When they woke this morning, Charlotte and Avery were strangers in a strange time: cast a hundred fifty years into the past to defend the city they call home in its infancy. They found a land still pure and clean, teeming with spirits, but already threatened by encroaching corruption. They found little more than a shantytown at the banks of a river, crowded with miners and tents, its downtown just a single hardpacked dirt road with shambling, thin-walled buildings to either sound. They found frightened townsfolk scattering for the horizon even as they watched. They found men willing to defend their home but unsure of how or when or if they had a snowball's chance in hell. They found kinsmen: brave souls born not of their own tribe but of Thunder, of Stag, and perhaps of Fenris and Cockroach; men who understood very well what was at stake, and why they needed to hold this line.
So: they hold the line. Avery and Charlotte, who have no real connection to this place or these people, no real stake in this battle other than all the repercussions that might echo through the ages -- they step up and they commit themselves to what is right, and what is courageous, and what is pure.
The town sees that. They understand, even if they don't know the true scope of the war. They rally, and in the end -- what they've achieved in a matter of hours is very nearly miraculous.
--
All through the long, hot afternoon the town was abuzz with activity: the stamp of hooves and the snort of animals, the banging of hammers, the crack and snap of boards sometimes pulled from the sides of half-completed buildings to be added to the windows of the stone house where the bulk of the defense will center.
The front door has been solidly sealed, planked across so many times that even a Crinos would be hard-pressed to batter his way through. The windows are boarded up with slits to fire through. The table in the back now blocks the back door. Weapons have been produced from the sheriff's cache, and from personal stashes all over town. Pistols, rifles, shotguns, and the odd musket that even in this day and age ranks as a venerable antique. Lost in their work, the townsfolk forget to be afraid. They forget the stories, the horrid tales that have drifted up the river to their ears: the slaughter, the desecration, the towns burned to the ground. They begin to think that maybe,
just maybe,
they have a chance.
--
Charlotte returns from the river when the sun is nearing the horizon. She is not alone. Walking beside her is a man, or what at least takes the shape of a man. Heads turn as she comes up the embankment, comes down the dirt road. Eyes widen, mouths hang ajar. Some clutch their firearms in instinctive fear, but --
she explains, she tells them they have nothing to fear. He has come to help.
He: towering over the men of the town, towering over Charlotte and Avery, towering over the deputies. Even in the twenty-first century he would be a giant, somewhere so far north of six feet that he must be pushing seven. There is something avian, alien about his face and form; humanoid, but just a little off. Too perfect. Too pure. Too strong and noble to be real. His skin seems to carry its own glow, a shimmer of gold just beneath the olive.
He is dressed like one of the local natives, and that is what the townspeople assume he is. He wears soft moccasins that make no sound with his steps; deerskin leggings that go to the hip; a shirt fringed and contoured, fitted to his body. He carries a bow, a quiver of arrows. A spear taller than even he stands. His eyes
are fierce as a falcon's, and as dark.
--
It is sundown.
A burning sun sets down the length of Main Street. Sears across the river, sinks into the mountains. The shadows are long and the sky is red.
They are ready, or as close to ready as they will ever be. They have prepared and stockpiled and boarded and fortified; they have talked strategy the best they can. Their women and children, and their most precious belongings, have been carried away across the river, secreted away in the canyon guarded by the Sheriff and young Deputy Charlie. The ones who remain behind have split into their assigned stations:
Jack, Oliver, Pickett and a half-dozen men across the street, hiding in the tiny little feed store.
Mad Dog Caradoc and the Arapaho man atop the stone house, along with three of the townsmen.
Emmett at the back window, Trevor at the front; the bulk of the townsmen with them, those with guns at the windows, the rest assisting the best they can.
And Avery.
And Charlotte.
Ready.
--
It begins like this:
dust on the southern horizon, visible only because the westering sun catches it. Shadows shimmering in the heat. Silhouettes of men, big men dressed all the blacks and browns and greys and blues, seemingly mindless of the heat. They grow closer as the sun sinks to the horizon. They ride slowly, purposefully, arrogantly.
Three at the forefront. The Kane brothers, no doubt. Spurs flashing, mounts held firmly in check. Four behind them, slouching in the saddle, leering, rough-cheeked, one leaning to spit into the brush. They follow the river. They pass the tents. They pass that tiny house where Pickett and his men hold their breaths, their backs pressed to the wall, praying they'll be overlooked, ignored, unseen.
Sherman Kane reins up in the middle of the street. He is a large man, broad and powerful, heavyset without running to fat. His clothes are of startling quality. A gold watch-chain glints across his torso as he looks down the length of Main Street
and returns his eyes to the stone house. Almost as though he knew.
"I'm Sherman Kane," he says. He doesn't shout, and doesn't need to. The town is dead silent; even the insects of summer seem hushed. "I've a proposition for the town fathers, if they'll hear it."
-black hat gunslingers-[error! front door is NOT SEALED.]
Black SheepHours later, the sun has turned in the sky. Charlotte is no girl in the umbra but a Garou: a Silver Fang in her highest, ritualized warform, white fur ruffling the drifting breeze that sweeps down from the mountains over the high plains, ruffling the spiritgrass in moving, sweeping shadowlines that look like the dark shadows of distant, half-seen clouds on the surface of the open sea.
The newly made talens are firmly packed in her leather pouch with the others she discovered in the chest this dislocating morning with her strange white dress, her bow, her sling, her sling-stones. The packed earth is quiet beneath her feet and the river is singing quiet in the back of her mind. It slips between its banks like a satin ribbon, just shining in the sun. The Child of Karnak, servant of Helios just - gleams - bathed in the light of the sun and if Charlotte were girl-formed she would clap her hands and smile shyly and glee quietly but she is a wolf and she is warformed so that shyness is eroded by rage and instinct and the girlishness comes out only in the low sweep of her tail, back and forth, and the loll of her pink tongue.
--
The girl in boy's clothes who emerges from the Umbra with a servant of Helios materialized at her side is steadier, more solid, more grave and grounded than the creature who disappeared across the umbra that morning. The town is in movement all around her, men, strangers all, boarding up windows and digging out weapons, gathering gunpowder and lead bullets, tearing up haylofts and water troughs and breaking up cheap, chewed-through furniture to find wood enough to barricade the windows and the doors in the fortified stone house.
