Yes, edge Anduriel…

Beta'd by Sesparra

As I'd expected, dinner was more than a little stilted. Mom and Dad had clearly had a fight while I was asleep and they were both giving it their best effort to avoid talking, Daniel and Matthew hadn't heard everything but they'd clearly heard something, the rest of the Jawas were taking cues from them, and Sanya was looking like he was expecting to be drowned in a sea of squabbling kids at the drop of a hat.

Just about the only one who looked anything close to calm was Shiro, and given the circumstances I wasn't sure whether he was actually calm or whether he was just good enough at pretending to seem that way.

The Forge glimmered as we were clearing the plates away, a sense of imminent change coiling up behind it like a riptide ready to drag an unsuspecting swimmer out to sea, but contrary to my expectations (and the half-paranoid twitch I made towards my pistol), we didn't get a surprise visit from the president of the Denarian-Owners Association telling us he was putting a lien on our lives, no matter how dramatically appropriate it may or may not have been.

No, the evening was quieter than I would have expected, what with having three different Knights of the Cross under one roof, and even with both homework to finish and some juicy technical schematics to look at, I was having trouble sitting still.

"Is always like this," was Sanya's response when I grumbled about it in earshot. "Soldier, Denarian, Knight, is always hurry up and wait until you have to be running around like chicken with head cut off." He shrugged. "In your case, though, well… prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped, no? That might be why you are less patient than usual."

"Yeah, probably, but that doesn't make it any better when I have memories of me being a lot better about this sort of thing. Just gets me frustrated, and that's another thing that doesn't exactly help my focus."

Sanya shrugged again. "There I cannot help you. Perhaps your AI friend could take a look at…"

"No good," I said, shaking my head. "She's got neural scans of me as an adult, sure, but they're neural scans of an adult non-wizard, not a pubescent wizard, and I haven't managed to find a for Dummies book on the neurochemistry of magic yet, assuming I wanted to try and fuck with my own head while it's still developing."

Sanya grimaced. "Right, that. Sometimes I just… forget how important it is to prevent brain damage during formative years, with how Tessa and Rosanna…" he trailed off, but the haunted look in his eyes told its own story.

"Don't worry about it." I rested my hand on his shoulder for a moment. "Tell you what, one of these days, I'm gonna hunt them down and make sure that they don't end up with some other poor kid to groom into a killing machine with silver in their palm and blood on their hands, what say I make sure to bring you along, for closure and whatnot?"

"I think…" He frowned for a moment, before nodding decisively. "If you think you can do it, I would appreciate being invited along."

"Sounds like a grand old time. I'll even provide the traditional road trip snacks." I stretched, feeling more than a few pops out of my back before I lowered my arms.

Sanya gave me a skeptical look. "Was that your back or a sheet of bubble wrap? I thought it was old men like me who were supposed to make that sort of sound, not spring chicken like you."

"Oh, you know how it goes," I said, shrugging. "We kids store up our annoying noises and bodily functions until they can be used to cause the most frustration to any given authority figure. You old folks need to get used to letting them out, too, or else you'll end up with real problems." I frowned. "Speaking of which, I'm feeling a bit peckish, you want anything? I'm gonna make myself a sandwich."

He shook his head. "I am not still growing, nor am I a wizard who relies on the energy of his metabolism to face the supernatural. Thank you for offering, though."

"Alrighty then," I said, leaving my datapad and sword behind in search of sliced bread, sharp cheddar, and cold cuts.

I was about halfway through my sandwich by the time that someone started pounding on the door, and not just regular pounding either- this was the kind of bambambambambam that was both loud enough and fast enough that it implied that the person doing the knocking was more than human, physically speaking.

Sanya tossed my sword to me just as I started raising my hands to catch it, and after unsheathing the blade, I gently rested the sheath on the floor, quietly enough that I didn't think that anything listening in could hear it. Then, I pulled the door open just the slightest bit, making sure that whoever it was couldn't see either my sword, ready to stab through the sturdy wood of the door, or Sanya, who had the gun his scabbard now turned into firmly trained on the door.

There was a woman with a swirling tattoo running up her neck to cover most of her face, standing out in lurid red relief against the brown of her skin, the sheen of her tight dress, and the darker shade of her hair, with another woman, shorter, blonde, and with the telltale jitters and wide eyes of someone who was in over their head dealing with the supernatural.

