Requiem K. 626 Lacrimosa
Fionola (Unknown Fae Lady)
It is not yet fully dark, but the last of the sun has been wrung from the sky, leaving only the bruised underbelly of twilight.
From the ridge above l’Academie, I watch the last sliver of light fail to reach the lawns, and a small parade of idiot children try not to notice the night coming for them.
It is, I think, the purest vision of hope to be found in this shithole of a world—the blind, defiant belief that the dark will not catch up if you run fast enough.
The canines are the worst, predictably. They can’t move through a space without advertising their collective insecurity, traveling in jittery phalanxes, always watching the perimeter, but never trusting their own.
I mark a cluster of them at the base of the north steps, the tallest one yapping at the rest until his joke lands and they all laugh too loud, their posture exaggerated by the awareness that even this close to the main hall, something might be watching from the trees.
They are not wrong, but their definition of ‘something’ is pathetically unimaginative.
On the quad proper, two felines cross in parallel, keeping three body lengths between them and pretending they don’t see one another. Their tails move in distinct patterns—one nervous, one contemptuous—and they pass without making a sound.
Good. It’s less noise for me to filter through.
The freshman brigade in their red plaid is the most laughable.
There’s a group of six or seven drifting at the edge of the campus like brainless flotsam.
Some other year, they would have been running toward the cafeteria, shoving each other and whining about tests and relationships.
Instead, they move with the slack disorganization of survivors, each one subtly guarding a different sector of approach.
I suspect these children have seen what happens to those who make themselves a story.
The clever ones have already mastered looking like nothing, and will probably live through September.
I let my gaze track across the rest of the grounds, but there is nothing new.
Every piece of this tableau has played out before, and every time it ends with the same blood on the same grass.
I wonder if any of the architects or their little cronies realize how their reforms resembled the systems they claimed to hate.
It’s always the same: the powerful create a nightmare for the powerless and then pat themselves on the back.
At this hour, with the taste of a coming storm in the air, even the new paint job on Dupree cannot disguise the rot underneath.
Movement at the far edge of the quad draws my eye, and I know what I’ll see before I look—our unsinkable bunny rabbit.
She is more colorful than the things that exist after the sun sets, striding out of the main doors with that staccato twitchiness peculiar to her energy.
The aura of outrage emanating from her is almost visible; something has pissed her off and judging by the rawness of her posture, she’s been at war all day.
That should concern me, but the next part matters more.
Flanking her—no, not just flanking, matching pace and breathing—is my ex-fiancé.
The gargoyle carries himself with the careful discipline of someone who expects a sniper at every window and has memorized every escape route, which is not who he used to be.
I suppose time changes us all for better or worse, and though I’m part of that paranoia, I dislike seeing his joie de vivre dimmed.
They’re moving toward the annex, neither of them talking, both hyperaware of gaps in their security.
I clock the distance between them and the next nearest predator and file it away for later.
There’s a reason I started with the worst of the pred children, and it wasn’t for the poetic vengeance of it.
If anything is going to crack this place open, it’s the impossible heir, the one even the most loyal Society leader cannot seem to actually kill because they don’t know what she might hide under her skin.
I wonder, briefly, if her mates know how easily they could become a liability, especially now that their auras glow with completed bonds.
I wonder if she does.
It doesn’t matter, though. I am not here to think about her, but to watch the rest of the equation.
Three centuries of disappointment give you a patience so complete that it’s almost a revenge of its own.
I spend the next several minutes cataloguing the remaining stragglers, marking which ones are nervous, which ones are pretending, and which ones are easy prey for our needs.
The pattern is the same as last year, and the year before, and the ten years before that.
Even the influx of capital from the Drew scion’s demands hasn’t changed the basic geometry of their student body here.
If you want to know who will crack first, watch the ones who never pay attention to anything but themselves.
The quad empties, and the only noise is the wind dragging leaves across the stone. I watch the sky for a few seconds, then check the position of the moon. The woods are waiting, and I have much to do as night closes in.
I step off the path and walk the border between manicured grass and an underfed tree line.
Every third step, the ground gives a little, and there is a brief, insistent pulse from the book in my coat.
It wants to be opened, but not here. It is not time, though—not until the signals converge and certainly not by my hands.
Everything must be done according to the prophecies if the future is going to come to fruition.
The campus lights warp and split my shadow on the uneven ground.
There was a time, long ago, when this would have unsettled me.
Now it just makes me want to correct the symmetry myself, but I cannot.
The urge to fix the lighting with a gesture is strong, but instead I focus on the weight of my mission.
My double agents have been in place since before I arrived, and the meeting at the old shed will happen as planned.
All I need to do is deliver the payload, and after that, it’s out of my hands.
The beginning of the end for the oppressors is nigh, but I’m still worried that things will go wrong.
A scream echoes from the far side of campus—not a real one, just the sound of a hyena girl cackling at something.
It’s so routine that it doesn’t even make the crows look up from their roost. I wonder what it would take to make this place care about anything, and then I remember that in a few weeks, it will.
The darkness under the trees is at a lower temperature than the campus behind me.
I let the cold bleed into me, reminding me of the difference between actual power and what preds teach in their little seminars.
True power is knowing the shape of every shadow and being willing to step into them.
I slip between the first two trees, and the woods close behind me with a noise like the closing of a vault door.