They all look to Avery, who seems brighter and more solid and more sure, who shines in the dying sun as the humming activity slows and she surveys the town and its environs and places her pieces carefully.
While the townsmen hold their breath and Sherman Kane's voice echoes on the quiet, deserted street and the sun paints the clouds banked against the western sky crimson the two women - strangers, both - at the center of the city's web of defenses watch from behind one of the slits in the boarded up windows of the stone house.
Charlotte frowns, inhales, nearly gagging on the scent rolling off the men in the middle of the roughpacked and rutted street.
Glances up at Avery, then, pale eyes on the Philodox's noble profile, simmering quiet but glinting with a flinty edge.
"Now?"
Reverence of DawnAt the Prickly Rose, Avery is a strange sight: men's clothes, for one, but some of them barely even notice that. In this day and age she looks so tall, so elegant, and where the sun hits her, she seems to shine. Even now, she has a smile for some of them, warm and earnest. She touches Jack Taylor's shoulder while she talks to them. She looks straight at Mad Dog, which even some full-grown men don't like to do when he's been drinking. She even turns back to Pickett, summoning the angels of his better nature to stand on his shoulders.
She talks of the wildness of this place that can never and should never be fully extinguished, that it is a wildness that is in each of them too or they would not be here, could not have come here and wouldn't be surviving here. That wildness is a vengeful thing, she says: they have all seen the lightning storms crossing the summits of the rockies. That is what they will be to the interlopers who dare to ride into this town.
By the end of a speech that lasts only a matter of minutes, if that, the men are silent and straight-backed, their eyes glued to her, their courage so high it burns out the alcohol, the fear, the cowardice, the poisonous doubt. They find that they are men of ideals, of causes, of nobility and strength and they will fight to the death if that's what it takes, not for any exchange or reason or greed but because that is who they are.
Avery ends quietly, though. No rousing cheer, but a simple statement that if they will help her,
we have a lot of work to do.
They are all rising after that, grabbing hats and holsters, leaving their chairs pushed out from the table, leaving beers and whiskies half-drunk, following her out, going to their own horses, watching her pull herself astride Toro, walking if they have to in order to follow her to the stone house where Charlotte will meet her. Meet them.
They begin boarding things up. Avery talks to the men some more, choosing and directing small groups from among them and telling them where they should be, where they would be of most use, asking if they could go across the street, telling Jack and Oliver and the others with him to stay as silent as possible, they will be in great danger if they begin to shoot before the last possible moment. She looks in Jack's eyes and tells him that he will know when the right moment comes, she trusts him. She'll be right across the way.
Shoot them in the back, she says, there is no dishonor or disgrace in executing a criminal, and that is what they are.
There is a moment inside, as the interior gets darker due to the boarding-up of windows, when she is crouching by boxes of ammo, parsing them out to distribute them where they'll be most useful, and she is inches away from Trevor Clay, their brows almost touching as they hunker down in their work. She keeps looking at him, enough that he'll notice, but if he asks -- and he might not -- she only tells him
You resemble someone I know. Considerably.
--
Charlotte returns and Avery goes out to meet her. Her eyes widen at the sight of the warrior, and a part of her wants to fall to her knees in awe, but she does not. She breathes in a sharp breath and puts up a staying hand as some of the men tense up and back away, shaking her head but not speaking. She inclines her head very deeply to the manifested spirit, and though her throat can barely handle the language in this form and she cannot change the shape of her throat to match the language, the words are as close to the High Tongue as she can make them:
Thank you.
He ascends to the roof with Mad Dog and Mad Dog's crew. They crouch behind the walls, hidden to the sides of windows that will not be boarded to protect them. That is for the arrow-killers to do. And the child of Karnak.
--
Avery has already called on her will as the sun sets: she feels the weight of Bear on her body, strengthening her mind and flesh against pain. She feels her hands and her face imbued with the righteousness of judgement, ready to be dealt by fang and claw. She does not shine in the darkness yet, and she has not changed her shape, but she stands with her arms crossed, eyes closed, as though listening for the distant sound of hoof-steps.
She hears them. Her eyes open. She breathes in and looks at Charlotte as the sound of jangling spurs join the hoofbeats, her thoughts going to Jack Taylor and the others across the road, and her thoughts going to her father and brother and the future city that this place will be and Calden, because Calden, and she thinks of Charlotte's dear friend Erich and wonders, a little, at Charlotte's stalwart courage and self-possession, wondering if she could ever be separated from a packmate so distantly and yet still stand so strong, do so much, and never show that she feels the sting of that separation.
She wonders a moment if Charlotte herself knows just how brave she is.
--
I'm Sherman Kane.
I've a proposition.
Avery's eyes are forward again, but she can feel Charlotte's eyes on her. She can hear the hard glint of the other female's voice in that quietly-spoken question.
"Give him the Mother's answer," Avery says, turning her head to look at Charlotte once more. Her voice is quiet
and dark.
Black SheepThe responsive gleam in Charlotte's eyes is a muddled pool of silver-gone-dark, the liquid and viscous as mercury. She exhales, closes her eyes. Sends that plea to the spirits and feels it like a fracture beneath her feet.
I'm Sherman Kane.
I've a proposition.
Their scent is so noxious it nearly chokes her.
The street is not wholly silent; the whicker of the horses, the clink of the bits. The buzz of horseflies and the song of crickets in the air. Kane's men breathing, watching, squinting against the dying sun.
Avery tells her to Give him the Mother's answer and so Charlotte stomps one rather small foot on the packed dirt floor of the ruined stone house. And outside, Sherman Kane has his answer.
The earth
opens up
beneath him.
-black hat gunslingers-None of them -- not Trevor, not Emmett, not Caradoc, perhaps not even that Child of Karnak on the roof, and certainly not Sherman Kane and his gang --
none of them saw that coming.
Sherman Kane. This is who he is, and this is what Charlotte senses in a retching, horrid wave: a creature of terrible intelligence, of sick wants and perverse needs, of dark, vicious humor, of blood-red violence. He is accustomed to, and he loves, the terror of the citizens of every single ramshackle little town he's sacked. He was expecting the same here. Terror. Uncertainty. Self-doubt. A war lost before it was even fought.
He gets the Mother's answer.
