23 – i – The Hermit

Tucked away in the heart of Hyde Park, concealed behind a nondescript brick façade, Ren lounged in her small slice of paradise within the otherwise chaotic city of Chicago. To the uninitiated, it appeared as little more than an aging townhouse, but to those with the right eyes—or the right introductions—it opened a door to a whole other world.

The heavy scent of incense hung in the air, mixing with the violet smoke that wafted from her long pipe. Carefully cultivated flowerpots hung throughout the room, each providing both color and specific smells meant to evoke an early-morning walk on a high mountaintop. A light stream of water, trickling overtop smooth river stones, enhanced the illusion, mixing a trace amount of moisture into the air and filling the ears with a pleasant background noise. The shoji screens partitioned the space, their paper panels painted with swirling motifs of foxes and autumn leaves, subtly animated through a specialty ink Ren developed in ages long past.

Skimming her pointed fingernail across the yellowed pages of an old book, Ren took in the words and a light puff from her pipe. The topic of the Old Gods felt archaic even in her youth, and yet, here she was, casually reading from a book on the topic written a thousand years before the humans of Egypt would pile their rocks into a mound and call it their greatest feat of engineering. It wasn’t the original text, of course—the original had been little more than a series of maddened scrawls on the walls of a cave, later transcribed onto papyrus, which also likely no longer existed. The edition Ren perused now was a copy of a copy of a copy, digitally printed from files sent by a contact overseas.

For all that Ren found the sights and, especially, smells of modern human society rather unpleasant, she admitted that convenience had its benefits. In ages past, she would have had to physically travel to the opposite side of the globe on a journey lasting months, if not years.

Yet, modern conveniences annoyed her just as much as they eased her troubles.

Modernity robbed her. Whereas before, she would have journeyed through a dozen cultures and peoples, encountered unfamiliar faces, new concepts, and novel ways of living, today, Ren simply remained within her comfortable quarters. Even if she traveled, it likely would have been via aeroplane, turning a years-long odyssey into a day-long nap.

“Perhaps it is time I moved on,” Ren mused to herself, idly waving her pipe back and forth to draw a facsimile of the world in the glittery violet smoke. A light swirl of her wrist sent it spinning around, highlighting potential future paths to tread even as her thoughts lingered in the past.

A few locales stuck out as glimmering violet sparks, remnants of the former incarnation of The Emperor’s list of places to visit. She still recalled the day he suggested they visit the Sami in Scandinavia. They spent a full two months absorbing their culture, living with the reindeer herders, before events in Chicago required The Emperor’s presence.

Perhaps another visit, now a third of a century later, was in order, if only to see how things changed since…

Like so many others Ren had known, The Emperor was gone. She had thought to leave shortly after—and perhaps it still was shortly after, for someone like her—but she ended up sticking around to offer some guidance to The Emperor’s successor, doing so out of nostalgia and obligation from their longstanding companionship.

The current Emperor was not her predecessor. The current Eclipse offered her no travelling companions, no enthusiasts of anthropology. All were too concerned with the now, and not the then or what could be.

A heavy knock on the door broke Ren’s concentration; the spinning globe dispersed into rapidly thinning clouds. Gently closing her book, Ren stood and stretched, arms high above her head and nine tails spread out in a fan around her. Another knock, more impatient than the last, did nothing to hurry Ren as she slid aside a shoji panel, opening a closet filled with exquisite silk. Selecting a ruby-red yukata, Ren ignored a third knock as she tied the sash around her waist with movements practiced over millennia.

The knocking continued all the while, each subsequent hammer against her poor door diminishing Ren’s desire to greet her guest at all. Little that required her active attention, and the few things that did would surely come over her mobile telephone. Nobody needed to visit her in person with such urgency.

To deliberately delay a few moments longer, Ren picked up her phone and tried to tap the screen to wake it. Every time she used it, it was fiddly. The current Emperor assured her that the phone was in proper working order, but the glossy black screen felt unreliable compared to the phones of The Emperor’s predecessor’s time. Eventually, she tried for the button on the side.

The screen flicked on, displayed a rectangle with a slim red bar, then promptly flicked off once more.

Ren took a long drag on her pipe. “Oh…”

Perhaps there was something urgent to attend to.

With no reason to make her guest wait any longer, Ren slid open the shoji panel of the front door. From the outside, the heavy wooden door would have swung inward, but it was what was inside that counted.

The Hanged Man darkened her doorway, smelling of a mixture of decay and far, far too much scented perfume he used to cover the first odor. His ordinarily perfect suit looked dusted and creased, as if he had recently been in a fight, though his face and immaculate smoothed hair remained unmarred. The moment the door opened, he shoved a glossy fresh phone into her chest.

