Katalepsis V: "No Nook of English Ground" (part four)

Beginning with 5.5, and seeing how far we get!

5.5​

Life continues to confront me with difficult questions, over and over. Did I ever really have a twin sister? Do I have the courage and strength to rescue her? Am I willing to love a sociopath? Is magic real, or am I just insane?

Yes, yes, untested, yes and also maybe.

Sitting on a cold stone bench before a wizard's grave, sheltered by the skeletal winter trees, Evelyn needed answers to a question I couldn't even begin to unpack.

Why did she still feel guilty for killing her own mother?

Doubtless she didn't expect a real answer from me, but the weariness on her face wrenched at my heart. She was groping for a handhold, from the bottom of a very deep pit. She'd been doing so for years. I struggled to summon the right words; it wasn't your fault, you had no choice, she forced your hand. She crippled you, she was going to kill you. She was evil.

Evelyn didn't need to hear any of that. Raine had probably said those exact words to her a hundred times before.

I hesitated, my lips half-forming the first word of a dozen different sentences. I'd tried to play therapist and waded far out of my depth. Great job, Heather. Some friend I am.

Really, best answer to her question is "Because she's your mother, and there's not much you can do about those feelings besides acknowledging that they are not rational but also a sign that you're not as fucked in the head as she was."

Or, alternatively, "skill issue."

Evelyn turned away with a little shake of her head. "Never mind," she murmured. "You don't need this."

"But you do, Evee. It's always okay to ask for help."

"Doesn't make much difference." She shrugged. "Not a day goes by I don't think about this, at least a bit. If I can't figure myself out, how could you? It's unfair of me to ask."

I think this is the kind of thing that's much easier with an outside perspective, actually.

Anyway, I provided my answer. Let's see what Heather's ends up being.

I felt her slipping away, slipping back into performative grumpiness and the comfort of her barbed tongue. Any moment she'd change the subject, wave a hand at her mother's grave with a bitter comment, smother the pain under sullen aggression. I had to buy time.

Luckily, my hand was still on her back; so I did the first thing that came to mind.

"Regardless," she huffed. "At least the old bitch-"

"W-wait, Evee, don't- don't say anything." I held up a finger. "Just- just stay perfectly still, don't move, stay right there."

"Heather?" She frowned hard, looked me up and down briefly. "What are you going on about?"

"Just, just stay. Stay sitting." I hopped to my feet and stepped behind the bench, behind Evelyn, shivering a little in the corona of cold air. She peered at me like I'd gone mad. "Please, you can face forward, how you were. It's okay, I'm not going to do anything weird."

"What are you going to do?"

"I … I'm going to touch your shoulders. Please Evee, you trust me, don't you?"

" … that I do." She didn't sound very certain, but she did face forward once more. Perhaps I'd piqued her curiosity.

The next step required no small amount of courage. Evelyn was not a touchy-feely sort of person. Hugs did not come easily to her, and her body was a litany of aches and pains, old injuries, bone problems and joint issues, before one even considered her prosthetic right leg or the missing fingers on her mangled left hand. But I was committed now, I had to see this through.

Gentle but firm, so she knew what I was doing, no surprises – I wrapped my fingers around Evelyn's shoulders. Beneath the thick grey jumper I could feel her muscles tight with permanent tension. I tried to recall the basics of Raine's technique. I had to get this at least partially correct or it would be pointless, and I didn't possess anything near Raine's grip strength.

"And?" Evelyn asked. "Is that it? What happens n-"

I pressed down hard with both thumbs and squeezed with my fingers.

"Ahh!" Evelyn winced open-mouthed.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" My hands flew to my mouth, mortified. Idiot. I hiccuped. "Evee, I'm so sorry, I wanted to-"

"Don't stop now," she snapped. "Get on with it."

Heh. There were a bunch of different directions I thought this was going in, in quick succession. Massage is not the worst it could have ended up being, I suppose.

"Oh … um, okay. Right." Hiccup. "Right then. I'll just start with … okay."

My hands fluttered as I hesitated, as I touched my fingers back to the thin muscles in Evelyn's shoulders. I pressed down hard, put my back into it. She grunted. This time I didn't stop.

We took several minutes to find a comfortable rhythm. Evelyn growled and hissed, grumbling under her breath as I dug in with my thumbs, telling me "left a bit", "down, no, further down", or "press harder" when my grip slackened. Her shoulders were terribly knotted with old strain, bunched and uncomfortable. Her habitual slouch probably didn't help.

Eventually she stopped wincing and grunting, and I felt the stress drain from her body inch by slow inch. She sighed deeply, sagged on the bench, and moved her walking stick off her lap to support her weight. Working my hands and arms chased away the worst of the chill air, or perhaps it was just proximity to Evelyn. Skinship does wonders for homoeostasis.

It occurs to me that with Evelyn's old injuries and pains might make massaging her without hurting her difficult. However, if you can do it right, it probably goes a lot for her at least temporarily. Honestly, getting regular, professional massage would probably be a good lifestyle choice for Evelyn.

Now, does Heather actually know what she's doing here? I don't see where she'd have gotten practice, barring the King In Yellow deciding to torrent it into her brain for some reason.

I'd bought time, now I needed to wheel the big guns into position. I wet my lips, weighed my options, and did the only thing I was certain of: I talked about myself.

hahahahaha what a cheap fakeout lol

"It's not on the same scale," I began quietly. "But I didn't feel any special relief or sense of justice after I killed Alexander."

Evelyn was silent, so I carried on.

"In the moment I won, I was satisfied, yes, I think so, in a brute sort of a way. But afterward? I still suffer all the same anxieties, still feel the same way about myself. He was a monster, he kept people in cages and fed their minds to his Outsider. The world is a better place with him gone, certainly, and I did what I did to protect myself and my friends, all of you. We defeated an evil wizard in his magical castle, put his monstrous minions to flight, and freed his captive. Aren't I supposed to feel victorious? What did I prove, in the end?"

To the first: yup!

To the second: nothing, you were fighting to protect yourself and your friends, not to make a philosophical point. You did incidentally prove that your dick is much bigger than Alexander's, but that wasn't the point and also really not an impressive achievement.

As I spoke, a weight lifted inside my chest. I hadn't realised it was there. I'd bottled this up for weeks, barely expressed a word of it to Raine, couldn't make sense of it to myself. It didn't hurt, not like Evelyn did, but I did struggle to keep a catch out of my voice. This wasn't for me, this was for her.

"Proved him wrong," Evelyn murmured.

"Exactly. So why do I feel this way?" I asked. "I don't feel big or strong, I certainly don't feel like a hero. All I did was commit murder. A necessary murder, perhaps, but I still made the decision to kill a person, clear headed, not in the heat of the moment. And I don't feel any different. I'm still me. That was me, all along." I had to take a deep breath. "I'm still terrified of ending up … other, different, that the brainmath will make me inhuman. All I proved in the end is that I had the strength to kill him, that's all. It's self-referential."

Evelyn nodded slowly. "I know. I know exactly what you mean."

I let out a controlled sigh and resumed rubbing Evelyn's shoulders, simply to occupy my hands.

"It was important," Evelyn muttered after a moment. "To me. That you were there. In that castle. You, Raine. Fuck it, even Twil, I guess. Even that thing," she gestured at Praem with a sideways nod. "I didn't have to do it alone. Thank you, for that."

"That's what friends are for." I tried to sound bright. "Or so I'm told."

"I'm … " Evelyn cleared her throat. "I'm learning that too, yes."

On one hand, Heather has been undergoing some striking personality changes in a short period of time that have been making me wonder the same thing.

On the other hand, an otherwise nonviolent person killing someone in a kill-or-be-killed situation is not something that requires a supernatural explanation. No personality shifts needed there, that's just someone being put in a desperate situation and acting on desperation.

The way she was tactical about it, saving her brain blast for when she had a clear shot and letting Zheng bring her into place for one, though? That aspect might be down to some personal evolution. Either natural growth from adventuring alongside someone like Raine for a little while, or something more insidious.

"I very much doubt I would have been friends with your mother, Evee. Goodness, it's no wonder you worry about ending up like her, she tried to take over your mind. You're not her. You'll never be like her."

"Mm."

We were deep in the core of it now, the most dangerous part, and I had to push on. "Killing one's own mother, even in self-defence, is going to mess anyone up. Let's forget for a moment that we're all neck-deep in supernatural doodads, that she was a monster, a magician, all of that. Boil it down to the fundamentals: you had to kill your own mum. You had to. Even without everything else, without the magic, without all the other stuff she did to you, that's a choice she inflicted on you. Of course you're going to be wounded by that. Anybody would be."

Evelyn frowned. "I suppose so."

More or less the same, just phrased a bit more diplomatically.

We slipped into silence. I focused on rubbing her back, kneading out the deeper knots.

"Serves you right," she mumbled.

"Evee?"

"Mm, pardon." She cleared her throat and straightened up, nodding at her mother's grave. "That was directed at her. She's sludge in a box, and I'm getting a shoulder rub."

This scene really loves throwing the reader off before correcting them the next paragraph, heh.

"You're very welcome. I think you rather needed it."

Evelyn sighed. "Never used to like it from Raine. She gave up trying years ago."

"You do tend to get the claws out for her."

"She deserves it."

"So, you're saying I give better back rubs than her?"

"I'm saying I'm … oh I don't know. More comfortable with you, I guess."

"Should I take that as a compliment? I think I shall."

Evelyn grunted, still staring at the grave. She hesitated over a word, opening her mouth before thinking better of it and lapsing back into silence. I squeezed her shoulders harder, enough to draw a wince from her gritted teeth.

"Uunh."

"I-I'm sorry." I blushed. "I don't know why I did that, I'm getting carried away."

"Then you should get carried away more often." Evelyn twisted her back to one side, producing a trio of pops from her spine. She let out a throaty grumble. "I want to tell you how it happened."

"How … how what happened?" I hedged my bets, though I could guess.

"Don't be obtuse, Heather, it doesn't suit you. How I killed my mother, what else?" She spoke in a very matter-of-fact way, like we were discussing the weather. "I've never told anybody. No point telling Raine, she was right there when it happened, all the way through the whole bloody business."

Oooh, storytime!

There was a half second there when I thought she was going to tell the story about the time Raine tried to massage her, but I'm pretty sure that this time it was 100% on me.

"Okay then." I swallowed, steeled myself. "I'll try not to be squeamish."

"Not much to be squeamish about. I stopped her heart." Evelyn made a squeezing gesture with her left hand – her maimed hand, the one with the missing fingers. "That was the end of it, the final move, checkmate. We'd be out here all day if I told you the entire story, but that was the end. It's not easy, forcing cardiac arrest, not something I could pull off these days, not against another mage. I was … different, then. I had help, of a kind."

What on earth does one say to that? "Wow," I breathed, then flustered and hurried to correct myself. "I-I mean-"

"Wow is right. It's okay, Heather."

I swallowed. "Okay. You had … help?"

Evelyn shrugged. She was absently tapping her artificial leg, right where the stump ended and prosthetic began. "It's complicated. Raine, in part. It was messy, you have to understand that, not a clean dramatic confrontation. It wasn't like I declared my intention and challenged her to a duel. We were planning to kill her, but we didn't chose the moment, or the day. It just happened. Raine's always insisted we bear joint culpability. Nonsense." Evelyn sighed and shook her head. "She was too busy keeping the zombies off me. The real ones. She never put a scratch on my mother, not in a way that mattered, though I do distinctly recall Raine attempting to brain her with a log at one point, but that can't be right, there was no fireplace in that room."

