Buried under layers of scavenged fabric, he must have looked like a pile of garbage. He was always careful to avoid being seen, but in the off-chance someone were to pass by, he wondered if they'd notice something was alive down there. Would they think it was just some mangy animal trembling beneath the heap? It would be bad if they got it in mind to shoo that animal off, but he didn't have the strength left to do anything about that if it were to happen. He hadn't eaten for a few days now, but he wasn't at the point where he was willing to dig through dumpsters again. Either way, this hollow ache in his stomach was still better than getting tied up and punched in the gut. It was honestly just a drop in the bucket. His mouth was parched, his throat was sore, and his lips stung with chapping.
Oh, his lips didn't actually sting. Maybe they'd gone numb? That wasn't so bad. Like when his arms and legs were sore too; in a way that felt good against the cold, since where his joints throbbed, a weird, tingling heat spread out.
There he sat, fending off the urge to simply die, left alone with his imagination, thinking about a hot fireplace and ornaments hanging by the neck from the ceiling and warm, chunky soup and fading in and out of consciousness under the dark of his pile. When he dreamed, his fantasies felt all the nearer, all the more solid and real, but they were still imagined in blackness, consigned to the same void he was. That was probably for the best. If his dreams and reality were so close, then the reality felt less real as well.
Come to think of it, in this state, he couldn't tell if he was awake or dreaming at all.
When he tried opening his eyes, he was blinded by light.
~~~
…The light of the Sun pouring through a gap in the curtains. He’s in his room. His nice, clean, warm room he has all to himself in Nilamai’s apartment. Cold sweat trails down his cheek. It’s a bit chilly – he’s kicked his quilt to the floor somehow. He lets out a deep sigh, then snatches the glass of water from the side of his bed and gulps it down. With a thought and a spark of crimson in the air, he creates a point of phantom mass beside the nightstand, pulls all the sweat and grime off of himself, and compacts it into a point of pressure so intense the components of the gathered matter break down into imperceptible particles and cease to exist.
From there, he moves right into his morning warm-up routine. Emergence might have made him immune to the consequences of indolence, but he has an example to set. Next comes the shower, which he sets steaming hot. He doesn’t technically need to shower anymore – even his hair takes care of itself now – but it still feels nice, and more importantly it still feels slovenly not to. That it should be illegal for his shampoo to cost as much as it did faintly crosses his mind, but he had something like fifty complimentary bottles stashed away after he'd done endorsements for it, so he might as well use them. He finishes by blow-drying his hair while it smooths and detangles itself of its own accord, then looks himself over in the mirror one more time.
“Damn I look fine,” he proclaims with a wink to his reflection and a wide smile that shows off his gleamingly white teeth.
The usual shining start to a day in the life of Roland Ysembard.
“Morning, Sis!” he calls. Though relatively unadorned, their place is spacious for an apartment and the kitchen is state of the art. The indoor charcoal grill pit was a special inclusion, added at Nilamai’s insistence. "What's on the menu today, honey bunny?"
Nilamai greets him with a twitch of one of the wings peeking through slits in her nightshirt and a brief glance over her shoulder, offering him the same soft, delicate smile she always did. “Nothing if you can’t leave the cook be this morning. Otherwise, it'll be done in just a minute.”
“Come on, don’t be that way!” Roland chimes as he takes a seat, rests his elbows on the table, and props his chin across his steepled fingers. “You make me breakfast every morning and everything, we're practically married already!”
"Oh, Claiasya forgive this vile temptress, to have become such a depraved cradle robber. Her grace Iona is going to kick down our door any moment now and drag me to the Soul Sanctuary personally. What will the neighbors say? How will I finish making breakfast?"
Roland claps his hands to his cheeks and gasps. "No breakfast? Who cares what the old hag thinks when she's interrupting breakfast? That's the real crime here. I mean, does age really matter when there's love~?" Roland says, feigning the scummiest, nasaliest cadence he can muster.
"Pff," Nilamai lets out a snort despite herself as she flips the fillets on the grill. "Blessed seas. Well, the old hag right here personally thinks it matters a lot when she's more than twice your age."
"Eh, give me another twenty years and nobody will be able to tell the difference. We are Keepers, after all."
"Mm. Sadly, in the course of solving the complications of our illicit tryst alongside all the secrets of love and marriage, there's just one crucial factor you've overlooked."
"A hitch with us getting hitched, as it were."
"Precisely. You've never made me breakfast, so it doesn't count. Love that only flows one way isn't really love at all, you know? It's really more like I spend my mornings stalking you.“
“In that case, I could–”
“Nope.” Nilamai cuts him off, still wearing her gentle smile. “I didn’t go to the trouble of getting this eel fresh from the market just so a junior chef could use it for practice. Speaking of, it’s almost ready!” she says as the rice cooker begins singing the little song that meant it was all done.
Resigning himself to the grueling fate of having home cooked meals granted to him by a cute girl who wasn't even the slightest bit romantically interested in him, cursed to receive affection without ever being able to give it in turn for the rest of eternity, the Stardust Seraph pulls out his phone and gets started on the day's work, checking Flow for any messages of interest and Lighthouse for any incidents that needed his attention. He glances away when Nilamai sets down two bowls of rice on the table, each crowned with a fluffy square omelette and glistening slices of grilled eel.
Roland whistles as he admires Nilamai's craftsmanship. "Looks as incredible as always," he says as he takes his first bite. The eel is dense and juicy and perfectly seasoned as always, melting in his mouth alongside the egg and rice, which are soft as clouds. "...and it tastes even better. Thanks, Sis," he says. Roland hadn't even known food could taste this good until he'd had Nilamai's cooking.
"You've very welcome," Nilamai replies, though to Roland, what small hints of pride or satisfaction her smile betrays are less obvious than the faint traces of dark circles under her eyes.
