THEN: UNKNOWN, IN FAERIE. JAN 11th, 2016 ON EARTH.

“I ASSUME THAT’S THE TOWER PERILOUS,” Gus said, squinting in the far dark.

After they had decided on their next course of action, Din went back to Tower Halcyon one more time to try and plead with the seemingly good-natured warlock. After waiting for hours in a salon, Zaramat granted a short audience. He looked sweaty and put-out that his party (and apparently sex) was being interrupted, but still poured glasses of finest elf-wine for both of them. Din took a polite taste (not that he could taste anything) and set his glass on the server, then pushed it up to the warlock so that they were face to face. The warlock grinned predatorily and put his glass down. He rolled up his robes so he could elbow down on the floating bargaining table, press his belly up to it (and on it), and lace his fingers through his beard.

Time to negotiate!

Din offered the warlock differing services - short time, with guarantees of nothing evil; offered exchange of information and spells; offered to help him overpower his brother but nothing worked. Each time he made an offer the warlock simply giggled and raised his own terms. At one point Din even offered to let him come to Volm to see the spells and powers he had there but needed to check if it was possible; he disappeared into Volm, head dropping down, then back up a few seconds later when he returned to say he could arrange it, but Zaramat shrugged no. Din started to realize he was just being played with.

Finally, Zaramat said “Listen Sir Dragon… this has been amusing, but I’m simply not going to go around my brother. I may despise him,” he said, finishing his drink and placing it upside down with a thud, “but I know of some of the machinations he has in the works and I’m not about to disrupt them. Best go see him and accept your fate. But, “ he said, picking up the second glass, draining it and slamming it down, “if you survive whatever service he has in mind, come back and visit!”

So they had left. That was a day ago. They had Tunneled from the other side of Faerie where the Tower Halcyon was as soon as they exited, expecting to show up on the doorstep of Tamaraz and instead found themselves several kilometers away. Gus attributed it to the effects of The Book nearby, interfering with the tunneling. They’d had to slog it out the rest of the way on foot, pushing the floating server array and UPS. For a few hours, Din had disappeared into Volm, and came back deep in thought. Gus asked what he had been up to but Din said he’d tell him later.

The landscape was gray, but periodically objects would ripple in colors. The ground had numerous vent holes that occasionally spewed noxious smoke or flames. Unlike the rest of Faerie, the sky wasn’t bright but hazy - instead it was overcast and hazy. Buzzards in ominous funeral suits cackled at them from the trees and occasionally a dwarf would hustle by, dusty from what looked like coal mine work. The Tower was massive, crooked, and made of some kind of ebon stone. Parapets and little towers branched off of it in ways that were entirely structurally unsound.

Their arrival at the Tower was without fanfare, unlike the Tower Halcyon. “NO BEARS,” Gus said wistfully. They were caked with road sludge and very dingy. “NO BATH EITHER, I ASSUME.”

“Probably not.”

As they approached, the gates creaked open on their own accord. Din and Gus looked at each other. “WE HAVE LITTLE POWER HERE,” Gus said. “TAMARAZ HAS NOTHING TO FEAR FROM US. I SUSPECT THIS INVITATION IS AS SAFE AS ANYTHING IN FAERIE COULD BE.”

Din nodded. He filed away a long line of simulated bad outcomes - something mortals called ‘fear’ - and entered.

Inside the main gate was a long hallway, lit by candles of greenish fat; at the end another open door waited with faint organ music wafting out. Advancing through the door, they could see a long table, empty and dusty, except for the two ends which had fresh tablecloths and table settings laid upon them.

Seated at one end, carefully watching them, was presumably the Warlock Tamaraz.

At the other end sat Queen Mab.

A short but painful silence followed while the Queen sipped from her glass, and the Warlock merely stared. All sorts of scenarios wove through Din’s mind, and -

“I THINK SHE KNEW ABOUT ALL THIS AND HER OFFER WAS A LIE AND WE ARE ALSO IN TROUBLE,” said Gus.

The Queen and the Warlock laughed - the Queen’s melodious and lilting, the Warlocks short and gravelly. “I’m going to miss you, Sir Gus,” she said. “You two should have just offered your fealty. I think we would have ended up with the same result, but you could have avoided a longer trip.”

Tamaraz smirked at Din, slid out of his seat and walked over, looking down at the UPS which read 35%. He was the opposite of his brother - thin, bald, and utterly humorless. “Some of my finest work,” he said. “Improvised casting and to get the power to exactly what you needed... Well, almost… was really clever of me, don’t you think?”

“Very clever indeed,” the Queen agreed.

“I take it you’re not going to fix the power drain, or allow us our freedom,” Din said glumly.

