zg_shadows | We built this city...

on broken bones.

Bones and blood everywhere. The mud that the ground was made of is mostly soup made of dirt and fresh water and salt water and blood and ichor and entrails-become-extrails.

Barely enough; the last bodies begged and bargained for. Thirteen of us who managed to hold a chorus and something that looked like a cross between lace-making and rope dancing all around a flickering brazier (can't get a decent bonfire here; the ground's too wet) for eight hours.

And in the background, the shock troops I bullied and twisted and pressured to come were killing.

I saw Leslie Penhaligon looking about as superior as you can while you're sailing a boat made of lots of sharks around a freshwater inlet and over a couple of squid monsters big enough to have swamped the island. I saw RUSS beating one up with a rolled-up newspaper, I swear.

There were ranks of marines porting down and laying down a crossfire over the battlefield, not caring who they hit, and Welham managed to make the earth swallow up a few platoons of them before they got in range.

The Garou were there - the Irish guy fought things that looked like fomori with spears, and I swear I spent three hours singing and unweaving as MSR battled one lone BSD. No one else dared interrupt them.

The bird flying above us (I think it was the woman the mummies call 'Rissa) was exorcising all the fomori in the area, and turning the spirits into armour plating, it looked like, while Mirella (who's got butterfly wings now, and doesn't smell like a demon any more...) was pulling out the defenders' bodies when they were too broken to take it any more.

There were three magi who'd just walked into the city that I bullied into coming along, and someone else I didn't know - I need to thank him; he might have been a ghost... I don't know how they managed to survive and conquer(too much the glow of the fire in my eyes, too much prowling around the circle to sing with each of the people there - Tolly was trying not to laugh at some of the keys we were missing, Zach giving me a beat to catch the heart of the world).

And Marcus behind me. Never thought I'd be able to ignore him standing at my back, crinos-bear with claws out, staring at the ritual and the battle like he was hungry; but he stood, and when the cavalry started shooting, he stepped forward into the laser fire.

I know I've seen the cavalry before, but I don't know his name. I do know that without Leslie, he'd have killed every deviant in the fens. Without someone breaking him down; without someone taking the shots every time so we could focus on opening the Gauntlet...

***
It opened. I felt it, as I fed the plaited rope into the fire and caught everyone for a second singing, screaming, howling the same note for a perfect, infinite second.

I heard the dog answer when Scythe's ally danced the island into the dawn.

***
There's a hall here, under water and under some bastard ex-Mummy's protection - and ownership.

He lied. He lied a lot. And now we need to talk; while I go on with stage 1.5 (what should have happened, but didn't) and fix the worlds around me.

***
Reality isn't my friend right now. I'm fragile and bloated and in danger of destroying everything I touch. But there are more important things than whether or not I Storm myself into a Paradox Realm.

We need to free what Gabriel stole from us. We need to give it to Flux.

And I think I might have an idea about how.