“I believe my phone is faulty,” Ren said, glowering at the new device. It appeared identical to her current one, even displaying the same aerial image of Mount Fuji with all the little icons scattered around the mountain. “I connected it just recently, but it appears to have run out of electricity once again.”

“Recently? Recently? Knowing you, that was last month. I have told you,” The Hanged Man said through clenched teeth, “you need to charge it every day.”

“My former telephone required connection as infrequently as one moon to the next, so long as it wasn’t used.”

“This isn’t some ancient Nokia, you—” The Hanged Man stopped, then let out a short, harsh breath.

Ren waved away the emotional anger in the air as The Hanged Man drew in her calm. His rage visibly diminished, though it remained simmering just underneath his tongue.

“There is an emergency.”

“There is always an emergency,” Ren said, turning on her heel back into her home, leaving the door open for The Hanged Man to enter. “I advise ignoring the problem. Most emergencies only feel dire in the moment, but after the fact, weren’t severe enough to worry over.” She pulled in a long draw on her pipe, and let the smoke mist the surrounding air. “Most problems vanish on their own, with enough time.”

“An unknown force of mask-wearing individuals attacked us.” The Hanged Man ignored her advice. “This was eight hours ago.”

Ren looked him up and down, pleased with herself for having guessed the reasons for his untidy suit. “You appear to have escaped unharmed. Could this not have waited—”

“Four hours ago, a disturbance occurred at a train station. The Lust is investigating, but it appears to match recent reality slivers caused by the presence of that clockwork angel.”

Nodding along simply to show that she was listening, Ren internally shrugged. The current Emperor had been complaining about that being for months now, wanting it out of the city. Its mere existence caused minor stitches and tears in the fabric of reality, often leading to troublesome effects for anyone in the vicinity. Those effects ranged from passing by two identical black cats in a bout of déjà vu, to falling into what The Adjustment termed ‘The Backrooms’.

Ren had her suspicions about what that angel was, but since nobody assigned contacting it to her, she had left it up to the others. They would have to learn what they could and could not handle on their own—she wouldn’t always be around to offer advice.

Since it wasn’t her duty, Ren simply lounged on her collection of zabutons, picking up her book on the Old Gods once more. She could smell the irritation in The Hanged Man’s breath as he went ignored, but a wave of her pipe dispersed his exhaled emotions into nothingness.

“I trust there is an emergency in your recounting of the night. An active emergency, worthy of disturbing me,” Ren said as she divided her attention between The Hanged Man and her book.

The Old Gods were an odd subject; by all rational logic, they couldn’t exist. That beings existed which could reshape the cosmos on a grand scale with a mere absent thought meant that the cosmos would constantly shift and churn. The empirical fact was that reality did not constantly shift, ergo, there were no Old Gods. The supposed creators of the universe, who dreamed every being into existence, belonged to legend and myth.

Every once in a while, an oddity would rear its head. A legend or myth would emerge from the woodwork, apropos of nothing, and give a little hint that maybe, just maybe, something resembling one of the Dreamers did exist. Most beings, even those longer-lived than average, would never experience one of those hints.

Ren was two-thousand, six hundred, something-something years old. The exact age stopped mattering long ago, but even in that great time-span, Ren had only heard of two such events, neither of which she had been physically present to witness.

Yet here she was, once again, delving into research that she had long forgotten, all because of a strange maggot.

“The Hierophant,” The Hanged Man said, making Ren lower her book. He waited, making sure he had her full attention. “There is a problem at the nexus, and he wants your advice. Your project is on the verge of failing—tonight.”

Ren’s heart sank. She knew the project would not work in the long-term; it had always been intended as a patch-job while she investigated a permanent solution. “It’s too soon. It can’t be tonight,” Ren said, book forgotten as she swept across the room. Sliding aside another screen, she revealed a large diagram of mystical arithmetic. All of her work on the nexus project, all her prediction trees, her problem solving, and potential fixes for minor issues neatly covered the entire board.

“We expected the first issue to arrive on the final day of February,” Ren continued, then checked the astral charts, just to confirm. “That is over a month away.” People often thought that her extended life gave her a disassociated relationship with the passage of time, and that wasn’t an incorrect assumption, but it wasn’t so bad that she would lose a full month.

“The Hierophant disagrees. The Adjustment has also been nagging me about contacting you; she said she had reason to believe there was a problem with your research. I sent you several messages,” The Hanged Man said, eyes flicking to the glossy black surface of her former telephone where it rested on the table, “which have obviously gone unread.”

“I saw a few,” Ren absently responded as she skimmed over her notes. “I knew there was a problem and saw no need to bother The Adjustment with needless responses.”

The Hanged Man curled a lip. “How did that work out for us?”

