Nathan opens the flask and takes a swig of Gwahin’s herbal tea. Martin scowls from the driver seat. Looking at him, you would think Nathan is chugging opium laced booze. Speaking of which he should ask tree girl if there are any side effects to the concoction, although, knowing her she would just smile mysteriously and say something along the line of “if you stop drinking it you might be dead in a week.”

The truth is that Nathan is about to blank. His vision is starting to tunnel, his extremities are starting to shake and lose feeling, a telltale sign.

Of course the draught helps, so does his limited training and the fact that the act if weaving is enough. There is no need for results, he just needs to keep at it. As Gwahin puts it “you weave like a small one eats soup. Most of it ends up on the ground”. If Varogs have been able to track him before, the juicy trail he leaves now will be impossible to miss.

So he has kept a tiny trickle of power into the flower pot on his lap. The smallest he could manage. Now a tiny green bud pushes valiantly up as a symbol of his ability to actually make something happen. You don’t even need a spyglass to see it. Take that Gwahin.

The downside of this is that he needs to keep at it until they reach his home and he is not sure he can make it.

Martin clears his throat, his voice is forced.

“I checked your background.”

Nathan’s voice cuts the background noise like a sword, sharp and cold.

“Did you now?”

Martin steals another glance. His face is calculating, gauging him.

“It made no sense what you said in the range’s parking lot. You were talking like someone who should be a firefighter or a solider or something. Or works with charities on his free time. But you don’t”

Silence.

“I’m thinking, is that because your father killed himself? That you are trying to save people now?”

Silence. Martin would not meet his eyes. He is licking his lips nervously.

Cold rage spreads over Nathan’s mind, surging through him in a chill wave and devouring every other emotion.

Breathe in, breathe out. The anger recedes and settles in a ball in his chest. He used to be able to control himself better, make every slight slide with a smile, but no longer. His anger pulsates with a life of its own, fueled by the outrage born of Martin’s action. He can tolerate the disgust over magic and himself, he can tolerate the occasional sneer at “civilian behavior”, as if pulling over drunk drivers helped with killing cannibalistic horrors. But this? He had opened his home to him, Martin had eaten his food, it should mean something, it should…

See some people are like that, they feel like they could have done something, seen it coming.

Martin steals another look at his face. Whatever he sees makes him stop

“Don’t take it the wrong way, I just, I don’t know, I need to understand the people I work with. There is always a goal, I just don’t see it with you.”

Anger pushes for control and Nathan forces the vicious smile away from his village. The anger asks for retribution. If not violence then at least let’s make him feel like shit. Ask him if it’s ok to dig up someone’s personal tragedy because he needs to understand, ask him if this is the best timing he could find, question his empathy and his morality and watch his composure crumble. Make yourself the victim and gnaw at his confidence as a proterctor of the people. Make him bend.

No.

Nathan reasserts himself. Anger serves, the mind leads. Nagging and throwing barbs like a pissed off spouse is a luxury he cannot afford, yet Martin crossed the line and he needs to know it.

“I think that you don’t understand how this works. We are not friends, we are allies. I do not owe you answers. You don’t need to understand me or know me to kill monsters with me, and you should not have done that behind my back. You overstepped.”

Martin gives a single nod and returns his full focus to driving. He looks a bit pale.

Nathan waits for empathy to kick in. It doesn’t. Instead he realizes that he is no longer close to blanking.

The flow going to the bud has not changed in intensity, instead, his focus meant that it took much less strength to keep the flow going, and he knew where this was coming from.

Anger.

Gwahin had told him that strong emotions would affect his ability to weave. Looks like Martin’s timing was good after all.

The ball in his chest dissolves, sated for now but not gone.

Seren

Seren distractedly scratches a burr in Nathan’s deck’s paint. Of course she has plenty of available entertainment, like checking her sword’s edge for the sixth time, reading the same paragraph from a borrowed copy of “Hyperion” for the fourth time and biting her nails.

Waiting can be tedious. Waiting for an exam or a duel to start can be stressful. Waiting when you don’t know when the enemy is coming and if you even have a fighting chance when they do, now that is hard. Seren comforts herself by remembering that it is still not as hard as waiting in a hospital room for the doctor to come and tell you wether or not your loved one survived. At least here she can do something.

