Jacqueline had inherited from her late father a certain Protestant reticence that was as out of place as her magecraft in Catholic Belgium; for her an evening walk should be serene, the setting of narrow cobbled streets and lighted churches giving a literary quality to her aimlessness. Here in America nothing of the sort could be found: the buildings were imposing edifices of the state rising high with their anachronistic Roman pretensions, and the streets were broad and peopled only by rushing cars.
In a place like this everyone had a destination in mind, and those that didn’t were swept away. Nowhere Jacqueline had been before felt so much like it was at the forefront of history.
And everyone here, it seemed, loved to talk - even in her own mind, the last refuge of the socially exhausted, she was no longer safe. Perhaps it was because of their palpable incorporeality that Clemence was so fond of using their voice.
Having walked uneventful miles through this city, Jacqueline rested by the Washington Monument. Clemence said something, perhaps about this place, but she didn’t catch it, instead studying the enormous stone structure for a while from her seat on a bench.
“Do you think anyone has ever climbed up that thing and thrown themselves off?” she interjected morbidly. The only structure taller she’d seen was the Eiffel Tower, and she didn’t ask the same question of it - the answer was well-known already - but all the same, the sheer height of this obelisk made her sick to her stomach when she looked all the way up to its pinnacle.
Clemence seemed to pause to intake that sudden idea. “Perhaps you could be the first.”
Jacqueline took a deep breath, steadying herself to look up again. Such a jump, naturally, would be fatal even for an accomplished magus. If she really was the first to do so, then she’d certainly make the newspapers. Many people would talk about her, at least for a week. It certainly wouldn’t be a lonely death, and that itself was something.
“If I died, having yet to find your body, what would happen to you?”
“I’ve got some theories of my own,” replied Clemence with a mental shrug. “But it’s all the more reason to find me somewhere out there, right? You don’t want to have two deaths on your conscience.”
A particularly nasty thought assailed Jacqueline just then, and she shook her head to chase it away. If there was a heaven and a hell, she imagined, what kind of cruel afterlife would it be to have this chattering voice stuck in her skull for eternity? For any other failures death could prove to be an escape, but this one threatened to follow her even beyond mortality.
“Maybe you would leap to another mind, find another host to chatter at while they try to figure out this mystery for you.”
“What am I, a ghost possessing poor innocent people just to relive the thrills of being alive?”
“I’m saying, you could have chosen better,” Jacqueline muttered aloud and not just in her thoughts, and now she was aware again of how insane she must look, like a sleepwalker in the midst of a dream. A bad one, she decided.
“Unfortunately for you, you’re the only person in the whole world who can help me. If you died, well… I’d be at a loss, that’s for sure. I’m lucky to be here in the first place!”
Jacqueline sighed and stretched her legs, not knowing what it was like to feel lucky in the first place. “That’s right: you’re lucky that I’m naturally curious, meaning the mystery of you in my head gives me something to think about other than my dead-end of a life, meaning I won’t leap off the nearest bridge or roof or obelisk just yet.”
“You really are nonchalant about dying, aren’t you?” Even the affable Clemence seemed perturbed, but only for a moment.
“Now, anyway, enough with the morose talk.” Clemence just as quickly shunted those worries aside, focused ever on their goal no matter how winding the path that took them there. “If you’re at the Washington Monument, ahead of you should be the reflecting pool. You said before that it’s a nice, clear night, didn’t you? Then you should be able to admire the stars in the water for me.”
Jacqueline frowned. “You talk about it as though you remember it fondly.”
At the same time… she didn’t dare think too deeply on it lest Clemence catch on to her train of thought and cut her off, but Jacqueline knew she didn’t mention the weather. For the most part Clemence spoke and she listened unresponsively, but American-style small talk was far beyond her. What did this seemingly bodiless, senseless voice know beyond what they shared, and more to the point what could they see?
She could feel the dull pressure of Clemence peering in on her thoughts. “Oh, don’t worry, I can’t see anything. If I could use your eyes, well… we both know how special they are. Most are just windows to the soul, as they say, but yours are a window to a whole world. Opportunities. Regrets. Alternatives…” They trailed off.
“...but yes, I do remember it, fondly. A lot is bound up here.”
That seemed like an opening, but Jacqueline knew by now that Clemence would cleverly close it off with all the suddenness of the slamming of a door.
