The Second Interlude

(Wherein we see what is going on elsewhere in the city at the same time. Again.)

Meanwhile, still somewhere else in Washington D.C.

Gabriel shifted into a more upright position on couch, resting his hands in his lap.

"Why do I get the feeling I'm really not going to like this?"

"Because you're not."

Nicholas Cooper, Hermetic Mage and sometimes poorly-funded adjunct, made his way back across the living room to take a seat next to his partner. He reached out to take the young vampire's hand in his, giving it a forebodingly comforting squeeze.

"Gabriel, how familiar are you with the basic principles of necromancy?"

"Oh, for the love of all that's holy, Nicholas, you didn't resurrect the rabbit did you!?"

Gabriel turned, affecting a suddenly significant grip.

"Resurrect the rabbit? Why would I need to resurrect Flopsy? Did he discombobulate again?"

Nicholas shook his head. "...No, this isn't about the rabbit. Gabriel, do you know what a fetter is?"

Still unable to hide his apprehension, "It's something about physical things that ghosts haunt, like a favorite toy or a childhood home, that kind of thing. Right?"

"Precisely. The objects that the fae are seeking out are fetters." Nicholas chewed his lip pensively.

"The fae are looking for ghosts? That seems…. odd." Gabriel mused.

Cooper paused to draw in a long breath and let it all out in a single, unending, stream of words.

"Well... it's not exactly ghosts they're after. More like, the long-destroyed remnants of an ancient empire involving the once High King of Ildathach, the many-colored place, and Tír na nÓg, the ancient empire of the eternal, who may very well now be literally resurrected in the bloodline of an elven prince from Bathmoora who is attempting to capture a unicorn so that he can make a claim to the throne."

Gabriel stared at him quizzically for a long moment.

"What?"

"An elf is after a unicorn so he can become king. Of…. every…thing."

"Uhhh…. huh."

Nicholas smiled tersely as Gabriel continued to stare at him. "And…what does this have to do with fetters?"

"Well," the mage continued, "That's what Solidus and I were trying to figure out, really. See, the thing is, the High Crown isn't supposed to exist anymore. It was supposedly destroyed, as in completely annihilated, during an event called The Battle of Trees, like, a few centuries ago or more. Anyway, that's neither here nor there, the important thing is that the magical communities of the Eastern Seaboard are in absolute chaos right now because one of their last living Sovereigns has found a way to bring the High Kingship back into being. This means that the Sacred Name, the title as it were, that holds the essence and power of the throne and the crown still exists somewhere. It's all very complicated and I don't really have the time to explain it all right now but just trust me when I tell you that the implications we're trying to get a handle on is that one, Prince Nuada, heir to Bathmoora, is hunting a Unicorn in the ancient tradition that begins the right of ascension and two, that the very fact he is even able to do this means that the Name of the King must exist somewhere in order for him to claim it. And, in this case, it is likely that the name is held in some kind of an object, which, if we look back at our esoteric history, the fae actually kind of do that a lot. Ergo, fetter."

"Right."

"You don't seem convinced."

Gabriel regarded his lover with a measure of incredulity. "You're a mage, I'm a vampire, that was a necromancer just now. I'm not sure I have a lot of leeway here in terms of disbelief."

Nicholas smiled brightly. "Exactly! Anyway, Solidus wants my help in seeing whether or not we can figure out precisely where and what this fetter is. Therefore…I was thinking…."

"…you were thinking I might let you use a few of my less than savory abilities to help you metaphysically search for it."

"My love, if I could enact clairvoyance and psychometry on my own, you know I wouldn't ask. But your blood connects you to the wisdom and experiences of elders whose lives stretch back thousands of years in time and I can use that to focus my inquiries in the Collective Unconscious and find this thing, hopefully before Prince Nuada does."

"Ugh. I really hate this."

"I know, I know, but I promise I'll make it up to you. Ok?"

