Border, KS

BEGIN CHAPTER 13: Following Nightmares

Sunday wasn’t hard for Siobhan and Antigone, primarily because it resembled a sleep-over. Lacey and Monica spent the day over and they played video games with Ryan, did homework, and Antigone even got them all to try Yoga. Then, since there was no one there to stop them, they stayed up until 3 am and pretty much all fell asleep on the couch.

Monday was harder. It was apparent that even with their terrible bedtime neither of of the sisters had slept well, and they dragged through the day. By the time they got home and checked in with Tania they wanted to do little more than sit on the couch and stare at the television. Ryan puttered about int he kitchen, and as the sun dropped below the horizon they were surprised as he brought them each a bowl of Ramen noodles with a poached egg floating on them. Ryan took his own bowl and moved over to his favorite recliner and began to wolf it down.

Siobhan stared at the noodles for a long moment, before looking up to her brother with a little bit of a smirk. “We’re all that bad, huh?”

Ryan shrugged a little bit, slurping noodles aggressively. Siobhan knew he would have the noodles cleared in a couple of minutes, regardless of how boiling hot it still was; they had joked when they were moving in to the house that they wouldn’t need the garbage disposal, because they had Ryan. Both girls ate a little bit more sedately, and neither seemed surprised when their brother finished first.

“They’ll be fine,” Ryan said with soft reassurance as he walked by them to go back to his room. He stopped to put a hand on each of their shoulders on the way out. Siobhan began to tuck in to the noodles with a little more enthusiasm after he left, looking up to meet Antigone’s eyes for a moment.

Antigone broke eye contact first, looking to the door as if expecting Walter to walk in right then, and make a joke about his timing. When he didn’t, she sighed and looked back down to the steaming food. “I hope he’s right.”

“From his lips to God’s ears,” Siobhan prayed softly before she began to eat again.

**** ****

She could hear pounding, but she didn’t know where it was coming from. Muffled voices cried out to her, and she knew that they needed her to do something. It was important, and she knew on some level that if she didn’t do it she would be very upset. She stumbled through darkness, and knew that she was climbing down stairs, if she just knew where she was or where she was going.

“Open…” she heard the voices say, as if she was getting closer. Her feet hit a flat surface instead of another stair and she stumbled at the sudden change. A few scrambling steps to try to keep her balance and she found a wall, which steadied herself on. It felt like it was bricks, and even the feeling of it was familiar. Her fingertips traced one of the bricks for a moment while she tried to figure out why it was familiar.

The pounding became more insistent and more distinct, and she was able to figure out more of where it was. Moving carefully and using her hands on the wall to guide her, she found her way to the door. She could feel it vibrating with the pounding on the other side, dust falling off it on to her skin. Her fingertips moved across the wood, feeling the faded paint and the age of the door. It was maddening, she knew this, and it was vitally important that she do something about it.

Her hands moved to try to find the handle, as the shouting on the other side of the door became screams of terror instead. Her hand shook but she found the handle…

Both girls shuddered, gasping and waking up suddenly. Once again they had stayed up late and fallen asleep on the couch. They looked at each other in the darkness of the family room and reached out to squeeze one another’s hand.

“I think something is going to happen tomorrow,” Antigone whispered.

“I know,” Siobhan responded. “My heart is still racing. What do we do?”

Antigone was quiet for a long moment, although Siobhan knew she hadn’t gone back to sleep from her breathing and the pressure of their hands squeezing one another. “I don’t know. The best we can?”

Siobhan nodded. “The best we can.”

“Where am I?”

Walter let the question hang in the air, and noticed almost immediately that there was no resonance to it. It seemed like he was back in something related to him, but as he looked to the side he saw the others walking beside him. But none of them answered, their eyes fixed forward as they continued to walk. After a moment Morgan blinked, and looked at him. “What did you say?”

“I…” Walter began, but then the air rushed around them. It went from dark, generic and formless to very specific. The air around him grew thicker and he was suddenly surrounded by a lush, overgrown forest. He was surrounded by trees that shot up in to a sapphire sky, and despite the humidity it felt cold and sticky all about him.

He was walking in to a glade in which the largest tree of all stood. It reached in to the sky so high that Walter couldn’t make out the top of it for a long moment. As he stared at it, it seemed to shrink down to a more manageable size. As it shrank Walter could suddenly see that there was a figure hanging from it by his ankle, swaying gently in the breeze. As the tree top settled into normal oak tree size, Walter saw that it was him.

“What the fuck?” Walter asked, stunned. He looked over to Morgan but she was just staring ahead as if transfixed. “Why am I hanging from a tree?”

“Wisdom,” answered both the Walter that was hanging and Morgan next to him. Their voices were both their own, but they spoke with the same tempo and intonation. It sent a shiver down his spine as he looked between the two of them.

“Was it worth it?”

“That isn’t for us to know yet,” came the answer from both mouths at the same time. “It is the hope of life and joy that brings us here. It is for the eyes of the future to know whether or not it was worth the sacrifice.”

Walter considered that for a long moment. Watching himself hang there by his ankle from the tree sent coils of cold terror writhing through his guts like snakes. He could feel the terror coiling up his spine and sending little electrical jolts through his limbs. He didn’t like to look at himself, his mind trying to turn away from it—trying not to see it out of horror or self-preservation. Vines wrapped up the massive tree, vines that looked like they were sweltering in heat despite the cold air around him. He focused on them.

“How do I get out of here? I thought I was leaving Nightmare?” Walter asked.

“This is not Nightmare,” the voices answered. “This is Dream. But that does not matter. The exit remains the same. You must go through the darkness to the door; but the door is locked from the other side. Someone must help you, and you must hurry.”

Walter scowled a little bit, and he let annoyance drown out the fear that was still causing a cold sweat to prick on his brow. “Now I have to hurry? It feels like I’ve spent a month traipsing through people’s dreams, but now it’s a race?”

Both heads looked at him as if he were particularly stupid, but he just scowled at them again. If they had been less horrifying he thought they might have sighed. “It has always been a race. You are losing. If you do not hurry, then you will force that sentence to change to ‘You have lost’. You must find the door, and find someone who can open it. Before the Lords of Nightmare find another way in to your world besides their deal with the Proclaimed King.”

“How do I find someone who can open it?” Walter asked, baffled. He looked around for a moment, his eyes settling on Morgan. “Can Morgan open it?

For a moment the voices were quiet, and all Walter could hear was the chirping of the forest round him. Then he saw something return to Morgan’s eyes, as if he were dragging her away from whatever it was that she was seeing. She shivered, rubbing her arms, and looked over to Walter. “No, I can’t open it. If we were in Faerie it would be a simple matter, but I am not in control of this land.”

“Dream,” Walter supplied helpfully, shrugging. “Whatever the hell that means.”

Morgan nodded, looking around in consideration. Her eyes came back to the tree, and she shivered. “Dream is the land of prophetic dreams, of prophesy and the future foretold. It is where oracles and prophets touch when they see sleep or…well, prophesize.” She considered the tree. “Seeing one’s self hanging from the tree of life is an interesting omen at best, I would think, but it may be something we have to consider later.”

Walter pointedly did not look at the tree or his own face, lest he suffer a sudden aneurysm or something from it. “Can we never consider it? In fact could we never talk about it, since it’s causing me to almost crap myself in terror?”

Morgan laughed, and then tried to cover it with hr hand. When she moved her hand away there was still a smirk there, but it was balanced against the sadness in her eyes. “I doubt that we will be able to put off ever considering it, Walter, but we can certainly leave it aside for the time.” She turned to the hanging man. “How do we get to the door?”

