Courts and Cabals 3

by G. S. D'Moore

  Butters froze as she sucked in a breath, and looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t say anything, so I didn’t know if she was happy or pissed.

  “I’ve had this idea with glamour and crystals for a while now, and this is just a prototype. If you hate it, I totally understand. Its arrogant of me to think this is what you want. If you don’t like it, I’ll buy you a car. Just . . .” I didn’t get to finish.

  Butters threw her arms around me and squeezed. I was very glad I held onto the troll strength as she laughed and cried into my shoulder. She pulled away, her eyes glistening with joy, and kissed me with her new face.

  Butters was an awesome person. It was impossible to deny that. She was loyal, dependable, went the extra mile for people who didn’t deserve it; all that crap that made her a saint. The problem was her outside didn’t match her inside. Some god had fucked up the production process, and if I ever saw him, I was going to give him a piece of my mind. All I was trying to do was fix that, so I gave her a new face.

  I’m not gonna lie and say I didn’t put a little of what I liked in there. She looked a little like ScarJo mixed with Gina Carrano; feminine, but strong. I would never take away Butter’s strength, but her sorority sisters should probably start thinking of a new nickname; or start using her current one ironically. Butters was now as beautiful on the outside as on the inside.

  “I guess you like it,” I smiled when our lips parted. There was more than a little heat there I wanted to explore. Maybe another time.

  “I love it. I just . . .” she was at a loss for words.

  “You deserve it,” I finished for her. “I don’t know if it’ll run on human magic, but I tried to make the spell human friendly, if that’s even a thing. I packed enough power into it so it should be good for at least a year. If you can’t recharge it, give me a call. I’ll come out, boost it back to full power, and we can grab some coffee. I’d love to see what college life is really like.”

  “It’s a date,” she smiled, and then rushed out of the room to show her friends.

  Less than an hour later, I packed Skella and Butters into a car and sent them on their merry way. Who knows, I might never see them again; or, I might be getting my pole smoked by a gorgeous student athlete in twelve months. Only time would tell.

  “Right now, I’ve got other things to think about,” I told myself to nut up or shut up.

  I knew a lot more about myself than I had over Christmas. Lark had some explaining to do. I could throw down with Peter later. I wanted answers. The Fae had been holding out on me for too long. It was time to figure out what being an Aesir really meant.

  ***

  I took some deep breaths as I rode the elevator down to the subterranean levels. I needed to focus. Last time I’d asked Lark these questions, he’d blown me off. Sure, Fae had to take oath’s seriously, but they were famous for finding ways around them. He could have told me to check out a book, maybe steer me towards another person who knew my secret but wasn’t bound by magic. There were another half-dozen roundabout ways I could think of off the top of my head, so why hadn’t the satyr even tried.

  It hurt a bit. I thought Lark liked me. We’d gotten along well. He’d even helped with my glamour crystal idea. Although, that probably wasn’t for me. He’d taken the idea straight to Venus, and they were greenlighting some trials for commercial products. I’m sure the other Fae would shit a chicken when they learned the cabal was using their signature power for human espionage, non-invasive facial reconstruction, or even to make cool Halloween costumes. Even better, since it was my idea, I got a cut of the profits. Fifteen percent might not sound like much, but if this thing got as big as I thought it could, I should start looking at private islands to buy and diversify my asset portfolio.

  I had to thank Marcella for that bit. I had the foresight to ask her about the stipulations in my contract to make sure I got my due, but she deciphered all the legalese. Cha-Ching! The only downside was that the cabal was only obliged to pay me while I was still a member in good standing. Normally, that might be an issue if I was only going to serve out the term of my contract.

  “Who am I kidding at this point?” I thought.

  I had the Fae after me, the UN weren’t my biggest supporters, and the Tikals wanted to tie me up and peel my skin off one layer at a time. I wasn’t going anywhere, which just made my issue with Lark that much worse. I wanted to be able to trust him. He was my current representative on the board.

