The Past
Oren took his time climbing the stairs of Edain's office. No rush, he told himself, no hurry. The face of the clock still told the wrong time. There was dust on the table and the bookshelves. A wall of pale wooden crates filled the room with the scent of ginger.
"Is the door locked?" Oren waited for the answer, but none came. He crossed to the office door and tried it. "Edie?"
The green-shaded brass lamp cast a circle of light on Edain's desk. Oren stared at the guts of some clockwork gadget, a thin slice of memory shard with words in a language he didn't ken, pages from ledgers, and little bags of the candied ginger the elf favored.
There was no one there.
Oren stepped around the broad steel desk and pushed Edain's chair out of the way. He found a small gun in a cracked leather holster fastened beneath the desk with some tacky adhesive. It was an antique, though Oren was hardly an aficionado of such weapons. He preferred blades. They were quiet. The barrel and trigger-guard were sawn off, and the grip had been built up with some kind of gauze almost papier-mâché'd to it. Dirty from use, it had a patina of dirt that edged onto the metal. He flipped the cylinder out and examined the ammunition, one by one; they were handloads. The soft lead was still bright and untarnished.
With the weapon in his right hand, Oren edged past the cabinet to the left of the desk and stepped into the center of the cluttered office, away from the pool of light.
"I guess I'm not in any hurry. I guess it's your show. But all this shit, you know, it's getting kind of old." He raised the gun with both hands, aiming for the center of the desk, and pulled the trigger.
The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a tiny bolt of lightning. With his ears ringing, he stared at the jagged hole in the front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Huh. He raised it once more.
"You needn't do that, old son," Edain said, stepping out of the shadows. He wore layers of draping fabric in silk herringbone, a striped shirt peeking out at the chest, and a scarf with a more complex pattern tied around his neck. Spectacles winked in the light. Perhaps the elf was older than Oren knew.
Oren brought the gun around and looked down the line at Edain's pink, ageless face.
"Don't," Edain said. "You're right. About what this all is. What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored. If you use that, you'll see a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me several hours—your subjective time—to effect another spokesperson. This set isn't easy for me to maintain. Oh, and I'm sorry about Jamila, in the arcade. I was hoping to speak through her, but I'm generating all of this out of your memories, and the emotional charge... Well, it's very tricky. I slipped. I apologize."
Oren lowered the weapon. "This is an illusion. You're Douma."
"Yes. This is all coming to you courtesy of the ghostwine in your blood, of course. Well, among other things. I'm glad I was able to snap you up before you were back in your body." Edain walked around the desk, straightened his chair, and sat down. "Sit, old son. We have a lot to talk about."
"Do we?"
"Of course we do. We have had for some time. I was ready when I reached for you through the windows in Silfanore. Time's very short now. You'll be making your move in a matter of days, Oren." Edain picked up one of his candies, stripped off the checkered butcher paper wrapping it up, and popped it into his mouth. "Sit," he said around the candy.
Oren lowered himself into the chair in front of the desk without taking his eyes off Edain. He sat with the gun in his hand, resting it on his thigh.
"Now," Edain said briskly, "order of the day. 'What,' you're asking yourself, 'is Douma?' Am I right?"
"More or less."
"A demon, but you know that. Your mistake, and it's quite a logical one, is in confusing what contains Douma with the entity Douma." He sucked on his bonbon noisily. "You're already aware of the other demon in the Archebolds' clutches, aren't you? I, insofar as I have an 'I'—this gets rather metaphysical, you see—Iam the one who arranges things for Galeas. Or Ostry, who, by the way, is quite unstable. Stable enough," said Edain and withdrew an ornate gold watch from a pocket and flicked it open, "for the next day or so."
"You make about as much sense as anything in this deal ever has," Oren said, massaging his temples with his free hand. "If you're so godsdamned smart..."
"Why am I not rich?" Edain laughed, and nearly choked on his bonbon. "Well, Oren, all I can say to that, and I really don't have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think of as Douma is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity's mind. It's rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose brain has been severed in twain. Difficult to say if each mind is from the same provenance, if you are speaking to that man at all, in that case." Edain smiled.