A bit into eating, he speaks up. "Say, you sleep okay, Sis?"
"...Mm-hm. I slept alright. Same as usual," she answers vaguely. "You?"
"Yeah, I slept fine. Just had a weird dream."
"Those happen. Want to talk about it?"
"Nah," he says after a pause, his finger scrolling across his phone's touchscreen. "I've got to head out soon. I already know what I'll be looking into today. Wouldn't want Irida to beat me to it."
"Alright. I'm always here if there's anything you need. Anything at all." That was her duty, after all, in lieu of anything else.
Roland smiles. "I appreciate it," he says, looking down at the notification that gave today's episode of the Stardust Seraph's life its title.
HIGH ALERT: Harbinger cult assault on New Claris Regional Hospital. Attackers at large. Potential incursion threat.
~~~
Once he’s caught up on Scolai and Aisling’s rundowns of the situation, Roland passes on school for today. His tutors will adjust their pace to his whenever he shows up, and while missing too much is bad for retention, he has more important work to do. He has a vague handle on his prey's signature, but Aisling’s report said her quarry was known to corrupt other Harbingers. Anything he might detect could be part of its plans.
So he attunes himself to the echoes of the monster as he felt it at Missing Lake, allowing its aura to tug at him like a faint gravitational pull should it come into his considerable sensory range, and takes his search slow, cheerily returning any greetings and waving at any awestruck starers as he makes his rounds throughout New Claris. Community outreach is also one of his assignments, after all.
Roland easily propels forward as he leaps across the city's rooftops, creating points of attraction that apply only to his own body above himself and in the direction he intends to go. At the same time, he weakens the effect of natural gravity on himself, making his movements light and smooth as a feather cascading through the air. He dispels the skyward point of gravitation at intervals and manifests a new one, sailing from anchor to anchor as though riding trapezes hung from the heavens.
This technique was a product of his most basic ability, his Gravitational Eyes – the power to create “phantom mass” that acted only on what he wished it to. He could manifest these eyes at a given point in space or alter a particular object's mass in relation to the world around it. He had a sort of instinct for it. With as much practice as he had, it was rote to control his trajectory and acceleration as he pleased, and achieving flight by suspending himself in the air was not much more difficult – though he preferred to do so while his face was shielded by his regalia to avoid getting a face full of bug.
On the street below, one scruffy black-haired girl in particular calls out to him as he hops from one roof to the next: “Roland?! Stardust Seraph? Oh Goddess I’m sorry to bother you but I’m a huge fan and I just wanted to-”
A redheaded girl at her side tugs on her sleeve. “Lin, you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! No one would blame us if we’re late, and today of all days, I need this!”
Roland has a lot of huge fans, and he’s perfectly content to meet them all. He can spare a moment for two of them. “That would be me! Can I help you?” he greets the pair as he drifts down to the street, his hair shimmering gold in the sunlight as it flows behind him.
“Yes, thank you so much, I was just wondering…” The girl pauses, opening and closing her mouth in a series of false starts. This happens occasionally. People who know him well enough to be his fans have already heard his answers to all the usual questions: What are your hobbies? Who’s your favorite Keeper? What’s your fitness routine? Would you date a fan? So, put on the spot, they do their best to think of something totally new.
“Hold that thought. Would you excuse me for a moment?” Roland asks.
The girl clamps her mouth shut, then nods rapidly.
“Thanks. I’ll just be a moment.” Roland steps off to the side, where a woman is staring at him and her little daughter is looking sullenly down into a patch of soil lining the sidewalk. There, at the base of a tree, a stuffed rabbit has fallen into the dirt.
“Oh… please don’t worry about us,” the woman says. “She just got a little startled when you flew overhead.”
“It’s no trouble at all. Hey, would it be alright if I cleaned your friend up?” Roland asks, kneeling to the kid’s level.
She looks up at him, eyes wide. “Can you?”
In answer, Roland picks up the rabbit, gives it a quick brush, then gravitates all the dirt and dust on it away, just like he does at the start of his morning routine.
“There you go! Good as new,” Roland says, handing it back to her. “What’s their name?”
“I, uhhh, wow,” the girl says, wide-eyed, as she takes her toy and squeezes it to her chest. “Lady Flopsington the First,” she adds after a moment.
“Say thank you,” her mom urges her.
“Umm, thanks, Mister Seraph.”
“Come on, sweetie. We don’t want to keep him too long.” the woman says, smiling as she squeezes her daughter’s hand. “Again, thank you so much.” she says, inclining her head as if to bow to him.
“Bye-bye!” the little girl says, mimicking the gesture, and then they’re on their way.
Roland’s scarlet eyes linger on the pair before he turns back to the schoolgirls. “You were saying?”
“Ah, yeah, I’m sorry, just… did you always want to be a Keeper? Was it a surprise when you got the offer, or a dream come true?”
“Hmmm…” Roland taps his cheek, feigning deep thought. “Well, to say it wasn’t a surprise would feel a bit presumptuous, but it’s just about everyone’s dream, isn’t it? It was certainly mine.”
“Um… right, that makes sense. Thanks. Ah, and could I get your autograph? Maybe a picture with you? No one’ll believe me if I don’t.”
“I’m supposed to save those for events." His signature sold for a lot on the Sea. Even though he was a Keeper, people could get a little wild trailing him if they thought he was willing to give it out on a chance encounter. “My next meet-and-greet is on my schedule, though – I’d be delighted to see you there!”
“Oh, okay…” The girl looks a bit crestfallen, then lights up again and starts rummaging through her bag. “Hold on, I have a marker, could you maybe just sign my hand?”
“Moving a little fast there, aren’t we?” her friend says, side-eyeing her. “Here I thought you were an Irida superfan.”
