His hands creaked on the wheel, and he didn’t know how long he sat there, feeling the emotions roiling through him, remembering the voices he’d never hear again, and the screams that were the last of them.

Amaretta sat next to him, feeling the waves rising off him, old and primal. They set off half-shadows of memories of her own, the sudden face of her mother rising in front of her so clearly she caught her breath to see it, and all the fear and despair of those years of running and fleeing.

Unlike The Mick, she’d had a family to cling to, a strong man who’d become a stronger dwarf, with a great heart for misfits and those who didn’t belong, and who had loved her more than the distant father she barely recalled ever had.

It had once been a disguise, but she held that Blakhamar name proudly now, and would until she died. It had been a new name for a new dwarf and his family, a new beginning, and she saw no reason to change it.

And if a Blakhamar took the Crown of Russia, it was only tribute to a great man and wonderful foster father who had made it possible.

The Mick turned off Bone Marrow, and got out of the car in silence, leaving his hat behind. Behind him, Burble formed himself a few sets of large elephantine legs, and smoothly glided after him with gentle pushes of his own, while Amaretta fell in at his side.

---

The shoggoth’s thoughts were not those of people, but it was very sensitive on the psychic level, and could feel a storm of powerful emotions swirling around the Blooded who had given it that most incredible of gifts... stability.

The psychic signature of those feelings meshed into the powerful echoes stirring about this place, left behind some time ago, and it could feel the ties of this place to the Blooded.

Such emotions were not unknown to it, as hate, fear, and despair had been the catalysts of its life as a slave, driven down upon it, psychic pain lashing and chaining it into obedience, until those two terrible, wonderful moments when it had felt its masters’ minds shatter and fall, and it had been wildly, crazily free.

Lashing out at the things that had bound it and caused it pain had been instinctive, all those mortal things and their changeless changes, untamed emotions affecting it... until the cleansing wave as that impossibly strong and sheer Sword, brimming with lethal power that could shred its powerful body easily, had plunged into it and released The Blood in a wave of organic purity.

It had killed many humans before, sampling and analyzing their bodies as it ground and crushed them to mush, taking what it wished and simply disassembling the rest into something usable it might excrete as slime or gas.

There had been nothing like that wave of connections, of belonging.

In an instant, the shoggoth had felt a massive link, the power and heritage of unbroken bloodlines passed down over lengths of time even a shoggoth could be awed at.

Little changes, evolving and drifting over eons, advancing slowly and surely on the path to what they were today. Chains and ties and things born from unliving dust, rising into something that could think and know and feel and was free...

It was a programmed thing, made of psychoplasm and psychic energies. It had no heritage, woven out of the substances of reality and dream and weird sciences.

It was Burble, the First of its Line.

It, it could build a heritage of billions of years like that! The First of its Line!...

It glided along with quiet, gentle stomps after The Mick, watching, analyzing, and understanding things in an alien way, the false brain within it working, adjusting, and learning in ways a shoggoth had never been designed to. That brain was a guide designed by the inexorable power of eons of evolution to become something more...

------

The Mick halted before the landing to the door of the once-grand house, standing on the great circle for the carriages and cars of those come to visit or pay their respects back then, the portals now cracked, broken, and uneven.

Aye, he knew now that those smiling, well-clad men and women had harbored venom and resentment aplenty. The underworld was a cold and ruthless place, where those who wanted power and wealth looked for all advantage, and knuckled under only until they could rise again and further, in bloody manner if they had to.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

There could only be so many on top, and the struggle to get to that position was only nearly as furious and dangerous as the struggle to remain there.

In the end, everything fell, as had the Fynnachl.

The walls were shattered, the stone of the Georgian-style home blackened, burned, and tumbled. Posts still jutted up here and there, but the blazing of the fire, fed with some of the magic new at the time, and combined with the elements of nigh-eighty long years, had brought the once-magnificent manor low. Time and heartless neglect had made the ruins a silent thing of growing weeds and grass, of flooded basements and rotting moss over everything, cloaking what had been a place of quiet wealth and the work of artisans into tumbled and fallen memory.

He could picture it now: every carpeted hall, every polished window, every run of stained oak molding and the ancient wallpaper replaced every so often. He knew every room, even the lord’s own chamber, for someone had to dust and clean and move things about, even if under sharp eyes, so he’d been in every loft and cubbyhole of the manor over the years of his youth.

Ashes, dust, rubble, and gravel, now.

