Eterna and Omega

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  The forthcoming display began with a low, long, deep horn blast. Looking down toward Waterloo Bridge, Clara could see nothing in detail, just the suggestion of a crowd moving in their direction.

  At length, the extensive procession was close enough to be seen from those on the obelisk: ensigns and standards—family crests, but none from prominent London gentry. The banners were carried by dim-looking men, women, and children who didn’t look fully awake. They were either drugged or possessed—perhaps both.

  “Odd … I don’t know any of those families,” Lord Black stated.

  A bright glow alerted Clara to the next phase of the display. “Oh no…” she said ruefully.

  “What do you see?” Spire asked.

  “Coming up to the crossing at Waterloo Bridge. Likely a host of ghosts,” Clara replied. The two men squinted.

  “I don’t see anything,” Black commented.

  “Even my own spectral sight is limited and changes depending on circumstance. It is never consistent. However, that which is coming closer is an unmistakable horde of spirits,” Clara explained.

  “Will the crowds see the ghosts?” Spire asked.

  “Some may, most will not,” Rose replied. “This may be the same sort of display Clara and I saw in New York, on a far larger scale,” she said. “And even there, while I doubted the populace all saw the ghosts, everyone was affected, especially as the ghosts were tied to dead bodies. That’s what we can’t see from here. It’s the bodies that are the worst of it … But that’s likely where the electricity will come in.”

  Black rummaged in a canvas bag, withdrew a wooden box, and lifted the lid. Inside was a sparking coil with a small buzz emanating from it. He shut it again promptly.

  “Dreadful,” Lord Black murmured, holding the box and watching as the next section of the procession came within a few hundred meters. “I don’t see forms exactly, but there is a ghostly glow in tow, I am seeing a change in the light. A thought struck him and his eyes lit. “I wonder if this will lure out our most elusive department!”

  At this, Rose and Spire sighed in tandem.

  “There is, supposedly, a department that specializes in specters,” Rose explained, seeing Clara’s bafflement, “but we’ve found no actual evidence of them, just stories of a small band of men and women charged with spectral policing…”

  “Like that small band of men and women there?” Clara asked, pointing toward Parliament. “They are mitigating some spirit onlookers. I can see them doing so.”

  “By God, that’s them! Oh, look, Spire! I’ve got to meet them!” Lord Black could not contain himself. He set the box aside, dashing down from his post in a few gangly leaps and headed toward the long-rumored “hidden department.”

  “Lord Black, this isn’t the time for—” Spire barked, then growled in irritation at being ignored. He turned to Rose. “I’ll only be a moment. I can’t let him get lost in this fray, I’ll bring him right back.” He darted after the nobleman.

  * * *

  The Guard had felt the pull toward the governmental heart of the city in unison during a shared pint or two at their favorite Bloomsbury pub. As a result, they came upon the parade from the direction of Westminster and positioned themselves at Westminster Bridge, among a battery of Metropolitan Police. The police were milling about in nervous efforts to keep the public from going past them.

  The mouth of Westminster Bridge held a particular power for this group of six men and women: It was where they had first met, youngsters drawn to the heart of the city and to their collective fate. They always stood a little taller and more sure of themselves on Westminster.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we ask you to stay on the east side of this blockade; no one is allowed to watch the event from the Parliament side,” said a uniformed young man, approaching The Guard.

  The lean, ostentatiously dressed man with flaxen hair, Lord Withersby, stepped forward and with a wave of his hand shooed off the officer, who wandered away, dazed. The six men and women moved undeterred toward the throng of bystanders.

  “Do any of those families mean anything to you, Rebecca?” Alexi, mounted on a black stallion, asked the tall, severe-looking woman walking alongside. She now and then patted the stallion’s muzzle if he began huffing about having to plod along instead of keeping his usual speedy gallop.

  “Not a whit,” the headmistress replied. “To be fair, I don’t know my heraldry very well, I haven’t needed to at the Academy, but as far as I can tell, those crests are of lines long deceased or decried.”