"Is Michael here?" the brunette asked, a reddish glint just about visible in the depths of her brown eyes, and once she opened her mouth, I could see the telltale too-sharp canines of a half-turned Red Court.

For a moment, I was tempted to just run her through, but the power I could all but smell wafting off that bloodred tattoo gave me pause.

"It is a design for channeling and containing the Hunger, my host," said Lasciel, and I remembered the existence of the Fellowship of Saint Giles- that piece of magic was pretty much synonymous with the organization, and I'd cribbed more than a few notes on how it had manipulated energy flows in my day.

"Why?" I asked, allowing my sword's point to drop towards the floor but not opening the door farther.

"Because Nicodemus has Harry."

"Fuck." I wrenched the door open. "Inside. Now."

Once the two of them had entered the house, giving a wide berth to both my sword and Sanya, I shut the door again. "Dad! Shiro! Harry's in trouble again!"

I could hear the blond muttering "Again?" but before I could react to it, the Forge flashed and grew a new pedestal.

On the pedestal was a… it wasn't quite a doll, being too soft, almost plush, but it had roughly the same proportions as one, depicting a woman with pale, almost paper-white skin shot through with threads of gold. Her overlarge eyes were the color of moonlight on corn silk, and the armor that she was wearing was clearly designed around the feathered wings on her back.

Flanking it on all sides, there were a number of smaller stands. One of these stands had an orchestra's worth of instruments in miniature, all animated and floating about, leaving trails of sparkling motes of light, another had a pack full of all sorts of useful items in it, and two more carried stacks of books and… game consoles? No, not just game consoles, it also had a series of discs, presumably separated based on which console they corresponded to.

It was the last pedestal, though, that was the most disruptive. Mushrooming up almost unobtrusively, it held a weighty book, vellum pages sandwiched between bluish leather covered in silver filigree, and a pouch that, by all rights, shouldn't have held nearly as much as it did.

As memories of a rather frantic month going through a crash course in arcane magic filled my head, I could feel-

Have you ever been at ground zero for a universe unraveling and then reweaving itself? Because I have, and let me tell you, it is trippy as hell.

It's like if you go from being on dry land to being up to your eyeballs in Lake Michigan with no shore in sight, and that's before you become sensitive to more aspects of reality than any mortal could even dream of.

I managed to claw my way back through the Weave and down into my mortal body, feeling power both arcane and divine in nature crackling within my skin and holding it in check with a herculean effort of will before it settled, quiescent if not calm, just in time to see Dad and Shiro hurrying down the stairs, swords in hand but not drawn yet.

I kicked my scabbard up off the floor, sheathing my sword in one fluid motion, before turning to Susan. "What exactly happened?"

"We were trying to intercept the Shroud before Marcone or the Denarians got to it, and we did, but… Nicodemus was there too, him and the one with razor hair, and a whole bunch of goons, and they- they caught Harry." Susan scrubbed one hand through her wavy hair, heedless of the hairspray that would have stymied a mortal hand, which meant that she was close to losing control of herself.

Dad's eyes turned to the blonde for a contemplative moment, then he turned to me. "I trust you will be able to find him as ably as you did Miss Yoshimo, Molly?"

"Maybe even easier, depending on where exactly. Aine's been-" I was interrupted by the chiming of my holocomm. "That's her, one moment."

Seeing her in a washed-out blue-white felt almost wrong, but I didn't have much time to dwell on the sight. "What's up?"

"I backtraced Ms. Rodriguez to where Mr. Dresden was taken, then tracked the SUVs they got into. "They went into an abandoned parking garage that is in the middle of an area known for disappearances."

I frowned. "Great, Undertown. Like we didn't have enough shit on our plate."

"I'll monitor the city to see if they emerge from any other locations, if possible. Given time I should be able to track the energy signature that magic gives off, and hopefully in so doing find Dresden." She paused. "Good luck."

"Thanks," I said, and then her image winked out.

"Sanya, Shiro, go. I am needed here," Dad said, eyes flickering to me in just such a way as to imply that I was involved in the situation, which… honestly that was fair, what with how much bullshit I'd been at the center of in the past couple of days. "Godspeed."

