Join, hide, or die doesn't just apply to the Wild Hunt.

Beta'd by Sesparra.

Before any of the Knights could muster up a response, but after the Forge rose up and subsided again without result, Mom stood up, the screech of the chair against the tile at odds with the tone of her voice. "I think," she said with the forced calm of the gallows, "that this is no conversation for me or my daughter. Come along, Molly."

I shook my head. "Can't, mom. I'm… let's just say already entangled, because magic is weird and arbitrary and doesn't care that I haven't been in the situation that got me tied up with the Venatori yet."

I don't think I could have shut Mom up more effectively if I'd gotten Dierdre to bite her tongue out.

"I think," said Dad, one hand rubbing at his beard, "you should probably explain yourself, Molly, so that everyone's on the same page."

Looking at both Shiro and Sanya, I could see the well-concealed curiosity and somewhat less well-concealed relief on their faces, which… yeah, that was fair. On Shiro's behalf because it wasn't very often that a family squabble got interrupted by the fucking Archive which immediately led to another family squabble, and Sanya because keeping a secret from Charity Carpenter was already daunting enough when you've had decades to get used to the idea, let alone with however much experience that Sanya had with the concept.

I clapped my hands together, then rubbed them against each other fast enough to warm them up. "Alrighty then, how does this go… Ah, yes, right." I opened both hands and, with an effort of will, an illusion of a little blue pill and a little red pill appeared. "You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed tomorrow, believe whatever you want to believe, and you go on with your life. You take the red pill…" I gave a deliberately theatrical shrug. "Well, if you take the red pill, you get to stay in Wonderland, and I get to show you just how deep this rabbit hole goes."

Sanya muffled a laugh into his fist, and when Mom turned her glare on him, he shrugged. "Is nothing, just… Lawrence Fishburne did it better."

It's not like he was wrong, so I shrugged as the illusion vanished between one heartbeat and the next. "Point is, I've got secrets that you can't unhear, things that will change your relationship with the world." I made direct eye contact with Mom. "This conversation needs to happen, one way or another, but if you leave, I won't hold it against you."

To be honest, I should have seen the Soulgaze coming.

I mean, come on, I was all but directly challenging Mom's authority as a parent, there was no way that she was gonna look away, and to be honest, this was probably as good a way that I could see it going.

Set up on high, almost altars, were seven blankets. I recognized them immediately- after all, little Harry was still using his, and after the rest of us had stopped using ours, Mom had insisted that we pack them away in the back of their closet with mothballs and the whole nine yards. Embroidered on one corner of each of them was a Name, and I didn't have to look particularly closely to recognize which one was mine. The stitching neatened up as the children they commemorated grew younger, but the amount of care and love that had gone into them was tangible and none of them were obviously more or less full of love than the others.

In the middle of the circle of blankets, even farther up, was a set of mail that I recognized as one forged for Dad, covered in blood, grime, and even a wayward scale, but still seeming to radiate hope, the promise of a better future embodied in the garb made for Love's knight, out of love, with her warhammer suspended in midair at its back as if to guard from attacks from behind.

At the foot of the stretched-out stand that Dad's armor hung on, covered in dust and tarnished, was a silver amulet. Upon casual inspection, it almost resembled a pentacle, but the longer I looked at it, the more I wondered how I could have recognized it as the symbol of pure magic that I'd been taught to see the five-pointed star as. The amulet had only four points radiating out irregularly from the square in the center, and perhaps more importantly, there was a claw that resembled an artist's depiction of a dragon's talons encircling the symbol instead of a plain circle. Instead of the Aristotelian elements and spirit, bound within human will, this symbolized draconic pride and greed, grasping at power over the natural world and damn the consequences.

Then, I saw it flicker, and for a brief moment, it was a pentacle, just as tarnished and dusty, but once again a symbol of life as it should be.

The Soulgaze broke, then, and I knew to my bones that this, right here, was a critical moment for mom, the time where she could either step firmly into the twilight world of the arcane and the supernatural or choose to set the burden of knowledge aside, turn away from Dad's work and content herself with being his armorer.

Looking at her face, I could see her blown-out pupils constrict and her jaw firm, and I allowed myself a grim smile. She'd be in more danger now, but having stepped up sooner would give her the chance to get back into the saddle and, more importantly, she'd have a better chance when the Fomor made the choice to try and sack Chicago, doubly so when I started equipping her and building up the defensive profile of the family home.

She sat down, still pale from whatever she'd seen in the Soulgaze, but her spine was firm and she nodded at the Archive firmly. "I'm staying."

Ivy smiled briefly, a too-mature expression on her young face, before her face returned to its previous too-mature neutrality. "My previous question stands: what do you know about the Venatori?"

The Forge shone again, but failed to discharge anything, and thus I had enough attention to spare to be surprised when Shiro asked "Which Venatori?"

Mom, Dad, and Sanya, all had the kind of blank curiosity that meant that they didn't know that there was more than just the Venatori Umbrorum, so the Oblivion War was definitely beyond the scope of their knowledge.

"There are two organizations that go by the name Venatori," said the Archive. "The Venatori Umbrorum are a group of primarily mortals who are aware of the supernatural, who prefer to pursue a guerilla war against the more… egregious of the supernatural forces like the Red Court. They were established as a cover for the true Venatori, who are responsible for preventing the Old Ones from pursuing their designs on Earth, vanquishing them by forgetting them in the eternal struggle to preserve our world known as the Oblivion War."

