Chapter XXIV
XXIV
While the Sentinels are based at Avalon Castle, where they train and prepare, their work often takes them elsewhere. However, the hyperconcentration of magical usage in the area around the castle does generate greater frequency of Orcan activity in the surrounding environs.
In a town off the coast of Lake Champlain, night came early. The town was dying anyway, and small. A bit too small, if Aren was being honest. He would have preferred to make his debut somewhere grander. Somewhere more memorable.
He stood on the corner of the closest thing the hamlet had to a town square.
A few blocks of too-long grass hemmed in by a post office, a chapel, and a handful of homes clad in crumbling shiplap.
Here was a part of the world left behind by industry, without an economy to stand on and too few tourists.
Though he’d fallen out of familiarity with it, Aren was accustomed to the unrefined underbelly of the world.
Unlike his friends in the Order, Aren had not come from one of the old lines.
He had not inherited property or wealth, much less had he spurned them.
His parents had known they had a family history of magical resonance, but they did not celebrate it.
Magic passed through his bloodline like a cancer.
It appeared at random in a few unlucky souls, and it was never welcome.
Some recent ancestors had fallen in one of the great conflicts, and their deaths had frightened the family off the concept of magic in its entirety.
Or so said Aren’s mother. Round about the 1820s, the Mann family fled to the United States to escape a revival of religious fervor in the homeland.
But in the New World they met oppression at the hands of magical practitioners much crueler than European zealots.
Rebuked by the preternatural, the Manns turned to God.
The men in his family became preachers, of all things.
They stood before crowds and decried witchcraft, Satan, and all of his counterfeits.
But Aren saw the tendrils of the occult in their liturgy once he knew to look for them.
For all they reviled their past, the Manns never quite learned to forsake it.
When Aren was born with the ability to wield light, his parents did their best to exorcise it from him.
When that failed, the family resolved to ignore the boy’s abilities.
Anxiety remained that he would stumble upon a way to use his talents, so his parents impressed upon Aren the utmost importance of never giving in to the baser urges.
He grew up in an unspoken panic that one day his control would snap and he would fall prey to the evils his parents predicted.
He said his prayers every night. He went to college—a small one, pious, and unknown to the likes of the Order—and listened to his family when they said that to exercise his abilities was to risk eternal damnation.
But one night his steps on the righteous path faltered. After a bit too much to drink and too many months away from his parents’ influence, he found himself kneeling on the cement floor of his dorm’s basement with a paring knife in his hand.
He turned the night to day and waited for his retribution to arrive.
It never did. No lightning crashed down from the heavens to smite him. No pox fell on his house. No, nothing happened at all except that Aren felt an overwhelming sense of purpose for the first time in his life.
He packed his bags that night and left for Avalon Castle the next morning.
Everything that happened from that point—with Meredith, with Max, with the Order and the Brotherhood and the countless smarmy shits lining the halls of that hateful castle—happened as a result of that overwhelming sense of purpose.
Aren had chased that feeling ever since.
He had chased it to Avalon, to Max and Meredith, to the voice that called from the dark.
He still chased it. It woke him in the middle of the night and kept him crawling back to the world that had scorned him. It would be his again, he knew. He needed only to fight for it.
Some of the past could never be reconstructed.
Aren would never again sit under cover of an elm tree with Max and Meredith, envisioning a better world they would create together.
Lightning never struck the same spot twice.
But remnants of the past lingered, and would continue to linger, until Aren claimed them.
And so he stood, back straight and strong, on the corner of a too-small street in a too-small town, tearing a knife through his palm and tossing blood to the ground.
It used to require more effort from Aren to block out the sun.
The trick was simple enough, and he’d been doing it for decades. He hardly felt the skin stitch itself shut over the wound. He spilled no blood on his suit.
Two children, playing alone in a snowy yard beside him, began to wail when the sun was snuffed out.
Lights flicked on in the homes nearby.
Humans stepped onto their porches and peered at the darkened sky, calling for others to come look.
The midday sun still perched overhead, but none of its rays reached the villagers.
The ether seeped the sun’s light from the air before it hit their eyes, and they stood in front of rotting homes staring up at the mystery.
On a cloudless afternoon, the scene must have looked distinctly alarming to someone who had never seen it before.
Aren remembered his first time. He hadn’t trusted his own eyes then, so strange was it to see the source of light but no light itself. All these years later, Aren could recall with perfect clarity the horror he felt when first he looked upon the blackened star.
It was darker than night. There were no stars, no moon to reflect the sun’s rays. Darkness fell, heavy and suffocating.
Aren watched the townsfolk discover this as they bumbled about.
Steadying hands held railings and shoulders in search of stability.
Flashlights followed, then headlights, high beams, exterior lighting, anything to let them see.
None of it worked, of course. That was the brilliance of Aren’s spell, after all.