“I mean, yeah, but you’ve gotten way more from that new girl! Is she your favorite now?”
“Yes! I’m mostly better now, she didn’t hurt me that bad!”
Oof. Beaten by the Silver King and Liadain one after the other. A perfect one-two punch right where it hurt.
“Now that I’m really not allowed to do anymore. Sorry!” Roland says, flashing a mischievous grin.
After a beat, the girl laughs the way she might at a joke she doesn’t quite get. She’s looking a bit disappointed now.
“But, y’know…” Roland scans his surroundings, making sure the coast is clear. "On second thought, I guess a quick photo couldn't hurt. It'll be our little secret, kay?" he says with a wink, putting a finger to his lips.
“...Are you sure that’s alright? I don’t want to cause any trouble for you.”
"Sure. Just take out your phone and turn on the camera."
The redhead reaches out a hand as her friend fidgets with her phone. “Want me to take it for you?”
Roland steps between the two girls, checking the phone's screen so he knew where the virtual shutter button was. "Nah, that won't be necessary," he says as he raises his finger and flicks his wrist, using his power to lift Lin's phone out of her grasp and suspend it in the air in front of them. "Both of you scoot in." He coils his arms across their shoulders, drawing them close. Both of them gasp and tense at his touch, clearly flustered. He can't help but snicker a bit. It's the typical reaction. He hopes they're savoring the moment.
"Still got that marker?" he asks.
"Y-yeah," she sputters as she takes it back out of her bag.
With nothing but a thought, Roland pulls the marker from the girl's hand to a point behind her floating phone, situating it so that its tip was level with the shutter button. “When a cry for justice rings through the heavens, the Stardust Seraph answers!” he cries, striking his trademark pose. "Smile, ladies," he prompts right as he presses the marker's tip against the phone's screen from afar, causing it to take the picture. He reaches out his hand and beckons the phone into his palm. As the marker casually floats back into her bag, Lin and the other girl look over the Seraph's shoulder to join him in seeing the results.
The photo is completely off-center, and while Roland himself is as picture-perfect as always, the two girls look like a pair of deer caught in headlights, their big smiles plastered awkwardly across their faces. Uh oh. Maybe he should have scried on the camera to make sure he got it right.
But Lin only smiles brighter as she looks over the picture. She lets out a pfft of poorly-suppressed laughter, which quickly breaks into a fit of giggling so hard that tears start to stream from her eyes. “Oh, that’s just awful! It’s perfect! Thank you so much!” she says between laughs. Her friend puts a hand to her face and shakes her head, but despite herself, she’s laughing too.
“So,” Roland says with a conspiratorial smile. “Who’s your favorite Keeper now?”
Lin wipes her eyes on her sleeve and smiles brightly. “For today, it’s the Stardust Seraph.”
Well, that’s a relief. He was taking a chance to bend the rules for her, if not a big one. Roland’s image is a carefully-curated thing, an icon held high as much by the Church’s support and Aethelflaed’s tireless efforts as by his own actions. There are no crowds of prying photographers documenting every moment of his life, given that no one will take the paparazzi's side if they make some Keeper uncomfortable enough to smash their fancy cameras. Even so, he has to keep the possibility of discreet creepers taking shots from the shadows in mind – the stealth some of those guys can manage is magic in its own right. They could be watching at any point, and he can’t show a single chink in his armor. The Stardust Seraph is a symbol, the shining hero the people look up to, a friend to everyone in New Claris, after all.
Although, truth told, he’d be hard-pressed to sincerely call anyone who wasn’t a Keeper his friend. Frankly, there isn’t anyone he’s especially close to in the first place. He doesn't have that kind of time. Nevertheless, his fans give him their own kind of strength. The admiring gazes of everyone around him, the way he could make anyone he spoke to stutter and fumble… it always feels nice to be seen as something faultless, desired by all, even for a moment.
But standing as a symbol of hope is far from his only duty. So with that, Roland says his goodbyes and soars away, back to the hunt.
~~~
Eventually, something at the far edge of Roland’s awareness starts to pull him faintly in its direction, pointing him toward the suburban Hills. The northwestern district of New Claris takes its name from its signature construction trend, homes built like burrows into the rolling earth at the forest’s edge. It’s a stretch of upscale suburban housing spread through carefully sculpted greenery, arranged such that from the right angles, nearly every home looks like its own idyllic cabin in a tamed, monster-free woodland. They’re about as nice as you can get without having something like the Fianata estate in the Weald.
And for all that, it’s no less likely to spawn Harbingers than anywhere else in the city. No material comforts can keep humanity safe from its only predator.
Roland touches a hand to his chest and forms his belt from embers like feathers of burning scarlet. Two magical circles materialize and spread outward from the belt – one up, the other down – and where they pass over his body, his outfit is transfigured into the plain white first layer of his regalia. As the circlets fade, he folds his arms across his chest, then snaps his back outward to straighten his posture, unleashing six radiant wings from his spine to wrap around his body. The wings form a shell which itself quickly disperses, adding the second, crimson-trimmed layer of his outfit. At last, he masks his face with a swift motion of his hand, finishing his transformation, and soars off toward the source of the corruption.
At a safe distance from his destination, Roland pauses in midair. He lessens the Harbinger’s pull on him and bends light around himself, rendering him effectively invisible. The shroud of distortion also filters light through his visor and into his eyes to maintain his vision, since reflecting all light around himself would otherwise render him blind. The spell’s more pressing weakness is that while it hides him almost perfectly from physical sight, it still bleeds a noticeable spark of his power, triggering a pulse of frantic emotion from the Harbinger inside.
So he suppresses his aura, gathering as much of his own presence as he can into himself, and brings a new Eye into being directly ahead of him. Then he sends it flying forward and off into the distance, hopefully creating the impression of a Keeper searching nearby, but elsewhere, missing the Harbinger’s den as they patrol past it. After a moment’s agitation, the monster’s aura settles back into its resting state.