Gabriel eyed Nicholas with a short-lived scowl before rolling his eyes in defeat. Blood in general was a major magical focus for Hermetic practitioners (he cursed their post-Christian Greek influences for that) and his blood…well…even more so. "Fine. But if you get yourself into trouble in there, I won't be able to do much to help you, alright? Just….be careful. It takes all of my concentration to anchor both of our consciousnesses and make sure we don't end up adrift in psychosis for all eternity."

Cooper nodded and giddily sat down on the couch next to his irritable companion. Gabriel almost never allowed him access to the mystical properties of his vampiric blood, let alone his mind, but he also knew that the mage would not have asked him to do this if the situation wasn't important. He just really hated the intense feelings of vulnerability these activities instilled in him.

"Do you want me to make the cut or do you prefer to do it yourself?" Nicholas asked.

Gabriel sighed. At least he'd remembered to put covers on the upholstery this time. With one last pointed look towards his companion he raised his own wrist to his mouth and quickly bit through the skin to allow a thin flow of blood to begin dripping slowly down onto his hand. He then offered the very same hand to the mage.

With that, Nicholas began his work. Resting both of his own hands on the vampire's offered wrists and entwining his fingers with the bloodied one, he closed his eyes and called forth his magic. Muttering broken syllables in old, dead, tongues, he shaped the ritual with surgical precision. He called upon the workings of the earth mages and the Druids, bidding them to lead his mind along the necessary path. He focused his thoughts on the notions of the Absolute, and drew from it his icons of choice: a crown, a book, and sword. The meanings behind which would guide the magic towards his intended goal. Lastly, he conjured an image in his mind, the most readily available and relevant image he could muster: The Unicorn in Captivity. The power then twisted and burned in his head, birthing a twin mind; a fabricated parallel to his senses and thoughts.

Nicholas gritted his teeth, straining to keep his eyes from rolling back as his mind accelerated and acclimated to the dual state. One mind strained to focus on the present, to retain identity and gird itself against any possible oncoming psychic onslaught. The other, safely partitioned and magically temporary, reached out to his lover to establish a telepathic bond.

Gabriel's mind, resistant at first, slowly began to give way through a tumultuous pattern of thoughts, ideas, and bits of memory. As Cooper anchored the link, Gabriel's own voice, the typical internal monologue of most conscious minds, began to fade as he shifted his concentration to keep them both moored in the material world. Safely tethered, Nicholas turned his consciousness and struck out into the maelstrom of the ether.

Almost at once, he perceived another voice; the soft timbre of a woman, somewhere in the distance. The words were strange, with a foreign cadence he couldn't place. The young mage furrowed his brow intently, physically reaching up to wipe the sanguine sweat from his lover's face even as his cognitive twin twisted and danced in the vampire's thoughts.

Cooper moved deeper into the telepathic blood-bond, still listening to the cryptic speech as he left the safety Gabriel's consciousness. Gabriel, for his part, mentally sounded another sort of warning, pulling instinctively away from the alien voice in his head but Cooper pressed forward. The woman's voice momentarily paused, the darkness around them falling silent... waiting...

A presence drifted towards them, gently, with inquisitive mirth. As it neared, Cooper felt something begin to creep towards his own half-mind. There was strange scent, of woodsmoke and old books. Was it in his mind? In Gabriel's? Did the air of the living room suddenly become denser; the faint footfalls of cherubs alighting across the carpet with censers of ash and incense?

It moved closer, the feel of broken wood crossing through the Hermetic's palm, and then an oddly familiar sensation...that of cold, rough-hewn, metal. Nicholas closed his eyes, reassuring himself of the illusory nature of the sensations both exotic and familiar. He centered himself for a beat, drew a token breath, and acted in concert with his own psychological twin.

As Gabriel relaxed into the tidal drift moving through his subconscious, the voice began to re-emerge, slowly, with soft intonations; a rhythm that could almost pass as the cadence of a ritual in its own right.

The shadows of the room swelled and stretched, pooling across the living room carpet, leaving dark stains of memory in their wake. A cold breeze swept through the closed windows, reminiscent of the winter winds coming off of the ocean. Nicholas could hear the rustling of cloth somewhere in the distance as Gabriel tried to force the images in his mind to sharpen. The young vampire was drawing on the memories of his bloodline to fuel his lover's magic, and there was no telling where that would lead them.