  “Odd, but of little matter to us,” the vicar said, standing at her side, a jovial-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair and a cleric’s collar.

  “Ah. But that is…” Alexi said, squinting ahead.

  The raven familiar that followed them on their rounds was again circling their number from above, and at the sight of the oncoming light he gave up quite a cry.

  Behind the heraldic pennants was a long stretch of metal carts, upon which bodies lay, with an odd gossamer glimmering around their forms. The Guard, watching, hoped that the stillness of the bodies was that of sleep rather than death. As the march drew closer, they could see that glitter was a vast network of wires. The filaments were connected to several taller carts that carried lines of turbines being hand-cranked by bent-shouldered laborers.

  On either side of these supine forms floated a retinue of specters. Most of their transparent faces looked ashamed or horrified. Some seemed to be trying desperately to pull away from the procession.

  “Damnable parades,” Alexi muttered, glowering. His onyx stallion stamped, apparently echoing his sentiment. “Always kicking up spectral dust, inciting the ghostly rabble all over the city…” As he spoke, an ethereal blue fire, an offset of bright light against all his black layers, leaped into his hand as if summoned from above to land in his palm.

  “What’s all this for?” asked the Irish healer.

  “By the look of it, it seems something to have to do with electricity,” the Frenchwoman stated. “Look at those wagons.”

  “Anything for a stunt and a chance to make money,” Alexi grumbled.

  They heard a sudden, angry shout. “No, this cannot be,” came an anguished voice. “This will. Not. Be!” shrieked someone in the crowd.

  A small man with mousy hair that stood up around his head like a static-ridden halo, whose eyes were wild with light that seemed sparked from within, dashed out of the shadows. He ran right into the procession, nearly floated as it seemed his small feet barely touched the ground between two of the turbine wagons. Several burly guards on either side of the conveyances lunged toward him, only to be repelled when they got within a foot of him. There was a resounding smack like the crack of a whip and a fire started on one of the men’s coats.

  The Guard as a whole stopped and stared.

  The turbines on each cart crackled with spun lightning. At first onlookers made noises of amazement and appreciation, but when the whine of the engines grew loud and shrill, when the collective hairs of the entire crowd rose into the air, they began to murmur in fear.

  “No. More!” the young man shouted and flung his arms wide.

  The sky was filled with a sudden arc of lightning, and everything that had been glowing went dark. Frederic the raven dove towards his mistress as silvery light threaded out in all directions. She held out her gloved forearm for him and once landed, seemed all too happy to tuck in against her.

  The processional bodies shuddered violently on their platforms, then stilled. The turbines smoked, their belts and rotors turned to veritable dust. Smoke lifted into the air from singed clothes, from flesh and the rigging of the corpses.

  In the stillness, The Guard looked for the strange young man, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “That’s why we can’t trust electricity,” Alexi stated with satisfaction.

  “But look,” Withersby countered, “it rather did our job for us. Look. The ghosts are gone. They vanished with that surging strike.”


  “And people are left injured,” said the Irishwoman, her hand lit with a soft white light of a powerful healer. “Let me go—”

  “Not our purview, Jane,” Alexi said softly. “I’m sorry, but we can’t interfere further.”

  The healer folded her arms angrily.

  “Come, let’s course farther down the parade route and make sure all has been put suitably to rest,” the leader said, spurring his horse onward, faster now that the procession had stopped.

  The headmistress turned to gather the others and follow, only to find Withersby toying with a couple of men who had stepped toward them out of the crowd. Two familiar faces, governmental operatives, the ones who had been in such trouble so recently.

  “Lord Withersby, you stop that right now,” she said as the nobleman made a man they knew to be Harold Spire raise his hands in the air and wave them about; Lord Black was frozen in place beside him, mouth open.

  “Look, Rebecca, it’s the government officials we saw held prisoner the other day! Hallo, old friends!” Withersby said, as if this assessment somehow justified his making the shorter of the two into a marionette.

