The following is the Beta Draft of Font of Fertility Ch 46. As a Beta draft, this is not the final work and may see major changes prior to final posting out in the wide world.
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All Characters in sexual situations are 18 years or older.
This story is a continuation of the Font of Fertility series. I suggest starting with Chapter 1 if you have not already. This chapter includes only brief mentions of sex.
Jeremiah starts farming, and opens up a long-needed dialogue.
Returning Dramatis Personae
Jeremiah ‘Jerry’ Grant - Seat of Fertility, aka. Powerful Sex Shaman
Lindsey Parker - Girlfriend/Concubine, gal-genius, former neighbour of the Baxleys
Victorious - Ancient demonic nightmare horse-turned-muscle car
Katie Valentine - Latina head cheerleader at school who likes making out and hates Emily
Lauren Baxley - Public girlfriend, Jerry’s Prime in the magic world, closest friend and confidant
Aidra Allard - Petite goth girl from Jerry and Lauren’s school, Fuck buddy, Witch
Referenced Characters
Stacey Wilde - Girlfriend/Concubine, athletic, old family friend of the Grants
Angela ‘Angie’ Dawkins - Girlfriend/Concubine, Lindsey’s friend from back in high school
Jordan - Concubine/Submissive, Redheaded writer friend
Christiane ‘Tina’ Hartley - Sister of Grace, who wanted help through a Judgment to get pregnant. Was effected by the mind virus.
Ramona Allard - Local Witch, mother of Aidra, well-endowed MILF
Annalise Stoker - Concubine/Girlfriend, Fire Mage
Moira - Real estate agent from the city
Anna ‘Other Anna’ - Yaroslav’s Prime, magical media mogul
Ned - Husband of Grace, the couple who wanted help getting pregnant through a Judgement
Grace - Sister of Christiane, Wife of Ned. Part of the couple who wanted help getting pregnant through a Judgement.
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“This is Delta Delta Phi,” Lindsey said, gesturing at the unassuming, if large, house. Greek Row at Cardinal wasn’t really that impressive, though I might have been a little skewed in my perspective because I owned a Penthouse apartment and a secret volcano sanctum hideout thing. Before magic, I probably would have been pretty impressed by a large 60+ year old house with a big yard that a bunch of college dudes lived in together.
“Who owns these houses?” I asked, completely derailing the point Lindsey had been about to make. She had co-opted my time again that evening for more ‘Siphon Duty’ and Greek Row had been our first stop.
“I… don’t actually know,” Lindsey frowned. “It’s probably some combination of their local and national chapters, and maybe the University. Why?”
“It just seemed weird to me that a group of college bros would be able to keep something like this going for decades, let alone multiple iterations across the country,” I said. “I mean, I could have been joining a fraternity next year. If I didn’t have you and Stacey helping out me and Lauren, we’d have fallen apart on a bunch of this kind of stuff already.”
Lindsey smirked and rolled her eyes, mildly embarrassed but also pleased that I was thankful for her efforts alongside Stacey. “What we should do is set up a new sorority,” she said. “And you ‘happen to live there.’”
I closed my eyes and sighed. “I already have you all living with me at home, Linds,” I said. “I
don’t need another house full of sexual partners.”
“You say that now,” she grinned. “But you haven’t seen the hotties around campus. College girls, Jerry. And if we do it right, that’s generations of fresh talent every year for decades to come…. OK, I hear how gross that sounds now that I say it, but I’m still leaving it on the list of ideas.”
“OK,” I sighed, shaking my head. The problem with Lindsey’s ‘bad ideas’ was that they were usually very functional, just… ethically grey. “So what are we doing at ‘Delta Delta Phi’?” I asked.
“Well, you’re going to put up Siphon runes on all the Greek Row houses,” Lindsey said. “But we’re starting with DDP because they are the major party house. Lots of athletes in the brotherhood, lots of keggers and themed parties, and lots of drunk college kids hooking up all over the place. Not to mention what I can only assume is a steady stream of lotion and tissues from the meat heads jerking off all the time.”
“Ew,” I said. “Just… ew.”
“Hey, we know that masturbation gives you some power, and every little bit helps, right?” she pointed out.
“OK,” I grumbled, looking across the street at the well-lit, large, white Victorian home. Sigma Lambda Tau was definitely a sorority with how nice it was. That was a place that I wouldn’t mind knowing folks were masturbating in. Then I frowned. “Sigma Lambda Tau?”
“Preppy academic girls, mostly,” Lindsey said, following my gaze. “Debate, politics, business, law. I mean, they’re still sorority girls, so they party, but not like the Delts.”
“Yeah, but S-L-T?” I asked. “Like, they have to know that’s-”
“Slut?” Lindsey smirked. “Yeah. They know. They pretend they don’t, but they know.”
“Do they live up to the hype?” I asked.
“Some of them,” Lindsey grinned. “Start with DDP, though.”
The key decision we had to make was what we trusted the Siphon rune to be able to handle. What felt right. I couldn’t just slap the rune on the front door and call it a day - first of all, people would ask questions about it. And probably paint over it. But also, did that make sense in terms of the whole ‘flow of magic’ element?
Most of the time, even now that I had my ‘detect magic vision’ as a permanent fixture, I didn’t ‘see magic’ all that often. Not like when I was in the sanctum, and especially not like when I was connected to the Amplifier. But it was there, flowing through the world. If I was attuned to sexual energy, and Life and Death seats were attuned to the other two sources, then there had to be plenty of it out there that was being generated that wasn’t being collected, and it had to go somewhere. And that didn’t even account for how other Ascended, with their much more specific attunements, drew on energy. Annalise talked about her fire coming from within her, while Aidra talked about it more like having a solar-powered battery she needed to let recharge when she used her witchy Luck abilities. Tina had told Lindsey she felt like it was all external to her, and was something she had to really focus on to connect with.
If magic had a flow, even if it wasn’t consistent or logical, then it made sense that I would need to position the Siphon runes optimally to any given location. Both for where it would be pulling in energy, and then how it would be sending it to me.
Or, rather, to my pool of power, somewhere between me and the Unreal.
But optimal for siphoning also didn’t mean optimal for repeated applications. I could go in and put a rune on the bottom of every bed in the fraternity, and even do that over and over down all of Greek Row, but that wasn’t any kind of efficiency. Especially if I was going to replicate this in a widening field of colleges and universities across my territory. Not to mention the other kinds of locations on Lindsey’s list.