"And Ivy here," I said, gesturing with my bottle at her, "is the key to it all. She is the repository of all knowledge, and more importantly, the spymaster and coordinator of the Venatori. She knows everything that is spoken and written down, so she is uniquely capable of directing the Venatori to strike at any organization or person who seeks to interfere on the Old Ones' behalf."

Dad frowned. "How do you know all this, Molly?"

"She's from the future," said Ivy, in the moment I was taking a deep breath to brace myself to tell him.

Mom was the first to react, standing up angrily as she slammed open hands on the table. "No!"

I blinked, then sighed. "I didn't do it on purpose. Things got bad, like, End of Days bad, and then… something intervened. Something called the Celestial Forge, apparently."

Ivy's jaw dropped as her head snapped around to face me. "Truly?"

"That's how I got the lemonade, and this," I said, fishing the holoprojector out of the pocket I'd put it in. "There's more stuff, too, like a big ol' tech database and a book that- well, I think it's related to why you're here?"

She nodded. "The book is… dangerous, for what it can reveal about several of the Old Ones, especially the one that… came closest to succeeding." She shuddered, and I couldn't blame her- reading about the way that you were going to die, even if couched in metaphor, had to be trippy, even if that destiny had been averted.

"Not to worry," I said. "The Forge saw fit to provide me protection against that kind of memetic hazard, and I don't think anyone can exert power over it without overpowering the Forge?" I shrugged. "Not sure, my understanding of the situation at hand is limited."

"As is mine. Much of the knowledge of the previous Chosen of the Celestial Forge was wiped from existence, and what remains is… not in human hands." At my curious look, she continued. "He was lost to… a foe from far Outside, and in doing so his power was turned against the world. It took the direct intervention of two archangels to prevent the fall of the Outer Gates, and a third to kill him."

"And why have we not heard of him?" asked Sanya, frowning as he chased a causal chain down to its conclusion.

"Ask Noah."

To be honest, I was a little bit glad that Mom and Dad were so gobsmacked by the conversation with everything Ivy'd said even after she left, since it would give me time to de-stress. Facing down the Denarians, confronting the Fallen who had started squatting in my soul, getting yelled at by Mom, then a de facto ambush from the Archive that ended up in me revealing that I was a time traveler who had survived an Old One breaking through the protections around the Oblivion War and become a Venator… that was a whole hell of a lot to put in one day, so I think it's excusable that I ran for Dad's workshop and the almost meditative act of woodcarving.

Eventually, I heard the door open and saw Shiro come in, cane clacking against the floor of the room. A moment of scrutiny allowed me to realize that no, it wasn't Fidellachius, just a normal cane, and I put down both my chisel and my wand, releasing my gradual expenditure of Soulfire into the implement as I did. "What's up?"

"You died," Shiro said, and I sighed, pressing my palms flat to the surface of Dad's workbench. This was going to be yet another one of those conversations, then.

"What gave it away?"

Shiro shrugged. "Little things. The way you hesitated, the flinch on Sanya's face when it came up." He made eye contact. "Easier to see when you're not so overwhelmed. I suppose that explains how a fourteen-year-old becomes a Venator."

"Same way anyone else becomes a Venator," I said, trying for casual and managing tired. "Wrong place at the wrong time. Not my fault the wrong time was after the containment team had already failed and one of the Old Ones had managed to pull one over on the Archive."

"Fair." He paused. "But that's not how you died."

"No, it isn't."

"You want to talk about it?"

"What's there to talk about? Nicodemus fucking Archleone found out where I slept and came for my ass out of a grudge against Dad for killing Dierdre." I could feel Lasciel pacing within the weird nest structure she had inside the Forge, somewhat uneasy with what was probably the thought of her host being killed by the man who gave her the Coin in the first place, but she could fucking deal with it.

"Always something to talk about." Shiro chuckled ruefully. "Especially when that old snake's involved in things."

"You sound like Listens-To-Wind."

"High praise," Shiro said, resting both hands on his cane. "I've worked with him, now and again, and he's a good man. Could have been a Knight, if he didn't have his own calling."

I was struck with the completely absurd image of the member of the Senior Council in dad's armor, arms out and covered in entirely too much armor, mail practically dripping off of him as he gave that one eyebrow raised judging look that he'd spent a couple centuries perfecting, and had to choke down a fit of giggles long enough to conjure up an illusion of the image to show Shiro.

He chuckled as the Forge once again tried and failed to manifest something new, all of the unoccupied pedestals thrumming with a swell of power running through them. "I think he'd get a kick out of that," Shiro said, once his laughter died down. "But you should probably talk to someone about it."

"Yeah, maybe, but, I mean… repressed emotions are great fuel for magic, so I think that I'm going to keep all my emotions right here," I said, rapping a fist against my sternum, "and then one day I'll die."

Shiro gave me a scrutinizing look, then sighed. "It is your choice. Just make sure you're being safe about it."

"Oh, don't worry about that," I said, splaying my hands in an exaggerated gesture of innocence. "Safety procedures are the first thing that any self-respecting Wizard teaches their apprentice, and I definitely got them from mine."

"If you say so," he said, one eyebrow raised pointedly at my lack of gloves, but he shrugged and walked back out of the shed, cane tippy-tapping, and left me to my woodworking.

And that's that!

Perks Earned:

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