[The Garden] Praeceptor of the Reliquiae

[Nox]

At least he wasn't that long winded in this answer. Though he was less interested in the words and more interested in watching the Ascendnacy's reaction to Eliot. Eliot was playing the handicapped channeler. Though he was harder and smarter than he wanted to be thought of in the moment. Both men were playing a game and the Ascendancy would win. Eliot was on his own, he wasn't going to stand up to the Ascendancy after he'd smited a woman for disobeying. Nox was not looking to die. He wasn't looking to help Eliot either.

But the cold was seaping into his bones and he knew, the smirk on Allan's face was all about his discomfort. Nox wasn't sure what he'd done to the man but Allan didn't look at him. And Nox avoided looking too long at Jay, and the other dominion Nox didn't know. But his eyes never lingered long except for on the Ascendancy. He wasn't sure what to expect, and he hadn't been asked any questions so he wasn't about to speak up. This was all Eliot's game.

[Helena]

She did not flinch; death was not an unknown companion. Helena had never been afraid of mortality, hers or others, and despite the ferocity of the action she did not feel any true fear. Or guilt for her part in it, either. Perhaps she had been loose with her phrasing. No one who mattered would die today. In truth she found it entirely wasteful even for a show of power, and to her it felt rather more like the tantrum of a child who had been thwarted. In other circumstances she might have noted the irony aloud, and she certainly noted it internally: that they petitioned a man who in one cruel gesture framed himself the very god the Atharim were sworn to eradicate. Who the Reliquiae meant to tame. What held her tongue from the observation was not self-preservation, however. It was what she saw the moment she clapped her eyes on the would-be god.

It was not the first time she had been able to… distinguish one mortal from another, and so assess their importance to the future. It was the very reason she had once watched Cillian die, knowing his life would ultimately make no difference whatever his supposedly exalted Finnegren bloodline. But it was the first time the distinction was so marvellously apparent to her. Nikolai Brandon glowed like a sun, as though he were a focal point on which light itself bent.

Helena was still as a statue, but her silence spoke volumes. She stared with intensity. Not quite awe. But something.

Elliot explained too much. Not that their plans weren’t admirable, but the man just murdered one of his subordinates to make a point about transgression. If the lives of channelers mattered to him, he would have broken the Atharim when he revealed their faces to the world. The minutiae of reformation were of no interest to him. He wanted to know what all great men wanted to know. Why him.

“We are here because you are the needle through which this thread must pass. And not only this thread, it would seem. That is why I came. To see you for myself. Though I did not quite expect…” Her lips pursed. “It changes around you. Everything.” Her family would kill for the moment she had claimed for herself, though they would never hear about it from her. Helena availed of their resources, but she had not truly been one of them for a long time. Perhaps not ever. Such details were inconsequential. The Di Inferi had been right about his importance, just wrong about why.

[Ascendancy]

Eliot finished speaking, the last of his idealistic appeals drifting away on the wind, and Nikolai found himself only half-listening. Words, so many words. He never thought he would yearn for Nox's tongue in comparison. Stacked, tangled, reaching for meaning like vines searching for purchase. The man spoke earnestly, yes. Boldly, even. But he failed to grasp the scale of the world he was proposing to reshape.

Helena, in contrast, required no such explanations. Her restraint was clean, sharp, and controlled. Her eyes held something approaching understanding. Not admiration nor fear, but something Nikolai could not quite place, but before he could weigh either of them properly, before he could dismantle their ambitions with the simple arithmetic of reality, there was another matter far more corrosive gnawing at the foundation of his control.

His gaze slid past Eliot and Helena, and settled on Nox.

“How,” Nikolai said flatly, “does he know so much about a secret government facility, Nox?”

He didn’t bother glancing at the Dominions. The idea that one of them might have spoken was inconceivable. They understood its secrecy and cohesion. Nox had always been different. So emotional. So impulsive. He would not put anything past Nox, but the fact that Nox might have shared such a secret with the Atharim, without so much as a simple request beforehand, was disturbing.

