Denouement

The Silvergrey Sea

Part Seven: What Is and Should Never Be

Denouement

* * *

The work of holding back the anger of the Silvergrey Sea was past difficult and becoming impossible. The Kokkinos had been taking shifts himself for the last hour. Calling in all Hermetists within range was considered and again rejected. There was no way they could get to the Evanescents in time. He regretted sending his fellow Elect off to return the dragons. The assistance of another dozen would have been a comfort.

Twice in the last six hours, the Red Elect had ordered the dome shrunk to save energy. Doing it a third time was out of the question. A way to the Sea had to be preserved as the area where chunks of Primal Matter were still being secured was the whole reason they were here. If he had to split the protection into two separate bubbles, things would get perilous, indeed, when it came time to bug out.

Currently, the Kokkinos was standing on a pulverized pile of the stuff of the Evanescents watching chunks of Primal Matter being moved into black metal cases for transport to whatever site Hermetists would eventually deem suitable for something so deadly.

Ironically, the disaster that happened just then solved the problem.

It started with shouts coming from all corners—the Hermetists maintaining the shield had been alarmed by something. A moment later, he knew why. The Silvergrey Sea was bubbling. Soon, bright points of light were visible in it.

Shouting from much closer.

The chunks of Primal Matter were glowing—and moving. They all seemed to be gathering in the crater caused by the explosion of the mountain. The center of that hole contained a small pool of the Sea. No time to consider how big a disaster this was likely to be.

The Red Elect used a cantrip to amplify his voice. “Evacuate the debris field.”

And it was done. There seemed to be some injuries, but in seconds, no one—vertical or otherwise—were anywhere near the remaining bits of blasted mountain.

Chunks began to emerge from the Silvergrey. Shrieking through the air, the pieces, some bigger than the average house and smoothed, as if they’d been partially polished, landed in the ever-increasing pile, which began to shine in earnest. Soon it was too bright to look at directly.

The Kokkinos’s sole source of relief was the Sea itself. It was calming as bits of Primal Matter left it. The level of the tempest had already dropped nearly a quarter from its previous height.

Over the next five minutes, the Red Elect ordered the perimeter surrounding the reassembling mountain widened thrice, during which time the Silvergrey Sea had returned to its usual calm state. He called an assembly of all senior Hermetists and ordered the shield dismantled.

There was a moment—only a moment—of relative silence as the handful of seniors and that detective, Tranker, gathered.

“We have survived the greatest crisis,” he began. “Our original problem has returned, however. That—” pointing to the reformed and glowing mountain of Primal Matter—”is again a threat. We have no way of knowing how it reformed. We can assume, however, that it was not done with our safety in mind. The forces behind the attempt to remake the Pleroma are not defeated. Indeed, they seem spoiling for a fight. A fight we will give them.”

Silence.

A voice from the crowd, “How?”

Another, almost on top of it, “How can we fight Poseidon?”

The Kokkinos watched Tranker; certain he would pipe up with something. He stood, arms crossed, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. His hat brim shaded his eyes, but a faint smile tugged at his mouth.

In truth, the Red Elect was at a loss as to how to fight the Sea God. He wished desperately that Abram, Mercurius Pro Tem, would arrive with some info as to how to proceed. Small mercy the Elements were not here.

The Kokkinos felt flanked. The beginnings of a long-forgotten feeling—panic—began to writhe in his stomach. He looked up, seeking calm, before speaking again. The sudden blooming of one of the stars in the sky condemned that effort to failure.

It seemed as if one of the millions of tiny sparkles had gone supernova. It was bright enough to compete with the brilliant glow of the wave tops of the Sea. A quick glance showed that all the people around him now had coherent shadows. All were similarly transfixed by the sight.

The Elements. This new star heralded their arrival.

Poseidon had won. Nothing could now stop the performance of the Rite of Manifestation, The Children of the Thrice-Great stared at the death of the Pax Hermetica.

The dragons were the first to emerge from the white hole. Flecks of black began fluttering down. Soon, they were a spiral of identifiable winged shapes. After a while, they stopped emerging and were merely helixing down.

More quickly than anticipated, the drakes were near ground level. They formed a tight cocoon around the mountain, which began to dim. The Red Elect looked up to the still open bright void. He’d been too distracted to notice that something else had fallen out of it.

Returning his gaze to the scene of the action, he saw three dragons flying toward him, each bearing a burden.

To his great relief, one of those burdens was the Mercurius Pro Tem. He moved through the small crowd to his superior.

“Mercurius!” The Kokkinos helped the other down from the dragon, which immediately returned to its fellows.

Abram embraced his fellow Hermetist. “Good to see you, Owen.” The former looked around. “Good to see things are still here, too.”

“What happened? Where have you been?”

“A tale for another day, my friend.”

“Of course, sir.”

