(no subject)
Oct. 13th, 2010 12:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonPreviously: “Okay…” Adam steps forward as his magical circle, (with bubble lettered glyphs and wild style sigils flowing throughout its perimeter), follows him in perfect synch so he never ventures outside of it, “my turn.”
In the absence of fear, it is not courage Adam feels but rather the single minded devotion of a lover, one who successfully strangles death back past the moment of surrender’s rapture. His face is the face of a man who stands naked on the roof during the worst of storms, outshouting the thunder to demand lightning’s immolation. Standing on the precipice of his death blindfolded, his enemies marshalling around the wake of his ambush and gathering strength in their numbers, he can truly say he has never felt so alive.
From inside his magickal circle everything’s filtered through “epiphany’s terror”. It’s like tripping on quality ‘shrooms, but only in the way being stoned is like tripping on quality ‘shrooms. Every color radiates with a secret significance on the cusp of revelation, every detail magnified around him to become the center of the universe’s perpetual bloom, every sigh a rumble, every breath the whispering echo of approaching angels. His thoughts have become an incendiary whirlwind raging around the depths of a suddenly bottomless skull, yet his resolve does not burn and the heat only serves to crystallize his attention upon his opponents.
In slow motion he watches Dent empty the clips on his 9’s, through memory’s grimorie he peels a graffiti tag from a snapshot of a distant wall. Three miles away the corresponding tag vanishes from the brick wall.
Adam mutters…
…snaps his fingers into a pistol that points bulls eye at the young mage’s face.
Time speeds back up as Dent is rapidly consumed in a wave of phosphorescent violet flames. No scream, no gasp, no time. Through the shimmering haze of the relentless blaze, the wavering silhouette of a diminutive figure drops to its knees and falls face down into a puddle of inferno.
Outside the factory – the ring of fire evaporates and vanishes.
Three to go.
Annie Kreist’s up next and hits twice as hard as she looks. She delivers a series of jabs, crosses and upper-cuts that hammer against the invisible shell emanating from Adam’s circle. Sparks flare off blistered knuckles. Across the tops of her hardened fists, two sets of tattooed dragon heads – of the Chinese variety – ignite with a golden luminescence. Adam begins to see spider-cracks spreading between him and Annie’s wrath.
“I’ve cracked open harder circles than this before…” she snorts at her foe through a maniac’s grin.
“… and no doubt they were stupid enough to stand there and let you do it.” Adam snorts back, sans the grin, before sinking into the floor of the circle – whose perimeter of wild style Hebrew and Alchemical symbols freeze in their orbit – before having it contrast around his absence into the single dot beneath an ‘!’
“Over here.” Adam whispers into her ear and she spins with a blow that could easily shatter a brick, much less his head, but that strikes instead empty air.
A tap on her left shoulder and Annie pivots with the sharp of her elbow ready to cave in the metromancer’s nose.
“He’s fucking with you, Annie!” Mistress Drown shouts, taking her severed whip and running its snub through a gloved hand that regenerates the entirety of her weapon’s full length.
“Adam Solomon Lastowski… Adam Last… Frater Never… “ Drown chants, “… by three names true I command you to reveal yourself!”
And at the crack of her whip, that elongates past the snatch of its possible distance, Adam’s circle appears again, right where it was, with a vague shadow that materializes into the sneering mage.
“Drown, Baby…” Adam shrugs playfully, “… you used to have a sense of humor. S’up with that?”
No sooner said than done, Annie plows her fist through Adam’s face.
The effect yields not shattered cartilage and pulverized bone, but instead simply ripples through Adam and collides full on with the wall behind him. A brief meteor shower erupts off her impact followed by a cloud of dust. Annie staggers back, blood dripping down her arm and sizzling against her right dragon tattoo.
Adam smiles and with a pointed finger traces Annie’s inks and growls an incantation taught to him, in another life, by Carlos the Chameleon. The dragon writhes, coils and slithers with life up the Riot Witch’s arm, before coiling around her neck. Her eyes bulge open with naked rage as her face flushes into a fine shade of asphyxiation red. She staggers forward towards Adam, who in turn, weaves two strands of an invisible thread into a loop and tightens it with a merciless yank.
Of the three remaining rings protecting the factory, the one whirlwind loop disperses into the shivering night air.
The last gasp of breath Annie was holding escapes and she drops to her knees as her dragon coils in tighter and tighter and…
… a snap from Drown’s whip wraps around Adam’s neck and yanks him out of the magickal circle. Focusing on Annie he let his guard slip for a moment and in that moment his circle’s shield vanished.
