Chapter Twenty-Six

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To my surprise, it really was painless. Portals apparently sucked so much that even a relatively tame one had left Saori semiconscious at best for several minutes, and while she had said that Ways didn’t have the same effect, I had still on some level been expecting this to be at least a little unpleasant.

It wasn’t. I moved forward into the darkness, and I had the feeling of continuing to move forward, just with “forward” pointing a direction I didn’t usually see. I wasn’t sure I was walking, and I had little awareness of my body; the world was dark and deep. But it wasn’t unpleasant, just foreign, and it only lasted a couple seconds before I was stepping out the far side. I didn’t pass out; I didn’t even lose my balance.

We emerged into the heavens. I had no better description than that. It wasn’t that it was impossibly pleasant, or that I had a feeling of benevolence here, nothing like that. But the only comparison point I had for the environment I was now in was fictional depictions of heaven. The ground under my feet wasn’t ground at all, it was clouds, which were impossibly thick and strong. More than enough to hold my weight. The feeling was odd, springy in a way that reminded me a tiny bit of a trampoline, but not enough to actually throw me off balance.

I looked around, and saw nothing but more clouds in all directions. There were walls to both sides, but they were all built out of clouds, varying in color and consistency, varying in size. We seemed to be in a sort of enclosed courtyard, one so large that recognizing that it was enclosed rather than being outside the castle entirely took me a couple seconds.

And it definitely was a castle, too. The buildings around the courtyard were at least five stories tall, and looked to be fortified heavily. Ahead I could see a sort of central keep large enough that it was hard for me to fully conceive of it as a building. The tower at the center of that larger complex had to be as tall as a skyscraper, and not a small one at that. And every bit of it was, impossibly, made out of clouds, like we were walking through an architect’s wet dream set in a traditional European idea of Heaven.

And the best part? I wasn’t even seeing the whole castle. This was the view from inside the castle, able to see only the portion of it that loomed over the surrounding parts of the structure. I had no idea how large the structure was taken as a whole, and I suspected I was glad for that. I wasn’t ready to see that tonight.

“Holy fuck,” I said, in a voice that registered even to me as awestruck, looking at Nephele’s castle. “What the fucking hell.”

“Yeah, she did a pretty good job on it,” Saori said. She didn’t sound awestruck. She sounded like a jaded urbanite humoring her rural cousin who had come from the country to visit the city. It was casual. But when she then added, “The rules here aren’t like what you’re used to,” there was a distinct thread of warning in her tone.

“Yeah,” I said, shaking myself out of it and starting to move. “Yeah, getting that impression.” A glance back confirmed that at least the Way seemed to still be open, a dark oval hanging in the air just like the one I’d walked into to get here.

Then I paused as something else occurred to me. “She built this whole thing out of clouds,” I said, poking the one underneath of me with my foot.

“Yup! You uh. You do realize her name literally translates as ‛cloud’, right? Nephele is a weather nymph, this is her thing.”

I sighed. Of course it was. Of fucking course it was. Because really, if I were to get a creepy invitation to a Sidhe event hosted by a nymph exactly when those were the two classes of creature I was currently being threatened by, why wouldn’t it also wrap in my involuntary-but-constant storm motif? That would just be inefficient.

Nothing else was said between the Way and the castle interior. I was trying, with limited success, to acclimate myself to the surroundings here. Everything felt just…slightly off as though it weren’t quite anything I was accustomed to. The light was steady, though there was no sun above, and I had no sense of what time it might be. The air was cool, but comfortable, and so still it was a little eerie. On a more metaphysical level, the whole place felt saturated with the same cool, mist-and-birdsong feeling I’d momentarily noticed when Saori activated the travel instructions on this invitation. It was stronger here, enough that I could also feel fainter elements, a note of amber in the scent, a rainbow overlay on my visual field. The energy flows around me were, in general, significantly stronger than what I was used to, and significantly less varied.

Taken as a whole, it was a little disorienting, and I didn’t like that. If just walking across the courtyard screwed with me, that did not bode well for my ability to tolerate the party itself.

Someone waved us over once we got close to the wall, a tall, wispy humanoid creature I did not recognize and did not try to. I was keeping my perceptual filters as strong as I knew how, and still didn’t feel like it would be enough. Actually making sense of what the beings around me were was a terrible idea.

Instead, I just showed it the invitation. It read through it, carefully and closely, and then passed it back to me and bowed. “This way, my ladies,” it said in a voice that sounded like whistling, and turned to walk into the castle. I followed, holding Saori’s hand a little too tight, like a child clinging to her mother’s hand for comfort in an overwhelming place. The kitsune smiled at me, a gentler smile than her usual wild grins, and we followed the strange, wispy being into the castle itself.