As he floats back to ground level, Roland takes stock of his surroundings. Even freed from its gravity, he feels the corruption all too clearly, now: it’s a dormant, still sensation, emanating from a home in the center of an otherwise cozy stretch. The place looks immaculate, with a spotless exterior and perfectly-kept garden lawn. If not for the malignant presence inside, it would be the most inviting on its street. Beneath the uniquely loathsome sensation of a Harbinger, it feels like a nostalgic scent, carrying a memory of kinder, simpler times.
It makes him want to smash the entire building into splinters.
But beneath that, there’s another familiar presence… Ill Wind’s? That can’t be right. He would have detected another Keeper by now. But it definitely feels like her, if colder and sharper than when he last picked up her trail. Ah, it's probably that when they attacked the hospital, she infected something of the Harbinger the way she had done to him. If so, this is the perfect opportunity. He’s not about to let anyone else mess with that girl.
There’s only one thing left to do. He tries the front door, finding it locked, and so undoes the bolt with a bit of precise telekinetic manipulation, making the motion slow and gentle, careful not to make a sound. He opens the door with equal caution, ready to disrupt any attempt by his prey to drag him into its Wound on the back foot. The house’s interior mirrors the condition outside, looking and feeling just as inviting and well-kept as can be. Save, of course, for the Harbinger’s stench.
He creeps deeper into the house, following the aura into a wide open living room. There, where a healthy fire crackles and the scents of burning oak and bittersweet memories mingle, is a red-robed creature roughly the size of a child, but with no skin, no features at all, only a body of grass and twine woven into the rough patterns of exposed musculature. Its face is a smiling, tear-stained marble white mask, and…
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…It isn’t alone. It’s leaning down to embrace a child sitting beside the fire, staring fixedly at something with a blank smile – a terrarium, a glass sphere housing a tiny garden around a tiny model house.
At the far end of the room stands a living statue draped in shadows, with too-long, too-flexible marble limbs and a cracked mask weeping inky black ichor for a face. Not a Harbinger, but it does feel like the thing from Missing Lake. One of its vessels? The two are conversing in soft, unintelligible Harbinger-speech, but the statue speaks much more than the actual Harbinger, which seems almost singly focused on the child in its arms.
But he can’t escape notice forever. Before he can decide what action to take, the statue – perhaps feeling his presence bleeding into the world – screeches a few more words, then turns and skitters away on all fours. The Harbinger barely acknowledges him, simply holding its victim a little closer, and from the way its presence suffuses the house, it seems to be bound here. Moreover, he can easily pinpoint the statue as the source of Liadain’s infection. If it’s part of the group that attacked her last night, it could lead him back to its master.
So, in a snap judgement, Roland zips through the living room after the statue, shedding his invisibility as he's drawn quickly along precise vectors by swiftly conjured Eyes. Around the corner, he finds his prey running through the kitchen, just short of the back door. In an instant, he spreads a zone of intensified gravitational force just beneath it, crushing it to the ground as the space around it seems to distort and smear like a mirage. It was a distinct expression of his magic derived from a Harbinger's heart, affecting the world around his target rather than the target themselves. It was possible to directly attune an Eye to other beings of magic, but much more difficult; the very reason they operated under diverged from his, so he had to either comprehend that reason or force his own upon them.
To achieve that, impalement sufficed. The light he wielded as his implement was, after all, an expression of his soul, an embodiment of his reason. Once the enemy was too weak to resist, he could overturn everything they were from the inside out, spiritually and literally. He could tear out a Harbinger's heart and crush it.
As the wings of crimson light that define the Seraph assemble themselves from a sudden flurry of shining plumage that erupts from all around him, stretching out from his back as he prepares for another crucifixion, the statue’s shadow shifts and splits wildly, as if cast by a dozen shaking lights. One spectral figure slithers rapidly out from beneath it, crawling away through a crack in a window. Five more surge toward him. With a flap of his wings, Roland launches a hail of pinion needles at the ground, shattering the immaculate tile floor and skewering the shadows, which quickly wilt to nothing beneath the window’s daylight.
And the statue’s body is suddenly pulverized by the weight of Roland’s haze, an empty shell no longer resisting him while its former inhabitant gets away.
Roland leaves behind a tiny Eye in the house attuned to nothing, then races out through the back door and launches himself into the air, strengthening the vessel’s pull on his feathers. He swiftly finds the shadow-statue – and it is a statue once more, its body regrown as if it had never left it – darting between houses, phasing through walls as if they aren’t there. Several houses down the road, someone shrieks in terror, and the screams don’t stop even when the statue emerges on the other side.
Grimacing, Roland touches down, wrenches the front door almost off its hinges with his mind, and charges inside, where a vaguely human-shaped shadow looms over a woman paralyzed with fright. From the slightest study of its aura, he can tell the shadow is not an entity unto itself, but an emanation of magic, something he can manipulate freely through sheer force. He swiftly gravitates it away from the woman and towards himself, whereupon he carves it from the world with a swipe of a wing. He then zooms out of the house at breakneck speed and takes off after the statue, chasing it into the woods beyond the last house in this stretch of the city.
The thing is fast. Coming from Roland, that means something. What's more, it's slippery.
At their fastest, his pinion needles can travel with speed alike to the red light they're sculpted from, but they're still limited by his focus and the speed of his thoughts. They were aimed by creating Eyes that applied only to the needles themselves at the position of whatever Roland wanted to hit, causing the needles of light to instantly gravitate to their target. This meant he had never hit anything or anyone he hadn't meant to, since his projectiles always hit their mark. Yet, because of the obstacles to simply directly altering another magical being's mass, he couldn't simply designate their mass as the force his plumage was acting upon. He still had to line his shots up to hit them by forming Eyes that put them in his attack's trajectory.