From ahead, there was the sound of boots tapping on stone. Light steps, not meant to be heard. Jacqueline’s mind cleared up as though Clemence wasn’t there at all, and she focused on the direction of the sound: crossing at a brisk pace to the right, then the crunch of grass underfoot - someone in the darkness was approaching at an angle, not wanting to be seen. Jacqueline felt consciously like prey being stalked, death itching at the back of her neck. She quickened her step. Her eyes shimmered with illumination in every colour of the whole spectrum of visible light, dancing in circles on the infinitesimal magic circuits that spiralled around her irises.
Her hand was bare and cool in the moonlight; she blinked, and heat licked at her palm, a pale flame of red tinged with green flickering there now like a crackling bonfire. Again she closed her eyes, and envisioned the long pool of water criss-crossed with electric white lines, and when she looked again, so it was: the night was bright, and the figure who had passed like a shadow in the night was lit up like a constellation.
She was ten metres away, and was immediately striking from her foreign looks and her long, black hair tied low, contrasted by her outfit, something like a grey-green flight suit. Jacqueline figured her for some kind of a soldier or mercenary, and unscrupulous images immediately came to mind.
She didn’t have long to follow that train of thought, nor to devise a strategy. Something dark and wooden clattered on the pavement; Jacqueline looked down, and when she glanced up and into the fighter’s cutting gaze she saw an arm raised, hand holding a revolver, levelled with her chest.
The bullet struck before the sound of the shot. It was made with perfect precision and not a moment’s hesitation, the mark of someone who had killed like this before. The fire in Jacqueline’s hand sparked and sputtered until it was no more, her palm and fingers winter-cold and numbing. She grasped for the wound and felt a deep, bloody hole over her heart. Her finger dug into the wound and there was no pain but only the sensation of sharp, cracked bone and steaming-hot metal. When she tried to take in a breath and step forward her body failed her. Another shot would end it, she knew, and in a moment she’d be helpless on the ground.
Would the newspapers report this, come the morning? Would anyone find her bleeding and dying in serene painlessness here in a shallow pool of water meant to reflect the pure hope of a blissful blue sky?
The woman walked closer, step by step, as if to get a better look at Jacqueline and maybe recognise her. She had dark skin like the Algerians Jacqueline had seen in Paris protesting the war, but there was no doubt that she was a killer herself. Desperate to feel something, Jacqueline pushed her finger farther into the wretched bullet hole as if she could reach in and touch her heart to feel its last beat, to sense the very moment of death and perhaps just before it arrived see a flash of what came after.
There was no heart in there, only the hard and twisted ball of a bullet. As her fingertip, stained through with red, touched it again it grew, as though replacing her heart in her soaking chest cavity; it sharpened and lengthened away from the hole, tearing itself out by force unbidden by Jacqueline herself, and from behind half-lidded eyes still dyed dazzling colours she saw her killer take one step back, then another, her dull brown eyes as wide as saucers like she’d become the one shot dead.
The metal twisted in circle after circle, a black mass now like a blade, hardly resembling the bullet that had struck her. It was as long as a hand before long, and it extended faster and faster; then came the ivory of bone dyed a deep crimson, reaching out from her chest like an arm.
It lunged out with a mind of its own and stabbed the mercenary woman through, up through her stomach under her ribcage to pierce her heart in the ultimate sympathetic act of shared mortality. Out it bloomed from her limp body, like a stamen from the heart of a scarlet flower.
A scream echoed into the night that made Jacqueline’s whole body shiver. When she was struck down, she made no such noise; there was no reason to. The fear of death was only the fear of pain, and there was none.
The glittering stars above now reflected in a pool of blood. There was a sound of scraping against concrete, and of something behind dragged through wet grass.
Jacqueline, with her final thoughts clearer than ever, wondered again what would happen to Clemence. That part of her mind had gone silent, but she realised too late that now she wouldn’t be sharing this moment with another consciousness, and she now understood the fundamental loneliness of death.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
The bed was a blinding white, and the sun streamed in through light curtains which gently fluttered in a cool morning breeze. The softness of the sheets were like the clouds of heaven, and the sunlight the face of God, but when over that face passed a cloud and the room darkly dimmed, He was nowhere to be seen. The sleeper, now awake, lay content.
Yet doubts arose again when a figure in ephemeral white, surrounded by a halo of red, came to the bedside - an angel? Blue eyes the colour of the deep ocean looked back with concern and sympathy, and a pale, gentle hand touched the sleeper’s clammy forehead. The angel shook her head and her lips quivered. Her other hand balanced a silver tray, on which was some marble-white cylinder and a saucer. All of it was unknown and unknowable, but perhaps this was the way of heaven. With the angel’s presence the cloudy darkness was dispelled, and the sleeper reached out for the proffered manna.
