#Anima Mundi | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

spookyspaghettisundae · 1 year ago

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Anima Mundi

Infinity could break a mind. Attempts to truly wrap the mind around the infinite were doomed because the mind was forever cursed with limitations.

Infinity could break a soul. Eternal it may have been, yet reaching for both things within its grasp and the unattainable would stretch it thin, to the point of tearing itself apart.

Inviolable laws of the cosmos.

The only path to infinity was in making peace with its power. Making peace with one’s self. One or the other: accepting the things within one’s grasp, or forever reaching for the unattainable. Surrendering to the limitations of one’s mind, or reaching out to infinity and seeing what lies beyond once the mind had broken like a dam, allowing the forever ocean to swallow all.

The Shadow knew this. A thousand tiny white dots glimmered in its intangible shape, thousands of eyes eagerly watching, eagerly awaiting while Michael worked his magick. It hovered and peered over his shoulder like an oversized parasite of roiling pitch-black. Like a demon. Liquid ink. Spiritual tar.

Dancing darkness, cast by the flames of tiny fires in the chapel, set among small piles of stone and old wood the necromancer had set ablaze with his lighter to illuminate the ruin’s bowels. In that starry night, Michael needed light to complete this magnum opus. The Shadow waited with great patience.

Michael dipped two fingertips into FBI Agent Parker’s open wound, like the painter wielding his palette. The decrepit old wall behind the altar served as his canvas. His fingertips kissed the coarse sandstone bricks, painting upon them the shape of a large triangle.

The beginning of a door to another world. To another time. The beginning of an end.

Parker moaned softly, though her consciousness had slipped into the arms of oblivion.

The Shadow smiled as it waited and watched.

The Shadow’s ghostly tar dripped from other places now, too. It oozed from all the cracks in reality it had wrought. It had invaded this world by crossing through a different door. Hailing from different times. Arrived from a different year, and a different era before that.

A dark traveler in the dark void of time and space. A projection, burnt into the fabric of reality. And yet, it had no true shape.

Eyes and dark tendrils extended like limbs of invisible mold, connecting all the people and places it had visited and infested.

Its tar-like imitation of SUBSTANCE still dripped from the dead machinery of THE HIGHWAY which it had corrupted, deep inside the Heart, in the basement of the Way King’s ranch house. Clockwork systems and steam engines no longer dripped with water, but with weightless matter, with the viscosity of tar.

Even the door where Klemens had opened a pathway between our world and the House of Change now oozed dark matter from its bottom crack.

It gathered in the cracks of a supermax prison cell in Kentucky, where Freddy Fletcher had been incarcerated. He stared at that shadowy stuff, pooling in the darkest corner of his small, confined space, pushing his sanity beyond its final frontier.

Droplets coalesced on the concrete of a basement wall in a mall in Kentucky, where the Shadow’s original form had originally crossed into this age. The sleeping wall, locked away in storage for nobody to see, sweated with tiny beads of dark matter.

In the train graveyard, far away, the same intangible matter pooled in a pit between two blobs of fleshy eyes and tentacle-like appendages. Once been human, THE SUBSTANCE had transformed. Evolved. A remnant of a lost world.

I am what awaits at the end of all roads.

The Shadow spoke in its Whispers to Michael.

Your king’s highway is dead, and I await you all at the end of its final road.

I am inevitable.

The sorcerer did not respond to the Shadow’s Whispers in his mind. He continued to work. Focused on the ritual he was conducting, he painted that triangle to completion, inch by inch, line by line, each edge of its shape drawn to the width of two fingertips pressed together.

Parker’s body lay motionless on the altar of this ruined chapel. Michael dipped his fingers into the wound on her belly again, salvaging more blood from the dying woman.

She was still alive. Barely. For once she died, the blood would no longer be useful to him. Beyond committing his focus and spirit onto the current ritual, keeping Parker alive continued to chew away on Michael’s focus. It sapped him of his meticulously harvested reserves of magick energy, sacrifices upon sacrifices of human lives he had taken in the past.

The Oracle of New York. A dark luminary in the world of occultists.

Spirit speaker.

Necromancer.

Behind even the Shadow, imperceptibly, a cloud of screaming souls swirled behind Michael. The many lives he had taken—most often against their will, sometimes through deception, and on rare occasion, even by honest seduction—all drawn to power his magick. They hated the living they could see through the veil, trapped just behind it. They screamed for his demise, and they screamed for freedom. Freedom from the prison he kept them in. The lives he had traded for arcane power.