My mind went up, thinking about the siphon rune pulling magic higher like a vacuum and then shooting it out to me through the unreal. Roofs were also a spot that I could probably put a pretty decent-sized rune without anyone noticing, particularly if I magically installed it under the shingles and onto the wood beneath it. Lindsey countered that thinking, though - first, because magical efficiency would mean I’d need to use my Forget Me spell while also doing something to let me fly up onto those roofs. And second, since we knew that the flow of magic seemed to at least partially respect permanent fixtures, it wasn’t likely that optimal ‘flow’ would come up and out through a solid roof.
We went through a couple of other ideas. The hearth of a building would be symbolic as hell, but not all homes had hearths these days, let alone other locations. The kitchen could be a decent substitute, but again, not all places had kitchens. And both would require entering the building and skulking around to find the right room. A cornerstone or other piece of the foundation was a solid runner-up to our eventual decision, what with a whole element of ‘grounding’ the magic and being unlikely to get messed with. The only problem would be figuring out which brick or area of the foundation to do it, and if that was on the inside and not the outside, we would have the same problem as the hearth or kitchen.
Doors.
I felt like it was too simple, and worried that we’d have to do every window and door on a building to be effective. The symbolism was definitely there, though - doors were portals of entry and exit, and if the Unreal bent to the Real, it would follow that sensibility, so all energy should flow through them in currents. And on a practical side, it meant that everyone entering a runed building would be passing under the siphon, adding to the current and strengthening the flow to divert towards it. And they would drag the energy with them when they were leaving.
Plus, there was the practical element of not needing to enter the building to apply the rune. Sure, it wouldn’t be peak efficiency in terms of siphoning up every ounce of sexual energy generated in a building, but we weren’t trying to get Magical Blue Meth here, I just needed a larger volume of regular Magical Meth…
That anecdote had come from Stacey and Angie, who had apparently been watching Breaking Bad together during their cardio workouts and talking about it afterwards as a bonding thing since they didn’t see each other much.
“I can’t just blast it up on every door,” I said to Lindsey once we’d settled on the location. “People would be asking questions, and probably trying to scrub it off or paint over it.”
“True,” Lindsey said, quirking her lips to the side in thought as she eyed across the front lawn of the fraternity house at the door. “You could try and do it on the inside edge near the hinges, or maybe under the hinges on the doorsill and not the door?”
“Maybe…” I said. “Maybe something with the door handle?”
“Every handle is going to be different, though,” she grimaced.
“This magic shit is so annoyingly specific for something so fucking nebulous,” I sighed.
“What if you do it in invisible ink?” Lindsey asked, then shook her head. “No, that doesn’t account for if people paint their doors.”
“Well…” I said. “I mean, how often do doors really get painted?”
Lindsey frowned with a thoughtful look in her eyes. “We’d want to keep a record of where you’ve put the rune so that we can do maintenance checks every few years,” she said. “But that would have been true anyway.”
“Am I really drawing a magical sex-energy-siphon rune in ‘invisible ink’ like I’m a little kid writing a secret spy message with a pen from the scholastic fair?” I chuckled.
My beautiful, genius girlfriend snorted. “Yeah, I guess you are.”
“Great,” I laughed, shaking my head. “I guess we should look up how that stuff works, then, so that I can get this going.”
****-----***-----****
I stumbled, and Lindsey grabbed my arm to help keep me upright as she looked at me in alarm.
“It’s working,” I said, shaking my head and blinking. “Better than the ones at my parents’ place.”
“That’s good,” Linds said. “Can you tell which location?”
We’d gone down Greek Row and hit every frat and sorority, painting invisible siphon runes onto every door, including the occasional balcony. And, because I was with Lindsey, I let her convince me to do ‘an age-old college challenge’ which really wasn’t that difficult to accomplish when I was magic and already using the Forget Me spell to make it easy for us to approach and walk around the buildings.
Lindsey had come away from Greek Row with a fistful of thongs and panties, one from each sorority house, in a ‘Gotta Catch ‘Em All’ style panty raid.
There had been a brief debate over how funny it would be to steal every pair of panties from every sorority girl on campus, but I’d put a kibosh on that because of the simple economics of theft on that scale. We’d be costing these college girls hundreds of dollars each. It was a funny idea though…
We’d been approaching Dunder House, the big ‘party house’ for the college that wasn’t a fraternity. Their parties weren’t as structured or regular as the Delta Delta Phi boys, according to Lindsey, but they were even more wild.
“No,” I answered her after a long moment of focus, examining the incoming trickle of power that had suddenly started draining into my pool. “I can’t tell from where, but I think if I really tried, I could probably follow it back to the source. Or sources, I guess. It’s more than one stream, but they’re tight together like threads that have been braided or something.”
“Interesting,” Lindsey said, then slid her hand down my arm to grab mine. “Come on. Let’s do this. One more stop after, and it’s the big one.”
“The big one?” I asked.
“There aren’t any parties happening tonight, it’s a Tuesday,” she said. “So right now it’s only incidental sex stuff happening. Casual hookups and couples. But the Orange Lounge is different.”
“Linds,” I sighed. “What the fuck is the ‘Orange Lounge?’”
****-----***-----****
“I’m going to be honest, I was expecting something either way nicer or way grungier,” I said. We were standing in front of a strip mall in a nicer part of downtown. On one end was a Subway, on the other was a hair salon that was closed for the evening, and in the middle, occupying two storefronts worth of real estate, with blacked-out windows and a bouncer wearing a black suit under a black leather coat, was The Orange Room.
“To be fair, so would I,” Lindsey smirked. We were sitting in Victorious, the demon car having shut off so he didn’t look like we were just idling, but he was still listening in.
“And it’s not just a bar?” I asked dubiously.
“Full on sex club,” Lindsey said. “Not a brothel; I’m still trying to find out if there are any here in the city, or the State, because that would be guaranteed power. But people come here to fuck, and there are some pro Dom and Dommes who work out of the back rooms. As far as I know or could research, it’s the only one in the city.”
“Baby,” I said, rubbing the inside of her jeans-clad thigh to try and reassure her. “How do you know that?”
“I haven’t been inside,” she said after a moment of looking at me, silently accepting that even if I had to ask the question, she knew that her answer wouldn’t change how I felt about her. Our experience in the Unreal had given us that. “I was invited once, and I probably would have gone if I hadn’t had a project I was working on that needed finishing. It was last year, and this cute French senior at the college who had a Parisian accent flirted with me and then invited me. She said she worked here, but just wanted me to come have some fun. She graduated before we could reconnect.”
“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “Talk about working her way through college.”
“I think it was more of an ‘I do this because I like it’ than an ‘I do this to afford tuition’ kind of thing,” Lindsey smirked. “She was posh. I’m pretty sure she came from money.”
I looked out at the bouncer and the door again. “And you think there are people in there fucking right now?”
“I don’t think all these cars belong to the one guy over there in the Subway,” she smirked.
