Reviving the Blood
A/N: This is a conceptual fusion of the Black Jewels universe with the characters and some aspects of the setting from Dark Angel. For those unfamiliar, BJ has a lot of content related to fixed gender roles and sexual coercion & violence, including of underage characters. Although those themes are not focal aspects of this story, they will be alluded to in some places, so proceed at your own discretion.
A/N 2: Primer of EYNTK about the Black Jewels universe to follow this (hopefully):
The Blood are a subset of the population with telepathy and other magical powers passed down from a mostly-extinct ancient race of dragons. Animals who are Blood have human-equivalent intelligence and are called kindred. They channel their powers through Jewels granted to them during two special ceremonies - a Birthright Ceremony when they are an adolescent and an Offering to the Darkness when they reach maturity. The Darkness is some combination of nebulous religious force and source of power. The color of Jewel(s) an individual receives corresponds to the deepest Web of Power in the Abyss they can descend to, i.e. how much power they can access at their strongest. The spectrum descends as follows: White/Yellow/Tiger Eye/Rose/Summer-sky/Purple Dusk/Opal/Green/Sapphire/Red/Gray/Ebon-gray/Black/Ebony where Opal separates what are considered lighter and darker Jewels and Ebony is so rare as to be unheard of. An individual can descend at most three ranks from their Birthright when they make the Offering. Their powers are referred to as Craft and are renewable but not inexhaustible, and extensive use can take a serious physical and mental toll. The Jewels themselves can appear either as a single uncut piece or a set that usually consists of a pendant and a ring.
Society is very regimented along three different axes: traditional wealth/social position, Jewel strength, and Blood hierarchy separated along gender lines. Women are witches and may sometimes also be Priestesses, Healers, Black Widows, and Queens where those titles denote special statuses and abilities. Queens are at the top of the hierarchy, meant to rule over and stabilize the land and the people and form courts around themselves for support and protection. Black Widows can do spell work that involves weaving Tangled Webs which may provide visions of possible futures, set stronger types of spells, or produce elaborate illusions. All witches are vulnerable to having their powers broken when they lose their virginity and find using Craft during their "moontime" incredibly painful. Warlords are the male equivalent of witches and may be Princes or Warlord Princes, though they mainly differ in harsher temperament and territoriality, rather than having distinct powers. Princes are equal to Priestesses or Healers, while Warlord Princes are a step below Queens.
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It had been an open secret for some time that the Blood was in a state of slow, continuous decline across the past several generations. At least for those who were in a sufficient position of power to notice such things. Whispers and rumors had escalated into openly voiced worries and meetings theorizing on the potential causes and any possible solutions. There were no clear answers bar a general resolve: something had to be done before the puissance of the Blood slipped away entirely. Each year, fewer and fewer hopefuls to the Birthright Ceremony walked away from the Dark Altars with Jewels that had the potential to reach the darker ranks at maturity. Fewer and fewer witches manifested the abilities to become Healers or Black Widows. Fewer and fewer males were dominant enough to be Princes or Warlord Princes.
With the conviction action must be taken agreed upon, the government of one of the largest nations had put together a group of scientists. Their mission was to study the generative properties of the Blood's abilities, determine why the decline was taking place, and formulate a plan of how to stop it. As one of their first real breakthroughs was the discovery that no similar decline was taking place among the Blood of the kindred races, the group came to call themselves Manticore.
Unfortunately that was their last major discovery for some time, and those running the project began to despair. Despite extensive studies conducted in secret with no concern for the test subjects or legality, they could pinpoint no reason for the decline nor begin to formulate a way to combat it. Only when a Black Widow named Sandeman came to them with a radical new plan was there any hope of further progress. A brilliant geneticist, she had boldly declared that given enough time and funding, she could splice together genes from the unwavering kindred lines with human genes to create hybrids to restrengthen the Blood. Not just in a general sense, but she claimed that given enough funding and a base gene pool from a wide enough selection of subjects, she expected to be able to predict the specific Jewel strength and other abilities of the hybrids she intended to create. It was a revolutionary claim and met with high skepticism; none of their own scientists had been able to find any indications of a genetic origin to their powers, though many had tried. Predicting the potential of a single individual sounded like a fairy tale.
With no more realistic hopes to fix the situation, however, Mantcore's Committee of Directors did agree to provide whatever she asked for to begin her experiments. Sandeman showed no more qualms than her predecessors in the acquisition and treatment of subjects, whether their DNA was stolen or they were used as surrogates. She also showed no particular disappointment or emotion when her first efforts came out as monstrous creatures that bore no significant resemblance to kindred or humans, many of whom had to be put down as complete failures. Some had no psychic strength at all and were useless except as subjects for dissection to investigate what had gone wrong. A few did earn dark birthright Jewels, but most of those quickly became unstable and dangerous after the Birthright Ceremony and had to be eliminated quickly before they caused accidents, let alone reached an age where they might use their strength to turn on their creators.
The more hybrid creatures she made, the greater the number from each batch that were human enough and stable enough to be allowed to survive, and the closer she got to finding the elusive magic formula to produce exactly the results wanted in an individual hybrid. Upon evaluating the results of her fourth distinct series of experiments, Sandeman was confident she had finally cracked the code of how to balance mental and psychic strength. She was confident when she presented the Committee with the embryos for what would ultimately be her final series of trangenic creations. Called X5s, she assured they would be fully-human in appearance, mentally stable, and would be guaranteed to possess the whole range of darker Birthright Jewels. It was the answer she had promised them to revitalizing the flagging dark bloodlines. She had expected them to be pleased.
Unfortunately, during the time Sandeman had been immersed in Manticore's secret labs working towards achieving her promised results, those who had agreed to her plan in the first place had started to have more and more doubts and second thoughts prompted by their own personal agendas. With the prospect of new dark Blood that would be so much stronger than they were upon attaining maturity, many feared they'd be unable to control the newly-dubbed transgenics when they grew to maturity. None of those currently in power had any interest in actually handing over their own preeminent status to a bunch of artificial test-tube Blood creations that weren't even fully human. They didn't even want to go back to a system where power shifted hands on a regular basis with caste and rank being equal determinants rather than staying solidly in their own aristo families for generations. The unexpected answer Sandeman got back to her reveal of the X5s was a request for her to scrap them and start over; if she could produce units to exact specifications, why not add inbuilt controls and docility that would keep them from revolting as their desirable strength was bred into the more general population? The darkest of the Blood had always been unduly savage, after all, and no one wished for that aspect of the Blood to return, or perhaps be exacerbated by the animal DNA mixed into the transgenics.
Sandeman balked. She'd had her own private reasons for creating the transgenics, and her plans for the future did not include them being such malleable instruments. While it was a mystery to those who had founded Manticore why the Blood were failing, Sandeman was entirely aware of the underlying cause. For thousands of years a secret group had worked together to slowly corrupt and gentrify the Blood outside their own families, pushing them away from properly honoring the Darkness and performing their necessary roles, corrupting general understanding of Blood Law, and chipping away at the ties that connected them to the land and each other. While they preferred to be subtle, they were also responsible for the occasional judicious assassination of darker Jeweled Queens or breaking of intractable young witches likely to grow into leaders and stabilizing influences. The Conclave were dedicated and patient and their end goal had been for only themselves to be left with enough power to rule over the Blood. Sandeman had been one of them and as committed to their traditions and goals as any, until the day she'd woven a tangled web and seen the ruin that would lie beyond their triumph, for the Blood as a whole and for Sandeman's family in particular. Her attempts to get them to change course had fallen on deaf ears, and she'd been lucky to escape with her life.