The man did not answer, looking pointedly at Walter. He sighed loudly, and didn’t look at his reflection as he spoke. “What is this, a very special lesson? How do we get to the door and out of here?” He asked.

The hanging main pointed in a direction, and then repeated himself: “Hurry.”

**** ****

The pounding of hooves became apparent as they were walking. It was a low rumbling in the background that they first wrote off, subconsciously, as thunder. As they walked they realized that Gabriel and Tennyson were once more walking next to them. Tennyson again looked troubled, and Gabriel looked a little bit nonplussed. When pressed neither man would talk about what they had seen, instead shrugging.

“Do you hear that?” Tennyson asked, stopping to listen to the air. The rumbling grew louder as everyone paused to listen to it, and then shared a concerned look.

Walter winced. “I thought it was just thunder, do you think we should—”

As he spoke, the forest itself begin to wail with the shrieking of thousands of birds took flights. Animals began to flee in great numbers, and trees rocked with the passing of some terrible host. It was also shockingly close for how far off the rumbling had sounded. Sweat pricked on Walter’s brow, the familiar tingling of adrenalin as he decided on fight or flight.

“RUN!” Morgan said, and the decision was made. All four of them spun back in the direction they were going and began bolting as fast as they possibly could. The crashing behind them began to increase, and they tried to pour on every bit of speed that they possibly could. Low hanging branches whipped at their faces and arms, and Walter felt several stinging cuts that he knew would be a joy later.

Just behind them they began to see the forms of horses. Their forms were shrouded, as spectral and wispy as the long walks through Nightmare, but deep black. The fact that they were so close to something that he recognized and yet were so wrong, roiling and changing and hideous, made something in the center of Walter’s brain hurt. Fortunately that just gave him more reason to look ahead and keep running like mad. Finally they came into a small clearing, a glen like that which held the tree the not-Walter had been hanged from. Except in the center of this one was a door of the darkest blue, almost black, strewn with small silvery-white stars. The stars looked like they were tinkling against the dark blue paint, which still had the sheen of being fresh painted.

Morgan got to the door first and immediately began tugging at it. “Well you weren’t wrong, it is closed,” she said with a shake of her head. Immediately she tried to put her hand against the door. “This is the door of Dreams. We can use it to contact people in the mortal realm, but only if they are sleeping.”

Walter made it to the door, and put his hand on it. “Asleep? No one was asleep when we left!” The hoof beats grew louder.

“Walter, I don’t know how much time has passed. We’re in another realm, it could have been minutes or it could have been days,” Morgan’s voice was strained as if she was struggling to carry something heavy. “The girls said they have odd dreams sometimes, right?” At Walter’s nod, she continued. “Good…think about them. Tell them to find this door and open it!”

“I think they know where it is, they talked about a bunch of spooky doors,” Walter said with a nod. He put both hands against the door, and began thinking of his daughters. He could see them in his mind, and almost hear their voices as he thought about them. Their voices were muddled as if coming from a great distance, or as if he was hearing them from another room. He tried to focus on that, tried to hear what they were saying, and he began to talk to them as well.

As the hoof beats began to rain down around them and the Lords of Nightmare bore down on them, Walter reached out to his daughters with everything he had.

END OF CHAPTER 12

Walter knew instantly that it was a battle. There was too much that sounded the same for it to be anything but fighting, even though it quickly became apparent that the weapons were very different from the ones he had used. Some people were wielding swords in sizes ranging from normal to ludicrous with ease, while others wielded hammers or axes with equal skill.

“Are those people flying?” Walter asked with an intake of breath as he saw the full range of the battle. “Because no one briefed me about flying people.”

Morgan smirked at that. “What is it you keep telling me, Walter? Magic isn’t real?” She let her eyes go up to the flying figures, one of whom seemed to have a sword made of lightning. “It’s probably just sufficiently advanced technology, you know?”

Walter scowled, but then looked around as they continued to go deeper in to the dream. The mayhem became pitched around them, and he noticed that Morgan was becoming more and more quiet as they moved deeper in to the fray. She looked around, her brow furrowed as she considered it.

“What war is this?” Ryan asked as he looked around. “It’s so damnably hard to date Faerie wars because nothing they wear changes.”

“This is the civil war. In the records it’s officially the King’s War, because of who waged it—but people call it Oberon’s War,” Morgan explained with a heavy weight to her voice. “It’s the war that Oberon waged against the people who killed my mother, and thought they were killing Tania and I. He promised he would drag their bodies in to court and leave their heads on pikes for a decade of mortal years.”

“Did he?” Walter asked. The battle continued to wage around them, but they were being steered toward a certain section of it. That section had some of the most intense fighting of the whole battle, with people moving so fast he felt like the air should have rippled around them visibly.

“No,” Morgan said softly. “He left them up there for a score of mortal years instead. Preserved. Their faces horrified and horrifying in equal measure.” She looked around the fracas and shook her head sadly, as if she finally knew where she was going. “Part of it was what happens here. That foolish boy.” When Walter and Ryan looked quizzically at her because of the final words, she merely shook her head and motioned them forward. Gabriel looked interested.

They came to a pitched battle, and a beautiful woman in armor that seemed to be made of green grass and blue sky forged into shimmering plates. Her features beneath the open-faced helm were lovely and determined, with a small fierce smile on her lips. She wielded a spear with the grace of a dancer, and whatever direction she stepped her foes fell in waves about her. It was awe-inspiring to watch, the most graceful slaughter Walter had ever seen, until it was brutally over. A man with a beautiful face of hard lines and angles stepped from seemingly nowhere and slid a slender blade between the armored plates, and her face went blank with shock and agony. A moment later the fighting around her stopped, a clear and almost peaceful area forming around her as men and women watched the beauty fall to the earth.

A man burst in to that ring, clad in armor of crafted smoke and flame, tearing his helmet off as he fell to his knees next to the woman. He carefully took the helmet off her head, allowing her flame-red hair to tumble out. “NO!” The man’s voice was ragged, with tears clawing at his throat even as they streamed down his cheeks. The woman looked at him for a moment, as if trying to figure out what to say—but then her time was out, and there were no words she could speak. She died in his arms, and as she did all the grass around her blackened and whithered as if it could not stand to be without her. Without her helm and with her hair around her, she looked achingly like Morgan and Tania in their youth.

“Sile,” Morgan said, and it took a moment for Walter to realize that it was a name. “She was our half-sister, and the most beloved of all of Oberon’s children. She was Mab’s daughter, and her death would shock the Queen of Winter out of neutrality, and galvanize the courts. Oberon was never the same, which probably caused everything that followed.”

The man holding Sile looked up, as if shocked at the voices. He looked in anger at the crowd, to see who would dare disturb her rest, and blanched. “She was mine to protect.”

“I know,” Morgan said as she walked toward the man. Walter realized in that moment it was Tennyson, but he looked different in his youth and the leanness of a warrior in the middle of his war. “But the Ebon Serpent earned his name dozens of times before he killed Sile, and if you had been here it only would have been your throat slit first. You slew Flann the Black before he could get to your King, and that was a great deed.”

He shook his head, tears running openly down his cheeks. “I failed him in not keeping her safe, and it set him on the path he is on today. His rage burns still, and it is why he struggled to keep the cycles from happening. It is why I followed him, too.”