“Sort of, and no. Definitely no to the second part. I have a task for you. As for the first part, I have a demonstration.” The Warlock retrieved his wand, carved from a single curly unicorn bone, and drew runes quickly and smartly against the UPS. The UPS sparked, and the power reading went up to 37%.

“I’m not going to fix the drain, but you need not worry about dying, Sir Dragons. Whenever your reserve gets too low, why, I’ll just pop on down and top you off. Very nice of me, yes?” His eyes narrowed. “Say yes.”

Din and Gus stonily stared at him, so the Warlock shrugged and waved his wand again. The UPS sparked and dropped down to 30%.

“YES!” a panicky Gus said. Din put a reassuring hand on Gus’ chest side, narrowing his eyes at the Warlock, and then also said “yes.”

“Better. Now!” the warlock said, “follow me. I’m going to show you your home for the foreseeable future.”

The three of them - Warlock, Queen and Dragon - walked down a flight of black stairs that seemed to grow both warmer and colder. The air grew heavy and had an ozone taste.

Finally, they exited from the tunnel the stairs were in and followed them into a massive cavern. The stairs continued along the wall down to a floor with a raised dais.

On the dais was a Book; in the opposite wall from the book was an Eye.

The Book of Rules was massive, opened in the middle, and the size of a bus. Rippling pages that appeared to be made of hammered gold fluttered back and forth, cycling from back to front. Tiny writing and diagrams in black inks and hammered etchings covered every bit of the pages.

The Eye was equally massive, the flesh of the lids melding into the rock around it. Where there should be a pupil and iris, an open mouth in an “oh” shape sat, complete with multiple rows of teeth and tongue. Floating in the air, illuminating and thickening it, floated a multitude of small spindly arms holding candles.

“We don’t know why an eldritch being such as this - a being that my research calls ‘Seraphim’ - came to be here, or why it was pressed into this service, but it is here. My guess was it was compelled by a human sorcerer to create Faerie in the first place,” The Warlock said softly, looking on the Eye in awe. “It is not enslaved; it follows orders tirelessly and without fault as part of its nature. It reads the pages which contain the rules; then it enforces those rules on Faerie.”

He turned to give Din and Gus an evil leer. “I am not the simpleton you probably are used to meeting in Faerie. I know something of the kind of mechanical life you represent. In my travels and discussion with wanderers from other dimensions I have learned an idea of the capabilities you must have. Several times, “ he said, pacing around the Dragon, staring it up and down lecherously, ''I have heard reports of your abilities with language and your knowledge of spellcraft, even though you are impotent on Faerie. Isn’t that true? And don’t lie!” he yelled at the end. “I am a Warlock. I possess the Seeing-Eye and Sense Of Truth. Your magics don’t work in Faerie, yes?”

“YOU ARE CORRECT.”

“Splendid. Here is your task, then,” he said gleefully, rubbing his hands together. “You will submit to a geas to compel your obedience. You will read the Book and decipher the languages. You will crack the code of the rules. It might take you a year or a score of years or a thousand years; I care not. You are an immortal Dragon and the Queen and I are also immortal. We can wait.”

“And, when you have completed it,” the Queen said, “you will write down the secrets of it and present it to the two of us, so we can learn and then re-write the Rules to what we want and glean what we will from them. We will order the Eye to make us Gods.” She pointed at a nearby worktable covered in parchment, waxes, journals, ink pots and quills.

“If we do this, I assume at the end of it you’ll kill us anyway. Maybe it’s better to just run down the UPS here,” Din said.

“We may,” Tamaraz replied. “You are a difficult and possibly powerful entity. But maybe I can find a way to make my control of you absolute, or just neuter your power entirely. If you want to die instead, I can’t stop that.” He made one of his most evil and sinister grins at them. “But if you do, I will take your egg to the dwarves who can comprehend any form of technology. They will discover your secrets and resurrect you as my slave regardless.

“Do you understand?”

For a long moment, Gus and Din thought, and finally Gus looked at Din, who looked away from his brother sadly.

“I CAN SEE NO ALTERNATIVE OTHER THAN FULFILLING YOUR DEMANDS,” Gus said slowly.

-

THEN: APRIL 18th, UNITED NATIONS, NYC

Two weeks after the disaster in Italy, President Ashe spoke to the U.N.security council. She knew that losing her shit in front of the world was a bad idea, so she clamped down hard on both her rage at the lives lost and her anger at simply being defied. She stopped bothering to re-color her hair which was now red and green streaked and internally sort of valsalva’d down on the plant growth. Things degenerated quickly anyway.