Usurper of the throne. The Way King now slept, and his highway, the greatest glyph of all times—the totality of all roads in the world—slept with Klemens now. All owed to Michael’s winding path of dark machinations and betrayal.

Michael desired to open that triangle-shaped door. Just like the Shadow.

They dreamed of the possibilities. A new world shaped by their dreams. A new dawn.

Together, they yearned to usher in a new future.

Thus, Michael painted in the flickering light shed by small fires in the ruined chapel. A reflection of the primitive world they all came from. With Parker’s blood, Michael painted strange symbols along the lines of the triangle. In his other hand, he held the jade tome, the Thaum of Thritain, studying its alien hieroglyphs, and replicating them around the triangle in a fingerpainting in blood.

Getting closer and closer to completing this ritual.

And the Shadow watched with glee.

Outside the chapel, clouds cleared the sky for the moon and distant stars to shine through. They bathed the deserts of Las Vegas in an eerie, cold light. The winds howled, cold and unforgiving, and they fed the flames of Michael’s fire inside the chapel.

And a group of people stood outside the ranch house, down the path along the dead fields, leading to that ruined chapel.

In reality, this path extended merely over a few hundred yards of crushed gravel and sand, flanked by decaying fence and desert.

But the Shadow had altered reality. That pathway now stretched into infinity. The closer one got to the chapel, the farther that path became. And its Shades, its deranged spawn, lurked between the fence posts, and the stray stones, and the cacti. They hungered for human spirit.

Outside the ranch, four people waited. Helpless. Unable to cross that distance.

Special Agent Derek Wells stood out in the open and his tattered bureau jacket fluttered in the cold wind.

Aria Chambers in her dirtied designer dress, and her bodyguard, the bulky mountain of meat in a suit named Barry, stood behind Wells.

Behind them, in turn, FBI director Anthony Collins sat on the sagging steps of the ranch house porch, hands bound behind his back with cuffs.

All four of them gazed across that stretch of unnatural infinity, that warp in the way, stopping them from reaching the ruined chapel on Klemens Weidmann’s dead ranch.

Or, at the very least, the infinity stalled them long enough for Michael to complete his work.

Their palpable impotence filled the Shadow with a sense of sadistic glee.

A sense of victory.

The porch to Weidmann’s home, where hundreds of bullets had pockmarked and torn up the wood and windows, squealed. The fly trap door, barely hanging from its hinges, opened. Three figures pushed out from the bowels of the darkened building. Their boots and shoes clomped down on the porch steps as they stepped out into the open.

Two more people, and a copy of a human.

In their leather jackets, the fallen Way King’s knights, Jericho Kane and Karma, joined this strange gathering.

The Way King’s final homunculus, a clockwork automaton—a perfect copy of Agent Parker’s appearance—followed right behind them.

They, too, came to stare in awe at the impossible distance between house and chapel. At the dancing Shades, mocking with their awful and monstrous presence.

Wells shot a glance over his shoulder to the new arrivals. He grimaced, recognizing the vicious woman named Karma, who had almost sliced his throat open with shards of glass.

He still wore the bandages from that confrontation.

“Oh, fuck off,” she muttered while he glared at her. “Don’t look at me like that. Your partner shot me.”

His hand twitched around the pistol in it. But he held his tongue.

She exuded no threat to him. The symmetrical features of her face shed no spite for him any longer, and she stared like the everybody else into the distance.

“Cool your fuckin’ jets,” Jericho said. His eyes were reddened with recent tears, and that struck a first nerve in the FBI agent. Jericho struck a second nerve when he continued speaking, cementing that he was addressing the evil beauty by his side, and not Wells. “This ain’t the fucking time or place. We all wanna get to that motherfucking snake over there.”

“That thing is no demon,” Aria said, repeating what she had told Wells and Barry earlier, upon their first failed attempt to cross the infinite distance to the chapel.

Jericho peeled his gaze off the distant building and locked onto Aria. His eyes sparkled in the starlight and he swallowed emptily. He tried to find the right words, to convey his concern, or to convince her to get out of dodge before their world ended.

Instead, he only blurted out something stupid.

“Why the hell are you here? You shouldn’t even fuckin’ be here.”

“Shut up,” she snapped. “I go wherever the hell I want. And I have unfinished business with Michael.”

“We all do,” spoke the homunculus. The red-headed facsimile of a woman spoke evenly, calmly, in a monotone that rivaled Parker’s regular demeanor. Staring into the distance like all others, she added, “She is there with him, and dying. The longer we wait—”

“Nah, fuck that,” Jericho said.