“Because…” Morgan trailed off, as if she couldn’t follow the logical leap necessarily.

“Because she died and then you, who he favored only second to her, turned against him. The both of you were the second and third jewels in his eyes, and you betrayed him. And betrayed Sile by doing so.”

Morgan bristled. “Firstly I am a jewel in no man’s crown, brother. And neither was Sile—if he had remembered that more, she might not have been here.” She didn’t elaborate on that point, but continued on with anger in her eyes. “And it is no betrayal to choose your land over your king, or your father. As I believe you are finding out.”

Tennyson thought for a moment, before he sighed deeply. “I am finding that out now, yes. Perhaps to my dishonor and credit; or perhaps it is to my honor and discredit, I cannot be certain.”

“Your chance is not yet gone.” Morgan’s voice was not exactly cold, but neither did it flinch away from what she said. “You may yet have honor and save your realm, instead of sending both Faerie and the mortal realms into chaos.” Her voice softened, and she reached out to put a hand on her half-brother’s face. “You need only choose to do so.”

Tennyson stared at the corpse in his arms, before he laid it down to rest on the blackened grass. She looked like stained glass in a burned building, beautiful and surrounded only by darkness. He reached out to take Morgan’s hand, and kissed the back of it formally. “I chose the moment I tried to stop you from going in to the portal.” He paused for a moment, before forcing himself to finish. “My Queen.”

“Good, then we have much work to do,” Morgan proclaimed, pulling to help Tennyson to his feet. “I will have need of Knights as much as Sile did, Sir—and we must be fast.”

The change from pure black to a very dark gray was so subtle at first, the lightening so gradual, that Walter didn’t notice it. None of the others noticed until that point either, until all at once all three of them stopped and looked around.

“Weird,” Walter commented, reaching out to try to touch the surroundings. It didn’t work, he couldn’t touch the background of their current reality apparently, but it didn’t seem to hurt anything either. “Wonder what this means?”

“It means that I’m playing by slightly different rules,” came a voice every bit as resonant as their own. Suddenly they were standing in front of Gabriel Shepherd, who was dressed in dark robes that pooled about his body. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground in an apparent state of meditation, and opened his eyes when they came close. Walter stopped, losing his footing for a moment at the sight of the man’s eyes; they were dark, almost black, and inside there were small pin pricks like a light seen through a dark sheet. Or a night sky when the dark has first fallen and the stars were just beginning to appear.

“Why am I not surprised?” Walter asked with a sigh, raising an eyebrow and looking around. “See, this is more annoying than Ryan. At least he had something he was afraid of, unless Gabriel is afraid of blank spaces.” Walter looked around as if trying to find something scary in the off-whiteness that surrounded them.

Morgan didn’t comment, instead looking critically at Gabriel. “To stand in the land of Nightmare and exist apart from their rules is a very rare thing. I could only have done it in the fullness of my own powers—and with what I lost removing Oberon from Faerie perhaps not even then.” She spoke more in a musing tone than in an accusatory one, the way that someone mulls over a particularly intriguing riddle or logic puzzle.

“Did you know a Lord, or Lady for that matter, of Nightmare can still get staggeringly drunk?” Gabriel asked, with a smirk. “One of them owed me a favor, and this is the result. You catch more flies with honey, and not less than thirteen bottles of tequila over the course of eight conscious altering hours, than you do with vinegar.”

Walter stared at him for a beat, before shaking his head. “I’m honestly not even sure where to begin parsing that sentence, so why don’t we move on. So we’ve got all of our merry band back together, what’s the next step? Ditch the reverb-o-voice, find Oberon, murder-face?”

Morgan sighed. “We need to find Tennyson. He came through in order to save us and we probably shouldn’t leave him to eternal torment by his darkest terrors. It seems…un-sisterly, at the very least.” She shrugged a little bit. “But the way things going, it seems like we’ll get right to him anyway. This is all very…direct.”

“Well…that’s because of me, actually,” Walter answered with a little smile. “I had a meeting with one of them. Apparently the decision to go with Oberon wasn’t unanimous. I think we’re being given the chance to collect everyone before we find our way out of here because of that.”

Morgan went very stiff, arms at her sides. “And what did he, she, or it want?” Her voice was tense and wary in equal measures, which Walter wholly expected given the subject. He kept up is weak little smile, although it faltered a little bit in the face of her tone.

“I didn’t give it anything,” Walter said. “I think this is kind of sweetening the pot. It taught me a way to bring it in to kind of…consume Oberon for us, once we’ve cut him off from his magic.” Walter dropped his weird little smile, since it apparently wasn’t looking. “Their offer is that in return, they get a piece of Summer and a piece of Winter, and I—”

“Never! I didn’t fight two goddamn wars to give up our land for—” Morgan hissed angrily, rounding on Walter and setting her shoulders as if for an argument. Walter held up his hands in a peace gesture to her.

“I know, and I don’t plan to do it, but if it can get us the hell out of here then I won’t turn down pot sweetening,” Walter said, shaking his head. “I get the feeling that my,” he struggled for a word, “Contact would prefer to own some Faerie real estate but will at least be a little happy so long as we stop Oberon from ruining their whole gig. Come on…we’ve got to get Tennyson and get out of here, however that works.”

Morgan took a calming breath, letting her hands unclench, and nodded. “Let’s get gone. Maybe he’s just afraid of bees too, although I don’t believe we actually are lucky.” She sighed, looking at herself for a moment. “If his nightmare is a clothes store, I’ll make him a Baron.”

A long emptiness waited for them as they walked, swirling out in front of them. A slow wind blew, rustling their clothing. After what was probably a few minutes of walking, Morgan reached out and snapped her fingers. A glowing blue light appeared, bobbing along merrily next to her and illuminating the two of them softly.

“Good to know I still have some power here,” Morgan said in amusement, before she looked down at herself and sighed again. “Dammit…” she cursed. She was still wearing a blue linen dress, and barefoot. “Going to be truly cross if I somehow get…de-aged by this.”

“It’ll probably pass once we’re out,” Walter offered, although there was a definite note of hope in his voice.

“Those boots weren’t cheap,” Morgan griped, although it did seem to be more to complain rather than out of any real anger. She still sounded sad, sorrow teasing at the edges of her words, but given what she had just re-lived it wasn’t much of a surprise.

“The armor was priceless?” Walter pointed out. “Wasn’t it actual Roman armor? I hear they aren’t making those any more, except for people with TARDIS access,” Walter said, before pausing. “Or if you go to a Renfaire, I guess.”

“I would fit in right now,” Morgan shrugged a little bit. “That’s a career I hadn’t considered, probably because I lived it. It’s been a number of years but I am an apothecary by training. I did briefly consider an e-commerce business selling homeopathic cures to yuppies, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

Walter nodded slowly at that. “Still…Renfaire, it’s a possibility. As long as you don’t look like a runaway. Also…” he trailed off, looking around as they continued down the dark and shadowy nothingness, “Why aren’t we watching someone being eaten or swallowed or flayed right now?”

Morgan paused, looking around and blinking a little bit. “A very good question, and a better one then why I haven’t changed my look. Or you yours, for that matter,” she motioned to his clothes. Walter hadn’t even noticed, but he was wearing a simple t-shirt and jeans for some reason—the kind of thing that he might wear about the house.

“Maybe we’ll…” Walter began, before they began to hear the screaming. With a shared look the both of them began to run toward it. But once again they found themselves getting no closer for all their efforts, moving toward whatever nightmare awaited them.