---

Nephele’s ballroom was exactly as impossible as the overall construction of the castle had led me to expect. It was the size of a factory floor, and not a small factory, either. Everything was still made of clouds, but they’d gotten more artistic in here; there were sculptures in the walls, and abstract designs made with clouds of different colors and consistencies. All of that art was, naturally, amazing.

It had taken a while to walk there from the courtyard. I didn’t even try to keep track of the path; there were too many twists and turns, and I wasn’t sure how geometry even worked here, which made it hard to tell where we had ended up in relation to the entrance. But it was a long walk, through wide corridors paved with clouds.

In a way, the sheer degree to which the place felt unreal was starting to be helpful. It was like my surroundings were so far removed from what I was used to that it had stopped registering as a real place. It felt more like a dream or a vision, and that made it easier, made it so that I could process events without trying to make sense of an environment that was not amenable to any sense I knew.

“Wow,” I said once we reached the ballroom itself, looking out over the space. We had come in at the top of a small staircase, and I had an excellent view. The whole room, the size of a factory floor, was full of the Sidhe, and there was nothing that could possibly have prepared me for that.

They were, on the whole, beautiful. Not all of them, but the majority seemed to favor forms that looked mostly human, and most of those forms were beautiful in ways that humans simply couldn’t be. A model or a world-class beauty might come close to a few of the Sidhe, but they would still fall far short of the more beautiful among them. And, at least as importantly, the model would be nowhere near as graceful, not remotely close to the elegance of movement on display here.

“Yeah,” Saori said, looking out at the crowd as well. “Yeah, that’s, uh, that’s a lot of faeries.”

“I have no idea where to start,” I admitted. I was still watching the crowd milling about, struggling to pull my eyes away. It was just…so much.

“Find some landmarks,” Saori said, somewhat surprising me with the practicality of her advice. She didn’t even throw in any bizarre, disturbing, and/or obscene details. “The buffet is to the right, and across the hall. The throne is to the left. You can use those as anchors so you know where you are, and the food in particular will be quieter than the rest of the room, if you need that.”

I blinked, with some effort, and then looked to the right. She was, I saw, correct. There was a whole line of banquet tables over there, and at a glance they were covered in food. Other tables were scattered around that general area, too, probably for the guests to sit and eat at. Because of that use, there wasn’t as much movement there; the Sidhe, and whoever the hell else got invited to this, were seated. It was…easier to pull my attention away when they were still.

“Right,” I said. “Nothing for it, I guess. Start with food, I guess?”

“I’m a sucker for a buffet.” Saori grinned. “And nobody does feasts like the Sidhe. Oh, and it’s safe to eat at an event like this, by the way. No drugs, no poison, no curses or whatever. It’s in the truce agreement.”

“Good,” I said. I’d been worried about that; there were so many stories, in both faerie tales and Greek myths, about people who ate food of another world, and found themselves trapped there as a result. But it made sense this would be relatively safe, and I trusted Saori when she said it was in the terms of the invitation, which made it sacrosanct.

We started down the stairs in that direction. And then, halfway down the staircase, I looked the other direction, towards the throne. That…was a mistake. Because that’s where the dance floor was.

I had thought that the crowd of fae was beautiful. And it was, but this was something else entirely. The dancers were so graceful, so beautiful, and the magic slid over me like rainbows and dappled sun-and-shadow patterns on the leaves of trees. I watched, captivated, and the rest of the world was forgotten.

There were no words for the high Sidhe dancing, none whatsoever. Human languages were never made with the intention of capturing visions like this. There had to be a hundred of them, and they were all impossibly beautiful, even the ones who were incredibly ugly. And their dance, their movement, was impossibly perfect. Every step, every tiniest shift of weight and change of posture, was perfect. There were no missteps, no errors. They whirled and spun and flowed past each other with wild abandon, and never got in each other’s way, never stumbled or collided with another dancer.

I was accustomed to tearing my attention away from beauty before it overloaded my perceptions. There was always a temptation to sit and watch the parallax movements of light on the river, or the chaotic dance of energy flows and emotional echoes, always a temptation to let go of myself and drift in the music and emotions and vibrancy of a concert. There was always an impulse saying I should just keep going, when I did those things, that they were so beautiful and so wondrous that I should just lose myself in them. Pulling myself back from that edge was a familiar thing, one I had been practicing for decades now.

What I learned now was that none of that had prepared me for seeing the high Courts of the Sidhe dancing. I was captivated, staring, tracking the various patterns of movement of one relative to another, fascinated by the display. Beauty did not describe it, was entirely too small a word. This was nothing humans had ever had a word for. It was graceful and beautiful and vivid and amazing and terrifying and distressing and wonderful all at once, all those things woven through each other into a single concept that dominated my attention.