She had tried to reason with Manticore, pulling out very old, very esoteric texts about the nature of the Blood's power she claimed to have used as references in her work. She explained patiently that creating such weak-willed vessels for all that dark power would only result in transgenics unable to reach their full mature potential without flaming out or descending into madness. She pointed out multiple times her earliest attempts had failed for that very reason. It should have been obvious, but the Conclave had perverted the teachings of the Blood about their own powers so completely, and they were so worried about maintaining their own positions, Manticore refused to believe her anything but stubborn and old-fashioned. They insisted it was simply a matter of her trying again and finding a different way to give them the power they wanted without the threat of strong-willed powerful Blood they did not.
Sandeman had not trusted them enough to explain about the existence of the Conclave before, and found the idea of risking it as they were threatening to destroy all her hard work no less foolish. She couldn't even be sure the Conclave's direct manipulative influence wasn't part of the reason behind their demands. Despite her passionate denials and insistence that creating weaker, more malleable transgenics with the same level of power would inevitably utterly fail, Manticore did not listen. Her words were ignored and her refusal to create a new series to order was met with increasing threats. In the end, she had no choice but to destroy her notes and flee into hiding once again, holding onto the hope that in the absence of her expertise the Committee would have no choice but to work with the transgenic embryos they already had. Among them she had hidden her best hope for stopping the plotting of her former allies, thanks to the vision web she'd woven near the end of her production of the X5 series.
Despite how intricately Sandeman planned the genomes of her creations, she had refused to allow more than the most rudimentary assistance from other scientists, and only those handpicked by herself. She had also insisted her notes on the progress of her experiments must remain exclusively her own as a safety measure. With them destroyed, Manticore was left with little idea of what her X5s would become beyond knowing she had created none expected to wear Jewels lighter than Birthright Opal. Likewise, they were left with no idea what the genetic key to dictating their powers was that Sandeman had unlocked. Without her expertise, Manticore's ruling Committee had no choice and did exactly as she had predicted and let the X5s be birthed and begin training.
However, they did not immediately give up their own ambitions for creating what they now saw as a far better prototype for their purposes. They simply saw no reason to get rid of the X5s before they had their replacements in production. After her loss from the program, those who had been working as Sandeman's assistants tried to continue with a new X series more in line with the Committee's desire for decreased intelligence and independence. None of them knew exactly how she'd matched the mental, physical, and psychic strength to create balanced individuals, and despite having seen some of her worst failures and Sandeman's warnings prior to her departure, they did not even understand exactly how delicate of a balance it truly was. Even once they stopped producing stillbirths and Blood infants too weak to even wear Jewels, their attempts to dull the instincts and abilities of the X6s and X7s seemed to result in transgenics that were lesser than their older counterparts in all ways. Many did not survive long enough to even reach a Birthright ranking. Of those that did, only a bare handful wore darker Jewels, and of those few, only a couple from each batch survived without showing signs of magical flameouts or psychosis that required them to be put down. In comparison to all but Sandeman's very earliest results, they were a complete disaster. When X8s and X9s were similar failures, they were forced to admit they could not replicate Sandeman's work.
Their plans to create equally powerful but more malleable creatures thwarted for at least the foreseeable future, Manticore's ambitions fell back onto the X5s they had kept alive as a fail safe. As the scientists had been producing the X6s, X7s, and X8s, the X5s had been subjected to a structured plan of harsh discipline to shape and control them to be be heavily dependent upon and fearful of their technically weaker handlers. Much debate went into whether it was too much of a risk to train their Craft abilities beyond the most rudimentary level before a few accidents made it clear it was safer for the trangenics and everyone around them if they had some better understanding of control. Not only that, but the Committee did not want to wait several more generations to see returns on their investment. The X5s were everything Sandeman had promised they would be and more. Psychically strong in rank, many showed signs of developing into the more specialized powers of the Blood's castes. They were very intelligent and possessed enhanced physical capabilities well beyond that of humans thanks to their kindred genes. Even better, they seemed to be largely controllable and retaining control was ever the most important aspect for Manticore. It seemed a waste not to use their strength to the Committee's advantage as soon as they reached maturity – and earlier, where possible. As such, training proceeded apace, with heavy doses of conditioning and manipulation at even the slightest signs of disobedience. Repeat offenders or continual failures were dissected in the continuing hope of eventually understanding Sandeman's methods.
The program for the X5s was thought to be a rousing success until nine years in when a group of eleven subjects rebelled and escaped into the night from their barracks. After that disaster, when none of the escapees were retrieved aside from a few terminated mid-escape, Manticore's methods of control were reevaluated and a number of changes were made. There was no small amount of irony in the emphasis of the transgenics' training being shifted to attempt to capitalize upon the instincts hardwired into the Blood, just as Sandeman had originally planned. For those of darker strength, the ties and restrictions of Protocol and Blood Law that the lighter-Jeweled Blood could ignore with little consequence were a nigh-unbreakable leash when they were properly invoked. A Black Widow named Elizabeth Renfro was hired to head the new conditioning program that saw the young transgenics organized into proto-Courts where the males were fitted with Rings of Obedience through which they were punished for both their own misbehavior and that of the young Queens they were assigned to. The Queens and Healers were given gardens and patients into their care that could be used both as additional bindings and potential hostages. Along with the change in their structure from random groupings to Courts, the pace and intensity of their training was also increased, to keep them from having enough energy to consider further revolt or escape. The Courts themselves were switched in composition at random intervals to make sure none of the transgenics became particularly attached to one another as the escapees had.
They may have been developing powerful Craft and had the training to know how to use it, but their indoctrination was so thorough and the penalties for infractions and disobedience so severe that rarely did any of them try to revolt. It did not help that their keepers were some of the few remaining Blood with darker Jewels. Madame Renfro wore a Sapphire Jewel and lead a small coven of powerful Black Widows who spun tangled webs used to ensnare, brainwash, and punish those few who still chose to rebel or simply failed any of Manticore's multitude of stringent tests. Many transgenics forced into them came out of the re-indoctrination bare husks of their former selves, with no thoughts but to serve Manticore. Colonel Lydecker, who oversaw the training of their more physical and offensive abilities gained from the more animal aspects of the kindred DNA they'd inherited, was a Green Jeweled Warlord who watched dispassionately as many died in those harsh tests he forced them through. As things stood, by the time most of them were old enough to make the Offering, the transgenics were so trained into the mindset of being overpowered and disadvantaged the idea of attempting to challenge their state as prisoners and experiments simply did not occur to them.
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Things were dire for the transgenics on the inside, but the state of things for those who had managed to escape and evade their captors was little better. Lydecker's attempts to track them down were relentless, and though a primary reason for their escape had been their attachment to one another, they had immediately separated even before they fully made it past the fences of their prison to make recapturing them that much harder. Zach had been the eldest and he had declared it should be so, and so it was. Even if he, himself, had felt the pull to try to stay together to protect and serve the young witches he thought of as family. Especially Max, the young Queen of the group.