The others don’t know that the trap will work but she does. The paths are getting darker and more complex as the minutes go by, she does not focus on them too much now though, she will need all her strength. Nathan suggested that changing paths too much would cause “blanking”, whatever that is.

“Contact.”

Sarah’s voice breaks the nervous silence. Seren changes her posture instinctively. Nathan stops lounging against the wall. He looks a bit ridiculous in his mix of modern camo suit, chainmail and a nasty looking spear. It’s almost….geeky. What has the world come to.

“Hum, it’s not them. It’s a blond woman.”

“Wait, what? Michael, stand by.”

“Roger that my dude.”

A beat-up Sedan slowly drives up the clearing. She can see a mop of blond hair and recognizes the woman first.

“Well well well, we have a medic now.”

“Nathan who is she?”

“That would be Patience, the nurse from the file.”

“I thought she wasn’t coming.”

“I thought that as well.”

“H-H-Hello! I have come to help!”

Patience is clutching a first aid kit as if her life depended on it. Her voice is strangely distressed and the stuttering only makes it, well, cuter. Her posture is tense and fearful. Seren thinks about the determined woman who slapped her back in that factory. She cannot reconcile the two.

After three seconds of awakward silence, Michael saves the day.

“Somebody fucking pinch me.

Nathan, 1PM.

It’s not stress, not really. Something is off. He can feel it like an itch under his skin, a thought under his scalp. Something that will not go away. It’s there, at the periphery of his mind. They have plans, they have weapon, they have com and now they even have a nurse. They are well prepared, well, as well prepared as they could be under the circumstances, but something is not quite right.

So Nathan does what he thinks is best, he stops focusing on the problem. He lets his hand run across the smooth wood, looks left and right. Probably going to have to cut that branch at some point. He hopes Patience’s car is parked properly, wouldn’t want to cause it undue damage given the state of the thing. It’s a very old Ford model. It was probably wiser to pick that rather than the family car, if she intends to …

Wait that’s it.

Intent.

Nathan can’t believe he was this stupid. Gwahin was pretty clear, what matters in magic is intent. He is not the best fighter in the group, hell he is probably the worst of the four. What he brings to the table is his knowledge of magic through Gwahin’s painful lesson, and he almost fucked up already.

Their intent is to kill the Varog to stop them from eating people but he messed up when he presented that. It’s an overarching goal. An ultimate goal meant to be achieved after a campaign, not just this single battle and here was the catch. The world is usually complex, and different shades of gray, and this has changed Nathan’s outlook, given him a strategic goal. What he needs now is a certain purity of purpose, to reduce the world to himself and the task in front of him. There is, in fact, a simple goal.

To defend one’s home.

Essentially the Varogs are coming here to kill his friends and him, to finish what they started with the girls, with their friends, with Martin’s mentor. They came here not like conquerors but like raiders and locusts to take, consume and leave.

No.

This is his place, his family’s refuge. This is the gathering , where his family sometimes crash for a while where he acts as host. It is his.

There is a pulse as his aura exerts itself for the second time this day, except this time it comes from outside. There is a current, a trend, something to follow. Nathan half suspects that the weave itself likes to flow in a certain way, half sentient but capricious like a cat. This time the weave is on his side, he merely has to go with the flow.

He feels his stance change, lets his feet carry him to his door. His hand lift the Yol spear forward and it stops a finger away from the wood. The world holds its breath. Nathan realizes he is at a crossroad. The Varogs will come no matter what, but he has a chance to change the paradigm, here and now.

“They are coming for us.”

Only Seren is close to him right now, and her eyes dart left and right, not just looking at him but also at the spear and at the door.

“They are coming for us.

He only exerts a minimum of consciousness and lets his hand flow, wielding the spear like a brush. The weave guides him left and right, through gentle curves and pointed angle, until he steps back to admire his handiwork.

On the wooden frame, a sigil burns like cinder, a beacon and a warning.

Home.

“…And we are ready.”

Seren’s smile is the coldest thing in the clearing.

“Everyone I got a car coming”.

Sarah’s voice echoes in his ear. Just in time then.

“except huh, it’s not them.”

Wait what?

“You sure?”

“Yah, I’m definitely sure. You got to see this.”

Thirty seconds later on Nathan’s desert and as yet unexploded front yard sits a car. A red convertible to be precise, with its hood opened despite the gray sky and chilly weather.