“Well, what’s the fucking problem?” Karma asked. “We’re all here to ice that piece of shit, so why are we standing around like jackoffs and talking?”

Barry pointed a meaty finger towards the chapel. Aria spoke in his stead.

“Bad mojo. That entity warped the space around the chapel. And do you not see those things out there?”

As if to underline her words with a threat of ill-will, the Shades danced madly between fence posts, stones, and cacti. Hungry, and wiggling their shadowy claws in anticipation of human contact. Grasping at the gravelly path, like they wanted to slice through hapless legs.

“So fuckin’ what?” Karma asked. She smirked, showing teeth. Having escaped the House of Change unchanged, her sadism returned to the fore. “Are you all stupid? Do you not realize what I am capable of?”

“I don’t even know the hell who you are,” Aria fired back.

Wells swiveled, gravel crunching underneath his scuffed shoes, and his eyes went wide. He stormed up to Karma with wide steps.

He knew.

“Yes. Do it,” he ordered. “Take us there.”

“Yo, cowboy,” Karma said, the smirk fading from her lips. “Hold your fuckin’ horses. Are we all on the same page here? What do all you dipshits think we’re gonna do when we get there?”

A beat of silence. Then everybody answered at the same time.

“Save Parker,” Wells growled.

“Stop Michael,” spoke the homunculus.

“Find and destroy that fucking book, which I bet that asshole has already,” Jericho drawled out.

“Squeeze Michael on where to find the book,” Aria said.

“No clue,” Barry replied.

“Wait, you think he found the book? When? How?” Collins asked. His questions lingered the longest out of all their conflicting responses.

“Shut up,” multiple people told Collins in groans with varying levels of annoyance.

Karma’s smirk widened into a wicked smile. “You dipshits should be way more worried about that thing with Michael. You all know what I’m talking about. We need to get rid of that thing.”

“I don’t think we can,” Aria admitted, deflating more with each word she uttered. “I don’t even understand what it is.”

“It’s bad fuckin’ news,” Jericho growled. “It could just come and go in the House of Change, so it’s clearly out of this world, above our fucking paygrades.”

“Until we figure out how to deal with it, let’s focus on what we do know, and know how to do right,” Wells ordered again.

He puffed his chest out. The anxiety and stress gnawed on his nerves, but he recalled the bureau’s motto. Like a silent mantra, it repeated in his head. Echoed in his mind in Parker’s voice, from the time she had said it out loud in earnest to him, he let it loop.

Fidelity, bravery, integrity.

He let it repeat in his mind while the wind howled over the desert, and all their eyes came to rest on him with expectation.

Even the Shadow’s millions of starry eyes. Even as it smiled.

“We get over there, we save Parker, we stop Michael, and if he has that book, we take the book away from him. In that order. Then we can bicker about the consequences until we’re blue in the face, but until then, we’re in this one together. Ride. Or die.”

Jericho sighed. Jutted his chin out. “Yeah, okay, fuck it. Yeah, let’s do it. I’m game, let’s go, come on.”

Aria sighed and added nothing. She glared at Jericho, for she sensed where they were headed. He only stared ahead into the impossible distance of the chapel, avoiding all eye contact with anybody else. Aria wasn’t ready to let him burn his life away.

The homunculus stared in the same direction and she suddenly spoke, bursting out into a flood of words.

“Agent Parker and I both dreamed of a long valley, where rain fell eternal, and all the stones on mossy grounds were of perfectly geometrical, spherical shape. In the fog, at the end of that valley, a forest of crystal trees awaited, and in its clearing, a tar pit bubbled, from which Shadow rose. It assumed our shape, a dark mirror of the self. Shadow, we all are. It is neither here nor there entirely. SUBSTANCE in an incomplete, corrupted form, twisted by human ambitions. A corruption of all things that exist. It cannot be destroyed without destroying reality itself.”

She fell silent.

All stood stunned, mouths agape at the homunculus fashioned in Parker’s image.

The Way King’s final act of peace, as he had declared himself.

The homunculus expected no response.

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Jericho grumbled.

“Anima mundi,” replied the homunculus.

Aria squinted at the red-headed homunculus. As a true Witch of the West Coast, Aria was the only person present who knew enough to glean any sense of her cryptic message.

“Who gives a shit?” Karma asked. “Let’s go, people. Time’s wasting. Start holding hands like we’re some kinda hippie protest chain. Come on, chop chop.”

