get was that it was like he was no longer there, in person, looking at the house on the bluffs.
What that meant eluded him and it had stayed in the back of his thoughts while he tried to focus on the other material Tia had brought him. Even after she had gone back to her apartment downstairs and he was lying in bed with Baby Bear, Aaron still hadn’t been able to make sense of it.
In the darkness of his room, as he waited for sleep with the TV playing in the background and a stuffed animal flopped across his forehead, it had finally hit him — he had no longer been seeing a landscape in the flesh, but a painting of one!
The epiphany was so jarring, Aaron had started doubting himself. He had wondered if it had always been a painting in his imagination and he just hadn’t recognized it, or if the very nature of the thing had changed so gradually he had failed to notice.
Whatever the case, he’d shot out of bed — much to Baby Bear’s discontent and requiring apologies later — and rushed back out to the dinette to go through everything Tia had brought him again. Dozens of copies of photographs, sketches, and paintings, but none of them matching the one he’d been seeing. None of them were even close.
Tia had encouraged him throughout the night to stay confident and let the image come to him. Since it hadn’t been too late when he finally had his revelation, Aaron had texted to ask her advice. Her suggestion was that he pay a visit to the archive.
The archive was, as he had learned the following morning, in the Drakon’s center of operations, housed in the skyscraper equivalent of a rectangular Star Destroyer.
When he and his security detail had arrived through the ubiquitous secret underground tunnel, they’d been asked to wait in the big lobby-slash-lounge area. The archivist, they were told, wasn’t usually in so early.
They had sat down and quickly devolved into the exaggerated banter that came naturally to Albert, Griffin, and Kiara. Aaron had avoided jumping in unless prompted, but he hadn’t smiled or laughed so much in months and it had been a tremendous pressure valve for the stress of the last few days.
Things had turned a little weird when two people showed up who were not with the Drakon, though one of them — a pretty but intense young black woman — had been on reasonably friendly terms with Aaron’s protectors. He’d tried to play the role of his cover story as best he could, but he’d been a bit distracted by the lady’s partner, Ares-something. Aaron was pretty sure that dude was an honest-to-god elf and he’d needed to clamp down hard on the urge to ask a million nerdy-ass questions.
As friendly as the three delvers might have been with the visitors, it was clear the trio wanted to get Aaron out of the room fast. They made their pleasantries and didn’t rush, but Griffin and Albert headed for a door almost as soon as the conversation got started. Considering no one had come to tell them the archivist was ready for them, it surely wasn’t a coincidence.
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If Aaron had followed the conversation well enough — which was a big if given how little he knew about this hidden world — then the visitors had been some kind of law enforcement officers. Tia had said something about there being only a few laws that were applied broadly among the supernatural types, but she hadn’t gone into the specifics of what they were or how they were enforced.
As soon as they were out of the lounge, Albert and Griffin led Aaron through several hallways, then into what looked like a storage room. Cabinets and tall shelves filled with boxes lined the walls and there were several rolling stools and step ladders. The three of them sat down in the tight space, Albert positioning himself to keep the door propped open.
“What was that all about?” Aaron asked.
“Nothing unexpected,” Griffin replied. “It’s just… a bit earlier than Barrett was anticipating.”
Albert frowned. “It’s a real kick in the pants some vigilum would show up in the same small window of time we’d be in the lobby, especially that one.”
“What’s a vigilum?”
“Vigilum is the plural of vigiles,” Griffin said, “which is the term for a member of the Vigiles Creaturae, an independent faction that monitors violations of the laws that govern eidolons, us included.”
“The mythic cops, to put it simply,” Albert added. “And I think the plural is eidola.”
“Why is it bad if they’re here? Are magic cops as much of a hassle as the regular ones?”
Griffin shook his head. “In general, no, but it’s complicated because of the history between the Drakon and them. That’s really too much to go into right now, but suffice it to say they used to be a lot worse than they are now and they have been screwing drakus, in particular, since their inception.”
“Barrett knew the Vigil would come snooping around the Drakon before too long since we’re getting ambushed all over the damned city, but he said tomorrow was more likely. This afternoon at the earliest if there was a particularly nasty brawl that left bodies behind,” Albert said.
