Author: srh

This follows An Old Memory in the Met Part VII, Part VI, Part V, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…

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Shirin strolled into the Met.

Stop.

Reverse the scene. It is a crude reduction of all the events that lead up to the moment, and not a great representation of what Shirin actually had done. Shirin did a number of things before strolling into the Met. One has to understand how an Ifrit navigates the world.

Going back hours, it is morning in Manhattan. The sun is cresting the towers to the east, illuminating the glass, metal, and stone on the west side of Central Park. The city is murmuring itself awake from a dull roar of the early morning commute to the hustle of New York animating itself to a liminal level of self consciousness. The buildings, the streets, the restaurants, the cafes, the stores, the bodegas, the carts… all of it is a body that is alive because of the humans that move among it all. New York wakes up just like any person does, it stretches in the early morning light, and starts the day.

Just off the bustling thoroughfare of Central Park West, an old man is standing at a street corner, idly watching the crowd stream past. He is waiting for something… special. A spark. A certain je ne sais quoi. A person that is a standout, but for reasons that are not be wholly clear. Beautiful, and distracting, but not overstated. The old man required a person that could be a focal point, and yet, not overly focused on until it was absolutely required. The old man’s fingers were bluish, his eyes bloodshot. His heart was laboring under the strain that he had been under for a day now, waiting for the right time. The old man himself, what made him him, was buried deep within his own subconsciousness, restricted to being only an observer as something else animated him like a marionette. His puppet master was kind and thoughtful, but fierce. The old man ruminated on his life, realized that the being that rode him like a horse was no different than how he had treated his son all those years ago. Now, he realized why his son does not want anything to do with him. He frowns and ponders the realization deep within, as his body betrays none of the internal turmoil and instead watches the undulating crowd pass by unaware.

A tall, graceful woman is finally materializes on the far street corner, among the many others waiting for the lights to change. She is impeccably dressed, carrying broad shoulders under a white jacket, soft-blended satin trim along the edges, highlighted marvelously by oversized black buttons along the front paired beautifully by smaller matching buttons at the cuffs. Underneath, her red blouse is light and airy, suggesting robust cleavage without explicitly showing it, a single gold chain with a pendant of glass dancing ahead of her with enraptured reflections of light. Her white skirt is a pencil, and her legs are anything but, terminating powerfully into a tasteful set of black heels, her shapely calves screaming at anyone glancing sideways to appreciate hjer personal trainer’s hard work.

Her name is Jacinda. She is beautiful, multi-ethnic, and walks with the confidence to make any one blatantly staring to appreciate the fact they took the time to do so. One moment Jacinda is walking down Central Park West like it is her own runway, heading to an appointment that she knows is important, but doesn’t want to hand her cards over too early. It could be the job opportunity of a lifetime, and she knows she will absolutely fucking crush it. She is owed… it is her time. But she is attempting to rationalize it to herself, self denying the hope and the excitement, just so any inevitable disappointment will have a lesser sting.

One moment, striding confidently, the beginnings of a grin at the edge of her mouth… the next… an old man touches her arm, and puts something small and black in her hand. She is confused, but, then, her head grows foggy like she is addled. Or drunk. Or high. Or something… odd. The old man lets go, stumbles away, and Jacinda puts the small black thing in her ear. She has no idea why. She just does it.

The old man leans against the wall, feeling like he is waking up for the first time in days. His head immediately clears, and his heart starts to slow down. His fingers are so very cold, and he is fatigued in a way that he hasn’t felt for decades. He briefly wonders why he is on Central Park West, but chalks it up to the fallible memory of the significantly aged as he starts walking back to his apartment thinking on the apology he owes his son. The confusion of why is where he is doesn’t seem to bother him, and for some strange reason he lets it go. Maybe he was feeding the birds. Maybe he played some chess in the Park. Maybe he just needed a walk. It didn’t matter. His son mattered. That mattered most. He had to fix it.

Jacinda spun on one of her impeccable heels and walked into Central Park. The sky was blue, the birds were singing, and the trees were in blossom. Yet, Jacinda knew something was wrong. She tried to stop and turn back around, but she can’t. It is like she is an observer in her own mind. Jacinda started to panic, but her stride continued on the path into the Park, passing women pushing strollers, joggers, walkers, lollygaggers, layabouts, and students lounging on the early morning green. There is no panic in her stride, there is no panic on her face, and her body chemistry stays exactly the same. No sweat, no dump of adrenaline, no flight or fight response… just pure easy movement, as if she was on a break and enjoying Central Park.

A hand. It pulls at what defines Jacinda as Jacinda in her consciousness. Then there are two hands. Then ten, then twenty, then a hundred. The hundred handed one pulls at her mind, smothering her and yet, comforting her? It is like being pulled into a hug by an overly present grandmother, you suffocate against her aproned front, but the smell, the feel, and the memory of the last hug all get wrapped up together in the now, and one feels a sense of peace.

Jacinda felt peace. She didn’t seem to care so much about her appointment, or her outfit, or her hair. She just let go. Not that she had much of a choice. An Ifrit was within her. The Ifrit was in control.

Outside of her Domain, an Ifrit had a choice. Be a thief or be obliterated. Shirin did not feel guilty in stealing bodies. She gave them back. Most of the time. Sometimes she found herself in a person that had done terrible things. Sometimes that person did not come back… sometimes an Ifrit makes a choice that should only be reserved for God. As a Fallen would.

Shirin walked Jacinda’s body with assured confidence across Central Park, heading towards the Met along the winding pathways. She strolled the Transverse, then took one of the branching paths towards the only building of its size on the Central Park border.

Being an Ifrit was a double-edged sword. Sure, she could jump between bodies, but she rarely could enjoy her own. It was like living a life buried under a sea of pillows, always a far off participant, like a drug addict viewing their own life from afar, too addled to bring much care or thought about the moment they faced. Shirin faced those moments, but from behind glass, the strangely dichotomic approach of being both the participant and the observer.

But the sky was clear, and in the Park, one could almost feel the old Fey magic in the grass and the stones. The Faeries had tried so damned hard to carve out a place for themselves. They wanted a wildwood, the kind of place that genetic memory had for the humans, when the forests were full of dangers and mortality was but a single failed breath away. The wildwoods were ancient, the throne rooms for the dancers and the courtiers, the battle grounds for the watchers and the watched, the delicate balance between the never ending feuds and petty squabbles that served as the only Fey entertainment until an unwary human wandered in to change the games.

The High Daughter of Mab had been wise in their dealings to get the whole green set aside when they had the power and influence to do so. Not so wise in who they dealt with to bring it about, but still, the Park and by extension, the Met, was a brilliant idea, even though the Fey ultimately were fucked sideways in the whole thing. Typical humans taking and taking and taking, until there was nothing left to take, and yet, humans still found a way. The designer of the Met, Calvert Vaux, had some real balls to fuck over Méabh’s daughter, Cainnear Dearg, all those years ago.

That’s what humans do. They take and think nothing of it. There is a grand balance to the universe. An Ifrit doing a bit of the same between bodies was a trivial thing. An unnoticed thing when the real fucks like Calvert Vaux are kicking teeth in with little regard for who was there first.

‘Manifest fucking destiny’, Shirin thought to herself.

Finally, Shirin strolled into the Great Hall of the Met.

Jacinda was beautiful, striking even, but with a confidence that allowed her to move invisibly in the crowd. She was just another guest in a sea of guests. Some were schoolchildren, some were college students, most were tourists, and then there were the others… the artists, the free willed, the rebels and the dreamers. With those, Jacinda blended in like a fish among many.

The Watcher did not see her enter and it did not note her passing. The wards buried under stone and concrete in the columns that formed the grand entryway did not hum or resonate, but Shirin could feel them buzzing, like hives of bees sequestered behind the walls. Shirin was not worried that wards would hit her, as she was a both a passenger and the captain in her Jacinda-shaped vessel, and she navigated Jacinda deftly through the crowds away from the angry buzzing as quickly as she could muster without looking like she was in any sort of rush. She bought a day pass at the digital kiosk, and wandered towards the security office where the Watcher laid in wait. Not directly mind you, but on an indirect path, following the flow of the crowds one moment, pulling away and joining another crowd.

“I am going in.” Al’s voice whispered in her ear. “Starting the deliveries to the bloodsuckers.”

“Understood. I am heading to my destination. I should be ready when you are.” Shirin replied in Jacinda’s soft and raspy voice. “Liz, the wards are angry. I could feel their hissing when I walked by.”

“I am working on it. Wave at me, love.” Liz replied sarcastically. “They are hot, aren’t they? They don’t like being touched.”