She extended a hand for Jericho to take. He seized it, grabbed Aria’s hand. She, in turn, took Barry by his hand, who snatched Wells’ hand in a meaty fist, the one not occupied by the FBI agent’s pistol. Wells holstered his service weapon in the confines of his jacket, and then took the homunculus by her hand, unsettled by how much she looked like Parker.

Karma led the way, back up to the fly trap door into the ranch house, right past Collins, still sitting on the steps dumbfounded. The train of people passed him by, steps thumping up the decrepit old wood, and he gawked at each of them.

“Uh, what—what about me? Hey! Are you leaving me here?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jericho snapped at him in passing.

Karma stepped through the door, and they chain of people bypassed reality, one by one. Stepping through the darkness of the fly trap door, they did not enter the ranch house, they instead emerged inside the chapel.

Her strange and unnatural power had crossed the impossible distance with her improbable ability. The liminality of all thresholds in reality served her as gateways between disconnected places. It could boggle the mind, though the people present either already knew of her terrible power, or possessed the faculties to process its effect in action.

Or, as in Barry’s case—they tried not too hard to think about it. Like anybody exposed to the unnatural, trying to rationalize it with conventional logic, and filing it away in the dustiest and oldest forgotten drawers of the mind, before it could chip away at and erode too much sanity.

The six figures crowded inside the far end of the chapel.

They gazed across the broken pews, to the altar upon which the dying Agent Parker lay. Michael had crossed her arms over her chest, like laying an ancient Egyptian pharaoh to peaceful rest.

Dim light flickered from the three tiny fires Michael had lit. He paused amidst painting the final glyph outside the triangle’s lines, rearing his head to gaze upon the interlopers. Surprise flashed in his bright blue eyes.

And the Shadow, creeping in the darkest corners of that cavernous ruin, it blinked its thousands of tiny stars. It oozed with malice.

Hatred for those six who had simply bypassed its attempts at keeping them away. It had worked so hard to corrupt THE HIGHWAY, distorting the distances of reality to create a pocket of infinity around the chapel, and one of the people present was capable of ignoring that awesome might altogether.

Well, well, well, look at this. Just in time to play the party poopers?

They now all heard its Whispers in their minds, provoking shudders to run down every spine. Then the mental Whispers turned to menacing Growls.

DO YOU NEED TO FEAST ON HUMAN ENTRAILS LIKE VULTURES? TO BE TAUGHT OF THE FRAILTY OF YOUR FLESHY MEATBAGS?

The light from the three flames dimmed and flickered. But it had not been the Shadow to do so.

Nothing but the howling wind, sweeping through the ruined chapel, whistling through the holes in sandstone brick walls.

Michael’s wide-eyed surprise gave way to a half-lidded, relaxed gaze. He picked up the switchblade from the altar, where it lay hidden behind Parker’s dying body.

The threat was clear. The sharp little blade glinted in the dim light, hovering above the unconscious red-headed woman. Its tip, however, was pointed at them.

He smiled at the six witnesses to his ritual.

“An auspicious gathering,” he said.

They would empower the energy he invested in it. They would serve perfectly to seal the sacrifice. Witnesses were almost better than the faithful.

“Karma,” Michael muttered, staring coldly at her. Confidently. He clicked his tongue between uttering her name and his next words. “And here I thought the House of Change would leave you forever… changed. Maybe fix your attitude, or your lousy manners. A shame you show up to sabotage me at the eleventh hour. I really, truly, should have known better.”

Karma smiled at him, but there was no joy behind it. Then the trauma of her entrapment in the otherworld all bubbled to the surface. Her face twisted into a mask of rage and malice.

She screamed at him, “I’m gonna gut you like a fucking fish!”

“God, I’ve had enough of this shit,” Wells muttered.

His pistol was slung up in a flash, and the former ranger shot Michael in the dead center of his forehead. The necromancer crumpled onto the floor behind the altar.

“God fucking damnit!” Karma spat, yelling. “He was mine!”

“Holy shit. Are we already done here?” Jericho said, taken aback by the sudden turn of events. “I mean, fuck, I’m not one to complain.”

His chin crinkled and he took a single dauntless step towards the opposite end of the chapel, towards Parker’s body on the altar.

The entire ruin rumbled, quaked. Its walls shook, and dust rained from the crumbling ceiling. Howling winds swept through the abandoned abode, and the three fires flickered till they nearly died down. Only embers remained and the Shadow grew. Intangible claws crept across every solid surface, closer and closer to the six intruders. The shifting Shades crowded outside the holes in the chapel’s walls, peering inside with tiny white dots for eyes, like a hungry sky of glimmering starlight.

