I could feel my bones beginning to knit themselves back together after having taken the full force of hitting the flat surface of the threshold at seventy miles an hour, the floppy, near-gelatinous mess of meat contained within the confines of my armor as I forced my boneless muscles to move. All things considered, I was grateful for the pain, it distracted me from how utterly screwed I was.

I hobble-walked forwards, shuffling weakly towards the threshold in blind panic as a lifetime worth of Wizard knowledge provided me with a step by step explanation of all the things that ought to have occured to me by now. Not the least of which was the realization that thresholds were no longer a holdfast behind which I could cross without permission. They'd always been part of my calculations as a wizard - walking over a threshold without permission robbed a wizard of significant power - but up to this point I'd still essentially been thinking of myself as a mortal wizard with some new toys, not a supernatural being no longer governed by the rules of magic as I previously knew them.

I was a being of spirit bound to a mortal form. Beings of spirit could not cross a threshold without permission. It had never even occurred to me as a potential problem, I'd been walking into and out buildings without difficulty for months. But every single building I'd entered had been part of my desmine or inhabited by people who worshipped me. The subterranean cave cities of the Unas might have had enough of a threshold to bar me entry, but One Eye had adopted me as a tribal elder. Hell, even the buildings I'd visited on Earth had been by "invitation" even if my own attendance hadn't been of my own free will.

I wasn't sure if I was crying from the pain or the bitter reality of yet another thing divorcing me from ever returning to what I had once been, but my vision blurred as I steadied myself against the sheer face of the threshold. My gauntlet sparked against the invisible barrier, Svartalf magic pushing back with enough force to discourage beings of spirit without hurting them. It was a polite suggestion to "stay away" rather than something to actually hurt a being of spirit but I knew enough about Svartalves to not brute force my way past that wall. Svartalves didn't screw around when it came to protecting themselves. There would be additional protections against someone foolish enough to test that barrier. Not might, there would be additional protections.

Nothing worse than a supernatural nasty with a decent sense of self-preservation paired with a healthy dose of common sense. Those are the ones that bite you in the ass.

I screamed as a halberd ran through my chest, the fairy made weapon piercing my spine and pinning me against the sheer face of the threshold. My hand spasmed reflexively, letting go of my staff before I realized what I'd done. No longer bound to my spiritual self, the weapon was carried by gravity. It tumbled over the threshold and to the road in front of me, tantalizingly close but maddeningly far.

The Nuckelavee howled with cruel laughter, kicking me with its wide hooves as it dragged me back and away from the threshold. Thinking was beginning to grow difficult as burning sensation spread out from where the weapon pierced my chest, supernatural vitriol from the monster infecting me. Nuckelavee were bringers of plague and poison, and while I was quite certain that no mere illness could kill me any more damn if the Nuckelavee wasn't about to try. I found myself in the world's worst modern interpretation of Fantasia, broken, stabbed, and beset at all sides by justifiably angry fairy folk as the Nuckelavee smashed me beneath its hooves, ripping my arms out at the sockets and tossing them to the side.

"Don't kill him." Spoke a cultured voice as the "drag-thump" foot falls of fae noble approached me. Kincaid's shot at the goat-man seemed to have wounded but not killed the staff-wielding goat man. He was favoring the haunch that had not been perforated by the mercenary's bullet, using his staff as a walking aid rather than a magical implement. He looked down at me with goatish eyes, expression more alien to me than any creature I'd met thus far. "The Queen wants to deal with him in person."

"Let me go!" Ok, it was a stupid thing to say but there are some things that you just say out loud when you're trapped in spite of knowing how stupid they are. Call it hostage etiquette. And I find that my witty repartee is somewhat sub-par after being quartered.

The hoary sidhe kneeled down next to me, his hot breath smelling of hay and honeysuckle even as his words were filled with utter venom. "Heka, were the choice mine to make, I would end you here and now. Be pleased that the Queen has more mercy for you than I."

"I am not Heka." I groaned.

"I care not for your title, only that you've chosen to bring about the end of one I love." The goat man chuffed, idly looking at the wall of fairy warriors that had formed between us as the resort. Hundreds of Summer's greatest warriors stood between us my allies. There would be no rescue. He followed my gaze, smiling his caprine grin. "Yes - know that you are powerless. I want you to understand hopelessness. I want you to understand desperation."

He jabbed his staff into my shoulder and whispered a word, planting a seed within my flesh. I howled agony as vines sprouted from the seed, burrowing into my flesh and spreading out through my muscles with angry thorns. He watched me writhing in pain, pinned beneath the halberd, tugging at his beard with a look of mild amusement. "I was there when Titania told Aurora you had engineered her death, you see. I saw the hope die in a child's eyes as she found out that she would not live past the week's end. I'm sure that you know the look, your kind inflicts it upon mortals often, but I think you lack the necessary context to realize its import."

