Monday, June 6, 2022 Lincoln Park, Chicago, Illinois, United States

Officer Kepitsky settled back into the seat of his Explorer with a pronounced sigh and handed out iced coffees and donuts. Sweat beaded his forehead and he basked in the blasting air conditioner.

His partner Edwards and Sergeant Byrne sitting in back didn’t hesitate on sucking down the cold drinks.

“Hot early this year.”

“Yeah. It’ll be a bad summer.”

“Yeah.”

Pleasantries done for the day, the exact same as yesterday and the day before, they settled back to watch the DePaul summer students walk by.

Edwards tapped Kepitsky, “You telling’ me you wouldn’t hit that?”

Kepitsky looked to where Edwards was gesturing. A young Latina girl was crossing the street. Her tight shorts and bare midriff had caught Edwards eye.

“Nah. Too much salsa. You know? Not worth a 1526.” Kepitsky was a man of simple tastes, no dirt for him.

“Bet she’s hot in bed though. You don’t have to marry her.” Byrne said.

The Sergeant was notorious. He’d probably arrest that girl for jaywalking and then negotiate it down for favors.

But it was too hot for playing today.

The radio crackled and Sheila, the dispatcher, came on, “We have a 2890. Keptisky, Edwards, it’s your turn.”

Kepitsky picked up his radio, “Sheila. It is hot as shit out here. Unless you are coming out with us?”

The voice came back annoyed, “Fuck off Kepitsky. It’s your turn. Sergeant, I know you’re there. Hit the prick for me.”

Kepirsky suddenly felt a hard hit from behind and when he turned around, he saw Byrne putting away his nightstick, “Hey " he complained.

“Just doing what the lady said. Now get off your fat ass and let’s go.”

Being Sergeant had gone to Byrne’s head, thought Kepitsky.

“I think she is softening to you Kepitsky,” joked Edwards. “She only told you to fuck off once.”

Kepitsky sucked down the last of his coffee and grabbed a bit of donut.

He put on his lights, burst his siren for a sec to get everyone out of the way, and started heading to East Garfield for the call. It was kind of early in the summer, so he was hoping he could pick up a couple of the kids for interrogation. Last summer he had missed third place by just three.

They pulled up to the corner of Kedzie and Carroll, they looked around. There wasn’t much here.

“Sheila, we are here. Ain’t no noise.”

“Fucking ‘urban’ youth. Probably just some gangbangers making noise,” grumbled Edwards. Kepitsky assumed the ‘urban’ was for the benefit of the Sergeant. Which was ridiculous. The Sarge had won their little contest each and every year before their interrogation site had been shut down. Fucking PC liberal bullshit. It had been good policework. They just didn’t understand what it took to keep the animals down.

“Gang bangers at eight in the morning? You never were a smart one Edwards.” the Sergeant asked sarcastically. “Kepitsky, drive around a bit and then let’s go.”

Kepitsky saw something out of the corner of his eye and he pulled the car to a stop. There was something in the alley.

“Sarge, you see anything down there?”

“Shit Kepitsky, you know I can see shit without my glasses.” The Sergeant grumbled a bit as he grabbed his glasses and put them on.

Kepitsky swore he saw three glowing lights in a triangle flash for a moment and some motion. Then it was gone.

“Let’s check it out?” Kepitsky said.

“Nah, who cares? I want to finish my breakfast and see if we can go over the the beach for patrol,” Edwards opined.

“O’Hara and Mickelson won that route today,” Byrne reminded them.

Kepitsky reached to his radio to call in that the had checked it out.

A bright flash of light emerged from the alley. The SUV was knocked over, rolling over and crashing against a parked car across the street.

“Sergeant? Edwards?” Kepitsky coughed from the sudden dust in the air, he was hanging from his seatbelt in the upside down vehicle. “What the fuck was that!?”

Edwards hung limply, Kepitsky saw blood dropping down from his head, but it was slow and he could see Edwards breathing.

“Kepitsky… I think I broke my arm. We need to get our of here!” Byrne had fallen to the roof, he hadn’t been buckled in.

“Edwards is unconscious… we can’t leave him!”

“Fuck Edwards, whatever that was, we need SWAT. Get out of the car and help me out of here.”

Kepitsky hesitated a moment, but the Sarge was right. There was no way he was risking himself over some garbage noise complaint. He carefully supported himself and unbuckled the seatbelt. His door still swung open and he made his way out, keeping an eye on the alley. He had his service pistol in hand, when had he taken that out?

The Sergeant’s door was stuck.

“Come out the window.”

“Shit Kepitsky, use your eyes. I ain’t fitting through that.” The Sarge had failed his physical twice already. And the office pool was not whether he would pass the next one but rather how much worse he would do.

“Let me check the other side.”

Kepitsky managed to get around to the other side. The door there had been crushed in the roll, but still managed to open. He got Byrne out, Byrne’s arm was at a very unnatural angle.

“Fucking animals. Let’s get out of here.”

Kepitsky looked at Edwards, still hanging upside down. But he walked off with a panting Byrne, keeping behind the cars for cover from the alley and whatever had done that.