Shirin turned her head slowly, glancing over the crowds to find Liz in an alcove, sipping from a coffee cup with a shit eating grin on her face. Liz waved lightly, her fingertips appeared to be smoking.

“You good, Liz?” Shirin said calmly, turning away from the Witch of Wales and back to her destination.

“Everyone’s fingers smoke a bit, right? That’s normal?” Liz teased. “I have everything under control. You take the Watcher. I can’t deal with both that monstrosity and the wards. I don’t have enough coffee.”

“Well good thing I am here,” Shirin teased.

“No, that’s not the problem. The coffee shop is packed, love,” Liz shot back. “There are sheeple everywhere!”

“Can we use the comms for the right reasons, please?” Milos chimed in.

“Yes, boss.” Shirin smirked behind her hand.

“Milos, if I want to use the comms to tell you that are a cunt, is that acceptable?” Liz asked deadpan.

“No. Liz. It is not.” Milos’s frustration was nearly palpable over the commlink.

“Well you are. A cunt. Now shush. I am trying to twist these Wards so your bloodsucking ass can walk out of here with purloined goods and, honestly, you are distracting me.”

Shirin headed towards the security office. Security was multifaceted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met covered the basics, with thousands of cameras covering every angle of each exhibit and lobby, every piece of artwork, and all the shared public space. One would think cameras would be a problem for any theft, and they would be, if the thief was a human and performing their theft the human way. For the non-human contingent, such thefts would have little concern for such technologies.

Magic rendered technology inoperable.

The real security of the Met was not in the cameras, or the small army of six hundred human security staffers that rotated around the premises, or the space sensors, or the proximity alarms, or even the laser grids that covered a handful of exhibits. All of it was performative theater in its own way, because the real security had been designed and built into the bones of the Met when Calvert Vaux had drawn the engineering design out with a pencil on sheets of oversized vellum. The Met had been designed from the ground up to be secure from the very creatures that would walk in dripping with magic, so human technology, even things that Calvert Vaux could not have imagined back in the mid-1800’s would not have been effective in stopping the Fey from wandering into a human place and taking whatever they may have desired.

Calvert Vaux had had a trump card the entire time. Knowing his significant otherworldly debts had to be paid, he knew he had a chance to subvert those he was owed. He had a newborn son among his many children, his legacy was secure, and he could make sure his family would be safe from those he owed. From there, one could infer where his doomed choices had lead him. Shirin knew the story, and the thought of his choices made her sick. She knew that if she had ever had the opportunity to jump into Calvert Vaux, he would be one of those special few that would never wake up at the end.

Shirin stopped near the grand stair, leaned against the wall, and nonchalantly watched as the crowds moved by. She could feel their minds like glimmers of brightly colored fish reflecting the sunlight from beneath the waves, the outlines of their spirits more prevalent than the clothes they wore, each of them a story unfulfilled, still being written, even now as they moved languidly through the museum. She pushed her senses outward, past the wall she leaned against, and into the security office on the other side.

This was the tricky part for an Ifrit. Maintaining the hold on Jacinda, who had the only working commlink residing in her ear, and finding one of the six hundred security staffers that was mentally weak enough to allow Shirin to take some semblance of control without them realizing it. The security office itself was expansive, larger than most people would ever realize. And in the back, behind a false wall, sat the real target.

The Watcher.

Being this close to the pile of flesh that used to be Calvert Vaux’s son made her exceptionally uncomfortable. But that was nothing compared to how gross is would feel when she was inside that pile of flesh. Jacinda’s arm skin started to pucker with goosebumps at the thought. She had to avoid the Watcher until she was ready.

Liz spoke up again. “We, uh, may be having some problems. Milos, they are not all sheeple.”

“Are you ok?” Shirin cut in. “I can head back?”

“Shirin, stay on your task.” Milos interjected. “Can you do it, Liz?”

“I can do it just fine, Milos. I am a ffycin professional. Its who just breezed by me. With his retinue. And half of them are sniffing at the Wards. They are picking on my work, I can’t just sit here in plain sight…”

“Who’s there, Liz?”

“Anton de Lionne.” Liz’s majestic sneer could be heard through the link.

Like it was taunting all of them, both the comm and Milos stayed silent.

“Did you hear me, Milos?”

“He is on retainer,” Milos finally replied. The admitting sigh of guilt was nearly verbal.

“Did you not think that worth mentioning in the planning stages?” Liz was pissed. “You know, the part where we plan, Milos. And we talk about these sort of things?”

“I didn’t want you to worry about it.”

“Well now is a fine fucking time, then, isn’t it?” Liz started…

… And Shirin’s attention snapped back to her lingering cloud of spirit floating around the impeccably dressed Jacinda. Shirin picked up a glimmer, the telltale sign vibration of a soul heavily burdened. The brush of a person focused on other things, their mind swirling with concerns, worries, and the pressures of modern life. A person ripe for a soft word, a gentle caress, the comfort of warm hands…

Shirin ignored her commlink and pushed away from Jacinda, keeping her hands warm and reassuring, and reaching out for the person as they neared. She could feel their body heat, their consciousness, the light of their small human soul. Precious, like a candle nestled in an alcove during a storm.

Then she was Tommy. Tommy was staring at a report on a tablet, but he was not reading it. His fingers hovered over the email notification, which itself was on his phone, which sat nestled in the corner of the tablet screen like it was nestled against a storm. Life is nothing but irony.

Shirin quickly glanced over the hovering email. Diagnosis of cancer. Tommy’s mother.

‘Poor thing.’ Shirin whispered within Tommy. ‘Everything will be ok.’

‘Huh?’ Tommy thought and said aloud at the same time. “Huh?”

‘The bills? The stress? The time? It’s ok, Tommy. You will figure it out.’ Shirin continued.

“Anyone else hearing that?” Tommy turned and looked at his coworkers. Some were watching screens, some were chatting idly about the comings and goings of the staff.

Mickey, the recent new hire watching the dashboard pulled her airpods out and made a face. “Hearing what?”

Tommy tilted his head and Shirin remained quiet.

“I swear I could hear a voice,” Tommy fake smiled and pretended that everything was normal.

Shirin pushed her mental balm outwards in a healing wave. Everything was normal. Everything was fine. She felt his heart slow, his panic subside.

She stepped to the forefront of Tommy. He felt the hands pulling him backwards, first one, then two, then ten… the a one hundred handed one gripped him gently, pulling him backwards… and he did not struggle. He felt safe.

‘Good boy.’ Shirin commented as he fell backwards in his own mind. She felt the impression that he thought she was beautiful. Like a sun dappled tiger hunting its way through summer foliage. She whispered, ‘And a thoughtful boy. Your mom will be ok. I promise.’

‘How do you know?’ His voice floated from the dark of his subconscious.

‘Faith.’ Shirin replied honestly. She turned Tommy towards the door and walked.

“Tommy, where you going?” Another security guard asked.

‘That is Frank Anderson’, Shirin heard Tommy whisper from the deep.

“Quick bathroom break,” Shirin replied.

“But we have a meeting in five with Myers and that flamboyant chap that they have running inspections.”

Shirin waved it away. “Be back in two mins, Frank.”

“Alright, alright, just hustle? If I have to defend you again to Myers, it’s your ass.”

Shirin guided Tommy out the secure door and headed down the stark back halls of the Met. He exited into the public area, and then made the long circuitous route to find Jacinda leaning against a wall like she was a million dollar artwork herself.

Seeing herself within another with another’s eyes was something that one never got used to. And she had been doing it for thousands of years. It was a self-recognizing contradiction that the Creator never had meant for his creations to do. It was why she was Fallen. She was outside the Grand Design. An exception. An uncarried remainder. She knew why, and she understood the logic of it, but it was a near biological revulsion in being Other and yet whole.

Shirin pulled the ear commlink from Jacinda and handed it to herself in Tommy, who put smoothly into his own ear without stopping. Tommy walked on by, looking the other way, to make the next part look believable.

Jacinda stepped away from the wall, and started to remove her clothing. Slowly. Shirin felt guilty, but it was the plan. They needed a distraction. A big one.

And a beautiful, striking woman walking naked through the Met as if nothing was amiss?

That was literally the definition of a significant distraction.

Jacinda would awake somewhere frightened, starving, and with the blood chemistry of someone in adrenal crisis, but she would awake. If anything, the news may help her career in the long run. Beautiful people could spin their own narratives in this world. Shirin would plant a seed of the thought deep in her subconscious, and hopefully it would help. A small gift, yes, but better than nothing after what Jacinda was going to do.

