Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EZRA
“I’m not too keen on everyone and their grandfather seeing the artifact,” Major Grendel said, her aggravation clear through the phone. “It’s dangerous.”
“I’m aware,” Ezra replied. “But I need options other than destruction. If Saemund can help me find a solution that’s not destructive, I want to accept his help. Right now all I have is destroying the skull, and I really think that’ll involve a catastrophic release of energy.”
“How big of a blast are we talking, here?” Grendel asked.
“Equivalent to the power and range of the blizzard, most likely. Several square miles, if not more.”
She was quiet for a long moment before she spoke, this time quite seriously. “We may need to bury it, then.”
Burying it was an option, but it left too much to chance—humans had too much greed and curiosity to leave anything in peace, especially something so dangerous.
“Or we can let Saemund see the skull, help me determine if there’s a less extreme solution.
” Ezra stressed his reply, even though burying it had been one of his ideas.
“I don’t want this thing to exist as it is now—it’s cruel to the living soul still inhabiting its remains, and the skull is too powerful to leave in a reliquary forever.
The temptation of power is too great for people to resist. Someone in the future will open it again, whether in five months or five centuries. I need more options.”
“Alright, you’ve made your point,” Grendel sighed. “I’m having the sergeants bring you and your guest to see the skull.”
“Thank you, Major.”
“Don’t thank me yet, this may be the biggest mistake ever,” she replied, but she didn’t sound too upset about it. “I’ll meet you there.”
Ezra
Getting to the MERS base was easy—Harlan drove through Edmonton and a little bit outside city limits to a nondescript base with a small private airstrip and multiple large hangars and several buildings.
Fenced-in with razor wire and a guarded checkpoint, spotlights and cameras everywhere, the base was on high alert from what Ezra could tell.
Armed guards with dogs patrolled between the buildings, and vehicles drove along the inside of the perimeter fence.
The sun was warm and the sky was clear, with a few puffy white clouds in the distance. It was a beautiful day to examine a dangerous artifact.
Ezra was moping. Sulking, pouting—he knew it, and it had nothing to do with the drive across town and everything to do with the fact that they left Raum behind at the library.
He had no reason to come—his grandfather was the potentially essential consultant, and that made Raum redundant in a way.
Ezra had trouble getting the sexy professor out of his head.
He wanted to text the handsome man and ask him innumerable questions, but he had a job to do and he had to focus.
The hangar was older, less modern in design, and was behind several buildings and away from the airstrip, an outlier in the clustered base. It appeared to be a converted storage facility, built to hold anything from a small airplane to stacks of copier paper.
And it was mostly empty.
Ezra stood in the cavernous space and stared at the reliquary that held the skull.
It was newish, as reliquaries went—made of polished marble and brass, with a very mundane human religious aesthetic to it—and it was shiny and clean.
Usually when he came across a reliquary in his job it was rusty or coated in dust and grime.
A clean and maintained reliquary was a novel experience.
It was large enough to comfortably hold the skull and then some, easily three times larger than necessary, but Ezra figured that was fine—he knew MERS had gone with the first reliquary they could find that worked, and no one was willing to crack it open again to find a better fit.
“Fancy,” Ezra finally said, hands in his pockets, and Saemund snorted a bit in amusement, standing beside him.
“It’s doing what it needs to,” Saemund replied, amused and yet somehow sad.
Ezra looked at the sidhe, taking in the shiny eyes wet with unshed tears and the wry smile on his lips. “Are you okay?”
“Not even a little bit,” Saemund replied. “But I’ll keep it together for now.”
“What do you see?” Ezra asked quietly. It was obvious that Saemund could see through the reliquary to the skull within, considering how morose he appeared.
“I can’t see everything, but what I do see is more than enough. A soul trapped in a fruitless endeavor, unable to reach peace.”
Ezra let the sadness and grief wash over him, and he rocked a bit on his feet. “Any ideas?”
“A fading is needed here,” Saemund replied heavily. Then he rolled his shoulders, wiped at his eyes, and tried to smile. “I never thought I’d say such a thing.”
Fading, for fae, was a form of death—according to commonly accepted theory—but Ezra thought differently.