There are those other wizards that Evelyn reluctantly called on the phone, back when they were trying to figure out how to deal with New Sun. Are these the ones who helped her, back then?

Wonder where Raine got that log lol.

"Sounds like Raine to me," I added, feeling far too flippant for this subject.

"Yes, quite." Evelyn sucked on her teeth. "Always the enthusiast for a bit of fisticuffs."

"Are magicians always so hard to kill?" I asked. "Alexander didn't seem bothered by a bullet, but … and I mean this in a very good way, Evee, but you don't seem as robust as that."

"Good," she grunted. "What's the first thing a ruthless person does with power? Hm? Protect themselves, that's what, but if you want to be invulnerable, you have to make sacrifices. Leave certain things behind." She let out a sudden, sharp sigh. "Ahh, Heather, I can't say I haven't been tempted, sometimes. If it wasn't for Raine, or … for you, maybe I would have given up on being human, just to feel a little safer."

I squeezed her shoulders. "I for one am glad you didn't."

Some kind of moral sacrifice is involved. Which probably means a human sacrifice, or something to that effect.

I wonder why that would be? Something about stealing vitality from other people to make yourself harder to kill, perhaps?

We've gotten our first glimpse at what Evelyn might have meant when she said that advancing the state of magical practice requires atrocities. Assuming that "stealing data from aliens at the cost of the intermediary's brain and body" a la New Sun's methodology is in fact the way this is usually done.

At the same time though, we do know that there are other methods, and that those other methods in fact produce much more impressive results. It's just that "befriend the aliens and hope they choose to gift you with the knowledge in question" isn't reliable or repeatable in the same way, and also doesn't favor the type of person who actively goes looking for power.

So, whatever the process for making yourself bulletproof is, I suspect there are similar dynamics in play.

She nodded, sniffed. "My mother wasn't like Alexander, not exactly, but she did have ways of defending herself. She couldn't have survived a bullet through the chest though. God, that would have been so much easier. So, yes. I stopped my mother's heart, and I had a hundred good reasons to do it. I was right, and I saved myself. But I still feel guilty."

"It's okay to feel that way. And to talk about it."

Evelyn grunted. This wasn't something one simply 'got over', I couldn't 'solve' it for her, to presume so would be awful. She'd carry this for ever, but at least I could be here for her. At least she knew I understood.

As we'd spoken, I'd spotted furtive movement on the far side of the graveyard, in the undergrowth between the trees. Slowly, as I'd been concentrating on Evelyn, a black nose and sleek russet snout eased out from beneath the ferns. A cautious, skittish fox emerged into the cold sunlight, raising his head and looking about.

"Evee, do you see that fox over there?"

"Yes, yes, I see it too. It's just a fox, not whatever you saw last night."

I glanced over my shoulder, to where Praem still stood at attention with her hands clasped. "Praem? Do you see it too?"

"Fox," she intoned.

The fox caught wind of us, or perhaps Praem's voice carried a little too well between the gravestones. His head jerked in our direction, yellow eyes flashing in the sunlight, and then he scurried away, hindquarters vanishing into the undergrowth with a swish of his tail.

Either there are multiple foxes, or it's not pneuma-somatic.

Or...it can shift in and out of the ethereal and into realspace? I recall that the mutilated necrodrones that New Sun uses had that ability, or were at least implied to have it.

If so, then - weirdly - this is a case where Heather might be less perceptive than normal people. Someone else could tell the fox was appearing and disappearing, but Heather sees no change.

"The wall's always been full of holes and gaps," Evelyn said. "All sorts of things get in and out."

Has she already forgotten about the time it phased through the walls of the house?

Maybe she assumes it's a different fox. Still seems uncharacteristically dull for Evelyn, though.

She rolled her shoulders with a grimace. "Thank you, Heather. You can stop now. I feel … " She waved a hand. "Buttery."

"Buttery?"

"Soft. Oh, I don't know. I'm no good at this. Sit down, will you?"

Evelyn wants her buns buttered, eh? eh? eh?

For serious now, though, that's actually a really good adjective to describe post-massage muscle limpness.

I almost giggled as I slipped back onto the bench next to her, despite or perhaps because of the weight of our conversation, the release of tension in my gut. Evelyn blinked at the grave one last time, then finally lifted her eyes to the sky. I felt closer to her now than I ever had.

Close enough to ask the question that had lingered on my mind, during the unquiet night of tossing and turning.

"Evee, yesterday, in the car, you said something that got me thinking."

"Hm?"

"You said you weren't very happy with Raine or I – which makes perfect sense, considering where we've dragged you."

"We've been over this. You didn't drag me."

"Be that as it may," I tried to stay on topic. Despite the strange bonding session we'd just shared, I felt I was verging on unsafe ground, but I had to clear the air. "I've been really selfish the last couple of weeks, completely wrapped up in myself. When I thought about it, about why you might be angry at me, I realised you've barely been talking to me lately, and some of the things you've said-"

Evelyn cleared her throat and turned her face away from me. "Heather, it's not your fault, it's nothing you've done."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Yes! Yes."

"Evee, you're the last person to pull your punches, but I still get the impression I've angered you in some way." I made an effort to keep my voice steady, to hold onto my courage. "You can tell me. I promise."

Evelyn directed a tight frown at me, her lips pressed together. I did my best not to falter.

"I'm serious," I said.

"Surely you've figured out by now I'm an extremely difficult person? You really want to open this can of worms?"

"Of course I know that." I couldn't help but smile a little. "And I'm still serious."

Evelyn let out a long sigh. She looked off at the lake in the distance, and spoke haltingly, as if selecting each word with great care. "You're the first real friend I've ever made."

"Raine doesn't count?"

"I don't know." Evelyn shrugged. "You tell me, does she?"

"I like to think so."

"We met under rather different circumstances, and she's always been … Raine." Evelyn gave me a sidelong look.

"Yes. She is. Very."

Huuuuuh.

I guess it depends on how narrowly you define "friendship?" I think she definitely qualifies. Like, with interest. But again, maybe Evelyn is just meaning a more specific type of relationship when she says friendship.

"You're my first real friend. I think. And then your mysterious bloody dream pixie comes along and … "

Evelyn threw up both hands and huffed in frustration. I blinked at her, and incredibly enough she began to blush, shooting me a mortified sidelong glance before averting her face, hiding her eyes behind her hand.

"Evee … you're saying … you're jealous? Of Lozzie?"

Huhhhhhhh.

Yeah, I did not see that one coming.

Really thought she just resented Lozzie because she's from a rival mage clan and that's all. But then, given how she seems to have forgiven Twil for that, even after much more hostile interactions, I probably should have been able to infer that it wasn't just that.

Evelyn shrugged, still hiding. "I don't bloody well know. All right? I rather took your words to heart, all that stuff you said weeks back about not keeping things from you. Well. Here it is. I'm impossible, I know. It's unhealthy, but I can't help it." I was about to reply, to tell her it was okay, when suddenly she emerged from behind her hand and launched off again, flushed in the face and embarrassed to her core but still strong-voiced. "Why did she get to waltz into your life, monopolise your time? Raine, I understand; you sleep with her and I want no part of that, but unless I've utterly misread you I'm pretty certain you weren't going wrist-deep in your Lozzie."

"Um, wow." I felt a blush creeping up my cheeks too. "You're right, no, I didn't do, um, that."

"Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we rescued her. She looked like a wreck. Perfect case for Raine. But … " Evelyn sighed sharply and threw up her hands again.

"Evee."

"I know, I'm a bitter, twisted weirdo. Evelyn Saye, turbo-bitch. Of course you can have other friends. I have no idea why I feel this way."

"Evee, don't talk about yourself like that." A smile tugged at the corners of my lips. Evelyn looked away again, so I got to my feet and stood up in front of her, tucking my hands into my hoodie to keep the cold at bay. "I don't exactly have a lot of experience at this friend stuff either."

I'm starting to think that Evelyn does in fact want in on the wrist-deep action.

Or...actually, I think she might be one of those homoromantic ace types. She wants a girlfriend rather than just a friend, she just isn't all that about sex.

"More than I do," she grunted. I saw she was about to retreat behind her hand again.

"Why don't we watch some of your anime magical girl shows together?" I asked.

That earned me her attention, an incredulous frown; gave me guts, for once.

"'I'll punish you in the name of the moon.'" I said. "All that stuff?"

Evelyn squinted at me like I'd gone completely off my rocker. Perhaps I had. "That's from Sailor Moon. I don't even like that show. And you don't even watch anime. What does this have to do with anything?"

"Then introduce me to it. We can do regular, normal friend things together, Evee. I'd enjoy that, I really would. Not everything has to be life-or-death magical shenanigans all the time."

"I-" Evelyn came up short, frowning to herself. "I guess I can think of a few you might like. Something with lesbian romance in it. I suppose."

Yeah, definitely avoid Sailor Moon then. No lesbian romance in that one, just cousins.

"Good. I'll look forward to it."

Evelyn shook her head, still mired in disbelief.

"While we're on embarrassing personal subjects, I'm going to take a huge risk," I said, plunging ahead before I had time to stop and rethink. If I planned this out I'd never ask. My heart thudded against my chest and my mouth went dry. This was absolutely going to get me shouted at, but I doubted I'd get another good opportunity, perhaps ever. "This question might make you angry, Evee, but considering what you've said, I think I need to ask it, because you deserve some good things in life."

" … I'm not going to like where this is going, am I?"

"Are you attracted to Twil?"

She blinked. "What? No."

"Because, the way you act around her-"

"No. Nullum. Twil? Have you lost your senses?"

Heather: "Well, I mean, *I'm* attracted to Twil."

Evelyn: "You're also attracted to my house."

Heather: "HAVE YOU SEEN HOW IT DRESSES?"

I faltered, babbling to explain myself as my cheeks flushed. Oh dammit, I'd gotten this wrong. "M-maybe I've been misreading the situation, but it's in the way you treat her. I admit, I'm … incredibly gay, so maybe I'm reading a meaning into your actions which isn't there, maybe you like men and that's fine and maybe we need to get you a boyfriend instead, but I can't help-"

"Do you really call Raine 'mommy'?"

"No! Oh God, that joke in the car. No. No … once." I blushed beet-red. Felt like steam was coming out of my ears. "It was really weird and I doubt I'd ever do it again. Not my thing."

Evelyn merely raised an eyebrow.

"Mommy," Praem intoned.

Lol of course.

Praem trollage aside, didn't Raine say that she and Evelyn kind of dated for a time? I could have sworn she said that.

Also, why the hell did she design Praem that way if not for the obvious reasons?

Speaking of...

"Don't you start on that too," I said to her. "You've hardly got room to talk, you're wearing a maid uniform."

Perhaps it was my flustered imagination, but I swore I saw a hint of amusement on the doll-demon's face.

"Yeah, but I'm doing it to traumatize Evelyn, that's different."

"Fascinating," Evelyn muttered.

"S-stop deflecting, Evelyn. I know what you're doing. Is that really your answer? I'm wrong, you don't like Twil in that way, at all? Look, I-I'm sorry for asking, but I had to know."