“Tit for tat!” Drown purrs and drags her prey across the floor towards a thrusted boot with surprising strength. When Adam reaches her, he is swiftly met by the stab of her heel into his left collar bone.
An inhuman scream resounds as eldritch energy swells out of Drown’s Chakra system and courses down the whip’s length to cascade as raw pain into Adam’s nervous system.
Adam shifts through whimpers, shrieks and screams.
“You know, you haven’t changed a bit. The strength of a slave and a coward’s cunning. Little else to be honest. Now really, Adam… did you think that was going to be enough?”
“G’ F’k Yr’s’f” Adam chokes through the agony coruscating across every nerve and pinpoint of his awareness.
“I’ve broken you before, gutter mage. Remember? How you begged and crawled for it. How you licked the filth from my boot with your poet’s mouth until only your perfect degradation reflected back into your gaze. And in that moment you saw yourself for what you were. And in that moment you were mine.”
“Y’h, a’bt th’t…” Adam forces himself up on a single scraped knee, grabbing one end of the taut line of the whip that binds him and presses two fingers into the ground beneath his stance. In that moment, beneath the whip’s coil around his throat, a lambent blue glow erupts and spreads back up the whip, incinerating it in its wake, before hitting Drown with a bolt of energy that literally knocks her off her boots.
Adam stands up, unzips his hoodie and yanks his shirt down. Revealed around his throat is an intricate tribal weave tattoo that forms a cobalt collar. Woven into the pattern – the name “Sarah K.”
“… I’ve moved on, Drown. I wear another Mistress’ collar now. Someone a lot stronger and meaner than you ever fancied yourself to be… and belief you me, she does not take kindly to other people fucking with her personal property.”
Mistress Drown is dangling by a tattered thread of consciousness. Every lash, every blow, every crack, stab and bite she has ever delivered to Adam has struck back at precisely three times the strength.
The moat of treacherous water outside, the second ring, dries up into mud and dirt.
“So, I guess that only leaves...” Adam’s words are cut off by a razor sharp wind slash that slices across his throat. Only Sarah’s collar keeps the slash from completely severing open his jugular vein. Words bubble and gargle from Adam’s throat. Another air slash cuts the tendons in the back of Adam’s calf.
“… me.” Mister Setheus appears as a floating sardonic grin over the hobbled and bleeding profusely, Adam.
The blue tattoo collar around Adam’s neck ignites again and this time there is a crackle along with a slight waft of eye-watering smoke. Adam removes his hand from his throat. The wound has sealed itself thoroughly beneath a hardening scar and flakes of freeze dried blood.
Adam staggers back up and another slash cuts him across the top of his wrist. Adam grinds the scream back and focuses. His magick circle flies across the floor and slips under Adam’s boots… just in time as a fourth slash sparks against his shield.
“You can’t stay in there forever…” a disembodied voice echoes around Adam. “… and you can’t hurt what’s not real. So now what will you do, little magician?”
Mister Setheus is a murder magician of the Zero Temple. A ‘reverse tulpa’ – a mage who, by sheer willpower, has willed hirself into a fictional character. A being capable of slipping in and out of reality and immune to not only conventional self defense but magical as well.
Adam knows this.
Which is why he’s laughing to himself through the pain.
He slaps his hand over his face. The crudely drawn magic-marker eyeball bursts into life, scans the room and settles on a blur constantly shifting out of the corner of his vision.
“There!” Adam barks and three graffiti ‘Pac-Man’ ghosts, each grinning with a full set of fangs, float off the walls and drift towards the murder magician.
Setheus slips into a blur of motion, gutting the first of the ghosts to reach him. The creature howls out before bursting into a spray of blue aerosol paint. Suddenly a wet silhouette is standing there naked in the room. The two remaining ghosts descend upon him, morphing into one homogenous creature that swallows up the murder magician whole.
The final circle that remained – spirit – vanishes in a puff of cold logic.
Adam looks around the basement.
A smoldering puddle of flames. A still struggling for breath, Annie. A monstrous graffiti ghost stuffed fat with its dinner. A barely still conscious Drown and the bullet riddled corpse of Frater Da’ath.
He’s only got a few seconds now. He quickly lights himself a badly needed cigarette and with the first puff of smoke…
… comes the familiar click-clack of a pistol’s hammer being cocked back.
“’Arsn’, Bitch?” Dent’s word seer into his thoughts. “Ni**er, I don’t burn!”