For a minute, I pause at the edge, look back at the campus, and let myself feel the smallest flicker of hope that maybe this time, someone will surprise me.
Maybe the bunny will; maybe she won’t.
Either way, the night will do its work, and I will be there to watch the sunrise.
Once I’m fifty yards into the woods, every remnant of campus sound dies, as if I’ve walked through a pane of soundproof glass.
The silence here is not really silent; it’s more like a blanket thrown over the land to muffle things.
Enchantments laid within the bounds of this forest deaden the unhurried tick of wood expanding and the almost-subliminal percussion of tiny claws, teeth, and wings claiming the night before the larger predators bother to do so.
I placed that small magical safeguard to allow me to move with stealth when I must come here, but it doesn’t activate until my aura breaches the perimeter.
No need to give my enemies and foes the same advantage when they cast us out for that kind of ability.
I walk at a normal speed, since the woods know me.
The birch trees were old when the campus was still a single stone building, and some of the low-growth ferns might remember a time when prey and predator were just words and not a death sentence for the former.
I run my hand along a trunk as I pass, feeling the slick moss on it, and the tree responds the way all living things do when someone gives a shit about them.
It shivers and then steadies. I press my palm to a weak spot in the bark, and after three seconds, a ribbon of heat pulses through the cambium, closing the wound.
Nothing dramatic—just a nudge, enough to heal a small insult.
A fallen log blocks the next segment of the path.
It’s half-consumed, which is precisely as it should be, but the moss has turned a little yellow where something acidic spilled.
I run my fingers along the spine of the log, and as I go, a line of impossible green unfolds in my wake.
There is no ritual to it. If you know how to look, the world will always show you how to fix itself; it just needs reminding.
Suddenly, I see a fox appear on the root structure to my left—smaller than average, with an old scar over the left eye and one ear clipped from a fight that probably shouldn’t have involved foxes at all.
It does not move, but its nose angles up to catch my scent.
I make a soft click with the back of my teeth.
The fox’s tail lowers, but it doesn’t run.
Not a familiar or a shifter—just a real animal, with a real distrust of anything that walks upright.
I respect its caution in the world we live in now.
Passing the prowling fox, I glance up. The canopy is dense, but there are slits where the sky shows through in indigo streaks.
A half-moon is rising, pale as bone and unremarked by anyone but the creatures beneath it.
About a hundred yards in, the ground changes to less moss and more rocks.
There is an old trail here, but most people don’t come this far in after sundown.
I know because I had minions watching the campus last year before our attack to learn the patterns and habits of the residents, so I could maximize every possible hiding spot.
I pause at a weird, stunted beech tree, its bark half-flayed off by some adolescent predator with a knife.
I do not heal this one because not all scars need fixing.
Instead, I set my hand at the base and whisper three syllables.
The wound closes a little—just enough to keep out fungus, not enough to erase the story.
It’s a metaphor for my fractured heart and psyche, so I wish it luck on its journey before I move on.
Healing our world and the creatures in it is the heart of my work.
The plots, the subterfuge, the middlemen and their stupid double-agent bullshit are simply a means to an end.
I have spent almost a thousand years doing it while I waited for the one.
Every time something grows over a wound, every time a bird takes a seed and plants it a hundred yards away, it’s a win.
Even if the preds burned down this entire patch of woods, they couldn’t get the memory out of the soil.
The memory would just wait, and one day it would choke their world in green.
Perhaps I am a bit maudlin tonight, but it has been so very long without hope, and now a better world is within our grasp—it simply requires a cleansing fire to allow things to regrow.
The book feels heavy tonight. Not physically, but its hum is louder, more insistent.
I shift the bundle under my coat, feeling the heat of it through three layers of fabric, and remind myself to be careful.
Wardings can be subtle, but this one wants to be read.
There is nothing so dangerous as a book that wants to be read, especially if it needs to be done under specific circumstances.
I check the moon through the trees again.
Five minutes to the shack, and maybe ten after that before I complete the handoff.
I let my free hand trail through a patch of bracken, and the leaves stand up a little straighter behind me.
Another fox, or maybe the same one, runs across the trail ahead, carrying a dead shrew.
Its tail is bushy and clean, a minor miracle in a world like this.
It does not look at me, which is fine. I am here to deliver the thing, and then to watch what happens when it makes its way to the right people in the right manner.
The wind picks up, but it doesn’t break the air; it just ruffles the topmost leaves and whispers a warning.
I’m almost at the clearing now; I know because I smell the blood.
The world out here has already forgotten the lesson the campus tries to teach every day—the strongest beings always win.
Sometimes, that is a much longer game to play than we wish, but it will eventually come to pass.
In the clearing ahead, the old house sits at its center like a rotten tooth. I step into the moonlight, letting the ambient magic swirl up around my ankles, and adjust the book so it’s held flat against my belly. It throbs once, like a heartbeat. I press back, and the feeling subsides.
No one is here yet. I have a few more minutes to make sure everything is perfect.
I drop to one knee and set the book on the mossy stone, unwrapping it as I let the cloth fall away.
The cover is darker in this light, but the runes still glow faintly, flexing as if they know the work to come.
I lean back on my heels, look at the world through the lens of a perceived traitor, and allow myself a rare, honest smile.
For tonight, that will be enough—it has to be, until my unlikely allies bend the knee.