30

It was early, but not too early. On a weekend, but it didn’t feel like one.

Marith had ventured out alone, because she trusted herself enough to know where the one and only glacier of those mountains was and how to get there. It was all pretty straight forward, until she found herself wrestling through the cutting wind, not finding any other sign of life on the steep, white plane.

The weather was bad. The wind was howling and the temperatures were well below zero. Marith was struggling up the glacier with frozen limbs and a pained face. She couldn’t quite grasp why the group was expected to assemble up there and she was starting to wonder whether she had unravelled the message in her clockwork the right way.

She paused on a fairly even piece of ice and took the instrument out of her pocket. The tiny compass under the limp, dull clouds was still pointing North and she was going North. At least she was right about the direction, but that was a meagre comfort under the circumstances.

Not always was the compass pointing North. After Watchmaker put an encrypted message through it would indicate the direction of their next gathering. Other hands, wheels and dials, decorated with mystical signs, letters and numbers would tell the owner of the horological wonder more about the time, location and purpose of the gathering. The purpose of a meeting could vary from a simple transfer of information between two Pupils to practice sessions with the Chain, gatherings with Elders and even interdimensional travel.

Marith shoved the optical illusion back into her coat and sighed, releasing a white cloud of vapour into an already monochromatic landscape. She was frozen, but not too frozen to not notice anyone gaining distance on her.

Instead of unleashing the strings in her mind, she just peeked over her shoulder. The plane of ice allowed her to gaze far and wide.

It was Juliette, once again wearing nothing more than a track suit and some sneakers. The Runner caught up with the Mage with ease.

They barely said hello to each other and walked side by side in silence for a while, defying the wind and the cold and the chilliness between them.

“How are you?” Juliette asked.

“Well… not great.”

“How so?”

You know why, Marith thought, annoyed. The attack on Jonathan, the drownings, her deteriorating father, her struggle to make Nate understand her. Granted, Juliette had no clue about the latter, but she could have guessed the rest.

Marith sighed, stomping forward next to the only Runner that didn’t seem to like her. “I just… feel good for nothing.” An involuntary sigh escaped her lungs again, before she continued. “I was unable to finish university. I have no substantial income, no fulltime job, no marriage, no children.”

“Well, I don’t have any of those things either,” Juliette answered, kinder than Marith had anticipated.

“I know,” Marith said, “most of us don’t. I didn’t mean to insult anyone, but it doesn’t feel right. Does it?”

“Well,” the Runner started hesitantly, “that depends on what you want in life, but I guess a lot of people aim for those things.”

“I have wanted children for as long as I could remember,” the Mage answered lethargic. “I think I was seven or so when I held somebody’s baby for the first time and that very moment I just knew I wanted to find a nice, loyal man to have some babies with. I mean,” she paused for a few moments to catch her breath in the thin air, still grappling up the glacier, “I have always wanted to be successful, have a career, play the cello and all that, but one doesn’t exclude the other.”

Juliette shoved her hands into the unzipped pockets of her tracksuit. “If there is anything I have learned from my roaming existence is that you cannot support society if society doesn’t support you... and let’s face it, the world isn’t built for people like us and yet we are expected to save it when necessary.”

“That’s probably true,” Marith whispered back, slightly choked up. She knew Juliette was right, but she couldn’t just abandon her wants and longings in life like that. The urge to raise a family was greater than the struggles of their generation in general and the contrarieties of the Pupils more specifically.

Juliette was taller than Marith to start with, but the fact that Marith was sinking almost knee-deep into the snow and Juliette walked on top of it like a biblical figure made Marith look like a heavy penguin ploughing clumsily through the dense white precipitation.

She had to lift her legs laboriously high with each step to prevent the resistance of the frozen water and to cover even remotely the same ground. The greyish white light, coming from every direction, was an assault to the senses.

“There is an old native proverb that goes something like this,” Juliette started. “An elder would say to a child ‘There are two wolves, a good one and an evil one. They are locked into a terrible fight that never ends. The same fight is going on inside me, inside you and inside every other person too.’ And then the child asks the elder ‘Which wolf will win?’ And then the elder replied ‘The one that you feed.’ I am pretty sure someone else can tell it better, but I hope you get the idea.”

“No,” Marith nodded, “it’s a good story. Is this a tale from your elders?”

“No, it’s from the Cherokee tribe.”

“Ah,” was all Marith said.

“We’re not on the path,” Juliette continued wise.

