Season of the Witch: a SHIELD Codex

You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. ~ Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan

1. Black Smoke

Columbia County, Pennsylvania-

The storm hit just after seven in the morning as the sun began to rise still summertime hot in the October sky. The sun's soft orange glow abruptly gave way to violent red painted along the breadth of the clouds, and then those once-fluffy puffs looked hard and dark as jet as the wind blew hellfire steam south across the dead zones and into the struggling small towns that shared the southernmost edge of the county line. It cut power lines and crashed old trees to the ground as it passed, like a giant striding through an unnatural night. Newscasters spoke into dead air as storm alarms thrummed through the black, but the people knew to get low and get safe without them.

Twenty-seven minutes of whirlwind nature, screaming its fury out to anyone that would listen. Windows slammed shut to defend the occupants within, autumnal flowers hammered down outside even while a few brave and frantic tenders tried to care for them in dirty shorts meant for last month and the month before. Plastic skeletons peeled from front doors and fluttered against the relentless onslaught while carved pumpkins shook and rolled, and almost forgotten radios sparked into life to tell hunkering, hopeful kids that they were not going to school today after all.

By eight the sun had begun to poke out from behind the withering veil of grey again, almost apologetically beating the heat back down hard enough to bring mist up from the asphalt in winding trails that looked, to the excited kids now spilling outside, like ghosts. One good week of fall weather laid in the recent past; cool and gloomy light rains and softer winds that carried the almost subliminal scents of spice and pine. Now it was gone again in favor of summer's already too-long stay full of muggy discomfort, and the towns shrugged and got on with their morning anyway, waiting for the electric buzz to come back to the air.

At nine, a few generators popped into life to cool the older folks that lived in the ivy-covered homes set far back from the roads along Ashland's Centre drive. Neighbors popped out into the streets, sweating and grumpy, to look for the PPL service trucks that were stolidly not appearing. A few delayed workers got onto the roads to find backups everywhere they went, the trees they'd heard distantly crashing becoming something annoying real in the background noise of their daily lives. They honked at the trees, they honked at each other, and most eventually turned their way back home, pissed off and unable to do anything about it.

And as nine o clock became the misty heat of ten without the relief of AC or cool water yet in sight for most, the puffs of white mist on the roads blew away, there in the little almost one-road town that lay south of abandoned Centralia, and what followed in its wake was a coal-miner's gloom as dead and filthy black as the storm before.

. . .

Aggie stood in the tiny kitchenette of the home she still owned on the outskirts of that tiny town named Ashland, looking out the water-stained window at the overgrown mess of weeds and herbs gone to seed that made up her lawn. She picked up her old yellow mug and blew once across the surface of the filmy tea inside as she watched the mist on the street puff away, then set the mug down again, forgotten. Her face was a stone mask, and she did not blink often as the sun tried the best it could to take back the morning. Her eyes were bloodshot. How it all usually was, these days.

The mug came up. One soft exhale to unsettle the thin white film, then it was set down again.

The tea had gone cold 'round seven. She had never bothered to take a sip, never glanced left to check the twitching time on the old battery-operated clock above the stove. She stood, there in her tiny kitchen that had last cooked a hot meal close to two years ago, and she watched. Her eyes were itching and strained as she practiced how to not think. It wasn't the storm that troubled Aggie that morning, not yet. It was always the silence inside her mind. That had ghosts in it, too.

The sun gave up and crawled back down behind the black mist boiling over the trees and the glimpse of winding road she had up at the edge of the neighborhood lane, and now she did blink once, looking up as the sky fluttered with fresh ash brought up from somewhere deep in the earth. She reached out and picked up the mug one last time, pouring its contents down the acrid-smelling disposal and turning to move towards the stairs that led down. She kept the mug in her hand this time and snatched up a dry, relatively clean towel from the back of a chair on her way to wipe it out. Why not, she figured. She was going to need something to pour with. Couldn't do worse than something that had recently held fresh water.

There was always a bag of pure, clean salt in the basement. Always.

. . .

Forty-six hours later, SHIELD's hidden Playground-

Agent Melinda May swept her slow, trained gaze across the open lobby of the shared library onsite agents used for both geopolitical research and to trade the latest crappy thrillers they read during their downtime, and did not acquire her primary target. It meant he was likeliest to be in the nook far back that he'd all but marked out for his own purposes. With a sigh, she marched down an aisle of SHIELD worldbooks so far out of date that at least one had a foreword about the then-recent death of the last king of Prussia.

She wrinkled her nose as the lanes grew narrower and older, then took a swing into a corner of the library now bound in permanent chaotic disarray. The incense burner she had smelled several aisles back wafted out its musky contents from where Loki had stuck it beside a pile of books with spines titled with words even she with a number of languages mastered couldn't identify. The man himself lay on a narrow green and dark-wooded chaise he'd recently rustled up from somewhere, dust sparkling in the air between his slender pale face and the gently dawdling magelights he'd strung up and bound to some sort of ornamental pole. Honestly, it looked like it used to be some kind of a wooden hat-rack.

At some point since the downfall of Thanos at the edge of the galaxy, Loki had discovered quaintly trashy antique shops and taken to them with that half-insane, darkly amused affection that was his trademark.

The library nook he had claimed, not to mention his own quarters, had gone to hell since.

May used the folder in her hand to tap at one of the boundary walls, a thick bookcase that held ordinary but also out of date maps on its other side. He glanced up from the dense, black-bound tome he was reading, eyes dozily parting to give her a cat's quick blink that said obviously I knew you were there.