I saw the barbed joke gather on her tongue – but at the last second Evelyn stopped, the ghost of a frown creasing her forehead. "Twil hasn't been playing silly buggers with you, has she? Made a stupid joke along these lines? Is that what brought this on?"

I shook my head. "No. Nothing."

Evelyn watched my face intently. "You're sure?"

"Quite certain." I declined to share my impressions of Twil's private feelings. "Would it make any difference if she did like you?"

"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know any of this. Will you take that for an answer?"

"You mean, you don't know if you're attracted to Twil, or you don't know what you're attracted to in general?"

"It's not a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about." She sounded deeply unimpressed.

I was about to apologise, withdraw the subject, allow Evelyn her privacy – we were close friends, but maybe this was difficult for her. Not everybody felt such clarity about their sexuality as I did. Perhaps she was asexual, and perhaps that was none of my business.

Before I could say anything, Evelyn suddenly let out a huge sigh. She attempted to rally her forces once more, but then gave up and spread one hand in the ultimate lazy shrug. "I don't know, Heather. I don't know if I'm … " She grumbled in her throat, covering awkward embarrassment. "If I'm into girls, like you are. It's not as if I think about cunts all the time. But I have looked at those," she made a wide gesture at Praem, and I assumed she was talking about the demon's impressive chest. "Men … I don't know. I don't even know if I have a functioning sexuality. At all. Half my body doesn't work, my brain's a mess. My mother broke more than even I understand. Fuck it, do you seriously want to hear all this?"

Yeah, Evelyn's sexuality pretty much has to be more complicated than "absent." Even if I was just imagining the thing about her and Raine having been that way, she just out and out admitted that she shaped Praem to her aesthetic.

"If you want to share, absolutely. We're best friends, Evee. If we can't talk about this then who can we talk about it with? If we can discuss murder and dead mages then I'm pretty sure I'm comfortable talking about what gets you off. Or, what doesn't. I'm not going to judge you."

"Of course you won't, don't be stupid, I'm not worried about that." She huffed, then put her weight on her walking stick and held out a hand. "Help me up, my false leg's gone numb."

I gave her my hand. In the corner of my eye I saw Praem twitch, as if she wanted to help instead. Evelyn levered herself off the cold stone bench and brushed off the backside of her long skirt. "Was that meant to be a joke?" I asked.

"Sort of." She shared a grim smile. "I think it's time I showed you something."

I stared at her. "Not a … not a porn collection?"

"What?"

"I-it's what we were talking about! I assumed … ahhh."

Evelyn snorted with laughter. "No. But keep that lightness of spirit, Heather. It makes you wonder-… " She cleared her throat. "It's good. We'll need that where we're going."

LMAO.

I asked a silent question with my eyebrows. Evelyn nodded through the sheltering trees, toward the bulk of the mansion towering over the landscape, the roof still visible even from this woodland grotto. "Raine already knows all this, she was here. She's seen it all. You're weren't, you don't understand. But you're right, you're my best friend, and I want you to … " She shrugged. "Whatever. It's time I showed you what my mother used me for."

There was no good answer to that except to follow her.

As we left the graveyard behind, Evelyn did not glance back at her mother's grave, but I looked over my shoulder to check Praem was following.

She was not. She was locked in a staring contest with a little russet snout that poked from the undergrowth on the far side of the graveyard. Yellow eyes glowed back at her. How bold. I suppose it had little to fear from people, out here.

"Praem." Evelyn clicked her fingers. "Stop dawdling."

The doll-demon turned away, shoes clicking to catch up. The fox slipped back into the wild.

I put the animal from my mind; just a fox.

"Could this possibly be the work of an enemy stand?"

I'm starting to think that the "fox" is putting some kind of mind-whammy on them. Making them not think about it as much as they should.

Back inside, shrouded once more in the oppressive shadows of the mansion's heavy beams and solid brick, Evelyn led the way down the kinking spinal corridor. The heavy carpet soaked up the sound of our footsteps and muffled Praem's escorting tread. Somewhere off in the depths of the house I could hear the pipes gurgling, a boiler running; perhaps Raine was taking a shower after her exercise. We passed by the kitchen, Lewis happily clanging pans around inside, humming to himself as he worked on tonight's dinner.

The locked door to the mothballed east wing didn't look particularly special, no different to any other door in the house. Solid, stout, dark wood. A little dust had gathered on the handle.

Evelyn produced the key she'd browbeaten out of her father, and fitted it into the lock. My throat and my guts both tightened.

If she ends up taking Heather to look at the mapping device after that segue I'm going to be really confused. Both at why Heather hasn't been pressing her about this until now, and why asking about her sexuality of all things was what led her to do it.

I forced myself to take a deep breath. Evelyn wanted to show me her past, she needed me to understand. I had to focus past my natural anxiety. There was nothing to be afraid of here, this place was dead and done. Besides, we had Praem with us. Only Raine made a more effective bodyguard.

Evelyn frowned sideways at me. "We're not even down there yet."

"I'm okay. I'm fine." I smiled, a little embarrassed. "Please do lead on, Evee."

She did. She pushed the door wide, left it open and unlocked as we ventured beyond. For some reason that reassured me.

The mothballed wing was saturated in darkness, far denser than the rest of the house. All the curtains in the corridor were shut tight, some of them double-layered, all covered in dust. What sort of prying eyes did they hope to keep at bay, out here in the back of beyond, in the woods? Evelyn found a light switch, apparently from memory. Nothing happened when she clicked it up and down.

"Tch. He's removed the bloody light bulbs," she grunted. "Idiot."

"Is it safe to open a curtain?"

"Eh? Why wouldn't it be?" Evelyn used the tip of her walking stick to sweep one of the heavy curtains aside. Dust billowed into the air. Weak winter sunlight crept over us and filtered down the long barren corridor, catching the edges of wooden door frames and metal handles. The light didn't reach far, soaked up by the darkness.

"I thought perhaps there was a reason they're closed? It's hardly an unreasonable assumption in here."

"The reason is wilful ignorance," Evelyn muttered as she squinted along the corridor. "This'll have to do. You," she clicked her fingers at Praem. "Open them as we go."

I don't think that was a stupid question at all. Sunlight can mess with a lot of different materials in various ways, so there's no telling what it might do to delicate magical devices.

Praem stepped ahead of us to obey. She grabbed the next set of curtains and drew them wide. Sunlight touched her face, highlighted those milk-white eyes.

"Light," Praem intoned.

"Yes, light," Evelyn grumbled.

Most of the mothballed wing was closed up, doors shut, a couple of rugs rolled against the corridor wall. We passed a few open doors, the rooms inside stacked with furniture beneath ghostly transparent dust-covers. A stale smell hung in the air, with undercurrents of harsh cleaning chemicals and aged wood. Evelyn strode with a purpose, walking stick swinging, shoulders hunched, knowing exactly where she was going. I followed a step behind. The shadows retreated before us.

Eventually the corridor ran out, terminated by a stout oak door. This door looked older, shorter, the frame a little crooked. Evelyn clacked the handle down. "Mind your head."

The room inside would have been beautiful under any other circumstances, a long sitting room with a very low ceiling and a wooden floor, covered in thick rugs. A pair of cracked leather sofas faced each other over a slab of glass and metal trying to pass itself off as a coffee table, all draped with dust sheets. A huge soot-blackened fireplace dominated the entirety of one wall, crowned with a marble mantelpiece, bare except for a skin of dust.

Evelyn ignored all of it, and my curious look. She stalked across the room to a door which hadn't been apparent until she pushed it open, hidden as it was behind a column of load-bearing wall. Darkness yawned beyond.

I peered over her shoulder. Wooden steps descended between whitewashed concrete walls.

"A hidden door to a secret cellar," I sighed. "What's next, eyes in the back of portraits? When does Scooby Doo turn up to solve the mystery?"

Evelyn wasn't laughing. She shot me a sidelong look. I didn't blame her, the joke was a weak attempt to push back my own trepidation. I mumbled an apology.

"Don't be sorry," she said. "Place is fucking ridiculous, I know."

"It really is."

Evelyn slapped a switch and a light guttered on far below.

"Too gutless to go down there and remove the bulbs, I see," she grunted.

"Evee." My voice caught, and I had to swallow. "I don't mean to sound worried, but I'm getting deja vu doing this."

"Hmm? For what?"

"You led me to a semi-secret underground magical treasure trove once before. You may recall I had a very uncomfortable face-off with a giant spider? Is there anything down there I need to know about, preferably before it surprises me with a giant stinger?"

Very good point. Evelyn is probably just too used to the synths to think about it. And also doesn't really grasp how frightening of an experience that must have been for Heather, since she couldn't actually see the library guardian menacing her.

Also, a Scooby Doo reference, after all the other stuff she doesn't get? Sometimes Heather seems less "sheltered and aggressively offline" and more "time traveller from the 1970's."

Evelyn grunted, taking me seriously. "Nothing pneuma-somatic. My mother would never have things she couldn't see so close to her most important work. The whole place is warded. Best not touch anything though. Raine and I cleaned up everything … " she waved a hand, searching for the words. "Everything independently mobile, but there's plenty of sights you won't want to see, remnants of her constructs. Just follow me."

I nodded. "Okay. I trust you, Evee."

"Mm."

Tacit admission from Loretta that servitors can, in fact, be hacked? It sure sounds like it. Noted.

She led the way down the stairs, walking stick clacking. We were spared the cliche of ominous creaking wood – instead the stairs echoed, a hollow space beneath them. The echoes multiplied as we descended to the cellar floor.

Surprisingly spacious, the cellar was filled mostly with empty wine racks, containing only a few moldering old bottles, half-blocking several doors. A sort of butcher's counter stood in the middle of the space, stacked with old metal kegs, casting a long shadow as the single bare light bulb struggled to illuminate the rear of the space. Modern concrete gave way to mortared stonework, open archways leading off into deeper darkness.

Dank cold air crept down the collar of my hoodie, dark and somehow unclean. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself.

"How old is all this?" I murmured. The whitewashed concrete surroundings multiplied even the beating of my heart, let alone Praem's precise tread as she brought up the rear.

Evelyn cocked an eyebrow. "Old enough. Don't fret, we're not going back there." She gestured for Praem. "Open that."

I felt a modicum of relief as Praem headed for the nearest door, modern and clean, but stared and felt a shiver again when I realised it was hewn from a solid block of stainless steel, with several arm-thick bolts on this side. The doll-demon opened it without effort, on perfectly balanced, silent hinges, then reached inside and clicked a concealed light switch. Harsh bright florescent illumination flooded out, the bulb buzzing in the echoing cellar. Evelyn let out a shuddering breath. I realised her knuckles were white on the handle of her walking stick, her jaw clenched hard.

"Evee?" I reached for her hand, very gently. "Evee it's okay. I'm right here, okay? We can- why don't we got back upstairs, wait for Raine too?"

She swallowed hard and shot me a frowning look. "It's just a Pavlovian response. There's nothing here anymore. Not really."

"If you're certain. Whatever you need."

"I'm bloody well here already, aren't I?" she spat. "Fuck it, let's go."

Evelyn led me inside, through the steel door. Praem swung to follow us without instruction.

I wasn't even remotely prepared.

It looked a little bit like one of the less savoury rooms at Cygnet hospital, and a little bit like a torture chamber. A real one. Not a medieval parody; no iron maiden, no rack, no table of rusty implements. That would have been easier, cartoonish.