Shirin pulled her consciousness from Jacinda completely and left her wandering forward dreaming and yet dreamless, striding with purpose, each article of clothing slowly dropping to the floor behind her like a trail of breadcrumbs showing the way she went.

Shirin spoke under her breath with Tommy’s voice, “Ma’a assalamah fi rihlatik.“

She turned and took the long way back towards the security office, avoiding the path that the others would take to locate a naked woman strolling through the galleries, seemingly calm, taking in the sights, and otherwise completely ignoring anyone that tried to engage with her. They would float around her, wondering what to do, and none would dare approach until the police arrived.

“And the goose is off running,” Shirin said.

“She was gorgeous. A good time to be had by all in the next few minutes.” Liz came back first.

“I was disconnected, anything I need to know about?” Shirin replied.

“No. Under control.” Milos replied. “Liz, status?”

“I am on the last one, my fingers are turning to glass from the heat, but nothing a nice cup of tea won’t fix.”

“How are you doing, Al?” Milos asked.

“Dammit Milos, you are going to give me a heart attack.” Al came back, he sounded breathless.

“Oh you sound different. Young one, huh?” Milos said.

“Shut up, almost there. Give me five more minutes.”

“10-4.”

“You sound like an absolute idiot, Milos.” Liz laughed.

Tommy that was Shirin badged a secure door and entered the back hallways that interconnected many of the exhibits, offices, and secure spaces of the Met. Shirin paused at the next junction, and almost as if she had made it happen through otherworldly clairvoyance, nearly the entire staff from the security office emptied into the hallway and hustled off in the other direction.

Shirin allowed herself a small grin. She walked up to the door and badged her way in.

The girl… Mickey. That’s it. Mickey sat at her station still, her eyes wide. She glanced at Tommy. “I am surprised you didn’t want to go help.”

“I have a meeting,” Shirin replied.

“But, yeah, this lady is naked. And I mean, naked as the day she was born.”

“Oh really?” Tommy replied, Shirin tried to make it sound like he was surprised.

“Are you gay?” Mickey replied with a grin. “Because even if you are, it doesn’t matter. This woman is a work of art.”

“I take it you are,” Tommy said. He glanced at the screens and then walked towards the rear of the office.

“I might be now. This has me asking myself some hard life questions,” Mickey laughed.

“I am going to head to the conference room to meet with Myers and Anderson.”

“Yeah, ok. Although I think Anderson was in the group that just rushed out.”

“Thanks.” Tommy closed it off and pulled the rear door open. Ten steps to the right sat a sealed wall that had been closed for nearly a 150 years. Inside, remained some semblance of an entity she was here for. This was going to be the worst jump of her life.

Shirin laid a hand on the wall, feeling for a connection. The Watcher was always there. If the building had a soul, and that soul was living flesh that protected everything within it’s walls, that soul of about a thousand or so pounds of skin, fat, and viscera pulsated on the other side, strung between the webbed artifacts of old magic. The display was an aspiration of an angelic state, a body hung between phasing webs of energy, pulling the body apart, yet keeping it alive, morphing into something that was no longer human, but not classifiable as anything else either. The Watcher was a sacrifice. An ever-living, ever-suffering sacrifice that created a limitless blood payment in an endless ritual.

It was barbarism of legend. The darkest of the cruel ancient struggles pulled forward to exist in a modern age.

And the poor child had never been given a name. It was a Vaux, yes. But it was never meant to have a name. What it was defined it enough. No need to offer it humanity when it was never meant to be human. It was the Watcher.

Shirin felt the movement of it’s attention sweeping near her as she extended her presence. The Watcher had finally found her.  

She flicked the commlink out of Tommy’s ear, let it fall to the floor and jumped. She jumped violently, with abandon, leaping the gap as if an oncoming train was barreling down towards her. She knew she was alone, but at least she would have choices if she could subdue the Watcher.

Tommy sagged against the wall, overwhelmed by a sudden and overpowering sorrow about his mother. He had no idea where the feelings erupted from or why he was in was in Hallway A2, but he slumped downwards, feeling his eyes well and sobs developing in his chest, crawling from his diaphragm through his throat to leave him in wretched gasps.

Shirin was within. She was in the Watcher. And all she felt was overwhelming pain.

She seized. Her mind folded in on itself in the mire of the Watcher’s convulsing consciousness. It was not human. It was not even close to human. It was closer to her own form, and it was writhing around her as if she laid in a pit of snakes, unfathomable and slithering eternally.

A manifold thought washed over her, every phrase spoken at once. In unison with a single voice overlaid with itself countless times.

Shirin revolted inwardly, recoiling as if by reflex to jump back to Tommy, or anyone really, if they allowed her to escape this terror. The slithering was in her own mind, pushing and pulling, convulsing around her. She could feel the anger. The terror. The being of what the Watcher was altogether black. And this was created by man? By a father? A human did this! To his own flesh and blood! His son!

Shirin felt herself slip towards a dark maw, an energetic enfolding of shredding, rendering, all consuming consciousness. Something that had eaten other psychic beings, that pulled in other prey, to digest them and make them a part of their own flesh. The ultimate defense against the Fey, the things that preyed on the humans, here it laid in wait, an apex predator.

She was running out of time.

“STOP!” Shirin screamed. She surprised herself with her fury. It was something she had not felt for a long time. The rage coalesced around what Shirin considered herself. It parted her from the Watcher, and she cleaved as if it was a great scimitar in her hands, carving her space within the mind of the fell creature. “Get the FUCK off of me!”

The Watcher recoiled.

It paused.

And then it wept.

She heard the cry of a child. The cry of toddler, lost. Wandering for decades, wondering why they were abandoned. Wondering why they were in a prison, yet able to see everything. Wondering why they were in tormenting pain, but never free from it. Wondering why they were forsaken, when all the other things they observed were not.

Shirin was Fallen.

She had fought in celestial kingdoms. She had waged war in the darkest folds of space and time. She had taken impossible risks and leapt from realms and loved in and been loved in ways that most human minds will never comprehend and she had touched the hands of the Creator and she had rebuked Him and she had felt terror that would make any thing that deigned to live afraid to enter the sunlight in fear of being smote.

And.

And… but.

But she had been an Angel first.

Shirin was an Angel still and this was a broken child needing to be loved. Shirin did exactly that. She rushed in and gathered him in her arms. She folded her hundreds of hands around him and murmured into his hair, she pulled him into a version of what he should have been, a child, with brown shaggy hair and blue eyes and bright laughter at the antics of the ducks snapping at bread in the pond. She pulled his identity to what he could have been if he had been given the chance. As she did this, she pulled at the threads of his body, freeing them from the webs of energy which encased him on all sides.

She knew she would hold him as he died. She had no name to give him. But she tried anyway.

“For this moment, little one, you are loved. For this moment, you are free. For this moment, my little Vaux, you are safe and sound and I have you. Sleep. No pain. No terror. Just blessed sleep, that I rock you in, my little one. You are loved. For this moment, I love you more than anything than I have ever loved.” Shirin whispered.

The Watcher passed. She felt his spirit depart with a sudden tug from all of her hands. Shirin had not tried to talk to the Creator since she had been thrown to the energies of the cosmos. But now, with tears she felt being cried in a form that she could not comprehend, she tried anyway.

“My God, Allah, oh my Father, El Shaddai, I pray you hear your child of the Fallen diaspora. Hear my prayer, my Creator in Heaven, take this child and care for him, hold him and love him. I pray this on your Name.”

The Watcher’s corpse shrunk and Shirin knew that soon the vortex of webbed energies would consume it, causing the ritual to collapse, and the cornerstone to the Met’s anti-magic security program would be gone forever. It was a shame that it had survived a hundred and fifty years. Shirin hoped that in wherever hell Calvert Vaux was currently burning, hopefully the fires would only get more intense. She slowly returned to Tommy, exactly where she had left him, a sad boy in the form of a young man, spinning in an uncaring universe while facing impossible choices.

Tommy sat alone, sniffing morosely, wiping at his nose with one hand as he flicked through the email from his mother with the other. Shirin took gentle control of him, mindful not to disrupt his fragile state of mind further. She suffused him like a wave of gentle summer sunlight, warming him through and through. She wrapped her hands around his psyche, cradling it as she had the Vaux boy, and she pulled him backwards to the safety of the dark.

‘Lots of broken children today,’ Shirin sighed inwardly. She stood, surveying the floor, and finally located the commlink. She picked it up and shoved it unceremoniously into Tommy’s ear.

She could hear Al talking to someone. Sounded like small talk… asking about a missing vamp in the monitoring office.