“Hmmm?” Marith wondered.

“The path. The path that most people follow in life. We’re not on it and we’ll probably never will.”

Marith just nodded.

“Yet, I think things might turn out alright for us if we aim for the right outcome.”

Their eyes locked for a moment and just like that they understood each other, their pasts, their hardships, their frustrations. It seemed to both of them the air had been cleared.

The Chain stood waiting for them on a level plateau in the wide plain of snow and ice. The skies were a pale grey and thick flocks of snow whirled down all around them.

Every Pupil existing in North-America was present, minus two Prophets and two Runners. The Chain had decided that there was no way to predict the Kid’s powers – if there ever was one – after the drownings, so from that moment on two Runners were always guarding the psychiatric ward of the local clinic.

The Web had called them to a gathering through the vessels of Oracle and Watchmaker. The first practice round of the North-American Chain and the recently arrived triangles had dawned.

That morning An would practice his control on the elements. Evoking a Flow, channelling the Web, he could make the glacier grow and retract. Up there he could cause landslides and avalanches that would never be noticed and, even if they would, they would never reach an inhabited area. He could set an entire mountain ridge on fire without harming any trees and he could mould sleds and boards from ice for the Runners to speed off the glacier with, before racing to the top again, carrying the ice-sculptures on their shoulders.

Seeing the fun other people were capable of having still filled Marith with some level of comfort and joy. There were moments she couldn’t help bursting out in laughter, especially when James, still trying to impress Theresa, missed the bobsled altogether and Juliette had to race Alexander and Anton down the glacier by herself. The spectacle pushed the conversation she had had earlier with Juliette to the background and almost made her forget about the stormy river of indefinable ominous feelings that raged inside her.

Pedro had wanted to practice his talent on the Prophets for a long time. He had finally convinced a few to be the suffering object of his abilities to manipulate the senses, taking them away, passing them around and returning them to the original owner. As it turned out his talent had stretched to the point of being able to take the constant Flow of the Web, the inexhaustible stream of visions that Prophets received, away.

Next he tried to take away the senses of a Runner speeding by. With his own super-senses he was able to track them, to feel and hear them coming, but locking them into a sensory prison at top speed was a fresh challenge he was fighting to master. At the end of the morning he was more or less proficient in robbing a Runner at average speed of every sense and a Runner at top speed of hearing and sight. He was not content, but not disappointed either. He had always perceived touch, taste and smell as lesser faculties. Losing those wouldn’t affect the Kid that much, he predicted.

Brad, Vanessa and Marith were there to enhance their own abilities, but had mostly tagged along to witness the progress of the group as a whole. Will would watch, awaiting his time, which the group was unaware was coming sooner rather than later.

Mara, Mynthia and Melania stood idly by as the local community gathered in silence for the memorial. The three of them had struck root right next to the lake house, diagonally opposite from the gathering, which made it hard to do anything but to stand idly by.

The body of water between them was frozen stiff between the rocks and the pebbles that crowned the shorelines. It functioned as a harsh mirror that reflected the grey skies, packed with clouds that looked as thick as cotton candy pretended to be, and the dispirited and dejected atmosphere of the entire week leading up to the remembrance.

Some of the women had brought tea lights, both the real ones and the fake kind, flowers and letters that they would leave to commemorate their lost sons, husbands, brothers and fathers. That afternoon they mourned the men of the tri-lake area. Very few of the ones, possessed and drawn to the water that chilling night, had survived.

The mayor, who had been absent during the homeless crisis, the mental health crisis and the economical downfall of the area, wasn’t attending the gathering at the lake either. There was no incentive for her to leave her house. The potions from the Corridors kept people demure and forgiving.

She did set a curfew that the Pupils were largely ignoring. The measure was generally pointless, since no inhabitant of the area felt inclined to leave the house after dinner anyway.

Local authorities had initially undertaken a half-hearted attempt to blame the incident on mass hysteria and when that wasn’t accepted as a feasible answer they mentioned drugs, which the Pupils knew as well as anyone else, were hardly used by the younger generations and the homeless in town. They let it rest, because they knew better and the memories and inklings of the locals would soon be pushed to the background.

In the aftermath of the drownings, during the obsequies and burials, heavy protests had stayed out, even though that night had changed a whole generation of women and killed even more men. Somewhere, a part of their brain, that was now deeply buried, knew they had been spared for a reason. Something had been done to them that night and if it wasn’t for the Mountain Dew they would have undoubtedly demanded to know what.