“Wait- watch yourself,” the angel, her voice less than graceful, sputtered as a weak, numb hand batted around the tray clumsily.
Those fingers settled on something ceramic. There was warmth, there, that passed through thin blue veins all the way to the heart.
The heart.
“Are you okay? Please, you needn’t stress yourself, miss.” That beatific concern in softly-spoken French brought comfort to the sleeper’s aching body, almost enough to bring about a premature deathbed conversion - if that was even necessary at this point, anyway. Her expectations for heaven had risen exponentially.
So much for the idea of meeting familiar faces in the afterlife, she thought: this red-haired girl bore no resemblance to any mother, sister, or friend she’d known in life. Gazing around the dreamlike room with bleary eyes, she didn’t even see the one person in her life she’d expected to find in a place like this, and at that realisation the warmth and lightness in her heart vanished.
With some effort, she parted her dry lips and spoke. “Where am I? And you…”
The girl knelt down by her side, a gentle smile on her face. “My name is Eleanor Rosemary Richardson and, unfortunately, you’ve come to Washington at a bad time. You’re Jacqueline, am I correct?”
Jacqueline bolted up in bed, the warm, heavenly haze of the room dissipating like a cloud darkening the sun. “How do-”
The sudden movement drew out a sharp pain from within her chest and she gasped, going a whiter shade of pale as she clutched at the front of her shift. Her skin felt cool and sweat dripped down her neck. With a soft, warm hand Eleanor eased her back down to rest.
Still wincing from the pain, she breathed in long and shallowly so her chest didn’t move, and then looked into Eleanor’s eyes. “How do you know my name? And how am I…” The wound in her heart throbbed again, unbidden.
“Ah. Still alive, you mean?” Eleanor wrung out a damp cloth that lay in a basin beside the bed, and pressed the warm fabric to Jacqueline’s neck and chest. From a stranger’s touch, Jacqueline could tell there was no scar despite the pain that assailed her. “My Servant and I found you near the Washington Monument early this morning, collapsed in a pool of water. From a distance it looked as though you were drowning, and I was concerned; Rider carried you here and I made a bed for you in one of the guest rooms. Your clothes were drenched in blood somehow, too - but don’t worry too much about those. It’s a good day out and the birds are taking care of them for you.”
Eleanor’s words aligned with Jacqueline’s own hazy memories to form a mosaic of recollection, but still the picture was unclear, out of order. Was she attacked? Was the blood her own, then, or her attacker’s? More to the point, what was she doing in such a place late at night? And Eleanor used a few turns of phrase that only compounded the confusion, not to mention the lingering issue of this girl knowing her name.
Jacqueline let herself sink back into the mattress, her eyes now staring up at the white ceiling. A slight breeze floated in from an open window, and she could hear a chorus of robins chirping.
“For an hour or two you spoke with yourself in your sleep, shifting from side to side and grasping your head. It was all indistinct and one-sided, as if you really did have a conversation partner in whatever dream you were having. You said, ‘can you hear me? It’s me, Jacqueline,’ and then asked them about a gun, and a spear, and lastly about your eyes.”
This was all familiar to Jacqueline, and again she tried to feel for a scar over her heart, but the skin there was far too smooth to have suffered such a brutal injury. The last sight she remembered was, indeed, that of a spear emerging from her chest - certainly that would’ve left an even bigger mark, but there was not so much as a scratch on her. At the same time, despite the forgotten battle she engaged in and the phantom pain that remained now as the only evidence of it, she felt as rested as though she’d managed a full night’s sleep. A new suspicion crept over her as she listened to the birds.
“What day is it?”
Eleanor thought for a moment, knitting her brows. “Today’s a Wednesday. August twenty-first, I believe. Are you a recent arrival to the city as well? If you need to get a flight home, I can order a car to bring you to the airport, and a plane from there can take you to New York City and then on to Europe.”
“Wait-” Jacqueline caught her breath again, and this time sat up much more carefully. “I have a lot of questions, first.”
“I understand, I’ll answer as best I can.” Sitting properly at the edge of the bed with her hands folded over her lap, Eleanor glanced to the open bedroom door as though expecting someone, then gave her full attention on her guest.
“First: you mentioned a servant, a ‘rider’. You mean to say a chauffeur? Did he see anyone else where you found me, or any sign of what happened?”