No, it was a sordid little place. A sour taste filled my mouth as I took in the implications.

The floor and walls were tiled, white, sloped slightly toward a drain in the corner. Easy to hose down. A tap jutted from one wall. An interior wall of thick steel bars split the room a few feet in – a cell, allowing an observer to watch in safety. The cell door stood open, the bars buckled and bent.

Inside that tiled cell, every single inch of wall and floor was covered with a vast, intricate magic circle, in deep midnight black strokes, like dried tar instead of paint. Four layers of magic circle. Between each, entire passages had been written in a script I'd never seen before, ugly and angular.

My head swam at the sheer complexity – but it didn't hurt my eyes or make me feel sick. The design had been ruined, disarmed. Several sections had been wiped away, smudged, a few tiles shattered.

In the centre of the circles stood a chair.

A little like a dentist's chair. Reclined. Bolted to the floor. Plastic, wipe-clean. Leather restraints for the forehead, ankles, wrists. Somebody had torn at the armrests, ripped out bits of stuffing.

The chair was child-sized. I swallowed a hiccup.

Huhhhhhh.

This makes it sound like Loretta was doing a less invasive version of the same experiments the Liliburnes are still pursuing. Using her daughter to interface with some kind of extradimensional entity.

Fortunately, doing so via summoning circle seems to be less destructive for the child (and probably the entity as well) than the New Sun method. Evelyn didn't mutate or incinerate like some of Alexander's victims appear to have done before dying. But still...that couldn't have been pleasant. Or healthy.

Why did she use her own daughter for this, rather than a random kidnappee? Unclear. I imagine she must have had a reason, though. Some way that the blood relation expedited or eased the process.

...is THIS the mapping device, actually? You need to strap someone in there and let them gaze into the mind-melting vastness of the cosmos? Evelyn's trauma and the map Raine wanted Heather to look at are one and the same?

Evelyn took three steps into the cell, staring at the chair, then turned her head to watch me, watch my reaction. Her breathing was steady, controlled, expression dark but not distressed. She seemed to have mastered her memories. I followed on numb feet. Praem stepped forward to stand a few feet from Evelyn, prim and straight-backed. Only later did I realise she'd positioned herself between Evelyn and the chair. Perhaps she felt protective.

I didn't even have to ask the question.

"It doesn't work anymore," Evelyn said, matter-of-fact. "It's defanged, no power source, and I ruined the circle."

I shook my head, glancing around again, then back at her. "But … Evee, what is this? Was this … you were down here?"

Evelyn wet her lips with a flicker of her tongue, and I realised she'd rehearsed this moment. How many times had she relived whatever had happened in this horrible little room? How long had she waited to unburden herself? Raine knew it all, what could Evelyn tell her that she didn't already know? I steeled myself as best I could. She needed somebody to listen.

To my surprise, she nodded toward Praem. "So, she's started talking."

" … yes?" I felt a catch in my chest. "She has."

Oh. Wait a minute.

Is this room where Evelyn first met the entity that Heather knows as Praem?

Did Evelyn encounter (experience? merge with?) this Gelus praeministra in its natural state while her body was strapped to this chair?

In which case, did she have to rip open these old wounds to create the Praem-synths, on account of this being the only demon she could re-summon at short notice?

"Why do you think it's taken her so long?" Evelyn reached up with her free hand and tapped the side of Praem's head with a knuckle. Praem turned to look at her. A glare? Evelyn ignored her, kept speaking. "Wood. Praem had nothing to work with. Summoning an incorporeal Outsider into a vessel is relatively easy, but Praem didn't start with a human brain to run on. She had to bootstrap herself, mimic, learn how to think in our reality. Adaptation is slow. The visitor takes time to remember itself, even with a simple thing like Praem here. You following this so far?"

Her voice echoed off the tiles. I nodded, and in my heart I began to see where this might be going. "I think so. Okay."

"Remember the zombies in the Sharrowford Cult's castle? Actual corpses. Barely functional, maybe a week or two old, easy to beat and not very clever, certainly not sentient, let alone lucid. Their potential was greater in the long run, yes, dangerously so. A brain, nervous system, sinews, it all gives the demon something to work with, a framework to base itself on, though the shock is greater. With time, every single one of those zombie would have been lethal."

"Like Zheng?"

Evelyn shrugged. "Perhaps. I don't know how she was made, or how old she is. A demon that strong would need a very short leash. She might just be stupid, intentionally crippled."

I nodded. "I'm sorry for interrupting, go on."

O...kay.

That raises a lot of questions about Praem. Like, a LOT a lot.

Like...the taste of strawberries. Where did she learn to like that? How did she even know what that was before she had any understanding of realspace and the way things in it work?

If the dolls that Evelyn bound her to didn't have brains, tongues, or any other neurology from an earthly creature in them (which I assume they didn't, lol), then how was Praem able to know to ask for that taste? And...why would she experience the sense of taste from putting things inside of her avatar's mouth, specifically, rather than touching them with her hand or staring at them from across the room?

My best guess is that she got the taste (and texture?) directly from Evelyn's brain. And also copy-pasted an ethereal analogue to her taste buds onto the most similarly-shaped part of the avatar. In which case, Evelyn either really did first meet the entity now known as Praem back in these childhood torture sessions, or she did a similar sort of self-induced interface thing during the summoning process a few months ago.

Almost more surprisingly though...Evelyn is talking about how long it's taken for Praem to start talking. In a way that implies she expected her to start talking and showing personality sooner or later, and the choice of an inanimate doll avatar just being meant to delay rather than prevent it.

That's NOT the way she's talked about Praem up until now. She was seemingly concerned or unnerved by Praem's growing signs of intelligence and personality. As if they were unexpected. I guess Heather might have been badly misinterpreting Evelyn's reactions to these things, but...yeah, I really don't know.

"Even with a real corpse, there's no electrical activity in the brain, nothing to hijack, nothing to communicate with, to teach it how the mouth works or what words mean, to give it context for what it's being asked." Her voice lowered, quiet, almost to a growl. She hunched her shoulders, leaning heavily on her walking stick. The dirty little tiled cell seemed to press in on us.

"I think I see where this is going," I murmured. My head felt tight, almost feverish. A high-pitched whine threatened at the edge of my hearing.

Evelyn eyed me. "Do you?"

"I'm sorry." I hiccupped, the horror of this almost too much. "I … this is … please. Tell me. I'm listening. I promise."

Evelyn nodded. "A real Outsider, a hundred times more complex than Praem, something not far off your Eye – summon it into a corpse, it won't be able to speak properly for weeks, maybe even months. By that time it'll have burnt out whatever vessel you've crammed it into. Certainly it won't be able to share secrets from Outside with a ruthless bitch of a mage, no matter what deals she tries to strike with it. No. You want to make deals with a real Outsider, an alien god, you need it sentient from the word go. This," she glanced at the chair, then stared at me. "This device was made to invite possession of a living human host."

"Evee. Oh, Evee."

Evelyn put her maimed hand to her chest. "No prizes for guessing who."

Oh. Wait.

Not just interfacing. Outright possession. For long periods of...

...

......

Is Evelyn saying what I think she's saying?

IE, is she not actually Evelyn Saye? Has "she" just been figuring this world out, in this alien body, burdened by these alien childhood memories, from behind the dead girl's name and face?

That would...well, no. No, that doesn't square with her attitude toward Praem.

Okay, yeah, I'm probably misinterpreting. But. There's still a chance I might not be. In which case, holy shit what a mindfuck.


Well. Next chapter ought to clarify it.

5.6

The claustrophobic echoes of Evelyn's voice ebbed away as she concluded her tortured confession, reflected off the dirty tiles in the horrible little cellar room. I hiccuped out loud. Disgust clutched at my guts, and I shook my head at the child-sized dentist's chair.

Hiccuping as a disgust reaction? That's a new one to me.

"Evee." My voice cracked.

"Mmhmm. I know," she grunted.

Dank subterranean cold leeched residual heat from the safe embrace of my hoodie, and wormed icy fingers up the back of my neck. I wrapped my arms around myself, felt awfully sick. The crushing press of the broken magic circle above and around us seemed to hang poised like open jaws. We stood in the maw of a dead beast.

Suddenly I very much needed to be out in the sunlight, but I wouldn't flee and leave Evelyn down here alone with her memories, not even for a half a minute. She looked rooted to the spot, set and solid, sheltering inside that over sized grey jumper and leaning on her walking stick next to Praem's impassive form.

" … I, Evee … that's horrible, I-"

"Tell me something I don't know," she grumbled.

I shrugged, quite lost for words.

"Scared of me yet?" she asked, an oddly sarcastic quirk to her lips. I blinked in confusion.

"Um, should I be?"

Evelyn sighed and sketched an uncomfortable half-shrug. She deflated, shoulders slumping, and I sensed she'd run out of carefully rehearsed words. She'd confessed, but now she needed to actually talk. "No. It was a bad joke, a bit of gallows humour – implying the demon is still in my head. Get it? Trying not to get too grim, that's all."

HEY DON'T MAKE FUN OF ME!

"Evee, don't joke about that. I'd never think that about you. Why would I be scared of you? You're sweet, and lovely, no matter what you think of yourself."

"Yes, well." Evelyn cleared her throat and averted her eyes. I didn't care how embarrassed she felt when praised – it embarrassed me too, but it was true. No wonder she felt barely human half the time. "I got rid of it five years ago. Sort of what precipitated killing my mother. Trust me, the demon wouldn't want to return even if it could."

Alright. It's not Praem OR the consciousness currently known as Evelyn, then.

"Good. Good." Unfamiliar vehemence entered my voice. "God, fu- … fuck your mother."

"Fuck," Praem echoed.

Evelyn raised an eyebrow, ignoring Praem. "That's rare enough, from you."

"I think your mother deserves a bit of foul language." I huffed and shook my head. "Why did she even do it? Her own daughter."

"So the Outsider she summoned could talk and think from the get go, trapped in a bound vessel. So she could force it to share it's knowledge. It got a functioning human brain and a human consciousness to pattern itself on. The process went very fast, though I wasn't exactly … coherent enough to observe," she spoke with such bitter scorn lurking in her voice. "It had full sentience in a handful of hours, then found itself strapped to that damned chair, in the body of a nine year old girl, at the tender mercy of my mother."

I wet my lips and took a deep breath, struggling to master the high-pitched ringing in my head; it wasn't magic at work, just disgust and the anger of empathy for my friend. "That's not the why, not exactly. Why do it at all? What did she hope to gain?"

"Real knowledge, from Outside."

I spoke a question with my eyebrows, still stewing in second-hand outrage. Evelyn continued her explanation.

"Magic is unreliable, extrapolated from scraps in old books, written by insane monks and murderous desert cannibals, a thousand years ago. Trial and error can be lethal, you and I both know that from experience."

"Too true, yes." I sighed.

"I managed to teleport myself Outside, completely helpless when I got there. Remember?"

"Evee, of course I remember."

"Mm, Well. So, my mother figured that maybe there was some kernel of truth, to the old stereotype of medieval wizards summoning demons, binding them with God's language, forcing them to divulge their secrets – all that dark ages nonsense. Turned out she was right. Imagine an Outsider, something almost like your Eye, trapped in a weak body. Imagine it. If you had the stomach for the act, imagine what clarity you might extract from it, what magic it could teach." She shrugged. "I think she tried other methods before deciding to use her own flesh and blood, but she didn't hesitate when the time came."