  A soft ding announced my arrival to the training area. It hadn’t changed much since the last time I was here. The gym equipment was new, courtesy of me demolishing it with my face a few months ago. It was a little eerie that none of it was in use. Like most soldiers, the imps were fanatical about working out. Sure, there were other gyms in the building, but this was the biggest. Feeling the complete silence of a room where people were usually grunting like rhinos in heat made my spidey senses tingle.

  Thankfully, Lark wasn’t lurking in a dark corner waiting to ambush me. He was in the middle of the open training floor, eyes closed, in some type of meditation. I’ve seen enough to know what a Lotus pose is, but it’s weird to see a six-foot goat in one. Lark was in full satyr mode, as he usually was with me. As one of the few even-close-to Fae in the building, he felt he could be himself around me.

  I moved quietly into the space; partially out of respect, and partially to see how close I could get before he noticed me. I didn’t get far before he opened his eyes and grinned. The grin was only part wicked.

  “Holy shit. Did Lark invent goat yoga?” I had the sudden inspiration as I stopped trying to stalk the powerful Fae. “He really is the devil if he visited such evil on the human race.”

  I smiled and Lark cocked an eyebrow. I waved it off and took a seat in front of him. “Honey, I’m home.” All of our interactions since I returned had been over some super, secret, encrypted video app the cabal used. This was the first time I was seeing him in the flesh.

  “I’m glad everything turned out okay,” he replied, uncrossing his legs out of the pose.

  I really wish he hadn’t. When Lark went Fae, he went full Fae; no clothes, no human social constraints, he just let it all hang out. Hairy dick and all.

  I didn’t let getting flashed deter me. “I wouldn’t exactly say everything is peachy if you get my drift,” I shot back.

  Lark just nodded. He knew I wasn’t exactly thrilled with him. Why would I be? I didn’t know what I was, people chased me, the cabal gave me up to protect their secrets, I got fingers up my ass, jerked off by the Masturbator 5000; and then a bunch of Fae kicked the shit out of me. What was there not to love?

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more forthcoming,” he looked like he was choosing his words carefully; which was so not Lark.

  “Is he scared of me?” I wondered.

  Secretly, the thought thrilled me. I’d been a few power levels below week-old horse shit. If the big bads of the cabal were now tiptoeing around me . . . hot damn, that was an ego boost.

  “Couldn’t or wouldn’t?” I applied more pressure, and the Fae looked away.

  “A little bit of both,” he didn’t meet my eyes.

  The Aesir dissected every word Lark said for lies. When I let Mr. Hyde come out and play, he was really good at spotting bullshit.

  “Why?” I asked. It was a simple question, but judging by Lark’s face, the answer was complicated.

  “First, I need to hear you say it. Tell me what you are.” Lark’s expression was deadly serious.

  I looked him right in the eye. “I’m Aesir.”

  The Fae shivered like he’d just done the ice bucket challenge. “Thank you,” he sat a little straighter, like a weight had been lifted from his furry shoulders. “I am free to speak to you about it now that I don’t have to reveal the truth of your origins.”

  “Then I’ve got the same question. Why?” I fired back. He might be relieved, but I wasn’t.

  “The journey is more important than the destinat
ion,” Lark deadpanned.

  “Oh, come on. Don’t give me that fortune cookie bullshit. The destination is pretty fucking important; especially when it gets your ass kicked from one realm to the next!” I realized I was shouting.

  The Fae didn’t flinch, but acknowledged my point with a small nod. “Maybe this will help. What do you know about the Aesir?”

  That brought me up short. “Um . . . they . . . I mean we’re the Fae’s boogeymen.”

  Lark scratched his chin in thought for a moment. “That’s not a great description, but Fae parents did relay tales of the Aesir to get their children to behave. My own mother constantly told me if I didn’t brush my fur, the Aesir would sheer it off and make a nice fur coat out of me.”

  “She sounds like a lovely woman,” I rolled my eyes.