Naturally, it went easier for some of them than others. Krit and Syl stayed together despite Zach's instructions and were able to mostly protect one another, though they never settled in one place for long. Zane, Tinga, and Brin separately found adoptive families who took them in and treated them as their own. Sadly, many of their original adoptive siblings did not fare nearly so well. Vada, a nascent natural Black Widow, was too afraid to seek help to deal with the snake tooth she developed at puberty and died in agony. Kavi ran afoul of a group of other Warlord Princes and died the year before he would have made the Offering. Meanwhile, Max, Jondy, Seth, and Ben did a lot of skipping from place-to-place, never feeling quite safe. Jondy ended up cornered by the warlord acting as a landlord at her slum of an apartment building and had her powers broken. Seth died rather than be recaptured by Lydecker, falling to his death off the edge of Seattle's space needle. Although Ben and Max both survived to make the Offering, the circumstances under which they did so were not optimal. Both separately came to the conclusion it was necessary to sneak into a Dark Altar undetected for the ceremony, and paranoia about being caught meant they both pulled back before descending to the full strength of their innate potential. Max went from Birthright Red to Ebon-Gray, while Ben went from Sapphire to the same Jewel of Rank, just slightly darker. Of the unit they had considered their family, they had been among those of the deepest potential and at maturity they were the two darkest powers. In the case of Max, although unbeknownst to her, this was not an accident. She had always figured into Sandeman's plans as her intended Special One, the witch she intended to become Witch and bring about greater changes for the Blood than just regaining the darker ranks of power.
That was a matter only revealed to Max herself some time later, however, and her concerns of the time were far more personal. After feeling like a failure for having cut short her descent to her full strength and forever lost the potential additional power, she needed to be able to feel the safety she was lacking. Even a witch with a Jewel as dark as hers had to deal with being exceedingly vulnerable once a month. She had never liked Zach's edict they stay separated in the first place, and this only seemed to her as more evidence she and her siblings would be stronger together. After a few months of fruitless searching, she came across a suspicious and incomplete news broadcast about the events of Seth's death. It sent her to Seattle, where she had hoped to find at least one member of her family. Unfortunately, by the time she arrived, the trail was completely cold thanks to the efforts of Lydecker and Manticore. Still, it was the only trace she'd ever seen of any of her siblings and since she liked the land and its town well enough, she decided to set down roots for a while in Seattle. It seemed like as good of a place as any from which to continue her search.
Things weren't easy for her, but over time she managed to learn to harness the skills she was born with to make herself comfortable enough. What she hadn't learned of Craft from Manticore and the various street gangs she had worked with she could usually accomplish with the physical prowess her part-kindred genes also granted her. It didn't bother her any that most of her income was from theft. At least, it didn't ever bother her until her sticky fingers caused her to cross the path of a Summer-Sky warlord from a very old and politically powerful aristo Blood family named Logan Cale.
After she attempted to steal a prize she glimpsed displayed in his penthouse apartment window and made a fairly spectacular getaway, he tracked her down with the single-minded intention of harnessing her skills for his own use. Despite his own aristo family's power, Cale spent most of his time and energies on running a clandestine crusade to expose some of the worst abuses of the Blood in power. Thanks to knowledge from a source he did not share with Max, he was just aware enough of the existence of Manticore and its creations to realize how useful to him and his cause she could be. Ultimately, he gained her agreement through a combination of flattery, blackmail, guilt, and empty promises of reciprocal help to locate her siblings if she helped him. Despite the crudeness of his tactics and the condescending air he often displayed towards her, their knowledge of each other's biggest secrets drew the two of them inexorably towards one another. Over time, their mutual loneliness - combined with a touch of lust and frequent mutual adrenaline highs - left both of them mistaking their arrangement for a truer bond. Any potential it might have had to develop into something deeper and more genuine was constantly stifled by their inability to be honest with each other about anything that really mattered and their own perceptions of their inadequacies.
For his part, Cale keenly felt the inadequacy of his much lighter Jewels and limited movement from permanent scars he'd gained in a battle he lost on one of his self-imposed missions before Max came along. Even the best Healers his family's money could afford were not able to restore his ability to walk unaided. His focused obsession on wanting to make something of himself outside of relying on his family's money and exaggerated feelings of inefficacy had lost him his place in court after court until he'd stopped trying and found purpose in his crusade for justice.
For her part, Max had always needed to remain an outsider ever since she escaped from Manticore, constantly guarded and on the move. As a young Queen, her unfulfilled needs to form bonds and put down roots had always left her constantly dissatisfied and certain there was something wrong with her. Without knowing any better, Max herself attributed this discontent to there being something fundamentally wrong with her from the kindred DNA Manticore had made her with. Her association with Logan Cale only reinforced that belief, as he endeavored to spend a great deal of time between missions educating her on the proper behavior of witches and their place in the social hierarchy.
On the outside, she dismissed and laughed these lessons off as foolish. However, the intricate dance of Blood Protocol was something she'd not yet learned at Manticore before the escape - nor was it of any concern to the thieves and criminals she'd spent most of her formative years with. Like the other transgenics back at Manticore, something in her cried out for the structure and began following Logan's ideas of the proper etiquette of Blood society. So much so that even when his rules went against her own instincts she internalized them anyway, so determined to be a good, normal witch. She convinced herself that if she could only suppress those parts of her kindred DNA, she could finally feel like she belonged in the outside world, not having any way to realize the wrongness ran far deeper through what Logan attempted to teach her.
While Max helped Logan to get far better results with many of his missions exposing various excesses of spoiled high ranking Blood aristos, attempting to track down her family brought her nothing but more pain. First there was Ben. After his own disappointing experience with the Offering to the Darkness, in his isolation and shame at his failure, instead of looking to reconnect as Max had, Ben lost touch with reality and fell deeply into the Twisted Kingdom. He thought the Darkness itself was whispering to him, asking him to test the faith of others and brutally killing those who could not live up to his more-than-human standards of worthiness. His trail of slaughter across the country ultimately brought him to Seattle, where Logan found out about his activities despite Manticore's ongoing cover-up. To Max's great sorrow, when she tracked him down, she could not talk him back to sanity. Ultimately, she had no choice but to end his life as as Lydecker and Manticore closed in on them, called to the scene by Cale. Max's need for acceptance and connection was such that the betrayal caused only a minor hitch in their relationship.
She hoped things would go better when Zach tracked her down on his own initiative, but all he wanted from her was for her to leave Seattle and Logan behind, which she did not want to do. She also did not, as a Queen, particularly care for a Warlord Prince trying to order her around for her own good when he wasn't even pledged to her. She felt even less happy with his refusal to put her in contact with any of her other siblings before he left town himself. Of course, he did come back when he needed help with situations involving both Tinga and Brin, but neither of those situations turned out at all well either.
Brin ended up in the hands of Manticore, brainwashed back into the fold. In the course of their reunion with Tinga, Max and Cale helped Lydecker realize Madame Renfro was working behind his back conducting experiments on the X5s without the Committee's knowledge or approval. Despite the number of transgenic deaths he himself caused, Lydecker possessed his own twisted version of affection for them, especially those sufficiently without flaws they had been allowed to come to adulthood and the escapees who had managed to evade his grasp for so long. In his eyes, with the X5s still being a limited and irreplaceable commodity, Renfro had to be stopped at almost any cost.
He was hindered, however, by her better position with the Committee that allowed her to turn them against him. So he went to the escapees. By a perfect blend of unique insider knowledge and manipulation Lydecker talked them into trying to put a stop to Manticore's power by blowing up the DNA lab storing copies of Sandeman's work under Renfro's watch. Their willingness to work with him was in no small part a result of having found Tinga dead in a huge, sickly tangled web in a secret facility and having personally witnessed Lydecker's own shock and dismay over it. They were too eager to strike back at the organization that had been a dark shadow over their entire lives to think all that much about the future of their fellows still in Manticore's hands, just the way Lydecker preferred it.
It was the first time a group of them had banded together since the original escape. The reunion partially reawakening their nacent childhood bonds to one another and their hopes of striking a blow against Manticore had all of their spirits riding high as they went to execute their plan to take down the mad scientists who had created them. Unfortunately, although they succeeded in blowing up the lab, it did not have the effect they wanted. Madame Renfro had a stranglehold on the Committee running Manticore beyond what even Lydecker realized, so even allowing such an intrusion was not enough to oust her from her position, let alone shut down the operation. Worse, Max found herself recaptured during the conflict and sent to be re-indoctrinated.