  “All the more reason not to muck about with them, Elijah,” scolded the vicar.

  “None of you have any sense of humor,” Withersby pouted. “Very well, then. On your way.” The snide, lean man wiped a hand over the faces of both men before him and darted off to catch up with his team, which had begun moving up the street, searching for ghostly residue.

  They had not gone far when the quality of the day’s light began to change, as if a bright dawn was coming toward them at breakneck speed and from all directions at once.…

  * * *

  Clara had been spared a seizure thanks to Mosley’s arcs of lightning cutting the ghosts free from the dead bodies before she was overcome, and the tether of Rose’s hand helped her stay cogent. She gasped anew from her vantage point at the speeding, brightening aurora ahead.…

  As the wondrous light expanded and began to become more detailed, she noticed that the oncoming cloud was in fact individual spirits. But they were so bright, colorful, even. Brighter than the grayscale she’d grown accustomed to in Louis.

  The luminous mob descended and swarmed toward the head of the parade, toward all the dull, dim-looking people carrying the antiquated crests. As the iridescent human forms reached those sleepwalking bodies, an odd separation began to happen. Something dark and cloudy peeled out and down from the bodies, slinking off onto the Embankment stones as if tar or oil were sliding off them onto the street to vanish or dissipating like smoke. The bright forms slid into the bodies as if putting on clothes.

  “My God,” Rose murmured.

  “Evelyn must be successful, right at this moment,” Clara gasped. “These are living souls reunited with bodies! The paintings must have been destroyed and the souls are returning to find their rightful homes. That’s why all the forms aren’t the grayscale color like my poor Louis … Oh, blessed, dear Evelyn…”

  One by one, bright soul light snapped into place, like magnets connecting, and once whole again, each body began convulsing, doubling over, but after coughing or retching they came to, disoriented, and looking around for something familiar in an unfamiliar scenario.

  For the most part, the souls found their bodies and began helping one another up. The Metropolitan officers, seeing them now to be persons in need of aid rather than a potential threatening mob, stepped in and began getting people to their feet, and a few families of dispossessed actually reunited, which allowed a few more bodies to regroup.

  Clara and Rose, their own souls having already been reunited, stared with tears streaming down their faces at this moving display.

  * * *

  Rebecca explained to her important coterie what must be occurring, turning to Alexi. “My God, these are living souls and living bodies reuniting. They’ve been possessed, all of them, look at the pitch-black shadows oozing away. What kind of rite has gone on here on such a scale to have created this massive display?”

  “Human interference like we’ve never seen,” the imperious leader replied. “Our Pull didn’t activate, meaning this was wholly human doing, not ghostly. There is no spirit here that wants to misbehave. They all want to stay alive in their rightful bodies and find their respective peace,” Alexi stated.

  His group nodded, feeling the truth of it in their interconnected hearts and the spiritual barometer that was their unique power. They watched in awe as egregious mortal wrong righted itself, soul by soul.

  But there was one lost girl, small and slight, her body crumpled up to the side of the crowd near an Embankment parapet that shielded her from view of most of the crowd, but her soul was bobbing about, lost and confused.

  Jane, the healer, broke free from the throng, and despite Alexi trying to keep her from interfering, she rushed forward to grab the unconscious body and placed the limp form across her lap. Lifting her lit healing hand, she slammed a jolt right onto the girl’s heart. She stared up at the spirit separated from its body that seemed too confused to return and held out her other hand, reaching for the hem of the golden, transparent dress of the girl, even though her fingertips wafted right through the soul.

  Jane turned her attention back to the corporeal body and bid it come back to itself with another jolt to the heart. The soul of the girl whipped her head around at last, as if seeing herself for the first time, and dove back into her body in a shimmering shudder of light. The girl convulsed once, coughed, and in a panic stumbled to her feet, leaning on Jane with a soft thank-you before turning to see her weeping mother, who flung herself into an embrace with her revived child.