This framing is very different from what we were told (or at least suggested) before, regarding summoning and binding demons. Especially given details like Praem being able to control multiple avatars at the same time. The avatars were framed as being puppets for them, rather than full-on surrogate bodies that entirely contain the summoned entity.

Then again, even if an avatar only contains a fraction of the entity's consciousness, and it's aware and active in other places as well, that doesn't mean you can't lock that appendage in place and use that to torture the creature for information.

Plus, "demon" seems to be a very wide category. Some, like the praeministra, might be well adapted to remote body control. Others, like the knowledgeable alien that fell victim to Loretta Saye, might not be.

What actual torture mechanisms were used on Evelyn's body...well, they might have been esoteric magic stuff, or they might have been depressingly mundane and mechanical.

Evelyn seemed to run dry at last. Her breath shuddered on the final word and her eyes slipped toward the chair, like water sucked down a drain. Before I could stop her or summon the courage to pull her into a hug, her maimed hand reached out and touched the wipe-clean plastic headrest. Her fingers shook ever so slightly.

"Evee, you shouldn't-"

Praem grabbed Evelyn's wrist.

I froze. Evelyn shot the doll-demon a razor-sharp frown. Praem didn't pay the slightest bit of attention to our surprise and disapproval, staring right back at Evelyn. Gently but firmly, she removed her mistress's hand from the chair.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Evelyn hissed.

Praem released Evelyn's wrist, folded her offending hands neatly in front of her, and returned to staring straight ahead.

"She's trying to help," I blurted out before Evelyn could explode. She whirled on me instead. "I don't think you should be touching it either, I really don't. Except maybe to pull it to pieces. Isn't that right, Praem?"

"Nonsense," Evelyn spat. "What does she care? She – it isn't even capable of understanding." Evelyn rubbed at her wrist.

Praem declined to answer. I sighed at her.

"You need to learn when to help your own case," I said. "Please?"

"No touching," she finally intoned.

Increasingly confused about Evelyn's perspective on who and what Praem is.

Also, Praem seems to be a lot more concerned about Evelyn's wellbeing than I'd have expected. Unless that's part of the parameters of her contract or something.

Evelyn whacked the chair's base with her walking stick. "It's completely inert. This whole set up is inert. It's harmless now."

"Not emotionally," I said quietly. "Not to you."

"Yes," Praem added.

Evelyn glared daggers at the doll-demon, shot a stormy look at me, then huffed and rolled her eyes. "I suppose you're right."

"It's a hateful thing. Even if I didn't know what it was used for."

Evelyn withdrew from the chair by half a step, shaking her head. "She never kept me in it for long. A few days at a time, four at most, then maybe a week to recover between sessions. Longer than that with a demon at the controls and the physical changes would have been too much, it would have taken over and broke free, or I would have expired."

"You mean, died?"

"Yes. And then she'd have to procure another child."

I reached down and squeezed Evelyn's maimed hand. She didn't squeeze back, but she didn't let go either. She shot me a look of resigned understanding, then glanced down at our interlocked fingers.

"Possession," she muttered. "Possession by a vast outer intelligence takes a heavy toll on the human body. Makes changes as it settles in, adapts the shell to suit the inhabitant, but it never got to finish any DIY on me – my mother was ripping it back out every few days. It's nothing like – what's that film, The Exorcist? Nothing like that, more like what we saw with Zheng. Perhaps it tries to do impossible things with human muscles, pushes them too far, breaks bones and fixes them wrong, or forgets to pump blood and lymph to an extremity." She tapped her prosthetic leg with her walking stick, a dull clunking sound in the little tiled room. "Hardly matters with a corpse."

Oh. I see.

Multiple periods of 2-4 days of that, on top of whatever pressures Loretta was applying, over the course of months or even years. Yeah. Okay. I see. That's why she's missing digits and limbs. And probably a whole bunch of other things internally.

It occurs to me that this might also be why Loretta tried to possess Evelyn after they killed her body. Evelyn's body was already "used" to being possessed. Weakened resistances. Easier target than a person would normally be, even on top of whatever biological compatibility benefits come with them being blood relations.

"You're not a corpse, and you won't end up as one," I said with all the certainty I had. Evelyn cocked an eyebrow at me and half-smiled.

"What, ever?"

"When you're a hundred and two. Not a day earlier."

Heh.

She snorted, then frowned at me. "Have I told you I have a detached retina? I can't recall. Here, the left eye." She opened her eyes wide. "Another legacy of my unwelcome cranial passenger."

I shook my head. "I don't think I can see any difference between your eyes."

"Mm." She turned away and resumed staring at the chair, the instrument of her past.

"We should go back upstairs, Evee. Thank you, for sharing with me, but I don't think it's good for you to linger down here. It creeps me out rather badly as well."

"I haven't reached the point yet," she grunted.

"Ah?"

"Twil."

"Um … "

"Twil. What you asked me. My … " She grumbled low in her throat. "I'm getting there."

Oh, yeah, speaking of her, what consequences is Twil paying for being permanently host to some kind of demon? Seemingly none, but there's likely a lot we don't know.

Also, I'm now wondering what form Hewrqtferrgas is actually in, in the Brinkwood sect's compound. It might just be bound in a decrepit old human corpse that some ancient wizard stuffed it in. Or, it could actually have a physical body of its own that they've got under wraps, either tangibly or on the pneuma-somatic plane.

...actually.

Oh. Oh man. I just had a fucking brain blast.

...

What is a "demon," exactly?

The category of "outsider" is a very broad one, and basically just means "alien." Anything not native to the dimensional spaces visible to humans without the aid of magic is an "outsider," if I'm not misinterpreting.

A "demon," though? That seems to specifically be something with an animating force that can bring an inanimate (or formerly animate) body to life. I've been assuming thus far that demons have bodies of their own out in the interdimensional void, but that could be completely wrong. Demons might only have bodies when they are given (or forced) access to a body.

I also mused earlier about the state of the occult underground on Earth being the consequence of longterm conflict between wizards and possessing demons.

And it seems to be that demons, specifically, have vast magical knowledge.

So, thinking back on the Sharrowford Leviathan and other tangible outsiders like that. Maybe that gigantic creature was just an alien body being possessed by knowledgeable demons? The actual target of the New Sun experiments was a possessing consciousness that happened to be inhabiting that spacewhale?

This also makes me wonder to what extent the Eye is physical. If it's actually a "demon," then the giant eyeball in the sky of its homeworld(s) might just be a projected image or something, and it actually resides in the brains of its millions of hosts on the planetary surface below. This would also handily explain what's going on with Maisie, as it might take it a long time to figure out how to fully possess a new type of host with a new type of mind and body (ie, humans).

I'm inferring a lot based on only a very little, of course. There may be many more categories of beings with superficial traits in common that get called "demon" or "outsider" or whatever by ignorant human magi. Demons (or at least, some types of "demon") may have native bodies of their own in addition to any avatars or hosts they're able to spread their influence into beyond that. Just, it's a thought I had. And one that I strongly suspect is at least part of the picture, even if it's not nearly the whole picture.

...

Anyway, about Twil and possibly Twil's family patron and/or the spirit pupper it fused her with!

I looked at her sidelong, then reluctantly let my eyes slide over to Praem.

Ah. Finally this was all falling into place, or so I thought. Demons in her head at the start of puberty – was Evelyn about to confess that's what she found attractive? Had I finally, after weeks of speculation, uncovered the real reason she'd wrought her doll-demon in the image of a cuddly voluptuous motherly type? I swallowed, and held my tongue.

Oh. Wait, right, no. We're talking about Evelyn's attraction to Twil or lack thereof right now, right. Not about magic stuff. I'm dumb lol.

"It had a name."

" … it?" I blinked, catching up.

"The demon – the Outsider my mother housed in my body. I can pronounce it, in theory, but it'd make my throat bleed and my tongue ache for a week. Probably make you chuck your guts up. Not because it's you, Heather, sorry," she added quickly. "The sound of its name would make anybody ill. Do you understand what that means?"

I shook my head, feeling three steps behind.

"Because it told me its true name. It hated my mother almost as much as I did. It didn't want to be here, not like her," Evelyn nodded toward Praem. "She's game for a few strawberries, and apparently dressing up like a fetish object. She's barely more complex than we are."

Praem turned her head to stare at Evelyn.

"She doesn't mean anything rude by that," I said.

"Rude," Praem echoed.

You tell her, Praem!

Evelyn ignored the banter. "It was like a king, or an emperor – a crap metaphor, but the closest I can get. It resented the sheer indignity of being summoned, of my mother's demands, of being forced to speak, but most of all it resented this." She tapped her chest. "Imagine yourself trapped in the body of an insect. It felt such revulsion." Evelyn all but spat the word. "We came to an understanding, it and I, over the span of, oh, three, four years, in what passed for the privacy of my own head, despite … despite … " Evelyn swallowed, hard, and screwed her eyes up for a second.

I squeezed her hand. "It's alright. You're not there anymore."

"You want to know why I call Praem an it, Heather? Because I've had one of these things in my head. Because it is alien. It taught me things it withheld from my mother, made sure the secret knowledge it did share with her was subtly flawed. It showed me how to cast it out and keep it out, and how to kill her.

Evelyn is really telling on herself right now.

From the sound of things, she was able to cooperate with the "demon" that she was forced to host. It had at least roughly relatable motives and feelings, at least for elementary things like "desires freedom" and "resents captors." It wasn't a human, but it was a sentient being, and one that can at least potentially be dealt with in a mutually respectful manner. Hell, it even proactively worked with her against a common enemy, giving her knowledge that it withheld from Loretta.

So, why the hell is she treating Praem the way she does?

Especially when she's admitting in this very same passage that Praem's overall level of complexity is around human-level, once she's fully settled into her avatar and adapted to local conditions. She knows that she's, if not exactly a person, then at least something that can be, wants to be, and therefore *should be* treated similarly to one.

Praem might not be bound here against her will like the entity Loretta summoned was, but Evelyn is being a very unpleasant employer even if she's not a slaver.

So yeah. She said this was going to explain (among other things) the way she regards Praem, but she's just making her behavior seem worse and less justified the longer she talks.

"When it finally left, in the space it had occupied, stuff was missing."

"Stuff?"

Evelyn shrugged. "Bits of memory. Some bodily functions it had taken over – I was incontinent for a week after. Disgusting, mm?"

"Not- not at all. That's hardly your fault."

"It was disgusting. Anyway," she sighed and waved a hand down at herself, at her abdomen. "I'll let you in on a secret. I've only had two periods in my entire life, when I was twelve. If anything still works down there, I don't know. I … " She frowned, cleared her throat. "As far as I'm aware, I'm incapable of orgasm. I don't know who or what I'm attracted to, and I don't know if that's just me, or if my capacity to feel such things was ripped out, overwritten." She turned to look at me, shrugged with her eyebrows, very matter of fact. "There's your answer."

Alright. So she took a bunch of endocrine and possibly gynecological damage as well. Plus, from the sound of it, some residual bits of body dysphoria from the demon's "self-perception" of her human body.