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As things had proceeded for the escapees, likewise had the lives of those transgenics left behind in the prison of Manticore. Always intending to get the most out of each of the embryos carefully constructed by Sandeman, every one of the X5s had cloned copies. After the escape, those who had been made from the same basic sequences as the escapees were put under especially harsh watch for any signs of rebellion in addition to Renfro's general changes. Each of them spent several extra months under the thrall of Renfro's webs. A few died outright, a few more ended up with their powers or their minds broken, and several came out of the experience with no thoughts or personalities of their own - beyond following the decrees of Manticore like mindless automatons. Those few who retained more of themselves learned to hide it well.
The Committee had intended the transgenics to both re-infuse strength back into their bloodlines and, once they saw the true potential of the X5s as individuals, to give them access that darker strength for their own ends as soon as possible. So long as they were kept under strict control, the X5s made ideal tools to reinforce and consolidate their personal power. To this end, the training the X5s received became even more specialized into the magics of combat and the subtleties of court politics and assassination. The plan was that once the Committee's families had achieved better positions and enough crossbred offspring with darker potential were produced, the X5s could finally be safely eliminated.
Despite previous experience with their plans going awry, Manticore's elite still continued to expect to be able to completely control and predict their charges. Regardless of Sandeman's early warnings, they were again taken by surprise with the savagery inherent in the darker Blood, especially after puberty, and a few deadly fights between the Warlord Princes and the guards and between each other were inevitable. Only an even harder crackdown on discipline and a few judicious castrations were enough of a threat to prevent most further incidents from escalating to bloodshed against unacceptable targets. Another unwelcome revelation occurred when more and more X5s made the Offering to the Darkness and came away without reaching their full potential. The scientists and geneticists had no idea why, which the Committee didn't like. No amount of promised reward or punishment seemed to change the outcome, however – in fact, such measures actually lead to worse results in supplicants after they were shown dire consequences being inflicted on their predecessors.
As for the individual X5s themselves, X5-494, twin to the escapee Ben, was one of the X5s who came out of Renfro's webs particularly good at pretending to be a blank obedient slate. Any real allegiance to Manticore had been destroyed early on when he'd spent so long in the Black Widow's dungeons after the escapees fled through no fault of his own. Therefore no matter how many times Manticore tried to drill in loyalty, it had already been broken – like many others, however, he saw no option to do anything but follow orders or be terminated, and became very good at playing along and keeping any hint of temper tightly leashed. It wasn't until one of his first long term missions outside of Manticore's compound went disastrously wrong that he gave any real thought to doing anything else.
An old aristo Blood family tied into the research at Manticore had asked for assistance in seeing a young Purple Dusk Queen through her Virgin Night and in forming her first Court. As Protocol training was a very large part of the lessons Manticore had imparted to keep the transgenics in line under Madame Renfro's direction, it had seemed a waste not to take advantage of their operatives being able to fulfill such functions. 494 had already done a few similar missions. However, his being chosen for that particular one was a disaster from the moment shortly after his arrival at Berrisford Hall when the two of them were introduced and instantly felt the bond of a Queen and a male that belonged to her.
When the time came for the temporary contract negotiated with Manticore to expire, 494 tried to explain to the young Queen that Manticore was not to be crossed. However, when she pressed him, he admitted his loyalty was no longer to them and he would fight going back for her if she asked. Manticore, not in the habit of leaving their assets unmonitored, was not pleased at either the rebellion or the hint of aggression behind the declaration more suited to the Warlord Prince he hadn't shown any signs of becoming since before the escape. Things only got worse when Rachel pled with her father to keep her new Consort, and the soft-hearted Berrisford foolishly tried to hardball them. Manticore did not take kindly to his threats to expose their program, nor did they have any interest in permanently losing the use of their property. Rather than give in to the demands of an utterly expendable ally, Manticore operatives incapacitated 494 through the Ring and staged a fatal accident for the Prince and his daughter.
When the incapacitated 494 was returned to Manticore, distraught, and dumped back into the hands of Madame Renfro's Black Widows, he was made to forget the entire incident. Still, even though he no longer remembered what had happened, some lingering instinctual memory of Rachael Berrisford and their bond affected him. He was sent to make the Offering shortly thereafter and walked away from the Altar with the same Sapphire Jewel he went in with. There was a great deal of discussion about this failure among the Committee, because few of the other X5s had failed to such a degree of not progressing past their Birthright at all. Ultimately, he managed to avoid any further punishment when they concluded he had been sent to make the attempt far too soon after exiting the re-indoctrination webs. As Lydecker and Renfro were the darkest Jeweled administrators on base and 494 had been carefully kept from forming attachments even more than usual because of Ben's escape, no one of sufficient strength was able to sense the lie of it. At least so long as he never actually used or displayed the uncut Ebon-Gray Jewel he'd received. As much as Manticore would have preferred it otherwise, the Offering to the Darkness was private and had to be conducted in isolation to prevent disruption of any kind. Some rules even they could not break.
After the incident with Berrisford, although he had not acted on his expressed thoughts of defection, Manticore took the precaution of never assigning 494 to any longer term missions where he might get equally attached to the target. Most often, he was sent out as an assassin, but his attractive appearance and relatively dark Birthright saw him sent out just as often on overnight missions to serve in the bed for pleasure or seeding. After the previous incident, Manticore became more careful about making sure the witches involved in those missions were not likely to develop or foster any attachments.
It would perhaps have been tenable enough as a situation for him if Manticore had not caught wind of Ben's murder spree. Since none of the other creations that came from Sandeman's X5 series had gone so spectacularly wrong, the Committee expressed a great deal of curiosity about why one of her creations was so defective. As Ben remained elusive, Renfro suggested they take apart the next best thing, his twin, conveniently at hand. Whether 494's extra strength would have done him any good when he realized they were coming to drag him down to the basement for the third time was something he'd always wonder later; he'd exhausted his psychic strength on a particularly challenging mission just the day before. They pushed and prodded and tried to drive him to fall into the Twisted Kingdom, triggering webs filled with visions of his twin's kills. He never understood how he survived the ordeal intact in its aftermath. He, like the Committee, would never be made aware that Madame Renfro had been an agent of Sandeman's all along and made sure of it.
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Though their attempts at creating a better X-series that could match up to Sandeman's results had continued, the efforts of Manicore's scientists remained lackluster and insufficiently powerful or stable to be of much use. Few were deemed worthy of survival, and even those were not born with Jewels sufficiently dark to make them suitable for Manticore's primary purpose of restrengthening the Blood. Making slight alterations to Sandeman's own templates remained their best method in producing viable results, and even some of those attempts went disastrously wrong. In light of that recurring failure, when their stockpile of embryos made by Sandeman was destroyed by Max and her siblings, the Committee was put in a desperate position.
The ultimate aim of the transgenic project was to reinforce the strength of their own bloodlines, but that was intended to be the careful work of many generations which they no longer possessed the means to continue making suitable transgenics for. After much consideration and debate with input from their scientists and Black Widows, the Committee decided their best hope of moving forward was to attempt to breed the X5s to each other. The few instances of crossbreeding with their own bloodlines that had already occurred had shown reasonably promising results – and they had at least not produced any failures as massive as had occasionally come out of Manticore's labs.