He thought fading was a way of returning the inherent life magics that made fae what they were to the earth, but without the body dying—a true conversion of matter into energy that was then absorbed by the world, the soul set free from physical constraints.
Some fae did die while trying to fade, especially the younger species; fading without death was something seen more commonly in the Elder species.
It was not death, not in the traditional sense of the word—but a conversion of matter into energy that was absorbed into the natural energy fields of the living world.
“Can that be something forced on another soul? A process we can stimulate?” Ezra asked.
“No, lad. But…”
“But?” Ezra gently prodded.
Saemund took a deep breath. “If the soul was awake and aware, it is something that they could do. It is a choice that any fae can make for themselves. If they chose to fade, the skull would cease to exist. The magic cycle would stop. No explosion.”
“That may be the best option,” Ezra said softly, but he grimaced at the implications. “That might be a horror to experience, if the soul is awakened. A consciousness trapped in such a way....I can’t imagine.”
“Unless you want to force the issue with a nuclear bomb, that’s our option.” Saemund sighed roughly. “Unless we can miraculously heal them and restore their body, that’s our only option.”
Ezra looked at the reliquary and shook his head slowly.
“For all the death magics pouring out of it, I have no notion of how to convert energy to matter to rebuild a body from next to nothing. I can heal a mortal wound in someone dying, but I can’t restore a fully missing body.
Such a healing is beyond even a necromancer.
That’s surely in the purview of the gods. ”
To resurrect someone from death, that was an ability of the divine.
The skull was as close to literal death as he’d ever seen the living get—and while the death magics could heal mortal wounds, illnesses, and injuries that normally killed someone, it repaired what already existed; it could not spin flesh from nothing.
As far as he knew, at least.
“The gods I know aren’t the type to heal,” Saemund said casually, making Ezra glance his way in some alarm.
Practitioners knew that gods were real. Faith took a back seat to knowledge—worship was a careful endeavor when you knew there was someone listening, and they were just as likely to answer prayers literally as they were to ignore them entirely.
Hecate was fond of Her necromancers, and Ezra was very careful of any erstwhile wishes he might send out into the universe.
She might be listening. And goddess forbid, She might answer.
He knew that from experience.
Knowing gods were real made living a religious life a bit of a dangerous existence—depending on the pantheon, the deities were either capricious and malicious, or far too involved in their worshippers’ lives for Ezra’s personal comfort.
And at no point would he ever casually mention that he knew some gods.
He lacked the audacity to even send a prayer to one directly, having done it once and the result, while favorable, was a hair-raising experience he had no desire to repeat.
Saemund noticed his alarm and shook his head once, patting Ezra on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry, lad. I won’t get them involved, at least not yet.
The ones I know prefer we exhaust our options before asking for help.
And none of them are healers or the type to resurrect.
The one who used to be able to do such works hasn’t been seen on this mortal plane for eons, so asking Her isn’t an option.
So don’t worry, I won’t be asking any gods to help, at least not yet. ”
“That’s…good? Yeah, that’s good. Don’t do that.” Having a deity directly involved in the situation left him terrified on an existential level. Ezra looked back at the reliquary and sighed heavily. “I guess we need to wake up the soul, tell it the truth, and then hope they fade on their own?”
Saemund nodded, grim-faced. “Yes.”
“What a nightmare,” Ezra said, hunching his shoulders and shaking his head. “How the hell do we do that?”
“I’m not sure, not yet,” Saemund said carefully. “I need to think about it.”
Ezra
They didn’t linger at the hanger. Ezra and Saemund left after Saemund took one last look with his senses, deeply affected by the state the nearly-deceased Elder fae was trapped in.
Ezra wanted to offer comfort but he had no idea what to do or say—frustrated by his limitations, Ezra knew enough to offer silence if he had nothing helpful to say.
Grendel was waiting for him as they stepped out of the old hangar.
Saemund glanced at the human and headed for the SUV, leaving Ezra to talk to her alone.
She grimaced, reading his expression. “That bad, huh?”
“We’ve got some options, but no idea how we’re gonna implement them. Not yet.”