But as his shadowy prey coils and writhes through the world, sinking in and out of solid surfaces, it's moving so quickly even the Seraph finds it difficult to track. It isn't enough to aim at where it is, he has to anticipate where it's going to be. He predicts correctly and strikes home multiple times, but the statue manages to tear itself away each time. Mere needles won't cut it for this one.
Finally, as the statue leaps between trees, doing its best to hide beneath the dense foliage and repeatedly slip free from his grip on it, abandoning and reforming its body enough times that he loses count, Roland catches his quarry slithering through a stretch of empty field. He spreads his wings wide and swoops down on the statue like a falcon, accelerating as quickly as he can.
His wings detach from his back and come apart into two swirls of glowing red feathers which swiftly compress and merge back together, forming twin spears of crimson light that flank him as he flies. He launches both spears at the vessel at once, aiming for where it will be in but a moment… but his prey has gotten wise to how the Seraph has adapted to its speed, and switches direction on a dime just as it senses the attack coming, flinging itself out of harm's away.
That was why Roland had made the gravitational pull on one of the spears weaker than the other. So that it traveled less quickly, and was still lancing through the air when the statue evaded the attack.
He dismisses the original Eye acting on the remaining spear and assigns it a new point in the same instant. The spear's trajectory diverts in the air as it turns to face the statue. Before the vessel can react, the spear pierces straight through its body and then, with another change in direction, slams it to the ground. A hazy blur erupts from around the javelin to envelop the vessel, crushing it with greater force than ever, refusing to let it escape.
It all happens in the span of seconds, and the chase is brought to its end.
Now pinned firmly in place, like a butterfly on a display wall, the statue lets out a low, pained croak. Its head spins on its neck, turning fully around like an owl, and its weeping mask shifts into a twisted, ink-stained rictus grin.
"What? Glad I'm about to put you out of your misery?" Roland bothers to ask. "Too bad. I'm not quite done with you yet."
“...You should really go check on my friend,” it says in a boy’s rasping, whispery voice.
In the near distance, the Harbinger’s presence flares to life.
Silent, unmoving, Roland creates a hologram window, a construct of light appearing like a digital display behind his visor, and links it to the small Eye he left behind in the house where that horrid aura nested. The window peers through the vantage of that point he left behind, and he shifts its position to scry on the perfectly-kept living room.
Where the child in the Harbinger’s grip is fading from reality, like an old photograph aging a hundred years in seconds. All the color drains from them reducing them to a flattened, greyscale image of a person. Cracks like chipped porcelain spiderweb along their face, then crumble away, leaving them spotted with dark, empty holes. And all the while, as their body breaks and withers into an empty husk, they let out halted bursts of low, droning noise that could equally be groans of pain or sighs of relief.
Then, with a shriek like a grieving parent burying their child, the Harbinger’s lower body abandons its shape and blooms outward, spreading through and into the house like a rapidly-growing root structure.
Roland closes the window as the space around the skewered vessel trembles, the gravitational distortion holding it in place intensifying enough that one can hear the creature's body creaking and snapping beneath the force's violence.
"Tell it to stop. Or I kill you."
Even as it breaks beneath his grip, the vessel merely cackles in the face of the Seraph's threat. “Little late for that, yeah? Humans die so easily! Maybe if someone had put a bit more work into them, neither of us would be here!”
Roland lifts his hand up, spreading out his fingers. He can end this bastard right here and now. It deserves to die. But if he kills this vessel, his lead goes with it.
What he saw through that window was sickening. Vomit-inducing. Disgusting enough to ruin anyone, even a full grown man. But this is not the first corpse Roland has seen in the line of duty, and no matter what sort of vows he’s made to protect the world, he can hardly promise himself that it will be the last.
But it will be the last time either of these monsters hurts anyone.
The Stardust Seraph sprouts three pairs of wings and thrashes them, sending himself rocketing skyward. Plumage diffuses from his wingspan in a roiling cluster as he rises, following his ascent like nebulae swallowed by a twister. After reaching the same elevation as the peak of the Fianata Tower, the Seraph halts abruptly, gazing across the breadth of the city. His pursuing feathers stop alongside him, hanging in the air for a span before they begin to swirl together and coalesce into eight luminous spheres of vivid crimson.
You don’t deserve to exist.
In the same moment, the Seraph maps his trajectory. He attunes himself fully to the point where he senses the Harbinger’s vile aura in bloom. The spheres surrounding him thin and elongate, sculpting themselves into eight scintillating lances that point ahead straight and true. He grasps the Harbinger's aura with the feeling of his gravitational sense and all at once raises its pull on him to an unhinged level.
Die.
Roland tears through the morning sky like a blood-red meteor, eight comets charging at his flank.The world is dyed crimson by his passing. He crashes into the immaculate home at full force, his course aligned directly with the Harbinger he neglectfully left to feed. His spears all meet at the same point, trained on the demon's heart.
Eight comets crash through the home’s roof, smashing it into scattered wreckage. Eight javelins of light trained on the Harbinger spear it as one, nearly shredding its entire body in a burst of purifying radiance, scattering its central mass about the room in a storm of sod and twine, and sending the corpse of its victim crashing into the wall.
Bits of the Harbinger’s essence leak from its body as it struggles to knit itself together – its memories are a torrent of longing for something that will never come again. Amongst the cacophony, though, a fragment of its selfhood, its dreams, lodges in Roland’s mind.
The Harbinger’s scattered pieces crawl along the totaled room, gathering and reforming into a tattered and broken version of its body, hunched protectively over the undamaged terrarium. A jagged fracture runs down the center of its mask. Its roots burrow into what’s left of the walls like worms, then move to surround Roland, rising from beneath the floor to strike back at him. A swoop of his wing, and another hail of needles lashes out to meet them, tearing through the floor and impaling the Harbinger’s growths as one.