  “She betrayed the queen and her petrified head still sits on Her Majesty’s castle ramparts,” Lark stated like he was ordering a Big Mac.

  “Okay?” I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Fae are weird,” I shuddered.

  “But the point is that the Aesir are more than a bedtime story to frighten young children,” he continued. “Like your own supernatural myths and creatures, they are an actual, living breathing people who have interacted with others through the course of your history, and mine.”

  “I think I would have heard about them,” I scoffed. I was a bit of a history aficionado if I could say so myself. “If there were basically gods running around calling themselves the Aesir then I would . . .” I stopped dead in my tracts.

  “Is it really that simple?” I felt a little sick.

  Lark just smiled. “We all know them as something a little different. Humanity has only experienced a bleed-over effect from the Aesir’s direct access to the Faerie Realm. They’ve never actually set foot in this plane of existence; but they want to.”

  “So, Odin, Thor, Loki, Freya; the whole Marvel cast; they’re real?” I blanched.

  “Suck it, Chris Hemsworth,” the Aesir in me laughed.

  “That’s an approximation that ancient human societies developed based upon past pantheons,” Lark corrected. “But their power is very real.”

  I thought back to my high school history classes. The human version of the Aesir were mainly worshiped in the Scandinavian countries, but those fairly small populations had done some brutal damage to the European continent for a couple hundred years. They’d basically subjugated England, raided the mainland and east into Russia. They even burned Paris, and sacked it twice. For fuck’s sake, they had a hit show on the History Channel.

  One thing about the Vikings had always stood out to me: the blood eagle. Something about the ritualistic execution told me it was a pretty good explanation of the real Aesir as a whole. The Aesir inside me cheerfully agreed.

  The Vikings would first force a man into a prone position and cut him open with a sharp tool. They’d sever his ribs from his spine, and through the opening, they’d pull out the person’s lungs. I guess it kind of looked like wings. I’d never seen it before, so I wasn’t an authority on the practice. I was just surprised anyone could survive long enough to endure all of that. They would have to be some tough old bastards, that’s for sure.

  Lark sat quietly as I thought about all of that, waiting for my next question.

  “The Viking Age wasn’t that long,” I formulated my question. “What happened? Something tells me that if the Aesir had been able to influence the Norse civilizations more, they would have rampaged across the globe.”

  “Exactly,” Lark nodded. “Maeve couldn’t have that. Your realm was our playground, not theirs. So, she shut them out. They could only get here through our home; so, she locked the door tight and threw away the key.”

  “And then you divulged tactics and weapons to counter the Viking’s advantages,” I completed the thought.

  “And our party continued without any further interference,” Lark sighed, like he was remembering the good old days.

  “So, let me get this straight. The Aesir are kind of Fae boogeymen, but you locked them out of your home. They can’t get here, because Maeve shut the door on them after they kicked over the sandcastle she’d been working on. All of that tracks, except one critical flaw. How the fuck am I here?” I threw that in his face.

  For the first time, Lark looked troubled. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “If the Aesir have found a way around the Fae realm, it is an indirect route, or the Allfather would be here himself subjugating the masses. No, they still can’t interact directly, so they must be trying to do it through you?”

  “Me?” I barked out a laugh. “What the hell can I do?”

  “As I expect you’ve learned; quite a lot,” Lark shot back.

  “Oh . . . yeah,” the image of the duke’s legs twitching as the last of the life went out of him flared in my mind.

  “What am I really capable of, and why is it fucking with my head?” I rubbed my temples as the Aesir chittered away at the back of my mind.

  “You’ve noticed changes,” Lark’s face turned grave. “What are they?”

  I told him. I spilled my guts about my split personalities; the psychopathic violence, and the push to fuck everything with a hole when I was done bathing in the blood of my vanquished victims. I tried to smooth over some of the points, but I don’t think I got anything by the devil himself.

  Lark listened calmly. Nodding in all the right places, and when I was done, simply stated, “At least that makes sense.”