“You all presume,” Nikolai continued, now addressing the group now but keeping his eyes on his experienced assassin, “that I have not considered what to do with criminal channelers. As though the world begins only where the Atharim’s shadows end.” And all three of them forgot something incredibly important: Nikolai hated the Atharim.

“But before we discuss salvation, rehabilitation or grand visions of reconstructed systems…” His eyes targeted onto Nox’s, unblinking. “I want to know, Nox, exactly how many of my secrets you’ve told the Atharim.” He needed to know where the line between betrayal and stupid, reckless ignorance lay with him.

[Nox]

The Ascendancy's eyes turned to him. He thought he gave Eliot information. Nox pushes away the anger that started to rise. He pushed it into the void. At least he didn't feel the cold.

"I've told him nothing. I know nothing of his plans or what he knows. I don't share secrets with people I don't know. You do know the Atharim have eyes and ears everywhere. This isn't news. I am only a middle man here."[

Though Nox was certain the man would not believe him. Why would he. He was waiting for anything to smite him It was only a matter of time. Nox didn't reach for the power, but it sat just a touch away a duel of sorts should it come to it Nox ran through a number of weaves as he waited on the Ascendancy's judgement.

[Eliot]

Eliot smirked as the boy defended his secrets. "He is correct my information doesn't come from him. We've barely spoken." Though he expected it to matter little not if he kills his own people for disobedience.

"Mr. Durante, while part of my plan, knows nothing of it, or how the inner workings of the upper echelons of the Atharim works. Even if he has a backdoor to our Intel."

[Ascendancy]

Nikolai studied them both in silence. Truth was a fickle, malleable thing sometimes hidden behind good intentions but more often nefarious than not, but he didn’t think Nox was lying. There was just something about his face that revealed guilt too easily to misconstrue his words.

He wondered whether there was a flow of Power that could compel only truth. If there was, he would have used it in this moment.

What Eliot and Nox had said was nothing he hadn’t suspected. Nothing, even, he hadn’t once known. The Atharim were everywhere. Embedded like rot in the bones of old trees. And if he had once believed that his inner circle was untouched, it was only because he had chosen to believe it. That, too, was a kind of guilt.

His tone shifted away from the edge of danger and into a temporary truce. “We will move this conversation indoors,” Nikolai said at last. “And I will entertain it further. On one condition.”

His expression was deadly still. “You will tell me which of my inner circle bears the mark of the Atharim. I want them all.”

He looked first to Eliot, then to Helena, though it was unclear who he expected the truth to come from.

“You speak of mutual trust,” he said. “This is its price. Pay it, or we are finished here.”

[Eliot]

Eliot nodded. It was fair. And they were names that wouldn't oppose his new regime. T was good for business. He gave a handful of names, "and Consul Semyon Alexeev." there were names he didn't give but Eliot took the man at his word -- his inner circle.

The boy looked didn't the l even twitch when Eliot had mentioned his back door. Even the Ascendancy seemed to eclipse the the notion that this kid had access to details he should not. Eliot wondered if the boy had his fingers in the CCD too. It made him wonder it head to make them too. But it wasn't his concern. At least not now. And there wasn't much he could do about that back door now. He was pretty sure their system was fully compromised now thanks to Nox's handlers deal.

But inside would be good.

[Ascendancy]

Consul Semyon Alexeev.

Nikolai neither moved nor flinched, but inside, he felt his mind snap with rage.

One of his own. The other names Eliot offered were bad enough, but Alexeev was a betrayal that burned deeper. The man had sat in his confidence. Advised on defense matters, eaten at his table. And he was a traitor the entire time.

Eliot gave up the names with the ease of someone bartering contracts not comrades. There was no plea for mercy. No protections negotiated. He handed his own brethren over like old coats to be thrown on the fire.

Cold bastard, Nikolai thought. And perhaps more trustworthy than he’d first believed. A man who could slit his own kin from the cause without blinking was either a psychopath… or a professional. Nikolai preferred professionals.

He gave no outward sign of his decision. Just a nod. “Follow me inside,” he said.