Samuel, who had seen the mournful bunch coming from a mile away, couldn’t take that melancholic, sentimental crap. Now that he was convinced he was tapping into new and improved streams of energy he decided to escape the solemn and serene atmosphere the locals and their stupid candles brought to test the current limits of his body.

He stomped through the shrubbery behind the lake house, entered the path that snaked around the property and left that one rather quickly as well. Russian hardbass, Dutch hardstyle and German heavy metal pounded through his plugs against his sensitive eardrums.

The decibels didn’t hinder his ability to perceive the environment in great detail. They encouraged him to speed up, take risks and open his other faculties to the information the Web was hiding so taut, so spastic from him.

He rushed through the greenery, barely touching the snow beneath his feet, like a wolfhound that had spotted a wolf.

He smelled a residue of fun coming from the Northern mountains. He ignored it. They were already descending the glacier – no doubt to attend the memorial – and he wasn’t in the mood to spy on those imbeciles again anyway. There wasn’t any use for them at the moment, and, if all went according to plan, they were no threat to him in the future either.

They were still under the impression that he was without a Prophet or a Mage, which was true to some extent, but little did the Pupils know that the Ottoman they were hiding somewhere in Mesopotamia wasn’t the only route to obscenities.

Their ignorance made him deeply happy in the most unsettling ways. Involuntary grins and grimaces crossed his face with bewildering speed and variety.

Once upon a glorious time in Europe he had been accompanied by not one, but three Mages. He created misery, but they could create chaos. He was fast and cunning, but they were malicious and creative. They complemented each other horrifically.

Due to an unfortunate fate their lives had been tied to his. When he had been send away by the Asian Chain the European one had taken care of his women. They hadn’t been of the human kind of course. Humans, even back then, appeared to want nothing to have to do with him.

After his defeat they had initially been spread over every plane of water, but the ethereal connection between the First Runner and his Mages had been too strong. Unbeknownst to the Elders, or any Pupil for that matter, their eternal particles would be caught by an elusive current and be directed towards the waters closest to where the Kid, or his corpse, was residing.

Every fragment of his nymphs had accumulated in Sweet Lake after he had been entombed. They had been floating around harmlessly ever since. His time to awaken them had come after the brutal and uncalled for murder on Harold.

Now they would reappear on a continent they had never been to during their corporeal existence and he wanted to be there for them.

But where were his volatile beauties?

The face of a million nightmares ran through the sea of trees that covered the mountains like a crisp blanket. He was hunting now. He had assumed he would be able to feel their energy, like he could taste deep discomfort, unhappiness and the magic of the Mages in the air. He had hoped the atmosphere would vibrate with their presence, that the rapture of their return would ooze over the snow covered branches and rocks.

He stopped running for a while and drifted around like a drunk. Staring at the trees around him, like they were going to talk to him.

They had to be here somewhere. He had brought the sacrifice.

Speaking of which, why was he out of breath? Why were his thoughts starting to bathe in mist?

While it was getting dark he sped up again and raced past the clearing. He hadn’t been there since the massacre.

With a hindering lump in his throat and his eyes floating in some kind of infuriating wetness he had to accept the small plane had remained untouched, since he had witnessed the Chain welcome new Pupils.

He quickly repacked himself. It was getting dark. He had been running for hours. His muscles were drained of strength and started to burn. A sensation he wasn’t ready to get used to.

The simpletons at the lake had surely left by now. He figured he could muster stopping by on his way home to scan that part of the area.

That afternoon he had to deal with the fact that the death of Harold and the energy spend on luring the locals to the lake had set him back and it would be a while before he would reap the benefits of his algorithm. He wanted to at least be reunited with his womenfolk.

He had scoured practically all the woods around the lakes, which would have been a difficult and near impossible endeavour before the drownings. Now his lungs were heaving, his heart was aching, his hopes and dreams were floating through the gutter and, to make matters worse, he noticed blots and specks blurring his vision.

He managed to drop by the white mansion. Neither the Pine guy or the pregnant little sister appeared to be there so he seized the opportunity to catch his breath by taking a leisurely stroll inside.

It was quickly decided that the grandeur of the building matched his presence. He would definitely take it after his inevitable victory, likely not too far away from those very moments. This prospect gave him some much-needed motivation.

After throwing up in the sink, flushing the blood down the drain and grabbing some kind of homemade muffin from a platter on the kitchen bar and almost swallowing it whole he collected the shreds of his waning strength and flashed outside, so he would go unnoticed to the motion detectors and camera’s on the facades.