The Growls in their minds rumbled, matching the force of the earthquake.

WE ARE FAR FROM DONE, YOU AND I. NOW YOU ALL ARE GOING TO HELP ME FINISH THIS.

The six people huddled together, back to back now, surrounded by swelling darkness. Terror gripped their hearts, a fear of the unknown paralyzed them with inaction. The agents of dark matter closed in on them.

Get back up, Mikey. GET UP.

Michael’s hand smacked onto the top of the altar, leaving a handprint in blood. His splayed digits trembled as he slowly pulled himself back up.

Heal her. And I’ll take over from here.

“Gimme your gun,” Jericho told Wells. He grabbed at it.

The FBI agent slapped Jericho’s grabby hand away.

Jericho growled, “Just keep shooting him, for fuck’s sake! He can’t keep doing that shit forever!”

Barry and Aria reacted, drawing their own pistols.

“Stop!” Wells’ command sliced through the howling wind. “I don’t trust you to not hit Parker.”

Michael chuckled darkly. Blood wept from the third eye that Wells’ bullet had punched into his forehead. The necromancer poked a finger into it, and smiled upon seeing his own blood and bone, clinging to his quaking fingertip.

HEAL HER. I WILL DEAL WITH THESE INSECTS.

You can sacrifice your own blood, and heal from it again.

“That violates the laws of cosmic transaction,” Michael breathed in protest, wobbling as he stood on buckling legs.

He braced himself against the altar, leaning over Parker. The dark priest. His power was divided in every direction.

The walls of reality are already crumbling while this event ripples forward and backwards through time. Reality is as malleable and decrepit as this old chapel. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel its flesh rotting away as the Way King now forever sleeps? His reign has ENDED.

You can remake everything. You can make up the rules as you see fit.

HEAL HER.

“This is bullshit,” Karma exclaimed. “These are just fucking shadows! What the fuck can they do, anyway?”

She pulled a large hunting knife out of her jacket. Then she snarled, casting a sneering grin at Michael.

“Now… to make good on my promise.”

Michael couldn’t help but shudder. She meant every word and she didn’t care about any consequences.

Everybody else hesitated as Karma charged at the altar, boots clomping down the aisle between all the broken pews, until others broke from their paralysis.

Karma had spoken true. The Shadow and its Shades only postured with menace. The touch of their dark tendrils instilled a dark chill in their hearts, yes, but it carried no substance. As the homunculus had said.

SUBSTANCE in an incomplete form.

The entire group advanced, three firearms drawn upon Michael, waiting for the right moment to shoot him dead.

DOOM.

An explosion of invisible energy repelled them. Karma tumbled backwards over the ground, struck strongest by that powerful blast. The others merely stumbled and stopped in their stride.

The cloud of screaming souls behind Michael had manifested momentarily, surging outwards from him in hateful waves. Each pulse that followed the blast deepened a feeling of sickness in their bowels. They all reeled with a sense of vertigo, feeling unable to reach the sorcerer.

He stood behind the altar, arms wide open, his head cocked back to the crumbling roof, like a dark messiah channeling divine wrath through his entire body. The vision of the cloud of screaming souls dissipated, but one thing was clear to everybody present.

Unlike the Shadow and Shades, Michael’s power was all too real.

The pulses from his cloud of death waned and the sinuous vision dissolved.

In its wake, the Shadow and Shades were all gone.

On the altar before Michael, Parker stirred. A pained moan escaped her parched throat. Uncrossing her arms, she pawed at her belly, where blood still soaked the fabric, yet skin no longer yielded to pressure in form of an open wound.

Healed again. By grace of Michael’s dark sorceries.

She sat up and let her legs dangle off the side of the altar, her back turned to Michael. Her head bobbed up and down, eyelids more closed than open, speaking to volumes of delirium, reminiscent of someone who had just woken up from a long coma in a hospital.

Karma groaned on the floor where she reeled, crawling towards the altar with painful slowness, her face twisted and cringing with agony from the blast, and a bloodthirst that raged in her, urging her to murder Michael.

All others stood still again, paralyzed with a new fit of indecision, and a deep-rooted fear of the unknown unfolding before them.

“Why?” croaked Agent Parker through her haze.

The embers and tiniest of flames in Michael’s fire cast a long Shadow behind her, looming above them.

The Growls had died down into Whispers, now isolated to Parker’s mind again.

As tender as they ever had been… just as when they had first met.

Because we can open the door, you and I. As I always said, and I will say again: you listen.