Heh. If this alien king or whatever it was does have a physical body of its own, I wonder if Evelyn would have some kind of reaction to seeing one. "I thought I didn't have a sex drive, but when I look at xir I just want to jam all xir pseudopods into my secondary brainsack holes and then look for a nice juicy kramfasaur to lay our eggs in!"

Imagine, now, that Heather was with her at the time and had to hear this. That would teach her not to lust after people's houses.

Now, that said, Evelyn did still make the decision to make Praem's avatars look like mega-curvy waifus. So, that look still does *something* for her, even if it's not entirely the something one would think. Maybe the pseudopods and brainsack apertures are just hidden under her clothes, idk.

I took a very deep breath, glanced around the horrible little tiled cell, and then locked eyes with Evelyn. "I think it's high time we got out of here. I'm going to take you upstairs and give you a very big hug now."

Evelyn started to shake her head. "Heather, I'm-"

"No ifs or buts. Up. Up!"

I held fast to her hand. Luckily she didn't offer much resistance as I dragged her from the room and back into the main cellar, then up the stairs, clonking on the hollow wood. Praem followed smartly behind, and to my immense relief she shut the steel door. She clomped up the wooden stairs as I pulled Evelyn back into the sitting room, with the huge fireplace and the low ceiling. Already I began to shrug off the cold, the dank smell of the cellar replaced with dust and winter sunlight.

"Shut that door, Praem, if you please," I said, and she obeyed, closing the door to the cellar.

Evelyn wormed her hand out of mine and clacked her walking stick against the floorboards.

"I'm not looking for sympathy," she said. "I didn't tell you all that to-"

"Evee. Shut up."

I gave her the very big hug I'd threatened to. She made a half-hearted attempt to pull away, but I wrapped my arms around her knobbly shoulders and held on tight, refused to let go.

I'd never had a friend like Evelyn before; I'd never really had any friends before, except a few fleeting teenage moments during my least bad times. I'd never felt this way about a friend before either – shared her pain, outraged at her mistreatment, aching to help.

I wanted, in my weak, circuitous fashion, to protect Evelyn.

How silly was that? She was a mage, she was far more in control of her powers than I, she had a supernatural bodyguard and Raine and the weight of family history behind her, not to mention money. It was not in the least bit romantic or erotic – despite how soft and fluffy Evelyn could be when one got past her thorns – but I did love her.

I really, really, REALLY wouldn't bet against Heather in the "who has better control of their powers" comparison. Heather's powers might have symptoms that Evelyn's don't, but in terms of reliability and ease of access? Yeah...

Frankly, I'm not even sure I'd count Raine's loyalty as entirely Evelyn's asset rather than Heather's at this point. At the very least, her devotion is shared, even if Evelyn may still command a somewhat larger share of it.

...actually, as far as Raine Bonding Activities go, Raine has helped Heather and Evelyn each kill one (1) evil wizard. That's not the only factor she takes into account when dividing up her heart, but it's probably a significant one.

Anyway. Nice chaste hug, despite Evelyn otherwise being very attractive to Heather's mind. Understanding the degree to which she isn't a (recognizably) sexual being seems to have sunk through very quickly for Heather, which is admirable.

Evelyn grumbled and I felt her blushing, but after a moment she returned the embrace, awkward and hesitant.

The handle of her walking stick pressed against my back.She let me take her weight, for once.

"I'm fine," she muttered. "This is all old stuff, history. I'm fine."

"You are," I murmured.

Eventually she cleared her throat and set her walking stick against the floor, and I let her go. She turned away, sniffing and rubbing a thumb under her eyes. I spared us any further embarrassment with a bit of quick thinking.

"Praem," I said, lifting the corner of one of the dust covers on the nearest of the two leather sofas. "Help me get one of these off, will you please?"

"Heather?" Evelyn frowned as Praem crossed to help me.

"I'd rather not sit in the dust, and I assume you wouldn't either?"

Praem 'helped' by whisking the entire dust cover off with one sudden jerk of her arms, the sheet billowing out with a crack of displaced air.

I flinched; hadn't seen her move that fast since the chaotic fight in the cult's castle. With a wince I braced for the heavy plastic sheet to slam against the wall and slide to the floor – but, at the precise moment of maximum extension, Praem flicked her wrists to fold the cover in half in the air, her maid uniform's skirt twirling as she turned and pinched the edges together and folded it again with a whipping motion. She caught the neatly stacked bundle on one outstretched hand, paused for a single heartbeat, and then placed it on the coffee table.

Heh. I know we've just gotten a thorough explanation of how demons aren't robots, but this still made me think of the Bishop Knife Trick.

She resumed staring straight ahead. Several long strands of hair had escaped her loose bun.

"Um, thank you?" I managed.

"Bloody showoff," Evelyn grunted, then covered her mouth as she coughed in the cloud of settling dust.

"Yes, very impressive. Though a gentler touch would perhaps have produced less of a mess?"

Praem tilted her head upward. The milky white of her eyes juddered back and forth rapidly. Was she counting the dust particles?

"Suppose I don't have a choice now." Evelyn coughed again, then batted at Praem's ankles with her walking sick. "Shift yourself." The doll-demon did as she was told. Evelyn settled uncomfortably onto the sofa, rubbing at the place her thigh joined her prosthetic. "Am I the only one sitting down or what?"

I shook my head. Praem took the question as an order, and perched on the opposite sofa, right on the dust sheet. We both watched her for a second, but she seemed content to stare into space.

"Actually, I'd like to do a thought experiment first," I said.

"Thought experiment," Evelyn echoed. "Why does that phrase make it sound like a profoundly bad idea?"

"It's nothing embarrassing. Or it shouldn't be, at least."

Her eyebrows climbed her forehead. "I never said anything about embarrassing."

"Just close your eyes. Please, Evee? I want to try to … get you to imagine something."

"If you creep up and shout boo in my ear I will thump you, Heather, friend for life or not."

I huffed and put my hands on hips. "Would I do that? I'm not Raine."

Fair's fair. I might be a dedicated Raine Apologist, but even I can't fight back against that one.

Evelyn relented with a sceptical frown, and closed her eyes.

"Okay, now just relax, try to … try to release as much tension as you can. Breathe deeply." I had zero idea how to accomplish this, too far out of my wheelhouse. I didn't even have Raine's examples to go on, but we had to start somewhere.

"Breathing deeply," Evelyn grumbled, unimpressed.

"I want you to picture Twil."

"Oh bloody hell, you're serious."

"Play along, please? Ignore the sexual aspect, all of that. Let's pretend for a moment that none of the magical stuff exists, either, forget that she's a werewolf, all of it."

"Easier said than done."

"Please try. Please." I paused, to let her think. "How does thinking about Twil make you feel?"

Wonder where Heather learned this? Probably from one or more attempts at cognitive behavioral therapy throughout her teens. Good that she remembered some of these techniques and can repeat them for other people, it's legitimately a good skill to have.

Silence.

"Imagine her … " I gulped, a little embarrassed. "Imagine her hugging you."

Evelyn cracked one eye and frowned at me. "That's all you've got? Bit tame, isn't it?"

"Just do it!" I flustered. "Close your eyes. Imagine her putting her arms around you."

Evelyn grumbled but closed her eyes again, fingers playing with the handle of her walking stick. I bit my tongue, in case she was taking this seriously. I didn't want to disrupt any rose-coloured imagination with the jarring of my awful scratchy voice.

Eventually Evelyn sighed a big sigh. She opened her eyes again and stared at me like I was a quack doctor.

"Well?" I prompted. "Anything?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. Twil … she … she's irritating. And stupid."

"Oh Evee, she's not stupid. That's hardly fair. She's impulsive, and passionate, and straightforward."

"She's dumb as a brick."

I'm currently agnostic on this issue. Twil has provided me with evidence of both positions.

"She's going to university to do bio-medical science next year. That's not stupid," I said. Evelyn grumbled under her breath and looked away, but I pressed on. "And even if she was stupid, it's beside the point. Do you want to hug her for real?"

"How am I supposed to know the answer to that?" Evelyn growled. I sensed I was losing her.

"Okay, how about … how about this? Imagine that you can hug her, for real – but!" I held up a finger as Evelyn scowled at me. "But afterward she won't remember it, and nobody else would know you did it."

I let the suggestion – rather underhanded and creepy, I admit – hang in the air for a moment, and hoped I hadn't given Evelyn the mage any nasty ideas. She opened her mouth to reply, then stopped and frowned, then blinked twice and looked down at her lap.

"Ah." I lit up. "Did that-"

"Don't you breathe a word of this to Raine. Not a word," she snapped, then frowned left and right before rubbing her eyes, an expression of mild panic crossing her features. She began to blush, and covered her mouth. "Fuck."

"Evee, it's okay, it's okay." I struggled not to giggle, to respect the moment.

"Goddammit, what am I supposed to do now?" She demanded. "What does that even mean?"

I slid onto the sofa. "Whatever you decide it means. You don't have to act on it if you don't want to. It's just … something to think about. Something nice?"

She sighed and glared at me. "You and Raine make it all look so easy."

I have complicated feelings about this exchange.

On one hand, it makes me think of an attempt to "cure" an asexual.

On the other, Evelyn clearly isn't what we typically mean by ace. She's got a weirder, more fantastical thing going on.

Which...on one hand, makes this less uncomfortable. Though on the other hand...well, I would have said we were missing a chance for ace rep, but then again the story had previously made me think that Evelyn and Raine were an actual thing up until recently, so the "chance" might not have ever actually existed heh.

"Oh, Evee, no, it isn't. It absolutely isn't. Even between us it's pretty complex, most of the time."

Evelyn leaned back into the old cracked leather of the sofa, trying to find some physical comfort to ward off this fresh confusion. I did feel a little guilty; the last thing she needed was more dilemmas in life, but at least this one contained potential pleasure for her, and took her mind off the cellar beneath our feet.

"Does she scare you?" Evelyn said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Raine. Does she scare you?"

"Oh." I blinked. "No, not at all. Though, ah, I am aware that sometimes perhaps I should find her a little scary. That's something I've been discovering about myself. I don't like violence but … when she does it, it's different. It's part of what I like about her. That's terrible of me, I know."

"She scared the shit out of me when we first met," Evelyn admitted.

"I'd heard."

"Mm."

Raine Apologist protocols activating.

Tread lightly, you two.

"You're deflecting again, by the way, Evee."

"Mm," she grunted. "What else am I meant to do? I'll … think about Twil, alright? I'll give it some thought. Maybe I can … can … " She waved a hand vaguely. "Maybe next time I talk to her, I can … see."

"Whatever you decide, I can always help."

Evelyn gave me a sceptical frown. "You're not exactly a lesbian Casanova."

*slowly raises finger*

I...

*thinks for a moment, and lowers it again, but only hesitantly*

I'll grant that Heather isn't that right this second. But like. I feel like that's the direction she's very strongly moving in? The confidence and commanding presence she's been building (regardless of whether or not she owes it to Hastur), combined with the emotional intelligence, combined with the unrelenting thirst...I have a feeling Heather is going to be exactly that soon enough.

I shrugged. "It's me or Raine, and while she is lovely I don't think she's a reliable source of romantic advice."

hey fuck you too

Evelyn snorted, and we fell into comfortable silence. Her gaze drifted down, until she was staring right at the floorboards. My mind wandered backward through the last half hour, through other ways I might help, might protect.

"Why is the chair still down there?" I asked, softly, loathe to ruin the moment but sharply aware we might never get another opportunity.