He kicked me,clipping my head with his hoof hard enough to chip the tip of it. "Your kind doesn't love - not truly. You're too divorced from the memory of immortality to understand it. But I know. I know love. I love Aurora like one of my own and you chose to kill her."

He smashed his staff across my back, yanking up with the shepherds crook to rip the vines from my body-shredding my innards with the razor-sharp vines as he did so. "But she is not the only woman I love. So, before I fulfil my Queen's desire to drop you within the darkest oubliette in fairy to spend eternity in darkness and pain, I will have an answer. Revenge will sate me but I cannot help my Queen heal without understanding the source of her pain."

He squatted, lifting my head to eye level as he spoke in tones of utter contempt. "So I will make you an offer. It is a meagre offer, but the best I have to give. Tell me why you have done this monstrous thing. Tell me why you have elected to kill the Summer lady. If you speak truth, I promise that there will be an eventual end to your suffering."

I laughed, sadly. "You're offering to kill me eventually?"

"It is a better offer than you deserve." The sidhe replied morosely. "But I would not see passion overcome all reason."

I felt a tug at the back of my mind, a warm sensation that I'd felt before when I allowed myself to tap into the mantle on the helicopter. A rush of hope ran through me as I realized what was happening. Perhaps I would get out of this after all. Provided, of course, that I could keep the sidhe talking so that he didn't notice what Muminah was doing.

My High Priestess was summoning me. She didn't have my true name, but even an imperfect summoning ritual could allow a supernatural being to come to the summoner provided that the entity being summoned actually wanted to be summoned.

And I really, really wanted to be summoned right now. I pooled my will surreptitiously, trying to invert the summoning spell I'd used for years. Creating a spell on the fly was always a dangerous proposition. Creating a spell to translocate my corporeal form was utter madness but we'd sort of crossed a threshold for crazy when we'd nuked arboreal Russia.

I willed a prayer to the universe that the sidhe was too focused upon his revenge to notice my severed arms clenching my palms in frustration as I struggled to form the spell I hoped would save me from my current predicament. Which meant I needed the sidhe good and angry so that he was making bad decisions. That was one skill for which I required none of my magic.

I have it on good authority that I can be remarkably vexing when I feel so inclined. I did my best imitation of Enlil's tone of beleaguered spite and replied to the sidhe noble. "Aurora was in no danger until she chose to kill Ronald Reuel and steal the Summer Knight's mantle."

The sidhe looked at me with alien contempt, his tone a measured mask of indifference as he queried. "Explain."

"The Summer Lady had the Summer Knight killed." I shrugged the stumps of my shoulders. "She's planning on killing all life on Earth because she's totally bonkers. Call me crazy, but I felt like that had to be stopped."

"You could have killed the Summer Knight or seen to having him killed." The Sidhe interjected.

"Billy boy, I'm sure that by now you're aware that the Summer Knight died. There are only a couple people capable of pulling that off without giving the power back to the Summer Queen. I'm not one of them. Plus… you know, subtle planning.. The whole 'hide who was involved' requires a deft touch." I flopped my torso from side to side to emphasize the shake of my head. "I don't know if if you've noticed, subtlety isn't really my schtick."

"You are lying." The sidhe stated matter of factly.

"The hell I am." I snorted. "The Summer Lady had the Summer Knight axed and is keeping his power to dump it in that stupid table."

"Summer cannot take up arms against itself." Replied the sidhe.

"Well bucko, you'd better start digging deep to figure out how that "cannot" becomes a bit more flexible, because she both "can" and "did" kill Reuel." I snorted.

"I will get the truth from you eventually." The sidhe replied sadly. "I had hoped to avoid pain beyond the limits of minimal necessity."

"About that… " I smiled behind my mask, opening my clenched fists and sending motes of starlight from my fingertips. "Gonna have to rain check that one."

"No!" The Sidhe Lord brayed in fury as my body dissolved into starlight, my power dissolving my corporeal body in an instant.

I suddenly understood why every creature I'd ever summoned had been so angry about having been summoned. Even as a willing participant in the process, being summoned was wildly unpleasant. The relative discomfort of astral projection was nothing in comparison to allowing someone to summon my physical form. The first feeling when one is summoned is one of utter absence. One is doused in an utter void without light, thought, time, feeling or sensation. I don't know how long the void actually lasts, it could have been seconds or centuries, but just as I started to lose hope that there would ever be an end to the nothingness I was abruptly thrust back into a world of pain. The only feeling worse than briefly ceasing to exist is having the universe force you back into existence.

I screamed a series of sounds that had been intended to form swear words, but mostly came out as guttural utterances of pain as my body formed from starlight and plumes of ensorcelled flames within the summoning circle Muminah had drawn on the sandy ground. I staggered drunkenly within the circle, dizzy from the ordeal as my high priestess broke the circle with her toe and knelt prostrate before me. "Forgive my impudence, Lord Warden, but I felt that it was unfair to the Summer Court to rob them of so many capable warriors."