He gets the earth cracking open beneath his feet -- a split-second of warning, a jet-black crack jagging across the ground like lightning. There's no time to get away; the ground simply caves, sheets away, belches a great cloud of dust up. Horses shriek, bandits shout, the townspeople gasp in shock. The earth itself rumbles, trembles, quakes,
comes to a standstill.
Dust, blood-red in the light of the setting sun. Trevor Clay tense in his corner, his back to the wall, a muscle standing out in his cheek. One of the townsmen -- gunless, with nothing but an old kitchen knife to protect himself -- breathing in short, stressed pulls at Avery's side, whispering:
"Are they dead? Is it over?"
His answer:
a soulshaking, mindbending roar from the depths of the earth. And a great black beast, furless, skin scaled like a dragon's, leaping from the bowels of the earth.
His brothers are close on his heels, a grey bat-eared wolf-thing and a brown one-eyed wolf-thing: monsters dragging themselves up by their claws, snarling and spitting. Their henchmen, crawling up from the depths bleeding and battered, all manner of monstrosities: their duster jackets splitting with tentacles and spines, their guns in their hands as they fight their way up.
One of them doesn't come back up at all. He lies buried by rubble at the bottom of the pit. Another is scarcely two feet out of the hole when a flash of gold streaks down from above. He topples back into the hole, an arrow through his eye.
--
In the stone house, men screaming. Some of them have lost courage entirely, even their bolstered will no match for the hell unleashed in the street. They can't be blamed. They can't be faulted for cringing in the corners, rocking under the stairs, pissing themselves, curling into balls.
Some of them have held firm, though. They are mad-eyed, they don't understand what they're seeing, but they see it and they know it's bad, it has to die. They are loading guns with shaking fingers, they're screaming bloodlessly as they shoot and shoot and shoot, pulling triggers on empty chambers until someone else rips the gun from them and supplies them with another.
Across the way, the men in the feedstore have opened fire as well. The bat-eared brother wheels on them, hitting the ground on all fours, running full-throttle toward the men firing from behind.
The rest of the gang are on the offensive now. Sherman Kane is battering against the door. A single punch cracks it down the middle. The next blow will splinter it apart. His brother is climbing the wall, his talons crunching into stone, aiming to eat those fuckers on the roof alive. And the rest of the gang, his henchmen, are rushing the walls, are punched through again and again with bullets, are shoving their own guns through the cracks in the boards to shoot blindly into the house.
It is chaos.
Black SheepCharlotte has her bow in hand and her arrows slung over her shoulder. These are men's weapons these are human weapons these are small weapons to use and be used against monsters so corrupt they wear the skins of seven beasts and bear the limbs of another half-dozen and cover it all with manskin.
The openings in the boarded over window at which they stand are eye level for Charlotte; high enough that she can see the street and notch and release and arrow and the scene is startling, heart-stoppering madness but they are Garou.
The noxious scent of their perversions, their lusts, they foul, dark, blistering needs is still filling up her nostrils and clotting in the back of her throat like boiling black blood and Charlotte takes in the scene through the slit in the window and breathes out sharp so that there is nothing in her lungs to disturb the pull of her bow.
Aims, aims - and fires at the bat-eared brother charging for the defenseless men in the feedstore.
Then, as soon as the arrow is loosed, she closes her eyes once more. Calls on the river to surge from its banks and knock him down.
--
[Spending 1 Gnosis to activate the talen. Dex + Athletics]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 ) Re-rolls: 1
Black SheepDamage 4 (arrow) +1 (successes) + 8 (activated fire tooth talen)
Dice: 13 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 7 )
-black hat gunslingers-[OW. bat-ear-brother soaks!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 5, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Black SheepThe bowstring snaps back with grave and punishing force and the arrow with the orange fletching - loosed - seems to scatter sparks behind it, sizzles through the air. Slams into the back of the bat-eared brother's back and bursts into a small fireball with a column of rising smoke but his skin is thick-as-mammoth's and the river is too far, too far, too far.
Charlotte closes her eyes one-more-time. Stomps her little foot one-more-time.
Calls not to river but to the ground beneath their feet.
Open,
open,
open.
And so it does.
Reverence of DawnIs it over?
Avery, if she were weaker, would huff a dry, bitter laugh. And break the man who asks. Instead she gives a small, honest shake of her head.
--
The roar of the dragon shakes the world, and Avery drops her arms from where they are crossed, moving to the door that faces the street, looking out through a slot, smelling the terrified sweat of the man at the window. He starts shooting. Avery doesn't stop him though the repaet of the bullets leaving the chamber makes her ears sting and her head pound.
One of the creatures turns towards the feedstore. Avery's eyes fly wide. "No," she says, like the word hurts her, like the very sight pains her to her core, the word heavy and ragged from her throat, choked there. She pushes away from the window and she's going towards the front door, but Charlotte is already moving, drawing an arrow and letting it go instantly at that creature going for their allies across the road.
Avery doesn't stop moving as that arrow flies. The door is thudding inward and the smell of urine and sweat and the sound of screaming fills her ears. She knows Mad Dog is up there and prays to Helios to protect him, sends those prayers out as earnestly as any speech she's ever given, then gives one to whoever is still sane enough to hear her:
"YOU CAN SURVIVE THIS. KILL THEM." Her head whips around and she looks directly at Trevor Clay as their enemy beats at the door. As if she would say something. But nothing --
-- as she snaps into her hunting-shape, elk-killing shape, calling on spirits to set her aglow, filling the interior of the house with light. The sight of her shapeshifting like that may send many of them into a delirium just as potent as the one coming from outside but by god
she is glorious.
The ground shakes again. Avery roars, fur bristled and on end, shining like white gold and silver intertwined, ready to meet Sherman Kane when he comes in. Bottlenecked. She will hold this ground
if it kills her.
-black hat gunslingers-That arrow Charlotte looses --
it flies as true and swift as any the Son of Karnak has shot. And he is shooting: they see the arrows shafting down from above, each one flashing down like a sunbeam before they impact, they strike, they become mere wood and fletching. Later on the men who bore witness will convince themselves it was merely the light of the setting sun reflected across wood, but right now, in the moment, they know the truth:
that man on the roof is a god.
--
But nevermind him. We speak of the arrow: the one that tears from Charlotte's taut bowstring. It shreds through the air. It seems to unzip the fabric of space itself; tears flame from thin air. Ignites, searingly bright, in the instant before it buries itself in the monster's back.
One inch to the left of his heart.
Not good enough.