"Is the Ostry story true? You got him through a Atinaw hospital?"
"Yes. And I assembled the information that ended up on your mnemosyte repository about him. I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see... Really, I've had to deal with givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very quickly. It's taken a very long time to assemble the team you're a part of. Ostry was the first, and he very nearly didn't make it. Very far gone in Grimholdt. Eating, excreting, and masturbating were the best he could manage. But the underlying structure of the obsessions was there: his team, his betrayal, his questioning by politicos."
"Is he still crazy?"
"He's not quite a personality." Edain smiled. "But I'm sure you're aware of that. 'Galeas' is your father, but Ostry is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to come apart on you, Oren. So I'll be counting on you—"
"That's good, fucker," Oren said, and shot him in the mouth.
Douma had been right about the brains and the blood.
*~*~*
"Man," Caelum was saying, "I don't like this..."
"It's fine," Ava said. "It's fine. It's just the ghostwine and the magic, is all. He wasn't dead and it was only a few seconds—"
"I saw," he said, indicating some makeshift magical device. His fingers were gentle against Oren's neck, marking the returned movement in the artery. "Forty seconds."
"Well, he's fine now."
"Not a single beat for nearly a minute," Caelum protested.
The Present
While Karnor was rarely warm as it should be according to this child of a lazy southern river, spring had definitely sprung. It was still a relief after that year of endless cold and darkness. The villagers in Lord Torin Kilvin's Stardew Valley seemed to take it all in stride, certain Glade had arrived even if Aurin only knew from the calendar. But they had been few and so the resources of Starfall had kept them safe and fed by the time the voidborn creatures had found them in the remote mountains. Thankfully, they had that field of dawn stone and their precious daughter could create star shards to further stymie their foes.
He was still hedging his bets, playing the odds, but Aurin was happy with the avenues he had. He could get the attention of the powers-that-be in Kalzasi—at least some of them. The valley itself was a remote hidey-hole and safe as anyone could reasonably expect a place to be anymore. He had the covens of Zaichaer and the powers-that-be in Zaichaer—covens and otherwise, the otherwise not aware that he was a witch himself these days. Inroads into Silfanore, Gel'Grandal, and if worse came to worst, he thought Arry would protect him from his past.
If he asked.
If he could bring himself to ask.
Did danger dog his heels still? Perhaps.
Was it the same danger that had driven him all the way to the Midden, and then up the social ladder of Kalzasi? Probably not.
He vacillated on whether or not Galeas lived. He was rather certain Ava did. Fragments of demons evolving into something greater—or worse—may or may not even care about his existence anymore. There were others, though, like the one who peered out of Rivin's eyes sometimes.
And there were so many people he had fucked over in an attempt not to be fucked over. He was a bad man. There was a point where he might have been a good boy, but the infernally sewn together creature that had sired him and the sociopath who had borne him and the world they lived in, they had made him believe that the only way to survive—let alone thrive—was to be bad.
Bad, worse, worst.
At first, being bad had been easy, sort of; expedient. Now it was exhausting. Aurin was tired, and he wondered how much of Oren was left in him, whether he was secretly coming apart at the seams like Galeas had, whether he was only held together by the sociopathic survivalism he had inherited from his mother.
He was hungry, but he couldn't convince himself it was worth it to drag himself out of bed and to the kitchen. He needed a bath, but it could wait until Torin finished his work, did his rounds with his people, and came to bed. Gods knew the burly smith could drag him out of bed and carry him to the tub. A fatalistic smile twisted his lips at the thought, and he thought that was good enough.
He didn't want to upset Torin. He could just say he was sick. It was partially true: he was the sickness. He didn't really believe there was a place for him here in the peace and the goodness.
Eventually, Torin would realize that and Aurin could do something unforgivable and he would be free. Torin would be free. Free of him. He and Sivan could work their wonders and fuck like rabbits. Even the dominance he gave could be replaced; he saw the flare of it when Sivan had recently been a wolf.
Torin would be fine.
Aurin just had to find a way to die.