Something about the way Jacqueline said those words made Eleanor’s shoulders loosen and fall, as if a tension had been building in her small frame and only now released. So, she doesn’t know after all, Eleanor thought to herself, and she put on a new smile.
“Yes, my servant… Monteith. He would have told me if he saw anything unusual, and certainly would have shared his concerns if he suspected someone was following us. All I can say is that there was a great deal of blood, and it quite clearly came from two people. It was… hard to look.” Eleanor shook her head, red hair cascading over her face. It wasn’t a memory she brought up lightly, and Jacqueline could only imagine the gruesome state her body must’ve been in before every trace of injury somehow evaporated.
Jacqueline nodded, accepting the answer at face value. Nothing seemed off about this girl so far, as much as her kindness now disarmed her.
“And you know with such certainty that I’m European and want to go back to the continent?”
At that, Eleanor stared her right in the eyes. It was getting difficult to keep things up as they were; she wasn’t accustomed to fibbing or playing with the truth. Bluntness - gently tempered, like a velvet glove on an iron hand - suited her much better. Sooner or later she anticipated Jacqueline would figure out what was going on, too, once she’d been given enough information to start making her own deductions.
“I know you’re a magus, sent here because of the war.”
Rather than being eased gently, the tension snapped like a wire, and Jacqueline felt the pain in her heart palpitating as she realised she was in the lair of a magus. She’d kept her suspicions open, but let her guard down about the possibility of others like her. Her eyes darted left and right, trying to sense anything that could be a disguised trap or an easy escape that hid a deadly spell waiting to be triggered.
The very things that made the caring figure by her bedside so convincingly angelic now made her seem all the more sinister.
Eleanor raised her hand, gesturing for Jacqueline to stop, and then turned her hand around to reveal a set of three ornate symbols etched in a line into her pale skin. They glowed a hot red when their wearer revealed them, then wicked away into her flesh like water, invisible. “Do you know exactly what these are, Miss Jacqueline?”
Her guest gave a plain ‘no’. At best, it looked to her like some foreign magecraft; she knew of some practitioners of old arts that channelled magical energy through tattoos, but these were fairly small and very specifically located, not the nearly full-body works that dedicated arcane tattooists would weave into their bodies.
“I suppose that’s for the best. I doubt those who sent you know the mechanical details, so to speak, of this war, considering how rare they are. A chosen few of us command powerful summoned Servants, whose strength is drawn from their exalted place in history and legend, and from the hopes and dreams of those who look up to them. This is supposed to be a competition between nations to crown one the victor, but fairly and without the threat of atomic bombs and innocent lives lost. A bloodless, silent revolution - how does that sound to you?”
Jacqueline frowned. “This sounds like blind optimism to me, and as a magus I thought you’d be more suspicious of politics. Washington is the confluence of some of the most potent leylines in the world, it’s a nexus of power... do you think this is all some harmless contest?”
That strong of a rebuke wasn’t what Eleanor expected from this foreign observer - one she presumed was an agent of the Mages Association - and she had to stop herself from biting her lip in frustration. Moctezuma assured her that if she said something along the lines of what she did, then it’d go well and they could have an ally. Was this all a coincidence, or was there some serendipity behind all this that drew this specific woman into her path?
“What I think is that there’s nothing you can do about it.” Her voice rose and her hands trembled, and as though on cue, Moctezuma stepped in from behind the door, carrying a delicate plate with two ceramic cups balanced atop it.
With a broad smile he set the plate down on the nightstand by the bed like a peace offering and, knowing his very presence raised more questions than it could ever answer, disappeared back behind the door whence he came.
Eleanor let out a small sigh of relief: she knew Jacqueline would piece together that this was a Servant, and her mage’s instincts would sense his strength. An unspoken threat.
“Now, please, take a sip of this. It is new to me, too, but it’s a fantastic delicacy to calm the nerves.” She offered up a cup after taking a small drink from her own, held close to her chest.
Jacqueline frowned at the strange liquid. It was reminiscent of coffee or chocolate, but had the smell of neither. Gingerly she took the cup that was given to her and let just a few drops pass her lips. It was an equal mix of sweet, bitter, and spicy, the tastes mixing and swirling together as it flowed down her tongue. She’d expected it to be boiling hot like fresh coffee, too, but no: it was cool like milk, and with a similar body. The first few sips were hard to get down and her eyes nearly started to water at the strangeness of it - a small part of her even suspected a poison - but before long her cup was empty to the last drop. True to Eleanor’s word, the beverage had cleared her mind and made her feel refreshed, and she breathed deeply and freely for the first time since their conversation began.