After her capture and time in the reindoctrination webs, Max ended up paired together with 494 as part of the new breeding program. When the orders came down from above in general terms, it was nothing new to 494. Of course, he was not particularly in favor of the arrangement once he was told he'd been assigned to a Queen who was one of the escapees that made his early years extra miserable. That alone he would have been able to shrug off, orders were orders after all. What he couldn't so easily dismiss was the hauntingly familiar and irresistible pull of belonging he felt when their eyes met for the first time. Being bound to a Queen in any way more permanent than the fleeting courts Manticore arranged to keep them all in line was the absolute last thing 494 wanted. To be bound beyond that on a level of Blood and instinct was unthinkable, and he did his best to shove the feelings aside as some weird unfortunate anomaly and get on with the orders at hand. His distaste for the situation only grew when she kicked him in the stomach and bitched him out for entering her cell with no thought to what happened to transgenics who didn't follow their orders. For a while his biggest worry was that they were going to try to put him in a court with her; he wasn't sure he could withstand being punished for all her infractions. Especially given his impression she wouldn't bother to give a damn or budge an inch to save him any pain.
For her part, being back in Manticore had always been one of Max's worst nightmares. While she had always enjoyed the benefits of the enhanced abilities encoded in her genetics, she had also seen her instincts as an unnatural foreign thing imposed upon her she should fight against. When introduced to the way Manticore had been using those very instincts to control her fellow transgenics, she only became more sure she was right. As to 494, she never admitted a large part of her need to push him away was because her instincts wanted to follow Manticore's rules. Though she told herself it was mostly because 494 was alive and fine when her Ben was not. Throughout her captivity, she constantly clung to fantasies about getting back to Seattle. Her relationship with Logan Cale, which had never been more than a potentiality, became even more of a fantasy of a perfect normal life, enshrined in her mind as something worthy of fighting to get back to. It pushed her to keep scheming to find an escape. It also gave Renfro a lever by which to try and tear Max's resistance apart, by engineering a false escape intended to have deadly consequences.
As much as 494 would have liked to want nothing further to do with Max, the instincts of the Blood were not so easily denied. After the whole mess with her being sent to kill the Summer-sky warlord she was stuck on went down and she not only forced Renfro to give her the means to save him but also burned Manticore to the ground, the newly-dubbed Alec couldn't seem to keep himself from following her back to Seattle. His initial impulse had been to get as far away from her as possible, but he'd told himself he needed to acquire additional resources in the nearest city before moving on and that was Seattle. Surely, he'd thought, it was a big enough place he could avoid seeing Max again.
At least that had been his original intention. However, the understanding of Protocol Manticore had taught the transgenics differed greatly from the way the Blood in the outside world related to one another. Not only was it hard for him to figure out what the rules even were to try and live according to them, but sometimes after he figured out what they were, they went so strongly against his own training and instincts it still kept tripping him up. To his disgust, he'd immediately made a few mistakes that were so grave in nature he had needed Max's help to extricate himself from the situations created or cover up their disastrous results. It kept drawing him back into her orbit, which added a heavy feeling of debt on top of the bond he didn't want to acknowledge he was still feeling.
At some point his plans to leave the city got lost in a never-ending cycle of trying to repay her and change her opinion of him. Despite himself, some part of him craved her regard and a place in her Inner Circle. Manticore had taught that strong Blood males were volatile and dangerous without ties to a Queen, but he hadn't wanted to believe it. On the outside, without even the incidental connections Manticore's temporary faux court structures provided, he could no longer deny it. No matter how many times she disdained him and told him she was never going to form a Court and certainly not one with a place for him in it, he couldn't manage to pull himself away for more than a few days at a time. And it wasn't just fear of ending up like Ben, though that had its place, too. He needed her, and he tried to make himself feel better about the fact she clearly didn't need him by irritating her as much as he could manage within the rules of his instincts. It was petty but kept him from lashing out in more devastating ways.
It did not help that Max and her pet warlord held Alec in contempt for his part as a double agent in Manticore's plan for Max to kill Cale via a tangled web placed on her skin, rather than blaming her own obliviousness at the time to the obvious ruse of an overly easy escape. The fact the web remained intact and potentially lethal despite Manticore being nothing more than smoking rubble only seemed to solidify Max's need to blame someone else. Alec, who she inconveniently felt drawn to just as much as he was to her, and who constantly reminded her of both Manticore and her lost brother, was the perfect external target. She was much better at hiding how much he affected her than he was, as well as how much sense his ideas of how the Blood should function felt so much more right to her. Still, while her constant denials and aloofness mostly kept Alec in the dark as to how she felt, Logan Cale was not quite as easily fooled. His efforts to pretend he found the connection between the two transgenics entirely nonthreatening were so transparent it only increased Max's need to push Alec further away to fix her floundering relationship.
Even beyond that interpersonal tangle, Cale was openly contemptuous of Alec's choice to continue adhering to the transgenic's version of the rules of Blood Protocol taught at Manticore whenever possible. Cale and Max both considered them primitive and antiquated, and Max frequently tried to convince Alec to change his behavior to match Cale's dictates about the proper deportment of the Blood. As much as he was drawn to her side and wanted her good opinion, however, the instincts and rules Manticore taught were buried too deep and made too much sense to him at a fundamental level. He just couldn't bring himself to change much beyond simply hiding what she didn't like where she wouldn't know about it. It only worked with occasional success, causing even more conflicts between them when she caught him out. He could feel it in the depths of his inner core that the strongest of the Blood could not function inside Cale's version of the rules, and could not understand how Max didn't feel that, too.
There was a much bigger picture than the drama between the three of them brewing, however. Manticore's efforts to enhance the strength of the Blood had been a secret. With Manticore gone and her experiments, including some of the earliest ones that did not look at all human, loose in the world, knowledge and fear began to slowly spread. Many of the Blood, though wanting to be more powerful themselves, had grown over the years to distrust those with much darker powers. The idea of powerful mutants who were part-kindred besides caused the gradual growth of a climate of fear and suspicion. Many of the transgenics were careful to only show their Birthright Jewels, but even that was not always enough to help them blend in given how much more they needed the strictures of Protocol and how different those rules were from the ones the outside population adhered to after thousands of years of Conclave sabotage.
More and more of Manticore's creations gathered together in the toxic landscape of an abandoned portion of Seattle called Terminal City to keep their own company away from the increasingly paranoid ordinary populace. Used to the traditional system of Courts and Protocol, most of them wanted to see some kind of Territory Queen's Court formed to rule over all of them as an ultimate authority. Max stubbornly insisted there was no need for setting up any official ruling Court, that what they needed was to stop trying to recreate the artificial structures and antiquated ideas of Protocol from inside Manticore on the outside. However, despite her words, she effectively took charge and began organizing more and more of the transgenics to gather supplies and make the abandoned portion of the city they'd claimed more habitable. Not only that, but she unconsciously stepped easily into the role of mediator in minor disputes between the smaller personal Courts the transgenics formed among themselves as they found compatible circles. Though Max knew almost nothing of the old ways of nurturing the land and largely considered it superstitious nonsense, the other Queens who had been given duties at Manticore tending to gardens and occasionally nurturing crops on specific lands at the direction of the Committee began making Terminal City slowly less toxic. Although they found her ideas odd, the color of her Jewels and her willingness to take charge spoke louder than her words about not wanting to rule.