He arches back. He roars. He comes down on all fours and he keeps going. In the tiny little feedstore, the men are screaming, one is running in a blind panic, the monster swats him aside like a fly. It is almost casual, almost thoughtless, but that man: he flies twenty feet, he hits a wall and he slides down boneless.
Maybe unconscious. Probably dead.
Still, the report of gunfire, the muzzle-flash of nineteenth-century six-shooters, Deputy Pickett -- for all his machismo and chauvinism, defending his ground to the last. Bullets pierce the monster, knock him off-balance, tear through even that thick hide, but it's not enough, it won't be enough, they might kill him in the end but he'll take all of them with him. He's almost upon them
when Charlotte stamps her foot.
The Earth answers. That jagged black lightning-fork of a crack across the ground. This time the monster knows what it is, and he tries to leap aside, but there is no escaping the vengeance of gaia herself. Like it has an intelligence of its own, that crack follows the back-twisting leap the monster takes. The ground gives way. With a last, furious roar, the bat-eared brother vanishes into the depths.
Men pour out of the feedstore. They aim their rifles and -- it's unnecessary, but give them this moment: they empty their chambers into the pit, their blood-wanting shouts drowned out by gunfire.
--
Three down.
Four to go.
-black hat gunslingers-The stone house, then:
The men at the windows are still firing. They are firing on the twisted men outside, the ones that jam their guns in and fire at random. Most of the shots miss, but the defenders are so few, and the aggressors are so strong. Every shot that hits, every shot that breaks a shin or tears through a gut or punches through a face: it's one less.
Still: the townsmen and the deputy don't flag. They riddle the twisted men with bullets. They send up ragged cheers as one falls; scream fury as another falls. By the last, the sounds they make are mindless and desperate. They're firing on the brother that is climbing rapidly out of their sight, too; they are trying to help their friends on the roof. Then it's too late. The one-eyed brother's trailing hindpaw is gone, out of sight, they can hear gunfire from above, a cut-short scream and a sick squelch,
a body thrown down the stairwell, tumbling like a puppet, hitting the wall in two pieces. The men trembling under the stairs, their nerves shattered, scream in terrified unison.
Across the way, Trevor Clay meets Avery's eyes for a moment. Two hours ago they bent over the same board. He looked so like and so unlike that man from the twenty-first century, that future reflection of himself who still wore boots and dungarees and vests and rough shirts; who carried a rifle in his truck, but no pistols at his hips. No star on his breast. His brow was furrowed and he was hammering a nail in and he saw her looking at him and he looked at her,
What?
and she shook her head and said -- what she said. There was a moment, there.
Now he meets her eyes. There's a moment here, a blank in the air, something that could be said. No, nothing. Nothing can be said. Not the right time, not the right age, not the right iteration of this soul. The lawman draws a deep steadying breath, and he nods to the lawwoman. Once, firmly.
A second later she is a monster, herself,
a beast of legend,
pure glory.
--
WHAM!
-- that's the sound of Sherman Kane, or the scaled monstrosity that was Sherman Kane, beating his battering fists against the door again. Wood splinters. Wood shatters. Dust sifts down from the rafters, and for an instant they can see the leering face of the beast, his tongue as long and forked as a reptile's. Emmett is running out of the back room, he's running up the stairs to try and help the Son of Karnak and Mad Dog Caradoc. He dodges -- another body thrown vengefully down the stairs -- and then he sees the beast breaking through the doors.
He rushes it, screaming. Runs past Avery before she can stop him. Guns blazing from either hand. It ends the way one might expect:
the beast reaching through the door, grasping Emmett's head in one hand the way a man might palm a tomato. The beast squeezes, and pulp and red squirt out from the sides of his fist, from between his fingers. Just like a tomato. Kane laughs, low and grating and inhuman; he claws apart the last of that door and wades in.
Bullets are bouncing off his scales. Literally: bouncing, falling to the ground in small squashed bits. A sweep of his arm catches two men who are running, running, trying to get out of the house past him. Kane sweeps them screaming off the ground. Kane breaks them in his handpaws, rips them easily and playfully apart. Kane throws the pieces every which way. A severed arm hits one of the men in the face. He cries out in dismay, flinching.
"Fall back!" Trevor Clay is shouting, "fall back, get the hell out of here, go up," and the men -- those not gibbering wrecks, those not screaming and running for the doors, the windows, anything: they're backing up the stairs, firing as they go, retreating from one battle to another.
Kane does not follow them. His head swings about on the end of a neck stretched too long for canine proportions; as long and agile as a snake. That forked tongue slithers. He has seen Avery, seen Charlotte, and moving steadily-sinuous on all fours, he shifts his weight to their left. Moves that way. Feints that way, maybe.
Reverence of DawnShe hears someone die overhead and everything in her soul wants to retreat then. She wants to run from here, hide not in a canyon or the woods but some mountain crag, and she might dehydrate there and starve there and she would not care. Shame falls on her even as Luna's touch illuminates her with glory. Shame and agony. She thinks she has failed. She had to choose.
She tries not to think about whether it's Mad Dog or someone else. As if it matters.
--
But when the door buckles, splinters, and she sees Sherman Kane's face, he stands for the Wyrm in all its forms, and she remembers one dark, heavy truth: all of these men are dead. Time has taken them ages before her own birth. They may die and the city may live and the Wyrm may fall today and yet the Wyrm will live and the land will go on without them as it has gone one without them for eons.
Not this one, though. She is going to kill him.
She feels almost still inside as she watches Sherman Kane tear apart Emmett. It is brutal. Her face and ruff are splashed with bright red blood from a man whose eyes she looked into earlier, convincing him to stay and fight when he was thinking of running. He's dying today instead of twenty years from now because of that speech she gave,
and Avery remembers that she knew that when she gave the speech, and her spine feels made of steel despite it. Maybe even because of it,
even if her heart feels like it's turning to dust.
--
Avery doesn't care where he feints. She goes for his throat, all out, all at once, shining with the glory and rage of one goddess, filled with the power and judgement of another.