I wasn’t sure how long I spent like that. Time didn’t seem to be real, during the moment; someone could have told me it had been anywhere from a minute to a day, and I would not have been able to confidently dismiss their estimate. I was lost, and the urge to just keep watching, to lose myself completely in it, to go and join the dance and be subsumed into that beauty, was immense. As with my usual sensory overload, I knew that it would feel good, would feel amazing—right up until it felt terrible.

But with most of my experiences, “terrible” just meant that I would have a seizure, pass out, and wake up a while later feeling sick and headachy and in a bad mood. I was pretty sure people who lost themselves within the Sidhe Courts’ dance didn’t get off anywhere near that easy. I was pretty sure those people never found themselves again. I had a strong suspicion I would never even want to.

Pulling myself back, closing my eyes and turning away, might have been the single hardest thing I had ever done, in terms of the sheer willpower it required. I couldn’t think of anything that could compare. Even with the ridiculous amount of experience I had at this exact task, even knowing the danger and knowing what to expect, it was still the hardest thing I had ever done in terms of the mental fortitude and force of will it required. I managed it, but it was close.

When I opened my eyes again, I found Saori still there, holding my hand tight, like she was wondering whether she would have to pull me back by main force and knew she couldn’t overpower me if she tried. She looked more than a little worried, and that was interesting, because I hadn’t seen that in her before. Not this clearly. There were moments of concern, flickers of anxiety, but I couldn’t remember seeing anything quite like this. She had been concerned about me, wondering whether I was okay after seizures or such, but this was the first time I had ever seen actual worry, seen this kind of anxiety that something bad was about to happen to me.

I wasn’t sure quite how to define the difference. And I only saw it for a moment, so briefly that I wasn’t totally sure I’d seen it at all. All the same, it seemed…important to me somehow, significant. I filed that tidbit away to think about later, and stood up straight, and carefully did not look anywhere near the dance floor.

“Took you long enough,” Saori said, with mockery in her voice that couldn’t quite cover the underlying concern. “Starting to wonder whether I’d have to get a bucket of water to throw on you or something.”

I laughed. “Yeah. Uh. I’m sorry. Kind of a lot to take in.”

“No, I’m Saori. You’re someone else.” That was a pun she made often enough that there was a nonzero part of me that wondered whether she’d literally picked the name because it worked as a near-homophone like that. It still got a laugh out of me, though, and felt oddly reassuring in its familiarity. More quietly, she added, “And it is a lot. Especially the first time.”

“Yeah. First time for a lot of things, I guess.” I shook my head once, trying and failing to clear it, and then started down the stairs again. I had stood still like that long enough for it to mark me as prey for anyone who had been paying attention already. I didn’t want to make it any more pronounced than it already was.

“Yup!” Saori was back to grinning now. “You’re stacking so many bad ideas on top of each other right now. I’m very proud of you. I wonder if they have popcorn at the buffet. We should go check on that.”

I sighed, but I also laughed.

---

Saori had said that no one did feasts like the Sidhe. This proved to be true, but as expected at this point, it was true in ways that I had no ability to really grasp, a priori, no context in which to place the words. The Sidhe did feasts like no one else, like no mortal ever could.

To start with, the sheer scale was staggering. There were so many tables covered in so many dishes that it would have probably taken me hours to even identify all of them. Many were things that were surreal, excessive, or even outright impossible by mortal standards. I had never tasted unicorn steak before, for example, and while I wasn’t quite willing to do so tonight either, the simple fact that it was there spoke volumes.

The dishes were all made of glass, including the cutlery, glass so clear that it was hard to tell it was there at all. I grabbed a plate and started going down the table, picking things more or less at random. There didn’t seem to be much order in how they were laid out, anyway, at least not one I understood. Cream puffs with elaborate, delicately spiced sauces were sitting next to what appeared to be butterflies roasted with herbs on one side, and thinly sliced sheets of grilled salmon on the other.

Every culture imaginable seemed to be represented, too, though I wasn’t sure how much of that perception was just because I was used to thinking of foods based on where they happened in my world. Then again, this party was apparently particularly linked with the mortal world, so maybe it was imitation. Regardless, I saw everything from barbecue and traditional Aztec meat preparations to elaborate French desserts to century eggs from Southeast Asia.

Saori found me at the end of the table feeling a little lost and a lot overwhelmed, but with a fairly large portion of food selected. The kitsune didn’t seem to have any, though she had acquired a cup of what smelled like coffee, a small bowl of popcorn, and a distinctly unhappy expression.

“Hi,” she said. “Doing okay still?”

I shrugged. “So far, I think mostly?”

“Good. So, um. I saw an old friend, and I really ought to at least talk to her.” Saori’s face and voice were not those of someone going to meet an old friend. Friends did not inspire that kind of agitation.

“And I shouldn’t be there for it?” I guessed.