  The Guard beamed at their healer as she returned.

  “All right then, now we can go,” Jane murmured, shy as ever, but with a pleased, proud grin on her face that was exemplary of the reason they heeded their difficult calling day in, day out, entirely unknown and unappreciated by anyone but the forces that summoned them from ancient times.

  * * *

  After a long moment, Spire and Black shook their heads, as if fending off drowsiness.

  “Mr. Spire,” Black said slowly, “why are we across the street from our station?”

  “I … I’m not sure, milord. What were we even on about?” Spire asked.

  “I’ve no idea; perhaps some of that toxin got in our system. Let’s not waste a moment more. Do I seem myself?” Lord Black asked, smoothing his light hair back in place.

  “Yes. Do I?” Spire asked slowly.

  Black inspected him. “Are you … generally irritated at the world?”

  “Generally, yes, especially during parades,” Spire replied.

  “Do you think all our paranormal mumbo-jumbo is entirely that?”

  “Yes. Entirely.”

  “All right, then, you’re yourself,” Black assured with a dazed smile.

  “Where is our…” Spire looked around. He spotted the needle and the platform around it. “Ah, yes, that’s right…” They turned toward their post, then took advantage of a slight break in the procession to rush back to the assembled company.

  “Oh, thank God, there you are, we thought you must have gotten trapped by Mosley’s arcs of lightning!” Rose cried the moment Spire was within earshot below.

  “The what?” Black asked.

  “Did you see what happened with souls and bodies reuniting?” Clara exclaimed excitedly as Black climbed up to join them.

  “No … I…” Spire scratched his head, remaining below, scowling. “No.”

  “No matter, come.” Rose gestured to Spire. “We’re just about to signal the lighting of the Wards. There’s a lull, but we fear it’s the calm before the storm, hurry!”

  “I’m going to stay on the ground with the senator for his protection,” Spire stated. “Give me a shout from your view.”

  The finale approached.…

  What looked like nearly two hundred possessed bodies marched in rows surrounding a vast banner that bore the Mast
er’s Society crest—dragons eating themselves, rampant on red and gold. The red of the banner was too dark, likely blood in the paint. Clara assumed that Moriel, in whatever conveyance he had chosen, was behind that banner.

  The procession stopped, and the possessed ones all turned at once to face the assembled spectators. In the fading dusk and tallow gaslight of the Embankment’s lamps, the host of glimmering, tar-black inhuman eyes was enough to strain the resolve of any onlooker. The crowd, which had been stunned into silence by the electric display, began murmuring in refreshed fear.

  The dread march was truly something to behold, and Clara was sure she and everyone near her would never forget the sight for as long as they lived.

  From behind the banner, a phalanx of Summoned shadows poured into the air like ink in water. The crowd gasped, transfixed in horror at the sight of the roiling black cloud of vaguely humanoid forms. Coalesced malevolence floated toward them in the direction of Parliament’s eaves.

  There was another low, resounding note from an unseen instrument.

  “London, you are ours,” chorused the collected voices of the possessed.

  The banner dropped and Moriel was revealed in an ostentatious robe and crown, standing on a golden calash like the one the queen had used in her recent parade. Guards stood on his every side.

  “London, you are mine and I have come to collect your crown!” he cried, raising a dripping, blood-tipped sword in one hand. Clara surmised that fresh blood was needed in such dark rites as this, and enough of the guards wore bloodstains on their clothes that it could have come from any of them.

  “For all that is right and good, hold your light aloft!” Bishop cried from within the crowd, affecting a common British accent. Moriel seemed surprised—and indeed offended—by this interruption.

  “For London!” Black cried from atop their crow’s nest, setting his Ward alight with a lit match into the vial, a shimmering light bubbling up from its contents, holding it up as if he was the embodiment of Lady Liberty’s lamp, even though only the hand of that grand gift had been raised in Madison Square Park thus far. In this moment, Lord Black magnified just such a beacon of hope, and Clara’s heart swelled afresh.