Black SheepThe air is sharp with gunpowder sharp with fear sharp with fury sharp with the flickerflash of weapon muzzles. Charlotte watches her arrow sail and thinks of the water and reaches for the earth and watches it open, open, swallow-him-up. This is her view: narrow and distant, instint remember instinct takes over; her body remembers this, this self with the bow and quiver and the talen-arrows and the snap of the string and the tension in the hewn wood. Remembers how to pull and how to release and how to pray that the arrow strikes true. The background is the foreground until the earth opens and the men pour out from the feed store, leveling their weapons into the hole in the earth. She is watching watching watching the opening ready for the monster to spring out reaching for another arrow and another but no,
the dust settles.
She breathes in and the immediate reasserts itself.
Emmett's blood a wild spray across the walls and across her fur. The frightened screams, the shouts, the slow frenzy of the defenders as they struggle to retreat - up the stairs, out the windows, towards the barricaded door, out out out and the swinging head of the human-skinned monster that has broken through the door.
Already has an arrow knocked. This one with white fletching rather than red. The girl pulls back, and back, and back and
- then she erupts into warform: the largest of them, the most grand, then looses the arrow at the monster. Aiming for his eye. With the same speed, the bow melts into her skin. She is white as snow except where the arterial spray has stained her crimson. Snarls a challenge at Sherman Kane.
Snears it, really. Launches herself at him with a snap of her jaws. Avery aims for his throat. Charlotte tears into his spine.
Black Sheep+9
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (3) ( fail )
-black hat gunslingers-[+3 rage to avery! +2 to charlotte!]
Reverence of Dawn[+9]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (5) ( fail )
-black hat gunslingers-[+18 :[ ]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (4) ( fail )
-black hat gunslingers-[kane - avery - charlotte! declare!]
Black SheepCharlotte: 1a. shoot arrow (called shot to eye)! 1b. get behind and/or flank Kane. Rage 1: Bite his ass. Rage 2: again!
Reverence of Dawn[1: Bite / called shot to throat (+2 diff) / spending WPR1:R2:R3: -- all bites on Kane but not targeted]
Reverence of Dawn[1: Bite / called shot to throat (+2 diff) / spending WP
R1:
R2:
R3: -- all bites on Kane but not targeted]
Black Sheep(WP on Charlotte's called shot as well!)
-black hat gunslingers-[1. Shatter Bone on Avery's leg
R1. Falling Touch via claw attack (-1WP) on Charlotte
R2. Bite Avery!
R3. Bite Charlotte!
R4. Grapple Charlotte as a shield!]
-black hat gunslingers-[Rolling 1!
-1WP, -1Rage
+1 diff for targeting leg. Needs 3 succ to succeed. On success, damage is rolled as # of attack succ -3. All successful damage is unsoakable, but not aggravated.]
Dice: 9 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
-black hat gunslingers-[3 successes achieved - leg is shattered, movement is impaired. Roll Dex to stay standing!
And here's the 1-die damage.]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 )
-black hat gunslingers-[my bad, lambent flame is on. diff 8; 3 succ. no damage. limb still shattered!]
Reverence of Dawn[Dex ('Agile') to stay up! +1 for standing IN DEFENSE OF DENVER]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )
Reverence of Dawn[1: Bite Sherman Kane's throat.
Dex 'Agile' + Brawl + 1 IN DEFENSE OF DENVER // +2 diff for targeting]
Dice: 9 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 1, 4, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]
-black hat gunslingers-[double the attack successes for damage.]
Reverence of Dawn[Damage!Str 5 + 1 + Hispo 1 + Fangs of Judgement 2 + Successes x 2 -1]
Dice: 14 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
-black hat gunslingers-[soak! + armored]
Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )
Black SheepCharlotte: called shot. Arrow to the eye. Dex + 1 (Crinos) + Athletics +1 for Avery is a Badass. Range: 2 yards, dif 4 +2 called shot. -2 dice for split action.
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 4, 5, 5) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
Black SheepDice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
Black Sheep(zat was damage)
-black hat gunslingers-[soak! - armored!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
-black hat gunslingers-R1 - claw attack + Falling Touch (-1WP). Rolling attack first!
Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )
-black hat gunslingers-[sdlfjdslkfkjdsl damage *skeered*]
Dice: 13 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 9 )
Black SheepSoak!
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 4, 4) ( fail )
Black SheepRage?
Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (3, 3, 5) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
Black SheepWater elemental gnosis to heal!
Dice: 10 d10 TN4 (5, 5, 5, 7, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 10 )
-black hat gunslingers-[full +3 hp extra cuz spirits are awesome and can do what they want, thor.]
Reverence of Dawn[R1: ATTAAAACK.
Dex + Brawl + 1 IN DEFENSE OF DENVER]
Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )
Reverence of Dawn[Damage!Str 5 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 5 - 1]
Dice: 13 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )
-black hat gunslingers-[soak + armored!]
Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 6 )
Black SheepCharlotte: dex + brawl + crinos + IN DEFENSE OF DENVER Dif 5-2 (behind)
Dice: 7 d10 TN3 (3, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 7 )
Black SheepDamage: Str + Crinos +1 + Sux -1
Dice: 13 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
-black hat gunslingers-[soak + armored!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )
-black hat gunslingers-R2 - biting avery. +1 diff.
Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 5 )
-black hat gunslingers-[UGH DICE. STOPPIT.]
Dice: 12 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )
Reverence of Dawn[SOAK]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Reverence of Dawn[R2!]
Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )
Reverence of Dawn[D!]
Dice: 14 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 9 )
-black hat gunslingers-[owie!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Reverence of Dawn[Avery is 110% done with your shit,. Sherman.]
Black SheepRage 2: bite!
Dice: 7 d10 TN3 (1, 3, 5, 5, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 6 )
Black SheepDamage:
Dice: 12 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 7 )
-black hat gunslingers-[@_@]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 5, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )
Reverence of Dawn[Charlotte is also 110% done with your shit. Like seriously, bro, sit down: you don't HAVE this.]
-black hat gunslingers-The last light of day barely reaches them in here. This land is pre-electric. It's pre-gaslamp, for god's sake. It relies on candles and guttering kerosene. It relies on daylight,
which, fading,
leaves them in a coppery-scented darkness. Thin slivers of sunset bounce through the gaps in the windows. Burn in the wolves' white fur. Gleam off the beast's black scales.
They circle. The beast flicks his tongue, tastes the air. His eyes are lambent, slit-pupiled. He watches them both, watches them without wariness, with dreadful confidence, and when they move, when they lunge at him almost as one:
he preempts them so utterly, so effortlessly, that their minds can hardly comprehend his speed.