You let me in.

Tar-like droplets of dark matter began beading upon the lines of the triangle on the wall behind them, oozing from the cracks between the bricks upon which Michael had painted the symbol in Parker’s blood.

“What if I don’t want what you want,” Parker breathed. The pain subsided as Michael’s magick continued to work, and she recovered from all the blood she had lost. “You are threatening these people’s lives. You are… I don’t even understand what you are or what you really want.”

The necromancer tilted his head. The reflection of embers in his icy blue eyes flashed with curiosity as he blinked, listening intently to Parker’s side of her telephone call with the Whispers.

I want to be whole again. To fill the hole with THE SUBSTANCE your sister from another world deprived me of when we crossed over together.

“What does that… mean?” she answered in question anew. “Explain, and I will consider—”

“Parker! Please,” Wells shouted. His gun lowered by his side. “Do not negotiate with these God-damned Whispers!”

Wrinkles creased his forehead above his furrowed brow, and he stared at her with wet eyes, concerned for his partner’s well-being.

Yes. You listen. You understand. We open this next door, and we reshape reality. We cross the sea of stars. Dive into the dark depths of the ocean of time, where everything folds into the present.

The Whispers spoke to her with infinite tenderness.

But you’ve done me so much harm, she answered the Whispers in her own head. No longer speaking aloud. Becoming one with the Shadow, wrapping her entire being around that parasitic entity in a gentle embrace. You have threatened, and hurt, and endangered myself and others. Time and time again. Why would I help you?

As the fire in her being grew, so did the flames of Michael’s externals fires. A cold wind from the desert let the embers and dry wood flare up again with new flickers. Parker’s Shadow grew behind her, and even Michael’s fear began to grow while he craned his neck to behold the swelling presence, towering over them.

“Naw, fuck this,” Jericho muttered. Then he shouted at them. “I know you got that fucking book, and I’m gonna destroy that stupid fucking book, you stupid fucking assholes!”

He didn’t make a step towards the altar. He didn’t need to. His intent was enough. He was moments away from burning down his entire life to finish the job, to ride into the sunset, with all his connections, and affections scattered in the wind. His friend, Klemens, had wanted that book so badly, but Jericho believed it needed to stop existing. And as a final “fuck you” to all the “mystic psychos” around him, Jericho was hellbent on annihilating the tome in one final blast of his own. He only needed to see it to destroy it.

The Thaum of Thritain, the jade tome from another time or space, it rested on the altar, right behind Parker, between her and Michael. It radiated with unnatural gravity. An opposite pole to the screaming cloud of souls that followed Michael through the ether; the jade tome sucked everything in like a black hole. Everybody sensed its presence, even if they weren’t aware of it.

That unreal presence only intensified, as if it was responding to Jericho’s threat.

“Don’t,” Aria whispered. Firmly. Glaring at Jericho, her voice cracked. “Do not throw your life away.”

Jericho clenched his jaw and spat out a string of incoherent expletives before he settled on a plan B. “Fine, fine. I don’t even need to tap my own mojo. Klem gave me a little something and I’m going to make some good fucking use of it now.”

Look at how they struggle to grasp the gravity of what is about to unfold, the Whispers told Parker. They resist without understanding what they are resisting. We can bridge the future and past. Connect all humanity with a higher enlightenment, and move this world one step closer to a greater evolution. Take my hand, and open the door with me, and we will be whole again. You always wanted to see what lies beyond, right? Beyond the confines of the only reality you knew?

“Right,” Parker breathed. “I do.”

It was true. Not only despair had invited the Whispers and Shadow in.

Earnest curiosity drove her. Had always driven her.

Michael burned with the same intensity. He studied the profile of her face, his eyes glittering with adoration of someone he considered his equal, despite the disparity of their occult power. In a mystic sense, they had become husband and bride.

“Yes,” Michael whispered. Oblivious to their conversation. He sensed it beyond words, he caught the glint in her, that subtle change, shifting from resignation to determination.

Yes, whispered the Whispers. Yes.

“Yes,” Parker repeated. She locked eyes with the homunculus down the aisle. Her doppelganger stood still, and rigid, and she stared back at her, mirroring the same calm resolution. “Promise they will not be harmed, and I promise to open this door with you.”

I PROMISE.

The chapel shuddered again with a quake, causing all people standing to stumble, and more dust rained upon them. The desert wind whistled through all holes again, howling.

“No!” Wells shouted.

He whipped his gun up, held in both hands with the same discipline and drill that had allowed him to shoot Michael in the head. But he knew not what to target.