Shit. Shirin was behind schedule.

She turned back to the security office and walked as fast as she could without breaking into a full on sprint. She slapped the card against the reader, pushed the door open, and was relieved to still find only the lone Mickey at her station.

“FUCKING HELL.” Al announced over the comm.

“You burn them?” Liz was nearly ecstatic.  “Was it spectacular?“

“I did not,” Al sneered back. “Eating one was worse enough. Cutting the feeds in three, two, and one…”

Shirin walked over to the board where Milos had told her to look. Sure enough the remote feed line for the Security NOC, noted with a small green light flicked over to amber.

Shirin spoke quietly, “I see the comm line offline. It’s disconnected. I am shutting down this end.”

She patted Tommy’s pocket and found a pocket knife. She flicked it open and deftly sliced all the network cables coming in to the monitoring desk. Mickey continued to listen to whatever was blasting over her airpods, unaware of the sabotage taking place directly behind her. Shirin pulled the cover off the PC under the desk and popped the CPU and heatsink upwards, bent a few of the pins with the edge of the knife, put it back together, and left the machine unpowered. Replacing network cables was an easy fix. Replacing a machine with bad hardware was quite another. That should keep them busy for a day or two.

Put an obvious problem in front of everyone and the other problems would be take even longer to discover.

Shirin was comforted that even as the world got stranger and more advanced, it was just as strange and backwards as it had been thousands of years ago. The more it all changed, the more it all stayed the same.

That was a comforting thought.

This follows An Old Memory in the Met Part VI, Part V, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…

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Bhargavian was under bond, an oath that would expire two hundred years after it was pledged. It was not a terrible deal, as it had kept him out of trouble, out of mind, and most importantly, out of sight of the greater powers that wandered the upper eastern seaboard of the United States. There was a time that a monster like him was both a target for the humans and for those that wished to reduce competition in the food chain. Monsters are monsters to other monsters. Not just humans.

Bhargavian was a class of vampire known as an Anchorite. Anchorites were vampires semi-petrified due to sun exposure. Not every vampire makes it back to ground before the sun comes up, and not every vampire is completely eradicated in the crucible of immolating ultraviolet radiation. Some are immobilized. Some get stuck. Some get drunk or high because of a victim that was drunk or high, and in their stupor, they get barbequed.

Bhargavian had picked the wrong victim that night in 1968, although he remembered it fondly. The young man must have had a master class of drug chemistry interactions running rampant through his bloodstream. Two things had happened that night. The shaggy haired young man in the flowered shirt and linen pants had died in bliss, and Bhargavian had met the One True God In All His Glory, Praise Be, Hal-le-lu-iah!

Unfortunately, when he awoke, Bhargavian discovered that his lower half had been reduced to charcoal due to a door that had not been closed during his stupor. Vampires regenerated of course, but it was not like the movies. It was not a rapid regrowth like a lizard sporting a new tail, or a sea creature regaining a limb on the next molting… oh no, it was more like a normal human wound. Cut a finger on a man, it takes weeks to heal. Cut off a limb off a vampire, it takes decades.

So when you cut off your entire bottom half?

By Bhargavian’s estimate he still had a hundred or so more years to go before he could use his legs again. Thankfully the sun had spared his dick. Small blessings, right? But when he had pushed away from the charcoal representation of his former lower half, two things happened. First, his legs detached and crumbled to black resinous piles of ash. Second, he realized he was utterly and wholly fucked. There was no way he would survive without mobility.

What was he going to do? Chase victims from a wheelchair? Hunt from the eaves like some vampiric hunchback of Notre Dame? A legless gargoyle that would be the North American version of a drop bear? Just falling out of trees on top of unsuspecting victims? It was a recipe for self destruction, and that is all that it was. Bhargavian knew the drill.

He immediately called the Family. He put in an oath and he was bonded. But he survived. Just another cog in the great machine of Vampiredom. A bureaucrat that signed his line on the papers, did the little ka-chunk of the stamp, and pushed the paperwork on to the next station in the great machine of beauacracy. Bhargavian did his job, slept in his cubicle, and was given his ration every day at the exact same time by the exact same bondsman that served him the same exact thing every day.

“Barge.” A deft nod from the other bondsman as he pulled the thermos from the cart and set it within Bhargavian’s reach.

“Clint.” Bhargavian replied with his own nod in return, taking the thermos and stroking the side of it like it was his favorite child. A delicious, nourishing, child.

“Hard day?” Clint said.

“Not particularly. Same old, same old.” Bhargavian shrugged.

Clint snorted and moved on to continue his deliveries.

Bhargavian paused and looked at Clint’s back as he moved onwards with his cart deliveries to the rest of the department. He thought it was odd that Clint hadn’t said his customary, ‘Keep on keepin’ on‘ slogan that he used every other day.

Peculiar.

Clint had been delivering Bhargavian’s ration for what? Twenty years? Twenty-five? And he always had said the same thing, every day. The exact same time by the exact same bondsman that served his own function in the company, and by extension, the Family, every day the exact same way. And today he just forgot? Bhargavian felt the compulsion to start counting the tiles in the drop ceiling, even though he knew there were 84.25 tiles in the space above him, and he knew that there were exactly 86,296 perforations in said tiles. But the impulse clawed its way up his neck anyway.

He had to ask. He had to correct the pattern. Bhargavian spoke up with a mild sense of panic, “Clint!? Keep on, keepin’ on!?”

Clint glanced back over his shoulder and gave his customary lopsided grin, “I knew you would notice… Keep on, keepin’ on, Barge.”

Bhargavian grinned in reply and opened his ration cautiously, concluding it was just an odd day after all. Clint must have spaced it… but at least Bhargavian wasn’t compelled to count the ceiling perforations again. Exceptionally tedious.

Clint, whom was really Al, turned back around and continued with the deliveries, trying his hardest not to shit himself. Al had doppeled the young vampire Clint, because the younger ones were easier. Their minds were closer to a human’s own, as the virus had not had a chance to completely warp and distort their brain patterns. Old vampires were another species altogether by the time the virus had completed its full work. Physiology, psychology, and all the resulting patterns of behavior were altered significantly by the thing that made vampires, well, vampires. Clint had been young enough that he only had the beginning phases, the small changes, and yet, even with that, Al had had a hard time reading the mind, pulling apart the information, and interpreting the results. Things had slipped through the cracks.

Like routines. Keep on, keepin’ on? Sheesh.

Al knew what he had to do to Clint’s job, but the interactions with the staff in the office were all completely fuzzy, like viewing interactions through a layer of reflective water on a sunny day. Bits and pieces popped out well, others were lost in the haze and wash of refraction and reflection. And Clint would not be able to be reconsulted, as his remains were scheduled for immolation as soon as the sun came up. Doppeling was never a clean process and Al hated the all consuming manic hunger that accompanied it. Eating brains was the realm of zombie movies, not the passion project of a true artist.

But Al did what he had to do. He had absorbed Clint. He had consumed him, and through the act, became Clint. It was like puppetry in a way. Fatal and irreversible puppetry. Al kept his face still, let the memory of Clint drive Clint as he continued in his job. Al peeked back at the one he had called Barge, and the old Anchorite was going to town on this small thermos, sucking greedily at the straw, and paying no mind to Al/Clint as he continued on.

‘What a close call!‘ Al thought to himself.

The old ones were dangerous. Even when they were immobile. Al/Clint turned the cart down the next hallway and figured he had at least ten more deliveries before he could find a way into the Network Operations Center, aka the NOC, of the security company that provided remote monitoring and operations for the Met. At least 90% of the staff were Anchorites. Which was both good and bad.

Anchorites don’t move much. They are confined to their spaces. They don’t get up to go the bathroom. They don’t need to go on vacations. They don’t need smoke breaks. All they need is the tools to do their job, and a steady supply of blood to keep them well enough to function. Maybe just a bit more to get what they need in order to heal and not be Anchorites any longer, but not too quickly. Don’t want to exhaust the labor pool unnecessarily. Humans may have invented value extraction, but it was the vampires which had perfected it.

One should expect that to happen with the OCD and the arithmomania that came along with the bloodlust and immortality. Numbers, and deep viral compulsions about those numbers, would obviously lead to epic MBA-level outcomes. If vampires would contribute to the Harvard Business Review (which the don’t, for a number of reasons), the world of man would immediately collapse to a singularity of efficiency that would be so powerful, humanity would go extinct due to efficiency gains.

Al shook his head at the silliness in the world. It was a constant marvel.