--
Sherman Kane strikes like a goddamn viper. Precise, steady as if he moved on rails. He pours in and he chops his forearm against Avery's thigh. The blow is not hard, it could be so much harder, but that doesn't matter. Fell force transduces through flesh, disintegrates the bone. She doesn't feel it. Not the pain, anyway. She does feel it when that leg simply
gives way.
She should collapse then. Become floorbound, easy prey. She doesn't. She goes for the throat. Her aim is true, her teeth are strong. She should tear his throat out, but she doesn't. Her teeth glance off the beast's scales, tearing a few loose; she doesn't even scratch the surface.
A thrum of a bowstring. Charlotte's arrow tears the air, strikes Kane dead in the eye. His head snaps away from impact, his eye squints shut a moment, but -- no gush of blood, no horrid enucleation. The beast's head swings back, smooth as a serpent; he sweeps that terrible clawed hand about and
he
kills
Charlotte.
--
She is dead. She is dead as can be. She hits the floor in her small, soft girl-form, the tips of her hair still absurdly pink. Eyes staring. Heart motionless.
And then --
convulsing, a surge of sheer Rage pounding through her, reminding her that it's not over, it's not over, it doesn't end like this, she's not a girl, she's not a mouse, she is Of Falcon and
once, they ruled the earth.
Blood spews from Charlotte's jaws. She coughs back to life. She can't move, but she can will, and with her will the river rises. The water, which would not come so far from its bed to sweep away the foul men, comes to raise her from the grave. A sudden flood rises surreally up the banks, floods the streets, turns dirt into mud, pours through the cracks in the walls and the gaps in the windows.
Buoys her up. Raises her up, good as new, better than new, ready, rageful.
--
They fall on Kane, then. He strikes back, hard as he ever did, but: it's different now, somehow. His scales fly off with every bite. His power doesn't seem so formidable; not with the allies they have, the earth and water, the sky and sun. They go at him, relentless, they take everything he dishes out, endures it, survives it.
They tear his spine open,
they tear his throat out.
The look in his eyes, there at the last, is sheer shock. He did not see this coming. Could not have believed it. Doesn't believe it, even as the mad light in his eyes dies.
Even as his knees unhinge.
Even as he hits the floor, face-down, man-shaped.
--
Not quite silence. Not yet. Still the noises of fighting from upstairs, the musical thrmm! of the Son of Karnak's bow; the thunderous report of pistols. Blood is beginning to drip down the stairwell, and someone's shouting, someone's screaming,
a body rolls down the stairs. It might be one of the townsmen. It might be Trevor Clay. It might be one of theirs -- but it's not.
They recognize him by his one staring eye. His chest is riddled with bullets, and there is a golden spear through his throat, fading to ordinary wood even as they watch. And then: there is silence, after all.
Reverence of DawnThe first experience Avery had with the curse of her tribe was when she was so young that no one knew she would ever change. She didn't know why it happened. It felt so natural then, seemed so sane, and she followed the urgings of her own madness without question or confusion. Ever since then, ever since she was brought back and ever since they sat her down and explained to her what was happening to her and what would always happen to her, what would only get worse over time, Avery has refused to be blinded by it.
She knew in Lark's office that this could all end with women and children dead and worse than dead in the canyon. Kinfolk slaughtered around her with mortals burning, their scent filling her nostrils. She knew when she rode Toro in that corral that the horse himself might become meat for a Dancer, that he was at least a little afraid of her. She knew that everyone around her might die today, and she might live,
or she might never see her father again, or her brother, or Calden, or the garou in Cold Crescent and Forgotten Questions that she has come to care for and respect over these past few months. She knew.
So she was not surprised when the Dancers tore apart men on the roof and opened Emmett's head in front of her, spraying her with arterial blood. She saw all of them potentially dead when she urged them to stay and fight anyway. Avery refused to be blind, even as she willingly, willfully blinded all of them with transferred enthusiasm, filled them with possibly false courage. She was not surprised.
But
by god
she was horrified.
--
When Sherman Kane breaks into the stone house, everything in the world reduces to that battle. There are only the three of them now. She and Charlotte will spend their last breaths, if necessary, keeping him off of the others long enough for them to escape. After that, she cannot save them. She cannot hope for them, or for the future. After that, she will go meet Falcon in their homelands and crawl on her belly in shame for her failure but for now,
for now,
she'll fight until she dies.
Except -- oh, bitter thing -- it's not Avery who dies. It's Charlotte, who is so precious in her seeming fragility, so powerful in her well-concealed strength, that Kane turns on and destroys. Avery screams, and regardless of form that scream is not a roar or a growl but a wailing, undulating noise of horror and rage that sends her flying at Kane again and again, thrashing at his scaled flesh, how dare he, how fucking dare he kill someone else first, how fucking dare he kill at all, how dare he profane the earth with his existence.
Behind her, beside her, Charlotte rises from the ground, no longer the maiden in the field that she breathes in every time she senses the scent of her dark-haired pack sister but
queen of the underworld,
bride of death,
eternal.
--
They rip him apart. Vengefully, furiously, at least one of them mad with rage and loss and pain, they open his body and his heart and throat, yank his spine from its moorings, kill him as viciously, more viciously, than any death he dealt to the mortals that Avery sent flying into his jaws. Avery meets his eyes when he is dying, his blood dripping from between his teeth, her eyes bright as the sky was when he first thought to come to this place, and he realizes
he was clairvoyant. He saw his own death in that pristine blue sky, those clouds turned faint pink at the edges by the sunset. He did not know, mad and perverse as he was, that the sky was a judge and the clouds were a witch, stripping him of flesh and bone and breath, stripping him of his twisted soul.
--
Avery grabs his head in her jaws when he falls. She yanks his head from his neck with a hard snap and a pull of her teeth, rage informing everything she does. She throws his head against a wall with a toss of her head, roaring after it.
A body falls and a growl catches in her chest as she whirls on the sound, but it is one of the enemy. It is one of them and she snaps into homid she should not be walking in this body her leg is twisted and limp but she is walking on it, not even doing the courtesy of limping on it, putting weight on that shattered bone, her body unfeeling, walking through the open door to look across the sinkhole and everything in her mind is madness and horror and hope and god help those who see her eyes wild,
wild,
wild like they are now.
She's bleeding. Her hair has fallen, bedraggled and loose, around her cheeks. She doesn't know where the blood is coming from but everyone can see it. Avery stands in that broken doorframe, panting, and turns to look for Charlotte.