Ren ignored his snide demeanor; youth were always so temperamental. “I have seen a great many troubles in my life, and the world still turns,” she said, pausing on one particular calculation. “Did The Hierophant mention anything about resonant interference?”

“Ask him yourself. The only thing I know is that something about tonight set this off.”

Ren paused, looking back. “You were attacked? By whom?”

“Unknown, as I said. They wore masks. Some of them took pretty hard hits—bullets barely worked—but then they went down after. The doc is doing an autopsy on one. Last I heard, that one looked like a normal human.”

“Anything special about the masks?”

The Hanged Man shrugged. “No idea.”

“And the other incident, the angel’s appearance, that was related to the attack?” Ren asked, earning another flat look. “You don’t know. You brought your automobile?”

“I have.”

“Take me to The Hierophant…” Ren trailed off, reconsidering with a glance at her research. “No, take me to the area affected by the angel’s presence.”

The Hanged Man nodded, turning like he had been waiting for her to ask. He politely opened her door for her as she stepped out into the cold wintery air. “Tails,” he said, swiftly stepping ahead of her to open the door to his black car.

Ren grumbled internally, vanishing her tails between steps—a handy trick for modern society, which hadn’t considered the comfort of those with tails when creating seating styles. At the same time, it wasn’t exactly comfortable to shunt her tails off to elsewhere, always feeling like someone was pinching the base of her spine.

The Hanged Man, after escorting her to the rear seat, got behind the steering wheel and began their journey. Ren occupied herself with her fresh phone, navigating through the messages she had missed. There were… a lot. Many from The Hanged Man, as usual, but surprisingly, several from The Adjustment. Aside from The Emperor and The Hanged Man, Ren had little contact with others in The Emperor’s retinue.

“The Prescient,” Ren muttered, reading through one of the missed messages. “Do you know that name?”

“One of The Castle,” The Hanged Man answered, his deep voice rumbling in irritation. “Said to have some insight into future events, and is likely the reason it is so difficult to track The Castle down.”

“No verification of those abilities?”

“I don’t think anyone has even seen the guy. We only know he exists because of passing mentions while talking to The Director or The Butler. Why?”

Ren frowned, swiping through more missed messages with her pipe in hand. “It seems he foresaw this. Who is The Agent? Another of The Castle?”

The Hanged Man let out a scant breath of mild irritation, visibly calming as he exhaled. “What does she have to do with this?”

“The Agent has been trying to contact me on behalf of The Prescient, according to The Adjustment.”

“Not part of The Castle, she’s apparently trying to be her own faction. She’s the one The Church got pissed at.”

“Ah, the one who fucked up. Didn’t you find and deliver her to The Church?” Ren was fairly certain she had heard the outcome of that whole incident. “Surprised she’s wandering around.”

“You and me both, but whoever knows with The Church. They do what they want and…” The Hanged Man trailed off, slowing the car as he leaned forward, looking upward out the windshield. “The hell is that?”

Ren matched his posture, squinting up into the night sky. Perched atop the stoplight, a bird-like creature glared down at the passing cars with an odd set of four bright orange eyes. Its odd hooked beak turned with each car, following them for a short distance before it looked at the next. Each time, it adjusted itself, lightly lifting then lowering its wings, which made the metallic surface of its feathers gleam in the headlights.

Something about its organic metal, visible ribs, and piercing gaze triggered a distant memory buried somewhere deep in Ren’s mind. A creature, not of this world, yet present all the same.

“You have a weapon on you?” Ren asked, not taking her eyes off the bird.

“Always.”

Bright orange eyes turned to their car next. Ren inhaled from her pipe, holding the mystic smoke within her lungs as she waited.

The car passed, and the bird simply carried on, staring at the next vehicle.

Ren slowly breathed out, letting the smoke gather against the roof of the car. “It felt like it was looking for something.”

“Not us, apparently. I need to call this in,” he said, pressing his finger to the small telephone in his ear. He carried on driving as he reported the bird and its location, only for them to pass another of the strange birds, perched atop an intersection’s lights a few blocks away.

This time, Ren focused on some of the other cars on the road. At night, it wasn’t easy to see inside most of them, especially not those with heavily tinted windows, but from the way most cars slowed down as they went through the intersection, they saw the bird as well. The few she could see through their windows craned their necks, flipped out their phones, or just stared.

Few people seemed alarmed, not speeding off like they were frightened, though she suspected some called whatever authority they believed best. As long as the birds remained in place, that was unlikely to change. The birds looked machine-like enough that most people probably thought they were simply props, human-made. Ren might have thought so as well, aware of human robotics as she was, if not for that odd niggle in the back of her mind.

Another hint? Or was she seeing signs in odd but otherwise mundane things?

Ren didn’t get time to consider before a storefront collapsed outwards on the block ahead, spilling hundreds of squirming maggots across a parking lot.