Howl and I are alone on the Owl Bridge, the deimovore seeming to have left us for good this time. Idly, I wonder where Agatha is, but my frustration with our supposed “guide” is eclipsing any worry I feel for the cute magical girl. The other witch chuckles to herself and laces her hands behind her head, unbothered by my outburst. “You had it handled. But, hey, if you wanna blame someone, you should blame your boss. She gave the word.” “Ferromancer?” My anger transmutes into bewilderment. “Apologies,” my teacher says over comms, “but deceiving you was an unfortunate necessity given the situation. Howl and I had a private discussion after your first encounter with the deimovore. She explained its capabilities and that it would likely try to separate you from the group, and that it was ultimately one of the less dangerous entities our opponent could have sent after you. Between its inability to seriously injure you and Howl’s confidence that she could intervene if something went unexpectedly wrong, I deemed gathering data on our unknown assailant a higher priority. I needed to know why it chose the deimovore, and you.” “You let it do that to me?” I… I don’t know how to feel about that. Betrayed, certainly. Uncomfortable. There’s a pit in my stomach that wasn’t there a second ago. “I trusted you to handle it,” Ferromancer assures me. “You have a history of performing well in high stress situations.” Her praise is cold comfort. I can see the logic, but it still stings. I thought Ferromancer would prioritize my feelings higher than that, but why did I think that way? Just because she was nice to me? I barely know anything about her, even after working together for most of a month. I guess, when I put it like that, it hasn’t been much time at all. I grit my teeth. “Fine. Get me up to speed, then. Tell me about our opponent.” Howl steps away from the railing and motions for me to follow. Reluctantly, I do. “Like I said before,” she explains, “there are worse things in this world than deimovores. Someone interfered with our portal and riled up the local beasties, but they didn’t send any of the real threats; no moonspawn, no hunting horrors, no skybreakers. No one got dropped into a shoggoth pit or trapped inside a fracture zone. Our mystery meddler was pulling their punches.” How was that a pulled punch!? And why does “shoggoth” sound so familiar? Dıscover more novels at 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹✶𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲✶𝗻𝗲𝘁 “They were testing us,” Ferromancer elaborates. “Or at least, that’s our current hypothesis. Harlequin and Delilah were put in a purely physical situation they could overcome with effort, while Agatha was dropped near you and then exposed to a specific enemy she had the reference base to recognize. Your test was personal and psychological. Howl and myself were not tested, which raises a different set of concerns.” “Unless I was your test,” I point out. There’s a pause, and then Howl cackles. “Oh, they got you good. That’s great.” “I hadn’t considered that angle,” Ferromancer says, sounding annoyed, “and now I’m kicking myself for the blind spot. You’re probably right, which means I’ve been underestimating whatever it is we’re up against and played right into their hands. Goddamn it.” She sighs into her microphone. “I’ll have to update analytics. For now… how do you feel, Archon? You’re the one who would know best what you got out of that encounter, if anything, or what direction it was meant to push you.” I get a sliver of vindication from Ferromancer admitting she fucked up, but it’s not enough to part the unease in my chest. How do I feel about my talk with the deimovore? How much do I feel comfortable sharing? Unbidden, a bit of paranoia creeps into mind: what if that still isn’t Ferromancer? What if this is another layer of the deimovore’s game, and it’s just baiting me into vulnerability so it can hurt me again? My stride stutters, hesitation slowing me down and then bringing me to a sudden halt. Howl looks at me and raises an eyebrow. I chew on my words, awkward and nervous. “How do I know,” I ask carefully, “that the deimovore is really gone? How do I know I’m not still hearing what it wants me to hear?” To my surprise, Howl’s expression turns sympathetic. “The long fear is what’ll eat you alive,” she tells me gently. “The first time one of those things bit me, I couldn’t sleep for days. I was jumping at shadows, convinced that it had followed me home—or worse, that I had never left the World of Glass. I was a wreck.” There’s this prickling on the back of my neck, cold and terrible. My face keeps twitching, my eyes unable to stay still. Look behind me, check my corners, make sure that nightmare isn’t watching. It feels like a compulsion. “So, what did you do? How did you make it stop?” Howl shrugs. “I said ‘fuck it,’ got smashed with some drinking buddies in Dusseldorf, and had disappointing sex with an English twink who only thought he liked having his hair pulled. It was an okay night.” Her response is so left field I burst out laughing, which cuts through some of the fear I was feeling. “And that worked?” She grins. “Well enough. The next morning I was complaining about his head game over a cheap, flat, watery cup of coffee, and I thought to myself, ‘if this is a nightmare, it’s the saddest I’ve ever had.’ And that was that.” More of my tension bleeds out, swept away by Howl’s humor. “Yeah, alright. Thank you. And, uh… you didn’t happen to hear any of what the monster and I were talking about, did you?” Howl waves a hand dismissively. “Wasn’t paying attention, didn’t care. And whatever you talk about with Ferromancer, I also won’t care unless one of you says it’s tactically-relevant information. Your shit is your shit.” Weirdly, I trust her about that. I trust my teacher less, to my discomfort, but even the worst case for what Ferromancer heard is less of a concern given how much she seems to be part of Striga and the Morrigan’s inner circle. “Okay. Ferro: I’m on edge, and I still feel a little raw, but… I’ve got new resolve. I made a promise to myself while trying to beat the deimovore that I’m still committed to.” “Interesting,” Ferromancer says. “Thank you for the data, Archon. And… I apologize for my lack of foresight. I will avoid making that mistake again.” Howl and I fly through the city in amicable silence after that, headed to the downtown skyscraper where Ferromancer has made her base camp. Nothing attacks us this time, so we make it there in good time. Ferromancer constructed her war room on the twelfth floor of an office tower only a few blocks away from the entertainment district. The floor-to-ceiling windows give a good view of the Visage Spire, the tallest building in the city, and this close I can see more strange seams on the golden orb. The Spire glows beneath the night sky, lit up like a beacon. Looking at it gives me a weird feeling that I can’t describe. It’s like… like it’s tugging on me, pulling at something. That doesn’t bode well. This floor used to be an office space full of cubicles, but Ferro’s been busy tearing down separators and ripping open computers for spare parts. The detritus is piled up in a closet, and the new centerpiece of the room is a cluster of machinery I can’t even begin to understand, but which looks familiar from so much time spent in her workshop. A dozen monitor screens coming off the pillar of technology show readouts and camera feeds, the latter of which depict locations from all over Forks and the surrounding area. She’s been busy. Unless this was the product of a previous expedition, she built this remarkably fast. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. The briefcase she brought to the Ossuary is open nearby, and at last I get to learn what Ferromancer meant when she called it “something absurd,” because the inside of that briefcase is a wormhole. The Witch of Invention reaches into the wormhole and pulls out another gadget to wire into her technological abomination as she explains that it’s a “dimensional tunneling device” connected to her workshop. She didn’t bring any of her drones with her at the club because she didn’t need to; dozens of robotic servants scurry around the office space assisting their master and spread across alternate reality Forks gathering data. It’s an impressive setup, and I’m not the only one impressed; Agatha got here ahead of us, having been escorted by Howl before the latter came to fetch me, and she’s currently geeking out over Ferromancer’s tech. I join her, lured by discussion of magic despite my newfound wariness of my teacher. Harlequin and Delilah are the last to arrive. They come in bickering, which surprises no one. Apparently the two of them were dumped out in the Quillayute Airport to the west, where they had to fight through a small army of painflayers before tangling with a four-armed freak that Howl calls a “sin eater.” Ferro’s pretty sure they both tried to kill each other at least once during the melee. Ferromancer claps her hands to get everyone’s attention, the clank of metal echoing through the commandeered office room. “We’re all here and we’re burning moonlight, so let’s get straight to the point: our entry into the World of Glass was disrupted by enemy action, but Howl believes that disruption was significantly tamer than it could have been. Howl?” The huntress witch is sipping something from a canteen when Ferromancer calls her name, having stolen an office chair and put her feet up on an unoccupied desk. “Right,” she starts, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “Here’s the deal: someone capable of dropping us into danger could have dropped us into much, much worse danger than we got. It was a message, though I haven’t the faintest idea what it means beyond ‘I see you.’ Anyone else get a flash of golden eyes in the transition?” We all nod, even Delilah. The Syndicate witch crosses her arms, leaning against the window wall, and asks, “Who could have interfered like that with a portal made by the Morrigan? Hey, meat-for-brains,” she addresses Harlequin, “think your Lilith could have done it?” The Coterie witch smiles thinly from their perch atop the trash pile in the storage closet. “More likely than your peers, but still just shy of zero—and with far less motive than your menagerie of menace.” Not to mention, wrong eye color, though I guess that would be trivial to change with magic. “Radiance has golden eyes, but no one in Visage has that kind of power,” Agatha adds, seated properly with her hands in her lap. “I don’t think anyone in the region is that powerful, frankly, except maybe Lady Striga—but again, no motive, and that’s purely a guess out of respect.” If she wanted to interfere, she would have simply talked the Morrigan into it. “I concur,” Ferromancer says. “I suspect our golden-eyed culprit is from this side of the dimensional curtain.” Howl drums her fingers on the side of her leg. “I can’t disagree, which bothers me; to the beasts of this realm, golden eyes are a sign of royalty. I’ve never been able to