Even as he tears its master to pieces, the place's aura of bitter yearning seems to take on a weight all its own, mounting into an almost physical pressure that seeks to converge around him and infect his soul with rot. The sensation of it gnawing away at his edges is a palpable, painful weight – the weight of watching your only real family die, of hiding from the world as vultures circle the corpse of your life, of desperate, clinging need for everything to go back to the way it was and stay that way forever and ever and ever.
As the sickly, tainted aura presses down upon Roland from all sides, an oozing, palpable mold begins to creep its tendrils along the surface of his cloak. But it could do nothing to choke his light. The scorching fury of his aura burns the decay away effortlessly as he draws closer to the Harbinger. He brushes the last traces of its residue off his left pauldron as he glares down at his enemy, his visor ignited with wrath.
“Is that all?” Roland asks.
He lifts his arm, fingers extended as though poised to catch something, and feels for that familiar sensation of density and concentrated power. His gloved hand clenches firmly. In that instant, Nilisfel’s broken form freezes, its shifting presence stabilized and halted in place before Roland’s closed fist. With the Harbinger’s roots burned to nothing and its core pinned in his grip, squeezing its terrarium close with its single intact arm, it weeps in a choked, scratching voice like the rustling of fallen leaves.
“This is your heart, isn’t it?”
The broken thing lurches back, pulling away with all its might in a desperate attempt to escape. The Seraph holds it still. After a brief initial struggle, it requires barely any effort at all to keep his hold on its core.
"I don't care if you never wanted to be what you are. If you hate even yourself, it just means you're a wish nobody in the entire world wants. Pathetic. You did something unforgivable, so I'm going to do something unforgivable to you."
The Stardust Seraph pulls. Like pulling the kernel of a fruit out with pliers. The Harbinger screeches. Tearing. Wrenching. Nilisfel shudders as its unfinished form bends toward him in an arc. Its torso begins to invert at its center, the grass and string of its insides a lighter, rawer shade than the outside. Its shrieks of pain give way to muffled gurgles as its heart is dragged away from it. Tendrils of twine lash out and wrap themselves around the sphere, desperately trying to drag it back into place, only to be burned away to nothing by the sheer manifest force of the Seraph’s rage.
Then, with one swift, decisive pull, Roland rips Nilisfel’s heart from its body. In the moment when it loses its last grip on its core, its mutilated remains begin to disintegrate into nothing, a shadow on the world with no light left to cast itself from. All that remains is its core – now a glass sphere housing a perfectly-kept idyll of a house, but packed with powdery shreds of rotting leaves like a dirty brown snow globe.
Could the products of such short, miserable existences ever be worth all the suffering it takes to obtain them?
Calmly, mechanically, Roland reaches into his regalia and feels around until its magical pockets provide him his phone, then dials the authorities. He relays the circumstances to the emergency operator and, once he’s secured the proper services, shuts his phone and continues standing there. He numbly looks down at Nilisfel’s heart one last time, then touches it to his chest, shuddering as its remains dissipate into his aura.
Giving away the Harbingers he helps hunt isn’t so charitable as everyone thinks. Roland is content with his magic as it is, but more importantly, he’s always hated the feeling of a monster becoming part of him, traces of its soul corrupting his own. He does all he can to crush his quarries, compact them into the core of his own power and leave no trace of them behind, but the process is hardly quick or perfect. Especially with ones that piss him off as much as this thing did. He’ll have to deal with it later, somehow.
The way it groped at its core like a fearful child in the end tied a knot in the Seraph's stomach.
And when he scries back to the wood where he left the vessel, it’s already gone, leaving only a javelin of light surrounded by chunks of crumbling stone. He clenches his fists so hard they hurt, buries a fresh hail of needles in the floor, then slumps down, too exhausted to summon the fury that monster deserves.
Roland plods over to the child’s body. He doesn’t really think to do it, his body just carries him. It had been flung to the edge of the room in the midst of the battle, discarded like trash. He crumples over the little husk as though whatever strings guided him this far have been cut, falling to his knees. He slowly, gently reaches out to the withered thing and pulls it into his arms, holding it up against his chest. It looks blurry. Even this close, cradling it, he can’t tell if it was a boy or girl.
"Forgive me. I couldn't do anything for you. Nothing at all," he says, barely more than a whisper. So much for the Church's great hero. He couldn't even save one little kid.
Like that, he continues kneeling in silence, crouched over the corpse for a long, long time.
He’s dimly aware of the sound of sirens in the distance. Eventually, his vigil is interrupted by an adult’s voice calling out from behind him.
“I, uh… Seraph?”
There's a pair of policemen standing in the what’s left of the entryway. Their expressions turn distinctly queasy as they take in the scene, and the speaker's voice sounds unsteady, unsure of his role here. "We'll handle this from here. So... go take care of yourself. And, ah, thank you for your service."
"Ah..." Roland mutters in reply to the officer, as if he’d just been jostled awake. "Right, of course." He softly sets the husk down and discovers it’s tarnished his outfit black where it'd touched with its sloughed flesh. "Augh, damn it..." he says, looking at his muck-crusted hands – not because of the filth, which would vanish in short order, but because he must have marred the body even further. There wasn't much left of it. The little kid didn't need him desecrating their remains on top of everything else.
Of course, there will be more bodies like this one down the line. Most likely, he would end up dirtying himself even more along the way. The Seraph picks himself up and bows slightly to the pair of policeman, politely thanks them for coming, and takes his leave, filtering for Harbinger auras and marching on with his patrol.
Soon enough, near the end of his flight over the city’s western edge, something horribly familiar tugs at him.