Then, with a gut-wrenching crash, a tsunami struck, tearing Cooper's half-mind from its moorings. The haze of mind and memory parted as a fog does before the onslaught of the sun. He found himself standing in a large, poorly lit room, filled with row upon row of ancient wooden tables, their worn wood splintered and stained with age. Blood splattered the stone floor, some old and long congealed with rain water and dust, some new and fresh; a blazing red badge of sin against a dull grey world. Various instruments of the abattoir, not since seen after the advent of electricity, lay haphazardly around the room; some used as macabre book marks in old texts so equally yellowed, some in various stages of purpose.

Cooper's eyes widened first with horror, then further with dread. He steeled his mind against the insistent clawing of panic against his consciousness, replacing his fear with anger, and couching this anger in turn with defiance. There was a presence here. Something causing their minds to find this memory in particular and to inhabit it as a matter of course. He pulled along the mystic channels of kinship that bound his lover to the undead kindred that had come before him and sunk his mind further into the thrum of human unconsciousness from which they emerged. Again, something stirred in the depths.

His eyes danced across the grim setting, using his nauseating historical sense of the scene to search for any object or shape out of place. Any such flaw, he reasoned, might reveal the illusion's linchpin... Or its creator.

The voice that answered his thoughts was as clandestine as it was seductive.

"I have plundered the fern, Through all secrets I spy, Old Map ap Mathonwy, Knew no more than I."

"The White Goddess." He rejoined, answering, in part, to an empty room. "By Robert Graves. Every practitioner of magic knows that book."

The timbre of the voice, while undoubtably feminine, shifted in pitch and resonance, before finally clearing to that of a young woman affected by the accents of millennia.

"Indeed, they do. And yet, they understand so little of it. Wayfarers wondered, Warriors were dismayed, At renewal of conflicts, Such as Gwydion made."

He crossed his arms, taking a step away from a particularly grisly scene involving a half-butchered stag on the table beside him.

"Show yourself, witch! If you were once kin to the Undead or kin to the Fae, I would see you out either way. There are questions need asking and answering."

As Cooper turned from the animal laid open on the table nearest him, he found himself face to face with the woman so maligned. She sat casually on one of the tables, impervious to the blood and fluids that flecked its surface. Her long, white hair, was left loose; flowing to an impossible length down over her shoulders and onto the table in great whorls of wind-swept locks. Her skin was equally an impossible white that he might have mistaken for the color of undeath had it not been for the faint rosy blushes on her face and shoulders. She was naked, as far as he could tell, save for the great bramble crown interwoven in her hair and growing up out of the separation of tresses into a thicket of bare branches that rattled when she spoke. Dried lacings of ivy held the spikes of plum and thistle together; a few ancient leaves clinging to life near the pointed tips of her fawn-like ears. Her eyes he liked least of all. Blue and gold, and lit from within by a potent and unquenchable fire. They were as inhuman as they were mesmerizing; with the wide, mirrored, reflectiveness of a beast at night but instead of echoing light, they echoed vengeance. Her hands, caked in dirt, lay neatly in her lap, absently toying with the pad of her thumb.

She regarded the mage with an inquisitive tilt. As she leaned back onto the table, her hands met with a pool of rust-red gore but her face registered not even a flicker of notice. Nicholas allowed himself a slow breath.

"I am not a witch." She replied.

"I can see that." Out of habit, he reached up to adjust his glasses. "And who, exactly, might you be?"

"You're the one who came looking for me."

He stopped. Took a breath, and tried again. Conversing with the psychic constructs of the Great Unconscious was not his forte and he was yet entirely sure where this one had originated.

"My apologies." He straightened his posture and addressed her directly. "But perhaps you can help me. I am looking for something. Something that has been lost for a very long time and I thought maybe you might know where to find it."

She did not answer but continued to watch him, unblinking.

"My name is Nicholas Cooper. I am a mage of the Hermetic Order. Can you tell me your name?"