"Stay safe, Dad," I said, flickering into my suit and coat. It was heavier than I was used to, but I found myself moving almost on autopilot to compensate, and within a couple of steps I could hardly tell anything was different.

Shiro and Sanya followed me immediately, but it was a moment before Susan, reloading a double-barreled pistol that looked to be about the right size for a holdout, followed us out into the night.

I stood back up from where I was following the blood trail, leaving the half-crushed claw where it had landed. "Well," I said, pulling my helmet off, "I think we can pretty reasonably say that the ghoul pack that was causing the disappearances is no longer a problem."

I turned back to see the rest of the party and-

Oh, right. I probably shouldn't have been quite so blasé about this, huh?

Susan was looking split between going feral and trying to lick the dried blood from the alley and being absolutely disgusted, looking around at all the entrails and other assorted viscera painted all over the area, and even if Sanya was looking slightly less affected, the bar there was on the floor, although I would give him credit for keeping his hand on his sword. Even Shiro was looking around somewhat apprehensively, one hand resting on Fidelacchius' hilt.

"Guys, I can say with absolute certainty that this was Ursiel who did this." I pointed at a couple of gashes in the brick and dumpster of the alley outside the parking garage. "If you know what you're looking for you can actually see the horn marks."

Shiro and Sanya started moving a little easier, and after a brief whispered conference with Susan, she tensed abruptly and then relaxed. "And… you're sure that he doesn't have any others with him?" she asked.

"Relatively sure?" I shrugged. "Shiro put Ursiel down, and I was lucky enough to catch Saluriel with his pants down, plus I… Let's just say that I've already accounted for the coin he keeps in reserve and leave it at that, so all we should have to deal with is Nicodemus and Dierdre." That got a scrutinizing look from Shiro, but it seemed to pass muster with Susan and Sanya, and after a moment the oldest Knight nodded.

"She's right," said Shiro, turning towards the disused parking structure as the Forge flickered dimly. "But with Ursiel and Saluriel dead, Nicodemus will be… backed into a corner, and that is when he is at his most dangerous."

There was something almost resolved to his words, in a way that sounded familiar to me, but it took a moment before I recognized it as the resolve of the condemned.

"Shiro, a moment?"

"Yes?" He followed me out of earshot of Sanya and, hopefully, Susan, but just to be safe I called up enough white noise to prevent anyone from hearing us.

"How long have you been waiting to die?"

He gave me a level look. "How long has the Weaver of Webs been whispering in your ear?"

"Not quite as long as I've been able to mold Soulfire," I said, calling up a brief manifestation of the silvery flame before allowing it to flicker out. "The Temptress has nothing to offer me, not in the wake of the Celestial Forge, and her manipulations aren't half as effective when I can shed any attempt of hers to bend my mind to her will by arcane power or biological manipulation." I shrugged. "To be entirely honest, she's more useful for me as a… test subject, shall we say, than as anything else, as with Saluriel."

"Wiser men than you have claimed to be beyond their manipulations," said Shiro.

"I'm…" I frowned, trying to condense it down into something that wouldn't take membership in the White Council and a couple dissertations' worth of research to understand. "I'm not just human, anymore. Learning the kind of secrets of the craft that I know, connecting to the Weave of magic that exists in the world now… it isn't something that can be done with just a human soul, and as I am at this point, I suspect I'm on the path towards being one of the Tuatha de Danann. Tempting me with hellfire would be like… the Summer Lady offering Mab a deal to allow her to call on Summer's power directly. Not only is it something Mab could control on her own terms, being so much more powerful, but it's almost antithetical to her nature."

Shiro frowned, then sighed. "That is sound reasoning."

"And how long have you been considering the sacrifice ploy, then?" I asked, returning back to my original question.

"Since my diagnosis." He shrugged. "Not as bad a way to die as lung cancer. Certainly less drawn out."

"Now that, I can help with." I frowned, running through a couple of different magical avenues and comparing them to what Aine and I could achieve with the medical bay on the Future Witness. "Couple different ways, actually.

"Hm." Shiro's face was placid. "Nicodemus is still Nicodemus."