"Was that a joke at my expense?" I asked in amazement, twisting the kinks out of my newly reformed neck. I needed either a chiropractor or an ectomancer… maybe both.

"No my Lord." Muminah flinched. "I'm sorry my Lord."

"Don't be, it was a decent joke and the jackass needs a reminder that he isn't invincible." Ammit interjected, tossing me my staff as she looked out at the furious fairy army trapped on the other side of the threshold. "And if someone had let us know that he didn't have a damn clue how to use his powers, he wouldn't have needed to be saved by a little girl."

Enlil barked out a long laugh, "Are you of all people, criticizing a man for seeking out a woman's aid?"

"When it directly insults the ego of the chauvinistic, short-sighted, man-child who has allowed to trap me on a hell-world because he was too short-sighted to seek out the wisdom of his elders to avoid communal capture and torture - yes I damn well do." Ammit's eyes flared as she jabbed my chest with a talon. "Who the hell do you think you are?"

"Ammit, I…" She cut me off, clearly not interested in my answer.

"I don't care! Here is who you actually are. You are a child many thousands of years my junior who has stumbled into power that you are only beginning to understand and are clearly too stubborn to wield wisely." Ammin started counting off mistakes on her taloned fingers, highlighting my personal failings with each digit. "You lied to me about who you were. You lied to us about how much you actually know. You lied about how much you were involved with the fairly courts. You lie so much that I suspect it comes to you more naturally that breathing at this point. We are your allies, your inner circle. We have no choice but to foster your success and you are hamstringing us at every possible chance out of some misguided need to maintain total control. Stop fighting us and trust us or you are going to get us all killed."

"Ammit - cease." Enlil stood between me and the huge predator.

"You dare to interrupt me?" Ammit growled.

"I am your Elder, Ammit. And I know the fear of not knowing one's true allies. I know fear better than any Goa'uld alive." Enlil spoke in a voice of measured calm. "We are not the pantheon you remember us as being. I know that the memory of nobility is alive and well in your heart, but the souls of the Goa'uld have become petty and small. Trust is unwise in the new blood and the Lord Warden is not half the fool you are treating him as."

"Thank you I…" Enlil shot me a withering glare and spoke over me.

"You are still five times the fool you believe yourself to be Warden. I will be teaching you statecraft and basic competence in ruling a realm. You are a King, if you wish to be one or not, and I will not serve a sub-standard king." Enlil's lip curled in amusement. "You shall become a worthy ruler even if I have to break you and start off from nothing."

There was a loud coughing noise as I remembered that my summoning had been anything but private. Our Earth born mortal and near-mortal companions were watching our exchange in mixed bafflement and fascination. My brother had been his throat loud enough to be heard over the angry conversation in Goa'uld. "So… uh… now that we're done yelling at each other, does anyone want to talk to the giant grey man from Roswell?"

The Svartalf had divested himself of his flesh mask, the lanky grey figure taller than either Ammir or I. Curiously, Ammit seemed entirely at ease with the Svartalf, reaching out her hand to grasp the creature by the wrist in greeting. The creature returned the gesture and spoke a few words in a vaguely norse sounding language. Ammit replied to him, bowing her head differentially to the Svartalf and pointing to each of us in turn.

The Svartalf nodded and held up its free hand. Glowing motes of light darted out from it and planted themselves next to our ears. They fluttered with a vague insect-like buzz before bursting into stardust, bathing our heads in a cool sensation of subtle magic. The Svartalf's mouth continued to move with the same jerky motions of the Nordic language but the meaning he'd intended to convey came out as clear as day.

"Ma'am, if you would please come this way with the rest of your party we can talk with the hotel manager." The Svartalf security guard seemed more or less unbothered by both my small cadres of misfits. "I'm not senior enough to address a hospitality contract predating the Unseelie Accords."

"I can understand him!" The mustachioed Russian soldier interjected eagerly. "The words, they make sense!"

"Translation magic." Kincaid replied, an impressed note in his voice.

"A damn good variant of it too." I agreed, more than just a little bit impressed. Translation spells weren't easy, one had to create a spell capable of both understanding and altering sounds in real time based on the speaker's intent. To create a spell capable of translating Goa'uld, English, Norse, and Russian in real time so that each language could be understood immediately required an extremely fine control over the magic used in the spell. To do that over a dozen times at once meant the Svartalf not only had a razor fine control of his magic but also a boatload of magic to back it up.

The Svartalf's lipless mouth quirked up in what might have been a smile. Great, he had an ego to go right along with that power. "Ma'am?"

"We will consent to meet with the manager." Ammit agreed. "I would see how how my property is being tended in my absence."

"Of course Ma'am." The Svartalf bowed. "Welcome home. Giza has missed you in your absence."