“No. You really shouldn’t.” Saori sounded unusually serious as she said that, enough that I found it interesting, and surprisingly compelling. Saori rarely took much seriously, and that she was right now was…indicative. “I’ll only be a few minutes. This is just…she would be salty if she learned I was here and didn’t at least say hello. I’d rather avoid that. Think you’ll be okay on your own for a couple minutes?”

I laughed. “Probably not, but I think okay is an implausible target regardless. I don’t think I’m in any immediate danger without you, though.”

“Awesome. Find a table and I’ll meet you there in a bit.” Saori grinned, and kissed me. Her mouth tasted like coffee and spice and fire, and then she was walking away, and she was lost in the crowd almost instantly.

“Find a table,” I repeated, turning to look at the seating area. I did not see any unoccupied tables, and I extremely did not like the idea of asking someone if I could join them right now. “Right.”

Abruptly, and without any warning whatsoever, I heard a voice directly next to me. “I can give you a hand with that,” it said, and I damn near jumped out of my skin. I was glad that my plate was on the table at the time, because if I’d been holding it there was no way I would have kept it in my hands. It was just…so close, and so sudden, and I was already on edge just from being here.

I moved a step away, turning towards the source of that voice. Predictably, I saw Dusk. Predictably, when she had said last time that I should see her when she dressed up, she had not been joking. She did not, superficially, appear so very different from last time. The basic elements were all the same. She had the same dusky skin tone, the same basic body shape. Even the outfit was much the same.

But it was all pushed several steps further. She wasn’t wearing a black-and-white tiger print coat, now. Nothing so mundane. No, she was wearing a black-and-white tiger pelt, and one so fresh that rather than pink trim, the edges were red and bloody, left streaks of blood on the skin beneath. She had nothing on underneath it, which made that easy to see. Her pants were forest green, and I thought they might be made of living moss. She still had a garland of skulls, but they were not even close to being plastic holiday trinkets. They were actual fucking skulls, small enough to be both comfortable to wear and uncomfortable to think about, definitely real bone. And her face…well.

The last time I saw her, Dusk was wearing red-rimmed sunglasses. In a way, this was the same. There was red surrounding black. But it wasn’t sunglasses. The rims of her eyelids were scarlet, like she was weeping blood. And the space where there should be eyes just…wasn’t there.

I had no better explanation. It wasn’t that her eyes were dark, or even that they were solid black. That would have been mild by comparison. It was more like they weren’t even there, but neither was anything else. She had void where eyes should be, darker than dark and endless.

I made the mistake of meeting those eyes, and fell into the emptiness. It was, in its way, at least as captivating as the Sidhe dancing, and similarly, I couldn’t say how much time was passing. It might have only been moments; it might have been forever. I had no sense of time, had no sense of my body or my surroundings. Her eyes had depths that were so dark, so much deeper than I was ready for, that I was pretty sure I could literally fall into them and be lost forever. It was like looking out at the void of space where no stars burned, and the darkness was full of mad, vibrant laughter.

Eventually, she chose to blink, and I staggered backwards, bumping up against the table hard enough to knock a few glasses over. When Dusk opened her eyelids again, she had eyes, though they were still creepy, bloodshot with irises as black as the pupils. They didn’t seem to be exerting the same effect anymore, had only been that endless darkness for a single moment.

I didn’t care. I was so freaked I was hyperventilating, just from that momentary eye contact. This…was not a woman. I was not sure what she was, but there was nothing mortal in those eyes, and nothing sane. I still couldn’t feel her signature at all, buried under the noise of the surrounding party, but I had gotten a taste, just the tiniest taste, of the degree of power she held in that endless moment lost in the darkness, and I was fucking terrified by it.

“You should have seen your face,” she said brightly. Her lips were so red I thought they might literally be painted with fresh blood. “Priceless. Anyway. Good evening, glad you could make it, et cetera.”

I just stared at her, trying and failing to find words. And then, suddenly, it clicked.

It was the skulls that did it. The rest of her appearance was creepy, but not in a way that was specific enough to have registered. But a garland of skulls worn as a necklace was just so specific that once I registered its significance, once I put it in the context of what I had just seen in her eyes, I went from hyperventilating to almost too scared to breathe at all in less than a second.

“Dusk,” I said, not responding to what she’d just said at all, and I was rather proud that my voice sounded only moderately thin. “As in, the onset of darkness.”

Her smile spread a little wider. Her lips were so red, and her teeth so very white. She said nothing.

“Does that darkness happen to be of the great, primordial variety?” I didn’t sound like I was asking a question, not really. I sounded like I was very much hoping that I didn’t know the answer, and very sure I did.

“I was wondering how long it would take you to catch on,” she said by way of answer. “I was considering just using Dark, but that felt a little too melodramatic. It would just be tacky in English, you know?”

“How about in another language, then,” I said. “Good evening, Kali.”

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