The parking lot was about two-thirds full with almost a dozen cars.
“Did you want to go in and look?” I offered.
Lindsey hesitated and actually blushed a little. “Yes,” she said. “But… no. Not because I wouldn’t want to see all the fun toys and stuff we could use - once you’re out of your parents’ place, I’m totally going to do research into fun equipment we should stock in the sanctum for me, Jordan and Aidra to use. And Tina would be so hot in any bondage apparatus. But I don’t want to go in there with you and feel like anyone else can see me like that. Not when I’m all yours.”
“Linds,” I said, squeezing her thigh a little tighter and meeting her concerned eye. “I love you.”
“Love you too,” she smiled sincerely. “Forever, totally.”
I sighed softly. “You do realise that fantasising about Tina in bondage isn’t fair,” I said.
Lindsey smirked. “I’m manifesting.”
That made me roll my eyes.
“What?” she laughed. “I haven’t had a crack at her yet.”
“I love you, baby,” I chuckled. “But leave the hot British lesbian alone.”
“Oh, she’s not a lesbian,” Lindsey scoffed, reaching over and giving my crotch a gentle squeeze. “She’s totally thirsty for more of this; the rest of us are just a bonus.”
My sigh, and her laugh, filled the car.
****-----***-----****
Staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, the last trickle of power finally shut off, and I felt like a dripping faucet had finally gone quiet.
“Fuck me,” I groaned, glancing over at the clock. 3:30 AM. While I’d been up and moving around, and while I’d been having a final late-night romp with Linds and Lauren to celebrate the siphon runes working, the constant trickle of power flowing into my pool had been present but not at the front of my mind.
Lying in bed with nothing but my thoughts, trying to go to sleep, it felt like the trickle was echoing in the empty cave that was my skull.
I was really going to need to learn how to ignore that. Or just never sleep again. Which was possible, but I’d also read too much fan theory about superpowers, supernatural beings and that sort of shit. The removal of sleep from the regular rhythm of a mortal person, even if they no longer needed it, was probably detrimental to their holding onto their humanity. Or sanity.
If I was staying in high school to make sure Lauren and I clung onto our humanity, I could learn to live with the flow of power in my head.
Probably.
****-----***-----****
“Hey, can I borrow him for a sec?” Katie asked. I was walking Lauren to class before heading off to first period myself, and the cheerleader had intercepted us by literally pushing between us from behind and looping her arms through ours on either side of her.
Lauren snorted, raising an eyebrow as she glanced from the cheerleader to me and back. “Sure,” she said. “Right here?”
Katie shrugged with one shoulder, grinning a little, and then let go of Lauren’s arm so she could turn and push me with one hand on my chest so that I pressed back against the lockers of the school corridor. Then she went on her toes and pulled me down into a kiss as she pressed her tongue against my lips, then into my mouth.
She’d told us yesterday, and proven, that she really liked kissing. We’d given her permission to kiss either of us. I’d sort of been thinking it would be in dark corners and under stairwells, like that first time with Zena. Not out in the open, in the middle of the morning rush, as the entire student body was trying to get to class.
I kissed her back, my hands landing on her waist. She wasn’t wearing her cheerleader uniform today, and was actually more casually done up like Lauren often was, though her hoodie was school Cheerleading Team swag and she was wearing tights instead of jeans. She hummed in approval as I held her waist, and something in that hum told me to go further, so I dropped my hands lower to her hips. Another approving hum, and a soft grunt, in between her sucking on my tongue. I slid my hands back around her, grabbing her ass.
“Mmfhmmf,” she grunted and nodded into the kiss.
Hey, if a cute as hell cheerleader wanted to join the ‘Good Morning Kiss’ squad, who was I to argue?
I massaged her ass boldly for a long thirty seconds as we made out, and I knew that half the student body would know about this by lunch. Then she finally pulled away, smirked at me as she smacked her lips. “Thanks,” she said. “God, kissing you is fun. Be at the room halfway through lunch, ‘kay?”
“Sure?” I answered. We weren’t supposed to be doing anything again until next week.
Katie pulled away from me and went to Lauren, who had been waiting in between the two streams of walking traffic in the middle of the hall, grinning as she watched her boyfriend and a cheerleader making out and feeling each other up. She must have seen what was coming, because she was grabbing Katie’s ass just as fully as I had been as the cheerleader kissed her right there in the middle of the corridor.
We were probably going to end up being bad influences on the general school population, doing things like this.
If I hadn’t quite gotten as hard as possible from the quick make-out and ass-grabbing, seeing Lauren do the same thing with the same girl got me there. In fact, it got me uncomfortably there because I was now tenting my pants and quickly shoved a fist into my pocket to try and disguise that fact.
They didn’t make out quite as long, but Katie pulled away from Lauren’s lips and went to her ear, whispering to her. My girlfriend was looking at me with a grin as she listened, and then grinned even broader as she nodded, before chuckling and swatting Katie’s ass.
“See ya,” Katie chirped to me, giving me a little wave with her fingers before skipping away into the pedestrian traffic, headed for class.
“Do I want to know?” I asked as Lauren came to me, pushing past a trio of Juniors who had all turned to watch the cheerleader and almost ran into my girlfriend.
“Yes, but it’s a surprise, so no,” Lauren smirked. “And she did that on purpose. She wants Emily to know.”
“Mm,” I grunted.
Lauren winked at me, grinning like a cat, and then snickered as she looked down at how I was trying to camouflage my erection.
****-----***-----****
“I can’t believe it wasn’t Katie getting you to do her butt,” Aidra sighed. “I really thought that’s what the surprise was going to be.”
“Nah, she’s for real about wanting that for a future husband or whatever,” Lauren said. “She promised me she was gonna work on more of the cheerleaders, I just didn’t think she would work that fast.”
“Brinlay was pretty clear that getting back at Emily for her bullshit was like half of the reason she was fucking me,” I said, shaking my head as I guided Aidra to get a little closer to Lauren, then offered them both my hand. They each grabbed a couple of fingers, ready for me to teleportal us.
“I still want details,” Aidra smirked. “That girl is all ass and thighs. Was it good?”
“He looked shellshocked after,” Lauren chuckled.
“Brinlay knew what she wanted,” I said, flushing a little. “And was more than willing to make sure she got it.”
The senior tumbler on the cheerleading team was all firm booty and thighs, and even in doggy, I’d felt like she was fucking me while I’d been going pretty hard. Katie had even knocked on the Green Room door to tell us to quiet down at one point because the slapping of Brinlay’s big, powerful ass against my thighs and pelvis could be heard in the corridor - which wouldn’t have been a problem if she hadn’t been ‘keeping watch’ for us, which meant I couldn’t use my Sound Dampening spell.