The puddle of flames upon which the diminutive mage fell into, erupt into a column from which Dent re-emerges. He empties a full clip of hell-fire rounds into Adam.
Ten shots crack but not shatter his shell.
Dent, still engulfed in flames and loving every minute of it, looks over at Annie and spits a wad of infrared flames. It splatters against her and the dragon suffocating her wails with the cacophony of a jangling glass before sliding back down to her arm and flattening back into a mere tattoo again.
Annie sucks in a breath and bursts back up. She shakes the damage off and processes the oxygen flow. The gas back on in her lungs, she charges and crashes into Adam’s shield. Sending them both tumbling down. Adam goes to fight her off but suddenly finds he can’t move his arms. Through a rain of hammering blows upon his shield he can see Drown leaning against the wall on the opposite end of the room. A single pair of talisman handcuffs dangling from an outstretched finger.
Dent turns around and spits again. This time the wad hits the massive ghost amoeba and incinerates it instantly.
A vicious right hook from Annie shatters the last of Adam’s shield and the circle flares in a full spectrum of light, before evaporating out of existence.
Annie gets up and hauls Adam up with her, before she pins him up against the wall.
“Now… where were we?” Dent laughs.
“Losing.” Adam giggles.
Kreist bounces his head off the wall once before landing a solid bitch slap across his chops. Adam feels more than one tooth loosen at the blow.
“Don’t fuck around, Annie… just kill him.” Drown shouts with barely concealed fear.
“Relax, woman. Bitch can’t use the same hexes on us twice, least not me. So what say we have some fun with this fool… least, before we put ‘em outta his misery.” Dent sneers.
“Hear that?” Annie leans in and whispers kiss close, “Any more magic words, Adam Last?”
Adam’s dizzy from pain and blood loss. His ears are still ringing from when she bopped his head off the wall, so he can’t hear the word he speaks next –
“Back-up!”
Annie’s quick. One of the quickest. A serpent that bleeds lightning and methamphetamines. She almost has time to snap Adam’s neck before her brains blow out the side of her head. She stands there a full second, her grip still squeezing Adam, before she slumps over and Sarah K. is standing there in her wake.
Dent is still drawing his pistol when Sarah vanishes and appears directly behind the still burning mage. A point blank double tap of her .45 (plated in chrome and bearing a leopard print handle) removes the young mage’s face from the inside out.
Drown goes for the door but Sarah, without needing to look, blows out her kneecap from the back of her leg. Drown goes down in a tumble of screams and agony.
The wind then slices at Sarah, catching her in the cheek. Another slash cuts across the hand. A third jabs right into her leg. A disembodied grin floating around her the whole time.
Sarah reels back and catches her balance. She can sense something moving out of the corner of her eye and she shouts –
“Arnold Franklin Davenport!”
In that moment a man appears just inches away from Sarah. White. Mid-40’s. Pot bellied and a tangle of thinning hair growing recklessly from his sides.
“No, no, I’m Setheus, I’m not real…”
Sarah dully lifts her pistol up and fires at range zero into the man’s face.
“Not anymore you’re not!” she snorts.
“Really…” Adam gasps weakly, “… you sound like one of those bad action movies, Babe.”
“Well…” Sarah, bobs her head in thought, “… when in Rome, right?”
She walks over to Drown and points the gun down at her.
Drown is rolling on her back, clutching her knee and grimacing back the tears.
“Don’t… don’t do this.” She begs Sarah.
“Fine…” Sarah lowers her gun, turns to her side and gives it to Adam.
“Nothing personal, Drown.” Adam squeezes the trigger, inadvertently emptying the rest of the clip into her.
The .45’s roar still echoing in his ears, the scent of gun powder singeing his nostrils and the after-tremors of the fire still trembling up his arm… Adam hands back the pistol meekly and looks into Sarah’s pixie green eyes.
“Now what?”
“War. The gangs will be at each other’s throats, so will the local lodges and covens. The Heart’s Beautiful Lie will find himself without an empire… and without an empire his power, his grounding in this world will be weakened. Not by much, but enough for us to finish this.”
Adam doesn’t say a word. He just stares at Drown’s body. A terrible nausea churns his stomach and the adrenalin begins to fade into cold hurt and sobriety.
‘What have I done?’ is the only thought he can summon.
“C’mon…” Sarah takes his hand, “… let’s get outta here.”