I sighed. "Shiro. I get you're resigned to this, but if you have- look. I have the sword skills of an anime protagonist, the kind that lets a mortal man take a mortal sword to a fight with a god and expect to walk away. This?" I drew my falcata, a faint otherworldly light radiating out from the blade and filling in the gaps between streetlights. "This is not a mortal blade, and I am not just mortal, not anymore. With you and Sanya, I think we can fight our way out, or at the very least, hold out long enough for me to open a portal out and shove you all through."

Shiro gave me the kind of look that you gave to children insisting that they hold your hand to lead you back home. "If you are that confident in your skills…"

"That, and I've got my bag of tricks on top of that. I haven't had the kind of prep time that really makes wizards scary, but I've got an ace or two up my sleeves."

"Very well." He rapped Fidelacchius on the floor once. "We shall do this your way."

I returned my sword to its sheath. "Glad to hear it."

I pulled on my helmet, making sure the light was securely attached before beckoning, and then I went deeper into the dark, abandoned parking structure with two Knights and a half-turned vampire in tow.

And that's that!

Perks earned:

"Aasimar" (Baldur's Gate 3, 400CP): True Aasimars are immortal in terms of lifespan and are pretty hard to kill. They can recover from getting their heart pierced or their limbs being torn off. They also have quite the regeneration ability as good as wolverine at the start of x-men movies. They are the most resilient race of those three. They are also resistant to necrotic and radiant energies along with damage from non-magical weapons and have darkvision on top. They can imbue their weapons with radiant energy that burns their enemies and have multiple divine abilities on top. They can detect lies, heal with a touch, have resistance to magic, call down radiant energy beams (which its aesthetics and minor effects can change depending on their heritage), change shape to a creature weaker from them and even have the ability to raise the recently dead. Oh, and they can fly with the wings on their back.

Wizard (Baldur's Gate 3, Free): Wizard, you alone have the potential to reach the pinnacle of all creation with your shrewd mind and arcane potential. No one can even become as half good as you are, when it comes to matters of the arcane. Although some may call you frail or weak, in time you may compensate for all your weaknesses with the appropriate spell or ritual. Temper your ambition with wisdom though, this path has been the doom of many wizards. Just ask poor Karsus. (Subclass: Theurgy (Arcana Domain))

Slavov OST (Baldur's Gate 3, Free): You may choose to have epic of soundtracks that will accompany your adventures, all composed by a specific artist that works for Larian Studios. This music isn't distracting in any shape or form, and you can make it so that others can hear it too. During battle it will change into tone depending on the situation.

TTRPG Collection (Baldur's Gate 3, Free): You get a collection of all the books and material that have ever been published by Wizards of the Coast in D 5e. It comes with a supply of endless quantities of dice of any design you want, battle maps, miniatures and other supplemental stuff. Enjoy the content!

RPG Media (Baldur's Gate 3, Free): You get a collection of all games published by Larian Studios with an appropriate system to play these games on. Strangely this also includes Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 even though they were made by BioWare.

Starting Equipment (Baldur's Gate 3, Free): You get all the starting gear appropriate for a beginner of your class of choice. A fighter may get a non-magical armor and a set of weapons of their choice, while a wizard gets an arcane focus and components along with a simple weapon. This equipment cannot be magical except spellcasting focuses. You also get a standard explorer's pack that contains some supplies that could last you for a couple of days, a bag, a pouch containing a decent amount of gold, fitting traveling clothes and some camping gear like a tent and bedrolls. Consumables in this gear set are non-replenishing but your equipment will repair itself, if broken or damaged.

If you want to support me as a writer, I got me a Ko (fi) (https (/) (/) ko (-) fi (/) lucifra) and a Pa tre on (https (/) pa tre on .com (/) Lucifra), and you can see chapters a week early if you become a patron. (remove spaces and parentheses)

Speaking of which, my thanks to NotableRonin, Mtron, AntaeusTheGiant, Starfall20, Danielle, Ultama Omega, Asuran Fun, KOOLAID, Journeyman_Mike, Josef Haerle, Freddie Capps, James, TheCosyIntrovert, JChuckS, James Blessing, Allen Baker, Sbhat Asfaha, Yotam Bonneh, Lazzie, Drain, Aaron Seddon, Teigen Sethi, Darkarma, Bailey Matutine, Mr Phantom, Thomas Vernet, Maleficarum, Conor Cooney and Ember for being patrons!

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That's not quite it, so go ahead and hop over to chapter 2!