“Nice,” Aidra chuckled.
“Too bad she was a one-and-done,” Lauren sighed. “I would have loved to spank that ass.”
“Same,” Aidra snickered.
“Jesus,” I sighed. “You two are worse than me.”
“Yup,” Lauren grinned, and Aidra just shrugged.
I rolled my eyes and teleportaled us from the back stairwell of the school to the Penthouse for a quick stop on the way to Aidra’s. I was finally getting time to accomplish a task Lauren had been scheduling for me for almost a week, but even she agreed that I could probably use one last huddle-up with my Magic Crew. There was something about not wanting to put my foot in my mouth when meeting with the organisations of wizards, sorcerers and mages that had been running independently for the last eighteen years that made me feel like checking my Ps and Qs, crossing my Ts, dotting my i’s, and generally reminding myself of my expectations and goals were all good ideas.
****-----***-----****
‘I think my Mom was hoping you were here to fuck her,’ Aidra texted me, along with a crying laughing emoji.
I snorted and coughed, then pocketed my phone. The meeting with Ramona had gone well, and I’d ended up leaving Annalise and Tina there because the older Witch had been shocked by their individual stories and had gone all matronly on them. In the end, we’d decided that Lauren and Aidra would also stay back while I approached the Old Blood alone. There was something to be said about bringing my own squad, especially if I was meeting with a council of experienced mages, even just to have extra eyes and ears, but Ramona had pointed out that I was a Seat - showing up with more Mages could be seen as a threat, or weakness, or like I saw them as a threat.
So, unless Ramona was trying to stab me in the back, which I really didn’t think was the case after the way we had sex and how she knew it would turn her daughter against her, I was flying solo.
Angie had Victorious back for the week, so I decided that I would teleportal from Ramona’s to a nearby cafe downtown in the city and walk over to the building that Ramona said the Old Blood was based out of. As I shlepped my way down the slushy, dirty streets of the city, I knew I probably looked… unassuming would have been a nice way of putting it. I looked like a teenager of no particular wealth, skill or status. If a random person even paused to look twice at me, they would probably assume I was heading to a menial service job or something.
In some ways, that was a little embarrassing. It was one of the things that made everything between me and Moira a little awkward, and Tina had pointed it out as well - living like I was still a regular ass guy, let alone an eighteen-year-old, made the rest of my life a little harder.
But, today, it was also something that I was going to use to my advantage. First impressions might matter, but lasting impressions mattered more, and at the end of the day, I had to remember that I didn’t need to impress the Old Blood.
They had to impress me.
I wanted them to. I wanted - fuck, I needed to understand them, have good relations with them, and hopefully be able to trust the various magical groups and organisations all over my territory. That was what meet-and-greets like this were all about.
But everyone was in agreement on my team. I didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. That was going to be tough for me to really live out and embody, but it was true. I just needed to believe it as much as they did.
The Old Blood building was right in the middle of the cluster of skyscrapers in downtown - we could probably even see a sliver of the domed top from the Penthouse. It was the sort of looming edifice that wanted to look important. The builders had faced it with a dark blue-black stone and tall, skinny windows that had a gothic, almost cathedral sort of feel to them. Standing in front of the building, I looked way up to the top, and to the sky above. No spells were worked into the exterior of the building as far as I could tell, and there weren’t any Ascended in view standing guard. There was a flow of magic up higher in the building, somewhere near the top - enough that I could see it like a faint fluster of snowy wind from this distance, circling the building.
That was interesting.
I put my hands in my coat pocket and approached the front spinning doors, using my shoulder to get it moving and then stepping into the lobby. They had the heat on, and my coat immediately felt like too much. It was a big lobby with more of that blue-black stone, and deep red carpets that looked like they must have been a pain to keep clean during the winter, but were somehow spotless without a hint of magic on them. I crossed over one of them, past a couple of decorative tables, to a small security stand next to a swipe-through gate that led to the elevators.
“Hi,” I said to the female security guard who was currently looking down at something behind the counter.
“You can leave the delivery here,” she said without looking up. “What’s the name?”
“Sorry, I’m not delivering food,” I said.
“Same with packages,” she grunted. The woman looked like she might have been in her late forties, with blonde hair in a ponytail that was turning silver, and was wearing a black sweater over a navy collared shirt. The only thing that really told me she was a security guard and not a secretary was the radio earpiece she had in one ear.
“I’m not here delivering anything,” I said. “I’m here for a meeting.”
Now she did look up, frowning even harder than she had been before as she eyed me up and down. “Who do you have an appointment with?” she asked.
I smiled, trying to be friendly despite the bluntness she was throwing at me. She wasn’t an Ascended, so she had no reason to recognise me or know who I was. That didn’t mean she should be rude, but I kind of understood it. “The ownership group of the building,” I said. “I believe at least one of them should be upstairs.”
Her frown didn’t move, but her eyebrow did as she raised it and snorted softly. “Kid, fuck off,” she said.
I pursed my lips and raised an eyebrow right back. “You’ll want to call someone up there and tell them that Jeremiah is here to see them.”
Maybe it was my confidence, maybe it was the absurdity of it, or maybe she’d seen just as many movies and shows as I had, where the unassuming long-lost heir who owned the business showed up, and a security guard was embarrassed by not knowing who they were. Whichever it was, she scoffed slightly but reached over and picked up a phone receiver from behind the desk, thumbing a button on it. Someone answered after a couple of rings. “I have someone down here who says they need to meet with a member of the Board without an appointment. Right, yes, here at the front desk. Mhmm… Yeah, he did… Oh. Okay. Alright. OK.”
She hung up the phone and swallowed before looking up to me. “Um. The Board will make some arrangements to see you, Mr Grant. Their secretary has asked for you to meet her on the 20th floor.”
“Thank you,” I said, flashing her a smile that I wasn’t really feeling, and then heading to the turnstile. She buzzed me through it, and I headed to the elevators, but she followed me and swiped a card next to the Call button, then tapped it on the inside before she pressed the button for the 20th Floor for me.
I wondered if this upstairs secretary had checked some security cameras or something, or if she’d been told to keep an ear out for my name. She would have passed my last name to the security guard for the lady to call me Mr Grant, so now I was sure that the Old Blood at least knew that I was in the building.
The elevator doors opened at the 20th Floor, revealing a white tiled entry alcove, completely lacking any other decoration, that led to what seemed to be some sort of office floor, all glass cubicles and computers. It was empty, though, since this was after regular business hours. The reception desk separating the elevator bay from the rest of the floor was also empty.
I walked up to the desk, pursing my lips slightly as I looked to my left and right. Most of the lights on the floor were off. Nodding softly, I cracked a little smirk and stood with my hands in my pockets. There wasn’t any magic around here, either.