Adam nods, closes his eyes, feels the city of Terminus open up within his mind… he focuses on the abandoned hotel room they’ve been holding up in and together the two of them fade slowly from existence, folding out of the mutual narrative of our reality to somewhere only they can share.
Last Stand
In the absence of fear, it is not courage Adam feels but rather the single minded devotion of a lover, one who successfully strangles death back past the moment of surrender’s rapture. His face is the face of a man who stands naked on the roof during the worst of storms, outshouting the thunder to demand lightning’s immolation. Standing on the precipice of his death blindfolded, his enemies marshalling around the wake of his ambush and gathering strength in their numbers, he can truly say he has never felt so alive.
From inside his magickal circle everything’s filtered through “epiphany’s terror”. It’s like tripping on quality ‘shrooms, but only in the way being stoned is like tripping on quality ‘shrooms. Every color radiates with a secret significance on the cusp of revelation, every detail magnified around him to become the center of the universe’s perpetual bloom, every sigh a rumble, every breath the whispering echo of approaching angels. His thoughts have become an incendiary whirlwind raging around the depths of a suddenly bottomless skull, yet his resolve does not burn and the heat only serves to crystallize his attention upon his opponents.
In slow motion he watches Dent empty the clips on his 9’s, through memory’s grimorie he peels a graffiti tag from a snapshot of a distant wall. Three miles away the corresponding tag vanishes from the brick wall.
Adam mutters…
…snaps his fingers into a pistol that points bulls eye at the young mage’s face.
Time speeds back up as Dent is rapidly consumed in a wave of phosphorescent violet flames. No scream, no gasp, no time. Through the shimmering haze of the relentless blaze, the wavering silhouette of a diminutive figure drops to its knees and falls face down into a puddle of inferno.
Outside the factory – the ring of fire evaporates and vanishes.
Three to go.
Annie Kreist’s up next and hits twice as hard as she looks. She delivers a series of jabs, crosses and upper-cuts that hammer against the invisible shell emanating from Adam’s circle. Sparks flare off blistered knuckles. Across the tops of her hardened fists, two sets of tattooed dragon heads – of the Chinese variety – ignite with a golden luminescence. Adam begins to see spider-cracks spreading between him and Annie’s wrath.
“I’ve cracked open harder circles than this before…” she snorts at her foe through a maniac’s grin.
“… and no doubt they were stupid enough to stand there and let you do it.” Adam snorts back, sans the grin, before sinking into the floor of the circle – whose perimeter of wild style Hebrew and Alchemical symbols freeze in their orbit – before having it contrast around his absence into the single dot beneath an ‘!’
“Over here.” Adam whispers into her ear and she spins with a blow that could easily shatter a brick, much less his head, but that strikes instead empty air.
A tap on her left shoulder and Annie pivots with the sharp of her elbow ready to cave in the metromancer’s nose.
“He’s fucking with you, Annie!” Mistress Drown shouts, taking her severed whip and running its snub through a gloved hand that regenerates the entirety of her weapon’s full length.
“Adam Solomon Lastowski… Adam Last… Frater Never… “ Drown chants, “… by three names true I command you to reveal yourself!”
And at the crack of her whip, that elongates past the snatch of its possible distance, Adam’s circle appears again, right where it was, with a vague shadow that materializes into the sneering mage.
“Drown, Baby…” Adam shrugs playfully, “… you used to have a sense of humor. S’up with that?”
No sooner said than done, Annie plows her fist through Adam’s face.
The effect yields not shattered cartilage and pulverized bone, but instead simply ripples through Adam and collides full on with the wall behind him. A brief meteor shower erupts off her impact followed by a cloud of dust. Annie staggers back, blood dripping down her arm and sizzling against her right dragon tattoo.
Adam smiles and with a pointed finger traces Annie’s inks and growls an incantation taught to him, in another life, by Carlos the Chameleon. The dragon writhes, coils and slithers with life up the Riot Witch’s arm, before coiling around her neck. Her eyes bulge open with naked rage as her face flushes into a fine shade of asphyxiation red. She staggers forward towards Adam, who in turn, weaves two strands of an invisible thread into a loop and tightens it with a merciless yank.
Of the three remaining rings protecting the factory, the one whirlwind loop disperses into the shivering night air.
The last gasp of breath Annie was holding escapes and she drops to her knees as her dragon coils in tighter and tighter and…
… a snap from Drown’s whip wraps around Adam’s neck and yanks him out of the magickal circle. Focusing on Annie he let his guard slip for a moment and in that moment his circle’s shield vanished.