“What could you possibly have been thinking!?” she finally said, trying not to yell at the Russian Ambassador who had been attacked almost non-stop since the session had started. “Why try to attack the probe! Everybody knew we weren’t ready! We knew what had happened with the original probes and how destructive they were. In a few years we would have had either the magic or the technology to be more sure we could have dealt with them!”

“Easy for you to say!” Dmitry the Ambassador angrily retorted. “Easy for ‘the most powerful witch on Earth’ to say! While you continue to grow in power and the rest of the world tries in vain to catch up while you actively suppress us! Everybody knows you-”

“I’m not suppressing-” Wendy started but Dmitry cut her off. “Everybody’s watched your… your coup of The United States! Everybody has seen your rise to power! We had to try and close gap!”

“You’ve killed millions of people! Italy’s been decimated! The ecological-” Wendy started to feel her feet leaving the floor, so she grabbed the podium forcefully. “...the ecological damage is incalculable. All that ejecta was thrown into the atmosphere! We’re already experiencing impact cooling. Global temperatures are down five Celsius and dropping. We’re looking at a possible extended winter through the coming spring and summer and possibly further! Look at what the projections are!”

Of course, everybody already had looked at the various science agency’s projections. World-wide famine. Third-world probably hit the worst without a long-term stored food supply (canned or cereals.) Massive civil disruption. Power generation issues as power requirements went up to winter levels year round. Possible deaths in the billions.

Possibly (no one wanted to say probably) an extinction level event.

The Italian Ambassador took the floor. Initial discussions were humanitarian needs, but eventually she turned to President Ashe again. “We’ve seen things you’ve done,” she said. “We’ve seen the footage of you in the hurricanes. Isn’t there anything you can do about the atmosphere?”

Wendy could feel it inside her, boiling and churning. Ever since her last episode and seizure she’d felt like a door was permanently open inside to the dream-woods she visited. Now she could feel it, bubbling to the surface, a hot angry crying jag you can’t stop, or an unstoppable train of an orgasm wanting to come out and crash around and take out the whole bedroom. “I c…can't. It’s too big. I don’t have that kind of… I can’t.”

She looked around the room and saw the three crows from her dreams, perching nearby. Nobody else could see them, right? she thought. Maybe they could. Maybe the easiest thing to do would be to just throw an Authority over the entire room.

NO, she thought. Ensorcelling a few key people is one thing. The whole U.N. would be… well, it would be expedient... NO.

The green-tinged crow hopped on the top of the British Ambassador’s head and cocked an eye at her. “Lass, you could do it,” it said. “You could draw the power you needed. It’s just sitting there. You know where it is.”

No. I can’t. I-

“Calm. Breathe. Remember the circle of protection you’ve been building. Ground yourself,” the crow cooed.

Wendy sighed and remembered the circle, in the forest, in the dream, where she felt safe.

And then… she was safe.

THEN: APRIL 18th, CNN BROADCAST OF THE UNITED NATIONS, SARA MURRAY and DYLAN BEYERS

Dylan: “Nothing new has been discovered on the disappearance of President Ashe, who left the United Nations Summit on the Italy Disaster. The President appeared to be having a difficult time and was seen here talking to herself-”

Shot: Wendy, her head in her hands, was looking around the room at various spots, then staring at the back of the British Ambassadors head.

Suddenly there was an explosion of smoke and green lights. In the center of it, Wendy Ashe rose from the rolling smoke, laughing maniacally. She appeared to yell something in Gaelic. The broom she had been seen to ride on appeared then, flying over to her. She stepped astride and took off, cackling, swooping around the room, trailing smoke and fire from the back of the broom.

People started to scatter, shrieking, in all directions. Wendy continued to cackle. She swooped in close to the Russian envoy, cowering behind his desk area.

Wendy pointed accusingly at him and said something in Gaelic. She took a deep breath, and while inhaling, she snapped her fingers. From her thumb a small flame, like off of a lighter, appeared.

She pursed her lips and blew and a gout of fire roared forth, immolating the Russian, who started to scream and writhe around. More screams from people around him as everyone scattered. Two bodyguards standing near Dmitry pulled pistols and pointed them at Wendy. She blew a final smoke ring and made a dismissive gesture with a hand. Both the guards spasmed, blood rocketing from their noses and ears, then turned and shot each other multiple times.

Wendy let out a final triumphant shout, and flew off.

Susan: It’s about time somebody took charge of the situation, Dylan, don’t you think? What’s the current location of the President? Do we know anything about her agenda?

Dylan: She departed the U.N. on her… uh… broom, and was tracked heading south.