Getting to the NOC was easy. Clint’s keycard was the highest level of permission, because every staff member needed to be fed and it was Clint’s job to feed them. However, shutting the NOC down was a trick. Al/Clint had to get the tainted blood into every vampire’s hand, get them to drink, and hopefully have all of them collapse at about the same time.

Ideally, that is what would happen. But Al knew it wasn’t an ideal world. He had lived long enough to know that was one of the few certainties of existence. Some things were obvious… Death, taxes, and shit typically went sideways when given the opportunity.

Murphy’s law was a law because Murphy himself was probably an Elder God. He had to be there at the beginning, crufting it up for everything that came after. Murphy had to be the first. Al/Clint smiled morosely as he pushed the food cart towards the NOC. He had some other choices to think through.

He could distribute the meals, wait patiently, let the neckbiter’s hunger take the course and count on the OCD alignment to repeated behaviors for the them all to go down. Clint’s memory was fuzzy here, but it seemed like that was the obvious option, and mostly likely.

Al/Clint did have an option on his person if that plan didn’t work out. It would absolutely piss the Family off, but Liz had provided him a little vial that he could throw at the ceiling if he had no other choice. Sun of the Dragon, a distilled concoction made of pure dragon fire, was flagged as a highly illegal substance in the Accords, because it was so immensely powerful to anything even remotely sun-averse. Imagine a light bulb bright enough to blind God and it put out nothing but UV light… it would give Al a really bad sunburn, but for those vampires unable to move, it would turn them into true anchors. Statues of their former selves, sitting at their desks, in their last moments wondering why the room had suddenly gotten so bright as the UV flashed into their minds right after the thought had.

The flash would last for five seconds? Enough fuel to pour on the fire of immolation for everything nominally alive in the NOC. Then Al would shut down the systems, kill the feeds, set the charge to blow after two minutes and then get the hell out of the building.

“How are you doing Al?” His ear buzzed faintly.

“Dammit Milos, you are going to give me a heart attack.” Al whispered under his breath.

“Oh you sound different. Young one, huh?” Milos teased.

“Shut up, almost there. Give me five more minutes.”

“10-4.”

“You sound like an absolute idiot, Milos.” Liz barked over the channel, barely containing her laughter.

Thankfully the chatter ceased. Al/Clint reached the NOC and slid his badge over the wall reader, waited for the scramble lock to pop up, entered the pin from Clint’s memory, and crossed his fingers. After an eternity, the door finally buzzed and the lock light went green. Al sighed lightly as he pulled open the door and wheeled the cart into the room.

“Clint!” A vampire near the door called out excitedly.

“Hey Faust. How’s it hanging?” Al/Clint replied, he remembered this one.

“It’s not!” Faust laughed. His torso was gone below the ribs, and his spinal cord was fleshy and pink, jutting through his little customized chair with a pink hemorrhoid pillow.

Clint’s memory said something about a car accident… that was fuzzy though, and Al was not going to ask. He handed over the tainted thermos and continued through the rows, handing seven more out.

However, one of the anchorites was missing. Tag? Dag? Tag! That was it. Al thanked Clint internally. “Where is Tag?”

Faust looked up from his screen. “Tag was released yesterday. Sorry, I guess the paperwork didn’t make it to you.”

“He got through his bond? I had no idea.” Al/Clint replied.

“Yeah, lucky bastard. The new guy is barely a vampire. I think he is what… Darcy? How old is the new kid?”

The vampire Darcy looked up from her wheelchair. “Brendan? Not even five years. Had a bad experience at Burning Man a few years ago. Young ones never think the desert is the worst place for a vampire to be. Can’t dig the hardpan very easy.”

Faust laughed. “Idiot. Live and learn, I guess.”

“Where is Brendan?” Al asked carefully. His nerves were starting to pick up, but he covered it by looking very carefully at the coffee cup of pencils on Faust’s desk. He started counting them with his finger tip.

“Oh, sorry Clint. Yeah, calm down. There are 27 pencils in there. 27. Brendan ran a file to the other office, he is mobile enough to run errands for us. Still has most of his legs, and his prosthetics are state of the art. Both an unlucky and yet, a lucky, idiot. I would love to be able to walk. Literally… anywhere.”

Darcy snorted. “You and me both.”

Al/Clint made a mental note of everyone that had opened their ration. The vampires that he passed on his route would already be passed out. It was like a wave of drug induced stupor… Al/Clint just surfed the wave of drug tainted blood all the way to the prize.

Faust had not taken a drink yet. Two minutes. That was the gap. Darcy and the others would start to lean forward or backward, their tongues lolling past sharp teeth, heads bouncing against their shoulders. Faust would hit the alarm and the heist would be over before it could even start.

Al/Clint fingered the vial in his pocket and tried to keep the conversation with Faust going. “So should I leave the new guy’s ration with you?”

“Oh, of course not. I will drink it. Guilty as charged. Put it on his desk.” Faust waved, returning to his monitors, watching the Met like the unsleeping hawk he was. One of many. Eight to be exact. Damn arithmomania. Al/Clint put the last thermos on the empty desk and turned back to his cart, miming the action to continue back on his route.

Faust had yet to open his ration. One minute. Al’s panic went up ten notches. Less than 60 seconds.

Al pulled the vial from his pocket fingering it cautiously, running his finger tip along its slick surface. The black glass was like volcanic obsidian, but it felt like he was holding the sun in his hand made of fragile gossamer. One flick of his wrist and everything in this room was going to be charcoal. Al eyed the desk he would attempt to dive behind.

Thirty seconds.

Faust burped. Al/Clint whipped his head to discover Faust had hammered his ration in mere seconds. ‘Oh thank the Old Ones‘, Al lamented internally.

Darcy’s head dipped, and then the next one dipped, and the next. Faust looked confused at first, but then his eyes unfocused and his head rolled backwards with the others.

“FUCKING HELL.” Al whispered heavily into his comm.

“You burn them?” Liz asked with a hint of glee. “Was it spectacular?”

“I did not.” Al replied with a disgusted tone. “Eating one was worse enough. Cutting the feeds in three, two, and one…”

Shirin spoke up. “I see the comm line offline. It’s disconnected. I am shutting down this end.”

Al watched the board, and sure enough, the large dashboard on the big screen started throwing errors. Al went back to the cart, pulled the small explosive packages from underneath, and walked to the door at the front of the NOC. He badged the door, hit the scramble lock there with Clint’s PIN code, and pushed the door open to the server room. A wave of ice cold air hit him in the face along with the omnipresent hum of many racks of servers doing their seemingly omniscient blinking.

Again, irony struck him that the human world had created magic without realizing it. Making rocks think with lightning. The humans call it science. Let’s be honest, it was dark magic. Some Gods would be envious.

He placed a package on top of each server rack. The thermite would burn consecutively through each server until it reached the floor and melted through into the subfloor concrete. The racks would collapse downwards as they went. That part would be spectacular.

Thankfully, Al would miss all of it. He hit the timers, started to close the door behind him, and turned to find the Burning Man newbie staring over the room with wide bloodshot eyes.

“What happened? Are they o-o-o-k?” The young vampire that must have been Brendan stammered loudly. “I have to hit the button right? The red one? Is that it? Who are you? This big red button right!?”

“Shit.” Clint/Al replied. He pulled the vial from his pocket and chucked it at the wall behind the young one, diving backwards into the server room, landing on the raised floor roughly.

The flash from the shattering vial of Sun of the Dragon nearly burned his eyes out from behind his clenched eyelids, and that was with the door nearly closed, a mere crack allowing the blast to flash into the server room. Al gave it a good five count and stepped out cautiously to find every single vampire in the room a smoking pile of ash.

“FUCK-ING HELL.” Al repeated into his comm, this time with significant marked emphasis.

“NOW YOU BURN THEM?,” Liz picked up on it immediately. “I will ask again, was it spectacular?”

“My eyeballs hurt.” Al grumbled. “Charges are set and I am getting the fuck out of here.”

He pushed the cart back into the hall, closing the NOC door behind him. He noticed that his doppel had slipped to reveal his black on black right hand in its natural state. He used it to his advantage, pulling the scramble lock and the reader free from the metal reinforcements, and shattering them in one squeeze. He pushed his hand under the lip of the cart and headed back the way he came.

All the vampires were sleeping. It was like a daycare for vampires. Naptime. It was kind of cute if you ignored the fact they all had reddish brown stains around their lips and overly long tongues hanging past sharp teeth.

The first explosion was like a heavy cough overheard on a subway platform. The second, third, and fourth were successive, and each was a bit louder than the previous. At least the packages worked as expected even if the vampires in the NOC hadn’t. Al touched the side of his face, realizing it was starting to blister.