Almost five minutes later, rapid clacking footsteps started to sound nearby, and a flustered-looking woman in a pantsuit came out of what must have been the stairwell a little farther down to my left. She was tall and lean, probably of Indian or another South Asian descent, with silver rimmed glasses and her long black hair back in a severely tight braid. I also had a feeling she wasn’t one of the Old Blood, even though she was an Ascended, because she had to be younger than thirty.
“Lord Jeremiah,” she said, swallowing hard and forcing a smile. “I am so sorry that I wasn’t here to greet you. Some of the Board don’t allow communication devices in their studies, and I had to inform them of your arrival in person.”
“That’s fine,” I said, smiling to try and help put her at ease. “I didn’t have an appointment.”
“Yes,” she said. “Right. Not that you need one.”
“No, not that I do,” I said.
“The Old Blood requests that you, ah, wait down here until they can prepare properly for your, um, audience.” She gestured over to a trio of chairs off to one side of the reception desk, and she had the good graces to look a little mortified. The chairs looked decently comfortable, at least, but they weren’t exactly nice.
“I understand,” I assured her.
“Can I offer you a refreshment?” she asked. “I- I can fetch something from upstairs. Anything.”
“No, I’m fine, thanks,” I said. “I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“I have no name, Lord Jeremiah,” she said.
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“I haven’t earned my name, Lord,” she said. “In the Old Blood. It’s a tradition of the society.”
“Right,” I said, narrowing my eyes a little. “But… people have to call you something.”
She shook her head, a blush creeping up her slender neck. “All servants of the Old Blood are nameless.
I sighed softly. “That can’t be practical. At all.”
“It can be… frustrating,” she admitted.
“What about the non-Ascended employees in the building?” I asked. “The security guards downstairs? Your government ID?”
“I, um…” she said, clearly torn between the reality of the situation, the fact that it was me asking, and whatever promises she’d made to this society. “Farida, Lord Jeremiah. The name I am known by outside of the society is Farida.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Farida. I’m happy to give the folks upstairs a chance to tidy up and get ready, since I didn’t call ahead. I just have one more question for you.”
“Yes, Lord Jeremiah?” she asked, and then swallowed hard as she looked me up and down quickly in the same way that members of Other Anna’s staff had looked when I visited their offices. Like I was going to demand something from her that would be so wrong to demand.
“Are you aware that you have… three spells currently lingering on you?” I asked. I’d seen them pretty much immediately, but none of them looked the same as the Memory Virus that had been cropping up at school and with Tina, Grace and Ned, so I hadn’t immediately jumped to conclusions.
“I- Three?” she asked. “One of the Old Blood placed a binding on me as part of my oath to the society, but…”
“I can look closer,” I offered. “Try to see what they’re doing.”
She hesitated for a long moment, licking her lips once nervously. “No,” she decided. “No, I am prepared to handle whatever magic the Old Blood has decided to bless me with.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, not really believing her. “OK. Well, I guess… I’ll wait here, then?”
“Please,” she nodded once.
I sat down to wait, and she went behind the reception desk and started to try and look busy. I couldn’t tell from my angle if she was actually working or not, but she at least put on a good show.
After twenty minutes of waiting, every second of which I could count because of the analogue clock discreetly hung high on the wall of one office in view like a clock in a classroom, I took out my phone.
‘They are either doing an ‘It’s the Feds, burn everything!’ or testing to see what I’ll do if they keep me waiting,’ I texted my group chat with the harem.
Several of the girls texted their annoyance or displeasure at that, and Stacey told me to be patient. Annalise, texting for the braintrust back at Ramona’s, cautioned patience as well, but not to take any shit.
Farida ran out of gas on pretending to be busy after about an hour, and I got the feeling she was just scrolling social media.
At an hour and a half, she sat up abruptly, focused on the computer for a long moment, and then that flush crept back up her neck.
“Lord Jeremiah,” she said, turning to look at me nervously. “Can I offer you any refreshments now?”
“No, thank you, Farida,” I said, determined to win this little game of wills. They wanted to keep me waiting? At some point that had already passed, it went from them making a power move to them looking silly. Now it was just a question of how deep they let silly slide into insulting.
“Can I offer you a blowjob, then?” she asked. “Or any other sexual service you might be pleased to gift me with?”
I sighed. This again. “Do you actually want to have any sort of sex with me, Farida, or does someone think that it’s appropriate to offer your consent for you?”
“I-” she said. “Ah. I am sure I would consider it a blessing if you… if we…”
“Mhmm,” I hummed softly. “That’s alright, Farida. I only have sex with women who actually want to have sex with me. You’re off the hook.”
“Th- Yes, Lord Jeremiah,” she nodded, looking both relieved and embarrassed.
At two hours, the poor woman looked mortified as she cleared her throat and turned toward me again. “Lord Jeremiah,” she said. “The Old Blood offers their apologies for keeping you waiting, and offers you my service for as long as you might require my body.”
“Fuck,” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “I don’t know about you, Farida, but I’m kind of grossed out by that. You know they’re offering that I could take you with me, use you like a toy, or knock you up if I want, right?”
“I’m… aware, Lord Jeremiah,” she said after swallowing hard.
“If I were you, I’d consider a change in path,” I grimaced. “Find a boss who has, I don’t know, any amount of respect for you?”
She just smiled flatly and turned back to her computer screen like she was afraid to answer me.
At three long, agonising hours, Farida sighed in relief as she stood up. “Lord Jeremiah,” she said. “The Old Blood is ready to receive you. If you’ll follow me, please?”
“Great,” I said, standing and letting her slip by me as we headed for the elevators. She had to swipe an ID card like the security guard downstairs, and as we waited for the elevator to show up, I cleared my throat and leaned sideways towards her just a little, dropping my voice to a conspiratorial level. “FYI, just shoot my Judgment email address a note if you ever want me to take a look at those spells on you. No favours or sacrifices necessary.”
“... Thank you,” she murmured back quietly, and her tone said she was seriously considering it.
When I entered, she tapped the badge just like downstairs, then keyed me up to the 26th Floor.
“It was… interesting to meet you, Lord Jeremiah,” she said as she stepped back out of the elevator, keeping a hand on the door to hold it open for a moment. “Thank you.”
“Nice to meet you, too, Farida,” I said and winked.
The ride up didn’t take very long, and when the elevator doors opened again, another secretary was waiting for me. Of a sort.
“Good evening, Lord Jeremiah,” the naked, curvy woman said with a warm smile. “I serve the Old Blood, taking care of their every physical need. Can I offer you a massage, perhaps? Or a haircut, manicure and pedicure? A dinner, considering the time? Perhaps a sexual experience?"