At least for a time. While the smaller Courts were an important stabilizing influence, and while significant progress was being made towards making the environment livable, the situation outside continued to deteriorate and Terminal City was not anywhere near ready to be self-sufficient. It also was simply too small an area to be comfortable for that many dark Jeweled temperaments to be crammed that tightly in together without significant friction. As the transgenics became more and more distant from their fear of Manticore, more and more disagreements and petty conflicts erupted and escalated to the point Max had to intervene. As it became more and more perilous for any of them to operate outside of Terminal City and within their own borders the infighting never seemed to die down below a dull roar, it became apparent even to Max that nothing would help until they had an official Court for the smaller ones to revolve around and provide the official final authority.
That was not the end of the debate, however. Even as she started being willing to discuss the idea out of necessity, Max was insistent that Cale would not only be part of her court, but part of her Inner Circle and Queen's Triangle. Both she and the rest of the transgenics considered the matter non-negotiable – but from opposite sides. It was not just because they didn't like Cale on a personal level, and didn't think he was strong enough to hold a spot in a true Dark Court, those those were certainly factors. Max was entirely convinced anything to come from Manticore must automatically be wrong, and had consequently been attempting to shove Cale's ideas of how a Court should function down the throats of everyone who came through Terminal City. For the most part, they had chosen to write off her dogged insistence as a product of all the years she spent on the outside trying to hide among the lighter-Jeweled Blood. It didn't make it grate any less that Cale's very definitive rules of what was right and proper for the Blood and their Queens went against everything their instincts said in a way Manticore's own training & rules never had. Mostly they had previously all just let Max make her speeches and done what they wanted in their own Courts anyway, but forming a ruling Court would not allow for such a separation of ideologies to continue. Unbeknownst to Max, the idea was idly circulated of elevating one of the other Queens to a position as the leader of TC, but it went nowhere. Despite all her faults, Max's dark power and presence exerted a pull as a Queen upon her fellow transgenics that few of them could deny.
That didn't mean her attitude and decisions went completely unopposed, however. Alec found himself directly in the middle of the conflicts she stirred up most of the time, often acting to calm flaring tempers and even to fight an occasional duel or two. Sometimes his role was attempting to reason with Max about what the other transgenics would accept, which was far worse than any duel in his opinion. For all their mutual denial he belonged to her, they had initially arrived at Terminal City together and Max consistently relied on his knowledge of Manticore and the other transgenics. He was also a known and trusted quantity to them in a way she herself wasn't. It was another situation where the transgenics took Max's actions of letting Alec speak for her as more important than her words, which remained dismissive of Alec while she praised Logan's efforts to insert himself.
He told himself the transgenics's survival was far more important than his personal relationship with Max. It still pricked Alec's pride, hard, that after working consistently on her behalf for months as she continued to snark that he did nothing but get in her way, she made asking him to join her Court into yet another insult. She had suggested it offhandedly one day after they'd been on a supply run together, saying she might let him take a place in one of her Court's outer circles if he could manage to not screw up too badly for at least a little while. Allowing her to take nominal control of Terminal City and directly agreeing to Serve were vastly different things in the minds of most of the transgenics, and they both knew she didn't have the kind of direct allegiance from twelve males necessary to form a complete Inner Circle without him. Yet even knowing that, even having discussed that Max wanted her Court to be little more than a pragmatic necessity, she couldn't bring herself to just ask him. She hated that she needed him and he hated how sure he was she'd never have asked if she had any other choice, which made them both surly and unhappy. He did at least agree with her choices of Joshua as her Steward and Zach as her Master of the Guard. The two were maintaining an uneasy truce for the good of the transgenics as a whole when their stalemate was broken by the arrival of Max's clone, Sam, X5-453.
Sam arrived in Terminal City proudly displaying her Black Jewels and a pendant proclaiming her a fully-trained Black Widow, already backed by half a Court's worth of transgenics with Lydecker himself acting as her Steward. She sauntered in and declared they all needed to come together to fight for the transgenics' rightful place among the Blood. Max, with Cale in her ear, did not want to fight anyone, even if she didn't immediately have a knee jerk desire to disagree with Lydecker on principle anyway. Working with him to take down Manticore once was not the same thing as trusting him with the transgenics' future. Max still believed if she could just gradually guide the transgenics to accept the more modern ideas of how the Blood should behave Logan had taught her that they could all eventually be peacefully accepted by the ordinaries.
As Max's clone, Sam immediately recognized Alec as resonating with her, but unlike Max, she had no desire to deny the connection. Immediately after Max refused to even consider the possibility of working together and stormed away with Logan faithfully at her heels, Sam directly approached him to offer Alec any place he wanted in her court. He had no interest in working with Lydecker willingly, didn't trust Sam's clever but obvious attempt to break Max's court to take over, and was too loyal to the rest of the already established Terminal City Court if not Max herself to switch sides so easily. Even if all the long months of conflict had left the bond between him and Max a strained and ugly thing he was even more eager to be rid of than when he first felt it. Even if Sam was the first Queen since Max he felt the slightest pull towards and he'd had the thought many times after their latest clash that he'd jump at the chance to bond with any other Queen if it might stick and finally break him of the habit of crawling back to her.
Sam and Lydecker, however, were harder, shrewder, and less idealistic than Max and Logan, taking Alec's refusal as a matter of no particular offense and a challenge to be worked through as part of their grander plans for the future. It was pretty obvious to them from nearly the moment they settled in to Terminal City that even if Alec was on the outer edges of her Court, the Warlord Prince held a lot of sway with the rest of the transgenics and did a lot of the work of soothing ruffled feathers over Max's Protocol gaffes and providing resources and assistance for the peripheral courts in Max's name. As such, they continued to make minor but persistent overtures in his direction, changing their offer to not just any position but Sam's First Escort. Lydecker was smart enough to know they couldn't force it and Sam direct enough to not only point out everything Max did wrong, but to show Alec what she intended to do right following the old ways of the Blood instead – thanks to knowledge gained by Lydecker's discovery of a great deal of Sandeman's research and knowledge, the changes she introduced suited the transgenics even better than the teachings of Manticore. While the presence of Lydecker was doing their case a fair amount of harm, the Old Ways called to the transgenics' need for structured Protocol that accepted the savagery underlying their nature in a way Max's parroting of Logan's ideas of proper behavior could not possibly match. The way Terminal City bloomed into health around them exceeding even the city outside the fences surrounding them only strengthened their case.
The unstable situation ultimately tipped in their favor when Max made a particularly daft decision about sending the transgenics out on some personal mission of Cale's. It was meant to expose some random Warlord Prince's abuses that had nothing to do with the transgenics' ongoing plight, and it ended in a bloodbath of a conflict with the mark's personal security. The next day, once the casualties had been fully counted, after Max passionately defended her choice to a gathering of half the transgenics in Terminal City, insisting no one could blame Logan for making a mistake, Lydecker offered Alec the First Escort's Ring again, and he took it. The future of the transgenics was more important, and he could no longer deny that Max was making decisions for them that just felt wrong.
Although he was angry over what she'd done and his defection would purposefully break her court, Alec was not so indifferent to Max he wanted to give the news to her in front of all the other transgenics. Despite her excuses, Max knew that she had messed up. The fact she'd had to invoke Queen's prerogative to do the mission over the objections of her entire Court aside from Logan was outright embarrassing. So when Alec took her aside just a day after that disastrous decision, she was already feeling defensive and completely wrong-footed. She'd expected him to berate her and throw all the times she'd called him a screw up back in her face. She hadn't remotely expected him to tell her he was defecting. He had been so steadily at her back since they came to Terminal City, the news was like a physical blow and her temper got the better of her. In a hot rage she slammed a wild surge of power into him, intending to wound him to the same degree she felt helpless, hurt, and utterly betrayed.