They called SWAT and an ambulance, reporting that officers were under fire, and waited around the corner.

Later, when SWAT came, they waited and slowly approached the alley, securing the buildings. The armored team van was military grade, brand new and shiny, and a tank practically.

It took a while, they secured the area and managed to get Edwards to a hospital for treatment for a concussion.

The five bodies they found in the alley, skinned and their heads removed, were deemed to be the result of cartel violence. Kepitsky, Edwards, and Byrne received commendations for bravery under fire.

Aqrabuamelu compound; Flushing, Queens, New York, United States

Ella sat at the table with Arcsa and the High Priestess.

“High Priestess, what do the Aqrabuamelu say about it?”

The object of their regard sat on the table. A long, white crystalline double sided knife blade, a handle with brass-knuckles type handle in gold, each knuckle ending in a pointed angle. Ella felt its non-magical twin at her side, the knife she had been training with before they had received the imperial dagger.

“The Dagger of Mists and Veils that Pierces the Fundament,” the High Priestess intoned reverantly. Then smiled a bit, “we know very little. It was almost always associated with the drow rather than us.”

Look at it normally, and most people’s vision slowly distorted, as if staring through a faceted crystal. The distortion would increase over time and became quite uncomfortable. Arcsa and the High Priestess would stare at it as long as they could before closing their eyes and allowing the effect to dissipate. Ella, on the other hand, did not experience the distortion and the vertigo and just stared at it.

But when she flared her eyes, her white crystalline irises glowing brightly in a vortex of harsh light, the dagger took on altogether an entirely different appearance. It became a black void in space. Ella felt some of the same vertigo, but also something else, like it was tugging on a part of her.

She imposed the framework that Xu and her had been working on. She mentally went through her exercise, beginning with her concept of dual partical-wave nature of the universe, the use of the Schrodinger equation to describe those wave functions, and layered in the various hypotheses and theories that she had studied over the years, trying to construct an edifice of understanding.

It snapped into place. Suddenly she saw the world as a series of possibilities and potentials. It still brought her a sense of awe that she vould violate quantum physics, she could see superposition values without causing collapse.

Arcsa and the High Priestess’s wave functions were the aggregate of a near infinite set of possinilities, but it was a peaked function, their probabilities heavily constrained by the lattice of their religious programming. Ella could see strands, potentials, which reached out to her crown and Ekerri’s crown, those two entangled items. They formed a web between her and Ekerri and all of the Aqrabuamelu.

She could gently pull on those threads, but couldn’t manage much more. She certainly couldn’t cut them off. Their future choices destined to always fall onto the side of loyalty.

But the dagger? It was something different. And Ella thought she now knew what it was.

“Bring out Ansheth’s dagger.” Ansheth, the drow who resided in the Aqrabuamelu holding cells, had one of the drow daggers. He had told Arcsa that it housed the soul of his dead wife and sung to him. Oddly poetic and horrifying at the same time.

The dagger that was placed on the table was different. It looked relatively conventional looking steel dagger, single-edged, slightly shorter than Ella’s dagger but still long. The handle was wood wrapped in leather. The Aqrabuamelu had said that the leather was the skin of Ansheth’s wife. But Ella tried not to think about that.

Along the length of the blade, there was what appeared to be a rather wide blood groove, but Ella had remembered a similar dagger, one that had glowing runes in orange appear down the length of the groove, that she had been stabbed with and ended up in the hospital.

Under her magical gaze, she could see the similarities. It was enough to make her theory.

“The drow dagger is a copy, a knock-off. The drow dagger has two enchantments to poorly approximate The Dagger of Veils’ one”

Ella looked at the two daggers in front of her and continued on, “The minor function is reducing the likelihood that someone would be noticed. The drow, themselves, have the same innate magic, and their daggers enhance that. It puts the user into an extremely unlikely collapsed state. To put it in layman’s terms, it chooses the alternative universe where the user is unnoticed even if someone bumps right into them.”

“The major function requires the runes somehow,” and Ella was frustrated. The lens which she was using to see magic was a very modern framework and runes were not necessary for her nor could she understand them. It was a limitation of the framework.

“The major function is to flatten the wave-function. To remove possibilities. It… it drains magic.”

“The wielder of the Dagger of Veils was also known as Fate-Cutter,” Arcsa said.

“We assumed it was just to sound scary.” The High Priestess added with a laugh. “But it truly does cut off future possibilities, it seems.”

Ella kept looking at the knives and the rest came to her, all the hard work with Xu, the perceptive frameworks they had built.

“The drow entangle themselves with one another when they mate. Ansheth says they have children together to perpetuate their race, and then they battle to kill the other and consecrate their daggers. What happens is they transfer that entanglement, that connection, to their daggers through ceremony. The Dagger of Veils? It is much the same. I can bind it to me, and then become its user.”

And now the reality of what she was talking about hit Arcsa, who had lived for thirty-thousand years. He leaned forward to look at her, “You would bind the dagger to you and cut away our religion?”

“Yes.”