I had to swallow hard for a moment because, while Farida had been pretty in a studious, nervous academic sort of way, this nameless woman was all gas, no brakes when it came to sexuality. She was a tall blonde with wide hips, a narrow waist and broad shoulders to support the absolute rack on her. Her hair was a beautiful golden hue cut to about jaw length with wavy curls, her pubes were a neat little wedge of slightly darker hair, and she had runic tattoos up and down her arms and legs that were glowing with contained magical potential under my Detect-o-vision.
She also looked like she’d oiled herself up, her sun-kissed skin shimmering slightly under the warm overhead lighting, her nipples engorged and stiff. And the look on her face said she was entirely serious and not nervous at all about offering herself to me.
“That’s very kind of you to offer,” I said, exiting the elevator and looking around. This floor looked like some sort of a spa, though again, it was practically empty except for the Ascended woman who had just met me. “But I’m fine, thank you.”
“I’ve been trained in some very recuperative massage styles,” she offered. “I wouldn’t hesitate to suggest that my skills might be some of the best in the world.”
“That sounds interesting,” I said, resisting the urge to add a sarcastic ‘honey’ at the end of it. “But I’m totally fine.”
She had spells on her as well, beneath the runic tattoos. Two of them were the same as Farida, focused mostly on the brain and spine, but this lady had more in her core.
“Well, that’s unfortunate,” she said, cocking her head and sighing softly. “I-”
I slammed the shield into place as her fingers just started to twitch, and the naked beauty dropped to her knees and howled as she was separated from her magic for the first time in her life. Three times I’d done this, now, and each time I had to wonder at the reaction Ascended had to that, and how the other Seats had reacted to the fact that I did it. It had to be some sort of psychological thing, because nothing I did was physical.
“I’m sorry,” she managed to howl, crawling the couple of steps across the lush spa carpet, her oily body probably staining the fibres. She reached out pleadingly to my shoes. “I’m sorry, Lord. Forgive me!”
I squatted down, grimacing at the display she was making of herself.
“What’s your name?” I asked her, catching her hand. The shielding spell had shut off the connection of her tattoos to the Unreal as well, along with the spells inside her - all of them were dormant until I released the shield. “Your government name.”
“Meredith,” she gasped, and then moaned pitifully.
“Alright, Meredith,” I said. “What did they ask you to do?”
She moaned again, painfully, and writhed for a moment before twitching once like she had made a realisation. Then she gasped hard. “They wanted me to test you, Lord Jeremiah,” she said, more clearly than before. “With my Kineticism. I’m a master of dozens of fighting styles thanks to my magic, and the tattoos Lady Charlotte bl- cast on me gave me strength, speed and resistance to injury. They wanted me to lure you into a sense of complacency and then strike. I- My name is Meredith O’Hennessy. I made a mistake and swore myself to them almost a decade ago, and they haven’t let me leave since. Please, I’ll do anything. Help me.”
If her words hadn’t gotten me, the pleading look in her eyes did, like hooks into my guts.
But something was… off.
“Fuck,” I sighed.
“Please, Lord,” she begged, clutching my hand with hers, still prostrated out on the carpet. “Please.”
I cast my Truth spell, limited to just us. “You want me to sever your ties to the Old Blood?” I asked her. “Forever?”
That last bit of emphasis was important.
“I-” she said, and stammered it a couple more times. “Yes.”
Lie.
It was a double play.
“Yes, please, Lord,” she begged. “Sever their hold. Take me out of here. I’ll serve you faithfully. Anything you desire. Anything is better than this.”
Well, now she was just overselling it, or she lacked imagination.
I slipped my hand from her clutching grasp and stood up. “Sorry, Meredith,” I said. “But I can tell when someone is lying. And you don’t want out. Not permanently.”
She looked up at me and sat up, mouth slightly agape, and then something must have snapped in her because she started blushing and moved to cover her considerable tits and her mound. “I- I’m sorry,” she said, dropping her eyes low. “Lord Jeremiah. I was meant to become a bodyguard for you. A trusted ally. The Old Blood wants to make sure that you are sufficiently protected, as our new overlord. They told me so directly, and I was happy to fulfil the duty.”
“Mm,” I grunted. “And, eventually, you were supposed to be welcome back. As part of their little council.”
She let out a breath, hesitating, reminding herself of what I’d just said. “Yes,” she admitted.
“And the whole attack plan was real,” I continued to guess. “But if it didn’t work, it was supposed to be a bluff.”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“And if I killed you instead of being more lenient?” I asked.
“It-” she said, but cut herself off.
“They thought the risk was worth it?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t.”
She shook her head. “All of our intelligence says that you would be more likely to incapacitate rather than kill. I chose to take the risk.”
“Mm,” I said, then shook my head. “Here, get up.” She took my offered hand, letting me help her to her feet, then continued to cover her privates. “Go get yourself dressed,” I told her. “And tell your bosses that I’m ready to meet with them. Now.”
“Yes, Lord,” she nodded, bowing slightly as she did it. She turned to walk away, but hesitated before she got too far - just long enough for me to see she had a pretty nice ass to go with her other physical blessings. “My, um, my magic, Lord…?”
I raised one eyebrow at her. “Not while I’m in the building, honey,” I said, no longer able to keep a mild pejorative from slipping out. “If you want it back, you’re gonna have to ask for a Judgment. You can email the hotline, and we’ll get to you when we get to you.”
She looked mildly horrified, but then hung her head. “I respect your authority, Lord Jeremiah,” she murmured. “I will, um, go ensure the Old Blood is ready to receive you.”
“Mhmm,” I said, not holding myself back from eyeing up that booty as she trudged away. She really was smokin’ hot. Whether Lauren and Angie put her on the Judgment schedule was going to be up to how apologetic she was.
The real question I was left with, as I waited near the elevator at the front of the spa, was whether these people thought I was a total imbecile or just naive.
I grunted softly, shaking my head. I was definitely starting to get fed up with this shit.
The elevator dinged behind me and opened, and Farida was inside. She looked concerned, particularly at the big smear of oily grossness on the carpet right in front of her. “Um, Lord Jeremiah?” she asked. “I- Um- They’re ready to see you now. In the Sanctum.”
Oh, that was cute. They had a Sanctum as well.
“Great,” I said, forcing a smile. “Let’s go.”
I joined the beleaguered secretary - and I did believe she actually was beleaguered, and a secretary - in the elevator, and she keyed us to the second-highest floor available, again needing to scan her ID on a card to gain access. Riding up the last few floors didn’t take long, but it was just enough time for me to calm my frustrations a bit as the crappy elevator music tried to lodge itself in my head.