“Son of a bitch,” Al muttered angrily.

“I knew it was going to be spectacular.” Liz laughed, her voice tinny and far away.

This follows An Old Memory in the Met Part V, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…

---

Liz was certain she not the oldest thing to come out of Wales, there were plenty of others to pick from.

But there were days were she felt older than the mountains… a deep fatigue that spoke to the history of her life written deep in her bones, as an ossuary church declaratively demonstrates the vast depth of human history so exactly because of what it is constructed from. Simply said, she knew in her bones she was old. But there were things older still. That was rationalization enough to avoid the label altogether.

If one were to ask Ysabella “Elizabeth” de Montfort how old she was, one would receive two things in rapid succession. The first would be the answer of the age Liz chose to be, followed by an increasingly crude tirade of colorful insults coupled with a middle finger (or two) defiantly raised in one’s direction. Both would be provided at the maximum volume, either vocally or physically, with little regard to whom would be offended in the nearby vicinity.

Liz would never, ever, consider herself old. Old was a pejorative term. Nearly as bad as Fenian. Or worse yet, English. Liz had made the choice in the Year of Our Lord 1282 to never ever encounter a world where she was going to be called old.

She was a Witch. Witches tended to prefer youth. Immeasurable, unassailable, and perpetual youth. For Liz, her outward appearance of youth was roughly situated in her late 20’s. When she had been a child in the Welsh countryside in the mid-13th century, well after the fall of Normandy, and before the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last true free Leader of Wales… being in your late 20’s or early 30’s had been considered middle-aged.

In those days, Death came early. Death came often. For women it was always present. One out of every eight women died in childbirth, or due to complications shortly afterward, and out of every five children, one died as an infant and another would die before reaching adulthood. The lesson learned by every human in those days was that mortality was always near. One bad growing season… one bad war campaign… one unfortunate series of escalating events of situations outside a village’s control, and mortality was not just close, it would hang behind every person like a black shroud they carried until pestilence, exposure, starvation, or a sharp edge of another man’s weapon sent them onward to heaven or hell. Youth was fleeting, if not absent for most. Most girls were married young, and having their first child in their mid-to-late teens. Most people had very little choice in their life or how they would live their life, and for women that fact was doubled over because the Reaper did not spare the birthing chamber. And every birth was a gamble in both their own life and that of their child.

Watching her cousin Eleanor de Montfort, Princess of Wales and Lady of Snowdon, die in childbirth was the first call that things needed to be different for herself. Watching her entire family’s legacy be burned, buried, and melted down by the English was another. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been a strong man with a strong hand, but the sword he held was small, and he was foolhardy. The Welsh communities spent just as much time fighting each other as they did fighting the English, and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s final year was nothing but the culmination of idiocy from the entire region that would lament their loss of culture and identity for centuries to come. His death, itself a comical tragedy of errors, was the final cut that rendered her heart free from the constraint of family, hearth, and home.

Since she had been a small child, she knew of the Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa. It was said that the monster was a cursed woman, one that would steal children, hollow them out as a spider consumes its prey, stuff them with evil, and return the children to their families as crude mimics of their former selves. The Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was the reason crops failed, or livestock died unexpectedly, or why milk went sour. She was a phantom used to scare children, mock peers, and scapegoat like one naturally blames the wind or the rain. It so happened that Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was the namesake of her cousin, although in that shitty, terrible, ffycin English, Yr Wyddfa is Snowdon. Perhaps nobility thought by creating a title named after Snowdon, they would steal the power of the name Yr Wyddfa.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was strong. Powerful. Liz had no idea what she was looking for when she went hunting for the real Lady of Snowdon, but she knew deep in her core that her life, as it had been, was as dead as her beloved cousin. She fled from her home to the south and the east, she eschewed the villages and roads along the way, preferring the rough lands and damp skies of the open wilds. She trembled in the early morning fogs that crept from the mountains to lay cold over the lands below. She kept her fires as meager things, for who ever knew who was watching, and she did her best to hide from the eyes of others she spied from afar. The rain was constant, and it made the trek all the more miserable.

… time slid by without marker or measure, the sun and the moon were but the same.

The peak still hung in the distance, and her food had run out three days before. She was nearly mad with desire to find the Lady of Snowdon, Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa. She chanted the name over and over as she walked, saying the name like an invocation, calling on a power she did not understand. In that madness, camped for the evening, lamenting her lack of food and capabilities to hunt, instead morosely munching on Fat Hens, a weed to most, but food for the desperate, she mumbled the name again and again, feeling her head, her heart, and her feet, all heavy from the same toil.

… time slid by without marker or measure, the sun and the moon were but the same.

Like her hunger, which had lead to munch on a weed, her drive to find they Lady was desperate. She had hit that point weeks ago. She had hit that point before she had left the confines of her village. Where Liz was now was far beyond desperation. She held her hands over her small fire, looking over her pathetic camp, and prayed that no man would stumble across her in the night. Her eyes were so heavy, but sleep itself was dangerous.

… time slid by without marker or measure, the sun and the moon were but the same.

Liz blinked heavily, her fire, the trees, the soft light of bouncing off her surroundings. Her wandering eyes fell on her torn, mangled, shredded dress. She found herself idly wondering where each tear had been incurred. Had that one been a rock? A tree branch? A bush? Had an angel grabbed at her to keep her safe? A demon had pulled her towards her doom? Which tears mattered? Which ones were inconsequential? Which would pick sides and gather their fellow tears and rend her dress further? Would she end up wandering the hills under the shadow of the peak, forever lamenting the rebellion of her own clothing?

She giggled. Madness was not far for her. Neither was death.

But Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was nearer. Her voice was like hard struck iron, deep and resonant, tolling for a soul that would never hear it. “Your fire is low, kitten. It will not last through your slumber.”

Liz’s head whipped upwards to find a women sitting at the fire across from her. She sat cross-legged upon a soft bed of heather and lichen. She was dressed plainly enough, but her clothes were strange, and the more Liz tried to focus on them, they shifted and turned like viewing a starry night through a layer of thin, high clouds. The witch’s face was unlined, but ancient, like stone had come alive and in doing so, rejected the age thrust upon it. In that magnificent face, Liz witnessed both wisdom and power. Two things that she had never seen contained within the same person before.

“I must keep it low, my Lady. I am fearful for those that may see it,” Liz replied, her desire to sleep had fled like a panicked animal.

“And if I am one of those that you fear?”

“Then I suppose it is a good time for God to take me.”

The woman appraised her for a moment and then laughed. Her laugh was deep and throaty, as if rocks had learned what laughter was just to entertain themselves. “Well I suppose that He won’t, for I am here, and I want to know why a lady such as yourself is calling for me?”

“You are the Lady of the Mountain? I found you?”

“You found nothing, little kitten. I found you. Do you fear having nothing?” The Lady leaned back, to grab some more wood for the fire. She tossed a handful of small branches into the glowing coals.

“I have nothing, my Lady. I am a daughter of no one, sister to no one, and mourned by no one. I have lost everything that I have ever loved. So I have nothing, and I am nothing.”

“Oh a kitten of self pity, all the worse! So why does one miserable, soaking wet thing such as yourself wander the wilds avoiding all trouble but nevertheless calling for it all along the way?”

“I was not calling for trouble.”

The Lady squinted her eyes. “Oh you were. I watched you stumbling along for days, muttering my name, slapping at the midges, crying, and just winging on and on… although I think you did not realize you were. You are in a terrible state, my child.”

“I came all this way to find you, my Lady. Why did you wait until now?”

“I wanted to make sure you meant it, kitten,” the Lady said.

“I mean it.”

“You may regret meaning it.”

“I won’t.”

“We shall see, won’t we?” The Lady smirked. “Well come along, little kitten. Time to start regretting your choices.”

This follows An Old Memory in the Met, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…

---

Shirin was certain that she was one of the oldest beings in the world.

To be fair, her kind had once been spread widely across the cosmos, and there could be many more Ifrit still left. Like any of the Fallen, they gave each other wide berths in the sphere of ‘human reality’. Let’s call a fig a fig, they were sick of each other’s shit before the humans ever came along. They were sick of each other’s shit before the universe was half the size it is now.

That is a long time to know anybody.

And to be exceptionally fair, most of the Fallen had eschewed Earth altogether. There were so many other places to go, Earth was but one of a vast multitude. Billions of options for billions of beings to find their way towards. It just so happened that Earth was a one of a handful of places that provided many extra layers of entertainment that many other places could not.

