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She should have expected this, really. What did she think would happen when she turned her camera on? She knew what she looked like, and she knew Quinn wouldn’t react well to seeing her this way. A reflex maybe, to seeing her on the screen—an impulse to make things feel somewhat normal again, whatever it was that counted for that these days. In truth though, a part of her wanted this. Wanted something to validate that last, sane part of her mind she’d shoved down, screaming that what she was doing wasn’t healthy, wasn’t sustainable. Besca was too buried, Roaki couldn’t care less, and Follen…well, she’d found a building distance growing between her and the doctor.

But here Quinn was, throwing her a rope she knew she needed, to climb out of a hole she’d dug for herself. She was too good, this girl. For RISC, the CSC, for piloting, for Illun, really. But Dahlia say there, and listened, and met Quinn’s budding sternness with small nods and a rueful smile.

Only the truth, after all.

I…” she sighed. “Can’t…make that promise. I’m sorry. I know you’re right, I know I’m not handling this well. I want to do better, but I just…can’t make you a promise I might break. I don’t know what’s going to happen in a week, or two weeks, or a month. I don’t know where my head will be, or what I’ll have to do, or…” Or anything. God, she didn’t know anything. No pilot did, that was the point. That was the life. Quinn had to understand that by now, had to get that neither of them were guaranteed their next hour let alone their tomorrows.

If something happened, it was on them. It was always on them. It was always…

Dahlia rubbed her eyes. She was tired. More than that, she was willing to admit it right now, which was an opportunity she couldn’t afford to waste on being cynical and bitter. Quinn was right, and for as long as her mind wasn’t going to fight her body, she was going to follow her advice.

I can try,” she said, smiling apologetically. “For now that’s what I can do. I can promise to try. And I’m about to fall over as it is so, I’m gonna go now so I don’t pass out in the shower. Then get some sleep.

She turned off her phone’s camera, about sick of seeing herself in this state, and certainly not wanting to show it to Quinn anymore. Instead, she tried to put some of the life back into her voice as she pulled herself off the sim room floor.

We’ll get those shakes out to you asap, just try to keep them to yourself. Don’t think they’ll win you any friends for their flavor.” she giggled, it felt genuine even if it was a bit weary. “Talk to you again soon, Quinn. See you soon, too. Love you.








“In Chains we find Reason. In Chains we have Virtue. In Chains we are Human.”

Before the Chains, humanity was an unbound monstrosity, corrupting everything it touched. Base creatures beholden to nothing but instinct, their shadowy masses would have consumed all life on Reah and left the world a silent, starving husk in the void. Even the Arbiters, bearing the wills of their celestial lords, could not hold them back, and little by little humanity pushed into the kingdoms of beast and fey, of dragon and titan and all mythos lost to time.

It was only the appearance of the Moon, and the intervention of the Mother of Prudence which forestalled Reah’s end. By binding her lunar vessel to the world, the Mother also bound humanity with Reason. Her Chains gave form to the blight, carving and shaping each shadowy vestige until the amalgam was unmade, and in its place stood the first, true, humans.

The rest, as they say, is history. Some of it written, much of it lost. In some ways nothing was changed; humanity did, eventually, supplant the kingdoms of the Arbiters, and many of the mythos earned their name, fading into legend. The Mother never left her Moon, but her silent presence was felt all the same.

In her shadow, in her Chains, humanity came to rule Reah after all.




The Chains which bind humanity, the conduit of its power, and the only thing preventing its devolution. The malignance from which they came was not destroyed, only bound by the Mother’s Virtues. Each person is a flood, each Chain is a dam; should they be broken, there would be no person at all, only a monstrous force of nature.

That is to say, should all be broken.

Old humanity was so destructive for a reason—it was powerful. While the Chains do prevent them from devolving, they also restrict that power unique and innate to humans, and had they remained as strictly bound as they were, Reah would still be under the celestial rule of the Arbiters.