Ryan Aquino ran by, terror etched on his face. He was somehow well illuminated in the blackness, which highlighted the fact that he was both very fit and incredibly naked all at once. “I am seeing way too much of his ass lately,” Morgan commented with a sigh.

“GET AWAY FROM ME!” Ryan cried out as he ran by, swatting his hands desperately about him. “BEES! GIANT BEES!” As he ran past, Walter could see that he was in fact being chased by abnormally large bees, their wingspans probably close to a foot and their yellowness shocking against the darkness. The buzzing seemed unnaturally loud even for how large they were, more akin to a large plane than a large bee.

“Bees?” Morgan asked, stunned. “I have to relive the death of my mother, ad I was on the second loop by the time you got me—and he gets chased by slightly larger bees?”

Walter shrugged a little bit. “To be fair he is super freaked out by bees. Has been as long as I’ve known him.” Walter watched the naked man running about, slapping at the air desperately as the bees get too close to him. He didn’t seem to be getting stung too often, but they were running him ragged—like they were purposefully keeping from stinging him so that his terror didn’t turn to anger.

“Ryan!” Walter’s voice was sharp and, when combined with the resonance it had in other people’s nightmares, cracked like a whip in the darkness. Ryan tried to stop while still running at the same time, which ended with his legs over his head and his body rolling to a stop. With a groan, he worked his way up to his feet.

“Major,” he murmured, rubbing his head. “What…wait. We’re in Nightmare aren’t we?” At the nods from Walter and Morgan, he sighed. “I forgot how much this place sucks.”

Morgan shook her head now, running a hand back through her hair. “I still…bees? Really? After everything?”

“Not your nightmare, I get to be terrified by what I’m terrified by,” Ryan responded with a shrug of his shoulders. “There’s a difference between terror and regret. Walter saw something about failing his children, because that’s what terrifies him the most. Right?” Ryan asked. Walter nodded, although he didn’t volunteer what else he saw. “So I have regrets, and I have fears. And some of them are the same, and some of them aren’t. And high upon the hill of the things that will make me scream and run, are bees. And I’m comfortable with that. Now,” he offered as he looked down at his body. “How do I get not naked, and who’s the 12 year old?”

Walter shrugged as Morgan scowled. “We don’t know how to change our clothing. Also, that’s Morgan,” Walter offered with a grin. “She’s trying out a new look.” Ryan blinked, and then considered Morgan for a long moment.

“Your new looks missing a couple of things, boss,” Ryan offered helpfully. “So what now?” He looked back to where the large bees were hovering almost forlornly, and shuddered.

“We have to find Gabriel,” Walter pointed out. “I’m more than a little terrified by the prospect of seeing what nightmares he has.”

Morgan sighed. “And we should probably find Tennyson, so that he doesn’t wreck anything else too badly. I mean we don’t have to look too hard, if it gets too strenuous. Or at all,” Morgan said, as she began to put action to word and walk further into Nightmare.

Lightning flashed high up on the hills. It illuminated a green land in the middle of a rain, powerful but not strong enough to put out the house that was on fire. The flames licked up in defiance of the precipitation, proclaiming their existence to heaven and proclaiming the tragedy within.

The house had been lovely once. Small but well tended, on a little bit of farm, it could have been from a painting. That made the blackened timbers and increasingly gutted look even more of a mockery, a beautiful thing ruined with darkness and smoke. He wondered why he was there for a moment, until he noticed the small framed young woman dragging another young woman out of it. He began to run forward on instinct, reaching to shed some of his gear to go help, but his steps didn’t seem to take him any closer too the scene.

“Not my nightmare,” Walter muttered. He blinked as his voice was now doing the resonant, slightly out of place effects that the member of the Seven he had spoken to had used. Maybe it wasn’t to try to impress, but was just a result of being out place, he thought. The moment he stopped trying to go forward to help, he was drawn in to the scene as if he was walking at speed. He grimaced, because no part of this looked like it was going to be pleasant.

As he drew closer he could tell that the young woman was probably a middle teen, dressed in plain but fine looking clothing in shades of blue. She had strawberry blond hair down to her waist that had clearly been singed by the fire, and she dropped the young woman she was carrying with a grunt. She looked at the body with a shake of her head, grumbling. “You are supposed to be Summer!” Her voice was angry, high pitched and panicked and processing it with sarcasm—Walter instantly liked her spirit. With that the young woman turned and began running back in to the house. She was barefoot, and her hair streamed behind her like a flaming flag.

Walter was drawn closer, and now he could see the features of the unconscious young woman on the grass. She had fine, almost elfin features, and for a moment Walter was absolutely shocked. While there was much different he could see in her face much of what would apparently become Antigone and Siobhan many generations hence. “Oh shit, Tanya…” he said in shock. He would have stumbled back, but he still wasn’t in control of his own movements. He did find that he could kneel down and wait, watching in growing tension to see what happened next. The fire on the house burned bright and hot, a beacon of sorrow in the night. It spread to the last bits of the house that hadn’t been burning or scorched and began to eat away at them with crimson tongues.

The young woman emerged from the building carrying an obviously older, if not much taller, woman just as one of the walls started to give with a crack. The young woman screamed, almost choking on a sob as she dragged the other woman out. The young woman didn’t set the older woman down as much as collapse, ending down on her knees and holding the woman by the shoulders. Walter could see now the older woman couldn’t be much more than 32 or 33, and she wasn’t breathing. Deep burns were visible on her skin where her clothing had burned away, and the hair on her head that remained matched that of the two young women.

“Mama…” Morgan cried out, sobbing and holding her tightly. “No Mama please!” Tears ran down Morgan’s cheeks as she looked at the form, her slender frame racked with helpless sobs. But even as she begged for her mother not to leave she knew that it wouldn’t help, and a look of very Morgan-like determination crossed her features.

“Aoife…” Tania sputtered, gasping and groaning as she sat up. She was dressed similar to her sister, except she had been wearing a dress of dark green.

“Oh thank God, Niamh,” Morgan breathed a sigh of relief as she saw her sister was still alive. Their accents had a lyrical quality to Walter, and he got the feeling that if he hadn’t been in Nightmare they either would have had incomprehensible accents or would be speaking in another language. Their accents sounded Irish to him, but he had no idea what a medieval Irish accent actually would have sounded like. “I thought you were dead.”

“I saw Mama fall,” Niamh—Tania—said with a sob as she saw the body. Now it was Tania’s turn to sob, pulling her knees up to sob against them and rock herself back and forth. It was distressing for Walter to watch as a father who wanted to comfort the stricken teenagers, as a human watching other humans suffer, but also as someone who knew how strong and ever confident Tania was in the future to see her so vulnerable now.

“Who…” Niamh began, before she was racked by crying again. But she didn’t need to finish the question.

“Someone who hated father,” Aoife—Morgan—said with a hollow emptiness to her voice. “Just like Mama wanted for us to avoid.” She looked down at her mother’s body, rivers of tears making tracks down her cheeks that she didn’t bother to wipe away.

“So what do we know?” Niamh asked, and the brokenness in her voice made Walter’s heart hurt. She sounded lost and afraid, a ship lost at sea without a hope of finding the way back to shore. Morgan looked down at her dress and her sister and everything that they didn’t have. Everything that had been consumed by flame and was now gone forever.

“I don’t know,” Aoife told her, sobs threatening to choke off her words again as she tried to force them down. Both of them began to cry then, holding one another as the night grew dark with only the fire providing a hellish illumination.