“We bring news and a plan.”

The Red Elect was going to ask who ‘we’ was when the other two joined them. One was Drago, the Watr Man. The other was the Fyre Child. Child no longer, the Element was a tall, slender young woman, bare of clothing. Though darker of skin than Tranker, the Kokkinos noted a strong resemblance between child and parent, softened to beauty in the younger.

That made three of the Elements present. “How do we stop this insanity, sir?”

The Mercurius fixed his fellow with his eye and said, “We aren’t. We’re going to help.”

“Abram—” the Kokkinos began to object.

Gripping his bicep, Abram leaned in and spoke softly, “Trust me, Owen.” It was an effort, but the Elect did. He nodded.

Abram turned to those gathered. He waved to Tranker, summoning him to the group. “Siblings, we have a situation. We also have a plan. Get everyone evacuated from the immediate vicinity of that—” he indicated the mountain of Primal Matter—“before we begin.”

Immediately, those assembled began to fan out, shouting orders. Only the Elements, the Kokkinos, the Mercurius, and Tranker remained.

“Sibling, would you give me a moment with Tranker?” Mercurius.

“Certainly.” The Red Elect moved a few paces away, beckoning the others to follow.

The two immediately began engaging in sober conversation. Tranker looked somewhat worse for wear. His coat was heavily stained. His hat was more beat up still. He hadn’t shaved in days. His hand shook when he took the cigarette Abram proffered. The latter had to hold the former’s hand steady to get it lit.

At first, Tranker just listened. As the Kokkinos’s superior continued to speak, however, the detective frowned and became visibly agitated. At one point, he interrupted to object to something. The Kokkinos caught, “…expect me to—!” before Abram placed a hand on his shoulder to calm him down.

More serious discussion. Tranker inhaled and blew smoke furiously, eventually dropping the cigarette and stomping on it vigorously.

The Mercurius leaned in, putting an arm around the P.I.’s shoulders.

Tranker’s face further darkened but when the other finished speaking, he nodded and took a deep breath.

A couple of pats on the back and Abram looked to the Kokkinos and beckoned him over.

“Brother Hermit,” Abram said. “The Manifestation is going to begin soon. We must be ready.”

“Uhm—aren’t we missing two Elements?”

“I expect they’ll be along quite soon.”

As if on cue, a muttering among the hundreds gathered caught The Elect’s attention. Some were pointing up amid rising panic.

There was movement in the air of the Silvergrey. Nothing was moving in it. It was moving, swirling, spinning.

“That’s new…isn’t it?” Harry.

“I believe it’s only happened once before,” Abram.

“When?” Red.

After a couple of seconds of silence, the Kokkinos looked down. Both were staring at him, Tranker smirking, Abram with eyebrows raised. “Oh. Right.”

The Mercurius Pro Tem made a circular gesture with the end of his rod of office. Much amplified, “Retreat to your hidden places. It begins.”

With a sense of calm purpose, the entire field of view emptied. The Red Elect was proud of his Order then. Panicked they might be, but they were trained servants of a noble purpose to which they had pledged their lives. This moment of crisis was not enough to make them forget that.

The vortex above had expanded. The entire sky was moving, now, the center much faster than the periphery. The faster the movement, the darker the sky—a funnel of sorts. All this in silence.

“We must move,” from Abram.

The three began to walk toward the crater. Drago joined them. The Fyre Child followed along just behind her father, who seemed unaware of her proximity. She was glowing a golden light. Black hair cascaded in waves to her waist. Her eyes, when she glanced at the Kokkinos, were a luminous silver grey. She smiled at her father’s back. Such a beatific look. Once, she raised an arm, as if to touch her father, but halted before she made contact.

The gyre of dragons was centered at a spot near the crater that was encircled by a makeshift wall composed of chunks of Primal Matter. Passing a gap in that barrier revealed a sizable space of ground almost perfectly flat and smooth. A large square of glowing silver-blue, about fifty feet on a side, centered it.

Also present were ten human-looking people, standing in a circle around the glowing square. They were quite short and had a vaguely simian look to them. Several looked at the group, expressions impassive. Abram seemed as surprised as he to find them here. “Where in the worlds did Poseidon find Atlanteans?”

“Obviously an Oerth Analog. With all that’s been going on, I hadn’t considered this. I knew He’d need mortals to make this work, but…”

“Yeah. Shall we proceed?”

Belatedly, they entered the Sacred Space.

Abram halted the Kokkinos with a hand on his arm. The others moved to places obviously prearranged. The Fyre Child moved to the near right corner of the square, the Watr Man to the far right, a dragon settled gracefully on the far-left corner, and Tranker moved to the center of the space. The ones on the corners faced the center. Harry, the only one still clothed, faced the left, toward the glowing mountain of Primal Matter. A sudden realization, “Abram, is Tranker—?”