It is only by breaking these Chains that one can access their ancestral power. The process is highly regulated, its particulars known only by a select few across every kingdom, but it can be done. Some would say it must be done. Breaking a Chain is a difficult feat to perform, but even more difficult to endure. Done indelicately, one can flood the body with too much power at once; the person may die, or worse, the flood may shatter every Chain in its rushing and they may devolve into monster, endangering countless lives before they can be slain. Likewise, a person who has not prepared themselves physically and mentally for a breaking may fail to contain their new power, and suffer similar consequences.

Each Breaking is more dangerous than the last, and for every one who has achieved the godlike status of First Chain, tens of thousands fail to break their Fifth. To free oneself without fully understanding the Virtues that bind them is doom, but to embrace them, to realize them, is both an entirely individualistic journey, and also only the first step.

The Chains are as follows:











The power once wielded by the qovu was devastating and manifold. However, with nothing to guide them their capabilities stagnated. Now, bound by the Chains, humanity can improve their capabilities through rigorous mental and physical training.

But as in all things, caution is key. The limits imposed upon one’s body by their Chains exist for a reason, and attempting to surpass them prematurely can easily result in a catastrophic Breaking. While outliers exist in every statistic, the capabilities of each Chain level are generally understood, and those who set out to study and improve will most likely be aware of when they have reached their limit.

The Links are as follows:










Magic existed in Reah long before the Mother lifted humanity from its monstrous origins, and has taken many forms throughout history. The Arbiters channeled power from their celestial gods; the fey cultivated their magic from the earth; the magics of titans and dragons was entirely unique to them. Even old humanity possessed profaned, horrific magic of its own, still utilized by the creatures that sprout from Reah’s ley lines.

But humanity is no longer limited. Through a process known as Arcane Sympathy, humans are capable of learning any type of magic, be it elemental, material, primordial, draconic, and so on. To this day, new schools of magic are still being discovered at various established institutions across the world, but also, occasionally, in the homes and minds of particularly determined individuals.

One’s magical aptitude is tied closely to their mastery over not only their Arcane Link, but the others as well, depending on their schools, and even the paths within those schools. One cryomancer may focus entirely on the conjuration of projectiles and frigid conduits and have no use for Links like Strength, or Instinct, where another may center their discipline on enhancements to their body or their weapons, necessitating good strength or reflexes.

Likewise, there are schools of magic that seem to fill the gaps in the boons offered by the Links. Vitality magic, for instance, focuses on the warding off of disease and the reduction of fatigue or the length of time one might take to recover from an injury. Most importantly, it offers the sole method of extending one’s natural life—a path sought after by practitioners of nearly all Chains. In other areas however, magic is narrow in particular ways. For instance, there is only one school of restorative healing magic, practiced almost exclusively by devotees of the Charity Chain, in which one takes the wounds and ailments of another onto themselves.

Regardless of school, all magic relies on one’s Arcane Link, which develops in tandem with their skill, but also just as importantly with their Capacity Link, which dictates how much of their innate mana they have access to. While outliers exist, the general pools available to each level of Chain are understood, up to First, where there is no true record. As such, most schools classify their spells not only by discipline, but by Chain level. While some spells improve as one sheds their Chains (e.g. A Fifth Chain lightning bolt versus a Third) others simply cannot be cast by higher Chains due to their cost exceeding the pool. For example, the Vitality school’s coveted spell which extends one’s lifespan is not only closely guarded, but also requires a Third Chain pool to perform.




Once the lands belonging the five Arbiters, humanity now reigns. Each nation is led by its sole First Chain, called their Sovereign. While there is a degree of cooperation and global trade, the kingdoms rule independently. That said, outright war has been stifled by stifled by ancient treaties, prioritizing a combined effort to stand against the creatures of the ley lines.