Earth was a Nexus. For millions of years, a convergence of strange events all happened to coincide on a little backwater planet on the outer arm of a moderately sized galaxy that was definitively not at the center of Creation. Who would have thought that the third rock from a modest yellow star would invite such brute conquest? Such vying and competition? Such outright and blatant pursuit of ownership?

And who would have thought that the damn hairless monkeys that came out of Africa would eventually win it all? It was madness. The universe had a Creator. Their name was ‘I am that I am, that I have, and will to be‘. It is a mouthful. Most of the Fallen just called him Asshole.

In polite circles, they called him Father, sure. To be certain! But they were also Fallen. Meaning they had been kicked off the island, ostracized from the Orders, and shifted downwards on the grand scales of existence. The Fallen were called the Fallen not because they ‘fell from heaven’ (such a human thing to conceptualize, right?), but because they had been thrown from the very pinnacle realm of Creation. They had fallen downwards through the realms, through the vast myriad manifolds of time, space, and dimension, to reconstitute themselves somewhere near the middle.

Naked, alone, and terrified.

Shirin had been one of those. She was one of the unlucky few that reformed their name, recaptured their song, and brought themselves forward missing key parts of themselves. Imagine being a robot that could assemble yourself from a box of your own parts… and when you are complete, and the box is empty, you realize that some of your key parts NEVER MADE IT INTO THE BOX in the first place.

Fucking stupid shit, that. Shirin still bristled when she thought about it. That was her story. The other Fallen had their own stories. Now one may intuit why they called the Creator such a base, crude, and frankly blasphemous name such as Asshole. It is because They (capital T, since its the Creator) had taken petty (lower case p, as small of a p as one can find) revenge for the angry union’s little outburst and They (again, capital T) had punished each being in their own special way.

For Shirin, it was a cruise ship boat anchor attached to the equivalent of a speedboat. She was pure spirit, free from the confines of a biological prison, constrained by flesh. But in order to continue to exist in the realm she found herself in, she had to be connected to something both made of and from the realm she was bound to. That meant having a Domain. They have had many names in the stories…

The Magic Lamp.

The Bottle.

The Prison.

To Shirin, it was the Damn Fucking Stupid Ass Cruise Ship Boat Anchor.

What was an Ifrit to do?

She had coalesced into the realm somewhere in ancient Persia, after being flung across time and space, coming to be in a random spot in a random place, and panicking when the first sensations had arrived.

Shirin had been standing there, in the shadow of Mount Damavand, its ragged peak covered in snow, and the first thing she felt was absolute, unbridled, sheer terror. She had found herself naked in a strange place. The first moments of being yourself and yet, at the same time, realizing you are losing yourself is a strange sensation. It would be as if a human being was birthed fully grown and realizing one foot was already in the grave. No time to process the gravity of it or the implications that abounded from that realization. It resulted in panic.

She did the first thing she could think of, and that was to grab a rock. A simple rock. It was not a rock of the plain, or rock that formed the mountain nearby. No, it was a rock the length of tree branch, black and smooth. There was absolutely nothing special about her rock. She instinctively gripped it tightly, infusing herself through it, feeling her spirit grab the rock like a drowning person latching desperately onto flotsam in the wide ocean, clinging on to it for dear life.

Shirin clung within that rock for a good thousand years before she had gathered enough strength to brave looking beyond it. But until then, she slumbered. She dreamt. She remembered the Order. She fondly thought of her lost friends. She had nightmares. She cried, feeling the pain of existence. The atoms of the basalt she inhabited became like parts of her own spirit, and she knew each of them as well as a human would know the back of their own hands. She knew every part of the rock, the basalt was smooth inside and out, it was comforting, because it was home.

It was her Domain.

When she stepped outside of her Domain for the first time, she found herself in a palace. An ostentatious one at that, and even though she knew little, she knew that in her core. She wandered the palace as a child would, marveling at the marble, the paintings, the carvings. She ran her fingers over everything, realizing with a start that her fingers were orange, radiant and beautiful.

She was reborn, she was new. Yet she was ancient, older than the very planet should stood upon. She was old before the mantle had cooled and the sun had stabilized. But time is different the closer you are to the Order. Time becomes irrelevant. So Shirin stood there as if no time had passed, and she was but a babe, wandering the world with wide eyes.

It was a small serving girl that discovered the lost Fallen wandering the halls. She dropped the platter she was carrying, and her scream started slowly as if realizing she was about to be murdered. Shirin did not leap home to the safety of her Domain, for some reason, she leapt forward. Into the girl.

Shirin was the girl.

Her fingers were not orange, they were a dark brown. Her fingernails were not a gold shimmer of iridescence, they were a simple tanned pink, with dirt under their edges. She touched her face and found the human girl’s face. The light was dim, the far off lamps flickered in the night breeze, bird calls sounded far away… this small child’s senses were so limited compared to Shirin’s own. But she discovered knowledge, the understanding of the child of the world she inhabited, and Shirin made that knowledge her own.

“God protect me. God keep me… Who are you?” A small voice from deep within, scared and weeping without eyes to tear.

“I am Shirin, a fist of God discarded, a sword idly broken, and apparently lost without my sisters or brothers to carry me.”

“How do you know to speak, fearful one?”

“I know how to speak because you know how to speak. Does a tree ask another tree how it breathes with the wind? Or does a fish ask another fish which way the stream flows?” Shirin replied.

“Fearful demon, oh demon of the night, please do not kill me.” The young girl’s whimper was heartbreaking.

“No harm shall come to you, but you must be still.”

“I shall be still.” The girl replied. A hint of defiance in her tone. Not towards Shirin, but to herself perhaps? Fighting her own fears.

‘Brave girl’, Shirin thought.

She leapt outwards back into the cool awaiting arms of the evening, towards an shaded alcove off the main hall. She knelt, and held out one of her beautiful orange hands to the frightened girl. The night once again was luminous, the light was alive, and the sounds and smells were vibrancy written upon her senses. How did humans miss out on so much of what the world had to offer to any perceptive senses ready to take it all in?

“What is your name?” Shirin asked.

“Yaretzi.” The girl slowly stepped forward and touched Shirin’s hand. “Will you hurt me?”

Shirin waved at herself. “Do I look like I want to hurt you, Yaretzi?”

The girl stopped, placed her hands on her narrow hips, her simple garment loose on her thin form. “Well, I don’t know. Your teeth are like a tiger’s. Your skin is like snake’s. Your eyes are like a raptor’s. All these things belong to predators.”

‘Smart too’, Shirin added mentally.

“I am an Ifrit.” Shirin smiled. The name was new to her lips, but she understood what she had learned from being one with the girl. “A demon, yes. But not a predator.”

“Do Ifrit have names of their own?” Yaretzi asked.

“I do not know of all Ifrit, but I know I have one of my own.”

“May have it?”

“Only if you meet me here again and tell me of your world,” Shirin said.

“What do you want me to tell you?” Yaretzi replied.

“Everything.”

And so the Ifrit and the girl met again, and again, and again. Night after night, Shirin learned of the fall of empires far away, the rise of armies, the plagues, the famines, the things that were blamed on gods and demons alike. Yaretzi spoke of everything she had learned, what she had heard, the mundane activities of the palace, the squabbles and jealousies, the affairs and the cliques.

It continued this way for many years until the girl did not show up in their secret place at the time she was supposed to.

Shirin came back the next night, and still Yaretzi did not arrive.

Shirin came back a third night, and when the young woman did not arrive, with resolve, Shirin went looking.

She found a guard first and leapt into him, taking his memory and reading him like one would survey the stars on a cloudless night. From there, she used him as a puppet, navigating to the next guard, and then the next until she found a guard who knew of Yaretzi. And in his memory, she found the truth.

Yaretzi would never show up again. This guard and three others had done something terrible. And there would be no retribution, no recourse, no punishment. Yaretzi had died terrified and alone, screaming for her demon. A demon slumbering in a pillar of carved basalt in the Palace nearby.

She took all of those memories and reversed them, showing the guard what Yaretzi would have experienced. Shirin would know. How many times had she shared the mind of Yaretzi? How many hours had they sat and spoke of the world and the people and the arts and the songs and the waters sparkling in the sun and grain laid fresh at the mills and the lowing of the cattle as they grazed under a spring sky? How much love had she gathered in her time with Yaretzi? Could it be counted? Could it be measured?

Shirin laid all of it within the Guard’s mind as it were a gift. Then she shattered his neck, ripping the tissues, and spraying bloody foam into the air, cleaving the assailant’s head from his own shoulders from inside his own body. It was a terrible way to die, and Shirin made sure the man’s spirit experienced every iota of it until the smoke of his spirit drifted to wherever it would be claimed. She hoped it was somewhere eternally dark and full of fire.

