Chapter 65 – Teller of Fate

Teller of Fate

Sixth Movement: The Fate of Stars

Chapter Sixty-Five

* * *

—and threatened Glyph itself.

Time. They had no more time.

The implosion the Templar half expected when the White and Red Gods met obviously wasn’t happening; not yet anyway.

Perhaps they had time after all.

As the brilliant, strobing mass of energy emerged from the gate, he heard, “Ready!” Magically enhanced, the shout echoed around the city.

The Templar saw movement as mages, mercenaries, and magsmen atop Magsmen and Mages Towers, and the nearer portions of the walls running parallel to the Effor Gate, swivelled around to focus on the Red God, who was now past the gate had heading toward the Plaza of Dying Suns.

“Fire!”

Almost as one, blasts of coloured fire sounding like hissing snakes on fire in a hurricane, and explosive chemically propelled projectiles arced, arrowed, and sine-waved toward the enemy from both sides.

A few of the projectiles, magical and mundane, struck the Rakhesh en route to their target, something that had no noticeable effect.

Misfires and ricochets did a lot of damage to the nearby buildings.

The Templar hoped the refugees and citizens had all by now been evacuated to the shelters below the city.

Small fires sprang up, but mercenaries, merchants, and magsmen were on the job. The flames quickly shrank. Most would soon be out.

Armed women and men began to stream the onto the Avenue from smaller gates exiting the Merchants and Mercenaries Quarters into the Magsmens and Mages Quarters to join the fight.

Where the missiles and spells hit the Red God, mayhem ensued.

Lightning-like bits of the Red God vanished in smoke, light, flame, or just clear air. They generally reappeared seconds later. Either that, or other bits replaced them.

No noticeable diminution of the Red God’s substance did the Templar notice. From the screeching it made, though, it wasn’t at all pleased.

Longer range offensive spells and missiles from the far side of Glyph joined the conflagration. Contrails of smoke and sparkling comet’s tails of residual magick hung overhead. The air soon had the stink of sulphur, ozone, and other less pleasant smells. The noise was deafening.

All spells that touched the great Working died instantly. Such potential collateral damage had been planned for. The mundane weaponry passed through without incident.

The Templar noted with a little dismay the figures astride some of the Rakhesh.

The Myr.

They’d obviously decided to forego a reckoning until after the current struggle was ended.

So be it. He hadn’t thought to escape this anyway.

‘Phæ?’

The voice was a whisper in his mind. ‘Paris?’ he responded on the same mental frequency.

‘Help me!’

His face flushed. The pillars became needles of light in his eyes. The wet warmth of tears trickled down his face. ‘Soon, love. Soon now. I promise.’

‘What are you doing? It’s angry. I’ve never felt it this way before!’

The Templar wiped his cheeks dry. Others, he saw were staring. ‘We’re preparing a trap and…there’s another. The two are in contact.’

Nothing.

‘Paris?’

‘How can there be another? Can you stop it?’

‘Nyarlathotep has taken a side. I don’t know if we can stop it or not. We’re going to try.’

‘Phæthon, I love you. Always and forever! Never doubt it.’

‘I’ll see you soon.’

The Templar turned away from the apocalypse dragging its way down the Street.

“The White God is quite discommoded,” he said, addressing the five others in the center of the square.

They were still putting away their distressed faces. Despite himself, the Templar was moved by their concern.

From the Kokkinos, “Will the passage of the Red God damage the Pillar in the Street?”

“No way to know for sure, but we did protect the Working from all interference we could think of. My guess is it will ignore the Pillar.” Phæthon was again his calm self.

“Should we continue, Elder Brother?” asked the Albedo.

“Yes, by all means.” He smiled. “Let’s see how much we can add to ITs discomfort.” He took his place outside the glowing circle of talisman-wielding giants and returned his attention to scanning the sky.

Now that he had heard his sister’s voice, he was sure some sign of her would be visible in the body of the White God.

He wasn’t disappointed.

A flicker of shadow in the open air; another close enough to show a face, a figure, the flash of steel.

His sister Paris was fighting still. There was hope of rescue.

More hope than that of victory, he couldn’t help but think.

At a glance, the Templar took in the fight raging down the Street.

Massively powerful spells, as well as some of the more potent missiles, were having a destructive effect on the walls protecting the Magsmen and Mages Quarters.

Burns and slashes weren’t the half of it. Slices and whole chunks of magically reinforced barriers were being pulverized or were just falling out onto the Street.

Some of the blowback made it over the wall and into the quarters themselves. Nothing to be done about any of it beyond ending this nightmare.

He turned away and nodded to the Mercurius. Time to bait the trap.

The scaffolding having been erected, the construction of the bait and the trap itself could begin. It started with the three governors. They each held up their cards. A moment later a final Duchess, Duke, and Præfator stood in a triangle, each with her or his lamp, and a small orange triangle lay on the pavement. It was just large enough to encompass the Mercurius and Dævara Teller.

The triangle of pillars: orange, green, and violet began to hum and vibrate noticeably. The tops of them began to thin. From their bases to a height twice that of the tops of the Guild Towers they remained the same thickness. Above that, they quickly became very thin lines of very intense light, coloured red.

A loud crack sounding like lightning and shimmering red sheets of light joined the bright lines. A planar triangular base connecting the three pillars completed what looked like a container big enough to swallow half the city resting on the thick pillars of light.