“Who the fuck is this schmuck. And is that… A Kid?!”

The driver slowly steps out of the car with his hand in the air. He is wearing an impeccably tailored coat the color of burnished brass over a navy suit. He has unnaturally pale amber eyes, copper hair that reaches his neck and perfectly matches the coat. Nathan has to admit that he is incredibly handsome in a pop star kind of way. The man could probably fill stadiums. Nathan cannot help but notice however, that his most defining feature remains a pair of horns.

They grow out of his temples up and backward, encircling his head in a golden crown. As Nathan focuses, he tastes an aura of cinnamon and overheated metal, a presence as compelling as Gwahin herself.

The man stops a few feet from the wooden landing and flashes his perfect teeth.

“I think you can lower your arms now, Agrias dear.”

The teen in the passenger seat lowers a white board with “Not Cannibals” written on it in tall black letters and underlines thrice. She is short with blue eyes and blond hair in a pixie haircut. She currently looks like the living embodiment of boredom.

Everyone is speechless. Nathan can feel the barest movement from Toothy, safely tucked in his scarf.

“Ah where are my manners? Allow me to introduce myself. Jin Mirra, of the Mirra and Z house of trade, purveyor of all things magical. At your service!”

His voice is smooth as butter. His words flow with the practiced ease of the politician, or the expert salesman, and an undeniable charisma. Nathan instantly dislikes him.

“ As a newly minted practitioner, you now have access to the full range of our extraordinary services! Congratulations! Please accept our welcoming gift to new customers. Agrias, the package please.”

The young girl steps out of the car with a bundle in her arms and steps closer, and Nathan can hardly believe he took her for a human. Sure she looks the part, but there is something sinuous and reptilian in the way she walks and as their eye meet he shivers. There is an emptiness in them that speaks of death, but where Varogs are the decay of the putrid marsh, that one is the absence of life. The surface of the moon could not possibly be colder.

Seren takes a step back and mutters while all of Nathan’s hair stand on end. Sensing the mood, the GQ model doubling as a salesperson takes the bundle from the monster teen’s arms.

She looks up and smiles.

All her teeth are square and flat. An illusory sound caresses Nathan’s psyche. Breaking bones and squelched flesh.

“This is a short sword made of true steel. And now I believe I have done everything I could here, and since we are on a schedule…”

The man drops the bundle on the stairs and deposits what looks like a business card on the wooden ramp. He raises a wrist and consults a massive gold watch.

“We are just on time for our next customer. And with this, I bid you a good day. Let’s go Agrias.”

The man gives a flawless bow, turns around smartly and steps into the car.

Agrias lingers. Her eyes go from left to right, stopping on Michael and Martin’s hiding place, Nathan himself, then Seren, then up to where he assumes Sarah and Patience are. Through the wall. Gwahin herself is not there since she unilaterally decided she would be in charge of making sure nobody would attack them from the sides or back.

“Fun times ahead.”

Her voice is exactly what you would expect from a fifteen year old girl if a bit raspy. It makes it way worse.

“Agrias, please.”

The… Thing, walks back to the car and, without a word, they leave.

The sound of the muscle car’s engine fades in the distance. The wind blows. A few leaves fall on the grass.

Sarah breaks the spell.

“What the, and I cannot stress this enough, actual fuck?!”

"I can’t believe we have been in this business for less than a month and laying low and still we get salesperson knocking on our doors."

"Stop joking Nathan how did they find us? Because if they can so do others."

Seren comments thoughtfully.

"Both of them were incredibly dangerous. We're lucky they were not hostile."

Nathan steps down the deck and grabs the package. It doesn’t have any aura.

"Can I have that?"

Seren sounds unusually eager. He throws her the bundle and grabs the business card for himself. It is well designed and super fancy. The company logo is a Z letter in a black circle, with the Z crossing it on both ends. There is a phone number but no website.

Huh.

Nathan reflects on the implications of this meeting. Gwahin makes it sound like magic has been dormant for a long time and magical creatures remain a rarity, however the existence of an actual trading house implies that there is a market. Others like him. The United States have a magic population. Huh. Maybe there are voodoo witches in Louisiana or covens around New York that gather every full moon in posh hotels for massive orgies where they…

“Mmmh guys?”

Sarah’s voice is shaking.

“It’s them”.