Evelyn shrugged. "Bolted to the floor."

"Then smash it apart."

She glanced sidelong at me, then did a double take when she saw I was serious. "I … how? It weighs a ton. We'd need industrial machinery to get the bolts out. It's not as if anybody's been down there in years. Let the damned thing rot."

"With … I don't know." I cast around. "Is there a sledgehammer anywhere on the estate?"

Evelyn looked at me like I'd suggested we go skinny dipping. "A sledgehammer."

"I don't know, for building fences? At least one of those outbuildings is full of garden tools, isn't it?"

"Heather, I am relatively certain neither you nor I can lift a bloody sledgehammer. We're both noodle-arms. I'd ruin my back."

It occurs to me that Heather actually does have a sledgehammer-equivalent with her at all times. Using it might just do a number on her brain instead of her back, though. Pulping Alexander didn't give her as much backlash as fine-manipulation work does, but it still gave her some.

Regardless, Praem also just showed off how strong and agile she is. I'm sure she could do it easily enough.

"I can try. For that, I'd try. Praem certainly could."

Evelyn paused mid-word, then frowned thoughtfully, an unfamiliar aspect lighting up inside her. Her eyes slid over to look at Praem. " … I suppose she could. She could."

The doll-demon seemed to catch wind of what we were brewing. She stared back at Evelyn, then at me, then stood up and brushed her skirt neatly over her backside.

"Sledgehammer," she intoned in her bell-like voice.

Evelyn and I shared a meaningful glance.

The shift in Praem's voice. From icy wind to "bell-like."

Is this strictly down to her own evolution, I wonder, or is it also partly down to Heather's?

Anyway, some time later...

"Raaaine! Over here!"

"We're in the kitchen."

"We're in the kitchen, Raine!"

"We're eating cake without you."

"Evee! No, shhh, shhh."

By the time Raine followed our voices, picked her way down the mansion's spinal corridor, and rounded the kitchen door, Evelyn and I had descended into a fit of giggles – well, I had. Evelyn retained a touch more self-control than I possessed, but even she started laughing at Raine's bewildered grin.

Raine pointed finger-guns at us and leaned against the door frame. "I see that I'm missing cake, but I hear that I've missed a hot-boxing session. What's got you two so giggly?"

"By cake we meant ass, obviously."

I shrugged, trying to control my laughter. "Just feeling nice."

"It is a good day," Evelyn announced, and jabbed her little fork back into the chocolate sponge cake her father had dug out of the fridge about twenty minutes ago, when Evelyn and I had bumbled into the kitchen, badly in need of celebratory food. "It is a good day to be alive, and it is a good day to eat cake. Rest's in the fridge if you want some. And grab the strawberries too," she added, waving vaguely at Praem behind her.

Raine, however, wasn't listening – cake and laughter could only distract her for so long from the sledgehammer in the middle of the kitchen floor, balanced upside down so perfectly on its own steel head.

"Hello, this wasn't here an hour ago. Think I would have remembered that. We having an emergency?"

"Only a dire lack of whipped cream to go with the cake," Evelyn said, and flourished her fork. I spluttered with laughter again, despite the fact it wasn't even funny – I felt wonderful. Released.

"I've missed some serious fun, haven't I?" Raine ran a hand through her damp hair, grinning. She was still pink and slightly raw from her shower, wearing pajama bottoms and a baggy black tshirt with a cartoon kangaroo on the front, feet bare. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to hug her and touch her all over, but there was Evelyn and cake and explanations to linger over first, and we did have more important things to do than make out.

"Fun," Praem echoed.

I'd love it if they made up a whole bullshit story about fighting off a sudden monster attack with a sledgehammer while Raine missed out on it.

Doubt she'd fall for it, but she'd admire the attempt at least as much as I would.

"So what's the sledgehammer for?" Raine asked.

"For hammering!" I broke into giggles again, but spluttered to a stop when Praem's voice echoed a half-second behind, "For hammering."

"I smashed up the chair," Evelyn said. She sat up straighter and raised her chin.

"The what?" Raine's eyebrows shot up. "Oh, bugger me sideways, it's still there? The-"

"The chair. The demon engine. It's gone, in a hundred pieces. Heather helped."

"Praem did most of the hard work," I admitted. Evelyn grunted, but even that didn't seem to dent her good humour.

Evelyn and I had landed one symbolic hit each. She'd required the extra support of my arms around her waist and Praem holding the hammer head up in the air for her. I'd barely been able to lift the hammer from where we'd found it in the garden tool shed, let alone swing the damned thing, but I'd put my whole body into the motion and managed to half-drop half-flail the heavy steel head into the chair's right arm.

I'd squealed, Praem had to catch the hammer, it was all very awkward and embarrassing, and I'd feel the muscle strain tomorrow morning, but it had all been worth the effort. The doll-demon had done all the heavy lifting, no matter how glowing and sweaty Evelyn and I felt, after kicking pieces of the chair across the floor of that horrible little chamber.

"Blow me down with a feather," Raine said, shaking her head at us. "I didn't even know it was still there. You should'a told me to get rid of it years ago."

"It's fine. It was a bonding experience."

"It was," I agreed.

Raine just assumed that she'd destroyed that whole demon torture chamber years ago. Makes sense for her.

"Cool stuff. Anything else need hammering before we scoot?" Raine strode forward and lifted the sledgehammer with one hand, caught the haft in the other and hefted the weight, grinning to herself. I sighed inside at the way her muscles flowed and tightened, the easy strength on display. Praem had lifted the hammer just as easily, but it wasn't the same. She was cheating. Raine's muscles were real.

"We can be off whenever you like, by the way," Raine said. "Shown her the map yet? Probably best to get away before dark, unless you both want to sleep in the car."

"We can stay as long as we need." Evelyn's voice was suddenly sober.

" … we can?" Raine blinked. "We can. What?"

"This is news to me as well," I said slowly. "Evee?"

"We're staying another night. Perhaps two," she declared, then cleared her throat and smiled a grim sort of smile. "Got to show Heather the map, sure, but I'm also going to clear out the whole bloody lot. Everything of mother's in the east wing. The project room, the dungeon rooms we left, the clockwork man, all of it. Destroy anything I can't appropriate. Put some flowers on my grandmother's grave. Have dinner with my father's squeeze, whatever."

I guess I really wasn't kidding when I said that Heather's picked up some therapist skills.

Raine seems to have just not caught the symbolism that all that stuff holds for Evelyn. Which, to be fair, is totally understandable. Raine's all about dealing with active threats and solving imminent problems. Also, she seems to have assumed that either Evelyn or her dad would have had this done on their own by now, which...well, she does have a bit of a history of overestimating other people's strength and sanity.

"Evee. Right on," Raine said with a surprised grin. Evelyn waved her off.

"This house will be mine eventually," she said, and gestured up and around with her eyes. "These servitors, they're older than my mother, they're family property and she's not family, not anymore. This is mine. It doesn't belong to her bloody ghost."

It does seem like Lewis is probably never going to manage to sell it, for emotional reasons if not market ones. So yeah, fair enough.

Now, we segue into a reverie of Heather's...

When I was a little girl I'd never been afraid of creeping to the toilet at night, because I never had to do so alone. I never did anything alone.

The constant presence of a twin blinds one to certain aspects of life. One is never alone, not really, though in retrospect I believe Maisie and I were even closer than twins usually should be. If one of us woke and needed to pee, the other would often wake without prompting. A familiar hand to hold makes a big difference to a small child groping her way down a dark corridor. We knew, in that strange shared childhood heart, that no shadow creatures or bogeymen could touch us when we were together.

This supports my earlier inference. "Blink witch" is another phenomenon that can result in twins among humans, easily mistakable for fraternal twins to the naked eye but actually something different.

That all ended after the Eye took her. Teenage Heather hated leaving the dubious safety of her bed covers at night, let alone braving the nightmare-haunted hallways of the family home. I developed a borderline complex about getting up alone in the night, and still felt a touch of the old discomfort even in the heavily-warded Sharrowford house, with its creaky floorboards and strange old corners.

Damn. Never even considered the symbolism from that angle.

As soon as her forever childhood companion disappeared, the monsters that they'd been untouched by together all appeared. I wonder. To young Heather, did the PSF initially seem like the things that all the other kids meant by "monsters under the bed" that haunt their rooms when they're alone? Did she wonder, for a time, if it really just was herself being alone for once that brought them out of hiding?

The irony of most pneuma-somatic life being benign at worst and friendly at best is irrelevant, except to perhaps add an extra little layer of tragedy over it. Imagine if Heather and Maisie had gained From Beyond vision without Maisie being taken, somehow. What sort of relationships might they and the pneuma-bionts have developed?

So it was that I found myself shivering in the frigid air, gum-eyed and drowsy, bladder very full, as I dug myself out of a blanket nest on the armchair.

This was not going to be an easy journey, in this spooky echoing mansion drenched with century-old darkness; I couldn't even recall exactly where the nearest bathroom was.

Evelyn was curled up right on the edge of the double bed, wrapped in a cocoon of sheets. Moonlight crept silver around the curtain, picked out the jut of her hip. I'd taken the armchair tonight, and not brooked any argument from either of them. Raine slumbered on, snoring softly, spread out on her front. I suppressed a sleep-addled urge to grab one of her ankles. Bad Heather.

I would not demean myself by waking Raine to request an escort. I was a big girl and I could go to the toilet by myself.

The hallway was almost pitch black. Moonlight struggled to reach down here with those clean silver fingers. A tired old servitor – some kind of articulated mantis-creature – shifted in the deep shadows, and I forced myself not to flinch. Suddenly I felt considerably more awake.

"It's fine, it's fine. It's the ultimate safe place, Heather," I whispered to myself, fingertips of my left hand brushing the wall as I traced my way down the corridor. "Fortress and refuge. Castles are spooky too, aren't they? You love castles."

I groped for the bathroom, stepped inside and clicked the light on, blinking sore eyes against the sudden light on tarnished chrome and old porcelain – and realised what I'd missed.

Praem hadn't been standing guard by the bedroom door.

Ohhh? What's this now?

I frowned in thought as I sat on the toilet, eyes closed, half asleep. Perhaps Evelyn had set the doll-demon to a specific overnight task. Evee had been a whirlwind of activity since our impromptu ritual exorcism of her mother's memory.

She'd stomped all over the house, pointing at things with her walking stick, rifling through the big project room we'd found her brooding in the night before, Praem carrying bin liners and a plastic tote behind her. Lots of staring at alien objects and nodding, muttering to herself, making a list in a little notebook she'd commandeered from her father. Eventually Raine and I had let her get on with it, made ourselves scarce but available.

Evelyn even put in a proper showing when her father's lady friend had pulled up to the house that evening. 'Angeline' turned out to be exactly what I'd expected – a high-flying city lawyer in her late 40s, exceptionally well-groomed, talkative and slim, all easy laughter and more glasses of wine, eager to regale us provincial college girls with tales about growing up poor and black in north London. Lewis had laughed and boomed and shared a couple of utterly ineffable legal world anecdotes of his own.

Fuck yeah survivorship bias let's gooooooooo.~

I'd even accepted a glass of red wine myself, after some coaxing by Raine. Hadn't liked it much, but it did make me relax.

An hour of two of pretending we were all normal.