They pointed phones at the sky to capture something they couldn’t explain.
Aren wondered why so few of them looked scared.
Neighbors gathered at the ends of driveways, communing in confusion.
Children clung to their ankles, more frightened than their parents but unwilling to miss the excitement.
Over their heads, adults tossed questions at one another.
Some of them knew exactly what was going on, and they were eager to explain.
It was a new kind of fog, you see. Something had floated in from the lake and settled over the area.
Everyone knew the factory upwind dumped all sorts of shit they weren’t supposed to in the water.
Pollution, that was responsible. But not from the lake, no, some kind of chemical spill.
A weather event, actually, was more likely.
The planet was changing. Freak weather happened all the time.
They were curious, unsettled, but not truly frightened. Not yet.
A portly man in a dirty gray uniform approached Aren’s place on the corner. The man stood unsteadily on his feet as he squinted. No doubt the man saw little more than the outline of Aren’s body as he peered into the darkness.
“You lost?” the man called from a few feet away.
“Just passing through.”
The man nodded, still intent on observing the demands of polite society even when he could barely see his hand in front of his face.
“You’re a ways off track if you’re headed to the lake. You wanna get back on the main road and—”
“I’m headed west, actually.”
“Something wrong with your car?” The man scanned the dark road for a vehicle that was not there.
“No.”
He’d stopped in front of an auto shop, Aren realized.
Tires littered the icy lawn. Equipment long since eaten by rust lay alongside them, and a dingy sign advertising the business hung at eye level.
He’d assumed it was abandoned, but its sole employee had disabused him of that notion when he came out to investigate the strange man on the corner.
“You ever seen anything like this?” The man gestured at the sky. The cursive name on his uniform was Jack.
“Never like this,” Aren replied.
“Me neither, man,” Jack told the darkness. “More and more of the time, it feels like the world is ending. Crazy shit keeps on happening.”
“It certainly seems that way sometimes.”
“Aw, well, I gotta head home and check on the family. You get where you’re going safe, now.”
Aren watched him stumble toward a beat-up truck in the next drive over.
Rust bubbled up from the wheel wells like mold, and the man fumbled for the door handle and clambered in.
The truck spewed a cloud of smoke as it roared onto the road in front of Aren.
It did little to advertise the man’s professional prowess that he drove such a husk around town.
If he had lived in this helpless place, Aren would have trusted a different mechanic.
He walked the opposite way down the narrow lane. A few cars passed as the residents of the town sped home.
On the corner across from the post office, some of his Brothers had already gathered at the town burying ground.
This would be their first foray into the world Aren had built for them, and they looked nervous.
Aren felt only the cool kind of calm he felt before every crisis—though there would be no crisis today.
This day was an opportunity, pure and simple, ready to be seized.
The Brothers’ muted conversations fell silent when Aren approached, and they drew back to watch him as best they could in the nonexistent light. But they didn’t need to see him to play their parts. They had practiced this.
Aren nodded, and they hurried into a circle on one of the walking paths among the graves.
Macabre it may have been, but a cemetery was the most efficient place for what they were about to do.
Even humans understood that places held memories, and some magic was best aided by the memories of the dead. Especially the old dead.
That was why Aren had chosen this place, after all.
This town, with its too few inhabitants and too little connection to the outside world, had one of the oldest cemeteries in the nation.
Not only was it old, it was more fruitfully populated than average, owing to an outbreak of influenza that had ravaged this village unusually hard at the turn of the last century, back when it had been an emergent industrial hub.
Lots of dead lay here, far more than one would expect.
No one needed to speak. This day had been months in the making, years. The time for discussion had passed—all that remained was the doing.
One of the older Brothers began to carve symbols into the cold ground. It must have been difficult, Aren noted, to slice the icy dirt with such precision. But the Brother gave no sign of struggle. He had prepared for his part well.
The symbols were beautiful, in their own way. Aren had designed them himself. Trial and error over many years led him to the perfect combination of forms and figures.
Aren had performed this ritual so many times—in so many places and iterations over the years—that it came as easily to him as breathing. Only the magnitude was foreign, and he felt his heart race as they began their ministrations.
Nothing happened at first. The dead rarely conformed to one’s schedule. Something of this scale would take time. Despite his years of waiting, Aren marveled at his own impatience. His eagerness did not show on his face, but he heard the blood crush through his thoughts.
Aren left the other men in the graveyard and walked away with measured steps.
A row of black SUVs lined the walkway into the cemetery.
One of the rear doors of the frontmost car swung open as Aren approached, and he took his time getting in, casting a final glance toward the dark sun hanging high above him.
The car turned onto the icy road and peeled away from the cemetery gates. Trees sped by the windows in the darkness, but Aren paid no attention. It was on to the next. The die had been cast.
They had hit the highway by the time the screaming started.