Max only had a second to be horrified by her own action before she felt the shock of power rebounding off of shields strong enough to deflect her attack hidden underneath the Sapphire ones her power had sliced easily through. When Alec called in a set of Jewels just as dark as her own Ebon-Gray, for the first time she verbally acknowledged their connection and declared that he was hers, but Alec only laughed mockingly. That she only cared once he'd already given up just made him angrier and he threw back the retort he resonated just as much with Sam as he ever had with her, sure that Max could not know it was a lie. At Max's continued insistence he had to rethink the decision for the good of them all, Alec's own swelling temper had him spitting out that he was stupid to ever think it was a good idea to serve a Queen willingly leashing herself to a Summer-Sky prick who wasn't even transgenic and didn't know the first thing about being part of a Dark Court.
She visibly bit back her ire for one last ditch effort, and told him she had been breaking out in runes for weeks. She dropped a sight-shield around the skin of her arms to prove she was not making it up. Logan had been translating them as best he could and said they were a message from Sandeman about how the transgenics had a mission to save the Blood as a whole. The powerful Black Widow had seen a future in her tangled webs where the transgenics would have to band together lead by a Dark Court headed by an incarnation of Witch. Since it was her the runes were appearing on, she insisted that he was dooming them all by breaking her Court.
Not only did this speech leave Alec unmoved, the fact she had clearly been hiding this information from him for some time was only that much more infuriating. When she admitted she had not told anyone else in the Court either other than Cale, he let his anger have rein and suggested spitefully the runes clearly mean Sam, who wore the Black which was Witch's hallmark. It meant nothing Sandeman decided to use her for a billboard. Max's temper started to surge again at this reminder of the disappointment she'd felt after making her Offering, but the angry retort was stopped on her tongue by a rime of ice flashing over all the nearby surfaces in the room. She realized in that moment she had pushed Alec's temper to the breaking point for the first time since they had met, and backed off as he stared her down with clenched fists. A long moment passed before he turned away and left her behind without another word.
Too stubborn and too used to having him bend to her will, however, Max took her complaints to Logan. That conversation lead to a second confrontation with Alec two days later where Logan tried to corner the man and insist there were very old stories where Witch wasn't always a Black Jeweled Queen or even fully human in the past. Furthermore, he insisted Alec must stay on Max's side now that they knew about his Jewels, because of something specific in her runes. Cale said he had been having trouble because they were inscribed in the Old Tongue of the Blood, which had been almost entirely lost. However a passage he'd been sure he'd read wrong before about a tilted mirror resonating on the same web of power as the Queen to destroy the destroyers must mean Alec. Yet another piece of information kept to themselves did nothing to sway Alec, and years of learning to leash his temper in Manticore had him storming off, telling the two of them they could go screw themselves for only caring about anyone else when they needed them for something.
Drawn by the thrumming dark power and angrily raised voices, several of the transgenics were there to witness this confrontation, unlike the previous one. While Alec may not have been persuaded in the least by Logan's argument, Sam and Lydecker were far more willing to listen. Lydecker had previously spent quite some time researching into Sandeman, trying to figure out what had motivated the witch to build the transgenics and figure out where she had gone. The availability of a message direct from the source was too compelling to ignore and he had never objected to the idea of working with, rather than against Max.
Their tentative agreement to work together was nearly broken before it started by Alec's harsh refusal when Max demanded he must not be allowed to leave her Court. When they turned to him, he spit out the words that if he'd wanted to be stuck serving a witch he didn't trust he might as well have stayed at Manticore with Renfro. When the crowd of transgenics around them had grumbled in uneasy agreement, Sam stepped in to implore any of the many males who had offered to serve in her Court since her arrival to trade places with Alec. Max, even if she was still quite angry, was not so unaware of her tenuous grip that she spurned the grudging agreement of the warlord who volunteered to take Alec's place. At least not openly. On the inside, she added it to her personal tally of reasons she couldn't stand Alec, really. This was just more proof that the instinctual desire she'd felt all along to want to trust him was clearly twisted and wrong.
.
Inside the fence, the tensions between the trangenics were mostly controlled by their need to work together. Outside the fence, things were the opposite of controlled. If the Committee had been unwilling to allow the transgenics any power in ruling the Blood, the general population was appalled by their very existence. The stories on the news described them as nothing more than a complete perversion of the Blood, even lesser than the kindred. Allowing them to potentially pollute the few remaining darker bloodlines was a grave mistake; each and every one of them should be put down with extreme prejudice. An sentiment that was carried out on too many unsuspecting lone transgenics. No matter how dark the Jewels, transgenics were still vulnerable to sudden physical attacks or overwhelming numbers of psychic attackers.
The extremist stance was not purely a matter of mob mentality that had appeared out of nowhere. The information linked out of Manticore about the transgenics existence had not happened by chance, in the same way the gradual decline of the Blood that had caused the formation of Manticore in the first place had not happened by chance. The group Sandeman had formerly been a part of, that secretive Conclave, were not about to let the Black Widow's creations have any chance of spoiling their plans to rule as the sole remaining Blood. After generations of gradually destroying and corrupting the Blood, the Conclave were too close to finally having their triumph, but there was one last step, now that the rest of the Blood had been stripped of much of the knowledge that connected them to each other, the land, and their own powers. One last major working of power would sever the rest of the Blood from their connection to the Darkness in a bare few months' time when a comet colloquially known as The Dragon's Tail lit the sky overhead. Their own Black Widows had seen that the only remaining threat to their ultimate success lay among Sandeman's hybrid creations. Not only did they have a level of strength the rest of the Blood could no longer muster to match the Conclave members on an equal level, but all the knowledge of the ritual that existed had been encoded by Sandeman directly into one particular transgenic's DNA. More than that, even, Sandeman saw most of the details of a complex counter working in her vision which she gave over to the young Queen who was part of a trio she'd created to save them all.
Of course, Sandeman had been no less careful fleeing the Conclave than she had been in evading Manticore's grasp, and while they were convinced her exit meant she intended to work against them, they knew none of the particulars of her visions at the time. With the extent to which they had integrated themselves into the most powerful levels of aristo society, however, it was not necessary for them to know all the details of Sandeman's plans to endanger them. They simply set their sights on destroying as many of the transgenics as possible with a particular focus on any Queens and Black Widows that could unite the creatures or see their plans in a tangled web. Many of Sandeman's creations were killed in their purges, and even more by the rest of the Blood spun up into a frenzy of outrage at their very existence.
Through all their sometimes desperate efforts to keep themselves alive, the transgenics did their best to hold together. As more and more of Max's runes were translated and made it clear she was Sandeman's chosen one, gradually the infighting between factions fell off and all the other transgenic Courts lined up behind Max, even Sam's. While the runes drew the overall cause of the transgenics together, the continued evidence with each translation that Alec was to play just as much of a part in the working as a direct balance to Max pushed the two of them personally even further apart. Their relationship hadn't once been better than shaky to begin with, and they'd never truly reconciled over the deep rift that had erupted due to her secrecy and his open repudiation of her. The idea presented in the runes that Sandeman had built them as a matched set was anathema to both. They maintained the barest civility when they had to meet to discuss the latest details of the runes or the transgenics' precarious position, and even that fell further apart when Logan became increasingly suspicious and jealous of Max's time and attention. Still determined that once this whole mess was over she would make a normal life for herself centered on him, Max became even more harsh to Alec, desperate to prove to her someday Consort that the other man could never come between them, whatever Sandeman may have intended.
