- Chapter 064 -

  Victory so Poisonous

  He woke up screaming.

  He was back in his chair, in his house, the world a nauseating, spinning blur of polished wood and stone. But the agony wasn't in his spine. It was in his head. A searing fire that felt like a drill boring into the base of his skull. And there was a pull, a psychic fishhook lodged deep in his consciousness, trying to drag him back into the nightmare.

  Tori and Valerie were already hovering over him, themselves haunted by events, their professional instincts had taken over. Valerie was checking his pulse, Tori had a hand on his shoulder, her healing magic a faint, sputtering light that reflected the strain of the situation.

  The world tilted as a wave of gut-wrenching nausea seized him. He doubled over in the chair, a dry, racking heave tearing from his throat. Between the gasps, he forced the words out, a desperate rasp.

  "The wall..." he coughed, tasting of bile in his mouth. He pointed a trembling, unsteady hand towards the new, seamlessly integrated doorway the Masons had built. "It's... in the wall."

  The Masons' renovations, their gift with an invoice. A Trojan horse.

  Carl registered the words instantly. Some of the earlier confusion was gone, the craftsman, the specialist with gems got to work. The tattoo on the back of his hand, the Heart of the Gemstone, flared to life with a soft, garnet red light. He walked over to the wall, his hand hovering over the stone a few feet from the new doorway.

  "He's right," Carl confirmed, his a grim murmur. "There's something in there. A resonance. It's... ugly." A faint, sickly green light began to pulse from within the stone itself, a malevolent, rhythmic heartbeat.

  Dawn was there in the blink of an eye. She didn't hesitate. Just a single, decisive act of violence.

  There was a sharp crack, partially of breaking bone, but also of fracturing stone, as her fist punched straight through the polished surface of the wall. Dust and stone fragments exploded outward. When she pulled her hand back, she was holding a small, glowing gem. It pulsed with the same nauseating green light, the anchor that had been trying to drag Mark back into the memoryscape and initially grabbed them all.

  With contemptuous grunt, she closed her hand around it. The sound was a sharp, definitive crunch. The green light vanished.

  And the fire in Mark's head went out. The immediate, searing agony was gone, leaving the throbbing ache of physical reality. He slumped back in the chair, gasping, the world slowly coming back into focus.

  The next hour passed in a haze of quiet, automatic professional activity. Valerie and Tori moved through the room with practiced efficiency, taking turns checking on everyone. Dawn, whose only physical injury was a set bloody knuckles and a slight break from her impromptu demolition work, sat silently in a corner, cleaning her daggers with methodical focus that was more about processing than maintenance.

  Valerie and Tori checked each other, then themselves. The conclusion was the same for all of them, no lasting physical harm, but a bone-deep mental and spiritual exhaustion. The kind that leaves a person feeling hollowed out, a ghost in their own skin. Carl had taken it upon himself to do a slow, meticulous sweep of the house, his Heart of the Gemstone a constant glow as he checked for any other gems that might be operating outside of their expected parameters, and thankfully finding nothing of interest.

  No one wanted to talk about what had just happened. The raw memory of it was too fresh, the implications too vast. The silence in the room was fragile and deeply disturbing.

  Mark sat in his chair, a blanket draped over his shoulders by a silent, concerned Valerie. He watched the moons rise through the large window. The street outside was dark, well past midnight, illuminated by a steady glow of the crystal lamps.

  It was a fork scraping against a plate that broke the silence. Carl had returned to the table, and was now working his way through a bowl of the cold stew. He was the first to talk about something that wasn't a medical diagnosis.

  He looked over at Mark, his expression a mixture of curiosity and grudging respect. "How did you know?" he asked, his voice a low grumble. "About the gem in the wall. Dawn broke the thing, so I couldn't get a reading. But you... you pinpointed it."

  Mark glanced up, his head still pounding, the sight of Carl eating almost turning his stomach again. "I took memories from him," his voice a low rasp. "You all saw it. And without meaning to... I ended up with more than I was looking for."

  He pointed a slightly trembling finger at the floor, at the seamless, polished grey stone of the new bedroom extension. "There are ritual circles under the whole house," he explained, the stolen knowledge feeling ugly thing in his own mind. "Large ones, woven into the new foundations. That gem... it was the focus. The anchor. It's how Clyde has been... scraping at my mind for weeks. And how he… projected his magic against us."

  "The ghosts that wouldn't let me sleep," the words tasted like ash. "The phantom smells, the memories of home... That was him. Trying to creep into my head." He looked around at their pale, exhausted faces. "And when that didn't work, when he couldn't get past my... my stars... he ramped up the power. And he took all of you hostage."

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  Seeing the fresh wave of horror on their faces, Mark quickly added, "The circles are useless now. Inert. They needed that gem for them to function."

  Valerie sank into a chair, her composure finally shattering. Her body began to tremble, an uncontrollable tremor that shook her from head to toe. "What I did..." she whispered, her voice a ragged sound. "What you did... it was unspeakable."

  Tori was at her side in an instant, a hand on her friend's shoulder, her own face pale with shock. "Valerie's right," she began, her voice tight. "What you did, Mark... how you did it... it was..."

  "Enough."