Humanity’s origin, their monstrous beginnings. Though restrained and refined by the Mother of Prudence into proper humans, the Qovu remain an ever-present threat—not just from their emergence from the ley lines, but from the Chains themselves. All those who fail their Breaking inevitably devolve, losing their humanity in form and function, and becoming some bestial creature, devoid of all but their most basic instinct: hunt, destroy, consume.
Dahlia knew what it sounded like when Quinn was putting herself back together, the quiver in her voice, the hitching in her breath. It was like plugging a hole in a boat with your hand; good enough for now, but a little water still leaks in, and eventually it fills up, or your arm gets tired, and you sink. Some days Dahlia felt she was up to her neck already. Some days she didn’t.

Seeing Quinn on the other end of the line made it one of the latter days.

She looked like a mess, but Dahlia couldn’t judge. When she turned on her own camera, the face she saw shocked her. Greasy hair pulled into a bun, eyes sunken into dark pits, lips chapped from long, dry stints in the sim pod. Her clothes were rumpled, her fingernails were jagged from chewing, and if she chanced a brief sniff at her arms, she had no doubt she might retch on the call.

Quinn laughed, Dahlia blinked, and then she burst into laughter too. Uneven and garbled and teetering on the edge of something less happy, but she could hardly control it. God, she looked like the dead.

Yeah,” she said, when she finally got ahold of herself. “I think we can swing that. Not like we’ll miss them here. I’ll tell her tonight, after I go through every ounce of soap we have and maybe take a nap. Think I need one of those, bad.

It was so stupid. She was so stupid. A glance at her recent sims would have told her how tired she was, how badly the spiral was impacting her abilities. Besca had said it a thousand times: it didn’t matter how much she trained if, when the time came and she had to act, this was the state she was in. She couldn’t protect Quinn if she felt like a zombie in her own skin. And right now, at least in this single moment, she didn’t have to. Quinn didn’t need saving—all she wanted was a god-awful protein shake.

Call me again. Whenever. Okay?” She laid her head back against the wall, settled into something that might have resembled a smile in the right light. It felt comfortable, anyway. However long this moment of clarity lasted, she was glad for it. “This’ll be over before we know it.

Maybe a little balm didn’t hurt.


Well, she had been aptly forewarned. As the goons armed themselves and moved into what might have loosely passed for some kind of formation, Yam pulled the trigger on her contract. A chill washed over her, like someone was brushing cold paint down her limbs. Her skin shifted, her arms most noticeably; they didn’t grow larger per se, but they hardened like chitin or scale or some kind of hellish tree bark. They were heavier, but with that heft came a surplus of strength, which she quickly stoppered once she had enough to work with. Power was influence, and if she borrowed too much, it was harder to turn off. Bel’s strength was soda spilled on a carpet; water would dry just fine, but all the sugar and chemicals would take much longer to wash out.

She looked down at her hands, at the obsidian claws glinting on each finger. Her eyes—their eyes—flicked up at the goons, scanned over their weapons. Clubs, knuckles, miscellaneous bludgeons of dubious integrity. Nothing particularly sharp, and nothing that could blow holes in her. Seemed like they weren’t interested in adding corpses onto the list of whatever other shit they were dealing with.

Less paperwork,” she said. Bel sighed, and the claws receded.

I give you hands to get dirty, and you still insist on wearing gloves.

The goons moved first. One came at Marty, and though she felt an instinct to cover him, two more lunged for her. She took hold of her righted chair with one bolstered arm and launched it like a fastball at the closer one. It connected full on with his chest, splintering like rotten driftwood and sending him sprawling onto his back. The second swung at her with his club, but Yam stepped in, took him by the arm and torqued around, lifting him up over her hip and slamming him hard into the ground.

Her mind went back to Marty, but before she could check on her partner, something hard connected with her face, and it was only by the split-second shift of Bel’s skin on her cheek that her jaw wasn’t shattered. She stumbled, blinking back her composure as the hulk of a goon drew back his brass knuckles for another swing. Yam whirled into it, meeting his fist with her own. Sturdy metal smashed into jagged demonic knuckle. The metal caved with a crunch, splitting skin and cracking bone. The goon yelped, clutching his bloodied hand back before Yam caught him in the gut with an uppercut and shoved him on the floor.