In a few heartbeats he stood on a fallen tree at the shore and looked out over a scattered collage of flowers, pictures, letters and candles, so many candles. He didn’t dwell on the pain that lingered there, or even paid it more than two seconds of his attention. Nothing that could even remotely capture his interest existed on that side of the lake, apart from his soon-to-be house.

He had to put all his efforts into not slipping off the trunk. Panic briefly surged, while he debated the odds of his plans not working out the way he wanted them to.

Then, through all the glittering flecks in his eyes, he noticed three out of the ordinary trees, opposite from the sea of tiny lights. He squinted his eyes, like a student straining to read the white-board after forgetting to bring his glasses to a lecture.

They looked slightly sexier than the average pine tree. They possessed an unmistakable ‘come hither’ look that he hadn’t come across since he had lived in the Mediterranean, thousands of years ago.

Of course, he realised elated. There was a reason he was the oldest human, or humanlike being, on the planet. He was special. He carried an unrivalled intelligence with him. Things did fall into place when he was around.

He jumped off the dead chunk of wood and stood next to his nymphs before the twinkling in his eyes could diminish.

Had they been there before? He curiously walked the last few metres alongside the red house towards the appealing greenery, as not to startle them.

Had they always cut off the light like this? There was barely any snow balancing on the needle-filled branches.

Yes, this was definitely the gleesome threesome. He could feel them now, his companions, his allies. They hadn’t forgotten about each other. Thousands of years apart. Now they were about to reunite.

They dropped into his arms simultaneously, flowing from their towering treelike forms to their slithering human ones in one disgusting, fluent motion.

The four supernatural forces of evil didn’t waste any words on coming to some sort of resolution, a plan of revenge. They already knew, or better, remembered the natural course of events that would follow.

They stumbled inside, so Samuel could make vigorous love to each and every one of them repeatedly, with renewed strength. He took one on the master bed, another one on the couch and the third on the kitchen table. He tore them apart in the same way his algorithm had assembled them.

Afterwards the Kid went upstairs again and took a steaming shower. Mara, Mynthia and Melania slipped outside. The laptop was being charged, so that its owner could shortly embark on a new and improved algorithm.

The women retrieved a pile of old booklets from the red and white wood shed that was built next to the lake house. Their thievery had been highly successful.

The tall, skinny sirens built a bonfire between the lake house and the jetty with the flammable research they had found in the safe and the matches they had come across in the kitchen. With great, playful gestures they tossed the books in, while silently dancing around the flames. When they were done they turned their backs on the crackling spectacle and let it burn.

Samuel sauntered outside, wearing wool slippers, chequered pyjama’s and an old jacket loosely tossed over it. He drowsily dragged a bear chair to the hot mess in the fire pit and sat down, balancing the laptop on the pillow on his knees.

While the flames devoured the old papers, filled with the Elder’s ink, the Runner and his Mages each fulfilled their purposes. The Kid did his coding, while the nymphs did what they were made to do, discovering patterns in the chaos that was formed by the particles of the Web.

The three pale, mute sirens stood side by side and peered through a device, they had previously stolen, into the cold evening, while the fire burned behind them.

The instrument was shaped like a tree. The trunk functioned as a handle. As replacement for leaves or needles the branches were filled with glass lenses, of all shapes and sizes and colours.

The women had been surprised, let down actually, by how the Tree of Disappointment, Despair and inevitable Death had been, rather simply, up for grabs in the workshop behind the store. Of course, nobody, not even Watchmaker, had been expecting them and it wasn’t exactly made of precious materials either, so there was no real point in hiding the instrument.

The triple D tree opened itself like a blossoming flower. It fanned out until all three of them had a cluster of glass chunks in front of them. This was no coincidence. The device had been crafted with them in mind, by a Roman glassblower, that they had bamboozled like they had the Prophet that guarded the clockstore, like the succubae that they were.

The lenses that hovered in front of their faces switched and turned, like the lenses in a phoropter at the optician’s office, showing them different particles in various fields.

Vibrations of fuckery slithered towards them like snakes over a lawn covered in morning dew.

They felt in their heartbeats, in the tingles up their spines, in the quivers of their breath that the streams of evil that naturally flowed through the Web were congregating to be guided by them, to gleefully obey them.