She sniffed, an annoyed little inhale that she felt behind her teeth. Now a standard and oddly reliable fixture of SHIELD's central nervous system, Loki still had a particular way of existing that could cause immediate irritation upon exposure. She pursed her lips, then forced the tension in her shoulders to relax.

It wasn't about him, actually, if she got honest with herself. It was the file in her hand. The weird ones. She'd started to hate the weird ones. But it was her turn to get out of the house, according to Coulson, and as long he still held authority, she'd roll with it as best she could. Maybe it would be good for her. Besides. There was nobody better to handle these weird ones than the weird one laying prone right here.

That thought distracted her a moment, making her look away as the drowsy look left Loki's face and replaced itself with a puzzled one instead. She caught the change and looked back, jutting her chin at him. "You been hearing the rumors?"

"The rumors that are, between you and I, not in the least actually rumors but really just a warning of a new reality to come bearing down on us? Those rumors?" He let the tome drop down onto his chest with a rustle of paper, a dangling string from the collar of his dark hoodie acting as an ad hoc bookmark. He arched a black eyebrow in a sardonic quirk that said more than his words did. "I am intensely aware of such rumors, yes."

"What's your read on them?"

Loki shrugged. "I told Phil I was going to stay despite what changes may come. Might have been nice had I been warned that statement was going to become… challenging, but, well. I'm not sure he knew then."

May frowned, realizing she was feeling a tiny jolt of relief about actually bringing it up. Choice of conversational partner be damned. She looked for another seat and found some sort of old cushioned stool he must have picked up on one of his last hunts out. She settled on it, tapping the folder on her own knee next. "What else?"

He studied her, looking almost wary. Fair enough. All trials they'd gone through together aside, she was still usually not the warmest of agents to interact with. "Oddly, I think it's the right decision for him." He slid a few inches upright as she continued to watch him, silent. He sighed. "Coulson is a good leader. One of the best I've encountered, actually. He has a manner of gaining trust and respect that is a right rare feature, and his management of dangerous situations, his ability to make quick decisions under pressure, is not a skill earned lightly." He tilted his head, as if acknowledging the undertone of what he was about to say. "And he is a miserable ruler."

"What's the difference?"

"Plenty." Loki laughed. "For one, never trust a ruler that seems to crave the position. Not that I know this personally." He laughed again, low and sardonic. "And he does not crave. There is no hunger in him for what he does now. It makes for a good space of time for a kingdom to flourish within, but it doesn't last. Leaders that fine burn out. Let him stand down while he still has some fire. He'll be better afield, and much the same as he has been before, I expect. Let the new figurehead take the headlines and the heavy crown. I don't know him, this new little lord. Don't think I'll much care to. It won't be the return of that Fury, at least. The leadership, really, will be much the same otherwise."

"You'll have to deal with the new guy. We all will."

He plucked the book from his chest and laid a proper paper mark inside it, putting it down next to the chaise. He looked down at it for a moment, sounding contemplative. "So what? We've handled worse." Then he looked up, quick and abrupt. "What's the file in regards to?"

She waggled it at him. "We got a live one."

"I was told the matter in Norway was a live one. It was most assuredly not." He swung around to get black-shoed feet on the wood floor, reaching out for the thin manila folder. She passed it over, but he didn't open it yet. He started looking off, contemplative and annoyed both. "Very disappointing. I don't know what I expected, I suppose. Tulpas are not exactly common in Europe. Or anywhere, really. Another sad example of…" He frowned. "The thing with the dog and the fool and the lot in the van."

That got a laugh out of her, a real one. "You got Scooby-Doo'd."

"Trite nonsense. Just so." He sneered, no hostility in it. "This one?"

She leaned back, feeling the warm wood of the bookcase hold her spine up. Surprisingly comfortable. "Lost contact with a small town day before yesterday, in the morning. Power went out after a surprise storm for starters. When I say surprise, I mean that we've scraped every meteorological assessment in the state and it doesn't show up on any radar until it sprung up to kick this place in particular in the teeth. They were caught flat-footed. State power can't get in, nobody is coming out. Hasn't hit the major news yet because it's a very small town, but we've been intercepting some families trying to make contact and they're getting nothing. Not cell reception, not deliveries. It's like they disappeared."

"My attention is duly earned." The file still sat thin between his palms, like a knife's edge. "That sounds almost like a sealing. Such rituals aren't usually strong enough to cover an entire town, however. A great deal of effort involved in setting up etheric walls and cutting off such other earthly access, and so, not the assumption I intend to start with. Where was this?"

"Place called Ashland. Nothing notable." She gestured at the folder, reminding him he could figure it out for himself if he wanted. "Due south of a bunch of central Pennsylvania ghost towns, if that tickles your fancy."

It did not. Loki went deathly still. The narrow face, already naturally fine and pale, visibly drained into cold marble and cracking bone. The effect made him haggard-looking, the soft blue-white of the magelights casting his high cheekbones into darkly chiaroscuro definition. "Central Pennsylvania."

She nodded, taken aback by the rapid transformation but not showing it on her face.

The next was almost in a whisper. "What ghost towns?"

"Well, the famous one. Centralia, with the big underground mine fire that killed the place a few decades back."

He sagged back against the chaise, visibly defeated, rolling his face up to the ceiling and exposing his throat as if he wanted it to be slashed open. "Oh… ruddy, bloody Hel."