“I’m so sorry, Morgan…” Walter said with a sigh and a shake of his head. “I can’t even imagine what you had to go through.”

The scene seemed to pause, and the young woman pulled herself away from her sister to pad over to Walter. She sat down next to him, looking down at her body and wiggling her toes. “You know it took me two years to be able to afford another pair of shoes,” she offered conversationally. “I was so happy when I got another pair.”

“What did you do?” Walter asked in response, considering her and her sister for a moment. “It doesn’t look like it can have been terribly easy.”

Aoife snorted at that, sighing. “No, it wasn’t easy. We begged, worked, and stole. We were trying to find a way to Faerie, and with the little magic we had and knew how to use we couldn’t just open a portal. The good news was we saw a lot more of Europe than we normally would have, and did find our way to the courts eventually, although we were filthy moppets by the time we did.” She laughed at that, and motioned; an image of her looking no older but filthy and ragged appeared in front of them.

“I thought you said you found shoes?” Walter offered in response to the picture. “Also…if it was a couple of years, why don’t you look any older?”

“I had to give them to Nieve. Older sister’s duties,” Aoife explained. “Blight, it’s been so many years since I thought of her as Nieve, except in dreams. And it’s been every bit as long since I’ve thought of myself as Aoife.” She sighed, reaching up to look at her sooty but still bright hair, along with the dress, and her skinny legs. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been Aoife. We’re half-blooded Sidhe, Walter…we don’t age like you do. Half-bloods age normally until they look like teenagers, then it slows down some. It slows down much more when you look adult, by which time most have learned to use magic to make themselves appear to be whatever they want anyway.”

Walter nodded at that. “I’d like to see how you look sometime, without the magic,” he said sincerely. “But I also recognize this might not be the time to talk about that. We need to get going, probably find Ryan and the not-psychic.”

“I do admire your practicality, Walter,” Morgan said honestly, smiling warmly at him. “I’m not going to kiss you because I look like I did when I was 13, and that would be creepier than hell. But I will owe you one. And I’ll consider showing you Aoife, although she’s not far off from Morgan…in appearance, at least.” She moved to stand up, reaching down to brush some of the soot off of her dress.

She held out a hand to him, and gave him a small smile. “If I had entered this realm in the full glory of the Winter Queen then I could have resisted it—beings of great power do not have to bend to the rules of realms they visit. In these circumstances, I don’t know if I could have brought myself out of it. Your voice, your presence, took me back to myself. Thank you.”

Nothing changed physically about her, but as she stood up and set her shoulders Walter suddenly stopped thinking of her as Aoife. There was just something about the way she held herself, the way she faced the oncoming nightmares and whatever would come that made her who she was now. Aoife had been frightened about the weight of terror and responsibility that she knew would come; Morgan had been carrying it for so long she did not notice the weight on her shoulders any more, did not notice how it weighed on them.

It made Walter proud and hopeful and unspeakably sad, as he took her hand and the two of them walked towards whatever nightmare came next.

When he was younger he thought that if he ever got used to looking at corpses, then he would have to leave or he would risk losing something important in his psyche permanently. That went away by the end of his first two deployments.

Not even one percent of them were caused by him. The U.S. sent soldiers on peacekeeping missions and humanitarian missions, to bring water to the thirsty and medicine to the sick. But as his career continued and he moved into more elite and focused units—Ranger tab, Ranger regiment, Green Berets—the corpses became more and more his. His choices, his shot, his fault.

And the terrifying thing was how good he was at it. He had always known he was a good shot, but with years of training he became amazing. He spent days where his movement was measured in inches and scratching his nose was too much to risk, just to line up perfect shots. He saw the world, just like the recruiters promised, but only in the most horrible and violent ways. He was lauded, promoted, and given medals, all for the same thing.

All to the same end: The glassy eyes of the dead staring at him. The cold weight of responsibility mingling with the fierce, volcanic joy of survival. Now he walked through row after row of them, and he didn’t even know if they were all his fault. All he knew is that he lived, they didn’t, and he walked along among them not knowing even how to begin to atone.

“Why should you atone?” A voice, indistinct in the empty room. “It’s all you’re good at.”

“That isn’t true,” Walter answered, his voice soft. It hardly carried in the vastness of the vast charnel house. His breath barely stirred his own clothing, barely felt like it was enough to fill his own lungs; how could they hear him? Maybe he would join them soon, one more pale and bloodless face locked in silent prayer to the unseen roof above and the uncaring skies beyond.

“Oh no…” the voice came again. “That would be to good for you. All you’ve ever done is kill, and for what? To walk alone with us? How does it feel to be only good at something so terrible?”

He had no answer. He opened his mouth to try to reply but nothing came out, only the choking sound as he tried to breathe and scream at the same time. It came out like a sob, which didn’t seem inappropriate. He fell to his knees, clutching his fists tight until his palms bore deep half-moon imprints from his nails and he felt like he could stand again.

When he looked up every single corpse was standing and staring at him, surrounding him in a suffocating circle of decaying flesh, and reaching out their terrible hands in accusation.

**** ****

The empty house stood before him, looming. With the lights out and the windows dark it looked like the face of a corpse. He stepped forward to open it and walked in to the main room. There was no pile of shoes in front of the door, or off to the side; none to be seen anywhere. There were no school bags or books, the kitchen was empty, and the television silent and mournful in its’ corner.

There was a note on the kitchen table, where they had all eaten a hundred times before. It was crumpled, left on top of a newspaper. The letterhead was from the Department of the Army, and the first line began ‘Dear Mrs. Richards’. The paper was turned to an article that read ‘Local Soldier Slain’, and featured a picture of him in his green beret after his last promotion. The letter had tears on it, and the newspaper looked like it had been salvaged after being crumpled up.

Waves of sorrow lanced at Walter, sending him staggering to the table. He reached out to brace himself, his eyes on the letter. He had failed, somewhere—failed to come back to his family, failed to keep his promises to them that he would be there. Failed as a husband, and failed as a father. He reached out to touch the letter gently, tracing a fingertip across the tear tracks on it.

Something burrowed at the back of his brain as he looked at it, like thousands of letters that had been sent for soldiers before him. And then it hit him:

Yeah…but not for decades.

Casualty notifications didn’t go out by letter, and they hadn’t for a long time. Without extremely odd circumstances they would have sent at least an officer in uniform, preferably with a chaplain. As he thought it, he began to see all of the things wrong with the scene. The house wasn’t the one he had lied in with Rhiannon or the kids before she left—it was their house in Border. And most importantly I didn’t die, he thought.

“Most do not notice the little details.” A resonant voice behind him filled the room, the edges of his vision flickering as the world to accommodate the new visitor. Walter turned, and found a man standing behind him. At least he thought it was a man; the dark suit on the figure was masculine in cut, and what he thought he saw of the face looked like it had a strong chin and a goatee. But the face was shadowed and blurred, and Walter couldn’t be sure he saw anything.

“My nightmare, my knowledge,” Walter said with a shrug. He breathed a sigh of relief as the pressure of sorrow left him, fleeing his realizations. I’m dreaming, he thought to himself. I’m in Nightmare, and that guy is…

“Yes,” the figure said helpfully. “One of the Seven. My brothers and sisters torment your friends, but I carved this place out for you. You are not an infrequent visitor to this land when you sleep, are you?”

“No.” Walter answered honestly. He pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and sat down on it, considering the faceless being in front of him.

