45

As Hunter prepared to cross the threshold between his old-timey bar personal Shard and the actual world of Elderpyre, he realized something had been nagging at the back of his mind more or less since he, Fawkes, and the Brethren had entered Mother’s Inner Sanctum. He’d been anchored to the Place of Power just outside the Sanctum’s entrance. Was that where he’d respawn? Would it be safe? For some reason, he’d been unconsciously operating under the impression that the immediate threat of Mother and her morbid gathering of faithful was somehow contained by the Sanctum, limited by it. Was that really the case? Why had he even assumed that in the first place?

Well, there was one way to know. He took a deep breath, braced himself, and crossed the door. As with every other time he’d done that, his senses short-circuited for a moment. He was assaulted by starbursts of impossible colors, the deep timbre of tolling bells, and the smell of ozone and camphor. He powered through almost absent-mindedly. Disconcerting as all those were, he was more worried about what waited for him on the other side. His felt his body materialize again, and…

Nothing.

The dark corridors of the Halls were empty and quiet, the great double doors to the Sanctum were firmly shut. Fawkes and the Brethren were nowhere to be seen. Even the incessant whispering of the Mother’s faithful was barely perceptible, muted by the powerful, ever-present beat of the Halls’ heart.

He was alone, but at least he was safe.

A notification flashed before his eyes, drawing his attention the messages that had been piling up in his game log.

You successfully make your way back to the realm of the living. Signs of erosion appear at the edges of your psyche. Your Élan quality is now 8.

Ugh. Alright, fine, not ominous at all. Hunter had forgotten about that, but this wasn’t the time to either worry or look further into it. There were more pressing things to do. He opened his game log and quickly went through the rest of his notifications going from newest to oldest, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

The first few were nothing interesting – just the moment-to-moment logistics of how he’d been brutally murdered by Mother’s honor guard. He scrolled past them almost absent-mindedly. He didn’t need some arbitrary damage values to know that being impaled on a huge spear and cleaved in half hurt a lot. He’d experienced that first hand. There were a few Skill and Ability increases here and there, too; namely, tumbling around and getting brutalized had gained him two points of Evasion and an impressive six points of Toughness. Not bad at all. If it wasn’t for the excruciating pain, the trauma, and the yet-undiscovered unsettling implications of his dwindling Élan, he might even consider it as a halfway-decent training method.

Next came the notifications about the contest of wills he’d lost against Mother – or rather some other entity whose name had been obscured and replaced with a bunch of question marks. That had to be the alien puppeteer centipede thing that hid behind itself behind Mother’s illusion, Hunter supposed. He’d failed his Willpower check there, but the corpse hair charm had absorbed the brunt of the attack and saved his bacon from its stunning effect. Fawkes and Sister Peregrine hadn’t been so fortunate. In retrospect, the charm had saved their collective bacon. It almost justified pilfering an ancient severed head and plucking its hair for crafting materials.

Almost.

Hunter willed the game log window away and summoned his familiars. They materialized a few seconds later, immediately pelting him with a wave of worried squeaks, both the telepathic and mundane kind.

“Hush, you fools!” he hissed. “Do you want every low-dweller in the Halls running after us again?”

Biggs and Wedge responded with the empathic link equivalents of “No, no” and “Oops, sorry” and landed before him, standing at attention like tiny feathered soldiers waiting for their commanding officer to give them their next orders.

“Okay, listen. I want you to fly around the halls and corridors–quietly!–and look for Fawkes and the Brethren. If you find them, or signs of them, or anything else, tell me. Understand?”

They did, or at least they thought so.

“One other thing. If you see any nasties, do not bring them back here. Fly off and lose them, but do not let them follow you. Alright?”

Biggs and Wedge nodded with such grim determination it was almost comical.

“Good. Fuck off now.”

***

As it turned out, it was Fawkes that found Hunter first, not the other way around. She and the Brethren had holed up in a nearby vault, just like when they’d almost been overrun by the low-dweller horde. Once they were settled, Fawkes, who apparently knew more about working along with Transients than she’d let on, snuck out on her own to keep an eye on the entrance to the Inner Sanctum and wait for Hunter to return to the Place of Power he was anchored to.

“Fawkes! You made it out!”

She nodded and put a gloved finger to her lips, shushing him.

“Quiet, fool. Come.”

Hunter sent a mental signal to Biggs and Wedge, recalling them from their little reconnaissance mission, and followed her. The vault was more or less identical to the other ones Hunter had seen, a nondescript rectangular room with some kind of lectern in the middle and four Kannewik dancing their eternal dance around it. This one held a small silver tuning fork. It looked innocent enough, but based on everything else Hunter had seen in the Halls of the Cor Ancestors, he would’nt touch it with a ten-foot pole. The Brethren were huddled under a blanket in the far side of the room, resting. Sister Peregrine raised her head and offered him a nod as he and Fawkes entered the vault, then went back to cradling Brother Aurochs’s head. She’d removed her headdress. Hunter ha never seen her without it, he realized.

As soon as they were safe behind the vault’s enchanted walls, Fawkes turned around and slapped Hunter across the face hard enough to send him reeling.

“Hey!” he cried, rubbing at his cheek and jaw. “What was that for?”

“What kind of an idiot are you, lad?” she hissed through clenched teeth, nostrils flaring. “What has gotten into you? First you use yourself as bait for a horde of low-dwellers, then this? What was this all about?”

“That’s way too many angry words to say ‘thank you’.”

“To the Nine Hells with ‘thank you’! What were you even thinking?”

Hunter scowled. He didn’t exactly expect a hero’s welcome, but neither did he a slap in the face and an earful. It wasn’t like Fawkes to get this hot and bothered. What had –?

Oh, that.

Yeah, stumbling upon a long-lost friend’s desecrated corpse would do that to a person, he supposed, even if that person was someone like her.

“I, uh… I take it you, uh… you saw him?” he asked, not sure how to broach the subject.

She didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about, at first. Then she did, and all her anger and fire faded, leaving her looking tired and defeated and old, so very old. Seeing like this hit Hunter harder than her slap ever could, like an iron fist right in the stomach. He was still angry, he realized, though he wasn’t exactly sure at whom. At Grimm, sure, despite the fact that he’d trumped him with his charisma. At himself. At the world. At this world, and at its creators too, who’d deliberately chosen to create people like Fawkes, conscious and self-aware, only to inflict suffering on them. And he was angry at the Brethren, too, at Sister Peregrine.

“Did you know?” he turned on her, his fury burning hotter with every passing moment. “All this time, did you fucking know?”

She didn’t respond, not even to deny his accusation or to tell him she didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. In fact, she didn’t react at all. She didn’t even acknowledge he was talking to her. She just sat there under her blanket and kept absent-mindedly stroking Brother Aurochs’s messy hair, a mere shadow of her former self. She looked naked without her headdress on, weak, robbed of her authority. Human. Too human. Hunter didn’t care. He wanted to admit it, to hear her say it. He wanted his pound of flesh.

Ironically, it was Fawkes who reined him in. She put a hand on his shoulder and let it rest there. There was something both strict and soothing in that unusual gesture of hers, something almost parental. It surprised Hunter enough for him to shake his rage away and make him turn from Sister Peregrine, almost ashamed for his outburst. He wasn’t used to being so emotionally volatile, swinging from stress to panic to anger to sadness and then back to stress and anger again, and then to shame and who knows what else. But then, he wasn’t exactly used to getting killed and tackling moral dilemmas, and the day was still far from over.