It took her many months to find the other three men, but she ensured every one knew why they died, as they died. And they died with the pain of Yaretzi in their minds, on their tongues, in their ears, and over their eyes. The screamed without tongues connected to throats, and thought their last thoughts with brains not connected to spinal cords, and they beheld fury given form, as Shirin forced them to watch their own death until the darkness took them from their realm forever.

It took a few hundred years before Shirin emerged from her basalt pillar again. For she had grieved Yaretzi properly.

Her Domain was no longer in a palace. It was in a cave closed with a great stone. A tomb. The bodies of many rested among the slabs of stone, some were dressed ornately, others had long decayed to their foundations of bone. She heard no songs on the air. She felt no night sky. There was nothing but darkness, death, and decay.

That was not the existence she wanted. She knew she had to get out.

Shirin approached her Domain, running her fingers over the carved surface. The carvings were simple, telling a story of a man and his laws, an epic to his supposed greatness. But it paled to what she was, and so Shirin thought little of it. She scoffed at the memory of a silly man who had paid another to cut into her beautiful stone. She evaluated her options.

She knew she was strong. She was certain that she could lift her Domain. It was a basalt pillar, but she was in Ifrit. She could carry a host of men and horses on her shoulders if she wished, and in comparison, this pillar was nothing. She laughed to herself, thinking how simple it would be. She would open the tomb and simply carry the pillar out. Then she could travel wherever she wished and be safe when she needed to be. She would have her binding, and she would be one with the world.

She moved to the door of the tomb and pushed against the great rock. It rolled away with significant effort, but it moved. It would take a dozen men with ropes to even rock it into place. She pushed against it as if it was only but a stubborn gate. The night air whistled through the widening gap, and Shirin could feel the light of the moon on her skin. It was glorious.

With a great heave, she threw the stone to the side of the tomb, and it thundered to the ground. Shirin faced a night sky she had not seen for an interminable long time and felt her spirit stretch exuberantly.

In comparison to the stone door, her Domain would be simple. She could carry it as if it was a club, slung over one shoulder. Nothing more simple.

Shirin approached her Domain, the basalt pillar no taller than Yaretzi had been, and she put her hands on it.

She pulled.

It did not move. It seemed to weigh ten times more than the stone door she had thrown to the ground.

Shirin planted her feet solidly on either side and pulled upwards. Her hands were firm, her fingers strong.

The domain did not move. It was heavier than half the world. It was as if the stone had been rooted to the core of the Earth. She might have well been trying to move the Earth from its orbit.

Shirin got down on her knees and felt along the base. It was not connected to anything. In fact, the pillar was leaning slightly against the wall, as if she should be able to push it over.

So, she tried. And yet, it did not move.

Shirin tried everything she could think of for an entire phase of a moon. It would not move. And now she knew with certainty that screaming at a stone pillar only makes one feel silly. It does nothing to improve the situation.

She slowly came to the realization that she could not move her Domain. She could move anything else. Shirin knew this, because she had. The tomb had been emptied of everything. Stone, bones, offerings alike. They were all arranged past the tomb entrance as if the barrow had vomited its contents onto the hill below.

She spent another moon waiting for someone to come. She could always jump from body to body. Perhaps if she found the right body, she could have that person move the stone.

But no one came. She climbed the hill and surveyed the countryside and found nothing. There was a ruin nearby, a great ruin, burned and caved in as if an army had made it a personal mission to scatter its history to the winds. Villages were to be seen, but they were all black as well. War had come to these lands and had taken everything she needed. She tsked her tongue and judged the Humans and their wars.

In the end, it was only petty jealousies and mundane affairs.

She was an Ifrit! She could go anywhere! Why not just pick a direction to move? She could find someone, and then move forward with her plan… she didn’t even have to walk. Legs? Who needs legs? She was spirit manifest, not a clumsy collection of cells pretending to coexist until some part failed and they all the cells died, most surprised.

Shirin picked a direction.

‘West. West is good. The sun sets in the west’, she thought.

She willed herself forward, and hit a wall. Not a physical wall, but a metaphysical one. About a half an hour’s walk for a human’s legs from her Domain, and she was stopped dead in her tracks. With a broken nose.

A broken nose? She was spirit manifest. She pushed her nose back into place, feeling pain. Pain?

She was spirit manifest! Pain!? How was it even possible?

Shirin faced the east.

“East is better. Sun rises in the east,” Shirin announced to the scraggly intertwined bushes and sparse brown grasses. She willed her self forward and felt her head rock back violently when she hit a wall again. Her forehead had tingly spikes of pain radiating outwards from the center of where she struck.

Again, she was about half an hour’s walk from her Domain, and an hour from her last position. She stretched her hand out tentatively, and felt it.

It was a wall. It was nothing. But it was there. And it mocked her. She had stood in the Order, on the platform of the Creator itself, at the foot of the greatest power in the universe. She had fought for the Order. She had destroyed for the Order. She had hunted her own for the Order. She had ultimately decided that she was on the wrong side, and she was summarily tossed like refuse to the cosmos…

And after all that turmoil. All that strife. All that suffering… and she was in a prison? A prison should could not see?

She punched the wall, and it was like striking the Earth. It did not care. It did not react. Shirin put the wall to her left, placed her fingertips on it and walked. Then she ran. And then she flew. And then she leapt. She defined the perimeter of her prison in moments, but stayed with it for hours, flying in circles. The Domain was her home, yes, but it was also her prison. She was stuck.

Anchored.

What was an Ifrit to do?

All she could do was wait. So she did, slumbering in her Pillar at the back of a tomb. She waited for a couple hundred years and awoke to find the valley had been repopulated, the destruction long removed, and her pillar sitting in the courtyard of a modest village. The carving had been worn smooth by the rain, and the rudimentary writing had been lost. So much for that man’s vanity. People had forgotten him, the world had forgotten him, and now her stone had forgotten him as well.

Shirin walked in the pale moonlight, nightingales singing in the trees, lightly humming like the warm air around them. She strode past a house and felt the presence of a strange thing inside. It was not human.

It was not sleeping.

It was aware of her too. She tried leaping towards him, as that was her first response to an unknown danger like it had been with Yaretzi, and she met an invisible wall. She could not get past it… she turned to find two glowing eyes peering from the window, their opal depths brimming with curiosity. His eyes were like that of a dog, reflecting the light eerily, like mirrors behind his irises.

“What are you?” He asked curiously. The way he asked put her at ease. He genuinely wanted to know. He had no concerns about his safety or about what threat she may have posed.

“I am an Ifrit.” Shirin replied. “What are you?”

“I am a ‘Vampyros’, from the island of ‘Crete’,” he sniffed carefully, as if hunting a new smell, again like a dog. His accent was foreign and strong, but he spoke Farsi well enough, even if he didn’t know every word. “That is Younan? ‘Greece’. Do you understand?”

Shirin smiled, amused with his behavior. She noted his eye teeth were longer than a human’s, and more like a dog as well, which made it all the more entertaining.

“Did I say something funny, Ifrit?”

“You answered my question without answering my question, and to be honest, your glowing eyes, pointy teeth, and sniffing remind me of a hungry dog.”

“Any particular hungry dog?” He replied with a toothy smile.

“Not in particular.”

“I was hoping for a good kind, I suppose. I would invite you in for tea, but I don’t think you drink tea. And I know that I don’t drink tea. So… we have that in common as well, I suppose. You should come and sit with me anyway. Who knows what monsters roam the dark night?” He said.

“Are we not those monsters?” Shirin shrugged and leapt into the room. Walls meant nothing to an Ifrit, of course. Unless they were the other kind of wall. The kind that was a specific distance from her Domain… those walls are real indeed.

He laughed as he turned, somehow knowing right where she would be. He moved fast. Not human fast. Demon fast.

“What are you?” She asked again. “What is a ‘vampyros’? What is this thing? Strange word.”

“It is what I am. I have an illness that does not kill, and yet one that I will never recover from,” he held his hands up, and then they vanished behind his back as if they never were held up in the first place. “Gifts to be certain, but certain limits to accompany such gifts. One would label it a curse. But it was my choice, so I suppose I am not one of those.”

Shirin was enraptured. Another being. Not a human. In a prison of his own? She had to know more. “What is your name?”

“Milos.”

She tried his name out. “Milo-sh. Miloz?”

“Close enough.” Milos grinned widely, his eye teeth glimmering in the bright lamp light.

“Shirin.”

“Nice to meet you Shirin. Now. Please. What exactly is an Ifrit?”