“Tit for tat!” Drown purrs and drags her prey across the floor towards a thrusted boot with surprising strength. When Adam reaches her, he is swiftly met by the stab of her heel into his left collar bone.
An inhuman scream resounds as eldritch energy swells out of Drown’s Chakra system and courses down the whip’s length to cascade as raw pain into Adam’s nervous system.
Adam shifts through whimpers, shrieks and screams.
“You know, you haven’t changed a bit. The strength of a slave and a coward’s cunning. Little else to be honest. Now really, Adam… did you think that was going to be enough?”
“G’ F’k Yr’s’f” Adam chokes through the agony coruscating across every nerve and pinpoint of his awareness.
“I’ve broken you before, gutter mage. Remember? How you begged and crawled for it. How you licked the filth from my boot with your poet’s mouth until only your perfect degradation reflected back into your gaze. And in that moment you saw yourself for what you were. And in that moment you were mine.”
“Y’h, a’bt th’t…” Adam forces himself up on a single scraped knee, grabbing one end of the taut line of the whip that binds him and presses two fingers into the ground beneath his stance. In that moment, beneath the whip’s coil around his throat, a lambent blue glow erupts and spreads back up the whip, incinerating it in its wake, before hitting Drown with a bolt of energy that literally knocks her off her boots.
Adam stands up, unzips his hoodie and yanks his shirt down. Revealed around his throat is an intricate tribal weave tattoo that forms a cobalt collar. Woven into the pattern – the name “Sarah K.”
“… I’ve moved on, Drown. I wear another Mistress’ collar now. Someone a lot stronger and meaner than you ever fancied yourself to be… and belief you me, she does not take kindly to other people fucking with her personal property.”
Mistress Drown is dangling by a tattered thread of consciousness. Every lash, every blow, every crack, stab and bite she has ever delivered to Adam has struck back at precisely three times the strength.
The moat of treacherous water outside, the second ring, dries up into mud and dirt.
“So, I guess that only leaves...” Adam’s words are cut off by a razor sharp wind slash that slices across his throat. Only Sarah’s collar keeps the slash from completely severing open his jugular vein. Words bubble and gargle from Adam’s throat. Another air slash cuts the tendons in the back of Adam’s calf.
“… me.” Mister Setheus appears as a floating sardonic grin over the hobbled and bleeding profusely, Adam.
The blue tattoo collar around Adam’s neck ignites again and this time there is a crackle along with a slight waft of eye-watering smoke. Adam removes his hand from his throat. The wound has sealed itself thoroughly beneath a hardening scar and flakes of freeze dried blood.
Adam staggers back up and another slash cuts him across the top of his wrist. Adam grinds the scream back and focuses. His magick circle flies across the floor and slips under Adam’s boots… just in time as a fourth slash sparks against his shield.
“You can’t stay in there forever…” a disembodied voice echoes around Adam. “… and you can’t hurt what’s not real. So now what will you do, little magician?”
Mister Setheus is a murder magician of the Zero Temple. A ‘reverse tulpa’ – a mage who, by sheer willpower, has willed hirself into a fictional character. A being capable of slipping in and out of reality and immune to not only conventional self defense but magical as well.
Adam knows this.
Which is why he’s laughing to himself through the pain.
He slaps his hand over his face. The crudely drawn magic-marker eyeball bursts into life, scans the room and settles on a blur constantly shifting out of the corner of his vision.
“There!” Adam barks and three graffiti ‘Pac-Man’ ghosts, each grinning with a full set of fangs, float off the walls and drift towards the murder magician.
Setheus slips into a blur of motion, gutting the first of the ghosts to reach him. The creature howls out before bursting into a spray of blue aerosol paint. Suddenly a wet silhouette is standing there naked in the room. The two remaining ghosts descend upon him, morphing into one homogenous creature that swallows up the murder magician whole.
The final circle that remained – spirit – vanishes in a puff of cold logic.
Adam looks around the basement.
A smoldering puddle of flames. A still struggling for breath, Annie. A monstrous graffiti ghost stuffed fat with its dinner. A barely still conscious Drown and the bullet riddled corpse of Frater Da’ath.
He’s only got a few seconds now. He quickly lights himself a badly needed cigarette and with the first puff of smoke…
… comes the familiar click-clack of a pistol’s hammer being cocked back.
“’Arsn’, Bitch?” Dent’s word seer into his thoughts. “Ni**er, I don’t burn!”
The puddle of flames upon which the diminutive mage fell into, erupt into a column from which Dent re-emerges. He empties a full clip of hell-fire rounds into Adam.