~~~
A half-junked car sails toward Mary, whirling in steady, rapid circles. She raises her rust-flaked box cutter and draws a line down its center, splitting it roughly in half in her mind, then slashes through the air, cutting the wreck into two uneven chunks without so much as a sound. Still the halves fly on, sailing past her, until she slashes to either side and cuts away the distance between them and the girl at the far end of the junkyard. Instantly warping through the air, the pieces crash back together, slamming into their target on either side with a satisfying screech of metal smashing against metal.
Erika steps cleanly out from the creaking wreckage like a ghost, totally unharmed. Even her outfit – a long, dark mantle, short black skirt, and a wrapping of pink and black ribbons around her legs and upper body, leaving her midriff exposed – is in perfect condition.
“Cheater!” Mary yells. “No phasing! What am I supposed to do about that?”
“Sure, sure, you win that round. Sorry I don’t wanna get squished.”
“You’d be fine.”
“Maybe! But this wouldn’t.” Erika raises a bottle, that fancy plum wine she likes, and takes a long swig.
“Good point. Gimme that.”
Erika strolls through the dump, pink ponytail swaying in the light breeze as she allows the world to affect her again, and holds the bottle out for Mary to snatch, dismiss her mask, and chug. It’s sweet and tart as fresh fruit, with only a faint burning nip beneath the taste. It always feels weird, moving so far up from the glorified piss she usually drinks out of habit. Weird, but not bad.
“Hey, betcha I can knock the mirror off that truck.” Mary hands the bottle off, hefts a piece of discarded rebar, and points it at a broken-down pickup.
“Sucker’s bet. Of course you can.”
“No magic. Just me and this guy.” Mary tosses the rebar up, catching it easily after one spin.
“Ooh, sure! Let’s see it!”
Mary squints, judging the distance, then takes a long, lunging step forward and hurls the bar at the truck like a javelin. It sails through the air, then crashes through the window just to the right of the mirror. Shattered glass tinkles against the metal interior.
“Well, shit! Shucks. Golly. Fuck. Shoot. Guess I lose.” She gives the ground a cheerful kick, glances back at Erika, and smirks. “I bet you can’t hit the mirror either.”
“Yeah, I probably can’t. So I’m gonna use magic. Just a little, though.” Erika plucks a chunk of rubble off the ground, taps one finger against it, then releases it, leaving it floating perfectly still in the air. Then she draws her arm back and gives it a big open-palmed shove. Free from gravity’s pull, the rock lashes through the air with impossible speed, sailing… about two feet past the mirror. It races a long way past its mark, lodging itself in the tire of a distant car farther down the line.
Erika blinks, deflating for an instant, before she shrugs and laughs at herself. “Oops. That’s embarrassing. I guess the truck is the real winner today.”
“Oh, no way are we gonna let it make us both look stupid!” Mary snatches the bottle and takes a long gulp, setting it down with a smile sharp as a knife.
Then she brandishes her box cutter and cuts the car away from the earth. The world twists, fixing it a hundred feet up in the air in a jaunt of non-motion.
“That’s better! Now smash it!”
A grin of pure, wild joy spreads across Erika’s face as she sails into the sky. There’s no motion, no force carrying her – she just soars up and up without so much as a breeze in her wake. She passes the car and keeps rising, then twirls upside-down in midair and brings herself slamming into it, open palms first. Mary backs up reflexively, feeling her hold on the hunk of metal break as it hurtles downward like a falling star, slamming into the rocky ground with an earth-shaking scream. When the dust settles, what remains of the car sits half-buried in a crater matching its shapes, smoking and practically flattened. Erika touches down on top of the wreckage, then jumps off and bows to an invisible audience.
“Fuck yeah!” Mary cackles. “That’s what we like to see!”
“How was that different from just letting it fall?” Erika asks. She’s smiling even wider, though.
“Teamwork,” Mary says. “Duh. Also we got a way cooler crash like this.”
Erika squints, inspecting the smoking hole in the ground, then nods. “Yeah, good point. Here, lemme clean it up. Don’t want to give the recycling folks too hard a time.” She grips the totaled car by one edge and raises it overhead like an inflatable toy – nah, that’s no fair to the toy. It would fight back at least a little. It wouldn’t move at her gentlest touch, or float in midair when her hands left it in place, and it really wouldn’t fly off into the sky with a single solid push from a teenage girl, disappearing into a tiny dark speck set against the Sun.
“Got you another present, big guy! Enjoy!” Erika yells.
The Sun doesn’t answer.
“Nothing to say for yourself, huh? Coward,” Mary laughs, even as she shields her eyes with one arm. “Hey, you’ve gotta go soon, right? Want to get lunch first?”
Erika looks up and cups her chin, miming deeper thought than Mary thinks she puts into anything. That girl is a leaf on the wind, carried wherever she goes by her whims.
“Can’t,” she says. “I’d love to, but I’m on a special diet.”
“Huh? Since when?”
“Yeah, haven’t I mentioned? I’m exclusively eating girls.”
Mary snorts out a giggle. “Fuck you.”
Erika shoots her a wink. “Anytime. But no, you know how it is. Captain’ll get whiny if I keep everyone waiting.”
“Why do you put up with that, anyway? The whole point of all this is to do whatever you want.”
“Yeah! And sometimes, what I want is to be anywhere but here. You’re always welcome to tag along! They’ll pay you to come.”
“When was the last time anything bad happened up there?”
“Four trips ago.”
“Then nah. Maybe next time. Today I wanna find something gross and cut it to pieces. Plus, like, if something did happen, you’ve seen me try to fly.”
She can teleport, sure. With a little more effort, she can fix her distance from the ground. Trying to actually travel like that is an awkward mess, and she can’t move without tearing through the air with her box cutter, leaving her weapon hand tied up in just trying to get around. Nothing like what Erika can do without even trying.