We stepped out into a small room, the same size as the entry alcove back on the office floor, but instead of being finished in white tiles and soft tones, this place had been left with the raw blue and black stone of the building. At least, it looked that way, but I knew for sure that this building wasn’t built out of big bricks of the stuff like it tried to seem.
Skyscrapers were built out of steel girders and cement blocks. Anything fancy on the outside was just a facade. The same was true here.
And the magic confirmed it.
The blue-black sheets, meant to look like stone, were hiding runes underneath. The glow of them in my Detect-o-Vision wasn’t blocked by the facade floor or ceiling. I couldn’t read them, but I could see how they were directing magical energies, shaping them and causing them to flow sort of like a series of fans trying to direct a stream of air.
Some of the panels led to hollows that were necessary for the magic - if the walls were solid, the Real would have affected the Unreal too much. But because whoever had designed and built this place knew those walls were hollow and porous, they were that way for the flow of magic.
Or maybe I was pulling ideas out of my ass. Tough to say.
One end of the small chamber was dominated by a large pair of bronze doors, green oxidation smattered in the deep recesses of the relief depicting… I really wasn’t sure. It might have been a wheel, or a round table, or any number of other circular things. What I did know was that it was supposed to look old, but it wasn’t magical in the slightest.
Farida gave me a nervous look and led the way to the doors, and she raised one of a pair of bronze knockers and clunked it against the door a couple of times, the metallic clang loud in the small space.
The doors opened by themselves. As if by magic.
Oooh, spooky magic, I thought sarcastically. Then I reconsidered - in a world where the Ascended could all only really do one kind of magic each, having a door that opens by itself was still sort of a flex. Someone had to either figure out how to make it themselves, figure out how to do it in concert with one or more other Ascended, or was actively doing it at that moment.
Except I could tell it wasn’t magic, so it was just basic engineering. There was a motor either in the walls, or in the floor above or below, and someone had pushed a button.
“Enter and be welcome,” a booming voice intoned from the large chamber beyond.
Farida looked like she wanted to say ‘Good luck,’ to me, but then remembered who I was and just backed off, still blushing. I had to remind myself that she wanted to be here; she wasn’t someone I needed to try and rescue above and beyond the offer I’d already given her.
I stepped into the large circular chamber. It had to be three, maybe even four stories tall, all in the same blue-black ‘stone.’ It had the same Cathedral-like architecture, including a high, domed ceiling that was helping direct the trefoil-looking flow to the magical winds in the room. Runes were plastered all over the place, and only some of them were affecting the winds. While I didn’t understand them, or what they did, there was one thing I could do easily - follow the patterns. The floor, panelled in the same stone and forming concentric rings from the middle of the room and out, had a flow to it that directed towards a large central panel that was the focus of the entire space. Everything else magical in the room hinged on something there.
The walls of the room, at least at my floor level, were attempting to look solid. Ominous. Imposing. A floor and a half up, balconies backing into shadowy alcoves studded the room, nine in all, evenly spaced out so that to see one, I had to look away from the opposite half.
Five of them had magical lights illuminating them from below, showing five Ascended sitting on a variety of thrones.
“Lord Jeremiah Grant, Seat of Fertility, Lord-Sorcerer, be welcome to the High Sanctum of the Old Blood. We accept your request for an audience with great alacrity.”
The old man who spoke, the same deep voice that had called for me to enter, looked like he might have been ninety years old at the youngest. He was unhealthy in his skinniness, with a drooping white moustache that fluttered against his lips and what had likely once been a fine head of hair now reduced to a thin white comb-over. Where his appearance seemed frail and unkempt, however, he was impeccably dressed in a power suit that would have fit any movie about Wall Street bigwigs.
He spoke with a semblance of warmth. Like I should be thankful to be there, looking up at him and his four little friends. Two more men, one looking almost like an elderly muppet, he was so cartoonishly old, and the other slightly younger than the speaker, but obviously using Just For Men to keep his shoeshine-black hair. And two women, one who fit the description of ‘old crone’ to a tee, and the other, maybe in her early fifties, looking the most regal and least prone to senility as she sat with a grim expression.
I narrowed my eyes, slowly turning in a circle as they stared down at me in judgment.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked calmly. “Get your old, scrawny asses down here. Now.”
“Lord Jeremiah, this tower is the express territory of-” the Old Crone started to snap.
“Now,” I boomed, putting some magic into it, and my voice bounced up and through the chamber. I lowered that a touch, still holding onto the connection I had made to the Amplifier effect of the room. It wasn’t nearly as strong or refined as the one in my Sanctum, but touching it was easy and I knew that, whatever works these old assholes had been accomplishing, they’d likely needed this to establish their dominance over the region. “Before I pull you down here with me.”
“We are not going to be spoken to in this way, Lord Jeremiah,” Shoe Polish Hair whined, his voice high and nasal.
I wrapped my mental hands around the block in the centre of the room, finding runes like handholds, and I twisted.
The middle blue-black panel spun in place and then rose, revealing an intricate, cylindrical web of brass and gems. It was older than the rest of the building, maybe even older than America. It was the heart of the Amplifier, and when I raised it, the flow of magic changed in the room; most of the runes in the walls, floor and ceiling went dull as they lost power, and everything began to sweep down, into and through the web sculpture.
“Deny me again and I take this with me,” I threatened, glaring at each of them.
It took an embarrassingly long time for the five of them to stand up from their thrones and make their way back into their alcoves. It would have been drastically faster if I’d connected to the magics flowing through the web sculpture and just lifted them down myself. The woman in her fifties was the first to leave, and the first to return through the same doors I had entered through, without a single change in her grimace. Next came Shoe Polish. Moustache was next, using some sort of a staff as a walking stick - it was magical, with an enchanted gem at the top of it that I would need to keep an eye on. The old Crone and the muppet-looking motherfucker were last, each one needing a silent, white-robed assistant to help them in using wheelchairs.
The thing that stood out about all of them was that they were each wearing a boatload of runic tattoos under their clothes.
“Well, Lord-Sorcerer,” Shoe Polish said once the two wheelchairs had their brakes deployed and the assistants had withdrawn. “You’ve insulted and threatened us in our own Sanctum when we granted you an audience. What now?”
I thought I heard a soft, annoyed sigh from the direction of the youngest woman.
“The five of you decided to test my patience,” I said evenly. “Then my intelligence, and my power. And then you decided to test my civility. I came here hoping for a simple, friendly hello, and to assure you that my popping up in your backyard wasn’t some planned disruption to whatever you had going on. Key words being simple and friendly.”
“We weren’t testing you, we were simply not ready for-”
“Maybe you fucks didn’t get a chance to debrief your servant,” I cut off Moustache. “But I will explicitly know when you’re lying.”