get more detail than that, but every creature in this place that talks will tell you that same detail when pressed.” Agatha raises her hand, which gets a snort out of Delilah and a nod from Ferromancer. “Um, about those creatures, actually, there was something that stood out to me about the jitterhounds we fought: they’re basically the Hounds of Tindalos, aren’t they?” I’ve been staying quiet and watching everyone else, leaning back in a chair of my own, but at that I frown and ask, “Am I supposed to recognize that name?” “They’re Lovecraft monsters,” Howl says, and when Agatha opens her mouth to interject she rolls her eyes and clarifies, “Lovecraft-adjacent, whatever. Mythos shit.” I snap my fingers and sit up. “That’s where I recognized ‘shoggoth’ from! At the Mountains of Madness, it’s the only Lovecraft story M—one of my friends ever got me to read.” Agatha blanches. “How many Mythos monsters are in this dimension?” Delilah raises her voice. “Hold on, you’re saying some of the fuckers out there are from books? The hell? How does that even work?” Harlequin hops off their makeshift throne and skips over to the window, pressing their fingers against the glass and drawing circles. “Do the monsters inspire us,” Harlequin muses, “or do we inspire them?” Howl takes another sip from her canteen. “Had a few thoughts like that the first time I recognized one. Borrowed some reading material from a friend way more into the stuff—had to fend off his attempts to get me into some roleplaying game for months after that—but it was chatting with Ferromancer that made me realize it goes much further.” All eyes move to Ferromancer. The Witch of Invention adjusts her cloak, face hidden behind that metal mask, and says, “The name of my power is Daedalus.” I nearly choke. She’s just saying that out loud??? To everyone??? To Delilah??? “And mine’s Loki,” Howl adds with a smirk. “Though I take bets on how many people I can get to think it’s Odin instead.” Oh my god, they’re just saying it. But, if they’re being this open about something that’s usually a taboo secret, then they must have a reason. And, when I think about it… “My power is Prometheus,” I reveal. “That’s a pattern, right?” Harlequin purses their lips, frowns, but then shrugs and says, “Hydra.” Agatha, following the room, nervously shares, “My power is Ariadne.” Everyone turns to look at Delilah, who crosses her arms. “You must think I’m stupid. Why the hell would I share that information?” “Your power is Arachne,” Ferromancer says calmly. “It’d be my first guess from the spider mask alone, given what I know, but I’m speaking with Striga’s confidence.” Delilah swears and kicks over an unattended wastebin. I’m chewing on the list of names in my head, and as Delilah keeps complaining I start to vocalize my thoughts. “Arachne and Hydra are monsters, Ariadne is the ally of a hero, and everyone but Loki is Greek.” I’ve been reading a lot of Greek myths since first sitting down to research Prometheus. Speaking of which… “My power is named for someone who defied the gods and was punished for it, like Arachne and arguably Daedalus.” “Allies and enemies—including victims—of the gods, with a mythological basis varying by region,” Ferromancer summarizes. “Striga herself, as many over the years have guessed, is the bearer of Athena. As far as we can confirm, every magic user empowered from California to Canada is given a Greek source. Most of Europe gets Norse.” “But that’s so arbitrary!” Agatha blurts. “The mythological history of both continents is so much richer than that. That feels so—so artificial!” “Exactly,” Howl says with feeling. “It’s not a natural system; someone—or something—built it. That same entity carved up the resonant meaning of a handful of mythologies and parceled it out as superpowers. Just like they picked out a list of horror monsters to incarnate while ignoring the rest; I’ve never seen an Alien or Predator in this world, no slashers, but plenty of Lovecraft. This realm, it’s connected to human stories, but selectively.” Something clicks. “You think this place is where our powers come from.” Howl rises. “I have seen great wounds in the landscape from which something was ripped out. I have seen the hole in the world where Texas burned and the World of Glass broke. I have walked battlefields that birthed monsters and found the vandalized gravestones of long-forgotten gods. I don’t know what the Jovians really want, but I know that’s it somewhere here, in this world, and our world is just a means to affect it. They’re using old stories to make new stories, repackaging mythology as superpowers to do something to this reality.” “And do you have any idea what that something might be?” Delilah drawls, having recovered from her rage episode. “I have a clue,” Ferromancer answers. She gestures to her pillar of machinery and its endless readouts and camera feeds. “It was all speculative before, but now I have data. Based on Howl’s experience and my own surveillance equipment, we know that thoughts and actions in our world create a great deal of conceptual noise in the World of Glass—a kind of magical energy that represents or embodies ‘meaning,’ and which entities like the deimovore and the painflayers feed on. A city as large as Forks should be flooding this side of the dimensional barrier with that energy, but alternate Forks’ energy levels are barren. It’s all being absorbed.” “Absorbed by what?” Agatha asks. I already know the answer. Ferromancer points out the window at the massive, glowing tower. “By the Visage Spire.”