The Dominions fell into step alongside him. The wind shut like a door as they passed into one of the structures. Its walls were of practical concrete, tile lined the floors, and the windows were practical steel frames without ornament. This was a military base first and foremost. The Garden was only a codename. Nothing about the space was beautiful. Nor was the conference room that awaited.


There were no banners or seals. Just a long table of dark composite, a few chairs, and a tactical screen darkened at one end.

He took his seat at the head of the table, the Dominions arrayed behind him like shadows carved from stone. Then, at last, his gaze turned to Helena once they were all settled.

“You said I am the needle through which this plan must pass,” he said. “But what of your Atharim laws? Your sacred traditions?”

His stare was hard, calculating. “Will I now fight the Atharim on two fronts? The ones still thirsty for my head… and the ones who will rebel against your plan?”

He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, fingers steepled.

“How do you intend to incorporate the world into this tribunal system you propose? You can’t possibly imagine scaling this as-is.”

[Helena]

Helena followed in silence. She sat in silence. Yet silence was not natural for Helena, a woman accustomed to speaking her mind irrespective of whether or not her words were well received. She detested restraint simply for the sake of pride and bureaucracy, but she also accepted that it was prudent to hold her tongue in such a situation. Eliot presented himself as more humble petitioner than she would have urged him to be, yet she did not interrupt. She wanted to see how he handled himself in the crucible of the moment, she supposed. Though admitting, out loud, that Durante had “back doors” into Atharim intel was frankly an embarrassment, not something which should have been so blithely shared like it was simply amusing. It made them look weak. It made him look foolish.

“I am not of the Atharim,” she said plainly, once the Ascendancy turned his attention upon her in the conference room.

A dead husband. A cold search for answers. An alliance extended to shape the new world, rather than be beholden to it. She would explain how she came to be tangled in this if he required more, though she found the details irrelevant enough not to speak them unsolicited. Enough words had already been wasted.

“They are a tool to be refashioned. Pushed unwilling into the light, and revealed to already be broken within themselves.” She gestured to Nox as case in point: a man exemplary of the Atharim’s ethos, and yet hunted because of the power he harboured. He persisted despite numerous attempts on his life, proof a channeler was no easy thing to kill, and of the internal fractures which made their organisation unsustainable. But more importantly, Nox continued to fulfil his purpose. Clearly the Ascendancy also recognised something in Nox himself, for the trust bestowed was no small thing. This meeting was testament. Her gaze then moved to the blonde, stone-faced Dominion whose name had been among Eliot’s files. A defector who accepted the Custody’s amnesty. He did not speak. She could read nothing of his expression. But she let him feel the weight of her attention.

“Death has long since ceased to be a sustainable answer, and yet they cling to it even when they fail to deliver it. The godhood they so fear can no longer be contained – and many of them know it, not just those already touched by its hand. Change is upon them, whether they wish it or not. And we, the hands who will seek to shape it anew. This is not about salvation, Ascendancy; it is about order.

“I cannot promise bloodlessness. You would think me a liar if I did. But I would say to you that a man who seeks to claim the entire world under his banner will always have others thirsty for his head. It makes his choice of allies all the more important.”

She did not much blink as she spoke, still watching the light doused around him with an unwavering intensity. Eliot had already said that their vision would begin only in Moscow, and he could elaborate if he wished. For Helena, it was the linchpin. She came from a family whose shadowy influence indeed infiltrated the world entire, not a city alone, but for now, Moscow was what mattered most.

[Eliot]

Helena had held her tongue and he'd been surprised but was grateful for it and he listened intently as she answered the Ascendancy's questions. Though she didn't go on about details of any sort. He was sure he would hear all about his mistakes later. It was just who she was.

"Moscow is a trial to see if it will work. The other goverments will need to get on board, and help in their local reasons. That is also where your backing would play a hand in. The CCD requires this or some such authority. There are factions among factions in the Atharim. Ones we know of, others we don't. Bringing Texas into the fold has brought in the American Atharim which as you are well aware or cowboys unto themselves." He looked pointedly at Nox who was probably as American as they came. He didn't follow the Regus to the letter, yet he was Atharim by blood and true to the cause even though he'd left the order because of his godhood.