Finally, a moment to breathe. She tried to take stock of the rest of the bar, eyes darting to find whoever else might still be standing. She quickly found the man in the purple suit, who hadn’t deigned to get involved. Yet.

Marty, you good?” she shouted over her shoulder, not wanting to take her eyes off the supposed leader of the bunch. Marty wasn’t the biggest or meanest demon she’d ever met, but, and this was important, he did have four knives.


“Just so you know, the neighborhood we’re headed to is a real shithole. In case you’ve never been.”

Yam resisted the urge to point out that the whole city, in fact, was a shithole. From the crime scenes to the homes to their own base of operations, New Helle was one flush away from a Richter scale sewage disaster, regardless of where you looked. But, the etiquette drilled into her from years of conversation with antsy tourists begged her: “What does arguing here serve?” To which there was rarely an answer other than “Nothing, but it’d feel good.” Besides, she wasn’t sure if shit was a sensitive topic, him being a fly and all.

Anyway, he was right. The Paradise was a shithole.

Worse than that, it looked like they’d missed a very lively, very relevant party. One could have been forgiven for assuming the last person in was some sort of bomb or a living tornado, which wouldn’t have been the least believable thing they’d seen today.

The tension shifted as soon as the remaining patrons caught sight of them; the gangs in New Helle might have been underhanded and sometimes terribly occult, filled with every flavor of demon and sleazebag and demon sleazebag imaginable, except rats. Even among the rat demons. Few things opened criminal mouths to authority ears in this city. Money worked, sometimes, but no one in Section 7 got paid enough for that, and anyway, they hadn’t come bearing a heavy briefcase. Talking was riskier, but, it could work—

If you didn’t instantly brandish a weapon or four.

She wasn’t sure what an intimidating voice would sound like coming from someone like Marty. Probably not like this, at least not to her ears, but maybe the incredulity was numbing her to his ferocity. She was afraid the gangsters would suffer a similar immunity.

Yeah,” she sighed. “You’re the good cop.

Bel chuckled in the back of her mind.

As rough around the edges as Marty’s negotiating prowess might be, she couldn’t deny that between them he was infinitely more personable. Did that mean he could sweet talk his way through a conversation with a group of gangsters he just threatened at knifepoint? She didn’t know. Better not to gamble.

So, while Marty stepped up to the diplomatic plate to bat, Yam picked a toppled chair over and set it back upright. She shucked off her coat and draped it over the backrest, flexed her shoulders and cracked her neck, then rolled up her sleeves. Mother’s runework slithered over her ashen skin, winding in arcane patterns that she couldn't have unwoven herself even at the height of her training. She grimaced; at least if things went sideways now, her mood was already ruined.

Yam pulled her tie loose and used it to bind her hair back into a frankly still-too-big tail. She considered wrapping her belt up in her fist, but this wasn’t a tussle on the street after bar-close. Instead, she held a mental finger on the trigger of Bel’s contract, ready to shift. If she’d learned one thing about engaging with the city’s underworld, it was that you didn’t go into it half-cocked.

On the bright side, Marty didn't seem physically capable of putting less than one hundred percent into pretty much anything, for better and, much more likely, for worse.



Yam still wasn’t used to getting picked last. Growing up, her arcane aptitude and pedigree had gone a long way in making her a first draft pick in everything from group projects to school admissions. At the time she’d enjoyed it, and then, slowly, she’d come to realize how much her mother’s name was carrying her through the aspects of social life that she wasn’t particularly good at. Being rid of it, accomplishing feats on her own, as her own, was validating; her hard work paid off in the Hexen, where eventually people stopped caring who she was and were more interested in what she could do.

Except now she couldn’t do, not like that, not anymore. Now she was saddled with a metaphysical anchor and no nepotism to smooth over her…charm. So, all said, she wasn’t surprised when the scene cleared out and all that remained was her, and the bug. Maybe that was a good sign; at least there was someone equally as despicable.

Well, two someones.