Wells stared down the iron sights at Parker. But he didn’t have it in him to pull the trigger.

Not after all they had been through on THE HIGHWAY.

THE SUBSTANCE, usurper of THE HIGHWAY, thrummed from beyond the triangle door. Dark matter oozed and dribbled from the triangle of lines drawn in drying blood. The walls wept with the intangible tar. The symbols pulsed with the same pull, the same gravity as the jade tome.

“Yes. It’s time, isn’t it?” Michael asked.

He walked around the altar, interposing himself between Parker and their unwitting crowd of witnesses. Michael walked as if he had never been shot, neither in his side nor his head. And he only stopped once he stood in Wells’ line of fire.

The artificial third eye on his forehead no longer wept blood, having healed entirely.

It is time.

“Parker,” Wells spoke up again, no longer shouting. Tremors shook his voice, but he spoke with sharp clarity. “Where do you see yourself when we close the lid on this case?”

His face flickered like the flames, fighting back the despair and finding it in him to muster a feeble smile.

The homunculus and Parker answered in unison, identical words, sharing the same cadence and pronunciation. A strange chorus.

“Kicking back with some damn fine coffee, cherry pie, and so many chocolate donuts that I might just grow sick of them.”

Parker’s lips curled into the same kind of feeble smile. Wells’ smile widened.

“No, absolutely fuck this, and fuck all of you,” Jericho growled. And like Karma before him, he charged at the altar to stop this ritual.

Michael’s cloud of screaming souls exploded outward again, blasting them back, this time yielding even greater force. Jericho learned the same hard lesson as Karma, the same hard way. Everybody else stumbled backwards several steps, thrashed by the hate-waves.

Jericho wound up on the ground, curled up into a fetal position, mere steps behind Karma, gripping his head as if it was about to explode. The teeming mass of screaming, angry souls were threatening to do exactly that. The paradox of their hatred towards Michael extended to his victims.

“Goodbye,” Parker said.

She swiveled on the altar and hopped off the opposite side. In the same fluid motion, she seized the Thaum of Thritain, scooped Michael’s jackknife up off the floor, and then approached the triangle painted onto on the wall.

As soon as she pressed her hand flat against the center of the surface, feeling the thrum of infinity hidden between all worlds, Wells clicked his tongue and shook his head.

He steadied his aim. He unloaded every bullet in his pistol into Michael. Barry and Aria soon joined in, discharging all three pistols in a blaze. The hail of bullets staggered the dark messiah. Every shot caused a spasm, made him dance, like a puppet being jerked around by countless strings, and spraying the world around him in his blood.

Perhaps he would have recovered even from that, with all his dark magick—

But Karma latched onto his ankle. Just as the others ran out of bullets, she clutched, yanked, and sent Michael hurtling sideways through the world, slamming his temple against the edge of the altar, only to bounce off that and crash into the ground where she crawled onto his back to straddle him.

Her hunting knife gleamed in the dark, raised high above her head.

The jackknife in Parker’s hand gleamed the same way.

Parker cut her own arm. Deep and wide. Letting blood flow onto the jade tome, and then drip from there to the ground. Spattering out in rhythmic, gushing bursts.

Sacrifice. Others readily sacrificed other human beings to power their magick, but Parker knew no other choice. Her honor demanded it.

Self-sacrifice.

A simple act, but an honest one. A powerful one. Its rule rippled backward and forward through the ocean of time, a cosmic law, eternal.

Yes. You are kind. And with you, I know, we will evolve together to be so much more.

So much more.

We are so much closer to being whole again. You complete me. Now… finish this.

Others shouted behind her, but their words all blurred into an unintelligible haze, a slurred soup of syllables which she was readily capable of shutting out.

Parker smiled as the warm fluid escaped her to the rhythm of her own heartbeat, painting the floor beneath her in a bright crimson.

The necromancer would ill have a chance to heal her like this, as Karma sat on his back, and plunged her knife into him, over and over again. Michael would only be able to heal himself.

Karma cackled and smiled as she stabbed Michael for the twentieth time. She could have been faster, even, but she relished it every time she sunk the blade into Michael’s back.

The others, meanwhile rushed to Parker’s side. She reached out to the triangle, ready to seal the ritual with the final act necessary: she and Shadow had become one, possessed the will to complete it, and the sacrifice was rendered.

Inches away from touching bloodied palm against stained sandstone, hands grabbed at her. Pulled her away.