  The word was a sharp, cold crack in the quiet room. Dawn had pushed herself away from the wall, her expression of pure fury. She wasn't looking at Mark. Her glare was fixed solely on Tori.

  "What he did probably saved all of our lives," she snapped, her voice a dangerous growl. "And as for how he did it... what did any of you expect? They broke his back. They tormented him in his sleep. Was he not supposed to fight back?"

  Her furious gaze swept the room, landing for a moment on Valerie's trembling form. "And you," she said, her voice softening fractionally but losing none of its intensity. "You had every right to do what you did. He hurt you. He hurt all of us." She looked from Tori's shocked face to Carl, who was now pointedly staring at the floor, refusing to meet anyone's eyes.

  "None of us," Dawn finished, her voice a final, absolute declaration, "get to stand in judgment after what just happened."

  "She's right," Mark said quietly. "I’m going to spend long enough doing that to myself." The words drew their attention. "But you all need to understand something."

  All eyes turned to him. He took a slow, steadying breath, the act a monumental effort. "I shouldn't have won," he stated, the words utterly terrifying.

  He saw the confusion on their faces, the silent protest forming on Dawn's lips. He held up a hand, holding back another wave of nausea and stopping them before they could argue.

  "Eric was a bully. A man with a fancy title and a glass jaw. He was never the real threat," his voice remained calm, a staffing assessment for a hostile team. "Clyde was. He's a Jade specialist in a field none of you understand. He held all the cards."

  He met their gazes, one by one, forcing them to see the brutal logic of his assessment. "I won, barely, because he didn't know of my history. I convinced him he was out of his depth. The sheer scale of it all... the millions of people, the noise, the technology he couldn't comprehend... It was a psychological assault. It was a bluff."

  He let out a humorless laugh. "If he hadn't been scared by a few tens of thousands of commuters, if a memory of a jet hadn't flown overhead with a sonic boom, if he had taken a single second to realize it was all just... a story... he would have won. It was the only gamble I had, based on the reactions I've seen whenI try to explain my world."

  He looked down at his own hands, at the faint tremor he couldn't quite control. The final, most damning piece of the truth.

  "The only reason I could get any of us out, to take those memories…" his voice a near-whisper, "the only reason that was even possible... was because Clyde was so terrified at the end, he convinced himself I could. I showed him casual horror, based on his perverse game he played with us, his belief in my power... that's what gave me the power to do it."

  He looked up, his expression of desolate irony. "I didn't beat him with strength. I beat him with an idea. Saturn did all the hard work for me."

  Carl needed details, adding while attempting to not sound judgmental, “Why didn’t that moonlight or that planet have the same effect on us?”

  “You saw the planet, felt a bit of gravity…” Mark slowly shook his head, “They got everything at once, the science, the math, the history… my life's knowledge on the subject, which is substantial.”

  Mark quickly added, "But if it hadn’t worked... I had a few other options!" The attempt at a hopeful, confident tone sounded thin even to his own ears, but the silent despair needed some light.

  "I could have dropped him into the heart of a collapsing star," he said, the image of his burning universe still raw in his mind. "I had some unfortunate practice with that. Or," he added, a flicker of his old, weary humor returning, "I could have tried to hide us all in a memory of a fantasy so bizarre that talking animals were the norm."

  The sheer, random absurdity of the last option seemed to cut through the gloom, at least a little.

  "But for now," Mark said, his voice firm, pulling them back to the present, back to the small, tangible victory they had won. "We won or at least survived." He gestured with his head toward the staircase he had so recently and painfully conquered. "There are bedrooms upstairs. Enough for all of you after the Masons'... renovations."

  Dawn nodded slowly, her pragmatism reasserting itself. "That's probably for the best," she said, her gaze drifting toward the dark window. "You don't go out in the darkness. Not after a night like this."

  Dawn's gaze shifted to the window, her expression growing distant. "I can feel an unease from Taz," her voice lowered. "He's on the roof. Guarding. The outside isn't safe tonight." She gave them a sharp, reassuring look. "It's the natural side of things, thankfully. Not that idiot wanting to make good on his threat."

  The thought of the great, silent leopard standing sentinel on the slate roof was a surprisingly comforting one.

  Tori pushed herself to her feet, her movements still stiff. "I appreciate you thinking the ritual is broken, Mark," she said, her voice regaining a fraction of its clinical authority. "But I'm going to set up a few basic dream wards before I even think about trying to sleep. Just in case." She looked around at the exhausted faces in the room. "If any of us can."

  Mark nodded, accepting her professional caution. He wheeled himself over to the dining table and retrieved a fresh notebook and a sharpened pencil.

  "I'm going to try and get a few hours myself," he said, the words a quiet, hopeful statement of intent.

  He watched as the group, a strange, dysfunctional little team, made their way toward the stairs. Dawn and Carl, two very different kinds of warriors, moved with an exhausted competence. Tori and Valerie, a pair of healers who had been through their own kind of hell, followed a step behind, leaning on each other for support.

  Mark turned his chair and headed for his own room, the vast space carved from the living rock of the mountain. The events of the day, the battles fought across his own mind, the victory so poisonous it felt like defeat, they all swirled around him, a storm that had yet to settle.

  But everyone survived, everyone was safe.

  For tonight, that would have to be enough.