Except, of course, for how Angeline's gaze had slid right off Praem, even though she'd stood behind Evelyn the whole time.

I finished up, flushed the toilet, and suffered the indignity of ruined night vision when I turned off the light and stepped out into the corridor. Squinting at the silvery spill of moonlight helped a little, though the window at the end of the corridor was obscured by a shifting curtain.

A curtain that turned to look at me, two milky white orbs floating in the darkness.

Oh, hello there. I hope that fox hasn't talked you into seeing humans as a type of strawberry since we last saw you.

I almost jumped out of my skin, a half-hiccup half-squeak caught in my throat. My body screamed with a pulse of adrenaline and only the absurd maid uniform stopped me from either running or screaming for Raine.

"Praem!" I hissed, a hand to my chest. "Don't … stand there in silence! Oh my God, you frightened the life out of me."

Praem turned away, resumed her vigil at the window.

"Praem?" I whispered again, and crept forward, to peer over her shoulder.

Rural night and a clear sky. A beautiful sight. The thin lawns had transformed into a shadowy dream realm of half-glimpsed shapes under the bulk of the house, the trees a darker bulwark before the mirror-like silver expanse of the lake. The moonlight dusted Praem's face with a ghostly sheen, but she betrayed no hint of wistful longing or quiet contemplation. She stared. Hard-edged and intent. Down.

Another fox. Almost invisible in the moonlight, russet fur a dark blotch against the grass.

Oh shit was I actually right?

It sat on its haunches barely ten feet from the rear of the house, and stared up at Praem.

I sighed and resisted a desire to roll my eyes. "Once, twice, maybe three times, I could have accepted as coincidence, but this is getting silly," I muttered. "That's not a fox, is it?"

"Fox," Praem echoed, at full volume. I winced.

"Praem," I said her name very carefully. "If it's not just a fox, I think Evelyn or I or Raine should know about it. What is it?"

Praem turned her head to me, then back to the fox, then took a sudden step back from the window and marched off down the corridor, long maid's skirt swishing around her ankles.

"Praem? Praem, wait!" I hissed, and scurried to catch up.

...for a moment I wondered if maybe Loretta had managed to Brann Stark herself into that fox when her attempt to possess Evelyn failed. But in that case, I think the fox would have done something evil by now.

She made the stairs, and managed to click her heels the entire way down without thumping her feet. I felt clumsy and awkward, groping through the darkness behind her. By the time I stumbled onto the ground floor, she'd turned away around a corner. I really didn't want to be alone in the maze of corridors, menaced by the shadows in the kinking corners, at real threat of getting lost. I hissed her name again and hurried after her.

I found Praem at the back door onto the patio, the very same one I'd led her through that morning.

She was pulling the door's bolt and turning the key, her hands moving with exquisitely inhuman slowness of intention. Her eyes were locked on the moonlit lawns beyond the door's inset glass, at the fox staring back at us, a silver ghost.

"Praem, what are you doing?" I hissed, hugging myself, curling cold toes against the carpet. Should have put my socks on before I left the room.

Praem straightened up, the door now unlocked, and slowly wrapped one hand around the door handle.

I saw the fox sit up, fur bristling, eyes alert and intelligent. The canine snout inched backward.

Praem eased the door handle down.

"Praem, not- … not … " Not alone? What was she going to do, catch the fox with her bare hands? I didn't have time to think, my head still too heavy from sleep, my guts tight with sudden anticipation.

"Not?" she asked. Her hand paused.

"What are we doing, Praem?"

"Opportunity," she intoned.

"For what? What?"

"Hunting," she intoned. "Opportunity."

Interesting. I see three possibilities here.

1. The "fox" is indeed a threat, either because of Loretta's latent influence of some other reason, and for some reason Praem either couldn't determine that until now or didn't think it was vulnerable until now.

2. The "fox" is actually some kind of magical creature that praeministra naturally prey on. We're about to learn a bit about Praem's real biology, rather than just learning to experience the human taste for foods like strawberries.

3. The fox is just a fox. The maid outfit, however, is possessed by the ghosts of English aristocracy past, and causing Praem to hear the horns and hounds and feel the rising bloodlust whenever she looks at a fox.

She was waiting for approval. The fox backed away, paws slinking across the field of moonlit grass – and slowly, so slowly, a horrible, unspeakable notion entered my mind.

Earthworms and the things which ate them. My mouth went dry, my heart fluttered in my chest; maybe we'd never get another chance.

"Okay, do it," I hissed.

The fox bolted, a shadow in the dark.

If that was the case, then this entire property must be infested with Loretta. The worms, the grass, the birds. I'm not sure why one singular fox would have become her host through that vector, at least.

That said, we know she tried to possess Evelyn without any of her corpse needing to be eaten, so other vectors might indeed exist.

Praem reacted so fast I flinched hard enough to almost trip over my own feet. She slammed the door handle down and shot out into the night, a dead sprint from a standing start, beyond what any human could achieve, certainly not in a full-body maid uniform. I flew to the door, staring after her. Cold night air sucked the breath from my lungs, slammed the heat right out of my thin pajamas.

The doll-demon sprinted across the grass, like a machine, going full pelt. A dark blur bounded ahead of her.

I stumbled out onto the patio, freezing my toes off, teeth chattering. The cutting cold whipped around the sides of the house, trees swaying in the distance. I was fully aware I should be yelling for Raine or Evee, or locking the door and staying inside, but it all happened too fast. The possible implication of that fox made my head spin, clutched my guts with a deep sickness.

In the back of my mind I repeated a mantra: this was a safe place. Safe place. Nothing to fear here. Just don't touch anything suspicious.

Unfortunate possibility: the fox is just meant to draw Evelyn's security away while the real attack comes from a different direction.

Frankly, this is a place where Heather might want to consider force-crushing the fox and sending Praem straight back to guard the others. Or else let Praem chase the fox, and run back to the others to defend them with force-crushes herself if needed.

Probably the latter. She wouldn't want to risk killing an innocent fox, if it turned out to be a misunderstanding.

Praem tackled the fox halfway across the lawns in a tumble of splayed skirts. A strangled animal screech split the night. She rolled twice, lay very still for a moment, then stood up and walked back toward the house.

As she mounted the stairs to the patio I put a hand to my mouth.

She'd pinned the fox with an expert's grip, an iron hard vice, as she clutched it to her chest, back legs and head both immobilised.

The poor animal's front legs twisted and lashed, desperate to scratch, the torso bucking and heaving, fighting exactly like the cornered fox it was, but the doll-demon's strength came from a place other than mere muscle. The fox couldn't move. Praem's wonderfully pressed maid uniform was scuffed with grass fragments and a smear of dirt, and her loose bun of hair had finally given up, loops of blonde hanging down in disarray.

"Fox," she intoned, staring at me.

Hmm. Well, she didn't kill it. If it's a threat, it's not the kind of threat you want to kill on sight.

My current guess is that it's someone else's familiar here to spy on them, and taking it alive might enable them to open a dialogue with its master and hopefully resolve the situation with them. That would fit Praem's behavior here.

I gulped and tried to think, tried to focus on the animal she'd caught. It whined, letting out these awful, pitiful yelping noises, and I think it had urinated down her.

I thought back to what Evelyn had said in front of her mother's grave, about worms and the flesh of dead mages, about lead coffins. I thought about apex predators and mercury and DDT, about food web contamination, and imperfect hazard containment.

The fox foamed at the mouth, yellow eyes wide and rolling.

"Is it just a fox?" My heart was still pounding. "How do we tell?"

Praem stared down a the animal in her grip. "Kill it," she intoned.

Praem hasn't killed it, though. Wonder why?

Or maybe she really just meant that as an answer to Heather's question. Killing it would enable them to determine for sure what it really is.

Hopefully Evelyn can provide another option for going about this.

"No, no," I held up a sudden hand. "It's just a fox, don't. It doesn't deserve this. We need to … " I swallowed, blew out a deep breath, and gathered my thoughts. This was crazy. "You stay right there, Praem. If you … hurt an innocent animal, I won't forgive you, okay? Okay?"

Praem stared at me again.

"Just don't hurt it." I repeated. "I need to go wake Evee, she needs to see this and make a decision. Yes, Evelyn'll be able to … work it … out."

Every hair stood up on the back of my neck. My skin crawled.

At the sound of Evelyn's name, the fox had gone still.

Not limp. Not an animal giving up to conserve strength.

Still. Watchful.

"Oh," I breathed. "Oh, it-"

With a sound like a clicking tongue, the fox was suddenly no longer in Praem's grip. It reappeared twenty feet away, hit the lawn running, and raced off under the moonlight.

"Oh no. Oh no no no," I blurted out.

Praem didn't miss a beat. She whirled on the spot and sprinted after the animal. I picked up my feet and stumbled after her.

Ah. Well. Okay then.

Yeah, Heather, I strongly suggest you force-crush that fox immediately and send Praem to Evelyn ASAP.

Granted, I still don't think this is Loretta. If it was, it would have been able to recognize Evelyn on sight before. I also don't think it's Edward, or it would have been spying on them in Sharrowford rather than waiting here.

Most likely, this thing answers to another wizard with designs on the Saye holdings. Possibly one of the two who we briefly spoke with on the phone a few arcs ago, possibly someone else.

In any case, if it can teleport than there's no point in trying to capture it again, even if doing so might open diplomatic options. Shoot to kill.


That's the end of the chapter. This apparently isn't going to remain a breather arc, even if the fox turns out to be less of a threat than it currently seems.

Anyway, this chapter has clarified the arc title. The house, the grounds, Evelyn herself. All paved over by Loretta's malevolent industry. Reclaiming this ground isn't something you can trust time and nature to do on their own; it's going to take work. Even if the fox isn't related to Loretta as I suspect it isn't, everything else in this chapter makes the title's meaning clear.

Additionally, this more indepth exploration of "demon summoning" recontextualizes something about the overarching plot. Namely, that Maisie and Heather were summoned. No, really. The thing that Loretta did to that alien king entity, and the thing that the Eye did to these human twins, are in fact the exact same thing. The Eye cast a "summon blink witch" spell to bind a pair of magically empowered humans from their mysterious extradimensional realm of Earth, and it kept one of them longterm while dismissing the other.

This is demon summoning from the demon's perspective. Or at least, this is what it can be, at its worst.

What that in turn means about the ethics behind Praem's situation? I'm not sure, but it's not encouraging, and it doesn't speak well of Evelyn's attempts to not grow into a version of her mother.

...

Funnily enough, this is similar to some thoughts that I've had before. Years ago, when I was playing in a Call of Cthulhu campaign and our party was dealing with some ferocious extradimensional predator that a reckless wizard had summoned, I asked the GM if some other worlds had a counterpart "summon grizzly bear" spell. We laughed and memed, but while I purposefully used a silly example to make my point I do think it's a concept worth thinking about.

...

Anyway, another closing thought. If wizards like Loretta are summoning entities that could be described as something like "kings" or "emperors" in their home realities against their will, and if these entities possess magical knowledge worth beating out of them, then it seems almost inevitable that sooner or later one of them will doom humanity. Retaliation isn't a question of "if?" It's a question of "when?" and "how indiscriminate?"

I suspect the Eye might be heading toward the "find out" stage of "fucking around" itself, for that matter. Not quite as badly, since Evelyn and Heather don't have the power and resources of a sorcerer-king at their disposal, but same basic principle.