Through the darkness, where her field of vision narrowed while the consciousness escaped her again, she saw their faces, huddled over her. Concerned, fearful, and confused.

And among them, the peaceful mirror of her own, that unsettling doppelganger; the homunculus stared back Agent Parker. A strange mirror. Blue eyes like crushed diamonds, fleeting and memorizing every inch of each other’s countenance. The short crop of red hair to frame the freckled pale face of one another.

Agent of Peace.

Damn it all. The Shadow and Parker thought in unison.

The Whispers caressed her mind. Maybe… you were just too kind.

Jericho’s face was the only one absent from those who rushed to Parker to save her life. Wells’ jacket flew off, and he tore up his shirt to improvise new bandages.

Jericho seized the Thaum of Thritain. He had wrestled it from Parker’s weakening grasp in the shuffle. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the tome in his hands, and the jade covers began to crack.

But the Shadow could no longer do anything to prevent any of this.

One vessel, Parker, was already too weak to finish the ritual; and the people present had dragged her away from the triangle.

The other vessel, Michael, was being dragged down the chapel’s aisle by Karma. She cackled again as she dragged her nemesis away from the group, all the way through the dark doors leading outside. Instead, she teleported through that portal, dragging her most hated foe with her, back into the Heart inside the ranch house; the center of the Way King’s machine, where she would continue to drag him to the next and final door.

To the door to the House of Change from which they had escaped, thanks to Klemens’ self-sacrifice.

Past where Klemens still sat on his brass throne alone, eyes closed, deeply asleep, and oblivious to the chaos of the world around him.

Karma continued dragging the bleeding, broken body of Michael. She stabbed him every now and then for good measure, preventing him from regaining enough strength to break free from her clutches. She spat out strings of expletives to spite both him and the screaming cloud of death he commanded, the angry spirits who hated the women who kept adding to their legion, until she booted Michael’s body through the door into its infinite corridor, her final act of disrespect towards the necromancer.

“Maybe you’ll come back out as something other than a flaming piece of shit,” she spat. She cackled by the end.

Michael raised a helpless hand, covered in his own blood, but Karma kicked the door shut between them, banishing him into the House of Change.

And Jericho, well, he indeed no longer needed to burn his life away with magick to destroy the Thaum.

We were too kind, Parker thought.

The Whispers answered her. No. To be whole again, we need kindness, too. You were the right choice all along. A shame we failed, so close to the end.

That kindness was mirrored in the mess of hasty hands, all scrambling to offer Parker first aid, to stop her intense bleeding, and prop her up.

Wells held her head against his chest and told her to stay awake, and stay with him, but everything sounded like she was underwater; a million miles away. They even looked like they were peering down on her through the shimmering veil of the ocean’s surface. Wells, Aria, and Barry all stared into her face, their expressions ranging from panic over dread to concern.

The face of the homunculus vanished from that group, appearing next to Jericho with the calm of a ghost. The flames of Michael’s flickered, and all shadows returned to normal.

Natural.

“Are you sure you want to destroy it? You nor anybody else will be able to use it again to open these doors,” the homunculus told Jericho.

He paused. Some part of him still hesitated from doing the deed.

Maybe Aria could still use the book and travel through time to prevent what was slowly killing her. Or maybe time travel would only invite greater disaster. They would find another way.

Jericho clicked his tongue.

“Nah, fuck all of this. This one’s for Klem,” he growled.

His nape bulged where the Way King’s clockwork spider had drilled into his flesh and latched onto his spine, and the inhuman strength it infused him with exploded outward with all his fury, an unnatural physical might once more unleashed.

The alien tome crumbled in his crushing grasp. The covers cracked apart into chunks. His fingers curled and ripped the ancient parchment to shreds, like a strongman tearing apart a phonebook, and then ripping it up into tiny pieces. He scattered the relic’s remains into the nearest of Michael’s fires, feeding the flames.

They flared up ever so gently, lapping at and then devouring the old parchment, all soon to be ashes joining the dust of the desert.

This is not the end. There is another way, said the Whispers.

But the Shadow was no more. Spread too thin, latched onto the dying Heart of the Highway, and the otherworld of the House of Change, its grasp on this world finally faded. The loci of power it had piggybacked on all waned, and fell apart, devoured by the sands of time. Gone was one vessel, crawling, bloodied, and helpless; lost in the House of Change. Asleep, another, a mind forever obliterated, liberated from his memories.

Only one vessel remained, though her grip on life slowly faded like the rest.

The oceans swallowed the Shadow. The Whispers remained.

Agent Parker’s consciousness faded to black.

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