"There are many you can choose from, if you like." She finally stated. "I was once Aimhirghin, born of song, but now no longer. Then, I became Fianait, the wild, who was named Fionúir, the ghost that haunts the marshes. Scáthach, who frightens even the most brave and stout. But then I was broken, and my names were taken from me, so they gave me Gormghiolla, the grey servant. Without memory I drifted, and became Ailithir, the pilgrim, now called Ailith, the one who is ascending."

"I see." Nicholas replied. "You are a ghost, then. Were you fae-kind in life?"

The strange woman smiled at him with an almost malevolent glare. "Murdered but not dead. Sundered. Undone. And yet, the sounds of my Name still breathe…"

Gabriel pulled along their shared consciousness, reminding the distractible mage not to tarry too long in their shared vision. Nicholas gave a dismissive harrumph.

"Perfect. Then, I think you might be just the person to help me find what I am looking for. Seeing as it concerns your…. former kin. So to speak."

"Help you? And what is it you think I would help you find?"

"A small thing really. Just a glimpse even, if it pleases you. I'm looking for a Named object; lost as you say, but plain to see. Lurking about under our noses, I should think. Do you know of what I speak?"

She elegantly rose from the table to float from one intricate decoration hanging on the wall to another in obvious appreciation. Pausing at a particularly clever twist of stone filigree, she spoke, at first seemly to nothing.

"Arose from a holy day devoid of light,
leading the sound of bellicose swine.
Then departed to create his storm of bitter cold and ice.
On the creatures of the night, he would dine.

A festival of followers shall amass,
to dance their endless carousel.
So end your cries, your anxious fear will pass.
Behold the royal heir to shadows and hell."

She turned only just enough to catch the mage's eye. "Tell me, Nicholas, are you afraid?"

"Of riddles? Hardly, but I'll imagine you're driving at something a bit more specific."

Nicholas watched the unearthly beauty from a comfortable distance as she drifted through the bloody stockyard, sliding his glasses up the bridge of his nose with an index finger.

A soft, tinkling, laugh emanated throughout the room, slowly seeping in through the walls.

"You should be."

It was as though her words struck out at the walls themselves, cracks suddenly forming in the construct around them, raining plaster and wood chips down onto the marble below. A tremor passed and the Dreaming began to change once again.

A vast open square unfurled before them, tall, domed, buildings rising in the distance, their reflective gold tiling sending blinding rays throughout the area. A crowd swarmed through the mid-day heat, the sun raw and scorching at the height of its zenith. Shouts and cries of madness and jubilation echoed through the humidity, wavering over the press of bodies. But the clothing, the people, and the stark colors of the buildings meant that this must be a scene from sometime in the late 1400s. A jester in red and white stripes pranced past him brandishing both a set of old bagpipes and a very large knife.

"The unicorn is killed!" The man shouted, waving the weapon about. "Dead! Dead! Dead!"

Nicholas recoiled. A few feet away, a knight in full armor astride a great dun horse and surrounded by hounds held a shining horn aloft to the cheers of the crowd. Its end was twisted and bloodied, having been hacked free of a body only seconds ago. The knight smiled triumphantly as the crowd cheered him on.

Ailith's voice cut through the din.

"You haven't much time, Nicholas Cooper. It would seem that history has come 'round again."

Nicholas' lip curled in disgust at the hateful phantoms swarming around him, the sound of their raised voices fading by his will as if he were muting an especially overblown audio track.

"Why are you showing me this?! A unicorn hunt six hundred years ago? Are you trying to tell me that the elven prince of Bathmoora is out for blood? I think we all knew that."

She drifted unhindered through the crowd, reaching a hand out as though caressing the frenzied masses before meeting the Hermetic's exasperated expression.

"He may yet put aright, what once was put asunder. May yet join what should never have been separated. He binds the wound that cannot heal. Gives a name to the nameless."

"Yes!" Cooper jumped at the chance. "The Name. Tell me, do you know where it is?"