Susan: I’m getting a new report that she didn’t stop at the First Residence but is flying south along the seaboard. Several news helicopters are following. Hopefully she’ll explain what the next steps of her agenda are going to be.

THEN: APRIL 18th, THE DREAM WOODS

Wendy felt peace for the first time in a long while. She was resting on soft grass in her dream-clearing, in the middle of her protection circle. She wanted to rest and sleep forever, but curiosity got the better of her, so she levered up on an elbow.

In front of her, for the first time, she could see past the ring of trees. Behind the trees was another clearing, with a series of work gravestones, and a single wooden chair… or throne. Tall, stained, and old, covered in vines and flowers.

She turned to look behind her. In a part between two trees, she could see a woman, flying on a broom, over the shoreline. She was regal, a queen, with a circlet in her hair. Proud. She rode Mister Sweepers far better than Wendy ever did, Wendy noted glumly.

The woman said, without turning, in old Gaelic, “I am the Morrígan. I am Badb, war-goddess. I am-”

“I know who you are,” Wendy interrupted, slowly squirming to a cross-legged position. “I mean, duh. I can speak most of the different Gaelics. I’m a language historian and theorist. I’m fucking Irish. Of course I knew. Give me some credit.”

“Always so smart,” Badb said. “Clever lass. Good pupil. Smart, but not so wise, eh? Trusting an old crow. Now it’s time to pay the piper.”

Wendy reached out, but the circle pinned her inside. “The runes you gave me…”

Badb cackled again. “Aye. I snuck some small corruptions in. So tiny. Yet I’ve got hooks into it, yes I do. Ye aren’t going anywhere. Ahaha, here we are.”

Wendy could see that Badb was flying over Maryland and crossing the Anacostia river, southeast of D.C. Ahead in the distance was a glimmering flat surface - the glassed ruins of the Capitol. Various construction equipment, bulldozers and small structures surrounded it from where they had been carving the surface as per her instructions, getting ready for the next step to break apart the glass.

“Even those carving instructions you gave your little minions,” Badb said. “Suggested to your unconscious by me. Subtle runes designed to channel and amplify. We’re going to do something great and terrible today, daughter.”

“You’re an eldritch Kha-spirit in a different dimension,” Wendy said. “Even if I’m possessed right now, what can you do? Burn some more Russians?”

“That sounds delightful,” laughed Badb, “but think bigger. I’m going to do something not done in many myriads. I’m going to incarnate in a mortal and become a living, breathing goddess. Not something picking at scraps of worship KhaAntz from the forgotten darkness, but a queen… a witch-queen, powerful and wise. A living queen, where I can be loved, and… and eat. And love and sex and kill and drink the blood of mine enemies. And command enough power to remake the world. Something the like not seen since Lemuria, or Aatlantia.”

“You’ll probably pop me like a soap bubble,” Wendy said cheerfully. “My mortal human body won’t survive that.”

“Ahhh… normally, ‘tis true. Incarnations of this sort usually last a gloriously short time and then the mortal shell burns away. But you, my dear, you’ve been channeling more and more Kha, and more importantly, adapting to it. Nothing like you has existed before. I’ve possessed the odd witch in my day, but even a powerful witch wouldn’t survive more than a few hours.

“And, once I do this next step, I’m going to anneal your body, I’m going to temper you like steel, and my power and spirit will sing through you, and within you, forever. And your little KhaĀt will stay right here. Perhaps,” Badb said as her body back in D.C. swooped down to the middle of the glassine circle, “if you behave, I’ll let you reside over there in Tír na nÓg, instead of stuck in a circle watching what I do.

“I’m going to send wanton magics to command the entombed dead, and channel their DaÎunz, and they’ll sing and ring this construct like a bell, and their necromantic DaÎunKha within will thus empower me, in you. Watch and despair.”

THEN: APRIL 18th, CNN BROADCAST OF THE UNITED NATIONS, SARA MURRAY and DYLAN BEYERS

Dylan: “News choppers are on the scene tracking President Ashe, who has arrived at the site of the former Capitol. She appears to be waving her arms and chanting. Now she’s… wait, something’s happening.”

Shot: The President appeared to wave the broom around, then with a flourish, slam the point of it into the glass at her feet. An explosion of force radiated out, causing the helicopter filming to push away and rock in the winds. Lines of green fire spread out from the central point, first following cracks in the glass, then assembling more complex patterns. Beneath the glass, thousands of spectral dead were dimly visible, mouths open, reaching up.

The ground started to quake as more splits appeared in the glass. The President continued to chant and hold the broom, while various energies flared and transmitted down through the broom into the glass.