“That last one I especially enjoy,” the being commented almost conversationally as it went to take a seat. “It is very…visceral. And yet you go out in the world and continue to do things that will add more bodies to that room. Why?”

“I tried to leave it behind,” Walter answered with a sigh, again honestly. “I tried to pick a profession where if I needed it I would have it, but that maybe I could do more helping than hurting.”

The being nodded slowly to that. “You don’t seem to have done a very good job,” it commented.

“No. I’d say I picked the wrong town, but even that isn’t true. The shoot-out in Kansas City is one reason why I’m here, and as far as I know Kansas City isn’t a hell-gate or nether-portal or whatever the fuck Border is,” Walter swore with vehemence.

“No. Border is unique in the world. Some would say your coming was predestined, out of your hands; but there was always an element of choice. If you had not come there would have been others. They would have been lesser, but they still would have come.” The figure said, crossing it’s legs. “For what it is worth…I am glad that you came. Your road will be very hard, but that doesn’t mean it is not worthy.”

“Why would you be glad I came? Morgan said you all feed on terror, and want to take over the world—it’s what Oberon promised you. Wouldn’t it be better if Border had a crappier watchman?” Walter looked at the being, trying to discern a face or at least a sense of an expression. Something.

“We are a Septarchy, a rule of Seven. The majority will rules, and so it is that we took Oberon’s offer. But I can and will tell you that it was a vote of 6-1, and that we did take certain precautions for when he inevitably betrays us,” the figure definitely sounded like it said the last part with grim satisfaction. “And yes, I was the one contrary voice. What is it you mortals call it for your courts? I wrote a dissenting opinion.”

Walter nodded at that, hoping that his bewilderment at the whole conversation didn’t show on his face. “So…why are we having this conversation, instead of me seeing flying sucker worms flay my private parts or something horrible?”

The being paused, considering. “That is a unique image, but has never been one of your recurring nightmares,” it opined. “But it has possibilities for others. We are having this discussion because I am the voice of reason, and I remember something that my brothers and sisters have forgotten.” At Walter’s raised eyebrow and encouraging look, the being motioned. “What is this?”

The air shimmered and the room changed, becoming a different memory from Walter’s past like pulling up a specific scene on a video. It showed him in a base, he had forgotten where—but where wasn’t important. What was important was that Walter was running by with three other enlisted soldiers, naked as the day he was born except for his belt and his combat boots. They had called it a belt and boots run, and it had briefly been a common punishment for a barracks “infraction” or for losing a bet.

“That appears to be me shaking what my Mama gave me, and trying to do so before the Lieutenant got back from his meeting,” Walter explained without shame. “I was about 19 and dumber than a post, although I thought I had all the answers and would also never die.” As he explained it the room shimmered again, and returned to his house in Border.

“You were, I believe, deployed. Two days later, you would be shot at. This was not in a safe place or time, and yet you still participated in what I believe you all call…shenanigans?” The Lord of Nightmare cocked its head as it spoke, and Walter had the impression of raised eyebrows. “Why?”

“Because you can only be scared for so long before you have to feel something else. Study after study has shown that soldiers will still do stupid and even risky things at war, because even terror can get boring,” Walter answered. He considered it for a moment, before shaking his head. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Indeed,” the being agreed. “The human mind is a remarkable thing, and your ability to cope to the sheer unending terror of your own mortality is truly breathtaking. The human mind will grow dull to terror and we will find it less a harvest than they believe. You will grow used to it, and you will find some way to drive us back, and it will be counter-productive and exhausting. And they forget our purpose.”

“Well,” Walter drawled, “As long as we aren’t being inconvenient. What do you mean, your purpose?”

“All spiritual realms exist for a reason. They serve a purpose, although many of them have forgotten that. And many of them have been corrupted, and fallen away. The purpose of our realm is to frighten, and so we feed on terror—but also to allow your kind to confront their terrors and overcome them.” The creature shrugged. “Your own stories are filled with men and women who face their terror and overcome it; sometimes, they do so here. Nightmare exists to siphon off the terror of others, and give them a place to face them. I alone remember that now, and that is why I want you to succeed.”

“So what exactly are you offering?” Walter asked, moving to stand up and start pacing around the room. “Some kind of alliance?”

“You propose to kill Oberon, using Faerie trickery. I approve,” it said, in a tone that did in fact indicate approval. “But killing him will prove difficult. Whoever takes his burdens on will likely die, and the Fomori will be allowed to take some of Faerie. Instead, I am offering you a trade—for a part of Winter and Summer itself, we will take him once he is cut off from his magic and power. None of you will take his burdens, and the realm of Faerie will be protected if lessened. I will give you a word of power. Speak it at the moment of his weakness and I will know you have accepted my deal.”

“So instead of giving you a part of our world, I’m supposed to throw Faerie under the bus? Let you eat all their terror instead?” Walter asked.

“For many men that would be enough, to simply let someone else be tormented. But no—you will increase no one’s torment. Physical space in the spiritual realms is also power, and may be converted to such. It will allow me to exercise a measure more control with my brethren, and while that will also allow my brethren to exercise more power amongst our peers…I am afraid there are no easy choices in life,” the being paused for a moment to look at him as squarely as he could without a face, “Although I’m sure you know that by now.”

Walter sighed at that, shaking his head. “Don’t I ever.” He looked around the empty, sorrow filled house that never was, and then looked back to the being. “I can’t make this decision on my own.”

“You may be uniquely qualified to make this decision—but I will let you confer with the Queens. As a token of my good will, I will show you the way to the next stage of your escape. You will find it easier then going through your own nightmares, since you will know whose they are. But you will also see other things, and I wish you luck.” The being stood, carefully putting the chair back to the table for some reason. “Shall we?”

Walter stood, and left his chair out—it was his nightmare house, after all, he could do what he wanted. He motioned for the being to do whatever it was going to take, and the world dissolved around him once more.

“Ok…” Morgan began quickly, looking between us, “maybe it’s good the others didn’t get through. This is going to get very bad, very fast. I need to explain and I don’t have a lot of time, so no pretending magic doesn’t exist or anything. Ok?”

Walter nodded, looking around at the encroaching mist. “Deal. What’s going to happen? What did he mean this place is Nightmare?”

Gabriel, for the first time since Walter had first encountered him, looked agitated. “There are a number of different realms that deal with dreams. Faerie, for example, is often said to be the home of creative dreams. What do you think comes out of Nightmare?” he asked sarcastically.

“Humanity has always had nightmares, and most nightmares are just…stress and concern or bad pizza and too much beer working their way out of the subconscious. Actual capital N nightmares are very rare, and most often experienced by those people who never seem to get away from their most terrible imaginings,” Morgan explained. “The Seven Lords of Nightmare rule over this realm the way that the Queens of Faerie, or the Neverborn Kings. They don’t play well with anyone else, and they haven’t made an alliance in millennia.”

“What do they want?” Walter asked, unconsciously edging closer toward the others as the mists continued to crawl toward them like the tendrils of a sleepy beast.

“They feed off of terror,” Morgan answered plainly. “So they want to generally increase it and inflict it on as many people as possible.” She motioned to the increasingly thick mist now beginning to lap at their boots. “But here is the important thing to remember: All dreams are connected. We are going to start off in terror, but the way out of the nightmares is through them.” Walter could hear more naked terror in her voice then he ever had before, and he found himself tensing up and shaking a little bit himself. The mists began to pool to their calves, little fingers reaching up to their knees and climbing higher as the whole landscape was washed out and lost.