She turned from two men in French caps and tunics as they quarreled over handfuls of a bloodied, silken, mane. "I know a Name that cannot be spoken." She passed between a woman in a yellow court gown and man in royal auburn velvet.

"I keep it secret here with me." She plucked a lilac from the trees overhead and placed it in her bramble crown.

"The Name." The mage repeated emphatically. "Show me where it is."

The wan creature raised her palm skyward, in supplication to the sun. She then reached out to what he could now see was the body of a…white deer? He couldn't quite tell. It was lying on its side, splayed out, broken, on the ground at the center of the frenetic crowd. He could make out cloven feet and tufts of white hair, as well as a thin, angular, face and terrible, jerky, movements. Like death throes. The noble woman in the yellow gown gaily rushed over as the poor creature struggled for breath. Leaning down, she shouted something in a language he could not understand, though the word "vivant" was clear enough to him. The woman began to poke and grab at it, grotesquely taunting the dying unicorn in its last moments. But then suddenly, a hand darted out from somewhere down near the fallen beast; a small, emaciated, white hand speckled with blood. It grabbed the woman, who screamed in startled horror, as she tried to tumble backwards out of the grasp of whoever, or whatever, it was emerging from the viscera on display. A moment later, the noblewoman was free, none really the worse for wear, except that she pointed at the figure beginning to stand up and shouted, over and over, "Mon collier! Elle l'a pris! Mon collier!"

"Necklace?" Nicholas repeated. He leaned closer. Indeed, he could make out something grasped in the red-slicked fingers. Held high in the bloody, elfin, hand was a glimmering silver chain, torn from the woman's bodice, and at its end, a prancing horse and a jousting pole.

"If there is one thing, Nicholas," Ailith now whispered dangerously close to his ear. "That I have learned through these long years of waiting in the abyss, it is this. Behold, on wrongs swift vengeance waits; and the least subdue the strong."

He tried to turn, but somehow she held him fast. "You will never know the truth as I do. The truth as he does. Mo anam cara." (Gaelic: My soul-mate). He tried but failed to turn again and her voice did not falter. "Coimhead fearg fhear na foighde." (Gaelic: Beware the fury of a patient man).

With terrifying strength, the woman seized the mage, shoving him backwards to be swallowed by the vicious masses. But before panic could set in from hundreds of clawing hands at his face and shoulders, Nicholas found himself jarred awake rather brutally by an unexpected crack to the jaw, Gabriel's voice splitting the dream and leaving only scattered emotions and tattered fears in its wake.

"I said WAKE UP, god dammit!"

Nicholas toppled, cringing and spitting an angry curse at the vanished creature as the ache of the impact soaked into his face.

"Hag! Shit ...Ouch."

His glasses cast aside, the boy-faced Hermetic squinted up at the attractive blur he could only assume to be Gabriel.

"Gabriel?"

"Of course, Gabriel!" Came the half-shrieked reply.

Gabriel pulled Nicholas into a sitting position on the floor as he leaned over to retrieve the slightly bent glasses.

"Nicholas, are you ok?! You've been catatonic for over 20 minutes. What happened?!"

Cooper groaned, a sound of exasperation more than physical discomfort. He shook the scowl from his face with a sigh.

"I'm not sure just yet. It was some kind of…dreamscape. I think. The collective chaos of the fae in the city seems to have, pardon the expression, bled over into the unseen world just as much as it is causing problems in this one. But I think I saw something….it was…. hang on…"

Pressing the glasses into Cooper's hand, Gabriel helped his companion upright. In an oddly comical sequence, however, Nicholas replaced his glasses on his face, noticed their warped state, removed them, adjusted them, and replaced them once more.

"I saw this woman, this sort of forest sprite or other, but that's not surprising. All kinds of beings and archetypes are bound to show up when one goes mucking about in subconscious spaces. Anyway, what I really wanted was to…" Nicholas stopped short, falling silent and staring wordlessly into the distance. With an expression of dawning realization, he suddenly turned.

Gabriel remained expectant.

"It's a necklace!" He exclaimed. "Gabriel! The Name fetter is a necklace!"