“Yes. Drago picked him for the duty.”

“Let’s hope the Watr Man chose well.”

With no fanfare, ten other creatures were suddenly there, hovering above the Atlanteans. The Elect tried to fathom them and failed. They changed form so quickly they seemed like staticky holographic projections. For a moment, he doubted they were even living things. “Where did they come from?”

“The Elven Dark.”

“They’re Fæ.” The import of that made Owen afraid again. “This is really going to happen.” The part of him that made him a Hermetist was giddily eager to witness a repeat of the Rite that had shaped so much of cosmic history. The Kokkinos decided to cling to that. His fear faded.

Directly above them, a dark blue dot of light now centered the spinning pinwheel of the sparkling grey sky. It grew and cracks of orange lightning began to streak outward. Those cracks widened revealing the inverted spires of the Mother Lodge. “No way has this happened before.”

“Not precisely. Azhure’en did not exist before the Templars. That which they took in order to make it, however, did.”

The Kokkinos wanted to ask what that was, but the next stage of the drama unfolded and there was no time for anything but awe and fear.

The skylight to the Hermetist homeworld had expanded to cover half the space above, and all Azhure’en was now visible like a glowing, upside-down ice sculpture. Blackness erupted from the windows and began to flow toward them like thick tar.

The first one hit just where the not-yet-occupied corner was. A blob of NOTHING like a sack of liquid two yards across sat, covering the corner. It had made no sound.

Of all present, only Tranker had never seen NOTHING before. After a brief glance over his right shoulder, he fixed his eyes straight ahead toward the mountain of Primal Matter. The Kokkinos noted with surprise that the P.I. hadn’t fainted, though his knees did buckle slightly. A strong one, that man. Perhaps Drago had chosen well.

The NOTHING began to ooze toward the center. Owen looked toward Tranker. He still faced the mountain but had turned his head to face the NOTHING again. Never had the Kokkinos seen that expression on a human face. He hoped never to do so again.

The NOTHING was terrifying to see for reasons the Red Elect was never able to identify. He felt pulled out of himself, looking at it, toward a gaping abyss of extinction. His training came to his aid, preventing him from panicking. It was a close thing, though.

The NOTHING slid around the private eye enveloping him, erasing him as if he’d never existed. Owen had trouble remembering what Tranker looked like, what he had been wearing.

He glanced at the Fyre Child, wondering what she thought of what had just happened to her sire, only to find her weeping, lower jaw quivering. She avoided keening, but it seemed to him it was a struggle. Such depth of feeling from a being only days old toward a person she had only met a handful of times! The Kokkinos did not know what to make of it.

Another gentle touch on his shoulder. Looking around, the Red Elect saw a figure standing on the corner, empty until the NOTHING had splatted onto it—the Erthe Woman. The ragged remains of a Hermetist uniform hung on her, failing to do service as cover for her body. No hat. Her skin, where it was exposed looked stained, as if she’d been rolling in tar. She turned the most disturbing grin on the two of them. “I’d expected three of you.” Her voice sounded like it came from far, far away through a wide metal pipe. It took a second for the Elect to understand what she had said.

“Liar,” Abram’s face was also wearing a smile. He seemed quite comfortable. Owen wondered if he were. “You expected opposition, true. But not anything like enough to stop you.”

“You cannot thwart Poseidon’s will.”

“I don’t intend to try.”

That rictus of a grin faltered. She recovered almost instantly. “Games, Mercurius. Always you Hermetists play games with words. You have nothing. You cannot stop the rebirth of the Templars and of the Pleroma. This time, nothing in the Multiverse will stand in the way of the Sea God’s plan.”

Abram shrugged as if to say, ‘We shall see, won’t we.’

Seeming slightly nonplussed, the former Rayne Hermit turned toward the center of the circle.

More quickly, blobs of NOTHING were dropping and dripping down the rough incline of the crater where a huge ball of the stuff hovered just over the diminished mountain of Primal Matter. The mountain, steadily increasing in brightness, began to shoot ragged blue lightning up to the inverted spectre of the Mother Lodge. The ten candidates for transformation began to walk in the opposite direction to the rage of dragons above, their respective Fæ orbiting above them.

A humming from no identifiable source rose from the silence.

The Elements around the square began to glow, red, blue, yellow, deep indigo.

As the last of the NOTHING dropped into the Evanescent dell, the energy spiking from the mountain increased. Owen could see it was getting smaller. The bolts were striking numerous spires of Azhure’en. The whole mountain-city began to glow silver-blue.

Finally, the mountain of Primal Matter was gone. The glow, which had slowly shrunk to a pinprick, winked out. A sphere of utter blackness hovered above the newly exposed pool of Silvergrey.

The sourceless humming continued.