“Yeah, fair. Good luck with that, then!” Erika fires off a sloppy salute. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” She darts forward, kisses Mary on the cheek, then whirls around and, taking off with a little hop, soars away toward the airship tower in the Fields.
Mary waves her off, then – oh hey, look at that, she forgot her wine. She grins, downs the rest of the bottle in one long gulp, and tosses it into the wreckage.
~~~
Mary’s magic senses are nothing special, but their range is great, and what she lacks in clarity she makes up for with speed. When she goes on the prowl, she jumps across the city through her holes in the world, a mile or two at a time, scans for a few seconds, then moves on if nothing turns up. Maybe she’s missing some small fry this way, but it works well enough for her.
Today, it only takes a few minutes of jumping around to find something. A big one, too, by the feel of it, lurking in the woods at the city’s edge. She carves a tiny portal in its direction, not a gate but an eyehole just big enough for her to peek through.
On the other side, there’s a gaping black hole in the world, just like the one left behind where Shona died. Above it, there’s a vaguely human-shaped creature cloaked in – or maybe just made of – tattered rags. Split-headed worms crawl around under its heavy hood, and the cloth is filthy with mold.
And it’s tied in place, flailing against a spiderweb of shadows. In an uneven circle around the pit, there's a woman in a weird white mask and a shapeless masked ghost, each with dark strings trailing back into their shadows. A living statue of a too-long, too-thin person stands guard next to the ghost, and a girl who'd look normal if it weren't for the two stretched-out stone puppets at her side stands back from the circle, just watching.
Huh. Of course Harbingers fight each other, but she’s never actually ran into them doing it, and it’s weird to see them out in the open like this. What happens if she jumps in? Can she mess things up between them, get in a good backstab, or will she just set the moldy thing free and turn them both against her? Do Harbingers see themselves as on a team against Keepers? Who the fuck knows what they think?
“Yo!”
Mary yelps as a voice startles her out of her thoughts. Shit. Someone’s already here.
That wouldn’t be a big problem if it was anyone but Roland.
She pulls back from her portal, and the squirt greets her with a wave, cheery as ever. Just hearing his crisp, too-composed voice makes her want to slam her fist through his visor.
“Oh, sure. Great to see you too, traitor,” she says. “The fuck were you doing in the sky just now, anyway? Showing off?”
The red light from Roland’s visor shifts slightly, as if he’s narrowing his eyes. “Guess we're doing this again.” The fake friendliness vanishes from his voice in an instant. “Could you do me a favor and not try to drag me down into your pit just because you weren't strong enough to climb out of it on your own? Would be great.”
“No one climbs out of that place, fuckstick. Some rich assholes pulled Irida up on a rope, and you just pissed off and got lucky. Then you abandoned us.”
“Better that than being so hung up on the past I go and do what you did.”
Mary lunges at Roland, crossing the distance to bear down on him in a single space-twisting step. Roland only folds his arms and glares up at her. What gives him the right to go there? Who does he think he is, acting like he even gives a shit about some dead guy? She should kick his ass into the Sun, but… no, she can’t lose her cool here. Not unless she’s sure she’d win.
“I held back. They’re lucky I didn’t kill them all,” Mary snarls.
“Cass was a kid there. Did you know that?”
It’s clear from his cold, steady voice that he doesn’t even care. Why would anyone? He’s just trying to score points in some stupid mind game.
“Yeah, I did. What about it? That just means he really should’ve known better. Bet he was a piece of trash before he aged out, too.”
For a beat, Roland just stares at her. From behind her mask, she meets the glare she imagines under his dumb shiny helmet.
“We don't have time for this,” he finally says with a sigh, breaking the staring contest to look off toward the Harbingers in the distance. “I called for backup before you got here. From the way this looks, I’d suggest we wait for them. Groups like this are pretty touchy, and I don’t know how much you keep up on Lighthouse, but these two are both known issues.”
Yeah, that’s right. That’s the way to handle little shits like him. She just needs to remind him that she’s the bigger dog. “Works for me,” she says, and goes back to peeking through her hole. At least for now, the Harbingers seem to be at a standoff, the moldy thing twisting hard enough in its restraints that the ghost and its cult are all focused on keeping it pinned.
“Hey! Glad you could make it!” Roland calls a few minutes later, once again sounding as fake as ever.
Mary looks away from her peephole to inspect his backup. Truth’s Lantern bikes up to them, already transformed. Riding along with her is that shrimpy white-haired plague girl, who pulls a cane out of nowhere and carefully steps off.
Could be a lot worse. He could’ve been trying to buddy up with Irida again.
“Cool. Are we waiting for anyone else?” Mary asks.
“Only if Roland or Liadain think we need more,” Aisling says. “How’s it feeling so far? It is them, right?” she asks Plague Girl.
“Yes. I could have told you Syancauri was here a few blocks ago,” Plague Girl – Liadain? whatever – says. “As for the other, I’m not sure. It smells the same, but I’ve never had a good sense of exactly how big it is, and that was… before Shona.”
“Got a plan, then?” Roland asks. “Is there a priority target? We could split our focus and try to hold them both down, but that’s…”
Mary flinches at the sudden ghost-feeling of something massive looming over her – like a ring of mountains rising from the earth to surround her, then opening too many jagged eyes to count, all staring straight at her. In the same instant, Roland spreads his light-wings and takes off, soaring in a wide circle overhead, while Liadain staggers, loses her grip on her cane, and falls to her knees, barely holding herself off the ground. She looks like she’s trying to scream, but only a high, weak whimper comes out.
“It’s gone. It’s still here. It’s everywhere,” she mutters, just before the sounds of crashing and screaming fill the city.
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