Gradually the runes spelled out the details, giving them a time when the spell had to happen to counteract the Conclave's efforts. How Sam would be the one to seal it to a web woven to hold the immense power involved. How all the transgenics should be involved with Alec and Max holding mirrored anchoring threads of the overall working, channeling the power of everyone else while Sam held the web together and channeled off the backlash safely. It would be a more complicated working than any of the transgenics had ever done, even those who had worked directly for Renfro's Black Widows, but there wasn't much choice. Even if some of the transgenics would rather let the rest of the Blood who wanted them dead be killed themselves, if the Conclave succeeded, they would be the only other Blood left. Against an organization thousands of years old, they would doubtlessly be outnumbered and eventually destroyed themselves.
Once the general details of the spell they needed to create were sufficiently known that Sam could start in on preparing to do the weaving of the required massive tangled web, Max pulled back even further from the others she'd never quite stopped holding herself partially aloof from to spend more time with Logan. While they all hoped it would go well, a working of that much power was always dangerous in and of itself. Having gotten to know Sam better through working together and having realized Sandeman created her specifically for their upcoming working rather than some more general leadership role gave Max confidence that the transgenics would be in better hands than hers. She'd never truly wanted to lead as their Queen, and though she had grown to appreciate the bonds she'd formed to others of her own kind who could understand and be comfortable with her dark power in a way the ordinaries outside and she herself likely never would, there was no real place for Logan in Terminal City. Therefore in her mind, there was no real place for her. She disbanded the Court she'd never truly wanted and spent long hours discussing her plans with Logan for a future together that no longer included the rest of the transgenics. It was the promise of what she had wanted for so long, the chance to just be a normal witch, and if it felt a little hollow and wrong to her, that was nothing new for a witch who had spent her whole life questioning her own instincts.
In contrast, Alec threw himself even further into the planning, going over every detail of how the spell was meant to work and organizing the logistics of the contributions of the other transgenics as Sam prepared the webs through which all of their combined power would be channeled. He wanted nothing more than for the whole thing to be over with, desperate for a future where he could finally get away from a witch he still felt an inexorable pull towards and more than a little heartsick he seemed to have been personally created just to serve as the anchor for a single spell, a single use tool easily discarded after its purpose was accomplished. He had nothing waiting for him on the other side as a promise, but anything had to be better than being stuck, unwanted, in Max's outermost orbit.
They all gathered in the largest building Terminal City had to offer the day before the night the comet was due to skim closest to the atmosphere overhead. It took hours of careful work to anchor all of the transgenics present by blood and mind through either Max or Alec, distaff or spear. As the fateful hour dictated by the runes Sandeman had written in Max's DNA approached, the trangenics were all tired and quiet. The three central actors of the spell had moved off into a small former office where the large web Sam had carefully constructed waited, and as the final step, she keyed the two of them, and through them all of the other transgenics, into the working.
It was a strange sensation, being keyed into all of the other transgenics, and though the effect had gradually muted over the course of the afternoon as more and more were added into the spell, the activation of the working was a whole new oddity. Alec could feel the power flowing through him, through the spell and the web, and even as he could feel the spell building, he could also feel an answering resistance against it that must be the Conclave's own working.
He felt it when the building power behind the transgenics reached a crescendo, and how the power opposing them continued to grow. The three of them exchanged a worried look and Sam called to Lydecker to have the transgenics in the other room funnel in more of their power. Alec could feel it increase, but it did not change the sense he had that it wasn't enough. That it wasn't going to be enough.
Alec had paid attention to all the nuances of the spell, and made sure he knew beforehand exactly how each part of it tied together and how they'd know it had worked. All the power was focused through him and Max, amplified through him and Max, and if he threw all his strength he personally had into it – Sam had to handle the backlash. Max had not learned any more than she needed to about the spell, and Logan would be waiting for her on the other side. Alec had nothing to lose but being stuck here fighting a losing war with the Conclave if this spell didn't work. Hellsfire, Logan had said the spell wouldn't work without him, specifically, not just him and Max. Alec knew there was a certain kind of power in a blowout, after all, so maybe this specifically was what he had been created to do. With no more thought and little time to lose, he had turned inward, descending as far as he dared into the Abyss and turning his power back into the working. He could feel it burning through him, ripping through his mind, Jewels, and body, draining everything. He could also feel the spell as a whole gaining, gaining, and passing the resistance against it and was sure if he can just hold together a little longer it would be enough. He wouldn't get to see it, but it would be enough.
Fighting through the agony to add a few more minutes, seconds, instants was taking up his whole concentration, until he felt a sharp and sudden tug coming from a different direction. He was too lost in the power to puzzle through what it could be before a sharp mental command from Max followed, telling him he had to stop. He ignored her but she just prodded harder. Irritated and exhausted, he didn't even form the return thought into proper words, simply sent back the awareness this is what Sandeman meant him for and that he's already drained himself so much there was no point in turning back. She didn't prod again, and Alec felt momentary relief that she understood for once before she suddenly slammed her entire will into him, latching on. He could feel her own power poring in as she swore that if he didn't pull back this instant she would sabotage the whole spell and kill them both, he didn't get to do this to her.
Baffled by why she suddenly cares, he can still feel her absolute conviction that she will do what she says and it shocks him enough to let go for just a second. It's a second that Max has been waiting for, and she yanks him upward out of the danger zone and keeps pouring power back across to him that eases a way a little of the feeling of being a balloon on the verge of popping from over inflation. Tentatively reaching back to the spell, he can feel that it has more than enough power if they can just hold it, and they do, until all resistance falls away and the spell is done. The whole time he can feel Max's awareness hovering, making sure he doesn't put anything else of his own into the spell. Once it's done, he intends to wake up, but falls into darkness instead. In the outside world, the comet comes and goes without any death toll or loss of powers, and most of the Blood sleep on in ignorant bliss.
Alec woke up in Terminal City's makeshift infirmary a week later, one of their strongest resident Healers and Max hovering over him. They both called him an idiot in colorful terms, at length. Before he could feel too abused or insulted, Max exchanged a look with the other woman who left them alone. Haltingly, Max explained the spell worked and they had not yet seen any significant reaction from the Conclave. She meandered through further explanations of various plans the transgenics were working on to support them all and perhaps gain some allies on the outside while Alec waited for her to get to the point. She finally trailed off and there was only silence for a long moment before she swore vehemently if he ever tried anything like that again she would kick his ass. When he tried to object, no less confused about her anger than he was before, she talked over him, slowly but firmly explaining about her fear and hatred of her own instincts because they were connected to Manticore. How she'd resented the connection between them for the same reason and Ben's death on top of it. How she had not actually been completely blind to how drastically Sam and Lydecker's knowledge of the old ways have transformed Terminal City and how poor the condition the rest of the land really was in comparison to what Terminal City was becoming under the transgenic's stewardship. The runes be damned, Sandeman had created them to deal with a much bigger problem than just thwarting one scheme of the cult's, and as her mirror she expected him to stick around and pull his weight.
Looking into the future, they still had to deal with a world that didn't even want them to be alive. Worse, they would have to somehow convince those same members of the Blood to go back to the old and to them, overly savage, ways that connected them to each other and to the land to bolster their powers without creating some other quick fix scheme like Manticore had been. And the cult was still out there, willing and able to spend another two thousand years for their next chance when the comet cycled by once more. They still didn't even really like each other that much. But for the moment, they had won enough time to try and that was a good enough place to start.
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A/N: Ultimately, I'm mainly posting this to complete the bingo. I never felt like I could find a good tonal pivot point between reporting a history rehashing Sandeman's work and the canon as changed by the fusion and telling an active story of the resolution of the cult plot. In the end, I chose to try and keep the whole thing in a detached style, but it notably sacrifices detail this way. I hope it was still entertaining to somebody out there, and I always appreciate feedback.