Everything paused. Despite the low noise, the stillness became absolute. The Elements were penumbra-ed with glows so bright, the two Hermetists cast multiple shadows. The Elect noticed that even the sphere of NOTHING had a glow of sorts. A weird unlight fuzzed the edge of the ball. Looking behind them, Owen saw that the shadow it cast of him was white.

He looked up just in time to see every spire on the Mother Lodge fire streaks of intense white light converging on the NOTHING. The concussion of the impact was not sound, but it did have force. The Mercurius and Kokkinos were knocked back onto the Primal Matter barrier.

By the time the Red Elect had scrambled from his bruised arse to his feet, the change in the NOTHING was almost complete. He looked in time to see the form of Harry Tranker re-emerge from the ball of Spirit.

The form. Not the man.

A man-shaped vessel of pure night hovered just above the center of the square. The pool of Silvergrey rose, a mercurial serpent, and wound toward the Æthyr Idol, wrapping round its midnight form. The glowing pinprick of the Idol’s left eye could just be seen. It turned away toward a gap in the spiked hills to where open water could just be glimpsed.

From the Silvergrey arouse the Sea God Poseidon. A network of bright silver lines shaped itself into an ovoid and began to drift, as if on the breeze toward the Sacred Space.

The Mercurius and the Kokkinos had been blown outside of the vortex of flying dragons. This was fortuitous, as the Sea God enveloped all within the Sacred Space and reshaped itself into a spherical spider web.

The Silvergrey Serpent wrapped around the Idol split into four and undulated toward the other Elements. As soon as all the Elements were connected, the sinuous lines stiffened into two diagonal lines of Silvery Water, the square quickly became the same.

The black Quintessence began to rise, arms outstretched, and the lines connecting it to the others angled to follow its form. The drakes and Poseidon moved as one, keeping the black figure at their center, but wide enough the encompass all, including the ten candidates and their Fæ. These last also rose, forming a spinning circle about the equator of the sphere.

Finally, the Elements around the square rose.

Hovering above the watchers was a silvery, wireframe pyramid inside multiple spinning spheres and a circle.

The humming increased in volume and lowered in pitch as the Elements began to glow brighter. The air began to taste of tin. Vibration, not at all like that of noise, began to shimmy their bodies. Soon, standing upright would no longer be an option for the Hermetists. A nodded agreement and pair dropped into a crouch.

Looking up, Red saw the pyramid begin to change shape. The top point began to descend toward where the mountain of light had been. The Aer Elder and the Watr Man moved further apart, meanwhile. Soon the pyramid was a pentagram inside a pentagon. Each Fæ merged into the Atlantean assigned to them. The proto-Templars then slowed their whirling and came to rest in the air. Every other one was near a point of the pentagram, a little further out than the Element standing on it. The rest were between them.

The dragons fled through the hole in the sky toward Azhure’en, leaving only the one chosen to hold their place in the Manifestation.

The energy provided by the Mother Lodge also stopped.

The hole slowly closed.

The noise died away.

“It’s done,” said Abram. “Now we find out if our gamble has paid off.”

The spider web that was the Sea God began to change as the whole formation descended until the pentagram was on the surface.

A manlike form of glittering Sea stood in the center of the fifteen others: The Elements and the newly born Templar Kings. The god reflected brilliant white light seemingly coming from all directions. Owen belatedly noticed the Silvergrey Sea seemed dull; the sparkles gone from its sky.

The Sea God spoke. “My children. Today we repair that which was broken long ago. Your nation will begin here, at the center of a power vaster than your predecessors could have imagined. Begin, now the—”

The first blast hit him squarely in the chest. Poseidon would have fallen back, but three more struck his back and sides. Before he could react, all ten of the new Templars were throwing power at him.

The Sea God tried to rise, tried to change.

He was swamped by his offspring, buried under savaging, immortal flesh.

The Elements began to change. The glow around them faded. The dragon abruptly flew off. The Erthe Woman, now just Rayne Hermit again, fainted. Ditto the NOTHING. Harry fell to his knees but remained conscious. The Mercurius Pro Tem rushed over to him. The Fyre Child was just a naked young woman, now—very pale and shaking. She too, rushed to Tranker’s aid, an expression of dread on her face. The Watr Man—

Was just the same. The blue glow had faded, not winked out like the others. He appeared just as much in control of himself as ever. Abram spared a moment for gratitude. His trust was vindicated.

Poseidon had managed to get airborne. Sizzling energies of red, green, and gold continued to rip into him. He let out a bellow that echoed off the hills and dropped into the dead, grey sea.

Owen had been right. The sky and sea had become so denuded of light that it seemed the land was surrounded by a blank grey fog.

As soon as the Sea God and his offspring disappeared in the water, all the light returned.

In this place, it seemed like a sunrise.

—Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, October 2026

© Gideon Jagged
All Rights Reserved