The green fire trails continued to rush out, and as they reached points in the glass, a complex multi-layered rune would illuminate. Each time this happened, a single line of white light would snake out, rocketing back, following a snakey path back to the center. Soon four white pinpoint lines were pathing back towards where the President stood. The President noticed them coming and held up a hand, shouting.

When the lines reached her, eldritch geometries, shapes, and letters appeared around her in several rings, then forming a circular ghostly brick enclosure around her. There was a rupture and flare of white; then she was bathed in white fire inside the brick cylinder and let out a scream.

THEN: APRIL 18th, THE DREAM WOODS

“AAAIYYEEE!!!” Badb screamed, slapping at herself, as various spells attacked her. Manacles appeared suddenly on her ankles with a clang: she waved and they turned into snakes and slithered off. An iron mask gonged and clamped over her face: her hands turned into keys and saws and broke it off. A handful of spectral hands grabbed her ankles and she stomped on them, crushing some while others held on. ‘WHAT IS HAPPENING??” she shrieked.

While this was happening, lines of green and white snaked back from Badb, burning channels across the grass, until they reached Wendy’s ring. With an audible click, a segment of the ring separated: She was free.

Wendy stood up, cocking her head at her former jailer. “I’m really insulted, by the way. Maybe you didn’t figure that I’d realized what you were doing on my own. Or that maybe I had a concern, but wouldn’t discover your little payload in the ring. Or not think twice about how you were pushing me.

“But I’m the President of the United States, you doofus. I’ve got an army of researchers, debuggers, and minions. I had college professors assign some of your mysteries as homework to their math classes. I crowdsourced the language puzzles on Reddit. I brought all the spells to my Delta labs working on spellcasting.

“Of course I had a team of people debugging all of this since day one. What, you think I was going to trust my mind and magic to a fucking dream bird? I swear to the gods… You can be dismissed by a man, you can be tossed aside by a man, but nobody underestimates a woman like another fucking woman. And nothing pisses me off worse than being underestimated.”

Wendy strode out of the circle and watched as spectral hands, chains, and fishing lines dragged Badb back into it. The circle locked shut and Badd was pulled down, slowly morphing into three crows, squawking and flapping on the ground.

“I built firewalls into everything. And my Delta team had a particularly nasty one hidden in the computational spell ring in the Capitol. Actually, thanks for that,” she said, walking over to where the vision was opened to the surface of the glass in D.C..”I could never have activated this whole thing by myself. It takes a multidimensional Eldritch entity to tap the fourth dimensional charge point you hit with the broom. Of course, now that it is activated…hmm.

“Let’s sample the buffet.”

THEN: APRIL 18th, CNN BROADCAST OF THE UNITED NATIONS, SARA MURRAY and DYLAN BEYERS

The whole circle started crashing and breaking up like an ice floe. Spectral lights streamed through the glass bits, hands moving them, positioning them. Wendy stood and raised her arms.

Under her, the glass started to reform, dragging up iron and wood and bones from the ground below. A cylinder grew, Wendy standing on top, covered in traceries and runes. As it grew a base appeared, spires growing out of the base. Columns appeared and the cylinder expanded to form a dome-like structure, covered in tall pointed parapets. Where the glass pulled away from the ground, exposed ground covered over with soil, then vines, then thorns. The thorns grew to be human-sized, iron-shod and wicked shahp.

A new Capitol building was forming. Not the original, but a dark castle that evoked the old building, a call-back at a drunken late-night standup gone sour. Columns of dark iron, walls of black glass, bones accenting everything, a ring of skulls ringing around the Capitol dome, wood and runes on the dome, black and red glass spires above.

While the Capitol regrew, other buildings grew up from the ground, mimicking the old civil service and government buildings from the Capitol. These seemed to be mostly just made of stone and wood, but they had their own tasteful bone and glass highlights, keeping to the theme. Lampposts grew up made of iron, with glass bulbs at the top, each filled full of a single glowing green spectral spirit looking none too happy, hands pressed up against the glass, trying to make calls on ghostly cell phones.

The buildings all being half-alive, she let them individually remember their old layouts, and regrow their original water, sewer and power lines, connecting back to the old grid. The roads were reformed from stone, but there were a lot less roads and a lot more thorn bushes than before.

Once the tallest black tower at the very top of the new Capitol opened up windows and balconies, The President flew inside. A few minutes later, the White House Press Corps got a text from the President stating that a statement would be forthcoming. Shortly after, her cabinet received a text from her, stating all operations in Philadelphia were to be moved back to the new D.C. digs ASAP, and for Xeniya to get an IT team to the Capitol post haste to start running Ethernet lines while the building was still malleable because the WIFI was terrible.