Hurtful.

I’ll drive,” she said, fishing her keys from her pocket and following Marty outside, tossing the chief a farewell wave on the way.

She led the way to her car, a sturdy, compact thing with faded paint but, surprisingly, no dents. Just as surprising was the interior, clean and tidy, which might have counted for more if it didn’t still whiff of tar. As she settled into the driver’s seat, she repaid her brimstone parasite’s sass by lightning another cigarette and taking a long, thoughtful drag. Yam didn’t know if demons could get lung cancer, but she was willing on Bel’s behalf to find out.

She turned away at the last moment, blowing smoke out of the window when she remembered she wasn’t driving alone. This would be one of the few times she’d worked alone with the…enthusiastic demon, and while she certainly had her gripes with his attitude, she couldn’t help but feel the tiniest bit guilty. It didn’t take long after Marty walked into a room to see how people felt about him, and though many of those feelings were fairly earned, others certainly weren’t.

Good call back there. Good intuition.” she said, pretending like she was waiting to finish smoking before they left, like a responsible officer of the law. “Never seen magic like that before, infernal or otherwise. Weird. But I think you’re on to something with the whole…” she made a vague, flowering motion near her head.

There, a good deed for the day before whatever shit was waiting for them at the end of their trip. She flicked what was left of her cigarette onto the pavement and started the car.

You’ll have to navigate,” she said. “I could get lost in a cardboard box.


The phrase ‘This is new’ was rote in Section 7. Whether it was gang wars, corporate espionage, or ritual zealotry, every single case had something(s) that got it ejected from the desk of whatever department should have been handling it, and put on the Easy Runner’s tab. New became norm, zebras became horses, and some days Yam was convinced all it would take to dupe their entire department was a cut and dry murder. Give them a jilted lover, and they’d likely spend a year trying to connect the victim to the Children of Helle, because Section 7 couldn’t see the forest through the trees unless it was on fire.

All that to say, this was new.

Not the scene itself, which was new in the old way. The shock and awe of a mass murder, smacking of weird and reeking of dead wannabe syndicate bigshots. But Armand was here, which was new in the new way; which meant it wasn’t actually new, because he’d shown up on a small number of cases before, but rather, it was now new in a way that made its old-new weirdness new-new weirdness. True-new. New plus. Suddenly every burning tree in the forest mattered.

Damn.

Yam crouched down in front of one of the flower-headed bodies. Lantanas. Interesting choice, which she did think it was—a choice. It wasn’t a bouquet, each of the eight overgrown victims sprouted the same flower, which meant they were chosen deliberately, or out of uniformity. Methodical inexplicability was the worst kind; there’d be rules, and Yam didn’t like playing games she didn’t know the rules to.

Thankfully, bugboy was on it. As grating as he could be—which was perhaps his most potent quality after his unshakable persistence—she hadn’t yet actually regretted having him on a job. His perspective, like his eyes, was manifold, and when you were dealing with weird, you wanted to see things from as many different views as you could.

Speaking of.

Yam shut her eyes, ignored the wriggling feeling beneath her eyelids, and then opened them again. She was, as always, keenly aware that they were no longer her eyes, but she saw through them all the same. Albeit, there was a subconscious tug, almost like an itch, trying to force her attention to certain places.

Thoughts?

Plenty, constantly. Bel’s voice was paved gravel, paradoxically smooth and also entirely too abrasive as it scraped across her mind. If that was a question, though, you’ll have to be more specific, and much more polite.

Yam blinked her own eyes back and shut him out. She wasn’t in the mood, not until she'd had a few cigarettes. Besides, there was enough here for her to go off of on her own, at least for now. She got back to her feet, surveying the rest of the carnage. Blood, bullets, slashes, stains. Whatever came through here wasn’t just big, it was too big.

Think we’re looking for a human,” she said, moseying back to the others. “I’ve never seen a demon who could do this, and anyone who could would be wearing thirty pounds of curses. You don’t get that kind of work dispelled without people hearing about it.
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