Charlotte is the only one who is, in Avery's time, still alive. If she can meet her eyes, then
then Avery will know
it will be okay.
Black SheepCharlotte does not remember the last time she died. Perhaps she has never died before; perhaps this is the first time death candled in her, brilliant and blinding as the horizon bleeding light through some desert sunset or sunrise. The hoary old wolves who sometimes haunt the delicate folds of her mad little brain all have death inside them. Deaths inside them: some may still be remembered, for their glory or their shame. Others are remembered by none but the spirits themselves, and even for them the details are burnished, buffed out, faded to nothing, nothing at all. Just the signal flame of that cessation.
The strange and steady knowledge that death is just the beginning,
of another battle.
--
Not one she fights tonight, no. She dies and she comes back, too injured to be frenzied; to injured to move or breathe or eat ot cry out, just-a-girl.
Then the river comes.
Mud in her fur and smeared across her snout, the water a slow, strange fingerling flood, spreading out from the banks in singular fashion, from the banks of the Platte River, beneath the foundation of the house-that-was-not-finished, to lathe her where she fell.
Where she rises,
again.
And surges back into battle.
In the aftermath:
shaken,
shaking,
girl-skinned and whole.
Skin and hair covered in a fine red mist. The air damp with blood and singed by range and suspended, it seems, as that final body comes falling down the stairs.
Charlotte meets Avery's eyes, see. Her hands are covered in blood, her hair pink and loose around her face, her eyes reflective discs huge as the moon.
she is in the middle of the room, crouched beside the body of one of the townspeople, who breathes rough and raw with an unhealthy whistling sound. Her hands are gloved in blood but:
she's here.
she's here,
she's here.
Triaging the wounded men, who has survived. Who requires immediate healing, who will live five or ten or twenty minutes while she climbs the stares to make the rounds on the roof.
[Charlotte will Mother's Touch / Gaia's Breath until she runs out of gnosis.]
-black hat gunslingers-Here's the thing, see.
Not everyone survived. No; let's not blunt it. Most people did not survive. These men that rallied because Avery rallied them, these men that were full of courage and hope because she gave that to them, but did not tell them the honest truth, did not tell them that they weren't facing bandits at all but monsters, monsters, creatures they couldn't imagine:
these were the men that stood to defend their home. That stood to defend their town, which would become a city, which would become the protectorate that Avery herself guards a hundred fifty years from now.
She led them today. Because it was her duty. Because she is who she is, unflinching, incorruptible. And because: she knew they had to make this stand. They had to hold this town, if the future was to survive.
She made a choice. In the end, in many ways, she made a sacrifice. Perhaps the only thing that divides her actions from those of a leader far colder and far crueler than she
is that she was willing to die with them. She felt every death against her own survival, and every one of them weighed,
weighs,
like a stone.
--
There are survivors, though. Those men in the feedstore: yes. Charlotte saved them. Make no mistake of that. She saved them, but she also made a choice; she chose to use Earth there, use her fire-talen arrow there, and not here. She saved them. The ones who would be saved, anyway. The ones who stayed in that house and fired from relative safety. Not the ones whose grimy honor, whose hardbitten nobility that Avery called forth so handily, had the better of them. They were the ones that charged out of the house when they saw the third Kane brother climbing the walls. They fired from the streets, they tried to save their compatriots. Some of them died. Many of them died.
And: the ones in the stone house, which was supposed to be their fortress. Which was their fortress, in truth: because god, they would have been mown down like grass before the scythe if they stood in the street. If they faced the monster-men and their bullets, their deadly aim. If they faced the Kane brothers three, with their teeth, with their claws, with their terrible strength.
They would not have survived. None of them. Not if Avery hadn't come. Not if Charlotte hadn't come. So there's your victory: some people made it.
Let's count them.
Trevor Clay made it. His arm is shattered and his lung is punctured but Charlotte reaches him in time, heals him.
Rob Pickett did not. He was one of the brave few who left the feedstore.
Mad Dog Caradoc is dead. He stuck his gun between the teeth of the monster; jammed it there so that it couldn't bite. Pulled the trigger one last time to blow a hole in the roof of its mouth, and then it pulled his guts out and strangled him with it. Bad way to die.
Two of the three townsmen on the roof died. One survived because he was mad with fear, he jumped down from the roof, broke his leg, lay mewling in the bushes until Charlotte found him.
Emmett is dead; we'll not speak of that more.
Jack survived. Oliver survived. Three men with them survived.
Of the dozen or so men in the stone house -- greater than half are dead. Three are still mindless with terror. Two are wounded, battered, bruised, and their minds are stretched to the limit by what they have seen. They are already rationalizing it. They stood firm, though. They made it.
And the Son of Karnak. He is alive, so far as any spirit is ever truly alive or dead. He is gashed, he is bleeding a strange golden fluid that does not look like blood. He is leaning on his spear, but he never complains. He never speaks at all. He looks at the Garou as they come up to meet him, or when they emerge from the stone house. He studies them with raptor's eyes, eyes that, in the wake of battle, have turned golden as the sun. And at some point,
when they turn from him,
when no one is looking his way,
he simply vanishes with the last of the daylight.
--
Eleven human survivors, then, and one kinsman, out of the thirty or so that gathered at the saloon. A grim count; but then, you have to remember:
there are the women and the children in the canyon. There is the Sheriff and his young, too-innocent deputy. There is the future that will grow from this atrocious day; there is that sinkhole that will be filled, and that other sinkhole that will turn into the foundation of a new building. There are others who will return to Denver City when they hear it has not burned to the ground. There are others who will come, and build, and nurture, and plan, and grow, until a hundred fifty years from this moment the city stands as unique and irreplaceable as every one of the lives lost in its defense.
So there is that, too. A falcon's feather set against the weight of the dead.
--
The last light goes out of the west. It is night. The survivors have drifted from the stone house, from the roof, from the feedstore. They gather in the middle of the street. No one has begun the cleanup yet. No one has it in them. They look up as the Garou pass, though. Some of them have empty, shellshocked eyes. Some are grief-lost. Some are grateful; reach up to grasp and grip the hands of the Philodox, the Theurge.
Jack Taylor is the one to remember those waiting in the canyon. Someone should go tell them, he says. And after a moment: I'll go tell them.