  “What the fuck?” I jumped to my feet. “I told you I make Jack the Ripper look like a Sunday school nursery rhyme, and I get super horny while doing it, and all you have to say is, ‘that makes sense’,” I really wanted to punch the Fae in the face, and the Aesir urged me on.

  “Ahh,” Lark nodded, and slowly got to his feet. “I see where I went wrong. You’re still thinking of the Aesir as the human mythology you learned in school. That’s wrong. They’re not human, and they’re not Fae. Stop thinking of them as such. You don’t know what they truly are.”

  “Then enlighten me, Obi Wan,” I involuntarily clenched my fists. I really wanted to hit something.

  “The Aesir are archetypes.”

  I stood there, waiting for more, but it never came. “Oh . . . well, I guess that explains everything. The Aesir are archetypes. Thanks, Uncle Lark, for that completely fucking pointless piece of information!” I was starting to see red, and the Aesir was close to breaking out of its cage.

  “I’ll explain,” Lark continued, without knowing how close he came to fighting the creature his mother threatened him with. “Think of a realm not that different from yours, or mine. It has prairies, deserts, grasslands, seas, and oceans full of life; but most importantly, full of magic. Like all realms, it has a creator. For mine that was Maeve. For the Aesir, the Allfather. Don’t bother asking about the creator of this realm. You’re not ready to know the answer.”

  That was exactly what I wanted to ask, but I shut up. There were more important things to learn today.

  “The Allfather seeded his realm with life in his own image. From the beginning, the Aesir were always a warrior race. Certainly, much more magically adept than humans, but not that different. They fought over land, resources, gold, slaves, and above all, the approval of the Allfather.”

  “That all sounds very human,” I replied.

  “Sure, but it was probably about a billion of your years ago. You weren’t even primordial muck at this point. The Fae were still in their infancy.”

  That was a bit of a whammy. Not only were the Aesir powerful as fuck, but they’d been around as close to forever as humans could comprehend.

  “So, the Allfather was a bit of an eager beaver to jump on the creation train. Gotcha,” I nodded.

  That made Lark laugh loud enough to shake the new gym equipment. “Indeed,” he wiped away a tear before continuing. “But that’s the problem with beings like the Allfather and Maeve, they still have very real emotions, and one of th
e Allfather’s weaknesses is boredom. After a few hundred million years, he got tired of the same fight, murder, rape, plunder, rinse and repeat; so, he had an idea. He wanted to make his people better in every way imaginable. Over the generations, he started to tweak them. He experimented with their minds, bodies, and most importantly, their magic. Only after he’d found what he was looking for did the Cull begin.”

  “That’s not ominous as fuck or anything,” I sensed the capital C in Cull.

  “There is nothing like it in the known histories of any realm I’ve ever heard of,” Lark looked truly frightened at that. “Imagine an entire race tearing itself apart. Billions upon billions were slaughtered without abandon because that’s what the Allfather decreed.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  The dude was definitely a capital G god. He did have his own realm and all, but why would he just throw it all away?

  “He wanted the best,” Lark’s answer was simple. “The changes he’d made to his people turned them into parasites. When they defeated their foes, they subsumed them, and gradually grew in power. It took tens of thousands of years for the Cull to run its course, and at the end, it left only a handful of Aesir. The myth is that the Allfather looked upon his chosen and was glad. As a reward, he gave each of them a sliver of his divine light; making them his true immortal children. I don’t know if that part is bullshit, or if the accumulated power of billions of slayed foes gave the remaining Aesir god status; but whether it’s one or the other, it really doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll bet,” I shuddered to think about the experience even one Aesir would have.

  I didn’t need to imagine it. I’d seen it myself. The Trickster had ripped through half of the Lady of Winter’s personal guard, and then disappeared back to his realm, while dropkicking me back to mine. That scoreboard read: Aesir one, Fae zero.

  “Why do you call them archetypes?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I knew the answer.