The conversation paused at the sound of someone approaching their storage room from the hallway.
“Unless the heel-heavy clomp! clomp! of tiny combat boots deceives me, that’ll be Kiara,” Albert said.
“You get anything out of her?” Griffin asked when Kiara joined them a few seconds later.
“Maybe,” Kiara said, waffling with one hand. “I’m pretty sure they know something about the attacks, but I’m not convinced that’s why Aaliyah and her new partner are here. The Vigiles wouldn’t send a Quaesitor from their big case squad for an initial probe and definitely not one who has a history with the Drakon like hers.”
Albert grunted his agreement. “I was wondering about that. I figured she saw a chance to hold our feet to the fire without screwing us too hard and forced her way onto the assignment.”
“Maybe, but there was something else,” Kiara said. “She wanted to know what our argument was about. That’s what she asked for in exchange for hinting that people might be going after drakus.”
“Since when has Aaliyah Dean ever given a shit about our pissing matches?” Albert asked, incredulous.
“Since never,” Griffin answered. “Which means she might’ve thought we were arguing over something important.”
“That was basically my thinking,” Kiara agreed. “Which means either she or the Vigiles might know about Aaron, or at least that we’re closer to a Primus than we’ve been in centuries.”
“Is there any reason these Vigiles people would care?” Aaron asked.
“Not in theory, but it’s an uncomfortable coincidence,” Griffin replied. “The Vigiles Creaturae started out as a collective effort between orders of magi; to police themselves, in part, but mostly to police those they viewed as lesser beings. Very few magi, until recently, would have considered themselves to be creaturae. They saw themselves as purely human.”
“To make a long story short,” Kiara cut in, “In the first few centuries the Vigiles was around, they hunted and punished eidolons for violating the Pillars but didn’t really see us as protected by those same laws.”
“I think the plural is eidola,” Albert said, earning a backhand to the shoulder from Kiara.
“Anyways, like five or six hundred years ago the magi managed to assassinate one of your predecessors, a Primus,” Kiara continued. “That was bad enough, but it came out later that the Vigiles was sort of complicit; they didn’t bother to investigate the killing and some of their people might have helped orchestrate it. There was a whole big war over it that lasted years and years and ended with the Vigiles being torn down and rebuilt.”
“It was supposed to make it a more equitable institution, but it just made it a little less prejudiced,” Griffin said.
Kiara pulled Albert up onto his feet, prompting the others to stand.
“We won’t know more until we find out what she was here to talk about,” she said. “For now, we keep our eyes on the prize. Let’s head to the archive.”
The four drakus made their way through a few more hallways, then up a flight of steps in a staircase so narrow they had to take it single file. Kiara brought them to a stop outside a thick wooden door with a large, brass knob set in the center instead of on the side. A plain metal plate was fastened to the door above the knob, and announced it was, “THE ARCHIVE.”
“Okay, a couple things to go over quickly before we go inside,” Kiara said. “The first thing is that the Archivist is generally very cool but she gets real shirty if you screw with her or the archives. Usually you wouldn’t need her to access the main chamber, but since you have a specific request and a unique situation we wanted to make sure she was here to help. Second, she probably won’t give you access to anything restricted — at least not directly — but it can’t hurt to ask if you feel you need to. Lastly, no drinks, no snacks, and no smoking.”
“What do we do if she’s not here yet?” Aaron asked.
“We’ll have a seat near the door and wait,” Albert said, adjusting his clothes and breathing into his hand to check his breath. “Don’t want to start off on the wrong foot.”
Griffin dropped an arm on Albert’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about him! He’s still the same seedy filth-pot, he just has a widdle cwush on the archivist.”
“Damned right I do,” Albert said. “Dibs, by the way.”
“You can’t call ‘dibs’ on a human being, you fucking used condom of a person,” Kiara sneered.
Albert pshawed. “Well I just did, so as usual you’ve proven yourself both shrewish and wrong.”
Griffin chuckled at the byplay and Kiara rolled her eyes, reaching for the doorknob. Before she could grab it, the wide door swung inward on its own.
“Welcome,” the Archivist said, standing in the doorway. “I hear there’s something you need help finding.”