Eleanor eventually finished her cup as well, and set it down on the platter. “It’s xocolatl, an ancient drink. Moctezuma made it for me in place of tea this morning… or was it yesterday? Well, he made it somehow, and I trusted him enough to try it. I’d thought cocoa only became comestible once Europeans took it and mixed it with sugar, but I’m starting to rethink that.”
“I see.” Jacqueline nodded amicably, but this momentary clear-headedness just made her realise how much she didn’t know. Even the answers she had now contradicted each other.
“Anyway, thank you,” she continued, trying not to bring attention to the gap in power between them. There was something hiding behind Eleanor’s socialised kindness, but Jacqueline wasn’t sure if the girl herself was aware of it yet - and she didn’t want to be there when she was. “You’ve given me a lot to think about, and again I thank you for your hospitality. But I have to leave, and find some answers on my own. If it’s any assurance to you, Miss Rosemary-Richardson, I mean you no harm as an observer. I… lost touch with the people I used to know, shall we say.”
“You’re more than welcome, and I understand.” Eleanor let out a melodic whistle like a bird herself, and in through the window like some fairy-tale flew a half-dozen robins carrying the black dress Jacqueline had been wearing last night, or this morning, or whenever she’d been attacked and left for dead only for this helpful young woman to happen upon.
The more she thought about it, the more the coincidences and uncertainty seemed to pile up and not in her favour. Whatever their source, she felt it was not by chance that Eleanor and her ‘Servant’ were the ones to find her. God and fate were dubious concepts, but magic she knew, and it weaved a thread wholly of its own design.
Eleanor gave Jacqueline a pat on the shoulder, and let her know that she would be happy to help her through any confusion she found herself in. At the same time, as a manner of paying her back, Eleanor made it explicit that she wanted any information Jacqueline came across regarding the other Masters in this supposed war of which Jacqueline was, perhaps, somehow its first victim. So much for no harm to innocents, she mused.
She dressed herself and patted down her clothing to make sure no clever little constructions of magecraft were lingering in or on it - and none were, to Eleanor’s credit.
On her way out Jacqueline gave a smile and a nod to ‘Monteith’ along with thanks for the xocolatl, and felt a palpable relief as she stepped out the swinging front doors of the mansion.
It was a clear and a fresh day, and she couldn’t feel an ounce of the pain that had struck her down to the bed before. The birds chirped her a goodbye as she walked down the herringbone path that led through the mansion’s gardens out to the street, where the city began to rise before her and greenery subsided as the urban horizon grew nearer. The road to the answers she sought was labyrinthine at its best, but she trusted her analytical mind to make sense of it. Long ago her family had produced and taught some of the most talented theologians the Low Countries would ever know; she liked to imagine herself heir to their intellect, if not their convictions.
Taking a moment to breathe and collect herself so as to figure out her next destination, a wave of dizziness overcame her. She put a hand to her forehead; her temperature was normal, and not a sliver of sweat wiped off onto her palm. Yet, something in her brain felt like it was on fire.
Then, the voice.
“Oh, good! I’d thought I’d lost you, Jacqueline. Now, where were we?”
Can't believe authors these days who don't have the guts to kill off their characters for real, absolute disgrace
I hope this chapter of doomer nightwalks and Eleanor trying to be sneaky was an enjoyable one! And the mysteries of this version of the Manhattan Project grail war continue to compound, though maybe soon Clemence can offer some answers... and maybe some advice for Jacqueline to avoid dying next time, that seems to have messed things up a bit.
For this chapter's choice, things are a bit different! Since we've seen a few faces already, that's going to be reflected on the map: characters who have been the focus of a chapter or scene will appear on the map with little chibi icons beside the icon of their map location choice. Characters who have appeared but either haven't been named or haven't featured as the star of a chapter yet will be marked by little red exclamation marks. Blue question marks are for characters who haven't shown up in any way yet. Jacqueline won't get a special icon unless she's the focus of a whole chapter, since she's kind of presumed to show up anywhere, anytime.
Map: August 21, 1963, Daytime
For the record btw since I don't have enough space for longer names on the icons, the Euclid is an apartment building, the Mayflower is a hotel, and L'Ambassade is the French Embassy residence. Make of that what you will!
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Originally Posted by Five_X