Soon they would be capable of great things again. Outbursts of insanity they didn’t want to resist. Madness that they wouldn’t be able to curb would flow from their fingertips again, with a little push from Samuel.

In the old days they would sacrifice animals and virgins. Now a laptop, a piece of ingenious electronics, and an ancient Roman artefact could have the same effect.

With the help of the Triple D Tree they would make sure up would be down and down would be up. The device didn’t just bring to light what was crawling in the dark, it could also attract and channel more energy, that found itself devoid of morals, values and ethics.

That night Amber and Kyle slept like toddlers, meaning that they woke up crying every hour, due to unstoppable nightmares stampeding through their minds, while bathing in sweat and squirming in agony. The nerves in their spines fired like a Buk missile system. The Prophets bend over backwards in their beds, their hearts racing, their brains registering shards of the future between travelling blue and white lights.

They dreamt of things that writhed and crawled in the dark. Slimy lumps that stuck to ceilings, only to let go and plummet to the floor with a wet thud as soon as they were ripe. Creatures that were made of meat and flesh, with bony claws and glassy eyes that foretold stories of decay and death, started to creep outside.

The claws reached for Amber and Kyle, while dragging mouldering bodies behind them over the road.

Smells of decomposing cat food penetrated their nostrils.

Food. These things - whatever they were, whatever they used to be - were looking for sustenance.

Their leather skin, stretched out to the point maps could be drawn in the wrinkles, had to be filled up again. Soon the gasses, exuded by the rotting process, would cause the crawling cadavers to bloat and their skins would be tight again.

All the while the Prophets knew it was real. The epilepsy-like episodes they suffered alongside the visions indicated as much. They didn’t know exactly where it was happening or when they would cross paths with this nastiness, but the flashing pains in their backs informed them of events that were happening along the timeline of their direct futures.

After Samuel was done coding in every language he had learned so far he slumped back in the chair and fell asleep like the old man that he was.

The silent Mages had been water for so long they wanted to be in touch with Earth as much as possible now. At night they had to be grounded. When they were done instructing the most vile particles of the Universe they stayed outside, to be trees again.

The lake house was just the first house. For nights to come they would repeat this ritual in backyards and on town squares. They would sneakily relocate several times per night and weren’t ever noticed.

The tri-lake area had always been sleepy, but recent events had caused people to lock themselves, and their children, inside, behind bolted doors. In the entire existence of his hardware store Keymaker had never been this busy.

Their toes and legs shot into the frozen ground as far as they could, their arms stretched upward and their elongated faces thwarted into ghastly yawns.

Their specialty was abysmal emptiness and their tool was the seed of evil.

They held their branches up into the sky like someone holding up a smartphone searching for reception. Their leafs and needles connected with all the vibrating particles of the Web that were as willing and evil as they were.

The creativity of the nymphs, the limits of their minds, happened to be operating on the fears of the humans that inhabited the area.

They got a grip on the physical world again by alternating what the survivors saw as reality. The first step was to draw them into an emotional illusion. They were just as much victims of society as they thought they were.

The metamorphosis would only affect the fortunate souls who had been escaping any and all mayhem that had plagued the area for a serious amount of time now, such as the voluntarily unemployed, the CEO’s of domestic operations, the slay at home moms and other individuals with bewildering ideas on how to give substance to their lives.

They had been spared because they were weak. They were weak because they had a predisposition for grandiosity and the nymphs could spin such megalomania to their benefit.

They would initiate the channelling and spreading of dreadful and misplaced feelings, such as despair over first world problems, thinking they were living a tough life or being overwhelmed with the idea that the world was conspiring against them.

Synapses would fire, neurons would feast and clash.

The seed would morph into self-harm such as, but not limited to, morbid obesity, shaving of heads, purchasing ‘live, laugh, love’ signs and buying into plant-based-medicine and other quackery.

Eventually, it would then lead to a spark, an ordinary short circuit in the brain that would let them evolve into their final stage, their true form. That of an unedited and unapologetic monster.

The transformation would start with demanding praise and admiration for completing simple and basic tasks, such as cleaning out the dishwasher and brushing their teeth. It would morph into demanding me-time, payments and bullying others into compliance. It would end with mental blockages and further self-destruction.

Then they would finally be delusional enough to turn into the lazy, hungry, leeching monsters everybody already knew they were.

Their minds would end up only barely connected to this fabric of reality. They existed in and of themselves, but not as part of a greater whole. Which was great, because – just like the First Runner – that way they stood a chance of beating the Chain.