All five of them glanced at each other uncomfortably.
“If we’ve been rude in our welcome, Lord Jeremiah,” the woman in her fifties finally spoke up for the first time. “I would like to offer the sincere apologies of our entire society.” Focusing on her, I could see that of the five of them, she had the most intricate level of tattooing across her body - so much so that I could almost see her nude outline glowing through her dress.
“If?” I asked. “If?”
“We’ve been rude,” she corrected herself, nodding deferentially. “My apologies.”
“We have nothing to apologise for,” the muppet grumbled from his wheelchair. “We are the pre-eminent power in the region. Always have been. I don’t see why-”
“Do shut up, Wallace,” Shoe Polish said tightly.
I shook my head slowly. They’d stylised their ‘society’ after the Circle of Threes, that much was clear. Nine thrones was a dead giveaway. And threes were supposed to be a number of power, so three sets of three, and so on.
“Did any of you ever meet Ezekiel?” I asked them.
They all looked uneasily around at each other.
“I’ll take that as a no,” I said. “I’ve heard varying reports about him. I’ve even read a letter he left for me. But one thing I’m fairly certain of is that Ezekiel was… old school in how he managed his territory. Hands off, for the most part. I’d been trying to reconcile that with what felt smart to me, but now I can see that, whatever stabilisation he felt it gave, or whatever ease he got from not being hands-on, it left some really shitty situations in his wake. And you five have done a great job of convincing me that things need to change. You’re so curmudgeonly, so power greedy, that you didn’t even replace empty spots in your own ranks.”
“There are no empty spots,” Moustache said. “The other members of our society are simply… elsewhere at the moment.”
“By elsewhere, do you mean not on this mortal coil?” I asked.
He glared at me, not wanting to lie, but not wanting to admit he’d been trying to lie and had failed.
“Which one of you is the leader?” I asked.
“We have no leader, Lord Jeremiah,” the woman in her fifties answered. “By our creed, we are all equal.”
I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose for a moment. “Which one of you has the biggest ego and likes to think they’re in charge?”
They all glanced at Moustache, which wasn’t too surprising. He scowled at the younger woman, showing me he thought she was an upstart.
“Right,” I said. “Here’s hoping you don’t have a heart attack.”
As gently as I could, I slid the shield into place.
He collapsed, moaning in horror, and then blubbering.
“What have you done?” the Old Crone demanded. “Horace, what has he done?”
Horace, aka Moustache, just clung to his staff as he sat on the floor, looking like he was trying to make it work and do something, but failing. The staff was still magical, so he probably needed his own magic to make it work.
“A year and a day,” I said, pointing at the old man. “That’s how long you’ll pay for insulting and attacking your Seat.”
“Horace,” the Muppet demanded. “What has he done to you?”
“It’s gone,” the old man moaned. “It’s gone. Where has it gone?”
Shit, I thought. I really hoped I hadn’t just turned the man senile or given him dementia or something.
“Now,” I said, pushing on, and pointed at the woman in her fifties. “You. Where’s your archive? And don’t try to fucking tell me you don’t have one because you call it something else.”
“A floor down, Lord-Sorcerer,” she answered me promptly.
“Good, you’ll bring me there,” I said, then I glared at the rest of the old curmudgeons. “Whatever sort of power you thought you were, remember this. Today, you met a young man, still fresh to his power, who bitch slapped one of the best of you without even trying. If you try even my patience again, I will take everything you value most from you. Do you understand?”
I only got a couple of mutters in response.
“Do you understand?” I demanded, letting just a drop of magic enter my voice.
“Yes, Lord-Sorcerer,” they all intoned firmly, but glumly.
“Good,” I growled, then focused on my guide. “Lead on.”
****-----***-----****
“I’m not stealing them,” I said from the middle of the pile of books, scrolls and stone slabs. “You’ll get them back. I’m not even planning on studying them all, I just need to collate what they are and where I can find them if I do need them, and then I’ll return them unharmed.”
“Yes, Lord Jeremiah,” Charlotte nodded. The youngest member of the Old Blood high council had been very particular in how she addressed me and hadn’t dropped her grimace or her posture.
“The relics… well, I make no promises,” I sighed. “But that’s the cost of trying to send someone to seduce and attack me.”
“Yes, Lord Jeremiah.” That same grimace. I couldn’t tell if she regretted that they’d done it or that they’d gotten caught.
She called herself a Scryptist, and her magic was specifically attuned to the ability to scribe magical runes with greater power, accuracy and precision than other Ascended, and she had an affinity for learning runic languages. I had no doubt that most of the work in their Sanctum, and on her body and those of her compatriots, was hers. If things had been different, I might have even thought she would be a great resource to connect with Esmerelda - I had no idea how popular ‘scryptists’ were in Ascended powers, but considering the unknown runic language the Stone Sword was covered in, Charlotte might have been useful.
If she wasn’t a grimacing, begrudging sourpuss that I’d just had to put in her place, along with the rest of her little gang of senile mages.
“Horace will be fine eventually,” I said, feeling a little bad about how we’d left the old man. I’d had to relieve him of his staff, since it was a relic. Hopefully, it wasn’t something I felt like needed to be confiscated, and I could return it in the first wave of stuff. I winced, though, considering that Charlotte had informed me several of the runic tattoos on her and her compatriots were to battle health issues. “Probably.”
“Yes, Lord Jeremiah,” she said, still grimacing.
“Right,” I sighed. “Well… let’s hope next time goes more smoothly, hmm?”
“Yes, Lord Jeremiah.”
I shook my head and focused on the large circle I’d drawn in the middle of their archive, both it and the three separate ‘secret archives’ I’d demanded to see now emptied out into it. With the web Amplifier sculpture above us, it wasn’t hard to reach up to it and grab the magic it was filtering, using that to fuel a much more complicated teleportation than I usually did.
Me, the tomes, and the relics, all pivoted within the circle, rolling out of the Real, phasing briefly into the Unreal, and then rolling back into the Real.
In my Sanctum, in my Amplifier.
A few pages ruffled, like a breeze had blown through, and a wand made out of some sort of bone rolled from where it had been leaning and clattered to the floor.
“Cool,” I said to the empty, but familiar, chamber.
Then I extricated myself from the ring of stuff and headed for the teleportal door. Dealing with all of that was going to be a job for another day; right now, I had a fire and a water mage who needed to be brought back home, and a witch who needed fucking.
The fact that I wasn’t sure whether that witch would be Ramona or Aidra was a bit concerning for keeping my ego under control, but I was on a trip already that day, so I let it go. The least I could do for either of them for being on my team and not being weird about who I was, was give them exactly what they wanted.