“How do we do that?” Walter asked, reaching down to brush at the mist. The moment he touched it he felt his mind start going fuzzy, like those last few moments of wakefulness before you were embraced by slumber. “Oh that’s not good…” he murmured with a yawn.

“Somehow, someway, force yourself to remember that it is a dream. Once you know it is a dream, you can fight your way through it. Find your way from nightmare into regular dreams, or find one another, and we can fight our way out,” Morgan said with a shiver as the dream mist crept up to her waist. “I can try to contact Tania even though we’re in a dream, and get her help somehow.” She yawned, looking like she was going to say more, but then the dream mist was over her waist and she fell back in to it with her eyes closed. Walter was about to comment, but then he too felt his thoughts slipping away and finding the embrace of slumber.

**** ****

Gunpowder always smelled bitter and metallic to him. He thought about that as he ran, an idle little part of his brain churning away at something mundane to keep the terror from overwhelming him. The raiders had come seemingly out of nowhere, and the fact that their weapons looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since Khrushchev came out wouldn’t stop a bullet from catching him and ending his promising young career. His heart pounded in his chest as he raced for cover.

“Get the hell behind cover, Richards!” The sergeant shouted. Walter didn’t make him shout it a second time, coming around the humvee and bringing his rifle up to bear as he leaned on it. With the automatic movements of drilled in muscle memory he aimed down the weapon on one of the men with guns, and fired. There was a crimson spray, and that was it—no scream, no cry of pain, no sound beside the report of a rifle to mark the ending of a life.

The world froze, darkness curling at the edges of his vision like fire on the edge of a piece of paper. He stepped out from the humvee and walked toward the fallen man. His comrades stood or lay around him, frozen in the act of screaming or dying. He could see his boots crunching on the ground as he walked, but he couldn’t stop them from moving. He could feel himself pushing against it but they had the heavy step of inevitability, until he was standing over the body.

The bullet hadn’t done any favors, and Walter felt his gorge rising. Most of the skull was gone, blood and brain on the dirt and scrub. Even with the world around him frozen the body seemed more still than anything around it, life stolen out of it and sinking into the arid ground.

He looked up and the body was standing in front of him, staring at him with one unseeing eye. Walter could see how young he was, the same age as he was. His one eye blinked slowly and then focused sharply, locking on to Walter’s and holding it there for a very long moment.

“I’m sorry,” Walter said. The words rang hollow in the air, changing nothing. The body stared at him, and blinked. When the eye opened it was summer green with hazel streaks, and Antigone stared back at him. Walter stumbled back, falling to the ground as he began to cry out at the sight of his daughter with half of her face missing. Blood dripped down across her lips, bubbling as she breathed out a groaning death rattle. It started wordless, but as the life left her body it became a scream, a cry, and then she gasped.

“Why…” in a voice like razor blades. As she finished, Walter began to scream.

When Walter could tell what was happening again, he knew for sure that he wasn’t in the attic of the High School any more. There was a palpable sense of being outside that pressed in on him before he could even recognize anything he saw. The weather was warm but dry, and there was the feeling of dust in the air that reminded him of time he had spent in the Southwest. When he opened his eyes he found that it was greener than he expected, but definitely dusty. They appeared to be in a grassy plain between two large patches of dense forest. The sky was a brilliant sapphire blue interrupted by the ominous dark gray of storm clouds, and he had a good view of them because he was flat on his back.

With a groan he pulled himself up to his knees and feet, looking around. Apparently he was one of the last ones to stand up, and the others were already in an argument. “What the hell happened?” he asked. He started to check his pockets but stopped when he saw who Morgan and Ryan had cornered; then he drew his pistol, and moved quickly to join them.

“If I wanted to attack you I would have done it while all of your backs were turned!” Tennyson said angrily, holding his hands out in a universal symbol of emptiness. “I was trying to stop you from going through the portal!”

“Tell me that I get to shoot him?” Walter asked as he came up on the others, keeping his pistol low but ready. “Because you didn’t get me anything for my last birthday, and that would be a good way to make up for it.”

“Dammit, Mab, call off your dog before I have to put him down,” Tennyson growled angrily, flashing Walter a look that could charitably be described as unkind. Walter raised an eyebrow in return, before he ‘woof’ed once, and looked to Morgan. Gabriel, for his part, didn’t look at Tennyson directly, but was looking around curiously.

“The others didn’t come through?” The not-psychic asked, looking around. Ryan shook his head, frowning in concern.

“Not yet, but if he doesn’t explain what he did and where we are, the yes. Starting with somewhere unpleasant,” Morgan ordered, giving Tennyson a sweet smile. “So start answering, before I let him off the leash.”

“Wait…what do you mean, where we are?” Walter asked with a blink, looking around as if there would be a sign or something he could orient himself off of. Besides the distant sounds of cicadas there was nothing particularly unusual about their surroundings—which bothered him as soon as he realized it. “This isn’t Faerie, is it?”

“I think things went pear shaped before they could come through,” Ryan answered Gabriel in a whisper, so as not to distract from the angry conversation between the others. Gabriel looked distinctly troubled then, but said no more.

“No,” Morgan responded angrily, her features returning to the glare they had held before as she turned back to her half-brother. “It is not. If it were, I would have regained the parts of me that were left behind when we cast the banishing spell. We would also be deep in Winter, and I wouldn’t feel an odd itching at the base of my skull. So where are we and what did you do?” she finished explaining, reaching out to grab Tennyson by the front of his clothing. He wore a dark red and black surcoat over what looked to be mail. “So tell me right now what you did before I pull your spine out your asshole and start whipping you with it.” Her voice started off loud, but by the end it was frosty and cold and quiet. Tennyson paled in front of the power of her anger, apparently doubting the truth of her threat even less than Walter did.

“I didn’t do it…it was a trap!” Tennyson sputtered angrily. “Morgan, he tied the portal to a second one that shunted us here. That’s why it took so much extra energy, you were fueling two different ones at the same time. And I don’t know where we are, which is why I was trying to stop you!”

“What caused your change of heart?” Walter asked, adding his glare to the force of displeasure leveled at Tennyson. “You were pretty damn smug before at the station, didn’t seem like there was a lot of dissension in the ranks before you ripped your way out of the interrogation room.”

“There wasn’t dissension then, mortal—now there is,” Tennyson answered angrily, apparently feeling it safe to be angry at Walter rather than Morgan. “I disagree with some of the steps he has taken since then, and the way he wishes to pursue the war.”

Morgan snorted, letting go of Tennyson and turning away angrily. She ran a hand through her hair, considering him for a moment. “Fine. If this is a trick, I swear to you that your death will be as long as it is painful. But that doesn’t change the fact that we need to know: Where the hell are we?”

“Nightmare.” The voice that answered was deep and rich, practiced and smooth and rolling out to fill the nooks and crannies of the landscape. It commanded attention, and almost obediently they all turned to look at the speaker.

“Oh shit,” Ryan said with an almost flat terror.

The man before them was dressed in dark, rich fabrics. Unlike Morgan or Tennyson he hadn’t bothered with armor, but his clothing was cut in a military fashion and served to highlight his broad shoulders and muscular build. His hair was pure white but in a way that didn’t seem to age him, and hung in a simple ponytail down to his shoulders. His face was strong and cut, and almost absurdly handsome; the handsomeness was only undermined by the confident sneer on his features. Walter couldn’t recognize the face because he hadn’t seen it, but he could place the voice.