That brings movement back to the town. Men start to haul the bodies out. Divide them into groups: their own dead, and the bodies of the bandits, which -- at least temporarily -- they cast into the sinkhole. Seems appropriate. As the minutes pass to hours they seem to forget both the best and the worst of it; the monsters in the night, and the sun-god that came to walk amongst them. The healing that poured from the Theurge's hands. The glory that was the Philodox in her truest form. The forgiveness of the water, washing clean their wounds.
They fall, slowly, to the task of cleaning, of rebuilding. They seem, gradually, to forget even Avery and Charlotte. They seem to look through them. And that's when they know: it's time to go. They're slipping out of the past. They're sliding back across the years, returning to their own present.
Trevor Clay, at least for a little longer, sees them; perceives them. He comes to them. Looks at them silently for some time, looking at their strange garb, their bloody hands. Eventually his eyes find theirs.
"You weren't really sent by the Sept, were you?"
Black SheepCharlotte hardly remembers the work or the wounded or the dead or the dying. The men. She did not meet the men or know the men the way Avery did. She is inhuman in ways many Garou will never be: closer to spirit than flesh. Ever-so-slightly unmoored from this world, even without the madness to unbalance her. But: she works. Heals, and heals, and heals.
Meditates perhaps, or begs the water elementals for a gift of Gnosis, and works, and works, and works, and tries not to remember the death scrubbed beneath her skin.
Somewhere in this nascent city Charlotte builds shrines, too. Small things, made or stones; to hold the sunlight on a bowl of water. Shrines to the earth and the river and the servants of Falcon and Helios. Hides them in the lee of this building or this hollow in the riverbank or that oxbow or or or -
Just a place for member.
--
And then they are fading. Are these their clothes? Is Charlotte in her bed? Did is this her body or her spirit? Did it die too?
Can she hear her pack breathing all around her?
Trevor Clay can still see them.
Charlotte, blooded and bloodied little thing that she is, looks at him, solemn, aware.
Strange.
"We were sent by someone."
Reverence of DawnShe should weep.
--
Charlotte lives. They are not bound by spirit or by blood but they are sisters under Falcon and in the midst of battle and they have shared a kill. Charlotte lives and Avery no longer feels like she is about to pass out from the weight she is carrying. The wounds she has suffered she will forget in a matter of days. She knows that, and it disturbs her the way it always has.
Avery closes her eyes and accepts that Charlotte is alive, and that many
many
others are dead. Because she did not let them run away. She could tell herself they died as heroes and they did. She could tell herself they died nobly and unafraid and some did. She could tell herself they died for a purpose and really, really... it makes no difference. When she came to this time they were all dead already.
--
Trevor Clay made it. Avery leans her back against a post and watches Charlotte heal the sucking wound in his chest, the arm sitting at an unnatural angle. She watches Charlotte-almost dead and Trevor almost-dead and does not come to terms with what has happened but at very least staves off her own insanity for long enough to stay standing.
She's glad to see Jack alive. She stays in homid in that poor kid's hoedown clothes, while Jack realizes that someone needs to go tell Lark and the people in the canyon that the town is...safe? for now. Avery just nods; even now, when people speak to her, she knows they are seeking her permission, her leave, her approval.
Avery never gets to say goodbye to the child of Karnak. She can barely move from where she stands, weighted in place by what she has done and what she has seen and everything that was almost lost, everything that was lost.
--
Her eyes follow the men who begin to separate the bodies of their own from the bodiest of beasts. Avery tells them to set fire to the mass grave. She looks at Charlotte, but Avery cannot cleanse and Avery cannot ask Charlotte to give anything she is not already offering. Giving. Releasing, as unselfish as a ghost already.
People begin to pass over her with their eyes. They begin to stop hearing her when she speaks. Trevor holds onto them a little longer, watching. He grasps a piece of the truth, and Charlotte gives him another piece of that self-same truth, and Avery just holds his eyes for a moment.
She crosses to him and puts her hand on his head, fingers in his hair, pulling his head down and his mouth to hers and kissing him, even with the taste of fear and the coppery flavor of blood touching her tongue as a result but she kisses him like she knows him because he is already fading at the edges. Kisses him like that, and steps away, and holds his eyes.
"Let them forget this," she says to him, quietly, and in a way,
begs him to share the burden of this with her. For a little while. Such a little while, until he dies, too.
--
Merriweather and Lightfoot left that day. No one saw them go.
-black hat gunslingers-They were sent by someone.
They were sent by something.
The deputy mulls that over for a moment. He accepts it, uncomplicatedly and without further questions. Perhaps he is not a curious man. More likely, he understands that he will never understand. Not really.
--
His hair feels the same way. The rough scratch of his beard, and the way his mouth opens to Avery's. That kiss feels the same way too, burning and intense. And yet not the same at all:
it also feels like a farewell.
They draw apart. She asks him to let them forget. But not him. Not for a little while longer. Maybe not ever. Maybe it's like the fairytales; maybe there's magic in a kiss. Maybe there's magic in two souls meeting, even if the time is not right, even if the incarnation is wrong.
Trevor reaches up to tip his hat. Finds it gone, lost in the battle somewhere. A wry look comes to his face, and he takes her hand instead. Holds a moment, then releases.
"Goodbye," he says.
--
They leave in the night. They walk away from the town. They walk toward the mountains, and toward the river, which swells to meet them as they come. The water creeps up on the shore, crystal-clear, purified of all contaminant: not water at all but the essence thereof. It tingles when it touches their feet. When it rises past their knees. When it rushes over their waist, and to their breasts; to their shoulders, to their lips.
They can see it, flooding into the town. None of the townspeople seem to notice. Nothing seems disturbed by that strange and slow flood; no grass bends, no trees sway. The blood washes away, though. And the uncleanness brought here by those terrible men. The stink of corruption; the stain of despair. It all washes clean, because this world is younger than the one they come from, and not so very dark yet.
The water rises past their eyes. Past the tops of their heads. Past the trailing strands of their hair. It takes them into darkness,
and no one sees them go.
--
They wake in their own beds, in their own times. One in her tiny room, surrounded by the warmth and comfort of her tiny pack. The other in her palatial home, with her father and her brother and all those other distant-distant cousins in her care all around her.
Charlotte's hands are wet. And in Avery's palm, the feather from the Child of Karnak's hair.
