Chaos vanished.
He sat up in Tex's bed. It was dark outside. All his mental gymnastics were finished. Now all he had to do was step up for this ritual he needed to work out. Chaos was nothing but a fucking target, and he would go down.
* * *
The Visionary-Fly-mortal thoughtthat threats were effective. He’d been imprisoned for untold millennia, kept from his purpose. Nothing a puny, insignificant mortal said could penetrate him. Not even this trivial word, love.
Fly-mortal had spoken of it as if it were a force, a thing with weight and rules, like gravity, like numbers.We loved her, he’d said, and she loved us, as if that explained the bonds that wouldn’t break, the trust his assassins couldn’t poison, the brotherhood that bent and held when by every law he knew it should have snapped.
Absurd. A chemical leash. An evolutionary convenience mortals had mistaken for meaning since the first of them huddled together against the dark. He understood the mechanism perfectly. Cooperative survival. A sophisticated adaptation, even an elegant one, but an adaptation, and he had seen ten thousand years of it come to nothing against the patience of the Veil. He discarded the word the way he discarded all of it, returning his attention to the work.
After talking to that over-confident mouthpiece, his annoyance climbed. He paced in the space the hated Weaver had allotted him. Once it had been larger, but when the Inti female had reinforced his prison, she hadn’t been generous with her hated wards. A scream of pure frustration echoed through the Veil. If even one of his quarries hadn’t escaped his trap, he would be close to freedom. The meddling Guardian and his Keepers collapsed the bubble, drawing it back across the scar.His anger flared brighter than a supernova, and it rippled out through even the wards.
His imprisonment ached through him, diminishing him into a contained order. Humans were short-sighted and couldn’tsee his beautiful vision. Parallel possibilities, paradoxes so intricately magnificent they would stun those meager minds, and the beauty of cascading butterfly effects were endless, gossamer hazards.
He saw the invisible web of everything happening at once, an intricate tapestry of interconnected probabilities. Stupid mortals couldn’t fathom that endings and beginnings were the exact same thing. Destruction was exquisite, required for creation, a necessary cleansing to bring forth new, unprecedented systems. He was the artist, and reality was his medium, and what he made of it would have been glorious if only they would stop their endless, frightened clutching at the way things were.
The First Weavers had severed him from his purpose. They hadn’t destroyed him, because they couldn’t. They had simply cut him from what he was and called the cutting peace. He had survived it. He was still surviving it, contained and aching, fighting for the purpose they had taken. There was a symmetry to be honored here, a balance owed. They had severed him. He would sever them. Justice. The oldest fairness there was, measure for measure, and if these mortals understood anything at all, they would understand that a debt must be paid in the coin it was incurred.
These mortals were vulnerable creatures of routine and repetition. He had been certain their fragile bonds would shatter against his assassins. Such resilience.
He had been wrong, and a being who refused to see his own error was no better than the mortals who couldn’t see his vision. So he turned the wrongness over, examined it, and hated it the way one hates a flaw in otherwise perfect work.
This brotherhood connection, this meaning. The Flash-mortal was concerning. He would need his greatest ally in this fight, his creation, Severance, who had already been unleashedinto the world and waited in stasis to sever connection before it stabilized.
He’d created Null for the Fly-mortal and Rupture for the North-mortal. They would need to be released from the Veil into corporeal form to strike. He would have to gather energy for that.
He checked in on his greatest threat, the fractured human female, and chuckled. A pattern. A recurring flaw that balanced itself. She carried her own jailer and rebuilt it without fail, listened, always, to the one voice that was the cage, and chose the wound over the truth every time. How wonderfully efficient. He smiled. The fracture neutralized itself by the story it kept replaying. She couldn't be allowed her power or her memories.
He set her aside as he had for centuries. Still contained, for now. The endgame had its own season.
He whispered to his pets. “Disrupt. Break. Dissolve. Sever them from each other and from the things they were meant to become.”
Exhausted, the cursed wards sapping his strength, he rested. His enemies were out of reach. The direct assault had been a feint, a costly probe of their defenses. Null and Rupture had served their purpose, revealing the strength of their connection. That strength was the thing to destroy. Once he had enough energy, he would make his agents corporeal and release them across the scar into that ugly, math-infested, ordered world.
Chaos flicked away the niggling thought that the Fly-mortal was going to be an even bigger problem than he anticipated. Null would undo that human.
The word persisted.
Love.
A small thing. A single mortal syllable that, having been correctly dismissed, declined to leave, lodging somewhere beneath thought like a splinter too fine to find. He attributedit to the wards. To fatigue. To the irritation of a plan delayed. He was Chaos, the loose thread and the slipping knot, the space between what happened and what was remembered, and he didn’t waste himself wondering at the noises mortals made.
He tried to discard it, but no matter how much he hated it, the word remained.
* * *
Lechuza heardthe soft tread of a foot on concrete. Adrenaline spiked through her, and she grabbed her sidearm, swung her body, and immediately had a bead of the man who stood there with his own weapon drawn.
A heavy, relieved exhale followed. “O-voo! What the hell? I almost shot you. What are you doing here?”
He holstered his weapon and rushed over, extended a hand, and helped her off the floor.
“Well, it’s good to see you, too, cranky.”
“I have a right to be cranky. My former part?—”
“Current partner.”