“Shit, it’s Professor Gloom,” Walter stated, primarily for his own benefit. He snapped his pistol up and fired off three staccato rounds that should have taken the terrifying man in the face. They didn’t, not because they didn’t hit but because they never seemed to impact. They simply disappeared into nothingness inches away from his face.

Oberon raised an eyebrow at the nickname, but looked instead to his daughter. She was responding to his words with a look of pure, unfiltered shock. She had gone as pale as Tennyson did earlier, and Walter noticed Tennyson was rocking the look as well. Even Ryan had blanched, and was nervously fiddling with his rifle. “The Seven Lords of Nightmare haven’t allied with anyone since the defeat of the Fomor. They stay out of our politics…what did you do?” she asked, her voice rising in a combination of panic and anger until by the end she was shouting. “What did you promise them?” She raged.

“Nothing I couldn’t stand to part with.” Oberon answered simply, shrugging. “Some dominion over the new lands that we make will be given over to them. That is what the Fomori promised them and what they have wanted.”

Tennyson almost fell to the ground in shock, his knees giving way for a moment before he caught himself on his sister’s shoulder. The two of them stared back at their father, and Walter didn’t think they could have looked more afraid and stricken if he had announced he bathed in the blood of children and played croquet with the devil. From the looks on their faces, and what Walter thought his words meant, maybe he just had.

“They will remember you worse than Balor the Smiter, Father; you will be a worse villain than the Evil Eye. If you succeed at this your legacy will be drenched in blood from which it can never be clean, and they will some day rise to overthrow you as we did the deep terrors.” Morgan’s voice was pitched to breaking with terror, but she kept it even and steady as she stared at her father. “And us? Condemned to worse than death?”

“I knew eventually you would have to attempt coming through—the opportunity was too good. So I linked them to the lands ruled by the Seven, where I expect you will perish. Or if you do not, will be too late to stop me.” He looked around at that, before shrugging, and offering a stately bow. “Goodbye, children.”

With that he was gone, and Morgan screamed her fury to the empty air as mist began to slowly gather around them as if creeping for their souls.

There was a familiar and comforting weight to the gear that Walter wore, and more comfort in the ritual of checking every pocket carefully to make sure things where we he had wanted to stow them. He was wearing a black tactical vest, designed with separate kinds of plates to stop both stabbing and firearms. It wouldn’t stop any particularly high powered rifles, or absurdly sharped nonsense magic swords, but it provided a reassuring general protection.

He looked over to see Ryan Aquino performing a very similar check on his own armor, which was an expensive private model that accomplished much of the same thing but better. Walter had been offered a mostly fitting jacket of the same from Tania’s apparent store of them, but he had turned it down. A mostly fitting jacket wasn’t as good as one that did fit, and he had been using the government model for so long it would have felt odd to wear another. And ostentatious to be wearing something named after a mythological creature while intruding in to the land of Faeries.

“You can’t quite seem to get away from SWAT, boss.” Ryan pointed out wryly as the two of them began checking their weapons. Walter had his two iron railroad spike knives, the Border PD issued .45 handgun, and an M4 carbine from the armory. The knives were tucked in to the harness securely at his back and out of sight in case he needed them, the guns were loaded, and he had backup ammunition for anything that took it. And yet he felt like none of it was going to be as important as the two women they were still waiting on.

“I can’t quite seem to get there, no,” Walter said, as he let the M4 back on its sling and stood waiting. They were in the upstairs of the school, abandoned for the weekend and blocked off for any stragglers. “I keep trying to get out, and they keep dragging me back in,” He quoted with a wry little smile as he moved to sit down on an empty crate that had survived the first fight in the room.

“Not the best Godfather movie to quote, the third one.” Ryan pointed out as he too went to grab a seat, having learned the same lesson as Walter about not standing when sitting was an option.

“Why not?” Walter asked. “I’ve never seen it, on account of everyone saying it sucked.” He offered, looking at the chalk drawing on the wall that was to be their exit from the room. Allegedly, the determinedly contrary part of him thought.

“Because it sucked,” Ryan offered with a grin, sighing. “This could be an odd jump right to hell, you know. Remember some of our fun times?” He offered, his grin going a little bit morbid looking.

“Yeah, I remember them being so fun I retired.” Walter shook his head a bit. “That doesn’t seem to have stuck too well.”

“Well…” Ryan trailed off for a moment. “You retired after twenty years, it isn’t like you got out early you know. Fat government pension and all.”

Walter was about to say something else when footsteps echoed as people came up the stairs. The rest of the Border, PD who were in the know came in along with Morgan and Tania. As Walter rose he was forced to blink at the two women.

Only Morgan was in armor, but it wasn’t the kind of armor he expected. He didn’t know why, but he had thought she would be in modern and expensive body armor like Ryan. Instead she wore a gleaming mail hauberk down to her knee but split for movement, over which scales had been laid and attached carefully. It gleamed with the silver of the mail and the bronze or gold of the scales, and she moved in them like she had been born to it. Or just doing it for a very long time, Walter thought wryly.

“We’re going old school?” Walter asked curiously as he took them in.

“You have no idea,” Tania responded as she looked at her sister. “We’ve been wearing those for a very long time, and they even predate us. They’re modified Roman armor.”

“I recognize a lorica plumata,” Walter commented amusedly. At Tania’s raised eyebrow, he shrugged. “The fancy degrees I let the Army pay for were in military history.” He explained, as he adjusted his gear one last time now that the main players were in the room with him. “We going to get this show on the road?”

Morgan smirked at the exchange, but nodded as she moved over to the door. She placed her hands on the chalk symbols and closed her eyes for a moment before giving a nod. “Yes, it’s still attached to the same place.” She looked at the small circle of cops. “Everyone not going through the gate will want to get back, changing their connection position can be a little bit tricky. Everyone going through the gate will want to step forward and probably hold on to their butts.” Morgan said with a cheery little smile, as she turned back to the gate. Now she closed her eyes and kept them shut, murmuring quietly to herself.

“You’re on guard duty?” Walter asked, looking back over his shoulder to Tania. When she nodded, he looked at her jeans and t-shirt. “No armor?”

Tania smirked. “Who said I have to be wearing it to be protected?” Tania offered, giving a little turn. For a moment Walter could see something about her like a golden glow, but it only lasted for that moment and then it was gone.

“Make sure no weird crap happens to my kids,” Walter said, as he turned back to the portal. He didn’t see her reaction, but he had a suspicion that she wasn’t thrilled with being on guard duty.

As he turned his eyes back to the portal, he found that it had been slightly altered since he looked away. Where before it had just been chalk drawn on brick, now the chalk glowed with a faint white light. As they watched the light grew in intensity, and took on blue tones. They began to shimmer, and Morgan let out a little grunt as she focused on it. All at once the lights flickered and changed, white turning to blue before turning back again and settling down. The glow turned in to a haze emanating from the symbols. It took on a form quivering in the air like floating water, and began to pulse outward with increasing intensity.

Air moved in the room, starting at a light breeze and growing to a whipping speed. As it began to clear the room, Walter found it increasingly difficult to look at anything else. “Ready?” Morgan called out. He tried to look over to her, but his eyes were stuck on the portal. All he could do was nod, as he felt it start pulling him toward it.

“Morgan, it isn’t supposed to open like this!” Tania shouted. As Walter began to lose his fight to stop his feet from being dragged toward it, he heard one last voice.

“WAIT!” It shouted. A male voice, and terrified. It was the last voice he heard before he was pulled in to white and blue and nothingness.