The Mercurius made her card play.

She held twenty-one cards, the entire Major Arcana but one.

While Dævara held her red staff vertically as high as she could, the blue Hermetist began a sinuous dance around her, chanting runes in a language not even wizards knew.

After three and a half circumambulations, the Hermetist flung the cards ahead of herself and stepped quickly away from Dæv.

The Trumps spread out along the path she had blazed, orbiting the Teller, and beginning to emit spectral colours. They became a rainbow, each card a different shade.

The circle became a helix, climbing slightly with each rotation.

Dævara brought her staff down sharply.

A spear of white light emitted from the red metal rod, stabbing the heavens.

The helical path of the cards became steeper. In moments, they had climbed up into the translucent red-light container over the city.

The elf relinquished the glittering crimson staff, which remained upright in the shaft of white fire.

The cards tossed by the Mercurius were only brightly coloured stars now, dancing a tango high above the city. They drew the eye of every beholder in a way most hypnotic.

Only one more thing remained.

The Red God was gaining speed. It would hit the Plaza in moments.

From the Templar, magically enhanced, “Hold the line!”

The fury from the defenders increased noticeably and the advance of the enemy slowed and actually stopped. It wouldn’t hold, though.

The trembling started again.

Again, the tumbling, rolling, grinding, grating echoed around the city. The edges of things in the Templar’s sight began to blur.

The White God was rousing.

This was the hoped-for reaction.

Glancing at the Wanderer in the Wastes still standing motionless, rags still fluttering in a phantom wind, the Templar cursed.

Their Working might be having no effect at all; the Red God could very well be the reason for the White God’s distress.

Their Working was the best it could be, true. Once before, a magick every bit a potent had trapped the White God. The addition of another god complicated matters. If only they could know for sure it would fail, they could try another option that might at least spare the rest of the Thirty Aions.

Because of the foolish plan of the Crawling Chaos, it might all be for nothing and there he stood at the end of the Street…directly in the path of the Red God.

With a flash of intuition, the Templar knew what was wrong. ‘Paris?’

‘Phæ!’

‘Get ready. Can you navigate in there?’

‘Not very well, but I can sense a bit of the landscape.’

‘Can you find the lowest part of the city?’

‘I don’t—wait! Yes! Yes, I know where it is!’

‘Go there now and try to hold steady. I’m going to pull you out when the time is right.’

‘Got it! See you soon, brother.’

In moments everyone in the plaza could see her flashing ’round them, silver highlights reflecting off a form itself unseen. She skittered in a rough circle for a while, trying to keep still. Finally, she managed it, holding mostly steady, though still shuddering in place.

Trying to still his sudden joy at the thought of reuniting with his love, Phæthon briefly explained to the Mercurius and to his daughter his surmises and told them to complete the trap as soon as he was in place.

The Templar then quickly made his way close to the shimmering that was Paris.

The game had changed, and the stakes were higher, but an error by their foe might just hand them a victory.

* * *

The return of perception as Paris had known it an eternity ago was terrifying to her at first.

Paris. The Brocach Templar had almost forgotten that name, remembering it during with the first communication with her brother moments before.

It wasn’t hers, of course. It was just the identifier she had last favoured. She had recalled it only after remembering the label her brother had liked best.

Memories began to flood her mind along with patches of an ancient city that hadn’t existed since long before the last time she had considered herself alive.

Paris saw the shape of this place and remembered another shaped like it where she had learned magick and combat ages ago.

She could just see the brilliance of light pillars in the city and recalled the aisles of columns lining the streets of the city she had matured in. That city had been gone a long time—much longer than they had the last time she remembered them.

Her sense of space returned and with it a panic inducing attack of vertigo.

Gravity, while not yet more than a mild inertia, was assaulting a sense of balance she had forgotten she possessed.

Movement suddenly meant wading through a medium that had been as omnipresent and unnoticed as water was to those immersed in it.

She could feel her body again. Stunningly, she could also see it.

Colour, like the pillars of light rising above the city, was a revelation after so long with nothing resembling sight.

The innards of body of the White God were a dirty grey.

It was also fibrous, like a multi-layered spider web. Moving though it now was like swimming through bile.

Paris could power her way along but that would mean sacrificing precision.

As she focused on the location she was trying to get to, Paris concentrated her energy at the spot in the God’s body she thought directly opposite it and pushed.

She ricocheted off the inner wall of the God and ended up over a city wall in a part of IT that overhung that city entirely.

The drag against the viscous guts of the creature was excruciating. She paused until the pain, another rediscovered sensation, faded.

Reconsidering the amount of force needed and recalculating her trajectory, the Brocach Templar tried again. Bracing for the pain she knew would come, Paris focused and pushed.

She cleared the wall, but that was about it. The pain was much less. More important, Paris was still on course.

Deciding to keep to the same level of force, she made it to the Plaza in a dozen jumps.

All the while, of course, the White God continued to try to snack on her.

Either ITs efforts had lessened, or she had become stronger, for Paris barely noticed those attacks now. Partly that might be because it was distracted.

Likely, her proximity to Phæthon and the pleasure of returning senses and memories did more.

Finally, Paris was close enough to make out the particulars of the plaza.

People. Those vague blobs were people.

Paris identified a spot that seemed free of obstruction and headed there. Despite a series of annoying overshoots, she finally got to the spot she needed to be.

— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, September 2026

© Gideon Jagged
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