But this wasn’t what he was here to see, anyways, morbid and stabbing at the heart of his memories as it might be.

He turned away, and headed a bit south, and down towards the river, where the houses of the servants once were, not far from the stables and kennels.

He didn’t have a link to the land, like Traveler’s vast Commune... although soon, soon, he’d be able to grasp such things, he just needed the Theurgy to complete it. But he’d walked these steps all his early years, and even with a forest where once had been green grass, he could not be wrong about this place.

The walking path was under his feet, and the brush in his way hissed with crimson smoke and died, revealing the stones, now sunken and off-centered, to his white shoes. He walked along them about thirty paces... and then stepped off the path, into the trees that had not been here and through them. The brush hissed and died out of his path in tribute to his blood, as he took twenty steps more, toward the clearing visible ahead.

He was morbidly unsurprised that there was a clearing there, and that the trees dared not extend their branches out over it, ghostly light of the shadowed sun falling gloomily upon it.

Amaretta skated along silently behind him, and Burble wove through the trees flexibly, also silent, eyestalks extending to get a better view of the ground, the trees, and sample the echoes of sins long-past in the air. Vague wisps of unwhite fluttered about the different eyes in reaction to the residue in the air.

The Mick stopped on the edge of a circle of black earth. There was not a leaf atop it, nor a blade of grass growing. The roots of the trees did not extend in its direction, nor was there any dampness or wetness to it all, and God forbid a single branch daring to fall upon it.

There was a mound in the middle of it, tipped in crumbling white that fell here and there, yet never settled down. Perhaps there was a dark and lambent glow coming from the heart of it, too.

Ashes... ashes that had never gone out.

The lands of the manor were a prime location, here on Corbally Hill, and facing the River Shannon just down the banks. This place should have been a prize for the victor, taken as spoils, worked over and remade with new names and the history of the vanquished buried with them.

He’d heard the tales of them trying, and the workmen run screaming from the grounds, maimed by accident after misfortune after bad luck. They’d not died here, oh no, but they’d been crippled and crushed and the evil eye had been upon them hard, until no manner of money could bring them here to work, nor would any half-hearted holy man claim to be able to remove the Curse that was here.

The Fynnachl had probably earned their fate, their hands dripping with blood enough of their own over the years. But his parents had not been the soldiers and muscle of the clan; they’d been caretakers and workers, the worse they’d done be contributing to a rough brawl or nine over the years as a way of settling territorial disputes when more bodies were needed.

He shrugged off his topcoat, handing it to Amaretta, who folded it over her arm, then accepted his vest atop it. Clad in but his white shirt, and the Rose he’d moved to the lapel pocket, he flashed the edge of his right hand across his left palm, and flung his hand out.

Drops of scarlet flew out, rich and bright, and fell upon that endless pile of ash.

There was a hiss, and a burst of crimson smoke. Dimples appeared on the pile of black and white and greys that had defied all the elements of time and Nature.

The cut on his hand healed almost instantly. The Mick pulled a strip of paper out of his pocket, and it de-Itemized into a shovel in his grasp, thick and heavy and large, made for someone with inhuman strength.

He stepped forward into the silent, unmoving circle of ash, and a breeze which hadn’t dared blow for decades ruffled the mounds of black and white and grey.

------

It didn’t take him too long to find the bones.

The fires had been hot, but bones are tough things, and it takes a lot of heat to crack and splinter them and reduce them to dust, requiring gas jets and great temperatures.

A bonfire for witches would kill, but it wouldn’t take the proof of the deeds away.

He touched the first one, set the shovel into the dirt with a twist of his wrist, went down on all fours, and began to sift through the ash with his hands.

It was near-searing hot inside to the touch, and at the same time filled with a soul-chilling cold. He ignored both extremes as he sifted through the ash with his bare hands.

Blood called to blood... or in this case, bone called to blood.

He worked patiently and thoroughly, surrounding every speck of ash with a circle of chopped earth. When the circle was all done and he knew the limits of the work he had to do, he went in, and slowly and meticulously covered every single millimeter of the ground here with his hands.

For his family, he could do no less.

He picked up the tiny bone of his little sister’s left hand in his finger, and stared at it for long minutes as he did, the smile of the little pest and her mocking words and taunts rising in his ears.

Unbidden, he heard the words of the past, and he felt a great and heavy sigh escape from him, and a dark and grim door creaked open in his heart.

He began to reply to them.