Ten shots crack but not shatter his shell.
Dent, still engulfed in flames and loving every minute of it, looks over at Annie and spits a wad of infrared flames. It splatters against her and the dragon suffocating her wails with the cacophony of a jangling glass before sliding back down to her arm and flattening back into a mere tattoo again.
Annie sucks in a breath and bursts back up. She shakes the damage off and processes the oxygen flow. The gas back on in her lungs, she charges and crashes into Adam’s shield. Sending them both tumbling down. Adam goes to fight her off but suddenly finds he can’t move his arms. Through a rain of hammering blows upon his shield he can see Drown leaning against the wall on the opposite end of the room. A single pair of talisman handcuffs dangling from an outstretched finger.
Dent turns around and spits again. This time the wad hits the massive ghost amoeba and incinerates it instantly.
A vicious right hook from Annie shatters the last of Adam’s shield and the circle flares in a full spectrum of light, before evaporating out of existence.
Annie gets up and hauls Adam up with her, before she pins him up against the wall.
“Now… where were we?” Dent laughs.
“Losing.” Adam giggles.
Kreist bounces his head off the wall once before landing a solid bitch slap across his chops. Adam feels more than one tooth loosen at the blow.
“Don’t fuck around, Annie… just kill him.” Drown shouts with barely concealed fear.
“Relax, woman. Bitch can’t use the same hexes on us twice, least not me. So what say we have some fun with this fool… least, before we put ‘em outta his misery.” Dent sneers.
“Hear that?” Annie leans in and whispers kiss close, “Any more magic words, Adam Last?”
Adam’s dizzy from pain and blood loss. His ears are still ringing from when she bopped his head off the wall, so he can’t hear the word he speaks next –
“Back-up!”
Annie’s quick. One of the quickest. A serpent that bleeds lightning and methamphetamines. She almost has time to snap Adam’s neck before her brains blow out the side of her head. She stands there a full second, her grip still squeezing Adam, before she slumps over and Sarah K. is standing there in her wake.
Dent is still drawing his pistol when Sarah vanishes and appears directly behind the still burning mage. A point blank double tap of her .45 (plated in chrome and bearing a leopard print handle) removes the young mage’s face from the inside out.
Drown goes for the door but Sarah, without needing to look, blows out her kneecap from the back of her leg. Drown goes down in a tumble of screams and agony.
The wind then slices at Sarah, catching her in the cheek. Another slash cuts across the hand. A third jabs right into her leg. A disembodied grin floating around her the whole time.
Sarah reels back and catches her balance. She can sense something moving out of the corner of her eye and she shouts –
“Arnold Franklin Davenport!”
In that moment a man appears just inches away from Sarah. White. Mid-40’s. Pot bellied and a tangle of thinning hair growing recklessly from his sides.
“No, no, I’m Setheus, I’m not real…”
Sarah dully lifts her pistol up and fires at range zero into the man’s face.
“Not anymore you’re not!” she snorts.
“Really…” Adam gasps weakly, “… you sound like one of those bad action movies, Babe.”
“Well…” Sarah, bobs her head in thought, “… when in Rome, right?”
She walks over to Drown and points the gun down at her.
Drown is rolling on her back, clutching her knee and grimacing back the tears.
“Don’t… don’t do this.” She begs Sarah.
“Fine…” Sarah lowers her gun, turns to her side and gives it to Adam.
“Nothing personal, Drown.” Adam squeezes the trigger, inadvertently emptying the rest of the clip into her.
The .45’s roar still echoing in his ears, the scent of gun powder singeing his nostrils and the after-tremors of the fire still trembling up his arm… Adam hands back the pistol meekly and looks into Sarah’s pixie green eyes.
“Now what?”
“War. The gangs will be at each other’s throats, so will the local lodges and covens. The Heart’s Beautiful Lie will find himself without an empire… and without an empire his power, his grounding in this world will be weakened. Not by much, but enough for us to finish this.”
Adam doesn’t say a word. He just stares at Drown’s body. A terrible nausea churns his stomach and the adrenalin begins to fade into cold hurt and sobriety.
‘What have I done?’ is the only thought he can summon.
“C’mon…” Sarah takes his hand, “… let’s get outta here.”
Adam nods, closes his eyes, feels the city of Terminus open up within his mind… he focuses on the abandoned hotel room they’ve been holding up in and together the two of them fade slowly from existence, folding out of the mutual narrative of our reality to somewhere only they can share.